Just some random passages from this essay called Truth and Indifferentism, presented with or without my commentary, starting with this:
when Christianity disappears from society, "it becomes an evil and cutthroat place," an anticipation of hell through despair and universal nausea.
Item: "Compared with not attending any religious service, attending a religious service once a week has the same effect on happiness as moving from the bottom to the top quartile of the income distribution." So, the nausea and despair are not about financial affluence but spiritual impoverishment.
Recall the freethinker's manifesto:
beliefs should not be formed on the basis of authority, tradition, revelation, or dogma, and should instead be reached by other methods such as logic, reason, and empirical observation.
Well, first of all, Gödel. In other words, man qua man always transcends any logical system.
Second, man is indeed the rational animal, but he is only rational if he is ordered to his proper end. Our freedom
lies in the power to choose the means that lead us to our true final end, and not the power to choose what turns us away from it. Likewise, reason is a faculty for reasoning correctly and not awry; it is a faculty for knowing truth, by avoiding error as much as possible.
But not everyone uses this freedom rationally or responsibly, to put it mildly, e.g., "Freedom for Palestine!"
Of course, they cannot be free because they are not rational. After all, they freely chose to be ruled by irrational monsters.
[It] is not true that all men, nor even the greater part of them, seek truth and virtue. And if one grants the freedom of teaching the errors that flatter desire and pride [not to mention bloodlust], a great portion of mankind would no longer find the saving truth.... St. Thomas had said likewise: "The majority of men follow their senses rather than right reason."
Which is precisely why the Palestinian terrortories are an anticipation of hell, for, among other things, hell is anyplace where there is no reason. Like a pro-Hamas rally.
Back to the rights of truth: "To prefer freedom to truth is obviously to favor license, the source of all disorders."
All? I suppose so, because freedom is again ordered to truth. Supposing it's ordered to something less, then it is dis-ordered, precisely.
Which we all learn in elementary school but systematically unlearn in college, if not before. I was a screw-up in school, but even I knew that my test answers were wrong because they weren't ordered to truth. Then again, I very much valued freedom over truth, a situation that took many years -- and decades -- to reverse itself.
I guess you could say that my head was an anticipation of hell. Again, truth is the conformity of judgment with being. If you believe otherwise, then you're well on your way to your head being annexed by hell:
true freedom only exists when it prefers, above itself, the truth that is its foundation, as the good is a true good only if it is founded upon truth, and the truth upon reality, that is, upon being and the nature of things. Truth consists in affirming what is and denying what is not.
Truth is a property of being. Without it, there is neither a true good, nor a true freedom for choosing the true good in preference to evil, which is only an apparent good.
Truth is a property of being. What a wild idea! But if this isn't the case, then hell -- in one form or another -- is around the corner.
Many philosophers no doubt think this is dogmatic, or rigid, or "pre-scientific," otherwise they'd all be Thomists. As mentioned a few posts back, I agree that it must be the worst philosophy, except for all the others. But philosophy as such can never map being, the former being finite, the latter infinite. However, we can prevent our philosophy -- and our heads -- from being a cheap imitation of hell:
The devil is essentially incapable of recognizing that he is wrong, unless an admission to that effect is in his interest; so it is error become habitual that must be right at all costs, even at the cost of our intelligence and, in the last analysis, of our existence...
The Devil -- like his communication arm, the liberal media -- is often wrong but never in doubt.
So, "the principle freedom that we must defend" is that of fulfilling our obligation to the true, the good, and the beautiful, which, unless one is very careful, all lead away from hell and back to God.
Recall that a "freethinker" is someone "who forms their own ideas and opinions rather than accepting those of other people, especially in religious teaching.... free thought is strongly tied with rejection of traditional social or religious belief systems."
Which reminds me of how the affluent woke can afford to entertain all those wacky luxury beliefs that result in disaster for the poor and underprivileged. Analogously, the cognitively underprivileged need
a power that sustains weak intellects against strong ones, delivering them from the most terrible oppression: oppression of the mind.... Neither peace nor freedom is possible outside the truth.
Gosh. I'm old enough to remember when academia was only an anticipation of hell instead of the real thing. But now the humanities have become the sub-humanities.
6 comments:
Fine example of a head annexed by hell.
The facial tattoos are a hint -- what they call an "objective correlative" of the hell within.
Looks good, but I'll wait for the price to come down:
“The religion of Humanity.” Comte coined the phrase and indeed created an atheistic religion of a self-adoring Humanity.... Manent observed victorious democracy interpreting itself in a similar framework. He took it upon himself to track this development, analyze it, and warn his fellow Europeans of its deleterious political, intellectual, moral, and spiritual effects. With conceptual precision and (most often) a sober tone, many contemporary sacred cows were gored. But in addition to cursing the humanitarian darkness, he also lit many candles of judicious political, philosophical, moral, and spiritual analysis.
Wow, I'm sure that she has a fulfilling life with healthy relationships and is in no way responsible for anything unpleasant that ever happens to her.
There was a video making the rounds last week, of a woman who had come to the horrified realization that everything she had been doing with the thought men would find it attractive (tattoos, muscles, boss bitch mindset, etc.) was actually the complete opposite of what the men she found attractive were looking for in a woman. At least she noticed and is young enough to do something about it, assuming the epiphany hit deep enough. Most women who go down that road never figure it out. Anticipations of hell, indeed.
Rufo:
Conservatives have mocked postmodern theory, which is based in part on the idea that everything is reducible to language and that, if you control the discourse of a society, you can control the society at large. But in rejecting this philosophy out of hand, conservatives are making a mistake. The postmodern case for the primacy of language might be overstated, but it also contains a kernel of truth. In many cases, if you control the language that is promoted as public orthodoxy, you make it very hard to escape....
Consequently, the Left, operating from within the bureaucracy, is no longer interested in equality of rights, as the Founders envisioned, or even equality of conditions, as the Marxists envisioned. They have begun to pursue what I call psychological equality, or “equality of the spirit"....
Yet despite all these efforts, we have a society that is more miserable than ever. I always think about these issues in terms of the American Founders, who saw very clearly that the end, or the telos, of political life is to create happiness, properly understood, in an Aristotelian sense. And a decent heuristic as to how well our society is doing is to measure happiness. Is our government leading us toward happiness as a people? I think the answer is clearly no. In fact, the more that the radical Left gains power within the bureaucracy and pushes its ideologies on the people, the less happy the people become.
They have begun to pursue what I call psychological equality, or “equality of the spirit"....
Now there's a horrifying thought. Presumably he isn't talking about actual gifts of the Holy Spirit, but rather gifts of personality. How does one equitably distribute a sanguine outlook? Closest you could get would be terrorizing everyone equally, but even there some people would handle it worse than others, and some people would achieve sainthood. The only true equality, ultimately, would be if all life were annihilated. Everything else is hierarchy.
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