J.P. Moreland

Once the existence of knowable truth in religion and ethics is denied, authority (the right to be believed and obeyed) gives way to power (the ability to force compliance), reason gives way to rhetoric, the speech writer is replaced by the makeup man, and spirited but civil debate in the culture wars is replaced by politically correct special-interest groups who have nothing left but political coercion to enforce their views on others.

Tolerance has come to mean that no one is right and no one is wrong and, indeed, the very act of stating that someone else’s views are immoral or incorrect is now taken to be intolerant (of course, from this same point of view, it is all right to be intolerant of those who hold to objectively true moral or religious positions). Once the existence of knowable truth in religion and ethics is denied, authority (the right to be believed and obeyed) gives way to power (the ability to force compliance), reason gives way to rhetoric, the speech writer is replaced by the makeup man, and spirited but civil debate in the culture wars is replaced by politically correct special-interest groups who have nothing left but political coercion to enforce their views on others.

Roughly, scientism is the view that the hard sciences —like chemistry, biology, physics, astronomy—provide the only genuine knowledge of reality. At the very least, this scientific knowledge is vastly superior to what we can know from any other discipline.

Scientism and Secularism

James Delingpole

Communism is ugly, dangerous and whenever and wherever it has been tried it has made people poorer, more miserable and often more dead. That’s why one of our most pressing missions in 2019 is to defend Western Civilisation from what I call the Care Bear Commies – all those youthful, telegenic, smiley, hard-left activists you see across the media reassuring your kids that actually communism is likeable and fun and the only reason it gets such a bad rap is that it hasn’t been tried properly yet.

JC Ryle

Beware of manufacturing a God of your own: a God who is all mercy, but not just; a God who is all love, but not holy; a God who as a heaven for every body, but a hell for none; a God who can allow good and bad to be side by side in time, but will make no distinction between good and bad in eternity. Such a God is an idol of your own, as truly an idol as any snake or crocodile in an Egyptian temple. The hands of your own fancy and sentimentality have made him. He is not the God of the Bible, and beside the God of the Bible there is no God at all

Be very sure of this,-people never reject the Bible because they cannot understand it. They understand it only too well; they understand that it condemns their own behavior; they understand that it witnesses against their own sins, and summons them to judgment.

Unity and peace are very delightful; but they are bought too dear if they are bought at the expense of truth.

Does any one ask me, What is the best safeguard against false doctrine? – I answer in one word, ‘The Bible: the Bible regularly read, regularly prayed over, regularly studied.’ We must go back to the old prescription of our Master: ‘Search the Scriptures.’ (John 5:39) If we want a weapon to wield against the devices of Satan, there is nothing like ‘the sword of the Spirit, the Word of God.

John Calvin

We are not to reflect on the wickedness of men but to look to the image of God in them, an image which, covering and obliterating their faults, an image which, by its beauty and dignity, should allure us to love and embrace them.

Institutes of the Christian Religion

John Frame

The idea that God communicates with human beings in personal words pervades all of Scripture, and it is central to every doctrine of Scripture. If God has, in fact, not spoken to us personally, then we lose any basis for believing in salvation by grace, in judgment, in Christ’s atonement—indeed, for believing in the biblical God at all. Indeed, if God has not spoken to us personally, then everything important in Christianity is human speculation and fantasy.

John Lennox

One of the most powerful evidences, to my mind, that there is an eternal mind behind the universe is first of all, that we can do science, that we can do it in the language of mathematics, that we have language we can use. We can use abstract concepts that are not material to describe things that are physical. All of that points in one direction, and one direction only, and it’s this: 'In the beginning was the Word,' not the particles.

John MacArthur

A truth that is heard but not accepted and followed becomes dull and meaningless. The more we neglect it, the more immune to it we become.

John Senior

The strongest reactionary force impeding progress is the cult of progress itself, which, cutting us off from our roots, makes growth impossible and choice unnecessary.

