The people who survive will be the people who cultivate a culture of questioning, said Stanley Kober of the Cato Institute (paraphrased) at a Georgetown Berkeley event recently.
This was said in a context of a discussion of the potential harm that an Egyptian-Iranian alliance could do in the context of Palestinian declared State hood. The extremists who strap bombs to themselves to make themselves weapons of mass destruction don't critically question anything- their blind obedience lead to death, of themselves and others who get in their way. Any extreme ideology breeds death and destruction because it insists on death. The Planned Parenthood lobby are just as guilty of this extremism.
"Critical legal studies" was in vogue when I went to Law School and this was a movement in which we were taught to think aggressively critically and question even basic premises. This culturally took hold I suppose after all the conventions of the 50s crashed in the disillusionment of the wild 60s.
But further back it is obvious that when a ruler like Hitler took power, he did so mandating that all alliegance be blind and total. It was unthinkable, "insupportable" to defy the regime. Autocrats function like this. Power mongers and tyrants function like that. This is the mentality that allowed the torturers in this country to Torture. They didn't critically question how wrong and evil their supervisors were.
Not so the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit never compelled a blind alliegance to anything because he put the power of Love in each of us and the power of conscience in each of us to determine for ourselves and discern for ourselves where LIFE is found. Those who find it in the Lord should be living lives of much more profound Love on a much deeper level than people engaged to and in blind obedience.
That's why the autocratic tyranical model of the Catholic church caused a split into many factions of Protestants who just don't buy it. They don't buy it because for many example after example the tyrant was wrong. Plainly corruptly wrong.
When he is wrong, it requires reform, or he is no less an instrument of death than any blind dictator.
Which takes me back to my common refrain- and no, I refuse to be silenced on it. The misinterpretation of Christ's death as imposing a death on the humanity of the priesthood to deny any of them marriage insisting that only celibates can consecrate the eucharist is so profoundly biblically wrong it is an evil. The Evil breeds untold deviancies, perversions, insulting unholy attractions that demean and dishonor women and create a spiritual death to other women for no other purpose or reason than to serve an institutional hierarcy that lives in a culture of oppression.
If it is not critically studied seriously, with better rationale offered than -its because it has always been done that way- I can't see the Church in its current form existing past two more generations. And its no small wonder churches are vacant in huge numbers through Europe and turned into stone museums.
It is as the French say "insupportable' as it is rooted in dishonor, discrimination, and demeaning of women in the name of an idolotrous view of Mary. She would be spinning in heaven. And don't get me started on how ridiculously vain some Cardinals look draped in red. So vain I could throw up.Like Jesus ran around posing for portraits with enormous jewelry on.
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