Showing posts with label Philosophy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Philosophy. Show all posts
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Friday, December 7, 2007
Atheism's Wrong Turn
[By Damon Linker, The New Republic]
Excerpt: ..."ndeed, the tone of today's atheist tracts is so unremittingly hostile that one wonders if their authors really mean it when they express the hope, as Dawkins does in a representative passage, that "religious readers who open [The God Delusion] will be atheists when they put it down." Exactly how will such conversions be accomplished? Rather than seeking common ground with believers as a prelude to posing skeptical questions, today's atheists prefer to skip right to the refutation. They view the patient back and forth of dialogue--the way of Socrates--as a waste of time.
It is with this enmity, this furious certainty, that our ideological atheists lapse most fully into illiberalism. Politically speaking, liberalism takes no position on theological questions. One can be a liberal and a believer (as were Martin Luther King Jr., Reinhold Niebuhr, and countless others in the American past and present) or a liberal and an unbeliever (as were Hook, Richard Rorty, and a significantly smaller number of Americans over the years). This is in part because liberalism is a philosophy of government, not a philosophy of man--or God. But it is also because modern liberalism derives, at its deepest level, from ancient liberalism--from the classical virtue of liberality, which meant generosity and openness. To be liberal in the classical sense is to accept intellectual variety--and the social complexity that goes with it--as the ineradicable condition of a free society.
It is to accept, in other words, that, although I may settle the question of God to my personal satisfaction, it is highly unlikely that all of my fellow citizens will settle it in the same way--that differences in life experience, social class, intelligence, and the capacity for introspection will invariably prevent a free community from reaching unanimity about the fundamental mysteries of human existence, including God. Liberal atheists accept this situation; ideological atheists do not. That, in the end, is what separates the atheism of Socrates from the atheism of the French Revolution...
...Still, the rise of the new atheists is cause for concern--not among the targets of their anger, who can rest secure in the knowledge that the ranks of the religious will, here in America, dwarf the ranks of atheists for the foreseeable future; but rather among those for whom the defense of secular liberalism is a high political priority. Of course, many of these secular liberals are probably the same people who propelled Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens onto the best-seller lists by purchasing their books en masse--people who are worried about the dual threats to secular politics posed by militant Islam and the American religious right. These people are correct to be nervous about the future of secular liberalism, to perceive that it needs passionate, eloquent defenders. The problem is that the rhetoric of Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens will undermine liberalism, not bolster it: Far from shoring up the secular political tradition, their arguments are likely to produce a country poised precariously between opposite forms of illiberalism.
The last thing America needs is a war of attrition between two mutually exclusive, absolute systems of belief. Yet this is precisely what the new atheists appear to crave. The task for the rest of us--committed to neither dogmatic faith nor dogmatic doubt--is to make certain that combatants on both sides of the theological divide fail to get their destructive way. And thereby to ensure that liberalism prevails."
Excerpt: ..."ndeed, the tone of today's atheist tracts is so unremittingly hostile that one wonders if their authors really mean it when they express the hope, as Dawkins does in a representative passage, that "religious readers who open [The God Delusion] will be atheists when they put it down." Exactly how will such conversions be accomplished? Rather than seeking common ground with believers as a prelude to posing skeptical questions, today's atheists prefer to skip right to the refutation. They view the patient back and forth of dialogue--the way of Socrates--as a waste of time.
It is with this enmity, this furious certainty, that our ideological atheists lapse most fully into illiberalism. Politically speaking, liberalism takes no position on theological questions. One can be a liberal and a believer (as were Martin Luther King Jr., Reinhold Niebuhr, and countless others in the American past and present) or a liberal and an unbeliever (as were Hook, Richard Rorty, and a significantly smaller number of Americans over the years). This is in part because liberalism is a philosophy of government, not a philosophy of man--or God. But it is also because modern liberalism derives, at its deepest level, from ancient liberalism--from the classical virtue of liberality, which meant generosity and openness. To be liberal in the classical sense is to accept intellectual variety--and the social complexity that goes with it--as the ineradicable condition of a free society.
