What Have I to Do With Refutations!

People who talk about capitalism, or structural racism, or colonialism, are automatically disqualified from consideration as wise on account of their holding to an ideological line that is the bequest of someone who has thought through these matters for him or herself and left it to them, who now think in complete conformity with doctrine, rather than for themselves. Likewise someone who speaks of a God who gives laws to men on mountaintops and means it as something other than a powerful fiction that sets in motion the whole legal system and inspires us with awe and respect for our vocation. In either case, you are dealing with political orthodoxy. In both cases, one is forbidden to contradict the official line lest one be expelled from polite company. Many are the religiously orthodox who will indict the left of political correctness and fail to see themselves in the mirror. They will indict Marxism as a cult and fail to see our own religion as cultic and historically contingent, Darwin offering us truth offered by the Torah from another direction, which is that our ancestors were idolators and Judaism nowhere to be found. One is compelled to revisit arguments from earliest childhood one has put in the past in order to begin all over again with credulous minds. Except, having worked through them and put them behind us, we no longer believe in their force! Better, perhaps, to educate ourselves, and leave others to be educated by the adversity of circumstances to their conceits, a surer antidote to falsehood than the arguments of man.