Metacrock plays Smack The Nominalist

Hume: Thank you! Thank you ladies, gentlemen and aliens!

Audience: <cheers, whistles, beeps>

Hume: And I'd like you to meet my new house band, led by Bold Fenian!

Audience: <wild applause, cheers, vaporization of people blocking the view>

Hume: So, BF, I gather you had a little trouble with the Orange Order this week?

BF: So we did.

Hume: And I hear 500 of them tried to march down your street?

BF: So they did.

Hume: Which is only 6' wide?

BF: So it is.

Hume: And what happened?

BF: Orange squash.

Hume: Now tonight I'd like to introduce you to a gentleman whose spelling says more about the standard of education in Christian seminaries than I ever could, it's Metacrock!

Hume: Hi Metacrock. And tonight you're going to be defending the Christian tradition via your web site at http://www.geocities.com/metagetics/1.htm
Take it away!

M: A current trend seems to be a real hatred for Christians in this day and age, especially among the young. Though Christianity was the basic foundation of Western culture, -

H: Gosh - so the Greeks and Romand had nothing to do with it? Thanks for setting us straight there!

M: - and though the lion's share of great Western thinkers have been Christians,

H: It all depends how you define 'great', doesn't it?

Audience: Ooh! Aah! Exterminate!

M: - the assumption made today, largely due to the failure of our educational system, that Christianity has nothing going for it, Christians are stupid and the faith itself is primitive and oppressive.

H: Now personally, I would have put this down to the SUCCESS of the education system! But anyway, in America this argument hardly seems to fit the facts. How many Americans are Christians? That hardly argues for a massive anti-Christain swing, now does it?

M: This site will argue that all of these ideas are merely ignorance in action.

H: As opposed to your own views, which are ignorance in a torpor..

M: Christianity is the foundation of the culture, and the culture only made sense when it understood its Christian roots.

H: Which culture?

M: New fads have created dissatisfaction with the true canonical scriptures and have led to a move to include false documents such as the Gospel of Thomas in the canon; and a false sense of the trustworthiness of this document in particular has led to an attitude that it is more trustworthy than the true Gospels; Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. This notion and this attitude will be repudiated!

Audience: That's the kind of talk we like! Exterminate! Exterminate!

M: The Christian tradition built Western culture. Judeo-Christian ethics form the basis of Western thought.

H: What's that clanging noise? Oh, it's OK folks, it's just the whole Graeco-Roman culture landing in the dustbin. And how much of mediaeval Christianity is built on a Classical (ie pagan) philosophical basis? (Largely neo-Platonist, but with elements of Boethius and the Stoics and others swimming around in there)

M: By the high middle ages Christian ethical doctrine had reached a point where each individual was seen as a unique individual. St. Augustine forms the basis for this view. Augstine said that we should love what is eternal and use what is temple.

H: Use what is temple? For what, pagan worship? Or is that just how you PhD "candiates" spell 'temporal'? And anyway, Augustine hadn't studied pagan philosophy had he? (Whoops, yes he had!). And oh my golly, how could one EVER work out that each human was a unique individual if Augustine hadn't pointed it out? I mean, that's one obscure insight!

M: This Augustinian scale of values resulted in an ethical creed which saw each individual as an end in himself. People are possessed of an immortal soul and thus, are part of the eternal scale of values.

H: Oh my - Augustine MUST have been inspired by God to work that one out - I mean, where did that turn up before Augustine except in Plato a few hundred years earlier? And what were the chances of an educated Roman like Augustine having come across Platonism in the late classical world? You've got us there, Metacrock!

M: People are not to be used as temporal things, but seen as ends in themselves --as eternal things. Another aspect of this doctrine that of ST. Augustine's which helped to build Western culture was the notion of the person. In arguing for the Trinity, Agustine casted the persons of the Trinity in a light which latter, along with other ideas such as his anticipation of Descarte's Cogito, helped to form the basis for the Western concept of the person. (See Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self, Harvard University press, 1991).

H: Casted? I thought that was something you did with sugar. And again, choosing the bits of Augustine which recast (or for you, perhaps we should say 'recasted') classical philosophy and claiming them as original will fool nobody here.

Audience: ! ! !

