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The basic principle of Protestantism is sola scriptura, the idea that the Bible is the only infallible rule of faith. Now Catholics have always responded, "Well, what good is an infallible book without an infallible interpreter of that book?" To which the Protestant rejoinder has always been, "Scripture interprets itself, so there!" And then followed the Thirty Years' War, which ended in the acknowledgement that where Catholics have the most gunpowder, that region will be Catholic and where the most gunpowder belongs to the Protestants, that region will be Protestant. If guns can't penetrate the hermeneutic circle, nothing can, and several centuries later the debate over sola scriptura is pretty much the same as it was in 1521. This means, among other things, that Protestants still insist that Scripture is self-interpreting. Okay, if this is so, then why do Protestants attend Bible School? What can Bible School teach you that the self-interpreting Scripture ...

 [written in 2008] The following essay is addressed to a woman and was in response to one of her posts on her weblog. The post was about Nietzsche's theory of morality. The woman claimed that Nietzsche asserted that all morality is a result of group think. I refuted this claim and wrote other things as well. It may be of some interest to my readers, or not. Okay,  zur Sache , as the Krauts say. First off, it is wrong to claim that Nietzsche proposed that morality is always the product of group think, if by "group" you mean the unwashed, knuckle-scraping masses of the "herd". For Nietzsche there are two categories of morality, the one of "good and bad" and the other of "good and evil". The former is the morality of the strong and is by Nietzsche's lights the healthy, life-affirming morality. The latter is the morality of the weak, which is according to Nietzsche based not upon love, as its proponents claim, but upon vindictive resentment a...

  [From Max Picard's book  Hitler in uns selbst] During a trip to Germany in 1932, I received a visit from the chairman of a major German political party, who asked me how it was possible that Hitler had become so well known, that he had acquired so many supporters. I pointed to an illustrated newspaper that was lying on the table and asked him to thumb through it. The first page had a picture of an almost naked female dancer. On the second page a battalion of soldiers were doing exercises with machine guns, and underneath was shown some scientist in a laboratory. The third page had a chart chronicling the development of the bicycle from the mid-19th century to the present day, next to which a Chinese poem was printed. The next page had photos of workers from some factory performing calisthenics during their free time, and underneath were the knotscripts of an Indian Tribe in South America. On the opposite page stood some lawmaker, sunning himself on a bright summer’s day. “Th...