“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 Epoch Times column I say from coast to coast Canada is turning away from trusting the people and abandoning self-government for meddlesome ineffective presumption.

“The general picture of Syria under Roman rule is one of prosperity more continuous than in any other province. Most of the workers were freeman, except in domestic service. The upper classes were Hellenized, the lower remained Oriental; in the same town Greek philosophers rubbed elbows with temple prostitutes and emasculated priests; and even till Hadrian children were now and then offered as sacrifices to the gods.”

Will Durant Caesar and Christ

“Our knowledge of the Lyons persecutions [in or very shortly after 177 AD] comes from a letter of ‘the servants of Christ at Lugdunum and Vienna in Gaul, to the brethren in Asia and Phrygia,’ preserved in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, v, 1. Some exaggeration may have crept into the report.”

Will Durant Caesar and Christ

“Protestants had been insisting on the correctness of their own readings of scripture, their own understandings of God’s purpose, since the time of Luther’s confrontation with Cajetan. Now, in the person of Spinoza, this tradition had begun to cannibalise itself.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

“‘The two greatest problems in history,’ says a brilliant scholar of our time, are ‘how to account for the rise of Rome, and how to account for her fall.’ We may come nearer to understanding them if we remember that the fall of Rome, like her rise, had not one cause but many, and was not an event but a process spread over 300 years. Some nations have not lasted as long as Rome fell. A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within. The essential causes of Rome’s decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars. Christian writers were keenly appreciative of this decay.”

Will Durant Caesar and Christ

“no Roman citizen, as every reader of the Acts of the Apostles knows, could be scourged, tortured, or put to death over his appeal to the emperor.”

Will Durant Caesar and Christ [and everyone knew it then, Christian or not, whereas nowadays I wouldn’t count on most state-educated people to understand any part of that sentence]

“But in reality, the more there was to do the better. I never ceased contriving fresh improvements, being fully aware of the importance of strengthening and maintaining the health of mind and body. This, indeed, with a consciousness of continual progress toward a desirable end, is found to constitute the main element of happiness.”

Johann David Wyss, Swiss Family Robinson