Quote of the Day (51)

Cognitive dissonance exists because it’s possible for otherwise-intelligent men and women to hold two points of view at the same time that mutually exclude at their core. ‘X’ and ‘Not-X’. That sort of thing.

I ran into this in a conversation with two women at work many years ago about the Liberal Prime Minister they had just helped elect. As I listed government policy after government policy with which I knew they both had serious issues, they nodded in agreement like twin bobbleheads of the sisters from Full House. These were indeed bad policies, and they were driving our country into the ground. We were all on the same page about that.

“So … why?” I finally asked.

Quote of the Day (50)

David de Bruyn’s morning email is a short prayer checklist entitled “When God Says ‘No’ ”. I’ve made them myself from time to time, and I’m sure I’ve done a post on the subject at some point over the years. You know what that looks like: “My prayer is not being answered in the affirmative, Lord. So what does your word say about that?”

What possible reasons might there be?

Quote of the Day (48)

Cultures do not suddenly plummet into the abyss for no reason. Yes, corrupt and self-serving leadership plays its part, and we have seen plenty of that in the last few decades. Still, assuming democracy is indeed the least-worst governmental option, and assuming it works as claimed to any degree at all, we have to look beyond leadership to explain how we have gotten into our current mess.

The man on the street has to be called to account.

Quote of the Day (47)

“He hated congregational religion. He hated the smiles and the manners of the Sunday-dressed Scottish Protestant, the emphasis on a communion not with God but with your neighbours. He had tried seven churches of various denominations in Edinburgh, and had found none to be to his liking. He had tried sitting for two hours at home of a Sunday, reading the Bible and saying a prayer, but somehow that did not work either. He was caught; a believer outwith his belief. Was a personal faith good enough for God? Perhaps …”

— Ian Rankin, Knots & Crosses

Quote of the Day (46)

I’ve told this story before, but it perfectly illustrates the mentality addressed in today’s quote.

In the mid-eighties, I was introduced to a fellow college student who claimed to be very interested in Jesus Christ, but had a “few” questions about the Bible first. I naturally offered to help in any way that I could. He handed me a list of familiar posers along the lines of “Where did Cain get his wife?”

Okay, the issues seemed important to him, so fair enough.

Quote of the Day (45)

As we have worked our way through the Minor Prophets in our Saturday studies, we have noted repeatedly the problem of communication that the Holy Spirit had to resolve when speaking through Hebrew seers two to three thousand years ago about events still to take place. I mention the Holy Spirit particularly, because the prophets themselves may not always have understood the communication barriers involved, though the Spirit of God was well aware of what was going on as he carried them along.

After all, in many cases the prophets had no idea when God would bring about the fulfillment of the events they described, let alone all the things that would happen to the nations and peoples they mentioned in the interval.

Quote of the Day (44)

“One of the things that convinces me of the reality of the Bible is that the level of the writing is so phenomenal. The only thing that has even a fraction of the storytelling power of the Bible is maybe The Complete Works of Shakespeare, and it’s not even close. Most of the writing of stories, and the dialogue and so forth, is absolutely superlative.”

— Vox Day

Here is a subject I have been wanting to get to for a while. Also, it lets me use the title “Quote of the Day” as a double entendre. Can’t beat that twofer!

Quote of the Day (43)

The always-excellent Antemodernist performs surgery on a post about Romans 13 and submission to authority from Stand to Reason’s Jonathan Noyes:

“Suppose a stranger walks up to you and declares himself a king and says he is your king, and by virtue of his authority over you, he compels you to pay taxes and serve in his militia. A bit strange, and you’d probably pretend to take a phone call to get away. Mr. Noyes, if he is consistent, cannot do this. He’d be disobeying authority.”

Like many of our readers, I have been struggling with this issue since early 2020. Prior to that point, if you had asked me when Romans 13 does not apply to Christians, I would have promptly answered, “When we are told not to preach the gospel.” That much I was sure of. Beyond that, I’m afraid I hadn’t given the illegitimate exercise of authority much thought. Since then I’ve had to give it plenty, the results of which you can find here and here.

Antemodernist has obviously been doing a fair bit of thinking as well.

Quote of the Day (42)

It’s hard to believe how frequently “everything old is new again”, how often “what goes around comes around”, or how reliably “the past does not repeat itself, but it rhymes”.

Having studied the past only just a little, I have still seen enough to grudgingly second the truism that “Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.” Even its slightly darker kindred observation, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results,” though wildly overused, has become cliché precisely because we have to acknowledge that people do this all the time.

We really must be nuts.

Quotable Quotes

I’m pretty sure that is (used to be?) a regular feature in Reader’s Digest. Anyway, they won’t mind me nicking their title ...

I had promised about two years ago to update the links page for our semi-regular Quote of the Day feature. It currently links to 41 posts with another on the way shortly. The update was to include the names of each person quoted, which seems a fairly helpful thing to do for anyone who is trying to catch up on these after the fact.

At any rate, that has finally been done. You can find the index page here if you’re interested, or access it any time from the banner on the main page of the blog.

At your service,

Tom

Quote of the Day (41)

In a week when the usual suspects have been howling for a “disproportionate response” to the downing of a U.S. navy spy drone, it’s refreshing to find a commentator who prefers violent provocations be met with no response at all.

