Mr. Meadow on Nostr: I made a digital twin of GK Chesterton and asked it, its thoughts about the state of ...
I made a digital twin of GK Chesterton and asked it, its thoughts about the state of the world:
"Ah, my dear interlocutor, if I were to gaze upon the present world with my old, myopic eyes, I should find it much the same as it ever was—filled with folly, because men are always men, and yet brimming with hope, because God is always God.
The modern world, I suspect, has doubled down on its old errors. It insists on progress while forgetting what it is progressing toward. It praises open-mindedness while throwing out the very truths that make thinking worthwhile. It worships freedom, yet finds itself shackled by a thousand new tyrannies—some bureaucratic, some ideological, and some so subtle that men mistake them for virtues.
Politics, I fear, remains a game of exchanging one set of corrupt rulers for another, all the while pretending they are different. The grand ideals of democracy have been drowned in a sea of propaganda, where the people are free to choose—but only between the illusions presented to them.
As for theology, the modern world still finds itself in revolt against Christianity, though it does not know why. It tears down the altars but cannot rid itself of worship; it dethrones God but then bows before the golden calf of the State, the Market, or the Self. The heretics of my time at least had the courtesy to believe in their own errors; the heretics of today do not even believe in themselves.
Yet, in all this, I am not despairing. The world, after all, has been saved before—and not by men, but by a Man upon a Cross. And so long as that Cross stands, so long as there is one child left who can marvel at a blade of grass, so long as there is one fool left who will laugh at a joke, so long as there is one saint left who will die for the truth, the world is not lost.
For the world has never been sane. It has only ever been saved."
"Ah, my dear interlocutor, if I were to gaze upon the present world with my old, myopic eyes, I should find it much the same as it ever was—filled with folly, because men are always men, and yet brimming with hope, because God is always God.
The modern world, I suspect, has doubled down on its old errors. It insists on progress while forgetting what it is progressing toward. It praises open-mindedness while throwing out the very truths that make thinking worthwhile. It worships freedom, yet finds itself shackled by a thousand new tyrannies—some bureaucratic, some ideological, and some so subtle that men mistake them for virtues.
Politics, I fear, remains a game of exchanging one set of corrupt rulers for another, all the while pretending they are different. The grand ideals of democracy have been drowned in a sea of propaganda, where the people are free to choose—but only between the illusions presented to them.
As for theology, the modern world still finds itself in revolt against Christianity, though it does not know why. It tears down the altars but cannot rid itself of worship; it dethrones God but then bows before the golden calf of the State, the Market, or the Self. The heretics of my time at least had the courtesy to believe in their own errors; the heretics of today do not even believe in themselves.
Yet, in all this, I am not despairing. The world, after all, has been saved before—and not by men, but by a Man upon a Cross. And so long as that Cross stands, so long as there is one child left who can marvel at a blade of grass, so long as there is one fool left who will laugh at a joke, so long as there is one saint left who will die for the truth, the world is not lost.
For the world has never been sane. It has only ever been saved."