[Vision2020] Doug Wilson, World Magazine, and Spinoza

[joanopyr at earthlink.net]

Dear Visionaries:
 
For those of you who don’t read World Magazine, a conservative evangelical Christian publication, you won’t know that Doug and his followers spent most of the month of April hurling holy hand grenades at Doug’s theological foes, AKA his brothers in Christ.  If you’ve an interest in Doug’s doings – or have nothing better to do on this rainy Tuesday afternoon, I refer you to the following:
 
http://www.worldmagblog.com/cgi-bin/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=14287
http://www.worldmagblog.com/blog/archives/2005_04.html
 
It makes for interesting reading – professed Christians, followers of the Prince of Peace, beating the Holy Hell out of one another.  Read some of this blog fight, and then consider the following paragraphs from Spinoza, sent to me this afternoon by a thoughtful, kind, truly Christian friend.  I think I need to pick up a little Spinoza myself and refresh my memory – it seems to me that he anticipated Doug, Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, and their ilk by more than a century.  And that, surprisingly enough, saddens me.

Spinoza writes:
 
“I have often wondered, that persons who make a boast of professing the Christian religion, namely, love, joy, peace, temperance, and charity to all men, should quarrel with such rancorous animosity, and display daily towards one another such bitter hatred, that this, rather than the virtues they claim, is the readiest criterion of their faith.  Matters have long since come to such a pass, that one can only pronounce a man Christian, Turk, Jew, or Heathen, by his general appearance and attire, by his frequenting this or that place of worship, or employing the phraseology of a particular sect—as for manner of life, it is in all cases the same.  
 
Inquiry into the cause of this anomaly leads me unhesitatingly to ascribe it to the fact, that the ministries of the Church are regarded by the masses merely as dignities, her offices as posts of emolument—in short, popular religion may be summed up as respect for ecclesiastics.  The spread of this misconception inflamed every worthless fellow with an intense desire to enter holy orders, and thus the love of diffusing G-D's religion degenerated into sordid avarice and ambition.  Every church  became a theatre, where orators, instead of church teachers,  harangued,  caring not to instruct the people, but striving to attract admiration, to bring opponents to public scorn, and to preach only novelties and paradoxes, such as would  tickle  the ears of their congregation.  
 
This state of things necessarily stirred up an amount of controversy, envy, and hatred, which no lapse of time could appease; so that we can scarcely wonder that of the old religion nothing survives but its outward forms (even these, in the mouth of the multitude, seem rather adulation than adoration of the Deity), and that faith has become a mere compound of credulity and prejudices—aye,  prejudices too, which degrade man from rational being to beast, which completely stifle the power of judgment between true and false, which seem, in fact, carefully fostered for the purpose of extinguishing the last spark of reason!”   
 
George Eliot was a fan of Spinoza’s, so those of you who aren’t up for more of the great man’s work might want to check out Eliot’s novel “Middlemarch” from the Moscow Public Library.  Unless, of course, you’re opposed to public libraries (re: Dale Courtney’s increasingly goofy blog).
 
Joan Opyr/Auntie Establishment
www.auntie-establishment.com


joanopyr at earthlink.net
EarthLink Revolves Around You.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20050510/28201cb0/attachment.htm