Quotes About Modern thought

There was a strain of ruthlessness and cruelty in early modern thought. The so called humanists were pioneering a rather convenient idea of natural rights to counter the brutality and intolerance they associated with conventional religion. This philosophy of human rights did not apply to all human beings.

Philosophy, as the modern world knows it, is only intellectual club-swinging.

Heroes can only thrive where ignorance reduces history to mythology. They. cannot survive the coldly critical temper of modern thought when it is functioning normally, nor can they be worshipped by a generation which has every facility for determining their foibles and analyzing their limitations.

ESOTERIC, adj. Very particularly abstruse and consummately occult. The ancient philosophies were of two kinds,—exoteric, those that the philosophers themselves could partly understand, and esoteric, those that nobody could understand. It is the latter that have most profoundly affected modern thought and found greatest acceptance in our time.

Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to state that all of modern philosophy constitutes reactions to and criticisms of Descartes' Meditations.

It is therefore no wonder that modern thought, to the extent that it reduces man from a spiritual to a purely biological entity, elevates the state of inexorable competition, conflict, and self-serving aggression from a tragic lapse of our ordained destiny into the primary principle of the natural order.

In modern thought, (if not in fact) Nothing is that doesn't act, So that is reckoned wisdom which Describes the scratch but not the itch.

the problem of evil is the guiding force of modern thought.

modern thought has arrived at an impasse, unable to come to a consensus on what constitutes man and his specific dignity, and consequently unable to define the rights of man.

The proper measure of a philosophical system or a scientific theory is not the degree to which it anticipated modern thought, but its degree of success in treating the philosophical and scientific problems of its own day.

It seemed impossible that modern thought could house itself in such decrepit and superseded chambers.

The relation demanded by religion between man and God must be of a personal character. No man can love a pure abstraction; he might as reasonably fall in love with a triangle or profess devotion to the equator. The God of religion must be a person, and it is precisely that, as a controlling force of the universe, in which modern thought finds it more and more difficult to believe, and which modern science decisively rejects.

Literature, not science or theology, is the master discipline, the paradigm of inquiry, for postmoderns.

The biblical stories know absolutely nothing of blind "leaps of faith," as that phrase is now understood. Such "leaps" are a pure fantasy imposed upon those stories and upon the religious life by the prejudices and tortured turns of modern thought.

Descartes was chief among the founders who designed the contours of modern thought and among the most original philosophers and mathematicians of any age.

Our business is to present the Christian faith clothed in modern terms, not to propagate modern thought clothed in Christian terms... Confusion here is fatal.

This should come as no surprise. Intellectual, social, and political inertia are normally powerful forces. Modern thought and institutions, evolved and nurtured in the late Holocene, fit comfortably with a world of cheap energy and stable climate.

suggestion that "sin" does not make God angry (a frequent idea in modern thought as a reaction against the caricatures of an ill-tempered deity) needs to be treated with disdain.

We need to understand enough of modern thought to identify the ways it blocks us from living out the Gospel the way God intends, both in terms of intellectual roadblocks and in terms of economic and structural changes that make it harder to live by Scriptural principles.