“Darwin himself, asked about the implications of his theory for religion and morality, replied that while the idea of God was ‘beyond the scope of man’s intellect,’ man’s moral obligations were what they had always been: to ‘do his duty.’ Leslie Stephen, after abandoning the effort to derive an ethic from Darwinism, finally confessed: ‘I now believe in nothing, but I do not the less believe in morality.’ George Eliot uttered the classic statement of this secular ethic when she said that God was ‘inconceivable,’ immortality ‘unbelievable,’ but duty nonetheless ‘peremptory and absolute.’”
Gertrude Himmelfarb The De-moralization of Society
In my latest Loonie Politics column I say there's nothing wrong with what the Trudeau administration tweeted about Saudi repression; it wasn't some utopian overreach to remake the world, just a statement in favour of the Canadian value of freedom.
"You must be the change you wish to see in the world."
Mahatma Gandhi
In my latest National Post column I worry about Boris Johnson being threatened with a "diversity course" to make him like the burka.
"'Unless you assume a God, the question of life’s purpose is meaningless.’ – Bertrand Russell, atheist"
2nd header quotation in Rick Warren The Purpose-Driven Life Chapter 1
"'Do you believe in God, Winston?' ‘No.’ ‘Then what is it, this principle that will defeat us?’ ‘I don’t know. The spirit of Man.’ ‘And do you consider yourself a man?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man. Your kind is extinct; we are the inheritors.'"
O'Brien and Winston Smith in George Orwell Nineteen Eighty-Four