Posted on 02/23/2016 6:37:51 AM PST by don-o
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To understand these words "civilization" and "culture," the best book to read is T. S. Eliot's slim volume Notes Towards a Definition of Culture (1948). Once upon a time I commended that book to President Richard Nixon, in a private discussion of modern disorders, as the one book which he ought to read for guidance in his high office. Man is the only creature possessing culture, as distinguished from instinct; and if culture is effaced, so is the distinction between man and the brutes that perish. "Art is man's nature," in Edmund Burke's phrase; and if the human arts, or culture, cease to be, then human nature ceases to be.
From what source did humankind's many cultures arise? Why, from cults. A cult is a joining together for worship-that is, the attempt of people to commune with a transcendent power. It is from association in the cult, the body of worshippers, that human community grows. This basic truth has been expounded in recent decades by such eminent historians as Christopher Dawson, Eric Voegelin, and Arnold Toynbee.
Once people are joined in a cult, cooperation in many other things becomes possible. Common defense, irrigation, systematic agriculture, architecture, the visual arts, music, the more intricate crafts, economic production and distribution, courts and government-all these aspects of a culture arise gradually from the cult, the religious tie.
Out of little knots of worshippers, in Egypt, the Fertile Crescent, India, or China, there grew up simple cultures, for those joined by religion can dwell together and work together in relative peace. Presently such simple cultures may develop into intricate cultures, and those intricate cultures into great civilizations. American civilization of our era is rooted, strange though the fact may seem to us, in tiny knots of worshippers in Palestine, Greece, and Italy, thousands of years ago. The enormous material achievements of our civilization have resulted, if remotely, from the spiritual insights of prophets and seers.
But suppose that the cult withers, with the elapse of centuries. What then of the culture that is rooted in the cult? What then of the civilization which is the culture's grand manifestation?
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Sobering voices tell us nowadays that the civilization in which we participate is not long for this world. Many countries have fallen under the domination of squalid oligarchs; other lands are reduced to anarchy. “Cultural revolution,” rejecting our patrimony of learning and manners, has done nearly as much mischief in the West as in the East, if less violently. Religious belief is attenuated at best, for many-or else converted, after being secularized, into an instrument for social transformation. Books give way to television and videos; universities, intellectually democratized, are sunk to the condition of centers for job-certification. An increasing proportion of the population, in America especially, is dehumanized by addiction to narcotics and insane sexuality.
These afflictions are only some of the symptoms of social and personal disintegration. One has but to look at our half-ruined American cities, with their ghastly rates of murder and rape, to perceive that we moderns lack the moral imagination and the right reason required to maintain tolerable community. Writers in learned quarterlies or in daily syndicated columns use the terms “post-Christian era” or “post-modern epoch” to imply that we are breaking altogether with our cultural past, and are entering upon some new age of a bewildering character.
Well, to completely instal one “cult”, the sitting “cult” must be displaced.
Western civilization’s “cult” is perilously close to being completely displace; by the competing cults of government(communism), islam(animalistic savagery).
I would tend to agree except in the case of islime. Far from promoting cooperation and advancement, it has done little more than set sub-cults at each others' throats, inhibited progress and destroyed what little has been made, and established "communities" of tyranny and oppression, united only by the fear of nonconformance. And that applies both internally -- within islime itself -- and externally.
Sure, the same could be said about Christianity during the various religious wars that punctuated the Reformation and its aftermath (and still marks the uneasy truce in Northern Ireland). But Christianity survived those upheavals and despite them, propagated its faith around the globe, bringing with it a prosperity and level of civilization unmatched since the Roman Empire.
Islime leaves nothing in its wake but terror, chaos, and death.
bookmark
Christianity and the worship of God is about love. Remove love and you will remove the key ingredient of a civilized society that results in a chaotic world where compassion is foreign and people are treated as “units” to be used (taxed to infinity) by their overlords. Just the way they’d like it.
As far as Northern Ireland goes, the IRA are communists and always about setting up a “socialist republic” over the entire island. That is why they had zero support in the Republic of Ireland for decades as far as domestic politics (but tacit aid to them for the “cause” of a “united Ireland”); not so much resistance to their “political wing” (Sinn Fein) now that the Republic has become so immoral.
Imposable.... It wouldn't be civilized..!!
Imagine, if you will, a civilization ran completely by the likes of Nancy Pelosi, Michel Moore and Harry Reed... It would be a whole Nation that looked like and functioned like....Detroit...or Boston... If the Fed wasn't there to support and take care of those folk....well sooner or later it would fall into complete chaos...
Gee....kind of like the way we're headed now....
MHO....
"We must hate. Hatred is the basis of communism."The communists were all about replacing love with its extreme opposite.
— Lenin
"We hate Christianity and Christians. ... They teach love of one's neighbor and mercy, which is against our principles. Christian love is an obstacle to the development of the revolution ... What we want is hatred; we must know how to hate; only then shall we conquer the universe."
— Anatoly Lunacharsky, first USSR education commissar
Good quotes that make my point. Thanks...: )
That “slim volume” is on Kindle, btw.
The end of civilization.
Bookmark.
Your post 9 is a Must-Read.
That "slim volume" is on Kindle, btw.
Ping to the Kindle owner in the house.
"Hatred fosters vigilance and an uncompromising attitude toward the enemy, and leads to the destruction of everything that prevents Soviet peoples from building a happy life. The teaching of hatred for the enemies of the toilers enriches the conception of Socialist humanism, by distinguishing it from sugary and hypocritical 'philanthropy'."They are obsessed with the destruction of Christianity and even Judaism.
— Small Soviet Encyclopedia (Moscow, 1947, vol. XI, p. 1045).
"It is impossible to conquer an enemy without having learned to hate him with all the might of one's soul."
— Stalin
"My object in life is to dethrone God and to destroy capitalism."
— Marx
Not possible.
Good government not only probably requires divine intervention, but is probably impossible without it...
"Children should be taught to hate their parents if they are not communists."If anything is more soul-destroying than doing that, I do not know what is.
Shows that liberals have identical mindset and modality as communists, and some admit to beig commies.
This is the actual 'root' of the lie which gave way to Original Sin. "To be as God", in its most distilled essence is to be able to *govern* without error, or bias. This is totally beyond our capabilities, and has been so ever since error and bias were interjected into the original 'programming', back in Gan Eden.
In short, we cannot govern ourselves properly, and far too often are absolutely incapable of even seeing, let alone understanding the *why* of it...
the infowarrior
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