Posted on 09/08/2003 3:05:17 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
I SENSED A KINSHIP with Martin Luther when reading Professor Thomas L. Johnson's comment ["Truly free? Not as long as religion plays a role in government," Aug. 19]. When Luther read Erasmus' diatribes he responded: "Your workstruck me as so worthless and poor that my heart went out to you for having defiled your lovely and brilliant flow of language with such vile stuff.It is like using gold and silver dishes to carry garden rubbish or dung."
Johnson assumes we experience philosophical ideas only in the philosophers' writings. This is erroneous. We meet these ideas in movies, television, and the lyrics of music.
They are in books such as Hillary Clinton's "It Takes a Village." The raising of a child is too important to be left to the parents; it takes a village. This belief is from Plato's "Republic." Movies and television have often portrayed the "anti-hero hero"--the individual who makes his own way and his own laws, and refuses to submit to authority. This is the "superman" of Nietzsche.
Johnson's own polemic on Christian "virtues" betrays the influence of Nietzsche's "Will to Power." These ideas are found in marketing: Get it here and now because here and now is all you have.
One does not have to read the philosophers to encounter the ideas they have promulgated. Even the U.S. Army has kowtowed to philosophy with the slogan "An army of one."
The contemporary church, as well, has been shaped by the philosophers. Rudolf Bultmann turned to the atheistic existential philosophy of Heidegger as the way to interpret the Bible, pushing many into a subjective approach. But perhaps it was Immanuel Kant in his "Critique of Pure Reason" who had the greatest impact on culture and church when he built his wall between the transcendent (God, the self, and essences) and the world as we perceive it. The Christian community abandoned its traditional rational arguments for God and turned to leaps of faith. Thus the church, like the culture, found itself separated from God, the self, and essences, and the answers to the important questions: What is Good, Beautiful and True? We have all bowed the knee to Father Kant and his disciples, even if we have never heard their names.
The history Johnson asserts is more wretched than his views on philosophical effect. In ancient Rome, Christians were executed for not worshiping the emperor. Christians stopped the practice of infanticide. It was the church's opposition that ended the games where people were butchered for the amusement of the mob.
Throughout history Christians have resisted tyranny--at Runnymede and the signing of the Magna Carta, in central Europe when the German Princes opposed Charles V, and in the Dutch war of independence. All these events were carried out by Christians. Parliament's victory over the King in the English Civil War was the work of Christians, as was the American Revolution. The history Johnson offered, of Christians as docile, willing servants of despots, is at its best abject knavery, at its worst odious slander.
The dictatorships of this past century, of which Johnson took little notice, were nearly all anti-religious. These opposed Judeo-Christianity and adopted Karl Marx's creed "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his need." Lenin and Stalin attempted to exterminate religion. Communist China's human disasters ("The Great Leap Forward" and the "Cultural Revolution") were not the result of Christian complicity. These tragedies, along with those perpetrated by the Pol Pot regime and numerous others, lay with proponents of anti-religious, anti-Christian socialism.
Johnson protests that both political parties are making government bigger, and they are. We have only ourselves to blame, having become enthralled with the politics of envy, greed, and guilt, justified by Marx's creed. This is the result of the marriage of agnostic socialism and 19th-century liberal theology, which is not Christian, as J. Gresham Machen so ably pointed out in "Christianity and Liberalism."
Professor Johnson may assert the contrary, but with God banished from, statehouse, schoolhouse, and courtroom, Caesar is now on the throne. Where humans rule rather than the law, tyranny will follow. Big government is the heritage of this exile.
We all suffer from Pascal's dilemma of being able to think of a better existence than we have, but being unable to bring it about. We as a culture have turned to a human institution, government, for our needs and wants. Many are ready to lay covetous hands on the public treasury. This is the legacy of the 19th- and 20th-century socialist movements, which abandoned the orthodox teachings of Judaism and Christianity.
The threat to freedom is not from the community of faith. It is from the culture's desire to have the state meet our desires and free us from accountability. In a family environment this would be called codependency.
