Category Archives: Religion

Axioms And Theorems

Imagine a large-scale mathematical society whose aim is to work together to broaden the scope of demonstrated mathematical truths. The way they would go about this is by building upon the theorems that have already been proven: finding new relations and isomorphisms between existing theorems, and proving new ones. They wouldn’t all work on the […]

Believe It, Or Not

This entry is part 8 of 8 in the series Pilgrim's Progress

Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, has just posted an excellent essay at Substack on why he is inclined toward theism. Longtime readers of this blog will know that this is a topic I’ve been wrestling with for ages, so I’m always glad to find essays like this latest offering from Bill. Bill asks: why are […]

A Mathematician’s Case For Belief In God

This entry is part 7 of 8 in the series Pilgrim's Progress

Here is a brief and almost impossibly concise rationalist apologia for Christian belief, given by the Oxford mathematician John Lennox. I’ll quote just two little gems from his speech. The first: “People are so desperate now to show that the universe created itself from nothing – which seems to me to be an immediate oxymoron: […]

As I Was Saying…

For years now I’ve been writing, in these pages, about a few points that I think are central to understanding the decline of American — and, more broadly, Western — society and culture. (I might as well have been yelling up a drainpipe, for all the good it’s done, but at least I’ve been trying.) […]

Vallicella On The Limits Of Transhumanism

We live in an age dominated by scientistic materialism. Ever since the Enlightenment, the explosive growth in our scientific understanding of nature has rocked religion back on its heels by providing mechanistic and mathematical explanations for phenomena that had previously been wholly mysterious. The great paradigm by which we understood the world was slowly inverted; […]

Happy Easter

“Man as man is conscious of the need of protection and direction, of cleansing from uncleanness, of power beyond his own strength. Through a multiplicity of forms, in different ages and races, this consciousness has sought expression, until at last it finds utterance in an insistent demand for God. Fear, ancestor worship, the personification of […]

The Demon-Haunted World

The title of this post refers to a book by the late Carl Sagan, in which he argued that scientific naturalism was a light that could drive out the demons that have bedeviled humanity throughout most of history. He’s right about the bedeviling, and the need for a positive force to keep the demons at […]

Deadly Sin #1

On Twitter, Nick Land has posted a link to an essay on the membership trends — growth vs. decline — of various UK churches. The author, John Hayward, examines these trends with respect to the various denominations’ endorsement of Wokeness. We read: A person would have to be a recluse not to know that a […]

The Confusion Of Tongues

I’ve referred on several occasions to the old Chinese story about “calling a deer a horse”, which describes the scheming courtier Zhao Gao’s stratagem (this was way back in the third century BC) for testing the loyalty of potential political allies by seeing what lies they would assent to. I first read about this over […]

Jim Kalb On Our Mass Craziness

James Kalb stopped by to comment on yesterday’s post, and his remarks deserve a post of their own in reply. (I’ve known Jim for quite a few years now, and for those of you who don’t recognize his name, he is a lawyer and scholar who has written extensively on politics, religion, and culture, and […]

When Pigs Fly

If you’re like most people — and most people are! — you’re probably looking at the news, and the fantastic things you are asked to believe, with a deepening feeling that either everyone’s gone completely mad, or that you have. If it’s any comfort, let me reassure that you haven’t gone insane, and neither has […]

The Pernicious Self-Deception Of “The Right Side Of History”

We are hearing, once again, a lot of incoherent prattle about “the right side of history”. It’s no surprise, given current events, but as time goes by, I find it increasingly annoying. It’s a vain and silly expression, full of swollen and virtuous self-pride; all it really refers to, in most people’s mouths, is whether […]

Bill Vallicella On Reason, Faith, And Doubt

This entry is part 6 of 8 in the series Pilgrim's Progress

Readers who have been coming around here for a while will know that in recent years I have felt the need to re-examine all that I once believed about scientism, philosophical materialism, and the existence of God. It began as a grudging acceptance, even as an unbeliever myself, that atheism and secularism might have a […]

The Roche Limit

People are starting to peel away from the Democratic Party as it falls deeper into the gravity well of the Left Singularity. (Tulsi Gabbard is a prominent and recent example, but there are many others.) If readers will forgive me for saying “I told you so”, in a post four years ago I used an […]

The Religious Stance, Cont’d

Following on last week’s post, here’s an essay by the Archbishop of Los Angeles, José H. Gomez, called Reflections on the Church and America’s New Religions. The essay begins: An elite leadership class has risen in our countries that has little interest in religion and no real attachments to the nations they live in or […]

The Religious Stance

I’ve been saying for a long time that what we are up against is a religion. (In 2017 I made the case contra Bill Vallicella, who was reluctant to apply the term.) At the very least, I think it’s helpful to borrow a technique from the philosopher Daniel Dennett, who coined the term “the intentional […]

Yes, A Religion

From Steve Sailer: Our New Religion of Race Read also this post of his from June 10th, linked in the article above. I won’t even talk about what the Smithsonian’s been up to; it deserves a post of its own, which I haven’t the oomph to write just now.

