The humble and the exalted

Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted. – Matthew 23:12

Retort 1

 

So now we know: in the afterlife vice is virtue and virtue vice.

 

Retort 2

 

One wonders if the exalted will feel any sympathy for the humbled or just gloat.

 

Retort 3

 

One also wonders if this peculiar symmetry is iterative and continues to replay itself endlessly as one cycles out of one afterlife into another.

 

Retort 4

 

The burning question this prompts is whether the tall will be short and the short tall.

 

Retort 5

 

What’s in store then for someone who follows the middle course?

 

Retort 6

 

Today's exalted had better start purchasing exaltation credit certificates if they want to settle the imbalances when they’ve departed.

 

Atheist and accident, politics and religion

An atheist is a man who believes himself an accident. – Francis Thompson

Retort 1

 

Whereas it is not a contradiction to say that a man of faith knows himself to be a product of intelligent design.

 

Retort 2

 

It’s ungenerous for a man of faith to put so little store by the verb ‘believe’ with reference to another man.

 

Retort 3

 

But you wouldn’t know this from casual observation because atheists plan their families whereas Christians are happy to let accident decide.

 

Patriotism is in political life what faith is in religion. – John Dalberg (Lord Acton)

 

Retort

 

Or rather, rancour is to politics what fear is to religion, and what a dung ball is to the dung beetle – both nutrient-rich food and a nest to lay its eggs in.

 

Foxholes, atheists, God

No one is an atheist in a foxhole. – Anon

Retort 1

 

Thus putting God in a difficult position whereby He has to save a believer in a foxhole on one side of the line and allow a believer on the other side of the line to die.

 

Retort 2

 

Foxholes – therein hangs God’s secret. And in takeoffs and landings.

 

Retort 3

 

If you spend your whole life preparing for the foxhole moment, your whole life will be a foxhole.

 

Retort 4

 

It’s certainly impossible to understand ballistics away from God’s plans.

 

Retort 5

 

If there is a God, why are there foxholes?

Atheists, morality, virtue, vice

Atheists express rage against God although in their view He doesn’t exist. – C. S. Lewis

Retort

 

Atheists express rage at people who say God exists and bemusement at the idea that He does.

 

In Christianity, neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point. – Friedrich Nietzsche

 

Corollary 1

 

If they did, it would be a race to the bottom. 

 

Corollary 2

 

That’s because religion and morality are aspiration while reality is perspiration. 

 

Without virtue there can be no liberty. – Benjamin Rush

 

Retort

 

Nor virtue without liberty. In fact, neither virtue nor liberty are possible without vice.

 

Science and religion, innovations, citizens

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind. – Albert Einstein

 

Retort

 

What the two have in common is a stick to move along with. That stick is the verb ‘to believe’. But that’s where the similarities end. The stick that science uses has ‘believe’ meaning ‘to suspect to be true’; to the religious stick holders, ‘believe’ means ‘to want to be true’.

 

We must beware of needless innovations, especially when guided by logic. – Winston Churchill

 

Retort

 

Innovations guided by logic are not a problem. The problem is when the rhetoric about innovations makes logic-based claims while the innovations are anything but.

 

If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what citizenship means. – Theresa May

 

Retort 1

 

Nowhere simply consists of citizens of somewhere else.

 

Retort 2

 

We are the citizens of wherever our vital interests are located. Our vital interests are located wherever our data is stored.

 

 

Abortion, intellectual dishonesty

I’ve noticed that everyone who is for abortion has already been born. – Ronald Reagan

Retort 

 

Just like immigration - many Americans who are for stopping immigration are already in America.

 

Abortion is legal because babies can’t vote. – Joseph Bonkowski

Retort

 

If babies could vote, they would vote against their parents having sex in the first place.

Falsity in intellectual action is intellectual immorality. – Thomas Chrowder Chamberlin

 

Retort

Fortunately, sooner or later it will collapse in the face of reality and may even be the first step to intellectual redemption. Falsity in belief is a contradiction in terms.

 

Atheism

It is not true, as is sometimes said, that man cannot organise the world without God. What is true is that, without God, he can only organise it against man. - Henri de Lubac

Retort

 

Whereas with God, man can only organize the world against the woman.

 

Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning. – C. S. Lewis

 

Retort

 

The logic of this statement is the same as in: if there is no God, how come we have a word for “god” in our language?

 

How to trap an atheist: Serve him a nice meal, then ask him if he believes there is a cook. – Unknown

 

Retort 1

 

How to trap a believer? Take him to Auschwitz.

 

Retort 2

 

How to trap a believer? Ask him what it is he doesn’t believe in and why?

Atheists, measuring, democracy

All thinking men are atheists. – Ernest Hemingway

Retort 1

 

But the converse is not true: not all atheists are thinking men.

 

Retort 2

 

And the harder they think, the more time they devote to thinking of proof for the absence of God.

 

If you can't measure it, you can't manage it.

 

Retort

 

The question is whether you measure what is relevant or only what is capable of being measured.

 

When a stupid government is elected in a democratic country, the best thing about this is that you learn the number of stupid people in that country. – Mehmet Murat Ildan

 

Retort

 

A lack of guarantee that a wise government will be elected each time is the strongest argument for democracy.

 

Middle of the road, democracy

Standing in the middle of the road is very dangerous; you get knocked down by the traffic from both sides. – Margaret Thatcher

 

Retort 1

 

But unlike from the roadside, you may be able to spot the danger coming from a long way off.

 

Retort 2

 

From the middle of the road, it’s half the distance to safety as it is from the wrong side to the right side of the road if you happen to have chosen badly.

Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. ― James Bovard

 

Retort 1

 

Spare us the good shepherd who, after dining on the proceeds from the sheep’s life-long service, sends the entire flock to the slaughter.

 

Retort 2

 

The sheep is damned but the wolves may well take heed that, next time round, the less bloodthirsty of the two will be on the menu.

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.  – Winston Churchill

 

Retort 1

 

Between speaking truth to ignorance and speaking truth to power, you have your work cut out for the rest of your life or your life cut short for a trifle.

 

Retort 2

 

A five-minute conversation with an autocrat is called an audience, where the voter listens while the autocrat speaks, and five minutes is what is left thereafter of the voter’s life.

Family

 All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. – L. Tolstoy

Retort

 

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in an interesting way.

 

 

A happy family is but an early heaven. – George Bernard Shaw

 

Retort

 

An early heaven is but an early death.

 

The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself. – Gilbert K. Chesterton

 

Retort 1

 

It is an elementary mistake to confuse answering the call of one’s gonads with freedom.

 

Retort 2

 

And once he’s made it, his freedom ends.

 

Retort 3

 

It is also possibly the last thing that he makes for himself and by himself. From the moment he starts a family, he’ll have things done for him.

 

 

Decisions, tradition

No decision is a decision. – Robin S. Sharma

Retort 1 

 

Not exactly. It's failure disguised as strategy.

 

Retort 2

 

Not exactly. It’s cowardice posturing as conviction.

 

However, the line has its own payoff, because the full quote apparently is: “Making no decision is a decision. To do nothing. And doing nothing always brings you to nowhere.”

 

 

Tradition is a guide and not a jailer. – W. Somerset Maughan

 

Retort 1

 

Tradition is a jailer that moonlights as a guide.

 

Retort 2

 

Tradition is a guide in the pay of the jailer.

 

Retort 3

 

Where tradition is concerned, the guide and jailer are Jekyll and Hyde.