Deepak Chopra gives us some insight into the liberal mindset
His own, that is.
Chopra’s basic argument: even though you’re pissed at Obama, you must support him because otherwise evil will triumph.
I especially like his first paragraph:
One of the virtues of being on the liberal side of politics is that total obedience isn’t required. There are no hidden agendas. Ideology doesn’t lead to unreason. In a political climate where it feels as if the inmates are running the asylum ”” as in the current Republican threat to default on America’s debt ”” the prevailing sanity of President Obama is something that others and I have taken for granted.
We cannot afford that luxury any more, I’m afraid.
Bizarro world.
I’m always amused how the contemporary left understands itself as ideologically-free — as if they are bring Light to the forces of Darkness.
Drama queens.
Would that it were impossible to do to the brain/mind what liberalism and Chopraism do — oh what a wonderful world it would be.
One of the virtues of being on the liberal side of politics is that total obedience isn’t required. There are no hidden agendas. Ideology doesn’t lead to unreason.
What universe does he live in? Without total obedience, hidden agendas and unreason there wouldn’t BE a liberal side.
Try to imagine the blockquote in the previous post…
Projection, thy name is Deepak Chopra.
What Libby said.
Behind Chopra’s smug and snotty pretentiousness, is fear–Obama could lose. That is the only real message of Chopra’s so-absurd-its-laughable plea for Obama togetherness.
And he had to really sell it hard, had to give all his good stuff to the choir, had to rile up that mob for what should be immediate and clear to them. Chopra’s web contains lies, magical thinking, contradictions, slogans, but mostly, an appeal to pride.
Nemesis is around the corner.
How do we find the portal back to the normal world?
“There is no compulsion in religion.” Or in liberalism! No demand for obedience, no hidden agendas … no pressure!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKgtWWCGQZ8
JHB said: “as if they are bring Light to the forces of Darkness.”
It’s pretty ironic given that most Christians who are conservative view things the same way – as a battle between the forces of the evil one versus the forces of God (e.g. abortion, euthanasia, etc).
My main agenda is to advance /preserve liberty, freedom, and the open profession of religion. The only advantage I have as a Christian is that I know that in the end, good does prevail over evil.
I stopped reading the comments over there after I read the five most recent one.
All five of them rip Chopra apart for his opinion column.
Young Deepak personifies and appeals to the very worst in our culture, the idiotic New Age Shirley MacLaine demographic that has a room temperature IQ, but is protected from selection pressure by the good offices of grownups. Back in the cave days, these are the people who would try to pet the saber-toothed lion. But, sadly, that self-correcting mechanism is no longer allowed to operate today, and as a consequence we’ve generated a great deal of genetic detritus, and even given that detritus a voice in affairs.
As for Chopra himself, he isn’t stupid, just slimy. He slithered out of India to prey on the cognitively disenfranchised here, and to make a good living indeed in the process.
…the prevailing sanity of President Obama is something that others and I have taken for granted. I can’t read that without laughing.
And I’m with Rose: Where’s the portal back to the normal world? The world where people haven’t been drinking the kool aid to the point that they’ve lost all grasp of reality?
“One of the virtues of being on the liberal side of politics is that total obedience isn’t required. There are no hidden agendas.””
I saw that too. If I had been drinking coffee at that moment i would have spewed. That and that comment that Obama isnt partisan. no wonder arguing with these people is impossible. They dont have the same view of reality.
This will come as great news to Muslims.
Example of an incredible goof-ball who’s living in an unparallel universe…
This prevailing mindset can’t end well for our country and is what’s going to try to re-elect our feckless president.
The San Francisco Chronicle is the paper that published the hilarious ‘Obama is a Lightworker’ column.
“…total obedience isn’t required.”
I used to think that way as well, though it made me an anarchist, not a liberal. Soon enough, however, I realized that this platitude – “total obedience is not a virtue” – is used in such a way that the argument it is a conclusion to is self-vitiating.
