Easter Celebrations in a Storm of Postmodern Iconoclasm

Unless you've taken up residence on planet Vulcan (which is becoming a more attractive prospect by the day) you can't have helped noticing the Catholic Church coming under heavy assault. In the chain of events the story happens to culminate over Holy Week and Easter.

While the abuse at the hands of priests is entirely despicable and without wishing to whitewash the guilty, it must be said that some of the media exposure has been disproportionate, to put it mildly. The postmodern left have reacted true to nature: dialectically and entirely in line with the Alinsky tradition: hold them to live up to their own standards (which no human being can do all of the time), then come down on them like a ton of bricks.

The smear campaign unleashed this week affects many groups and entities: the Tea Party movement, Republicans, Conservatives, Geert Wilders, Israel, the Berlusconi government in Italy, Euroskeptics, warmist deniers, Georgia and its President Saakashvili, the US Constitution (now toilet paper), George Bush and Dick Cheney, Eric Cantor, the usual talk radio hosts, Fox News, banks, insurance companies, big oil and big pharma, Capitalism, the private sector, reason, the middle class, weapons, heterosexual marriage, the Pope and the Vatican - all dissent from the Neo Socialist line is fair game. See here what's happening in the UK, where the Tory leader turns out to be a follower of Lucifer "community organizer" Alinsky.

The Counter-Enlighteners have had their eye on religion for a very long time. But Catholicism, as the ultimate adversary, has been singled out for demolition from the get go (others get the "boring from within" treatment). They've had too much power for far too long. Now's the moment to strike and paint them as essentially evil. And that, they do. They've been ramming nails into the coffin all week long.

But Free Republic in a post just up entitled "Forgotten Study: Abuse in School 100 Times Worse than by Priests" have been summing up the figures and put them into some perspective:

"(...) the physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests. After effectively disappearing from the radar, Shakeshaft’s study is now being revisited by commentators seeking to restore a sense of proportion to the mainstream coverage of the Church scandal. 

According to the 2004 study “the most accurate data available at this time” indicates that “nearly 9.6 percent of students are targets of educator sexual misconduct sometime during their school career.” (...) 

In an article published on Monday, renowned Catholic commentator George Weigel referred to the Shakeshaft study, and observed that “The sexual and physical abuse of children and young people is a global plague” in which Catholic priests constitute only a small minority of perpetrators." (...) >>>

By a chance constellation the Jewish Passover, Western Easter, and Orthodox Easter, all happen to coincide this weekend. But there's no love lost in the Christian brotherhood. While the Archbishop of Canterbury has said the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland has lost "all credibility", and "Experts offer opinions on whether the pope should be held responsible", Galveston-Houston Archbishop Cardinal Daniel DiNardo criticized the media coverage.

The Church has started pushing back: "several prominent European clergy on Thursday denounced suggestions that Pope Benedict XVI was anything but a vigorous defender of victims of priestly sexual abuse."

And at a Good Friday service, the Pope's personal preacher, Reverend Cantalamessa, likened allegations of the pope's involvement in an alleged cover-up to "some of the worst aspects of antisemitism". It didn't take long before that was viciously savaged in a fit of moral indignation. Antisemitism is on the order of the day, unless Jews can be exploited to attack Christians! Talk of bigotry! After the dust settled it transpired the cleric had been quoting from a letter he received from a Jewish friend. You can hardly expect postmodernists to understand the parallels in using a few rotten apples to tarnish the whole basket, or can you?

That is, unless their favorite religionists are involved! When it comes to Muslims, it is entirely outrageous and racist, indeed fascist to lump an entire religion of peace pieces, with a few assertive victims of Western imperialism who - in their desperation - have turned to asymmetric warfare (a.k.a. terrorism, or man-made disasters). Hold them to their own standards and then apply double standards, is the line.

The Jihad Jane case - "white Al Qaeda", home-grown hirabahism, is by now hardly unique. It provides ample proof that Islamic violence has nothing to do with race or culture, but has everything to do with Islam as an ideology. There must be something in it, that triggers its practitioners into bloodletting. While the older religions of Judeism and Christenity according to the Platonic mind/body dichotomy have separated the sacred from the secular, the younger religion of Islam permeates every aspect of life, including politics.