It is to accept, in other words, that, although I may settle the question of God to my personal satisfaction, it is highly unlikely that all of my fellow citizens will settle it in the same way--that differences in life experience, social class, intelligence, and the capacity for introspection will invariably prevent a free community from reaching unanimity about the fundamental mysteries of human existence, including God. Liberal atheists accept this situation; ideological atheists do not. That, in the end, is what separates the atheism of Socrates from the atheism of the French Revolution...
...Still, the rise of the new atheists is cause for concern--not among the targets of their anger, who can rest secure in the knowledge that the ranks of the religious will, here in America, dwarf the ranks of atheists for the foreseeable future; but rather among those for whom the defense of secular liberalism is a high political priority. Of course, many of these secular liberals are probably the same people who propelled Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens onto the best-seller lists by purchasing their books en masse--people who are worried about the dual threats to secular politics posed by militant Islam and the American religious right. These people are correct to be nervous about the future of secular liberalism, to perceive that it needs passionate, eloquent defenders. The problem is that the rhetoric of Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens will undermine liberalism, not bolster it: Far from shoring up the secular political tradition, their arguments are likely to produce a country poised precariously between opposite forms of illiberalism.
The last thing America needs is a war of attrition between two mutually exclusive, absolute systems of belief. Yet this is precisely what the new atheists appear to crave. The task for the rest of us--committed to neither dogmatic faith nor dogmatic doubt--is to make certain that combatants on both sides of the theological divide fail to get their destructive way. And thereby to ensure that liberalism prevails."
Sunday, November 18, 2007
Beyond Liberal & Conservative (Updated)
From Jack at "After The Future"
November 11, 2007
Beyond Liberal & Conservative (Updated)
From Frank Rich, "The Coup at Home:
Last weekend a new Washington Post-ABC News poll found that the Democratic-controlled Congress and Mr. Bush are both roundly despised throughout the land, and that only 24 percent of Americans believe their country is on the right track. That’s almost as low as the United States’ rock-bottom approval ratings in the latest Pew surveys of Pakistan (15 percent) and Turkey (9 percent).
Wrong track is a euphemism. We are a people in clinical depression. Americans know that the ideals that once set our nation apart from the world have been vandalized, and no matter which party they belong to, they do not see a restoration anytime soon.
Anybody who is still stuck in the liberal/conservative dichotomy is hopelessly incapable of understanding what's happening to us. We're now into the American/unAmerican dichotomy, in which 'American' stands for honor, decency, and the rule of law, while unAmerican stands for the kind of corruption and brutality in the name of national security that has overtaken the GOP. As Rich says earlier in this column:
To believe that this corruption will simply evaporate when the Bush presidency is done is to underestimate the permanent erosion inflicted over the past six years. What was once shocking and unacceptable in America has now been internalized as the new normal.
This is most apparent in the Republican presidential race, where most of the candidates seem to be running for dictator and make no apologies for it. They’re falling over each other to expand Gitmo, see who can promise the most torture and abridge the largest number of constitutional rights. The front-runner, Rudy Giuliani, boasts a proven record in extralegal executive power grabs, Musharraf-style: After 9/11 he tried to mount a coup, floating the idea that he stay on as mayor in defiance of New York’s term-limits law.
Democracies are certainly capable of electing governments that will do away with democracy. It's happened elsewhere, and while most Americans don't want to face up to it, it's happening here. Lots of people understand this, but it has been troubling to me that it has taken those Americans who think of themselves as moderates and principled conservatives so long to catch on. There are a few like Andrew Sullivan and John Cole, both GOP cheerleaders earlier on, who have publicly and repentantly repudiated their earlier administration support. They both understand that the Republican Party no longer stands for what they thought it did, even remotely. Why they ever thought this particular group was trustworthy is another question, but both have become ardent critics, and they should be credited for not allowing their good sense and decency from being obscured by their ideology. ...CONTINUE READING JACK'S POST
Thursday, August 9, 2007
Philosophers, Artists, Saints.