Let’s put it in Chopra’s terms: liberals are not “totally obedient;” conservatives are. The argument plays out more or less like this:
1) “Total obedience” means something like “adhering to principles in a thoughtless way.”
2) Liberals are supposed to adhere to principles in a thoughtful way.
3) “Thoughtfulness” means complete individual autonomy in deciding what are legitimate principles and what are not. (This is what JHB called, on another thread, “complete self-authorship,” and it is the central tenet of modern liberalism).
4) Tradition, therefore, has no presumptive authority. Mores and manners have no authority. Constitutional principles have no authority. Nothing external to the individual has any presumptive authority.
5) Accordingly, the ideal liberal is reduced to a blank slate, hovering in Rawls’s “original position,” or moldering in Hobbes’s state of nature.
6) With nothing in the external world to latch onto, subjective reason is forced to follow its only reference point, namely the passions. (This is because reason needs content, not just logical forms. With the negation of all potential content outside of the individual being assumed, all that remains is the passions.)
Conclusion: Liberal “non-obedience” amounts to obedience to the passions. It is the ideology of the passing fancy.
Upshot: This conclusion clearly contradicts the premise of liberal “thoughtfulness.” Which is to say, Chopra and those who think like him are forwarding a view that holds an ideology of submission to passion as “free,” “non-obedient,” and “sane.” QED.
It would be interesting to note which actual qualities of liberalism can be derived from this mess. Perhaps this: as an ideology of the passing fancy – the obedience to the passions within – liberalism easily slides into worship of the zeitgeist and can be expected to have a taste for fads. The appeal of Hegelian historicism to such minds is then easy to see. As is the appeal of Marxism.
Or this: the “pragmatism” much-touted by liberals turns out in practice to be an unprincipled playing out of what “feels” right. Incoherence at the level of principle is the flip-side of this.
Another interesting implication is that, as an ideology of obedience to passion, liberalism will manifest untutored emotion – i.e., the emotionalism of children. We should thus expect to see the more childish passions being manifested in liberal prescriptions.
Now, after working through these oddities, it becomes clear that there is something wrong at the root of liberalism – something rotten in its premises. In the above argument, it is clearly the complementary assumptions that complete autonomy and rejection of the given world together constitute preconditions for “thoughtfulness.”
By contrast, what conservatives have always recognized is what Aurel Kolnai called “the sovereignty of the object.” Meaning: thought and principle must always have an anchor in the objective, given world. It doesn’t mean we’re always better or always right – it’s a question of where liberals and conservatives are respectively rooted. Liberals are rooted in the subjective passions. Conservatives root themselves in an external world. And there, precisely, is the kicker: the perspective of the sovereignty of the object can easily accommodate passionate commitments and emotions, such as empathy. The same is not true of the liberal perspective – a foundational devotion to subjective passion cannot accommodate an object-perspective that views external reality as largely independent of our wishes and intentions. Liberalism’s irony is that the apparent vastness of its “unconstrained vision” is actually a much thinner, shallower, and emptier perspective on reality than conservatism’s “constrained vision.”
Questioning and skepticism, in sum, can validly proceed from the conservative perspective, because there are multiple reference points that can be held constant as others are questioned. This is the proper way to conceive of “non-obedience.” It is also the proper way to conceive of “thoughtfulness.” Conservatives understand this; liberals never will.
Deepak Chopra: epic fail.
OB wrote “these are the people who would try to pet the saber-toothed lion.”
good one.
I believe Chopra job description is that of “bullsh*t artist”. Apparently he is unaware that if the economy tanks (further) his style of BS is going to be one of the luxuries that will be cut back on.
Bob from Virginia,
Bingo. Every time I see Chopra I think, snake oil salesmen are alive and well in the modern age.
He truly found his niche in the new age, enlightenment-obsessed limousine left. I was channel-surfing one night and happened upon an episode of HGTYV’s House Hunters in which Chopra and his wife and kids were shopping for a multi-million vacation home in Hawaii. Most of the talk was about Deepak’s insistence upon granite countertops, as I recall.
