The End is the Same

Mon, 21 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The end of all men is the same. Rich or poor, famous or ordinary, intelligent or stupid, learned or illiterate, strong or weak, old or young, their end is all the same.

Every man dies. Every man is forgotten.

Therefore what counts in life is not glory, or fame, or riches, or any other superlative. Duty to God and man are the only things that count. Do not burden yourself with lofty goals beyond the earthy and heavenly good of your people. A man can no more expect himself to be rich or influential or successful any more than he can expect himself to be lucky. For riches, influence, good looks, success, and many other aspects of abundance are in large part due to luck. All things come from God: blessing and cursing, celebration and mourning, life and death. Accept your lot in life, whether lucky or unlucky, as the result of the fatherly providence of the Lord of Glory. For, “we know that all things work together for good to them that love God” (Romans 8:28).

No Up and No Down: The Rot of Modernism and Postmodernism

Wed, 19 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

There are chiefly three regimes of thought that have developed throughout human history. These are, in historical order: the Premodern, the Modern, and the Postmodern. All three of them have different ways of determining what is True, what is Good, and what is Beautiful.

In general, the regime of thought known as “Modernism” is the dominant regime of the Modern world, although that is quickly changing. It is associated with rationalism and materialism, the latter being the assumption that the only things that truly exist are material, and the former being the belief that what can be known is only that which can be deduced via human reason. Unsurprisingly, the rise of Modernism coincided with the rise of natural science. Although the two things are not synonymous, they share many of the same assumptions about the world and have a common view of how to attain new knowledge. Modernism’s defining characteristic is that it restricts Truth only to what can be observed and reasoned about. Because Modernists are materialists, this restricts their field of study to the interplay of universal laws, matter, time, and space. All that ever was and ever is and ever will be can be explained in terms of these things, and anything which cannot be reached by reason or observation is simply a non-entity. In other words, there is no room for spiritual or metaphysical explanations that cannot be observed, and any Truths that cannot be arrived at by a deductive argument are simply unknowable. Famous science educator Carl Sagan, an atheist, summarizes this view of the Universe by saying, “The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us – there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.” Sagan’s viewpoint is that the physical Universe is the same thing as the Cosmos; it is all that there is, and there is nothing else outside of it to govern it or intervene in its inner workings. The ideas of “meaning” and “significance” have no place in this, as they are not things which can be directly measured or reasoned to.

Philosophy on Christopher Carter

The End is the Same

No Up and No Down: The Rot of Modernism and Postmodernism