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[Order David Horowitz’s new book, America Betrayed, HERE]
In the most recent episode of the Freedom Center’s podcast The Right Take, host Mark Tapson talks with Catholic League President and CEO Bill Donohue about his new book Cultural Meltdown: The Secular Roots of Our Moral Crisis. Don’t miss it!
Check out the short excerpt below:
Listen to today’s episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. And subscribe to The Right Take here: 
The communists didn’t ”forget God” they replaced him with a secular Utopian religion . Marx/ Lenin became GOD
Marxism replaces Almighty God with Almighty Society. Christianity prepared the ground for Marxism. Marxism is religion pretending to be secular science.
“All rights rest on the ethics of egoism. Rights are an individual’s selfish possessions—his title to his life, his liberty, his property, the pursuit of his own happiness. Only a being who is an end in himself can claim a moral sanction to independent action. If man existed to serve an entity beyond himself, whether God or society, then he would not have rights, but only the duties of a servant….
You are probably wondering here: “What about Communism? Isn’t it a logical, scientific, atheistic philosophy, and yet doesn’t it lead straight to totalitarianism?” The short answer to this is: Communism is not an expression of logic or science, but the exact opposite. Despite all its anti-religious posturings, Communism is nothing but a modern derivative of religion: it agrees with the essence of religion on every key issue, then merely gives that essence a new outward veneer or cover-up.
The Communists reject Aristotelian logic and Western science in favor of a “dialectic” process; reality, they claim, is a stream of contradictions which is beyond the power of “bourgeois” reason to understand. They deny the very existence of man’s mind, claiming that human words and actions reflect nothing but the alogical predetermined churnings of blind matter. They do reject God, but they replace him with a secular stand-in, Society or the State, which they treat not as an aggregate of individuals, but as an unperceivable, omnipotent, supernatural organism, a “higher unseen power” transcending and dwarfing all individuals. Man, they say, is a mere social cog or atom, whose duty is to revere this power and to sacrifice every thing in its behalf. Above all, they say, no such cog has the right to think for himself; every man must accept the decrees of Society’s leaders, he must because this is the voice of Society, whether he understands it or not. Fully as much as Tertullian, Communism demands faith from its followers and subjects, “faith” in the literal, religious sense of the term. On every account, the conclusion is the same: Communism is not a new, rational philosophy; it is a tired, slavishly imitative heir of religion.” – Leonard Peikoff
Wow, a useless lecture on fixing our cultural “meltdown” Do you really think anyone gives a crap on what Lenny Phuck-off or you think?
Anyway, TLDR. But I did get to crack open a beer because you mentioned your big bug-a-boo, Christianity.
You are such a puffed up crashing bore. I’d rather be a brute. No wonder she won’t date you, Mr. Wimpy.
Freedom of conscience boils down to freedom of religion? No, freedom of conscience boils down to the freedom to think for yourself as an individual, even if your thinking leads you to the conclusion that a particular religion, or religion as such, is mistaken and irrational.
Freedom of conscience boils down to freedom FOR religion and freedom FROM religion, whichever is your individual choice.
It is perfectly true that the so-called secular Left is anti-science because it is anti-reason and anti-reality. But where does this irrationality ultimately come from, this rejection of reason, logic, and reality? It comes from religion. The early Church fathers, such as Tertullian and Augustine, were rabidly anti-reason, anti-science, and anti-freedom of conscience, and so were later Christians such as Matin Luther.
The irrationality of Christianity produced the Dark and Middle Ages. The irrationality of religion produces a dark age of theocracy.
“Intellectually speaking, the period of the Middle Ages was the exact opposite of classical Greece. Its leading philosophic spokesman, Augustine, held that faith was the basis of man’s entire mental life. “I do not know in order to believe,” he said, “I believe in order to know.” In other words, reason is nothing but a handmaiden of revelation; it is a mere adjunct of faith, whose task is to clarify, as far as possible, the dogmas of religion. What if a dogma cannot be clarified? So much the better, answered an earlier Church father, Tertullian. The truly religious man, he said, delights in thwarting his reason; that shows his commitment to faith. Thus, Tertullian’s famous answer, when asked about the dogma of God’s self-sacrifice on the cross: “Credo quia absurdum” (“I believe it because it is absurd”)….
What were the practical results of the medieval approach? The Dark Ages were dark on principle. Augustine fought against secular philosophy, science, art; he regarded all of it as an abomination to be swept aside; he cursed science in particular as “the lust of the eyes.” – Leonard Peikoff, “Religion versus America”
If you could only think for yourself. Instead you rely on the recycled prattlings of a dead woman and near dead living corpse. You couldn’t find an original thought with two hands and a flashlight.
End of Pt2. TLDR.
Indeed. When I think of “cult follower,” I think of THX.
The ultimate cultist…….
“Radical individualism” is an anti-concept just like “anti-racism” is an anti-concept.
An “anti-concept” is a term, a word, that is designed to obliterate an actual objective concept. “Anti-racism” obliterates the objective concept of individualism — and so does “radical individualism”.
