Posted on 01/05/2003 10:54:52 PM PST by RichardMoore
Ok, it's been a while since I last checked in to this place as a vanity expert but I just wanted to drop this plum in your laps. I will as usual credit Chesterton with the original thought here and take the road of messenger, although the message may be somewhat garbled. So 'll keep it short and sweet and suggest that you check out chesterton.org for more on the topic of education and anything else actually
Modern education is flawed. But as products of that education we have extreme difficulty in recognising that simple fact. There is a backwash of anti-christian thought in all public education and most private education and that is directly attributable to the inclusion of Darwin, Marx and Freud.
These three gods of the modern world are not only false but they are atheistic. They wouldn't even believe in themselves as whole-heartedly as we moderns do today. Their anti-christian foundations have been taught with such unquestioned regularity that the only thing left for us to do today is to seek to be un-educated or perhaps deprogramed. WE accept without question that Birth Control(which is no birth and no control) divorce(which is polygamy) and monopolistic commerce(which would be considered criminal in a sane society) are all inevitable products of progress(our main article of modern faith) Darwin teaches us to applaud the strongest and fiercest commpetitor and to seek to create heaven on Earth; while Marx points out that everything is economics and the capitalists don't have to convince us that we are doing our part for the greater good. And Freud has given us SEX as the ultimate commercial enterprise and selling gimick.
As a final note I would like to suggest that these three monsters emerged from the folks who gave us the "Enlightenment" and the Protestant Reformation. I realize that it is modern tolerant dogma to view all "progress" as good but the world has gained nothing by turning it's back on Catholicism. And as Chesterton once said,"The Church keeps appearing to pass away; and then miraculously it rises from the dead." One look at John Paul II and what he has done in the face of all the troubles in the Church and the world and you can begin to see the staying power and reality of a sacremental view of the world.
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I am a Freudian behaviorist. Freud, much like Einstean, is misinterpreted by the marginally knowledgable to suit their own purposes. Einstein talked about relativity in the world of physics. People took the terms and brought them into philosophy and morality to declare those areas to be relative and arbitrary. They are not. Freud's views on sexuality have continued to evole over the years within the thinking analytic movement. Many of his original concepts were rather valid. How they are applied by amateurs and dishonest opportunists is a separate matter for which Freud can not be blamed.
I repectfully disagree concerning Darwin and Freud (and I don't care enough about Marx to comment.)
Neo-Darwinists and neo-Freudians are a different story, however. But that they are so abundant and diffuse, yet unremarkable for their own individual stature (name 10 neos real quick...) is evidence to how much a variation upon an idea can become more powerful than the original. Neither Darwin or Freud were intent upon being anti Christian. They were focused, absorbed even, on their own insights regarding speciation and root causes for psychopathology. The theory of evolution was not and is not a challenge to the faithful. It was Darwin's effort to explain God's way.
Similarly, Freud's insight regarding the importance of early childhood experience in shaping adult personalities was not at all an effort to assault either God or Christ.
That is not to say that the subsequent "devotees" to either Darwin or Freud have not grossly perverted the original--for they most surely have.
I ask: put the blame where it is deserved, but not easily and falsely upon these two pioneers of knowlededge.
I think the truth is that fundamentalist religious folk need to create enemies. It is a convenient way of dealing with doubt. You'd think that after 911 most people would have figured that out, but the lesson doesn't seem to reach many Christian fundies. They can be just as block headed as Islamic fundies.
Marx on the other hand was an evil man that did not believe in God or the Bible. In a nutshell, he believed that man was inherently good. He was dead wrong.
I do know a little about Darwin. First of all, he was a "Christian" minister...second, he was a scientist. The phrase "survival of the fittest" was defined as the organism (in this case, finches)that produced the most offspring would be able to survive (traits)to the next generation. Darwin did not know about DNA, nor did anyone else for that matter, but he got it right. Later on we understood that traits(both physical and hidden) were both beneficial and harmful to the next generation. Darwin was a very observant man. He was simply telling it like it is. There is too much observable evidence out there to debate the existence of evolution. Darwin knew this and was simply trying to answer the question we are all asking today. What was the mechanism for it to occur? Just because we can't answer this question does not mean that evolution did not exist. Pseudo-intellectuals, murderers, and corrupt politicians twisted the meanings of his observations for their own personal gain. It is people such as these that have poisoned the minds of ignorant people. By the way...Gregor Mendel (a monk) got the evolution ball rolling with his pea plant experiments. Didn't your pope come out in defense of evolution a while back?
