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Orwell was right to comment that the best way to prevent people thinking things the State does not wish them to think is to change the language; if there is no word for dissent, then as a concept it ceases to exist; if you call it ‘racism’ or ‘homophobia’ and make those things ‘hate crimes’ you criminalize dissent; you might not be able to stop people having such thoughts, but you can send them for reeducation – or ‘sensitivity training’ as it is euphemistically called. That we have such things in the UK and accept them meekly shows the extent to which the concept of free speech is no longer understood. It is acceptable to tell adults what they must think; we must not, apparently, tell children this; they must not be given the tools to think for themselves; they might have ‘inappropriate’ thoughts.
A whole culture dies in this whimper. Where Hampden would tell King Charles what he could do with his ‘ship money’, where Bunyan could tell the bishop what to do with his edicts, and where John Wilkes could go to jail for libelling the King, where these things happened, men and women would declare their rights as free-born English and tell the authorities what they thought; aye, these men suffered, as did those whose activities in the unions so annoyed the bosses; now, their political descendants kow tow to political correctness.
Whatever the downsides, and I do not deny them, of Protestantism, it inculcated a spirit of freedom; no priestling would use hocus pocus to frighten us with stories of how, if we didn’t pay up, our loved ones would never get out of Purgatory; and when their Anglican successors tried to exert their ‘authority’, they too were defied by the plain words of Scripture. Everyman his own Pope is not a recipe for a quiet life; but I prefer it to tugging my forelock; but for all that, at least the Catholic Church was motivated by the desire to save men’s souls. The bossy folk with their clip boards and their ‘hate speech’ and their delations to the police or social workers, are just bossy little Hitlers, drunk on a little brief power. They are like ‘Sharkey’s men’ in the ‘scouring of the Shire’. Lickspittles, sneaks and opportunists. Men do not, as Chesterton (I think) remarked, cease to believe in anything when they cease to believe in God, they simply transfer their allegiance – usually to a sub-branch of Mammon.
If you begin with the basic building block of our culture across the ages, the family, Sharkey’s men abolish it. They begin where Satan began, with the man and the woman. Don’t worry about developing a relationship, just give in to your primal urges, oh, and don’t worry, there won’t be any consequences. Just have some drugs, ones with, of course, no side-effects, and you’ll not need to worry; oh, and if there is a .mistake’ and you have an ‘unwanted’ child, we’ll call it a foetus and kill it; you can get it on the NHS, which means it’s free (except for the taxes needed to support it, and the resources it takes from actually saving lives). They, freed to the ‘burden’ of children, you can get on with rutting, and buy lots of lovely things to fill your empty lives with; if you go off sex, we can give you more drugs, and if you go off your partner, don’t worry, have a new one, of better still, change your ‘sexual preferences’ and try it all ways; our version of paradise is the dream of the rue down the ages. Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you will die – but not before you have consumed more than you can afford. Don’t worry, by the way, about the fact you can’t afford this stuff, we’ll lend you the money.
So, we begin by destroying the basic structure – man, woman, family, a solid unit which can build a life for its members. But what’s that, there’s still an organisation in our society which wishes to preserve this basic structure – best get on with undermining that. Sharkey’s men know we can’t live with them and their trashy values.
Servus Fidelis said:
Well, bread and circuses, still work to keep the masses dim-witted and slaves to their passions; but only until the government runs out of money and their passions will be redirected to find food, shelter and clothing. God never promised that we humans will be overly bright and make good decisions on our own; and, of course, history shows that we continue to be fooled by the old trick of misdirection time and time again.
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Geoffrey RS Sales said:
Yes, we’re none too bright as a species.
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Servus Fidelis said:
Our brains seem to be connected to our libidos and to the sensual pleasure center of the brain (if you can call it a brain).
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Geoffrey RS Sales said:
Very sad – but a wide open freeway to Satan.
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Servus Fidelis said:
Yes. We are removing all his roadblocks and waving him onto the fast lane.
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Geoffrey RS Sales said:
I am afraid so.
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mkenny114 said:
Another excellent post on this topic (as were the two that preceded it). Doesn’t stop the cultural vandalism that’s going on being deeply troubling, but it does help bolster one’s courage to know that there are still sensible people out there who can see right through the nonsense.
How long before either Western culture wakes up, or those in power overstep the mark though? I have a horrible feeling that it might have to get worse before it gets better, such is the subtlety of the methods employed by those hell-bent on taking us into a more ‘enlightened’ and ‘progressive’ era.
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Servus Fidelis said:
Dangers of a state run religion.
Perhaps coming to England soon? http://wdtprs.com/blog/2014/06/denmark-parliament-forces-state-lutheran-church-to-have-same-sex-marriages/
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mkenny114 said:
Yes, I saw that article this morning and had exactly the same thoughts. It’s only a matter of time in my opinion – some CofE ministers have already broached the rule against their entering into same-sex ‘marriages’, and absolutely nothing has been done; also, there are already services of thanksgiving (or something like that) in place, which are treated by clergy and laity alike as celebrations of marriage.
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Servus Fidelis said:
Chilling.
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mkenny114 said:
It really is.
