In my latest Epoch Times column I denounce the Canadian Forces’ proposed plan for military chaplains as an Orwellian project in which uniformity is diversity, exclusion is inclusion and freedom is slavery.
“Christmas can be commercial and tacky – after all, graduations, weddings and funerals are often commercial and tacky – but it should never be sentimental. Sentimentality is love without sacrifice. The sentimental man sends his wife flowers but never helps with the dishes.”
Fr. Raymond J. DeSouza in National Post Dec. 24, 2002
“Things do come to those who wait, but only things left over from those who hustle.”
Not Abraham Lincoln, despite countless internet attributions. (And to be blunt, it doesn’t sound like him either, in tone or content.) It’s still a good line. But not his.
“It is a pressing problem for a credible theology, second only to the problem of suffering, to give some satisfactory account of why the diversity of religious affirmations should not lead us to the conclusion that they are merely the expression of culturally determined opinions. Kenneth Cragg reminds us that even in the seventeenth century John Bunyan felt the difficulty. In Grace Abounding he wrote, ‘Everyone doth think his own religion rightest, both Jews and Moors and Pagans: and how if our faith, and Christ, and scriptures, should be but a think so too?’ Of course, there is unquestionably a degree of cultural determination in our actual religious beliefs. If I had grown up in Saudi Arabia, rather than in England, it would be foolish to deny that the chances are I would be a Muslim. But the chances are also that I would not have spent most of my life as a theoretical physicist, but that does not mean that science is simply a cultural artefact. We must not commit the genetic fallacy of supposing that origin explains away the content of belief.”
John Polkinghorne The Faith of a Physicist
“he seems as unprepossessing as an unshelled peanut.”
Peter C. Newman on Joe Clark in National Post Feb. 19, 2000
In my latest Loonie Politics column I say it is clown-level silliness for B.C. Premier John Horgan to insist that our health care system is brilliantly designed and crumbling simultaneously.
“And what, philosophically, is the difference between those physically alive, but sleepwalking through their daily existence and those physically dead but alive in the being of others?”
A writer whose name I did not record in Chronicles magazine July 1987
“history; which is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.”
Edward Gibbon Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire