“Ambrose Bierce wrote of an inventor who built a moon rocket. When he fired it up, it bored straight down into the earth. A while later he crawled up out of the hole, and triumphantly announced, ‘My invention has proved correct in all its details; the defects are merely basic and fundamental!’ … whereupon the investors rushed forward to press money on him for the next attempt.”

Spider Robinson in Globe & Mail April 27, 1999

In my latest Epoch Times column I say that an ideology, aka paradigm or worldview, is essential to coherent thought. So instead of the “I know you are but what am I?” spectacle of people trading cries of “ideologue” we should try to debate the reasons why we disagree about which evidence matters and what it says. And your goal should not be to avoid ideologies but to choose a sensible one.

In my latest National Post column I say the DND report on patriarchy invading the cosmos , while hilarious, reflects an pernicious ideology that destroys all productive enterprises from space exploration to defence procurement, and has wrecked governance in Canada.

“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.