“Our life is no dream, but it should and will perhaps become one.”
Novalis, quoted in George Macdonald Lilith
In my latest National Post column I say that acts of evil, including the mass shooting at two New Zealand mosques, result from deliberate cultivating of evil thoughts.
“In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it. If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: If you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth – only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair.”
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
“We live under the shadow of a gigantic question mark. Who are we? Where do we come from? Whither are we bound?”
Hendrick Van Loon The Story of Mankind (the beginning)
“Unmaking the bomb (as I’ve written before) is like trying to un-eat the forbidden fruit. Leaving the Tree of Knowledge alone might have been a better choice, but it’s a bit too late for that. Pretending it never happened isn’t a useful idea. God had good reasons for his dietary restrictions in the Garden of Eden, arbitrary as they may have seemed to his critics, then and since.”
George Jonas in National Post August 8, 2015 (defending the use of nuclear weapons to end World War II; interestingly, Jonas was not a believer)
In my latest National Post column I say the bizarre life of the late fashion icon Karl Lagerfeld reflects the emptiness of postmodernism all too well.
“Truth does not become more true by virtue of the fact that the entire world agrees with it, nor less so even if the whole world disagrees with it.”
Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed (according to https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/194459.Maim_nides)
“Frederick Myers describes a conversation with her [George Eliot] in which, ‘taking as her text the words God, Immortality, Duty, she pronounced, with a terrible earnestness, how inconceivable was the first, how incredible the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third’…. It is quite normal now for people to go through life without an ultimate object, but to the Victorians it was new and daunting. No wonder so many of them were such odd fish – Kitchener, Rosebery, Salisbury, Dilke, Curzon, Carson, Randolph Churchill, Fisher, Rhodes, Milner. In many cases certitude was replaced by a streak of violence…”
Paul Johnson The Offshore Islanders