From the It's-OK-When-We-Say-It Department: American Jew Mark Levin calls Pittsburgh shooter "sub-human"

Here:

"It’s sickening that the media is blaming the mass murder of American Jews by a sub-human killer on rhetoric instead of on the killers hateful actions."

The Untermensch lives in every man, not simply in some.

The price of calling Muhammad a pedophile in Europe is $547

Sex, the sixth pillar of Islam

Telling the truth is now defamation in Europe, unless you're Charlie Hebdo apparently.

Defaming Muhammad does not fall under purview of free speech, European court rules:

The court’s decision comes after it rejected an Austrian woman’s claim that her previous conviction for calling Muhammad a pedophile, due to his marriage to a 6-year-old girl, violated her freedom of speech. ... A Vienna court convicted her in 2011 of disparaging religious doctrines, ordering her to pay a $547 fine, plus legal costs. The ruling was later upheld by an Austrian appeals court.

The Gospel of John is truer, you see . . .

The Gospel of John is truer, you see

than Synoptic Gospels ever could be:

Where it's "Verily, Verily I say unto thee",

and a single "Verily" won't quite do it for Me.

-- Johnny

'Twere profanation to tell our love

As virtuous men pass mildly away,
   And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
   “The breath goes now," and some say, “No,"

So let us melt, and make no noise,
   No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
‘Twere profanation of our joys
   To tell the laity our love.

Moving of the earth brings harms and fears,
   Men reckon what it did and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
   Though greater far, is innocent.



Dull sublunary lovers’ love
   (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
   Those things which elemented it.

But we, by a love so much refined
   That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
   Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
   Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion.
   Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
   As stiff twin compasses are two:
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
   To move, but doth, if the other do;

And though it in the center sit,
   Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
   And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
   Like the other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
   And makes me end where I begun.

-- John Donne

He who borrows to give is no liberal

Such moderation with thy bounty join,

That thou may'st nothing give that is not thine;

That liberality is but cast away,

Which makes us borrow what we cannot pay.

-- John Denham

George Scialabba isn't convinced by John Gray's attack on The Enlightenment, but still finds his new book worthwhile

The true believer dies hard.

From Scialabba's review in The New Republic here:

As Carl Becker argued 85 years ago in The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (still “the best book on the Enlightenment,” in Gray’s opinion), the philosophes “demolished the Heavenly City of St. Augustine only to rebuild it with more up-to-date materials.” Gray’s verdict is even harsher: “Racism and anti-Semitism are not incidental defects in Enlightenment thinking. They flow from some of the Enlightenment’s central beliefs.” ... [A]gain and again, Gray finds, ... a mode of thought overthrows religion, only to imitate some of its characteristic intellectual moves. ... In fact, some of the resemblances Gray claims to see between Christianity and various types of atheism are less than compelling. In a devastating critique of Becker’s Heavenly City, Peter Gay coined the phrase “the fallacy of spurious persistence” to name a tendency to claim false or exaggerated continuities. ... Of course we should keep Gray’s cautions well in mind. The catastrophic revolutionary ideologies of the past were ersatz religions. Scientific utopias and promises to transform the human condition deserve the deepest suspicion. Moral and political progress are always subject to reversal. Humans are animals; human nature is riven with conflicts; reason is a frail reed. 

The never-failing vice of fools

Of all the causes which conspire to blind

Man's erring judgment, and misguide the mind,

What the weak head with strongest bias rules

Is pride, the never-failing vice of fools.

-- Alexander Pope

Rod Dreher's conversion experiences all come with an expiration date

Suborned tears

 

[Her] artful bosom heaves dissembled sighs;

And tears suborn'd fall dropping from [her] eyes.

-- Matthew Prior

The blackest vices are the surest steps to favor

The fear of punishment in this life will preserve men from few vices, since some of the blackest often prove the surest steps to favour; such as ingratitude, hypocrisy, treachery and subornation.

-- Jonathan Swift

Fortune is a floozy

 

 

Dilatory fortune plays the jilt

With the brave, noble, honest, gallant man,

To throw herself away on fools and knaves.

-- Thomas Otway (1652-1685)

"Wit depends on dilatory time"

Lying lips

Let the lying lips be put to silence; which speak grievous things proudly and contemptuously against the righteous.

-- Psalm 31:18