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Post by hibernicus on Nov 6, 2012 10:56:32 GMT
Quite correct - there is a distinction between an external reward and the sort of reward which is proper to the action itself, which the Kantian insistence that only actions undertaken without hope of reward can be moral overlooks (reflecting, I would say, the ways in which anti-sacramentalism leads to anti-incarnationalism; Kant is offering a secularised version of Protestant pietism). In fact, what the atheists are really doing is expressing a dispute about what it is to be human. Are humans simply rational-hedonist animals, geared to maximising happiness in this life because there is no other, or are we by nature directed to a transcendent End in which alone we find our proper fulfilment? (An interesting comparison would be with Feser's post about how modern zombie stories and similar horror fictions involving reanimated corpses rest on the Cartesian assumption that the soul is an external element which manipulates the body, and hence in theory might manipulate a dead body as easily as a living body; the Aristotelean-Thomist view of the soul as the form which animates and organises that particular body means that death consists of the separation of the soul from the body, which without the form resolves into its constituent matter, implies that the body cannot be dead while the individual soul is still there and cannot be alive if it is absent.) edwardfeser.blogspot.ie/2012/02/how-to-animate-corpse.html I am not a trained philosopher, and while I read several Platonic dialogues in translation years ago I regret to say that I am pretty much completely ignorant of Aristotle, so it is fascinating to see how many familiar concepts have Aristotelean underpinnings, and how some of the oddities of modern phllosophy arise from a reaction against Aristotle. BTW CS Lewis is very strong about the issue of how belief in God as natural End of our unsatisfied yearnings can be seen as a reasonable conclusion rather than dismissed as wishful thinking - partly because he never quite shook off the fear that this might indeed be the case (natural for someone who is a professional thinker - Newman had the same ultra-sensitive fear of self-delusion, which is one reason why he was very frustrating for those who looked to him for clear leadership).
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 14, 2012 21:42:21 GMT
An interesting piece by Fr Dwight Longenecker on the chronological snobbery inherent in Christopher Hitchens' sneer that religion is an infantile comfort blanket invented by ignorant primitives: www.patheos.com/blogs/standingonmyhead/2012/12/hitting-on-hitchens.htmlEXTRACT ...Hitchens’ comment illustrates how the atheist’s attack on religion is rather like the color blind person’s critique of art. He begins with a total red herring, “Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody…had the smallest idea what was going on.” Yes and no. They didn’t know how to do open heart surgery and make iPhones and they didn’t have the scientific knowledge we now have, but they were certainly just as smart as we are, but smart in other ways and about other things. I expect they understood the natural world in a way that was different than scientific knowledge. Indeed, if Christopher Hitchens were plopped down in the primeval forest ten thousand years ago with our ancient ancestors and asked to survive for forty eight hours I expect they would be saying that he didn’t have the smallest idea what was going on. He goes on revealing his total misunderstanding of what religion is all about: “It (religion) comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as for comfort, reassurance and other infantile needs).” His chronological snobbery is incredible. Why does he suppose that modern man is not in need of comfort, reassurance and knowledge and that there were not people in primitive times who got along quite nicely without any extra comfort, reassurance and knowledge? Had he met a tribal warrior in the primeval jungle who was about to spear him and eat him for dinner I doubt whether Mr Hitchens would have recognized someone who was suffering from an infantile need for reassurance and comfort. In fact people then and people now are pretty much the same deep down. Some need knowledge, reassurance and comfort. Some do not. The point is, these needs (or the lack of them) are not the reason for the development of religion. Instead human beings–both ancient and modern–sense that there is something else “out there.” They see the beautiful, ordered world around them and deduce that there is a mind behind the order and beauty. Within the human heart (whether it is in need of reassurance and comfort or not) there is a religious instinct. Human beings are not so much homo sapiens as homo orans. Finally, Hitchens makes the common sophomoric mistake of thinking that the primitive religious quest was about knowledge, reassurance and comfort. This is because modern Christianity is mostly about knowledge, reassurance and comfort. Has Hitchens actually studied the primitive religions