Posted on 07/25/2010 1:37:12 PM PDT by betty boop
Finally, I am awake. It has been a slow morning. I think your 3 legged stool named spinelessness is right on. The article referenced earlier, America’s Ruling Class, made much the same distinction. For these so-called leaders being a member of the club is more important than their personal values. The nation suffers under this brand of leadership.
There's a really good illustration of precisely these dynamics in the "Cordova Center" controversy at Ground Zero.... Moreover this controversy shows that enemies of our law use our law to advance their interests/designs. The "logic" here, to me, is that the proposed mosque must be built at Ground Zero, for the same reason that the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem HAD to be built on the Temple Mount, on the very footprint of the destroyed Solomon's Temple. Al-Aqsa is a monument to the victory of Islam over the West, which is to say the Judeo-Christian tradition. As I believe the Cordova Center would be also, assuming it is built.
Perhaps only Muslims understand this "logic."
Then again, your "average people" seem to get the message, as the polls are showing opposition to building the mosque at Ground Zero at around 70%. Unfortunately, the political class in NYC is blinded by their doctrinaire assumptions about "peace" and "tolerance" and "building understanding among peoples," yada yada yada. All of which assumes that The Other Side is also engaged in good-faith concern about such matters, that this is their motive for building.
The political class simply has no right to assume this. The "average people" know better, and are increasingly frustrated by the arrogance, unaccountability, and irrationality of the political class....
Thank you for your wonderful observations, dear Amos! Certainly the commitment to civility and honesty in one's dealings gives an advantage to an adversary who does not consider himself bound by these rules. A Muslim can lie to an unbeliever with impunity; Allah does not at all object to this. Indeed, lying is often necessary in order to advance the global interests of Allah.... The end justifies the means....
I suppose the underlying principle to my thesis is that it is vital to pick one’s enemies carefully. Once selected, however, there ought be no destraction from the business of absolute destruction of their ability to continue their policies.
Conservatives have been silent when falsely accused of the very sins fostered by progressives, communists, Muslims and other derelicts. When we are called racist it is absolutely certainly that a racist is using the euphemism.
Obama’s use of the vulgarism teabagger is a case in point. He is, after all, by many accounts, himself a teabagger of some notoriety. This from one who has claimed personal knowledge of teabagging.
(I trust I am not in trouble with the monitors for the use of such language.)
An obvious tactic of progressives of all stripes to to blame the other guy for doing what one is already doing one's self, "behind the screen" as it were. And I certainly agree that only a racist thinks and speaks in terms of racial groups....
As you wrote, "When we are called racist it is absolutely certain that a racist is using the euphemism."
So very true, dear Amos!
~self ping~ for followup.
I might add there is some dispute among the experts as to where the second Temple was actually located in reference to the Dome of the Rock. That might come into play if they try to make Jerusalem an international city and permit the Temple to be rebuilt. If so, then ...
Maranatha, Jesus!!!
Thank you for your most perceptive insights on these matters, dear spirited irish! Of the three conditions you give — moral relativism, the desire for approval from our fellow men, and willful ignorance — the first seems to be the most fundamental.
Notwithstanding, it seems fair to note that not all ignorance is "willful." Some of it is deliberately promoted by our deplorable American public educational system.... For instance, when you start to see American history textbooks showing up in classrooms that begin the story of our nation with the Civil War, you know something is very wrong ... or you should know that. Sigh....
Once upon a time, education was regarded mainly as the transmission belt of a people's culture and civilization from one generation to the next. In the meanwhile students were taught critical thinking skills and habits of study that enabled them to acquire valid knowledge on their own; i.e., without being "told" what the "valid knowledge" is.
Nowadays, public education at all levels is little more than a trade school to grind out future taxpayers whose only civic responsibility is to be preoccupied with their personal lives as worker bees and taxpayers, and to leave the business of the state up to the experts.... [This is the essence of the "Prussian model" which so impressed John Dewey.] Beyond that, it's about the "socialization" of of the rising generation — not into the traditions of their inherited past, but into the "new order" the progressivists want to create, using these children as the "material" out of which to build the new order of progressivist preference....
