[nothingnew]

"It's hard to see what is loving," Dr. Budziszewki notes, "about sexual acts that cause tearing, stretching, bleeding, choking, death, disease and pain."

I plodded thru this entire post, and this is the most important thing to me.

Granted, I'm a neanderthal when it comes to this kind of writing, but I do know in my my own small mind and my own small world what is natural...other than that, I know little.

Thanks for the post.

FReegards,

FMCDH

[cornelis]

Is there a fundamental flaw in the way the natural rights thinkers understand human nature, in the sense of cutting men off from revelation?

JVS: Frankly I think so. I tend to agree with people like Allan Bloom, who say that natural right is a modern idea, stemming from Hobbes and Weber. There is a legitimate way in which one can use the word jus, the Latin word for "right." There are two words, law and right. There has always been a word for law, and there has always been a word for right. We will have these two words that refer to a different kind of thing. The modern notion of a natural right meant that there are no presuppositions to it other than the will of the legislature. Modern natural right causes its devastations because of this will basis.

The only option after an antinomian crisis against society is a bad attitude in the form of unwarranted hope or despair. Unless, perhaps, there is recourse to the adoration of the self and the will to power of a hubristic pedant like Swann: I much prefer to call myself an egoist, second because I don't worship any god outside myself, but first because I worship enduringly the god that is my self. But I complicate things further by going to Mass every week, and I can say big chunks of the Eucharist in Latin.