America’s Jews and Christians are Failing the Test of Their Lives

[Rubee]

I’ve watched Jordan Peterson too but still dont buy it.

Didn’t he avoid debating an actual Marxist? Maybe a psychology Professor and clinician isn’t the best qualified to teach people what Marxism is. I’ve heard from a Marxist professor that Marx just offered a critique of capitalism. I’m pretty sure the Catholic church has offered plenty of critiques too. I think Marxism, whatever it is, is not the same thing as communism or that silly internet meaning, “SJWs.”

 

[RobertAdams]

If you can point to a currently influential group of scholars who explicitly adapted Marx to cultural issues but are not actually just open Marxists I will force myself to get used to it.

Otherwise, it seems to be more in the family of Hofstadter’s “paranoid style;” of argument by insult.

 

[Elf01]

Then as time passed, some conceived that the oppressors and the oppressed were oriented on lines other than capital and labor, hence the difficulties between whites (oppressors) and blacks and other minority groups (oppressed); between men and women, between non-transgender and transgender, between heterosexuals and homosexuals, and so on.

To be fair there were (and probably are) abuses against those groups that needed (need) to be addressed.

 

[RobertAdams]

Marx did more than critique capitalism. He also advocated an atheistic materialism and wrote the Communist Manifesto; a pretty awful book.

There’s no doubt that Marxism is both ridiculous and responsible for massive atrocities throughout the last century. Which is partially why I think it’s important to only use the label to describe actual Marxists. Calling people one disagrees with on cultural issues Marxists normalizes the idea that Marxism might be just one among any other poorly conceived set of notions.

 

[Rubee]

Fair enough. I haven’t studied it but I listened to a professor on it who described it very differently than I’ve heard it described.

 

[Annie]

To be fair there were (and probably are) abuses against those groups that needed (need) to be addressed.

Absolutely! And at the time Marx was writing, abuses against laborers were absolutely terrible, since that was the time of the Industrial Revolution with all its cruelty.

 

[Annie]

In looking into this to answer your question, I find that the term cultural Marxist has been used by a wide range of conservatives and people on the right, some of whom are rightly considered bad people and has even been linked to a different term used by the Nazis, so with these associations, the term is disliked by a wide range of people.

(I myself dislike this form of associational critique: i notice no one says Hitler was a vegetarian so vegetarianism must be evil.)

So, to carry on. Another name for this is critical theory, propounded first by the Frankfurt School, which is described by Wikipedia (from Britannica) as “was the first Marxist research center at a German university.” (Emphasis added)

For me, the problem with that way of thinking, which is very Marxist, is that it assumes that human relations are entirely governed by power. People are either oppressors and trying to gain more power over the oppressed, or they are oppressed and trying to get out from under the oppression.

The oppressors are irredeemable, and the oppressed are sanctified because not only are they right, they are furthering the progress of all humanity towards the ideal, which is why some people say that there is a right and wrong side of history.

You can see how antithetical this is to Catholicism, which is seen as an oppressive blocker of progress toward the ideal. Catholicism is based on Love and consequently love is the ideal towards which we must each strive with the additional consequence that society will be leavened and thus improve.

 

[Paddy1989]

0Scarlett_nidiyilii:

However, I think hes way overstating that the current BLM/ALM debate is the biggest crisis ever.

We’ve reached the point where every day some Chicken Little is announcing the Biggest Crisis Ever.
One day it’s gay marriage, the next day it’s clergy scandals, the next it’s Pachamama, then it’s Dems pushing abortion, then it’s churches being closed due to COVID, followed by BLM and worries about riots (nothing new).

It doesn’t take long for people to tune out Chicken Little. I know I did long ago.
It’s unproductive to live one’s life seeing crises under every bush.

I think it is more dangerous to understate it especially if people don’t understand the damage these ideologies have caused. The growing number of children being brought up in broken homes, the growing levels of abuse, poverty and crime associated with it. The one BILLION!!! Unborn human beings exterminated in the last 50 years. The objectification of other human beings for our own desire to the point where the most popular category in the sex industry today (Pornography) is rape porn so now this is how young people are perceiving what sex is and how it ought to be. Human beings mutilating themselves and their children because they suffer from body dysphoria. Tell me these things aren’t as dangerous as we say they are? Tell me these things haven’t led to the most perverted and twisted generation in human history since the flood?

