Show notes
It’s as if We Have Been Under Foreign Totalitarian Occupation. Eric Metaxas, John Zmirak.
The Eric Metaxas Show
John Zmirak
Jan 24 2025
Other Episodes
John Joins to discuss the the Inauguration
Article Mentioned-
With Trump, America Inaugurated a Return Not to Faith, But to Reason
https://stream.org/with-trump-america-inaugurated-a-return-not-to-faith-but-to-reason/
Books Mentioned-
The Triumph of Reason by Rodney Stark
The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success Hardcover – December 6, 2005 by Rodney Stark
Many books have been written about the success of the West, analyzing why Europe was able to pull ahead of the rest of the world by the end of the Middle Ages. The most common explanations cite the West’s superior geography, commerce, and technology. Completely overlooked is the fact that faith in reason, rooted in Christianity’s commitment to rational theology, made all these developments possible. Simply put, the conventional wisdom that Western success depended upon overcoming religious barriers to progress is utter nonsense.
In The Victory of Reason, Rodney Stark advances a revolutionary, controversial, and long overdue idea: that Christianity and its related institutions are, in fact, directly responsible for the most significant intellectual, political, scientific, and economic breakthroughs of the past millennium.
In Stark’s view, what has propelled the West is not the tension between secular and nonsecular society, nor the pitting of science and the humanities against religious belief. Christian theology, Stark asserts, is the very font of reason: While the world’s other great belief systems emphasized mystery, obedience, or introspection, Christianity alone embraced logic and reason as the path toward enlightenment, freedom, and progress. That is what made all the difference.
In explaining the West’s dominance, Stark convincingly debunks long-accepted “truths.” For instance, by contending that capitalism thrived centuries before there was a Protestant work ethic–or even Protestants–he counters the notion that the Protestant work ethic was responsible for kicking capitalism into overdrive. In the fifth century, Stark notes, Saint Augustine celebrated theological and material progress and the institution of “exuberant invention.” By contrast, long before Augustine, Aristotle had condemned commercial trade as “inconsistent with human virtue”–which helps further underscore that Augustine’s times were not the Dark Ages but the incubator for the West’s future glories.
This is a sweeping, multifaceted survey that takes readers from the Old World to the New, from the past to the present, overturning along the way not only centuries of prejudiced scholarship but the antireligious bias of our own time. The Victory of Reason proves that what we most admire about our world–scientific progress, democratic rule, free commerce–is largely due to Christianity, through which we are all inheritors of this grand tradition.
The Return of the God Hypothosis by Steven Meyer
Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries That Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe Hardcover – March 30, 2021 by Stephen C. Meyer (Author)
The New York Times bestselling author of Darwin’s Doubt, Stephen Meyer,presents groundbreaking scientific evidence of the existence of God, based on breakthroughs in physics, cosmology, and biology.
Beginning in the late 19th century, many intellectuals began to insist that scientific knowledge conflicts with traditional theistic belief—that science and belief in God are “at war.” Philosopher of science Stephen Meyer challenges this view by examining three scientific discoveries with decidedly theistic implications. Building on the case for the intelligent design of life that he developed in Signature in the Cell and Darwin’s Doubt, Meyer demonstrates how discoveries in cosmology and physics coupled with those in biology help to establish the identity of the designing intelligence behind life and the universe.
Meyer argues that theism—with its affirmation of a transcendent, intelligent and active creator—best explains the evidence we have concerning biological and cosmological origins. Previously Meyer refrained from attempting to answer questions about “who” might have designed life. Now he provides an evidence-based answer to perhaps the ultimate mystery of the universe. In so doing, he reveals a stunning conclusion: the data support not just the existence of an intelligent designer of some kind—but the existence of a personal God.
Is Atheism Dead? Eric Metaxas (Narrator, Author)
Is Atheism Dead? is an entertaining, impressively wide-ranging, and decidedly provocative answer to that famous 1966 Time cover that itself provocatively asked “Is God Dead?”
In a voice that is by turns witty, muscular, and poetic, Metaxas intentionally echoes C. S. Lewis and G. K. Chesterton in cheerfully and logically making his astonishing case, along the way presenting breathtaking - and often withering - new evidence and arguments against the idea of a Creatorless universe. Taken all together, he shows atheism not merely to be implausible and intellectually sloppy, but now demonstrably ridiculous. Perhaps the only unanswered question on the subject is why we couldn’t see this sooner, and how embarrassed we should be about it.
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John Zmirak makes his weekly appearance and covers current events and shares recent articles available at- https://stream.org/author/johnzmirak/
Watch Eric Metaxas on Rumble- https://rumble.com/c/TheEricMetaxasRadioShow
The Eric Metaxas Show- https://metaxastalk.com/podcasts/
Eric Metaxas Show on Apple Podcasts- https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-eric-metaxas-show/id991156680
Check out- Socrates in the City
Find All of John Zmirak Articles at-
https://stream.org/author/johnzmirak/
John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. He is co-author with Jason Jones of “God, Guns, & the Government.”
John Zmirak’s new book:
No Second Amendment, No First by John Zmirak
Available March 19, 2024
Today’s Left endlessly preaches the evils of “gun violence." It is a message increasingly echoed from the nation’s pulpits, presented as common-sense decency and virtue. Calls for “radical non-violence” are routinely endowed with the imprimatur of religious doctrine.
But what if such teachings were misguided, even damaging? What if the potential of a citizenry to exercise force against violent criminals and tyrannical governments is not just compatible with church teaching, but flows from the very heart of Biblical faith and reason? What if the freedoms we treasure are intimately tied to the power to resist violent coercion?
This is the long-overdue case John Zmirak makes with stunning clarity and conviction in No Second Amendment, No First. A Yale-educated journalist and former college professor, Zmirak shows how the right of self-defense against authoritarian government was affirmed in both the Old and New Testaments, is implied in Natural Law, and has been part of Church tradition over the centuries.
Zmirak further shows how today’s mounting threats to the gun rights guaranteed by the Second Amendment are inexorably linked to the
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