To R. Scott Clark and his citation of W. Robert Godfrey description of the differences Machen saw between religiously conservative Christians and liberal Christianity. This appeared in Heidelblog
What we need to consider, if we want to avoid the sin of the Pharisee from the parable of the 2 men praying, is if there are wolves among both conservatives and liberals. What we need to consider is if we need to continually build hybrid theologies from the best of what both liberals and conservatives have to teach.
Certainly liberals need to pay attention to the conservatives' emphasis on the supernatural character of Jesus, His substitutionary death for His people, His literal and physical resurrection from the dead, God's judgment of the quick and the dead, and the inerrancy of the original autographs of the Scriptures.
But conservatives need to acknowledge that many of the social concerns liberals have are implied by the Scriptures. That while Machen identified some legitimate divides between liberals and conservatives, that he overreacted to other differences and that, out of anger for how he was personally treated, he portrayed liberals and liberalism in all-or-nothing terms and thus implied that we religiously conservative Christians have everything to teach liberals and nothing to learn from them.
How Machen treated liberals has become a model for how conservatives and non-conservatives have come to regard each other in other spheres besides religion. And the result becomes a self-righteousness that causes people to unnecessarily attack those who are different.
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August 13
To Rev Ben Johnson and his article claiming that Socialism dehumanizes the poor. This appeared in the Acton blog.
First, we have socialism and we have socialism from the Marxist perspective. While the former might revolve around the controlled redistribution of wealth by the state, the latter does not. In fact, socialism from the Marxist perspective revolves around the redistribution of power from the bourgeoisie to the workers--a feat that has not occurred in the "socialist" governments of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Hugo Chavez, and others.
Second, socialism's track record has been interfered with primarily by the US. As Iran was moving to the left with the nationalization of oil reserves, the US and Great Britain orchestrated a coup to replace a democratically elected leader with a brutal dictator. As Guatemala's new democratically elected leader President Arbenz was promising land reform, the US overthrew him and turned the nation over to a dictator in 1954. As it looked like Greece was about to select a leftist government in 1967. the US stopped the process and installed a military dictatorship. And the last example that will be mentioned but not the last that occurred is what happened in the first 9-11 in Chilé in 1973 when the democratically elected leftist leader President Allende was replaced with the brutal dicator Pinochet who was later indicted for crimes against humanity for how he treated many of his own people.
Yes there are other examples, but none of them were ever mentioned in the writings of those who wish to denounce socialism and one must wonder, but not too hard, why.
The dehumanization of the poor comment misrepresents what Marx was saying. But what he said about Capitalism cannot be argued against by the results. That Capitalism makes workers into disposable objects of profit. Workers, in Capitalism, become commodities like any raw resource commodity would. This is amplified in today's neoliberal capitalism where we have economies designed to profit shareholders before anyone else and sometimes at almost everyone else's expense. Workers are put at risk for exploitation as is the environment, he latter of which Marx didn't foresee.
For sure, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Hugo Chavez and some other revolutionary "socialist" leaders or their political descendants did dehumanize those not in the politically privileged class. But that didn't come about by empowering workers, it came about by destroying workers' democracy. it came about by elite-centered governments, something of which socialism has no monopoly. It was Marx who relied on the workers to bring about his utopia and he was wrong. But his emphasis on empowering the workers and redistributing power from the bourgeoisie to the workers is what we can gain from him. And it seems that by not mentioning that power battle between the bourgeoisie and the workers, that apologists for today's Capitalism want people to overlook that imbalance in power in order to continue to support the dominance that the bourgeoisie continue to have over the workers. And today's attacks on the environment by Capitalism and the way of life it promotes adds another reason for opposing Capitalism, especially today's neoliberal capitalism.
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August 14
To Joseph Mussomeli and his attempt to use King’s message on equality to attack programs like Affirmative Action. This appeared in the Imaginative Conservative blog.
The basic theme that Mussomeli eventually gets to his theme that despite our past abuses of people from different races, women, and economic classes, we should not employ affirmative action to readdress those wrongs. And somehow he reduces Martin Luther King, Jr.'s message to his dream speech in order to refer to King as an opponent to affirmative action.
But what really bothers me about the above rambling article is how it reduces King's message. Below is a quote from his speech against the Vietnam War. In that quote, King offers an explanation of why we still have such a racial divide and what is inseparably linked to that racism. He also offers a partial solution to our problem with racism: a change in the social morals of soceity (see http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2564.htm ):
I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
For as long as society values things more than people, we will be competing in groups for those things. And the groups we will be competing in will be primarily defined by both our race and our economic class. And sometimes we will be competing as members of one gender against another gender. So if people are more important to us than things, we will be more willing to share power and opportunities with those from other races and classes and we will recognize what they have to contribute that we don't. And that is the message that Mussomeli needs to bring balance to his attacks on practices like Affirmative Action.
However, that message of sharing is not strong enough in Mussomeli's article to either address the problems with programs like Affirmative Action or reflect what King thought about how we undo past and current abuses of others.
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