Losing My Mind - Religion, Reason, and Truth

I’m fascinated by beauty. It is my final fortification against materialism, a barrier from reducing the world to numbers. Sam Harris’s arguments are very sound—they explain things, fill in the gaps. But atheism specializes in the details and misses the sunsets and the waterfalls and Beethoven’s Ninth and Charles Dickens.

The sky’s on fire in the west tonight

 A chorus of pink, purple, blazing orange

 The air pulses with meaning and—

 I think of random particles,

 of chance and infinite typewriters,

 but no cold device could make the beauty,

 nor make me understand it.

Tolkien on the Incarnation

Incarnation proves the intrinsic worth of each human person. 

~J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter 136

The Incarnation of Jesus Christ was one of the central ideas in J.R.R. Tolkien's theology. Besides his philological attention to the whole idea of the word-made-flesh, he was interested in in the Incarnation’s refutation of the perceived schism between body and spirit, an idea particularly fostered in modern times. In the good old days, it was branded a heresy: Gnosticism. The Gnostics believed in the supremacy of the spirit over uncouth bodies. The vice versa equivalent would probably be modern secular materialism, placing all emphasis on what can be quantified. Both ideas are popular now, with trendy pop-Buddhism taking the place of Gnostic spiritualism.