April 6, 2023 - 6:00pm
Every so often someone expresses concern at the minority of “integralist” Catholic political theorists who propose ordering state power to Christian precepts, sometimes calling them would-be “theocrats”. But in truth, theocracy has been back for a while.
State power across the Anglosphere is ever more explicitly ordered to religious beliefs; it’s just that these beliefs aren’t Roman Catholic. Instead, what’s now granted state backing is a belief in the absolute moral sanctity of bodily self-creation.
In Canada, legislation has just been proposed that would ban protests within 100 metres of a Drag Queen Story Hour. This proposal echoes an existing provision in the UK that bans even silent prayer in the vicinity of abortion clinics. And over in the USA, a Christian mother is suing the state of Oregon, which has barred her from adoption for saying she wouldn’t accept a putative adoptee’s self-declared pronouns or permit them to take puberty blockers.
What, then, is the sacred value being enforced here? In the words of one supporter of both abortion and gender ideology, the common thread is “bodily autonomy and attempts to define the futures of others”. From this perspective, power should be ordered to the sacred value of self-creation, even over normal aspects of our organism such as puberty, pregnancy, or sex dimorphism. There is no sense in which our bodies should be accepted as a given, and anything we don’t like about them is a problem we’re entitled to solve as we see fit.
Increasingly, the laws now being rolled out across the West to give this belief the backing of state power serve as a new set of Test Acts. These 17th century English laws, whose intent was to limit the access of professing Catholics to power in national institutions, compelled anyone seeking public office to take an oath renouncing key points of Catholic doctrine. It’s just that the doctrine that must be renounced this time is that there’s any normal, natural baseline for the human body. Under the new religious tests, an otherwise good candidate to adopt can be barred from doing so. Elsewhere, someone may be fined $25,000 or arrested on the street, just for expressing views consistent with a belief that human nature exists.
This should bring home what’s happening: the liberal interregnum in which “religion” was a private matter for individual conscience is over. For contra that small (and now, if they’re paying attention, increasingly furious) cohort of Gen X Right-liberals who came of age in the brief period where you really could say anything, total freedom of belief isn’t actually a workable basis for a functioning polity. You need sacred values, or you don’t have a coherent social order; and these are enforced via blasphemy codes.
Accordingly, the battle is now joined over what those sacred values should be. And the human body is the central battleground. I suspect the resulting round of religious upheaval will be as far-reaching as the Reformation, and will see increasingly bitter religious and political schisms over what (if anything) is sacred about the human organism.
A glance at news headlines from just the last fortnight or so affords no shortage of grim examples of such disputes erupting into violence. Brace yourselves: it’s going to get worse. And staying neutral will not be an option.
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SubscribeWhat we have is a hyper-individualistic interpretation of the harm principal which classical liberalism was built on.
Not only is the individual the absolute and sole sovereign of their body but contra to classical liberalism this sovereignty extends beyond the reasonable confines of the prevention of physical harm to themselves or others but also extends into indirect harm caused by the free actions of others that may lead to phycological distress. This interpretation was of course rejected by most liberal thinkers because it instantly collapses the liberal market place of ideas. As soon as harm is defined as anything which causes you or others distress, we are in a state of irresolvable conflict with all of society we are in disagreement with.
The resolution arrived at by progressive liberals is to elevate the individuals well being above any definition of value as a shared social good. There can be no appeal to a utilitarian interpretation of good, as such a good will set off the fragile trip wires of the individuals rights. To point out that conservative values can produce objectively preferable outcomes for society is irrelevant as soon as they darken the door of the absolute ego of progressive liberalism, since no harm can be ever be permitted to befall the sacred ideological fiction of the sovereign self.
If this sounds like a recipe of anarchy, and it is, it’s triumph, I’m my humble opinion, has been brought about by the fact that this great autonomous individual does not spring forth from some great act of Will, like Nietzsche’s Übermensch but is entirely dependent on and sustained by, the enormous scaffolding of the modern state.
So vast is this web of scaffolding of bureaucrats, civil servants, NGO’s and charities that it is no longer clear which sustains which. The state that was formed to to protect the individual of liberal philosophy has itself entered into a symbiotic relationship with it and is now driven to acquire greater and greater strength in a state of self perpetuating logic. The greater the required freedom of the individual the more powerful the state must be; the more powerful the state is, the more free the individual must be made to feed its hunger for power.
What is excluded entirely is any notion of society as the product of the free formation, struggle and co-operation of groups searching for shared values to coexist by.
There are individuals. There is the state. Between this communion, there can come nothing else.
Nice to see someone who understands that the “what is a woman” question isn’t actually about women at all. It’s about whether there is any form of natural order. It’s about whether reality exists.
The postmodernists says the entire universe is ours to be redefined as we see fit. That’s what “reality is a social construction” actually means.
Everyone from the Enlightenment until the postmoernists says that there is something called “the real world” which imposes constraints on our power.
The former is demonstrably wrong, and any ideology built on a false view of man will eventually implode. However, it can do (and is doing) a lot of damage along the way before it does.
I don’t think this is what’s happening at all. Individual expression has become forbidden. Unless my beliefs conform to the so-called progressive norms, I will be punished, cancelled and become an outcast. Bodily and individual sovereignty isn’t the issue. Progressives despise this. You can argue for and against liberalism, but what we are seeing today is not liberalism.
I think you’re both right tbh, because you’re both examining this from different angles.
