In my latest National Post column I argue that the real division in Canada is between people who praise diversity in theory but suppress it in practice and those who do the opposite.
“The examined life is no great shakes either”.
Another from me, on December 10 2021, prompted by entering the April 1 Socrates quotation into the relevant digital file
In my latest Loonie Politics column I say there’s a stark divide in Canada and throughout the West, vividly on display over the truckers’ convoy, between those who favour plain reasoning and those who like their logic ornate, dazzling and convoluted.
“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
Socrates, quoted in Neil Postman Building a Bridge to the 18th Century (and about 10 million other places)
“We cannot begin by forming independently a theory of how God is knowable and then seek to test it out or indeed to actualize it and fill it with material content. How God can be known must be determined from first to last by the way in which He actually is known.”
Thomas Torrance in 1969, quoted approvingly in John Polkinghorne The Faith of a Physicist
“something has to be overcome before we can cut up a dead man or a live animal in a dissecting room…. We do not look at trees either as Dryads or as beautiful objects while we cut them into beams: the first man who did so may have felt the price keenly, and the bleeding trees in Virgil and Spenser may be far-off echoes of that primeval sense of impiety. The stars lost their divinity as astronomy developed, and the Dying God has no place in chemical agriculture.”
C.S. Lewis The Abolition of Man
“Well, if that’s what you call being at peace, for heaven’s sake just warn me before you go to war, will you?”
The main character in Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt
“If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at the moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Christ. Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved. And to be steady on all the battle fields besides is merely flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point.”
Martin Luther, quoted among many other places by https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/657155-if-i-profess-with-the-loudest-voice-and-clearest-exposition