faithandreason - The Left is Killing Religion

The Left is Killing Religion

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Tuesday, 07 July 2009 00:43

The Left is Killing Religion Giles Auty

Article from: The Australian from a speech delivered at Campion College for the 4th Annual St Edmund Campion lecture

1^st July 2009

BY an odd coincidence, Hal G.P. Colebatch's excellent article "UK bill an attack on faith" appeared in yesterday's The Australian about five days after I had the pleasure of delivering the annual St Edmund Campion lecture at Sydney's Campion College.

Colebatch's moving piece explained why it may soon become illegal to hang a cross in any Catholic school in Britain and asks advisedly what sort of intolerant world postmodernist totalitarianism is creating. Anyone familiar with Elizabethan history in Britain may recall that Campion was tortured and executed in 1581 for trying to keep alive the old faith - Catholicism - in Britain after Henry VIII's historic rift with Rome in 1533.

The substance of my talk, which was called "Are we truly evolving? Reflections on the life of an Elizabethan saint", touched on the creeping influence of postmodernist totalitarianism throughout the Western world rather than only in Britain. Anyone who has read Evelyn Waugh's biography of Campion will understand something of the extraordinary heroism through which he and scores of other martyred priests - plus thousands of devout laypeople - struggled to keep what they regarded as the true, historic Christian faith alive in Britain.

Now, instead of finding itself persecuted by Elizabethan spies, informers and hangmen, Catholicism finds itself under severe assault from the self-righteous, politically correct social engineers of Britain's political Left. Thankfully the same thing has yet to happen in Australia, but with the increasing politicisation of public education here by an ideologically driven Marxist Left, something very similar may not be far away. Already Christianity in all its forms is treated with increasing contempt in societies that basically believe they have evolved and so distanced themselves from what they imagine are the old-world superstitions - and attendant moral constraints - of their past.

Postmodernist ideology is an exclusively man-made - and, of course, woman-made - ideology that finds no basis whatsoever in any traditional human system of belief. Until the advent of postmodernism, communism was Christianity's most persistent and relentless recent foe. Now postmodernism in all its largely Marxist-inspired guises - political correctness, gender theory, feminism, post-colonialism, determinism, deconstruction, relativism, structuralism, historical revisionism - has become a stealthier and thus even more sinister adversary that flourishes, generally unremarked, in our midst. Why has Western society, with all its proud history, generally allowed such an abject internal collapse?

American Roger Kimball, who is one of a number of international cultural commentators with whom I have corresponded through the years, explains the whole matter as well as anyone: "In a democratic society like ours, where free elections are guaranteed, political revolution is almost unthinkable in practical terms.

Consequently, utopian efforts to transform society have been channelled into cultural and moral life. "In America, scattered if much-publicised episodes of violence have wrought far less damage than the moral and intellectual assaults that do not destroy buildings but corrupt sensibilities and blight souls. The success of America's recent cultural revolution can be measured not in toppled governments but in shattered values. "If we often forget what great changes this revolution brought in its wake, that, too, is a sign of its success: having changed ourselves, we no longer perceive the extent of our transformation."

These wise words are taken from Kimball's The Long March. Postmodernism corrodes society largely through assaults on its soft underbelly, principally through theeffective hegemony it has created in the arts, education and culture generally. Perhaps its most damaging corrosion has been through the politicisation of public education at the tertiary, secondary and even primary levels. I

n Australia, generations of children have effectively been abducted from the influence of their parents, who often have little or no say in what - or how - their children will be taught. Now, as Colebatch makes clear, the postmodernist Left is intent on wiping out the remaining pockets of resistance that exist in private and religious schools. I hope I am not alone in regarding this as an insult to the basic principles of democratic life.

Giles Auty is a former art critic for The Spectator and The Australian.

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Killing Religion & The Rebirth of Sacred Art

This address by Auty is little more than a collection of one-dimensional cardboard cliches.

Would any of the professors or lecturers at Campion give it anything other that an F triple minus grading if it was submitted as course work?

The sort of thing one would find in a narrow minded fundamentalist Bible college in the USA, and not in an institution that promotes itself as a place where deeply considered discriminative intelligence is valued and cultivated.

That having being said, and because Auty was an art critic, and also a practicing artist please check out these these related references on Sacred Art and its relation to Western culture altogether.

http://www.aboutadidam.org/readings/art_is_love/index.html

http://www.adidabiennale.org/curation/index.htm

http://global.adidam.org/books/transcendental-realism.html

http://www.aboutadidam.org/readings/transcending_the_camera/index.html

Plus a reference on the politics and culture that inevitably flows from the perspective communicated via the above Sacred Art

http://global.adidam.org/books/not-two-6.html

Plus a selection of essays titled The Truth About Religion (God, science, and Reality altogether)

http://www.adidam.org/teaching/aletheon/truth-religion.aspx

Plus a completely different reference which features a unique perspective on the relation between Western art of the past 100 years or so and Western culture altogether.

http://artandphysics.com

John , July 13, 2009

-1

dada and adidam

I like dada. It's cheerfully absurdist.

I don't like adidam - even if its justification sounds remarkably similar. Adidam is kooky easternish artsy trash that gives mysticism a bad name. Like many such sects it was hit with various accusations of financial, sexual and emotional abuse.

