Finished Reading “Heretics”

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  "G. K. Chesterton, the "Prince of Paradox," is at his witty best in this collection of twenty essays and articles from the turn of the twentieth century. Focusing on  "heretics" - those who pride themselves on their superiority to Christian views - Chesterton appraises prominent figures who fall into that category from the literary and art worlds... those who hold incomplete and inadequate views about "life, the universe, and everything." He is, in short, criticizing all that host of non-Christian views of reality, as he demonstrated in his follow-up book Orthodoxy. The book is both an easy read and a difficult read. But he manages to demonstrate, among other things, that our new 21st century heresies are really not new because he himself deals with most of them." (Goodreads)

Impossible, You Say?

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Montaigne confronts unbelief, arrogance and ignorance head-on in his short essay, “That it is Folly to Measure Truth and Error by Our Own Capacity.” He begins explaining that belief is in direct proportion to the malleability of the soul. Establishing this, he proves that we can’t say this or that is impossible on the grounds that we don’t have enough information. We should say instead that this or that is unusual. 


Reason dictates that “to condemn anything for false and impossible, is arrogantly and impiously to circumscribe and limit the will of God, and the power of our mother nature, within the bounds of my own capacity.”  He adds that, “to condemn them as impossible, is by a temerarious presumption to pretend to know the utmost bounds of possibility.” Belief is kept intact by judging “with more reverence, and with greater acknowledgment of our own ignorance and infirmity . . . “


So the next time someone says “that’s impossible” see what happens by asking “don’t you mean ‘unusual’?”


For further study: Matthew 17:30, 19:26; Mark 10:27; Luke 1:30, 18:27

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