Bernardo Takes a Strong Stand

[Lou Gold]

The Church's incomprehensible and shameful suicide.

[Ben Iscatus]

The pope is not in an enviable position if he must either deny human rights or deny scripture.

A third option is to keep quiet and hope everyone gets on with their lives without expecting the church to base its morality on scripture.

A fourth option, and probably the best, is simply to refer to the life of Christ.

[AshvinP]

The Church's incomprehensible and shameful suicide.

That was a well-written and passionate critique, which was also right in line with what I have been thinking about in terms of Nietzsche's metaphysical critique of Christianity. The Church itself is starving for meaning and finding it in all the wrong places, such as social and political causes, because its metaphysical perspective (some form of rational dualism) has left that as the only option! Which is why I wish BK would have focused on that aspect more and gone deeper with the critique. If you leave it in the realm of sociopolitical issues, then everyone can safely ignore you because there are a million different rational arguments for why your opinion is wrong.

Metaphysical idealism, on the other hand, and as BK very well knows, is not so easily brushed aside by the rationalists and dualists. When faced with such a critique, they cannot take shelter in the endless pliability of a world devoid of transcendent meaning. We won't convince someone that homosexual relations can be a natural and loving pursuit by questioning their particular interpretation of scripture, their particular denomination or their particular political positions. What needs to be questioned are their most fundamental unexamined axioms about the structure of reality, the experience of reality.

BK knows that better than most, and he may be right about this - "Perhaps the death of this Church is, after all, what is required, so that something with true life in it might emerge from the ashes" - but then again, there are countless millions of people who feel they belong to that Church, and their hearts-minds may still be open to a true change in perspective if we approach them with empathy and an alternative which actually makes better sense of the apparently meaningless world they find themselves living in.

[Eugene I]

The problem the Church is facing is that they have to make a decision on the issue and regardless which choice they make they are going to upset and lose some members. If they accept LGBT they will upset and lose conservative members, if they reject LGBT, they will upset and lose the liberal ones. They tried to postpone the decision for as long as possible, but eventually they had clarify their position. They decided to go along with the conservative part, because the conservatives are the core and majority group of the churchgoers.

[Lou Gold]

The pope is not in an enviable position if he must either deny human rights or deny scripture.

A third option is to keep quiet and hope everyone gets on with their lives without expecting the church to base its morality on scripture.

A fourth option, and probably the best, is simply to refer to the life of Christ.

My first spiritual teacher told me (a non-Christian), "Get one of those New Testaments with the words of Jesus in red. Just read the red letters. No less and no more. Everything else is commentary. "

[Soul_of_Shu]

Suicide?! And here I thought the Vatican was the walking dead.

[AshvinP]

The Church's incomprehensible and shameful suicide.

That was a well-written and passionate critique, which was also right in line with what I have been thinking about in terms of Nietzsche's metaphysical critique of Christianity. The Church itself is starving for meaning and finding it in all the wrong places, such as social and political causes, because its metaphysical perspective (some form of rational dualism) has left that as the only option! Which is why I wish BK would have focused on that aspect more and gone deeper with the critique. If you leave it in the realm of sociopolitical issues, then everyone can safely ignore you because there are a million different rational arguments for why your opinion is wrong.

Metaphysical idealism, on the other hand, and as BK very well knows, is not so easily brushed aside by the rationalists and dualists. When faced with such a critique, they cannot take shelter in the endless pliability of a world devoid of transcendent meaning. We won't convince someone that homosexual relations can be a natural and loving pursuit by questioning their particular interpretation of scripture, their particular denomination or their particular political positions. What needs to be questioned are their most fundamental unexamined axioms about the structure of reality, the experience of reality.

BK knows that better than most, and he may be right about this - "Perhaps the death of this Church is, after all, what is required, so that something with true life in it might emerge from the ashes" - but then again, there are countless millions of people who feel they belong to that Church, and their hearts-minds may still be open to a true change in perspective if we approach them with empathy and an alternative which actually makes better sense of the apparently meaningless world they find themselves living in.

Also, I know this comment is kind of contradicting my entire last post, but I found it odd that BK threw "gender identity" in there with sexual orientation. If the latter is not a "choice" for the most part, then the former is certainly not a choice. The immature urge to "change" one's identity from year to year, month to month, or moment to moment, is one of the worst symptoms of the metaphysical 'meaning crisis', especially as it relates to young children and teenagers. JP called it "delayed fantasy child's play" in a recent discussion with Bret Weinstein, and that sounds about right to me.

[Soul_of_Shu]

Next thing we know folks are going to be identifying with being transcorporeal

[Lou Gold]

Next thing we know folks are going to be identifying with being transcorporeal

And there goes suicide.

[Lou Gold]

I really think that Dostoevsky nailed it.



Shu, you can count this one too.