Pedophilia and Kulturkampf

Culture Wars ^ | April, 2002 | E. Michael Jones

[neocon]

Sorry to post and run. Talk amongst yourselves.

This article is no longer linked to the Culture Wars homepage, but is still online.

I've tried to catch any formatting errors, and to convert all links from relative to absolute URLs. Apologies in advance for any errors on my part.

[neocon]

Here is the E. Michael Jones article I promise you all a few days ago.

Of your charity, please pray for Budge's recovery. He's a fine man who has suffered more than his share of infirmities.

[HowlinglyMind-BendingAbsurdity]

It is true that the seriously flawed Freudian "libido" model theory of sexuality has had some influence. Essentially, it's a plumbing model with a periodic need to discharge fluid quite apart from any serious conjugal relationship. Unfortunately, the problem with sex predators is not really between their legs but in their brains. Their ability to regulate impulses is directly involved. Normal heterosexuals don't have sexual desires for children.

[HowlinglyMind-BendingAbsurdity]

There's an even more bizarre presupposition underlying this as well. It's the idea that if a modern school of psychology or a social science discipline assert that something is true (and enough Ivy League experts pick up the party line), that it is something the Church needs to adopt. "Catching up with Freud" might make sense if the theories in question were true. A great many psychiatrists today actually recognize the serious flaws in the Freudian model of human personality. Most of the psychobabble crap of the 1960s and 1970s, and the earlier Freudian nonsense of the 1920s, has very little scientific foundation.

[Askel5]

Appreciate your nod to Budge as well. He's a sweetheart.

Looking forward to the read.

[Askel5]

I'm nearly finished with Libido Dominandi ... Sexual Liberation and Political Control. It's an excellent book ... written such that you can go chapter by chapter at your leisure. Can't recommend it highly enough.

[independentmind]

Askel5, I know that you are a fan of E. Michael Jones, but I often find his articles difficult to read because I think they sometimes have a tendency to ramble. Also, why do I get the feeling that he sometimes cuts and pastes his articles from previous articles? Maybe I'm just too crabby these days :)...

Do you think that someone or some group of human beings is masterminding a plot to control the world by creating a world full of slaves to appetite? Or is what we are seeing the logical consequence of error and spiritual disorder (and massive educational failure)?

[independentmind]

Notre Dame University defended the performance of the play precisely on the grounds of academic freedom; the bishop does nothing to contradict this undermining of morals, and in fact, in a scenario which has by now become familiar, those who attempt to defend the moral standard get punished. When Joe Scheidler, the prolife activist and Notre Dame alumnus, came down from Chicago to protest the performance of The Vagina Monologues, the university called the police and threatened to arrest him.

BTW, I am a more than a little surprised that Jones made the error of referring to Notre Dame University. If he's referring to the school on the other side of the lake from St. Mary's (his former employer), he has the name wrong. As for the play at ND, someone told me a few years ago that Notre Dame isn't really a Catholic university anymore. In many ways, I agree.

[american colleen]

Ping!

Thanks for a great post, neocon.

[patent]

Bump

[Romulus]

Some people do this because their guilty consciences compel them to; others get paid to do it.

And some, depraved but emotionally immature, because they are so insecure in the bad choices they've made that they insist on having the rest of us ratify their acts.

Reading...

[Romulus]

"How," Sullivan wonders, "can a church that preaches the impermissibility of so many forms of consensual, adult sex simultaneously tolerate, ignore or cover up the sexual abuse of children by its own priests?"

Having worked like hell to introduce scandal into the institutional church, the agent provocateur is shocked, shocked to find it there.

[Romulus]

They promised me monastic robes, glorious Latin liturgy, the protection of the three sacred vows, the peace of saints in a quiet cell, the sisterhood of a holy family...

And so on. The self-pity and dishonesty are palpable.

Not long ago, I saw a program about the cult of Nuestra Señora de la Soledad, particularly popular in Oaxaca, where it's celebrated every Decem. 18. The devotion, which speaks to me for more than one reason, imagines Mary at the moment of Christ's death, not only bereft and alone, but tormented by grief and tempted by the thought that God's promise was a lie and his salvation a sham. This is the suffering of one whose grief and solitude are not only physical but metaphysical and existential. Indeed, a sword pierced her heart. Far more than just a cult of the lonely, this devotion is for those who're tormented by the thought that God has played them false and led them astray. I cannot say what persuaded Our Lady to preserve her faith through this ordeal, unless it was her memory and reliance of early events "preserved in her heart", and most especially the Archangel's message, borne out in the conception and birth of the Child. I'm quite willing to believe that the first person to murmur, repeat, and ponder the words "Hail highly-favored one; the Lord it with thee" was Mary herself, and that she did so at the foot of the Cross.

[tiki]

I think they want the minds AND hearts of people. They want people to see God as a hard taskmaster who asks you to give up everything they think is good for you (unlimited sex outside of marriage with any gender, greed, materialism, abortion...)

I think it amounts to an attempt at Communism by Democracy and they can't get that until they get a Godless society.

[LarryLied]

Thanks for the ping. Too late to digest so a bookmark bump!

[ELS]

Thanks for posting the article, neocon. I can see I'm going to have to add E. Michael Jones to my reading list.

[neocon]

Most of the psychobabble crap of the 1960s and 1970s, and the earlier Freudian nonsense of the 1920s, has very little scientific foundation.

