Watched the Netflix movie "Trumbo," which is about the McCarthy era when Communists in Hollywood were blacklisted for it through Senator McCathy's House Committee on Unamerican Activities hearings.
The movie is of course sympthetic to Trumbo and all those who were blacklisted and I don't want to suggest that there was anything good about that blacklisting. But at the same time we now have a nation that is on the verge of being destroyed by the Left, by Marxism, by Communism, and the way the McCarthy era played out no doubt has a lot to do with that. McCarthy was right about Communists in Hollywood and it is certainly true that Communism is unAmerican, actually AntiAmerican but the problem is that so many of us don't know what's wrong with Communism and how it is such a danger to the nation.
The movie presented the Communists as idealists full of compassion for the downtrodden implying that there is something heartless about the American system that needs to be rectified by Commyunism. Nowhere in the film was the difference between Communism and the American system even mentioned, let alone discussed. The character Trumbo seems to consider his Communist belief to be completely American, and his opponents, such as Hedda Hopper, are of course depicted as unlikable people, and none of them ever has anything substantive to say about why they are so adamantly opposed to the Communists. Just a lot of pattriotic-sounding hot air. All you'll get from this movie is leftist propaganda you'll learn nothng about the reality of the conflict it's about./
We go on in that same ignorance even today as we are now faced with an election that pits the American system against Communism in such a direct way the contrast is inescapable. It's never been spelled out so clearly before. Would the American voters actually choose Communism given such a stark contrast? I don't know. It'[s sad to think that many might reject Trump based only on disliking his personality, with no idea that they would be choosing the demise of the country itself.
The problem in the era of McCarthy was that there was no real discussion of why Communism is such a danger, at least that I recall, and I don't think many understand it today either. The blacklisting in Hollywood didn't make the issues clear to anyone, it caused severe suffering for many people who felt it was completely undeserved. Those who considered their Communist affiliation to be an expresion of compassion never got challenged about it, and blacklisting only made them bitter.
So th4e blacklisting was finallyl condemned and we never did get the education we needed on these things. McCarthyism is now a dirty word and. We aren't getting any better understaing now either. I hear some good discussions of it on conservative talk radio but those discussions never get a public airing. Sean Hannity just wrote a book that may address the issues to some extent, and Mark Levin has written many such books and talks about it a great deqal on his talk show, but the people who need to hear it aren't listening.
If the Left wins it will be because of this ignorqance, but if it wins there will be no way ever to return to the real America.
Friday, July 17, 2020
Reducing God to the latest psychological or philosophical theory
Before I became a believer I sometimes encountered writings that purported to explain religious belief, of course mostly Christian belief, in terms of the prevailing theories of philosophy or psychology or whatnot. It was frustrating and boring though I'm not sure I could have said why, since for all I knew that way of dealing with religion was all that was possible to us.
But of course such thinking is merely human beings applying their imagination to systems that long preceded our time, as if there's anything persuasive about our mere cogitations. We want truth, don't we? But how on earth are we going to find truth by such means?
Science is something else of coruse, the "hard" sciences that is, the phenomena that can be tested empirically by separate individuals arriving at the same results. That method can't be applied to questions of the meaning of life, whre we are left with speculatons based on interpretations of history and the minds of other thinkers rather than any kind of objective knowledge.
The same is true of the theory of evolution, which is often defended as a science but really isn't, at least not in the same way the hard sciences are, since you can't replicate any of it or test any of it, and as in the case of religious or philosophical meaning all you can do is make intepretations based on some principles that were never empirically demonstrated though they are taken for fact. because some thinker in the past argued them persuasively. Even if boring and frustrating this method is at least justifiable for philosophical questions, but when it is applied to an area of physical reality, i.e. biology, it becomes, in my opinion, pernicious and misleading, a body of pseudo-knowledge that erects a fake reality in the hapless minds of humanity. It just sounds silly, sophomoridc, fatuous, the way evolutionist thinkers will talk about how the human race acquired this or that attitude or behavior at such and such a time in our history, as if they could possibly know such things. Sociobiology's "altruism" of decades ago is the sort of thing I'm thinking of. They don't seem to mind that they can't know such things, they can only speculate, or that it's mindnumbingly simplistic. Evolution is also applied to the attempts to figure out religion of course.
