Vatican proposes EU as example of Social Doctrine

[Ridgerunner]

Never did I say all things modern were taken from Greece or Rome; only that much has been. But moderns don’t even agree on morals with each other, and undoubtedly that was true in Greece and Rome as well.

But even the term “ethics” was coined by Aristotle. As an intellectual discipline ideally affecting behavior our first knowledge of it is from the Greeks. Their concept of the “good” is not greatly different from ours, though our concept of the object is quite different.

You can’t deny that Christianity’s first real mass acceptance was in the Hellenistic world and chiefly among Greeks, not Jews or even Romans.

The gratuitous insult to the president of the U.S. is low-brow in the extreme.

 

[Vouthon]

But moderns don’t even agree on morals with each other,

I reckon the vast majority of modern Westerners believe that certain rights extend, without exception, to all individuals at least in principle and are inalienable; that sex should be consensual and never coerced; that entire groups of people do not deserve to be treated as sub-humans and subjected on occasion to slaughter for the education of young warriors (as in Sparta); that disabled people deserve dignity and should not be subjected to discrimination or left to die at birth (as per the Roman constitution) and that fathers do not possess life or death over their children etc. etc.

There are certain norms that mark all liberal representative democracies derived from the enlightenment and these norms are not in anyway traceable from classical Greece or Rome.

I’m not denying the philosophical, mathematical, architectural, literary, legalistic and political influence of the fertile classical civilizations.

But to attribute our morality to them is very short-sighted.

It also neglects the genius of other cultures. Meritocracy, for example, was in origin a Chinese, Confucian philosophical concept.

The ancient Sumerians and Egyptians wrote treatises on ethics. The ancient Indian civilization had Vedic philosophers as every bit profound in their analyses as our own Greeks and Romans - you had for instance the Charvaka, an astika school that taught materialism, like our Greek atomists or Epicureans, as well as empiricism and philosophical scepticism.

And they had Jain philosophers who were even more uncompromising in their commitment to non-violence (ahimsa) than any science of ethics pioneered by Westerners.

You are overlooking much that Christianity and enlightenment philosophy had to “disabuse” itself of in classical moral systems, while looking purely at the compatible elements.

As a whole, the Graeco-Roman worldview is alien to our own morally speaking.

Christianity is a universal faith, not bound to any particular philosophy or culture, as Pope St. John Paul II once said in Fides et Ratio.

"The Church has no philosophy of her own nor does she canonize any one particular philosophy in preference to others.

My thoughts turn immediately to the lands of the East, so rich in religious and philosophical traditions of great antiquity.

Among these lands, India has a special place…the context for great metaphysical systems. In India particularly, it is the duty of Christians now to draw from this rich heritage the elements compatible with their faith, in order to enrich Christian thought… .” -( Pope St. John Paul II. "Fides et ratio, 49 )

 

[Vouthon]

The gratuitous insult to the president of the U.S. is low-brow in the extreme.

Says the guy who calls the EU a Fourth Reich and compares Merkel and the EU leaders to some of the worst specimans of humanity in history.



What’s good for the goose …

 

[PickyPicky]

Speaking for myself, I thought your lowbrow gratuitous insult was rather good.

 

[Ridgerunner]

I have seen Europeans call the EU a Fourth Reich. I have seen liberals of various places say Donald Trump will bring in the Fourth Reich, but I have never seen Trump quoted as saying the EU is a Fourth Reich. Possibly you could provide us of reliable evidence that he did.

But regardless, even if he did, bad manners do not excuse an ill-mannered retort.

 

[Ridgerunner]

If this is going to turn into just one more Trump bashing thread, I’m gone.

 

[Vouthon]

I have never seen Trump quoted as saying the EU is a Fourth Reich.

I never said that he did, I was talking about you.

My point was that it’s a wee bit rich to chastise me for making a low-brow remark about your POTUS (comparing him to a caricatured Caligula), when you have said far worse things about EU political leaders i.e. comparing them to a Fourth Reich.

IMHO, it’s far more insulting to compare modern Germans or Europeans with Nazis than it is jokingly referring to Trump as a mad Roman Emperor in a thread where another poster is waxing lyrical about America being a modern day reincarnation of ancient Rome.

 

[Vouthon]

If this is going to turn into just one more Trump bashing thread, I’m gone.

Because of a single “off-hand” barb/shade that I threw at Trump, in the context of the Roman discussion vis-a-vis America?

Oh come on. It’s not as if he himself doesn’t insult people left right and centre nearly every time he opens his mouth.

I hope he’d be man enough to take it on the chin.

If a person likes dishing it out, they need to be able to take some ridicule in turn without it busting their ego.

