Clearing the Record
Dean
Several people seem to think my earlier piece today indicates that I am angry with LaShawn Barber. I certainly am not. I think she's wrong about the ancient Romans, and about America in the past. Prior to the advent of the Roman Empire, the Roman Republic was a savage, cruel nation; until the Greeks came along to give them philosophy, poetry, literature, and religion, their greatest claim to fame as a people was the rape of the Sabine women and the enslavement of everyone in Italy who wasn't Roman. The majority of people who lived in ancient Rome, by the Romans' own accountings, were slaves. We speak of abortion today, but it was the practice in the old Roman Republic for an unwanted infant to be left on a hillside to die of exposure if she were unwanted. It was also more or less expected that a woman would be faithful in her marriage, but that a man might have as many sexual dalliances as he liked among the family's slaves--male or female.
In other words, I really do not know why we think of the Romans as such paragons of virtue. Nor do I see how they "declined" as a result of all this, given that all the things I describe were ongoing in Rome for hundreds of years while their art and literature flourished, their economy expanded, and they grew to be the mightiest and largest empire in world history.
As for America: I can somewhat understand those who claim that abortion is a blot on the American soul that has made us a wicked nation. I don't buy it, but I understand the thinking. I'm not sure the practice is worse than the ancient Roman practice of exposing unwanted infants, but I get why some people consider it a horrible abomination.
Still, the idea that God used to protect America but no longer does: what is the basis of this thinking? When was the period exactly in American history where America was better? Okay, today divorce is more common, as is single motherhood. But yesterday, Jim Crow was the norm, and it was normal for a pregnant girl to find a man to be willing to marry her to "legitimize" her child. Perhaps in that area things were better... but the syphilis epidemics of the Roosevelt era bely any notion that people weren't fornicating 50 years ago.
So really, I just think I'm raising honest questions and pointing out important data. I'm not mad at anyone. I just wonder why some people think America today sucks more than it did 50 years ago--I mean, look at all the areas where we're better today. Aren't all those improvements worth celebrating?
Anyway, Doc Rampage has a discussion going about the whole thing.
I would like to think that God has put his blessing on the United States of America. One can find anecdotes that could lead to that conclusion. That said, we have no way of truly knowing. As the Bible says, “For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust.”
Is this country going to h*** in a hand basket? It depends how I feel when I get up in the morning or see what’s on the evening news.
The United States has never repeat NEVER practiced the kind of expansion that Rome did. We expand our influence through trade not conquest. Have the incentives reduced? Not so's you'd notice.
If a mother tells her little boy to go take a bath after playing in the mud because he's so dirty, she's not saying "I hate you because you're so dirty!" Similarly, if a conservative says "There's too much promiscuity in America today." that's not the same thing as saying "I hate America because there's too much promiscuity in America today!"
I couldn't find the line in LaShawn Barber's post where she said that God has withdrawn His protection from America. It sounds like you're remembering that infamous statement by Jerry Falwell, with which Pat Robertson agreed, that 9/11 happened because God had withdrawn His protection from America because of the atheists, abortionists, the homosexuals, etc.. That statement was condemned by all the conservatives in the National Review and many around the blogosphere at the time and since. As to Rev. Fred Phelps and his "God Hates Fags!" and "God Hates America!" blasphemies, you yourself have often pointed out that he speaks only for his own dementia and that of his tiny knot of followers and not for the American Right in any sense. He has no political influence whatsoever. He is a joke. (I worry much more about Lou Sheldon, Robert Knight, and Paul Cameron, professional homosexual-haters who do have some pernicious influence over a certain quadrant of the Right but who operate away from TV cameras.)
Doc Rampage is right that even that quadrant of the American Right do not side with our country's enemies nor try to weaken our military strength as the Hate-America Left do. The very fact that they believe that America once was under God's protection (even if no longer) differentiates them from those on the Left who believe that "AmeriKKKa" was evil, racist, sexist, imperialist, fascist, etc., from the very beginning. Those Leftists typically hate us for being Christian also.
A conservative, in the National Review as I recall, once noted that there is an isolationist element both on the American Right and on the American Left, but for diametrically opposite reasons. Isolationists of the Right have always believed that America is "God's Country", so good that she should not get herself entangled with the corruptions of the Old World. Isolationists of the Left believe that America is so evil that her imperialism will corrupt the Noble Savages of the Third World.