The test that liberal democracy has in store for Muslims will be if the Ummah will be able to break up its collective, and if it will manage subsequently to separate Mosque from State. That will be the sole hope of integration into Western culture, so as to avert the clash of civilizations that everyone fears so much.

Happy Passover, a happy and blessed Easter, Kali Anastasi kai Kalo Pascha ...

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Pomo Exegesis For Dummies

It is not a foregone conclusion that Reed Dunn, pastor of Christ the King Presbyterian Church in Joplin (USA) has successfully resisted the siren call of the Emergent Pomo Church. His words are just a little too relativist. It passes for politeness these days.

He may still believe in that embarrassingly absolute Biblical truth and - possibly - an objective account of Christianity. Who's to say? His narrative is too woolly to be certain, yet he explains very well in lay terms what the deliberately obfuscated approach to the faith, as revealed by the early Emerging Church Fathers actually is: a subjective story in which everyone reads whatever works for him. The result is so-called 'narrative' (browse this file for a crash course in Pomo lingo).

- Caption: Deceptive 'rhetoric' - pretending agnosticism on truth, whereas in fact, postmodernism excludes it. -

For a feel of what we are up against note that in the pomo version of truth, science is a so-called Western 'meta narrative.' Nothing objective there of course ... but then, objectivity itself is also but a Western meta narrative. Confused? You won't be, after exegesis by the pastor of Joplin.

Evangelicals are frequently categorized by skeptics as postmodernists on account of their emphasis on revelation rather than official doctrine. The dishy Dunn sheds light:

"(...) one of the most confusing things for evangelicals to grasp is how he (Jeremiah Wright) draws such wild conclusions from the same Bible we study every week. How does Wright take something like the crucifixion of Christ and say that it is about the oppression African-Americans have experienced here in America? Certainly the Bible applies to all of our lives, but how can he make a jump that seems so illogical?" ... ah, the blessings of postmodernism ...

Skeptics are on a mission of their own. These dogmatic materialists can frequently be found in the company of Leftists and postmodernists. Among the emotionally incontinent Platonists they find themselves in a constant state of cognitive dissonance, and they know not why!

Under the false dichotomy of faith versus ratio skeptics claim to be the absolute and sole custodians of reason. But after the pre-Renaissance catharsis led by the Aristotelian Scholastic Thomas of Aquinas, Catholics have shed the irrational self-image.

What's good for Catholics, is good for evangelicals too! The pastor: "Modern evangelicals are deeply impacted by the Enlightenment. That means that evangelicals place primary importance on the original meaning of the text — whatever it meant to St. Paul is what it should mean to us today."

At this point he spills the beans. "And before you throw too many stones at Wright’s postmodern methods, you should know that most of mainstream Christianity is up to its eyeballs in it. Whether it is the Emergent Church, the Purpose Driven Life, or the Contemporary Church Movement, almost all of us are trying to make our story the central theme of the Bible in some way or another."

Which is why only evangelism, Roman Catholicism and the Eastern Churches may survive the Pomo onslaught. Laugh what you will at their moonbatting: in respect of Operation Western Deconstruct they've been exceedingly successful in relatively no time.

Update:

Here's a suggestion for Americans ...

- Filed on Articles in "Postmodernism" and "Christendom Resisting Emergence" -

Sunday School Theology for a Time of Crisis

In a posting on Chiesa yesterday Sandro Magister writes as follows:

The letter from the 138 Muslims addressed last month to Benedict XVI and to the heads of the other Christian churches received a spectacular collective reply in a message signed by 300 scholars and published in "The New York Times" on November 18.

The message originated in the Divinity School of Yale University, specifically through the initiative of its dean, Harold W. Attridge, a professor of New Testament exegesis.

The signatories belong mainly to the Protestant confessions, of both "evangelical" and "liberal" strains, and include such a celebrity as the theologian Harvey Cox. But the list of the 300 also includes a Catholic bishop, Camillo Ballin, the apostolic vicar in Kuwait. Other Catholics include the Islamologist John Esposito of Georgetown University and the theologians Donald Senior, a Passionist, and Thomas P. Rausch, a Jesuit from Loyola Marymount University. Also Catholic – although at the margins of orthodoxy – are Paul Knitter, a specialist on interreligious dialogue, and Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, a teacher at Harvard and a feminist theologian.