M: When taken together, the Augustinian scale of values and the Trinitarian notion of the person, we have the backdrop to modern culture, with citizenship and our individual human rights, our notion of ourselves as individuals with our own set of rights and our own notions being members of a community entitled to the protections of its laws and endowed with the powers and responsibilities of that society. How ironic that now the very notion of individuality is used to counter Christian belief, as more and more the fruits of the romantic rebellion are juxtaposed to Christian moral duty. But the very notions we have of ourselves as persons would not even exist without the Christian tradition.

H: Do you honestly imagine anyone is going to believe this crap? Most of these ideas emerged in ancient Greece (pagan), and resurfaced in the enlightenment from thinkers who were NOT orthodox Christians (they were unitarians, deists and the like - but more of that later). During the period when the church had the most influence over Europe, these notions were almost wholly absent. Maybe you should call your thesis "The History of ideas, but missing out all the bits I don't like".

M: The Christian tradition (that is in it's broadest sense, and it is not all unity--it is very much divided and contradictory) has not always been so noble. More and more we hear about the church as the font of hypocrisy; oppressive, hierarchical, sexist, and so on. But there is a subtext as well. The true nobility of the Christian tradition resides in this subtext, like an undercurrent which runs much deeper than the surface level current. That nobility begins, of course with Jesus Christ who laid down one of the highest ethical standards the world has seen and infused it with a sense of compassion and Grace that no other religious or secular tradition offers in quite the same way.

H: Maybe the reason people are so negative is that it's difficult to concentrate on the 'noble undercurrent' when the 'surface current' is preparing to pull out your fingernails or set fire to the faggots it has piled around your feet...

M: That ethical standard was enhanced in the first few centuries after the church as Christians rescued infants set out to die, spent their money to free slaves (Olympia deaconess of Constantinople spent her entire family fortune to buy and free slaves) and opposing tyrants on behalf of the people (John Chysostom). When Christianity was made the official state religion of Rome, these same ethical notions continued to enrich Western culture even before Augustine. Contstantine enacted laws based on Christian ethics which freed slaves and gave women and orphans their first secured rights in the empire (Charles Norris Chockoran Christianity and Classical Culture).

H: So Olympia bought up converts - whoops - 'freed slaves'. Let's have a big round of applause for Olympia! And I have never denied that the church, and individual Christians, have done some very good things. But doing charitable works is not a defence accepted in court - "Yes your honour, I murdered seven people but I work at the orphans home on Saturdays." "Well in that case we'll let you off, Case dismissed!"

What Christianity stands accused of is a) the fact that as a world-view it is demonstably unture, and b) the evil that Christians have done in the name of their religion.

M: If there were crusades and religious wars, if the church benefited form the reigns of power, it did not invent those reigns.

H: "Hand me my horse's reins", said the reigning monarch. The church was right in there with the reign of terror it instigated to get hold of the reins of power. Remember the comment of the bishop accompnying the Albighensian crusade? "Kill them all. God will know his own."

M: Feudalism was a synthesis of what remained from Rome and the Germanic inheritance laws (Paul Tillich, The History of Christian Thought).

H: This is a very contentious view. The catholic church itself, at that time, had a profoundly 'feudal' structure - pope, cardinals, archbishops, bishops, priests, deacons, clerks, laypeople. It also took tithes and threatened everlasting hell-fire for those who opposed it.

M: If there was oppression from persecution, witch trials, and the eventual defeat of paganism and conversion by the sword, there were also Christians who won converts with love and inspired the pagans to willingly give their old ways (as with St. Patrick who had been a slave and went back to Ireland to convert those who had enslaved him). The poverty movement of the middle ages provided an actual imitation of Christ, and spurred a vast movement which sought to feed and clothe the poor, renounce possessions, minister the sick, and produced martyrs like Gerhard Groute who died treating victims burning with the plague. There were many such examples to selfless devotion to Christ's teachings; the end result was the notion of hospitals (which Christians actually invented)

H: Yes, invented wholly originally after having seen them in Muslim countries during the loving, selfless crusades...

M: the foundations of the youth hostile

H: That sounds like fun. Are youth hostiles where soccer hooligans go when they travel abroad?

