“When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”
― G.K. Chesterton
David Starkey starts his comments on life after religion with Chesterton’s quote and goes on to explain how he sees that quote played out in today’s world.
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9 comments
Feel free to reply to any comment by clicking the "Reply" button.Chesterton was a competent writer of detective fiction, as a philosopher and theologian he was a competent writer of detective fiction.
David Starkey is the BBC's go to rent a fuckwit. A colonialist, xenophobic old fart, a relic of "the good ole days" who spouts racist bigotry and calls it plain speaking legitimized and justified by Historistic precedent, cares nothing for tact or truth and is a holdover from Victorian British values, the male equivalent of a pearl clutching old "Memsaab" who locks her doors at night for fear of the "Natives" coming in and violating his innate Englishness.
LenHazell53
Level 9
Nov 2, 2019
1
Thank you...you’ve saved me the effort of writing much the same thing! Old fart is a very apt description of this overarching bore who has become a byword for all that is wrong with middle England and which can be most accurately described as xenophobia wrapped in the Union Jack, and masquerading as Britishness .
So what's he saying? That we should believe in God (whether we really do or not) out of fear that if we don't we will believe in anything? Sounds like a pretense faith born out of a paranoid fear of chaos.
Besides the people he talks about still BELIEVE. They have just moved the object of their veneration to something else outside of the standard objects of belief. They are still religious/superstitious. They are simply entrapped in a different superstitious cage. They just worship and subject themselves to different nonstandard "god".
Actually, once you free yourself from the god-belief trap, the opposite occurs. You become more skeptical, not more susceptible.
Heraclitus
Level 8
Nov 1, 2019
1
I don't think so. I think he's saying what you're saying, that a new way has been found to continue worship and superstition - putting new wine in old wineskins, so to speak.. I'm basing my guess that he's not religious on his perceptive, and I think very funny, comments in the video about the history of the Anglican Church.
I was taken aback by Sam Harris' response to Jordan Peterson's statement that socialism in Russia was based on an atheism that was genocidal in its very essence. Harris replied that everything about the structure of socialism was religious from the dogma, the state Inquisition, the treatment of 'heretics' and who knows what else. If true, religious belief of a kind carried on under socialism. Douglas Murray has just released a new book called The Madness Of Crowds that claims our modern ideological groups are also religious in the same way. Starkey's take on cult following, cultural guilt etc. gave me pause for thought in the context of new religion. I had to laugh when he called Greta Thunberg the new Joan of Arc but who knows? Maybe he's on to something.
brentan
Level 8
Nov 1, 2019
0
We reject the idea of gods because lack of evidence for them gives us no reason to think they exist, and critical thinking shows fatal problems with most descriptions of gods.
This doesn't mean we believe everything. Many things fail one or both of the requirement of evidence, or critical analysis.
Chesterton was flat-out wrong.
As to most of the rest being said in the video... Yeesh.
Kelsey
Level 2
Nov 1, 2019
0
WE "believe" nothing of the sort.
YOU reject the idea of gods.
SOME reject the idea "god" has a set of rules OF ANY SORT for us to follow.
SOME reject everything but the Golden Rule.
SOME reject ANY idea, be it god, anti-god, semi-god, as the "truth." ALL IS CONJECTURE, according to them.
SOME reject atheism as just another failed "belief system," made up by yet more fallible, pig-headed men, trying to tell the rest of us what to think.
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