“I’m not smart, but I like to observe. Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton was the one who asked why.”
William Hazlitt [https://www.azquotes.com/quote/127744]
“I hope that Christianity will participate in that [“ecumenical encounter of the world faiths”] dialogue in a way that is respectful but not too apologetic or appeasing. Integrity requires us to speak for the truth as we see it, and we need to remember Farrer’s warning that ‘the acknowledgement of a vital truth is always divisive until it becomes universal’. I sometimes fear that Christianity is a little too eager for dialogue, a little lacking in nerve to hold fast to what it has learned of God in Christ. We Europeans must shake off lingering guilt arising from our colonial past. We certainly do not want to be triumphalist, but nor do we wish to forget that there may well be issues on which we are right and those who do not share our view are mistaken. In the end, it is the question of truth that matters, and there is an inevitable exclusivity about truth. If you tell me that you hold the view that the phenomenon of heat is due to the subtle fluid caloric, I do not say that you are entitled to your opinion and I respect you for it. I try, instead, to convince you of the correctness of the kinetic theory of heat energy. Either Jesus is God’s Lord and Christ or he is not, and it matters supremely to know which is the right judgement. Of course, we must be careful to distinguish between the necessary intolerance that truth has of error and a social intolerance exhibited by failing to respect as people those whose opinions we believe to be mistaken. I do not despise you for your caloric belief, nor do I try to impose my kinetic belief on you by harassment or manipulation…. A religion which has resisted its own dissolving into a gnostic account of timeless truth should be open to meeting the historic idiosyncracies present in all religious traditions, without reducing them to merely contingent collections of opinion.”
John Polkinghorne The Faith of a Physicist
“There might be a clockwork ploughman to plough the cornfields or a clockwork miller to grind the corn. I would merely add the equally human hypothesis of a clockwork householder to eat the bread. Then machines could do without men altogether.”
G.K. Chesterton in New York American Nov. 12 1935, quoted in “Robots” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 6 (July-August 2023)
“There are no bad things, only bad uses of things.”
G.K. Chesterton “in his book on St. Thomas Aquinas” quoted by Gabriel Ahlquist in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 6 (July-August 2023) [but in defence of AI which I suspect may test that rule severely]
“Maybe if we start telling people their brain is an app, they’ll want to use it.”
Comment by “mikeorclem” on the Climate Discussion Nexus “Hottest Ever Except Not” video.
“Antisemitism is both a sort of mental impairment and a barrier to learning. If you think that ‘the Jews’ control the banks, you don’t understand finance, and will never understand it because you have this happy conspiracy theory and you think you already know everything. If you think ‘the Jews’ control the weather with their space lasers, you’re not going to bother to study meteorological science. A society in which this kind of antisemitism is prevalent is not going to be a sign of a society on the cutting edge of science or business or economics or anything else. In our society, these beliefs are toxic. They’re terrible for Jews, but they are actually poison to what makes America, America.”
Walter Russell Mead in conversation with Bari Weiss on The Free Press October 31, 2023 [https://www.thefp.com/p/are-we-tipping-into-world-war-three].
In a talk to the Augustine College Summer Seminar I argued that the American Revolution brought liberty and prosperity because it looked back to the solid foundations of Magna Carta, Christianity and the Western tradition, while the French Revolution brought misery and death because it looked forward to a utopian future unconstrained by the past.
“We have been accused of hostility to the scientist, when we are merely hostile to the materialist.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News May 9, 1931, quoted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 # 4 March-April 2022