When I was a junior at university, for some reason known only to the scheduling computer my class in advanced electromagnetism was scheduled in the psychology rather than in the physics building. My professor, who later became my thesis advisor, happened to be late one day -- very unusual for him with his British punctuality, -- and we were left standing outside the classroom. Posted on the wall was the midterm exam for a senior-level course in the "Psychology of Visual Perception," with the answers listed on the last page. With nothing else to do, I took the exam mentally. I completed it in less than 10 minutes and scored about 85%. Mind you, I not only had not taken this particular course, I had never taken any psychology course whatsoever. My estimation of the intellectual content of the field dropped immensely and instantly.

Now, there are many interesting philosophical and scientific questions associated with perception, and much of neuroscience and cognition is quantifiable and not overly speculative. In fact, most of my later work as an industrial scientist was based on the pschyophysics of human color percerption. There are even some fairly deep mathematical concepts, primarily in the area of functional analysis, which can be brought to bear on the subject. But obviously, what is being taught academically is, to put it charitably, simplistic. And that's to say nothing of areas of psychology like behaviorism with its Skinnerian overtones.

You might be interested to know that Jones tackles these frauds as well. Here are the contents of the first book I read by him, which I recommend:

Degenerate Moderns
Modernity as Rationalized Sexual Misbehavior
by E. Michael Jones
©1993 Ignatius Press

CONTENTS

Introduction:
Why Modernity is Rationalized Lust: Why Biography is Destiny

1. Samoa Lost: Margaret Mead, Cultural Relativism,
   and the Guilty Imagination
2. Blue Lagoon Social Studies [Ali Mazrui, mostly]
3. Homosexual as Subversive:
   The Double Life of Sir Anthony Blunt
4. Stanley [Fish] and Jane [Tompkins]'s Excellent Adventure:
   Or, Why Politically Correct Professors
   Hate Western Civilization
5. The Case Against Kinsey
6. Liberal Guilt Cookies [Anna Quindlen]
7. Cubism as Sexual Loathing: The Case Against Picasso
8. Sigmund [Freud] and Minna and Carl [Jung] and Sabina:
   The Birth of Psychoanalysis Out of the
   Personal Lives of Its Founders
9. Luther's Enduring Legacy

Epilogue:
Moral Realism: The Ultimate Deconstruction

I also recommend his Dionysos Rising, on music, and Living Machines, on Bauhaus architecture (Walter Gropius, mostly).

[neocon]

As you know, the centerpiece of the last hour of prayer each day, Compline, is the Nunc Dimittis, the Canticle of Simeon, Lk 2:29-32. In the verses directly following, Simeon goes on to predict to Mary that a sword will pierce her heart, and in verse 19 we read that Our Lady pondered the events of the Nativity, and presumably these as well, in her heart. It is no coincidence that Compline ends with a Marian antiphon; it varies with the liturgical seasons, but is most often the Salve Regina.

Mary is the model of the contemplative life, and her sorrows have given rise to some of the greatest works of art in Western Civilization on the subjects of the Pietà, and the Stabat Mater. Like the disciples, she would have been intimately familiar with the Psalms. I'm sure that Jesus chose to begin the recitation of Ps. 21 (22) ["My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"] from the cross not only because of its parallels to the events of His Passion, but because his listeners would know that it starts in despair, but ends in joy: "My soul shall live for Him and my children shall serve Him. They shall tell of the Lord for generations yet to come; declare His faithfulness to peoples yet unborn: 'These things the Lord has done.'"

So I think Our Lady must have also recalled Ps. 41 (42): "My tears have become my bread, by night, by day, as I hear it said all the day long: 'Where is your God?'" This psalm, too, has a "surprise ending", a refrain, actually: "Why are you cast down, my soul, why groan within me? Hope in God; I will praise Him still, my savior and my God."

Finally, I think the most poignant passage in all of the NT is Jn 20:2, where Mary of Magdala, who has just been to the empty tomb says to Peter and John: "They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don't know where they have put Him." (Just after a less detailed account of this, in Luke we go on to read of the appearance of Our Lord on the road to Emmaus, the outline of which bears a remarkable similarity to the sequence of the Catholic liturgy.) The Easter hymn, O filii et filiæ recounts the this story. With its rhetorical economy, the Latin text says: "Angelicos testes, sudarium et vestes." So what began in sorrow ends in continuing joy.

[maryz]

Pedophilia plays a crucial role in this system of control through appetite. It is the sexual sin which excuses all other sexual sins.

Actually, I had been thinking lately that pedophilia is the sin which excuses all other sins, not just sexual.

I think I am as horrified by this whole scandal as anyone, but in the more shrill condemnations (of something surely deservedly condemned), there is a reek of self-righteousness. An article posted here made the point the pedophilia is so condemned precisely because it's so rare. Most people don't molest children -- or adolescents -- because they don't want to; there's no particular virtue there. C.S. Lewis said somewhere that he was reluctant to preach against gambling and homosexuality, because they are two sins to which he has no temptation.

Sinful behavior must be condemned, but I think condemnation itself puts one in a dangerous spiritual neighborhood -- and as in any dangerous neighborhood, one must keep his eyes open and not linger longer than necessary.

[maryz]

As part of that assimilation process run amok, priests have been told that they are sexual beings; that they should not repress their sexuality; and that repression is bad.

This actually sounds like a book described in the Boston Herald, in connection with Geoghan case, that was used as a kind of textbook in the "treatment" facility for problem priests. The Herald quoted a psychologist (apparently a sane one) who reviewed it as saying (I quote from memory), "My God, this is psychobabble -- it's a how-to manual for sex offenders." Oh, yes, it was written by a priest and a nun.