Posted on 09/01/2013 5:46:15 AM PDT by Popman
Christianity’s big problem is that God is a lot more subtle than had been taught for the previous 1700 years. Science explains most of what happens in this world, not God, at least at the most immediate level. Christianity was caught off guard by the sheer power of modern scientific explanation. It’s this crisis, with the resulting doubt in God, that has fueled the world-historical wave of atheistic socialism. Simple people were overwhelmed and left defenseless because their intellectual superiors had yet to come up with a reply to this new onslaught. It was like a movie where the bad guys roll out their super weapon and the good guys are momentarily routed. In our case momentarily means a few hundred years while Christianity searches itself and refines itself and climbs to an understanding that is higher than the wave that is rolling against it.
Christians number 2 billion and growing worldwide
THAT'S the question for American Conservatives.
Exactly. What the author is emphasizing is that when you remove God from the equation (and by God, I mean the Judeo-Christian God), then whether your philosophy is Capitalist based or Communist based, an emphasis on a godless philosophy will ultimately lead a Nation to a social dystopia. In other words without reference and deference to the God who gave us our Natural Liberty, the end result will be that we will lose whatever Liberty God has granted us.
Certainly a Nation can tolerate Atheists, but when a Nation turns its back on God, when the Nation itself becomes a reflection of godlessness, then ultimately whatever gifts God has bestowed upon that Nation will dry up.
Ayn Rand’s and Saul Alynsky’s godless philosophies ultimately both lead to the same destination.
The disagreement between conservatives and libertarians is a second order thing. They agree about individual freedom and limited government. They have different abstract reasoning that gets them there but they agree at the concrete level. The disagreement between liberals and conservatives is different, because it exists at the concrete level. I’m always amazed at how conservatives want to throw libertarians, who agree with them where the rubber meets the road, under the bus with liberals who disagree with them from top to bottom.
Hence: Ignorance is bliss.
Or as I would put it: Socialism is a fools paradise.
Actually, science texts I have back to 1848 pay homage to The Creator, whose works they sought to understand. It is only later that scientific hubris decides that The Almighty isn't necessary because we're so smart. Darwin was a step along the way, but just one.
Not in America. America is moving towards becoming a secular country. After that we will become an atheistic country. After that we will cease to exist.
Not in America. America is moving towards becoming a secular country. After that we will become an atheistic country. After that we will cease to exist.
Understanding the Almighty is critical, but you have to understand him correctly. He is bigger than science. Let science have the material world and let God have the big stuff.
Thanks for posting.
The only people I know thatAnyone hypes themselves as readers of The Economist are elitist liberal snobs, hipsters, and the "I'm far too socially connected to be part of the OWS crowd, but I hear they do great things" set. I tend to think of the publication as ahighlights for Kids... for grown up trustfund douchebags.
As a christian.... I discovered Rand in the late 1980...
I found her work and philosophy very appealing.....also too appealing..
But in the end my christain faith and belief system did not mix well with an objectivist belief system....that does not mean I disavowed portions of it and are a much more rounded person philosophically because of her writings...
I would recomend her writing to any christain.....
To put it somewhat more succinctly:
Culture is more important than politics, because politics grows out of culture.
We have lost the cultural war, so we are inevitably paying the price for it, the loss of the political contest.
The only way in the long run to alter this equation is to counter-attack and retake the culture.
Unfortunately, I don’t really have any idea how to do it.
To me, given the battle we fight to restore our nation as a free republic, I think that religious conservatives and Ayn Rand Objectivists need to remember that while they disagree intellectually and philosophically, their political interests are virtually identical.
Theodore Dalrymple on The Dystopian Imagination.
Key passages:
“This passage reminds me of the advertising slogan of a credit card launched in Britain about 30 years ago: it “takes the waiting out of wanting.” The advertisement showed no recognition that immediate gratification usually presents a bill, with extortionate interest.
Huxley surmised that life lived as the satisfaction of one desire after another would result in shallow and egotistical people. True, he had a poor opinion of mankind to start with: “About 99.5% of the entire population of the planet are as stupid,” he once wrote, “as the great masses of the English.” But after gratifying their desires instantly throughout their lives, people would cease to carry the divine spark that distinguished man from the rest of creation. They would seek entertainment unto death: at Brave New World’s Park Lane Hospital for the Dying, “at the foot of every bed, confronting its moribund occupant, was a television box.” I think of my own hospital, where the dying usually depart this world to the sight and sound of driveling television soap operas.
Those who live lives of immediate gratification, Huxley thought, would not be able to bear solitude of any kind. As Mustapha Mond explains, “people are never alone now. We make them hate solitude; and we arrange their lives so that it’s almost impossible for them to ever have it.” A life devoted to instant gratification produces permanent infantilization: “at sixty-four . . . tastes are what they were at seventeen.” In our society, the telescoping of the generations is already happening: the knowledge, tastes, and social accomplishments of 13-year-olds are often the same as those of 28-year-olds. Adolescents are precociously adult; adults are permanently adolescent.”
Re: “It takes the waiting out of wanting.” A perfect description of Obama, symbolic of the credit card immediate gratification mentality - the quintessential man of the times for the times - a man who never had a productive job in his entire life, cossetted and feted by a virtual army of sickening sycophants. The guy who along with his wife amassed $120,000 debt in student loans and took over twenty years to pay it back
( http://dailycaller.com/2013/08/27/its-personal-obamas-carried-120000-student-loan-debt-for-decades/ ). You’d think that two people with Harvard Law degrees could have had productive jobs and paid off that debt earlier.
http://www.city-journal.org/html/11_4_oh_to_be.html
I would say that historically the typical way to reverse entrenched institutionalized culture is to burn it down and start over.
When a person or a society subscribes wholly and completely to either a purely free market or a rigid command economy, the preoccupation is with how to live, never addressing the purpose of that life.
So you’re saying there has to be certain amount of government control over the markets for life to have meaning?
Thanks so much for the Dalrymple link. How incredibly profound!
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