Posted on 02/16/2004 7:22:27 AM PST by rface
Edited on 04/13/2004 2:11:38 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
MEL GIBSON'S soon-to-be-released film "The Passion of the Christ" -- hailed by some as a powerful account of the last hours of Jesus' life, decried by others as an inflammatory screed with anti-Semitic overtones -- has become a lightning rod in the culture wars. The film's conservative defenders have charged that the criticism is driven by liberal fears of religion's growing influence on society. The critics charge that conservatives are using the issue to whip up a hysteria about alleged persecution of religion. Recently, the debate shifted to another inflammatory issue: Holocaust denial and comparisons between the Holocaust and other atrocities.
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
Practices are not doctrine. A doctrine is a tenet of faith, not a liturgical rite, a canonical court, or a rule of worship (e.g. fasting before reception of Holy Communion).
The Inquisition certainly was not a doctrine. It was an an investigation into heretical practices and imposed punishments upon perpetrators of heresy. Recent scholarly research (and I will find it for you, if you wish, since I cannot recall the author or title at this moment) discovered that the Inquisition's reputation as the agent of thousands of murders is patently and provably untrue. That some injustices were perpetrated, yes, that is probable. But the number of tortures and executions was probably less than 100 persons. In any case, the Inquisition is not a doctrine.
That there is only one, apostolic, catholic church has been a church doctrine since the earliest days of the church, as was the belief that outside the church there is no salvation. You can find this doctrine in Counciliar documents from the fourth century, for example. The Nicene Creed is from that era, and the idea of only one church is quite clearly present in it.
Purgatory is found in the canon of scripture that was defined by the church in the late fourth century. Protestant scriptural revisionists removed those books from their version of the scriptural canon in the 1500s because they inconveniently supported the doctrine Protestants did not want to believe.
Oral Tradition was the repository of sacred scripture until it was collected into the Bible as defined by the Council of Chalcedon (a Catholic council, since at that time no other church existed!). Since the Holy Spirit protects the oral, teaching Tradition of the Church, from which flowed the Holy Scriptures, Tradition (with a capital "T") enjoys the same inerrancy as Scripture. There are stringent qualifications for doctrines that reside in Tradition that make them infallible.
The Immaculate Conception of Mary is an ancient belief, found in early Church fathers' writings. Mary was always honored as the Ark of the New Testament, who carried the Son of God in her womb. She was the source of Jesus' human genes, his human component. To give the Son of God the perfect Ark, God preserved Mary from the stain of original sin, something the Almighty could easily do. Mary gained special grace from God to preserve her sinlessness throughout her life. Again, this doctrine was not an innovation: it was formalized as a dogma of the Faith because innovators of belief wanted to change what the Church had always believed and taught.
Which brings us to infallibility. I cited in my first response to you the fathers of the Council of Chalcedon (late 400s), who adopted the theology of Leo I with the acclamation "Peter has spoken through Leo!" This acclamation of the bishops at the council is but one example of bishops recognizing the special teaching authority and protections bestowed upon Peter and his successors by Jesus. Jesus conferred upon Peter the Keys of the Kingdom: "What you bind on earth will be bound in heaven; what you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven", and in so doing Jesus ensured an ultimate authority in His church. Again, this was not a novelty; it was an ancient belief, called into question by innovators, and the Church had to clarify and codify what it had always taught.
The Assumption of Mary is also not a new belief. Mary's purity and God-graced sinlessness preserved her from bodily corruption, and she was assumed into heaven by God, as an honor for the mother of God. In other words, all these things did not just "pop up" a thousand or more years after Christ's death. They were all present in some form or another since the beginning.
I hope this helps.
Regards
Peace.
Me: In this article, Young inferred that Gibson had discounted the severity of the offense of Nazi Germany by daring to refer to the horrors of communist Russia in the same breath.
You: No, actually, she didn't.
Me: Yes, actually, she did. Her convoluted logic first ignores Gibson’s statement, “Yes, of course”, and then cites academic source(s) to support her contention that Gibson somehow colludes implicitly with “Holocaust deniers”. She cites George Mason law professor David Bernstein, for example, who asserts that “Holocaust ‘revisionists’ typically do not deny that Jews were killed; they simply minimize the killing, portraying it as another part of the overall death toll of World War II, rather than the systemic extermination campaign that it was.”
