Comments on: Kicking the Secularist Habit

By: Isegoria

Isegoria — Mon, 03 Nov 2014 13:10:52 +0000

I was going to cite G. K. Chesterton's quip, "When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing — they believe in anything." Then I read up on it:

This quotation actually comes from page 211 of Émile Cammaerts' book The Laughing Prophet: The Seven Virtues and G. K. Chesterton (1937), in which he quotes Chesterton as having Father Brown say, in "The Oracle of the Dog" (1923), "It's the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense." Cammaerts then interposes his own analysis between further quotes from Father Brown: "'It's drowning all your old rationalism and scepticism, it's coming in like a sea; and the name of it is superstition.' The first effect of not believing in God is to believe in anything: 'And a dog is an omen and a cat is a mystery.'" Note that the remark about believing in anything is outside the quotation marks — it is Cammaerts'. Nigel Rees is credited with identifying this as the source of the misattribution, in a 1997 issue of First Things.

By: Spandrell

Spandrell — Mon, 03 Nov 2014 12:20:45 +0000

“We are living through one of the great periods of scientific progress and the creation of wealth. At the same time, we are in the midst of a religious boom.”

I take it the first sentence is a result of the second. Great period of scientific progress? Today? Talk about blind faith.

By: David Foster

David Foster — Sun, 02 Nov 2014 20:41:35 +0000

Brooks missed one of the key anti-secularist trends: the growth of mystical beliefs among people who reject formal religions. I don’t have numbers handy, but there are a lot of college-educated Americans who believe in astrology, magical crystals, a conscious Gaia, etc etc. Generally these are people who say they are “spiritual but not religious.”

C S Lewis’s devil (in The Screwtape Letters) referred to the coming of the “materialist magician.”