A great post from a blog I just found: [ http://afterthefuture.typepad.com/afterthefuture/ ]
The growing rush and the disappearance of contemplation and simplicity from modern life [are] the symptoms of a complete uprooting of culture. The waters of religion retreat and leave behind pools and bogs. The sciences . . . atomize old beliefs. The civilized classes and nations are swept away by the grand rush for contemptible wealth. Never was the world worldlier, never was it emptier of love and goodness. . . . Everything, modern art and science included, prepares us for the coming barbarism. . . .Everything on earth will be decided by the crudest and most evil powers, by the selfishness of grasping men and military dictators.
Nietzsche, Thoughts out of Season, 1873-76
Nietzsche lamented the loss of the philosopher, artist, and saint as bourgeois modernity replaced the older aristocratic culture of the premodern west. And I lament it , too. Not the loss of the aristocratic social order, but the loss of the culture-wide aspiration toward the More that the philosopher, artist, and saint used to symbolize. N's antidote to the leveling forces of modern culture was his promotion of the idea of the uebermensch or superman, but that creates as many problems as it solves.
But he recognized the problem--which was the loss of the aspiration toward transcendence as a universal cultural ideal. I have always taken his famous statement that "God is dead . . . We have killed him" to be simply a description of the culture's loss of what has been an intuitive certainty in every culture until the 19th century in the modern west. The sky darkened and all there was left was man alone. And it was not a pretty sight. So the uebermensch was his attempt to reinvent the philosopher, artist, saint on this now bleak, godless planet where otherwise human culture devolves into eat or be eaten barbarism of the Social Darwinists.
The word "transcendence" is not a word often used in our day-to-day lives, and so let's be clear about its meaning. As suggested above I mean by it the "More" to which human beings aspire. By "More" I mean that dimension of our humanity that goes beyond our instinctual life. It's most often thought of as spiritual. Barbarism, on the other hand, is life lived completely circumscribed by instinctuality. An effective religious practice is the soul work people do to transform their instinctual lives by a form of training or discipline, a work which is inspired by this fundamental transcendent aspiration.
"Transcending" is is the human project by which the lower is transformed into the higher. It can't be done if there is no higher and that humans are nothing more than animals with a highly developed cerebral cortex. Higher just means more complex. More efficient at getting needs met. It's a vision of the human as machine rthr than soul, and it leads to the kind of cyborgian future that is already being talked about as the next evolutionary step. For Nietzsche, the prospect of a cyborgian future would have been appalling. Deep down he knew, as all of us know, that we are more than that no matter how "modern" our sensibility. Transcendence calls us to become that More. It's a call to become completed, a call to realize that which we were created to become.
A healthy culture provides a trellis upon which the souls of the people born into it can grow upward toward the More that calls us to be More. Unhealthy or decadent cultures like ours have only the memory of a trellis, or if there is one, it is at best rickety, neglected, and unused. Unused mainly because most people have ceased to believe that it leads anywhere. And so without a trellis upon which to give shape to one's growth, humans develop aimlessly in whatever direction along the ground, living their lives driven primarily by the three basic instinctual drivers symbolized by sex, power, and money. To the degree that these three shape our cultural life uninfluenced by the aspiration to transcend their limitations, to that degree a society is barbaric.
Look at our youth culture--its monotonous music, its obsession with violent video games, sex and drugs. It's a swamp. And what you have there is Nietzsche's nightmare of the barbarism of the Last Man. So I could imagine that many people think that the kind of "redneck" culture or the subcultures that are built around rightwing Christianity are more preferable--at least they give lipservice to traditional virtues out of which the trellis was constructed. But I would say that they are two sides of the same Last-Man coin. There are left-wing and right-wing Last Men. Both are equal as attitudinal social systems in promoting a blindness to transcendence. The former is the condition of the younger brother in the gospel story of the prodigal son, the latter the condition of the older brother. More on that later.
How can I say that any Christian group is blind to transcendence? Isn't that the whole point of faith--it's openness to the transcendent, the absolute, superabundant More of God? Yes, but I think it's fair to ask whether that's what these Christian groups are about, and whether, despite their purported commitment to truth that speaks through the Bible, they have in fact developed an attitude that closes them off more than it opens them up to it. By their fruits you will know them.
The archetypal form of such blindness is Phariseeism--Jesus described the Pharisees of his day as whited sepulchers, pristine clean on the outside, enclosing what what was dead and rotten on the inside. But as they were a type of religious personality then, so have they been through history in all religions.