Such a humble “spiritual leader,” isn’t he?
Nice work if you can get it.
C’mon folks, let’s not be so harsh. That piece of Chopra’s is pure comic gold; there isn’t a single sentence that isn’t filled with hilarity.
It’s one thing to read or hear some idiot liberal going on about Obama, and there might be some shred, however minute, of sensible argument in it, but this was the most sycophantic, disgusting work of tripe ever.
Chopra, New Age Comedian extraordinaire.
Oh, he also needs some psychiatric help. He seems to be poster child for the (correct) meme that liberalism is a mental disorder.
Chopra seems to me to be pretty much Bhagwan 2.0..
Some day I will understand the susceptibility of weak-minded Westerners for Indian mystical mumbo-jumbo.
It’s just not gonna be today, that’s all.
Kolnai,
I just checked out Aurel on Wiki. He sounds like a fascinating thinker.
Occam’s,
I loved the “room temperature IQ.” It even works better in Germany, where we use the celsius. I hope you don’t mind if I drop this in casual conversations without attribution. I love having people think I am both clever and a bit wicked.
Finally, I agree with all who say Chopra is a sleaze. He seems to sell deep thinker creds to all who shell out for his books. I wonder how much of his income is redistributed to the poor.
Great argument and observations, Kolnai. Absolutely superb and helps explain how the Orwellian world exists. Obedience to the passions is sold as freedom. Addiction is freedom. But you’ve not just explained one Orwellian contradiction, but provided a general argument for why all of them exist.
This effort is a summary of a potential book. Great job. I am sure you have put in a colossal amount of reading and thinking and writing; it shows.
Occam’s,
Re susceptibility: I think it has something to do with status. The believers hide their failures by pretending to have entered a higher plain, and their parents don’t have to be embarassed for their “philosopher” offspring. They never have to confront the fact that the societies where this mystical stuff originated were both feudal and racist.
I agree that DP is a con-artist pedaling new age balderdash. That said, his statement reflects accurately what most liberals see when they look into a mirror.
“One of the virtues of being on the liberal side of politics is that total obedience isn’t required.”
Someone needs to inform Chopra about Senator Joe Lieberman, formerly a Democrat with a good liberal voting record, who was drummed out of the Democrat Party because he jumped ship on the War on Terrorism.
Lieberman recognized that the first duty of any government is protective. But when his party refused(and still refuses) to even properly identify the enemy, much less protect US citizens against it, he felt compelled to endorse John McCain in 2008. McCain, he felt, would be a better protector than Obama.
On most issues, especially of the domestic type, Lieberman even today votes reliably liberal and he caucuses with the Democrats. But he must be appalled at Obama’s foreign policy. He is an example, like Rick Perry, of reformed Democrats. In Texas, where Perry is from, many of today’s Republican politicians were former Democrats who felt that the Party had abandoned them.
Curtis –
Your kind words are much appreciated (as are your regular posts, which I always enjoy). I really just wanted to try and think through step-by-step what we all sense intuitively is wrong about what Chopra said (and it is typical liberal boilerplate, so it can be taken as representative of the species).
It’s evident on its face that the claim that conservatives are somehow ideologues of “total obedience” is just incorrect. I have never read nor heard a single conservative, no matter how simpleminded, argue that total obedience to anything is a first principle of their political philosophy.
In fact, the only people I’ve ever heard make such arguments are Marxists and Communists. “Darkness at Noon,” as we all know, was about Communists, not conservatives; and if a liberal really wanted to read a horrifying argument for absolute obedience, he should check out a book by one of the left’s heroes, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, called “Humanism and Terror,” intended as a reply to Koestler. Does Chopra mean to say that Merleau-Ponty was really a conservative? Please.
Apart from ideology, conservatives do not behave in a way that would bear out a view that they had some subconscious “Fuhrenprinzip” at work either.