Scott Harris's public/private distinction, which he made in the previous thread and in a number of times before, is also much worth thinking about in this context. Privately, promiscuity and adultery and other things were practiced just as frequently in the past as they are today. But they were not publicly proclaimed in the past as they are today. They were certainly not taught in the schools. Nobody wore an "I Had An Abortion" T-shirt. They didn't parade their sexuality in the streets. They didn't expose their private parts on TV People kept things to themselves more. I often think that conservatives are more introverted while liberals are more extroverted.
Using Murray S. Davis's 3-fold spectrum: This is not only because of a Jehovanist belief that sex is dirty and sinful but also because of a Gnostic or Jehovanistic-Gnostic belief that sex is sacred. Taboos pertain not only to that which is forbidden because it is profane but also to that which is holy. Both Jehovanists and Gnostics want "erotic reality" to be kept separate from "everyday reality", Jehovanists because the former corrupts the latter, Gnostics because the latter corrupts the former.
Today, the Naturalists do everything they can to blur and break down all distinction between "erotic reality" and "everyday reality", including all the things I mentioned, e.g., sex education in public schools, public nudity, etc..
I'm against that. In my ideal world, I very likely wouldn't even be typing this comment about sex, because then that Divine longing and embrace would be written of or spoken of or enacted only in the Holy of Holies.
Many of the logical arguments, and not so logical rants and raves that came from that group sound identical to the statements coming from the mouths of some of the religious right today. Many felt that America was being cursed because the government was “encouraging’, and even more shameful, actually profiting from the sale and use of the Demon Rum.
I still find it hard to believe that the temperance groups actually succeeded in moving the government to enact prohibition. And a bit scary too.
And we can all see how God blessed and rewarded America for enacting such a noble and moral law: An increase in lawless debauchery, more corruption in government and business, the rise of the national gangs and mobsters, and soon thereafter, the Great Depression.
In the end, its very easy to consciously choose examples of supposed cause and effect (or even filter them subconsciously) to illustrate most any concept or theory. In this respect, this topic is not at all different from many topics Dean has discussed here in the past.
When Greek and Roman decadence came to an end, it was replaced by the holy Catholic Church. That glorious period of faith-based government was called the Dark Ages.
Catholicism in those days was the ultimate one-worlder philosophy. Under this theocratic precursor of the UN, stable government, schools, libraries, a uniform currency, scientific thought and exploration were lost, not to be seen again for hundreds of years. Barter replaced money as the major purchasing system. Cities and towns were destroyed the concepts of usable roads and indoor plumbing disappeared, not to be seen again for about a thousand years.
Very few people could read or write - nobody expected conditions to improve. Because scientific thought, reasoning and education had been replaced by faith, they were right - nothing improved. The only hope for most people during the Middle Ages was their strong belief in Christianity and the hope that life in heaven would be better than life on earth.
Islamists are currently seeking to return to the bad old days with their dark-ages Caliphate. Theocracies that follow the Islamist model like Iran, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan under the Taliban are models of dark ages misery and ignorance.
It's just fine with me when right-wing Christians comment on morality and seek to share their faith. Even if I don't agree with everything they say, it's nice to have another point of view and see the First Amendment in action. They can chide all they want, I don't mind. But there are very real, historically-based reasons to object to laws and political systems that are supposed to be based on one-world government and/or a singular interpretation of the word of God, so that's where I draw the line.
I don't know anything about debating, but it seems that this is an insidiously clever rhetorical device. In particular, for those who are not Christians of Ms. Barber's general persuasion, it makes her appear somewhat arbitrary, and even for those who are, they could easily disagree on when the decline began. I.e. such a comment could even cause disagreements among thinkers who generally agree with Ms. Barber.
Perhaps the following will enlighten the discussion.
A quotation by Marcus Tullius Cicero regarding ancient Rome:
"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.”
