- You are wrong, you know nothing of what I think and feel, moreover you sadly yourself display no Archived Message
Posted by Thomas Newfield
on January 3, 2020, 12:20 am, in reply to "Re: War on Christianity"
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knowledge of Christianity whatsoever. Personally I despise the CofE as much as most here in England, Ireland and the rest of the Isles always have. There was never much enthusiasm for the political compromise which gave rise to the church of England and its various imperial offshoots. Your comment once again, true to form, displays the trite straw-doggery of the, yes, liberal fascism and intellectual tetany-jerking of the western culture which you Canadians seem to represent par excellence in these times. Something to do with suppressed cultural cringe recoiling I suspect, but that's your business. I'm no theologian, I was brought up with little Christianity, my mother was expelled from school at 15 for being a member of a Lutheran club but is the least political, or dogmatic person you could meet; my father, a fundamentalist atheist last time I checked, is the son of an apostate Jew and and a working class Yorkshire girl who was bright as as button... they both were. But I did have a soupcon, a homeoepathic dose, innocently and unforced, no brutality like our resident Irish argument-allergic-anarchist-between-sulks. What I've come to notice recently is the direction of friends who had NOTHING, and whose children have as it were double-nothing: they're wandering in all and every direction, but in their unconsciousness of their roots they are multiplying and recapitulating the worst excesses of their familial Protestantism: worshiping "morality" - of course a thin disguise for their own lostness and defensive hubris (like the 10 commandments pinned to the church wall in place of the old iconostases and actual devotion) a bit like in the legend of the smashed mirror which only serves to multiply its demonic reflexions manyfold. I said "no knowledge". All your arguments (not just you Mr B) are so much question-begging for me. You start and end with a sociological and materialistic view of "the church". Yes, the church is and must be of this world. In the original teachings this world, the material, is not despised or abhorred as filthy or inherently sinful - which became the western european niche. Kinda neo-Platonism in an ugly disguise.... Just "fallen" but capable of redemption. That's why in the Christian world, those closest to the original message, the Russians and Greeks are who spring to mind, have a much healthier relationship to their own bodies and sexuality. For one thing they enjoy them. So much for materialism. But for real Christians, the "head" of the church is I believe Christ, and is manifest in the Holy Spirit, the spirit of Truth. Its members are the dead as much as the living. Anyway like I say I'm no theologian. And my own family past was far from a warm fuzzy fug, 'specially at Christmas time. You're right that I increasingly see the arguments of most on the left as simply explanatory tactics to cover their own lostness, often but not always resentment. Not that they completely lack explanatory power. Not the "the right" has much to offer besides greed and intellectual dishonesty. And, I do believe that feeling, of a sort, is an essential part of Truth and Knowledge (but not all of it: that's Catholic stuff!) I have thought I caught a breath of the original Christian feeling, a warm feeling with a lot of promise, in certain corners of the Orthodox faith I discovered by accident here beyond the westernest tip of Eurasia, of all places. But then why should the geography surprise when Ireland was the first outcrop of original Christianity in northern Europe, and England was one of the last to fall to the Catholics? And spiritual Truth is for all? I've mostly forgotten it now myself. Such an apparent eccentricity was always going to be quite a lonely furrow to plough in this location. But from my standpoint that's mainly because the war on the spirit of love, sacrifice, compassion, devotional and non-materialist lifestyle, has been waged for a long time. In the form of obsessive rationalism - borrowed from the pagan Greeks; in the worship of man, and of material things - more crypto-paganism - or indeed in New Age type "pure spritualism" which seems to reject this our gifted world but so can be pulled with ease into evil for the lack of the anchors of shared experience. In modern times for me the attack seems to be intensifying, with tanks in the Christian east; in the west with the direct or barely disguised ideological equation of Christianity with evil actions and habits. To be reactive, reactionary - would be easy, and betray a lack of any real devotion. I do see not only a destruction of the beautiful but a hatred of actual beauty around these parts. What's truly sad deserves mourning. I only pray for faith in and awareness the overflowing, merciful abundance, within and and without, as a shield for one thing! I know there are hymns about that but I'm deliberately avoiding them for now. |