April 19, 2017 – 10:47 am
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 […]
March 17, 2017 – 11:03 pm
We’ve devoted some space lately to the mutated and camouflaged religion (and not just any religion!) that goes by the name of Progressivism. (Once you’ve spotted it, you can’t un-see it; it’s as plain as this owl.) But why the camo in the first place? Moldbug explains: The question is: why? How did we fall […]
William Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, having read my own recent item on William Deresciewicz’s article about Progressivism-as-religion, has just offered a post expressing his disagreement. Bill writes: It is true that leftism is like a religion in certain key respects. But if one thing is like another it does not follow that the first is […]
March 11, 2017 – 10:00 pm
In order correctly to understand the modern Left, it’s important to recognize it as a secularized religion. Tracing the development of this religion, from its origins in Protestantism, then Puritanism, then through its many transmutations in America — from sixteenth-century Massachusetts, through its northern and western Protestant expansion, through the “Awakenings” of the seventeenth and […]
Following on our earlier post — and with thanks to our commenter Jason for the link — here are Charles Murray’s own remarks on having been assaulted by a violent leftist mob at Middlebury College last week. We read (the item refers to Professor Allison Stanger, who had invited Mr. Murray for an interview, and […]
November 1, 2016 – 3:46 pm
Today we have an essay for you, from Francis Spufford, on how two prominent atheists — Sam Harris and Barbara Ehrenreich — have approached their profoundest subjective experiences. It begins: To say, as people do from time to time, that science is the only source of meaning available to human beings is to consign large […]
I know I’m late to the game here, but I find this ginned-up outrage over Donald Trump’s comment about Judge Curiel tremendously irritating. I would chalk it all up to mere cognitive dissonance, of the sort that is essential to maintaining a modern Leftist worldview, but it is really nothing more than another salvo in […]
In case you missed it: Actual Climate Scientist Judith Curry posted an item a few weeks ago linking to a forceful essay by Mario Loyola on climate-change activism. The Loyola essay is behind a paywall at The American Interest, but that publication offers non-subscribing visitors one free article a month, so you ought to be […]
April 13, 2016 – 12:03 pm
Over the transom today came a link (thank you, Bill K.) to Diplomad’s latest salvo: At War with the History of Mankind. Dip makes the point that a central tenet of modern Leftist ideology (which is, as I and others have argued at length, essentially a cryptoreligious belief-system) is to make Nature sacred, and mankind […]
Our previous post — a link, with excerpts and brief commentary, to an essay by Dennis Prager on how leftism and statism step in to fill the void left by religion — seems to have left some readers puzzled. Here are some further thoughts of my own: The religious impulse, the need for sacred objects, […]
Dennis Prager published an insightful item yesterday, entitled “A Note to Conservatives Who Are Secular”. We read: The vast majority of leading conservative writers, just like their liberal colleagues, have a secular outlook on life. With few exceptions, the conservative political and intellectual worlds are oblivious to the consequences of secularism. They are unaware of […]
In 1968, the Fair Housing Act made it the law of the land that owners of property could not refuse to sell or rent it on the basis of race, color, sex, religion, or national origin. In 1988 the list was expanded to include family status and disabilities. Absent from this list of criteria was […]
March 24, 2016 – 11:22 am
I’ve just run across a glum and deeply reactionary essay by Gregory Hood, written in November of 2014, on the spiritual exhaustion of the West, and the durable appeal of Islam. It examines four possible foundations for the future of our civilization: Christianity, paganism, techno-liberalism, and submission to Islam. Some excerpts: To most people, being […]
March 23, 2016 – 12:27 pm
We hear a lot about “virtue-signalling” these days. The term is new, but the idea is not: its influence on American behavior is as old as the Puritan settlements of New England, from which it spread across the North, into our academic and cultural institutions, and became, in increasingly secular form, the chief feature of […]
There’s a good article by Mark Yuray, over at Social Matter, on making a career out of secular holiness. A longish excerpt: More than 1 million illegal Middle Eastern and African migrants entered Germany in 2015, with the invitation of the German government. This year, hundreds of thousands have already arrived and a 1-2 million […]
A recent post by our friend Bill Vallicella exposes the philosophical ineptitude of militant atheists such as, in this case, Richard Dawkins. Here his target is the hidden axiom scientists (and I use the term in the sense of “those who practice scientism”) must rely on in order to deny the possible role of a […]
January 31, 2016 – 7:33 pm
We’ve written often (for example, here) about the unbroken ideological and doctrinal thread connecting the Puritanism of the Massachusetts Bay Colony with the modern, secular religion of the Left. The “mission into the wilderness” continues unabated, its outward forms unaltered. All that changes is the temporal object of the mission: the MacGuffin varies from picture […]
January 10, 2016 – 1:04 am
Over at Maverick Philosopher, Bill Vallicella has taken on the question, raised by a disciplinary action at Wheaton College, of whether Christians and Muslims worship the “same God”. I’m not a religious believer myself, but over the past decade or so the naive atheism of my earlier years has withered away to a sympathetic agnosticism, […]
December 19, 2015 – 3:36 pm
With a hat-tip to our friend Jeffery Hodges, here is a reminder that if Islam is a “religion of peace”, it is only the peace of submission, of surrender, of captivity.
