In the ages past, there have been very articulate men and women who spoke for non belief. I don’t know whether such persons were known to the general public or was it just a small section, the elite, that knew them?
France had its Voltaire, Diderot. The English had Percy B Shelley. In the US of A they had Ingersoll, Ernestine Rose, Thomas Paine and I would add Joseph Lewis in East Africa we had Okot p’Bitek. I don’t think I have read any works from Latin America, Asia and China on non belief.
Who would our descendants name as the most articulate advocates of non belief? Who would we say used his wealth & influence like Voltaire to make the world a better place? You know an Ingersoll type?
Whether it is necessary that each generation produces a Darwin, a Newton or Eugenia is altogether open to debate. Maybe the example of these fellows, among others, is sufficient. Who knows. Or maybe Mark Twain was right when he said nature once it finds a product that works produces it en mass with slight variation.
Or maybe I am not making sense.
Random thoughts 
Our descendants? If current trends are any indication, it’s doubtful that future generations will possess the skills required to engage in any kind of meaningful discussion, let alone those involving deep philosophical thought and introspection.
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I hear you. We translate NYT’s material (including video) and at times I swear the job is actually ‘interpretation.’ It seems American’s are having terrible trouble just forming (and then speaking) coherent sentences.
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Americans are becoming so woke, it is annoying. In a few years, everyone will be cancelled due to wokeness and only eggshells will be left to walk on
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Former educator John Taylor Gatto wrote a book (“Dumbing US Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling”) about the dismal state of public education in 1992, but his warnings and recommendations went largely unheeded. The end result is that education costs have risen while academic results have flatlined or worsened.
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I see almost a similar trend here. Education keeps getting expensive while the results are going the other way
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It’s not just education. The “cost disease” is an interesting phenomenon.
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Weird, and in Australia public schools are today virtually academically indistinguishable from private. The only real difference is the depth and scope of extra-curriculum activities available.
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They cost the same?
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Private and public? No. State schools are free.
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Ah I see. Here, public schools have been underfunded over the years and resulted in mushrooming of private schools that are better off razed.
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Spot on
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Have some hope, Ron. A miracle might happen
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i wish it would because America and western Europe appear to be headed towards serious decline. (Though I suppose it was inevitable given that history has shown us that all great empires to date have eventually succumb to slow inner decay followed by total collapse.)
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The rest of us are also fast on your heels in facing decline. Ours is compounded by the unfortunate event that we never did get to full potential before we started to nice dive
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This is the way I’ve come to look at it all. All empires decay and collapse. And the decay is usually faster than the original rise, but it is the only way for something new to be spawned. We alive now, probably so t see it, but a few generations down may, in time. In the long long run, change is growth. We are simply seeing the downfall of the US and much of Western Europe.
Have you heard of the Seneca Effect?
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Let’s hope we all follow the British (Empire) model and do it gracefully, without tears or complaint… Just quiet resolve that a change has occurred and we have to adapt.
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Too much money made by The Owners propping up the system. I read somewhere that as the Roman Empire was sputtering to its collapse/transformation, they still kept funding the legions until the very end. Blogger Marcus Ranum has been following the utter debacle of the U.S. military’s F35 fighter jet program which illustrates perfectly how over-complex systems inevitably fail/..
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Good point. I think it was Dick Cheney who said during a govt. shutdown, “You pay the men with guns first.”
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And as dysfunction grows, you increase the size of the army.
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While screaming “Patriotism!”
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and god bless the nation and no one else
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The army is a good prop for a failing civilian administration
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Christopher Hitchens.
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That name came to mind immediately for me. Or, although not a
“thinker” per se, George Carlin!!!!!
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I love George Carlin, the laughing philosopher
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you are in want of an oracle?
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i think and since I can’t go to Mt. Olympus, can the mountain come to me?
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Future generations will hold in esteem those who speak to the pressing issues of their time. As the world becomes less religious, champions of secular thought will have to answer a question Nietzsche couldn’t: what next?
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Revaluation of all values.
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Yeah, but he never said what that would be.
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No, he didn’t explicitly but one could get his thinking from his genealogy of morals or gay science as he called it
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I haven’t read it. I took him at his word in “The Will to Power.” Leave it to Freddie to hide things in other books that I’ll have to buy.
Maybe since he called it the gay science, this is why Christians hate him so much.
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I proudly nominate YOU! 🙂
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