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To: Sir Francis Dashwood
Hobbes's anti-Papism is of the wrong sort, as evidently is yours since you demand "evidence" from the Bible (in bold, not less). To the Orthodox Christian, protestant anti-Papism is not really anti-papal: it is only anti-Pope-of-Rome. It makes every person who fancies himself a Christian and has a copy of the Scriptures into his own infallible Pope: the moment he is convinced he has Scripture to back an opinion on faith or morals, hey presto! It is TRUE and no one can argue with him. Both papism and protestantism make the mistake of thinking that Christianity is a religion based on authority. While authority has a place in maintaining good order in the Church and society, Christianity, is not a religion based on authority, but a life based on the experience of God as He as revealed Himself in His Incarnation and the Gift of the Holy Spirit. The Scriptures are not axioms we reason from, but he record of His preparation for that self-revalation (in the Old Testament) and the experience of the generation which witnessed and participated in it (the New Testament). The attempt to reduce the Faith to an ideology based on a text always leads to heresy, most patricularly and rapidly when done outside of the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church (since the 11th century called the Orthodox Church, thanks to the loud misappropriation of the word "catholic" by the Roman Papacy), which is the Mystical Body of Christ.

It is years since I read The Leviathan, so I will not try to argue with you about what is usually called social contract theory (even if the term itself came from Rousseau, the late corrupter of the idea). Hobbes justified absolute monarchy, as I recall, as natural and necessary. Locke using the same view of society arising by agreements to escape from what Hobbes called "the war of all against all" justified liberty. As I said, the American Founding debunks Hobbes's reasoning that an absolute monarch is a necessity to escape from the state of nature, and giving extensive contrasts between Hobbes who started the idea and Rousseau who gave it what is now the common name doesn't really answer the point.

Hobbes's view of the state of nature, is, of course, part of what I would characterize as hyper-Augustinianism. It is only the overly radical understanding of the Fall which began with Blessed Augustine and was even more heartily embraced among the "reformers" of Northern Europe than by the Roman Papacy which justifies such a dim view of the human condition. Orthodox Christianity did not follow the West down that path, and speaks of "Ancestal Sin" not "Original Sin", recognizing that Blessed Augustine misread a passage in St. Paul's Letter to the Roman: it is by death, not by Adam, that sin passes to all men (the pronoun should be Englished as "it" not "him"). Even fallen man absent grace is still capable of good actions, though not capable of saving himself as Pelagius vainly thought.

As I said, I have no use for Hobbes: as an American who loves liberty because of his misapplication of ideas Locke used to justify free societies to justify instead absolute monarchy (which thanks to the propensity toward sin of fallen man leads always to tyranny--quickly in the case of non-Christian monarchs, and alas sometimes quickly even in the case of Christians), and as an Orthodox Christian because he is a heretic, the fact that you define heresy differently than the Church, apparently as disagreement with your own reading of the Holy Scriptures notwithstanding.

54 posted on 03/14/2003 8:51:43 AM PST by The_Reader_David
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To: The_Reader_David
The attempt to reduce the Faith to an ideology based on a text always leads to heresy, most patricularly and rapidly when done outside of the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, which is the Mystical Body of Christ.

The Bible says otherwise. Christ said otherwise.

Jesus defined the Church in the Gospel as being wherever two or more are gathered for My namesake, there shall I be in your midst.. Your sectarian doctrine is contrary to the Word of God.

As I have said previously, outside of Scriptural reference (most especially the Gospel), all else is the sectarian dogma of institutions constructed by men.

Likewise, morals are such a construction of idols commonly used by the Left as a rationale for them to demand compliance to their wishes in politics, which most often are a skewed mess of fallacies in logic. Morals are a deceptive replacement for the avoidance of sin. If a person believes in a God, it is the conviction of the Holy Ghost by which they are guided and not by the idolatrous vanities of morals constructed by others.

They worship for gods 'those appearances that remain in the brain from the impression of external bodies upon the organs of their senses, which are commonly called ideas, idols, phantasms, conceits, as being representations of those external bodies which cause them, and have nothing in them of reality, no more than there is in the things that seem to stand before us in a dream...'

Like the necromancy of the Wellstone funerally, the use of Martin Luther King Day, or constantly invoking the "spirit of the '60's," the Left attempts to raise spirits of the dead as a totem for worship.

Marxism and their forms of Cultural Marxism are a religion, a collection of cults. In many cases they worship a dead Karl Marx like some (and I stress some) Christians worship a dead Jesus, and not a living God. This is no more apparent than in the practice of enshrinement and regular grooming of Lenin's corpse in the former Soviet Union.

It is the religious fervor associated with the pro-abortion advocacy. The societal practice of abortion is ritual mass murder upon the altars dedicated to idolatrous vanities, a collective human sacrifice to pagan idols. It has a similitude to the Teutonic paganism of Adolph Hitler, whose idolatry was the idea of a "master race." In effect, this genocide was a mass human sacrifice to those pagan idols.

The Left is properly identified with a 'confederacy of decievers that, to obtain dominion over men in this present world, endeavour, by obscure and erroneous doctrines.'

Now, you can criticize Hobbes as being a fallible human being as all are, but his interpretations of Scripture concerning Christian doctrine are pretty solid even though his politics are based on the 17th Century idea of a divine right of Kings. He lived in a different time, but did have the same Bible.

55 posted on 03/15/2003 6:45:37 AM PST by Sir Francis Dashwood (LET'S ROLL!)
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