While as Catholics we don’t get the luxury of being pessimistic as in the end we know it finishes with Christ it is perfectly normal for people to observe what is happening and weep in sorrow at the downward spiral and more so WARN others about it’s true danger so as not to fall victim. Have we become so desensitized? To merely shrug away these great warnings as over exaggerated crisis. I remember watching Fulton Sheen giving us great warnings in his time over issues that would cause many of us desensitized Catholics today to barely bat an eyelid

 

[JimG]

. I remember watching Fulton Sheen giving us great warnings in his time over issues that would cause many of us desensitized Catholics today to barely bat an eyelid

Yes, Bishop Sheen was pretty stark with his warnings, and he was on prime time television. But what is happening now would, I think, have caused him to conclude that the end times were near.

 

[MNathaniel]

It doesn’t take long for people to tune out Chicken Little. I know I did long ago.
It’s unproductive to live one’s life seeing crises under every bush.

I respect your comments on this site. You’re often far more patient, resourceful, and prudent than I am.

At the same time, I’ve noticed that you seem to have a tendency to chide those who express concern about western social trends, and frame them as overreacting. I’m not denying that overreactions exist. At the same time, I wonder if you ever consider that sometimes, the sky really is falling. Just as empires really do fall.

I’m not suggesting we panic or lose our peace over it. I suppose I’m suggesting that we consider that there may very well be crises under many bushes… while keeping on walking and doing our best on our respective roads to death.

I think we can both acknowledge the reality of the depth of crises going on all over the world, and keep living productively and without fear. I don’t think it’s either/or.

 

[otjm]

Also lol @ this article. You know someone’s losing it when they treat Marxism as a threat in 2020.

I will presume that you do not support Marxism; but if you think that Marxism is not at the root of a whole lot of what is going on in the public square, you are either not doing any research or are willfully blind. There are a number of professors, openly avowed Marxists, who have been for a long while promoting ideas we now hear spouted by students and graduates on the college level. The further reaches of the socialist movement in America have at their base Marxism, which in its philosophical base has a radically different view of human nature than Catholicism in particular and Christianity as a whole.

And I would suggest that it has been long baked into the idea that the way to defeat the various forms of Marxist governments (e.g. USSR and China) was through economics, apparently in a misguided assumption that Marxism and Communism was at its heart a matter of government run, as opposed to independently run economics and labor. We are not face to face with that fallacy as we are confronted withe an economy much more loosely run than Mao, Lenin or Stalin ever envisaged, with a government which is rigidly Communist; Covid 19 has brought that truth to the forefront. That, and the ever tightening Belt and Road initiative of the CCP

It may well be that Lenin never wrote the term “useful idiots”; but anyone who has followed the formation of Communism from Uncle Karl’s manifesto and followed the various countries implementing a Communist dictatorship in various countries knows the meaning of the term and has observed how the rabble which are the useful idiots operate to carry the goals forward.

 

[hvizsgyak]

Unfortunately, the young think way differently than those born before (I’m guessing) 1970. The young want to do things in a better (but unfortunately, a quicker) way instead the slow and grueling way most of us born born before 1970 (again not an exact date but its hard to p(name removed by moderator)oint). The young don’t want to spend all their time in school learning stuff that may be irrelevant to their lives in the future. They want hands on training (quick and simple). They don’t want to work their way up the social ladder. They want to start at a place where they are making a decent wage or better. They feel everybody should have a home, car, food, phone, health insurance - it should be a given in our day and age. They want to enjoy life like they did in school with not to many worries. They want a simpler life than us with all the latest gadgets.

Our economic system makes you start at the bottom and if you’re ambitious enough you can work your way up the ladder for more pay (but more problems and a more complex life). Hence Marxism sounds good to them. Supposabley (how do you spell this word, I can’t seem to find the right letter combination), everything is taken care of for you, all you have to do is show up at work.