Christopher Hudson Jr. > Recent Status Updates

According to Spinoza...to say that God contravened natural law is to say that God “acted against his own nature—an evident absurdity.” Indeed, since God is perceived through the “immutable order of nature,” our knowledge of God increases along with our understanding of nature. But a miracle defies rational comprehension, so it actually diminishes our knowledge of God.

“The liberal deists attempted to safeguard the equal rights of individuals by discrediting all appeals to special revelation that sought to do an end run around natural rights and thereby justify political dominion over unwilling subjects.”

Death, adoption, divorce, and BDSM

According to Toland, if we are to rescue the Bible from the depths of absurdity, then we must interpret much of it figuratively; otherwise, “the highest Follies and Blasphemies may be deduc’d from the Letter of Scripture.”

“The skeptical analysis of miracles—one defended by virtually every deist of the eighteenth century—had taken its toll, as purely secular histories became the rule rather than the exception. Although Edward Gibbon was not the first modern historian to adopt this approach—we also find it in the deists Voltaire and Adam Smith, for example—he was one of the most influential.”

“For the first several decades of the 18th century, the debate between deists and Christians was the most contentious and most widely discussed issue in England.”

"The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer efects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups."