So very well observed and expressed. To paraphrase Groucho: these are my principles, if you don’t like them well….I have feelings. And as he also very wisely said, "Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.”
Maybe we should have a different form of Marxism in political theory....
Another brilliant piece. Right to the hub of the matter... well, lack of a sense of the sacred (or divine) and the war on love, as you've touched upon before. These are related of course.
Our uniquely Christian conception that we are all made in the image of God and contain a spark of the Divine, undergirds the elimination of slavery, the secular concept of equality and the modern driving out of racism from Christendom. That Nishan can express such naked racism (substitute black for white in the quote) shows how complete the secular victory has been and moral abyss it has left. In a microcosm of the grand canvas David so ably paints, try asking your avowedly atheist friends why it would be morally wrong for you to punch them in the face.
It is all very well for us--unbelieving friends of other people's religion--to complain of the bad consequences of an unbelief that we share with enemies who are indifferent or hostile to religion, but it isn't such complaints or even such friendship that will remedy the thing that we see has gone wrong. The only thing that will do that is the very thing we are ourselves incapable, not some mere "concept of the divine" but an actual belief in a living God. Carlyle must have been, if not the first, one of the first, to use a religious language--Christian, of course--without it committing him to Christianity or any other particular religion or religious belief. As my friend Ian Robinson said, in a book--The English Prophets--which no one has ever heard of--"who gave Carlyle the word 'God' and the others he needs like 'faith'? ... [He was] of a religious tradition. But because ... he got on very well without formal profession ... could not see that for his own kind of faith to be possible, there has to be generally available a more explicit, if humdrum, variety." Ian began as a critic of modern translations of the Bible (The Survival of English) but became if not an ordinary at least a regular, believing and humdrum churchgoer. Without that, I can't see that there is any saving the spiritual and transcendent from the secular, 'rationality' and 'science'.
Agree re: Diana hysteria. Naturally I looked to myself first (who suspected foul play) but concluded something was happening in the collective psyche. As I said to a young 'transhumanist' the other day: "You're smart - you know there are more than 4 dimensions right?"
So very well observed and expressed. To paraphrase Groucho: these are my principles, if you don’t like them well….I have feelings. And as he also very wisely said, "Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.”
Maybe we should have a different form of Marxism in political theory....
Another brilliant piece. Right to the hub of the matter... well, lack of a sense of the sacred (or divine) and the war on love, as you've touched upon before. These are related of course.
Our uniquely Christian conception that we are all made in the image of God and contain a spark of the Divine, undergirds the elimination of slavery, the secular concept of equality and the modern driving out of racism from Christendom. That Nishan can express such naked racism (substitute black for white in the quote) shows how complete the secular victory has been and moral abyss it has left. In a microcosm of the grand canvas David so ably paints, try asking your avowedly atheist friends why it would be morally wrong for you to punch them in the face.
It is all very well for us--unbelieving friends of other people's religion--to complain of the bad consequences of an unbelief that we share with enemies who are indifferent or hostile to religion, but it isn't such complaints or even such friendship that will remedy the thing that we see has gone wrong. The only thing that will do that is the very thing we are ourselves incapable, not some mere "concept of the divine" but an actual belief in a living God. Carlyle must have been, if not the first, one of the first, to use a religious language--Christian, of course--without it committing him to Christianity or any other particular religion or religious belief. As my friend Ian Robinson said, in a book--The English Prophets--which no one has ever heard of--"who gave Carlyle the word 'God' and the others he needs like 'faith'? ... [He was] of a religious tradition. But because ... he got on very well without formal profession ... could not see that for his own kind of faith to be possible, there has to be generally available a more explicit, if humdrum, variety." Ian began as a critic of modern translations of the Bible (The Survival of English) but became if not an ordinary at least a regular, believing and humdrum churchgoer. Without that, I can't see that there is any saving the spiritual and transcendent from the secular, 'rationality' and 'science'.
I agree entirely. Although I wish to make clear that I am myself a 'believing' rather than unbelieving friend!
Then my comment is addressed more to myself than you.
Agree re: Diana hysteria. Naturally I looked to myself first (who suspected foul play) but concluded something was happening in the collective psyche. As I said to a young 'transhumanist' the other day: "You're smart - you know there are more than 4 dimensions right?"