The Pope is in Australia talking to young people about Moral Relativism and I am encouraged if he is asking these impressionable minds to study Sartre, Hume, Spinoza and Nietzsche and not to accept his Cliff Notes version of the subject matter. There is the old line about how if you can frame the perimeters of the argument then you can probably win the argument.
I doubt that Jesus ever studied Sartre, Hume, Spinoza or Nietzsche or ever had the need to.
This week a famous publication, The New Yorker, had a “satiric” cartoon in the minstrel style of the original mission statement of the magazine founding in the 1920’s. Ultra liberal types seem to be accommodating themselves to the fact that the next President of the United States is not going to pure bred, burb bred, or drug brain dead like themselves. Oh the insecurity of the ruling classes! Oh the cost of psycho-therapy these days!
I make reference to the fact that there was an American flag burning in the oval office fireplace of this “satiric” spoof illustration. Spoof illustration for The New Yorker would have had Christopher Hitchens being water boarded and seeing a vision of Mother Theresa (God rest her great soul!).
I got put in my place by someone and was told that the burning flag thing was a cartoon and therefore not a valid talking point. Whatever.
After almost two decades of non-stop radio hate-mongering and right wing fascist propaganda sputtering out of the burned out, thieving, lying, pension fund looting conservative movement, I think that maybe the boring monolithic Byzantine politically correct brain dead democrat club is about to return with a vengeance, to descend onto this country in the same horrific manner as the recent conservative non-thought movement, and like a plague on logic in the near future.
It is good to be the elite in the USA, to only have to deal with your politically correct neighbors in the local country club and only occasionally wonder who all the other people on the TV screen or outside your gated community or concierge-doorman serviced high-rise are all about. Then the percocet takes effect and all is well with your world.
The global economy and the global mindset is not going away. The idea of you living in peace and harmony in your global village (gated community) and communicating by telegraph with the rest of the world, to and from your mines and mine overseers, from out there somewhere, and people earning a quarter an hour or even better a quarter per day - That model, that monster is about to bite America in the ass. Is biting us in the ass right now.
Was the collapse of Christianity part of that half century old Ivy League model of perfection with the corporate spreadsheet model of the global village?
When our secular world invaded the other parts of the planet with fast food and disco - Was there a back up plan or an exit strategy for the impromptu corporatist non-moral system exported along with the cappuccino?
When we set out on the crusades were they to conquer Islam or to bypass the greedy christian middlemen of Byzantium? What did we get from the crusades? Diapers and Gothic cathedrals? Perhaps the real Holy Grail in Jerusalem was an old Greek mathematics book to make cathedrals possible.
In any case, the global conversion is on. Do the world’s montheistic religions merge (yuck!)? Do they learn the tolerance they all claim to have at the base of their philosophies? Does a little bit of Buddha get thrown into the formula? I don’t know.
This primitive Cultural Christian can see great things in our future as a planet and as the people of God. I know that the Sermon of the Mount will be reiterated in the centuries to come both here and beyond here and travel with the human race to the stars.