If you want to morally condemn hedonism and nihilism, please do so, but don’t call them “radical individualism”.
The secular Left wishing to obliterate the legitimate concept of individualism uses the anti-concept of anti-racism.
The religious conservatives wishing to obliterate the legitimate concept of individualism are now using the anti-concept of “radical individualism”.
“An anti-concept is an unnecessary and rationally unusable term designed to replace and obliterate some legitimate concept. The use of anti-concepts gives the listeners a sense of approximate understanding. But in the realm of cognition, nothing is as bad as the approximate . . . .
Observe the technique involved . . . . It consists of creating an artificial, unnecessary, and (rationally) unusable term, designed to replace and obliterate some legitimate concepts—a term which sounds like a concept, but stands for a “package-deal” of disparate, incongruous, contradictory elements taken out of any logical conceptual order or context, a “package-deal” whose (approximately) defining characteristic is always a non-essential. This last is the essence of the trick.
Let me remind you that the purpose of a definition is to distinguish the things subsumed under a single concept from all other things in existence; and, therefore, their defining characteristic must always be that essential characteristic which distinguishes them from everything else.
So long as men use language, that is the way they will use it. There is no other way to communicate. And if a man accepts a term with a definition by non-essentials, his mind will substitute for it the essential characteristic of the objects he is trying to designate . . . . Thus the real meaning of the term will automatically replace the alleged meaning….
[Some other terms that Ayn Rand identified as anti-concepts are “consumerism,” “duty,” “ethnicity,” “extremism,” “isolationism,” “McCarthyism,” “meritocracy,” and “simplistic.”] – Ayn Rand
No idea what any of this gibberish means. And I don’t care. TLDR.
Just what I need….
Rand’s purpose of a definition. Can you imagine what life would be like if I sat around trying to define the purpose of a definition.
Must be a slow day on your block. So very special……..
End Pt3
Philosopher Laurie Calhoun is taking her lead from Immanuel Kant. Post-modernism is what Kantian philosophy has led to.
Kantian philosophy also led to Hegel who led to Karl Marx, who led to Hitler and Stalin.
“No, Kant did not destroy reason; he merely did as thorough a job of undercutting as anyone could ever do.
If you trace the roots of all our current philosophies—such as pragmatism, logical positivism, and all the rest of the neo-mystics who announce happily that you cannot prove that you exist—you will find that they all grew out of Kant.” – Ayn Rand
“One of Kant’s major goals was to save religion (including the essence of religious morality) from the onslaughts of science. His system represents a massive effort to raise the principles of Platonism, in a somewhat altered form, once again to a position of commanding authority over Western culture….
Plato was more than a Platonist; despite his mysticism, he was also a pagan Greek. As such he exhibited a certain authentic respect for reason, a respect which was implicit in Greek philosophy no matter how explicitly irrational it became. The Kantian mysticism, however, suffers from no such pagan restraints. It flows forth triumphantly, sweeping the prostrate human mind before it. Since man can never escape the distorting agents inherent in the structure of his consciousness, says Kant, “things in themselves” are in principle unknowable. Reason is impotent to discover anything about reality; if it tries, it can only bog down in impenetrable contradictions. Logic is merely a subjective human device, devoid of reference to or basis in reality. Science, while useful as a means of ordering the data of the world of appearances, is limited to describing a surface world of man’s own creation and says nothing about things as they really are.
Must men then resign themselves to a total skepticism? No, says Kant, there is one means of piercing the barrier between man and existence. Since reason, logic, and science are denied access to reality, the door is now open for men to approach reality by a different, nonrational method. The door is now open to faith. Taking their cue from their needs, men can properly believe (for instance, in God and in an afterlife), even though they cannot prove the truth of their belief. . . . “I have,” writes Kant, “therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith.” – Leonard Peikoff
I just Kant Kope with all of this meaningless obtuse material.
What a crashing bore you are. TLDR again.
End Pt4 Thank God.
God is love, and in Him there is no darkness. Marx is hate and in him is much darkness. I am a Christian and don’t like religion but you would not understand why. Religion is man seeking the approval of God. This requires one to conform to the crowd’s values and sacrifice their volition. This is where I agree that religion is like communism.
If all you do is be agreeable to the crowd at the expense of your personal convictions, you aren’t much different than a commie. Big denominations are usually filled with agreeable sheep who abandoned their critical thinking skills.
In the end every person will appear before God alone. Then all will realize that it wasn’t the good works that matter, ,it was what you thought that matters..
All of it matters. What you think matters. What you feel matters. What you do matters.
What if your thoughts and intentions are good but you don’t act on them? You commit an evil by not taking action, you sin by omission.
What if your thoughts are evil but you do good? You’re in danger of eventually doing evil. Good and evil begin with thoughts.
The right thing done the wrong way becomes the wrong thing.
Your convictions can be right, but the crowd’s convictions can be wrong. But the reverse can be true, your convictions can be wrong, and the crowd’s convictions can be right.
Being human isn’t automatic Being virtuous isn’t automatic. Being rational isn’t automatic.