Posted on 05/04/2017 5:19:12 AM PDT by Gamecock
Charles Colson speaks of a modern “return to the Dark Ages.” When I think of the original Dark Ages, I think of a period when culture was in decline and the progress of knowledge was static.
But today we read of the problem of the explosion of knowledge. It is a time when information and communications are big business. We hear the cry from the universities that knowledge in every field of investigation is increasing so rapidly that no one can assimilate it, even in the most narrow of specialties. The age of the “expert” is over. The word expert must now be defined in relative terms.
If knowledge is light and the light is exploding in magnitude, how can we speak of a new Dark Ages? The darkness is in the heart. It is a darkness produced by a shroud covering the face of God.
Thirty years ago, I read a book written by the Jewish philosopher and theologian Martin Buber. Buber’s book had an ominous title: The Eclipse of God. That is the eclipse of our age. A shadow has passed over the glory of God. We are a people who will not have God in our thinking. We have returned to Plato’s cave, in which we prefer the dancing shadows on the wall of ungrounded opinion over the light of truth.
Coram Deo
Ask God to dispel the darkness in your own mind, soul, and spirit through His marvelous light.
Passages for Further Study
Hosea 4:1 Hear the word of the Lord, O children of Israel, for the Lord has a controversy with the inhabitants of the land. There is no faithfulness or steadfast love, and no knowledge of God in the land;
Luke 11:52 Woe to you lawyers! For you have taken away the key of knowledge. You did not enter yourselves, and you hindered those who were entering.”
Habakkuk 2:14 For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.
Ping
Funny, the best definition I have ever seen of “expert” involved “from out of town” and “with a briefcase” and that is decades old.
Maybe, here is a better one, “someone who knows just enough about a subject to think he knows everything...”
It is a darkness of the spirit, a darkness I have experienced up close and personal, and have had to get away from, when personally witnessing a number of mass-protests on the streets of Manhattan (I could feel it coming out of the crowd and trying to cover me too - SOOO MUCH HATE) It is a darkness that fills the anti-free speech movement that is trying to silence voices all across academia. It is the darkness that infects the media as it attempts to ridicule and marginalize anything Conservative in society, to cover the face of G-d and Liberty with fealty to a giant G-d of secular government that all things (to them) are better left to.
It is a darkness I see growing in the structure of the Roman Catholic church today, as it collectively, continues to believe falsely that any pope can ever be infallible, and by that false belief has allowed themselves to again (not the first time) be led by a false leader, a leader who is more a Marxist secular humanist than a Catholic or a Christian.
Yes, I can see a dark age is trying to take hold. Will it?
We don’t know. We must act not knowing what G-d knows, and work against such an age as much as we can. It will not be for us to say for sure if we will succeed, this time, against it or not. But to lay down and not fight against it would itself be betrayal. Only G-d knows when we have done all we can do.
So-called "progressives" of both Parties in recent times, portray themselves as the "intellectual" elite, although they may be totally bereft of any real knowledge or understanding of the great ideas which were the seedbed of Ameria's successful 200-year experiment in liberty.
Today's so-called "progressives," with all of their domination of academia and Far Left politics, seem to fit into a category described in an essay by T.S. Eliot on Virgil:
"In our time, when men seem more than ever to confuse wisdom with knowledge and knowledge with information and to try to solve the problems of life in terms of engineering, there is coming into existence a new kind of provincialism which perhaps deserves a new name. It is a provincialism not of space but of time--one for which history is merely a chronicle of human devices which have served their turn and have been scrapped, one for which the world is the property solely of the living, a property in which the dead hold no share."(Bold added for emphasis)
Without intellectual anchoring in the enduring ideas which provided the philosophical foundation of America's Declaration of Independence and Constitution, their vain imaginations of superiority only expose their limited world view.
Yet, the America which rose from obscurity to greatness, from crude hoes and axes to putting a man on the moon, and from oppression by King George to a symbol of liberty and light for millions all over the world--that America provides shelter for them, even as they attempt to "change" her into something unimagined by the Founders, and ungrounded in Constitutional principles.
If they are allowed to succeed in their own little provincial experiment, their posterity never will know the "blessings of Liberty" proclaimed by the Preamble to America's Constitution.
Now might be a good time for conservatives to read Dr. Russell Kirk's "The Conservative Mind, which can be read online, by the way.
In Kirk's last chapter he reviews the works of poets and writers, quoting lines which now seem to bear a striking resemblance to the players on stage in American politics today.
For instance, in Robert Frost's "A Case for Jefferson," Frost writes of the character Harrison:
"Harrison loves my country too
But wants it all made over new.
. . . .
He dotes on Saturday pork and beans.
But his mind is hardly out of his teens.
With him the love of country means
Blowing it all to smithereens
And having it made over new."
Yes, the pseudointellectuals who made up the last Administration, the media, and much of Congress fancy themselves "intellectuals."
By their words and actions, however, they display that provinciality Dr. Kirk recalls as having been described by T. S. Eliot (see above) as being one of time and place, having no intellectual grounding in ideas older than their own little experience in dabbling and discussing Mao, Marx, and other theoreticians.
America's written Constitution deserves protectors whose minds are out of their "teens" in terms of their understanding of civilization's long struggle for individual liberty.
It certainly deserves protectors who do not consider it a "flawed" document because that Constitution does not permit the government it structures to run rough shod over the rights of its "only KEEPERS, the People" (Justice Story).
Blasting it "all to smithereens" seems to be the goal of the Far Left and its power-hungry leaders.
Those who have found ways to bypass the Constitution's limits on their power rely on what they believe to be the ignorance of the American people when they assert extra-Constitutional powers. They have been outwitted, however, by an increasingly knowledgeable citizenry who are using the miracles of technology to study for themselves ancient and modern writings on the ideas of liberty versus those of tyranny. As Jefferson wisely observed:
"History, by apprising the people of the past, will enable them to judge of the future; it will avail them of the experience of other times and other nations; it will qualify them as judges of the actions and designs of men; it will enable them to know ambition under every disguise it may assume; and knowing it, to defeat its views."
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