“Muslim society has a hard time explaining what caused the loss of power and prominence . . . Whatever index one looks at, Muslims can be found clustering toward the bottom, whether in terms of military prowess, political stability, economic development, corruption, lack of human rights, health, longevity, or literacy” (Daniel Pipes, Militant Islam Reaches …
Disturbing the Disturbed
“Disturbing the corruptions of men who will oppose out of malice is not something to be greatly regarded. When Christ was told that the Pharisees were offended He cared not for it, but made a great matter of the offending of any of His little ones” (Burroughs, Irenicum, p. 114).
The Guy in the Teapot
Not surprisingly, Richard Dawkins places the evolutionary process at the center of his argument. “This book will advocate an alternative view: any creative intelligence, of sufficient complexity to design anything, comes into existence only as the end product of an extended process of gradual evolution” (p. 31, emphasis in the original). This might be hard …
Resenting the Disaster
“This inner sense of confidence helped imbue Muslims with an unparalleled loyalty to their religions. Added to this internal confidence was the fact that Muslims enjoyed outstanding success during their first six or so centuries. To be a Muslim meant to belong to a winning civilization. This pattern of success started right at the beginning: …
How Do You Solve a Rose?
“Take a rose. How will you proceed to solve a rose? You can cultivate roses, smell them, gather and wear them, make them into perfume or potpourri, paint them or write poetry about them; these are all creative activities. But can you solve roses? Has that expression any meaning?” (Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the …
The Wicked Limber Up Their Bow
Minister: Lift up your hearts! Congregation: We lift them up to the Lord! In the Lord I trust, How can you talk to my soul like that? How can you taunt, saying, “Fly like a bird To your mountain home?” The wicked limber up their bow, They set the arrow on the string, To shoot …
A Couple Junior High Girls in a Slap Fight
Dawkins spends a goodish bit of time in his first chapter trying to show that belief in supernatural religion is not worthy of the thinking man’s respect. “It is in the light of the unparalled presumption of respect for religion that I make my own disclaimer for this book. I shall not go out of …
Thou Art the Potter
Remember that the Lord makes all things new, and this includes us. We come to worship the Lord, not to fashion ourselves according to what we think He might want. We come to worship the Lord, not to assume that we need not change at all. In worship, we present ourselves to God, as clay …
Not an Aberration
“Putting all this together, we might surmise that Islamic terrorism, though most immediately arising from the eighteenth-century Wahhabi movement and therefore a divergent stream of Islam, is in continuity with Islam as a whole” (Peter Leithart, Mirror of Christendom, p. 7).
The Demand for Originality
“The demand for ‘originality’—with the implication that the reminiscence of other writers is a sin against originality and a defect in the work—is a recent one and would have seemed quite ludicrous to poets of the Augustan Age, or of Shakespeare’s time ” (Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker, p. 121).