Padre Paulo Ricardo de Azevedo, consultor da Congregação do Clero, em assuntos de catequese junto à Santa Sé, professor de Filosofia e Teologia, e reitor do Seminário Cristo Rei de Cuiabá (MT) denuncia as influências materialistas do marxismo cultural no mundo Ocidental com o objetivo de "descristianizar" a sociedade. Alerta para o perigo de uma leitura sociológica da Bíblia em função dos interesses do comunismo.
cancaonova.com: O que é o marxismo cultural?
Padre Paulo Ricardo: Marxismo cultural é um movimento ideológico que pretende implantar a revolução marxista. Não através dos meios armados ou de uma movimentação de violência, mas por meio da transformação da cultura ocidental. Na verdade, o Ocidente é uma cultura que está toda baseada, desde o tempo dos antigos filósofos gregos, principalmente depois do Cristianismo, na espiritualidade.
cancaonova.com: Por que muitos pensam que o comunismo desapareceu totalmente, após a queda da União Soviética?
Padre Paulo Ricardo: O que desapareceu foi o comunismo real, no entanto, os ideais marxistas continuam de pé e muito vivos, basta lermos os programas dos partidos políticos no Brasil e veremos que aquilo que se pretende com o marxismo continua sendo o ideal de toda uma movimentação política. Só que esses adeptos da cultura marxista estão convencidos de que não conseguirão implantá-la aqui se antes não destruírem a cultura, que há no país, toda baseada na espiritualidade, o que é típico do Ocidente como já foi dito. Trocando em miúdos, o marxismo é materialista e para implantá-lo é necessário que as pessoas estejam convencidas do materialismo. Então, eles, aos poucos, vãos desmontando a cultura ocidental, que é espiritual, cristã, filosófica e metafísica, e implantando o materialismo pagão, que é contra a metafísica e que só é a favor daquilo que é experimental, que se pode palpar, aquilo que podemos experimentar no dia-a-dia.
cancaonova.com: Como esta ideologia comunista mais afeta nossa vida de Igreja e influencia nosso pensamento?
Padre Paulo Ricardo: Ela afeta justamente pelo fato de que a teologia da libertação, aqui no Brasil e na América Latina, tem como ideal a implantação de uma sociedade parecida com aquela que os socialistas e comunistas esperavam, ou seja, uma sociedade igualitária, em que as pessoas sejam todas iguais. Por meio dessa teologia, esse tipo de leitura da Bíblia e da realidade bastante socializante e materialista foram entrando aos poucos em nossa maneira de ver o mundo e da visão da Igreja.
cancaonova.com: Como combatê-la e se dar conta de que se trata de uma 'ideologia marxista', mesmo que disfarçada?
Padre Paulo Ricardo: A primeira coisa é compreendermos que, através da ideologia marxista, se tende a ler tudo a partir da sociologia. Então, quando, por exemplo, encontramos uma pessoa que começa ler a Bíblia e em todas as suas passagens tira alguma aplicação social, esse é um indício, um sinal bastante claro de que, talvez, ela esteja seguindo esse tipo de pensamento marxista. Sabemos que a Sagrada Escritura tem uma lição social, mas nós não podemos extrair dela apenas uma mensagem social.
cancaonova.com: Quais os principais meios utilizados pelos militantes do marxismo cultural para difundir suas idéias?
Padre Paulo Ricardo: O primeiro ponto é que eles agem em dois campos muito distintos. O primeiro campo mais importante para eles são as universidades, onde, basicamente, quase todos os professores, de alguma forma, foram influenciados por esse tipo de pensamento materialista e socializante. Já o segundo são os meios de comunicação. Através das novelas e noticiários, eles vão influenciando e montando a mentalidade do povo de uma forma contraria à do Cristianismo e à visão espiritual da realidade.
cancaonova.com: Como padre, na sua história de vida, o senhor percebe que foi alguma vez instrumentalizado pelos pensadores do marxismo cultural?
Padre Paulo Ricardo: Sem dúvida nenhuma. Quando eu era um jovem estudante de Filosofia, eu seguia aquilo que os professores ensinavam em sala de aula, dentro da universidade. E, sem perceber, ia escorregando para esse tipo de leitura sociológica, uma leitura socializante da Bíblia. Mas graças a Deus e pela providência divina, eu fui encontrando livros que, aos poucos, foram me abrindo os olhos e é por isso que, hoje, quero prestar esse serviço para as pessoas, ajudando-as também a encontrar o caminho de saída desse tipo de pensamento que esvazia o Evangelho.
cancaonova.com: Em qual aspecto os católicos devem ficar mais atentos para não serem 'inocentes úteis' nas mãos dos intelectuais do comunismo?
Padre Paulo Ricardo: A primeira coisa que nós temos de notar é que somos a maioria, só que, infelizmente, somos uma maioria inconsciente, ou seja, nós não temos consciência daquilo que deveríamos fazer. Enquanto eles são uma minoria muita bem treinada. Por exemplo: no jornal Folha de São Paulo foi veiculada uma pesquisa afirmando que 47% dos eleitores brasileiros, portanto, a esmagadora maioria de acordo com a pesquisa, são bastante conservadores em termos de moralidade, portanto, os brasileiros são contra o aborto, o casamento homossexual e todo esse tipo de coisa.
Mas os adeptos da cultura marxista procuram passar toda uma programação a favor do aborto e do casamento gay, porque pretendem desmontar a moral cristã para implantar uma mentalidade materialista.
Pois bem, se nós somos a maioria, por que é que eles conseguem nos dominar? Porque eles dominaram os meios de comunicação. Existe, na verdade, uma minoria falante que está dominando uma maioria muda. A primeira coisa que nós devemos fazer é parar de ser mudos e começar a falar, a protestar e a dizer: "Não, eu não estou de acordo com isso! Não é assim!" E se formos chamados de conservadores, não importa.
A primeira coisa que um católico precisa realmente ter consciência – diante do fenômeno do marxismo cultural – é de que nós iremos ser policiados por eles, naquilo que eles chamam de "patrulhamento ideológico", mas não temos de nos importar com isso, porque assim como os primeiros cristãos sofreram perseguições, nós também as sofreremos, mas estas serão de forma ideológica. Devemos lutar para levar a verdade do Evangelho para frente! Não podemos ceder e "barateá-lo" a uma nova agenda cultural que está nos sendo imposta.
cancaonova.com: O que o Papa Bento XVI significa em todo esse contexto?
Padre Paulo Ricardo: O Papa Bento XVI, quando era professor na Alemanha, sofreu bastante com esse tipo de movimentação do marxismo cultural, porque este movimento não está presente apenas na Igreja do Brasil, mas também na Alemanha. E muitos teólogos tentavam adaptar o Evangelho ao marxismo, de modo que foram eles que mais criaram problemas para ele. Quando ele foi eleito cardeal em Roma, logo começou a combater a teologia da libertação marxista, tentando mostrar justamente que se tratava de um desequilíbrio e de uma traição ao Evangelho. Agora que é papa, nós vemos claramente que Deus se manifestou ao escolher este homem para ajudar a Igreja do Brasil e do mundo inteiro a sair desta situação de querer ler o Evangelho através de uma visão sociológica e de uma agenda política que não tem nada a ver com o Cristianismo. Então, podemos dizer que a eleição de Bento XVI é a virada. Ele é, de alguma forma, o homem da providência e nós agradecemos a Deus por ter nos dado esse homem providencial.
cancaonova.com: Teremos uma sociedade ideal, harmônica, igualitária, neste mundo um dia, ou nossa meta de vida perfeita é para a 'pátria celeste'?
