Three Links Wednesday (vol. XIV)

"He is himself more preposterous than anything he denounces...The softening of the brain which ultimately overtook him was not a physical accident. If [he] had not ended in imbecility, [his philosophy] would end in imbecility. Thinking in isolation and with pride ends in being an idiot. Every man who will not have a softening of the heart must at least have a softening of the brain."
--G.K. Chesterton

--I--

Since we suffer a two-party system, it's going to be President Obama vs Mr Romney this time around, with a few protest options in the third parties. Nathanael Blake has a post concerning what will be (and, for that matter, has been) the strategy of president's re-election campaign: distraction and demonization.

--II--

Speaking of Mr Blake, one of the ideas which he and I occasionally come back to is the idea that culture matters (duh!). One of the consequences of this is that Christians in general cannot both have our cake and eat it with a culture which is steadily sliding away from traditional Christian mores. This mean that we should hardly be surprised to learn that an exorbitant number of Christians engage in the same general immorality (e.g. premarital sex, divorce and remarriage, and even abortion) as the culture at large. It may not quite be so large a percentage as the population in general, but I would suspect that the number of Christians who obey traditional Christian sexual ethics is in the vast majority. This is what Mr David French notes on The Corner. When the Christian version of (for example) dating is everything else save having sex t the end of the night, we shouldn't be altogether surprised to find that many young Christians are also having sex at the end of the night. And taking this a step further, such things as the Obama Administration's tyrannical HHS mandate (or its attempt to arrogate to itself the authority to decide who religious institutions can and cannot hire) or the recent Kansas city council's consideration of forcing churches to support gay-marriages become more-or-less inevitable.

--III--

The Integrated Catholic Life has recently republished a 6-part series by Professor Peter Kreeft, "The Pillars of Unbelief." It's an interesting read, even if I disagree with some of his analysis. Here is his conclusion concerning Nietzsche:

"Pre-Christian (i.e., pagan) societies and philosophies were like virgins. Post-Christian (i.e., modern) societies and philosophies are like divorcees. Nietzsche is no pagan pre-Christian, but the essential, modern post-Christian and anti-Christian. He rightly saw Christ as his chief enemy and rival. The spirit of Anti-Christ has never received such complete formulation. Nietzsche was not only the favorite philosopher of Nazi Germany, he is the favorite philosopher of hell."

He certainly seems to have captured the egoistical nature of Nietzsche's writings (e.g. Ecce Homo Est, itself bearing a rather egoistical title). Perhaps this is why the egoistical intellectual elites so prefer him?

--Bonus--

Ever wonder about the tradition of yelling "Geronimo" upon jumping from a great height? Mental Floss has the story.