Forum Log

" The good news isn’t good unless the "bad news" is bad. […] The world, the flesh, and the devil are working very hard to conceal or blunt the bad news. Sick? There’s a pill for that. Aging body? There’s a nip-and-tuck. Lonely or worried or restless or afraid or heartbroken? There’s shopping and sex and bourbon and YouTube. Anything, anything rather than facing the bad news that I will, that I must, sicken and die and decompose and be forgotten from the face of the earth because of my inheritance of Adam’s curse, and my complicity in that same curse by my sins. […] There is something deeply, cosmically wrong with the universe, and without the intervention of a deity, my final end is utter, total erasure and senility and death and rotting and oblivion. "Remember your last days." writes Sirach. "Remember death and decay." " - Kelly Scott Franklin, 'The Bad News', in The Lamp Magazine, Issue 31. https://thelampmagazine.com/issues/issue-31/the-bad-news

- Great post. Very true. - Where I'm at mentally: Human activity can be so bad that it's preferable to believe in God in order to have a defense against demonic behavior. - To go one level deeper, and to turn the focus away from other people, I understand my own proclivity towards evil / sin, which is quite strong, and the church offers a remedy, which is significantly better than the only two real alternatives: buddhism & nilihism. (I don't consider Nietzche's Ubermensch a viable alternative.) - That said, i still think the faith should be held in balance / tension against instinct / thor / odin / zeus / darwin. Sanity / truth emerges from the tension of opposites. - Incidentally, this is a way to avoid the temptation to try to justify christianity in the terms of scientific proof. I watched a lot of people try to do this. It's pointless. Cedes frame. - The faith is the faith. It needs no further justification. - cf "I am who i am" / ipsum esse

New podcast episode (~ 4 mins) I'm taking a second crack at the podcast arena. Maximum stripped-down approach. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diYjLykJHw8

"Modern politicians and becoming a man" - New article on Tela Blog It contains two quotes that I found striking. Issues: - The effect of a constant audience on a politician - The default state of man absent the cultural imposition of masculinity "... Mature masculinity is artificially induced through culture...." https://telablog.com/modern-politicians-and-becoming-a-man

... This imagining is another important good bestowed by historical reading, for it dispels the illusion that H.G. Wells called the "governess view" of history: They (the bad people) are doing this terrible thing to Us (the good people). The fallacy in it is to suppose that any large group acts as with one mind, clear in purpose and aware of consequences. Such a projection of the single ego upon whole masses is a form of provincialism that is encountered in most political discussions and certainly in all social prejudices: "If the President would only act ... if those people would only see reason...." A reader of history is cured of this simple-mindedness by developing a new sense—the historical sense—of how mankind in the mass behaves, neither free nor fatally pushed, and in its clearest actions mysterious even to itself. ... 'The Point and Pleasure of Reading History' Jacques Barzun