“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
“The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
Carl Sagan
“Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.”
Seneca
“Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.”
Funny, though. Without some widely held religious creed societies tend to revert, as ours so clearly has, to being driven entirely by greed, lust and thinly-veiled tribalism. Morality, as Ayn Rand noted (but failed to live out), under-girds all human achievement. When worldly men abandon morality religion becomes its only refuge.
And it would seem our rulers have abandoned even the pretense of religion as if to say, “Don’t even expect us to hypocritically acknowledge any moral standard. We are totally free to do whatever we please and unless you bend to our will you are totally f___cked.”
You’re right about Ayn Rand. The long public affair she had with Nathaniel that she forced her husband to endure was immoral and in conflict with her view that Men were moral striving beings. I read Atlas Shrugged in high school and fell in love with it. As I aged, I began to see that some of the arguments were as ideologically rigid as she accused the Bolsheviks as being -as was the way she conducted herself-but I still like her idea that we should strive to be the best we can be, that capitalism is the best economic system, and individual rights trump collective rights. I think a big weakness of her vision is that she had no place for religion. She made the same mistake the Communists made by attempting to replace God with the perfectible Man. She did not give credit to the fact that it is Christianity that gave us our moral code. So many of the things that happened in her novel as the socialists chipped away at capitalism have happened over the years. One of my favorites is when the EU required Microsoft to give their proprietary secrets to their competitors to make the competition “fair”. Rearden is spinning in his grave.
Great post sir.
No religion -> No civilization.
As far as which is the right one?
The fruit of the tree shows the nature of the tree.