One one side, we have the progressives hyper-individualistic non-consequentialism, whereby their actions are intrinsically good, and any examination of the consequences of their actions on others is labelled as right wing, fascist, or evidence of some kind of ism or phobia. On the other side, we have the non-progressives, and their individualism is painted as intrinsically bad, and the consequences of their thoughts (as a kind of action) are dissected and micro-analysed so that every possible thing about them that might possibly hurt the feelings of someone somewhere is emphasised and treated as an inevitable harm.
This is essentially malevolent narcissism in practice, the narcissists can do no wrong, and everyone else is expected to bow down and treat the narcissists as above criticism unless they want to be accused of having committed some heinous breach of the narcissist’s rights.
This is exactly what it is like living with a narcissist, and those of us unfortunate enough to have experienced that have been vulnerable to them because we’ve lacked a proper understanding of boundaries. Society has the exact same problem, which is why these dysfunctional individuals are ruling the roost. The only option for society is for it to rebuild some proper boundaries and then enforce them no matter how many tantrums the narcissists throw at not getting their own way.
I think you’re both right tbh, because you’re both examining this from different angles.
One one side, we have the progressives hyper-individualistic non-consequentialism, whereby their actions are intrinsically good, and any examination of the consequences of their actions on others is labelled as right wing, fascist, or evidence of some kind of ism or phobia. On the other side, we have the non-progressives, and their individualism is painted as intrinsically bad, and the consequences of their thoughts (as a kind of action) are dissected and micro-analysed so that every possible thing about them that might possibly hurt the feelings of someone somewhere is emphasised and treated as an inevitable harm.
This is essentially malevolent narcissism in practice, the narcissists can do no wrong, and everyone else is expected to bow down and treat the narcissists as above criticism unless they want to be accused of having committed some heinous breach of the narcissist’s rights.
This is exactly what it is like living with a narcissist, and those of us unfortunate enough to have experienced that have been vulnerable to them because we’ve lacked a proper understanding of boundaries. Society has the exact same problem, which is why these dysfunctional individuals are ruling the roost. The only option for society is for it to rebuild some proper boundaries and then enforce them no matter how many tantrums the narcissists throw at not getting their own way.
“The greater the required freedom of the individual the more powerful the state must be; the more powerful the state is, the more free the individual must be made to feed its hunger for power.”
Very well said, and how true! Provides the answer to a pertinent question some of us ponder these days. What is the cohesion that will keep such an atomized, hyper individualistic society together? You nailed it!
Nice to see someone who understands that the “what is a woman” question isn’t actually about women at all. It’s about whether there is any form of natural order. It’s about whether reality exists.
The postmodernists says the entire universe is ours to be redefined as we see fit. That’s what “reality is a social construction” actually means.
Everyone from the Enlightenment until the postmoernists says that there is something called “the real world” which imposes constraints on our power.
The former is demonstrably wrong, and any ideology built on a false view of man will eventually implode. However, it can do (and is doing) a lot of damage along the way before it does.
I don’t think this is what’s happening at all. Individual expression has become forbidden. Unless my beliefs conform to the so-called progressive norms, I will be punished, cancelled and become an outcast. Bodily and individual sovereignty isn’t the issue. Progressives despise this. You can argue for and against liberalism, but what we are seeing today is not liberalism.
“The greater the required freedom of the individual the more powerful the state must be; the more powerful the state is, the more free the individual must be made to feed its hunger for power.”
Very well said, and how true! Provides the answer to a pertinent question some of us ponder these days. What is the cohesion that will keep such an atomized, hyper individualistic society together? You nailed it!
What we have is a hyper-individualistic interpretation of the harm principal which classical liberalism was built on.
Not only is the individual the absolute and sole sovereign of their body but contra to classical liberalism this sovereignty extends beyond the reasonable confines of the prevention of physical harm to themselves or others but also extends into indirect harm caused by the free actions of others that may lead to phycological distress. This interpretation was of course rejected by most liberal thinkers because it instantly collapses the liberal market place of ideas. As soon as harm is defined as anything which causes you or others distress, we are in a state of irresolvable conflict with all of society we are in disagreement with.
The resolution arrived at by progressive liberals is to elevate the individuals well being above any definition of value as a shared social good. There can be no appeal to a utilitarian interpretation of good, as such a good will set off the fragile trip wires of the individuals rights. To point out that conservative values can produce objectively preferable outcomes for society is irrelevant as soon as they darken the door of the absolute ego of progressive liberalism, since no harm can be ever be permitted to befall the sacred ideological fiction of the sovereign self.
If this sounds like a recipe of anarchy, and it is, it’s triumph, I’m my humble opinion, has been brought about by the fact that this great autonomous individual does not spring forth from some great act of Will, like Nietzsche’s Übermensch but is entirely dependent on and sustained by, the enormous scaffolding of the modern state.
So vast is this web of scaffolding of bureaucrats, civil servants, NGO’s and charities that it is no longer clear which sustains which. The state that was formed to to protect the individual of liberal philosophy has itself entered into a symbiotic relationship with it and is now driven to acquire greater and greater strength in a state of self perpetuating logic. The greater the required freedom of the individual the more powerful the state must be; the more powerful the state is, the more free the individual must be made to feed its hunger for power.
What is excluded entirely is any notion of society as the product of the free formation, struggle and co-operation of groups searching for shared values to coexist by.
There are individuals. There is the state. Between this communion, there can come nothing else.