A timely passage: [P]olitics and the pulpit are terms that have little agreement. No sound ought to be heard in the church but the healing voice of Christian charity. The cause of civil liberty and civil government gains as little as that of religion by this confusion of duties. Those who quit their proper character […]
Today I read a good piece by one of my favorite political writers, Mollie Hemingway. In the wake of the Amtrak derailment, and the Left’s immediate rush to blame the disaster on inadequate government spending (which is to say, on fiscal conservatives), she raises the concept of ‘theodicy’ — that is, “attempts to defend God’s […]
The Supreme Court heard arguments today in Obergefell v. Hodges, which, as you may know, concerns itself with whether or not same-sex couples have a right to redefine what marriage is, and to compel every state to accept the new definition. Good coverage of the arguments here. Haven’t even had time to go over it […]
October 13, 2014 – 9:55 pm
In middle age, after a youth of unreflective atheism, I began to have a serious interest in the role of religion in human affairs, and in the doctrine and philosophy of the great religions. I determined to educate myself, with a particular focus on the history and teachings of Christianity and Islam. I’m still an […]
February 21, 2014 – 10:49 pm
Last year I wrote this about liberal orthodoxy’s unavoidable antagonism to truth: A sine qua non for the modern liberal ideologue is a flair for living comfortably in a state of cognitive dissonance. This is made necessary by the internal contradictions of his worldview, and by its frequent, and calamitous, collisions with the social, political, […]
February 10, 2014 – 1:28 am
The CBS program 60 Minutes reported tonight, to everyone’s astonishment and dismay, on a recent, and heretofore completely unsuspected, scientific discovery. The context was specific — differences in the effect of the sleeping pill Ambien on men and women — but it appears, shockingly, that the scope of the problem might be far more general, […]
January 24, 2014 – 11:32 pm
Here’s something that seems to be in the air today. Yesterday I added a comment to our Benghazi thread from a few days back. As usually happens as threads lengthen, the conversation had wandered off-topic toward the more general sort of ideological scuffling that is a constant attractor in any discussion of current events these […]
October 23, 2013 – 9:58 pm
Here’s a a 3D zoomable panorama of the Sistine Chapel.
On the elevation of the new Pope, we’ve seen a lot of sulking about the Catholic Church’s inexplicable reluctance to get itself properly aligned with the Left’s social-issues agenda. It is, as Dennis Mangan points out here, perfectly understandable for socially ‘progressive’ sorts to consider the Church a political opponent, and to seek to reduce […]
February 18, 2013 – 9:24 pm
Kevin Kim, whose academic specialty is the study of the world’s religions, has written a stupendous essay on the possibly-divine nature of Peter Sellers’s character Chance, from the movie Being There. Get thee hence and read it, here.
February 17, 2013 – 1:16 am
A vexing feature of modern physicalistic non-theism is that, followed to its logical conclusion, it leads to moral nihilism. (I realize that theistic attempts to put morality on an objective basis also face serious challenges, but that’s not the point tonight.) Moral nihilism being, to most folks, bad, there’s been a rash lately of books […]
January 16, 2013 – 12:44 am
Last week the New York Times published an Op-Ed piece by Susan Jacoby called The Blessings of Atheism. In it, Ms. Jacoby attempts to rebut a colleague’s remark, apropos of Newtown, that atheism has no consolation to offer when people are suffering. I’m an atheist myself, and I think Ms. Jacoby is on a fool’s […]
January 11, 2013 – 11:08 pm
I’m an admirer of the philosopher Daniel Dennett. He can be overconfidently brusque and dismissive, and in particular I have parted company with him on the issue of activist atheism (more about that in a minute), but he has an enviably fertile and wide-ranging intellect. He’s also a terrific writer; in particular I highly recommend […]
January 10, 2013 – 11:11 pm
Since emerging, chastened, from the militant atheism of my not-so-distant past, I have in recent years come round, despite being an unbeliever myself, to the opinion that wide-scale secularism is a maladaptation that sharply — perhaps even lethally — reduces a society’s fitness. In a recent lecture at Washington University in St. Louis, George Will […]
September 18, 2012 – 1:37 pm
Here’s an attention-grabbing item: an ancient Coptic papyrus fragment referring to Jesus’s wife.
