Not that anyone cares, but I recently called the secular right on their silence in the face of ideological suppression. Well, ESR actually commented on it, expressing support for freedom of speech without reservation. Well done, sir. What else can I say?
I’ll come up with something, naturally. Decadent man, the tongue wags me just as the tail wags the dog.
I have some quibbles with his presentation and his reasoning, of course. I recently described Heaviside and our favorite brony as decent men by nature who are evil by ideology, whereas Koanic is evil by nature but well-tempered by Christianity. (I mentioned someone else in the same vein, maybe it was EdensThaw.) ESR probably falls into the former group, as a practicing American pseudoBuddhist and well-programmed rationalist of the 19th century sort. It is no small blessing that he is at least not cut from 20th-century cloth.
As with all rationalists, he hopes to stand on logic alone. This is silly to the point of childishness, and probably due to the sorts of books he preferred as a teenager. Rather, we must first realize that logic is good, and it is good because it is loved by God (the other famous possibility quickly explodes). To believe otherwise is to fool ourselves and deny our own humanity, neither of which are good things as described.
This is why, traditionally, the primary goals of civilized parents were 1) to teach their children to love and fear God or the pagan gods, and 2) to teach their children to recognize and love good things (like upstanding character, reason, and beauty).
Let parents, then, bequeath to their children not a heap of riches, but the spirit of reverence.
Aeoli Pera 