A quotation by David B Hart October 2003:
“We live in an age whose chief moral value has been determined, by overwhelming consensus, to be the absolute liberty of personal volition, the power of each of us to choose what he or she believes, wants, needs, or must possess; our culturally most persuasive models of human freedom are unambiguously voluntarist and, in a rather debased and degraded way, Promethean; the will, we believe, is sovereign because unpremised, free because spontaneous, and this is the highest good. And a society that believes this must, at least implicitly, embrace and subtly advocate a very particular moral metaphysics: the unreality of any “value” higher than choice, or of any transcendent Good ordering desire towards a higher end. Desire is free to propose, seize, accept or reject, want or not want—but not to obey. Society must thus be secured against the intrusions of the Good, or of God, so that its citizens may determine their own lives by the choices they make from a universe of morally indifferent but variably desirable ends, unencumbered by any prior grammar of obligation or value (in America, we call this the “wall of separation”). Hence the liberties that permit one to purchase lavender bed clothes, to gaze fervently at pornography, to become a Unitarian, to market popular celebrations of brutal violence, or to destroy one’s unborn child are all equally intrinsically “good” because all are expressions of an inalienable freedom of choice. But, of course, if the will determines itself only in and through such choices, free from any prevenient natural order, then it too is in itself nothing. And so, at the end of modernity, each of us who is true to the times stands facing not God, or the gods, or the Good beyond beings, but an abyss, over which presides the empty, inviolable authority of the individual will, whose impulses and decisions are their own moral index.”
There was actually a log of scholarly research that went on during the Dark ages. In fact, a great deal of the Enlightenment was really just people stealing research from Dark Age schoolmen. They took ideas from hand-writen books and used the leverage of the printing press to gain fame from other people's work without crediting them.
What is different is our ability to hear about atrocities in terms of real time. Scott Peterson killed his wife, and everyone knew about it within hours or days. Doesn't mean no man ever killed his wife before, but news in the 1800's didn't travel across the country (or the world, for that matter) as fast as it does now. So we hear about stuff faster, and we hear about more of it, than ever we used to.
That makes it seem like humanity is going to hell in a handbasket. We're not, though, because humanity is no different than it has ever been. Human nature being what it is, human beings have always and will continue to behave as human beings behave. And with progress in technology and communications, we'll hear about more and more of human nature and its consequences, and we'll hear about it faster and faster.
Imagine a future news release on CNN: So-and-so was arrested today for thinking about killing his wife. What made him do it?
These posts are really good. I believe LaShawn will appreciate them.
That may be true, but these ideas didn't improve anyone's lives until the printing press was used. People didn't suffer a massive loss of IQ points during the middle ages, but their centralized, theocratic society enforced ignorance.
Many people of a liberal persuasion seem to feel that morality is just an attempt by religious people to inflict a set of made-up, arbitrary, rules on those who would prefer not to be so-constrained. In adopting such a stance, they may be ignoring something like 4000 years of human experience about what works, and what doesn't work, for a survivable society.
While I agree with Dean that sleeping around is nothing new, I would also point out that promiscuity does clearly lead to the spread of sexually transmitted disease, and that a societal distaste for promiscuity does tend to limit the spread of such disease. 100%? No. Still, proscribing certain behaviors (or encouraging others)does tend to favor the survival of a society, whether entirely successful or not.
On that basis, it is not at all unreasonable to be concerned about forces within society that tend to undermine those proscriptions and admonitions that favor survivability. "Those who will not learn from experience are doomed to repeat it." Couching the argument in religious terms may be counterproductive, because those whom they seek to persuade do not accept the validity of such arguments. Arguing on the basis of survivability of society may be more relevant.
Can we assume upon your scientific authority that
"indoor plumbing disappeared, not to be seen again for about a thousand years"
and that that inaction can be directly attributable to the dictatorship of some Pope following the fall of the roman empire ?
I don't know anything about debating, but it seems that this is an insidiously clever rhetorical device.
Wrong. In fact, claiming it's an "insidious rhetorical device" is just a dodge, a rhetorical device in and of itself. A rather snotty one I might add.
LaShawn made a specific claim: America is more wicked today than it was in the past. She needs to back that up. She also said that as a result of our greater wickedness, God no longer protects America. She made this claim, not me. Therefore she is asked to provide proof or, if not proof, then at least an explanation as to when we stopped getting the special protection.
I see nothing here but efforts to dodge and bob and weave and shuck and jive in response to specific questions about specific allegations.
Can you name one way in which the Holy Roman Catholic church helped the average peasant escape their disease-ridden hovels?
The Pope's job, like the UN's, was to maintain the status quo. He did that by convincing people to "cope" with their lot, rather than improving it.
Compare the lifestyle of an average Roman town like Pompeii to the dirty, diseased lifestyle of Britain in the 14th century. For hundreds of years, humanity took giant steps backwards. If the Popes didn't cause it, they certainly didn't help.