he pontificates about? There was not much knowledge in them at all. Primitive religions are not about theology or philosophy or arguments for the existence of a Triune Deity. There is no theodicy or argumentation. Neither is there much reassurance and comfort. The primitive religions were attempts of frightened human beings to placate gods who were irrational, capricious, cruel and unpredictable. There was little reassurance from a god who demanded human sacrifice. There was little comfort from a god who was as likely to consume you as he was to bless you. Only a partially educated, elitist, intellectual and cultural snob like Hitchens write such a thing. The idea that religion could provide knowledge, reassurance and comfort was a much, much later development. Even the earliest teachings of the Christian church did not offer much in the way of knowledge, reassurance and comfort. Jesus Christ was not your buddy who walks with you the beach and has golden hair and cuddles little lambkins. He was, instead, the fearsome judge of all–the King of the Universe and the Almighty Son of the Father. Neither was God the Father the warm and cozy, kindly sort of Colonel Sanders in the sky we modern soft Christians have imagined. He too was the Lord God–the Creator–to whom one day you would have to give account. Finally, Hitchens makes the mistake most atheists make in concluding that because we have advanced scientific knowledge of the natural world and advanced technological achievement that we are therefore advanced in everything else. It only takes a brief look at one medieval cathedral or a cursory study of the knowledge of the ancient world to realize that we may be smart where they were dumb, but they were very smart and accomplished in areas about which we are totally stupid... An atheist like Hitchens is not only like the color blind man in an art gallery, he’s like a color blind man in an art gallery who thinks all the pictures are stupid and should be destroyed. END OF EXTRACT
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 18, 2012 21:05:44 GMT
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 7, 2013 15:29:08 GMT
An interesting example of the problems of some forms of liberal religion when confronted with atheism. Rod Dreher notes an exchange between Hitchens and Andrew Sullivan in which Sullivan's view that we can believe in God without knowing anything about Him and that Jesus doesn't want to tell us what to do gets shown up as vacuous. One of the commenters notes Hichens' remark that Sullivan's view ends up as a sort of "Christified Hinduism". That interests me because I have been posting elsewhere on this forum about the works of John Moriarty, who fits this description to a T. Moriarty explicitly takes a Hindu position which is pantheist or panentheist (the creator is not distinct from the creation; matter is an illusion and mind is the only reality), rejects the Bible and the concept of sacred history tout court, denies that the God of the Jews is the Father of Jesus, and calls for a grand reconciliation between God and the Dragon (aka the devil) - he removes all particularity from Jesus and reduces Him to a sort of avatar undergoing a shamanic ritual outside of historic time, an allegorical being no more "real" than Christian Rosenkreuz en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Rosenkreuz Yet this sort of fauxtianity is being solemnly recommended as the cure to all the Church's problems (cf the review of A MORIARTY READER in the current DOCTRINE AND LIFE). As between Dawkins and Moriarty, I'd prefer Dawkins - to be quite honest www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/sullys-therapeutic-deism/#post-comments
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Post by maolsheachlann on Feb 7, 2013 19:08:48 GMT
It's so boring, isn't it? So mushy and misty and formless and bland. How could such a cosmology ever inspire anyone to do anything, or even to care about anything? Everything is equivalent to everything else and nothing makes any difference.
Chesterton once wrote (about the liberal parsons of his day): "The parson is not dull because he is always expounding theology, but because he has no theology to expound. This is quite as true of bad theology as of good; of things I utterly disbelieve as of things I believe. The old Scotch Calvnistic sermons kept a very high intellectual average, and intensely interested the Scottish peasants who were trained under them. And this is not so much because theology is necessary to religion, as simply because logic is necessary to theology. Logic is at least a game, and the old Calvinistic preachers played the game. It was a fine, fantastic exercise in Lewis Carroll's game of logic, to take any text from the chronicles of Christianity and reconcile it with the creed of Calvin. It took some doing; and it was amusing to see it done. The Scotch peasants went eagerly every Sabbath to see a Presbyterian minister performing like an acrobat. But there was some real fun, because there was some real thinking. And there was some real thinking because there was some real theology."
