“The need of most human beings to believe in a moral universe is proof for Nietzsche that lies and self-deception are essential conditions of human life . . . . But there is a tension in Nietzsche between an amoralism that repudiates all objective standards and a distinctively hierarchical kind of thinking that ranks souls …
Sound Effects
“There is a difference between insulting the truth of God and insulting some lunacy that a televangelist is maintaining as the truth of God. There is a difference between kicking puppies and lampooning the self-righteous and pompous, although sometimes the sound effects are very similar” (A Serrated Edge, p. 82).
No Brakes On Hip
“Aside from the settings and multiple victims, another common feature of these killings has been the influence on the perpetrators of films such as Natural Born Killers and Basketball Diaries, of fantasy video games, and of the nihilistic lyrics of Marilyn Manson . . . The pursuit of evil, then, can have a certain grandeur …
A Special Gift
“Whenever the Christian faith is accepted and established in a nation, and a large number of people are members of various churches, one of the first and deadliest temptations is the lust for respectability — a lust which is defined and established by complacent worldly values, and not by the Scriptures. Soon the pulpits of …
Where The Action Is
“It is a truism of the business world that Coke and Pepsi don’t make soda pop, they make advertising. Nike may pay Indonesian laborers absurdly low wages, but their most important concern is convincing us that it is meaningful, daring, and fulfilling to spend over one hundred dollars for a pair of sneakers. If you …
Pointy Pagan Hats
“I am reminded of the time I was reading Augustine’s wonderful work The City of God, and I came to the part where he was making fun of the pagan priests for wearing their silly mitres for hats. I thought to myself, huh, I thought, and flipped the book over for another look at the …
Alternating Alternative
“Thus with the ‘alternative’ face lift, ‘rebellion’ continues to perform its traditional function of justifying the economy’s ever-accelerating cycles of obsolescence with admirable efficiency . . . Ever since the 1960s hip has been the native tongue of advertising, ‘antiestablishment’ the vocabulary by which we are taught to cast off our old possessions and buy …
Satire As Prophecy
“We are Bible people, and we name our churches Bible churches, and we go to Bible studies, although Bibles are increasingly rare at them, and our holy hardware stores make megabucks selling study Bibles for ‘whatever ails ya.’ But the problem with making up titles of such Bible versions to illustrate a point here is …
Social Totemization
“Brands are also a handy device for papering over nasty ambiguities like how things are made and what product is ‘right’ for a person’s socioeconomic standing and lifestyle. This strategy has been taken to ridiculous extremes, as in the case of sunglasses, hiking shoes, water, beer, and countless other cases where the most everyday products …
Top to Bottom, Front to Back
“So before there can be any kind of restoration of national dignity in the civil realm, there must absolutely be a reformation in the Church — top to bottom, stem to stern, from the front of the face to the back of the head. Modern evangelicalism is not the solution to America’s problems, modern evangelicalism …