So, conservatives do not think or act in the way liberals usually suppose they do; whereas, on the other hand, the perfect specimens of “total obedience” have overwhelmingly been leftists. It’s obvious there’s a problem here. And it’s surprisingly difficult to tear through the webs of neurosis, projection, and rationalization that the left has built up to buttress their inane little theory.
Anyway, I hope I shed some light on the weirdness.
expat –
Kolnai is the most unappreciated political philosopher of the 20th Century. A mammoth intellect, he is virtually unknown outside of a small coterie of Catholic conservative intellectuals (led by Daniel Mahoney and Pierre Manent).
He was proficient in about 10 languages, and English was not his first, so his writing can be prolix and difficult – no doubt this hinders his appeal, but it hasn’t stopped atrocious writers like John Rawls from obtaining universal acclaim.
I suspect Kolnai simply slipped through the cracks. Leo Strauss was a mega-thinker who created an institution at Chicago; Kolnai was not really a book writer, and he wasn’t prone to Grand Theorizing. He was barely able to secure a few teaching positions here and there, owing to the kindness of fellow philosophers who appreciated his genius.
All of that being said, Kolnai’s unfinished book “The Utopian Mind” is hands-down the best analysis of utopianism ever put forth. And insofar as understanding the utopian mind is crucial to understanding leftism, communism, Marxism, and totalitarianism in general, this book alone should be enough to cement Kolnai’s reputation.
For what it’s worth, his book on “Sexual Morality” is also a masterpiece. And his first book, “The War Against the West,” was one of the only works to fully explore and come to terms with the magnitude of the National Socialist threat, before the war.
Wow. Reading that article brings to mind the saying “You are entitled to your own opinions, but you are not entitled to your own facts.”
Rose wins the thread for succinctness; Kolnai for detail.
Expat, I suspect it’s garden variety stupidity in conjunction with well-founded intellectual insecurity. After all, how can anyone logically refute something based upon irrationality? The chance of being bested forensically is nil. Ambiguity and obfuscation are the sword and buckler of the cognitively disenfranchised.
Given your circumstances, you’ll appreciate the Nietzsche quote:
Feudal, racist, yes, but these minor defects are more than offset by their having corpses floating in their rivers.
I note that Deepak isn’t living in India. In fact, he lives a few miles away away from me (geographically, but light years socioeconomically), in a breath-taking compound on the SoCal coast. (I’d drop by, but he’d probably set the dogs on me.) The wages of sin might be death, but those of untrammeled mendacity are apparently pretty good.
If their parents were capable of embarrassment, the offspring would be orphans, so no problem would arise.
Occam’s,
My husband went to a meeting in Varanasi several years ago. He told me about the cow carcasses floating down the river. Human carcasses (the young and the poor who couldn’t afford cremation) didn’t because they were weighted down with stones. He also noticed a huge pipe emptying into he center of the Ganges, which he was told emptied raw sewerage. Meanwhile, on the river banks the people bathed and brushed their teeth.
His tales of the cockroaches in his hotel meant that he had to leave his suitcase outside for a week (in a very cold December), before I would allow one item in the house. He also had some pretty gruesome tales about the way people treated their underlings. He has no desire to return. We have been told that things are much better in Mumbai, but it sounds like up is the only way to go from the holy city.
Nietsche was right. The muddier the the thought, the better able to assign it the most comfortable meaning.
Kolnai,
Thanks for the recommendations. Amazon has some of his works, but the prices are steep. I’ll have to take some time to go over the ones they offer.
Speaking of Deepak Chopra:
Liberals love to sneer at believing Christians, vilifying them as superstitious and prone to follow crackpot preachers.
And yet Deepak Chopra, New Age crackpot and fraud, is a favorite on NPR.
No amount of Quantum Healing can repair the liberal mind. 🙂
Hmmmm.
I’m chuckling imagining physicsguy’s reaction to the title, “Quantum Healing.”
