Friday 10 May 2013

Prophetic and Prescient

Modern Blasphemers

For the past two days we have run pieces by Dr Grégor Puppinck on the planned militant imposition of homosexual ideology in French schools.  This "project" apes similar moves in Spain and Germany.  European institutions are moving rapidly to asset the rights of the state over parents and children, and officially to indoctrinate children into believing homosexuality is normal.  Parents that resist or object conscientously are being punished.  These programmes and moves have largely been endorsed and supported by the European Court of Human Rights.

Why?  On what basis?  Well, children have rights too, don't you know.  They have a right to learn the truth about human sexuality (that it is all a matter of individual preference, choice, freedom, and personal inclination).  The state must protect children from any moral pre-conditioning by anyone--except the state itself.

We have characterised this as "madness".  It is madness because it is self-destructive.
  It does irreparable harm to children, to families, and ultimately to society itself.  It is a death-wish.  But--and here is the crux of the matter--it is also perfectly consistent with secular humanism as a philosophy, ideology, and religion.  It is where it inevitably drives itself.

Secular humanism, or modernism has an atomistic view of existence.  The ultimate reality is the individual.  Man (individual, autonomous Man) is the master of all things, and nothing human is foreign or wrong.  In 1898 Dr Abraham Kuyper delivered a series of celebrated lectures at Princeton University, which have remained in print ever since.  They were entitled, Lectures on Calvinism (accessible here.) They represented, amongst other things, a forceful rejection of modernism as represented by the Enlightenment and the French Revolution and their step-children.  In the first lecture (Calvinism as a Life-System) Kuyper pointed out that every philosophy, modernism included, has to provide a fundamental interpretation of the relation of man to man.  He reviewed some of the alternatives history has presented to us: Pagnaism, Islamism, Romanism, Calvinism, and Modernism.  He then said this about Modernism's view the relation of man to man:
Finally, Modernism, which denies and abolishes every difference, cannot rest until it has made woman man and man woman, and, putting every distinction on a common level, kills life by placing it under the ban of uniformity.  One type must answer for all, one uniform, one position and one and the same development of life; and whatever goes beyond and above it, is looked upon as an insult to the common consciousness.  [Abraham Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1931), p. 27.]
Those sentiments, spoken just over one hundred years ago,  may have seemed exaggerated at the time, hyperbolic even.  But we now see they were profoundly prescient.  What Kuyper diagnosed back then as being intrinsic to Modernism is actually being aggressively institutionalised throughout Europe today.

Modernism has proven that it cannot rest until it has made woman man and man woman.  Its fundamental principles drive it inexorably to such conclusions and perversities.  And notice how closely Kuyper's prophecy is coming true: it is not just that Modernism or secular humanism insists that there be no "stereotyping" of male and female so that the very concepts of "male" and "female" are officially neutered, of not obliterated, but that anyone who protests or demurs is insulting the common consciousness.  Throw the insulters, the blasphemers into prison! 

1 comment:

Blair D said...

Another outcome of modernism, or secular humanism was broadcast on Saturday Morning (National Radio, with Kim Hill) when Alison McCulloch was interviewed, April 27 of this year.

Ms McCulloch a journalist and writer on abortion, "Fighting to Choose: the Abortion Struggle in New Zealand", refused to speak out against the mutilating act of female circumcision because who was she to judge the values of another culture and the culturally and contextually specific practices they might have. For some reason that argument doesn't apply to those who for cultural, religious or other contextually specific reasons are opposed to abortion. No, those people must be silenced because they are harmful to women. Never mind the child!

Such a response, and from a woman, would have been unimaginable not that long ago. Even the UN had a campaign and ambassador to highlight the plight of the victims of such a practice.

I wonder how long it will be before the UN will no longer make such statements such as that by UNICEF Executive Director Anthony Lake. “FGM/C is not only deeply wrong, we can and must end it to help millions of girls and women lead healthier lives.”

Surely modernism, logically will find itself incapable of opposing such a practice. If it were to try it would be in denial of itself.

Yes, modernism is a death wish.