Posted on 11/10/2008 11:37:17 AM PST by betty boop
This is the heart of the matter. Read Daniel 9:8. A people who live in disobedience are a confused people.
And as de Tocqueville reminds us "Liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith."
self-government” begins in the good order of the individual citizen: Personal morality is the foundation of the system. If the people are “disordered,” then so will be the society.
This is the heart of the matter. Read Daniel 9:8. A people who live in disobedience are a confused people.
And as de Tocqueville reminds us “Liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith.”
Spirited: Actually, the heart of the matter resides within the First Principle, “In the beginning God...” From there it works forward to and answers the question, “What is man?”
Though physically an animal, man is unique, for spiritually he is made in the image of his Creator. Spiritually, every man is an individual, with an individual mind (the citadel of the soul), moral conscience, reason, and volition (free will). Hence man has been endowed with the spiritual abilities so vitally necessary for self-governance. Viewed in this light, our founding documents, particularly the Declaration and Constitution, are great spiritual documents. In short, the spiritual is supreme.
From Spinoza to Hegel, and on through Feuerbach, Comte, Marx, and Nietzsche-—all of these thinkers contributed to
the 20th century’s totalitarianin irreligions.
At the heart of these irreligions, is monism (oneness). Monism has the effect of destroying the individual and God, as it subsumes both man and God into nature (or matter, or the cosmos).
Spinoza, Hegel, and Nietzsche, for instance, were pantheistic monists. Marx was a materialist monist. In any case, the two types are simply the two sides of one coin, and are entirely compatible.
Paul summed up Christian theism and monism when he said, “Man will either worship and serve creation (monism) or he will worship and serve the Creator of creation (Christian theism)
As can be seen by this brief summation, monism is the antithesis of Christian theism.
Maybe. Was the Revolutionary War and exercise in confusion?
Yes,and it is difficult to battle the pervasive monism of our culture. Once there is no underlying difference between the components of the universe and the prime cause of the universe everything becomes relative.
The monist view of creation is that universe and its components are a manifestation of God and not a creation of God. There is no individual, no God, no right, no wrong.
There is no longer any basis left for liberty, individual freedoms or rights.
Thank you for taking me down this thought path. (I am not yet fully understanding)
Was the Revolutionary War and exercise in confusion?
Spirited: Short answer, ‘No.’ The revolution was the logical conclusion of a view of man-—the most radical and offensive view the world has ever known—which says that all mankind are members of a great spiritual brotherhood.
By extension, this most radical equality is highly offensive to slave-owners, malignant narcissists (tyrants), etc.
That our civilization and freedoms are in decline speaks not to any failing of our founding worldview but rather to the corruptibility of man. We tried the ‘ideas,’ as it were, and decided that they were too rigorous and demanding.
Armed revolt against established authority, but not "disobedience".
Liberty: Good. Innovation: Good; "tearing old ideas apart and remodeling the world": not necessarily good, not necessarily innovative, and not necessarily expansive of individual liberty. The Devil's in the details.
But I do take your point marron. We see in Iraq, for instance, a greater participation of women in civil society, and this has had a liberalizing effect on society in general, as it tries to move away from authoritarian or theocratic political models. If this trend continues, it ought to contribute to the overall prosperity and security of Iraq in the future, and so I hope and pray it all works out.
I'm just a little touchy about "feminism" in general, which is what I associated with Fowler's term, "Eve-flavored age." Frankly, I find feminism a puzzling term. Is Sarah Palin — a strong, self-determined, capable woman — a "feminist?"
When that term is used, I surmise what we're talking about is a person identifying with a radicalized group of females who either overtly or covertly detest and resent men, and whose "litmus test" of political association is the implacable demand for free access to abortion services at any stage of pre-born life or even after birth. Clearly Sarah Palin could not be described as a "feminist" on these terms, though Pelosi, Feinstein, Boxer, et al., certainly can.
Heaven knows I'm all for the advancement of women in society since I happen to be one myself. But I much prefer the Iraqi model to that of the Feminazis. It seems to me that the Iraqis are at least dealing in First Reality, while the organized feminists want to tear it apart and "remodel the world" in ways more conducive to their liking.
Just some more maunderings FWIW.... Thank you ever so much for your perceptive essay/post marron!
Armed revolt against established authority, but not “disobedience”.
Spirited: Your response not only lacks discernment between good and evil, but is in fact, an inversion of good and evil. By its inverted logic, Mao and Hitler being “established authority,” resistance and/or revolution against their ‘authority’ is disobediance. Hence willing submission to slavery and tyranny is the logical conclusion of your inverted reasoning.
And with good reason. I was trying to re-draw a distinction. Fowler was trying to credit "Eve-flavored" movements with liberty and innovation and I was suggesting that its the reverse; greater liberty for women is indicative of greater liberty all around, and greater liberty leads to innovation (and here I'm assuming "innovation" as a positive).
Liberty isn't really a thing itself, its really a visible indication of something else, which is respect for your neighbor. Respect for your neighbor is the outward reflection of love of neighbor. Where love for your neighbor is generalized it manifests itself as respect for your neighbor and that produces "liberty".
Love for your neighbor must precede the legalisms; the legalisms merely formalize what already exists in the human heart with or without formal law.
