Lew Rockwell BlogNew gods for old ...
Posted by Christopher Manion at July 31, 2003 09:16 AM
Lew, thanks for linking Monbiot’s Interesting article, although it scrunches some stuff together, so to speak. Nonetheless, what intrigues me more than anything else about this civil religion enterprise, is this: while we have made of the state an idol, diversity demands that we have not one god, but a horde of them, depending on whose views (hey, they're all equal, aren't they?) we're sampling at any given moment (a la Hobbes).
Whereupon we have, "All secular gods are equal, but some (those of the ruler) are more equal than others (everybody else’s)."
And we wind up then with the divinity of the emperor, exactly as the pagan Romans did. All that's left to complete the imperial project is to crucify the Christian objectors.
Hegel was wrong: history is not the inexorable unfolding of Hegel's inspired gnostic revelations; but Aquinas was right: actions will, by dint of the natural law, have their consequences. And the inescapable result of this deification of the state and the zealous, "humble" enforcement of its revelations is persecution of any and all Christians. It was Augustine’s City of God that first spelled out the limited state, on the basis of man’s ultimate destiny, salvation, which lay beyond politics. So the imperial, divinized state must exterminate Christians, since they are natural competitors, as it redeems the darkened world. Very Darwinian.
Then, of course, comes collapse, chaos, and carnage.
