I once asked Dalrymple whether he considered himself an atheist or an agnostic. He shrugged his shoulders, suggesting that he didn’t find the distinction particularly important, and said, “Well…I live my life as though there were no God.” I thought this a wonderful example of a practical mindset, implying as it does that the best criterion for answering the question was his actual behavior rather than his thoughts.
As many of you know, Dalrymple nevertheless sees great cultural value in religion’s constriction of the range of acceptable behavior and the purpose and meaning it gives to many. Now, in the Salisbury Review, he defends the Pope from charges of racism, endorses his belief in the insufficiency of a materialist lifestyle, and argues against the suggestions that he be arrested for the Church’s response to the acts of child abuse by some of its priests.
The Skeptical Doctor
Dedicated to the work of Theodore Dalrymple
Dalrymple’s own personal inexperience with religion–perhaps the best summary of his religious POV–hasn’t prevented him from pointing to the same roots of our social ills as the very Christian C. S. Lewis did in his 1947 classic, The Abolition of Man. What Lewis warned would come as a result of how English literature was then being taught in the “upper forms of schools” in his day is now true of almost all of English society from the highly educated to the barely literate. Here’s perhaps the best known quote from that book:
“In a sort of ghastly simplicity, we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”
I wonder if AD has read Robert Pattison’s Vulgarity..?
Anthony Daniels will one day become a Catholic – provided that he studies traditional Catholicism and thus bypasses that poisonous council of wretched memory known as Vatican 2 and its horrid Novus Ordo Mass. I don’t blame anyone who’s not attracted to post-Vatican muliebral nonsense. Who would die for this Oprahism?
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I think President Obama has used the bully pulpit as a way to attack capitalism.
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The full article has been reprinted (with permission) at the Catholic Education Resource Centre website
http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/apologetics/ap0371.htm