Ronald V. Huggins

Last night a stream of conversation was running through my dream on the subject of Faith and Reason. I found it interesting. The upshot of it was that statements like “I live by faith and you live by reason,” or “I live by reason and you live by faith,” are not ultimately meaningful in themselves. Faith and reason always have an object, a point of reference, a realm of activity. The large majority of what people on either side of the equation believe to be true based on reason is actually based on faith, often on the assumption that they think it “reasonable to believe” this or that because some authority has said it that they trust more than others. Very often the real foundation of this sense of “reasonableness” is nothing more than the fact that “most people” think the same way for the same reason. In addition the true definition of “most people” in such cases is usually “most right-thinking people,” which may or may not amount to a majority. Which may i

"As Christians we must understand that when the world shouts its morality at us and insists we are not good Christians unless we fall in line behind it as it pursues its endless and ever-shifting sequence of causes, we must remember that this is just what the world does, that people need to be saved from the world's false moralities as much as they do from its sinful pleasures. And this precisely because the pursuit of false moralities is a kind of sinful pleasure." Moses recalls the reason Israel at first refused to enter the Promised Land: "It was because the LORD hated us that he brought us out of Egypt to hand us over to the Amorites to be wiped out." (Deut 1:27). Attributing sinister motives on God is one of humanity's oldest pastimes. For that generation of Israelites it meant they all died in the desert. In our time we often hear that there is no such thing as a "privileged" narrative. Actually to whatever exten

The thing that makes ideologies dangerous is that those  ensnared by them don't know they're dangerous,  which makes them dangerous too!

I was a third grader at Saint Joseph's School in Butte, Montana. That was back in the day when we still wore uniforms, the boys a blue shirt, salt and pepper corduroys, and a blue neck ties with SJS stiched into them. The girls dresed similarly only in blue dresses with straps that went up over their shoulders instead of pants. As a Catholic, Kennedy was "our" president. The first Roman Catholic to become the President of the United States. A real step forward in a country always dominated by WASPS [White Anglo-Saxon Protestants] who had traditionally run everything in the country while at the same time often hating and fearing us because of our suspected loyalty to the Pope over allegience to our own country. At the time I only knew that wherever I had lived Cathoics were in a marked minority. So I was very proud that "one of us" had risen to such heights. As I recall we even had a bronze plaque of him inside the schools front doors

“Dawkins and Hitchens miss two important points. First, their critics are not  only talking about their scholarly limitations but about their errors, errors that a more informed or careful critic wouldn’t make…”. Curtis White, The Science Delusion: Asking the Big Questions in a Culture of Easy Answers (with new afterward; Brooklyn, London: Melville House, 2014), 35. Popular books are often based more on the author's audacity and force of personality than on carefulness or expertise. They are pep rallies in print, exercises in preaching to the choir to elicit enthusiastic shouts of "Amen," and let anyone outside the choir be damned. Popular authors are cheerleaders really, who use forceful assertions in place of pom poms. As such the most popular authors are likely to be dilettantes prone to making obvious mistakes of the sort that proper expertise would have saved them from making. Still I often find myself surprised that some of the

Very often I find that the cycles of history bring clarity when they come around again. In reading the description the politics of ressentiment in Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals what he was describing seemed essentially illusive. I have to say, however, that the Trump years and especially now with the impeachment hearings, what Nietzsche was talking about has come into sharper focus for me. And this quite apart from questions of whether he's guilty of the things he's being charged with, whether he's a good or bad guy, etc. However you view all that (and remember I didn't vote for the guy), it does very much appear that his political opponents have sort of cast him in the typical role of the Übermensch whose unbounded freedom they feel intimidated by and therefore at any cost must gang up on in Nietzschean sense and take down. In a sense this is nothing new since the person opposed by political opponents is very seldom the person who actually ex