I think my greatest problem with Young’s treatise is that she comes down on both sides of the issue of whether or not communist socialism was a disaster for humanity. She cites a couple of works, recites critical reviews, says critics of the Western left feel frustrated, but does not clearly state her own opinion. What she succeeds in doing is to say that there is a double standard to which the left adheres, and then she adopts the very standard she does but does not condemn, to condemn Gibson. If she believes that Stalin’s deliberate and calculated starvation of ten million Ukrainian peasants is not as horrific as the Holocaust, then her writing skills need to be improved, for she fails to convey that sentiment adequately. She does, however, skillfully craft the sense that there is a double standard but that’s OK, too; therefore, Gibson is guilty of not stating clearly enough that he believes that the Holocaust happened. That’s intellectually dishonest.
You: She pointed out that by giving the same sort of answer that Holocaust deniers use to discount the severity of the Holocaust, Gibson managed to raise more concerns about what his beliefs might be instead of soothing concerns, right when he had been given an engraved invitation to do so.
Me: Actually, she quoted David Bernstein who said, “Gibson is skirting pretty close” to minimization of the Holocaust. Gibson did not give “the same sort of answer” Holocaust deniers use.
Me: My point was that she projected her own sentiments upon Gibson's, and in so doing invalidated her assertion.
You: On what grounds do you claim to know "her own sentiments"?
Me: I concluded she suffered sentimental projection because she completely failed logically to prove her assertion, the charge that Gibson’s persecution by the left is justified and that he suffers “moral obtuseness.”
Me: She implicitly discounts the severity of the offenses of communists, who inflicted far more evil upon the world and its citizens, than did Hitler,
You: Okay, I'll bite -- exactly where do you think she did this?
She implied positive sentiments for Thurston’s 1996 book, ‘Life and Terror in Stalin’s Russia,’ “…which argued that bad things happened, but there was no systematic deliberate terror…and received blurbs from respected scholars…” , and then implied that a work with a tone not friendly to communist socialism was “widely criticized as sensationalist and biased.” The net effect of this paragraph, again, skillfully implies that a history that minimized communist socialism’s most horrific years was received favorably by critics, but one assailing the system for its bloodthirsty murders was not. She sets the stage for her conclusion that some genocides are not as bad as others and must be considered separately, the rationale for condemning Gibson’s mention of the Holocaust in the same sentence with other 20th century horrors.
You: On the contrary, she makes a point of pointing out the hypocrisy of people who *do* "discount the severity of the offenses of communists. Consider again the following passage from her essay:
You (quoting Young): “The double standard applied to Nazi and communist crimes has long been a sore point among critics of the Western left, and it's a legitimate charge -- made, among others, by British writer Martin Amis in the 2002 book about Stalin's reign of terror, "Koba the Dread."
(Quote continues): “Gulag revisionism is not stigmatized the way Holocaust revisionism is. Historian Robert Thurston's 1996 book, "Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia," which argued that bad things happened but there was no systematic deliberate terror, was published by Yale University Press and received blurbs from respected scholars hailing it as "thought-provoking" and "original." Meanwhile, "The Black Book of Communism," a 1999 book documenting communism's bloody record, was widely criticized as sensationalist and biased. “
(Quote continues): “ So yes, there is a double standard because communism is seen as having "progressive" goals. And yes, the Soviet regime engaged in mass murder on a Nazi-like scale.”
You: This is a clear statement *condemning* a double standard, and *explicitly* stating that "the Soviet regime engaged in mass murder on a Nazi-like scale".
Me: You forgot to append the paragraph’s closing line: “But that hardly justifies Gibson’s comments.” Why not? She apparently doesn’t think the double standard applies in this case, for some reason. The Holocaust and communist socialism’s horrors somehow combined in consideration are less horrifying than when mentioned separately. Why doesn't the double standard apply here?
You: So again I ask, how do you manage to arrive at the conclusion that "her own sentiments" are somehow to "implicitly discount the severity of the offenses of communists"?
Me: It must be a sentiment, a political belief, or a component of compelling scientific dialectic materialism, since the conclusion is not drawn logically from her presentation.
Me: in order to paint Gibson with foul innuendo that cannot be sustained with fact.
