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Post by Los Leandros on Sept 22, 2011 16:01:36 GMT
John Water's has been making the very trenchant point that in view of the Irish media's initial attempt to stifle the debate on the David Norris/paedophile connection ( it was after all an independent blogger who ensured that RTE & mob could'nt ignore the story ) & the more recent development where many of the liberal chattering classes are openly touting for Mr. Norris ( Sean O'Rourke on RTE News is virtually brow-beating everyone politician he interviews to sign his nomination papers ), the whole media hysteria over so-called child abuse is so much vacuous hypocricy ; only of concern to them where they can cynically use it to have a pop at the Church. I wish the official Church, Archbishop Martin etc., would go on the offensive a lot more in this regard. Otherwise, the opportunity will be lost.
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 22, 2011 22:19:27 GMT
I'm afraid the official Church have made such a mess of things that they would be dismissed as the pot calling the kettle black, and at this stage the media have established themselves as a much more effective magisterium (of the Church of Football, Fillies and Fintan) than the pulpit. I wonder is RTE also urging politician-interviewees to nominate Dana in the interests of fair play and letting the people decide? Thought not.
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Post by Los Leandros on Sept 23, 2011 9:17:24 GMT
I agree. but at this stage the only thing for the " official " Church to do is to come out fighting with all guns blazing. A bit like Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid. I know it ended in tragedy, but better to go down fighting than with a grovelling whimper !. Yeah, RTE are really rooting for Dana.
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 23, 2011 13:00:07 GMT
And I think the official church is currently in the position Kierkegaard ascribed to the Lutheran Church of his own day - like a clown in a theatre who realises the place is on fire, runs out on the stage in full costume and shouts "Fire, Fire". Because he is in costume the audience assume this is all part of the show, and the more he shouts the harder they laugh - until they burn to death. The Church needs to recover its sense of what it's for before it can address the audience effectively. (BTW, one thing that strikes me from looking at the ACPI blog is that a lot of them are motivated by a bitter feeling that they pledged their lives with tremendous enthusiasm in the 50s and 60s without fully realising what they were letting themselves in for and how much things would change over their lifetimes. The Church had faith in itself then - sometimes misplaced - and as it lost faith in itself so have they. We need to recover that faith and enthusiasm, and that can only come when there has been a proper accounting with the real crimes and mistakes that undermined it - and by real accounting I mean one based on the Faith, not the jettisoning exercise advocated by Garry O'Sullivan and the ACPI.)
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Post by losleandros on Sept 23, 2011 15:30:33 GMT
The Kierkegaard story is very apt. I'm just wondering ( in less than charitable mode ) is the audience worth saving ; even if the Church is on message. They have free will, they are adults ( of a sort ), many of them were perhaps just looking for the opportunity to jump ship. The core teachings of Catholicism simply dont appeal to their hedonistic tendencies. Pope Benedicts thesis about a much smaller, but hopefully more authentic Catholicism, seems the best we can hope for. Maybe they'll leave us alone then. Maybe not. For example, have you noticed despite Dawkin's & co's. declared disinterest in Catholicism, virtually every interview he gives seems obsessed with the teachings of the Church.
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Post by Cato on Sept 24, 2011 19:17:02 GMT
Is settling for a smaller leaner church not an abandonment of the mission Jesus left his followers to 'go teach all nations'?
Why do you think that hedonism is the reason that people left the church? Seems a little odd to me and it is certainly not the reason I left. (And I am no hedonist!)
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Post by Los Leandros on Sept 25, 2011 11:37:35 GMT
Good questions, Cato. Some thoughts in reply. While Jesus gave his apostles that admonition, Catholicism is also strongly predicated on the concept of free wiil. You, as is your right, have exercised it ; as have large sections of Western society. I would argue that they have replaced it either with nothing or with ultimately damaging ideologies/creeds. But they are free to leave. I am using hedonism in a broad context, as the sole love/worship of the here & now. It could be sexual pleasure, material or whatever. The general idea is well explored in the book - " Degenerate Moderns ", by E. Michael Jones. Thanks for your comments.
