Posts in Life
Wish I'd said that - August 26, 2018

“we have lost a vision of man. We are not sure how different he actually is from animal or vegetable or rock or mineral. It is partly, I think, because we have ceased trying to relate ourselves to God: we no longer even cry that God is dead; instead, we have named him an hypothesis, a dream, and turned him over to the laboratory to ‘prove.’ And because we have stopped searching for God we have stopped searching for ultimate meaning, saying there is no purpose in human existence. Hence all is absurdity, all is nothing. The more honest among those who want God ‘proved’ tend to seek uneasy solace in neo-nihilism; or, putting heart above logic, in humanism - while the less honest settle for their own brand of idol worship, sacrificing all to success or skin color or capitalism or communism or their work or their pleasure, whispering, Let’s don’t think about it.”

Lillian Smith Killers of the Dream

Wish I'd said that - August 19, 2018

“Darwin himself, asked about the implications of his theory for religion and morality, replied that while the idea of God was ‘beyond the scope of man’s intellect,’ man’s moral obligations were what they had always been: to ‘do his duty.’ Leslie Stephen, after abandoning the effort to derive an ethic from Darwinism, finally confessed: ‘I now believe in nothing, but I do not the less believe in morality.’ George Eliot uttered the classic statement of this secular ethic when she said that God was ‘inconceivable,’ immortality ‘unbelievable,’ but duty nonetheless ‘peremptory and absolute.’”

Gertrude Himmelfarb The De-moralization of Society