But I digress. Bottom line for me, this "spinelessness" (as dear brother in Christ Amos succinctly puts it) is above all else a symptom of profound spiritual disorder, starting with persons, and radiating out from there into the general society.
Plato well understood that a given society is only as good (or as bad) as the generality of the goodness (or badness) of the individuals who compose it. If the preponderance of the people is disordered, then the society they form necessarily will be disordered also.
The genius of the classical thinkers was to realize (among other things) that when social disorder reaches a certain critical mass, it takes a tyrant to step in, to "clean up the mess" and set things "aright" again.... [According to progressively, increasingly debauched standards of "right.")
The problem of the order of human souls goes back to Heraclitus at least, and Plato drew on his insights. The order of souls is related to the order of natural reality itself: The universe is fundamentally lawful in its behavior. In other words, its order is subject to a universal, unchanging logos "common" to all, that is beyond finite, physical, changeable nature; thus this order, this Logos, has long been recognized (at least over the past 7 millennia of human history and experience) as divine in origin. Heraclitus put the matter this way:
Although this Logos is eternally valid, yet men are unable to understand it — not only before hearing it, but even after they have heard of it for the first time. That is to say, although all things come to pass in accordance with this Logos, men seem to be without any experience of it.... My own method is to distinguish each thing according to its nature, and to specify how it behaves; other men, on the contrary, are as forgetful and heedless in their waking moments of what is going on and within them as they are during sleep. [Fragment 1]I'm running long and so must soon conclude. First just to mention that, to Christians, this Logos is the Word of God, the Son of God, Who Is Alpha and Omega — first to last, and the order of everything in between....But though the Logos is common, the many live as if they had a wisdom of their own. [Fragment 2]
Those who are awake have a world one and common, but those who are asleep each turn aside into their own private worlds. [Fragment 89]
It is not meet [fitting or suitable] to act like men asleep. [Fragment 73]
Those who speak with the mind must strengthen themselves with that which is common to all.... For all human laws nourish themselves from the one divine — which prevails as it will, and suffices for all things and more than suffices. [Fragment 114, emphasis added]
Also to mention that it is very clear that for these ancient thinkers, the men who are "asleep" are suffering from a pneumopathological condition, a/k/a, a spiritual disease. Plato called it nosos — his descriptive word for the psychic condition of anoia, a word that can barely be translated into English nowadays, but which definitely suggests a flight from nous, from reason itself; Aristotle called it nosemos; the Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero later called it aspernatio rationis — that is, "contempt for reason."
I'll leave it there for now. Thank you ever so much, dear sister in Christ, for your wonderfully thought-provocative essay/post!
Thank you for sharing all your insights, dearest sister in Christ!
Oh, do you have a link to that handy, dearest sister in Christ? I'd like to "get up to speed" on this.... Especially because this issue "might come into play if they try to make Jerusalem an international city and permit the Temple to be rebuilt."
Thank you so much for writing!
Here is a summary of the three positions proposed for the location of the Temple.
For a more detailed discussion, click here.
Maranatha, Jesus!!!
Balint Vazsonyi’s “America’s 30 Years War” has a few chapters with the exact same theme. It’s an excellent read. I highly recommend it.
Well done, dear sister. We are dealing, then, with a culture in which a preponderance of members are spiritually sick.
The particularities of this condition range from outright denial of spiritual reality to spiritual corruption including ghosts, seances, talking with the dead, reincarnation and hubris (the belief that one is god). Scientology, Mohammedism and other primitive religions yield similar spiritual sickness.
The denial of absolute reality is symptomatic of all of these diseased conditions. Your discussion is precisely on point. The rejection of absolute truth is the denial of reality. Solving this cultural condition is not complicated but it is difficult.
We must DEMAND that false doctrines be ended. Humanism, communism, collectivism, progressivism are false and malicious and must be ended. Accomplishing this requires a fanatical commitment to the truth.
