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Edited on Sun Mar-16-08 07:09 PM by KCabotDullesMarxIII
from the truth. I agree with you 100% on the subject. It's why despite the madness of social liberalism/licence, economically, I'm a Socialist. People have to be able to survive with a modicum of dignity, before a concern for spiritual edification can figure as a factor. I'm 100% on the side of Castro and Chavez, for instance; and highly critical of the execrable witness of my own church, the Roman Catholic Church, in this regard, historically, and am all too well aware of its shameful complacency with regard, precisely, to slavery. It was the non-denominational churches that drove and led the abolition movement.
And, as you mention, such precepts as "grace building upon nature", true and important though they are, and giving excessive precedence to "personal spirituality" over justice in terms of a meaningful structural economic reforming of societies, constituted the foundations of the mockery of religion observed by the scribes and the Pharisees, and elicited Christ's numerous extremely vehement diatribes against them.
"There is far more evidence that social injustice is making people "bad" then there is that "bad" people are causing social problems. In the realm of politics we attack social problems with collective political action, not with self-improvement regimens.
It is highly reactionary and a right wing message to blame the people for their own misery, and to turn our collective suffering into an individualized problem of improving oneself."
That is precisely what I go on about all the time, here and elsewhere. However, post-WWII, the fact is that, in the UK, the historically predatory culture of the old, Christian one-nation Tories was attenuated to an extent by a real Christian faith, albeit still distorted somewhat by an excessive fondness for money and status. Now, under Blair and Brown, we have discovered that with encouragement from the new, wholly barbaric far right, and a confidence that they are more subtle than the latter, we are nevertheless finding they are essentially the same low-lifes as them. Worse, they have some intelligence.
However, as I always point out, the post-war, Labour Government was as full of rogues and vagabonds as you could find anywhere, but because of the nature of Socialism, they were forced to, at least, pay tribute to the second Commandment. It was their only front, but it nevertheless served us, the people, well. Better hypocrisy, vice paying tribute to virtue, than virtue simply being despised as it is by all our political parties now. They were to a large extent kept honest, in terms of the welfare state they created.
Today, New Labour doesn't feel the need for much of a front at all, it is as corporatist as the Tories. It's great trick is to have the media ignore the existence of the poor and suffering majority, whenever its talking heads or distinguished guests have talked about how wealthy, indeed, how much better off the country was now under their aegis - while the country is in tatters at every level, in very sphere. It is not as if they downplayed their significance. No. They don't even acknowledge their existence. It is the literal truth that the only success they have had, has, in reality, been the only one they ever wanted, their own personal self-enrichment and self-aggrandisement. By sucking up to Big Business and its moguls. And now the country is about to reap the whirlwind.
Even today, Reees Mogg in the Mail was boasting about how he had predicted the rise in the value of gold in 2002 and held forth as if he had never, instead of always, been a fervent apologist for the far right! The very snakes-in-suits who have brought about this incipient depression.
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