It's a great plan!
Let's spend ever more and yet more time/ energy/ resources on locating the sins of other-people, and then loudly and emphatically stating that these other-people were sinful!
It will make us all better people, and make this a better world - for sure.
Especially when these people lived generations ago; and someplace else.
Let's do loads of research to discover more and novel examples of individuals or groups of sinners...
And then let's write books, make TV programmes and Movies about how they were sinful, very sinful; and then splash these across the media in a kind of saturation process.
Let's Change the Names of everything named for other-people who were sinners, especially from the olden days; while explaining over and again that doing this makes us better people...
But refusing to Change Names means - on the contrary - that we personally approve of all the sins of all the other-people who ever lived!
Because people who don't want to Change Names of sinners, actually personally desire that everybody nowadays ought to be doing these sins, all the time!
(Bad Kitty!)
We can be confident that by Changing more and more Names, we shall incrementally - a little bit at a time admittedly, but cumulatively - improve ourselves and human society.
If only we could sustain and expand such a strategy of world-reform for decade after decade (i.e. for an additional forty-plus years) - it would be certain to reduce, maybe abolish, most of the most important kinds of badness that plague the planet earth.
We would do what previous generations (who were all sinners) have all failed to do (because They were All sinners): which is to Make This World A Better Place.
And if the Name has already been Changed - then let's just change it again...
Because after all the changed name celebrates sin, just as much as the original name used-to!
6 comments:
The other day it occurred to me that the sins that many of those cancelled "names" were guilty of, must have been presented to anyone with scruples at the time in terms of "if WE don't do it, then someone else will", or "it's here to stay, deal with it", i.e. exactly the justification given to day for performing (and even "learning to like"!) various new evils today - examples of which will easily come to mind.
The underlying vulnerability to sin in this manner is exactly the same.
But the narrative is that for some reason in the Current Year we are now enlightened and make "rational decisions", or at the very least do so "mindfully", whereas those in the past did so gleefully, revelling in evil and greed.
The end result of this reasoning is that new evil becomes easier to commit.
@dwhpl - You are right. It's the old motes and beams problem from the Bible - any strategy that involves 99% mote-pointing is bound to be popular with moralizers, despite being actively net-harmful.
dwhpl reminds me I was thinking the other day how odd the other way of viewing the past is. I mean today’s “conservative” atheists who revere historical thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, while treating the religiousness of these figures as a sort of quirk, not integral to their thinking and easily set aside without compromising the foundations of the rational edifice. A. There’s no real explanation for *why* these historical figures were religious, and B. There’s no explanation for how they could be “partly rational” in such a way that God can be removed from their thinking. With Aquinas in particular I find it strange given the intensity of his religious life (levitation, visions, ecstasies, etc.). These thoughts were triggered by the opening of the Nicomachean Ethics where Aristotle argues that we should not expect precision beyond what is appropriate to the discipline in question. The modern mind whether more “left” or more “right” is precision-obsessed and would rather follow a precise process to hell than meander our way to heaven (in this I include most “religious” moderns also). I think this is manifesting in the moral perfectionism of the name-changers and in the “selective rationality” of the reverers of the past.
@Mia "The modern mind whether more “left” or more “right” is precision-obsessed and would rather follow a precise process to hell than meander our way to heaven (in this I include most “religious” moderns also). ".
This is true, but I do not think it is possible for us Not to do this *in practice*, we cannot *refrain* from precision, because this merely means we do not take our conclusions seriously enough for them to resist the external pressures.
Thus people who try to adhere to an imprecise mystical Christianity - who (in an absolute sense, correctly) claim that metaphysical assumptions and their implications Need Not be important - nonetheless are unable to resist the implications of these assumptions.
To paraphrase Barfield; (Coleridge excepted) the Romantics refrained from making a Romantic philosophy, which merely meant that anti-Romantic philosophy carried the day. Romanticism became a leisure activity merely - atheistic-materialism became the professional and functional "serious" assumption, built into all our institutions.
For romanticism substitute morality, arts, real science... All the things with potential to give life value.
When it comes to precision, I think we have to follow precision to its limits and beyond; go through, and then come out the other side!
Off-topic, but I've been thinking lately that our newly imposed progressive morality, with all its crushing condemnations of the past and hidden sins of racism etc, because it seems rooted in Christianity but isn't actually found anywhere in Scripture, seems purposely built to bypass the doctrine of divine forgiveness which would defeat it.
@Epi - Yes. It is only a part of Christianity insofar as Christianity has been overcome-by, and dissolved-into, secular radicalism. And the same applies to all other religions, and all other social institutions. It is a totalitarian atheist-materialist phenomenon.
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