The Pharisee is the man of faith who has no faith--and doesn't know it. He's someone who is going through the motions because in his doing so he thinks that he is a better than others who don't. The whole goal of the Pharisee is to create a false identity that makes him appear good rather than being truly good. Pharisees can be but are not necessarily hypocrites. They can be very sincere and intense in their project to appear morally blameless. St. Paul was such a one before his conversion.
But this kind of project is really a compulsive disorder, and has very little to do with real faith, even though this type of person is attracted to religion and often plays an important role in its institutions. One of the major themes of the Gospels is is to warn about the dangers of becoming such a person. These are the wolves in sheep's clothing.
The gospel repeatedly contrasts the blindness of these self-righteous prigs with the supple-hearted people who often enough are scandalous sinners. The point that the gospel makes is that the most important trait that a human being can have is not to be morally perfect but to have the cognitive capacity to see with one's heart. The Samaritans, tax collectors, prostitutes, and other sinners recognized in Jesus what the Pharisees simply could not see. Why? Their minds and hearts had not rigidified in the way that the Pharisees' had.
I don't think that the point is to validate moral libertinism, but to say something important about religious psychology. Usually the people who recognize God in their lives are the ones who one way or another have come to realize their need of Him. There are all kinds of people who think they have no need of God in their lives, but the toughest cases are those who think they have no need of God because they already possess Him. This is the condition of the Pharisee, and it's a form of mental illness and cold heartedness parading as normalcy that is so severe that when the very incarnation of truth and goodness appears in their midst, the Pharisee has no capacity for recognizing Him.
And his cluelessness is the same as that of the older brother in the story of the Prodigal Son. Remember how it goes? The younger son asks his father for his inheritance and goes to a far off country where he squanders it. Impoverished and abandoned, he figures he would do better if he returns to his father, tells him that he was a fool, and asks for a job as a servant. The father, overjoyed at his son's return instead throws a big party and returns him to his place of honor. The older son, however, who was the boy scout who followed all the rules, seethes with resentment. Are there no consequences? How can this be fair? This resentment is one of the chief symptoms of 'whited sepulcher syndrome.' It's a picture of the soul rotting inside.
For those suffering from it are blinded by their inability to understand what is really going on. He misses the point, because the story is about the discovery of the need for the More. Nothing else matters. The Father is overjoyed not because his younger son lived a life of depravity, but because he survived the shipwreck that was necessary to awaken him to a deeper understanding of the way things really are.
The older son hadn't awakened yet. If the older son had, he would have been as overjoyed as his father to learn that his younger brother had found it too. The younger son has made a discovery that the older has not yet made, and no matter how it's done, making this discovery is the only thing that matters. The gospels are full of stories about something being lost and then found. The only important thing is the finding. Everything else is secondary.
Now the finding does not mean that things become safe and secure for the finder. Certainty, safety, and security are the obsessions of the Pharisees. The goal is not peace and serenity as it is in the Eastern religions. The finding means that one becomes a disciple and that means being called to go places where one would rather not go. It means having an awakened conscience which requires in a very real sense dying to the normal understanding world, and not living as normal people do. I think this plays out for different people in different ways. But one of the fruits is a growth in freedom and individuality and an increased capacity for love. This is what we mean by a saint, which brings us back to where we started.
As the philosopher is a prodigy of thinking about what's true, and the artist a prodigy of the feeling for beauty and the making of what is beautiful, the saint is the prodigy in the use his or her will for the doing of what is good and of becoming someone who is truly, deeply good. Not just nice. Not just decent--but someone who is terribly good. The whole idea of truth, beauty, and goodness as transcendent ideals that call us to be More has become something of a joke, something to which we refer only with irony. And so one of the great signs of the decadence of our culture is that genuine prodigies of truth, beauty, and goodness are no longer recognized or honored. They have always been rare, but now they have become invisible.
The rest of us suffer for it because we rarely meet such prodigies who can inspire us by what they have become to realize the unrealized possibilities in our own lives. We need that inspiration, because without it it's so easy to give up, and to believe that nothing More is a real possibility for us or for anyone.
