It's been about 10 years. I am watching the Lord of the Rings extended trilogy. Greatest. Movie. Ever.

Every generation inherits traditions, institutions, and beliefs that have given its civilisation continuity and direction. Yet every generation also encounters new circumstances that those inherited traditions must address. This creates an enduring tension between tradition, which preserves the wisdom of the past, and progress, which adapts that inheritance to the needs of the present. These forces are not natural enemies. A healthy civilisation requires both, just as each of us must decide what to preserve, what to reform, and what to relinquish. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle teaches that virtue lies not at the extremes of excess or deficiency but in the measured mean between them, a proportion adjusted to circumstance and according to one’s state in life. This mean is not a fixed midpoint but a fitting measure, discerned through reason and ordered towards the ends proper to human flourishing. Civilisations, like the persons who shape them, flourish when they cultivate this proportion, and so do individuals, families, schools, churches, and communities. They flourish when their customs, decisions, and aspirations are directed by an ordered sense of purpose. However, they begin to destabilise when a single impulse is allowed to dominate the other. In this light, tradition and progress are not adversarial forces but complementary dispositions: tradition as the preservation of civilisational memory, and progress as civilisational imagination. One provides structure, continuity, and measure, and the other produces vitality, adaptability, and the controlled turbulence through which a living culture grows. The practical challenge is therefore not to choose between tradition and progress, but to discern what each requires of us in a particular moment. We must ask what deserves to be preserved, what requires renewal, and whether a proposed change strengthens or weakens what we have inherited. Only when these tendencies are held in disciplined equilibrium can a civilisation and the people within it remain both firmly founded and capable of advancing into the future.

Here I am, Lord, send me.

In this world, therefore, the dominion of virtuous men is profitable, not so much for themselves as for human affairs. But the dominion of vicious men is hurtful chiefly to themselves who rule, for they destroy their own souls by greater licence in wickedness; while those who are put under them in service are not hurt except by their own iniquity. For to the just all the evils imposed on them by unjust rulers are not the punishment of crime, but the test of virtue. Therefore the virtuous man, although he is a slave, is free; but the vicious man, even if he reigns, is a slave, and that not of one man, but, what is far more grievous, of as many masters as he has vices. – St Augustine (City of God)

A modern-day Pieta.

The most disappointing part about interacting with atheists is that you're conditioned to believe that they're these high IQ Nietzschean type atheists and you need to have studied science and metaphysics in order to counter them, but in reality, they're almost always these low IQ Reddit type atheists, and all you really need is a functioning brain and a basic understanding of history.