If you want to change your argument from science to technological progress, then you still can't make the case. Technological progress was no faster during the Roman Empire than it was during the Dark Ages. The Catholic Church was born in a society that had no respect for innovation at all. Innovation became popular under the influence of the Catholic Church. How do you get from this to the idea that the Catholic Church stifles innovation?
I really do believe that you got to the gist of the matter with that one question. I would LOVE to hear the “God is punishing us because America is morally bankrupt” crowd give us an answer to your question. Until then, we can’t possibly have a reasonable discussion or debate on the topic.
The Pope's job was like the UN's ? You gotta be kidding ?
And of course the Pope is responsible for the
"... the dirty, diseased lifestyle of Britain in the 14th century."
Gimme a break. 14th century Britain was post-Henry VIII. They kicked the 'fookin' papists out mi dear.
A wee time back, mi brother went to visit the ould sod and the cousins in 1968. They didn't have indoor plumbing. Actually they had no plumbing. Seems one building was reserved for the cows who maintained room center. The peoples did it in the corners.
But in charity to the cousins, they were always clean.
Yes, A certain Gregor Mendel. He has a history of being knowledgeable in the present day science of genetics. In fact he is rather esteemed.
Innovations like flying buttresses?
about medieval innovations in medicine:
Medical knowledge in the Middle Ages must have appeared to have stood still. While the Ancient Romans, Greeks and Egyptians had pushed forward medical knowledge, after the demise of these civilisations, the momentum started by these people tended to stagnate and it did not develop at the same pace until the Seventeenth/Eighteenth Centuries. In Britain, as an example, most things linked to the Romans was destroyed – villas were covered up as the Ancient Britons believed that they contained ghosts and evil spirits. With this approach, it is not surprising that anything medical linked to the Romans fell into disuse in Britain...
..medicine became steeped in superstition and the Roman Catholic Church effectively dominated what direction the medical world took. Any views different from the established Roman Catholic Church view could veer towards heresy with the punishments that entailed. Therefore, when the Roman Catholic Church stated that illnesses were punishments from God and that those who were ill were so because they were sinners, few argued otherwise...
...There were people in the time of the plague (the Black Death) who believed that they had sinned. They believed that the only way to show their true repentance was to inflict pain on themselves. These were the so-called flaggellants who whipped themselves to show their love of God and their true sorry at being a sinner. Clearly, this was no cure for the plague.
As far as science goes, there was the Church's resistance to the idea that the earth revolved around the sun. There was something called the inquisition, which investigated and judged and punished Galileo for questioning Church doctorine, among other things. Was the inquisition one of the Church's many innovations?
One of the Church's main innovations was the theory of how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, whether Jesus was a hermaphrodite, and if the Ressurection took place during the day or night. These are some of many of the medieval innovations that brought no improvements to anyone's lives. Contrast that with Pompeii AD 62, where they took regular baths and even had fast food. During the middle ages, knights and peasants bathed once a year, ate without forks and pooped in a ditch.
- on Mendel:
It was not until the early 20th century that the importance of his ideas was realized.
Just wondering, why is anyone defending a centralized stasist theocracy?
"Regardless of its ultimate legacy, America is a civilization on the decline. "
That is not something with which I agree.
On the other hand, the theories for the fall of the Roman Empire, Pax Romani if you will are multiple and most of which do not directly relate to morals nor the family although in my view they are very crucial.
Thomas Cahill, in his book, How the Irish Saved Civilization lists all of the primary reasons for the Fall of the Roman Empire. Augustine blamed the pagani (pagans unhappy with christian influence),Petrarch the father of Rennaissance humanism blames the empire's internal faults.
Later, Machiavelli blames the barbarians.
Not taking into account the lack of tax revenues primarily due to Roman soldiers settling in foreign lands, nor the defanging of the Roman soldiers due to christian doctrines of peace and charity, Rome became disabled and subject to all manner of insults.
In December 406, the Rhine river froze over creating a natural bridge and hundreds of thousands of invading starving hordes descended into the City of Rome and Alaric, the king of the Visigoths and all his forces parked at its gates.
We know the outcome.
As to the "centralized stasist theocracy" charge, you are conveniently ignoring that even though the Church wielded great power, there were always secular rulers that were responsible for the physical welfare of their subjects. Why do they get off the hook so completely?
As a faith, Catholicism is as good or bad as any other. As a form of government, it was, by any standards, horrible, as most theocracies are.
