Biggar appointed to the Pontifical Academy for Life

[KnightofChrist]

I wonder what would have happened if the High Priest of the Chair of Moses would have appointed King Herod to the Commission of the Holy Innocences? 

[Era Might]

5 hours ago, Nihil Obstat said:

Badiou is an excellent writer. I think his ideas are garbage and nonsense.

Ok, but even so, bad or nonsensical ideas are not post-modernism. I'm actually interested in what you think post-modernism is, because I generally don't read post-modern writers. They don't interest me. Modernists do, but modernists range widely. T.S. Eliot was a notable Christian modernist.

[Era Might]

Let me maybe put forward a different direction of discussion. I recently met an Iraq war vet. He had PTSD, two sons, a troubled domestic life, deals and does drugs to get by. A nice guy, though I wouldn't want to be there when he snaps. He told me some stories about what he saw, a guy's face get blown off, then the commanding officer shot the guy as euthanasia. This vet is very against the military, basically he was sent off to the middle of nowhere where civilization didn't exist, it was carnage and mayhem, and now for the rest of his life he has to face reality. What did he go there for? What did he come back to? What was that hell for? To serve the government?

Life is real, beyond anything we can imagine in the comfort of our ideas, our fortunes, our principles. Abortion is the death of hope, but it is an ugly fact of life, like men who slaughter other men in deserts, like slave labor who work like animals to turn a profit for people across the world, like prisoners locked in a system of law and hatred and destined from birth to be there. To me, the pro-life movement is a farce that knows nothing of the real world. It's a politically invented mesh of religion, science, and respectability. So long as the womb is a battlefield for us to win, hope is dead.

Edited June 17, 2017 by Era Might

[KnightofChrist]

Just what the hell-o does any of that have to do with appointing pro child killing individuals to a commission entrusted to protect the lives of children? 

 

The answer is nadda in case it's not obvious.

[Nihil Obstat]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodern_philosophy

Postmodern philosophy is a philosophical direction which is critical of certain foundational assumptions of Western philosophy and especially of the 18th-century Enlightenment. It emphasizes the importance of power relationships, personalization and discourse in the "construction" of truth and world views. Postmodernists deny that an objective reality exists, and deny that there are objective moral values.^[1]

Postmodern philosophy is often particularly skeptical about simple binary oppositions characteristic of structuralism, emphasizing the problem of the philosopher cleanly distinguishing knowledge from ignorance, social progress from reversion, dominance from submission, good from bad, and presence from absence.^[2][3]

Postmodern philosophy has strong relations with the substantial literature of critical theory.^[4]

 

[Norseman82]

On ‎6‎/‎17‎/‎2017 at 10:27 AM, CatherineM said:

Wonder what would have happened if the Pope had put Martin Luther on a papal commission. 

I think the difference here is that Luther started out with a legitimate "beef" - the abuse in buying/selling indulgences.  Unfortunately, he didn't stop there (maybe because there were political forces willing to back him up in order that they could seize Church property). 

[Era Might]

18 hours ago, KnightofChrist said:

Just what the hell-o does any of that have to do with appointing pro child killing individuals to a commission entrusted to protect the lives of children? 

 

The answer is nadda in case it's not obvious.

I think it does have to do with it. The Pope seems not to buy into the pro-life ideology's pushing of everything to an extreme, where abortion becomes the lens through which everything is seen.

16 hours ago, Nihil Obstat said:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodern_philosophy

Postmodern philosophy is a philosophical direction which is critical of certain foundational assumptions of Western philosophy and especially of the 18th-century Enlightenment. It emphasizes the importance of power relationships, personalization and discourse in the "construction" of truth and world views. Postmodernists deny that an objective reality exists, and deny that there are objective moral values.^[1]

Postmodern philosophy is often particularly skeptical about simple binary oppositions characteristic of structuralism, emphasizing the problem of the philosopher cleanly distinguishing knowledge from ignorance, social progress from reversion, dominance from submission, good from bad, and presence from absence.^[2][3]

Postmodern philosophy has strong relations with the substantial literature of critical theory.^[4]

 

Thanks. That's a pretty broad brush though. Most of those things can be said of many currents of thought. Modernism was also a rupture of Enlightenment thought, and Enlightenment thought was a rupture of medieval thought. There is a long mystical tradition of unknowing, questioning the world's assumptions. 

When I think of post-modernism, I think of a sort of meta-thinking, a deconstruction, but deconstruction does not have to renounce construction, but to see it anew.

On 6/17/2017 at 9:19 AM, Jack4 said:

 

 

St Thomas and other scholastic doctors made God the object of their study, their philosophical inquiry; yet their reverence to the Lord was not lacking. 

 

There's a saying, I'm not sure who said it, that Thomas himself wasn't a Thomist. In other words, inquiry becomes a system, and that system creates a fixed idea of the world that becomes a farce, because it cant think outside itself. Even in the middle ages, scholasticism was parodied as a system. We can speak of "Thomism" or "scholasticism" precisely because they are dead systems, they are thoroughly seen as part of another historical world, or rather, a specific historical world. The church got stuck in that scholastic system after the Reformation, and it wasn't until Vatican II that the church really returned to earlier sources. That's my point about the pro-life movement, it is a modern political ideology, it is not Catholicism or Christianity. It can be analyzed and criticized much as we do the political religion of the middle ages. The only difference is we are not at a distance from our times as we are from theirs.

[Jack4]

6 hours ago, Era Might said:

I'm not sure who said it, that Thomas himself wasn't a Thomist. In other words, inquiry becomes a system, and that system creates a fixed idea of the world that becomes a farce, because it cant think outside itself. Even in the middle ages, scholasticism was parodied as a system. We can speak of "Thomism" or "scholasticism" precisely because they are dead systems, they are thoroughly seen as part of another historical world, or rather, a specific historical world. The church got stuck in that scholastic system after the Reformation, and it wasn't until Vatican II that the church really returned to earlier sources.

Can you explain further, please?I don't understand. 

[Jack4]

On 6/15/2017 at 8:45 PM, Jack4 said:

http://www.lifenews.com/2017/06/14/vatican-names-pro-abortion-philosopher-to-pro-life-academy/

 

The Catholic Church has been one of the leading advocates for the rights of unborn babies in the world.

This week, however, many are questioning Pope Francis’s decision to name Nigel Biggar, a philosopher who supports abortion, to the Pontifical Academy for Life. Biggar was one of 45 ordinary members appointed to the pro-life academy this month, according to a Vatican announcement.

“I would be inclined to draw the line for abortion at 18 weeks after conception, which is roughly about the earliest time when there is some evidence of brain activity, and therefore of consciousness,” Biggar said in 2011.

He continued: “It’s not clear that a human foetus is the same kind of thing as an adult or a mature human being, and therefore deserves quite the same treatment. It then becomes a question of where we draw the line, and there is no absolutely cogent reason for drawing it in one place over another.”

 

The head of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life, Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, has defended Pope Francis' appointment of a new Academy member who is pro-abortion and has expressed qualified support for euthanasia: “[W]e pray that Catholics and Catholic media not fall victim to sensationalism,” he tweeted. “Love for life must mean love for each other.”

https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/pontifical-academy-for-life-chief-defends-pro-abort-pic-accuses-catholic-me