Monday 9 September 2019

QUAMVIS RESERUATIS

Ruminating on our current cultural dilemmas and the ever expanding battlefields upon which conservatives are engaging with the cultural totalitarians and thinking of course about the gauntlet recently thrown down by the 'deep state political establishment' in Britain, I reservedly agree with Melanie Phillips sentiment in this passage from her book 'The World Turned Upside Down:
Morality is privatized so that everyone becomes his or her own moral authority, while the laws and traditions rooted in Christianity and the Hebrew Bible have come under explicit attack. The old order of Western civilization, resting on the external authorities of religion and culture, has to be destroyed. With no order or purpose in the world, moral and cultural relativism are the rule; any attempt to prioritize any culture or lifestyle over any other is illegitimate.
The paradox—and it is acute—is that this relativist doctrine itself assumes the form of a dogmatic moralizing agenda that takes an absolutist position against all who challenge it and seeks to stamp out all deviations. Medieval Christianity—like contemporary Islamism—stamped out dissent by killing or conversion; Western liberals do it by social and professional ostracism and legal discrimination. It is a kind of secular Inquisition. And the grand inquisitors are to be found within the intelligentsia—in the universities, the media, the law, the political and professional classes—who not only have systematically undermined the foundations of Western society but are heavily engaged in attempting to suppress any challenge or protest.
It is paradoxical but not surprising that the assault on intellectual liberty is taking place within the institutions of reason.
Why reservedly you may ask? Because I, as both a practicing Christian and a student/teacher of history (Art, World & Christian) would argue that the ancient Christianity of the disciples, early apologists and Martyrs had been significantly hijacked by a rigidly religious hierarchy by the late medieval period; a hierarchy that was just as opposed towards true Christianity as many of the secular ideologies are today judging by the oppression and persecution of believers that eventually resulted in the Reformation and the persecution of Protestants throughout the European continent.

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