Re: Who's Really Behind Promotion of The Da Vinci Code?


Jr@Ease wrote:

That's it? All we need is the body, not the mind?

Yes.

Then why not the same for other animals?

Because they don't belong to us.

A cat is fully a cat, not fully a human being. He participates in
cat-dom (I doubt if that's a word), but cat-dom is not humanity.
Cat-dom doesn't paint the Sistine ceiling any more than an individual
cat does.

A human being, no matter what his state of mind, participates in
humanity.


But, how many people actually follow the high end of Catholicism? The
higher echelons of the Church? Maybe some Catholic intellectuals and
academics? The rest simply accept it and believe in it, not because
the Church says so, but because their parents said so, got them into
the groove, and they never got out.

How many people read Kant or listen to Beethoven? Does that mean
that "music" is just Fifty Cent?

I don't agree that "most people" believe just because the Church
says so, or their parents did--in fact, most of the active, practicing
Catholics I know (and a fair number of Protestants, including the
traditional kind) are highly critical of their tradition, do a lot of
thinking and deciding about it, and often do a lot of reading about it,
too. Most religious Americans, faced with a conflict between what the
Church tells them is morally good and what they themselves think is
morally good, go with what they think. If Catholics were the sheep you
want to think they are, the vast majority of them in the US wouldn't be
using birth control and the American hierarchy wouldn't have the
headache of Catholic divorce rates.

It is, in fact, one of the most highly sophisticated and highly
developed systems of moral philosophy ever devised, and NONE of it is
"because God said so."

I never got that from my Catholic upbringing, but I'll take your word
for it.

This kind of thing floors me. I didn't have a Catholic
upbringing. I come from a family of atheists and agnostics. But I
went to a Catholic secondary school, and I got all this. Hell, I
wouldn't have ended up studying Medieval lit and history if it hadn't
been for those nuns and all that Thomas Aquinas and Augustine and all
the rest of it. I was taught formal logic through Thomistic
syllogisms.


Yes. I'm sort of new to the whole religious dialog thing, having
avoided it for so many years, and sometimes I do find the Protestant,
especially fundamental, strain to be somewhat...straining.

There really are people who fit the stereotype of "Christians"
that I find on the web, but there are very few of them, and they are
virtually all both poor and marginal.

Most Americans who get tarred as being "fundamentalists" are
nothing of the kind. (There's a difference between a fundamentalist
and an evangelical, for instance, although both will tell you that
they're "born again.")

And I keep trying to point out that painting these people as
stupid is counterproductive, and painting George W. Bush is stupid
because he's religious is REALLY counter productive.

Because what do these people see? They see you (not you
individually, as John, but liberals/Democrats as a group) painting a
man who went to Andover, Yale and Harvard as an idiot because he's
religious. And they conclude, not all that wrongly, that what's going
on there is religious bigotry and that they, themselves will always be
looked down on and considered stupid as long as they're religious at
all.

So they vote for the guys who don't do that.

I would.

And I'm not
very knowledgable of the higher end of Catholicism. I probably seem
somewhat simplistic in my thought processes, but one of the things I
really hated about theology was the over-complication of something
that I realized later in life didn't even exist.

Well, murder really exists. The problem of intent exists--if A
kills B, WHY A killed B is important not only in law but in making a
moral judgment about A's act. Etc.

I should think you did a lot of what's done in moral theology when
you were in law school.

Jane Haddam
http://www.janehaddam.com

.

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