Bear Grylls on Faith

“Christianity is not about religion,” Grylls says. “It’s about faith, about being held, about being forgiven. It’s about finding joy and finding home. We all want that, but nobody wants religion. Why do people turn away from faith? They’re not, they’re turning away from religion most of the time. I’ve yet to meet anyone who doesn’t want to be forgiven or held or find peace or joy in their life. We try loads of other stuff—we think booze or foxy women or whatever will fill it—but it doesn’t fill the hole.”

“It’s about being strengthened. It’s about having a backbone run through you from the Person who made you. It’s about being able to climb the biggest mountains in the world with the Person who made them.” cf. (World Mag)

I found this interesting because I've watched a lot of episodes of Man vs. Wild.

The Road to Serfdom

It is not to the Germany of Hitler, the Germany of the present war, that England and the United States bear yet any resemblance. But students of the currents of ideas can hardly fail to see that there is more than a superficial similarity between the trend of thought in Germany during and after the last war and the present current of ideas in democracies. .... There is the same contempt for nineteenth-century liberalism, the same spurious "realism" and even cynicism... Although one does not like to be reminded, it is not so many years since the socialist policy of that country was generally held up by progressives as an example to be immitated...
The supreme tragedy is still not seen that in Germany it was largely people of good will, men who were admired and held up as models in democratic countries, who prepared the way for, if they did not actually create, the forces which now stand for every thing they detest. .... Few are ready to recognize that the rise of fascism and naziism was not a reaction against the socialist trends of the preceding period but a necessary outcome of those tendencies. This is a truth which most people were unwilling to see even when the similarities of many of the repellent features of the internal regimes in communist Russia and National Socialist Germany were widely recognized. As a result, many who think themselves infinitely superior to the aberrations of naziism, and sincerely hate all its manifestations, work at the same time for ideals whose realization would lead straight to the abhorred tyranny.
...the socialism of which we speak is not a party matter, and the questions which we are discussing have little to do with the questions at dispute between political parties. It does not affect our problem that some groups may want less socialism than others; that some want socialism mainly in the interest of one group and others in that of another. The important point is that, if we take the people whose views influence developments, they are now in the democracies in some measure all socialists. If it is no longer fashionable to emphasize that "we are all socialists now," this is so merely because the fact is too obvious.
(Introduction to The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek)

Comment on progress in knowledge/science

You’re invoking a false mythology of progress. They did not consider intelligent design and then reject it in modern times. Instead they rejected ID a century ago, about the same time that the professionalization of science took place. So no matter what new evidence modern science uncovers many will support evolutionary creation myths that have been fused to their professional identity. Ever since the professionalization of science many0 have even openly admitted that scientific consensus and their professional identity come first and the actual empirical evidence second.* Only the ignorant and naive believe that scientists are always interested in empirical evidence per se.

*E.g.

Mainstream science reacted predictably to any suggestion that the prints were made by humans. Geologist Albert G. Ingalls, writing in 1940 in Scientific American, said: “If man, or even his ape ancestor, or even that ape ancestor’s early mammalian ancestor, existed as far back as in the Carboniferous Period in any shape, then the whole science of geology is so completely wrong that all the geologists will resign their jobs and take up truck driving. Hence, for the present at least, science rejects the attractive explanation that man made these mysterious prints in the mud of the Carboniferous with his feet.”
(The Hidden History of the Human Race by Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson :151)

Note on materialism

I just want to file this so I can look it up, from comments at UD:

The key word here is information. The key issue is how does a philosophy (naturalism) explain the existence of information within the confines of its explanatory resources? Since the very definition of naturalism includes the idea that the universe is causally closed (that is all causes ultimately resolve in physical laws – NOT mind) and therefore that the laws of physics ONLY have explanatory power, how then do they account for information?

They cannot. Information requires language. All languages are comprised of symbols and rules for the arrangement of those symbols. It is impossible to have information apart from a language. It is equally impossible for the laws of physics to explain either symbols or the rules that govern the use of those symbols. Therefore, naturalism can never, ever, explain information, and thus life. When darwinism succumbs to the next naturalist explanation of life (evo-devo or whatever) the new explanation will face the same insurmountable challenge. How to explain information in terms of physics and time? The game is over but we seem to still be playing. Why is that? I think it must be rebellion against Reason. Tom

The history of Jesus

Good post here.

Interesting chart...

Check out the comparisons in the chart to the left of this post.