Posted on 10/02/2006 6:28:07 PM PDT by neverdem
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BUMP FOR LATER READING
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I really don't think Victor Davis Hanson understands the Pope, or what his initiative has already achieved. Too bad, because I usually enjoy reading his work.
Hanson is a bright guy, but Pope Benedict can think circles around him.
Bump.
We're not there yet? Oh yes, we're there, we're there! You haven't gotten the memo? The word 'niggardly'is forbidden in our public schools. Computer term 'master/slave' ist verbotten in our gummint. I could go on.
Good writing...
This article is accurate in just about everything except I think the Greek enlightenment happened in the 6th century BC.
bump
No, fifth century BC is correct.
If you read this carefully you will realize Hanson is
not berating the Pope in any way.
I have been "yelling" at the "Enlightened" to wakeup for about two years now.
If Europe goes...the US is not far behind.
Three French philosophers managed to work up the courage to issue a public statement today that maybe the French teacher who disparaged Islam and is now in hiding shouldn't be killed if the bad guys would be so kind. That's the stuff of the Marne, all right...
In fact European intellectual life has rejected the Enlightenment since Sartre and his coterie of fashionable Marxists took over the academe. Foucault? Baudrillard? Derrida? Lyotard especially, who built a career on criticism of an Enlightenment he patently did not comprehend? These fellows would do very well under dhimmitude so long as they restricted their polemics to the West. Which they did.
European intellectual life will slough off this stifling, enervating multicultural nihilism or it will go under, period. When it does so the world will not miss it, but the tragedy is that it will drag so many of its fellow citizens with it.
Perhaps VDH reads and understands the FR 'type' too much for you?
"-- Those in an auto parts store in Fresno, or at a NASCAR race in southern Ohio, might appear to Europeans as primordials with their guns, "fundamentalist" religion, and flag-waving chauvinism.
But it is they, and increasingly their kind alone, who prove the bulwarks of the West.
Ultimately what keeps even the pope safe and the continent confident in its vain dialogues with Iranian lunatics is the United States military and the very un-Europeans who fight in it. --"
Weren't they in the 6th century?
Sure, the pre-Socratics were important, and Homer was no slouch, either.
But it's commonplace to refer to the Age of Pericles or the Golden Age of Athens in the Fifth century.
You can do similar things with the Renaissance, moving it earlier, since there aren't always distinct lines. For instance, many historians speak of a Renaissance of the 12th century. But normally when you use the word it means somewhat later, maybe the fifteenth century in Italy.
Not really.
No, but he appears to have a major blind spot about Catholics and the Pope, in this article at least. I hadn't noticed it before.
And, no, I have no problems with NASCAR fans or energetic Americans. That part of it doesn't bother me at all.
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