Jul 8, 2020 | Epistemology - Trust
If you read the title of this post and immediately thought I was talking about religious faith, I got ya! I don’t mean to be rude, but you’ve been programmed by our secular culture to think of “faith” purely as a religious phenomena that applies only to religious people. In fact, faith, a synonym for trust, is an inescapable reality of every day existence for finite human beings. You can’t live without it. I will shortly prove that, but why this is so important is because the enemies of religious faith, specifically Christian religious faith, distort the meaning of faith to demean our faith. This is not double talk. Many Christians have allowed this distortion to create unnecessary doubt about their faith. As I’ll argue, doubt is as necessary to a normal functioning human being as faith, two sides of the same coin. Which brings me to the virus. (more…)
Jul 7, 2020 | Notable Quotations
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Jul 4, 2020 | Notable Quotations
About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.
President Calvin Coolidge, Speech on the 150th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence
July 5, 1926
Jul 3, 2020 | Explanatory Power
I don’t even like cats! And yet there I was balling as my wife was holding our dead cat in the backseat on the way to the vet’s this morning. He had escaped this mortal coil on our living room floor, so thankfully we didn’t have to give the vet the order to “put him down.” God mercifully did that. We thought we’d lost him two months previously, but he recovered, and it seemed fully. In the last few days, though, we noticed the familiar listlessness, but didn’t think it would happen so quickly. It did. Anyone who thinks or claims that death is “natural” is in denial. They can say or think that, but they know in their bones it isn’t true. Death is wrong! Death shouldn’t be! We hate death! I’ll get to why in a moment, as I have here many times, but first . . . animals. Or more accurately pets. I’m not a big animal person in the first place, but I marvel at God’s handiwork in creating so many varieties of them. That is yet another apologetic for the reality of our Creator God; chance doesn’t do that. (more…)
Jul 1, 2020 | Notable Quotations
The current age is beginning to seem an age of social insecurity, whose leading belief is in the inability of individuals to change the drift of things. A dash of Marxism, a touch of Freudianism, a vague groaning about something called the System, and distrust of action, a denigration of success—such appear to constitute the chief strands of social thought of the day. None of this allows much leeway for the use of intelligence, courage, and resolution on the part of individuals. It is almost as if we subscribed to a form of social determinism that has no name and whose causes and effects we haven’t quite managed to formulate, but to which we feel ourselves helplessly hostage.
—Ambition: The Secret Passion
by Joseph Epstein, 1989
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