A Liberal Secular Humanist Teacher Proudly shows his Condescension(warning to religious sensitive)

This is an email sent from a friend to a friend....it demonstrates what some in the country now believe.

Thanx vm for the thoughtful (telephone) call. Sorry we were in a rush, but this was a “Super Solstice Celebration” party thrown by one of my dearest friends down here and he'd scheduled the event on Friday night just so (a friend) could attend.

The party was excellent!! We barely made it home before midnight. Would have looked like any other nice party except we all stopped partying at ~10 p.m., gathered in our hosts’ great room, and spent ~30’ talking about the true historic origins of “Christmas” being placed on December 25th.

(In attendance was) a wide variety of terrific people; mostly highly educated retirees from other parts of the country who have responsibly and joyfully banished religion from their lives or are hopefully curious about how to do so. Really good folks!!)

Watched your Newt video. He certainly is a polished speaker and debater, with an air of authority that makes it easy for his audience to believe what he's saying is true because he's so self-assured and throws in enough names and dates to make one think he must know what he's talking about.

And he definitely looks smarter and more competent compared to his Republican opposition; but so would a steaming pile of yak man*re. Right? The smartest, most rational, most humane people on the stage are two hopelessly unelectable losers; Ron Paul (a committed Libertarian, not a true Republican) and Romney (who believes Jesus came to America, the Garden of Eden was real and was located in Missouri, a moronic angle (sp) named Maroni told God's secrets of the universe to a drunken drifter in New York, and his underpants are “magical”)!!

I'm no authority on some of the subjects he addressed (like the Federal Reserve, the European Union's problems with Greece, Italy, Ireland, etc.), but IMHO, Newt only persuasively appears to “know his subject” - as you put it - if his listeners don't. To say he plays fast and loose with the facts stretches the definition of “facts” to the point of absurdity.

For example:
- Yes; presidential and congressional politicians certainly got America into the enormous economic mess we're in, but it hasn't primarily been the Democrats’ fault and certainly not Obama’s. Face facts that even rational Republicans (not yet a true oxymoron) concede: The “Great Bush Recession” was almost entirely caused by the profligate spending of the Cheney-Bush presidency and the Republican dominated House and Senate from 2000-2006. Clinton gave Cheney-Bush hundreds of billions in federal budget surplus. The Republicans turned it into trillions of dollars of deficits (sp) spending money we didn't have on the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars (the first inexcusable, the second unwinnable) + more irrational, fiscally irresponsible tax cuts for the wealthiest 1% (which just happened to be Republicans’ biggest political contributors) + wasted funds on “Faith Based Initiatives” + more hundreds of billions wasted on Iraq War Profiteers (like Cheney's Halliburton & it's many, amazingly profitable subsidiaries, like the Blackwater Christian mercenaries, Inc.) + more millions using U. S. troops as Christian Crusaders trying to convert Muslims in Muslim countries to Xtianity + + + + ad infinitum, ad nauseum.

The worst “delayed effects” of Bush's Debt Debacle on subprime mortgages, the housing market, jobs, Wall Street tycoons’ reckless gambling away of teachers’ & firemen’s pension funds + AIG’s “lost long shot” didn't hit until 2008-2009, which allowed sleazy Republicans and stupid citizens to put Obama’s face on Cheney & Bush's crimes. The only disaster the Cheney-Bush Republicans didn't do on purpose - I don't think - was that ruining America's middle class decimated the federal government's tax revenue base, so our economy imploded while their fingerprints on all their “wasted money bombs” were still clearly visible to anyone who wanted to see!

I won't defend the Democrat congress's bungling of Obama’s economic stimulus plan and the healthcare bill (now falsely referred to by almost everyone as “Obamacare”) or the time and political capital Democratic congressional leaders wasted vengefully paying back Republicans for their sins from 1994-2006, but nothing they did made a dent in the Cheney-Bush-Congressional Republicans’ “Economic Disaster Trifecta”; i.e., the federal debt crisis + the “Great Bush Recession” that damaged economies worldwide and was the “Bush Depression” for middle and working class Americans + the shameless bailouts for the Wall Street gamblers who lost our collective asses betting both for and against the U. S. economy trying to profit billions instead of mere millions on financial shenanigans like derivatives and credit swaps, based on “magical commodities” that never really existed but were scammed as valued 10 times the entire worth of the NY Stock Exchange!