I commented on social media about this yesterday, also stating that we had got there first with our abortion clinic restrictions.
I think we must thank Nicola Sturgeon for the final implosion of gender ideology, and now Kemi Badenoch (I know the groundwork was laid by many others!), but Mary is right to say that this is now going to get very ugly at the denouement.
Choose a side. Don’t be a fence-sitter like Keir Starmer.
I commented on social media about this yesterday, also stating that we had got there first with our abortion clinic restrictions.
I think we must thank Nicola Sturgeon for the final implosion of gender ideology, and now Kemi Badenoch (I know the groundwork was laid by many others!), but Mary is right to say that this is now going to get very ugly at the denouement.
Choose a side. Don’t be a fence-sitter like Keir Starmer.
The Canadian Constitution Foundation has already indicated they will challenge this law as a violation of Canada’s charter of rights and freedoms as it is a violation of the charter right of freedom of expression. The charter is content neutral when it comes to this right meaning you can’t ban some types of protest/assembly that you disagree with but allow others that you do.
Or rather the government can’t.
CCF deeply troubled by new Calgary bylaw: preparing challenge | Canadian Constitution Foundation (theccf.ca)
This isn’t reassuring. I have little faith in the Supreme Court of Canada, especially under current Chief Justice Wagner.
Although I agree with pretty much everything the Canadian Constitution Foundation is doing, it must be acknowledged that they are considered right wing extremists by the elites who completely control this country. The judiciary – appointed by the government and generally composed of party hacks – will do as the state controlled mainstream media and corporate oligarchy expect them to do. I understand that we have to fight the fight, what else can we do, but sadly it must be acknowledged that the fix has always been in and there never was a chance. Canada is a lost cause. The brain drain to the south has always sucked out too many of the best and brightest. Once they destroy our resource sector, the trust fund that has always sustained our supposedly first world economy, the economic collapse wont be far behind. That may be the only thing that can shake Canadians up enough to throw these ‘b*ms’ out of power.
This isn’t reassuring. I have little faith in the Supreme Court of Canada, especially under current Chief Justice Wagner.
Although I agree with pretty much everything the Canadian Constitution Foundation is doing, it must be acknowledged that they are considered right wing extremists by the elites who completely control this country. The judiciary – appointed by the government and generally composed of party hacks – will do as the state controlled mainstream media and corporate oligarchy expect them to do. I understand that we have to fight the fight, what else can we do, but sadly it must be acknowledged that the fix has always been in and there never was a chance. Canada is a lost cause. The brain drain to the south has always sucked out too many of the best and brightest. Once they destroy our resource sector, the trust fund that has always sustained our supposedly first world economy, the economic collapse wont be far behind. That may be the only thing that can shake Canadians up enough to throw these ‘b*ms’ out of power.
The Canadian Constitution Foundation has already indicated they will challenge this law as a violation of Canada’s charter of rights and freedoms as it is a violation of the charter right of freedom of expression. The charter is content neutral when it comes to this right meaning you can’t ban some types of protest/assembly that you disagree with but allow others that you do.
Or rather the government can’t.
CCF deeply troubled by new Calgary bylaw: preparing challenge | Canadian Constitution Foundation (theccf.ca)
The paradox of tolerance
Quite profound, Andrew!
But it really never was a virtue, was it?
True. The thing being they still think we’re the intolerant ones.
True. The thing being they still think we’re the intolerant ones.
I trust that the Scottish doctrine that those under 25 are too neurologically immature to be punished by imprisonment will also be incorporated in Canadian legislation so that while the neurologically mature may be restrained from entering the sacred 100 metre space of the ritual reading the bodily autonomy of those under 25 will not be restrained beyond a few hours of community service for the ravishment of the reader.
Quite profound, Andrew!
But it really never was a virtue, was it?
I trust that the Scottish doctrine that those under 25 are too neurologically immature to be punished by imprisonment will also be incorporated in Canadian legislation so that while the neurologically mature may be restrained from entering the sacred 100 metre space of the ritual reading the bodily autonomy of those under 25 will not be restrained beyond a few hours of community service for the ravishment of the reader.
The paradox of tolerance
Basic pedophilia disguised as a cultural movement. The human condition needs to substantially corrode before these people and their useful idiot enablers get back to work.
Basic pedophilia disguised as a cultural movement. The human condition needs to substantially corrode before these people and their useful idiot enablers get back to work.
I find the correlation between religious fundamentalism (in its more old-fashioned sense) and the beliefs being propagated by those who seek to proselytise what the author terms “bodily self-creation” fascinating.
There’s the obvious analogy between Catholic belief in transubstantiation and the ideology behind transhumanism, but perhaps more importantly, the willingness to put one’s entire sense of being on the line for a principle such as self-ID has the same fervour and inability to broach compromise.
My frequent references to the perils of religious belief (of any kind) hardly need repeating here. It’s a mindset, and a straightjacket into which people are all too keen to trap themselves. Only be examining and identifying the human tendency to do this will we finally start to break away from the constant round of religious or quasi-religious battlegrounds that strain the groaning library shelves of our history.
That’s really funny. It is naive materialist reductionism that is incoherent in principle. This is a wonderful manifestation of what results from the loss of Aquinas’ “,Final Causation” – the end or purpose of things. Philosophies grounded in Baconian 1620’s worldviews of mindless matter in meangingless motion are … as must be the case without final causation … unintelligible.
