Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
March 21 - July 24, 2019
"fallen." Fallenness is a paradox: we are neither simply good nor simply bad, but created good and broken. We are not a sheer ugliness, nothing so plain, but a beauty ruined.
Babel, I suggest, is not a modern revolution, but the enduring condition of the fallen human race.
Before too long, any culture in deep moral denial must either come to its senses or collapse, for the consequences of denying first principles are cumulative and inescapable.
By adopting a posture of neutrality among competing goals and aspirations, of equal concern and respect for them all (that becomes one of his absolutes), he tries to escape the futility of interminable apologetics and carve out a new moral sphere in which people of every point of view can get along: sodomists with Socialists, pickpockets with Platonists, hedonists with Hassidim.
colleague thinks reasonable people of all persuasions will agree that since we do not know whether the fetus is a human being, we should let each woman decide for herself whether to have an abortion or not. There is the argument from ignorance again. But even if it were true that we do not know what babies are -- a point I do not concede -- why should we say that because the baby might not be human we may kill him? Why not say that because he might be, we should protect him?
But why original sin? Because the three great troubles of public life are all results of the Fall. Politics would have been easy in Eden, but that was a long time ago. One of our troubles is plain and practical: We do wrong. The second is intellectual: We not only misbehave but misthink, not only do wrong but call it right. The third, of course, is strategic, for the second affects our efforts to cope with the first. Our toils to rectify sin are themselves twisted by sin, our labors to shed light on iniquity themselves darkened by iniquity. No mind is unstained, no motive unmixed. We cannot
...more
How are they smarter? They misidentify the deeper problem of original sin, but at least they are looking for a deeper problem. Marxists locate it in ancient class conflict. Feminists trace it to primordial war between the sexes. Both see blindness and cruelty as inevitable, on grounds that everything a person thinks and seeks is determined by his class or sexual interests.
The Marxism of the Marxist must be determined by his class interests, and the Feminism of the Feminist by her sexual interests. If their theories are right, then inevitably they will be as blind and cruel as their counterparts. The only way they can escape the dilemma is to declare themselves the sole exception to their theories.
Those who boast of their suspicion of metanarratives are merely offering a meta-metanarrative -- worse yet, a meta-metanarrative in denial, an ideology about ideologies which denies being an ideology. I
But if the surgeon's hands are severed, it follows only that another Surgeon must mend him.
Only he claimed not to teach but to be the surgery of God.
The Scriptures do not supply a ten-point political program, nevertheless they supply a point of vantage from which every ten-point program can be called to judgment. St. Paul said "We destroy arguments and every proud obstacle to the knowledge of God." (2 Cor. 10:5.)
Nobel-prize laureate James Watson proposes that parents of newborns be granted a grace period during which they may have their babies killed, and in 1994 a committee of the American Medical Association proposed harvesting organs from some sick babies even before they die.
Instead she seems to be speaking of principles that everyone with a normal mind knows by means of conscience. She seems to be speaking of a law written on the heart -- of what philosophers would later call the natural law.
Unless there is a law written on the heart, it is hard to imagine where this intuition comes from.
These are the laws we can't not know.
Everything in conscience can be weakened by neglect and erased by culture. Now if mere moral realists are right about this, then although the problem of moral decline may begin in volition, it dwells in cognition: it may begin as a defect of will, but ends as a defect of knowledge.
If the traditional view is true, then our decline is owed not to moral ignorance but to moral suppression. We are not untutored, but "in denial." We do not lack moral knowledge; we hold it down.
We restrict what we allow because we know it is wrong but do not want to give it up; we feed our hearts scraps in hopes of hushing them, as cooks quiet their kitchen puppies.
the knowledge of guilt always produces certain objective needs, which make their own demand for satisfaction irrespective of the state of the feelings. These needs include confession, atonement, reconciliation, and justification.
The need for reconciliation arises from the fact that guilt cuts us off from God and man. Without repentance, intimacy must be simulated precisely by sharing with others in the guilty act. Leo Tolstoy knew this. In Anna Karenina there comes a time when the lovers' mutual guiltiness is their only remaining bond. But the phenomenon is hardly restricted to cases of marital infidelity. Andrew Solomon says that he, his brothers, and his father are united by the "weird legacy" of their implication in his mother's death, and quotes a nurse who participated in her own mother's death as telling him, "I
...more
Joseph’s brothers in Genesis
many of the women who call her do so not to report that they have been raped, but to ask whether they were raped. If they have to ask, of course, they probably have not been; they are merely dealing with their ambivalence by throwing the blame for their decisions on their partners. But this is a serious matter. Denial leads to the further wrong of false witness.
Think what is necessary to justify abortion. Because we can't not know that it is wrong to deliberately kill human beings, there are only four options. We must deny that the act is deliberate, deny that it kills, deny that its victims are human, or deny that wrong must not be done.
Need we wonder why, then, having started on our babies, we now want to kill our grandparents? Sin ramifies. It is fertile, fissiparous, and parasitic, always in search of new kingdoms to corrupt.
To survive what is bearing down on us, we must learn four hard lessons: to acknowledge the natural law as a true and universal morality; to be on guard against our own attempts to overwrite it with new laws that are really rationalizations for wrong; to fear the natural consequences of its violation, recognizing their inexorability; and to forbear from all further attempts to compensate for immorality, returning on the path that brought us to this place.
It might seem remarkable that people who insist that tolerance means moral neutrality should themselves be so earnest in ridiculing those who aren't neutral.
that there is no such thing as Neutrality.
What all this tells us is that "religious" and "secular" constitute a false dichotomy.
The Defense of the Revolution, The Greater God of the Whole, The Purity of the Race, the Hunger of Molech, The Right to Control One's Body -- neither these nor any other claimants to ultimacy are accepted as justifying the sacrifice of innocents.
The bottom line is that Neutrality is no more coherent in the matter of religious tolerance than it is in tolerance of any other sort. What you can tolerate pivots on your ultimate concern.
True tolerance is not well tolerated. For although the God of some of the disputants ordains that they love and persuade their opponents, the idols of some of the others ordain no such thing.
Here's the rub: we are a broken race in a fallen world. For denying the Atonement a man may be faithless, but for denying its need he is insane.
What steers most men toward the common good, he says, is merely the desire for honor, which is not a craving for goodness as such but for the good opinion of others.
The pageantry and shadow play of its patriotic songs and rituals all trade on a longing for that which no earthly commonwealth can satisfy; they make love to the citizen with words and tokens that are really native to another clime.