The medieval Catholic Church really did have a lot in common with the UN. They didn't wield power through military force, but they were considered to be a politically moral force. Catholic with a small c means universal. They were, in the smaller medieval world a real one-world government. And, despite their vows of poverty and charity they managed to gather an amazing amount of wealth.
it wasn't so much for his research (which in fact was based on others', and had serious flaws), it was his attitude, and the way he went about promoting himself
If Galileo was prosecuted for his "attitude" are we supposed to be OK with that?
there were always secular rulers that were responsible for the physical welfare of their subjects. Why do they get off the hook so completely?
Feudalism and monarchies are awful too.
In any case, I stand by it: if we've stopped getting divine protection, it would be helpful to know when we stopped getting it exactly, so we can analyze what we did to piss off The Big Guy so bad. We could also then analyze whether we're really experiencing more suffering and whatnot...
In other words, if you're going to speak for The Big Guy and claim he's treating us a certain way, maybe you'd better have something to back it up.
Its an interesting comparison of the RCC with the UN, but I (a fundamentalist Baptist raised to believe that the RCC is the Whore of Rome) think you are being too harsh on them. Compared to democracy and independent fundamentalist churches and research labs and garage tinkerers and capitalism, why yes, they are pretty bad.
Personally, I suspect that for most illnesses before 1920 or so, it made sense to have a Christian Scientist view of health because the doc was likely to kill ya'.
And according to Paul Johnson, in the '20s something remarkable happened in America...a decent standard of living became available to the great mass of society. And that this was a first for the world.
And as to God's punishment, well He says clearly that He does it. But at the same time, Jesus said of some men who died in a tower collapse that they were not more evil than the rest in the city. Which tells you what?
Sometimes God intervenes to smack jerks, and sometimes He lets the laws of the world operate which enables a rational framework for existence. How to tell which is which? You got me.
I'll begin with Jaymaster's mention of Prohibition (of drinks with alcohol in them). I'm against Prohibition, of course. But I must say they did at least one thing right: They passed it through a Constitutional amendment, the way it should be done. And then it was repealed by a Constitutional amendment. This is the one country where such a Prohibition law was passed. This is also the one country where people started drinking on principle solely in order to defy such a tyranny. God bless America!
Today, by contrast, we have people advocating national prohibitions on everything from cigarettes to guns to marijuana (even for medical need) to, yes, alcohol again to meat to perfumes to.... You name it, somebody wants to ban it. And they do so, not by Constitutional amendment, but by "creative" interpretations of the Constitution (negating the Second Amendment, expanding the "interstate commerce" clause to near-infinity, etc.). I'm against that.
(I would support a Human Life Amendment to extend Fourteenth Amendment protections to human life in the womb.)
Mary (at Exit Zero):
I usually agree with you, but I have to take exception to this medieval-Catholic-baiting -- particularly that nonsense about "angels dancing on the head of a pin". I'm going to dismiss this Cecil Adams exactly as cavalierly as he dismissed St. Thomas Aquinas. Adams begins his reply to the question with "You're a minister, why don't you ask the Big Guy?" In other words, he doesn't believe in any God, so of course he doesn't believe in any angels of God, and so of course he would think all discussion of their nature is useless nonsense to be ridiculed.
Catholics, and Christians generally, believe in a angels because they are mentioned frequently in the Bible. Some serve God in various ways, others the fallen angels) serve the Devil, who brought about the Fall of man. So, of course Catholic theologians would have been curious about the nature of these powerful beings, just as they are curious about the nature of the Supreme Being.
People discuss and debate what they believe is real and important to them, whether it has any economic utility or not. Catholics believed in a God (the Trinity) and in a hierarchy of beings created by that God, and so they argued about the nature of that hierarchy and those beings (including ourselves) and their Creator. You might as well poke fun at physicists for debating the nature of quarks, gluons, photons, quantum mechanics, etc.. Or Supreme Court Justices for debating about the Constitution means.
St. Thomas Aquinas was one of the greatest minds who ever lived, as brilliant as Aristotle oe Einstein. He was the fairest debater I have ever come across. If you have ever read his Summa Theologica, you would know that he invariably stated his opponents arguments on any question in as comprehensive and convincing a way possible before he would proceed to logically refute them. Other theologians such as Abelard did the same. For the best introduction to Aquinas, and his pivotal role in history, I strongly recommend G. K. Chesterton's Saint Thomas Aquinas: the Dumb Ox. That is a book that has been praised by such Thomist scholars as Etienne Gilson, Jacques Maritain, and Charles Peguy.