There is a reason why as in the US, only 1.6% of Americans are atheists with college educations (the other 25% of the 27% total with college educations reject atheism – even the “nones” overwhelmingly) and I would suggest that a metaphysics that allows for the possibility of sanity as in Thomism (after the monk genius Thomas Aquinas) is the only sane option.
Even the founders of the US had to adopt Thomistic Natural Law principles to have a sane foundation.
How very strange to read that the road to reason is to deny that REASON or the MIND of Einstein exists. Intelligibility rests upon the UNINTELLIGENCE? How absurd.
Reason only has a foundation if REASON is at the heart of being. And the arguments for such a BEING have never been refuted; not by David Hume’s incoherent empiricism, Kant , postmoderns or anyone else as philosopher Ed Feser (former atheist) has shown everyone in his book The Last Superstition: a refutation of the new atheism” . Its a primer in the sanity we lost in the west.
Incidentally Hume’s famous and what should be infamous “fork rule” which he dogmatically asserted to do away with metaphysics and meaning or purpose in existence… breaks his “fork rule”. He’s doing metaphysics. But incoherently. Monotheism is the necessary ground for even the possibility of sanity. Cheers
It’s not untypical for the counter arguments to cite numerous examples of the very reasoning that’ve led humanity to the impasse that religiosity brings about.
There’s nothing funny about, it’s a dead end (literally! Now that might be funny…)
Instead of using historical examples of such reasoning, i’d simply ask that we start to think differently, away from the straightjackets that i’ve referred to and of which you’ve provided examples. I appreciate it’s difficult, but think differently we must.
Monotheism is nonsense. It’s a human construct, brought about by a misunderstanding of our biological origins. The rise of consciousness required answers which our ancestors sought prior to that understanding, and it’s insidious to maintain that such answers remain relevant.
We face a situation where it’s seen as good to act as if religion is outdated, archaic, and backwards, yet as social institutions, most of our major religions, monotheistic or otherwise, have actually had many centuries of reformation to optimise their role in underpinning our societies, and inhibit the worst of their excesses.
Religions are essentially social apparatus that channel the belief imperatives of human psychology, and the only replacements we have for them at present are political ideologies, and they are for the most part unhindered by the varied barriers we created to inhibit religious tyranny.
As much as individually we can deride religions and the kind of magical thinking represented by transubstantiation and trans ideology, religions have provided the least worst option for managing that magical thinking in terms of violent and repressive outcomes for large portions of history, and unless we produce significant social reforms, we’re going to have a big problem with the magical thinking of political ideologies, because legally and socially, we lack the barriers to keep them in check, and there’s little incentive within the political elite to instigate such reforms.
Thus spoke mindless matter in meaningless motion. As the Oxford U 2011 study on Cognition and Religion found worldwide, rational beings are “naturally” religious.
I also cited folks like Hume, Kant and postmoderns who have attempted to refute the classic demonstrations from change and contingency along with our awareness that nothing self creates.
You offer hostile scary words in defense of mindless matter in meaningless motion… which itself has an unfortunate consequent for anyone who claims such dogmatic… and it is dogma not evidence… materialism.
Ironically it is refuted by quantum physics itself as local determinism was proved false by the 2015 Bell Inequality study results. If that were even needed.
And indeed famed mathematical physicist Sir Roger Penrose has pointed out that modern physics cannot read of understand an act of human understanding while it has no problems with the algorithmic functions of computers.
As Ed Feser points out in his philosophy of mind book the action of the intellect is universal and not reducible to your 16th century physicalist dogma either, even as we work with numbers and other non material things. How large is the number 3 and what color is it? How about justice or “rationality”.
And as the brilliant Dennis Bonnette points out, metaphysical certainty is grounded in what is. We know this from about the age of four or so.
Monotheism is based upon a fundamental analysis of the structure of contingent being and change along with the staggering wonder of existence itself.
Biology is defended by philosophical arguments with the same foundations. Part of the reason modern science was first articulated in the 100’s at places like the Cathedral School at Chartres.
The folks who introduced the genius of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle .. philosophical realism… were the same monks and priests who founded our first universities which were all Catholic institutions.
You are of course free to believe that your “thoughts” and ideas are just the latest instances of mindless matter in meaningless motion, but this of course does not reflect physics as we know it while free will cannot be coherently denied as it is required to make free intellectual judgments.
It doesn’t seem like you’ve ever studied any of the issues and principles relevant to the subject matter and that you are asking for the blind faith of the other kind of fundamentalists, but in mindless matter in motion.
We face a situation where it’s seen as good to act as if religion is outdated, archaic, and backwards, yet as social institutions, most of our major religions, monotheistic or otherwise, have actually had many centuries of reformation to optimise their role in underpinning our societies, and inhibit the worst of their excesses.
Religions are essentially social apparatus that channel the belief imperatives of human psychology, and the only replacements we have for them at present are political ideologies, and they are for the most part unhindered by the varied barriers we created to inhibit religious tyranny.
As much as individually we can deride religions and the kind of magical thinking represented by transubstantiation and trans ideology, religions have provided the least worst option for managing that magical thinking in terms of violent and repressive outcomes for large portions of history, and unless we produce significant social reforms, we’re going to have a big problem with the magical thinking of political ideologies, because legally and socially, we lack the barriers to keep them in check, and there’s little incentive within the political elite to instigate such reforms.
Thus spoke mindless matter in meaningless motion. As the Oxford U 2011 study on Cognition and Religion found worldwide, rational beings are “naturally” religious.
