Getting over Vatican II

Posted on July 30, 2014 by Bonald

What the Church desperately needs with regard to the Second Vatican Council is to embrace the Hermeneutic of Forgetfulness.  But how to get there?  Attitude will be crucial.  Let us take one of the bromides of the conciliar era, “pastoral”, and turn it to our use.  Vatican II was a pastoral council.  Everyone says so.  But what does “pastoral” mean?  Or, rather, what meaning do we wish to give it?

1) pastoral = “popularized”.  Pastoral means effectively reaching people, which means being accessible, which means (so we shall imply) being dumbed down.  Vatican II theology is for people who can’t cut it with “manual” Thomism.  It’s like popular science books for nonscientists.  Scientists will all say that it’s good that such books exist, but they definitely have less authority than the technical work they are meant to distill.  If somebody read in a popular science article about spacetime being like a rubber sheet and thought we was then qualified to critique actual general relativity textbooks, we would laugh at him.  Similarly, Vatican II, as popularized Catholicism, has no authority to critique the real pre-conciliar theology.

Sly implication:  People who talk up VII and quote its texts are stupid.

2) pastoral = “sanitized”.  Real Catholicism is shocking and intense, and it can be too much for some people at first.  Vatican II is like those edited-for-TV movies where they take out the gore and swearing and nudity.  Usually this doesn’t affect the movie much, unless one makes a big point of the lack of such offensive material.  So, a theologian claiming that there’s no inconsistency between Catholicism and liberalism based just on Vatican II is like somebody seeing the edited-for-TV version of Die Hard and then writing a term paper about John McClane being a hero who doesn’t swear.

Sly implication:  People who talk up VII and quote its texts are sissies.  And stupid.

Of course, the trick is to insinuate these things rather than say them outright.  It’s more effective that way.

Filed under: The Dark and Terrible Springtime of Vatican II | 30 Comments »

Is it even possible to know what is offensive anymore?

Posted on July 29, 2014 by Bonald

Can anyone tell me what this guy said that was supposedly so offensive?  From what I can tell, it’s pure PC.  If I had written any of it, I would think that I had sold my soul completely to the Left.  He criticizes Richard Feynman for being a “sexist”, but says that those were horribly sexist, patriarchal times from which we have now been happily delivered, and Feynman was no worse than anybody else in that horrible, horrible age.  The accusation itself seems to be without merit, in that it consists wholly in Feynman being a womanizer, and I can’t think of what principle the Left could use to denounce that.  From what I can tell, the writer is towing the feminist line but was fired for not being hysterical enough.  Or was there something there that I missed?  It’s frightening to think that I wouldn’t know how to avoid PC offences even if I tried.  Selling one’s soul to the Left is actually difficult to do.

Some of the comments at isteve are interesting.  For example

But you gotta love that YouTube video of Gell-Mann putting to rest the mythical Feynman. He makes Feynman out to be a pretentious actor always trying to be cutesy. (An aside: I am always skeptical of people who have a lot of funny occurrences happening to them). I love the bit about how Feynman ridiculed Gell-Mann and called him an ordinary person, a salesman-type, for washing his hands after urinating (Feynman thought hand washing after urinating was unnecessary and superstitious).

When I was a kid I wondered about this too.  It seemed to me that my hands were likely to be dirtier than my penis, since it was my hands that had been out touching foreign objects.  I went ahead and washed my hands anyway (and–don’t worry–I still do), but it’s gratifying to know that I’ve had at least one Feynmanesque thought in my life.

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Science finds its moral compass, alas!

Posted on July 29, 2014 by Bonald

I can remember from my childhood the waning years of the Left’s ambivalence toward science. Of course, the Left saw itself as the party of Reason, so it couldn’t be openly anti-science.  However, in those times, people’s attitude toward science was shaped largely by their attitude toward new technology. Scientists were seen as magicians who had proven that they could do just about anything, and what’s more, they would do just about anything if somebody asked them to and gave them the money.  Brilliant but amoral.  The shadow of the Manhattan Project lasted a very long time.  The Left had already established themselves as the guardians of morality, and they found it hard to forgive scientists giving America all those H-bombs to point at the Workers’ Paradise.

Continue reading →

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More on white guilt

Posted on July 24, 2014 by Bonald

Reparations for slavery

It can’t happen because the whole idea is that white should pay our debt.  But if we pay our debt–with some sufficiently big one-time check, even one big enough to reduce the white population to penury–then we will have paid our debt.  That would mean things would be square between whites and blacks.  Whites would no longer have anything to be ashamed of.  This, of course, can never be allowed.

The mystery of Harper Lee

From the Guardian:

In a move which has shocked Monroeville, Lee, who resides in an assisted-living facility in the town, is bringing a lawsuit against the local museum, accusing the small, not-for-profit institution of exploiting her fame and the prestige of her Pulitzer-winning book without offering compensation. The museum is fighting back, condemning Lee’s lawsuit as “false” and “meritless” and warning that the legal action could destroy an institution that honours the author’s legacy and provides an economic boost to the town.