What got me into all this is that I listened to part of a couple of lectures on religion by the psychologist Jordan Peterson, who became known a few years ago for his very trenchant answers to some popular leftist political correctness. He doesn't consider himself to be a conservative although many of his views are congenial to the conservative positions. It's interesting that he also has a strong attraction to biblical Christianity, having given many lectures on the Bible, but it's all from the psychological/philosophical perspective.
In a nutshell this could be said to boil it all down to a very complex way human beings learn to aspire to high wisdom in conducting our lives. That is, he reduces God to such higher wisdom, that some special human beings learned how to access, or something like that. Which I gu3ess explains why it got written down and preserved for future generations.
Although he considers this to be a noble thing, to my mind it is the same kind of thinking I called silly and fatuous above in relation to evolutionist explanations for human behavior. And evolution is certainly part of his framework too, of course, as it's all about how humanity learned this or that, grew over time to develop, say, greater wisdom about life or whatever.
So the story of Abraham is all about how he learned life's lessons, it's got nothing to do with what the Bible actually says, that believers understand it to mean, that there really is an objective God Who really did call the man Abraham for purposes of God's own that have nothing to do with ordinary human life. Peterson's view would imply that all humanity could learn from this God that is really a reservoir of higher wisdom about life, or perhaps some special people could, but we understand the Bible to be telling us something absolutely unique that God chose to convey through Abraham, for the salvation of fallen humanity. God chose Abraham for this unique purpose, as He chooses all thos4e through whom He speaks to us in scripture. God is not just a wisdom by which Abraham can learn to conduct his life, God is teaching Abraham about Himself and His plan of redemption. He is not teaching Abraham some abstract wisom about, say, sacrificing to gain higher knowledge, He is teaching us through Abrqaham's willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac, about the necessity of trusting God that some day a great sacrifice of His own Son will bring salvation to eternal life for all who believe.
How is it that unbelievers can permit themselves to impose such an alien philosophical system on the Bible? In one of his lectures Peterson kept referring to what "we" think about the Bible, how "we" used to believe it but no longer do, which of course ignores the millions of us who do believe it even today. How does he justify reducing God to a sort of faculty of our own minds? How does he justify gnoring what the Bible actually says about the transcendent objective reality of God? I wonder if he can answer that question. It can only come down to the subjective statement, Well I just can't believe what it actually says. And somehow that is enough for him? No matter what millions have understood it to mean for thousands of years, his own psychological cogitations are sufficient against all that.
Much the same thing as the "contemporary biblical scholars" who don't believe in the supernatural so they arbitrarily date the most prophetic books after the prophecies they so clearly state, with no regard for whatever how they destroy the whole fabric of the writing.
Oh well. Nothing new under the sun there I guess.
It's so simple really. Just believe it. That's what it says, just believe it. It's a simple honest account of things that actually happened, and it's only a deep prejudice embedded in your own mind that gives you the arrogance to think you can make it into something else. Of course if someone did that to an honest accounting of your own about your own experiences you would be very unhappy, but no matter, you can do it to God's revelation that has taught millions over millennia. Jung? Nietsche? Ugh.
But of course such thinking is merely human beings applying their imagination to systems that long preceded our time, as if there's anything persuasive about our mere cogitations. We want truth, don't we? But how on earth are we going to find truth by such means?
Science is something else of coruse, the "hard" sciences that is, the phenomena that can be tested empirically by separate individuals arriving at the same results. That method can't be applied to questions of the meaning of life, whre we are left with speculatons based on interpretations of history and the minds of other thinkers rather than any kind of objective knowledge.
