It surely must be part of how my mind works that I see irreconcilable opposites all over the place. Although part of my therapy tool kit is to be aware of interpersonal splitting as a form of denial and defense, my larger intellectual tool kit rather specializes in detecting either/or phenomena and quite often affirming them. There are times when Hegel and Jung are right, when opposites become transformed in a third novum. But this is neither a universal fate nor an everyday desirable. The world functions not only out of cooperation but by competition.
When I wander through the religious cybersphere, I detect irreconcilable oppositions. Catholics vs Protestants, no matter how much dialogue goes on, are two quite different kinds of Christians. Or at least two different kinds of Christian religion. And liberal Catholics vs orthodox Catholics: I fail to see any reasons other than inertia, habit or likely disadvantage --in status or wealth--why the vast majority of liberal Catholics do not form themselves into a separate body or into a pre-existing body which matches their beliefs and values: the Episcopal Church. To my knowledge, nothing at all that liberal Catholics want is missing in the Episcopal Church. And no proposal for change coming from liberal Catholics eventuates in anything other than the Episcopal Church. Yet they refuse to budge.
The way the current conflict between the Roman CDF and the American LCWR has been played in the press and in a lot of the Church shows the irreconcilable worlds that are there. It is ironic that an ex-theologian "gets" Rome's problem with the lefty nuns. For the consensus, it is all about male domination and right-wing politics. They can't see what is right in front of them, that for Rome, and for history, Catholic identity is doctrinal: underneath the moral issues is the nuns' decades-long resounding silence on the Trinitarian God, on Christ as the Incarnate Son, on the Church and its sacraments. Wherever Catholicism clashes with feminism, Catholicism is always and in every case dumped.
As far as America goes, I see all kinds of unworkable and unsustainable divisions. Is it my dark attitude that makes me imagine that we are living through an undeclared Second Civil War? One that has been going on for a half-century?
I see it not only as ideological but as racial. (And that is not just an American, but a Western phenomenon: a second Barbarian Invasion of the Empire.) Neither Christianity nor Islam have been able to eradicate group warfare within their own realms. And most of that warfare tribal, blood and kind and land based. And these are religions, perhaps the most powerful kinds of trans-tribal archetypal containers in human history. And we are supposed to believe that Enlightenment Liberalism --a form of thought unrivalled by its unrooted abstractness-- will create a world without ethnic/racial/tribal strife?
Only White people, I suspect, are foolish enough really to believe that.
I see the battle of the sexes as something quite real as well. Feminism has raised this immemorial tension, this oppositional lack of interchangeability, to the level of warfare.
As always, I have one set of rules for individuals and another for groups. But the group realities are undeniable.
Not everyone sees what I see, of course. I myself have looked at the world differently from how I now do. But there it is.
When I wander through the religious cybersphere, I detect irreconcilable oppositions. Catholics vs Protestants, no matter how much dialogue goes on, are two quite different kinds of Christians. Or at least two different kinds of Christian religion. And liberal Catholics vs orthodox Catholics: I fail to see any reasons other than inertia, habit or likely disadvantage --in status or wealth--why the vast majority of liberal Catholics do not form themselves into a separate body or into a pre-existing body which matches their beliefs and values: the Episcopal Church. To my knowledge, nothing at all that liberal Catholics want is missing in the Episcopal Church. And no proposal for change coming from liberal Catholics eventuates in anything other than the Episcopal Church. Yet they refuse to budge.
The way the current conflict between the Roman CDF and the American LCWR has been played in the press and in a lot of the Church shows the irreconcilable worlds that are there. It is ironic that an ex-theologian "gets" Rome's problem with the lefty nuns. For the consensus, it is all about male domination and right-wing politics. They can't see what is right in front of them, that for Rome, and for history, Catholic identity is doctrinal: underneath the moral issues is the nuns' decades-long resounding silence on the Trinitarian God, on Christ as the Incarnate Son, on the Church and its sacraments. Wherever Catholicism clashes with feminism, Catholicism is always and in every case dumped.
As far as America goes, I see all kinds of unworkable and unsustainable divisions. Is it my dark attitude that makes me imagine that we are living through an undeclared Second Civil War? One that has been going on for a half-century?
I see it not only as ideological but as racial. (And that is not just an American, but a Western phenomenon: a second Barbarian Invasion of the Empire.) Neither Christianity nor Islam have been able to eradicate group warfare within their own realms. And most of that warfare tribal, blood and kind and land based. And these are religions, perhaps the most powerful kinds of trans-tribal archetypal containers in human history. And we are supposed to believe that Enlightenment Liberalism --a form of thought unrivalled by its unrooted abstractness-- will create a world without ethnic/racial/tribal strife?
Only White people, I suspect, are foolish enough really to believe that.
I see the battle of the sexes as something quite real as well. Feminism has raised this immemorial tension, this oppositional lack of interchangeability, to the level of warfare.
As always, I have one set of rules for individuals and another for groups. But the group realities are undeniable.
Not everyone sees what I see, of course. I myself have looked at the world differently from how I now do. But there it is.
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