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BJK: Please, please don’t forget the essential fact here: spirited irish titled her thread, in part: “Damnable Heresies”, and Kevmo has determined that my views, similar to those of many Founders, make me a “God Damned Heretic”.
Now, it seems to me that should be a matter of grave concern to “the community at large”, that both Kevmo and spirited should be sternly scolded for not only intemperate language, but unacceptable ideology.

Spirited: The concern you raise is of grave concern to all human beings who view themselves as “sovereign,” that is, there is no transcendent Authority, no Mind, over their own minds. In other words, “man, but particularly BJK in this instance, is the measure of all things.”

That sinful men would elevate their corrupted reasoning above God was one of the very grave concerns of perceptive thinkers like Richard Weaver.

By the close of WW II, Weaver and countless other classical liberals apprehensively discerned that the Western civilized nations were on the road to breakdown and

totalitarianism.

Suffering “progressive disillusionment,” Weaver perceived that old cultural restraints had failed to control man’s propensity for evil. This led him to ponder the fallacies of modernist ideas-—the ones you champion, BRK-—
that had produced the holocaust of evil visited upon the world from WW I to WW II.

By late 1945, Weaver published his conclusions in his book, “Ideas Have Consequences.” The subject of Weaver’s book was “the dissolution of the West.” Its deterioration was traced by Weaver to the late 14th century when Western man had made an “evil decision.” Enticed by William of Occam’s (d. c. 1349) philosophy of nominalism, Western man abandoned his belief in eternally unchanging transcendent “universals” and thus the position that “there is a source of truth higher than, and independent of, man...”

The consequences of this revolution in ideas were catastrophic, for “The denial of everything transcending experience means inevitably...the denial of truth. With the denial of objective truth there is no escape from the relativism of ‘man is the measure of all things.”

As Weaver feared, things worsened as the downward spiral continued:

God would be conceptually murdered, Heaven shut-down and Nature itself elevated to the supreme reality. The doctrine of original sin was abandoned and replaced by the “goodness of man.” With only the physical world of the senses held to be real, supernatural Christianity declined, rationalism arose, and materialist science and biological evolution became the most prestigious way to study man.

With knowledge limited to the sensory realm (empiricism), man’s spiritual attributes, that is, man’s soul, mind,
conscience, and free will were soon lost in an endless cycle of reductionism and determinism. Man, created in the spiritual likeness of his supernatural Creator would be lost. In his place would stand the soulless human ape, an accidental emergent product of mindless evolutionary forces.

Weaver dubbed this way of thinking the “spoiled-child psychology” of modern man, who had “not been made to see the relationship between reward and effort.”

This orgy of mindlessness is traceable to certain terrible-willed modernists who, no longer wanting to be created in the spiritual likeness of their Creator, had failed to achieve an integrated world picture, a “metaphysical dream,” said Weaver.

Weaver concluded with an ominous warning:

“the closer man stands to ruin, the duller grows his realization (for) the annihilation of spiritual being precedes the destruction of temple walls.” (The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, George H. Nash, pp. 30-33)

There it is BRK, a portrait of yourself: the spoiled-child psychology of a terrible-willed relativist blind to the fact that the cost of his intellectual arrogance is
annihilation of spiritual being.

But then pride goes before the fall of the narcissist relentlessly pursuing “self-gratification” no matter the cost to others. If erasing the stain of heresy from “self” means destroying the good character of others, then so be it.

Only in this world are you able to get away with your chicanery, manipulation of perception, and endless quibbling over the meaning of heresy. But within minutes of the death of your body, your immortal soul will be met by either a righteous angel or an evil angel sent to escort you into eternity.

With every lie, deception, twisted meaning, attempt at manipulation of perception and transference of your own guilt onto others, you are freely choosing which angel will be waiting for you when your immortal soul departs your dead body. And this is why CS Lewis said hell is a freely made choice.

It is not too late for you to repent, BRK. But don’t wait until it’s too late.

