Posted on 06/09/2007 2:21:41 PM PDT by AlbionGirl
For well over a century now, the idea that something about modernity will ultimately cause religion to wither away has been practically axiomatic among modern, sophisticated Westerners.1 Known in philosophy as Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous story of the madman who runs into the marketplace declaring that “Gott ist tot,” and in sociology as the “secularization thesis,” it is an idea that many urbane men and women no longer even think to question, so self-evident does it appear.2 As people become more educated and more prosperous, the secularist story line goes, they find themselves both more skeptical of religion’s premises and less needful of its ostensible consolations.3 Hence, somewhere in the long run — perhaps even the very long run; Nietzsche himself predicted it would take “hundreds and hundreds” of years for the “news” to reach everyone — religion, or more specifically the Christianity so long dominant on the Continent, will die out.
As everybody also knows, much about the current scene would seem to clinch the point, at least in Western Europe. Elderly altar servers in childless churches attended by mere handfuls of pensioners; tourist throngs in Notre Dame and other cathedrals circling ever-emptier pews roped off for worshippers; former abbeys and convents and monasteries remade into luxury hotels and sybaritic spas; empty churches here and there shuttered for decades and then re-made into discos — even into a mosque or two. Hardly a day passes without details like these issuing from the Continent’s post-Christian front.4 If God were to be dead in the Nietzschean sense, one suspects that the wake would look a lot like this.
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
But can't help but notice already something I've always held, and that's that surfeit makes us truly strangers to one another, and misery or scarcity makes enmity between us, and brings to the fore the smallness of man.
Economics really does matter.
Currently reading Weber's the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. It's fascinating. And it too reveals something I always held and that is that the Protestant work ethic is born of piety and not greed.
Max Weber was a genius!
How we burned in the prison camps later thinking: What would things have been like if every police operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive? If during periods of mass arrests people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever was at hand? The organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt."
"If. . . if . . . We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation. We spent ourselves in one unrestrained outburst in 1917, and then we hurried to submit. We submitted with pleasure! . . . We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward."
-- Alexander Solzhenitsyn
The first quote hits you hard, as it should. Whose quote is that, if you don't mind me asking?
First quote made me think of a situation during WWII (I think) in which both companies of soldiers, Allied and Axis were on the brink of refusing to fight one another. It was just before Christmas day.
And man will always face death.
Count on that.
That was WWI, early in the war. Germany was still Christian, and so was Britain.
Its all one quote from Solzhenitsyn.
“surfeit makes us truly strangers to one another, and misery or scarcity makes enmity between us, and brings to the fore the smallness of man.... Economics really does matter.”
Do you have any favorite quotes yet from Weber’s book, or an online link handy?
I don't disagree, but the way you phrased the truth, makes it seem that man is attached to God only insofar as his inferiority permits, and, if that's true, what kind of children are we?
Thanks.
Neither side had any real idea of why it was at war, and didn’t really want to continue. It took a number of summary court martials and executions to get the war rolling again.
In WWII, ideology had replaced religion in both sides, and that type of thing was no long possible.
Spirit, in the late 40s my Mom was washing clothes, in the dead of winter, in a river, in the mountains of Italyl. That's not that long ago.
I tell my parents still, I would have died at 16 from not wanting to live that life. They laugh heartily because they know that I know, even though I never actually lived it.
During that time, everyone did need one another, but it didn't make them better people or better Christians, when all is said and done. A very contracted nature and an abiding jealousy was part and parcel of the peasant class. And while I think jealousy is not a defect known only to peasants, to peasants who really are bright, energetic and hard workers but who can't climb out of that pit of misery because of economics, it gnarls them.
There is an Italian saying Patria e Pagnotta (a loaf of bread). It's sort of hard to translate, but it amounts to this: your fatherland is the land that can feed you.
The opposing side to all of this is that surfeit deadens us.
Earlier this week, I read something that said Satan's optimum view would look a lot like suburbia. Not because people who live in the suburbs are great sinners, it's rather the oppposite, they're kind of dead.
Milton Freidman (I think it was him, anyway) was chronicling the very early 18th Century and he said that a lot of the Puritans were not going to church, and instead were pretty bent on having a 'good time', if you know what I mean. So much so, that laws began to be enacted to get them to shape up. My kind of people: real, live, honest-to-goodness sinners. You know, the kind that neeed The Physician.
In the end, perhaps the scarcity/surfeit thing is a wash and as such not worth much in terms of providing a rememdy, if a rememdy is indeed needed.
Spirit, in the late 40s my Mom was washing clothes, in the dead of winter, in a river, in the mountains of Italyl. That's not that long ago.
I tell my parents still, I would have died at 16 from not wanting to live that life. They laugh heartily because they know that I know, even though I never actually lived it.
During that time, everyone did need one another, but it didn't make them better people or better Christians, when all is said and done. A very contracted nature and an abiding jealousy was part and parcel of the peasant class. And while I think jealousy is not a defect known only to peasants, to peasants who really are bright, energetic and hard workers but who can't climb out of that pit of misery because of economics, it gnarls them.
There is an Italian saying Patria e Pagnotta (a loaf of bread). It's sort of hard to translate, but it amounts to this: your fatherland is the land that can feed you.
The opposing side to all of this is that surfeit deadens us.
Earlier this week, I read something that said Satan's optimum view would look a lot like suburbia. Not because people who live in the suburbs are great sinners, it's rather the oppposite, they're kind of dead.
Milton Freidman (I think it was him, anyway) was chronicling the very early 18th Century and he said that a lot of the Puritans were not going to church, and instead were pretty bent on having a 'good time', if you know what I mean. So much so, that laws began to be enacted to get them to shape up. My kind of people: real, live, honest-to-goodness sinners. You know, the kind that neeed The Physician.
In the end, perhaps the scarcity/surfeit thing is a wash and as such not worth much in terms of providing a rememdy, if a rememdy is indeed needed.
I think that I read about his truce in Carnage and Culture, by Victor Davis Hanson. I think that I also read in C&C that in very early warfare the soldiers could get together and depose a general, if he was not doing his job. When I read of this, all I could think of was Robert MacNamara. I don't know how any person could have the heart to write the book he wrote, so many years and so, so many deaths after the fact. To pierce the hearts of those family members who were left behind.
If it would have been up to me, I would have given him 30 days worth of food, a good knife and I would have exiled him to Borneo or some other country where they're reputed to still have head-hunters.
I just finished reading The Life of Jesus, by Ernest Renan. It moved me a lot. He denied the Incarnation, the Trinity, etc., and at first I was worried about reading it, thinking it would adversely affect my Faith. But just the opposite happened -you can't be afraid to read things, that's a mark of fear and servility.
Anyway, he does a masteful job of bringing the human Jesus into the fore. But as he does it, the main thought that accompanies everything is this Human must needs be Divine.
It was also a sad read, because I sensed that he wanted to believe, but his logic forbade it. And because of that there was a melancholy strain through the whole thing.
Truly, the love of money is a root of all sorts of evil. Whether rich or poor, if one puts faith in wealth, for it cannot satisfy nor truly provide peace of mind. Where one’s heart is, there their treasure will be also.
Thanks, first glance says FASCINATING. Bookmarked.
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