I also cited folks like Hume, Kant and postmoderns who have attempted to refute the classic demonstrations from change and contingency along with our awareness that nothing self creates.
You offer hostile scary words in defense of mindless matter in meaningless motion… which itself has an unfortunate consequent for anyone who claims such dogmatic… and it is dogma not evidence… materialism.
Ironically it is refuted by quantum physics itself as local determinism was proved false by the 2015 Bell Inequality study results. If that were even needed.
And indeed famed mathematical physicist Sir Roger Penrose has pointed out that modern physics cannot read of understand an act of human understanding while it has no problems with the algorithmic functions of computers.
As Ed Feser points out in his philosophy of mind book the action of the intellect is universal and not reducible to your 16th century physicalist dogma either, even as we work with numbers and other non material things. How large is the number 3 and what color is it? How about justice or “rationality”.
And as the brilliant Dennis Bonnette points out, metaphysical certainty is grounded in what is. We know this from about the age of four or so.
Monotheism is based upon a fundamental analysis of the structure of contingent being and change along with the staggering wonder of existence itself.
Biology is defended by philosophical arguments with the same foundations. Part of the reason modern science was first articulated in the 100’s at places like the Cathedral School at Chartres.
The folks who introduced the genius of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle .. philosophical realism… were the same monks and priests who founded our first universities which were all Catholic institutions.
You are of course free to believe that your “thoughts” and ideas are just the latest instances of mindless matter in meaningless motion, but this of course does not reflect physics as we know it while free will cannot be coherently denied as it is required to make free intellectual judgments.
It doesn’t seem like you’ve ever studied any of the issues and principles relevant to the subject matter and that you are asking for the blind faith of the other kind of fundamentalists, but in mindless matter in motion.
It’s not untypical for the counter arguments to cite numerous examples of the very reasoning that’ve led humanity to the impasse that religiosity brings about.
There’s nothing funny about, it’s a dead end (literally! Now that might be funny…)
Instead of using historical examples of such reasoning, i’d simply ask that we start to think differently, away from the straightjackets that i’ve referred to and of which you’ve provided examples. I appreciate it’s difficult, but think differently we must.
Monotheism is nonsense. It’s a human construct, brought about by a misunderstanding of our biological origins. The rise of consciousness required answers which our ancestors sought prior to that understanding, and it’s insidious to maintain that such answers remain relevant.
What is the analogy? I’m curious.
The changing of biological substance (bread/wine) from its original constitution into something else, in the case of Catholicism into the flesh and blood of someone claiming the status of a god, is analogous to the desire for humans to change their own biology to become more perfect, or perfectable.
The Sacrament of the Eucharist has nothing whatsoever to do with any supposed desire for humans to change their own biology to become more perfect.
Catholicism, so intimately involved with the material world, offers no illusion that man can perfect man; it is the height of pride to think that man can improve upon God’s design.
“For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”
As for transubstantiation: Christ said, as recorded in the Gospels, that he offered his body and his blood in the bread and the wine. “Do this in remembrance of me.”
There is no desire to be “perfect”, and in any case it is not clear how taking the Eucharist would make one more “perfect”. No, in taking the Eucharist there is only the desire to follow the instructions of Christ the King.
Indeed the “effects” of the Eucharist are not necessarily seen in the body; but rather in the soul. And these effects are always to the good.
Whereas, as far as anyone can see, the effects of transhumanist attempts to “perfect” the body are ruinous.
and in the new religion the priests are surgeons.
…and the real presence, is an absent *****
…and the real presence, is an absent *****
The Sacrament of the Eucharist has nothing whatsoever to do with any supposed desire for humans to change their own biology to become more perfect.
Catholicism, so intimately involved with the material world, offers no illusion that man can perfect man; it is the height of pride to think that man can improve upon God’s design.
“For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”
As for transubstantiation: Christ said, as recorded in the Gospels, that he offered his body and his blood in the bread and the wine. “Do this in remembrance of me.”
There is no desire to be “perfect”, and in any case it is not clear how taking the Eucharist would make one more “perfect”. No, in taking the Eucharist there is only the desire to follow the instructions of Christ the King.
Indeed the “effects” of the Eucharist are not necessarily seen in the body; but rather in the soul. And these effects are always to the good.
Whereas, as far as anyone can see, the effects of transhumanist attempts to “perfect” the body are ruinous.
and in the new religion the priests are surgeons.
The changing of biological substance (bread/wine) from its original constitution into something else, in the case of Catholicism into the flesh and blood of someone claiming the status of a god, is analogous to the desire for humans to change their own biology to become more perfect, or perfectable.
Are you saying that you have no personal philosophy of what you believe to true or untrue, right or wrong? In the broad sense, that is what “religion” is. Or, are you implying that if one does have a philosophy of life that he believes is true and right, he must never say anything about it to another? Is that the “peril of religious belief?”
I don’t think so at all.
It is entirely possible to have personal morals and ethics without subscribing to a belief in some sort of god(s) or religion or adopting some off the shelf package of beliefs someone else came up with a long time ago.
I don’t think so at all.
It is entirely possible to have personal morals and ethics without subscribing to a belief in some sort of god(s) or religion or adopting some off the shelf package of beliefs someone else came up with a long time ago.
That’s really funny. It is naive materialist reductionism that is incoherent in principle. This is a wonderful manifestation of what results from the loss of Aquinas’ “,Final Causation” – the end or purpose of things. Philosophies grounded in Baconian 1620’s worldviews of mindless matter in meangingless motion are … as must be the case without final causation … unintelligible.