And I could use some cheering today. One of our dogs came to the end of her days today, at age 17. A good innings, as the Brits would say, but we’re pretty sad around here tonight.
He is so Deep -ach! Chopra embodies the smug, just-so attitudes of the left. Remember, Oprah loves Chopra. ‘Bout says it all.
Occam,
Sad to hear about your dog. Each of those 17 years of companionship and loyalty are treasures to remember.
For twenty years, Deepak Chopra was a personal friend of Michael Jackson.
That should tell everyone all they need to know about his “writings”.
I’m sorry about your dog, Occam. No matter what their age, it’s tough to lose a good friend and companion.
Thanks for the condolences. Non-dog lovers probably think it’s silly, but … she was a family member, and a much beloved one. We miss her terribly.
The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert.
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
–W. B. Yeats
Kolnai, that was an absolutely brilliant analysis, and worth the read.
Occam, my sympathy on the loss of your dog. Dog lovers do know how such a pet becomes a part the family. When she is gone there’s a painful sense of her absence; the family feels incomplete without her.
I’m sorry about your doggie, Occam. They’re such dear beasties.
Occam, my condolences.
from Mel Brook’s “The History Of The World”:
name?
Comitus
occupation?
stand-up philosopher
you mean bullshit artist!
is Deepak, no?
expat
They never have to confront the fact that the societies where this mystical stuff originated were both feudal and racist.
A sociologist became a follower of an Indian guru, and made a pilgrimage to India. One reaction: as a sociologist, did not this guru-follower examine the realities on the ground of the society that produced all this mysticism?
One possible answer would be, “No.” Not all those who returned from the pilgrimage manifested rigorous thinking. Those who had returned from the ashram in India were exchanging war stories about diseases they had contracted during their time in India. I realized that had they bothered to get the standard battery of vaccinations recommended for Third World travelers, available at nominal fees, their time in India would have been much more disease free. Someone who does not bother to get vaccinated before a trip to India is not using their thinking facilities.
“”the idiotic New Age Shirley MacLaine demographic that has a room temperature IQ,””
OB
A hallmark of the Shirley Maclaine demographic is in thinking oppressive backwater cultures without indoor plumbing must be heroic non imperialist. Plus they find the oppression attractive in how it provides a heroic activism lifestyle that needn’t be superficially imagined.
“New Age” should always be pronounced “Newage”, to rhyme with “sewage”.
Occam, so sorry about your loss.After two years, I still miss our retriever especially when we are at places we went together.They are wonderful companions. I feel that I will see him again.
Kolnai: epic comment.
How much of this is good, old fashioned Antinomianism, the great heresy of the Puritans? How much is the ongoing philosophical crack-up of a domineering, self-selected Elect, who were Antinomian, and then Unitarian, and then Transcendentalist, and then entranced by Hegel’s World Spirit, then seduced by Marx’s Hegelian fantasies, mesmerized by spiritualism and New Age mysticism (especially if it originated East of Suez), until landing on Decolonialism and Multiculturalism as modern Marxism, and finally grafting on Environmentalism as an expression of New Age antimaterialism
So Chopra is a perfect embodiment of the new religion: an anti materialist, multicultural celebrity. If any part had been missing, he would not have a fraction of his wealth.
I remember hearing about something called the Third Empire Heresy back in my lit crit days 30 years ago. Does that ring a bell for anyone?
Depak Chopra in another time
http://cdn3.iofferphoto.com/img3/item/207/592/538/9nRV.jpg
He comes from a long tradition of Fakir
A fakir or faqir / a Muslim Sufi ascetic in Middle East and South Asia. The Faqirs were wandering Dervishes teaching Islam and living on alms.
