Modern evils “arise from the governing classes having too much liberty and the governed having less liberty than ever.”
G.K. Chesterton quoted in “Chesterton’s Mail Bag” (subhed “Church and State (not in that order)”) in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #2 (November/December 2023)
“Even as Poitiers was being fought, collections of sayings attributed to Muhammad were being compiled that, in due course, would come to constitute an entire corpus of law: Sunna. Any detail of Roman or Persian legislation, any fragment of Syrian or Mesopotamian custom, might be incorporated within. The only requirement was convincingly to represent it as having been spoken by the prophet – for anything spoken by Muhammad could be assumed to have the stamp of divine approval. Here, then, for Christians was a fateful challenge. Their time-honored conviction that the true law of God was to be found written on the heart could not have been more decisively repudiated. No longer was it the prerogative of Jews alone to believe in a great corpus of divine legislation that touched upon every facet of human existence, and prescribed in exacting detail how God desired men and women to live. The Talmud, an immense body of law compiled by Jewish scholars – rabbis – in the centuries prior to the Arab conquest of the Near East, had never threatened the inheritance of Paul’s teachings as the Sunna did. Muslims were not a beleaguered minority, prey to the bullying of Christian emperors and kings. They had conquered a vast and wealthy empire, and aspired to conquer yet more. Had Francia gone the way of Africa, and been lost for good to Christian rule, then the Franks too would doubtless and eventually be brought to the Muslim understanding of God and his law. The fundamental assumptions that governed Latin Christendom would thereby have been radically and momentously transformed. Few, if any, who fought at Poitiers would have realized it, but at stake in the battle had been nothing less than the legacy of Saint Paul.”
Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World
In my latest National Post column I call on Parliament to rein in the overweening pride and overreaching presumptions of Canada’s courts, especially the Supreme Court.
“If you particularly want it [a post] to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution. Briefly, if you want the old white post you must have a new white post.”
G.K. Chesterton Orthodoxy
“’There is no graded scale of essential worth,’ [Martin Luther King Jr.] King had written a year before his assassination. ‘Every human being has etched in his personality the indelible stamp of the creator. Every man must be respected because God loves him.’ Every woman too, a feminist might have added. Yet King’s words, while certainly bearing witness to an instinctive strain of patriarchy within Christianity, bore witness as well to why, across the Western world, this was coming to seem a problem. That every human being possessed an equal dignity was not remotely self-evident truth. A Roman would have laughed at it. To campaign against discrimination on the grounds of gender or sexuality, however, was to depend on large numbers of people sharing in a common assumption: that everyone possessed an inherent worth. The origins of this principle – as Nietzsche had so contemptuously pointed out – lay not in the French Revolution, nor in the Declaration of Independence, nor in the Enlightenment, but in the Bible.”
Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World
This week on Forum Daily News with Hal Roberts, I discussed the JCCF petition against Bill C22 that I personally delivered to the Prime Minister’s Office in the admittedly remote hope that they’ll reconsider this Draconian and mistargeted bill.
In my latest Loonie Politics column I deplore the prideful inability of people in public life to admit an error and apologize even though, weirdly, it would be better PR than their flailing efforts at spin control, as well as better statecraft and soulcraft.
Today on behalf of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms I delivered a petition to the Prime Minister’s office urging him not to proceed with this aggressive infringement on our digital privacy. Watch the video here: https://vimeo.com/1194808661