Repost: On Our New Religion

I’ve said for years that the missionary Progressivism now in control of every aspect of our civilization can only be properly understood as a religion. And just as the Great Awakenings of the 18th and 19th century were attended by great waves of repentance for our sins, and the fear of Hell, exactly so is […]

Motive And Opportunity

Two motives must be kept in mind as we debate public policy regarding this lockdown: First, elected politicians have one universal and overriding priority, which is to preserve their seats, and so to minimize short-term public risk. If they are faced with a choice between, say, liberty and security, they will consistently, and quite naturally, […]

More Than This

Naturalism asks us to believe that we are just a pile of protons, electrons, etc., pushed and pulled willy-nilly by mindless attractions and repulsions — or even that we are, at bottom, nothing more than a set of solutions to some fundamental equations. Yet we think and dream; we feel love and grief. We taste […]

Keep It Simple

This entry is part 5 of 8 in the series Pilgrim's Progress

In a recent post, I wrote about my dissatisfaction with the answers that scientific materialism has offered for some difficult questions. One of these questions is about the astonishing fine-tuning of the physical constants of the natural world: To understand this it’s important to keep in mind what’s called the “Anthropic Principle”. This is the […]

The Parallel Postulate

This entry is part 4 of 8 in the series Pilgrim's Progress

Last spring I wrote a post in which I described my dissatisfaction with the atheist, fully materialistic world-model I had inhabited (and defended with vigor, sometimes even cruelty) all my life. I’d come to see that there were essential questions to which it provided no good answers — and that the “scientism” it was built […]

Morsels from GKC

I’ve been reading Orthodoxy, by G.K. Chesterton. Reading in the Kindle makes it possible to highlight passages, and pick them up online (which saves a lot of copying by hand). Here are some of the ones I’ve selected so far: ‣   If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will […]

Does Belief in Natural Law Require Belief In God?

This entry is part 8 of 8 in the series Michael Anton, Thomas West, and the Founding

The Bronze Age Mindset discussion at The American Mind has become a symposium. Of particular interest to me at the moment is Dan DeCarlo’s entry, An Epic Pervert, because it takes on, albeit in passing, something that I’ve been stewing over for some time now: is the natural-law/natural-rights theory of the American Founding sustainable without […]

William Barr On The Battle Of Religions In America

Last week our Attorney General, William Barr, gave a speech at Notre Dame on the assault of “secularism” upon traditional religion. He touched on many of the themes I’ve been brooding over in these pages: the withering effect of the death of the transcendent, the natural-rights principles of the American Founding, and the question of […]

The Children’s Crusade

Mencius Moldbug: [W]hen we identify progressive secularism as one thing and Protestant Christianity as another, we have basically just walked up to one of the most dangerous intellectual pathogens in Western history, said “how ya doin,” invited it to a wild hot-tub party and promised to deactivate our immune system for the evening. Is this […]

All Sail, No Ballast

This entry is part 3 of 8 in the series Pilgrim's Progress

The novelist and podcaster Andrew Klavan has published an essay at City Journal making an eloquent defense of the position that, contra Steven Pinker and others, the hyper-rationalism of the Enlightenment is insufficient to sustain our civilization against moral, spiritual and philosophical exhaustion — and so he calls us back to the faith that built […]

The Suffering Of The Innocent

This entry is part 2 of 8 in the series Pilgrim's Progress

My friend Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, has a new post up on what I consider the most difficult challenge to belief in God: the arbitrary suffering that is such a conspicuous feature of the world that He created and sustains. How could a God that combines the triple perfections of omniscience, omnipotence, and absolute […]

Scalia: How Should A Christian Think About Socialism?

Following on the spiritual dissatisfaction I expressed in my April 5th post, I’ve been reading On Faith, a newly released collection of the late Justice’s speeches and essays on his Catholic religion. In one of his speeches, Justice Scalia considered how a Christian should think about socialism: The allure of socialism for the Christian, I […]

Pilgrim’s Progress

This entry is part 1 of 8 in the series Pilgrim's Progress

As I get older (I will be sixty-three in a week or so) it becomes harder and harder for me to accept the Universe as a “brute fact”: a thing that just is, and that cannot, even in principle, be accounted for. It’s difficult for everyone, of course, not just me, and so people who […]

Tilting At Windmills

It has for many years been a tenet of the Progressive religion that solar and wind power must replace fossil fuels as the source of supply for our energy-hungry civilization. Critics of the idea have said all along that this is an impossible dream, a colossal waste of resources, is destructive to the environment in […]

Northern Exposure

The next skirmish in the war for religious rights and freedom of association might be the case of the Hope Center, of Anchorage Alaska, a Christian charitable organization that provides succor for the poor and downtrodden. Among the services it provides is a women’s shelter. The shelter’s clients are typically victims of domestic and sexual […]

Wolf!!

Well, the IPCC has released another terrifying report on the climate crisis. This time, we’ve got 12 years to make “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society”. Or we’re all doomed. This ultimatum is nothing new: we’ve had a decade or so to act before reaching some catastrophic “tipping point” for a […]

Fides Et Ratio: Can One Be Both A Catholic And A Maverick Philosopher?