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 7, 2013 22:25:14 GMT
I wouldn't say it was boring - what it is is (a) self-absorbed; your personal problems are the only things that matter in the whole wide world (b) engaged in profound denial because its answer to the problem of evil is to pretend that evil and suffering are illusions which can be wished away.
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 2, 2013 21:51:57 GMT
There is a blogosphere debate about Michael Haneke's film AMOUR, which won the Best Foreign Film at the Oscars. [PLOT SPOILERS AHEAD - The film is about an elderly couple, both music teachers, living prosperous and cultivated lives in a Parisian apartment; there is one daughter, who lives in England with her own (somewhat unhappy). The wife suffers a stroke and her arm is paralysed; she tries to commit suicide, realising she can only look forward to a slow descent into senility, but the husband stops her. She does indeed undergo a slow decline into senility, albeit with a number of visiting but generally lacklustre carers; the husband, having angrily refused various offers of sympathy in the (accurate) belief these are meaningless, finally snaps and suffocates her with a pillow. After writing an account, he leaves the apartment (almost certainly to kill himself); the film begins and ends with the police breaking in to discover the wife's body and the daughter wandering bewildered through the empty rooms. Barbara Nicolosi Harrington points out that its popularity among the US intelligentsia reflects the growing tendency to present euthanasia as the next great liberal cause, and compares it to the Nazi pro-euthanasia film ICH KLAGE AN. The current issue of ALIVE magazine has taken up the comparison. (I think BTW this comparison is overdone. I have not seen ICH KLAGE AN, which was deliberately intended to promote euthanasia as seems to be the case with AMOUR, but the key difference is that the husband in the Nazi film is young and vigorous and can look forward to love and happiness with a new mate and to breeding lots of future soldiers for the Volk, whereas in AMOUR the husband is old and equally doomed - it becomes clear that he is also going senile, though more gradually than his wife.) www.nationalreview.com/human-exceptionalism/328033/cheering-euthanasia-sure-fire-way-win-show-biz-awardsen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ich_klage_anwww.patheos.com/blogs/churchofthemasses/2013/01/twisted-oscar-amour/ Here is an attempt by an orthodox Catholic blogger to defend the film from the charge of being pro-euthanasia, with Nicolosi's reply in the combox: www.theamericanconservative.com/amour-the-family-plot/EXTRACT Barbara Nicolosi says: January 15, 2013 at 11:07 am “This strikes me as totally wrong.” “Totally wrong,” Eve? Really? The actors and director have said this is a movie about euthanasia. The director said he hoped the movie would spur a cultural discussion about euthanasia. Of course, the movie has emotional power. But that shouldn’t blind you to the lack of moral condemnation in the movie for the principle beat of the main character’s story. If this movie belongs to the husband, then the whole thing leads him on a journey to his final choice. And, according to Aristotle, if that choice is for evil, than we should all be clear that his choice is bad for him and for the world. The movie, and the whole cultural Left, has resisted any moral judgment as regards the film. Few people even know that it is a love story that culminates in a murderous act. The very lack of discussion about the goodness or badness of the end of the movie is a sign that the Left is trying to normalize euthanasia. It’s fine to point out the good in cultural products. But missing the forest for the trees is also not a virtue. Best to you always - END When I saw the film a few months ago, one point that struck me is the way in which it takes the absence of religious faith for granted. (At one point, when the couple are flicking through their photo albums as the wife deteriorates, we see a photo of her as a little girl dressed in white for her First Communion, but this is not remarked on.) The conservative US film critic James Bowman (with whom I often disagree) picks up on the full implications of this as indicating the extent to which Western high culture in our own time, having banished transcendent hope, is based on despair: www.jamesbowman.net/reviewDetail.asp?pubID=2223EXTRACT ...At another point, a pigeon flies in the window and Mr Trintignant is forced to scurry around in an effort to find the means of ejecting it. In the context the image may call to mind that of the Venerable Bede when he compared the life of a man to a sparrow’s transit, out of a cold