Satan’s main strategy in the modern world is to convince men that he exists and that all human beings are primarily good and are bad for secondary reasons such as poverty or problems in brain-chemistry or… Whatever. Satan is a useful fiction in the thoughts and discourse of even the most rational and least superstitious … [Read more…]
I am writing this essay shortly after finishing a good book, longish by modern standards, which discusses two personality types in European peoples—especially those of the Northwestern countries. These two types of aristocratic individualist and egalitarian individualist have formed the liberal orders of Europe. That book is Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition by Kevin … [Read more…]
[This is the first in a series of some number of articles on this subject—Love and Stuff, which will be defined over the course of the series. The past eight months of so began with writer’s burnout, went into a streak of sinus infections, followed by flu in early July. I’ve also endured a rapidly … [Read more…]
Early in May, I read The Birth of Modern Belief: Faith and Judgment From the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment by Ethan H. Shagan. I thought the analysis was pretty good, but I didn’t like the ‘global’ conclusion: Enlightenment rationality did not devour the world in its ravenous maw, it was only a subset of … [Read more…]
There is something describable by the term `human nature’ and something else describable by the term `human personhood’. We’ve confused the two greatly in our modern world, so intellectually challenged in nearly all fields of thought but science and technology and so morally challenged in all fields including science and technology. To orthodox Trinitarian Christians, … [Read more…]
Christians in the past century or more have failed utterly to face up to the biological reality: God has created a world where family-lines of organisms are kept in good condition by Darwinian selection processes leading to death or reproductive failure of organisms with `inadequate’ traits—often caused by mutations. Complex traits, such as intelligence or … [Read more…]
In From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present, Jacques Barzun wrote about a gradual and long-term decay of the West. He wrote that only about 50% of French peasants in 1500 were literate but also noted that those peasants were reading novels far too complex for most (nearly all?) modern-day college professors. Quality of … [Read more…]
I’ll start with a digression to the question, “What is paganism, really?” In a simple comparison of paganism vs Christianity (in the sense of comparison and not of combat), I’ll be able to better define the “world” from the Christian viewpoint but for modern sensibilities. I’ll write of higher paganism. To a pagan, the world … [Read more…]
I have begun a new research and thinking and writing project which bears the tentative title: Through Christ: Creation. It is intended as a step or two forward rather than a step or two toward a different goal than I’ve been pursuing in recent years: the use of modern knowledge of the world to build … [Read more…]
Liberals lie. And I include libertarians among liberals. Perhaps they lie first to themselves, but they lie. All liberals, from Hobbes to Locke to Jefferson to von Mises to Nozick and on to the collectivist enablers or advocates of a `liberal’ and totalitarian order. The biggest part of their lie is the one which claims … [Read more…]