Catholicism reverts (again)

[drew]

The technicalities of religion have no place in the minds of god.

--A

Wasn't something similar to that in one of the O God! movies ?

God (George Martin) said that he's not really into religion.

[Menolly]

Dromond, fortunately, I'm in The Close, not the 'tank (fact...see Header).

...psst...Drew...it was George Burns in the Oh G-d! films...

[danlo]

Well I've heard the dreaded words symbols and dogma on the last page-I really can't stand either, those are some of the many reasons I don't like religion. God doesn't do or care about real estate and a crucifix is an execution device, plain and simple.

[Menolly]

...sorry danlo...

*blushing*

[rusmeister]

Well I've heard the dreaded words symbols and dogma on the last page-I really can't stand either, those are some of the many reasons I don't like religion. God doesn't do or care about real estate and a crucifix is an execution device, plain and simple.

While the word' phobia' is frequently misused, I think there is such a thing as 'dogmaphobia'. Let me offer a brief comment on this from a truly great thinker:

Whether the human mind can advance or not, is a question too little discussed, for nothing can be more dangerous than to found our social philosophy on any theory which is debatable but has not been debated. But if we assume, for the sake of argument, that there has been in the past, or will be in the future, such a thing as a growth or improvement of the human mind itself, there still remains a very sharp objection to be raised against the modern version of that improvement. The vice of the modern notion of mental progress is that it is always something concerned with the breaking of bonds, the effacing of boundaries, the casting away of dogmas. But if there be such a thing as mental growth, it must mean the growth into more and more definite convictions, into more and more dogmas. The human brain is a machine for coming to conclusions; if it cannot come to conclusions it is rusty. When we hear of a man too clever to believe, we are hearing of something having almost the character of a contradiction in terms. It is like hearing of a nail that was too good to hold down a carpet; or a bolt that was too strong to keep a door shut. Man can hardly be defined, after the fashion of Carlyle, as an animal who makes tools; ants and beavers and many other animals make tools, in the sense that they make an apparatus. Man can be defined as an animal that makes dogmas. As he piles doctrine on doctrine and conclusion on conclusion in the formation of some tremendous scheme of philosophy and religion, he is, in the only legitimate sense of which the expression is capable, becoming more and more human. When he drops one doctrine after another in a refined scepticism, when he declines to tie himself to a system, when he says that he has outgrown definitions, when he says that he disbelieves in finality, when, in his own imagination, he sits as God, holding no form of creed but contemplating all, then he is by that very process sinking slowly backwards into the vagueness of the vagrant animals and the unconsciousness of the grass. Trees have no dogmas. Turnips are singularly broad-minded. G.K. Chesterton, Heretics, ch 20

[danlo]

So, you're calling me a tree, eh? I can live with that. I should have been more specific by saying stagnant dogmae which many religions appear to cling to. I'm all for evolving dogma that the estemmed Christian thinker above suggests at, but then again Christian's don't believe in evolution do they? (humor)

[rusmeister]

So, you're calling me a tree, eh? I can live with that. I should have been more specific by saying stagnant dogmae which many religions appear to cling to. I'm all for evolving dogma that the estemmed Christian thinker above suggests at, but then again Christian's don't believe in evolution do they? (humor)

Dunno if you're old enough to remember the sitcom "Mork and Mindy":
"Humor. (Hnnn.) A difficult concept."

Just trying to point out that there is a legitimate case for dogma, something that most are exposed to in a negative context, and never realize that they hold dogmas themselves (for example, "Miracles are impossible and cannot be.") and a case for legitimate, and therefore correct dogma.

There are two types of Christianity - the type you folks here have encountered, and an adult version, both rational and mystic, simple enough that an idiot can accept it, and deep enough that the greatest thinkers can't grasp all of it. The trick is in finding the latter.

In the meantime, I'd find out more of what Chesterton had to say from the horse's mouth.

www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/index.html

Heretics is an excellent bust on skepticism, and on what I guess you could call the 'turnipization' of society.
www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/books/heretics/ch1.html

'Orthodoxy' is (to me) about the way we should think. Or, given that we have rational minds that come to conclusions (and therefore concepts of right/wrong, correct/incorrect), how we should use them.
www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/books/orthodoxy/

'The Everlasting Man' is probably the strongest case ever for man's place in history and the place of Christ in the history of man. A young (OK, 30-ish) atheist logician named Jack Lewis read this book and abandoned atheism as a result. He is better known as C. S. Lewis. (Narnia, anyone?)
www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/books/everlasting_man.html

A teaser from ch 1 of Heretics:

It is foolish, generally speaking, for a philosopher to set fire to another philosopher in Smithfield Market because they do not agree in their theory of the universe. That was done very frequently in the last decadence of the Middle Ages, and it failed altogether in its object. But there is one thing that is infinitely more absurd and unpractical than burning a man for his philosophy. This is the habit of saying that his philosophy does not matter, and this is done universally in the twentieth century, in the decadence of the great revolutionary period. General theories are everywhere contemned; the doctrine of the Rights of Man is dismissed with the doctrine of the Fall of Man. Atheism itself is too theological for us to-day. Revolution itself is too much of a system; liberty itself is too much of a restraint. We will have no generalizations. Mr. Bernard Shaw has put the view in a perfect epigram: "The golden rule is that there is no golden rule." We are more and more to discuss details in art, politics, literature. A man's opinion on tramcars matters; his opinion on Botticelli matters; his opinion on all things does not matter. He may turn over and explore a million objects, but he must not find that strange object, the universe; for if he does he will have a religion, and be lost. Everything matters--except everything.

