The way things are …

… Perilous Directions by Gregory Wolfe | Articles | First Things. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… Original Prin is concerned with the phenomenon raised by a line from G. K. Chesterton, often misquoted as follows: “When a man stops believing in God he doesn’t then believe in nothing, he believes anything.” What ­Chesterton actually wrote is even more provocative. In one of the Father Brown stories, the priest-sleuth notes that one dire result of unbelief is not the rise of reason but the proliferation of superstition: “It’s drowning all your old rationalism and scepticism, it’s coming in like a sea; and the name of it is superstition. . . . It’s the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense and can’t see things as they are.”