Sunday, June 17, 2007

Things that you'll like and that are good for you too

Time of Transitions by Jurgen Habermas. Mr. Habermas is Germany's preeminent philosopher and has been one of the world's preeminent philosophers for decades. In 2004 Mr. Habermas, an atheist, wrote an essay that is also this book's title. A key sentence has been reprinted in various media and has slowly circled the globe. It was recently reprinted again in an article in Foreign Policy and Arts & Letters Daily has cited to that article in quoting Mr. Habermas. The sentence is:

"Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this day, we have no other options [than Christianity]. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter." This is Public Occurrences.