If there were a living tradition, it would produce the kind of people who would realize those possibilities and show those of us who follow how to become what they have become. Instead our philosophers and artists have no feeling for the transcendent. And our religious leaders are for the most part Pharisees or lightweights. And the rest of us are mired in mediocrity as a result. The only prodigies these days are the prodigies of barbarism.
There is no trellis there anymore for us to climb up out of the swamps of barbarism, so the job, I suppose, is for us to build one. For the religious right, for the most part, offers us not a trellis, but a whited sepulcher.
The growing rush and the disappearance of contemplation and simplicity from modern life [are] the symptoms of a complete uprooting of culture. The waters of religion retreat and leave behind pools and bogs. The sciences . . . atomize old beliefs. The civilized classes and nations are swept away by the grand rush for contemptible wealth. Never was the world worldlier, never was it emptier of love and goodness. . . . Everything, modern art and science included, prepares us for the coming barbarism. . . .Everything on earth will be decided by the crudest and most evil powers, by the selfishness of grasping men and military dictators.
Nietzsche, Thoughts out of Season, 1873-76
Nietzsche lamented the loss of the philosopher, artist, and saint as bourgeois modernity replaced the older aristocratic culture of the premodern west. And I lament it , too. Not the loss of the aristocratic social order, but the loss of the culture-wide aspiration toward the More that the philosopher, artist, and saint used to symbolize. N's antidote to the leveling forces of modern culture was his promotion of the idea of the uebermensch or superman, but that creates as many problems as it solves.
But he recognized the problem--which was the loss of the aspiration toward transcendence as a universal cultural ideal. I have always taken his famous statement that "God is dead . . . We have killed him" to be simply a description of the culture's loss of what has been an intuitive certainty in every culture until the 19th century in the modern west. The sky darkened and all there was left was man alone. And it was not a pretty sight. So the uebermensch was his attempt to reinvent the philosopher, artist, saint on this now bleak, godless planet where otherwise human culture devolves into eat or be eaten barbarism of the Social Darwinists.
The word "transcendence" is not a word often used in our day-to-day lives, and so let's be clear about its meaning. As suggested above I mean by it the "More" to which human beings aspire. By "More" I mean that dimension of our humanity that goes beyond our instinctual life. It's most often thought of as spiritual. Barbarism, on the other hand, is life lived completely circumscribed by instinctuality. An effective religious practice is the soul work people do to transform their instinctual lives by a form of training or discipline, a work which is inspired by this fundamental transcendent aspiration.
"Transcending" is is the human project by which the lower is transformed into the higher. It can't be done if there is no higher and that humans are nothing more than animals with a highly developed cerebral cortex. Higher just means more complex. More efficient at getting needs met. It's a vision of the human as machine rthr than soul, and it leads to the kind of cyborgian future that is already being talked about as the next evolutionary step. For Nietzsche, the prospect of a cyborgian future would have been appalling. Deep down he knew, as all of us know, that we are more than that no matter how "modern" our sensibility. Transcendence calls us to become that More. It's a call to become completed, a call to realize that which we were created to become.
A healthy culture provides a trellis upon which the souls of the people born into it can grow upward toward the More that calls us to be More. Unhealthy or decadent cultures like ours have only the memory of a trellis, or if there is one, it is at best rickety, neglected, and unused. Unused mainly because most people have ceased to believe that it leads anywhere. And so without a trellis upon which to give shape to one's growth, humans develop aimlessly in whatever direction along the ground, living their lives driven primarily by the three basic instinctual drivers symbolized by sex, power, and money. To the degree that these three shape our cultural life uninfluenced by the aspiration to transcend their limitations, to that degree a society is barbaric.
Look at our youth culture--its monotonous music, its obsession with violent video games, sex and drugs. It's a swamp. And what you have there is Nietzsche's nightmare of the barbarism of the Last Man. So I could imagine that many people think that the kind of "redneck" culture or the subcultures that are built around rightwing Christianity are more preferable--at least they give lipservice to traditional virtues out of which the trellis was constructed. But I would say that they are two sides of the same Last-Man coin. There are left-wing and right-wing Last Men. Both are equal as attitudinal social systems in promoting a blindness to transcendence. The former is the condition of the younger brother in the gospel story of the prodigal son, the latter the condition of the older brother. More on that later.