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Servus Fidelis said:
It is true that I found it quite refreshing that I did not have to sit through long sermons about putting more money in the basket and having them passed around again and again once I became a Catholic. I have never had to listen to what seemed to be a staple of the sermons I heard when I was a Protestant here in the U.S. I don’t know if that is a practice still to this day or if it was just the U.S. but it seemed almost a standard thing in most of the churches I attended.
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theophiletos said:
I don’t know when you last listened to Protestant sermons, but I suspect it has changed to some degree, depending on the denomination (and perhaps on the region as well). Of the five churches I have attended repeatedly in my peregrinations, only one ever preached on a “duty to bring tithes and offerings,” and a second occasionally (~2/yr) preached on the opportunity to give to the church after prayerful discernment, while I think the other three were so embarrassed by the subject that they preferred to avoid it.
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Servus Fidelis said:
That is good to hear. As a rebellious teenager (probably the last time I attended) it was very off-putting and seemed like a fund raiser as much as a religious service. I’m glad if that has largely changed, even if it hasn’t changed everywhere, it was long due, in my mind.
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mkenny114 said:
Just found this quote from Chesterton on the wonder of children – it should be sent to abortion clinics and ‘pro-choice’ advocates across the land:
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theophiletos said:
I love Chesterton. Thanks for sharing!
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mkenny114 said:
Glad to! He is always a good (and more often than not surprising – in a good way) read isn’t he 🙂
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theophiletos said:
Geoff’s point was not about tithes, which I believe were also compulsory in medieval Europe, but about indulgences given in exchange for voluntary donations over and above the tithe, and the office of quaestor (colloquially termed “indulgence salesman”) which was abolished by the Council of Trent.
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theophiletos said:
I also disagree with much of the direction that current society is going, but I wonder how much (certainly not all) of its impetus is because so many so-called Christians have been hateful rather than loving, even celebrating murders such as that of Matthew Shepard. The law is a very blunt instrument, and cannot really discern motives of the heart. But absolute freedom of speech (such as has never existed) would prevent anyone from being called to account for lying, slander, or false marketing. So freedom of speech is a legal principle of only middling value, designed to protect lively debate, such as at AATW. It is not designed to protect those whose words prove the falsehood of the common schoolground song (only common in the US?), “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” The problem, as I see it, is that people are now encouraged to find their whole identity in a minor proclivity, and to conflate reasoned discussion of the moral rightness of sexuality with a knee-jerk “ugh” or an internal desire to cause harm, and thus reasonable dissent on moral rightness becomes an existential threat to a member of society. Some of us have adopted reasoned dissent without having any particular sense of “ugh” and while wishing to avoid causing harm! But some conservatives’ rants in other venues (not AATW) only bolster the case that all rejection of homosexuality is true homophobia.
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Servus Fidelis said:
“But absolute freedom of speech (such as has never existed) would prevent anyone from being called to account for lying, slander, or false marketing.”
Well, among our politicians in the U.S., they get a pass on lying, slander and false marketing (or insider trading) and operate on a different code of law that is applicable only to the ‘unwashed masses.’ And the watchdogs that were to keep them somewhat ‘honest’ has been destroyed when the press decided to affiliate themselves with the liberal elites who get a pass no matter what foolish lies they tell. Now we have to recognize their hypocrisy ourselves and most don’t bother. Hate speech in the US these days is only something that white, conservative people (of the lower castes) are held to.
Is it the same in the U.K.?
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mkenny114 said:
Some very good points here. There is indeed a great deal of baggage that people associate with Christianity, and are thus suspicious of its gaining a public voice on that basis (not only on that basis of course, but this is definitely part of it). It’s very hard to distinguish how much of the current secular repression of values that were common currency only a few decades back is due to this suspicion of Christian authoritarianism and how much is due to a desire to just sweep it under the carpet in general in order to further the gospel of individualism. Personally I would say the emphasis is more on the latter, but that does not mean the other factor is not a significant one.
Also, the point you make about people being encouraged to ‘find their whole identity in a minor proclivity’ is a very good one, and not discussed often enough – we have come to simply accept the language of ‘orientation’ and ‘sexual identity’ as a given, when it is by no means clear that such things really exist in the sense that people give to them. This then makes it much harder to present a case to the public that certain acts are immoral, because those acts are intimately associated with the person, and any criticism made re the act is de facto a criticism of the person – to hate the sin is to hate the sinner in the eyes of 21st century Western culture. There was a very good article on this topic written recently at First Things actually:
http://www.firstthings.com/article/2014/03/against-heterosexuality
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theophiletos said:
Wow. I never expected to see Foucault cited approvingly on the pages of First Things! But that is a powerful article, and I appreciate it for elucidating and arguing more clearly than I could do some of my own complaints against sexual orientation as a category. Thanks so much for sharing!
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mkenny114 said:
No problem. It is a good article isn’t it, and I too was rather surprised to see Foucault being used to such effect! I wonder what Foucault himself would have had to say about how the author used his ideas. Not that a post-modernist deconstructionist can really say a particular interpretation is wrong, but… 🙂
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Geoffrey RS Sales said:
QV – let’s not argue – in the Middle Ages ‘voluntary’ was an elastic concept.
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atomiccataract said:
Reblogged this on Blinding Light By Which We See and commented:
Why linguistics are so important!
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