The voices / 27 fragments

J. Budziszewski

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01Undated

Of course there is such a thing as too much doubt, for we ought to accept what is true. But there is also such a thing as proper doubt, for we ought not accept what is false. The possibility of doubt is inherent in the longing to understand, and nothing less than complete and perfect knowledge can satisfy the mind. We do not possess such knowledge here on earth; it is reserved for the beatific vision. Until then, doubt will be with us. This is...why it is so unreasonable to trust only what cannot be doubted, as Descartes proposed, because everything can be doubted. We should believe, not what we cannot doubt, but what we have the best reasons to believe.

J. Budziszewski / quote

02Undated

There is even a certain tendency to punish those who do try to see. A case in point: At the dawn of the sexual revolution, social scientists produced statistical studies purporting to show that children are better off when quarreling parents divorce, that broken homes are just as functional as intact ones, and that cohabitation has no influence on the stability of a subsequent marriage. As anyone conversant with the field now knows, newer and more careful studies show all that to be wildly false. A young, untenured family sociologist whom I know used to circulate the results of these new studies secretly among other scholars. But he asked me and his other friends never to mention his name. Why? Because calling the mirage a mirage is a good way to end a career.

J. Budziszewski / quote

03Undated

When, despite considerable intelligence, a thinker cannot think straight, it becomes very likely that he cannot face his thoughts.

J. Budziszewski / quote

04Undated

The unitive capacities of the spouses don't exist for nothing; they exist for motherhood and fatherhood. That is the matrix in which they develop, for children change us in a way we desperately need to be changed. They wake us up, they wet their diapers, they depend on us utterly. Willy-nilly, they knock us out of our selfish habits and force us to live sacrificially for others; they are the necessary and natural continuation of the shock to our selfishness which is initiated by matrimony itself.

J. Budziszewski / quote

05Undated

Christian faith undercuts the urge to fix everything on our own, through conviction of the final helplessness of man and confidence in the providence of God--through certainty that only God can set everything to rights, and faith that in the end, He will. Man can only ameliorate, not cure.

J. Budziszewski / quote

06Undated

What your body does is unrelated to your heart. Don't believe it. The same survey reports that hooking up commonly takes place when both participants are drinking or drunk, and it's not hard to guess the reason why: After a certain amount of this, you may need to get drunk to go through with it.

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07Undated

It is hard enough to face the moral law even with the revelation that the divine justice and divine mercy are conjoined. It offends our pride to be forgiven, terrifies it to surrender control.

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08Undated

Jesus, I am sorry.

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09Undated

Even the suicide desires his own good: he wrongly imagines that he would be better off dead. The moral problem is not that we love ourselves but that we love ourselves the wrong way.

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10Undated

In the same way, filling a cavity restores to the tooth its natural function of chewing. Healing does not transcend our nature; it respects it.

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11Undated

To be evil at all, Satan needs good things he can abuse, things like intelligence, power and will. Those good things come from God.

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12Undated

Trying to understand man without recognizing him as imago Dei is like trying to understand a bas-relief without recognizing it as a carving.

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13Undated

Yet our common moral knowledge is as real as arithmetic, and probably just as plain. Paradoxically, maddeningly, we appeal to it even to justify wrongdoing; rationalization is the homage paid by sin to guilty knowledge.

J. Budziszewski / quote

14Undated

Those are just platitudes. Everyone has his own idea of "playing fair." "Does he? Try making up your own idea of what's fair--say, "giving the greatest rewards to the laziest workers"--and see how seriously people take you.

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15Undated

The goods of fidelity, for example, are plain and concrete to the man who has not strayed, but they are faint, like mathematical abstractions, to the one who is addicted to other men's wives.

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16Undated

The problem was not that they failed to find these principles written upon their hearts, but that they could not bring themselves to attend closely to the inscription.

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17Undated

If all meaning were relative, then the meanings of the terms in the proposition "All meaning is relative" would be relative. Therefore the proposition "All meaning is relative" destroys itself. It is nothing but an evasion of reality. That seems a high price to pay, even for the privilege of killing people.

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18Undated

Besides, morality is not about whether the human race survives, but about what kind of survival it gets. We marry; guppies don't. We don't eat our young; they do. Yet neither species is in danger of extinction.

J. Budziszewski / quote

19Undated

In order to avoid believing in just one God we are now asked to believe in an infinite number of universes, all of them unobservable just because they are not part of ours. The principle of inference seems to be not Occam's Razor but Occam's Beard: "Multiply entities unnecessarily.

J. Budziszewski / quote

20Undated

Atheist: 'I hear the voice of conscience, but I deny the reality of God.' St. Thomas: 'That is like listening to someone speak, but denying that anyone is there.' Atheist: 'That's right; nobody is.' St. Thomas: 'Then you deny not only God but conscience, because you consider it a hallucination.' Atheist: 'I misspoke. What I meant to say is that when I am listening to conscience, I am really listening to myself.' St. Thomas: 'Then you still deny conscience, because you deny its authority to judge you. Instead you claim to judge yourself, but no one can be judge in his own case.

J. Budziszewski / quote

21Undated

That is how sin works. Having nothing in itself by which to convince, on what other resources but good and truth can it draw to make itself attractive and plausible? We must use the natural law to recognize the abuse of the natural law; there is nothing else to use.

J. Budziszewski / quote

22Undated

in the modern era, many thinkers began to mistrust faith, viewing it as 'blind' and an enemy of reason. Their watchword was 'reason alone.' One of the difficulties of this stance is that reason cannot test its own reliability, any more than soapstone can test its own hardness. Any argument, accomplished by reasoning, that what reasoning accomplishes can be trusted, would be circular, because it would take for granted the very thing that it was trying to prove.Suppose I am at the window of a burning building. Although I can hear the firemen calling to me from far below, I cannot see them because of all the smoke. They are telling me to jump. Though I may have every reason to believe that they will catch me in their net, I may not trust them enough to overcome my fear, and so, hesitating, I burn to death. Obviously, my reasons are not the same as trust; faith surpasses reason. Even so they are reasons for trust; though faith surpasses reason, it is not irrational.

J. Budziszewski / quote

23Undated

A wise man governs his eyes, not because it is wrong to delight in beauty, but because otherwise his delight may suffer transmutation into something very different.

J. Budziszewski / quote

24Undated

How conscience tells us that we ought to be fair, nobody knows. This we can say: we don't know it just from being told, we don't know it from the five senses, and we don't know it by inference from prior knowledge. We just know it. The knowledge is "underived.

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