Philosophy Now Forum

Nick_A recommended an article in New Republic.

----parties necessarily corrupt the souls of their members. “Political parties,” she writes, “are organizations that are publicly and officially designed for the purpose of killing in all souls the sense of truth and of justice.” The member of a party delegates his conscience to the party, accepting its verdict on all political and moral questions; a person will do “as a Communist” or “as a Nazi” things that he would never do as himself. Once again, Weil brings the discussion back to the question of truth. Independent thought, she writes, necessarily seeks the truth: “If ... one acknowledges that there is one truth, one cannot think anything but the truth.” It is only when one stops searching for truth and starts calculating partisan advantage that one falls into what Weil calls “inner darkness.”

This helps me to understand what Nick means by The Great Beast. I do concur with the writer of the article especially with claims about saddling people with unthinking party loyalties. I disagree with Nick that liberal, child-centred, education is as bad as any other sort of schooling. Child-centred schooling by its very nature is not institutionalised but is led by the needs of the children their moral, aesthetic , physical, and cognitive development.

All this child-centred schooling costs more than simple old-fashioned indoctrination which was aimed at producing compliant , efficient, citizens. This one of the reasons that my politics is Left-wing, as Right-wing austerity cannot inject the money for plenty of good teachers and well built schools.

https://newrepublic.com/article/119305/ ... rb-edition

Belinda wrote: ↑Sat Jul 08, 2017 10:15 am Nick_A recommended an article in New Republic.

----parties necessarily corrupt the souls of their members. “Political parties,” she writes, “are organizations that are publicly and officially designed for the purpose of killing in all souls the sense of truth and of justice.” The member of a party delegates his conscience to the party, accepting its verdict on all political and moral questions; a person will do “as a Communist” or “as a Nazi” things that he would never do as himself. Once again, Weil brings the discussion back to the question of truth. Independent thought, she writes, necessarily seeks the truth: “If ... one acknowledges that there is one truth, one cannot think anything but the truth.” It is only when one stops searching for truth and starts calculating partisan advantage that one falls into what Weil calls “inner darkness.”

This helps me to understand what Nick means by The Great Beast. I do concur with the writer of the article especially with claims about saddling people with unthinking party loyalties. I disagree with Nick that liberal, child-centred, education is as bad as any other sort of schooling. Child-centred schooling by its very nature is not institutionalised but is led by the needs of the children their moral, aesthetic , physical, and cognitive development.

All this child-centred schooling costs more than simple old-fashioned indoctrination which was aimed at producing compliant , efficient, citizens. This one of the reasons that my politics is Left-wing, as Right-wing austerity cannot inject the money for plenty of good teachers and well built schools.

https://newrepublic.com/article/119305/ ... rb-edition

Child centered education sounds good but is impractical in secular society which only stresses cognitive development with the aim of serving society. Plato stressed the importance of gymnastics for developing the body but the secular emphasis stresses either winning or equality in losing. Not much human development there. Secularism creates its own morality and its aesthetics doesn't even recognize a difference between art and expression. Under these conditions, what does child centered education teach? Money isn't the problem. The problem is the human condition that has created the Great Beast as its idol. Secular intolerance will do what it can to support the idolatry of the Great Beast assuring an inhuman education. What is needed are people within education who understand the human condition and its effects on humanity. Unfortunately they are shouted down by secular intolerance so kids grow up in a meaningless generation with only drugs to imitate the desired spiritual experience. Secular intolerance wins but what does it win?

Nick_A wrote:

Child centered education sounds good but is impractical in secular society which only stresses cognitive development with the aim of serving society. Plato stressed the importance of gymnastics for developing the body but the secular emphasis stresses either winning or equality in losing. Not much human development there. Secularism creates its own morality and its aesthetics doesn't even recognize a difference between art and expression. Under these conditions, what does child centered education teach? Money isn't the problem. The problem is the human condition that has created the Great Beast as its idol. Secular intolerance will do what it can to support the idolatry of the Great Beast assuring an inhuman education. What is needed are people within education who understand the human condition and its effects on humanity. Unfortunately they are shouted down by secular intolerance so kids grow up in a meaningless generation with only drugs to imitate the desired spiritual experience. Secular intolerance wins but what does it win?