[emotional leper]

Saying Miracles can't exist depends entirely on your definition of the word, and this is one of the reasons I dislike arguing.

I tend to experience about a Miracle a month.

[Avatar]

Well, depending on the looseness of your definition, that could be quite natural...

--A

[Edge]

Rusmeister, I'm curious: do your beliefs run along the lines of Christian Mysticism and/or Greek Orthodoxy?

[danlo]

I'm very sick today and can't concentrate on reading a bunch of stuff, but I am very interested. What little I know of you views, rus, reminds me of my friend Ser Camaris who runs (or used to run) a quiant little board called The Badger's Den that discussed lots of Chesterton and Lewis. It used to be a sister board of my board, Ahira's Hangar.

[rusmeister]

I'm very sick today and can't concentrate on reading a bunch of stuff, but I am very interested. What little I know of you views, rus, reminds me of my friend Ser Camaris who runs (or used to run) a quiant little board called The Badger's Den that discussed lots of Chesterton and Lewis. It used to be a sister board of my board, Ahira's Hangar.

Sounds like fun!

Hi Edge - I'm (Eastern) Orthodox Christian, which includes the Greek, Russian, Antiochian and other (canonical) Orthodox Churches. I'm as much a believer of mysticism as EO is! I'm American, but live in Russia and currently am part of the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church (although I was accepted initially into the OCA - Orthodox Church of America). They're all in communion, so it's all good.

[danlo]

Just checked out the site--it's fallen to the EZBoard ad-monsters, too bad...We do have a Lewis forum at the Hangar if you're interested. Check my www to get there...

[Edge]

Hi Edge - I'm (Eastern) Orthodox Christian, which includes the Greek, Russian, Antiochian and other (canonical) Orthodox Churches. I'm as much a believer of mysticism as EO is! I'm American, but live in Russia and currently am part of the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church (although I was accepted initially into the OCA - Orthodox Church of America). They're all in communion, so it's all good.

Hi Rus - nice to meet someone who's beliefs seem very like my own, and who enjoys some of the same authors.

[rusmeister]

Setting my faith aside, I'd be interested in anyone's comments on the Chesterton quotes or links above.

A central disease of our society is that in fearing extremism, such as an anti-intellectual Islamic (or Christian or whatever) fundamentalism, with dogmas that are literally life-destroying, we have come to deny dogma altogether (which winds up becoming a dogma in and of itself - the irony being that most don't see that and come to fear the word 'dogma', seeing in it only the above-described extremism. In doing so, we have moved to an opposite extreme - in saying that "belief is purely a matter of personal opinion" we now say that there IS no truth; that it is "wonderful that you have your beliefs - but they do not, and cannot reflect a reality that also affects me." - in a word, what you believe doesn't matter. We can agree that truths arrived at via science affect us universally (ie, oxygen); we cannot agree that truths arrived at via philosophy or religion similarly are true for everybody (ie, sin).

Under this philosophy, good and bad, right and wrong become blurry and gradually cease to exist - even our reason can become warped when the first principles our thinking is based on are wrong; ie, do not correctly understand/describe reality. And Chesterton hits the nail on the head. But don't read me. Read the above quotes, and while they could have been written yesterday, remember that they were actually written a hundred years ago. It's actually better to read the quotes in context, though.

Whaddya think?

[Avatar]

I suppose much depends on how you define dogma.

belief or doctrine held by a religion or any kind of organization to be authoritative. Evidence, analysis, or established fact may or may not be adduced, depending upon usage.

I'm an eschewer of dogma in the sense that I think anything authoritative should be questionable. I don't believe in a universal truth, and I do think that questions of right and wrong, good and bad, are blurry, and rightly so. I'm against absolutes. That doesn't mean things can't be right or wrong or good or bad, it just means that what is right as far as I'm concerned isn't necessarily right as far as you're concerned.

--A

[rusmeister]

I suppose much depends on how you define dogma.

belief or doctrine held by a religion or any kind of organization to be authoritative. Evidence, analysis, or established fact may or may not be adduced, depending upon usage.

I'm an eschewer of dogma in the sense that I think anything authoritative should be questionable. I don't believe in a universal truth, and I do think that questions of right and wrong, good and bad, are blurry, and rightly so. I'm against absolutes. That doesn't mean things can't be right or wrong or good or bad, it just means that what is right as far as I'm concerned isn't necessarily right as far as you're concerned.

--A

And this is precisely what Chesterton is talking about.