If you give the least damn about the “too big to fail” investment bankers and insurance titans who criminally defrauded, recklessly gambled, and straight-out stole over a trillion dollars from hardworking Americans, drove their companies into bankruptcy, then begged for and received over $700,000,000,000 in taxpayer's government funds from their Goldman-Sachs man in the White House, used our money to buy up other financial institutions they'd put into bankruptcy, then gave themselves multi-million dollar annual bonuses for being the biggest financial failures in history???!!!

And not one of those crooks has gone to jail???!!! (Oh; that's right. What they did would have been criminal before Reagan but it wasn't after Reagan!! Add those embezzled trillions to the lost incomes of the millions of American jobs Reagan cost us by writing business regulations and tax laws that blatantly encouraged America's biggest industries to send our jobs to third world countries - so they could be extremely profitable there instead of merely highly profitable here - leaving only their corporate headquarters behind, so they could explode the average CEO salary and bonuses from 14 times their average workers’ pay to over 40 times in only 8 beautiful, Reagan years!!!

And Newt can't say “I'm a Reagan Republican!” loud enough or often enough???!!! That's exactly what I - and if you haven't noticed on Fox Not-the-News, almost every public official and staff member who has ever worked with the “real” Newt - are so terrified and furious about! If ever elected president, Newt will be exactly the same kind of corrupt, conscienceless, self-absorbed, greed-crazed, viciously partisan and anti-patriotic, economy-wrecking, butt-licking, theocratically plutocrat that Reagan and Cheney-Bush II were. Except he'd be even more disastrous for America because he's a hell of a lot smarter than those two dimwits were.

I could go on and on about the subjects Newt addressed in your video - the Federal Reserve’s role in the Great Bush Recession, Medicare, PSA false positive tests, the Republican debt ceiling farce (that almost turned America into a third world p**S pot), the “Select Debt Reduction Committee's” abominable failure due to Republicans’ hyper-partisan intransigence, the real content and international effects of Obama’s “apologias”, China's threat and the Republicans’ complicity, and the 100% lies told in Newt's closing campaign commercial - but you've probably stopped reading several paragraphs ago!

I love you (people). But if y'all seriously believe that what America needs in order to recover any semblance of its lost greatness is more vicious partisan Cretans like Jim DeMint and fewer smart practical patriots like Obama, I think you've completely lost touch with reality; at least the reality of contemporary Neo-Con/Tea Bagger Republican politics. (And your girl, Nikki Haley is certainly setting a fine example of conservative government, isn't she?! I didn't think it was humanly possible to screw things up so badly in SC that Mark Sanford's goobernatorial follies would look like the “good ol’ days”, but she's pulling it off!!)

This is EXACTLY the same spew my college professor PhD type associates use. They believe it too!

Jeepers, my father-in-law could have written this verbatim! LOLOL, I love him dearly, but he is a "Leftist crank" with whom one cannot have a rational conservation. :^) [My husband agrees.]

I gather the reason for this is — he is living in an alternative, or "second reality"; the screed posted by DomainMaster is the detailed description of it. It is the "reality" being drilled into college kids everywhere nowadays — even though all it is, when you boil it down, is a totally artificial cognitive construction having questionable contact with the real world of human existence and experience.

It is also the favored worldview of the MSM, the self-selected "intelligentsia," the Obama administration, and "fashionable" people everywhere.

Please note the screed is nothing but a series of allegations, with not one proven "fact." These are the presuppositions on which the second reality is built. They may not be questioned!

Anyhoot, the term "second reality" comes to me from the philosopher Eric Voegelin. It refers to a psychic/social phenomenon brilliantly explored by three great German-language novelists: Robert Musil (The Man without Qualities), Heimito von Doderer (The Demons), and Elias Canetti (Auto-da-Fe). The three novels are simply superb — and often totally harrowing.

I have found it virtually impossible to "debate" with a denizen of Second Reality. As Voegelin put it (in his article, "Debate and Existence"):

...no agreement, or even an honest disagreement could be reached, because the exchange of argument was disturbed by profound difference of attitude with regard to all fundamental questions of human existence — with regard to the nature of man, to his place in the world, to his place in society, to his relation to God. Rational argument could not prevail because the partner to the discussion did not accept as binding for himself the matrix of reality in which all specific questions concerning our existence as human beings are ultimately rooted; he has overlaid the reality of existence with another mode of existence that Robert Musil has called the Second Reality. The argument could not achieve results, it had to falter and peter out, as it became increasingly clear that not argument was pitched against argument, but that behind the appearance of a rational debate there lurked the difference of two modes of existence, of existence in truth and existence in untruth. The universe of rational discourse collapses ... when the common ground of existence in reality has disappeared.