What you know about children's experience at school is not what I know. I am actually experienced in this field, and have young relatives who went to state schools so I have evidence to hand.
The above from you, Nick, is not theory or argument but unsubstantiated assertion
I guess that you don't believe that you, Immanuel Can, and Simone are the only people who have escaped the maw of the Great Beast. Can you say who are those people who are not "secular"?
What are the connections between "secular" people and being swallowed by the Great Beast? What morality do you think "secular" people have which differs from the morality of people who are not "secular"?

You wrote: "-----secular intolerance so kids grow up in a meaningless generation with only drugs to imitate the desired spiritual experience". I know that the present generation of children in America and the UK, in urban areas anyway, lack fulfilment. The Great Beast teaches it's good to be sexualised when very young, that it's good to expect no suffering but constant pleasure, that individuals cannot survive without the supervision of the Great Beast, that failure is failure to have a lot of money or fame, that girls should be very thin to emaciation, that outward signs of success are more important than souls. You and Immanuel Can have yet to explain how the religious life teaches initiative,coping skills, physical skills, critical skills, respect for self and others, humility, cooperation, and benevolence to others. I assure you that modern school teachers do work very hard to teach all of those, and in the UK under a government that prizes austerity, school teachers are working under a lot of stress to commit to children's educational needs.

Belinda

You wrote: "-----secular intolerance so kids grow up in a meaningless generation with only drugs to imitate the desired spiritual experience". I know that the present generation of children in America and the UK, in urban areas anyway, lack fulfilment. The Great Beast teaches it's good to be sexualised when very young, that it's good to expect no suffering but constant pleasure, that individuals cannot survive without the supervision of the Great Beast, that failure is failure to have a lot of money or fame, that girls should be very thin to emaciation, that outward signs of success are more important than souls. You and Immanuel Can have yet to explain how the religious life teaches initiative,coping skills, physical skills, critical skills, respect for self and others, humility, cooperation, and benevolence to others. I assure you that modern school teachers do work very hard to teach all of those, and in the UK under a government that prizes austerity, school teachers are working under a lot of stress to commit to children's educational needs.

I haven’t had te good fortune to discuss education with Immanuel Can so cannot speak for him.

You cannot teacn what you don’t believe. Kids see right through it. It’s not that there are no good teachers or even teachers with potential. The problem is that their efforts are largely destroyed by secular intolerance.

A religious life begins with the attitude of humility in front of a conscious source we are attracted to which offers human meaning and purpose as opposed to the hypocrisy which dominates our lives.

"The combination of these two facts — the longing in the depth of the heart for absolute good, and the power, though only latent, of directing attention and love to a reality beyond the world and of receiving good from it — constitutes a link which attaches every man without exception to that other reality.

Whoever recognizes that reality recognizes also that link. Because of it, he holds every human being without any exception as something sacred to which he is bound to show respect.
This is the only possible motive for universal respect towards all human beings. Whatever formulation of belief or disbelief a man may choose to make, if his heart inclines him to feel this respect, then he in fact also recognizes a reality other than this world's reality. Whoever in fact does not feel this respect is alien to that other reality also." ~ Simone Weil

What is the ideal purpose of education for the whole student? The secularist claims it is adaptation to cave life and indoctrination into standards such as political correctness created by cave experts. Universalists who have become aware of Man's relationship to higher consciousness. know that the goal of human education is "awakening" for those open to it as opposed to the indoctrination of secular education.

The Great Beast offers the greatest good for the secularist. The secularist becomes intolerant of those who suggest the importance of grace to develop emotional quality much like text books develop intellectual quality. When the Great Beast (society as a whole) loses respect for the Source and the ability to feel its importance, then commercialism and materialism takes its place as is happening now.

I see no reason to praise spirit killers and secular intolerants. It seems far more sensible to strive to understand why their influence is so dominant and what can be done to reveal its emptiness..

The New Republic Weil article:

Crucial to this process is the assumption that, as Weil puts it, “Reason is identical in all men, whereas their passions most often differ.” Cancel out the passions, and what is left will be reason, justice, the truth: “All men converge on what is just and true, whereas mendacity and crime make them diverge without end.”