Padre Paulo Ricardo: Sem dúvida nenhuma, nós temos de ser realistas. Somos imperfeitos, por isso não somos capazes de gerar, nesse mundo, uma sociedade perfeita. Todos aqueles que quiseram implantar um paraíso, aqui, na terra, a única coisa que conseguiram produzir foi o inferno. Todas as ideologias do século XX, que propunham fazer um paraíso na terra, foram as que causaram mais mortes. Nós não podemos agir assim, temos de tentar melhorar a sociedade sim, lutar para a justiça, mas o próprio Papa Bento XVI nos recorda na encíclica "Deus Caritas Est": "Não é possível implantar o paraíso aqui na terra, o que nós devemos esperar é que tenhamos forças morais aqui na terra, suficientes para lutar contra o mal", mas essa luta irá durar enquanto o mundo for mundo. Somente no final dos tempos é que nós veremos o reino dos céus vir como um dom de Deus e não como a realização de uma obra humana. Entraremos na Jerusalém celeste, sim, mas como diz o livro do Apocalipse: "Ela é a esposa que desce do alto e não aquela que sobe da terra, porque quem sobe da terra, é a prostituta".
Contato: www.padrepauloricardo.org
Saturday, January 19, 2008
Pe. Paulo Ricardo - instrumentalização da Igreja face aos interesses dos comunistas
Friday, January 18, 2008
Common Errors in English
Online version of the book below:
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/errors.html#errors
The Godfather Of American Conservatism
The Godfather Of American Conservatism
John B. Judis
Story in .rtf
Today, whether the issue is arms control, school prayer, or tax reform, the most heated political battles are being waged among conservatives rather than between conservatives and liberals. There are as many factions of conservatives–new right, old right, neo-conservative, movement conservative, moderate conservative–as there used to be factions on the left. But beneath these divisions does there lurk a common set of assumptions which is conservatism?
The most concerted attempt to discover these assumptions was made by Frank Meyer, an ex-Communist who from 1957 until his death in 1972 was a senior editor of and columnist for National Review. Meyer was the ideological godfather of the conservative organizations and politicians who got their start in the late ’50s and the ’60s, from the Young Americans for Freedom to Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.
Meyer communicated many of his ideas through countless phone calls emanating at all hours of the night from his Woodstock, New York home. But he also tried to create a philosophical synthesis of American conservatism in his writings. Meyer set out, he explained in his book, In Defense of Freedom, to "vindicate on theoretical grounds the native belief of American conservatives."
In the minds of many conservatives today, Meyer succeeded admirably. Conservative columnist M. Stanton Evans said of his work, "In the perspective of time, we shall rank his libertarian-conservative writing among the principal achievements, not only of modern conservatism, but of political thought in general."
David Keene, now the chairman of the American Conservative Union and in 1969 the chairman of the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), said "YAF and the young conservative movement really looked to Frank Meyer of National Review as their philosophical leader."
Yet neither Meyer nor his philosophy is known outside the conservative movement.
Meyer was a small, pale, gaunt man with high cheekbones, a long thin nose and protruding lips. Former New Republic editor Michael Straight, who knew Meyer as a Communist in London, described him as looking like "an Aztec priest." He paid little attention to what he wore, except for his red suspenders, which are now fashionable on the right. He was passionate and excitable: an avid conversationalist and stirring orator. He was also a notable eccentric.
For the last twenty-five years of his life, Meyer lived in Woodstock, in a house dominated by books. Distrustful of the public schools, he and his wife educated their children themselves. Meyer was a night person. He went to sleep at seven in the morning and awoke at two. He would volunteer to perform wakeup calls for his unfortunate friends who had to keep normal hours.
Through the telephone, he kept very close track of national conservative politics. For instance, when Robert Bauman was the head of Young Americans for Freedom in the early ’60s, he recalled hearing from Meyer as many as four or five times a night on the eve of an important board meeting. He also extended coveted invitations to young conservatives to visit him in Woodstock.
Like many prominent right wing intellectuals, Meyer began on the political left. Meyer joined the British Communist Party in 1931 as a student at Oxford, to which he had transferred from Princeton. In 1932, he went to London School of Economics for graduate work and ran successfully for student president as a known Communist. After a blowup with the school’s president in 1934, he was expelled from LSE and deported from England.
Back in the United States, he rose quickly to become Educational Director of the party in the Indiana-Illinois region. Known in party circles as a "Marxist theoretician," Meyer was responsible for educating party cadre in the latest directives from the leadership and in the most recent interpretation of the Marxist classics. "He was always able to quote what the latest line was," William Sennett, a party comrade, recalled.
Meyer became an enthusiastic proponent of the party’s pro-New Deal Popular Front policies, epitomized in the slogan "Communism is Twentieth Century Americanism." Unlike many other Communist intellectuals, he stuck with the party through the Moscow purge trials of the mid 30s and the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939. It was only in 1945, when Moscow replaced Communist leader and popular front proponent Earl Browder with hardliner William Z. Foster that Meyer began to draw away from the party.
Meyer never formally resigned from the Communist party, but by 1950, he had become both an ardent anti-Communist and a proponent of free market economics. In the early ’50s, he was an expert government witness at Smith Act trials in New York and Chicago; and he was writing articles condemning the Soviet Union and praising the free market for the American Mercury and The Freeman, the two right-wing journals of the time.
Meyer later credited F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom with turning him to the right, but Hayek’s book cannot account for the speed, intensity, and extent of Meyer’s transformation. Most other former Communists or Trotskyists became liberals. Most of those who became conservatives took their time in doing so and retained, even on the right, elements of their former belief. For instance, James Burnham took almost 15 years to journey from Trotskyism to conservatism. And Wilmoore Kendall and Freda Utley both remained Keynesians.
Meyer’s commitment to communism had been philosophical rather than organizational. He did not seek the security of the party cell, but the metaphysical security of a total system of ideas. When he abandoned communism, he sought certainty in a new American conservatism. "He was the ultimate ideologue," said John Leonard, who worked with Meyer on National Review.
Meyer’s quest for metaphysical security was borne out by his deathbed conversion from secular Judaism to Catholicism. According to his son Eugene Meyer, his father’s conversion to Catholicism did not reflect an experience of Jesus’ divinity but rather the conviction that the evil of communism had to be balanced by the goodness of Christianity. Like Whittaker Chambers, Meyer had come to identify Christianity with civilization.
As Meyer was dying of lung cancer in 1972, he consumed his last hours feverishly debating whether the Catholic prohibition on suicide and the phrase the "communion of Saints" violated his libertarian ethic. His final conversion to Catholicism consummated his journey from Communism to conservatism.
In 1955, journalist Ralph de Toledano, who had known Meyer on the left, introduced him to William F. Buckley Jr., who was then starting a new magazine. Meyer began writing regularly for National Review, and in 1957 became a senior editor. In his column, "Principles and Heresies," Meyer began to develop a "correct line" for the conservative movement just as he had once done for Midwestern Communists.
In 1957, however, there was no conservative movement as such, but rather diverse and often fractious movements and organizations, loosely identified with the right by their common opposition to the New Deal, Communism, and federally-imposed racial integration. Nor was there a common intellectual approach associated with the right; instead, there were two principal intellectual currents, individualism and traditionalism, neither of which, in their pure form, had any embodiment in the political realm.
The individualists or libertarians, led by a young economist Murray Rothbard, hearkened back to Albert Jay Nock, the editor of the original Freeman, and to his disciple Frank Chodorov. They were right-wing anarchists who identified freedom with the free market and rejected any government intrusion upon individual rights, whether in the form of antitrust law, social security, or military spending. Many had been isolationists; and after World War II, they became vigorous critics of the America’s burgeoning military budget and Cold War policies.
The traditionalists or conservatives, typified by Richard Weaver, Eric Voegelin, and Russell Kirk, author of The Conservative Mind, viewed society as an organic whole the health of which was more important than the health of its individual parts; they regarded the inculcation of virtue rather than freedom as the supreme goal of politics; and in the name of Christianity, Tory England, or the Plantation South, they upheld tradition and prescription over ideology and reason. They abhorred socialism, communism, and liberalism not because they destroyed freedom, but because they encouraged an unnatural egalitarianism. While preferring capitalism to its rivals, they blamed it for the commercialism and materialism rampant in society.