There is a reason why as in the US, only 1.6% of Americans are atheists with college educations (the other 25% of the 27% total with college educations reject atheism – even the “nones” overwhelmingly) and I would suggest that a metaphysics that allows for the possibility of sanity as in Thomism (after the monk genius Thomas Aquinas) is the only sane option.
Even the founders of the US had to adopt Thomistic Natural Law principles to have a sane foundation.
How very strange to read that the road to reason is to deny that REASON or the MIND of Einstein exists. Intelligibility rests upon the UNINTELLIGENCE? How absurd.
Reason only has a foundation if REASON is at the heart of being. And the arguments for such a BEING have never been refuted; not by David Hume’s incoherent empiricism, Kant , postmoderns or anyone else as philosopher Ed Feser (former atheist) has shown everyone in his book The Last Superstition: a refutation of the new atheism” . Its a primer in the sanity we lost in the west.
Incidentally Hume’s famous and what should be infamous “fork rule” which he dogmatically asserted to do away with metaphysics and meaning or purpose in existence… breaks his “fork rule”. He’s doing metaphysics. But incoherently. Monotheism is the necessary ground for even the possibility of sanity. Cheers
What is the analogy? I’m curious.
Are you saying that you have no personal philosophy of what you believe to true or untrue, right or wrong? In the broad sense, that is what “religion” is. Or, are you implying that if one does have a philosophy of life that he believes is true and right, he must never say anything about it to another? Is that the “peril of religious belief?”
I find the correlation between religious fundamentalism (in its more old-fashioned sense) and the beliefs being propagated by those who seek to proselytise what the author terms “bodily self-creation” fascinating.
There’s the obvious analogy between Catholic belief in transubstantiation and the ideology behind transhumanism, but perhaps more importantly, the willingness to put one’s entire sense of being on the line for a principle such as self-ID has the same fervour and inability to broach compromise.
My frequent references to the perils of religious belief (of any kind) hardly need repeating here. It’s a mindset, and a straightjacket into which people are all too keen to trap themselves. Only be examining and identifying the human tendency to do this will we finally start to break away from the constant round of religious or quasi-religious battlegrounds that strain the groaning library shelves of our history.
So walk-on girls for darts are cancelled and drag queen story hours are great?
can someone enlighten me please
What does 2SLLBTGI+ cover ??
Insanity.
Insanity.
can someone enlighten me please
What does 2SLLBTGI+ cover ??
So walk-on girls for darts are cancelled and drag queen story hours are great?
“Increasingly, the laws now being rolled out across the West to give this belief the backing of state power serve as a new set of Test Acts. ”
Interesting piece of history. I’d never heard of the Test Acts.
“Increasingly, the laws now being rolled out across the West to give this belief the backing of state power serve as a new set of Test Acts. ”
Interesting piece of history. I’d never heard of the Test Acts.
I have thought for a while that great slaughter has been done in the past over far less. But it’s worth remembering that many of our most cherished institutions were born out of a maelstrom of ‘founding violence ‘. Perhaps finally history is beginning again and a New World might rise from the ashes of this one.
Demographers are pointing out that the west is dying at a horrendous clip and the west will be at the tipping point of 20% by 2150, about one and a half lifetimes. Suicide.
Why is this “bad” ? The world has had a smaller population in the past. We can do just fine with a stable or smaller population. Perhaps even better with less pressure on resources and the environment.
Why is this “bad” ? The world has had a smaller population in the past. We can do just fine with a stable or smaller population. Perhaps even better with less pressure on resources and the environment.
Demographers are pointing out that the west is dying at a horrendous clip and the west will be at the tipping point of 20% by 2150, about one and a half lifetimes. Suicide.
I have thought for a while that great slaughter has been done in the past over far less. But it’s worth remembering that many of our most cherished institutions were born out of a maelstrom of ‘founding violence ‘. Perhaps finally history is beginning again and a New World might rise from the ashes of this one.
Catholics are the last liberals. They’ll even stand up and try to defend a tiny person about to be dismembered in a womb.
There’s absolutely nothing ‘liberal’ about doing that.
Is existence not the foundation of all other subsequent rights? And do you imagine that they are something you bestow? So you can make rape ok by asserting it? Interesting.
Is existence not the foundation of all other subsequent rights? And do you imagine that they are something you bestow? So you can make rape ok by asserting it? Interesting.
There’s absolutely nothing ‘liberal’ about doing that.
Catholics are the last liberals. They’ll even stand up and try to defend a tiny person about to be dismembered in a womb.
Narcissistic hedonism is the new “Liberal”- ism in Canada and with the Dems in the US. There is nothing liberal about it. Sodomy really isn’t gay as the million dead young men lie in testament to our actual human biological natures. The religion of the west is faux LGBQ ideological acceptance., queer “science”. Developmental disorders highly correlated with having been sexually abused at an early age.
By those with a ‘vocation’, no doubt.
What better place for hoomosexual paedophiles to hide away in the West, with access to their preferred sexual partners than in a celibalt male clergy?. There is a reason so many coaches of youngsters or females are also found to be exploitatiive, as for the UN/Oxfam aid workers, well who is there to take an interest in the poor victims of 3rd world catastrophes that those enlightened liberal do-gooders have abused?
or perhaps more accurately those without a vocation, but who espy an opportunity?