I really hate posts like this because people come out of the woodwork asking for proof of evolution. These same people will ignore the fossil record, geology, plate tectonics, and chemistry. So it is difficult to discuss things with them. Besides, this is not the place for it.
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I think you hit it pretty close. In an article to be published elsewhere I say aggressive paranoia needs enemies. It creates enemies by provocation or actions to provide licencing for further actions.
As for the 3 stooges of humanistic secularism - Marx, Darwin, and Freud - their narrowly defined world views concerning the origins, the pathologies, and the economic relationships of humans have been disintegrating for years now.
But it's not just a question of Freud's ideas being cheapened or distorted or misapplied by his followers. In many ways, some of his successors have improved very much on his insights. And in some ways, Freud had as much of a crackpot or propagandist or charlatan in him as some of those who followed, as his work with cocaine, biorhythmic theories, historical speculations, and some disastrous therapeutic interpretations and interventions might indicate.
Current scientists are putting Freud into perspective, sorting out the positive from the negative sides of his work, and the useful from the blind alleys. I don't think one can blame Freud for the discovery of sex or the use of it as marketing gimmick. Simple experience accounts for that. But Freud did much to add to the level of cynicism of 20th century humanity.
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Cynicism is one of the first orders of business of a good psychotherapist. If your patients are being abused or betrayed and you are not cynical enough to catch it, then your patients fail to improve because your own mind is too bland to perceive and tell them the truth. You becom an enabler for the enemy...
The same is true of social/political analysis.
These Eastern Orthodox adherents believe that it was only a small step from one man (the Pope) declaring himself as the supreme interpreter of Scripture and Tradition to another man (Luther) declaring that any man may interpret Scripture on his own. There is one Web site, orthodoxireland.com, which claims that the Christian faith of the British Isles was once Orthodox, but that the Roman Catholic Church, in alliance with the Normans, suppressed the original faith.
What is unproven in the Eastern Orthodox position is exactly how one position, such as Papal supremacy, leads to another, such as the Protestant position of sola fide. Likewise, it is rather difficult to see how the Reformation and its "solas" led to the Enlightenment's apostasy. The nation where the Enlightenment was carried to its most extreme extent was the France of the Revolution of 1789, the same nation once called the eldest daughter of the Catholic Church. Interestingly, France had effectively removed almost all her Protestants via exile and execution by about a century before the Bastille fell. We must also remember that the Catholic clergy strongly supported the brutal Ushtashi regime in Croatia during World War II, as well as the less severe dictatorships in Spain and Portugal under Franco and Salazar, respectively.
Ironically, for the Eastern Orthodox, it was Mother Russia, the "Third Rome", that proved to be the first foothold of Marxism, a descendant of Enlightenment philosophy. This occurred despite the Russian Orthodox Church having a near monopoly over religious worship and the existence of the most thorough police state in Europe. After the October Revolution, the Russian Orthodox Church, after fierce persecution by Lenin and Stalin, let herself become a willing tool of the Soviet state.
The Protestant nations have their own shame: majority Protestant Germany, cradle of the Reformation, fell for the neo-paganism of the National Socialists. Naziism, while not a child of the Enlightenment, did draw upon the Romantic reaction to the exceeses of the French Revolution and embraced the myths of a heroic, pagan Germanic past. While many of the Nazi leaders, inlcuding Adolf Hitler, were of Catholic background, the Lutheran north and east of Germany were generally the most supportive of Hitler. Most German clergy, whether Lutheran, Reformed, or Catholic, cooperated with the Third Reich.
Assuming that any of the three main branches of Christianity somehow "caused" atheistic or materialistic thinking, which is the root source of most modern tyranny, defies both the historical record and reason. Various Christian clergymen may have supported one or another tyrannical regimes, but we cannot assume that this support stemmed from their churches' theology.
The degree to which thinkers are responsible for the uses that others make of their concepts is also open to question. Freud may not have been as cynical as many in the world around him, but he did little to check the corrosive and reductive cynicism of those who cited his ideas or, without even having read his books, picked up his ideas. Some of Freud's successors have recognized this and have tried to recast his ideas in a less mechanistic and less materialistic vein.
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