The proponents of individualism and traditionalism had little patience or even respect for each other. Kirk once confessed to historian George Nash that "he, felt closer to socialist Norman Thomas than to anarcho-capitalist Murray Rothbard." But Frank Meyer set out in the ’50s to incorporate elements of each philosophy into a new conservative politics that would be not only valid, but also relevant to the emerging movement of the late ’50s and early ’60s. Because Meyer’s new philosophy fused elements of both individualism and traditionalism, it was called "fusionism."
Meyer shared the individualists’ identification of freedom with the free market. He viewed liberalism, socialism, and communism as steps on a ladder leading to the extinction of any freedom. But Meyer was also a militant anti-Communist who thought nothing should be spared in fighting the international Communist conspiracy, and a man of straight-laced morality who thought virtue rather than happiness or pleasure should be the end of existence. According to Meyer, individualism threatened to sap "the foundations of belief in an organic moral order."
Meyer maintained that the individualists were correct in positing freedom as the "primary end" of politics, but he rejected the view that freedom was an "absolute end." "In the moral realm freedom is only a means whereby men can pursue their proper end, which is virtue," Meyer wrote.
But Meyer was equally, if not more, critical of the traditionalists. In reviewing Russell Kirk’s highly acclaimed The Conservative Mind in 1955, Meyer charged that Kirk, by preferring tradition to reason, had enshrined "the maxim, ‘Whatever is, is right,’ as the first principle of thought about politics and society." According to Meyer, Kirk’s society that stressed "authority and order" over "freedom" and "status" over "contract" "would only move inevitably toward totalitarianism."
Meyer maintained that virtue was not possible without freedom. "The simulacrum of virtuous acts brought about by the coercion of superior power, is not virtue, the meaning of which resides in the free choice of good over evil," Meyer wrote.
But if the state could not impose virtue, how could a free society hope to inculcate it? Meyer rested his hope for virtue on a model of society quaintly similar to what the Soviet Communists initially claimed to be their ideal. "A good society is possible only," Meyer wrote, "when the social and political order guarantees a state of affairs in which men can freely choose, when the intellectual and moral leaders, the ‘creative minority,’ have the understanding and imagination to maintain the prestige of tradition and reason and thus to sustain the intellectual and moral order throughout society."
Meyer claimed that his ideas not only replicated everyday conservatism, but also the historic beliefs of Americans. Just as Meyer’s political economy dated from Andrew Jackson’s affirmation of the frontier’s free market, his morals reflected Puritan America’s solitary quest for a virtuous polity. The two conceptions belonged, of course, to different eras–the Puritans’ views of government was far closer to that of Kirk than Meyer–but they had co-existed in the American psyche since the early 1800s. Meyer elevated their co-existence from homily to philosophy. And in doing so, he sought not merely to ground conservatism in philosophy, but to ground conservatism in the peculiar philosophy of Americans.
Meyer did succeed in providing at least the appearance of a theoretical underpinning for the conservative movement of his time. Meyer himself wrote or helped write the founding statements of both the American Conservative Union and the New York Conservative Party, and the authors of the Young Americans for Freedom’s founding "Sharon Statement" credited him with that statement’s attempt to combine individualism and traditionalism.
![[Image]](http://www.aliciapatterson.org/APF0901/Judis/Judis01.jpg) | Frank Meyer |
Meyer used fusionism to justify the political stances of the emerging strands of the conservative movement. Meyer invoked his concept of freedom from government interference on behalf of Southern segregation, as well as Northern resistance to the enlargement of the welfare state. And Meyer’s insistence on virtue as the moral end of existence dovetailed with popular dismay at the drug counterculture and ghetto violence of the ’60s. When Barry Goldwater ran for President in 1964, or when Ronald Reagan ran for governor of California in 1966, it was substantially on Meyer’s fusionist platform. The first book of neo-conservative politics, Irving Kristol’s On the Democratic Idea in America, was virtually a gloss on Meyer’s fusionism.
Once he had worked out the central idea of fusionism in the mid-1950s, Meyer himself never budged from it. It occupied the same place in his thought as Stalin’s version of Marxism once had. It became the basis for denouncing suspected deviations from the correct line, from Rothbard’s anti-war stand to the pro-marijuana stance of the Libertarian faction of the Young Americans for Freedom.
Young conservatives found Meyer looking over their shoulder as they plied their trade. "Frank Meyer really was the conscience of the right wing," recalled David Keene. "If you were a movement conservative, and were in a position somewhere, and were doing something that you knew you shouldn’t be doing, Frank Meyer would know about it, and he would call you on the carpet for it."
Like Stalin’s Marxism, fusionism also became for Meyer on overarching theory in which even seemingly contradictory facts were fitted. Thus Meyer could defend Southern segregation and become an outspoken apologist for South Africa’s "apartheid" system, praising it as an attempt to develop "the black nations within South Africa to an eventual equal status with the white nation."
Since Meyer’s death, no alternative philosophy has supplanted fusionism among conservatives. The only attempt to provide an alternative was made by columnist George Will, who in Statecraft and Soulcraft tried to revive Kirk’s traditionalist approach to the state. But Will’s book was rudely received by both National Review and Human Events. Fusionism is still the unofficial philosophy of American conservatives.
The acceptance of fusionism among the great body of conservatives does not, however, validate its theory. Viewed according to the canons of logic rather than according to the requirements of politics, fusionism does not really amount to much as political philosophy.
The most telling critique of fusionism was made two decades ago by traditionalists. In a 1962 essay, Brent Bozell, Meyer’s close friend who later became the editor of the right wing Catholic journal Triumph, challenged Meyer’s root assumptions. Meyer’s argument rested on the premise that freedom was a precondition of virtue, but Bozell demolished this premise simply by noting that a Soviet political prisoner, severely restrained by his government, was as capable of leading a virtuous life as an American businessman. "The freedom necessary to virtue is presumably a freedom no man will ever be without," Bozell concluded. Meyer’s argument unraveled from there.
For Bozell, who was already moving toward a Franco-inspired authoritarianism, the point was that freedom is not merely irrelevant to virtue, but perhaps even detrimental to its realization. But regardless of his motives, Bozell succeeded in showing that Meyer had not theoretically reconciled freedom and virtue, but merely placed them side-by-side in the same theory. If virtue–and particularly Christian rather than Classical virtue–is the proper goal of humanity, then other justifications for freedom must be sought.
Bozell also objected to Meyer’s contention that economic freedom was a condition of political freedom. Noting the case of Great Britain, which remained a political democracy while nationalizing part of its industry, Bozell argued that its citizens could "exercise their political freedom against their economic freedom." Meyer could only respond by circularly defining the problem out of existence. Political freedom, Meyer wrote, was "the limitation of the power of the state to the function of preserving a free order."
Russell Kirk’s objections to Meyer were more down to earth but no less telling. Kirk pointed out that the free market whose preservation Meyer had made the goal of political society could itself encourage vice rather than virtue: whether in the form of suburban shopping malls, prostitution, television advertising, or the hunger for material success. Kirk accused Meyer of simply replacing an uncritical anti-capitalism with an equally uncritical pro-capitalism. "There was a tendency among the ex-Communists and ex-Trotskyists to go from one extreme to the other," Kirk recalled. "Frank Meyer is the clearest example of that. Having been turned away from ideology they seek another ideology which becomes a kind of ideology of capitalism."
Bozell’s and Kirk’s objections undercut the philosophical validity of fusionism, but in politics, as James Burnham pointed out in The Machiavellians, the usefulness of a philosophy is not necessarily related to its theoretical soundness. Rather, it is related to the degree to which the philosophy resonates with popular mythologies. Meyer’s philosophy did precisely that: invoking both the frontier free market and John Winthrop’s City on a Hill and reconciling the Chamber of Commerce’s economics with the Sunday sermon against the evils of pornography.