The message lavishes praise upon the letter of the 138. It endorses the letter's contents, or the indication of the love of God and neighbor as the "common word" between Muslims and Christians, at the center of both the Qur'an and the Bible. And it prefaces everything with a request for forgiveness to "the All-Merciful One and the Muslim community around the world."

This is the reason given for the request for forgiveness: "Since Jesus Christ says: 'First take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor's eye' (Matthew 7:5), we want to begin by acknowledging that in the past (e.g. in the Crusades) and in the present (e.g. in excesses of the 'war on terror') many Christians have been guilty of sinning against our Muslim neighbor."

In releasing the message, its promoters announced that it will be followed by meetings with some of the signers of the letter of the 138, in the United States, Great Britain, and the Middle East, meetings that will also be open to Jews.

Magister starts his article on the subject with a question contained in the title "Why Benedict XVI Is So Cautious with the Letter of the 138 Muslims", which he rhetorically answers with the assertion that what Benedict wants is a dialogue that is completely different. "The pope is asking Islam to make the same journey that the Catholic Church made under pressure from the Enlightenment. Love of God and neighbor must be realized in the full acceptance of religious freedom.

God bless Pope Benedict! The former Professor Ratzinger of Theology and Philosophy at the Regensburg University is a unique, shining light of reason and intelligence in a world which is self-destructing under the debilitating madness that is called Postmodernism. What can a person say when dumb struck by a protracted exercise in jaw-dropping?

The School of Non-thought that equates all uniformed men with Nazi brutes and cannot for the hell of it perceive any difference between BushHitler, Nazism and Zionism, has made devastating inroads into organized Christian religion over the past decades. It has been gnawing away and sclerocizing its vital organs like a malignant form of cancer.

Although God knows that Roman Catholicism has been plagued by its own brands of virulent, post Vatican II, politically motivated heresies, it is Protestantism that is really seriously in trouble. I think the obituaries on the Episcopalian Church have all but been pronounced. The sclerotics collected in the Emergent Church are simply too much deluded to understand that they are being used and that what they are proclaiming, is directly opposed to the Christian message. False prophets and scions of Satan indeed!

At the present time of deep social, cultural and religious crisis this putrefied collection of hypocrites that calls itself the followers of Christ have seen fit to reply the Muslim letter in the most debilitating terms imaginable - oozing false humility: the infantilized platitudes are not even fit for a sub-quality Sunday school!

Forgiveness indeed! For efforts to roll back the Muslim conquests of the Holy Land, the Levant, and Outremer? For defending Christian lands in Egypt and Asia Minor against Islamic onslaughts? For throwing them out of Al Andaluz? For driving them back at Tours and Vienna? For excesses on the War on Terror: moral trauma in the defence against a brutal, barbaric, blood-thirsty, indiscriminate war declared on Muslim, and Infidel civilians alike? These people are red hopping, criminally insane!

I think we shall find that the invitation to the Jewry, when push comes to shove, will "not be opportune at this stage", and that Pope Benedict in the end - in the most woolly, theological terms possible - will have to distance himself from the whole affair ... but that last may be wishful thinking on my part.

I pray to God that he may keep us from the Postmodern All-Merciful One and that bees may pee upon them all!

~ For an historic overview on this subject, see: "Historical Letter from Islam to Christendom". ~

Related:
- Postmodern Delusion Without Cognitive Dissonance
- Flanders Fields: "From the Belly of the Beast"

Cardinal Tauran: Condemn Terrorism

Catholic World News: "Vatican greets Muslims, asks cooperation for peace"

As the Islamic observance of Ramadan comes to an end, the president of the Pontifical Council for Inter-Religious Dialogue has sent a message to the world's Muslims stressing the duty of all believers to bear witness to the Almighty.

In his message, Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran says that all believers, regardless of their faith, should share in "work in favor of peace, by showing respect for the convictions of individuals and communities everywhere through freedom of religious practice. " Enlarging on that theme, he calls for "doing everything one can to reject, denounce and refuse every recourse to violence which can never be motivated by religion, since it wounds the very image of God in man."

Cardinal Tauran's message makes a special point of condemning terrorism, "which strikes blindly and claims countless innocent victims, is incapable of resolving conflicts and leads only to a deadly chain of destructive hatred, to the detriment of mankind and of societies." >>>