 

[Vouthon]

True, its a Germanic tongue through and through just like its close British islander cousin Scots.

 

[Vouthon]

It was meant to be ridiculous because I was explicitly ridiculing the comparisons @Ridgerunner was making between modern ‘Western’ post-enlightenment America and Ancient Rome.

I was not intending my off-hand, colourful jibe to be taken as an exercise in comparative political biography.

 

[Vouthon]

You can’t deny that Christianity’s first real mass acceptance was in the Hellenistic world and chiefly among Greeks, not Jews or even Romans.

The receptivity of Greek-speaking Gentiles, living in the first century Roman Empire, to the Christian message, was not necessarily the result of any perceived philosophical kinship understood to exist between it and their own schools of thought. (Which seems to be your premise?)

The weight of scholarly opinion in antique studies leans precisely the other way: holding that the Christian message ‘caught on’ as a zeitgeist because it was counter-cultural and subversive.

Graeco-Roman writers regarded Christian doctrines and morals as exceedingly offensive to their established sensibilities. It was classified as a depraved superstition — the Latin term superstitio.

We have many references to Christian beliefs in extant pagan literature of the time, including Pliny the Younger’s Letter to the Emperor Trajan about how to handle two arrested female Christian deacons who were subjected to torture in 112 A.D, Tacitus’s Annals, [15.44] in 113 A.D. which describe the Neronian persecution of Christianity, the Meditations (161 to 180 A.D) of Emperor Marcus Aurelius which refer to Christians and the peculiar aspects of Christian doctrine multiple times ( I.6, III.6, VII.68, VIII.48.51, and XI.3. ), the physician Galen (129 AD – c. 216) in De pulsuum differentiis , ii & iii and the satirist Lucian of Samosata (c. 125 AD – 180 AD) who wrote about Christian beliefs extensively in his satirical Death of Peregrine, written entirely in Greek.

Lucian wrote:

The Death of Peregrine | De Morte Peregrini | The Lucian of Samosata Project

It was now that he came across the priests and scribes of the Christians, in Palestine, and picked up their queer creed…

These misguided creatures start with the conviction that they are immortal for all time…and then it was impressed on them by their original lawgiver that they are all brothers and deny the gods of Greece, and worship the crucified sage, and live after his laws.

Christian beliefs were variously scorned, ridiculed and feared.

And none of these educated Graeco-Romans wrote positive appraisals of the sect, which was deemed socially disruptive.

"Christianity was certainly not part of the establishment…[and] was considered…a dangerous development that challenged what were then accepted notions of religion, piety, identity, and behaviour…

In the eyes of many of that time, early Christianity was odd, bizarre, in some ways even dangerous. For one thing, it did not fit what “religion” was for people then. Indicative of this, Roman-era critics designated it as perversity.

Yet the very features of early Christianity that made it odd and objectionable in the ancient Roman setting have become now unquestioned assumptions in modernity .”

― Professor Larry W. Hurtado, Destroyer of the gods: Early Christian Distinctiveness in the Roman World

 

[Vouthon]

@Ridgerunner to continue my discussion above, let us consider some particular features of Graeco-Roman morality vis-a-vis Christian and modern secular ‘enlightenment’ ethics. Before I do so, a post with more general remarks.

In Homo Deus, his 2017 sequel to the world bestseller Sapiens, the atheist Israeli historian and professor Yuval Noah Harari postulated that, despite their enormous contributions to human civilization and progress in the past (as well as human misery in other instances), traditional religions are becoming - or have long since become - a spent force in terms of creative potential, existing today in a primarily reactive mould.

In spite of this negative interpretation of the meaningfulness of religiosity in the modern world (as befits his secular atheism), Professor Harari has a better appreciation for the unique role played by Christian ethics in breaking, decisively, with the prevalent moral norms of the classical world than you do and he does not, like you, erroneously attribute the core Western ethical revolution to the ancient Greeks and Romans - a concept that is both factually wrong and out-of-step with your faith.

Which is surprising since he is an atheist Jew, whereas you are a Catholic. He writes:

Christianity spread the hitherto heretical idea that all humans are equal before God, thereby changing human political structures, social hierarchies and even gender relations. In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus went further, insisting that the meek and oppressed are God’s favourite people, thus turning the pyramid of power on its head, and providing ammunition for generations of revolutionaries.

In addition to social and ethical reforms, Christianity was responsible for important economic and technological innovations.

(pages 276-277)

Of course, in your estimation these ethical innovations are to be attributed to Lycurgus, Zeno of Citium, Aristotle, Plato and Cicero, no?

Well, the Jewish scholar Daniel Boyarin explained, in his 1997 study A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity , how early Pauline Christianity proclaimed the doctrine of a " universal human essence, beyond difference and hierarchy " and called for " autonomy, equality, and species-wide solidarity ".

