GK Chesterton
Article
GK Chesterton is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 6 times across 6 issues between August 18, 2021 and August 23, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “as GK Chesterton claimed, people who don’t believe in God will believe in anything”; “I think GK Chesterton has said something almost the opposite”; “attributed to one of GK Chesterton or CS Lewis”. It most often appears alongside Biden, China, Google.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 6
- Issue count: 6
- First seen: August 18, 2021
- Last seen: August 23, 2024
Appears In
- Links For August
- Highlights From The Comments On Justice Creep
- Will Nonbelievers Really Believe Anything?
- My 2024 Presidential Debate
- Links for July 2024
- Your Book Review: The Complete Rhyming Dictionary and Poet’s Craft Book (1936 Edition)
Related Pages
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- Biden (2 shared issues)
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- China (2 shared issues)
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- Google (2 shared issues)
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- Harvard (2 shared issues)
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- North Dakota (2 shared issues)
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- QAnon (2 shared issues)
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- Rome (2 shared issues)
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- Shakespeare (2 shared issues)
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- Twitter (2 shared issues)
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- white evangelicals (2 shared issues)
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- 1984 (1 shared issues)
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- 2016 (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
17: Is it true that, as GK Chesterton claimed, people who don’t believe in God will believe in anything? IE that Christianity fills a useful religion-shaped-hole in people’s heads, and so non-religious people are easy prey for cults, conspiracy theories, etc? I hear this a lot, but here’s a study finding that church-goers were more likely to believe in QAnon, even after “adjusting for confounders” (remember, this is hard and doesn’t always work). The same article notes that “white evangelicals” are more likely to believe in vaccine-autism connections, moon landing fraud, etc - although I find this less convincing than I would if they just gave me the church attendance statistics without bringing race and denomination into it.
Inline links: here’s a study finding that
Interesting! I think GK Chesterton has said something almost the opposite of this, where Christian charity is superior to justice, because the just man only helps people who ‘deserve’ help, whereas the Christian helps everybody.
Big talk, although I notice that this is practically always attributed to one of GK Chesterton or CS Lewis, neither of whom actually said it. If you’re making strong claims about how everybody except you is gullible, you should at least bother to double-check the source of your quote.
Trump: GK Chesterton said that fairy tales were more than true, not because they tell us that dragons are real, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten. In the same way, I think misinformation is more than true - not because it tells us there are pedophiles in pizza parlors, but because it tells us that pizza parlor pedophiles can be discovered and dragged into the light.
6: Mind and Mythos essay club looks at GK Chesterton’s Defense of Heraldry. Key quotes:
Inline links: GK Chesterton’s Defense of Heraldry
Let us celebrate Gilbert Keith Chesterton All who heard him were deeply impressed at an Amply earnest debate Where his words carried weight And his own weight was, one would have guessed, a ton.
1936, however, was a bad year for poetry. Rudyard Kipling died, having at one point been the most widely-read contemporary poet in the English language. G.K. Chesterton died, still remembered today by the online limerick dictionary in limerick form:
On the flip side, Wood can write about free verse from the perspective of a poet who grew up, with, and at one time genuinely loved, the fixed forms. My sole opinion on free verse came from a pithy G.K. Chesterton quote (“Free verse? You may as well call sleeping in a ditch ‘free architecture’.”), but reading this book showed me how and why someone might hypothetically like it, and what someone might hypothetically get out of reading it. He didn’t convince me to like it. But I can’t quite sneer like I used to.