M: the hospices movement in caring for the sick, and many other examples. Even social welfare policy comes out of this time (even the puritans had social welfare pocicies although they weren't much). Joacim of Flora, Gertrude the Great, Hildegard of Bingin, and other reformers of the Middle ages led poverty movements, opposed tyrants, and sought to bring real compassion to the practice of the faith. They form the basis of our Western culture and our very ideas of modernity in terms of social responsibility.

H: Now just a minute - THEY were storing up 'treasures in heaven' as Christ commanded; they were therefore acting in self-interest. When humanists do good deeds, they can expect no such 'eternal reward'. Which is the more selfless, I wonder?

M: The Reformation furnished the basis of Western democracy, and if it lead to the Religious wars, it also led to secularization. It was Christians in the enlightenment who put an end to the witch trials (see Issor Woloch)

H: Whoopy do! And remind us who started them in the first place?

M: But the contributions don't stop with social progress. Many might be tempted to think that religious belief held back modern science. The Trial of Galileo hangs over the head of the church, and this has fueled the popular impression that Christianity held back modern science. Actually, Christians invented modern science. Every name on the list of great scientists form Galileo himself to Newton and Boyle is the name of a Christian. Moreover, many were devout Christians; including Keppler, Newton, Boyle, Priestly, and many others.

H: Agreed, but misleading... what you should ask yourself is to what extent the contributions to science made by these men supports the Christian cosmology...

M: The very system of thought which has been used to condemn Christianity as unscientific, that of scientific reductionism was invented by a devout Christian (Newton)who tried to use it in a social project to promote Christianity (see the science and religious belief page --link]. Nor did Christians hold back the course of modern though in philosophy and the use of reason, names such as Locke, Liebniz, Descartes, Buttler, Berkeley, loom large over that field.

H: I'm sure I'm not the only one baffled by your deterministic notion that philosophy has a "course". And how convenient that you miss out all the major thinkers who DON'T support your thesis (Spinoza, Hume, JS Mill, Marx.... shall we go on?)

M: At the turn of the 18th into the 19th century, in America a burgeoning sense of class consciousness began to grow as Wesley's Methodists and other groups sought rights for the poor. In both America and England Christians fought slavery, and campaigned for universal suffrage and women's suffrage. The first women's suffrage group in America, and the first abolition of
slavery group in America were both started by Phoebe Palmer and the Methodist Women. In England Lady Huntington (also Methodist) fought Slavery, and both in England and America the Quakers did a great deal to bring slavery to an end. Evangelists such as Charles Finney fought for the abolition of slavery as well. In fact the unbelievers were slower to involve themselves in the fray.

H: Maybe because surprisingly few of them were slave traders or owners to start with...

M: Christians stocked the ranks of the early labor movement, figures like Mother Jones were religious leaders and risk their lives to give working people basic dignity and living wages. Walter Rouchenbush in the early part of the century published his work The Social Gospel, an early form of liberation theology.

H: Again, you ignore the far stronger anti-clerical thread which ran through these movements. For every one who has heard of Rouchenbush, I can find many more who know if Marx and William Morris...

M: In The Holocaust Christians risked their lives to hide Jews form the Nazis. Oscar Schendler was a Christian but others all over the Netherlands, and in France at Lo Chambo, where the whole village took part in the plot, Christians worked to save Jews and to oppose the evil of the day; and some died for it.

H: Ah yes, as in the film "Schendler's Lest". And what did the guards have on their belt buckles? 'Gott mit uns'. Yes, some Christians tried to help; most who called themselves Christians did not. Communist partisans fighting back against the Nazis were far more numerous than Christian ones... The pope failed to help Rome's Jews, the German army had Christian chaplains, need I go on?

M: IN Latin America a vital Christian movement, actually many movements, have worked for almost 50 years to bring an end to oppression brought on by death squads and right-wing regimes.

H: Bully for them. Does that really excuse your views? How many LAtin American countries have you worked actively in? How many death squads have you faced? Just wondered...

M: The Christian tradition has been responsible for many problems and many travesties, but in the subtext there is a noble tradition, but intellectual and socially aware which has produced the greatest and most noble Western culture has to offer.

H: What do we say to that folks?

Audience: ZZZZZzzzzzzzzzz......

Audience: ! ! What time is it? What planet are we on?

H: That's all for now folks - see you next week!