I've just added a new blog to our blogroll, Kings and Cabbages, run by "moscowgrumbler" (Sergey). He claims to be a mathematician (how bad can that be?) and writes like a Russian, so a very smart guy living in Moscow seems to fit the evidence.
Chuck mentioned him back in January, but for some inexplicable reason I never had a chance to visit and he never got put into the blogroll.
Here, for example, is a post which could have been written in spirit by Truepeers:
It is amusing that humans, it seems, unable to devise anything really new in such realms as world-view, ethics or religion, they only unknowingly reproduce the old ones with some modifications. For example, Leftist world-view for last 200 years (Marxism, Communism, Trotskyism, Stalinism and all varieties of Socialism) was and still is a combination of the two many-centuries-old heresies: Pelagianism and Manichean. Even the most zealous neocon, Christopher Hitchens, still follows this combination, replacing the original sin (capitalism) of his previous Trotskyist faith by a new enemy - Islam. He wants us to wage a Crusade against it, but not in the name of God, but in the name of secular New Enlightenment. A ridicule proposition: where can he hope to find enough true believers for that? To win an all-out religious war, one needs to be no less religion motivated and fanatical than his opponent. Atheism is not a weapon, but a fatal weakness in such a battle.
Islam, too, is a Manichean delusion, but combined not with Pelagianism, but with Calvinism in its most pessimistic and antihuman form.
I believe you'll find a perusal of his blog to be time well spent.
Update: He was already on the blog roll but this idiot couldn't find him! Check him out anyway.
6 comments:
But he is already on the blog roll, I added him some months back. I you had put him in alphabetically you would have seen the link.
Oops! Thought I was.
Well, he's still great anyway. Thanks for the find.
Yeah, I think I know where this guy's coming from. A couple of links to further the discussion:
The (first) two comments here, in reference to the essay linked at the top of the page, really help clarify what is in debate here.
See also Gil Bailie:
"One of the West’s greatest shortcomings is its aversion to accurately assessing its own cultural uniqueness and especially the religious sources of that uniqueness. The key to the kind of pluralistic and politically secular polity that the West rightly cherishes is the parallel cultural coexistence of a religious tradition whose faithful are taught to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s and to recognize the dignity of the person and his or her right to follow the voice of conscience."
Good, good stuff. Thanks, guys.
truepeers,
That's a great quote. Why don't you put it on the front page where people will read it? Together with a little elaboration as to what it means, of course. :-)
I think it means we westerners are on the whole selling our culture short.
Wonder why? Probably, nice manners. Mercy. The Golden Rule.
Are all of them out of place in the Jungle? We're gonna find out.
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