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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022

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Goodbye to one of the last great men of Christian Europe, an apostle of being to a nihilistic world, and one of the few contemporaneous people I look to as a genuine example for my life. I am sad that he is no longer with us, but more sad for us than for him. For as the pagans recognized, "all who have duly purified themselves by philosophy...pass to still more beautiful abodes which it is not easy to describe, nor have we now time enough." (Plato, Phaedo)

I'm not sure if this needs a statement of culture-war relevance, but Benedict XVI is the closest person I can think of in our age to really living out the west's classical paradigm of an excellent human life: to be a wise, cultured, orthodox Christian gentleman. The value of this paradigm will likely be discussed and debated within the coming days.

In truth--one thing is certain: there exists a night into whose solitude no voice reaches; there is a door through which we can only walk alone--the door of death. In the last analysis all the fear in the world is fear of this loneliness. From this point of view, it is possible to understand why the Old Testament has only one word for hell and death, the world sheol; it regards them as ultimately identical. Death is absolute loneliness. But the loneliness into which love can no longer advance is--hell.

This brings us back to our starting point, the article of the Creed that speaks of the descent into hell. This article thus asserts that Christ strode through the gate of our final loneliness, that in his Passion he went down into the abyss of our abandonment. Where no voice can reach us any longer, there is he. Hell is thereby overcome, or, to be more accurate, death, which was previously hell, is hell no longer. Neither is the same any longer because there is life in the midst of death, because love dwells in it. Now only deliberate self-enclosure is hell or, as the Bible calls it, the second death (Rev 20:14, for example). But death is no longer the path into icy solitude; the gates of sheol have been opened.

(Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity)

Today, having a clear faith based on the Creed of the Church is often labeled as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, that is, letting oneself be "tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine", seems the only attitude that can cope with modern times. We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one's own ego and desires.

We, however, have a different goal: the Son of God, the true man. He is the measure of true humanism. An "adult" faith is not a faith that follows the trends of fashion and the latest novelty; a mature adult faith is deeply rooted in friendship with Christ. It is this friendship that opens us up to all that is good and gives us a criterion by which to distinguish the true from the false, and deceit from truth.

(Ratzinger, homily, Missa pro eligendo Romano Pontifice, 18 April 2005)

the west's classical paradigm of an excellent human life: to be a wise, cultured, orthodox Christian gentleman.

If the classical paradigm of an excellent human life requires that you not be a Jew, I want no part of it.

  • -24

There is something incredibly perverse about demanding Jewish representation in this discussion about the former leader of the Christian church.

Something I have noticed in the current discourse is the idea that “anti semitism” is something that the general population should be concerned about. The pressec routinely throws “anti semitism” in with things like “the rise of extremism”.

It’s as though we’ve gotten to a point where supporting the Jewish religion is equivalent to being a moral person.

I cannot imagine any time where “anti semitism” is used being substituted with “anti Catholicism”. Can you imagine the POTUS (who is Catholic!) talking about the dangerous rise of anti Catholic sentiment? Or can you imagine Catholics demanding that all things must be made up of and for Catholics and if not they should be considered “anti catholic” and therefore immoral?

To the above poster: yeah, the world being imagined wants you to be Christian because Christianity and Judaism are competing religious philosophies. I’m not planning on converting to Judaism any time soon, as suspect you don’t plan on converting to Catholicism. My position is that that’s fine because you are welcome to your own belief system. Why is it that Jews don’t seem to want to grant the rest of the world the same courtesy, and if anybody ever wants to have their own belief system, that this is considered anti semitic and immoral?

It’s not anti semitic for me to not be Jewish. You guys don’t want me anyway. Where the hell does that leave most of the world?

It’s as though we’ve gotten to a point where supporting the Jewish religion is equivalent to being a moral person.

The problem here is the reverse: supporting the Jewish religion is treated as not being a moral person.

  • -13

On one hand I question the assertion. On the other I feel that even if I were to take your comment at face value, the only charitable reply is that having to ask the question means you wouldn't understand the answer.