I sit up and pay attention when Roger Scruton speaks. He recently considered the significance of the worldview evinced in books by Uval Noah Harari, who is a biological determinist in the same vein as Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins. Harari acknowledges the philosophical consequences of the humanist rejection of transcendent truth. He goes a step […]
Read more...Blog
The Dismal Tide
“Somewhere out there is a true and living prophet of destruction and I don’t want to confront him. I know he’s real. I have seen his work.” This line is spoken in the early scenes of No Country for Old Men, a Coen Brothers movie that’s been out for 10-plus years now. I saw […]
Read more...The Back Row
I read a bunch of reviews of Chris Arnade’s recent book Dignity before picking it up myself and they often remark upon the objective and nonjudgmental approach Arnade takes. He’s purposely encountering people we might think of as down and out, to try to understand them. One of his conclusions is that a major […]
Read more...Normal Man
Here is some imagery suggested by Roberto Calasso in his book The Unnamable Present. He speaks of secularists, modern people who oppose religion in public but more importantly feel for themselves no religious orientation. The type of person is not new, Calasso says, but has always existed as a “perpetual shadow” to another type of […]
Read more...Etiolated Language II
In Etiolated Language I suggested that writers and speakers sometimes confusingly use words for Christian concepts in non-Christian or even explicitly materialist contexts. Use of the words analogously then blends into a new, replacement meaning, leaving us with no word for the original meaning. My point was that this can interfere with understanding of what Christianity […]
Read more...AI and Consciousness
Advances in artificial intelligence are of interest because of what they may say about consciousness. If a machine can acquire human-like sentience, does that mean consciousness is entirely an emergent property of brain functioning? If so, it would arguably eliminate human consciousness as a phenomenon that proves God’s existence. All the more reason, then, that we […]
Read more...Fascista
A professor at King’s College New York, Joseph Loconte, recently wrote on the origins of fascism in a way that is illuminating to the position we are in today. Before introducing his article, I’d like to back up to something I wrote (in Illiberalism) on this subject a year or so ago: On the far right, […]
Read more...Friendship
From time to time I’ve asked rhetorically whether there might be a link between the loss of faith and the rise of despair. For example, in a memoir I wrote: We sometimes say people “lose hope” and become despondent, perhaps to the point of despair or even suicide, but what does that phrase really mean? […]
Read more...Active God
I’ve long been interested in how to think about the ongoing presence of God in our day-to-day lives. I could be oversimplifying, but it seems to me there are two ways of thinking of God. Either He is the aloof God of Deism, the uncaused-cause necessary to explain physical reality, but nothing more, or He […]
Read more...Etiolated Language
I have written before about how language is debased such that Christian concepts are built into secularism in a confusing way. It is unfortunate not just because precision is lost. It is also unfortunate because it serves to obscure the naturalism endemic to modern secularism. The operating assumption you’re routinely expected to embrace is that […]
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