This is why you can't impose liberty. Liberty grows as love of neighbor grows in a society and it dies as love in a society dies. What we understand as liberty comes very much out of a judeo-christian understanding of the proper relationship of humans with respect to their creator and with one another. Liberty isn't limited only to the judeo-christian world but it is limited to those societies in which love, respect, for ones neighbor is generalized.
Frankly, I find feminism a puzzling term. Is Sarah Palin — a strong, self-determined, capable woman — a "feminist?"
She's Sarah Palin. Just as you are you.
As I recall, Palin called herself a "feminist" and the head of NOW in Los Angeles agreed that she is and supported the ticket as did some of the Hillary supporters.
But there are probably even more women who call themselves "feminist" but really mean that they believe women are superior to men and that they must have the absolute right to kill their unborn for any cause as if that were proof of their power. Seems to me that such a worldview is an abomination to God and therefore to liberty itself.
In my view, the legal status of women in a society does not prevent the strong woman, e.g. Jael (Judges 4), Naomi and Ruth (Ruth), Esther (Esther). They do what must be done despite the constraints.
More importantly, the legal status of a women in society cannot prevent the woman who loves God above all else, e.g. Mary the mother of the Incarnate Word Jesus, Anna (Luke 2), Mary the sister of Martha (Luke 10), and others.
But weak women like weak men - and women like men who love themselves (or any thing or any one else) more than God - are of no good effect either for themselves or the ones in their sphere of influence.
My two cents...
Even putting it into theological context is problematic given the relationship between the Crown and the Church of England at the time.
“Your original assertion made no such discernment...”
Though I responded to your rhetorical question, if you’ll look back over my responses, you’ll discover that it wasn’t me who made that claim, re: disobedience. In c&ping a portion of a response, I accidentally included that sentence. You need to go back to the originating post containing that sentence and ask the poster to explain the reasoning behind it. You may in fact discover that you’ve simply taken it out of context.
It looks like a simple conflation of “immoral” with “disorderly”.
bump
Do not use potty language or references to potty language on the Religion Forum.
What a beautiful insight, dear marron! And oh so very true!
I don't see the great hierarchy of being as a "system" at all — unless by "system" you mean "universe" or "cosmos," and not its narrower sense of a philosophical doctrine. Rather, I see it as a simple description of the universal context in which human beings exist, thus comprehensively forming the irreducible bases of human experience.
On this view, to put it crudely, human experience only comes in these four "flavors," God, Man, World (natural world, physical world) and Society (community, polity). You can test the description for yourself by engaging in a simple exercise in self-awareness. Pick any ordinary day, just go about your regular daily routines; but while you're doing that, try to reflect on the types of experiences you are having involving any "other than yourself." If at the end of the day your experiences involved anything other than experiences of these four "partners" singly or in some combination, then I would dearly love to know what that was.
Of course, if you think the God partner is mystical and magical per se, then probably the description of the great hierarchy of being is senseless to you. But this result would be a function of your predisposition of unbelief.
Which brings us to the man "partner" and his relation to God. Perhaps the greatest insight of classical Greece and of Judeo-Christianity is that ultimately, it is the God–man relation that is key to the good order of man and thus of the justice of his relations with other men and with the other partners in being.
The French philosopher Henri Bergson spoke of the man who lives in "openness to God" as l'âme ouverte, or "the open soul." There is also the man who freely chooses to close his soul to God, the l'âme close. The idea here is that the man who closes his soul to God "deforms" himself. (I'll spare you the details for now and just mention that the good order of the soul in open existence under God was perhaps Plato's major preoccupation over a long and prolific life; and that the "turning around" of the soul (e.g., Plato's periagoge, or the Christian "born-again" experience) to Christ — the Way the Truth and the Life — is the divine remedy for such deformity.)
There are echoes of the great pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus in Bergson's insight. Heraclitus maintained there are only two types of men, the "public man" and the "private man."
The public man — the mature, wise man — is such because he acknowledges the Logos, or the universal order of being. He sees it as "one and common" and thus binding on all men as the true source of order not only of the individual human being but of the good society. Thus the public man is a man who is "awake" because he understands that the order of the real world is "one and common" for all men. But there are others — the private men — who, not acknowledging the Logos, are in effect "asleep, each turn[ing] aside into their private worlds." They live "as if they had a wisdom of their own."
The analogy to Bergson is that Heraclitus' private men are cases of l'âme close. WRT the private men, the "many," Heraclitus put it this way (Fragment 1):
Although this Logos is eternally valid, yet men are unable to understand it.... That is to say, although all things come to pass in accordance with this Logos, men seem to be without any experience of it.... My own method is to distinguish each thing according to its nature, and to specify how it behaves; other men, on the contrary, are as forgetful and heedless in their waking moments of what is going on around and within them as they are during sleep.The l'âme close, by not acknowledging the Logos, falls asleep into his own dream world, and thus becomes a private man. It is out of that dream world that all Second Realities arise....
Some things never change.
Exactly.. humans are to "that concept" merely primates.. or monkeys with instinct and habits..
Pity that they cannot see the only way for humans to evolve is to be "re-born" into another creature.. Or primates to evolve into something "else".. They miss the very deep scientific truth of the evolution of humans.. to fulfil the metaphorical evolution of other life forms all around them.. They miss the punch line.. or the point of being born again...
Could be in the future they will be told this.. only to look at "some angel that tells them this and then goes.. "Duuuugh!".. when it dawns on them..
Amazing that some people will hear what they want to hear.. and see what they want to see..
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