Paradoxical as it may seem, it remains true that man is perfect in exact proportion to the subjection he gives his superiors, to that subjection given the Supreme Being who is the First Cause and Last End of every creature. As a matter of fact, there cannot be atheism. Man may vociferously deny that he [...]
There I, a convinced atheist, stood alone in a sandy and windy world, devoid of water, trees, or anything that seemed to be alive. And I couldn’t help but wonder what madness had overcome me. The most fateful university holiday I ever experienced was way back in February 1988. Yes, during that magical and mystical [...]
During his final illness, Blaise Pascal often refused the care of his physician, saying: “Sickness is the natural state of Christians.” He believed that human beings had been created to suffer. Misery was the condition of life in this world. My uncle made book for a living. That is, he took money from those who [...]
Myth can be a fantasy tale full of whimsy and phantasmagorical characters, but true myth is much more than that. It is a tale that is true whether it is factual or not, and when it is both factual and true our eyes and hearts are opened to new realities and our quotidian lives are [...]
Spinoza has appeared to build upon the edifice of the ancients and the medieval scholastics, but he has actually taken the floor out from under us, so that “God” and “man” no longer mean quite what they did. A wise man has written a book called God or Nothing—the title a profoundly pithy expression of [...]
Even though it is not easy, and often impossible, to make our enemies our friends, it is nonetheless true that there is no other way of making our enemies our friends except by loving them. Any honest soul in genuine pursuit of the truth is a friend of mine. Three unsolicited e-mails, received in the [...]
Brian Greene is the latest in a long line of thinkers who assert that there is no God, and no free will, no independent consciousness, no transcendent reality whatsoever. Though we learn much science from Dr. Greene, none of it dull and much of it fascinating, he leaves us perplexed in the end. The very [...]
Heaven knows why, but on Easter Sunday 2020 I thought back to a conversation I had with Christopher Hitchens. I’d invited him to come to the Hauenstein Center to talk about his recent book on Thomas Jefferson. It was October 3, 2006. On the two-hour drive from Detroit Metro Airport to Grand Rapids, he mentioned [...]
The Invention of Science by David Wootton is a dense, thought-provoking, and encyclopedic account of the Scientific Revolution. The book is an intellectual history, focusing mainly on the mental paradigm shift that the Revolution brought to Western Civilization. How man thinks about the natural world post-Revolution is not the same as how man thought before it, [...]
Like all human beings, the atheist ones I’ve seen and known are always prattling on about justice and injustice. But atheists don’t seem to realize that there is such a category as “should” because there is a design for the world that we perceive. Atheists do not believe in God, but I confess that I [...]
Blaise Pascal wrote that men hate religion and “are afraid it is true.” But can we agree with him? Some have made clear a hatred for it, but do they fear it? And what about the wider culture? Do people today, generally speaking, fear religion? The renowned physicist Stephen Hawking once heckled that the idea [...]
The world has been and will continue to be overwhelmingly traditionally religious, whatever intellectuals like Nietzsche might have expected to the contrary, thus confirming those philosophers who contend that all civilizations must be supported by such moral frameworks… San Diego State University recently announced what it called perhaps the largest ever study of American youth [...]
When there is no religion, the religion that exists in the vacuum—ideology—is the very worst sort of religion… After observing yet another protest march the other day I became interested in how similar to religion ideologies are. The ideology could be left wing or right wing, North, South, East or West wing. It matters not. [...]
I, like you, was born in the Kali Yuga, the Dark Age of Hindu mythology, when all the great faiths of the world are on the wane. The secular faith in the Nation-State, in grand schemes to institute Paradise on Earth, and in placing transcendent hope in human institutions has been destroyed by history. No [...]