Sunday 12th of May 2024
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the news as gospel...

news as gospel

Our world is a funny place and we try to make as much sense of it as there is no sense in it... But we try and try and try... Eventually we have to decide on what makes "our" world tick. We are necessitating the unnecessary beyond that of survival.

And some people do it with the news of god... rather than the news of the day...

 

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The Signs of the Times: Moral Discernment in an Unintelligible Present
Oliver O'Donovan

If "new every morning" is the tempo of divine grace and the tempo of our personal responsibilities, it is because the morning is a time when one can look back intelligently and look forward hopefully. It is the tempo of practical reason. The media's "new every morning" (quickly becoming "new every moment") is, one may dare to say, in flat contradiction to that daily offer of grace. It serves rather to fix our perception upon the momentary now, preventing retrospection, discouraging deliberation, holding us spellbound in a suppositious world of the present which, like hell itself, has lost its future and its past.

Oliver O'Donovan is a Fellow of the British Academy and Professor Emeritus of Christian Ethics and Practical Theology at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of many books, including, most recently, Self, World, and Time: Ethics as Theology, Volume 1 and Finding and Seeking: Ethics as Theology, Volume 2, from which this article has been extracted.

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Gus: 

Oliver O'Donovan of course comes the religious side of the road. So he thinks from the top down.

For Gus, moral discernment is a choice of human nature based on having evolved from natural roots. Moral discernment is not divine. It is a stylistic choice that is designed to help us survive better on this planet and has nothing to do with hell or paradise. It has to do with our personal and social choices that help us manage pain and contentment. We basically want a good life. 

The "suppositious (a dangerous word here) world is not what the professor is telling us, but the idea we have invented in order to make some sense out of it. We invented god in our image, because we lack imagination and want instant-soup simplistic explanation of a complexity that has no purpose. 

We can see the universe but the universe does not see us.

Whether we exist or not has not a brass razoo of an effect on the universe. We only exist through a very complex set of parameters at which energy settled on precise interactions of matter, flexible enough to evolve to our level over 4 billion years in a 13.6 billion years old universe.

Through science we know these levels within a few nanoseconds from the start of this reality.

Whether we read the news or not in the morning is only a limiting activity related to a set of values we have adopted and modified since we were toddlers. We react or not to the news. But the momentary now is far more important than the future in the illusion of hell or paradise. We can manage our moral "obligations" (decisions) with or without reading the news. The only thing the news will do is stir our personal historical mud of biased views in which our morality is a flexible entity according to circumstances. For example the sixth commandment expressly say "Thou shall not kill"... Of course in certain circumstances of war and self-protection, we will kill: morality going through the window of necessity. We will make excuses of passion. Now the same commandment I learnt as "Thou shall not kill" has been "modernised" and reads "you shall not murder"... This shows a shift of morality to allow "special" circumstances.

The Emeritus Professor of Christian ethics would know that his subject of expertise is not one iota scientific. That is to say that most of his work revolves on assumptions, especially the assumption that god exists and wants us to behave in a specific manner. 

Natural forces are more demanding and less obvious. We are caught between our needs (survival) and our wants (greed) and the lines are blurred. Thus we slowly (accelerating) suffocate the planet. We modify the planet to suit our wants that we believe are our needs because our principal economic system of needs has been constructed upon our wants. The morality here has nothing to do with god, but with our environment. The daily offer of grace is our way to mask our destruction of the next. 

The news is not holding us spellbound. it is telling us various opinions, some true and some false. Thus we have to make choices into understanding the reality. So for O'Donovan to say:

It [the news] serves rather to fix our perception upon the momentary now, preventing retrospection, discouraging deliberation, holding us spellbound in a suppositious world of the present which, like hell itself, has lost its future and its past.

is cheap and glib. The sentence is quite meaningless but tries to appear full of depth. It is shallow and full of gross self-importance. Yes history can be full of deceit... The brave professor tells us:

 

The deceits of history

One of the possible ways of sinning against the contingent nature of temporal experience is that form of anxiety which retreats from discerning God's call in the immediate horizon of the future-present, and turns instead to a reading of present experience which we hope may deliver the future up to clear and masterful anticipation. We look for "the way things are going" - the direction that can be read off the present.


I say brave because here O'Donovan is wadding in suppository suppositions... Believe what you will, but this does not make sense, except for reading the stock market in which the trends are set by lemmings, on the discreet pronouncements of economic priests, under the influence of a few rich blokes who want to make a "killing" on the market. Reading the entrails of crows or turtles would give us more insight into the future of this planet, as we discover more and more plastic bits inside. 

Placing ourselves in the cradle of an illusionary grace of god is a cheapskate alternative to understanding. If O'Donovan represents the educational status of the British Academy and the University of Edinburgh, let's destroy these institutions forthwith. They promote the wrong discussions with long winded dusty pomposity. 

 

 

the smell of sulphur...

 

I suspect humans always live in times of transition; what is time if not transition? But I believe we are living in a time when Christendom is actually coming to an end. That is an extraordinary transition whose significance for Christian and non-Christian has yet to be understood. But in the very least, it means the church is finally free to be a politic.