As to who made the "Dark Ages" (i.e., the centuries [circa 500-1100 A.D.] in Europe from the fall of Rome to the rise of the High Middle Ages dark, may I humbly submit my own ancestors? I admire the Vikings for the great mythic and heroic sagas they wrote of Tyr, Odin, Thor, Freya, Sigurd, etc. But, when they were not composing such sagas, they spent their time sacking villages, cities, and monasteries. It was in the monasteries that the sole remnants of Classical learning were preserved. Catholic charity created the first hospitals. Catholic intellect created the first universities. That is why we call the philosophers and theologians of the Middle Ages the "Schoolmen" or "Scholastics".
I know it's somewhat out of character for me to say anything nice about Islam or Muslims, but I have to say that Muslim scholars of that period such as Ibn Rushd and Ibn Sina played a huge role, too, in preserving and transmitting Classical learning, particularly Aristotle.
If any man made the Renaissance possible, it was St. Thomas Aquinas. Ayn Rand, an atheist, acknowledged this. The Protestant Reformation, by contrast, was diametrically opposed not only to the Middle Ages but also to the Renaissance. Calvin, Luther, Cromwell, and their co-revolutionaries produced a new Dark Ages of Puritanism, witch-burnings, and the most terrible religious wars.
The only good thing (other than John Milton) that came out of the Reformation was that it finally produced so many warring sects that at last they found that they had to put up with each others' existence or else revert to the "state of nature" so eloquently described by Thomas Hobbes. That -- quite inadvertently -- ultimately gave rise to John Milton's Aeropagitica, John Locke's Letters on Toleration, the Enlightenment, and the United States of America.
June 17, 1977...I was there; a sad sight to see.
:o)
On a more serious note, it is absurd for anyone to say that public morality is just the same as it was in the past - we have clearly degenerated as a people in recent decades. Things which wouldn't have happened, happen all the time now.
As a Christian, I know that these individual and collective sins we engage in cost us - and cost us dearly. The cost is in lives.
God, however, never abandons anyone - people who say that God has cursed us for our sins have a distinct lack of understanding of God. It is we who curse ourselves, while God ever and always shows us the way out of our troubles, if we'd only cease our sinning and pay attention to His really rather simple and easy rules for living.
When I referred to innovation under the Catholic Church, I wasn't referring to the Dark Ages but to the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution. Both occured on a continent that was dominated by the Catholic Church.
Yes we all know the stories about how mean the Pope was to poor Gallileo. I never said the Catholic Church was perfect. All I said is that you are blaming the Church for problems that long preceeded it.
Your point about bathing is opaque. So the Romans bathed and the rest of Europe didn't. And this is the fault of the Catholic Church because...?
And now you are blaming the Catholic Church for the crushing poverty brough on by wars, invasions, and disease.
No, don't tell me. You are going to blame the Church for the wars too, aren't you? Because everyone knows how peaceful all of those Europeans were before the Church came along and stirred them up and got them to fighting each other.
And before you go mocking Aquinas and his discussions of Angels, maybe you should take a good look at what passes for scholarship in modern universities in the humanties departments and in programs like women's studies.
In continuence from the other thread yesterday.
Since your ancestors are nordic, and the other half of my ancestors are Irish, I demand full recompence and restitution of lands taken from my ancestors those thousands of years ago, when the vikings invaded the lands of my forebears. :-P
Oh and I guess I should sue myself for restitution also, seeing that my irish ancestors invaded my cherokee brethren.. blah blah. Man this gets circular.
Anyway back on thread.
I still think this whole mess is based on people who have a false base in biblical theology. These are people who, knowingly or not, claim to have a 'direct line to God' about certain things.
I like LeShawn a lot, and read her blog at least weekly. But she should understand that this line of thinking she is holding to is derived from a line of corruption that engaged the church around the turn of the 20th century that was propagated by the Campbellite movement. The idea is that somehow America is the 'New Israel' that is under the protection of God is very, very odd theology, and not biblically founded.
The Old Testament tells us that it was Israel that was under God's wing. The New Testament explains that by adoption it is the Church (Followers of Christ) that became PART of Israel; they are a new branch grafted on to the old root. Not a 'New Israel' as some of the more fundamentalist church groups would have it (Church of Christ for example). Now how do they jump from the ‘Church’ being Israel to the Church being America? I have no idea.