winter’s night, through one window of a warm and lighted mead hall filled with feasting and out at another window again, back into the night. [IN ITS ORIGINAL CONTEXT THIS IMAGE IS EVEN MORE APPOSITE - IT IS UTTERED BY A PAGAN PRIEST WHO SAYS THAT THE FACT THAT CHRISTIANITY OFFERS HOPE AND KNOWLEDGE ABOUT THIS MYSTERY IS A COMPELLING REASON TO ADOPT THE NEW FAITH - HIB] Most importantly, of course, the lifelong intimacy between Georges and Anne is here translated into the images of infirmity and death. When Georges attempts to wrestle the nearly helpless Anne from wheelchair to bed or bed to wheelchair, the two briefly seem to be dancing, as one imagines they did in their youth, but with a melancholy difference as to the consummation to be expected. Again as in Funny Games, the viewer may feel himself bludgeoned by images portending death and great sorrow. For here there can be no transcendent meaning in what we know is to come, no comforting sense of fulfilment or peace or transfiguration through suffering. Suffering is just suffering and death is just death: mean and ugly and hateful and utterly without any redeeming qualities. Indeed, the end of life is so horrible that it casts a pall backward over what we suppose had been long happiness and ultimately makes Georges and Anne, in different ways, hate their own lives for requiring such an end. [THIS PUTS INTO WORDS EXACTLY MY OWN SENSE OF THE FILM'S IMPLICATIONS, WHICH THUS ARE MUCH DARKER EVEN THAN MERE PRO-EUTHANASIA PROPAGANDA.] The place of music in the film, I take it, is to stand for the joy in life that has now fled... Life ends, and so does the music that had been the point and purpose of these particular lives. Except that it doesn’t, of course. Schubert’s music is precisely that of him which lives on, and will live on as long as there is anyone left to hear it. Similarly, Eva [THE DAUGHTER] and Alexandre , in different ways, are what will survive of Georges and Anne, but stern Mr Haneke will allow neither them nor us any comfort from this. Small wonder that the world looks so bleak when all you choose to see of it is the bleak parts: the pain, the suffering, the loss and the moral nullity at the end of all when there is nothing else in life. There is certainly a sad truth to these things, but it is not the whole truth unless you insist on its being so, as Amour does. Our serious culture is now dominated by this teaching: that heartbreak and sorrow and loss, like violence and sex, are the touchstones of "reality." And the corollary is that there must be something fake about hope or happiness or consolation. It’s a pity that such a talented film-maker as Michael Haneke should be so uncompromising in his adherence to this kind of principled despair. END As I come from a fairly old-fashioned Catholic background it was not until my early twenties, when I was researching a literary topic as a postgraduate student, that I read modern Irish literary fiction in bulk, and what struck me about it was precisely this despair - this sense that the falsity of the hope which Bede's Anglo-Saxon pagans found in Christ was self-evident, and that literary greatness lay in its clear and total rejection. That was when I realised just how deeply the rot of secularisation had grown, and just how dark was the alternative it offered, and how important it is, in some way however trivial, to bear witness against it. It has taken me much longer to realise that for that witness to be true it must face the horrors on which that despair draws, and not avoid them as so much genteel fiction did. That is why I have posted this item on this particular thread; because the intellectual adolescents of the Irish atheist movement seem to me like the university students who bemused Lionel Trilling at the end of his life- because where the modernist texts they were taught looked into the abyss of the loss of faith and the crisis of civilisation, the students just regarded it as an interesting landscape feature and did not seem to realise it was an abyss. St Edith Stein and Bl. John XXIII saw the horrors of World War I army causalties (as a nurse and a hospital orderly) and did not despair. Let us ask for their intercession that we may see, and not despair, and act to relieve pain, and still speak of the Lord's marvels.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Mar 3, 2013 1:18:33 GMT
England's NHS is Godless and I've heard many horror stories about people dying there. I'd probably want Dignitas too if I lived through an old age there, you really need your family around you for love and tenderness if Christ isn't underpinning the ethos of your hospital/hospice/nursing home. I've only had experience of Catholics in France and they take their aging parents in with them.
