Opus Dei It Is Gruesome - Road to the Middle Class

SHOULD CHRISTIANS emulate the Muslims? Should they tear the place up and burn a few multiplexes when Hollywood produces a blasphemous movie like The Da Vinci Code?

Mary Wakefield went to see the movie and found herself cringing after about fifteen minutes.

Five minutes into the film, I began to squint with embarrassment, and after 15 I slid down in my seat so as not to catch a Christian eye. The flick itself is daft... but the attack on Christianity is breathtaking.

After the movie she exchanged a couple of words with Jack Valero, PR man for Opus Dei, �for once without his trademark grin.�

"It is gruesome to see my brothers and sisters represented in this awful way, it bears no relation to reality," he said.

Hollywood is, after all, just a bunch of artists. They get their anti-religious bigotry because it is in the air. Anti-religious bigotry is in the air because believers in our modern secular religions higher up the food chain, the MSM and the universities, fill the public square with their secular culture and their secular religion. Hollywood types pick it up and turn it into movies.

How can you blame them? They experience their anti-religious art as an enlightened and creative challenge to a backward superstition. They want to enlighten the world and convert it to their secular religion of government-run compassion and sensitivity and individual creativity, and they are completely right to understand Christianity as a stake poised above their beautiful prostrate bodies, about to be driven into their enlightened secular hearts.

(Yes, of course history is witness to countless religious wars conducted in the name of God. But what do you think the great wars of the twentieth century were all about? They were wars provoked by militant secular religions.)

The culture war is a religious war. It is a war between a God-based religion and a secular religion. It probably won�t come to an end until one side wins.

Nobody can know who will come out on top. But there is this to think about. The secular world view may be helpful and beneficial to an educated, creative elite. It is, after all, their religion. But the record shows that it is utter ruin to the folk trying to make it in the city. That is why the welfare state has made the inner city into a war zone of joblessness, helplessness, and hopelessness—and brutal violence. The people who have just arrived in the city need not so much material as spiritual aid.

That is something that our secular elite just cannot understand.

Sphere: Related Content |

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

TAGS

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

What Liberals Think About Conservatives

[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican

Liberal Coercion

[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

mysql close 0