Category: Fleming
Essay: Sade, the Prophet of Modernity
The greatest of the philosophes, the Marquis de Sade, took the Enlightenment to the ultimate conclusion. God did not exist; religion and morality were invented to repress mankind; therefore, rape, torture, and multi-sexual orgies were all part of a program for liberating the human spirit from the shackles of Christianity.
Poems by Conrad Aiken
These hills are sandy. Trees are dwarfed here. Crows
Caw dismally in skies of an arid brilliance,
Complain in dusty pine-trees. Yellow daybreak
Lights on the long brown slopes a frost-like dew,
Choosing the Future
Nations make choices, usually unconsciously, though it is too late, when a later generation complains about their teeth being set on edge, to refuse to drink the cup of sour wine that was offered to their fathers.
The Tax Revolt That Never Happened
There is a tedious meme making its weary way around FB. It shows a smiling British soldier and informs the viewer that the USA, a country that once fought a revolution against taxation, has just hired 87,000 more IRS agents. Where are the FB fact-checkers? There was no revolution against taxe
Poem: Une Belle Dame Sans Merci
I wrote this some time in the early 1980s before moving to Rockford. It’s been printed in one or two places. Lovers of Ernest Dowson will recognize the line I have borrowed from one of his best poems.
The Great Revolution–From Whiggery to Marxism in one easy lesson
The Liberal Premise is not so much a collection of ethical and political positions as it is an ideological posture, or, to take a metaphor from everyday life in the new millennium, it is a virus that is forever mutating to meet new challenges to its advance.
“I Don’t Want to Startle You, but They are Going to Kill Most of US…”
Reading the media coverage of the recent hit on the head of al Quaeda, I asked myself the question: When is a terrorist not a terrorist? Answer: When he works for the government of the United States.
Rationalizing Abortion
Most modern schools of philosophy base morality on the principles of reason, and the principal accounts of moral development emphasize growth in moral reasoning rather than moral behavior. To be a human person in this sense would mean that an individual is conscious of his own existence and capable of making rational decisions, including the decision to remain alive.
Abortion and the Laws of Nature, Part II
On abortion and other forms of infanticide, Nature gives us the sort of answer she always gives–general rules and statistical averages to which there are exceptions, but, from the Christian perspective, Nature is the tarnished mirror in which we can only glimpse, obscurely, the true reality
