Posted on 07/15/2018 12:14:04 PM PDT by CondoleezzaProtege
Whittaker Chambers’s Witness was published fifty years ago during the coldest days of the Cold War. It tells the story of a brilliant man driven by despair over the “crisis of our time” into the arms of the Communist Party.
The most famous part of the book is Chambers’s gripping account of the two perjury trials of Alger Hiss in 1949 and 1950, which pitted the cerebral if somewhat disheveled Chambers against the worldly Hiss, a man who had been Chambers’s friend and protégé.
But Chambers believed that his witness was about much more than an espionage case or the sordid realities of Communist subversion.
Chambers wrote that “two points . . . seemed to me more important than the narrative of unhappy events” which preoccupied his readers. These two capital points dealt with “the nature of communism and the struggle against it.” For Chambers, the “crux of this matter is whether God exists. If God exists, a man cannot be a Communist, which begins with the rejection of God. But if God does not exist, it follows that communism, or some suitable variant of it, is right.”
Even if the West turned out to be successful in its secular struggle with totalitarianism, it still risked revealing itself to be a mere frère-ennemi of its great rival.
According to Chambers, communism itself was symptomatic of a much larger crisis—a “total crisis,” as he called it—that was convulsing the entire world. Its defining trait was the West’s loss of confidence in its animating principles.
Properly understood, “external freedom is only an aspect of interior freedom.” For Chambers, “religion and freedom are indivisible. Without freedom the soul dies. Without the soul there is no justification for freedom.”
(Excerpt) Read more at firstprinciplesjournal.com ...
I use that term daily around young people.Some ask me what it means and I tell them.Hopefully it gets through to a few of them.
Yet I have no problem with things like Nicomachean Ethics, or McLuhan's abstractions in Understanding Media.
Weird.
Agree so far.
If God does exist, a man cannot be a communist.
Umm... no, I don't see that. A person could believe in God and still think "Well, Jesus said render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's, so a government that gives individuals no legal rights or private property has nothing to do with my acceptance of God's dominion over my soul, and me following His commandments." There are no Biblical commandments that I know of that a Communist could not follow. Now, a Christian who refuses to state that there is no God is not a good Communist, but a Communist can be a good Christian.
If God does not exist, man will exalt the state to the same level as God.
Oh, they do that anyway. Look at all the European kingdoms who simply declared their King as God's representative on earth and then garnered as much power as they could, all in God's name, of course.
Power hungry men will demand they be revered as God and control everything you are.
Yep. Every European King, ever, and every cult leader too. They just declare themselves His representative and, that little detail taken care of, proceed as they see fit.
Look at every communist state - NORK (Kim dynasty), China (Mao), USSR (Lenin, Stalin, et al).
Look at Mohammed's legacy. Hey, say what you will, he believed in God.
“I slowly came to the opposite conclusion—even if there were no God, it would be much better for humanity to act as though there were.”
Nietzsche also understood that if God is dead then we have to invent a god, a superman. But as we’ve learned supermen are no replacement for God. If one can’t be a believer, perhaps being agnostic is the next best thing, at least in the back of your mind the possibility of God is still there, and you act accordingly.
Yet I have no problem with things like Nicomachean Ethics, or McLuhan's abstractions in Understanding Media.
Weird.
Books on Tape got me through Witness and AS (and dozens of other books that I had only ever started but never finished before). Including the Bible several times. I have Wealth of Nations in my queue for eventual listening.
The only one I can't quite get into is Risk Management. Something about the narration.
“If one can’t be a believer, perhaps being agnostic is the next best thing”
Speaking as a fool who spent decades as an agnostic when he should have known better, I did not find it to be so. It’s far too easy to come down on the side of a question that flatters one and allows one to do what he wants, when one does not feel bound by God’s law.
Historians Will and Ariel Durant wrote, “Does history warrant the conclusion that religion is necessary to morality—that a natural ethic is too weak to withstand the savagery that lurks under civilization and emerges in our dreams, crimes, and wars? ... There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.”
I heard Jerry is taking on Kenny as a protégé!
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