The term has become a common Urdu, Bengali, and Hindi word for “beggar”. The term has also been used to refer to Hindu and Buddhist ascetics (e.g., sadhus, gurus, swamis and yogis). These broader idiomatic usages developed primarily in the Mughal era in India. There is also a now a distinct caste of Faqir found in North India, descended from communities of faqirs who took up residence at Sufi shrines.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
A Yogi is a male practitioner of Yoga. The word is also used to refer to ascetic practitioners of meditation in a number of South Asian Religions including Jainism, Buddhism, and Hinduism.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Swami is a Hindu term referring to an ascetic or yogi who has been initiated into the religious monastic order founded by Adi Sankara,[1] or to a religious teacher.
Adi Shankara
Book of Secrets is deepak chopras book
At the heart of The Book of Secrets is Advaita Vedanta, the Hindu philosophy of non-duality or wholeness. Drawing freely on the Vedantic palimpsest of commentaries, Deepak Chopra restates old wisdom in new words, using his own experiences to reshape ancient sacred philosophy for a modern profane world.
http://www.indiacurrents.com/articles/2005/03/22/advaita-vedanta-for-153-per-secret
its a waste of my time to relate as to waht it means, and such since almost no one in the west cares for the history, the culture, or the writings that people follow and act from.
so to tie him to the swami and the whole thing and relate that people like him are old old old and make their way in the world spouting…
its an ASIAN tradition… seen everywhere if you know history, culture, etc… from the wandering monks of the shao lin temple.. to the modern tales of Sato Ichi the master blind swordsman, wandering..
to christianity… and their wandeing in the deserts till inventing domestication..
the point is, you want to know what crazy reformation he is coming from… then you have to rea even more complicated bs than marxist communist dialecitcal stuff.
at least deepak aint trying to take over the world. but he is helping… in that his side of the coin is the negation of self.
saying Advaita I might as well say Dvaita and ViÅ›ishá¹Ädvaita for all anyone would understand me.
as i described marxist philosphy, and got burned for the length and no one wanted it.
and i described chinese philosophy in terms of what marxists take out of it… got burned for length and no one wanted it….
and heck… aint no way to even START explaining the much more complicated and harder to ‘
get’ hindu and other such things…
sigh.
to make a very long thing very short.
he wants to be the next name on the list
an Acharyas who ends up in the advaita guru paramparÄ…
* NÄrÄyaṇa
* Padmabhuva (BrahmÄ)
* VaÅ›iá¹£á¹ha
* Åšakti
* ParÄÅ›ara
* VyÄsa
* Åšuka
* Gauá¸apÄda
* Govinda bhagavatpÄda
* Åšankara bhagavatpÄda
* PadmapÄda, HastÄmalaka, Toá¹aka, VÄrtikakÄra (SureÅ›vara) and others.
funny how you can look at his wiki, and they will say things, and westerners and others will have no idea waht they are, be completely incurious as to what they say, and then go blithly on and make up stuff, or gab away twittering among themselves, and i wont say what its really like from outside… but it certainly is not erudition, its a cargo cult armchair version of the koffiee clatch revolutionary in daily discourse.. among other thigns..
The key source texts for all schools of VedÄnta are the Prasthanatrayi–the canonical texts consisting of the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita and the Brahma Sutras. The first person to explicitly consolidate the principles of Advaita Vedanta was Adi Shankara,[6] while the first historical proponent was Gaudapada, the guru of Shankara’s guru Govinda Bhagavatpada. Adi Shankara’s system (i.e., Advaita) is unmatched (with other schools) for its metaphysical depth and logical power
i have read the sutras, and such…
well, translations of course..
but anything from there would fall on only a few who would want it, understand it, be curious about it… and the din of the others is too great to relate that and such to how and what he says and so forth.