I am sorry to say you have revealed your ignorance of the facts of sexual abuse, which is overwhelmingly not perpetrated by priests.
In fact, as more and more reports come to light in Archdioceses throughout the US, what is clear is how overblown the priest “sex abuse” scandals are.
There is no standard for what constitutes a “credible accusation.”
Despite sensational claims about “pervasive” sexual abuse, the fact is, vanishingly few American priests have ever been found guilty of criminal charges of sexual abuse.
Meanwhile gay, etc, people are far more likely to have experienced sexual abuse, and at the hands of other gays–not by priests.
No. Not true. The JJCCJ study found abuse was actually less in the Catholic church but it was virtually all homosexual and post pubescent. The church wised up and stopped accepting people with pronounced homosexual tendencies to study. There are 10X the number of cases with the Boy Scouts of America and the other churches and public schools in particular have a greater problem, especially the public system. But Hollywood and materialists hate the church Christ founded and sustains even through bad times like these.
What better place for hoomosexual paedophiles to hide away in the West, with access to their preferred sexual partners than in a celibalt male clergy?. There is a reason so many coaches of youngsters or females are also found to be exploitatiive, as for the UN/Oxfam aid workers, well who is there to take an interest in the poor victims of 3rd world catastrophes that those enlightened liberal do-gooders have abused?
or perhaps more accurately those without a vocation, but who espy an opportunity?
I am sorry to say you have revealed your ignorance of the facts of sexual abuse, which is overwhelmingly not perpetrated by priests.
In fact, as more and more reports come to light in Archdioceses throughout the US, what is clear is how overblown the priest “sex abuse” scandals are.
There is no standard for what constitutes a “credible accusation.”
Despite sensational claims about “pervasive” sexual abuse, the fact is, vanishingly few American priests have ever been found guilty of criminal charges of sexual abuse.
Meanwhile gay, etc, people are far more likely to have experienced sexual abuse, and at the hands of other gays–not by priests.
No. Not true. The JJCCJ study found abuse was actually less in the Catholic church but it was virtually all homosexual and post pubescent. The church wised up and stopped accepting people with pronounced homosexual tendencies to study. There are 10X the number of cases with the Boy Scouts of America and the other churches and public schools in particular have a greater problem, especially the public system. But Hollywood and materialists hate the church Christ founded and sustains even through bad times like these.
By those with a ‘vocation’, no doubt.
Narcissistic hedonism is the new “Liberal”- ism in Canada and with the Dems in the US. There is nothing liberal about it. Sodomy really isn’t gay as the million dead young men lie in testament to our actual human biological natures. The religion of the west is faux LGBQ ideological acceptance., queer “science”. Developmental disorders highly correlated with having been sexually abused at an early age.
The Catholic implementation of bodily self-creation is exemplified in the edict of priestly celibacy, noble in intent but practically leading to widespread child abuse…
Except for the evidence that is. The JJCCJ report showed the sexual abuse matched exactly the acceptance of candidates for the priesthood with homosexual tendencies. Unlike the rest of the west 81% of the abuses were against pubescent males and was homosexual in nature. The press, toadies like everyone else thought “pedophile priests’ would find more favor with its readership. The church has stopped accepting anyone with homosexual tendencies. Lesson learned. One might ask as Gallop puts homosexual men at 1.4% of the US population how one out of 4 sexual assaults is on males. One dare not speak the sacred incantation of LGBQ which shows how “liberated” we are. It is a behavior tied to abuse. A developmental disorder as is about as obvious as men and women. OOPS! And it is indifference , the opposite of love to watch sodomizing kill a million young men in the west with parades for the abused. I’ll stick to the sanity of Catholic natural law.
How is consciously not entering a lifelong, exclusive partnership with someone from the other sex – involving the procreation and education of children – bodily self creation?
And what is “bodily self creation” anyway?
If celibacy leads to widespread abuse, what about the many abusers who aren’t?
Catholic Church, but I forgot the Boy scouts
The Catholic church had less abuse than other institutions and religions and it was 81% or overwhelmingly the result of accepting people with pronounced homosexual tendencies into the priesthood. They stopped doing that and the problem is receding.
The Boy Scouts currently have 10X the number of abuse claims and lawsuits. The media detests Catholics and the church’s natural law ethics which incidentally are the work of reason not revelation as indeed even the existence of God is.
The Catholic church had less abuse than other institutions and religions and it was 81% or overwhelmingly the result of accepting people with pronounced homosexual tendencies into the priesthood. They stopped doing that and the problem is receding.
The Boy Scouts currently have 10X the number of abuse claims and lawsuits. The media detests Catholics and the church’s natural law ethics which incidentally are the work of reason not revelation as indeed even the existence of God is.
Its just a transference of metaphysical principles of contingent finite being into bodies. It doesn’t work. Nothing that requires an actualization of potentials to exist can possibly be the ground of being. Something that is , as Aquinas showed, “actus purus” or Pure ACT .. is necessary to explain the possibility and reality of contingent beings. Something …Someone as such a cause is the necessary ground of all being.. is necessarily transcendent and understood by us only by analogy. BEING.. God.
Catholic Church, but I forgot the Boy scouts
Its just a transference of metaphysical principles of contingent finite being into bodies. It doesn’t work. Nothing that requires an actualization of potentials to exist can possibly be the ground of being. Something that is , as Aquinas showed, “actus purus” or Pure ACT .. is necessary to explain the possibility and reality of contingent beings. Something …Someone as such a cause is the necessary ground of all being.. is necessarily transcendent and understood by us only by analogy. BEING.. God.
