Jung’s intriguing psychoanalysis of Yahweh — Carl Jung once psychoanalyzed God, in a 1952 book called Answer to Job. Luckily for Jung, the Goldwater rule wasn’t yet in effect, so he needn’t have feared recriminations from psychiatric associations for engaging in so indirect a psychiatric assessment. …

And the relative triviality of most preoccupations — A million tribal grievances divide us into warring camps, as we leap to defend the symbolic caricatures that give our lives meaning. But if a race of intelligent extraterrestrials visited our planet, I wonder whether they’d interpret all our cultural comings and goings according to a single, overarching distinction: Ultimately…

And the liberal’s burden of distinguishing Israel from its Islamist neighbours — Israeli political propaganda draws a sharp line between Israel and the Islamist terrorists who seek to end the Jewish state. Israel is supposed to be a civilized, liberal, democratic republic that happens to be surrounded by Arab dictatorships and medieval theocracies, and whereas Israel is relatively pragmatic and restrained in…

The sanctimonious prejudices behind Edmund Burke’s case against atheism — The father of modern conservatism, Edmund Burke, is often held up as a virtual prophet for predicting the reign of terror and the dictatorship that resulted from the French Revolution. Early modern progressives had been naïve in thinking they could reason their way out of Christendom since their zeal for…

War’s strange legality, and the UN’s call for a truce in Israel’s war with Hamas — According to a press release, on Oct 27 the United Nations issued its first formal response “to the escalation of violence in Israel and Palestine since the Hamas terror attacks of 7 October, after the Security Council failed on four occasions to reach consensus on any action.” The response, backed…

The supposed irrationality of atheists, according to a Christian nationalist — The alt-right activist and author who’s commonly called “Vox day” (as though he were the voice of God, as in Vox Dei) wrote in 2008 the book The Irrational Atheist: Dissecting the Unholy Trinity of Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens. This was one of many post-9/11 pro-religion books aimed at countering…

Modern German genius, and the danger of cultivating a middle class when the existential truth is bleak — German culture was dominant in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, and its dominance was just as strong, albeit in a negative way, in the 20th. In fact, the story of modernity is very largely the story of recent German history, and it’s about the rise and the fall…

Is Christianity true because it “works”? — When asked at the CS Lewis Institute why he’s a Christian, the Oxford mathematician and apologist John Lennox begins his answer by saying, “The primary reason is that I believe Christianity is true.” You might think, then, that Lennox would be led to defend the Christian creed or that religion’s…

Technological innovation, the antiquated US Constitution, and the breeding of populist frustration — “Populism” is a misleading, seemingly innocuous word for a paradoxical dynamic that led to the Progressive Era and to the civil rights revolution in the US, but also to Nazism and Trumpism. We might ask what’s wrong with doing what’s popular and ignoring the snobbish presumptions of the elite minority…