How can I say that any Christian group is blind to transcendence? Isn't that the whole point of faith--it's openness to the transcendent, the absolute, superabundant More of God? Yes, but I think it's fair to ask whether that's what these Christian groups are about, and whether, despite their purported commitment to truth that speaks through the Bible, they have in fact developed an attitude that closes them off more than it opens them up to it. By their fruits you will know them.
The archetypal form of such blindness is Phariseeism--Jesus described the Pharisees of his day as whited sepulchers, pristine clean on the outside, enclosing what what was dead and rotten on the inside. But as they were a type of religious personality then, so have they been through history in all religions.
The Pharisee is the man of faith who has no faith--and doesn't know it. He's someone who is going through the motions because in his doing so he thinks that he is a better than others who don't. The whole goal of the Pharisee is to create a false identity that makes him appear good rather than being truly good. Pharisees can be but are not necessarily hypocrites. They can be very sincere and intense in their project to appear morally blameless. St. Paul was such a one before his conversion.
But this kind of project is really a compulsive disorder, and has very little to do with real faith, even though this type of person is attracted to religion and often plays an important role in its institutions. One of the major themes of the Gospels is is to warn about the dangers of becoming such a person. These are the wolves in sheep's clothing.
The gospel repeatedly contrasts the blindness of these self-righteous prigs with the supple-hearted people who often enough are scandalous sinners. The point that the gospel makes is that the most important trait that a human being can have is not to be morally perfect but to have the cognitive capacity to see with one's heart. The Samaritans, tax collectors, prostitutes, and other sinners recognized in Jesus what the Pharisees simply could not see. Why? Their minds and hearts had not rigidified in the way that the Pharisees' had.
I don't think that the point is to validate moral libertinism, but to say something important about religious psychology. Usually the people who recognize God in their lives are the ones who one way or another have come to realize their need of Him. There are all kinds of people who think they have no need of God in their lives, but the toughest cases are those who think they have no need of God because they already possess Him. This is the condition of the Pharisee, and it's a form of mental illness and cold heartedness parading as normalcy that is so severe that when the very incarnation of truth and goodness appears in their midst, the Pharisee has no capacity for recognizing Him.
And his cluelessness is the same as that of the older brother in the story of the Prodigal Son. Remember how it goes? The younger son asks his father for his inheritance and goes to a far off country where he squanders it. Impoverished and abandoned, he figures he would do better if he returns to his father, tells him that he was a fool, and asks for a job as a servant. The father, overjoyed at his son's return instead throws a big party and returns him to his place of honor. The older son, however, who was the boy scout who followed all the rules, seethes with resentment. Are there no consequences? How can this be fair? This resentment is one of the chief symptoms of 'whited sepulcher syndrome.' It's a picture of the soul rotting inside.
For those suffering from it are blinded by their inability to understand what is really going on. He misses the point, because the story is about the discovery of the need for the More. Nothing else matters. The Father is overjoyed not because his younger son lived a life of depravity, but because he survived the shipwreck that was necessary to awaken him to a deeper understanding of the way things really are.
The older son hadn't awakened yet. If the older son had, he would have been as overjoyed as his father to learn that his younger brother had found it too. The younger son has made a discovery that the older has not yet made, and no matter how it's done, making this discovery is the only thing that matters. The gospels are full of stories about something being lost and then found. The only important thing is the finding. Everything else is secondary.
Now the finding does not mean that things become safe and secure for the finder. Certainty, safety, and security are the obsessions of the Pharisees. The goal is not peace and serenity as it is in the Eastern religions. The finding means that one becomes a disciple and that means being called to go places where one would rather not go. It means having an awakened conscience which requires in a very real sense dying to the normal understanding world, and not living as normal people do. I think this plays out for different people in different ways. But one of the fruits is a growth in freedom and individuality and an increased capacity for love. This is what we mean by a saint, which brings us back to where we started.
