#brad gregory

[christopher-bryant]

"i dont have three dads"

yeah ok erin. tell another lie

[julsobsessed]

rewatched season 1 and the new season 2 of space force and honestly i think this second season was better i really like the dynamics and relationships between the team and i love all these characters

[classicwtfplotline]

Space Force cast together in Vancouver (presumably to film season 2!) (x)

[michaelsmosey]

Brad Gregory

[septembersung]

Westerners now live in societies without an acquisitive ceiling: a distinctly consumerist (rather than merely industrial) economic methods depends precisely on persuading people to discard as quickly as possible what they were no less insistently urged to purchase, so that another acquisitive cycle might begin. In proportion as an individual identity is derived from consumption, the quest to (re)construct and (re)discover oneself is inseparable from endless acquisitions—there can never be “enough” if to be is to buy, if self-fashioning depends on ever more and newer fashions for the self.

Brad S. Gregory, from The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Belknap, 2012), p. 17.

[septembersung]

Whatever the issue, American national political culture as manifest in the media is lacking in rigor and loaded with rancor. Often “our own poisoned public sphere,” as Anthony Grafton has recently called it, seems little more than a shouting match of distorted and distorting slogans and propagandistic one-liners. The realities of a bumper-sticker political life seem distant from idealizations of the well-informed, fair-minded, reasonable citizens theorized by champions of deliberative democracy, whether in a Rawlsian, Habermasian, or some other form. Add to this the empirically verified tendency of differently minded citizens to avoid face-to-face conflict, and one arrives at Diana Mutz’s sobering conclusion: “It is doubtful that an extremely activist political culture can also be a heavily deliberative one.”

Brad S. Gregory, from The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Belknap, 2012), p. 16-17.

[septembersung]

So-called transhumanists understand the implications. If “right” and “persons” no less than “morality” are mere constructs without empirical grounding in the findings of science, and only science can legitimately tell us anything true about reality, then such constructs can be deconstructed and dismissed in the pursuit of alternatives—such as a calculatingly eugenicist ethical agenda that seeks to hasten the evolutionary self-transcendence of Homo sapiens. Quite literally, the transhumanists’ aim is the deliberate self-elimination of human beings with genetic manipulations.

Brad S. Gregory, from The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Belknap, 2012), p. 19.

[septembersung]

From the undeniable fact of pluralism, it is frequently inferred that moral and cultural relativism is true, that there are no norms and values rightly applicable to people of all times and places. (Hence the incoherence of attempts to abandon truth as a category: its denial always involves at least this one truth claim. Consistently to abandon truth requires that one stop making assertions or arguments.) Instead of seeking to advance exclusive and particularistic and divisive truth claims, it is said, we should (note the normative imperative) promote toleration and diversity. But not all diversity. Racism, sexism, and violence, for example, are bad, and so are not to be tolerated. But “bad is a moral category. So we need a moral criterion to distinguish good diversity and toleration from bad diversity and toleration. But morality has already been relegated to the realm of subjective and contingent constructions. Hence moral constructivists have nowhere to stand, no basis on which to make normative claims. If they are correct, why should anyone accept their arbitrary construction of morality rather than that of a fascistic racist, an authoritarian Catholic, a fundamentalist Protestant, or a militant Islamist? Why indeed, unless it is true?

Brad S. Gregory, from The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Belknap, 2012), p. 19-20.