Re: "Dog-whistle Catholicism"

On Jun 27, 1:58 pm, Charlton Wilbur <cwil...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"RH" == Richard R Hershberger <rrhe...@xxxxxxxx> writes:

    >> Ah, but that lack of duplicity is why I *wouldn't* call Narnia
    >> "dog-whistle Christianity." I'd call it "Christian allegory that
    >> a surprising number of otherwise apparently well-educated people
    >> manage to completely overlook."

    RH> This is, I suppose, a matter of the definition of "dog-whistle".
    RH> Is intent part of it?  If I drop the expression "Here I stand"
    RH> into something I write, I might be sending a secret signal to
    RH> other Lutherans that I am one of them, or I might simply be
    RH> using a familiar (in my particular subculture) catchphrase.  Is
    RH> one a dog-whistle and the other not, even though they are the
    RH> same from the readers' perspective?

Yes, it's a problem with the intentional fallacy, which means that we
can argue over whether something is or is not a dog-whistle passage
based on the intent we infer from it.  But I think that the intent to
send a coded message is an essential part of the defintion of a dog
whistle.

    >> Perhaps in 1960. Possibly even in 1980. But in 2008, ignorance
    >> of the basic tenets of Christianity is all too common.

    RH> I have trouble grokking this, as it seems just plain weird for
    RH> putatively educated persons to have such Bushian incuriosity
    RH> about their own culture.  But I undoubtedly am naive in this,
    RH> and likely many other respects.

Oh, I agree.  I don't know how you can understand a lot of European and
American history without understanding Christianity.

I mean, you probably could summarize a lot of the 16th century by "Some
people were Protestants.  Other people were Catholics.  They fought a
lot."  But doesn't it make people curious as to *why*?

Not neccesarily. For example:

"Some people were Sunnis. Other people where Shiites. They fought a
lot."
"Some people were Marxist-Leninists. Other people where Maoists.
They fought a lot."

It's difficult to realize at close range, but the differences which we
draw
between 'Us' and 'Not Us' which seem so clear and obviously
important, may very well seem a matter of big-endian vs
little-endian (in the Swiftian sense) to others.

Peter Trei


.

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