Its a classic example of False logic.
Church == Israel
Church == Christians
America == Christians
therefore America == Israel.
It's fairly easy to make the connection that the Church 'proper' is Israel, but America? I really don't get their line of reasoning, from a theological standpoint.
Why does everybody condemn the imprisonment of Galileo Galilei but fail to mention the burning of Giordano Bruno? If you want to condemn the Catholic church, then condemn it for burning Bruno. Of course, John Calvin (nice fellow that he was) would have done exactly the same thing to Bruno.
Another favorite canard that we still hear is that medieval Catholics believed that the Earth is flat and that Columbus showed that it is round. False. Eratosthenes in ancient Greece had long ago proven the Earth to be round, and had also calculated its size to a extraordinarily accurate degree. All educated men in the Middle Ages, i.e., all Catholic clergy and men schooled in Catholic theology, knew this (through Aristotle). E.g., see Dante.
Where Columbus disagreed was in his estimation of the size of the Earth. He grossly underestimated it!, and they warned him, but let him go anyway. If he hadn't fortuitously run into the New World (which he thought was India, hence "Indians"), he and his men would have soon run out of provisions and starved. On this, he was wrong and the church was right. That does not detract from Columbus's importance as discoverer (for us Europeans) of the New World. If there was any explorer of that era who conclusively, empirically proved the spherity of the Earth, it was Magellan, the first man to successfully circumnavigate the globe.
And, yes, I also love the flying butresses of the Gothic cathedrals. The style!
Eric R. Ashley wrote:
"Ancient Egyptian medicine was terrible, and the Egyptians thought they were great at it, but considering that many concoctions consisted of manure in part, I think I'll disagree with their self-regard. Smearing manure in an open wound sounds like a bad idea."
I've defended the medieval Catholics. Now I'm going to defend the ancient Egyptians. I would not have liked to have needed a doctor in any pre-modern age, including ancient Greece. With the technology he had at that time, Hippocrates himself would have been unable to perform a triple bypass operation. People did what they could with what they had. As I said in the other thread, technology is totally irrelevant in evaluating the moral character of ideas of an age. The question is not: Are we (materially) better off than the generations that came before us? The question is: Are we (morally, spiritually) better than the generations that came before us? And to that I answer emphatically: No
I like our modern technology. But I love the theology of the ancient Egyptians more, above all the holy myth of Osiris (the archetype of the Christ) and Isis (the Queen of Heaven). That is where I stand.
McKiernan's quotes here are quite fascinating. The styles. Much to think about. Cicero was as right today as he was then about traitors, even more so. There can be an honorable foe, there can never be an honorable traitor. As to what David B. Hart wrote, however, I have to disagree. I do not see self and God, individual freedom and Divine order, as necessarily in conflict. I think they complement each other instead. Still, much to think about.
As to Deanna Barr's comment here, you make a good point. But no conservative argues that nobody ever killed his pregnant wife before. What conservatives are arguing against in this case is an ideological movement which calls itself "pro-choice", and yet opposes any law to protect a baby in a womb even if the woman wants that child, because it will endanger their idea that that baby is not human and not worthy of protection, and thus endanger the (dubious) Constitutional right to kill him or her at will.
People's behavior has not changed all that much over the millennia. What is new are certain ideas and ideologies that seek to justify or to forbid certain ancient behaviors. E.g., abortion is now practically a sacrament for some, while ownership of pets is condemned by others as "speciesism". I agree with G. K. Chesterton that creeds are often more important than deeds. They have more long-term impact. E.g., many the Founding Fathers owned slaves, yes, but they had an uneasy conscience about it and some (Washington, Hamilton) freed their slaves. Even Tories like Samuel Johnson opposed slavery. But in the 19th century, racial theories were concocted that justified slavery as a "positive good". Those same racial theories also bore bitter fruit in the 20th century.
"Imagine a future news release on CNN: So-and-so was arrested today for thinking about killing his wife. What made him do it?"
Unfortunately, I can all too easily imagine such a thing. If we ever get to that point, I can imagine a similar news release: "So-and-so was arrested today for thinking about leading a protest against the government. What made him do it? And how can we cure him of such deviant thoughts?"
"Include me out" of such a future!
"Steven:
In continuence from the other thread yesterday.
