Friday, June 26, 2015

My dear foreign Justices (who have chosen an Alien god),

"Do you mean," asked Syme, "that there is really as much connection between crime and the modern intellect as all that?"

"You are not sufficiently democratic," answered the policeman, "but you were right when you said just now that our ordinary treatment of the poor criminal was a pretty brutal business. I tell you I am sometimes sick of my trade when I see how perpetually it means merely a war upon the ignorant and the desperate. But this new movement of ours is a very different affair. We deny the snobbish English assumption that the uneducated are the dangerous criminals. We remember the Roman Emperors. We remember the great poisoning princes of the Renaissance. We say that the dangerous criminal is the educated criminal. We say that the most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men; my heart goes out to them. They accept the essential ideal of man; they merely seek it wrongly. Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it. But philosophers dislike property as property; they wish to destroy the very idea of personal possession. Bigamists respect marriage, or they would not go through the highly ceremonial and even ritualistic formality of bigamy. But philosophers despise marriage as marriage. Murderers respect human life; they merely wish to attain a greater fulness of human life in themselves by the sacrifice of what seems to them to be lesser lives. But philosophers hate life itself, their own as much as other people's."
The Man who was Thursday, by G. K. Chesterton

And so, be ye welcomed among the "philosophers":
[...] But the petitioners, far from seeking to de-value marriage, seek it for themselves because of their respect—and need—for its privileges and responsibilities [...]

A mathematician, of all sorts

3 comments:

plato said...

I followed you to this link by clicking on the name, some_guy_on_the_street, of one of the commenters on Fr Z's blog. Ths is a pretty interesting blog that you have here, Belfry Bat. It was a pleasant surprise. :)

plato said...

Upon further research ,Belfry Bat, I see that it is this blog's other contributor who led me to this blog through a linked name from a comment on Fr.Z's blog. I thought it was you . I am glad either way.

Belfry Bat said...

There is only the one of me; I've been collecting pseudonyms for a while; three of them have been current more-or-less through the the writing. Glad you like!

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