As the philosopher is a prodigy of thinking about what's true, and the artist a prodigy of the feeling for beauty and the making of what is beautiful, the saint is the prodigy in the use his or her will for the doing of what is good and of becoming someone who is truly, deeply good. Not just nice. Not just decent--but someone who is terribly good. The whole idea of truth, beauty, and goodness as transcendent ideals that call us to be More has become something of a joke, something to which we refer only with irony. And so one of the great signs of the decadence of our culture is that genuine prodigies of truth, beauty, and goodness are no longer recognized or honored. They have always been rare, but now they have become invisible.
The rest of us suffer for it because we rarely meet such prodigies who can inspire us by what they have become to realize the unrealized possibilities in our own lives. We need that inspiration, because without it it's so easy to give up, and to believe that nothing More is a real possibility for us or for anyone.
If there were a living tradition, it would produce the kind of people who would realize those possibilities and show those of us who follow how to become what they have become. Instead our philosophers and artists have no feeling for the transcendent. And our religious leaders are for the most part Pharisees or lightweights. And the rest of us are mired in mediocrity as a result. The only prodigies these days are the prodigies of barbarism.
There is no trellis there anymore for us to climb up out of the swamps of barbarism, so the job, I suppose, is for us to build one. For the religious right, for the most part, offers us not a trellis, but a whited sepulcher.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Beware of the Bible
From Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Soren Kierkegaard
“The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. ‘My God,’ you will say, ‘if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world?’ Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the church’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh, priceless scholarship, what would we do without you? Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament.”
available free from :
http://www.plough.com/ebooks/Provocations.html
“The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. ‘My God,’ you will say, ‘if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world?’ Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the church’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh, priceless scholarship, what would we do without you? Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament.”
available free from :
http://www.plough.com/ebooks/Provocations.html
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Wednesday, March 7, 2007
Berdyaev On the Industrial-Capitalist System's Corruption of Christian Faith
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
Nicholai Berdyaev On the Industrial-Capitalist System's Corruption of Christian Faith
From Stephen Hand, http://tcrnewscom.blogspot.com/
Robert Inchausti writes that for Beryaev, "The bourgeois didn't worship money per se, but they were addicted to personal success, security and happiness. For these things, they willingly compromised their honor, ignored injustice, and betrayed truth, replacing these high values with trite moralisms and facile bromides that blurred important distinctions and justified selfish actions...
"The bourgeois did not repudiate religion but reinterpreted its value in terms of utility. The love of the poor moved to the periphery of the faith and was embraced only so far as it didn't clash with one's own economic interests. [Berdyaev wrote:] "The perfected European and American civilizations gave rise to the industrial-capitalist system, which represents not only a mighty economic development but the spiritual phenomenon of the annihilation of spirituality. The industrial-Capitalism of civilization proved to be the destroyer of the eternal spirit and sacred traditions. Modern capitalist civilization is essentially atheistic and hostile to the idea of God. The crime of killing God must be laid at its door rather than at that of revolutionary socialism, which merely adapted itself to the civilized "bourgeois" spirit and accepted its negative heritage" (Subversive Orthodoxy, pp 43, 44)
Chesterton, it should be noted, says essentially the same thing. One cannot have the spirituality of Chesterton, Berdyaev, John Paul II, the Sermon on the Mount ... and the utilitarian economic spirituality of the Neo-conservative revisionism, no matter how well-intended that revisionism. At the end of the day they do not mix. One cannot convert the free falling market, guided as it is by the morally indifferent invisible hand of desire and greed. We must try, together, to move forward, toward making the future ---by catching up with our past (Chesterton, JPII, Leo XIII, et al)... We can start by seriously regulating the market and eliminating usury, each in the interests of human compassion and keeping a restraint on corporate greed. Then we can further consider the truths of Distributism
Jean Baudrillard, 77, Critic and Theorist of Hyperreality, Dies
One of his better known theories postulates that we live in a world where simulated feelings and experiences have replaced the real thing. This seductive “hyperreality,” where shopping malls, amusement parks and mass-produced images from the news, television shows and films dominate, is drained of authenticity and meaning. Since illusion reigns, he counseled people to give up the search for reality...He was also a fierce critic of consumer culture in which people bought objects not out of genuine need but because of the status and meaning they bestowed. ...more
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