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A spiritually empty society inevitably overestimates the benefit of raw immediate pleasure.and
Every public teaching that is based in opinion, educated or not, is a religious teaching. The second an atheists demands assent without knowledge, that atheist is a religious person. The real opposite of believe isn't disbelief; it's indifference. This person is certainly not indifferent.I rather like the invention of insults, even if the "girl's blouse" line baffles me.
The turn introduced by the Renaissance evidently was inevitable historically. The Middle Ages had come to a natural end by exhaustion, becoming an intolerable despotic repression of man's physical nature in favor of the spiritual one. Then, however, we turned our backs upon the Spirit and embraced all that is material with excessive and unwarranted zeal. This new way of thinking, which had imposed on us its guidance, did not admit the existence of intrinsic evil in man nor did it see any higher task than the attainment of happiness on earth. It based modern Western civilization on the dangerous trend to worship man and his material needs. Everything beyond physical well-being and accumulation of material goods, all other human requirements and characteristics of a subtler and higher nature, were left outside the area of attention of state and social systems, as if human life did not have any superior sense.So what's missing? H. Allen Orr:
The key question is: Is there any religious faith beyond supernaturalist religion that remains untouched by the enlightenment case? [Philip] Kitcher concludes that there might well be. He calls this final variety of faith "spiritual religion." Spiritual religion abandons both the supernatural and literalism and, in their place, offers ethical models of right action and moving portraits of nobly lived lives.In this case, I wouldn't assert that this kind of cosmetic surgery is wrong, exactly, but it seems to me that it reflects a rather skewed sense of what's important.
Everything beyond physical well-being and accumulation of material goods, all other human requirements and characteristics of a subtler and higher nature, were left outside the area of attention of state and social systems, as if human life did not have any superior sense.The whole paragraph that sentence belongs to is trite--the entire address is largely mystic nonsense--but this assertion is manifestly untrue. As if "the prevailing Western view of the world"--however Solzhenitsyn cares to define that--was ever opposed to--as if it wasn't actually the driving philosophy behind the creation of--all the national museums, orchestras, ballets, universities and schools, built in every Western country during the last 400 years!
posted by koeselitz at 4:23 PM on October 30, 2007