One thing that Plato teaches about the great beast is that the passions do not cancel each other out. This is why the in the Republic democracy eventually leads to tyranny. The demagogue knows how to manipulate the passions of the mob. The mob is characterized by the abandonment reason. Instill anger and resentment in the people and they will attack whatever scapegoat is offered for sacrifice.

If truth and justice are Forms, things that can only be known by ascent from the cave, then we cave dwellers know nothing of them other than the images provided to us. Someone can rise to power either by appeal to popular belief or, more insidiously, by claiming to know what truth and justice themselves are and by convincing people to distrust any beliefs but those of the would be demagogue, who claims to have escaped the lies we have been fed in the cave.

If the peope are convinced that they are in a cave of ignorance and that here is someone who knows what they do not know, then they can be convinced to follow blindly. When the guise of knowledge is transcendent we should have learned of its danger from history. And it is here that we find the wisdom of secularism, which holds whether one is religious or not. The separation of church and state protects the people from the establishment of unquestionable authority in matters of both mundane and transcendent.

I agree with the following criticism in the article:

Democracy functions by recognizing that politics is not a matter of finding the right answer, but of coming up with an answer that everyone agree to live with. That is why liberal democracy never satisfies those, like Weil, who are in search of perfect truth and goodness, or who see politics as a form of soul-making. In this sense, Weil herself has more in common with the totalitarian parties she attacks than she does with liberalism. Like them, she insists on a single truth, and demonizes those who oppose her as enemies of truth.

The danger in American politics today is that, on more and more issues, we are falling into this same Manicheanism, in which each party accuses the other, not just of error, but of treason and evil. Democracy only works if our loyalty to the collective is more powerful than our insistence on our own righteousness. When righteousness and loyalty cannot be reconciled—as they finally couldn’t over the issue of slavery—democracy fails, and the only resort is to violence. Parties ought to help avert that kind of apocalyptic conflict, by forming coalition in support of political consensus. The more ideologically embittered our parties become, the greater the danger we face of returning to Simone Weil’s world, where the very word “party” can only be a curse.

The danger that Plato warns against is not the great beast but of those who know how to train it. They may use religion as a whip, either by advocating for religion or advocating against it. Indeed, we should be wary of demagoguery in whatever robe or flag it wraps itself in.

Fooloso4

The New Republic Weil article:

Crucial to this process is the assumption that, as Weil puts it, “Reason is identical in all men, whereas their passions most often differ.” Cancel out the passions, and what is left will be reason, justice, the truth: “All men converge on what is just and true, whereas mendacity and crime make them diverge without end.”

One thing that Plato teaches about the great beast is that the passions do not cancel each other out. This is why the in the Republic democracy eventually leads to tyranny. The demagogue knows how to manipulate the passions of the mob. The mob is characterized by the abandonment reason. Instill anger and resentment in the people and they will attack whatever scapegoat is offered for sacrifice.

You do not understand Simone. Canceling out the passions means reason without emotion or exactly what secular intolerance is incapable of. Plato makes sense. Our egoistic emotions force reason to deny the experience of what he taught including the vertical relationship between knowledge and opinion.

I

f the people are convinced that they are in a cave of ignorance and that here is someone who knows what they do not know, then they can be convinced to follow blindly. When the guise of knowledge is transcendent we should have learned of its danger from history. And it is here that we find the wisdom of secularism, which holds whether one is religious or not. The separation of church and state protects the people from the establishment of unquestionable authority in matters of both mundane and transcendent. ……………………

……………………..The danger that Plato warns against is not the great beast but of those who know how to train it. They may use religion as a whip, either by advocating for religion or advocating against it. Indeed, we should be wary of demagoguery in whatever robe or flag it wraps itself in.

Secularism is an expression of the blindness of the Great Beast closed to the experience of the third direction of thought so is trapped in duality like any other beast. Wisdom cannot be expected of it anymore than from any other beast. As a whole it is governed by social force.

