The Religion Moderator has a thankless job, and does the best possible job that can be done, here. The RM deserves the support of all of us.
Excuse me, Judith Anne
What’s NEED for YOU to post this to me?
I’m quite aware of the quiet complaints he/she must get from the thin-skinned - so their any grief isn’t coming from me.
So why address this to me - YOU are making this VERY PERSONAL.
When one looks at many of the posts, one realizes that intemperance and indiscretion are considered good things by some. The idea of a "Virtue-based" ethic is not rejected, only because it isn't considered long enough to qualify for rejection.
As Scripture suggests, a rejection of Virtue leads to a loss of virtues. And clearly not only are temperance and prudence early victims, but justice also is forsaken. Maybe there's some fortitude still being exercised, but I'm not sure.
And that's before we get to the infused virtues, the ones that come only by extraordinary gift. There's no charity in gang-banging Mormons. It's hard to imagine that a Mormon would be converted by a bunch of "orthodox" Christians circling him and howling like coyotes.
I do not mean this to be a general slam, a sort of dignified howl. But some things struck me: The first was the contempt for temperance. This is cloaked by an adopted attitude which might be articulated as "Extremism in the defense of MY view of the Gospel is no vice."
And who knows? Maybe it isn't. But one problem with it is that conversation is not possible when people are yelling at each other. When reason and justice are forsaken, all that's left is force majeure. Rhetorical might, or at least persistence, makes right.
No room is made for Truth to enter in, because they see no need to make room. Instead of being possessed BY the Truth, they think of themselves as possessing the truth, and they thank God that they are not as others are, or even as these Catholics.
The predictable consequence of the renunciation of prudence, temperance, and justice is a degradation of fortitude and of judgment or discernment.
Here I have to say, on both sides there was a little high-fiving among the members of one gang, a little eagerness to take potshots at one's opponent in threads not addressed to him -- all, of course, in the name of the God of Love.
But a simple aspect of the loss of judgment is the manifest inability to distinguish between going after an argument and going after the person who made it. So when somebody makes an assertion which can be disproved with less than five minutes research, to point that out and to ask for an account of the error is considered going after the person, rather than going after the argument.
And the vice of injustice leads to its own punishment, a sense of outrage when confronted with the consequences of one's injustice.
So what we face when the battle flag goes up is an opposition each one of whom thinks that his or her own 'discernment' is the final arbiter, and that anyone who persists in another view is vicious.
But all of the above is comparatively trivial, maybe matter more fit for a psychological than a theological or epistemological consideration.
What is important is that here are both of the oldest sophistries, two of the Father of Lies favorite lies come together. "Might makes right," and persistence (or timely withdrawal) matters more than the rightness of the cause; and "Man is the measure" - "my discernment" trumps any objective standard.
Digression: Where this melds with the "psychopathology of everyday life" is at the juncture where "MY FEELINGS BEING HURT" becomes confused with an act of discernment. In truth, hurt feelings are nothing more than a "heads up": Something important is happening, but I need to exercise THOUGHT to know what's going on. But what it more frankly pathological (and there are folks on either side with this "issue") is the sense that "MY feelings" are dispositive, while YOURS are irrelevant (or deserved.)
And what this shows is how some forms of Protestantism, and especially of Sola Scriptura, has led to modern relativism. If it's all nothing more or less than "my inner conviction", if "my inner conviction" trumps any objective standard, then nothing distinguishes me from the thug acting out the teaching of a Nietzsche he has never read.
Finally, it is not our arguments that are wrong, in their eyes. Indeed our arguments n=do not merit consideration. It is our arguing at all that is wrong! In arguing we are searching for a standard of judgment with which both sides are in agreement. Having found it, we lay out are views in respect to that standard.
But while our opponents CLAIM Scripture as their standard, what their many fissiparations make clear is that it is "MY OWN interpretation (and that of my homies)" that is the standard. They have sown the wind of personal interpretation and they reap the whirlwind of a loss of objective reason. In the words cited by Eusebius, they begin in voluntary ignorance and end up in involuntary psychosis.
So, DBK, your noble effort in this thread has produced fruit. Maybe it's not the fruit you were looking for, but it's not bad fruit.