Posts in Philosophy
Words Worth Noting - May 31, 2026

“Lest we forget an at least over-the-shoulder acknowledgement to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology lives off and leaves off and history begins – or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom – Lucifer.”

“Saul Alinksy” quoted as 3rd of 3 header quotations in Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals [from the “so you admit it” file]

Words Worth Noting - May 10, 2026

Nietzsche was “[c]ondemned by many as the most dangerous thinker who had ever lived, others hailed him as a prophet. There were many who considered him both. Nietzsche was not the first to have become a byword for atheism, of course. No one, though – not Spinoza, not Darwin, not Marx – had ever before dared to gaze quite so unblinkingly at what the murder of its god might mean for a civilization. ‘When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet.’ Nietzsche’s loathing for those who imagined otherwise was intense. Philosophers he scorned as secret priests. Socialists, communists, democrats: all were equally deluded. ‘Naiveté: as if morality could survive when the God who sanctions it is missing!’”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

Words Worth Noting - May 7, 2026

“Repeatedly, whether crashing along the canals of Tenochtitlan, or settling the estuaries of Massachusetts, or trekking deep into the Transvaal, the confidence that had enabled Europeans to believe themselves superior to those they were displacing was derived from Christianity. Repeatedly, though, in the struggle to hold this arrogance to account, it was Christianity that had provided the colonized and enslaved with their surest voice. The paradox was profound. No other conquerors, carving out empires for themselves, had done so as the servants of a man tortured to death on the orders of a colonial official. No other conquerors, dismissing with contempt the gods of other peoples, had installed in their place an emblem of power so deeply ambivalent as to render problematic the very notion of power. No other conquerors, exporting an understanding of the divine peculiar to themselves, had so successfully persuaded peoples around the globe that it possessed a universal import. When, a month before his inauguration as president, Mandela traveled to the Transvaal, there to celebrate Easter in the holy city of Moria, it was as a Savior who had died for the whole world that he saluted Christ. ‘Easter is a festival of human solidarity, because it celebrates the fulfillment of the Good News! The Good News born by our risen Messiah who chose not one race, who chose not one country, who chose not one language, who chose not one tribe, who chose all of humankind!’ Ironically, however, even as Mandela was hailing Easter as a festival for all the world, elites in the old strongholds of Christendom were growing ever more nervous of using such language.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World