"The majority [of people today] are left with their two poor values of personal peace and affluence. With such values, will men stand for their liberties? Will they not give up their liberties step by step, inch by inch, as long as their own personal peace and prosperity is sustained and not challenged, and as long as the goods are delivered?

And since personal peace and affluence are so often the only values that count with the majority, politicians know that to be elected they must promise these things. Politics has largely become not a matter of ideals--increasingly men and women are not stirred by the values of liberty and truth--but of supplying a constituency with a frosting of personal peace and affluence. They know that voices will not be raised as long as people have these things, or at least an illusion of them.

Edward Gibbon, in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, said that the following five attributes marked Rome at its end: first, a mounting love of show and luxury (that is, affluence); second, a widening gap between the very rich and the very poor; third, an obsession with sex; fourth, freakishness in the arts, masquerading as originality, and enthusiasms pretending to be creativity; fifth, an increased desire to live off the state. It all sounds so familar. We have come a long road since our first chapter, and we are back in Rome."

-----Francis A. Schaeffer, from "How Should We Then Live?: The Rise and Decline of Western Thought Culture" circa 1976

"Many problems are now reserved for an ecumenical council. It would be better to defer questions of this sort to the time when no longer in a glass darkly we see God face to face....

Formerly, faith was in life rather than in the profession of creeds. Presently, necessity required that articles be drawn up, but only a few with Apostolic sobriety. Then the depravity of the heretics exacted a more precise scrutiny of the divine books....

When faith came to be in writings rather than in hearts, then there were almost as many faiths as men. Articles increased and sincerity decreased. Contention grew hot and love grew cold. The doctrine of Christ, which at first knew no hairsplitting, came to depend on the aid of philosophy. This was the first stage in the fall of the church....

The injection of the authority of the emperor into this affair did not greatly aid the sincerity of the faith....

When faith is in the mouth rather than in the heart, when the solid knowledge of Sacred Scripture fails us, nevertheless by terrorization we drive men to believe what they do not believe, to love what they do not love, to know what they do not know. That which is forced cannot be sincere, and that which is not voluntary cannot please Christ."

-----Desiderius Erasmus, from his preface to Hilary

I think it's one of the last great ironies that the conservatives are appropriating 1950's lit-department philosophy and turning it back on the liberals, essentially beating them at their own game with their own philosophy. It's all very Chestertonian. . .Colbert's comment below says it all.

“Language has always been important in politics, but language is incredibly important to the present political struggle,” Colbert says. “Because if you can establish an atmosphere in which information doesn’t mean anything, then there is no objective reality. The first show we did, a year ago, was our thesis statement: What you wish to be true is all that matters, regardless of the facts. Of course, at the time, we thought we were being farcical.”

-----Stephen Colbert, from an interview with New York Magazine


"The strongest saints and the strongest skeptics alike took positive evil as the starting point of their argument....if it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can make one or two deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do. The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat."

-----G.K. Chesterton, from "Orthodoxy"