My dear Socrates … you know why they are putting you to death? It is because you make people feel stupid for blindly following habits, instincts, and traditions. You may be occasionally right. But you may confuse them about things they’ve been doing just fine without getting in trouble. You are destroying people’s illusions about themselves. You are taking the joy of ignorance out of the things we don’t understand. And you have no answer; you have no answer to offer them.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile
Most poets in the West believe that some sort of democracy is preferable to any sort of totalitarian state and accept certain political obligations, to pay taxes, to vote for the best man or programme, to serve as jurymen, to write letters of protest against this or that act of injustice or vandalism, but I cannot think of a single poet of consequence whose work does not, either directly or by implication, condemn modern civilisation as an irremediable mistake, a bad world which we have to endure because it is there and no one knows how it could be made into a better one, but in which we can only retain our humanity in the degree to which we resist its pressures.
W.H. Auden in Encounter (April 1954), via Alan Jacobs
The term civil religion was introduced by Rousseau in the eighteenth century. In the last chapter of The Social Contract, Rousseau proposes an explicit civil religion as a cure for the divisive influence of Christianity, which had divided people’s loyalties between church and state. Rousseau does not wish to erase Christianity entirely, but to reduce it to a “religion of man” that “has to do with the purely inward worship of Almighty God and the eternal obligations of morality, and nothing more.”
William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence
Oh. Only "inward" worship and yada, yada, yada. Nothing to see here. Move along now.
On so many topics, the legacy press has forcibly limited the scope of legitimate discussion. The downstream effect of this is is as obvious as it is alarming: It denigrates trust in institutions that are meant to be in the business of pursuing the truth. And it drives curious people to dark corners of the Web, where conversations about the origins of the virus mix easily with those about the Rothschilds.
Bari Weiss, Did Covid Come From the Lab? Mike Pompeo says Yes.
Dr. Russell Moore is leaving the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. A lot of Southern Baptists considered him a liberal for deny 45’s suitability for the office of POTUS and for answers like this one, which forever endeared him to me.
Russell Moore isn’t the only Evangelical who warned against 45:
The day after his inauguration, I wrote, “A man with illiberal tendencies, a volatile personality and no internal checks is now president. This isn’t going to end well.” And it didn’t.
Peter Wehner, arguing that we’re not out of the violent woods yet.
I often think that the famous Orthodox answer to certain questions, “It’s a mystery,” … is not a statement that means, “I do not know,” but, rather, “I know, but there are no words for it.”
Fr. Stephen Freeman, The Verbal Icon of Christ
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 