Senator Obama, whose own church seems quite ready to accentuate differences, repeats the common goodthinker’s complaint that
Somehow, somewhere along the way, faith stopped being used to bring us together and started being used to drive us apart.
The change is not so mysterious. In the 60s or thereabouts governing elites decisively rejected their residual connection to traditional Christianity, at bottom in the interests of a purer form of technocratic rule. The school prayer and abortion decisions mark the transition: the public order became purely secular and self-contained, and the value of human life became a matter of will, utility and technique. Once those things had happened any assertion of traditional views in public life became, from the official point of view, ipso facto heretical and schismatic (in current language, “extremist and divisive”). Average Americans became antisocial radicals if they just stayed what they had always been and continued to present their views in public. That’s why the divisive forces Senator Obama worries about suddenly appeared in our public life.
What really happened in the 60’s.
This post reminds me of one of your early VFR entries on what really happened to us. http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/001259.html
“The Public Interest piece (LINKED IN THE ENTRY) documents the obvious truth that the story of the “culture wars” is the reverse of that presented by the major media. It was not extremist evangelicals but sectarian secularists who staged a takeover of a major political party and other public institutions, and so injected religious and moral issues into politics.”
While it’s an obvious point, it’s one that we should never forget and never fail to emphasize.
Ciao Bruce,
You say: It was
Ciao Bruce,
You say: It was not extremist evangelicals but sectarian secularists who staged a takeover of a major political party and other public institutions, and so injected religious and moral issues into politics.”
Was it Chesterton who said (in so many words): “Break the big laws and you don’t get freedom, but a lot more piddling little laws?”
This reminds me of what happened up here in the hills around Turin. When I first came here, law or no law, a kid could buy a bottle of whiskey, because there was still a fine “Catholic” drinking culture and 999 out of 1000 the boy was only buying it for his dad.
Today, with the rise of binge drinking and Saturday Night post-disco Road massacres (the N°1 cause of death among young Italians), the bars won’t serve you a Cognac after 10PM and there are balloon tests galore.
What I’m saying is that with the loss of virtue there is now much more religion than anyone ever imagined possible. Now there’s zero tolerance and I can get busted for a tablespoon of cough syrup or for eating one of my Aunt Roberta’s delicious Rum Babas. I’ll have my driver’s license confiscated and will be sent to re-education school (atheist catechism) to learn the obvious.
Man got too proud to to kneel in front of Almighty God and must now kneel down to random carabinieri waiting in ambush, alcoholometric gadgets, absurd schedules.
The loss of voluntary virtues shifts the world towards an Islamic mindset of Haram, Halal and Tolerated.
The similarities between Atheist/rationalist/barbarity and Islam are quite unsettling.
First of all, the Atheist/rationalist/barbarians are corporeal enough to reap praise but become ethereal when it comes to reaping scorn. (There are only good atheists). Real Muslims are only good Muslims. Pol Pot an atheist who studied at the Sorbonne? “Nope that ain’t us!” Bin Laden? “Nope, not a real Muslim.”
Then there’s the Age of Ignorance, for the Atheist/rationalist/barbarians it’s anything more or less before Voltaire, for the Muslims it’s before Mohammad.
Then there is permanent atheistic Jihad but without anyone laying down a shred of orthodoxy. Just as the Koran is a mix of sweet and sour, hot and cold, murderous and kumbayah, so too is the Atheist Koran (all books). Just as the Koran says let there be no compulsion and then a few pages later, says “fight ’em and jump on their corns,” so too do atheists speak about freedom of religion, but then fight to knock down Christmas trees and take “In God we Trust” off the money.
Then there is behaviorism which is just Islamic fatalism with a college education.
One also notices a rise in victimization and conspiracy theories. (As in what? 30% of Americans and a whopping 50% of Europeans believing that 9/11 was an inside job).
The truth is that life has never been more religious… but now there’s a blindfolded goddess… who like Allah is all-knowing but not at all reasoning or reasonable.
Another wake-up call?
Mr Kalb,
Don’t you think the current attitude of the President and congressional Republicans on immigration is a wake-up call about the values that really run things these days?
You are no stranger to these themes: technocracy, NWO, etc. It is just that the whole matter is so brazen! The whole business strikes me as a necessary sea change for thinking people. I am not big on neocon/paleocon arguments and the like. Those arguments seem very shallow or misplaced. What I am talking about seems more momentous. Something more like a form of Treason or a real oligarchical takeover.
Sorry to change the subject from Obama’s dreary notions of religion.
Get with the program or you’re divisive
Obama might want to check the Ten Commandments to see where that division began.