Our friend Bill Vallicella explores the tension — which he believes is a fruitful one — between Athens and Jerusalem. Why is such a tension — an essential feature of Christianity, with its mysteries and paradoxes, that is conspicuously absent in Islam — fruitful? It is a fruitful tension in the West but also in […]

If It Quacks Like A Duck…

In a recent post our friend Bill Vallicella sticks to his guns regarding what he considers the “mistake” of looking at the missionary leftism of the modern West as a religion. He prefers to use the alienans expression “ersatz religion” to describe it, while I’ve said all along that it really is a religion — […]

B.V. On Jerusalem, Athens, And Dual Citizenship

Here’s a fine meditation, by Bill Vallicella, on the tension between reason and faith, and what it means for the philosopher who is also a Christian.

Well, Right

Here’s a peppery little post by one Anne Carter on the state of public discourse: Shrieking Monkeys. Ms. Carter is a Southerner, and so, not having been farm-raised in the Yankee waters that our ruling classes have swum in all their lives, she is in a position to notice the moralizing and missionary zeal that […]

Questions About The Founding, Part 5

This entry is part 6 of 8 in the series Michael Anton, Thomas West, and the Founding

Bill Vallicella weighs in on the natural-rights question we’ve been discussing, here. We read: The problem is that the notion of a natural right is less than perspicuous. Part of what it means to say that a right is natural is that it is not conventional. We don’t have rights to life, liberty, and property […]

Container Vs. Content

The brilliant but relentlessly optimistic Steven Pinker offered today a link to a brief article about a new cross-cultural study of human morals. The article, which you can read here, lists seven moral rules that seem to be universal to all cultures. They are: 1) Love your family. 2) Help your group. 3) Return favors. […]

A Religious Test For Islam?

There’s been an interesting discussion over at Bill Vallicella’s Maverick Philosopher website about the Constitution’s prohibition, in Article VI, of a “religious test” for public office. The discussion, with an anonymous Canadian philosopher (although, as was said once of Newton, “we recognize the lion by his claw”), spans several posts. In the first post in […]

Rod Dreher On The Failure Of An Ideal

The scales have fallen from Rod Dreher’s eyes. Commenting on Harvard’s decision to suspend and defund a campus religious organization, he says that his belief in “compatibilism” — the idea that it is possible for orthodox religion to coexist peaceably with the modern liberal state — is over. Regarding the new liberal order, he notes […]

The Demotion Of The Supernatural

In a comment to my previous post, reader Asher says that Leftism, rather than rejecting the supernatural, locates it in Man himself. I think this is almost right. But it is subject to an important objection: if Darwinian Man is nothing more than a part and product of Nature, then locating the “supernatural” in Man […]

The New Cathars

I thank Bill Keezer for sending me an excellent essay, by law professor Amy Wax, on the collapse of civil discourse in academia. Professor Wax has had a better opportunity than most of us to observe this collapse first-hand, thanks to the cataract of abuse she endured for having commented publicly on another socially destructive […]

On Laïcité And The Cryptoreligion Of the Modern West

Over at the Maverick Philosopher Bill Vallicella has published a post commenting on the failure of “Laïcité” — the doctrine of separation of church and state, intended to pre-empt religious political factionalism — in Europe. Bill advances the argument that, because modern Leftists are such unreflective secularists, they’ve lost their understanding of the “deep-rootedness” of […]

Sacred And Profane

The transgendered have become holy objects because, unlike those of us who are frozen in a conventional relation between our sex and our gender, and are trapped in the matrix of objective and pre-existing natural categories, the transgendered demonstrate the supremacy, and so the apotheosis, of the subjective. In a secular religion that denies the […]

Plus Ça Change…

I’ve just finished an excellent book: The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation. The author is Richard M. Gamble, who holds the Anna Margaret Ross Alexander Chair in History and Politics at Hillsdale College. The book covers the period leading up to, and immediately following, the […]

Render Unto Caesar

Our e-pal Bill Keezer has sent along an essay by Ian Hutchinson, a professor of nuclear science and engineering. Dr. Hutchinson is also a Christian, and his article is a riposte to people like Lawrence Krauss and Richard Dawkins, who flatter themselves that the certainty of their atheism is grounded in truth, rather than their […]

The Church of Christ Without Christ

I’ve just run across a really excellent essay, from 2014, about our hegemonic modern religion — a religion that the author, Joseph Bottum, correctly identifies as deracinated Protestant Christianity. The essay is long, but there is very little in it for me to disagree with. To the neoreactionary reader it will sound some very familiar […]

Facing Down The Witch-King

Following on our previous post, our reader and commenter “Whitewall” has sent along a link to a post by the professor of history at the University of Chicago who was, as it turns out, the object of Dr. Karl Seigfried’s fulminations. The post, a brave and rational woman’s response to a darkening madness that seeks […]

Altar-ed State

Mencius Moldbug: …in many ways nonsense is a more effective organizing tool than the truth. Anyone can believe in the truth. To believe in nonsense is an unforgeable demonstration of loyalty. It serves as a political uniform. And if you have a uniform, you have an army. With that in mind, here’s a good item […]