Re: RRR#2

From: RFaussette@aol.com
Date: Sun Feb 09 2003 - 07:39:31 EST

  • Next message: Iain Strachan: "Re: Random from Professing evolution column"

    In a message dated 2/8/03 7:19:29 PM Eastern Standard Time, bcrouse@fni.com
    writes:

    > I also recommend a short editorial by = David Permutter 'Palestine' for
    > Dummies found in the Jewish World Review.
    >
    >

    The definitive work on Jewish fundamentalism is Israel Shahak's Jewish
    Fundamental in Israel or his Jewish History, Jewish Religion. Shahak, who
    passed away recently, was a survivor of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and
    a Jewish professor in Israel. Also, Gershom Scholem on the concept of
    "tikkun" or repair of the world might also be enlightening to one studying
    Jewish settlements in Palestinian terrirory.

    Going to the Jewish World Review to get info on Palestine is a little shaky.

    Postmodernism is a particularly Marxist creation.

     “In the ancient world through the Middle Ages negative views of gentile
    institutions were relatively confined to internal consumption within the
    Jewish community. However, beginning with the Converso turmoil in fifteenth
    century Spain these negative views often appeared in the most prestigious
    intellectual circles and in the mass media. These views generally subjected
    the institutions of gentile society to radical criticism or they led to the
    development of intellectual structures that rationalized Jewish
    identification in a post religious intellectual environment. Faur (1992,31ff)
    shows that Conversos in fifteenth and sixteenth century Spain were vastly
    overrepresented among the humanist thinkers who opposed the corporate nature
    of Spanish society centered around Christianity. In describing the general
    thrust of these writers,Faur (1992,31)  notes that ‘Although the strategy
    varied -- from the creation of highly sophisticated literary works to the
    writing of scholarly and philosophical compositions -- the goal was one: to
    present ideas and methodologies that would displace the values and
    institutions of the ‘old Christian.’” 22

    The effects of the Converso initiative were felt almost immediately and
    continue to the present. 

    In How to Reach Secular People, George G. Hunter III writes: “The cause of
    Christendom's disintegration was a massive secularization process within
    western history in the last 5 or 6 centuries, a process that continues today.
    Repeatedly, over much of Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the
    armies of various nobles and barons sacked the monasteries and seized church
    property, withdrawing it from control of the Church... The Church experienced
    lost influence in every area of western society's life — from education to
    government, economics, art, architecture, literature, music, personal
    morality, and community life.Today no one even pretends that western culture
    still marches to Christianity’s drum. The nearly complete secularization of
    the West is the Great New Fact confronting the entire western Church.” 24

    22/23: Kevin MacDonald, Culture of Critique, An Evolutionary Analysis
    of Jewish Involvement In Twentieth Century Intellectual and
    Political Movements  (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998), ppgs.6-7

    24: George G. Hunter III, How to Reach Secular People, (Nashville, Abingdon
    Press, 1992) pages 25-26                                                 

    postmodernism and a post religious intellectual environment seem like pretty
    much the same thing, don' t they?

    rich



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Sun Feb 09 2003 - 07:40:19 EST