Thus Second Realities "cause the breakdown of rational discourse." Voegelin noted that they are "a comparatively recent phenomenon":

They have grown in the modern centuries, roughly since 1500, until they have reached, in our own time, the proportions of a social and political force which in more gloomy moments may look strong enough to extinguish our civilization — unless, of course, you are an ideologist yourself and identify civilization with the victory of Second Reality.

As you wrote, narses: "God help us all!"

Thank you so much for writing!

You wrote: “Regarding Second Realities. [your post #69] Dr. Godwin is familiar with Eric Voegelin’s treatment of this subject. ..”

Yes, Eric Voegelin calls it: “immanentizing the eschaton”.

“How the Word is Flushed When the Weird Becomes Flesh”
http://onecosmos.blogspot.com/2008/03/how-word-is-flushed-and-weird-becomes.html

In The Religion of Eternal Racism and Eternal Sexism, Bruce Walker addresses a sort of paradox, that is, the left’s embodiment of “eternal” principles, when the whole point of the left is that — in the turgid but accurate phrase of Eric Voegelin - it “immanentizes the eschaton,” meaning, in plain Raccoon lingo, that it collapses the vertical into the horizontal, which dispenses with the “permanent things” of the transcendent realm altogether. As a result, all that is left for the bereft left is a horizontal, temporal, and material struggle “below,” which necessarily pits one group against another, based solely upon the lust for power. Any cynical “humanist” will tell you that this is simply the way of the world. See: http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/03/the_religion_of_eternal_racism.html

This is because, in the absence of absolute principles to guide them, humans are reduced to something slightly below the animal kingdom, in that we have their form but not their nobility, restraint, and common sense. Rather, we are like “animals gone wild,” somehow liberated from our genetic program to undo nature’s delicate balance and wreak havoc on the planet. Any good “environmentalist” will tell you this.

My point is that the left can have no “eternal principles” on pain of immediate and final self-refutation. Therefore, it must obscure its absence of principles with constant tactical maneuvers that change from day to day, week to week, and year to year. Obviously, if you deny what Schuon calls the higher “principial” realm — which contains the absolute and eternal metaphysical principles of which this lower world is an instantiation — you can only live in a kind of “absolute relativity,” which, if you give it a moment’s thought, is intrinsically absurd. Frankly, it is metaphysically impossible, as relativity would then be absolute, thus negating itself. Obviously, cultural and moral relativism are intrinsically absurd and self-negating as well.

Walker highlights this absurdity of the left, in that it hews to faux-eternal principles which can never change irrespective of what actually happens in what they ironically call “reality,” being that reality for them is reduced to the flatland, material world. For example, Walker asks, “How many ‘civil rights’ leaders talk as if racism is an immutable, eternal characteristic of American society? How many feminist leaders talk as if sexism is an immutable, eternal characteristic of American society? The mere passage of years, the mere enactment of statutes or adoption of polices, the decades long public relations campaign against bigotry — none of this can be allowed to make a difference” (emphasis mine).

But why does the left embrace a kind of bitter and reactionary anti-theology, in which they hold to such a negative view of the world despite what actually occurs here? As Walker writes, “the sins of America are a religious article of faith to self-appointed black leaders and to self-appointed representatives of the female sex.”

But here again we can see that the left is not guided by true principles, for example, the truly eternal principle that “all men are created equal.” Rather, for the left, “it is crucial that the sin is not racism or sexism, but specifically American (or, perhaps, Western) racism and sexism.” If the crimes aren’t committed by white Westerners, feminists aren’t interested. They will yawn “when told about honor murders, female circumcision and the imprisonment of rape victims,” so long as non-Christian people of color are responsible. “The catechism of the Left is that America is evil,” not that rape or honor killing are evil.

So the true motive that animates the left is not a “positive” principle such as equality, much less liberty, but an anti-principle. And this is why it takes such diverse forms, as the leftist must always fool you (and, more importantly, himself) into believing that he is defending eternal principles, principles in which he doesn’t actually believe. For example, the left universally believes that it is proper for the government to discriminate on the basis of race, “gender” and “sexual orientation”, and that failure to do so should be illegal. Not surprisingly, the party of trial lawyers loves these kinds of laws, because trial lawyers are the group that most benefits from this crass power grab in the guise of a principle.

