November 18th, 2008 Posted in Culture10 From Lisa’s Lookout

A classic from J Budziszewski:

What we lose when we forget what sex is for  Touchstone 2005

Midnight. Shelly is getting herself drunk so that she can bring herself to go home with the strange man seated next to her at the bar. One o’clock. Steven is busy downloading pornographic images of children from Internet bulletin boards. Two o’clock. Marjorie, who used to spend every Friday night in bed with a different man, has been binging and purging since eleven. Three o’clock. Pablo stares through the darkness at the ceiling, wondering how to convince his girlfriend to have an abortion. Four o’clock. After partying all night, Jesse takes another man home, not mentioning that he tests positive for an incurable STD. Five o’clock. Lisa is in the bathroom, cutting herself delicately with a razor. This isn’t what my generation expected when it invented the sexual revolution. The game isn’t fun anymore. Even some of the diehard proponents of that enslaving liberation have begun to show signs of fatigue and confusion.  Liberation Fatigue  Naomi Wolf, in her book Promiscuities, reports that when she lost her own virginity at age 15, there was “something important missing.” Apparently, the thing missing was the very sense that anything could be important. In her book Last Night in Paradise, Katie Roiphe poignantly wonders what could be wrong with freedom: “It’s not the absence of rules exactly, the dizzying sense that we can do whatever we want, but the sudden realization that nothing we do matters.” …

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Steven Hayward, Heritage Foundation

Contemporary Threats to Freedom: C. S. Lewis as Prophet of Post-Modernism

“Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.”
- The Magician’s Nephew

“A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule
which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery. . .
The process which, if not checked, will abolish Man, goes an apace
among Communists and Democrats no less than among Fascists.”
- The Abolition of Man

First the good news. Orwell — or at least his admirers who warned that technological advance promised an increasingly “Orwellian” world — was wrong. Far from buttressing the power of tyrants, the advance of technology has turned out to be powerfully subversive of totalitarian regimes. (1) As George Gilder has celebrated better than anyone, the advance of computer and communications technology holds the promise of further liberation for individuals and their families. Technology is changing the conservative public policy agenda by diminishing the monopoly power of bureaucracies. For example while privatizing the postal service and adopting school choice are both still worthy policy goals, technology is making these changes less imperative (and, paradoxically, more likely to happen). The latest postal rate increase will simply mean that more correspondence will be sent by FAX or E-mail, while the expansion of computer networks will provide more parents the choice as well as the means to home-school their children.

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C.S. Lewis on Threats to Freedom in Modern

Society

EDWARD J. LARSON AND STEVEN LAYWARD

C.S. Lewis expressed concern about how the modern state could undermine human freedom and dignity if policymakers adopted the approach of modern social science. At the same time, Lewis also doubted the ability of any government to permanently reshape and subordinate a nation’s citizenry. Here then is what Lewis viewed as the major threats to human freedom in modern society.

Science as a Threat to Freedom in Modern Society

Edward J. Larson, University of Georgia and Discovery Institute

Among other things, C. S. Lewis considered modern science a threat to freedom in modern society. In order to understand how modern sciences is a threat to freedom, we have to consider Lewis’ view of modern science. Lewis lived at a time when science was emerging as the dominate system of thought in the Western world, when the technological spin-offs of that intellectual activity were fundamentally transforming every aspect of life. Lewis reflected on this in his 1954 inaugural lecture at Cambridge University, when he declared: “The sciences long remained like a lion-cub whose gambols delighted its master in private; it had not yet tasted man’s blood. All through the eighteenth century, . . . science was not the business of Man because Man had not yet become the business of science. It dealt chiefly with the inanimate; and it threw off few technological byproducts. When Watt makes his engine, Darwin starts monkeying with the ancestry of Man, and Freud with his soul, then indeed the lion will have got out of its cage.”

As we know from the Narnia tales, a free lion does not pose a threat so long as it is true — like Aslan. But Lewis did not view science as a source of neutral truths about nature. For example, in The Discarded Image, Lewis wrote about the differences between the medieval and modern model of nature.

The most spectacular differences between the Medieval Model and our own concern astronomy and biology. In both fields the New Model is supported by a wealth of empirical evidence. But we should misrepresent the historical process if we said that the irruption of new facts was the sole cause of the alteration. The old astronomy was not, in any exact sense, ‘refuted’ by the telescope. . . . The new astronomy triumphed not because the cause for the old became desperate, but because the new was a better tool. But the change of Models did not involve astronomy alone. It involved also, in biology, the change — arguably more important — from a devolutionary to an evolutionary scheme. . . This revolution was certainly not brought about by the discovery of new facts. . . .The demand for a developing world — a demand obviously in harmony both with the revolutionary and the romantic temper — grows up first; when it is full grown the scientists go to work and discover the evidence on which our belief in that sort of universe would now be held to rest. . . . I do not at all mean that these new phenomena are illusory. Nature has all sorts of phenomena in stock and can suit many different tastes.

Lewis made similar comments about the development of Darwinian evolution in Christian Reflections, where he concluded, “every age gets, within certain limits, the science it desires.”

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Zimbabwe church Launches Nehemiah Festival – as strife hits the church

October 23, 2008