Until we are willing to demand and require an end to the corruption of truth it will continue. This was my concern in my first post.
We cannot engage progressives and agnostic intellectuals in rational discourse. They are not rational because they deny the ground of rational thought, the reality of God. If they do not know Him we must witness to them until they acknowledge Him. We must never debate with them.
We know the Truth. The Truth has set us free. We must witness to our condition with every soul who has not yet met the living God.
Love those Hungarians.... and a classical pianist to boot! Also late director of the Center for the American Founding....
Thanks so much for the book recommendation. I'm so looking forward to reading it!
Plus the chilling concluding paragraph:
There is the possibility that climatic changes could take place in the Middle East, which would allow Israel to exercise control over the Temple Mount. The Antichrist may very well be the individual that institutes radical transformation in the Arab-Israeli conflict. His resolution to the conflict would certainly be cause for the world to worship the Antichrist.Thanks again for this link!
It also makes perfect sense as a way for peaceable resolution of a thorny problem — the rebuilding of the Third Temple. The only problem I see with this proposal is that both sides must want a peaceful solution. Somehow or other, I feel fairly sure that Islam will not allow its Holy Place to be "defiled" by the presence of a Jewish Temple right next door to the Dome of the Rock, wall or no wall.
Allah is not looking for peace. He's looking for the universal submission of all mankind to himself. Or so it seems to me, FWIW.
Thanks again, dearest sister, for the excellent link!
And so I say:
Maranatha, Jesus!!!
Dear brother in Christ, I absolutely affirm your first statement. The second, however, seems problematical to me.
The solution to the raging cultural condition of existence in untruth is difficult because it is complicated. It's complicated because of the plethora of different ways people can go wrong, once they're off "the God-standard."
You wrote, "We cannot engage progressives and agnostic intellectuals in rational discourse." Well, all I can say about that is from personal experience. On that basis, the statement is correct. As Eric Voegelin has pointed out, "debate" between persons who do not acknowledge a common ground of Reality are doomed from the outset. Or to put the matter another way, people who do not live in the same reality are unlikely to agree about much. Or again: People who live in First Reality do not understand people who live in a Second Reality; and vice versa. They do not even speak the same language.
Which I think is the basic point of what Heraclitus was saying, that there are two basic kinds of people: those who recognize that "the Logos is One and common" and is the very order of being itself; and those sleepers who reject the Logos, and thus withdraw into their own inner worlds, as if dreaming. [Logos is the ancient Greek word for word, truth, story, design — Koine words are remarkably "compact" compared to English, which is a "relentlessly denotative language."]
Thus it seems to me there are those who are on the "God-standard," and those who are not. Needless to say, the two camps are not exactly "eye-to-eye" on anything. They simply do not stand on the same ground, rationally or morally.
So "debates" between such parties inevitably tend to be "all heat and no light."
So if you can't get anywhere with such people with reason, with good-faith public debate, with rational persuasion, what do you do?
What you're left with is witness, just as you say, dear Amos. Your witness may not do a thing for people who refuse to be persuaded. But it might be of great help to others, those not yet thoroughly indoctrinated into such life- and reason-denying ideologies.
And of course, that witness must be of our Lord, Jesus Christ — Who is the Son of God, the Word of God Alpha and Omega, Who was God, and was with God in the Beginning, by and for Whom all Creation heavenly and earthly was made.... That witness preeminently must take the form of living in His Law, in His Love.
Other than that, I don't have a clue what to do about the fact that, nowadays, we are building a Tower of Babel [Babble] in the Public Square.
Or so it seems to me FWIW.
Thank you so much, dear brother in Christ, for your kind words, and for your excellent essay/post!
I was shocked to learn that the Dome of The Rock was originally built by the Caliph
AS A GIFT TO JEWS FOR A PLACE FOR THEM TO PRAY AND WORSHIP.
WHAT AN EVIL FARCE ISLAM IS.
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