“As an example, Americans who watch an average amount of TV and film, and listen to modern music, will probably find it incredibly difficult not to believe that their lives can be justified if they find and marry the right person. Ernest Becker argues that the modern relationship is all many of us have left after the so-called ‘death of God.’ When another human being looks directly into your eyes and confesses their self-giving love to you for life, that is a profound affirmation of your existence. In the church, we believe that marriage reflects something of the relationship with Christ and his church, and so we have a way of explaining why marriage feels so validating: it is an echo of Christ’s justification of his church, his body. But it is only an echo, because unlike Christ, ‘No human relationship can bear the burden of godhood, and the attempt has to take its toll on some way on both parties.’ If you look to any other person to give your life justification and meaning, you will eventually resent them and leave disillusioned. Yet this myth, this vision of fullness, continues to be one of the most enduring in the West. And we have seen this myth repeated in a million stories, so that no matter how many times we personally experience its emptiness, we still find it alluring.”

Alan Noble Disruptive Witness

In my latest Loonie Politics column I say the reason Mark Carney can’t pull us back from the left-wing idiocies of Justin Trudeau is that he holds substantially the same views and doesn’t even know it.

“delivered with the quiet dignity of a wet T-shirt competition.”

Eli Lake in The Free Press November 3, 2024 [with specific reference to Donald Trump’s political flimflam that does not so much lie on purpose as deny the very possibility of truth]

“Moral decay contributed to the dissolution [of the Roman Empire]. The virile character that had been formed by arduous simplicities and a supporting faith relaxed in the sunshine of wealth and the freedom of unbelief; men had now, in the middle and upper classes, the means to yield to temptation, and only expediency to restrain them. Urban congestion multiplied contacts and frustrated surveillance; immigration brought together a hundred cultures whose differences rub themselves out into indifference. Moral and esthetic standards were lowered by the magnetism of the mass; and sex ran riot in freedom while political liberty decayed. The greatest of historians held that Christianity was the chief cause of Rome’s fall.”

Will Durant Caesar and Christ [the greatest of historians is of course Edward Gibbon - but it is not immediately obvious that Christianity caused any of the things Durant just listed including unbelief or sex running riot]

In my latest Epoch Times column I say Canadian authorities’ feeble justifications for cancelling concerts because they don’t like the singer or the lyrics show just how little they understand free speech… or even think about it.

“It seems to me this pleasure-mad generation has lost the art of enjoyment.”

G.K. Chesterton in Gloucestershire Echo, Oct. 26, 1925, quoted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #1 (September-October 2024)

“In the end, he [G.K. Chesterton] says, the exaggeration of sex becomes sexlessness. We are no longer drawn to the bait on the hook. We are drawn to the hook itself.”

Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #6 (July-August 2024)

“One of the great blows to stability has been the change in family life, from the first appearance of the teenager in the late 1930s, to Edmund Leach’s disturbing Reith lectures of 1967, which blamed the traditional family for most of society’s problems. There’s been a transformation in the way in which people arrange and furnish their houses, the sort of food they eat and where and how they eat it.”

Peter Hitchens The Abolition of Britain