You: Which "foul innuendo" would that be -- that he blew his chance to clear things up and managed to make it worse? Seems pretty unarguable to me.
Me: Young convicts Gibson with “moral obtuseness”. He might better be described as engaging in moral inclusion since he is willing to condemn any genocide equally, but Young is not. Perhaps it is Young who engages in moral obtuseness?
Me: I did not insult her: I asserted that, based upon the point of view of her article, one intimating much proving little, she must have an agenda to advance that she cannot sustain with facts.
You: Maybe you don't consider it an insult to falsely accuse someone of excusing mass murder when communists do it, but *I* would sure be insulted if you made such a false claim about me -- and I suspect you would to were you the subject of such a charge.
In fact, you present it *as* a condemnation of her, so why do you now say that it would be no insult?
Me: I do not think I falsely accused her of excusing mass murder. I did not say I thought she excused mass murder; I said she discounted it because one mass murder was conducted by communist socialism; the other was conducted by National Socialism. Tainting Gibson with the Nazi brush, as she attempted to do with her article, is intellectually dishonest. That is what I condemned.
Me: I concluded that she wished to suppress viewing of the movie.
You: Based on...? This "conclusion" seems to have arrived out of the blue, even taking into account your misreading of her comments about the Soviet mass murders.
Me: What reason could she have to implicitly condemn Gibson as a cryptofascist, except to try to reduce the impact of Gibson’s movie?
Me: My pivotal conclusion, one derived from the apparent intellectual dishonesty displayed in crafting the article,
You: Would you care to revise that assessment after taking another look at what she *actually* wrote about the Soviet mass murders?
Me: That won’t be necessary, for obvious reasons.
Me: was that she fears piety and Christian religious sentiment, or believe them to be impossible or dishonest.
You: Yet another conclusion which appears to have been pulled out of a hat, instead of built upon a logical progression founded upon facts in evidence. Would you care to spell out the missing steps?
Me: A few critics, church members, politicians, and theologians have seen and written about the movie. The universal sentiment is that the film is irresistibly moving religiously. Since I had concluded that her article is an attempt to reduce ticket sales of the movie by painting Gibson as anti-Semitic, I concluded that she must fear religious sentiment since that is the film’s predominant effect upon those who see it.
Me: She implicitly doubts Gibson's piety by implying him to be insincere (the "yes, but" accusation).
You: No, she doubts Gibson's PR-savvy when he sticks his foot that far into his own mouth when he should have been staying on topic (topic: Attitudes towards Jews, not a global review of warfare over the past century.)
Me: “The Passion” is about sin and God’s loving redemption. Not just about the Jews, or warfare. Young spins much from a fragment of Noonan’s piece, and it may be Young who is off-topic here, not Gibson.
Me: In that, I may have erred.
You: I suggest that you have.
Me: And perhaps not.
Me: On the other hand, Young may have erred in authoring an article charged with innuendo and potentially, with intellectual dishonesty.
You: Or you may have misread it.
Me: And perhaps not.
Me: I suggest that she might be more careful in her condemnations, if she wishes to avoid criticism, in the future. I do not owe her an apology.
You: Not even for accusing her of excusing murders by communists, when she explicitly condemned the double standard by which some on the left do so?
Me: Again, I did not accuse her of excusing genocide, but of discounting the seriousness when conducted as an aid to attaining the coals of communist socialism. To do so she uses the double standard she condemns, saying one exists but never-mind-it-anyway-Gibson-was-still-wrong-to-mention-other-evil-in-the-same-breath-since-one-is-more-wrong-than-the-other. One cannot condemn a hypocritical practice and then employ it as the rationale for a conclusion. It contains implicitly what it does not clearly state, and I am guilty of nothing when explicating what Young reveals implicitly in her sentences.
Me: That my comments were taken out of context - and called simple-minded as a result of that - might suggest that I am owed one.
You: I think I'll stand by that assessment unless you can salvage your argument.
Me: That’s OK. I believe my argument needed no salvaging to begin with, and I also believe you will never accept that. I can live without an apology.
Me: By the by, I am still proud to be a Freeper, more than ever.
You: I'm glad to hear that, as am I most of the time.
Me: Regards.
You: And to you.
Me: Ditto.
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