Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Religion

  • Hitchens on Falwell

    The following entry has been languishing in the queue for years.  I just now finished it for what it's worth. ……………. Which is worse, the fundamentalism of a Jerry Falwell or the snarling hatred of religion of a Christopher Hitchens, who, in his anti-Falwell diatribe, shows just how far someone who is a leftist about…

  • Flannery O’Connor on Pious Language

    Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1979), p. 227 in a letter to Maryat Lee dated 28 June 1957: I doubtless hate pious language worse than you because I believe the realities it hides. To the unbeliever, pious language is just so much cant and hypocrisy and offensive for these reasons. …

  • Machiavelli, Arendt, and Virtues Public and Private

    Current events warrant this re-post from two years ago.  Christian precepts such as "Turn the other cheek" and "Welcome the stranger" make sense and are salutary only within communities of the like-minded and morally decent; they make no sense and are positively harmful in the public sphere, and, a fortiori, in the international sphere.  The…

  • Cruciphobia

    Given that the ubiquity of crosses all across this great land has not yet established Christianity as the state religion, why, as it declines in influence, do the cruciphobic shysters of the ACLU and their ilk agitate still against these harmless and mostly merely historical remnants of a great religion? This question occurred to me…

  • Knowing God Through Experience

    A mercifully short (9:17) but very good YouTube video  featuring commentary by name figures in the philosophy of religion including  Marilyn Adams, William Alston, William Wainwright, and William Lane Craig.  Craig recounts the experience that made a theist of him.  (HT: Keith Burgess-Jackson) As Marilyn Adams correctly points out at the start of the presentation,…

  • The Psalms

    I find in the Psalms too much praising of a tribal god, and not enough seeking of the hidden God. But both are there.

  • The Dawkins Hustle

    Karl White sends us to this Spectator article and provides this summary: For $85 a month, you get discounts on his merchandise, and the chance to meet ‘Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science personalities’. Obviously that’s not enough to meet the man himself. For that you pay $210 a month — or $5,000 a…

  • Imagine No Religion? Christianity on the Rise in China

    It is not just philosophy that buries its undertakers. Here. (HT: Karl White)

  • Imagine No Religion?

    You are free to imagine a world without religion as per the silly ditty of John Lennon, but if Pew Research Center predictions are correct, atheists and leftists need to brace themselves for serious disappointment: . . . the religiously unaffiliated population is projected to shrink as a percentage of the global population, even though…

  • Holy Saturday Night at the Oldies: Religious Themes

    Herewith, five definite decouplings of rock and roll from sex and drugs. Norman Greenbaum, Spirit in the Sky Johnny Cash, Personal Jesus. This is one powerful song. Clapton and Winwood, Presence of the Lord. Why is Clapton such a great guitarist? Not because of his technical virtuosity, his 'chops,' but because he has something to…

  • A Partial Philosophical Defense of the Monastic Life

    The suggestion was made that I give a little talk to the monks of Christ in the Desert, a Benedictine monastery outside of Abiqui, New Mexico.  I thought I would offer a few words in defense of the monastic life, not that such an ancient and venerable tradition needs any defense from me, but just…

  • The Adam and Eve Controversy in the Blogosphere

    Here

  • If You Think that All Religions are Equal . . .

    . . . do you also think that all political ideologies are equal?  Equal, say, in their conduciveness to human flourishing?

  • Michael Walzer on Religion

    At least one lefty gets religion. Actually, the preceding sentence is ambiguous.  The thought is that at least one leftist understands that religion has far deeper roots in human nature than a typical leftist analysis can expose, let alone eradicate.  The following quotation borrowed from the weblog of  Keith Burgess-Jackson: The left has always had…

  • What Does It Mean to Say that Nothing is Sacred?

    Yesterday I quoted Christopher Hitchens as saying that nothing is sacred.  I now ask what it means to say that nothing is sacred.  I think it means something like the following. Nothing, nothing at all, is holy, venerable, worthy of worship; nothing is an appropriate object of reverence.  (One cannot appropriately revere one's spouse, 'worship…