Let me explain things to inhabitants of Monroeville who are “shocked”.  Anyone who has read To Kill a Mockingbird knows that Harper Lee hates you.  She hates all white Southerners.  Demonizing you has been her life’s work.  Of course she doesn’t mind delivering an economic hit to the town.

What does it mean to say that we are a “nation of immigrants”?

It means that our culture, and by extension we ourselves, have no real connection to this land.  Trace back anybody’s ancestors far enough, and one finds that they came from somewhere else, but that doesn’t make everybody an immigrant.

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I wouldn’t worship that god either

Posted on July 21, 2014 by Bonald

Reading this

Since God is our Heavenly Father – we can consider how an earthly father might hope that his children should regard and address him – especially if that earthly father’s wish was for his sons and daughters to grow into unique and developed personalities who would at some point undergo a transition from child dependent to adult ‘friend’.
Taking this perspective, it seems clear to me that a good father would hope for love of course, and also respect and due deference – but not ‘worship’, submission, abasement, grovelling or anything of that sort – which would more appropriate to a tyrant than to a father.
my first thought was that it is sheer Luciferian blasphemy, implying that worship, adulation, submission, and recognition of utter dependence could ever become inappropriate responses to the Ground of Being, Subsistent Existence and Goodness (and that therefore it is a tyrannical vision that “the Son himself will be made subject to him who put everything under him, so that God may be all in all“).  Then I remembered that Bruce’s idea of God is very different from this.  He is merely another finite being in the world, rather than a Creator apart from it.  He lacks the classic divine attributes, and at least some beings aren’t dependent on Him for their existence (making one wonder why this God could not be removed altogether with a justifiable blow of Occam’s razor).  “Loving father” or not, I am not inclined to worship this being either.  In fact, I have no use for him whatsoever.  I already have a human father with whom I’m satisfied, and I’ve reached the point in life anyway where I worry less about having a loving father than about being one.
I hate to pick on Bruce in particular, a man from whom I’ve learned a great deal and one who has always treated me respectfully.  Many other versions of theistic personalism are open to similar criticisms.  However, Bruce is a sort of mentor to the Orthosphere, so his writings always get more special attention from me.  The fact is that it’s very hard to come up with a conception of God that fosters what we know is the proper attitude toward Him.  It is Bruce’s primary critique of the classical conception of God that it supposedly doesn’t help us relate to Him properly.  Now he himself sees that his own conception has a tendency to undermine the elementary religious emotions of awe, worship, submission, the sense of one’s own nothingness before the Infinite.  So both conceptions have their pitfalls, and one must be wary in giving too much authority to any particular idea or picture of God.
Talking about God, one must walk a narrow line between reducing Him to just another person on whom we are not fundamentally dependent (in which case how could He give meaning to our lives or have anything to do with morality?) or reducing Him to a metaphysical abstraction like the Platonic Good or One on the other (in which case one could not relate to Him personally with gratitude, love, or repentance).  Our only positive knowledge of God comes from analogical thinking based on finite creatures.  When playing this game, we must remember not to sneak into our idea of God the limitations inherent in the beings from which we draw analogies.  A good human father wouldn’t demand worship and ritual sacrifice, presume to forgive sins of which he is not the victim, predestine some souls to heaven, or punish unrepentant sinners with eternal damnation, but the God of the Bible certainly does.

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Thinking for oneself is overrated.

Posted on July 20, 2014 by Bonald

I’ve watched others do it.  I’ve seen the results.

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The “good news” of marital invalidity

Posted on July 18, 2014 by Bonald

Read commenter Taco’s story of how the Catholic annulment machine helped steal his family and realize that this is what our Kasperized hierarchy would regard as a successful operation, the system working as desired.  Those of us that don’t like it must just be lacking in mercy.  Both Zippy and the pope think that half of Catholic marriages are invalid.  I disagree with both of them, but there’s a big difference between the two.  Zippy recognizes it as a pastoral catastrophe; the bishops see it as good news.  It means that half of married Catholics have a “get out of jail” card that can be given to them if and when convenient (for one of them).  Perhaps with more careful analysis, it could be found that all marriages are invalid.  Now that would really be ideal!  Yes, it would mean that we’re all fornicators and our children are all bastards, but the whole point of the Kasperite heresy is that it’s subjective experience rather than reality that matters.  You didn’t really want to bind yourself to another person; you just wanted to feel like you had.

It’s a very easy thing to do, arguing that at the time of a wedding, one of the spouse’s knowledge or will didn’t encompass the entirety of the sacrament’s meaning.  In fact, we know that this is always true!  Sacraments are, to use my prior terminology, supra-rational signs.  What they signify can’t be exhaustively encoded in explicit human statements.  If the signification could be thus captured, it wouldn’t be supernatural.  If we follow this reasoning, saying that some (actually all) marriages are invalid because of the least bit of vagueness in the participants’ understanding or motives, then it follows that all baptisms are invalid, all confessions are invalid, no one has ever properly received the Eucharist, and the Church is useless as a vehicle of grace.

I suppose it could still get by as a vehicle of warm feelings, though.

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