Ian Hammond

“Now the story of Abraham has the remarkable property that it is always glorious, however poorly one may understand it; yet here again the proverb applies, that all depends upon whether one is willing to labor and be heavy laden. But they will not labor, and yet they would understand the story.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

“What distinguishes modernity from the age of Christendom is not that the former is more devoted to rationality than was the latter but that its rationality serves different primary commitments”
― David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies

“What I find most mystifying in the arguments of the authors I have mentioned, and of others like them, is the strange presupposition that a truly secular society would of its nature be more tolerant and less prone to violence than any society shaped by any form of faith. Given that the modern age of secular governance has been the most savagely and sublimely violent period in human history, by a factor (or body count) of incalculable magnitude, it is hard to identify the grounds for their confidence.”
― David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies

“The Christian view of human nature is wise precisely because it is so very extreme: it sees humanity, at once, as an image of
the divine, fashioned for infinite love and imperishable glory, and as an almost inexhaustible wellspring of vindictiveness, cupidity, and brutality. Christians, indeed, have a special obligation not to forget how great and how inextinguishable the human proclivity for violence is, or how many victims it has claimed, for they worship a God who does not merely take the part of those victims, but who was himself one of them, murdered by the combined authority and moral prudence of the political, religious, and legal powers of human society.”
― David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies