Posted on 06/21/2015 12:46:56 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
[BIG SNIP]
The Quakers’[new penitentiary system using isolation]experiment revealed that the consultation of one’s inner self without outside reference or constraints, with nothing to measure one’s self against, could produce distorted human beings who became certifiably mad. Self-proclaimed gods can turn out to be a Caligula or a Jim Jones.
Just as bad as the fact consulting the inner light can result in the exhibition of mad or corrupt behavior is the fact that the newly minted gods believe themselves to be entitled to demand obeisance from us mere mortals.
We mere everyday humans must bow down and worship the deities among us. We must change human discourse to reflect the belief system of those with unique divine rights. The new linguistic framework is to become a new and universal liturgy spoken and written by all of humanity. The new liturgy must be recited lest the gods are offended. No questions are to be asked,no doubts expressed. Old ways of thinking must be eliminated.
Whereas once the royal “We” was used by royalty in addressing lower classes,who in turn were to use terms like “Your Majesty,”and “You Highness;” now the ordinary human being must inquire as to how the new gods would like to be addressed--What would “He” or “She” like to be addressed as? Please help us to pick the right form of address, the right pronouns,lest we offend and are subject to just punishment.
The uneducated masses must also be taught to honor the gods. The new mythology of the new pantheon must be taught to children,disabusing them of the old fairy tales found in such books as the Bible,which erroneously teaches that God created humans as male and female--and as mortal creatures. New shrines dedicated to the gods must be erected,including the retrofitting of bathrooms to acknowledge their elevated status.
[BIG SNIP]
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
I see the underpinnings of Postmodernism, the philosophy that has been embraced by the Left; you will recognize it in Millennials; criticism is not allowed - you see this attitude on many chat boards.
From Voshell's piece above: .....For extremists who believe in the supremacy of soul-feeling over empirical science, a person’s intuition is seen as an infallible indicator of that person’s identity, springing as it does from one’s inner genius allied to some sort of natal star. Any demands for rational explanation; any requests for verification of claims or any questionings of a human god’s flawlessly immaculate self-conception are not permitted.
Interestingly, below is a comment from someone that criticizes this on the basis of science and not religion:
A verificationist (also an atheist) "Philosopher Daniel Dennett declared, "Postmodernism, the school of 'thought' that proclaimed 'There are no truths, only interpretations' has largely played itself out in absurdity, but it has left behind a generation of academics in the humanities disabled by their distrust of the very idea of truth and their disrespect for evidence, settling for 'conversations' in which nobody is wrong and nothing can be confirmed, only asserted with whatever style you can muster."
“pick up YOUR own cross and follow me”....
Who said that.?.
The conceit of the Church of Green (Creation Care Environmentalism) naturally follows the idea that man controls and dictates the health of “Mother Earth.”
There is only so much mileage atheists can get with the notion of truth.
They muff as soon as they are pressed about who requires it.
It is assigned by God, not self.
www.nationalreview.com/content/generation-vexed
May 2015
“Generation Vexed”
By Kevin D. Williamson
[excerpt]
While similar to the boomers, Millenials do stand out in some key ways
The political distinctiveness of the Millennials is greatly exaggerated. In their incoherence, they are very much like the general run of American voters, who want more spending, lower taxes, and balanced budgets, who oppose endless war in the Middle East except when they don’t, who think that the government should do more to help the poor except for all those bums on welfare, etc. Millennials may be much more enthusiastic about gay marriage than their elders, but on other key issues, such as the legality of abortion, they are largely indistinguishable from them. Like most other Americans, they tend to cite jobs and economic concerns as the issues most important to them, and, like most other Americans, they generally lack even the rudimentary grasp of economics sufficient for understanding the main arguments about those issues. The main difference between them and preceding generations is that the Millennials are young, they are many, and, ironically enough, they lack any sense of genuine introspection even as they remain utterly fascinated by the contents of their own navels.
White Millennials are on track to become politically similar to their parents
Even the racial cleavages in their politics represent a reversion to the trend. About half of white Millennials (99 and 44/100 percent of whom have never seen Jesse Helms’s “Hands” advertisement) believe that discrimination against whites is as significant a national problem as discrimination against blacks, while two-thirds of non-white Millennials reject that view. White Millennials are on track to become politically similar to their parents — who, if they had prevailed, would have sent Bill Clinton back to Arkansas in 1992 or cheered the arrival of President Bob Dole in 1996. But there will be relatively fewer white Millennials than there were white Baby Boomers or white Generation Xers, which might conceivably lead to the emergence of a very robust and lamentable form of white identity politics, especially if the economy continues to give Millennials the back of its hand.
But if oldsters find it difficult to figure out what exactly it is Millennials believe and why, Millennials themselves do not seem to be doing much better on that front. Millennial psephology is terrifying, and kind of hilarious. Nearly half of them say that they prefer socialism to capitalism as an economic system, but barely one in six of them could accurately match the word “socialism” to its definition in the same poll. Most of them want more redistribution of income — until their incomes cross the $40,000-a-year mark, at which point they become remarkably hostile to the idea. A solid majority of them tell Reason Foundation pollsters that they want larger government with more services; a solid majority of them tell the very same pollsters that they want smaller government with fewer services — as The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson points out, the results flip according to whether the word “taxes” appears in the question. Hugh Hewitt had fun swatting around Zach Carter, the Millennial employed as the Huffington Post’s “senior political-economy reporter,” who had very strong views about the Iraq War but was surprised to learn that the Clinton administration had waged war there as well, who did not understand the Bush administration’s rationale for the war, who had apparently never read a single book on the Middle East, and who had no idea who Alger Hiss was, among other things. One wonders who is serving as the junior political-economy reporter over there.
If there is anything distinctive about the Millennials, it is that their trust in government per se is relatively low and declining — a trend that is simultaneously encouraging and discouraging. According to the Harvard survey, Millennials’ trust in President Obama dropped from 44 percent to 32 percent between February 2010 and April 2014. Their trust in Congress went from 25 percent to 14 percent; in the Supreme Court, from 45 to 36 percent; in the federal government as a whole, from 29 to 20 percent; in the media, from 17 to 11 percent. All that during a period in which their faith in Wall Street, of all things, ticked upward slightly. At the same time, their faith in their state and local governments remained low, but steady. Their faith in the military was on a downward trajectory, too, but it still rated higher than any other of the institutions inquired about — a little higher than the president and Congress combined, in fact.
A conservative policy platform based on federalism, localism, devolution of powers, reining in the imperial presidency, and national defense as the first and most important duty of the federal government should, in theory, appeal to many of these young voters; and, indeed, Republican self-identification has climbed slightly among the younger Millennials. In general, though, the GOP and the conservative movement have struggled to make their case to these voters — a problem that cannot be explained away by gay marriage or any other single issue.
Part of that is a matter of style, surely: The youngsters may roll their eyes at Democrats’ emoji-festooned economic infomercials, but a great many Republican offerings read like they should have come off a fax machine — remember fax machines? — from right around the time Goonies was opening in the theaters and Small Wonder was lighting up faux-wood-paneled cathode-ray televisions across the country. The GOP has changed a great deal since the Millennials came into this vale of tears, but in many corners it still has an enduring whiff of the televangelist about it. But there are substance problems, too: Professor James A. Stimson has been tracking the “policy mood” of Americans over the decades, and he identified three high-water marks for conservatism: The first immediately preceded the election of Dwight Eisenhower in 1952; the second announced the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980; the third coincided with the ascendance of Barack Obama to the national executive. One of these things is not like the others, and the remarkable fact is that the Republican party is struggling — not only with Millennials but with the electorate as a whole — at a moment when the country is most open to conservative arguments. It is probably not merely coincidental that this is happening while the GOP endures an ongoing mutiny on the right: The worst legacy of the Bush-Hastert years is that many conservatives, and many open to conservative reforms, do not trust Republicans to do the things that Republicans historically have promised to do, such as seeing to national security with intelligence and competence, disciplining budgets if not balancing them, and occasionally kicking dysfunctional bureaucracies in the pants.
As with women and minority voters, conservatives probably are better off not attempting to court Millennials as Millennials but instead addressing them as members of families, taxpayers, citizens, business owners; as people failed by the higher-education system and saddled with student loans; as people who see jihadist beheading videos on the Internet and intuit that something forceful should be done about the tendency they represent.
Conservatism is a hard sell at the best of times, and the agenda of self-reliance, work, family, discipline, and tradition has seldom set young people’s minds ablaze. In a survey conducted by Pew and Elon University, scholars studying Millennials’ Internet-oriented communication habits “predicted this generation will exhibit a thirst for instant gratification and quick fixes, a loss of patience, and a lack of deep-thinking ability due to what one referred to as ‘fast-twitch wiring,’” according to Pew’s report. Millennial politics, like Millennial humor, largely consists of a hermetically sealed, self-referential universe, something like T. S. Eliot’s “penny world,” in which the rules of discourse and intellectual conformity are enforced with a self-righteous ruthlessness beyond anything to be found among the relatively liberal Victorians. What is a John Oliver clip or a Jon Stewart rant if not the moving-picture version of an emoji, a self-contained and angstrom-deep piece of communication aimed at the paleomammalian brain rather than at the neocortex? As a consequence of this, Millennial voters tend to find it difficult to critically evaluate received wisdom, and that’s a real problem for conservatives: Once it was established in the pop-culture mind, for example, that the financial crisis was a result of “unregulated capitalism” — originating in finance, the most heavily regulated industry short of pharmaceuticals and nuclear power — ten thousand essays on regulatory capture and the misdeeds of federal banking regulators could have little or no effect. Andrew Breitbart’s insistence that “culture is upstream from politics” is especially apt in the Millennials’ case.
Conservatives will never out-snark, out-mock, or out-tweet the popular culture that embraced Barack Obama as a semi-religious icon. But Millennials are right at the beginning of what promises to be an unpleasant, extended encounter with the facts of life, and it may be that they will soon figure out that there is more to understanding those facts than snark and emojis. Mocking them would be easy, while persuading them will prove difficult and frustrating, because conservatism, unromantic disposition that it is, is in the end an exercise in calculating a balance of human imperfections. The Millennials do not understand that — not quite yet.
This whole thing, the original article and this ‘vexed’ thing, looks, feels, and smells of an apologist’s thesis why the resr of America needs ‘to understand the misguided souls’, when it is THEY that are mucking up the nation for the rest of us.
Remember, THEY are of the ‘Occupy ‘x’ mindset.
Remember the anti-Vietnam crowd wasn't all of us either. But those anti-Vietnam/anti-Americans are in the WH now.
The author's point (what I took from it) is that Millennials, who are very convinced that they're right (but really aren't so sure and starting to "believe with their lying eyes"), can be turned away from where the Left has directed them.
Dylann Roof reportedly wanted a race war. How many Americans sympathize?
That was the thesis of HG Well’s “Invisible Man” as well. Without the ability to see the consequences of one’s choices, it becomes easy to slip into a relativist morass.
I clicked on the link and found that it has a lot to say about “anti-minority” sentiment but NOTHING to say about the reverse as if anti-majority sentiment did not exist.
Just as bad as the fact consulting the inner light can result in the exhibition of mad or corrupt behavior is the fact that the newly minted gods believe themselves to be entitled to demand obeisance from us mere mortals. - http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/06/the_gods_among_us.html
Both presuming yourself to be enlightened without any submission to Scripture, or to be uniquely protected from error, and requiring implicit obedience is to presume Divinity and is contrary to Scripture. And when souls do so then both the bodies and souls of men are in danger.
When the proud and arrogant (exemplified by Obama & Hillary) disregard the Bible, they have no restraints on their behavior. There is no authority that can say that they are wrong. They are free to “do what is right in their own eyes.” Things depend on what the definition of “is” is. Any criticism of them is just another person’s opinion, and since they are probably not as smart or enlightened, they can be disregarded.
Without the Bible, there is no objective truth and so once God and the Bible are “dead”, it is simply a matter of who among us should establish what should be done. We then enter the world of Nietzsche where only “the will to power” determines who are the ones who are destined to rule and the ends justify the means. The arrogant, who see themselves as our superiors, have the right to be dictators and censor any opposition, at any cost. There are no more inalienable rights or “rule of Law”. After all, they are the enlightened ones among us. That is the mindset of Hillary and Obama, and the many other Leftists who are like them.
Interesting quote. Would you care to expand on this? Genuininely interested.
Good point, and of course the current trend is to insulate people, wherever possible, from the negative consequences of their own actions. Which in turn, of course, means that people continue to make very bad choices.
True except that the vacuum left by the rejection of the Bible is filled by the specious ethos of said rulers. Mao had his little Red Book, and Communism has its laws, though the elite are their gods, proxy servants for the devil who seeks homage. When masses are made dependant upon the leaders, then this is realized.
So THIS explains ME!
: )
This concept came from the Renaissance when people switched their thinking from man was basically corrupt to man was basically good. A consequent of this that we see being acted out in society is there are no moral laws. There is no sin-so some believe. It is sad to think that much of our post-Renaissance theology is built around this concept. The Quakers were not alone.
Yes, the notion of evil is conveniently tossed aside, despite the world around us telling us the opposite.
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