Now, it seems to me that should be a matter of grave concern to “the community at large”, that both Kevmo and spirited should be sternly scolded for not only intemperate language, but unacceptable ideology. — BJK

YIKES!!!! "Unacceptable ideology???" What is going on here?

The Framers were not "ideologues."

Among other things, the Framers — faced with the weighty challenge of how to make a free government work — banked the fires of zealotry and political millenarianism in favor of latitudinarian faith and a quasi-Augustinian understanding of the two cities. They humbly bowed before the inscrutable mystery of history and the human condition with its suffering and imperfection and accepted watchful waiting for fulfillment of a Providential destiny know only to God — whose "kingdom is not of this world" (John 18:36). But in addition to understanding government as necessary coercive restraint on the sinful creature ... they reflected a faith that political practice in perfecting the image of God in every man through just domination was itself a blessed vocation and the calling of free men: It was stewardship in imitation of God's care for His freely created and sustained world, one enabled solely by grace bestowed on individuals and a favored community. They embraced freedom of conscience as quintessential liberty for a citizenry of free men and women, as had John Milton long before who exclaimed in Areopagitica: "Give me liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties." [Which when you come to think of it is pretty silly; one cannot execute liberty of conscience when one is dead. So LIFE must come "first" among the God-granted human liberties.] And, for better or worse, they followed Milton (as well as Roger Williams and John Locke) in heeding his plea "to leave the church to itself" and "not suffer the two powers, the ecclesiastical and the civil, which are so totally distinct, to commit whoredom together." The correlate was religious toleration within limits, as necessary for the existence of a flourishing civil society whose free operations minimized tampering with religious institutions or dogmas. Yet the historically affirmed vocation of a special people under God still could be pursued through active devotion to public good, liberty, and justice solidly grounded in Judeo-Chrisatian transcendentalism. Citizens were at the same time self-consciously pilgrims, aware that this world was not their home. It is this ever-present living tension with the divine Ground above all else, perhaps, that has made the United States so nearly immune politically to the ideological maladies that have characterized much of the modern world, such as fascism and Marxism and, lately, fanatical jihadism.

Like all of politics, the Founders' solutions were compromises, offensive to utopians and all other flaming idealists. But this may be no detraction from their work, since despite all national vicissitudes, we still strive to keep our republic — under the world's oldest existing Constitution.... — Ellis Sandoz, Give Me Liberty: Studies in Constitutionalism and Philosophy, South Bend: St. Augustine Press, 2013, p. 32 f.

If we are in search of ideologues, I imagine we will find none among the Framers. Their genius was Godly and practical at the same time: They all stood on the same ground of Being; that is to say, on the Creator God and the liberties and commensurate/corresponding duties He imposes on every human person equally, regardless of "station" in life. This was their idea of the public good, the prescription for the flourishing of individuals and society itself, and the fulfillment of divine Justice as much as possible in this world.

Now it seems to me the problem spirited irish and BroJoeK have been having on this thread is that the two do not stand on the same Ground of Being. What to BJK is a party game, a divertissement, an exercise in word-play is to spirited irish finally a matter of life and death. BJK senses spirited's alarm and passion regarding the cultural destruction and deformation that seems inexorably to be destroying our free society and thinks it's funny. So he has been working overtime to depict spirited as an object of ridicule.

Doesn't seem very "Christian" to me — though BJK occasionally murmurs that he is really a Christian himself.

For my part, I see very clearly the reasons for spirited's alarm. I share her concerns.

The so-called "Cartesian split" is no longer merely a hypothetical tinker-toy for the mind to play with: It has become the main presupposition of a despiritualized, unthinking populace utterly ignorant of human history and culture — theological, philosophical, religious, social — and the judicious common sense experience of living individual persons, then and now.

So of course spirited is worried. BJK, to you I say: Keep on dreaming. One can be a "star" in one's own dream world.

Though I don't see what good that sort of thing does for the maintenance of a free society governed by the Rule of Law, not by the Rule of Men.

Just some thoughts. I wish you both — and all the pingees — a HAPPY, HEALTHY, AND PROSPEROUS NEW YEAR!!!