Meeting everyone's needs (Main Forum)

by James, Australia, Monday, May 24, 2010, 14:42 (1123 days ago) @ DavidC
edited by James, Monday, May 24, 2010, 16:07

David, thank you very much for a very clear exposition of the philosophical trends that have caused so much havoc in traditional Christian thinking. I have always found this almost obsession with relativism on the part of the Pope somewhat puzzling, but maybe that is because I have absorbed post modernism without even realising it was happening.

Quite apart from the influence of Kant and others, quantum physics throwing us into a spin about the nature of reality, and all the strange things that are coming out of neuroscience about how our brains work, I could never understand this insistence on absolute truth that the Church claims that it has.

One only has to look back on Church history to see how "relativist" it has been both in relation to its belief in the physical world (creation) and in relation to ethics. For the pre-Copernican Church, the sun did revolve around the earth, and pre-palaeontology and geology, the world was created in six days. These were the absolute truths at that time.

In the sphere of morals, slavery was ok, and so was anti-Semitism, and so was genocidal mass murder provided it was done by a Pope with the wonderful name of Innocent and not a Saladin or an Attila the Hun.

Those who have this fear of "relativism" never seem to have read Church history, or if they have, it was been done through the rose tinted glasses of their faith.

Your post also explains why a Benedict or Pell never give a clear explanation of what they really mean by "relativism" other than to put up straw men or find some philosophical extreme position that very few follow anyway. There are very few people who are completely relativist, and would say that it is ok to genitally mutilate females because it is part of the group culture. In other words, relativism in that sense is not really going to take over the world.

But for them relativism seems to be the rejection of the eternal truths of Christianity and then one is left with no values at all, and with "anything goes". But that just isn't true. And the people who are doing the rejecting - particularly the young - know it isn't true.

The problem for Benedict or Pell is that it is very difficult for them to give coherent reasons why this rejection of the absolute values of their version of Christianity is wrong, other than to keep insisting it is.

Anyway, thank you again for a very stimulating post...