Here’s an item that should come as no surprise to anyone: Religion Is a Potent Force for Cooperation and Conflict, Research Shows The article discusses a paper by Scott Atran and Jeremy Ginges that describes religion as strongly fostering cooperation within human social groups, as a means of competing more successfully against other groups. We […]
April 30, 2012 – 10:34 pm
Here’s an item from NightWatch‘s Robert McCreary: Iran: For the record. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei provided the following guidance in response to a question about whether it was sinful to use social media. “In general, the use of social networking websites (such as Facebook, FriendFeed, Orkut, etc) is impermissible if their use entails a corrupt […]
Here’s a thoughtful new item by Sam Harris called Islam and the Future of Liberalism. A sample: As I tried to make clear [in a recent podcast], we know that intolerance within the Muslim world extends far beyond the membership of “extremist’ groups. Recent events in Afghanistan demonstrate, yet again, that ordinary Afghans grow far […]
With a hat tip to hbd chick (and to reader JK as well), here’s a little test: how well do you know Sunni from Shia Islam? The British, meanwhile, are soon to be experts. Paul Weston explains.
February 13, 2012 – 12:12 am
Nicholas Kristof weighed in today on the Catholic-contraception kerfuffle, in a Times op-ed piece. Even Mr. Kristof acknowledges that this issue is hardly cut-and-dried. He writes: Look, there’s a genuine conflict here. Many religious believers were sincerely offended that Catholic institutions would have to provide coverage for health interventions that the church hierarchy opposed. That […]
February 11, 2012 – 2:11 pm
The Obama administration made an embarrassing political blunder recently when it mandated, with swaggering disregard of First Amendment niceties and pugnacious indifference to the moral teachings of the Roman Church, that Catholic organizations would be required to provide contraceptives to their employees. When Catholic institutions objected, they were told they had a year to get […]
February 10, 2012 – 11:26 pm
Our friend Kevin Kim has written a meaty response to Bill Vallicella’s latest remarks on Dennettian theoskepsis. (The study of religion is Kevin’s academic specialty; and in passing I’ll recommend his book Water From a Skull for those with an interest in the field of comparative religion.) A quibble: in this post Kevin discusses Bill’s […]
January 4, 2012 – 1:18 am
In the discussion thread of our recent post about Yusuf al-Qaradawi and the Muslim Brotherhood, the issue soon became: what should the attitude of the West have been toward the democratic uprisings in Egypt and elsewhere? On the one hand, as Americans it seems we ought to support democracy wherever we can; on the other, […]
November 30, 2011 – 11:47 pm
Interesting item over at Jeffery Hodges’ place: Jeff comments on an interview with the prominent Egyptian Protestant Ramez Atallah. Atallah talks about the unique centrality of Islam in Arabic-speaking lands. He also has this to say about Western indignation over the ubiquitous persecution of Christians in Muslim territory: I need you to please understand that […]
November 2, 2011 – 12:56 pm
Over at NRO today, Andrew McCarthy and Robert Spencer debate the distinction between Islam and “Islamism”. Mr. Spencer argues that Islam is in its very essence “Islamist”: that its core doctrines, on any coherent and broadly acceptable interpretation, are normative and prescriptive not only spiritually and socially, but also legally and politically. Mr. McCarthy insists […]
October 19, 2011 – 6:43 pm
The Texan pastor Robert Jeffress caused quite a ruction last week with his endorsement of Rick Perry for the GOP nod. Mr. Jeffress said that he thought all good Christians should prefer a Christian as their president, and that in his opinion this disqualified Mitt Romney — because the “cult” of Mormonism is something other […]
A conversation with my father on the subject of the Armenian mystic Gurdjieff has led me to a re-reading of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, which apparently G. had recommended to his study groups. (My father was a member of Gurdjieff’s London group after the war until G.’s death in 1949, and in fact went to […]
I’ve been reading Diarmaid MacCulloch’s outstanding history of Christianity (it’s enormously absorbing, and full of fascinating detail) and I’m currently immersed in the factional disputes of the fourth century A.D., when the biggest problem of the day was to work out a good account of the Trinity, and in particular the nature of Christ. It’s […]
This just in, from my old friend Dave Pauley.
This might be worth watching (I can’t say for sure, because I haven’t watched it myself yet): a debate between Sam Harris and William Lane Craig.