Don Colacho

The sayings of Nicolás Gómez Dávila, a grouchy old reactionary of the poetic South American type. My favourites:

As long as they do not turn equality into a dogma, we can treat each other as equals.

Nothing is more dangerous for faith than to frequent the company of believers. The unbeliever restores our faith.

The worst demagogues are not recruited from among the poor and envious, but from among the wealthy and ashamed.

We can never count on a man who does not look upon himself with the look of an entomologist.

There was never any happiness so free of threats we would dare live it again.

To innovate in liturgical matters is not sacrilege, but stupidity. Man only venerates immemorial routines.

Every non-conformist knows, in the depths of his soul, that the place his vanity rejects is the exact same place nature has assigned him.

The modern theologian longs to transform Christian doctrine into a simple ideology of community behavior.

We should resign ourselves to the fact that nothing lasts, but refuse to hasten anything’s demise.

The old despotisms limited themselves to locking man up in his private life; those of the new stamp prefer that he have nothing but a public life. To domesticate man all one has to do is politicize all his gestures.

Today’s revolutionaries are just impatient heirs. Revolution will be spoken of seriously when the “consumption” they hate is not just someone else’s consumption.

--

In other news, a Pew survey of religious attitudes of Americans. The most interesting part of this survey is the reported attitudes of the atheists. It seems that 21% of American atheists have some form of belief in God - 6% believe in a personal God, 12% in some impersonal force, 3% "Other/Don't Know". 10% pray weekly.

When someone who identifies as some sort of Christian doesn't believe in the afterlife, or that Christ existed, or even that God exists, this is comprehensible: they identify as such because it serves as a cultural or tribal marker (as in the story of the atheist who, going to Northern Ireland, is asked whether it's the God of the Protestants or the God of the Catholics in whom he doesn't believe), or because they agree with certain insights or rituals or practices of a certain religion even though they don't accept its supernatural dogmas. But how does this happen with atheism? You can't pick and choose from the tenets of atheism, it only has the one; so either "atheism" has become a cultural marker that people apply to themselves even if they don't believe in the nonexistence of God, or 21% of American atheists are rather confused about the definition of "atheism".

(Read about this at Mark Shea's blog, and then got into a debate with an atheist who'd come to render disagreement in a friendly and non-trollish manner over here. (I never felt it necessary to qualify "register disagreement" with "non-trollish" before I discovered the joys of internet arguments. How I weep for the days of my lost innocence...))

--

D.G. Davidson's review of a 20th-century Japanese novel:

...the novel matches the unfortunate expectations the typical Christian sf fan has of non-genre fiction. That is to say, it's a plotless story about ignoble, unhappy people doing contemptible things with little in the way of motive or excuse.

Reminds me very much of Neil Gaiman's description of modern-day literature: "miserable people having small epiphanies of misery."

(Despite going to church all my life I've never met all that many Christian sf fans; so talk of the mindset of "the typical Christian sf fan" strikes me as like talking of the likes and dislikes of the typical one-legged zen garbage collector. But I see the point.)