Political movements rarely possess coherent unified world views; instead, they are concatenations of conflicting Weltanschaungs, whose unity is predicated on common but sometimes fleeting fears and interests. Thus, both urban blacks and rural Southern whites were integral to the old Democratic majority; while "country club Republicans," the "born again Falwellites," and disillusioned ethnic Democrats conspired to provide Reagan with his two landslides.
The practical unity among these groups is fleeting. For instance, a serious recession under Republican rule could send the disillusioned Democrats in the North and South scurrying back to the fold. But in the absence of long-term practical unity, Meyer’s philosophy provides the appearance of long-term philosophical unity.
Meyer’s fusionism was more rationalization than theory. It is not likely to stand with the works of Jefferson, Calhoun, or Croly in the anthologies of American political thought. Nor is it likely to survive the political coalition that it helped to sustain. But for the moment it does provide a banner in which those interested primarily in school prayer or segregation and those interested in lower taxes and less regulation of their businesses can march together.
©1986 John B. Judis
John B. Judis, senior editor on leave from In These Times, is exploring the development of American conservative politics.
The Shaping of the American Conservative Movement
The Fusionist
An NRO Flashback
Editor's note: This review appeared in the June 17, 2002, issue of National Review.
Principles and Heresies: Frank S. Meyer and the Shaping of the American Conservative Movement, by Kevin J. Smant (ISI, 425 pp., $29.95)
For fifty years, most American conservatives have stood for three basic propositions: that American foreign policy should seek to end totalitarian regimes; that the domestic functions of government, and especially of the federal government, should be strictly limited; and that the moral precepts traditionally associated with Christianity (sometimes the formulation includes Judaism as well) should be upheld.
These propositions attracted distinct, though overlapping, constituencies to conservatism: defense hawks, libertarians, social conservatives. The coalition thus created has achieved some political success. Arguably, it had something to do with the achievement of its paramount goal, the overthrow of Communism.
But whether the coalition made sense in terms other than those of expedience has always been disputed. Sometimes, it has been disputed by people who accept one or more of the conservative propositions but reject others. Some libertarians, for example, opposed the Cold War. Often, the intellectual coherence of conservatism has been challenged by people who shelter under none of its tents. Thus liberals charge that there is a deep contradiction between advocating low taxes and condemning low morals.
In the founding generation of modern American conservatism, no one tried harder to answer that charge than Frank Meyer. Meyer attempted to show that traditionalism and libertarianism were indeed compatible and that both were necessary. He succeeded in persuading most conservatives. His thought became, to a large extent, the philosophical basis for American conservatism. But conservatism has grown less philosophically inclined over the years, and most young conservatives have never heard of him. For those who wish to make his acquaintance, Kevin Smant’s new biography, appearing on the thirtieth anniversary of Meyer’s death, is a good place to start.
Like so many of his generation of conservative intellectuals, the Newark-born Meyer had been a Communist — working for the party as an organizer first at Oxford and then in the Midwest. He met the woman who would be his wife, Elsie Bown, at a party class he was teaching in Chicago. In the 1940s, however, both of them began to develop ideological doubts.
In Smant’s telling, the key episode came after Meyer enlisted, for both Communist and patriotic reasons, to fight the Nazis. He was quickly discharged for having flat feet. The recovery from surgery on both feet kept him immobilized for eighteen months. Naturally, he read — the Federalist Papers, for example, with much of which he found hihimself agreeing. Other readings impressed on him the strength of the West’s belief in the dignity of the individual. Meyer became a sort of moderate Communist. He wanted a democratic, gradualist, and peaceful Communist party, one more deeply rooted in American tradition. For a while, he thought the party was moving in his direction; but the re-imposition of Stalinist discipline dashed those hopes. Elsie and he argued their way out of the party together.
He was briefly a Truman Democrat. But books like Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom and Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences pushed him rightward. In addition, liberals seemed to his mind not to understand the nature of the Communist threat. Liberalism had grown too relativistic and too collectivist to grasp any longer the moral case for freedom, and thus lacked the intellectual resources to resist Communism. Worse, both major political parties now drank deeply from this liberalism.
Meyer started to write for the conservative publications The Freeman and The American Mercury. When William F. Buckley Jr. asked him to write for a magazine he was starting, Meyer accepted. For fifteen years, he served as NR’s book-review editor. He also had a regular column, titled “Principles & Heresies.”
Meyer believed that he must “unremittingly trace his errors to their sources” and start over. In his columns and elsewhere — most notably in his book In Defense of Freedom — Meyer argued for a recovery of what he took to be the main current of the Western tradition. That tradition, he wrote, held both freedom and virtue “in balance and tension.” It regarded virtue as the highest end of man, but over time it came to see freedom as both a precondition of true virtue and man’s highest political end. Traditionalists and libertarians both objected to Communism and liberalism. Meyer claimed, however, that they had not only “a common enemy” but “a common heritage.”
Meyer’s mix of libertarianism and traditionalism came to be called “fusionism,” but he didn’t think he was fusing anything. America’s Founders were concerned about both freedom and virtue. Only in the 19th century were these ends divided. In the aftermath of the French Revolution, classical liberals became too utilitarian and hostile to religion and tradition. In reaction to them, classical conservatives defended authoritarianism.
Both had part of the truth. The conservative — and, at the time Meyer wrote, the traditionalist — was correct in affirming the existence of an objective moral order and the importance of virtue. The classical liberals, and now the libertarians, were right to oppose statism. These truths were not at war, but merely “contrary emphases in conservatism” as Meyer was trying to define it. But either emphasis, if pursued to the exclusion of the other, risked error.
Traditionalists could slight the cause of freedom, failing to see that virtue cannot be coerced. They could fail to see that the individual was the locus of virtue. (Toward the end of his life, as he moved toward the Catholicism he would embrace on his deathbed, Meyer increasingly stressed that this failure missed the significance of the Incarnation.) They could be too critical of reason, leaving them no way to choose among traditions where conflict existed. Against Russell Kirk and Edmund Burke, Meyer wrote that “to make tradition, ‘prejudice and prescription,’ not along with reason but against reason, the sole foundation of one’s position is to enshrine the maxim, ‘Whatever is, is right,’ as the first principle of thought about politics and society.”
The characteristic error of libertarianism was to undermine “belief in an organic moral order,” even though this belief was in truth “the only possible basis for respect for the integrity of the individual person and for the overriding value of his freedom.” So “both extremes” were “self- defeating: truth withers when freedom dies, however righteous the authority that kills it; and free individualism uninformed by moral value rots at its core and soon brings about conditions that pave the way for surrender to tyranny.”
As M. Stanton Evans notes in the foreword to Smant’s book, Meyer was both a polemical and a unifying figure. He never hesitated to do intellectual battle with representatives of either “extreme” within conservatism. He also moved from theory to practice, advising Young Americans for Freedom, the American Conservative Union, and the New York Conservative Party. Arguments were also settled, and intra-conservative unity forged, in long late-night phone calls from his home in Woodstock.
Meyer’s fusionism was not without critics, even within NR circles. Whittaker Chambers, in a letter to WFB, had a memorable put-down of Meyer as doctrinaire. James Burnham found him insufficiently realistic about tactics. Still, Meyer largely prevailed. His writing may have been “often heavy and stiff,” as Smant rightly notes. But conservatives were ready to accept his thesis, no doubt in large part because so many of them had both libertarian and traditionalist tendencies themselves. From the 1960s on, the federal government gave fusionism a powerful boost by seeming to promote moral and social decay at every turn, subsidizing illegitimate births and blasphemous art.
Fusionism lingers among conservatives and Republicans to this day. Meyer’s influence can be seen in Charles Murray’s remark, in his book In Pursuit, that if Adam Smith and Edmund Burke could admire each other, why can’t he admire both? In 1995, Ralph Reed, then executive director of the Christian Coalition, spoke as a fusionist in counseling the new Republican Congress that “in an essentially conservative society, traditionalist ends can be advanced through libertarian means.” Around the same time, William Kristol urged conservatives to practice a “politics of liberty” and a “sociology of virtue.”