Stanley Hauerwas is Gilbert T. Rowe Professor Emeritus of Divinity and Law at Duke University. His most recent books are The Work of Theology and Approaching the End: Eschatological Reflections on Church, Politics and Life.

http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2015/09/02/4304356.htm

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Gus: here again, Stanley is backward in coming forward. It does not make any sense, except possibly to himself. He must have forgotten that the "Church" has been a "politic" since Constantine 1600 years ago. The Church has slept with kings and queens. That Christendom is coming to an end is hard to say, who knows... Non-Christians, especially atheists understand the significance of the demise (if any), because many atheists were often taught to be religious and then they asked the real questions. And they became non-believers as everyone should. 

By the way, I should thank the ABC (the Australian Broadcasting Corporation) for pushing these religious clowns (Hauerwas and O'Donovan) to the fore. I can hit them on the head without having to spend much time looking for them.

 

which version of the claptrap...?

In Washington, separation of church and state isn’t just a principle of governance, it’s an architectural and geographic rule as well. Pierre L’Enfant envisioned a national church on Eighth Street. A patent office was built on the site instead. More than 100 years later, the city finally got its National Cathedral — far from Capitol Hill, in the upper northwest corner of town. The downtown skyline is dominated by monuments to men; the Holocaust Museum and altarpieces in the National Gallery of Art are the closest things to religion you’ll find on the Mall. Washington, of course, has its believers, but they practice too many faiths to fit under one roof.

Now, though, the Good Book is coming to town in a big way. The Museum of the Bible — backed by the evangelical owners of the craft store Hobby Lobby, who famously took their objections to contraception and Obamacare to the Supreme Court — is set to open in 2017, just off the Mall. The proximity of the museum to the world-class Smithsonian and the Capitol has raised eyebrows. How will it fit in among the venerable institutions lining the Mall? How will it function in a multicultural city? And what version of the Bible will we get?

To many in the scholarly community, the museum seems like an oversize piece of evangelical claptrap. Some academics and curators also worry about the origins of its collection — the more than 40,000 biblical artifacts were amassed in a remarkably short time by Hobby Lobby President Steve Green. But the museum is trying to pitch itself as deserving of its spot. Last month, it inked a deal to display a selection of objects from the Israeli government’s eminent Antiquities Authority. And it has hired David Trobisch, a prominent liberal academic, to head its collection. It will be up to Trobisch to win over skeptics and transform this intriguing assembly of artifacts into an institution that brings a bit of church to a secular state.

At the heart of the Museum of the Bible is the Green Collection, a huge, disjointed assemblage that includes pieces of the Dead Sea Scrolls, a Gilgamesh tablet, Elvis Presley’s Bible and about 850 manuscripts, 12 of which are in Hebrew and come from China’s Jewish population. A third of the material may be considered Judaica, related to Judaism and the Old Testament, including torahs that survived the Spanish inquisition and the Nazis. Many of the objects are more important than beautiful, more interesting than spectacular.

Why did Green want to turn his private collection into a museum? A number of academics have questioned his family’s motives. “I don’t expect the Bible Museum to be anything other than a tax-deductible kitsch attempt at spreading Christian fundamentalist propaganda,” archaeologist Dorothy King said. In an interview with NPR, Jacques Berlinerblau, a professor of Jewish civilization at Georgetown University, questioned the location of the museum, two blocks south of the Mall, where it might overlook periodic rallies opposing abortion or same-sex marriage, offering brick-and-mortar moral support to conservative causes. Sarah Posner concurred, writing in Talking Points Memo: “The museum will be a living, breathing testament to how American evangelicalism can at once claim it is under siege from secularists, the LGBT rights movement, or feminism — yet also boast of acquiring a prime private perch, strategically located at the nation’s epicenter of law and politics.”

read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2015/09/04/f145def4-4b59-11e5-bfb9-9736d04fc8e4_story.html

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This is not a "Benedict Option"... It's bringing the tax deductible paraphernalia of god into the hot brimstone of Washington hell's kitchen... I can already hear Elvis singing Alleluia...

Read from top. See also: http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/30391

lying by not telling us...

 

The Liberal candidate for the Canning byelection, Andrew Hastie, has refused to be drawn on whether he shares his father’s views on creationism, saying his religious views are irrelevant to voters, and that “people are sick of this crap”.

Asked eight times at a media conference in Armadale on Thursday whether he believed in creationism, Hastie at first skirted the question, which he claimed was irrelevant to the 19 September poll, because: “There’s no religious test in this country for public office.”

“Like many Australians, I have a Christian faith, which presupposes the existence of a God,” he said.

“The belief that there is a God endows every person with dignity and it inspires me to treat people with equality, and so my faith has taught me to love others, not judge others.”

read more: http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/sep/10/canning-byelection-andrew-hastie-refuses-to-give-his-views-on-creationism

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Beautiful Hastie bullshit. When it comes to choose between chaplains in schools or science teachers we know where the cookie falls with the creationists. WE NEED TO KNOW WHERE THE RELIGIOUS COOKIE falls in Andrew Hastie's pigeon loft. 

By not telling us his belief means he is disowning his own beliefs in order to get elected DECEITFULLY and then hammer us with religious crap. Voters, your choice. 

Go with this lying by omission bible-basher all the way back to the loving inquisition of the 1500s, meanwhile realise that medicines — such as IVF and many of your life-saving drugs — have been BASED ON EVOLUTIONARY TECHNOLOGY, and are an improvement, as imperfect as medicine is, on dying young or in pain.

Hastie's religious views ARE VERY RELEVANT TO VOTERS. Everyone needs to know WHAT CRAP HE BELIEVES IN !