Except for the evidence that is. The JJCCJ report showed the sexual abuse matched exactly the acceptance of candidates for the priesthood with homosexual tendencies. Unlike the rest of the west 81% of the abuses were against pubescent males and was homosexual in nature. The press, toadies like everyone else thought “pedophile priests’ would find more favor with its readership. The church has stopped accepting anyone with homosexual tendencies. Lesson learned. One might ask as Gallop puts homosexual men at 1.4% of the US population how one out of 4 sexual assaults is on males. One dare not speak the sacred incantation of LGBQ which shows how “liberated” we are. It is a behavior tied to abuse. A developmental disorder as is about as obvious as men and women. OOPS! And it is indifference , the opposite of love to watch sodomizing kill a million young men in the west with parades for the abused. I’ll stick to the sanity of Catholic natural law.
How is consciously not entering a lifelong, exclusive partnership with someone from the other sex – involving the procreation and education of children – bodily self creation?
And what is “bodily self creation” anyway?
If celibacy leads to widespread abuse, what about the many abusers who aren’t?
The Catholic implementation of bodily self-creation is exemplified in the edict of priestly celibacy, noble in intent but practically leading to widespread child abuse…
The west is a rigidly grooming cult ure. It bought the utterly false narrative of “born that way” despite the clear evidence from large cohort and national identical twin based studies. And it started talking about “gay” not the sodomy that has killed a million young men in the west.
Also ignored are the NYC studies showing half of people with GRID (Gay Related Immune Disease) later changed to AIDS had been sexually abused at the average age of eleven like a friend of mine raped on his paper route at that age.
The Danish registry study of 2006 shows that these behaviors emerge in children who suffer early parental divorce, death of a same sex parent, or relational problems with same.
Otago NZ 2010 student body study found that the less than 1% who identified as other than normal were mostly from the group that was flagged for having been sexually and otherwise abused.
We have to start loving people more intelligently and with informed compassion. My friend was railroaded into the life , being told he just “was” gay. Last I heard he had a lovely girlfriend. He changed very quickly after he saw the identical twin large studies that were not “convenience” samples as most are in these matters.
Maybe an eight times higher suicide rate even in “accepting” cultures isn’t a wonderful thing for us liberals to impose on children.
The west is a rigidly grooming cult ure. It bought the utterly false narrative of “born that way” despite the clear evidence from large cohort and national identical twin based studies. And it started talking about “gay” not the sodomy that has killed a million young men in the west.
Also ignored are the NYC studies showing half of people with GRID (Gay Related Immune Disease) later changed to AIDS had been sexually abused at the average age of eleven like a friend of mine raped on his paper route at that age.
The Danish registry study of 2006 shows that these behaviors emerge in children who suffer early parental divorce, death of a same sex parent, or relational problems with same.
Otago NZ 2010 student body study found that the less than 1% who identified as other than normal were mostly from the group that was flagged for having been sexually and otherwise abused.
We have to start loving people more intelligently and with informed compassion. My friend was railroaded into the life , being told he just “was” gay. Last I heard he had a lovely girlfriend. He changed very quickly after he saw the identical twin large studies that were not “convenience” samples as most are in these matters.
Maybe an eight times higher suicide rate even in “accepting” cultures isn’t a wonderful thing for us liberals to impose on children.
This MPP (Member of Provincial Parliament) is in the opposition, so hopefully the house duly considers this and then rejects it.
This MPP (Member of Provincial Parliament) is in the opposition, so hopefully the house duly considers this and then rejects it.
Agree with most of this but the body modifying theology doesn’t work because another sacrament is that we can’t change our skin colour.
I agree with this
…Well I tried it on the barista at Starbucks this morning, by responding to her query what my order was, with ‘I’m a long black’ even though I look like ‘a short fat white’ and it worked! Sort of, I got an americano.
I agree with this
…Well I tried it on the barista at Starbucks this morning, by responding to her query what my order was, with ‘I’m a long black’ even though I look like ‘a short fat white’ and it worked! Sort of, I got an americano.
Agree with most of this but the body modifying theology doesn’t work because another sacrament is that we can’t change our skin colour.
“total freedom of belief isn’t actually a workable basis for a functioning polity. You need sacred values, or you don’t have a coherent social order”
Very true, Mrs. Harrington. This is the essential blind spot in American politics today – a lot of people in the giant muddled middle still think we can all just ‘go along to get along’ – that ‘tolerance’ is the high-water mark for civic virtue. They don’t understand that ‘tolerance’ only works against a backdrop of unspoken values that are shared by all. And we no longer have those values, at least not in critical mass.
“Brace yourselves; it’s going to get worse” – hoo boy
“total freedom of belief isn’t actually a workable basis for a functioning polity. You need sacred values, or you don’t have a coherent social order”
Very true, Mrs. Harrington. This is the essential blind spot in American politics today – a lot of people in the giant muddled middle still think we can all just ‘go along to get along’ – that ‘tolerance’ is the high-water mark for civic virtue. They don’t understand that ‘tolerance’ only works against a backdrop of unspoken values that are shared by all. And we no longer have those values, at least not in critical mass.
“Brace yourselves; it’s going to get worse” – hoo boy
There comes a time to join the side you’re on – Midge Dector
God bless Vladimir Putin
God bless Vladimir Putin