“Of all the Asian gurus…, Chopra has arguably been the most successful at erasing apparent differences between East and West by packaging Eastern mystique in credible Western garb. …[H]is quest to construct a pleasing and seamless model of the universe tends to jump to easy conclusions and to spackle over problematic gaps and inconsistencies in the ideas he presents – is obvious to all but his most starry-eyed fans. But grousing about such crimes – as many do – does little to explain his enormous popularity. Chopra is as rich as he is today not because he has been dishonest with anyone, but because his basic message – that love, health and happiness are possible, that mystery is real and that the universe is ultimately a friendly and benevolent place where orthodoxies old and new can meet and make peace with one another – is one that he wants to believe in just as sincerely as his readers do
TIME…
heck… given out image cargo cult culture, who beleives you can put on a robe and dance in a circle and feel waht its like to be a priest while on vacation..
is it any wonder that Ajay Mehta is making a small fortune as the all wise store manager besides the white stock clerk that tries to convince everyone that there really is fiber in the cereal…
All that glisters is not gold;
Often have you heard that told:
Many a man his life hath sold
But my outside to behold:
Gilded tombs do worms enfold.
Had you been as wise as bold,
Young in limbs, in judgement old
Your answer had not been inscroll’d
Fare you well, your suit is cold.
today, feminist Portia always chooses poorly…
It is possible to get Chopra to shut up.
This guy did it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qySx8tSs8BQ
My take is that Liberalism is mostly about Club Membership, thus the propensity to defend slogans and avoid contradicting facts.
“One of the virtues of being on the liberal side of politics is that total obedience isn’t required. There are no hidden agendas.” is the second dumbest thing I’ve ever heard a Liberal say. The first dumbest was said by James Michener (I loved his Hawaii) in a Parade Magazine article decades ago, to the effect that it pleased him to pay his taxes because he knew the Federal Government would spend his money more wisely than he.
Sheesh!
From Wikipedia:
Antinomianism (a term coined by Martin Luther, from the Greek ἀντί, “against” + νόμος, “law”) is a belief or tendency in most religions that some therein consider existing laws as no longer applicable to themselves.[1] The term originated in the context of a minority Protestant view that since faith itself alone is sufficient to attain salvation, adherence to religious law is not necessary,[2] and religious laws themselves are set aside or “abrogated” as inessential. While the concept is related to the foundational Protestant belief of Sola Fide where justification is through faith alone in Christ, it is taken to an extreme. It is seen by some as the opposite of the notion that obedience to a code of religious law earns salvation: legalism or works righteousness. An antinomian theology does not necessarily imply the embrace of ethical permissiveness; rather it usually implies emphasis on the inner working of the Holy Spirit as the primary source of ethical guidance.[3]
While there is wide agreement within Christianity that “antinomianism” is heresy, what constitutes antinomianism is often in disagreement. The term “antinomian” emerged soon after the Protestant Reformation (c.1517) and has historically been used mainly as a pejorative against Christian thinkers or sects who carried their belief in justification by faith further than was customary.[3] For example, Martin Luther preached justification by faith alone, but was also an outspoken critic of antinomianism, perhaps most notably in his Against the Antinomians (1539). Few groups or sects, outside of Christian anarchism or Jewish anarchism, explicitly call themselves “antinomian”.
Occam sorry about the loss. It is indeed odd our dependence on another species for something we lack. And their dependence on us.
G6loq,
Whatta link! Just the way to expose Deepak as deeply shallow.
JuliB: It’s pretty ironic given that most Christians who are conservative view things the same way
I don’t think so. Not even fundamentalists.
The difference is this. When lefties disagree with others, they tend to emotionalize the difference, as if the benighted non-lefties need to have their consciousness raised, to become aware, to let go of the hate, to evolve, that kinda thing.
While when righties disagree with others, usually it is assumed that human beings generally have the same ends, but may not be squaring means with ends in the wisest fashion. Conservatives are also usually upfront about their assumptions, while lefties pretend they’re beyond all biases, which probably explains why they emotionalize those who disagree with their “unbiased” perspectives.
STUPIDITY of that ‘Depth’ ought to be a Stoning Offense.
pst314 Says:
“And yet Deepak Chopra, New Age crackpot and fraud, is a favorite on NPR.”
That and they are economic flat earthers.