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Post by Cato on Sept 25, 2011 13:06:08 GMT
I have found that those who are, say we say, actively engaged in their religious disbelief, actually put quite a lot of thought into their ethics and are trying to live 'the good life' (in the philosophical sense, not the hedonistic one). Most of the hedonism I see around me is perpetuated by people who are disengaged from such thinking, but many of whom, if asked, will confess some kind of religious belief. Religious believers who are actively engaged in their faith are also, in general, quite moral. The problem is the disengaged persons and also that some kind of crude hedonism seems to be an almost default state for such persons. Given the choice between someone being a religious believer, or being an unreflective, disengaged person, I would prefer the religious believer.
Personally, the ethical school I adhere to is that of Stoicism and it is quite a stern one, but one that really has lead to a much more eudaemon life than that which I lived as a Christian.
As to the other point, it does seem as if the Catholic Church in Europe in general and Ireland in particular is simply going to accept a smaller leaner church and is going to settle for that. I see no effort at evangelization being planned or taking place, and this seems to signal a loss of nerve or confidence by Catholics, which I find odd.
Thank you for your reply.
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Post by Los Leandros on Sept 25, 2011 13:45:00 GMT
I admire your adherence to stoicism. I would'nt have the courage. I also admire the fact that you are prepared to discuss Catholicism without the gratuitous/cheap/dismissive vulgarism which is the norm in Western society ( & most particulsarly Ireland ) at present. As a Catholic I would'nt be too concerned over the " numbers game ". In fact I think it is good for the authenticity of the Church. I agree with Pope Benedict, better a more intellectually/morally vibrant Church, than a numerically strong, though vacuous entity. On the positive side, the Church is thriving in large parts of Africa/Asia. Over two millenia, you are going to have all sorts of fluctuations. Again, thanks for your comments.
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 29, 2011 23:02:15 GMT
The numbers game is pretty double-edged. On the one hand, the idea of a smaller purer church can be a recipe for spiritual pride, introversionist cults, and gnosticism. (Los Leandros; it's dangerous to despise those for whom Christ died. Remember Jesus saw the people as sheep without a shepherd, and he pitied them. On the other hand, there is that point that salt which loses its savour is only fit to be thrown out. Pope Benedict's vision of the New Evangelisation is based on the view that the post-vatican II opening to the modern world was carried out in a naive, indiscriminate and excessively optimistic manner and that a reassessment and reassertion of specifically Catholic identity is a necessary condition for re-evangelisation. (This is not to say that everything which was thrown out should have been kept- one has only to look at the Jew-hatred and Franco-worship which run rampant on certain SSPX and sedevacantist sites to see this. )
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 29, 2011 23:25:46 GMT
This is specifically for Cato. I wonder if you have come across two Catholic writers who felt the emotional attractions of the stoic variety of atheism, and have addressed it? The first is the science-fiction author and recent Catholic convert John C Wright, who regularly posts accounts of his spiritual development on his blog. Here are some recent posts in which he argues about whether morality can exist without a religious foundation, and incidentally discusses the intellectual deterioration of the Nietzscho-subjectivist atheist, whom he sees as much more widespread than the stoic/objectivist type. (I would suggest Christopher Hitchens as an example of the Nietzscho-subjectivist variety; that man has always been arrogant, sloppy ad dishonest whether he is on the political left or the right.) johncwright.livejournal.com/426011.htmljohncwright.livejournal.com/426725.htmljohncwright.livejournal.com/427211.htmlThe second is the american Catholic novelist Walker Percy (1916-90) who was brought up after his parents' suicides by an uncle who had abandoned Catholicism for a form of aristocratic stoicism. Although Percy was attracted by it he came to see it as leading to despair and to darker forms of self-assertion (he recalled being attracted by Nazism when he visited Germany in the 1930s, precisely because its martial death-cult chimed with certain aspects of stoicism) and he became a Catholic existentialist strongly influenced by Kierkegaard. He can also be pretty funny about the differences between the mythic image of the white south and the suburban-redneck contemporary reality. His last novel THE THANATOS SYNDROME is not his best but it's in some ways his most approachable, and the alcoholic priest Fr Schmidt reflects aspects of Percy's own life story. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walker_Percy - not nearly comprehensive but a good list of sources. One other thing - stoicism is certainly a respectable philosophy (Marcus Aurelius was a worthy recipient of St Justin Martyr's APOLOGY, even if the result was unsatisfactory) but isn't it deist rather than atheist? That is, it postulates that the cosmos is ultimately ordered even if we don't have access to that order: The gods themselves, by nature, must possess An everlasting age of perfect peace Remote alike from pleasures and from cares Far off removed from us and our affairs Perfect themselves, to whom we cannot add Nor pleased by good things, nor displeased by bad
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Post by Los Leandros on Sept 30, 2011 8:45:28 GMT
Hibernicus, I was neither suggesting that we should despise anyone or set up some kind of narrow/elitist sect. There are enough of them in Ireland already -the NUJ, for starters. I was merely drawing attention to Catholic teaching on free will. Perhaps I have misinterpreted, but there is a degree of presumptiousness in your post which I disagree with. Lets not fall out though !.