Of course that's an ad hominem attack, but my dear John, you've no other substance. The Orientalism you propogate has been rubbished since such orientalism turned up.

Darling, don't insult nihilism by going about nothing.

Pietro Aretino , July 14, 2009

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While bearing in mind that the above is only an article adapted from a speech, isn't applying the term 'postmodernism' to Marxist-influenced social engineering in a liberal democracy just a little bit misleading? Marxism is only the most sucessful of the liberal-derived ideologies, to which I thought cynical postmodernism is opposed. But then again, isn't 'postmodernism' only modernism on steroids, taking it's principles to their logical conclusion?

Duncan , July 18, 2009

Killing Religion

Apparently this blog is supposed to be attached to an institution which supposedly promotes deep scholarship--or at least pretends to do so.

Arieto. Perhaps if you really did your homework like a true liberal-arts scholar would you will find that Adidam has nothing whatsoever to do with Orientalism. Adi Da was an American born Westerner who grew up as a Westerner and lived and taught entirely within a Western circumstance.

Meanwhile the rest of your post tells us much about YOU and your ignorant pre-JUDGEMENT.

The essays etc that I pointed you are part of the most sophisticated Spiritual, philosophical, and cultural communication ever given on this planet. And their is nothing at all "trashy" about them. Which make Auty's speech look and sound like kinder-garden stuff.

John , July 29, 2009

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My dear fellow

I did my research. I have more than a passing acquaintance with yoga and the ideas that underpin it. Adi Da has the appearance of a Westerner discovering the East and then carrying on from there, like a great many since the West's contact withe the 'Mystic East'.

I cannot offer any logical refutation to 'mystical' system. I have more wit than those scientific types that think they can. But then I can offer no logical refutation of the delusions of a paranoid schizophrenic.

And of course the monism, sorry nondualism, that is espoused provides a perfect defence for all manner of behaviour - I notice Adi Da has been accused of a number of criminal offences of a serious nature.

I think it would interest you to research the mystics of the West, such as John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart, and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing and the Orthodox East - in particular the Hesychasts and Imiaslavie (although these last were ultimately declared heretics and wiped out).

I doubt any of this will make much impact. I've found your posts on other sites and know that it is foolish to hope that a person of strong beliefs will seriously consider points of view opposed to their own.

See, this time I didn't refer to Adi Da as a deluded braindead moron, conman, sexual deviant and as crass and ordinary as any other cultist.

I didn't.

Pietro Aretino , July 29, 2009

Postmodernism

A very perceptive piece by Mr. Auty, a name, I must confess I hadn't come across before.
He outlines well the current and looming landscape of conflict between the faith and liberalism.
Aggressive liberalism in the UK has one overriding objective. That is, to use militant Islam as a weapon turned against what remains of Christianity in these Islands. This agenda also seeks to enforce New World Order interests in the Middle East , by oppressing Arab nations, while simultaneously promoting the multi-faith and multi-culture in Europe. The basic premis of post-modernism, is that man is , or can become God. They declare war on the Christian faith, and the revelation that God became man.
If man is becoming God in the post modern world, then he doesn't need any other authority to tell him what to do, because by definition and through his own efforts he is becoming one of the immortal ones.
That is the code , I would suggest, that is embedded in all the talk about man evolving, 'and the new way'.
The new liberalism is totalitarianism, because it brooks no opposition . I have no doubt, that the pressure will be on in the UK again and quite soon to have crucifixes removed from Catholic schools. Oddly enough, this will also prove the lie to the diversity point, because Catholics will be precisely the people who wont be allowed to exhibit diversity. These people are very , very cunning however, in the way they play their cards, because they do it , usually with continual reference to things taken out of context in the bible , like tolerance, respect for others , justice , etc.
We saw this with Obama and abortion, when he tried to appear as a friend of pro-live, presumably for votes, by saying how horrible abortion is and how it should be reduced, and simultaneously supporting finding for abortion, funding itself, of course taken in part from the tens of millions of faithful Catholics in the US.
So, in the UK, there will be a great appeal to not causing offence,. promoting love of neighbour, whilst at the same time, ruthlessly enforcing the post-modern agenda.
The scale of the war that we are in, and I agree it is a war for hearts and minds, as Mr. Auty says, and not open warfare, as yet at least in the streets.
It takes its cue from a failed form of Marxism and the people promoting it consider themselves the children of the revolution. The people in the UK , who are now High Court Judges, politicians, heads of industries. We must never forget that we are in a cultural and spiritual war, because that is the last thing these people want to see it called, as they want us to willingly to submit to this new liberal tyranny.

~Julian UK.~

Julian , August 01, 2009

I think the irght is killing relgion

I think she is wrong it is more the right killing relgion. Just look at how George W Bush and sarah palin have brought shame on penticostalism. Also look at how Obama and rudd are promoting a religous values based approach to goverance. MAybe what she meant was that the open and democratic ideas of the left are killing her religion which she believes is the only true relgion like any fundamentalist whether they be Catholic, prtoestant or Muslim.

Justin , October 19, 2009

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Ich Bin Ein Berliner!

Gina , November 10, 2009

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A united United States of America and Israel and all the Jewish and Gentiles.