Comments Which Conservatives Block From Their Blogs For June 17, 2018

June 20

To R. Scott Clark and his blogpost that describes the kind of Reformation that the American Church needs to undergo. This appeared in Heidelblog.

With his criticisms  of Pietism and Fundamentalism and his list of 4 indicators for telling whether Reformation is occurring in America, one has to ask what changes, a.k.a., reformations, would Clark's own church need to make for a true reformation to occur at his church?

That question shows the problem. For it is Clark, who is a true theologian of the Reformation, who seems to be playing the role of the Pharisee from the parable of the two men praying as he tells the rest of American Christianity what changes they need to make to come up to the standards set by Clark and his church. For that is the obvious conclusion that one comes away with here. While Clark's church and theological circle doesn't need reformation, the rest of American Christianity does. And if that is an accurate assessment of Clark's answer, then it would seem that Clark's church and theological circles have everything to teach the rest of us while having no need to learn anything from us. And at that point, Bonhoeffer's assessment of American churches, as well as Clark's own stated description of fundamentalism, applies to Clark and possibly his own church and theological circles.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

June 26
 
To Joe Carter and his blogpost that references a Forbes’ article that asks what is next for Spain now that it has elected a Socialist as its Prime minister. This appeared in the Acton blog.

referenced article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alejandrochafuen/2018/06/20/spain-throwing-out-the-baby-with-the-bathwater/#d89161f76313

Neither Carter's comments nor the article referenced above really answer the question of what's next for Spain.  But I would like to venture a guess here seeing that my political affiliation, according to my driver's license, is with the same party as the newly elected leader of Spain. Spain's future, from a socialist perspective, depends more on Sanchez's efforts at listening to the people rather than directing them. Spain's future will depend on Sanchez giving more decision-making power to Spain's workers. After all, the proletariat dictatorship is what Marxist Socialism is about. However, not instituting the proletariat dictatorship has been the failure of leaders who called themselves socialists.

Starting with Lenin, there was no transfer of power from gov't officials to workers in many "socialist" regimes. Those who gained power, by either seizing it or through elections, saw themselves as vanguards who were there to bring socialism. And because of that, they ended up relying on bourgeois models of governing than on socialist ones. And that resulted in no significant change between what was before and what came after.

So what's next for Spain depends on whether Sanchez acts as a true Marxist Socialist by giving more decision-making powers to workers or by using the current bourgeois model of government but ruling as a socialist or will he give socialism a try. With either model of governing, there are no guarantees. It is that one model consolidates power while the other distributes it.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

To Pat Buchanan and his blogpost on how, for the most part,  liberals are destroying public civility.  This appeared in the Imaginative Conservative blog.

What Buchanan forgets is that the end of public civility started with the Right. It started with Rush Limbaugh some decades ago as he employed black-white thinking to convince his followers that no good could come from liberals or the Left--note that they are not the same.

What Limbaugh did, and still does, on his radio show is to conduct a virtual book burning session where conservatives are encouraged to throw into the fire of criticism which employed all-or-nothing thinking anything that was not conservative. And conservatives feeling worn from the criticisms of non-conservatives were more than happy to oblige. So led by Limbaugh, they played the persecution card. Of course, never mind that, like other conservative heroes, Limbaugh never seemed to live by important conservative standards. And the standard that seems most often broken is the one one pertaining to marriage. Whether we look at Gingrich, Limbaugh, or Trump conservative standards used to judge nonconservatives were not used to judge these conservative hero-spokesmen. Of course, Limbaugh had other transgressions, such as mocking Michael J. Fox because of his symptoms from Parkinson's Disease.

And let's look at Buchanan's use of evidence. The race riots that followed King's assassination had nothing to do with liberals vs conservatives. It had everything to do with extreme frustration at the lack of justice in the US. Yes, some soldiers returning from Vietnam were spat on and that was wrong. But what avoided Buchanan's notice was that 2 to 3 million Vietnamese civilians were killed by American troops--mostly by bombings from the air. Where were conservatives then? And if you want to look at the epitome of public incivility, one only needs to look at the history of how Blacks were treated in this nation. And when people challenged that incivility, SOME conservatives called integration 'communism' and held up signs proclaiming 'White Power' and displaying swastikas. Or look at the centuries of incivility suffered by the LGBT community. Are conservatives less guilty than liberals when it comes to practicing incivility?

What lies behind all of the incivility regardless of its ideological source is the morally lethal combination of all-or-nothing thinking and the self-righteousness as demonstrated by the Pharisee from the parable of the two men praying. And to assign more guilt to one side or the other is to passionately embrace that morally lethal combination as one's own personal partner. To reverse the curse of that morally lethal combination, we must learn how to recognize what opposing ideologies bring to the table and look to collaborate. Otherwise, we will look to conquer. And no doubt that conquering interferes with public civility. After all, look at how trying to conquer is killing public civility today.