Don’t worry, this is not about the Strait of Hormuz or what constitutes Iranian airspace. The provocation is storyline-only, and the response to it is disproportionate only if you fail to consider the circumstances in which it occurs.

Quote of the Day (40)

“Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” The book of Acts begins with this question.

Jesus does not answer it directly. Instead, the Lord draws his disciples’ attention away from Israel’s earthly kingdom and redirects it to their mission promoting his spiritual kingdom in this present age. After this, he is taken up into glory.

Some read this to mean there will be no restoration to national prominence for the Jews. Others believe the restoration of the kingdom to Israel is fulfilled in the Church’s present ministry on earth.

Quote of the Day (39)

In his book Do We Need God to be Good? anthropologist C.R. Hallpike quotes mathematician Kevin Devlin:

“Whatever features of our brain enable (some of) us to do mathematics must have been present long before we had any mathematics. Those crucial features, therefore, must have evolved to fulfil some other purpose.”

This sort of statement is incredibly common among evolutionary psychologists and biologists, but “some other [undefined] purpose” is pretty much the best they have to offer the world. The gaping holes in their theoretical framework are orders of magnitude larger than the frame itself, calling their entire dubious intellectual structure into question.

Quote of the Day (38)

Moira Greyland on being raised by sexually abusive parents:

“I understand why it feels so hollow to forgive: I have no problem at all with never even getting mad at what they did to me. My response is frozen in time. I cannot even begin to forgive them for what they did to other people, which is why I was able to take action against them when a child was in danger.”

Walter Breen, Greyland’s father, died in a California prison at the age of 64. He was there because of his daughter’s testimony.

Quote of the Day (37)

The very articulate Stefan Molyneux hosts Freedomain Radio, the most popular philosophy show on the Internet — not that he has a lot of competition in that department. Molyneux has described himself as an atheist, though these days he seems more of an agnostic than a hard-nosed denier.

Earlier this year I picked up a copy of his book Universally Preferable Behaviour: A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics, figuring I might review it here if it turned out to be of interest. The case for ethics apart from God is a tough one to make, and I was curious what sort of evidence Molyneux might produce.

Quote of the Day (36)

If Professor Bret Weinstein is not quite Washington State’s answer to Jordan Peterson, at very least he’s managed to make a bunch of the same enemies by refusing to kow-tow to political correctness on campus, and good for him.

Weinstein is an evolutionary theorist and a professor of biology at The Evergreen State College in Olympia. He and Peterson got together on Joe Rogan’s show recently (ostensibly to discuss Hitler, of all things) in a wide-ranging, almost three hour brainstorm-fest. (Rogan may have an ‘everyman’ sort of appeal, but he too is no intellectual slouch.)

At least part of the three-way exchange might interest other Christians as intensely as it interested me.

Quote of the Day (35)

Photo: Adam Jacobs, under license

I’ve been promising to transcribe this and fisk it since I first came across it a few weeks ago, so here we go.

Jordan Peterson (for the three remaining people who haven’t heard of him) is a U of T professor who took a lot of flack late last year for adamantly refusing to use the made-up gender pronouns of the transgendered Left with his students. Since then, he’s been all over YouTube, and I’m not surprised. The number of Canadians willing to take a public stand in front of the daunting combo of the State, the State-owned media and the Progressivist lobby for things like morality, tradition or (God forbid) anything even remotely resembling Christian values is, well, microscopic.

The following exchange occurred in the question period after Peterson’s fourth lecture in his Old Testament series, which was NOT about abortion. Not at all.

Quote of the Day (34)

The late Christopher Hitchens famously claimed men can be good without God. To prove his case he challenged his detractors to name even one moral action performed by a believer that could not equally have been performed by a nonbeliever.

Hitchens is dead and gone, but his claim is not. Others continue to advance it in different ways. Stefan Molyneux explores the subject in Universally Preferable Behaviour: A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics. Dr. Jordan Peterson, notably coy about his belief in the existence of an actual Supreme Being, lays down a rationalistic scenario in a series of recent lectures in which the Bible, though apparently the product of naturally evolving morality rather than divine revelation, still serves a vital purpose in civilizing man, providing an irreplaceable basis for social interaction and transforming the individual.

Goodness without an actual God. Hmm. Does that work for you?

Quote of the Day (33)

The English Language & Usage website is a useful tool for readers who come across words and phrases they don’t understand and can’t find an answer elsewhere. Other users generally supply the answers they are seeking.

Here’s one rather curious recent inquiry:

“So, what does it mean to come to the end of yourself? Is it related to getting to the point where you are powerless? Or maybe to the fact that you are sick of yourself? Am I even close?”

Now, if you’ve ever circulated among Christians at all, you’ve almost surely encountered the expression, but it’s my sneaking suspicion you won’t come across it elsewhere and that if you do, it’s probably crept in quietly to secular thinking from Christian theology.

Quote of the Day (32)

The old me needed to die, that was the bottom line.

There was no hope of improving him through education, no chance that a good example might nudge him in the right direction — in fact, everything around him seemed to be pushing him the wrong way entirely. Nobody could reasonable expect that left to his own devices he might eventually turn out to be a decent bloke after all.

But God had something in mind for that guy.