Simone Weil’s essay on the Iliad is considered by many to be the finest explanation of Homer’s epic poem. It is a description of social force. Of course appreciating her essay automatically puts the supremacy of the Great Beast into question which is too insulting for many to consider. From the beginning:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Iliad ... e#Synopsis

Weil introduces the central theme of her essay in the first three sentences:
"The true hero, the true subject, the centre of the Iliad, is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man's flesh shrinks away. In this work at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relation to force, as swept away, blinded, by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to." She proceeds to define force as that which turns anyone subjected to it into a thing – at worst, into a corpse. Weil discusses the emotional and psychological violence one suffers if forced to submit to force even when not physically hurt, holding up the slave and the supplicant as examples. She goes on to say force is dangerous not just to the victim, but to whoever controls it, as it intoxicates, partly by numbing the senses of reason and pity. Force thus can turn even its possessor into a thing – an unthinking automaton driven by rage or lust. The essay relates how the Iliad suggests that no one truly controls force; as everyone in the poem, even the mighty Achilles and Agamemnon, suffer at least briefly when the force of events turns against them. Weil says only by using force in moderation can one escape its ill effects, but that the restraint to do this is very rarely found, and is only a means of temporary escape from force's inevitable heft.

The Great Beast is a slave to force. It is its nature. How can wisdom be expected of it? You think that abandoning the religious influence will automatically free humanity to deal with force. It cannot. Since we are as we are, everything remains as it is.

Of course the essence of religion has become secularized and corrupt. Hypocrisy is a normal result of secularism. But those like you and Greta would seek to demean and destroy the attraction to the essence of religion calling it fantasy and find victory in spirit killing in defense of secularism. Suppose Simone is right when she describes atheism as a purification?

Religion in so far as it is a source of consolation is a hindrance to true faith; and in this sense atheism is a purification. I have to be an atheist with that part of myself which is not made for God. Among those in whom the supernatural part of themselves has not been awakened, the atheists are right and the believers wrong.
- Simone Weil, Faiths of Meditation; Contemplation of the divine
the Simone Weil Reader, edited by George A. Panichas (David McKay Co. NY 1977) p 417

That is why St. John of the Cross calls faith a night. With those who have received a Christian education, the lower parts of the soul become attached to these mysteries when they have no right at all to do so. That is why such people need a purification of which St. John of the Cross describes the stages. Atheism and incredulity constitute an equivalent of such a purification.
- Simone Weil, Faiths of Meditation; Contemplation of the divine
the Simone Weil Reader, edited by George A. Panichas (David McKay Co. NY 1977) p 418

Simone Weil has observed: "There are two atheisms of which one is a purification of the notion of God."
- William Robert Miller (ed.), The New Christianity (New York: Delacorte Press 1967) p 267; in Paul Schilling,
God in an age of atheism (Abingdon: Nashville 1969) p 17

Amazing! One young woman has more spiritual depth and understanding of human conscious potential than all these puffed up secular experts dedicated to spirit killing that have become dominant in modern society. They seek to kill the spirit and glorify the Beast as the source of wisdom. I am happy to support those who support becoming capable of feeling and opening to human meaning and purpose at the expense of misguided secularism including secular religious corruption. They are a brave minority in this day and age that glorifies technology. We have chosen our sides.

Belinda wrote: ↑Sat Jul 08, 2017 10:15 am
All this child-centred schooling costs more than simple old-fashioned indoctrination which was aimed at producing compliant , efficient, citizens. This one of the reasons that my politics is Left-wing, as Right-wing austerity cannot inject the money for plenty of good teachers and well built schools.

Re: money and education.

Your observation brings to mind a TED talk. To summarize: a computer was placed in public view in an Indian village that had no knowledge of computers. No explanation of any kind was offered. No instructions, no reasons why it was there, no explanation of what it was. The researcher left, and then returned in a few weeks to see what had happened. I'm a bit hazy on the details, but I think it didn't have a keyboard.

In addition, the kids there lived in poverty. Literally, dirt poor and living on a dirt floor. However, and this is important, they did not have an impoverished state of mind, which should be noted. Their minds, innocent of the cacophony of modern electronic life that absorbs the attention of youngsters today, in comparision must have been as clear and open as only eyes connected to curiosity can be.

Of course there’s much more. If you’re interested and can’t find the talk, I’ll personally search for it.

Give a motivated kid a library card and what that offers. Maybe point in the right direction, if asked.

Nick_A wrote:

You cannot teacn what you don’t believe. Kids see right through it. It’s not that there are no good teachers or even teachers with potential. The problem is that their efforts are largely destroyed by secular intolerance.

A religious life begins with the attitude of humility in front of a conscious source we are attracted to which offers human meaning and purpose as opposed to the hypocrisy which dominates our lives.