The influence of fusionism has not been wholly positive. Meyer contributed to an unfortunate tendency among conservatives toward theoretical maximalism, as in his casual reference to “the totalitarian implications of the federal school lunch program.” Another instance of that maximalism was his assertion that “society does not exist” (a phrase Margaret Thatcher later used). Did libertarianism really have to be founded on such extreme individualism, rather than, say, skepticism about or fear of the state?
In Meyer’s thought, virtue is aligned rather too neatly with religion and tradition, and reason with libertarianism. Many “traditionalists” defend tradition precisely insofar as it embodies, and helps guide people toward, sound moral principles that are rationally defensible.
The largest problem with Meyer’s synthesis is that he leans too heavily on the proposition that virtue must be freely chosen. It is true that the law cannot compel the internal assent of the will. But that truth does not by itself yield the Millian libertarian conclusions that Meyer draws from it. It does not mean, that is, that virtue is impossible under compulsion. Whether to obey the law is always a moral choice, for one thing; and one can do the right thing for the right reason even if the law provides an additional reason for doing it.
It would be pointless, in just the way Meyer supposes, for the law to attempt to compel religious belief. But there is a point to using the law to protect a moral ecology that supports people in the exercise of virtue. Laws help form character. They teach. Many times, they do so in ways compatible with strict libertarianism — by punishing some classes of unjust action, or allowing industry to be rewarded. But Meyer provides no good reason for abjuring non-libertarian morals laws in all cases.
Another reason that Meyer’s fusionism is not wholly adequate as a guide to conservatives is that it was the product of his times. The notion that libertarian policies would yield a society that moral conservatives would approve was most plausible when applied to a largely traditionalist society. Ours is manifestly no longer one. The threat of “regimentation” and “planning,” which Meyer understandably feared, is not what it used to be either.
Meyer also wrote at a time when America had a stronger sense of itself as a unified culture than at most points in its history, including our own. The conservative triad that he helped to develop — anti-totalitarianism, free markets, moral orthodoxy — has nothing to say about cultural cohesion, and not enough to say about patriotism. Meyer helped to produce a real novelty: a conservatism relatively indifferent to the transmission of culture down the generations.
What he did, however, was enough. Those of us who generally believe in both free markets and conservative morals have a lot to thank Meyer (and his like-minded colleagues) for. There was nothing inevitable about the way conservatism developed. It could very well have moved in a more statist direction, in which case America would probably now be weaker and poorer.
Smant summarizes Meyer’s achievement well. He does, however, leave out a nice anecdote. At one of the editorial meetings, Priscilla Buckley stepped in to defuse an argument between Meyer and Burnham. Meyer turned to her and said, “You are the grease in our crankshaft.” Years later, the Washington Post wrote a story that mentioned the incident, correcting Meyer’s quote to “You’re the grease on the axle.” The Post may have known a lot about cars, Miss Buckley remarked, but not much about Frank Meyer.
They came, they saw... and they asked for new underpants
They came, they saw... and they asked for new underpants
Last updated at 22:36pm on 13th January 2008 An archaeologist's life is often a pretty grim one, or so Robin Birley thought as he rooted through a pile of Roman sewage on a windswept fort in the wilds of Northumberland.
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Sifting through the mixture of ancient sewage, rotten bracken and the contents of several decades' worth of Roman rubbish bins, Dr Birley didn't think much at first when he came across a handful of half-burnt, sodden slices of oak, each about the size of a postcard.
Then, suddenly, he spotted a few faded vertical and horizontal marks in ink - Roman ink, made out of gum arabic - and water.
Scroll down for more..
Are you sitting comfortably? Ciaran Hinds, above, as Julius Caesar in the TV series Rome. The exhibition shows that soldiers in remote outposts yearned for nothing so much as the luxury of clean underwear
He had found it! The Holy Grail - the elusive detail experts on Roman Britain had been in search of for centuries: letters to and from the Roman soldiers who had garrisoned Britain from AD43 to 410.
Now known as the Vindolanda Tablets - after the fort where they were found - the more than 1,000 pieces of birch, alder and oak give an unparalleled, moving and often very funny insight into the life of the Roman soldier stuck miles from home at the end of the first century AD.
The letters, found 35 years ago, tend to be from officers and were found in the ruins of the praetorium, the residence of the officers commanding the Vindolanda units from AD90 to 120, just before Hadrian's Wall was built between AD122 and 130. The wall eventually stretched 74 miles from Solway Firth in the west to Wallsend on the River Tyne in the east.
The letters reveal how the soldiers miss their family and friends back in Gaul - that's where most of them came from.
How they long for fine Italian wine. How they dread the attacks of the vicious Picts - the woad-encrusted savages from the north whose raids were to be held off by the new wall of turf and stone stretching across the neck of England.
But most of all, how cold they are in the frozen north, a few miles from modern Hexham.
The funniest letter is a simple list of the clothes sent from the warm south to a poor frozen Roman: "Paria udonum ab Sattua solearum duo et subligariorum duo." Or - socks, two pairs of sandals and two pairs of underpants.
Two pairs of underpants! We tend to forget that the Roman Empire, the greatest the world has ever seen, stretching from Wales to Spain, from Tunisia to Turkey, had to be patrolled by thousands of soldiers, and soldiers, like all of us, are humans. And humans need underpants.
These glimpses into the life of a Roman soldier in Britain will form the central exhibit in a new British Museum show devoted to the Emperor Hadrian, who ruled from AD117 to 138 and visited Britain in 122.
But if Hadrian is the main feature of the new exhibition, then his lowly soldiers are the stars of the show - with their all-too-familiar gripes about life.
These little wooden postcards tell in the cramped hands of more than 280 correspondents what life was really like in the Roman Empire.
"My brother Veldeius," complains one. "I'm pretty shocked that you haven't written to me for ages. Have you heard anything from the folks?
"Do say hello to Virilis the vet and ask him if you can get one of our pals to bring me the pair of shears that he promised me after I paid him. Hope everything is going well. Goodbye."
Another reflects upon the strange native race they encounter: "The British are unprotected by armour. There are lots of cavalry. They don't use swords nor do these dreadful British people mount their horses to throw javelins at us."
But there are, apparently, some pleasures to be had in such an inhospitable posting: "To Lucius. The real reason for my letter is to hope that you're in good health.
"By the way, a friend has sent me 50 oysters from the Thames estuary on the north coast of Kent," writes a soldier.
Most Roman letters were written on papyrus - paper made from the papyrus plant grown in the Nile. Another technique was to inscribe a stilus tablet - a wooden frame with a wax panel set into it.
There's not much call for papyrus plants in Northumberland and the wax has perished from the stilus tablets, leaving barely decipherable scratch marks on the wooden frame beneath the wax.
How lucky, then, that the Vindolanda officers tended to write on longer-lasting simple leaves of wood, one to three millimetres thick, scratched with a reed pen dipped into an inkwell.
The wood was all local. Once written on, the letters were often folded, leaving an imprint of wet ink on the opposite page.
Just as on postcards today, Romans then wrote the addressee on the right side of the card, with the name of the sender below preceded by "a" or "ab" - meaning "from". Much of the letter was written by a professional scribe, with the sender closing the letter in his own hand, writing "vale frater" - "goodbye, brother".
Among the things we learn from these delicate little documents are military reports of the strength and activities of the Vindolanda garrison. Also revealed are details of the domestic administration of this remote little outpost.
Sifting through them, we learn of the diet of the Roman expat, so reminiscent of home: Massic wine (a fine Italian vintage), garlic, fish, semolina, lentils, olives and olive oil.
They also ate a lot of the local Pictish fare: pork fat, cereal, spices, roe-deer and venison.
There are many mentions, too, of "cervesa" and "callum" - that is, lager and pork scratchings, and all 1,000 years before the great British pub had been invented.
