There is no honest, informed way to play dumb anymore.HondurasKeiser wrote: ↑Fri Dec 15, 2023 11:39 amFor a deeper look at desecration or "de-creation" and the consequences of unshackling ourselves from God-given limitations in the name of Freedom; I recommend Carl Trueman's Erasmus Lecture.barnhart wrote: ↑Thu Dec 14, 2023 11:55 am Thanks HK, your response reads like an editorial. There is very little there I would disagree with. The liberal project is a runaway train but everyone is along the same track, scoffing those behind them who got off sooner and expressing horror at those who went further. The secular West may experience a "de-creation" event but isn't that the flip side expression of the same passions that produced the horrors of empire, like the Crusades, in previous eras. I am reminded of the epistle to the Hebrews, "We have here no continuing city, for we seek one to come."As both Augustine and Freud understood, transgression is pleasurable, and the greater the transgression, the greater the pleasure. Well, there can be no greater transgression than that against the sacred. In killing God, we grant ourselves the privilege of becoming gods ourselves. There is surely no greater exhilaration than in being God. And there is no more dramatic way of being God than in waging a holy war against the God-given nature of embodied human personhood.
There is a heavy price to pay for the desecration of man. In a letter written, like Lewis’s The Abolition of Man lectures, in the early 1940s, Czesław Miłosz commented to his friend Jerzy Andrzejewski that, without a religious and metaphysical underpinning, the word “man” becomes contentless. Elsewhere in the same letter, Miłosz speaks of wartime atrocities being made possible by the philosophical reduction of the human person to a lump of animated meat (or as Mary Harrington put it more recently, “Meat Lego”). Once that reduction is accomplished, Miłosz says, it is easy to imagine young men in clean military uniforms shooting other human beings while also eating their lunch. In Crepuscular Dawn, Paul Virilio observes that the presupposition of Nazi eugenics was that the body possessed no moral significance; camp doctors were therefore free to engage in their horrific experiments with no pang of conscience. Divorced from the image of God and from personhood, the body is animate Play-Doh at best. And so the desecration continues, as recent responses on American university campuses to Hamas violence against Jewish children indicate. Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov, faced with the incalculable suffering of innocent children, was unable to accept that sense could be made of it by any final providential ordering. In a melancholy act of rebellion, he declared that the price of harmony was too high, and he most respectfully returned to God the ticket. Ours is a world that seems all too eager to revel even in the destruction of infants, all enabled by the death of God and the consequent dehumanization that it entails.
Our cultural imagination is steeped in the seemingly endless potential offered by technology. “Man” is an even emptier term for us than it was for Lewis and Miłosz. Technological developments simultaneously destabilize any sense of what it means to be human and push us to see nature as mere raw material. As the folk memory of the Christian moral vision fades, we can define the term “human” however we wish. Indeed, it is this repudiation of the body’s authority that has made the question “What is a woman?” so difficult to answer. Gender confusion is not a discrete phenomenon. It arises from a basic bewilderment about how to answer the question “What is a human?”
This lack of any normative embodied understanding of what it means to be human frees our technologically empowered wills from any limitation. The question of what, if anything, it means to be human is then projected into the future, to the detriment of whatever we have been in the past or are in the present. If to be human is to be embodied according to Christian teaching, then today we are dehumanized, our bodies mere matter without moral or teleological significance, to be moved from potency to act. And yet, having no given nature, our potency has no intrinsic shape to define what that move might look like.
The experiment was implemented, the godless results are in. This, in my lifetime.
Good intentions by many, unintended consequences. “Rule by atheists,” was not an openly stated plan.
It follows by default.
Back to the old drawing board.