Except for your remark about " secular intolerance" I agree .

Walker wrote:

Give a motivated kid a library card and what that offers. Maybe point in the right direction, if asked.

Children's literature is a great source for learning. As for all literature including fiction the criteria for good literature apply, and for children's literature the additional criterion applies that the book has to be interesting for the child reader. The special problem which the popularity electronic media has caused is that many children don't have time for reading books.

Fooloso4 wrote (today 1.15 am):

The danger that Plato warns against is not the great beast but of those who know how to train it. They may use religion as a whip, either by advocating for religion or advocating against it. Indeed, we should be wary of demagoguery in whatever robe or flag it wraps itself in.

Nick, please see that it's not only "secular" people who can, as Fooloso4 says ,"train" the Great Beast, it's also religious people of faith who can and do train the Great Beast to obey their selfish desires.

Nick_A wrote:

Fooloso4
The New Republic Weil article:

Crucial to this process is the assumption that, as Weil puts it, “Reason is identical in all men, whereas their passions most often differ.” Cancel out the passions, and what is left will be reason, justice, the truth: “All men converge on what is just and true, whereas mendacity and crime make them diverge without end.”

One thing that Plato teaches about the great beast is that the passions do not cancel each other out. This is why the in the Republic democracy eventually leads to tyranny. The demagogue knows how to manipulate the passions of the mob. The mob is characterized by the abandonment reason. Instill anger and resentment in the people and they will attack whatever scapegoat is offered for sacrifice.
(Nick replied to Fooloso4)You do not understand Simone. Canceling out the passions means reason without emotion or exactly what secular intolerance is incapable of. Plato makes sense. Our egoistic emotions force reason to deny the experience of what he taught including the vertical relationship between knowledge and opinion.

But it's not possible to "cancel out emotions" unless the subject is dead, drugged with a lot of tranquillisers, unaware in dreamless sleep, or suffering from hypothyroidism. Indeed we don't want to "cancel out " emotions. What we need to do, all of us, is refine our raw, and even our diseased, emotional reactions with reasoned thought, foresight, ethics, and insight into our own psyches.

Nick, you had written "You cannot teacn what you don’t believe. Kids see right through it. It’s not that there are no good teachers or even teachers with potential. The problem is that their efforts are largely destroyed by secular intolerance."

Can't you see that evil thoughts, words, and acts are intolerable to both religious people of faith and also to "secular" people? People of good will have one heart and voice regarding evil no matter whether they are believers or unbelievers.

Belinda wrote: ↑Mon Jul 10, 2017 10:18 am Children's literature is a great source for learning. As for all literature including fiction the criteria for good literature apply, and for children's literature the additional criterion applies that the book has to be interesting for the child reader. The special problem which the popularity electronic media has caused is that many children don't have time for reading books.

If in doubt about one’s sex, get a blood test.

Confiscate all electronics at the school door.

Not even past giants had more time. Everyone gets the same daily time ration. 24 hours every day give or take, even all the folks who invented how to say “hi!, lol, and cool,” with handheld communicators, voice or text, via satellite. It’s not so much a matter of time or money, but rather, placement of attention that should be undistracted as possible from the purpose of the moment, which per topic, is reading, riting, and rithmetic. The 3 R’s. For instance, reducing distractions is the point of non-coed schools, which is a rather quaint anachronism in an age of gender neutrality, and becoming as rare as books in a library.

School should focus on input. The kid will take care of output. The teachers should make sure that the input isn't crap.

Belinda wrote: ↑Mon Jul 10, 2017 10:42 am But it's not possible to "cancel out emotions" unless the subject is dead, drugged with a lot of tranquillisers, unaware in dreamless sleep, or suffering from hypothyroidism. Indeed we don't want to "cancel out " emotions. What we need to do, all of us, is refine our raw, and even our diseased, emotional reactions with reasoned thought, foresight, ethics, and insight into our own psyches.

What about surgical lobotomy?

One can cancel emotions, but that’s to be avoided. Emotions are to be experienced with as much depth and expanse as possible. That’s why they’re there. The confusion arises with attachment to the emotions. One is attached when one is smaller than the emotion. When one is larger, attachment is not possible because the perspective of compassion cannot be ignored.

