We can intellectualize love, conceptualize love, analyze love, psychologize love, but we cannot create it by any exercise which originates primarily in the intellect. The heart may remain untouched despite all the most careful thought. The one emotion that ideology seems all too readily and too often to generate in abundance is hate. It may, however, also generate a pseudo-love, a counterfeit to stand in the place of what love, by its nature, is meant to be. Ideologically bred “love” is obsession, fanaticism, a sort of veneration of national, class, social, or economic identity. This pseudo-love is usually an amalgam of more than one of the above, and it absorbs the “lover’s” sense of self in the process.
Tag Archives: Progressivism
Faith and Hope, Assurance and Conviction, 8 – Hope and Assurance, 1
Despite the self-flagellating oddity of the West’s admission of guilt, it is paradoxically out of the much-maligned West that all these much needed calls for reform and equalization of injustices and rights have come.
Faith and Hope: Assurance and Conviction, 7 – The Smell of Blood
As far as I can make out in reading scientific treatments of the question of origins written for ordinary folks, the farthest the cosmologists can reach back is about 14-15 billion years to the Big Bang. Whether and why there was anything before that to “Bang” is, for the present and foreseeable future, enshrouded inContinue reading “Faith and Hope: Assurance and Conviction, 7 – The Smell of Blood”
Myth, Conspiracies, Shame, and the Quest for Truth, 5 – The Third Way, Reprise 2
Neither whisper is going away. Both will remain, breaking ever in upon us, piercing our armour of self-sufficiency and independence at the most inconvenient and unsuspecting moments. The monstrous Nazi and Soviet horrors of the twentieth century remind us. At such moments the whispers become warning shouts, alarms, that our true nature is other than the myth of self and independence, the conspiracy of silence (or rather silencing) about the greatest story of all time. Even a great leader of the West in that moment (Winston Churchill) recognized that it was really about the survival of “Christian civilization”, which even in 1940 was well on the road to a fading echo, although not then quite a whisper.
Myth, Conspiracies, Shame, and the Quest for Truth: 3
The saddest part of the West’s identity crisis is that the triumphant secular establishment does not have the courage of its own proclaimed convictions. It has gone beyond the pendulum-swing analogy of a strong reaction against the stifling shackles of the old religion and its clinging tentacles.
Myth, Conspiracies, Shame, and the Quest for Truth: 2
For more than a thousand years, the divide in the West’s soul created the dream of “Christendom” on the one hand while still lured and divided by the old habits of heart and mind of power, greed, and lust. The cynics, or perhaps realists, have always had plenty of ammunition to question the dream of the coming of the Kingdom of Christ in the warp and woof of human history – Christendom!
The Third Way, 29: The Soul of the West
nihilism and Nietzschean despair live on. Mockery of the Creator and even the idea of His/Her existence also lives on, declaring, like Sergeant Schultz in Hogan’s Heroes, in the face of the ever-increasing, quietly accumulating scientific (yes, scientific!) evidence to the contrary, “I see nothing; I hear nothing; I know nothing.” Schultz was choosing to see, hear, and know nothing, and so do our ultra-modern-postmodern nihilists. As an old friend used to say, “My mind is made up; don’t confuse me with the facts!”
The Third Way, 15: I, We, You
The sticking point for we poor, ignorant, superstitious humans, who seem to long for spiritual connection with one another and all the rest of the creation (even as a product of the Big Bang it is a creation, just not one attributed to a ‘Being’), is that we exist as persons with a personality and personal identity. (I hesitate to use the term ‘individual’ with all its increasingly negative and self-absorbed connotations.) We may try to subdue and even strive with yogic might and main to erase this ‘illusory self’, but we are still locked into the locus of our particular point of reference within life and the river of time, place, and experience.
The Third Way, 6: Path 2—Zealotry
fanatic – 1. Person filled with excessive and often misguided enthusiasm for something. 2. excessively enthusiastic. (Derivation – Latin, fanum – temple) zealot – 1. An uncompromising or extreme partisan; a fanatic. Canadian Oxford Compact Dictionary, 2002. In the post previous to this one, I suggested that the ‘Second Way’ for humanity to go forwardContinue reading “The Third Way, 6: Path 2—Zealotry”
The Third Way, Part 2: Progressive Redemption, an Analysis
Progressive ‘redemption’ and ‘salvation’ suggests the best possible future as a least-painful, most comfortable, safest possible sort of existence for the greatest possible number, perhaps with a little adventure thrown in from time to time to add a little ‘danger’ and ‘risk’ (which seems to be a necessary stimulus for progress to continue). The goal seems to be survival for the species for the longest possible time-span.
Is this enough for our species to
thrive? Or is it really a chimera which
would, in the long run, stultify and smother who and what we really are?
World.V.You 