Will The New Prophets be like the Millennial Traditional Catholics?

[pbrower2a]

(09-30-2021, 10:29 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(09-29-2021, 08:42 PM)AspieMillennial Wrote:

(09-29-2021, 05:36 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Secularism better respects minority views, even in religion, than does fundamentalism. Fundamentalist Muslims cannot understand Fundamentalist Christians even if they have similar psychological profiles. Secularism is tolerant unless it has a Marxist-Leninist bent.

Today's Irreligiousness does have a Marxist-Leninist bent. They don't tolerate Christian views.

Why does being open minded portend Marxist-Leninism?  I see the Fundamentalist Christians as truly dogmatic, so yes, any group not kowtowing to that dogma may be considered oppositional.  So what?

If anything, I see Marxist-Leninists as extremely close-minded and intolerant, at least before 1989. The question is whether people claiming the Marxist-Leninist heritage have scrapped the support for dictatorships that exclude any dissent whether internal or external. China and Vietnam have scrapped Marxism-Leninism-Maoism as an economic rationale while maintaining the dictatorships in their countries. North Korea is Hell, and the current boss of the Communist Party of Cuba may find himself choosing whether to be another Gorbachev or another Ceausescu. Laos is almost as irrelevant as a country can be on the world scene.

There still is a Communist Party of the USA, and it claims to stand for political pluralism and the Bill of Rights. It does not field candidates and has typically supported Democrats while excoriating Republicans. It welcomes people of faith, reinterpreting a badly-written paragraph that was long the rationale for official atheism among Marxism-Leninism. (The person who believes in nothing is much more suspect than someone who has disagreements on theology unless those disagreements have the tag "Believe it or burn in Hell". Of course, Donald Trump leaves much to excoriate even if one is not a Marxist of any kind. Then again, I cannot attach Donald Trump to any moral tradition.

(really to Aspie Millennial):

I recognize well that secularism has no satisfying promise of any purpose in life that outlasts life. Religion can offer an Afterlife that costs the believer nothing. Whether God exists or does not, and what His Nature is is a theological speculation that usually gravitates to one's heritage. My view is heretical in any religious tradition.

First, one must ask the question "What is God?" The only reason for me to believe in any Divine Presence is that the universe makes sense (whoops -- that makes miracles and special rescues by God nearly impossible), and it takes only one Entity to decide the core laws of physics, mathematics, and the dialectic. A universe in which 2+8 is 11 one day and 9 the next is absurd. Different rules in the binding curve of energy might make iron rare (and life on a rocky planet like the Earth impossible) or make arsenic common (arrgh!), which it would be if germanium were the low point of binding energy. It is a good thing for life on our planet that beryllium-8 is terribly unstable, as (1) beryllium is highly toxic, and (2) that would cause the Sun to have started fusing carbon by now, in which case the Earth would already be a molten mass of silicates and metals. The universe works by predictable rules of logic that most of us understand well. We exist, therefore God? I don't know if that is as truthful as Cogito ergo sum by Descartes, but Exigo ergo exigit Deus is little less pithy.

(If you want my view on the hereafter... I may be saying more of myself than of God, but that is how most people do things anyway. Clear commandments inherent in mass self-interest exist  that make life as secure as it can be and prosperity and progress possible. Do evil and you will be judged harshly; you may face some harsh purification of your vices so that you can like Heaven. Be evil enough, and you are damned. God is powerful enough to select what rules by which He judges the recently-departed... so if you were a Nazi war criminal you will find that God is Jewish. If you bombed African-American churches while a Ku Kluxist you risk finding that God is African Methodist Episcopalian. If you were one of the Serb butchers of Bosnian Muslims you will find that God is Allah and Muhammad is His most important Prophet. A benign God is no gangster... and He has no use for gangsters in His Domain. As for some other vices... I don't want to be where drunks and addicts stumble around me as the only sober soul, let alone among terrorists, rapists, or thieves.

OK, anyone can be an amateur journalist, historian, or even theologian and perhaps I do reasonably well at any one of the three, at least some of the time. But that might be "reasonably well" by standards of a century ago and not now.