Posted on 04/20/2002 11:13:03 AM PDT by Romulus
Oh my God what's happening? free speech at a state affiliated college - Where will it end? Who let this happen!!!
This is permitted. A Pope and the Catholic Church is the target. Try holding a debate on the role of Trotsky,Morel,Dushanski and Kaganovitch in a mass murder even worse than the Holocaust and see what happens.
"Nothing in the bleak, cold, unfeeling universe was remotely concerned with human aspiration and longing," he (Rubenstein) said at the time. "I found it impossible to believe in a providential God."To this day, Rubenstein's position remains unchanged. The words of 17th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, he says, best describe modern life as it is increasingly stripped of the constraints of social responsibility: "Short, nasty and brutish."
"I believe in the God of the mystics," he (Rubenstein) says. "The Holy Nothingness whence we came and where we shall return." Belief in the God of the Bible, on the other hand, gave birth to what he calls "the secularization of consciousness which, when carried to an extreme entirely unintended in the Bible, can lead to mass murder."
There's something of a half-truth in this; both the mass-murdering mass-movements of the last century had messianic tendencies; yet their god was on the one hand race and on the other absolute human freedom, defined economically.
Here is a LINK to the historical document, written by Pius XII's OFFICIAL REPRESENTATIVE to President Roosevelt, urging Roosevelt to oppose the creation of Israel, or failing that, to re-settle the Jews into some OTHER piece of land OTHER than the one God GAVE ISRAEL FOREVER.
My position is that I cannot see how someone, who considers themselves a Christian, would oppose the clearly written Will of God that Israel was to posess the land He promised to Abraham FOREVER.
If Roosevelt had acceeded to Pius's will and re-settled Israel into some random piece of land in, say, Morroco or Tunisia, it would have provided Bible critics with all the ammo they needed to discredit God's Holy Word, and would have provided a rationale to disregard the Holy Bible.
Thanks for bringing this to my attention. I've a few more things I'd like to add to this or the previous thread, but I'm quite pressed for time at the moment. My charity is also sorely strained, so I'd rather turn my attention to preparing the music for tomorrow's liturgy.
For now, though, I'd remark that James Carroll is equally a disgrace. His thesis in Constantine's Sword is that Christianity (I presume he cannot justly confine this criticism to Catholic Christianity) is inherently antiSemitic, since the Gospels clearly indicate that the Romans crucified Christ at the behest of the Sanhedrin. At the end of his execrable tome, he proposes the "solution" to this problem: that Christians abandon the notion that Christ's death was a redemptive sacrifice in expiation of our sins. Reducing Jesus to just another moderately-interesting "philosopher," in his thinking, automatically absolves the Jewish people of the charge of deicide.
The problem with this line of "thought", of course, is that if the Crucifixion was simply the unjust execution of a good man, then it was a crime attributable to the Sanhedrin. If, on the other hand, Christ's death was a redemptive sacrifice, and he really did rise from the dead, then the eternal benefit of that event to all mankind trumps any inherent injustice in the temporal means by which it occurred. The consistent teaching of Catholic Church, as well, is that guilt is not generational; that is, each individual is morally responsible only for his own acts. Any guilt for the injustice of the Crucifixion is at most attributable to Judas, Herod, and the Sanhedrin (if even to them in light of the transcendent nature of the event), and not to anyone else, most especially not to the Jews of our time. This is a necessary result of our theological understanding of the nature of free-will.
So, to put it bluntly, Carroll has it precisely ass-backwards. It is an embarassment that such an obviously illogical argument should have been given a moment's credence by anyone with pretentions to scholarship. Further reading in Constantine's Sword reveals that his prescription for an ideal Church is that it deny its own central tenets of belief. Carroll's solution to the supposed problems of Christianity is that it cease being recognizably Christian. (The Unitarians have already accomplished this feat, so he ought to simply satisfy himself with them.) Carroll also, perhaps unwittingly, reveals that his motivation for the destruction of the Church arises from his own psychic anxiety resulting from incidents in his upbringing.
In short, his book is an extended airing of personal dirty linen, but since its propaganda value is of immeasurable to the Left, he had no trouble finding a publisher for his tripe. Scholarship must always be motivated by a search for objective truth instead of a quest for the confirmation of one's personal prejudices. If anything, I'm more incensed by the assault on rationality Carroll's oeuvre represents than I am by its obvious antiCatholic bias.
I am too busy right now to flame further but I will be back before too long to deal with the specifics.
Speaking from a SPIRITUAL point of view (NOT a human p.o.v., with our limited, geopolitical sense of reality) you have to wonder why someone would oppose Israel being in a position to have all the prophesies in Revelation come about. What would be the AGENDA of someone who does not WANT the events of Revelation to transpire?
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