[Aurini]

(12-14-2018 01:01 AM)a beer is enough Wrote:  

Snip.

At some point, we let the failures of society loaded with envy get a big enough voice and are slowly paying the price of it. It started off by letting uglier women determine the beauty standard to make themselves more attractive and slowly started to go downhill from there.

This quote from a recent Brett Stevens article:

Quote:

The sickening part comes when I think about how the crowd will react. They scored. Touchdown! They will high-five one another and think they’ve saved the world. Ignore the public reaction. The grief-councilors have deployed to mop up all the crocodile tears. It reminds me of a chapter from Thus Spoke Zarathustra. A tightrope walker attempts to cross from one high tower to the next. A crowd looks on as he attempts the crossing. A jester makes fun of the tightrope walker causing him to fall to his death. The crowd is secretly relieved that the performer is dead since none of them could have crossed over.

I worry about the future of America. On the surface she seems to be doing a lot better than my own homeland, Canada; the right to bear arms is enshrined in the Constitution, and there aren't the government-sponsored Hate Speech Tribunals that we have here. But I don't believe these offer as much protection as the average American would like to believe.

First of all, on the practical level, you might have the right to carry a gun and use it to defend yourself... but should you do so, there's a good chance you'll be mired in the legal system, while being tried in the court of public opinion. Just look at George Zimmerman.

But this is just a side effect of the deeper issue: the Puritanism that's at the core of the American Experiment. The issue with Puritans - and Protestants in general - is that they try and force the Supernatural into an Objective reality. This is why they make harsh, literalist pronouncements about theological matters, such as free will and God's ominscience (Calvinism); or about the value of human souls and the value of human individuals (all men are created equal). By placing the mystery of the supernatural into an objective, scientific box, they deny themselves the ability to admit ignorance, or to live holistically. If religion is objective, then there must be a strict, specific, and accurate path to salvation. If they go on to reject God, then there must be a best way to order society; something strict, dialectical, and materialistic.

Such a worldview can't admit that some things are bigger than man - that they'll always be bigger than man - and that there are some places we ought not to tread. They'll turn their theology into an absolute dictatorship; or their science into an absolute solution. Disagreement - when you are this certain about the fundamental nature of reality - is absolutely intolerable, there is no place for vagueries of opinion, or personal taste.

With Catholics, the Pope has absolute authority on theological matters; but on anything else he's just another man who has to argue his opinion. With Protestant cults, the founder's political theories are just as vital as his theological theories; because by eliminating the veil between objective truth and higher mysteries, he has made the personal political, and the political theological.

In Catholic countries - such as Canada by accident, and Italy by tradition - we're all sinners, none of us really know what we're doing, so we keep the yoke tied loosely. It's only in matters of survival that we demand obedience and conformity. In Protestant countries such as America and Britain, heresy from the orthodox is a nigh-criminal offence. The fact that the British investigation is formal, while the American investigation is informal (carried out by the media/twitter hordes) is irrelevant. As Heinlein said, "...you are just as dead if you buy the farm in an "incident" [or a "police action"] as you are if you buy it in a declared war."

When you claim to know everything (whether it be the Protestant carrying God in a lunch box, or the materialist claiming that all is knowable through the Scientific method) mysteries become intolerable - they become an assault on your faith, and ergo an assault on you (since this form of faith is based upon pride, a presumption of knowledge, rather than an admission of ignorance and smallness in the face of the immensity of God). So - when something goes wrong? Whether it's people choosing to buy dildos despite being church goers, or people refusing to follow your communist scheme for perfect reality - well, time to pull out the big guns. Eliminate the heretics. Eliminate those who are cursing the crops. Your theory is perfect, after all; by definition, since you command objective truth (God is in your lunch box), you can't possibly wrong. So if things aren't working out as you planned, it's because of immoral saboteurs.

I can definitely see a violent religious mania taking over America. I worry about you guys.