Raw emotion fuels the movement of life. Attachment is to be enslaved and emotion is attached to energy, which unchecked is destructive. Non-attached energy, undissipated by emotion which usually focuses on past or present, is movement of body, or verk in the present. The same energy applied to movement of mind is thought that directs the body. Mind directed by body is just as enslaved as energy can be to emotion.

For example, the teaching of Milarepa’s life demonstrates how he lost emotional attachment to the burden of his past via the stacking all those stones, should you feel like googling. In the course of human evolution one eventually does encounter the ego-nullifying effects of craftsmanship that requires stupefying labor, such as one encounters in stone wall-building competitions.

Nick_A:

Canceling out the passions means reason without emotion or exactly what secular intolerance is incapable of.

According to the article this is accomplished by:

... heeding the consensus that emerges from honest public discussion, in which “individual passions will neutralize one another and act as mutual counterweights.”

It has nothing to do with what secular intolerance is incapable of. It has to do with what the “great beast” is capable of if every individual is given a voice. It is an expression of the “general will” of society, that is, of the great beast. Unlike you, this is something she advocates for not against.

Nick_A:

As a whole it is governed by social force

.

And that is exactly what Weil is advocating. A social force that emerges when all individuals are given a voice and the passions of one cancel out the opposing passions of another.

The Great Beast is a slave to force. It is its nature. How can wisdom be expected of it?

When, according to Weil, each individual is given a voice.

You think that abandoning the religious influence will automatically free humanity to deal with force.

I said nothing of the sort. What I said is that religion can be used as a whip, either to advocate for or against religion. Advocating for abandoning religious influence is the very thing I said can be used as a whip to inflame the passions.

I also pointed the problem of the individual or, I might add, party, who claims to have achieved “vertical” knowledge and seeks to establish a state ruled by such individuals. As long as such claims remains a private matter it is perfectly consistent with secularism, but when one attempts to establish political authority on such claims then it is no longer consistent with secularism or with good government.

Of course the essence of religion has become secularized and corrupt.

Your attempt to impose your own notion of “the essence of religion” is highly suspect. It is a form of religious intolerance, corrupt, spirit killing, and hypocrisy.Neither you nor Weil are in a position of authority that allows you to dictate to others the motivation or direction of their religious search, struggle, belief, and practice. You have not attained the vertical knowledge you profess to seek and so do not possess the measure of it and cannot say who if anyone has found it.

I posted on the problem of Weil’s political philosophy. You have demonstrated that you have not even understood what it is she is claiming in the article you posted, and have been transparent in your effort to shift away from the criticism of her naive political claims, criticisms made not only by me but in the article, back to the comfort of hearing your own voice, endlessly repeating the same thing, goading others to respond in order to give you the opportunity to repeat it yet again.

Belinda

Nick, please see that it's not only "secular" people who can, as Fooloso4 says ,"train" the Great Beast, it's also religious people of faith who can and do train the Great Beast to obey their selfish desires.

You forget that what you are calling religious people are just advocates of secularized religion who are attached to their selfish desires as all other representatives of secular institutions.

Secularism seeks to animal train while the essence of religion seeks to awaken humanity to its normal meaning and purpose. You don’t seem to recognize the difference.

Nick, you had written "You cannot teacn what you don’t believe. Kids see right through it. It’s not that there are no good teachers or even teachers with potential. The problem is that their efforts are largely destroyed by secular intolerance."

Can't you see that evil thoughts, words, and acts are intolerable to both religious people of faith and also to "secular" people? People of good will have one heart and voice regarding evil no matter whether they are believers or unbelievers.

I’m sorry but this just reads like Oprah feelgoodism to me. The truth is that we are hypocrites. We say one thing and do another. That is the truth of the human condition and why it is said that “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

"Humanism was not wrong in thinking that truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are of infinite value, but in thinking that man can get them for himself without grace." ~ Simone Weil

As usual Simone hits the nail on the head. The secular idolatry which has the Great Beast as its idol or god and advocated by a secular attitude and intolerance within which Greta and fooloso4 are a part, must unconsciously struggle against the influence of grace entering society. I say unconsciously since it would be inhuman and demonic to do it consciously. The Great Beast is God for this attitude. If it were limited just to them it would be of no concern but it is a spirit killer for the young with a natural attraction to reality beyond what they experience around them. They need the light of grace to promote their psychological awakening but are denied by a dominant secularism which prevents it and focuses their attention on the transient attractions being offered by technology. A slow death. No Oprah feelgoodisms will do any good. It is the natural result of the attempt at a free society devolving into selfish secularism

Look t these kids in urban areas like Chicago for example killing each other. This is what secularism has created. Such abuse is only possible in the collective darkness of Plato’s cave which secular intolerance is all too eager to support..