To reference the scholar of late antiquity and New Testament Studies Professor Larry Hurtado:

That the poor should be as worthy of respect as the rich; that the starving should have a claim on those with the reserves to feed them; that the vulnerable — children, prostitutes, slaves — should not be used by the powerful as mere sexual objects: all of these novel Christian doctrines must surely have had some influence on ‘the triumph of Christianity’ among the teeming masses of Roman cities.

 

[Zzyzx_Road]

Germany is easily the most dominant country in the EU; they’re the ones dictating terms to the Greeks, Italians, Spanish, Poland, etc. It’s not these countries dictating terms to the Germans. The euro currency has benefited Germany far more than it has the southern European countries. Those tensions have not eased and I haven’t seen anything that suggests they will anytime soon. Germany isn’t Hitler-run, it isn’t Nazi, it isn’t old fashioned empire, it isn’t racist. But at least from the economical and political points of view, it has once again become the dominant country and that can’t be papered over with accusations of Naziism just for pointing that out. It was Germany that said ok to the migrants and everyone else in the EU just had to take it regardless of their own feelings on the topic. That was not a democratic decision in any way, shape or form. The other 27 EU countries never had an opportunity to vote on that decision in the first place, only the opportunity to talk about sharing the cost.

Christianity was so very drastically different from anything that had gone before so Vouthon has a very good point regarding actual ethics and morality. We might have taken architecture, infrastructure, finance, “bread and circus”, personal style and other pointers from the Romans and the Greeks, but we definitely did not take our religious or ethical tips from them. These were informed by the embrace of Christianity from which we trace our concepts of consanguinity, marriage and rule of law.

 

[tomarin]

Christianity was so very drastically different from anything that had gone before so Vouthon has a very good point regarding actual ethics and morality. We might have taken architecture, infrastructure, finance, “bread and circus”, personal style and other pointers from the Romans and the Greeks, but we definitely did not take our religious or ethical tips from them. These were informed by the embrace of Christianity from which we trace our concepts of consanguinity, marriage and rule of law.

And to go further off topic, the ancient Romans didn’t turn to their religion for ethical or moral advice, since those gods were morally capricious and not good role models; for moral instruction and to learn how to live a good life one turned to philosophy.

 

[RCIAGraduate]

How would you respond that today’s nutritional issues have actually flipped; instead of hunger, we have obesity but in this case, it’s due to the fact that healthier options are more expensive or the poor like the working poor/working class are rather exhausted to take the time to prepare poor dishes or nuances like the difficulties of getting a poor child to eat nutritious foods (especially if you can only afford so much)?

 

[Ridgerunner]

I’m sometimes reminded of an account I read of some Continental European (can’t remember the name) who traveled to Britain and Ireland in the 18th Century. He remarked that of all European peoples, the healthiest and most attractive by far were the Irish. At the time, most Europeans ate breadgrains and meat and fish of uncertain provenance, while the typical Irish diet was whole potatoes with the skin on, cooked in buttermilk and with perhaps (but uncertainly) a bit of fresh-caught fish or smoked pork with it. Most of the meat, of course, and all of the butter and grain went to the landlords.

100 years later, of course, it would be different after the famine struck. But the fact is that diet was nourishing and very healthy. Sometimes a healthy diet is not really expensive at all.

 

[PickyPicky]

Local elections in England show (so far) big gains for the Remain parties (LibDem and Green), and big losses for the divided parties (Conservative and Labour) and the more unpleasant of the Brexiteers (UKIP)

 

[Ridgerunner]

Went off topic. Sorry.

 

[Kaninchen]

Local elections in England show (so far) big gains for the Remain parties

I live in a Remain area that’s even more Remain, excellent!

 

[Zzyzx_Road]

That was the local elections. The Lib Dems weren’t rewarded so much as the Tories were punished. As to a lesser extent were Labour. But Change UK didn’t get anywhere. An anecdotal story about said punishment that shows sentiments are still running hot:

Local elections results: Ballots spoiled by voters furious about Brexit

Disillusioned voters have vented their anger at both the Conservatives’ and Labour’s handling of Brexit by spoiling their ballot papers in local council elections.Voters up and down the country turned...

finance.yahoo.com

Regarding the European Parliament elections, that might be another story.

European Parliament voting intention: Brex 30%, Lab 21%, Con 13% (29-30 Apr) | YouGov

Latest YouGov European Parliament voting intention figures

yougov.co.uk

Then there is word that the Brexit Party will field a candidate for the Peterborough MP by-election taking place June 6. The previous MP who represented Labour was recalled; this is a district that voted 61% for Leave. This one bears watching.