The demand for fine food hits a peak at the festival of the Roman goddess of chance, Fors Fortuna, when they have a hog roast, washed down with great quantities of wine, which they claim is "ad sacrum divae" - "for religious use" - an early version of the old "I only drink for medicinal purposes" ploy.
As well as pants, the Romans are desperate for "subuclae" - or vests - for the "abolla", the thick heavy cloak, and for "cubitoria", a full dinner service.
But what really gets the heart racing are the real day-to-day lives of the soldiers, their family and friends.
A man writing to his brother - "Vittius Adiutor eagle-bearer of the Second Augustan Legion to Cassius Saecularis, his little brother, very many greetings."
Solemnis, in another letter, wrote to his brother Paris: "Hello there. Hope all's well. I'm in top form - and I hope you are, even though you've been so bloody lazy and haven't sent me a single letter.
"I'm so much more considerate than you are, my brother, my messmate. Say hello to Diligens and Cogitatus and Corinthus. Goodbye, my dear brother."
Most moving of all is a letter from Claudia Severa to her sister, Sulpicia Lepidina, the wife of a big cheese at Vindolanda - Flavius Cerialis, prefect of the Ninth Cohort of Batavians.
"Oh how I want you to come to my birthday party - you'll make the day so much more enjoyable. I so hope you can make it. Goodbye, sister, my dearest soul."
"Anima mea desideratissima" - "My most longed-for soul" - Claudia calls Sulpicia in another letter. You can almost hear the wrenching apart of the hearts, divided by the greatest imperial project in history.
What a wrench it is for us, too, almost 2,000 years on, to read how those hearts were brought together by these rotten, scorched little slips of oak, inscribed with words that sound as fresh as if they were written this morning.
• Hadrian's Britain, British Museum, July 24 to October 26. • Amo, Amas, Amat... And All That: How To Become A Latin Lover by Harry Mount (Short Books, £12.99).
First Temple seal found in Jerusalem
A stone seal bearing the name of one of the families who acted as servants in the First Temple and then returned to Jerusalem after being exiled to Babylonia has been uncovered in an archeological excavation in Jerusalem's City of David, a prominent Israeli archeologist said Wednesday. Photo: Edwin Trebels courtesy of Dr. Eilat Mazar The 2,500-year-old black stone seal, which has the name "Temech" engraved on it, was found earlier this week amid stratified debris in the excavation under way just outside the Old City walls near the Dung Gate, said archeologist Dr. Eilat Mazar, who is leading the dig. According to the Book of Nehemiah, the Temech family were servants of the First Temple and were sent into exile to Babylon following its destruction by the Babylonians in 586 BCE. The family was among those who later returned to Jerusalem, the Bible recounts. The seal, which was bought in Babylon and dates to 538-445 BCE, portrays a common and popular cultic scene, Mazar said. The 2.1 x 1.8-cm. elliptical seal is engraved with two bearded priests standing on either side of an incense altar with their hands raised forward in a position of worship. Dr. Eilat Mazar A crescent moon, the symbol of the chief Babylonian god Sin, appears on the top of the altar. Under this scene are three Hebrew letters spelling Temech, Mazar said. The Bible refers to the Temech family: "These are the children of the province, that went up out of the captivity, of those that had been carried away, whom Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon had carried away, and came again to Jerusalem and to Judah, every one unto his city." [Nehemiah 7:6]... "The Nethinim [7:46]"... The children of Temech." [7:55]. The fact that this cultic scene relates to the Babylonian chief god seemed not to have disturbed the Jews who used it on their own seal, she added. The seal of one of the members of the Temech family was discovered just dozens of meters away from the Opel area, where the servants of the Temple, or "Nethinim," lived in the time of Nehemiah, Mazar said. "The seal of the Temech family gives us a direct connection between archeology and the biblical sources and serves as actual evidence of a family mentioned in the Bible," she said. "One cannot help being astonished by the credibility of the biblical source as seen by the archaeological find." The find will be announced by Mazar at the 8th annual Herzliya Conference on Sunday. The archeologist, who rose to international prominence for her recent excavation that may have uncovered King David's palace, most recently uncovered the remnants of a wall from Nehemiah. The dig is being sponsored by the Shalem Center, a Jerusalem research institute where Mazar serves as a senior fellow, and the City of David Foundation, which promotes Jewish settlement throughout east Jerusalem.
Photo: Dr. Eilat Mazar Expedition
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Blizzard makes WoW wish virtual reality
Blizzard makes WoW wish virtual reality
Make-A-Wish and a willing company help a grade schooler become the first outsider to create a new character in World of Warcraft.
UPDATE: Gamers show support for Ezra, Blizzard (May 23)
IRVINE – For World of Warcraft players hanging out in Shadowmoon Valley last Friday, bizarre events occurred that can only be explained by a small group of people inside the headquarters of Blizzard Entertainment.
At the helm of the strangeness sat 10-year-old Ezra Chatterton, who directed Warcraft's lead game designer Jeff Kaplan to blast ferocious-looking monsters, or "bosses," with a single death ray. Chatterton cleared the Black Temple for a European clan to fight the volcano-summoning Supremus.
All that power. Heh, heh.
"I'm impressed with Blizzard," said Chatterton from his wheelchair. "Bravo!"
The Riverside fifth-grader has a brain tumor. The diagnosis isn't good; metastatic cancer. Splitting headaches started in March, which led to an emergency room visit in April. Doctors had to sedate him for the pain and he didn't wake up for a week. Groggy and weak in the hospital, Chatterton only wanted to play the massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft.
When the Make-A-Wish Foundation of America, an organization that grants wishes to children with life-threatening cases, came calling two weeks ago, Chatterton knew exactly what he wanted.
"I wished for a trip to Blizzard because I'd like to see if they could make a character and do some things for us."
Chatterton didn't think his wish would come true. He's starting treatment today. And, at most, he thought it could just be a video conference call. But when he found out Blizzard was nearby, and willing, Chatterton became the envy of the 8.5 million World of Warcraft players worldwide. He not only got the chance to tour the company, but to create something new for the game.
Dubbed WoW, Blizzard's game debuted in 2004 and has inspired hundreds of fan sites, a Warcraft Wiki, global game tournaments and even a "South Park" episode.
Chatterton had his father, Micah, sketch characters and write down questions so he wouldn't forget.
Blizzard pulled the daylong funfest together in days. On Friday, father and son arrived at Blizzard's Irvine headquarters in a black limo to tour one of the world's most successful game companies.
Chatterton was whisked immediately to Kaplan's office to create weapons and characters for the game. Later he would head to the recording studio to do a voice for the new character and meet with an artist to get the character's look just right. Throughout the day, he got to design a new weapon, add his dog Kyle to the game, create a quest and record his voice for the new character, Ahab Wheathoof, the Old Rancher.
"We definitely want a crossbow," Chatterton instructed Kaplan. He offered a detailed description of what he wanted: dangerous flames, curved frame and an ability to wreak havoc.
"I want it to shoot a fiery arrow at 300 damage over 10 seconds," he said.
With a few clicks of his mouse, Kaplan constructed a prototype.
"Wow. Weird. Progress is going quicker than I expected," Chatterton said.
"This crossbow will be the only one in the game and it's very difficult to get," Kaplan explained. "You're going to get a lot of questions (from other players)."
Chatterton shied away at Kaplan's suggestion to add "Finely crafted to Ezra's specifications." Father Micah explained, "He doesn't want to appear boastful." They settled on attributing it to ePhoenix, his character in the game.
Chatterton's parents divorced about five years ago and he spends time with both. But only when he's with his dad does he get to play WoW. Micah Chatterton, a writer, wanted to play from the game's beginning, but couldn't afford it. In the U.S., WoW costs about $20 plus another $15 a month in subscription fees. Also, to play online, it's best to have a high-speed Internet connection, which is another $20 to $50 a month.
