Christianity since the Middle Ages has confronted the faithful with a faint hope of salvation and the practical certainty that nearly everyone is damned. The life of the believer is a self-centered melodrama based on the unending agonized contemplation of this dilemma. It's important to remember this when tut-tutting over the cruelty of TULIP. Protestantism merely cut away the institutional trappings of Catholicism, with its multitude of sacraments, its magical priesthood, and its corrupt involvement with the feudal ruling classes, and placed the individual conscience of the believer in an impenetrable cocoon of social and emotional isolation. Calvinism presents this in its starkest form--less rigorous doctrines merely cloud the picture with a lot of maybes that offer little hope in the long run.
The sheer narcissistic self-obsession of Bunyan's Mister Christian, secularized, provides the perfect ethos for capitalist individualism and selfishness, for the notion that society is mediated only by contracts between individuals, and also for the Romantic movement that owes so much to Calvinism--Milton's Satan and Jean-Jacques Rousseau both stem from this diseased root. The philosophy of Shelley's quondam father-in-law and mentor Godwin is the direct result of Godwin's early immersion in Sandemanianism, a particularly exiguous branch of Calvinism. Very little theology is required to grasp this. The Times review cited here blithers on about theology as though it had some sort of vital role in current intellectual life--we are all supposed to have a "robust conversation" with it as with the mythical "intelligent conservative" who is the true Penelope of all liberals. Shades of Harvard academics wallowing in adultery and unblended Scotch and showing up in church every so often because they and their "colleagues" like to muse about "spirituality" over drinkies when they have nothing (or nobody) better to do. I say set fire to the Harvard Divinity School and either shoot dead or put all its former inmates to work on chain gangs and let's get past this godawful nonsense and the attendant abundant drool once and for all. I don't know how Chris Hedges stands it, but anyone can see the horrible effect it has on his thinking. Do you want to end up like that? -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#6021): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/6021 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/80293435/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
