The Chute’s resident theologian rips into Pat Robertson’s latest “WTF” commentary.
Thoughts on labels in society, and progressivism specifically.
Justice is what separates society from anarchy, it is the fundamental distinction and possession of government which distinguishes it from mere brigandage. To quote St. Augustine, “In the absence of justice, what is sovereignty but organized robbery?” Society is something which elevates us above the mere beast, but justice is what separates us from the madman, from the tyrant, from oppression
It’s easy to blame religion for the atrocities that its adherents commit, generalities make it easy to not have to address real problems or invest any time in learning and understanding the context and history which act as incubators of cultural and sectarian violence. We have either forgotten or it simply never occurred to our navel fixated little brains that America and the socio-political climates we are born and raised in is fundamentally different then most everywhere else, especially in comparison to middle eastern and north African nations whose people are more accustomed to totalitarianism and a state controlled media than a free press and the right of self determination.
Our democracy, then, must be chained by the mandates of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, for if it is not, it shall trample the freedoms that we fought so hard to grasp. They are all that stands in the way of an egalitarianism run amok; equality must be defined and qualified before it may be pursued and defended.
…postmodernism, the belief that truth is inherently subjective and a function of power. With the rise of postmodernism came the notion that the only heresy that remains is the belief in absolute truth–orthodoxy. Postmodernism, for it’s part, contends that the only absolute is diversity, that is, the notion that there …
So, if we accept that rights are inherent and thus, by extension, conferred by something outside of society, then it is perfectly acceptable to insist that the State uphold or restore those rights; we are simply invoking the duty implicit in the nature of the State, in exercising it’s obligatory prerogative.
Narrative knowledge produces a prescriptive impulse whereas the form that scientific knowledge embodies is fundamentally denotative. Though science can tell us the what, it can never move from empirical to moral. Science will always fail to tell us the why and the what for of existence, only the moral or prescriptive narrative can provide that. Thus science/fact is unable to create a cognitive matrix on it’s own that explains it’s own existence. So science, real science, is inherently non-religious, neither for or against, because science can produce no ethical impulse. Because the why is the narrative. The empirical only substantiates or disproves belief and or speaks ontologically when contextualized by the narrative. Science can never give you the why because it then would move from the descriptive to the prescriptive, from the empirical to the religious. That is why atheism is as religious as theism. Both purport to explain what is back behind what is.
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, …
Why aren’t churches taxed? This seems like a legitimate question. The First Amendment says this: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the …