Owen the Ochlophobist has a really good post on Plastic memories that is definitely worth reading. He writes:
So often the discussion of the drastic changes in the human psyche and human social order seen in late modernity are framed in language of the supposed culture wars, etc., but I think much of this misses the point – as if “correcting” divorce, abortion, homosexuality, etc., can happen or is fundamentally meaningful in a culture which throws everything away. …
I was intending to post my own thoughts on related matters as a prelude to recommending his post, but have just deleted them, and really need to stop. And in any case, Owen expresses these things far better than I do and what I did want to say was still half-formed.
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November 23, 2010 at 11:33 pm
How fiercely the symptoms are attacked, and yet they persist.
November 27, 2010 at 9:49 pm
Francis Schaeffer said that liberal theology is nothing more than secular humanism in religious terms; because the liberal theologian will inevitably side with the secular humanist on all issues. Whether abortion, embryonic stem-cell research, same-sex marriage, social welfare, the liberal theologian will shun biblical Truth for the relativism of the humanistic worldview.
That is what the author of Plastic Memories has done. He has tried to marry the humanist worldview with religious terms. He insists on moral relativism because of the perceived moral hypocrisy of the “neo-Christian” natural law types.
He claims the US has no moral authority to prevent abortions when it “kills Iraqi children while on one of its corporate-adventure wars.” This is what I call a “reductionist fallacy.” He reduces the intentional killing innocent babies through abortion with the unintended killing innocent Iraqi children during war. By reducing both of these situations to “killing innocent children” the author makes the illogical leap of saying they are morally equal. The problem is the intentional targeting of babies in the womb is a greater evil than the accidental death of children during war.
More pernicious than that is the author insists Christians are hypocrites when they oppose the discarding of children in the womb because they throw away their sandwich baggies. After all, over the years those baggies can add up and cause, uh, global warming. Instead of standing for the lives of innocent babies being killed today, he sides with the secular humanist environmentalist who has fallen for the false science of “climate change.”
Yes, liberal theology is nothing more than secular humanism in religious terms.
November 27, 2010 at 10:11 pm
Owen advocating liberal theology? Now I’ve heard everything. I should have realised that he was just a Byzantine-rite secular humanist all along!