“You hold that your heretics and sceptics have
helped the world forward and handed on a lamp of progress. I deny
it. Nothing is plainer from real history than that each of your
heretics invented a complete cosmos of his own which the next
heretic smashed entirely to pieces. Who knows now exactly what
Nestorius taught? Who cares? There are only two things that we
know for certain about it. The first is that Nestorius, as a
heretic, taught something quite opposite to the teaching of
Arius, the heretic who came before him, and something quite
useless to James Turnbull, the heretic who comes after. I defy
you to go back to the Free-thinkers of the past and find any
habitation for yourself at all. I defy you to read Godwin or
Shelley or the deists of the eighteenth century of the
nature-worshipping humanists of the Renaissance, without
discovering that you differ from them twice as much as you differ
from the Pope. You are a nineteenth-century sceptic, and you are
always telling me that I ignore the cruelty of nature. If you had
been an eighteenth-century sceptic you would have told me that I
ignore the kindness and benevolence of nature. You are an
atheist, and you praise the deists of the eighteenth century.
Read them instead of praising them, and you will find that their
whole universe stands or falls with the deity. You are a
materialist, and you think Bruno a scientific hero. See what he
said and you will think him an insane mystic. No, the great
Free-thinker, with his genuine ability and honesty, does not in
practice destroy Christianity. What he does destroy is the
Free-thinker who went before. Free-thought may be suggestive, it
may be inspiriting, it may have as much as you please of the
merits that come from vivacity and variety. But there is one
thing Free-thought can never be by any possibility–Free-thought
can never be progressive. It can never be progressive because it
will accept nothing from the past; it begins every time again
from the beginning; and it goes every time in a different
direction. All the rational philosophers have gone along
different roads, so it is impossible to say which has gone
farthest. Who can discuss whether Emerson was a better optimist
than Schopenhauer was pessimist? It is like asking if this corn
is as yellow as that hill is steep. No; there are only two things
that really progress; and they both accept accumulations of
authority. They may be progressing uphill and down; they may be
growing steadily better or steadily worse; but they have steadily
increased in certain definable matters; they have steadily
advanced in a certain definable direction; they are the only two
things, it seems, that ever can progress. The first is strictly
physical science. The second is the Catholic Church.”
- GK Chesterton
theres my homeboy right there