I keep asking myself the same questions today. Why are our political leaders unable to see the handwriting on the wqall? Why is the electroate continually bamboozled by lies from Mass Media Podpeople and politicians *spit*? And even, are the people bamboozled sheeple or complicit in the crimes against society perpetrated by Mass Media podpeople, politicians *spit* and their ilk? And if wittingly complicit, why? Perhaps one portion of the answer can be found in this 2005 post from the old Blogspot days
On biblical illiteracy
If the cornerstone is crumbling, what of the building it once upheld?
Interesting piece in The Weekly Standard . In his article “Bible Illiteracy in America,†David Gelernter outlines the historical impact the Bible has had on America and hints at what the future may hold for a biblically illiterate people. Thought-provoking. A taste:
“THE GENEVA BIBLE became and remained the Puritans’ favorite. It had marginal notes that Puritans liked–but King James and the Church of England deemed them obnoxious. The notes were anti-monarchy and pro-republic–â€Âuntrue, seditious, and savouring too much of dangerous and traitorous conceits,†the king said. Under his sponsorship a new Bible was prepared (without interpretive notes) by 47 of the best scholars in the land. The King James version appeared in 1611–intended merely as a modest improvement over previous translations. But it happened to be a literary masterpiece of stupendous proportions. Purely on artistic grounds it ranks with Homer, Dante, Shakespeare–Western literature’s greatest achievements. In terms of influence and importance, it flattens the other three.â€Â
Oh, and Gelernter also briefly points out where to lay the axe to the common lies about Puritans, as well. Of course, since most Americans are as historically illiterate as they are biblically illiterate, little of what Gelernter says will have much context for most folks.
A society with no sense of its own history will lurch from one faddish thought to another without any genuine critical faculty to assess what is good or ill. Gelenter’s article points out one of the important anchors we have cast away, resulting in just that very cultural character: rootless, we are “blown by every wind of teaching…â€Â
Monday doldrums or simply recognizing the fact that my children will have to survive as adults in a land of illiterate pagans?
*sigh*
Buried deeply in the (very lengthy) afterward to the article are gems like this one:
“College students today are (spiritually speaking) the driest timber I have ever come across. Mostly they know little or nothing about religion; little or nothing about Americanism. Mostly no one ever speaks to them about truth and beauty, or nobility or honor or greatness. They are empty–spiritually bone dry–because no one has ever bothered to give them anything spiritual that is worth having. Platitudes about diversity and tolerance and multiculturalism are thin gruel for intellectually growing young people.â€Â
Indeed.
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Historical and biblical illiteracy may hold a part of it, but I think the greater part is wishful thinking. We WANT to think the moslems aren’t out to get us, and we WANT to think that societies on other continents have just had bad circumstances or bad things done to them. We don’t want to think that things may be, on occasions, irreparable to the point of having to kill a man, or that in a world where a terrorist can fly across the globe in a jetplane in 18 hours, there may not be time to heal. We want to think that people are basically nice and we don’t have to act, but the reality is, they’re not.
People would rather believe that a maverick president who is trying to change their view of the world and trouble them with scary thoughts is an incompetent, horrible, fascist imbecile then believe that terrorists are out to kill us, and there’s the problem. The media intoxicates the world by making them think it really isn’t that bad, and that once we dump off this “dumb” Texan, everything will be okay. And by doing this, they make Bush the scapegoat for all our troubles, and turn Iraq in to Vietnam.
“It will be easier for the people to believe a great lie then a small one.” -Lenin
Indeed, Jeremy. Do note though that the wishful thinking (and other self-delusionary tactics :-)) you describe would have a harder time gaining a serious hearing in a public arena less clogged by intellectual (and other *sigh) sloth, greed and deliberate deception. And a more generally literate–not only able to puzzle out words in text but able to understand those words– population with a grasp of its cultural history and an ability to actually handle some basic maths, etc., would be harder to decieve.
[Note that sloth and greed are but two of the many things that biblical literacy can at least partially address, where nothing that modern ethicists who strip discourse bare of a couple of thousand years of ethical discourse influenced by biblical literacy can speak.]