Jordan Peterson

It was Solzhenitsyn who warned us that the catastrophes of the Soviet state were inextricably and causally linked to the deceitful blandishments of the Marxist utopian vision. It was Solzhenitsyn who carefully documented the price paid in suffering for the dreadful communist experiment, and who distilled from that suffering the wisdom we must all heed so that such catastrophe does not visit us again. Perhaps we could take from his writing the humility that would allow us to understand that our mere good intentions are not sufficient to make us good men and women. Perhaps we could come to understand that such intentions are instead all too often the consequence of our unpardonable historical ignorance, our utter willful blindness, and our voracious hidden appetite for vengeance, terror and destruction.

Joseph Pearce

Original Sin is as much an integral and integrated part of the cosmos as are the laws of thermodynamics and, in consequence, it cannot be extricated or repaired by any man-made progress. We cannot“ progress beyond what we are, i.e. fallen beings made in the image of God, and no technological progress or ideological innovation is going to alter the fact. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose! The more things change, the more they remain the same.

Laurence J. Peter

Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it

Martyn Lloyd-Jones

When the church is absolutely different from the world, she invariably attracts it. It is then that the world is made to listen to her message, though it may hate it at first.

Michael J Kruger

In a culture that so claims to value 'tolerance,' Christians who refuse to publicly affirm the cultural gods are given none.

Michael Novak

Vulgar relativism is an invisible gas, odorless, deadly, that is now polluting every free society on earth. It is a gas that attacks the central nervous system of moral striving. The most perilous threat to the free society today is, therefore, neither political nor economic. It is the poisonous, corrupting culture of relativism….

During the next hundred years, the question for those who love liberty is whether we can survive the most insidious and duplicitous attacks from within, from those who undermine the virtues of our people, doing in advance the work of the Father of Lies. “There is no such thing as truth,” they teach even the little ones. “Truth is bondage. Believe what seems right to you. There are as many truths as there are individuals. Follow your feelings. Do as you please. Get in touch with your self. Do what feels comfortable.” Those who speak in this way prepare the jails of the twenty-first century. They do the work of tyrants.

Mike Adams

Today's generation often fails to distinguish between the concepts of truth and belief. In order for a statement to contain truth it must exclude falsity. Otherwise it is meaningless to call it truth. If you correct my statement you assume error exists. As soon as you affirm the existence of error you affirm the existence of truth.

Os Guinness

Neither secular progress nor secular progressives have brought the West where they once promised. Nor can they.

Christianity is the only religion whose God bears the scars of evil.

Peter Hitchens

Abortion is the only event modern liberals think too violent and obscene to portray on TV. This is not because they are to squeamish or prudish. It is because if people know what abortion looks like, it would destroy their pretense that it is a civilized answer to the problem of what to do with unwanted babies.

Peter Kreeft

No sane person wants hell to exist. No sane person wants evil to exist. But hell is just evil eternalized. If there is evil and if there is eternity, there can be hell. If it is intellectually dishonest to disbelieve in evil just because it is shocking and uncomfortable, it is the same with hell. Reality has hard corners, surprises, and terrible dangers in it. We desperately need a true road map, not nice feelings, if we are to get home. It is true, as people often say, that "hell just feels unreal, impossible." Yes. So does Auschwitz. So does Calvary.

Dictators do not come into the human race from without, from Mars. They erupt from within, like hemorrhoids, from an infected body, from the one fact no secularist ever dares to face: original sin.

Suffering leads to wisdom in the long run but not in the short- run, and short-range folly is a price worth paying for long-range wisdom.

A God who did not abolish suffering--worse, A God who abolished sin precisely by suffering--is a scandal to the modern mind.

If you don't believe there is a benevolent Mind guiding all of human existence, suffering is just a pointless and meaningless accident.

...God in his wisdom deliberately allows bad times, troubles, trials and temptations precisely to hammer out saints on the anvil of suffering in the furnace of wickedness.

Death...is a great attention-grabber; it is a solid, sound, secure and indisputable fact; and it slaps us in the face with our own wretchedness, our utter helplessness before the loss of everything. It is our obvious problem, and Christ claims to be the answer.

One of the few things in life that cannot possibly do harm in the end is the honest pursuit of the truth.

The closer we are to God, to divine attributes — such as absolute truth, goodness, and beauty — the more we wonder. When we separate ourselves from truth, goodness, and beauty, we lose wonder and become cynical. The Enlightenment was basically the narrowing of our vision to a purely scientific, empirical, rationalistic worldview, screwing down the manhole covers on us so we became squinting underground creatures.