Then, last fall, Micah Chatterton's house burned down, taking away all his son's toys. He used some insurance money for a computer and Internet access. The father-and-son team entered the world of Warcraft. By Friday, they had made it to level 63. Blizzard bumped ePhoenix up to level 70, the highest level, and stocked the character with gold, weapons and new armor.
"There were a lot of things that are unconventional with our relationship, and the way we choose to bond and spend time together," said Micah Chatterton. "For instance, WoW was something we had researched and talked about. We would talk about what kind of character do we want to create. This costume as opposed to that costume. We would make decisions together. Neither of us would feel comfortable about making a big decision without consulting the other."
In the few days the two had to prepare for the trip to Blizzard, they did their homework.
"He asked me draw (a character) and we settled on this Phoenix motif because that's his middle name. It's certainly apt because we'd like to have some rebirth," Micah Chatterton said.
"I asked him to think about why he likes to play WoW and one thing he said was he likes interacting with people he doesn't know. No matter how crappy things are going on the outside, in the real world, he can be strong and successful and really turn heads in WoW."
Ezra Chatterton's enthusiasm kept him going all day, even getting out of his wheelchair to lob some bombs. By the end of the visit, he'd probably spent nearly seven hours with the Blizzard team.
"From my end, it was a lot about really maintaining the momentum of the day, just the happiness," Micah Chatterton said. "By the end of the day, when we sat down with the artist, Ezra was exhausted and said, 'I'm just happy with what I've got.' "
WoW players should keep an eye out for Chatterton's creations: the rare, flame-shooting crossbow, a quest from a graying Tauren named Ahab Wheathoof and his frenzied dog, Kyle. Blizzard will add Ezra's changes to the game in the next four weeks.
"If Blizzard is listening, I'd like to say thank you for everything you've done for my character to make him so good. I want to thank them for making the quest of the lost dog and the Old Rancher and all the stuff they gave us," said a grateful but drained Ezra Chatterton, who by Sunday got in about five hours of game play.
The visit has given him more to think about than playing games. He's starting to think about his future.
"I'd like to be paid to test and play the game and test weapons, but I don't think I meet the age requirements," he said. "I'm only 10."
Contact the writer: 714-796-4952 or tchuang@ocregister.com
Por que Deus-Homem? (Cur Deus Homo?)
Gabriel
Por que Deus-Homem? (Cur Deus Homo?)
1. Definição de Pecado
De acordo com Santo Anselmo, o pecado consiste em não dar a Deus aquilo que lhe é devido. Ora, ao não dar a Deus aquilo que lhe é devido, peca o homem e entra em débito para com Deus. Assim também o homem que ofende a outrem, passa a ter uma dívida moral para com o ofendido.
Como restituir essa dívida? No caso da ofensa, vemos que o ofensor deve sempre devolver ao ofendido algo que lhe agrade mais do que lhe desagradou a ofensa. Em Deus, o mesmo se dá.
Entretanto, não basta ao homem voltar a dar a Deus aquilo que lhe é devido. Uma vez feita a ofensa, é preciso algo maior do que ela para compensá-la.
Ora, mas quando peca, o homem caí em divida infinita para com Deus. Mas por que é que a dívida é infinita?
2. Divida infinita
Deus é "O Ser perfeitissimo do qual não se pode pensar nada maior", diz-nos o argumento ontológico, prova apodítica da existência de divina. Ora, dar a Deus o que lhe é devido nada mais é que reconhecer em processão intelectual e volativa de sua perfeição absoluta. É reconhecer a infinitude do Criador.
Ao não dar ao Criador aquilo que lhe é devido, o homem passa a entrar em saldo negativo para com Ele.
Alguém poderá perguntar: e se o homem arrepender-se e retornar ao caminho da retidão, dando ao Ato Puro aquilo que lhe é devido? Eu respondo: Nada acontece a tal homem, uma vez que ele apenas voltaria a fazer a sua obrigação, que é reconhecer ao Bem absoluto. O débito não se anula com isso. Por isso, qualquer pecado separa em absoluto o homem de Deus.
Ora, se dando a Deus aquilo que lhe é devido, o pecado do homem, mesmo que sendo um só, ainda não é sanado, logo, tem-se que o homem deveria dar mais à Deus do que aquilo que lhe é devido. Ora, isso é impossível, uma vez que, para dar a Deus mais do que ele merece, seria necessário dar à perfeição aquilo que é mais que perfeito, e à bondade, aquilo que é mais que bom. Ora, sendo Deus absoluto, não pode haver algo que seja maior que ele.
Portanto, é IMPOSSÍVEL para o homem quitar sua dívida com o criador.
3. A única saída
Ora, a Bíblia afirma que Deus amou o mundo e, por isso, fez-se homem e morreu por todos, cancelando, assim, os efeitos condenatórios do pecado adâmico sobre toda a humanidade.
Com a impossibilidade do homem voltar ao estado original, Deus poderia largá-lo num canto do Universo, um dos muitos mundos, abandonando-os ao seu próprio fim. Entretanto, isso não seria demonstrar amor à sua criatura, o que é o oposto que a Bíblia nos diz.
Para solucionar o dilema em que a humanidade, com Adão, entrou, é necessário, como vimos, quitar a dívida para com Deus. Entretanto, essa dívida tem valor infinito, e o homem não pode pagar por isso, uma vez que é um ser finito. Portanto, somente um Ser Infinito poderia cancelar a dívida do homem. Ora, pelas vias tomistas, pelo argumento ontológico, e pela Bíblia, sabemos que só há um ser infinito, que é Deus. Portanto, só Deus poderia resgatar o homem de seu estado pecaminoso.
Entretanto, não bastaria que Deus simplesmente resgatasse. Quem fez a dívida foi o homem e, portanto, é o homem que deve quitá-la.
Dessa forma, somente um ser poderia por sobre a terra o peso que Adão trouxe-nos: O DEUS-HOMEM, isto é, o Verbo Divino, Sabedoria de Deus, que transforma-se em perfeito varão, valendo-se de ser 100% Deus e 100% Homem para, justamente, lógicamente e amorosamente, redimir toda a humanidade.
4. A Impossibilidade do Pai em recompensar o Filho
Diz nos Santo Anselmo:
"Se, porém, o Filho de Deus oferecer espontaneamente a Deus um dom tão grande assim, não é justo que fique sem retribuição. Mas o que se lhe dará que como Deus já não o tivesse, ou o que se lhe perdoará, se nada devia? Antes que o Filho oferecesse sua vida ao Pai, tudo o que era do Pai também era seu, e nunca deveu nada que pudesse ter que lhe ser perdoado.
Vê-se, assim, por um lado, a necessidade de ser recompensado,e por outro, a impossibilidade de se o fazer.
Mas se o Filho quisesse o que a si é devido, dá-lo a outrem, poderia o Pai proibir-lhO?
Mas a quem mais convenientemente atribuiria o fruto e a retribuição de sua morte senão àqueles por quem se fêz homem para os salvar e aos quais morrendo deu o exemplo de morrer pela justiça? Inutilmente seriam seus imitadores, se não pudessem ser partícipes de seus méritos.
E depois, diz-nos o mesmo Anselmo:
Nada mais racional, nada mais doce, nada mais desejável o mundo jamais poderá ouvir. É evidente que Deus jamais rejeitará a nenhum homem que dele (Cristo) se aproxime sob a tutela de seu nome. Verdadeiramente quem sobre este fundamento edifica, está alicerçado sobre uma rocha firme.
Quem poderá conceber uma misericórdia maior do que o pecador, condenado ao eterno tormento, sem ter como redimir-se, ao qual Deus Pai se dirige e lhe diz:
"Aceita o meu Filho Unigênito,
e ele te redimirá?"
E o próprio Filho:
"Toma-me contigo,
e redime-te?"
Pois é de fato isto o que dizem, quando nos chamam à fé cristã e a ela nos trazem.
Dessa forma, fica demonstrado o motivo da necessidade do Deus-Homem para redimir toda a humanidade.
