Becoming an educated citizen starts with understanding the lineage of your beliefs. (View Highlight)
Note: Becoming an effective operator starts with understanding the lineage of your beliefs.
This sentence can be applied to business leadership too.
But there’s a problem: human equality isn’t self-evident at all. (View Highlight)
Note: Great break and call for attention
His theory of natural rights is based on the idea that God owns us as property. Human equality is self-evident only if you assume, as Locke did, that God has given us the natural rights that modern Americans take for granted (View Highlight)
Note: I’m curious about this source. Where can I learn more about John Locke?
The original Constitution says that our “unalienable rights” are a result not of secular rationalism, but rather an omnipotent God who endows us with those rights (View Highlight)
Note: I should read the constitution to see where it says unalienable rights are due to God
So now, they’re faced with a head-scratching dilemma: one of their central beliefs — human rights — is self-evident only if God says so. (View Highlight)
Note: I like the visualization of “head-scratching dilemma”
We are desensitized to Christianity’s influence on Western thought not because it’s irrelevant, but because it’s so all-consuming. (View Highlight)
Consider this: the coordinates of time and space are both measured in reference to Christ. The year at the top of every calendar denotes the number of years since Christ was born. When it comes to space, “The West” is any place to the West of where Christ was crucified. (View Highlight)
Note: I didn’t know this. The West is anywhere west of Christ’s crucifix
Even if a group of people can agree on how to treat people in the moment, consensus can change at any moment. Today’s virtues can become tomorrow’s vices. Like a sand castle, the tenets of morality can be destroyed by the tide of public opinion. (View Highlight)
Note: Wow. Sand castle
The same people who tout the virtues of being well-read skip right past the Bible, the most popular book in human history. To my amazement, I made it through 16 years of schooling without ever reading the Gospels. That thinking continues into adulthood, where we’ll binge-read biographies about some hot new tech CEO while skipping the one about the most important figure in Western history: Jesus Christ. (View Highlight)
Note: Painting all of the dissonance in education
Some intellectuals have tried to navigate this conundrum by becoming Cafeteria Christians. It’s like they’re at a hotel buffet, where they can take the foods that look appetizing and reject the rest. Cafeteria Christians want to adopt the most useful parts of the tradition and reject everything else. (View Highlight)
The problem is that you can’t pick and choose theology without becoming a slave to intellectual fashions or destroying the integrity of those ideas in the first place. (View Highlight)
Note: If you pick and choose the parts to believe, you open yourself to the sways of favor
this “spiritual, but not religious” crowd compliments religion, they do it backhandedly. Religion is a “useful lie,” they say. The argument goes like this: Even if religious ideas aren’t literally true, the world is a safer and more prosperous place when we buy into them. Thus, we should deceive ourselves and become religious even though — wink, wink — it’s false. (View Highlight)
Another study found that the percentage of Americans who rated their mental health as “excellent” fell for everybody except those who attended a religious service in the past week (View Highlight)
