Of all forms of stupidity the most crass, the most tedious, and yet the most exasperating is learned stupidity; a pompous furniture of accumulated facts unrelated by the intelligence. We all know the symptoms. There is the use of a jargon to impress the gaping public and the substitution of specialist unfamiliar terms for plain English. There is the constant respectful allusion by one pedant to this, that and the other pedant, so as to present the whole herd of them as a sort of sacred college....

The soul of the error is a substitution of hypothesis for fact: the putting forward of what is in truth mere guesswork as affirmations, and the spinning of endless theories, any one of which is held respectable on condition that it contradicts traditional knowledge and the plain statements of the past. 

The Bible has been made a playground, apparently inexhaustible in its resources for people of this kind. They are so lost to common sense that they solemnly present great poems as being the products not of poets but of committees. Splendid passages of descriptive prose they imagine to have been pierced together out of discordant fragments. They will talk in the most familiar way of wholly imaginary documents and by their aid dissolve all straightforward narrative, and incidentally all the dignity of just expression.

-Hilaire Belloc, The Battleground

The Dangers of National Repentance

Young Christians especially last-year undergraduates and first-year curates are turning to it in large numbers. They are ready to believe that England bears part of the guilt for the present war, and ready to admit their own share in the guilt of England…. Are they, perhaps, repenting what they have in no sense done?

If they are, it might be supposed that their error is very harmless: men fail so often to repent their real sins that the occasional repentance of an imaginary sin might appear almost desirable. But what actually happens (I have watched it happening) to the youthful national penitent is a little more complicated than that. England is not a natural agent, but a civil society. When we speak of England’s actions we mean the actions of the British Government. The young man who is called upon to repent of England’s foreign policy is really being called upon to repent the acts of his neighbour; for a Foreign Secretary or a Cabinet Minister is certainly a neighbour. And repentance presupposes condemnation. The first and fatal charm of national repentance is, therefore, the encouragement it gives us to turn from the bitter task of repenting our own sins to the congenial one of bewailing but, first, of denouncing the conduct of others. If it were clear to the young that this is what he is doing, no doubt he would remember the law of charity. Unfortunately the very terms in which national repentance is recommended to him conceal its true nature. By a dangerous figure of speech, he calls the Government not ‘they’ but ‘we’. And since, as penitents, we are not encouraged to be charitable to our own sins, nor to give ourselves the benefit of any doubt, a Government which is called ‘we’ is ipso facto placed beyond the sphere of charity or even of justice. You can say anything you please about it. You can indulge in the popular vice of detraction without restraint, and yet feel all the time that you are practising contrition. A group of such young penitents will say, ‘Let us repent our national sins’; what they mean is, ‘Let us attribute to our neighbour (even our Christian neighbour) in the Cabinet. whenever we disagree with him, every abominable motive that Satan can suggest to our fancy.’

-C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock

[H/T to this blog]

Remember: everything is class warfare these days. Especially so-called identity politics, the most clever divide-and-conquer scheme devised in this century. Always be aware that those who thunder most about "privilege" have done and will do nothing to divest themselves of it. Acknowledging privilege absolves them and authorizes the wielding all of privilege's prerogatives. It's a topical cream: for external use only.

-Dale Price

"You ought to say plainly that you do not believe the gospel of Christ. For to believe what you please, and not to believe what you please, is to believe yourselves, and not the gospel.

-St. Augustine of Hippo, Contra Faustum, Book XVII, 3 (written about the year 400)