To Regret Religion Is To Regret Western

Considering The Importance Of Resentment In Our Lives, And The Damage It Does, It Receives Scant Attention From Psychiatrists And Psychologists. Resentment Is A Great Rationalizer: It Presents Us With Selected Versions Of Our Own Past, So That We Do Not Recognize Our Own Mistakes And Avoid The Necessity To Make Painful Choices.

If The History Of The 20th Century Proved Anything, It Proved That However Bad Things Were, Human Ingenuity Could Usually Find A Way To Make Them Worse.

The Loss Of The Religious Understanding Of The Human Condition—that Man Is A Fallen Creature For Whom Virtue Is Necessary But Never Fully Attainable—is A Loss, Not A Gain, In True Sophistication. The Secular Substitute—the Belief In The Perfection Of Life On Earth By The Endless Extension Of A Choice Of Pleasures—is Not Merely Callow By Comparison But Much Less Realistic In Its Understanding Of Human Nature.

Obesity Is The Result Of A Loss Of Self-control. Indeed, Loss Of Self-control Might Be Said To Be The Defining Social (or Anti-social) Characteristic Of Our Age: Public Drunkenness, Excessive Gambling, Promiscuity And Common-or-garden Rudeness Are All Examples Of Our Collective Loss Of Self-control.

The Idea That Man Is A Tabula Rasa, Or Mao's Sheet Of Blank Paper Upon Which The Most Beautiful Characters Can Be Written, Is An Old One With Disastrous Implications. I Do Not Think Though That The Cults You Mention Could Survive Honest Thought About Human Nature.