The Bible makes it clear: we must be poor in spirit. Poverty of this sort, the true poverty which can be found in the lives of some who are poor and also in some who are prosperous, doesn’t dictate some sort of extreme asceticism, voluntary or forced upon us. Our Lord Jesus Christ lived in … [Read more…]
In my various writings, I’ve not had a good thing to say about the welfare systems and social security systems of our modern age. I only want to write a short entry explaining the basic principle behind my opposition to welfare systems and social security systems. We are physical creatures, creatures who need food and … [Read more…]
This will be a short one and necessary only because there are so few who really care about ideas nowadays. We think in terms of policies, of immediate flows of cash and the resources which cash can buy in the modern world. And so it makes some limited sense in the context of our times … [Read more…]
We are all liberals and individualists nowadays, even those who pretend otherwise (forget the Amish for a few minutes, please). Our views of self and society lead us lead us to act according to a cowardly form of prudence. Let me take a quote from the 1913 Webster as found in the Collaborative International Dictionary … [Read more…]
In “To See a World in a Grain of Sand”, I noted that Melville thought Emerson and Thoreau to be morally insane — Hawthorne and Henry James, Sr. agreed. Melville noted in one place that the morality of those Cambridge sages was a spiritualized materialism that masked a total lack of charity, a total lack … [Read more…]
I’ve made a tentative commitment to participate in the March for Life down in Washington in January of 2007. To be honest, I’m not going because I think it’s a worthwhile activity but only because it might be interesting. The Bible doesn’t tell us that we properly confront evil by putting on spectacles to amuse … [Read more…]
In my first posting on the American Empire which is taking a somewhat more definite shape, I noted the relationship between liquid wealth and the growth of central powers. Those central powers, in the case of the United States an unholy alliance of politicians and corporate capitalists, will see liquid wealth as so much booty … [Read more…]
I know just enough about history and economics to be dangerous and what I know leads me to the dangerous thought that a sufficiently large political entity with a centralized government will tend strongly to evolve into an empire, no matter its pretences to being a republic. It may have initial periods of freedom, but … [Read more…]
This article states the obvious truth about our moral confusion and makes the valid distinction between ends and means. Americans have always been confused about this distinction, often because of the domination of practical reasoning in the American mind. As I point out in my book “To See a World in a Grain of Sand: … [Read more…]
No, I didn’t claim Darwinism is sexy, only that Darwinism is sexual. And it’s more accurate to say evolutionary theory is more sexual than natural, since Darwinism is at least arguably an ideology only accidentally connected to a valid field of study.