[Lord Mhoram]

The Chesterton quote is an interesting one. Here's my take: I think it's important to consider postmodernism and post-structuralism and all the other schools of thought he's talking about, in their historical context. The reason postmodernism became a viable school of thought was that Europeans saw the end-result of their millennia-old moral system go down in flames in two of the most horrific wars in human history - World Wars I & II. No one really believes that Christianity is the reason for the Holocaust. But it was apparent to a lot of intellectuals in the postwar period that there was something deficient in the moral systems that had dominated Western culture. It was dogmatism and nationalism and cultural selfishness that had caused the clash of the world wars. Hitler said that the German way is the only way. A more utopian moral system rejected that kind of thing - it said that nothing was the only way. We sort of threw the baby out with the bathwater in that respect. I for one agree with the postwar thinkers that saw the deficiencies in previous moral systems. I agree that the dogmatism of the Church and of Christianity itself ought to be abolished. Where I disagree with them is with regards to the matter of absolute morality - I actually believe in absolute moral truths.

[Avatar]

And this is precisely what Chesterton is talking about.

Yes, but he thought it was a bad thing.

--A

[rusmeister]

The Chesterton quote is an interesting one. Here's my take: I think it's important to consider postmodernism and post-structuralism and all the other schools of thought he's talking about, in their historical context. The reason postmodernism became a viable school of thought was that Europeans saw the end-result of their millennia-old moral system go down in flames in two of the most horrific wars in human history - World Wars I & II. No one really believes that Christianity is the reason for the Holocaust. But it was apparent to a lot of intellectuals in the postwar period that there was something deficient in the moral systems that had dominated Western culture. It was dogmatism and nationalism and cultural selfishness that had caused the clash of the world wars. Hitler said that the German way is the only way. A more utopian moral system rejected that kind of thing - it said that nothing was the only way. We sort of threw the baby out with the bathwater in that respect. I for one agree with the postwar thinkers that saw the deficiencies in previous moral systems. I agree that the dogmatism of the Church and of Christianity itself ought to be abolished. Where I disagree with them is with regards to the matter of absolute morality - I actually believe in absolute moral truths.

That seems like a typical educated modern view. With no intent to offend, only to encourage further thinking...

Unfortunately, this crashes right away on the simple fact that Chesterton wrote most of this stuff BEFORE the 1st World War, and died in 1936. Heretics was written in 1905, Orthodoxy in 1908. Chesterton predicted a lot of that stuff, and it was the ideas of his atheistic arch-opponent, George Bernard Shaw that were actually put into practice by the Nazis (Eugenics, the efforts to produce superior men, etc.) - not that Shaw supported them - he didn't, but this was the practical fruit of his theoretical philosophy. Christian dogma opposed the evil and wrong-doing engaged in in the war periods. (Oh, and selfishness is individual, really, not cultural. That is what selfishness means.)

What Chesterton was saying was that it was apparent that there was something deficient in the rising rejection of moral systems that had already begun to dominate Western intellectual culture.

Dogmas are things that all people - even you - have. You have been trained to think of dogmas as something exclusive to traditional Western religious culture, aka Christendom. To say that there is no way or there is no truth is just as dogmatic as Hitler's dogmatic statements. Any serious study of the traditional morals - which if you really read Lewis and Chesterton you will discover are really universal with very little variance regardless of the location or time of the culture - will reveal that Hitler's dogma was wrong. Not that we should try to reject all dogma - something ultimately impossible, but rather that we should use
1) our reason, and
2) our common sense

to decide which dogmas are right and which are wrong.

Moral systems are not things which intellectuals think up somewhere, and they existed long before intellectuals existed. They spring from what all of us inside ourselves know to be right and wrong. It IS possible to smother these feelings, as can be witnessed via the commitment of any atrocity (say, Nazi horrors or 9/11), but the fact that no one begins without this sense, that small children do not need to be taught to lie, to hit others, but then feel a need to justify their acts, reveals rather that:

a) we have strong desires to act in our selfish interests, and

b) we also have persistent (if weaker) feelings that we ought to act in certain way, and this frequently contradicts (however weakly) our selfish desires.

(This, by the way, is why it is SO popular to debunk Christianity, because it's always reminding us of this, and gosh, I want to do what I want to do.)

Your attitude towards Christian dogma could be just as dogmatic as the Christian dogma itself.

I think my own personal objections are to the smug intellectual attitude that I see ALL the time that, "We already know what Christianity is and we have 'outgrown' that. We are so much wiser than our ancestors because we happen to be living today. They were all so ignorant and we are so intelligent." Basically, that most people who object to it have either grown up and left Christianity without learning about it from an adult perspective, or have experienced a primitive version of it far removed from the original. (I call the former 'a second-grader's version of Christianity)

One more little Chestertonian quote:

"The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried." - Chapter 5, What's Wrong With The World, 1910

(Edit) One more, because it is about the essence of dogma -

We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end. We say that the juryman is not a juryman because he has brought in a verdict. We say that the judge is not a judge because he gives judgment. We say that the sincere believer has no right to vote, simply because he has voted.

G.K. Chesterton, from his collection of essays, "All Things Considered" essay - The Error of Impartiality)