Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Mon Jan 10, 2022 4:37 pm
...a man from a Christian culture...European...American culture. It is intensely impositional. It remakes the world and, as it crashes forth, it remodels the world.
Here we have to make the key distinction.
You're conflating American and European with Christian. I see no reason for this, other than the common misperception that having a significant population of Christians baptizes the larger culture and somehow makes the culture itself "Christian." No such thing is ever the case, of course. There are more Christians, at least nominally, today in China than in America or Europe.
Nobody is so unthinking as to claim this makes China "Christian." America and Europe both function on entirely secular procedures and methods, even when they tip the cap to "Christianity." Anybody who lives in either place knows that.
And I also think you are very wrong in another sense: you can very much compel, and impel, and influence, how people think & see through the education they receive.
Education, rightly done, does not indoctrinate. It informs, enables, empowers and enlightens the faculties, but opens up the mind to personal investigation and personal judgment. That's critical thinking. And that sort of liberal value was what was held up as the goal and ideal in education in the early part of the previous century, until the Left began to colonize public education. Nowadays, much of public education is systematic indoctrination. Critical thinking is downplayed, and conformity to the ideology of "Critical Theory" is emphasized. Independent critical faculties, science, reason and independence are diminished, and collectivism, "Social Justice" and groupthink are up-played. And there is no ideology more abused and rejected in public education today than Christianity.
This is indeed the "compelling, impelling, and influencing" of young people. But it is the secularists, not the religous who are doing it.
will he remain the slave of his own passions and his own sins, or will he recognize his own condition, deny the demanding self, give himself over to that which is truly important and valuable, and live a new way?
This is another part of the *preamble* that I hoped to develop. It is possible to move from a sin-concept to a shame-concept,
No movement is needed. To realize that one is a sinner is to recognize the fact of one's shame.
But shame is a despised quality in our ethos. That's too bad: because while shame can, at times be induced for bad reasons, it is most naturally the expression of a conscience that has become aware of its misdeeds or bad character. A person who has no shame is an evil person, a person with a seared conscience and a lack of moral integrity.
Some shame is good. Our society needs a great deal more of it than it will presently allow itself. If it had more shame, it would do less evil.
But the modern ethos despises shame. And why? Because
secularism has no cure for it. In a Godless world, there is no forgiveness, no cleansing, no repentance, no change, no escape, no recovery of purity, no healing, no restoration...only regret for things that have been done and cannot be changed now. And so it seems obvious to the modern mind that what we should do is simply avoid, downgrade and dismiss shame...for shame has no upside, no payoff, no benefit, and leads nowhere for it.
To be steeped in sinfulness is one thing, and produced certain results, but to really devlop a sense of shame when one acts badly -- now that is clearly a different thing.
Right. One can be very wicked, and still be telling oneself that one has no need to feel shame.
You can see the modern attitude to shame in phrases like, "fat shaming" and "slut shaming." The implication of these coinages is that shaming people is bad, because there's nothing they can do now about their promiscuity or corpulence, and it's nobody's business to tell them to change anyway.
Of course, if one has cancer, it does no good at all to deny the diagnosis. But if one thinks one's cancer is terminal anyway, one might have reason to prefer not to know.
And I also think that it is quite different to see oneself, and genuinely to believe oneself, to be a partner with God rather than a slave of God, produces a different sort of individuality.
What about the Biblical term: "
friend of God"?
Will he accept metanoia and enter the weltanschauung of God? Or will he persist in his own way?
A good question, of course, but
metanoia can be many different things.
Not really.
One can change one's mind in many ways, of course: but Biblically speaking,
metanoia is first and foremost about one's personal moral condition. And about that, there are really only two ways to go.