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Post by Cato on Sept 30, 2011 10:03:29 GMT
hibernicus;
Thank you for those links. I will look into them.
As to the atheist/deist question on Stoicism; Technically, they were pantheists and identified nature and god as being one and the same thing. They understood reason/logos/λόγος to be imbued throughout all of material reality and not to have any separate existence from it. They believed the universe to be providential but not in any particular conscious way. Their conception of god was radically different to that of the Christian God. The god of Spinoza's metaphysics would be closest to it (and many accused Spinoza of being an atheist and he was condemned as such - as were some of the Stoics).
However, all of the above is a general view and there was a variety of thought on the matter, with some veering towards a deistic view and some towards an atheistic one. When I was a Christian myself I used to consider pantheism to be a 'polite' form of atheism and attacked it as such.
Stoic ethics though is not dependent on their view of god to any great degree and their is much agreement through their writings that regardless of their being a god or not, or an afterlife or not, that one should still lead a life of virtue. In a sense, those questions, and any answers to them, should not influence the way of life for a Stoic.
Modern Stoic writers (believe it or not, there are a few! - it's almost an underground movement but there are conferences starting to be organized) are either pantheists or atheists, although again, it is not seen as being a terribly important question. One mark of both historic and modern Stoicism is a lack of dogmatism. It is an adaptive philosophy and bears the marks of 'practicality' that were a feature of the Greek mind from so long ago.
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 30, 2011 10:12:29 GMT
Los Leandros: I was not suggesting that you wanted to set up an introversionist sect - my remarks there were mainly directed to Cato's query about whether having a smaller "select" church did not contradict the Great Commission. My reference to you was mainly to your query about whether the audience was worth saving - I still think that is a dangerous question to entertain, but I did not mean to imply that you had taken it to the lengths that my post could be interpreted as meaning. I apologise for any offence given.
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 30, 2011 10:26:09 GMT
Cato: I would agree that pantheism is basically a form of atheism (if everything is God, then nothing is God). As you know, the accusation of atheism against Spinoza was of material atheism (denial of the belief that a transcendent God intervenes in the material world) as at the time it was widely believed that formal atheism (denial of the existence of God as such) was widely regarded as self-evidently false. It is indeed IMHO the question of divine intervention - not divine existence - which is the crucial one; if God is not a Being with whom whom we can have a personal relationship (covenant, submission, or incarnation) then His existence or non-existence does not make very much difference. I suppose you answer the Nietzchian question (do we create the order we appear to see in the world?) in the same way Thomists answer the question of moderate realism - that we are so constructed as to be able to perceive external reality and that's just the way we are (in your case not because God created us that way but because we are part of the order of nature and the nietzschian- Romantic view that we can stand outside it is itself an unacknowledged relic of Christian belief in the divine origin of the soul). How would you answer Mill's argument that just because the universe is ordered a certain way there is no reason why we should submit to it, especially given the amount of material and moral evil the universe comes up with? (This was aimed at Calvin - who was strongly influenced by Stoicism - but applies even better to Stoics, for a Calvinist can reply by an act of trust and love in an inscrutable God out of the Book of Job - I have heard of Calvinists who held that if God had predestined them to be damned He must have good reason for it - whereas Stoics and pantheists can't invoke anything outside of nature)?
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