That scenario will happen again and again if people don't have somewhere to go where love is part of caring, where caring is part of your ethics, where suffering is seen as honourable, where people intervene before hope is gone and despair sets in. I think we'll see a gentle road into euthanasia in the next few decades. Does anybody remember that Star Trek episode (yes yes, I was a Trekkie) where a certain race automatically committed suicide at 60 and he saw it as a kind and rational thing to do? It was shown in a terrible light by the show but I wonder if they were to make that show now...
That film also highlighted the daughter's passivity. It's a common problem, not here so much, but people do expect the state to do the work for you. But they won't guarantee your parents are cherished, not at all. You can't buy love. Keep kicking God out of the public services and you run a not for profit efficiency machine, not a service for the public good.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Mar 3, 2013 2:39:23 GMT
I remember that Star Trek. It was shown in a dim light to a certain extent but at the end there seemed to be a certain acceptance of it.
If it was made today, the scientist would probably desperately want to die but his race would be keeping him alive because of their antiquated customs. Star Trek was very humanistic, actually, in the good sense of that word.
All of the rhetoric and sloganeering and plausible-sounding arguments seem to melt like suds when you realise it boils down to the taking of human life.
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 3, 2013 22:19:20 GMT
The problem for the daughter was not so much that she was passive as that she lived in another country and had children to look after and problems with her own marriage (her English husband cheated on a fairly regular basis, which I suspect says something about the French view of les Anglo-Saxons). At one point she offers to help and the father angrily rejects this as meaningless, asking "What can you do? Do you want your mother to come and live with you?" Clearly the expected answer is No (though it was also the case that the mother had expressed a wish to remain in the apartment). The film also made it clear that the parents were sufficiently well-off to pay for home help (though the home help was very under-motivated and downright rude at times). The big problem is that our economy means people live far away from their relatives, and the older generation will often actively resist having the younger make sacrifices for them - it's not just a simple refusal. The utilitarian case for euthanasia (and indeed for abortion) is very difficult to resist once you remove reference to human life as an absolute value. (One of the more chilling things I remember in recent years BTW is that when the Terri Schiavo case happened and elements of the Republican party in Florida tried to intervene, albeit at a fairly late stage, to have her kept alive, opinion polls showed that a MAJORITY of the electorate were hostile because they were afraid of having to bear the cost of their elderly relatives right to the end.) Patsy McGarry's recent sneer that the embryo is "a compound of chemicals" can be applied at the other end of life as well.
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tobias
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Post by tobias on Mar 4, 2013 20:48:11 GMT
My wife's cousin is 99 this year and insists on staying at home despite having fallen a couple of times in the house and had to be carted off to hospital. But she has a first class carer provided by the HSE who calls every day and looks after her, my wife calls in to her every week too. Her nephews and neices come over from England frequently and stay for a week at a time. But she often says she is tired of living but yet she is hanging in there. I'm pretty sure this is replicated all over the country in one way or another so I think there is a streak of humanity in us still that would resist euthanasia for quite some time yet. Mind you, I'm 69 now and in the whole of my health T.G. but as I get older and more crocked I'd better make sure there are no pillows left lying around! Re. Patsy McGarry's remark about a "Compound of chemicals" Prof John Crown made a similar remark in the Sunday Independent some weeks ago and likened the embryo as resembling a cancer cell. A disquieting and peculiar comparison, I think, from such an eminent physician.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Mar 5, 2013 15:16:48 GMT
I agree with Tobias - this is scary.
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Post by hibernicus on May 1, 2013 8:13:32 GMT
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Post by hibernicus on May 1, 2013 8:20:01 GMT
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Post by maolsheachlann on May 17, 2013 20:29:03 GMT
The problem with this approach is that religion only has cultural value when a critical mass of people do believe in it. I know, for instance, that English satirists and comedians like to portray Anglicanism has a national church that ran on empty for centuries, with nobody really believing any of it, but you only have to dip into the history of England to realise that was never true. It still isn't.
Although I sometimes wonder whether Shinto does serve as a completely cultural religion for Japan. I don't know enough about Japan to tell, though.
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