In my latest National Post column I insist that, since Islam is a religion not a race, whatever concern about radical Islam might be it cannot be racism.
"I know a man who has such a passion for proving that he will have no personal existence after death that he falls back on the position that he has no personal existence now. He invokes Buddhism and says that all souls fade into each other; in order to prove that he cannot go to heaven he proves that he cannot go to Hartlepool."
G.K. Chesterton Orthodoxy p. 344.
"the Furies of conscience do not wait upon our assumptions. One who admits the Furies but denies the God who appointed them – who supposes that there can be a law without a lawgiver – must suppose that forgiveness is both necessary and impossible. That which is not personal cannot forgive; morality 'by itself' has a heart of rock."
J. Budziszewski in First Things June/July 2002
"Truth is not only stranger, but much more blood-curdling than fiction."
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News Dec. 31 1921, quoted in “Chesterton Rewrites more of the Classic Lines” in Gilbert Magazine July-August 20077-8/07 p. 37
"There are those who hate Christianity and call their hatred an all-embracing love for all religions."
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News January 13, 1906, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 4 #7
"the difference between passion and addiction is that between a divine spark and a flame that incinerates. The sacred fire through which Moshe (Moses) experienced the presence of God on Mount Horeb did not annihilate the bush from which it arose... Passion is divine fire: it enlivens and makes holy; it gives light and yields inspiration. Passion is generous because it’s not ego-drive; addiction is self-centred."
Gabor Maté In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts
In my latest National Post column I ponder the mystery of Donald Trump's enduring appeal to people who should know better... and those who drive them to it.
"people who think of the All, and only of the All, have, as far as I have seen, a tendency to become like the worshippers of a tadpole. They are worshipping something heartless, brainless, bodyless, something that is everything and nothing, something that has not the power of giving anyone that shock of reality which we can get from a woman’s face or a sting of pain. They do not love their god as monks love Christ; they do not fear him as savages fear Mumbo-Jumbo. And out of them comes that horrible universalism, that freezing and theoretic philanthropy which is the worst of the modern evils."
G.K. Chesterton in Daily News March 24, 1904, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 7 #5 (March 2004)