The same is true of the theory of evolution, which is often defended as a science but really isn't, at least not in the same way the hard sciences are, since you can't replicate any of it or test any of it, and as in the case of religious or philosophical meaning all you can do is make intepretations based on some principles that were never empirically demonstrated though they are taken for fact. because some thinker in the past argued them persuasively. Even if boring and frustrating this method is at least justifiable for philosophical questions, but when it is applied to an area of physical reality, i.e. biology, it becomes, in my opinion, pernicious and misleading, a body of pseudo-knowledge that erects a fake reality in the hapless minds of humanity. It just sounds silly, sophomoridc, fatuous, the way evolutionist thinkers will talk about how the human race acquired this or that attitude or behavior at such and such a time in our history, as if they could possibly know such things. Sociobiology's "altruism" of decades ago is the sort of thing I'm thinking of. They don't seem to mind that they can't know such things, they can only speculate, or that it's mindnumbingly simplistic. Evolution is also applied to the attempts to figure out religion of course.
What got me into all this is that I listened to part of a couple of lectures on religion by the psychologist Jordan Peterson, who became known a few years ago for his very trenchant answers to some popular leftist political correctness. He doesn't consider himself to be a conservative although many of his views are congenial to the conservative positions. It's interesting that he also has a strong attraction to biblical Christianity, having given many lectures on the Bible, but it's all from the psychological/philosophical perspective.
In a nutshell this could be said to boil it all down to a very complex way human beings learn to aspire to high wisdom in conducting our lives. That is, he reduces God to such higher wisdom, that some special human beings learned how to access, or something like that. Which I gu3ess explains why it got written down and preserved for future generations.
Although he considers this to be a noble thing, to my mind it is the same kind of thinking I called silly and fatuous above in relation to evolutionist explanations for human behavior. And evolution is certainly part of his framework too, of course, as it's all about how humanity learned this or that, grew over time to develop, say, greater wisdom about life or whatever.
So the story of Abraham is all about how he learned life's lessons, it's got nothing to do with what the Bible actually says, that believers understand it to mean, that there really is an objective God Who really did call the man Abraham for purposes of God's own that have nothing to do with ordinary human life. Peterson's view would imply that all humanity could learn from this God that is really a reservoir of higher wisdom about life, or perhaps some special people could, but we understand the Bible to be telling us something absolutely unique that God chose to convey through Abraham, for the salvation of fallen humanity. God chose Abraham for this unique purpose, as He chooses all thos4e through whom He speaks to us in scripture. God is not just a wisdom by which Abraham can learn to conduct his life, God is teaching Abraham about Himself and His plan of redemption. He is not teaching Abraham some abstract wisom about, say, sacrificing to gain higher knowledge, He is teaching us through Abrqaham's willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac, about the necessity of trusting God that some day a great sacrifice of His own Son will bring salvation to eternal life for all who believe.
How is it that unbelievers can permit themselves to impose such an alien philosophical system on the Bible? In one of his lectures Peterson kept referring to what "we" think about the Bible, how "we" used to believe it but no longer do, which of course ignores the millions of us who do believe it even today. How does he justify reducing God to a sort of faculty of our own minds? How does he justify gnoring what the Bible actually says about the transcendent objective reality of God? I wonder if he can answer that question. It can only come down to the subjective statement, Well I just can't believe what it actually says. And somehow that is enough for him? No matter what millions have understood it to mean for thousands of years, his own psychological cogitations are sufficient against all that.
Much the same thing as the "contemporary biblical scholars" who don't believe in the supernatural so they arbitrarily date the most prophetic books after the prophecies they so clearly state, with no regard for whatever how they destroy the whole fabric of the writing.
Oh well. Nothing new under the sun there I guess.
It's so simple really. Just believe it. That's what it says, just believe it. It's a simple honest account of things that actually happened, and it's only a deep prejudice embedded in your own mind that gives you the arrogance to think you can make it into something else. Of course if someone did that to an honest accounting of your own about your own experiences you would be very unhappy, but no matter, you can do it to God's revelation that has taught millions over millennia. Jung? Nietsche? Ugh.
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