The left once unanimously maintained that we should judge people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. But the fact that they so readily abandoned this principle shows how they are always rooted in tactics, not principles. Likewise, up until the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, the left was a vocal supporter of Israel, whereas now all of the wholesale anti-Semitism in the world emanates from the left (including, of course, the Obama campaign (cf here). http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives2/2008/03/020124.php

America’s founders were (among other things) political mystics, in that they did not “deduce” the spiritual principles upon which the country was founded, but saw into the realm where they eternally abide. The intellect “sees” these principles with absolute certainty, “light to light,” so to speak.

See: On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding by Michael Novak
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1893554686/103-0073253-5764633?ie=UTF8&tag=onecosmos-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=1893554686

As Schuon explains, “Metaphysical truths are by no means accepted because they are merely logically clear, but because they are ontologically clear, and their logical clarity is only a trace of this imprinted on the mind.” Here again, this kind of higher truth is “not held to be true — by those who understand it — because it is expressed in a logical manner, but it can be expressed in a logical manner because it is true, without — obviously — its truth ever being compromised by the possible shortcomings of human reason.”
HERE: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1893554686/103-0073253-5764633?ie=UTF8&tag=onecosmos-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=1893554686

As further explained by Oldmeadow, metaphysical truth “has nothing to do with personal opinion, originality, or creativity — quite the contrary. It is directed towards those realities which lie outside mental perimeters and which are unchanging. The most a metaphysician will ever want to do is reformulate some timeless truth so that it becomes more intelligible in the prevailing climate.”
See: Journeys East: 20th Century Western Encounters with Eastern Religous Traditions (The Library of Perennial Philosophy) by Harry Oldmeadow http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0941532577/103-0073253-5764633?ie=UTF8&tag=onecosmos-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=0941532577

Indeed that is the whole purpose of my book and this blog — it’s why I tried to make the book a metaphysical joyread, and to make cosmic truth fun for the whole family! See: One Cosmos Under God: The Unification of Matter, Life, Mind & Spirit by Robert W. Godwin http://www.amazon.com/dp/1557788367?tag=onecosmos-20&camp=14573&creative=327641&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=1557788367&adid=09WHWY1FE83RZ5WWS76M&;

Thus, when the Founders said, “we hold these truths to be self-evident,” they were not appealing to mere logic, but to something much higher — something eternal, axial, and principial, in this or any other cosmos. They were not conveying to King George what they “thought” about reality, but they were disclosing and imparting this transcendent reality to the monarch. These principles would still be true if not a single human being were aware of them — which, strictly speaking, is impossible, being that the human, qua human, is the being that is by definition conformed or “proportioned” to the absolute. Humans and humans alone are the cosmic mediators between time and eternity, God and creation, vertical and horizontal — which is why we may know eternal Truth and conform ourselves to it. Or not.

In short, because we possess free will (freedom being one of the Divine attributes reflected in the human being) we may incarnate Truth or uncarnate the Lie. It’s all up — or down — to you.

*****

Dr. Sanity brings attention to the same unprincipled leftist principles in her post Morally Twisted, which gets into the question of why the worthless Palestinians get so much more attention than the worthy Tibetans. Read the whole thing, as it really lays bare the broken moral compass of the left:
See: http://drsanity.blogspot.com/2008/03/morally-twisted.html

“In the holy book of leftist belief, ‘victimhood’ is the most celebrated quality deserving of attention and pity. This is in part because many on the political left have a pathologically narcissistic need to see themselves as ‘champions of the oppressed’, hence the constant need to find and maintain an oppressed class of people to champion. But it also dovetails nicely into the the Marxist dialectic that underlies that ideology. The world is divided up into two groups, you see: the oppressors (i.e., white, male,heterosexual, Republican, Americans or Israelis) and the oppressed (everyone else)....

“Now compare and contrast the Palestinians with the relatively gentle culture of Tibet and the non-violent philosophy of its spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama. You can also compare and contrast the deliberate brutality of China and its Communist leadership with Israel. China’s brutality and oppression is almost always given a free pass by the left in much the same way they have extended to Fidel Castro and other despotic totalitarian and authoritarian regimes their devoted loyalty and sympathy. Israel, as a Democratic and morally conscious nation actually works hard to spare innocent human life is automatically condemned whenever they respond to Palestinian provocation simply because it represents Western values and is by definition of the neo-marxists of our day, an ‘official’ oppressor. The left always calls Israel’s response to the provocations ‘disproportionate’; but in reality, it is the left’s moral equivalence that is so disgustingly disproportionate.”

posted by Gagdad Bob at 8:59 AM on Mar 26, 2008

Thanks for the ping! bttt

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