Many roads lead up the single mountain of religion to God at the top. It is provincial, narrow-minded, and blind to deny the validity of other roads than yours.

The unproved assumption of this very common mountain analogy is that the roads go up, not down; that man makes the roads, not God; that religion is man's search for God, not God's search for man. C. S. Lewis says this sounds like "the mouse's search for the cat". 

Christianity is not a system of man's search for God but a story of God's search for man. True religion is not like a cloud of incense wafting up from special spirits into the nostrils of a waiting God, but like a Father's hand thrust downward to rescue the fallen. Throughout the Bible, man-made religion fails. There is no human way up the mountain, only a divine way down. "No man has seen God at any time. The only begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known." 

If we made the roads, it would indeed be arrogant to claim that any one road is the only valid one, for all human things are equal, at least in all being human, finite, and mixtures of good and bad. If we made the roads, it would be as stupid to absolutize one of them as to absolutize one art form, one political system, or one way of skinning a cat. But if God made the road, we must find out whether he made many or one. If he made only one, then the shoe is on the other foot: it is humility, not arrogance, to accept this one road from God, and it is arrogance, not humility, to insist that our manmade roads are as good as God's God-made one. 

But which assumption is true? Even if the pluralistic one is true, not all religions are equal, for then one religion is worse and more arrogant than all others, for it centers on one who claimed, "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life; no man can come to the Father but by me."

Guilt is a warning in the soul, analogous to pain as a warning in the body.

The difference between love and "luv" is the difference between the prophetic model of religion and the therapeutic model. In the prophetic model, God commands us to be good. In the therapeutic model, people use religion to make themselves feel good.

...the concept of tolerance reveals a presupposition of moral objectivism, for we do not tolerate goods. We only tolerate evils in order to prevent worse evils. The patient will tolerate the nausea brought on by chemotherapy in order to prevent death by cancer. And a society will tolerate bad things like smoking in order to preserve good things like privacy and freedom

“Progress” seems to be our name for Juggernaut, the Hindu god that trampled his worshipers to death like a runaway elephant. Between Juggernaut and Moloch, the old gods are making a remarkable comeback in our secular society.

The new paganism is the virtual divinization of man, the religion of man as the new God. One of its popular slogans, repeated often by Christians, is "the infinite value of the human person." Its aim is building a heaven on earth, a secular salvation. Another word for the new paganism is humanism, the religion that will not lift up its head to the heavens but stuffs the heavens into its head.

[Nietzsche]....was a very important thinker because he shows to modern western civilization its own dark heart and future...[Nietzsche]...let the cat out of the bag.

In an age of relativism, orthodoxy is the only possible rebellion left.

Reason alone cannot give you a whole steak, but it sure helps with identifying bologna.

Moral stupidity comes in two different forms: relativism and legalism. Relativism sees no principles, only people; legalism sees no people, only principles.

If we do not see ourselves...as desperate cases, we are simply not part of the audience Christ came to save.

Philip Rieff

Religious man was born to be saved, psychological man is born to be pleased.

The truth is, Jung has brought back one member of the old duality, unreason, with a new name; it is no synthesis at all, but only the latest maneuver in the war against rationality that has been conducted with rising hysteria by literary intellectuals and humanists against the laws of a culture they have reason to distrust and disobey. The Jungian theory proposes to every disaffected humanist his "personal myth," as a sanctuary against the modern world. Against the vulgar democracy of intelligence, Jungian theory proposes an aristocracy of feeling. From this proposal derives Jung's persistent influence on modern critical and aesthetic style.

PJ O'Rourke

The principal feature of American liberalism is sanctimoniousness. By loudly denouncing all bad things — war and hunger and date rape — liberals testify to their own terrific goodness. More important, they promote themselves to membership in a self-selecting elite of those who care deeply about such things.... It's a kind of natural aristocracy, and the wonderful thing about this aristocracy is that you don't have to be brave, smart, strong or even lucky to join it, you just have to be liberal.

You can't shame or humiliate modern celebrities. What used to be called shame and humiliation is now called publicity. And forget traditional character assassination; if you say a modern celebrity is an adulterer, a pervert and a drug addict, all it means is that you've read his autobiography.