Our society has become a celebrity wasteland focused on Britney Spears’ shaven pinhead, ignorant of the history that brought us to where we are and the depth of Western culture upon which it was built. “Traditional values” are touted by rootless (non)conservative cultural illiterates as an anodyne. But what tradition’s values? And whence came they?
“There is a tide… ” and we are at that place in its current where we MUST catch the tide or be lost, I fear. Now, we have cultural illiterates packing our schools… “teaching” the citizens of the future. (Yes, many of them are well-meaning, hard-working, dedicated and caring individuals. But that only worsens the problem when they are largely culturally illiterate and trapped in a corrupt system of (mis)education. *sigh*).
We have Mass Media Podpeople who are even more culturally illterate than teachers, politicians and Academia Nuthouse Fruitcakes and who influence their ever more enstupiated American sheeple flocks with ever more dumbed down, corrupted entertainment.
Oh, the culturally illiterate Academia Nuthouse Fruitcakes? One example (of many–MANY) in just my personal experience: A “professor of rhetoric” who was an English department chair in a major East coast university once asked me in email (in offlist talk spurred from an elist conversation) if my meme-ish reference to another poster’s argument as “Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” was a reference to… Faulkner.
That’s right. An English department chair who had never read MacBeth. TFurther conversation revealed he’d never read Shakespeare at all.
More and more typical.
No wonder multi-culturalism, for example, considers Aztec culture as being equal in importance with ancient Greek culture: multi-cultis by-and-large simply do not know better. And so we have idiocies like “Aztlan” and “La Raza” given not just equal status with Western Civilization values and history and current society, culture and law in the public arena, but favored status, wherein sober (and completely assinine) arguments for ceding the rule of the U.S. to Mexico are put forth.
From a study of genocide about two decades ago in pursuit of a(nother) degree:
Somehow we can grasp a few people being killed, yet when we speak/think of genocide, the case is large numbers and not faces of individuals. Difficult for us to grasp that those hundreds/thousands/millions each was a real person, with a life, a personality, a family – those characteristics of a person that causes us to “attach” to our fellow human beings….
This I offer to go along with Jason’s astute commentary above. Easy to pick on one person, than 1.5B, that even if 1% are the only fanatics, still leaves us with 1.5M people, which…is about the size of our Armed forces today and look at how formidable that group is.
As soon as the blog gets moved, I’ll be on “The Party of Death” and “They’ll Support Bleeding Them to Death.” I’m furious at our leadership in this nation, that has made a game of holding political power, rather than an honorable profession….
xformed,
I can hardly wait to read your take on “The Party of Death”. I can’t help but wonder how your observances might dovetail–or not–with my observations about the Cult of Death (Islam).
But comparing a WAG of “1.5M” Islamic terrorists extracted from a worldwide population of about 1-1.5B Muslims fails my view of reality on a couple of fronts:
1) As many (wiser, more experienced and knowledgeable) observers have noted, Islamic culture strongly militates against the kind of sophisticated, complex force projection using the amazing technological advancements in armament and unit tactics available to modern armies. Partly–though only partly–because Islamic leaders must keep their followers ill-informed and dependent. Islamic culture as a whole will keep any 1-to-1 comparison of force projection ill-aligned with real world. (Of course, that’s assuming we would let slip the dogs of war… *sigh*)
2) But then, the numbers are heavily skewed in favor of Muslims by the vast pool of illiterate young Muslim men, many of whom are–like the even vaster pool of communist Chinese young men–filled to the brim with frustrated hormones… And the terrorists have at the very least the tacit support of every Muslim on the planet, regardless of what lying so-called “moderate” Muslims may weakly protest. Quantity has a quality all its own, as you know.
So, while a 1-to-1 comparison fails a reality check, the picture may be bleaker than a 1-to-1 comparison, because a.) Dhimmicrats, Mass Media Podpeople and their ilk all refuse to admit the truth about Islam and Islamic cultures/societies–indeed, openlu lie about such things to the point that subliterate Americans are gulled into thinking there are such things as “moderate” Muslims (who, even in their so-called “moderation” revere the FIRST Islamic terrorist, Mohammed, the Butcher of Medina). And b.) in the current atmosphere of lies and pursuit of surrender of the West, it is highly unlikely that the armed forces will be loosed to visit upon the heads of terrorists and terrorist-sponsors what they can do so very, very well: kill people and break things.