On Soapboxes and Chesterton

The topic I want to talk about today is one I don't think I should actually weigh in on.  I go back and forth on whether or not I want to use this area as a soapbox.  In many ways, I already am.  This is our little chunk of the internet to talk about what we want, whether it's something personally happening to us in our lives, or just things that we have thoughts about.  In other ways, I think some things are better off left in their own little corners of the internet, not touched with a 39 1/2 foot pole just to weed out the spammers and trolls.  It is my fervent desire that in this day and age we should be mature enough to have rational conversations regarding all manner of problems going on in our world.  But people really aren't like that; especially with hot button issues that create an immediate emotional reaction and considering how difficult it is to temper that reaction.

That being said, I think it's safer to talk about a book I've been reading on and off while I substitute teach-one of two.  Heretics by Chesterton was a difficult one for me to get into.  I feel like I should read Orthodoxy first, but I would probably be just as lost reading that one as I feel with his response to the response to Orthodoxy.  I feel like I'm listening in on a conversation that I'm not only hearing only one half of, but have little context for.  That's ok, though.  With a little research and a little time, I'll get that figured out.  The book in and of itself is still interesting.

There was a section I read yesterday which really got me thinking.  Chesterton posits that no one is asking "what is good" anymore, but instead we have given up on trying to determine what "good" is, as if we can never know.  That really blew my mind, more because I believe he's probably right than anything else.  It further boggled my mind trying to comprehend how we consider ourselves a progressive society, and yet have ceased to make progress where it really matters.  I need to think about this a little bit more before I run on a tangent of a rant, but it was something that got me thinking.

I'm just going to leave this here, too, because it made me smile and laugh:

"The human race, according to religion, fell once, and in falling gained knowledge of good and of evil. Now we have fallen a second time, and only the knowledge of evil remains to us." ~ G. K. Chesterton