A church by any other name.................and if you dare rebel against their teachings, there will be hell to pay.
http://www.wnd.com/2015/08/americas-...rant-religion/
Alexander Solzhenitsyn lived to tell about this Church.....
Moral relativismKnowing that many in the audience, faculty and students alike, played at socialism, Solzhenitsyn coldly stripped them of their illusions. “Socialism of any type and shade leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death,” he told them. It is the inevitable path men take when they see themselves as the master of the world, free of personal evil and confident that “all the defects of life are caused by misguided social systems, which must therefore be corrected.”
All of this was disturbing enough, but Solzhenitsyn rocked the young swells when he described, much as Chambers had, the unfortunate choices America’s ruling classes had made. Thinking themselves “the center of everything,” they had forgotten what the nation’s founding fathers well understood, namely, that “man is God’s creature.” For those graduates who had not heard the word God in the last four years, save as the first half of a swear word, this news had to shock.
As both Chambers and Solzhenitsyn recognized, the empty rationalism of the twentieth century had eroded the traditional faith of millions of Western intellectuals and replaced it with a smug, self-satisfied belief in the human will to power. At its conception, this new theology was self-righteous to the core and keen on “punishments,” but initially those punishments were reserved for its class enemies. Over time, believers would broaden the roster of sinners. Indeed, contempt for these many and various sinners would become the faith’s unifying core. Although Soviet-styled communism was in the process of exhausting itself at the time of Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard address, man’s second-oldest faith was mutating and adapting to the environment. As a would-be 1960s radical, African American author and social critic Shelby Steele watched it happen up close. Like Solzhenitsyn, Steele noted the emergence of a narcissistic “new man, a better man than the world has seen before.” This new man, teased Steele, was “so conspicuously cleansed of racism, sexism, and militarism that he would be a carrier of moral authority and legitimacy.”
From one day to the next, the rules change......... the ever-shifting sands of an ideology without any any real foundation, unless madness counts.Like Hazel Motes, the embittered protagonist of Flannery O’Connor’s prescient 1952 novel “Wise Blood,” Western progressives were creating “a Church Without Christ” – a church without God, for that matter – where, in O’Connor’s words, “there was no Fall because there was nothing to fall from and no redemption because there was no Fall and no Judgment because there wasn’t the first two.” Among the many contradictions of contemporary progressivism is its avowed reluctance to pass judgment. If neo-puritans did not create the word judgmentalism, they created the taboo around it. “Censorious judgmentalism from the moralising wing, which treats half our countrymen as enemies must be rooted out,” thundered Alan Duncan, Britain’s openly gay Tory MP a few years back. In a similar vein, actress Ann Heche, speaking at a vigil for slain gay student Matthew Shepard, wished that “one day, we will all join on the opposite side of hatred where one truly connects with God.”
The catch was, of course, that Duncan and Heche, like most progressives, could no more shuck the impulse to judge than could Hazel Motes. After scolding his colleagues for their judgmentalism, Duncan denounced them as the “Tory Taleban.” After scolding her fellow Americans for their antigay judgmentalism, Heche reminded them, “You, you are the abomination in the eyes of my God.”
Without meaning to, Duncan and Heche captured the paradoxical nature of what Steele called “an unforgiving social puritanism” and what Peter Hitchens called “an intolerant and puritan secular fundamentalism.” For all of their postmodern prattle about relativism and multiculturalism, neo-puritans would prove quicker to judge and harsher in their judgments – Abomination? Tory Taleban? – than the most spiteful New England divine. “Throughout the Western world,” author Mark Steyn has observed, ‘tolerance’ has become remarkably ‘intolerant,’ and ‘diversity’ demands ruthless conformity.” With the exception of Islam, an unlikely ally in the rainbow coalition, progressive neo-puritanism may well be the most judgmental, vengeful, unforgiving quasi-religious sect abroad in the Western world today.
For progressives, the anxiety derives from never quite knowing what the boundaries of thought and language on a given subject at a given moment might be. Resident Duck Dynasty philosopher Phil Robertson got it right when he described their belief system as “constantly changing and evolving” and eventually “morphing into a dark maze of nonsense.” The further this system estranges itself from reason, the more confused progressives are about what a “perfect faith” entails. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, all virtues are compatible. One can just say no to wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, and gluttony more or less simultaneously without semantic assistance from the Ministry of Truth. Progressivism, to say the least, lacks that kind of coherence. The biggest slacker in Logic 101 can sense the dust-up coming when the enemies of sexism and homophobia and the friends of Islam try to hammer out a multicultural “ten commandments.” Heads just might roll. Literally. Like their New England forebears, progressives cope with this anxiety by aggressively asserting their rightful place among the elect. Steele coined the phrase “zone of decency” to describe the sacred preserve in which progressives imagine themselves clustering. To distinguish themselves from lesser mortals, argued Steele, they are quick to “decertify” those who do not embrace the values du jour and to dispatch the condemned to Hester Prynne’s “magic circle of ignominy.” And again like the Puritans, Steele argued, progressives need “only the display of social justice to win moral authority.”
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by Torchbearer
Site Information
About Us
- RonPaulForums.com is an independent grassroots outfit not officially connected to Ron Paul but dedicated to his mission. For more information see our Mission Statement.
Connect With Us