Wednesday, May 26, 2004
HRE defends Thomas
This one's for you, Jess.
The reason you will do this is that your *current* political necessities demand it. If the Church is right that all humans desire happiness that makes it... problematic... if you wish to cast your side as the Good Guys in a Manichaean struggle against Wholly Alien Creatures who mysteriously desire pure evil for its own sake. You will be resistant to the notion that the people you are fighting are humans, like us, who, like us, desire happiness, but in profoundly disordered ways which lead them to do evil. You will tend to dislike the Church's view as a "bleeding heart", "optimistic", "blind to original sin" view which does not go far enough in making the Evil Ones out to be as Fully Evil as they are. It "humanizes" them, makes them "sympathetic". It's "soft".
Better, then, to shout down the teaching of Holy Church as "idiotic nonsense" and "the worst, most banal, self-congratulatory tripe I have read outside UN declarations in my life". And if St. Thomas basically supports the Council's teaching that a) nothing God makes is intrinsically evil and b) human beings are incapable of not desiring happiness (which is the basis for the Church's *hope* (not "optimism") that there is a good, though badly fallen, human being there upon which grace may still build), well then, let's shout down Thomas too. All that medieval twaddle is "useless technicalism" and "ledgerdemain". These people for whom the Church hold out the hope of redemption are Bad Guys in whom the imago Dei has been completely and utterly destroyed, all the goodness of nature has completely vanished, and no toehold of goodnes of *any kind* remains for grace to build on. Never mind that this would imply that Christ did not and could not have died for them. The Church's "idiotic" expressions of redemptive hope get in the way of demonizing our enemies and so the Church must be ridiculed, not learned from.
When will the Magisterium learn that it is there to confirm us in our prejudices and a priori assumptions, not to make us think?
The reason you will do this is that your *current* political necessities demand it. If the Church is right that all humans desire happiness that makes it... problematic... if you wish to cast your side as the Good Guys in a Manichaean struggle against Wholly Alien Creatures who mysteriously desire pure evil for its own sake. You will be resistant to the notion that the people you are fighting are humans, like us, who, like us, desire happiness, but in profoundly disordered ways which lead them to do evil. You will tend to dislike the Church's view as a "bleeding heart", "optimistic", "blind to original sin" view which does not go far enough in making the Evil Ones out to be as Fully Evil as they are. It "humanizes" them, makes them "sympathetic". It's "soft".
Better, then, to shout down the teaching of Holy Church as "idiotic nonsense" and "the worst, most banal, self-congratulatory tripe I have read outside UN declarations in my life". And if St. Thomas basically supports the Council's teaching that a) nothing God makes is intrinsically evil and b) human beings are incapable of not desiring happiness (which is the basis for the Church's *hope* (not "optimism") that there is a good, though badly fallen, human being there upon which grace may still build), well then, let's shout down Thomas too. All that medieval twaddle is "useless technicalism" and "ledgerdemain". These people for whom the Church hold out the hope of redemption are Bad Guys in whom the imago Dei has been completely and utterly destroyed, all the goodness of nature has completely vanished, and no toehold of goodnes of *any kind* remains for grace to build on. Never mind that this would imply that Christ did not and could not have died for them. The Church's "idiotic" expressions of redemptive hope get in the way of demonizing our enemies and so the Church must be ridiculed, not learned from.
When will the Magisterium learn that it is there to confirm us in our prejudices and a priori assumptions, not to make us think?
