I've been listening to City of God recently (for free on Archive.org -- totally recommend it, although it's not short or easy listening). It's a really amazing, and excruciatingly thorough, refutation of the Greco-Roman religion. Most interesting to me is the timeliness of my attraction to this particular work. Not long ago, cosmically speaking, (a clarification making things less clear), I attended a conference where Vocab Malone of Urban Theologian was speaking on small inner city cults, and he mentioned that there exist in American cities organized groups of people who actually believe and act on the ancient mythologies of Greece and Egypt.

Now, I suppose those groups must be terribly small because I have never encountered such a person, and I can only imagine that it must be an embarrassing belief system to hold (or else they'd be more vocal about it), but it's good to be equipped with knowledge to shut down every argument against the truth. (That said, City of God is such a dense and fast moving work that I am committing very little of it to memory by just listening while I work).

One thing in particular which stood out to me in this work (which I'm just under half-way through) was Augustine's discussion of Platonic moral theories. He attacked three related moral theories of the day: the first that morality consists in that which blesses the body, the second that morality consists in that which blesses the mind, and the third that morality consists in that which blesses both. In short, he identified that all three of the theories find themselves blessing the man. These are found at length to be models inferior to the Christian model, which is that morality consists in that which blesses God.

Augustine's methods here were were to attack the base suppositions of the philosophers. I think that the methodology he uses is notably similar to that of modern apologists Van Till, Bahnsen, White, Durbin, and others, who when debating what atheism apparently produces as its best and brightest fellows (for no others stepped forward), were made to listen to the pitifully ignorant sentiment that their apologetic was "new" and represented Christianity's 'last effort at survival'. Not at all! It is not the case that Christianity is inventing new arguments in order to defend itself against atheism. Rather, it is the case that atheism was a tiny outlying sect in ages past due to its self-proponed lack of foundation for any moral assertion, and the impossibility of acting at all (much less with any consistency) while simultaneously believing that that it is impossible to know with any certainty that the world exists or that you are perceiving it correctly, or that you can even trust your own faculties. Christianity's argument has not changed, but the rest of the world has rather moved further away from the truth, and thus more deeply into absurdity, requiring a new articulation of the same exact truth.

Still looking for my old poems. I have a hopeful theory that they might be hiding in one of my external hard drives, but those are boxed away at the moment, so I'll be looking into it soon hopefully.

"There is nothing new under the sun"