5. Sumário
Vimos hoje que, a partir do momento que o homem pecou, ficou em divida para com Deus. Ora, a dívida não pode ser paga simplesmente voltando a dar aquilo que é devido a Deus, pois estariamos tão somente fazendo nossa obrigação e não pagando pelo erro feito.
Ora, mas dar a Deus mais do que aquilo que lhe é devido é impossível, pois equivaleria dizer a dar ao infinito mais do que o próprio infinito, e dar à perfeição mais do que a própria perfeição. Portanto, ao homem isso está totalmente fora de questão e um homem perfeito, que seja somente homem, nada poderia fazer por toda a humanidade, mas somente a si próprio.
Ora, por isso, nossa divida com Deus é infinita. Mas se ela é infinita, somente algo infinito poderia quitá-la. Por isso a necessidade do Deus Homem - 100% Deus e 100 Homem perfeito, exatamente como na Bíblia.
Amplexos a todos,
In corde Jesu, semper,
Gabriel.
Extraído originalmente de um artigo que escrevi ao GMJ - Grupo Missionário de Jovens, de Pouso Alegre.
http://www.orkut.com/CommMsgs.aspx?cmm=
The Huckatax: How Fair Is It?
I am urban. I am white-collar. I am tolerant on social issues. I am Jewish. In Mike Huckabee's "us-vs.-them" identity politics, I am a poster child for "them." Nonetheless, when it comes to evaluating Huckabee's signature domestic proposal, the FairTax, I want to try to be, well, fair. Neither its supporters nor its detractors are providing a clear perspective on the concept. The basic idea is to replace the existing Federal taxes with a national sales tax. Potential advantages include reduced complexity, weaker incentives to lobby for tax breaks, and stronger incentives to save. Potential drawbacks include difficulty raising revenue and major shifts in the tax burden relative to the current system. Over four years ago, I described a consumption tax to replace our existing tax system. I proposed that the tax be levied on personal consumption expenditures as defined in our National Income Accounts, without saying how the tax would be implemented. The FairTax is implemented as a sales tax, which means that it taxes goods and services at the point of purchase. As I understand it, the tax would apply even if the goods and services were purchased by someone other than consumers -- by government agencies, for example. Thus, the scope of the FairTax appears to be somewhat larger than the scope of my consumption tax proposal. Both proposals treat spending on health care as subject to tax, but the FairTax exempts spending on education. The FairTax also has the oddity of taxing the purchase of a new home but not taxing the purchase or the implicit rent on existing homes. I proposed a tax rate of 40 percent, with a personal exemption of $5000 per person per year. The FairTax has a rate of 30 percent*, with exemptions of $2352 per adult and $792 per child. For a family of two adults and two children, my proposal would create a personal exemption of $20,000. With the FairTax, the exemption is $6288 per year, which for a family of four is not even enough to pay for health insurance. (*The FairTaxers quote a 23 percent rate. If a boombox costs $100 and I pay a $30 sales tax, then to me that is a 30 percent tax. What the FairTaxers are saying is that if I have to lay out $130 for the boombox and $30 of that is taxes, then I am paying $30/$130 = 23 percent in taxes. This is consistent with the way we think of income taxes--if you earn $130 in income and pay $30 in taxes, then you think of your tax rate as 23 percent. However, it is not the way we typically think of sales taxes.) I proposed using the consumption tax to cover spending at all levels of government, but I proposed eliminating 2/3 of government spending, including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and public education. The FairTax does not pay for any state and local government spending, but it is supposed to pay for all existing Federal spending, including Social Security and Medicare. There are transition problems and implementation problems galore with moving toward a consumption tax. For the purposes of this essay, I want to set those aside. William Gale questions the FairTaxers' arithmetic. He thinks that they fail to account for: (a) the need to finance the exemption (which I did account for in my tax proposal); and (b) the fact that if government pays sales tax on its purchases it will need more revenue After correcting this arithmetic, Gale concludes that the tax rate would have to be 44 percent. That is, on the boombox that costs $100, you would pay an additional $44 in sales taxes. The moral of the story is that if we want to abolish the income tax and shift to a consumption tax, we will have to do something drastic. In my scenario, the drastic policy is to eliminate Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and public education. The only redistributive mechanism in my plan is the personal exemption, which you will recall I set at $20,000 for a family of four. Under the FairTax, we keep all of the big government programs, but there is a puny personal exemption of $6288 for a family of four. Furthermore, we sock the middle class (and everyone else) with a 44 percent Federal sales tax that, unlike most state sales taxes, covers health care and housing. For years, economists have been saying that a consumption tax would be a good idea. Why, then, does the FairTax seem so drastic and implausible? To understand why a consumption tax is a radical idea, study the following table (source) showing the share of U.S. income taxes paid by the various income brackets. What the table shows is how dependent the government is on income taxes from the rich in order to pay for national defense, agriculture subsidies, and all sorts of other wonderful programs apart from Social Security and Medicare. The non-entitlement Budget is largely financed with taxes on the top 5 percent of earners. The problem with a consumption tax is that the top 5 percent of earners do not consume at the same rate that they earn income. As a result, the government cannot abolish the income tax without sacrificing hundreds of billions in revenue from the subset of high earners who also are high savers. To make up for this loss, the middle class has to be socked with either higher taxes or fewer entitlements. An argument can be made that a progressive tax would be a tax whose burden falls most on the people who spend the most, not on the people who earn the most. This argument could be used to justify cutting taxes for high-income savers, with a corresponding tax increase (or entitlement benefit cuts) for middle-income spenders. The philosophical justification for this position is actually fairly sound. However, the political reality is that there are a lot more middle-income spenders than there are high-income savers. The fact that we have a system that steals from the latter to give to the former ought to be no surprise. In fact, one of our major political parties is dedicated above all to attempting to increase the amount of such stealing. That party characterizes any reduction in income tax rates as "tax cuts for the rich." I do not think it would be prudent to go "full Monty" with the FairTax. However, I believe there is some potential for reforms along the following lines: 1. Abolish the income tax for households with incomes under $100,000. Tax 10 percent of income between $100,000 and $150,000 and 35 percent of income over $150,000. Index these brackets for growth in nominal wages, but otherwise put in mechanisms that freeze the income tax. 2. Abolish the payroll tax. 3. Institute a national sales tax of about half of the FairTax plan. In the future, implement all tax cuts and tax increases through the sales tax, not the income tax. Roughly speaking, the income tax provides 1/2 of Federal revenues, and the payroll tax accounts for 1/3 of Federal revenues. If we cut income tax revenues by 1/3 and abolish the payroll tax, we would lose in total 1/2 of Federal revenues. Thus, the national sales tax would have to be about half of what it would under the FairTax plan. If Gale's estimate is correct, then the national sales tax would have to be between 20 and 25 percent. The idea of freezing the income tax while leaving the sales tax up for grabs politically is to try to increase the public's sensitivity to the cost of Federal programs. Right now, politicians can treat high-earners as an ATM machine, always there to dispense cash for "targeted tax cuts" or foolish spending programs. Instead, the idea would be to fix the amount of "soak-the-rich" taxation permanently, with all of the variation at the margin coming in the sales tax. Thus, if a politician wants to raise spending or institute some form of "targeted" tax cut, the sales tax rate has to rise, and everybody has to feel it. Compared with the FairTax, the semi-Fair tax would not reduce taxes on high earners--some of them might even face higher taxes. However, it would reduce taxes on work and increase taxes on consumption. That combination might encourage more saving. In addition, if the rules about keeping the income tax invariant and paying for new spending with sales tax increases could be made to stick, the bias toward higher government spending might be greatly reduced.
A Consumption Tax
Arithmetic Issues
Something Drastic
Minimum Income Income Bracket Share $365 K top 1% 39% $145 K top 5% 60% $104 K top 10% 70% $62 K top 25% 86% $31 K top 50% 97% < $31 K bottom 50% 3 % Semi-Fair Tax