Since your ancestors are nordic, and the other half of my ancestors are Irish, I demand full recompence and restitution of lands taken from my ancestors those thousands of years ago, when the vikings invaded the lands of my forebears. :-P
Oh and I guess I should sue myself for restitution also, seeing that my irish ancestors invaded my cherokee brethren.. blah blah. Man this gets circular."
Since some of my ancestors are Irish, it looks like I, too, will have to pay reparations to myself. ha! ha!
As to America = Israel, you're right. That's not in the Bible. And there's the British-Israelite theory which argues that "Anglo-Saxons" are the 12 lost tribes of Israel. Supposedly, this was discovered by deciphering hieroglyphics in the Great Pyramid at Gaza. The nonsense never ends.
I especially like to do this because I can compare it to Moses' medicine, which despite being trained all the wisdom of the Egyptians, had none of their folly. And instead, for the limited tech base of the day, had some astonishingly good ideas (latrines, quarantine, being checked to be clear of disease, destroying houses to prevent the passage of infection, washing hands and bowls in running water.)
I've heard that the city-fathers of Vienna in desperation during the Black Plague went back to Mosaic teachings and saved teh city.
Yea, interestingly enough, I ran into a guy up here who believes that. It’s some odd mixture of white supremacy with all kinds of weird crap thrown in. Anglo == angels and saxon == light, therefore the anglo-saxons are the 'children of light' i.e. the lost children of Israel.
They don't subscribe to the idea that Gentiles have been grafted onto the 'root' of Israel, etc, but rather those Aryan races that descended from the Anglo-Saxons aren't actually Gentiles because they are the true blood line of the Hebrews, Decended from the 'real pure blood jews' who fled Jeruselem and made their way into northern Europe. They also argue that the Modern Jews are not really Jews, but are of a corrupted blood line of philistines or something, and that the 'Original Hebrews' were fair skinned, Anglo-like peoples. (Um, hello, Abram came out of Ur.)
Non-White skinned people are ‘a different race’ altogether. Anglos were ‘Man’ and other races were ‘Hu-Man’ or ‘different man’ or something. Honestly I didn’t listen too much of what he was talking about because It was so outlandish. There seems to be a bit of that up here in WNC. I guess it is an outlet for their supremacy belief system, and they are just trying to vindicate themselves.
Luddites + a goverment that discourages progress in the interests of maintaining the status quo = a stagnant, miserable society. That's what I've been trying to say (maybe not successfully) Lefty luddites are just as bad.
As to who made the "Dark Ages" (i.e., the centuries [circa 500-1100 A.D.] in Europe from the fall of Rome to the rise of the High Middle Ages dark, may I humbly submit my own ancestors?
Yes, but the collassal mess that was medieval society was unable to effectively defend themselves; they didn't have the organization, the techonology or the will to do it.
St. Thomas Aquinas was one of the greatest minds who ever lived, as brilliant as Aristotle oe Einstein.
That's the problem. I'm not trying to argue that Catholicism made people stupid - it didn't. I'm just arguing that theocracies are a very bad form of government, no matter what faith they're based on.
There are a lot of luddites and people of faith out there on the right and the left who would like to replace democracy with centralized government and laws based on their dogma. History proves that this would be a disaster.
History also proves that the "progressives'" dream, a one-world government, would also create a stasist backwater.
In short, when LaShawn Barber can say that promiscuity is causing the decline of the American empire and Dean can disagree with her, that's a sign of expression of beliefs in a functioning democracy.
If President Bush said that promiscuity is causing the decline of the American empire, and everyone who disagrees will be jailed or deported, that a sign that we're in a theocracy.
If world president-for-life Kofi Annan, in accordance with his sponsors in the Arab league states that the punishment for promiscuity will be death by stoning, it's the end of the world as we know it.
If all of our leading scientists, artists and thinkers are employed by Kofi in the effort to prove that promiscuity causes global warming and thus the end of the UN's empire, that's a sign that we'll soon be living in a full-fledged, "bring out your dead", rolling-around-in-the-muck, ignorant, stasist society.
..oops, that should have been President Fallwell. It wasn't a freudian slip, honest.
I agree with you on the politics of it. The church should not control the state, and the state must not control the church. You can't make people moral or holy or save souls by passing laws and throwing people in jail or killing them. The sole legitimate function of government is to protect the life, liberty, and property of the individual, and therefore the military security of the nation, and otherwise to get out of the way.
And I'm totally against any One-World government. I say: Get the U.S.A. out of the U.N.O. and get the U.N.O. out of the U.S.A..