I remember the first time a Christian friend belittled reason in my presence. I was actually a bit shocked, just as I was a bit shocked the first time I heard my pious mother tell me that one of my friend’s books should be burned.
I shouldn’t have been at all surprised, of course. I had read church history as a teenager; indeed, the pastor of the church my family “attended” (that is itself an un-Christian way of putting it) had encouraged me to read his Bible College history of the Christian religion, and that may have been a bad move on his part: what I took away from the reading was a long, sad parade of censorship, persecution, torture and death. It was quite a bracing history, to say the least.
I am trying to remember exactly what my Christian friend said about reason — something like it was fallible and limited and “just a human perspective” and blah blah blah. But I do remember the book my mother thought merited fire: Job Opportunities on the Black Market, by Burgess Laughlin.
I wonder what she would have said about the book I had read not long before that fateful conversation, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, by Walter Kaufmann.
Christian conservatives still ply these notions. And while slighting reason and yearning to censor may be foreign to my way of thinking, it is on the resurgence. Lee Waaks invited Robert Tracinski to talk about this on the latest episode of my LocoFoco Netcast:
You can listen and comment on the audio version at LocoFoco.net, or subscribe via Apple and Google podcast services, or Spotify:
N.B. I reloaded the SoundCloud file to get rid of an editorial mistake, and will upload a new video file soon. (5/23/2020 10:46 PM PDST)
Wirkman Comment 