Fooloso4

It has nothing to do with what secular intolerance is incapable of. It has to do with what the “great beast” is capable of if every individual is given a voice. It is an expression of the “general will” of society, that is, of the great beast. Unlike you, this is something she advocates for not against.

Why do you insist on involving yourself in ideas you clearly do not understand. Simone refers to an ideal impossible for the Beast because of what it has become. From the article:

But Weil is not about to make an argument in favor of a more limited version of party competition—for instance, the idea of the party as a “loyal opposition” in the British tradition, which challenges the government’s policies without attacking its legitimacy. Rather, Weil writes out of a Rousseauan tradition, according to which the task of government is to express the “general will” of a society. This general will is the true and just desire of the people, purged of any malicious private interest. It can be determined by heeding the consensus that emerges from honest public discussion, in which “individual passions will neutralize one another and act as mutual counterweights.” Crucial to this process is the assumption that, as Weil puts it, “Reason is identical in all men, whereas their passions most often differ.” Cancel out the passions, and what is left will be reason, justice, the truth: “All men converge on what is just and true, whereas mendacity and crime make them diverge without end.”

Society as a whole is incapable of objective reason. Corrupt emotions will not allow it. Secular intolerance assures that the help necessary to further emotional intelligence or become human will be denied by secularism which is closed to the value of the light of grace.

And that is exactly what Weil is advocating. A social force that emerges when all individuals are given a voice and the passions of one cancel out the opposing passions of another.

When, according to Weil, each individual is given a voice.

No. social force is what diminishes a human being into a thing. It results in mechanical reactions as opposed to conscious actions. As a secularist you are not open to the difference.

I also pointed the problem of the individual or, I might add, party, who claims to have achieved “vertical” knowledge and seeks to establish a state ruled by such individuals. As long as such claims remains a private matter it is perfectly consistent with secularism, but when one attempts to establish political authority on such claims then it is no longer consistent with secularism or with good government.

All this is just typical secular rationalisms. The bottom line is that all those who value a free society as was the intent of America’s founding fathers know that what John Adams wrote is true:

John Adams in a speech to the military in 1798 warned his fellow countrymen stating, "We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion . . . Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." John Adams
is a signer of the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights and our second President.

The bottom line is that without the light of grace to psychologically illuminate the human psyche and what is normal for it as opposed to the blind reactions of corrupt emotions, a free society is impossible and must devolve into a form of statist slavery which will worship the Great Beast as its God. Its secular trainers will keep the atoms of the Beast in line. Your way, not mine.

Fooloso4

Your attempt to impose your own notion of “the essence of religion” is highly suspect. It is a form of religious intolerance, corrupt, spirit killing, and hypocrisy.Neither you nor Weil are in a position of authority that allows you to dictate to others the motivation or direction of their religious search, struggle, belief, and practice. You have not attained the vertical knowledge you profess to seek and so do not possess the measure of it and cannot say who if anyone has found it.

I posted on the problem of Weil’s political philosophy. You have demonstrated that you have not even understood what it is she is claiming in the article you posted, and have been transparent in your effort to shift away from the criticism of her naive political claims, criticisms made not only by me but in the article, back to the comfort of hearing your own voice, endlessly repeating the same thing, goading others to respond in order to give you the opportunity to repeat it yet again.

Secular intolerance imposes. The essence of religion awakens. You have become incapable of anything other than ad hom attacks.

Could you have written "The need for Roots" as Simone did as she was dying? Would those like Albert Camus call you "The only great mind of our times?" Yet you will call her naive.

You do not believe that philosophy is the love of wisdom. For you it is the love of secular politics. You do not believe there is any source other than your God - the Great Beast to govern society and enable it to serve the purpose of creating evolving individuals. You attack me on this basis. And you have the nerve to call Simone naive??