The late Vince Lombardi, observing the American scene in 1970, said, "People no longer understand the difference between liberty and license." I see in Professor Johnson's diatribe that lack of understanding.
It's the horribly simple definition.
Matter is convertable into energy, and relativity proves that time is no absolute in any sense. Recent advances also indicate that the speed of light is not an abxolute, and that particles in two different places can be linked by means for which we have no understanding yet.
E=MC2 involves the speed of light, which is the equivalent of a measure of time. Why should the illusory elements of the universe be tied to one that is not to produce their illusions?
Beyond that, given that all you know of the universe is illusory, how would you know it changes all the time? Don't forget the relativity issues.
I found the most interesting part to be the support given to Calvin by Kant, not to mention Darwin. Calvin, of course, was a bit too simplistic, but the key attributes of his denial of free will are there, provided one allows for the existence of a creator, and Kant does.
There was a time when nuclear fission could not even have been dreamed of. Science had to make an awful lot of progress before the concept was even possible, much less any attempt to determine if the concept was valid.
We know today that nuclear fission is not only possible, but can be put to practical use, and in fact is generating the electricity powering this computer I am writing this on.
Though once never guessed, and later greatly doubted, we now know it is a fact, nuclear fission is possible.
This is an absolute fact. It is not suddenly going to become untrue, it is no true only on certain days, it is not true only if someone believes hard enough. It is ABSOLUTELY TRUE, whether anyone believes it or not.
Now I have no idea why you want so badly to believe we cannot know the truth, not only about scientific matters, but many others as well, but that wish is not going to be fulfilled. Maybe you really cannot know anything for sure, but I assure you, the rest of us can.
blind faith in science has every bit of potential as has blind religious faith to cause harm.
I agree that blind faith in anything is dangerous. It is not the object of the faith that is the problem, however. It is credulity itself. Quackery, junk-science, and almost every scam and con going passes itself off as "science" or "philosohy" or "medicine." It is not legitimate science or philsophy or medicine that is the problem, it is people's superstitious "faith" in those things they believe they have no need to understand.
Hank
That is the nature of science and one of many reasons why we should not make science our new "god". I stole that from Einstein .... "We should take care not to make the intellect our god
Einstein wrote often of faith, spirituality and the importance of mystery. Here are some more:
"The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion. Herein lies the germ of all art and all true science. Anyone to whom this feeling is alien, who is no longer capable of wonderment and lives in a state of fear is a dead man. To know that what is impenatrable for us really exists and manifests itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, whose gross forms alone are intelligible to our poor faculties - this knowledge, this feeling ... that is the core of the true religious sentiment. In this sense, and in this sense alone, I rank myself among profoundly religious men." ___ A. Einstein
I have deep faith that the principle of the universe will be beautiful and simple. ___ A.Einstein
The process of scientific discovery is, in effect, a continual flight from wonder." ___ A. Einstein
Nobody's perfect.
The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion.
Einstein was brilliant, in a very narrow way, but in some areas he was just another crackpot. What a, "mystic emotion," might be, I cannot imagine. (There is no such thing.)
Let's do this. If you name me one disease that has been cured or relieved by mysticism, I will name you ten that have been cured by the science of medicine. You name me one advance in agriculture or food production that mysticism has provided and I will name you a hundred that science has provided. You name me one form of electronic device that mysticism has provided and I will name you a thousand that science has provided. Name me one principle of mathematics, logic, or economics that mysticism has provided, and I will name the geniuses in these fields that have provided all we know about them.
What mystic teacher or teaching has made a single contribution to human betterment or knowldge in any field? None!
Mysticism has never (and never will) provide one useful truth, or any knowledge of any kind. Why do you pursue it so?
Hank
I consider "too open oneself up to the greatness of possibilities, to free one's self of intellectual restraint," both mysticism and grossly immoral. To live for the truth and to live morally requires self-restraint and ruthless intellectual intergrity.
Hank
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