Irving Kristol Quotes
The assumption that the only way to discuss religion is some variant of discussion of one or another traditional orthodoxy is fatal. Irving Kristol was groping at this conclusion but could never get that far; he was captive to the very orthodoxy he knew he must criticize. He could not bring himself to do it. Today's Christians, of whatever persuasion, cannot do so either. It is a failure of imagination. They literally cannot conceive that any other way to discuss religion exists because they have been thoroughly conditioned against any such thing. This is also a failure of education, of assuming that religion can only be what, as far as they know, it has always been. Further, they have no stomach for re-educating themselves. But that is exactly what is called for. The answer of today's Christians: "I need to make a lot of money; no-one can live on less than $50,000. I do not have an appetite for re-educating myself, besides, it would not increase my income by even one dollar." That's true, of course. We all are familiar with the famous verse in Ephesians where the Apostle Paul says, "unless you earn [the equivalent of] $50,000 you cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Unless you earn a comfortable middle class income you are a failure to yourself, to your family, and to Christ, who, of course, made do with a modest $ 85,000 himself." I wonder what Kierkegaard would have said if he had lived to see Christianity as it has become in modern day America. For what is is worth, and in acknowledgement of my many shortcomings, it is a relief to have put that kind of Christianity behind me for good. We are all hypocrites about something , of course, but I thank God that whatever my hypocrisies may be, they are nothing like those of so many of today's "Christians." Kierkegaard was right, even the Church can rot on the vine. All that is necessary is to ignore each and ever painful truth that comes to your attention. All that is necessary is to hide under the bed, its as simple as that. Basically, with profuse apologies to those Christians who actually still are Christians, this whole thing disgusts me. It took me far too long to finally figure it out, to finally recognize it for what it is, but now that I see it, it is impossible to "unsee" it. I'm supposed to believe in that kind of Jesus? My best reaction to such entreaties is: LOL, ROTFUL, and "you've got to be kidding me, right? You can't be serious." It is objectively that bad when you think it through. BR ---------------------------------------- Here are some quotes from Irving Kristol that get at the problem: “For well over a hundred and fifty years now, social critics have been warning us that bourgeois society was living off the accumulated moral capital of traditional religion and traditional moral philosophy, and that once this capital was depleted, bourgeois society would find its legitimacy ever more questionable. These critics were never, in their lifetime, either popular or persuasive. The educated classes of liberal- bourgeois society simply could not bring themselves to believe that religion was that important to a polity. They could live with religion or morality as a purely private affair, and they could not see why everyone else—after a proper secular education, of course—could not do likewise.” “The delicate task that faces our civilization today is not to reform the secular, rationalist orthodoxy, which has passed beyond the point of redemption. Rather, it is to breathe new life into the older, now largely comatose, religious orthodoxies—while resisting the counterculture as best we can, adapting to it and reshaping it where we cannot simply resist.” “[Liberalism] is an ethos that aims simultaneously at political and social collectivism on the one hand, and moral anarchy on the other” “We in our secular, rationalist world are utterly unprepared for such existential-spiritual spasms. For one thing, we do not study the history of religion in any serious way, even for explanations of religious phenomena. Instead, we look for sociological explanations, or economic explanations, or even political explanations, and we do so precisely because we find it almost impossible to posit spiritual appetites and spiritual passions as independent, primary forces in human history.” “The granddaddy of all countercultures, of course, was early Christianity itself. And in a polemic written in the 2nd century by the Greek philosopher Celsus, we have a marvelous document of the bewilderment and incomprehension with which Greco-Roman rationalists of the early Christian era viewed this counterculture.” -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
