Posted on 05/30/2003 9:55:54 PM PDT by Hugenot
NewsMax.com's religion editor, Fr. Mike Reilly, sees a disturbing trend in the latest news from the European Union.
Zenit News is reporting on the new Constitution for the European Union and the news is not good.
"Drawing inspiration from the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe, which, nourished first by the civilizations of Greece and Rome, characterized by spiritual impulse always present in its heritage and later by the philosophical currents of the Enlightenment, has embedded within the life of society its perception of the central role of the human person and his inviolable and inalienable rights, and of respect for law. ..."
Do you get the sense that there's something missing from the preamble? What "spiritual impulse" are they referring to? Could it be the Irish druids, who worshipped trees? Or perhaps the Norse gods like Thor and Loki? Maybe they mean ancient German legends about Siegfried coming from Valhalla.
Are these the "spiritual impulses" that united Europe, or rather was it something called Christendom?
"It borders on the ridiculous that the Preamble should make nominal reference to the Hellenistic and Roman component and jump directly to the 'philosophers of the Enlightenment,' omitting the Christian reference without which the Enlightenment is incomprehensible," Josep Miro i Ardevol, president of the Convention of Christians for Europe, said in a statement.
In an interview on Vatican Radio, Cardinal Roberto Tucci, a member of the executive council of the radio, said that "It was not a question of adherence [to Christianity], but of recognizing the historical fact of the enormous influence that Christian culture has had on European culture."
"The most unifying factor of Europe, which has been Christian culture, is missing" in the Preamble, he said.
The draft continues, "Conscious that Europe is a continent that has brought forth civilization; that its inhabitants, arriving in successive waves since the first ages of mankind, have gradually developed the values underlying humanism: equality of persons, freedom, respect for reason. ..."
Where do they think these values come from? What other civilizations espouse these values? The fact is that it was Christian culture which civilized and united tribal barbarians into what was left of the declining Roman Empire, which would eventually become modern Europe. That is why every modern tyrant has seen the need to attack and suppress Christianity.
This does not bode well for Europeans who treasure freedom. If our rights come from men, then men can take them away. Our founding fathers were wise enough to acknowledge that "man was endowed by his Creator with certain inalienable rights. ..."
Sadly, the leaders of Europe lack that insight.
Not to mention the fact that both were built on the backs of massive slavery that made the antebellum South look trivial and benign in comparison.
The Poles, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Bulgarians, Serbs, Croats, Romanians, Belarussians, Estonians, Italians, Spaniards and Danes will clean that mess up. After 45 years of fear and abuse ... they won't get fooled again.
We need to help those people help themselves. They'll take care of the Islamoscum.
When Caligula was assassinated, there was some sentiment within the Senate to restore the Republic, but of course Claudius was made emperor instead. I don't know if there was anything after that.
You may very well be right about that. The really important question is whether we can engineer a "soft decline" rather than a "hard fall". Neither is inevitable. The Portugese, Spanish, and British empires are all what I would consider to be examples of empires that had a soft decline. Rome, of course, is the classic example of a hard fall, but there are others as well.
You need to update your world view. The world is one e-mail, phone call and a 15 hour plane ride away from any point.
There are no empires in a geopolitical sense. America is an empire of blessed spirit, inspired engineering and irresistable and timeless human lure. That's unassailable.
The Phoenicians were the ancestors of today's Palestinians. Today they wait until their children are 18 or so, and then sacrifice them by having them blow themselves up in crowded places. Progress is great, isn't it?
We even had a general who conquered Gaul and then went on to become our head of government.
What I find rather interesting is that most of the great philosophical and literary achievements occured during the post Pelo war period when everything was falling apart in Athens and not during the glory days between the Persian War and the Peloponnesian War. Maybe this confirms that adversity tends to make humans a bit more introspective and creative than during the good times.
It's called rent. Sometimes known as groceries.
America will always be in a "Next?" mode. Brokaw is full of it, there is no ONE SINGLE greatest American generation. Our young soldiers stepped up and demonstrated their courage and skill last month. Every American generation is great when events warrant. We'll be around until the Big Star blows up good. We've got a winning human model.
Well, I'm not sure I would quite agree with your assessment. Yes, Plato and Aristotle were both late, but Homer, Herodotus, and the great playrights were all prior to the end of the Peloponnesian war. And there were many other good philosophers back then, too, but we have lost many of their works. Aristotle was in many ways not so much an original thinker but rather a summarizer of what had been done prior to himself -- particularly by those living during the golden age of Pericles. In today's terms, he would be writing textbooks rather than publishing groundbreaking new research papers. It is even very much debatable how much of Plato's material is original and how much is directly from his teacher Socrates.
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