Some interesting posts at "Anglican Mainstream"
"Anglican Mainstream" is a blog run by Anglo-Catholic, Evangelical, Orthodox, and Charismatic Anglicans, and often has some good posts (it is one of the Anglican sites included in the links further down my right side-bar). There are several good ones from December 7th and 8th that I recommend:
"Russian Patriarch: Losing their Christians roots the people of Europe will sign their own death warrant" on Dec. 8th
and "Where Netherlands goes..." on December 8th.
This second post discusses the move of the Dutch government to spend millions in programs specifically targeting orthodox religious believers, especially young Muslims to change their views on homosexuality to reflect to more "tolerant" position of the governemnt.
This raises a whole host of questions for me. Is it the governments's place to deliberately change the religious beliefs of people? Does the government play any part in forming people's values? Socrates (according to Plato's Republic) believed that it could not avoid doing so, since people will always use the laws as an ethical gauge of sorts.
Is that true? If so, what is the responsibility that it implies for the government in terms of accepting or rejecting various ideologies (as in this Dutch case - certain ideologies recieve official endorsement and others are targeted for destruction - through persuasion, of course). What does this imply for countries that are supposedly pluralistic? Can such a country even have laws that apply to all citizens equally (as our 14th Amendment supposedly requires)? How worried should I be about this?
Of course, all of these questions relate to Patriarch Alexy II's point that Europe has abandoned a whole web of inter-related ideological commitments (that of a Christian worldview) in favor of a hodgepodge of Enlightenment and postmodern plattitudes that may or may not be coherent together in their pre-suppositions about the nature of the world and of community and of justice (Pope Benedict XVI has written extensively on this, as I have noted before).
What do you guys think?
"Russian Patriarch: Losing their Christians roots the people of Europe will sign their own death warrant" on Dec. 8th
and "Where Netherlands goes..." on December 8th.
This second post discusses the move of the Dutch government to spend millions in programs specifically targeting orthodox religious believers, especially young Muslims to change their views on homosexuality to reflect to more "tolerant" position of the governemnt.
This raises a whole host of questions for me. Is it the governments's place to deliberately change the religious beliefs of people? Does the government play any part in forming people's values? Socrates (according to Plato's Republic) believed that it could not avoid doing so, since people will always use the laws as an ethical gauge of sorts.
Is that true? If so, what is the responsibility that it implies for the government in terms of accepting or rejecting various ideologies (as in this Dutch case - certain ideologies recieve official endorsement and others are targeted for destruction - through persuasion, of course). What does this imply for countries that are supposedly pluralistic? Can such a country even have laws that apply to all citizens equally (as our 14th Amendment supposedly requires)? How worried should I be about this?
Of course, all of these questions relate to Patriarch Alexy II's point that Europe has abandoned a whole web of inter-related ideological commitments (that of a Christian worldview) in favor of a hodgepodge of Enlightenment and postmodern plattitudes that may or may not be coherent together in their pre-suppositions about the nature of the world and of community and of justice (Pope Benedict XVI has written extensively on this, as I have noted before).What do you guys think?
Labels: Christ and Culture, Eastern Orthodoxy, Europe, Political Philosophy
posted by Rev. Daniel McLain Hixon at 12/08/2007
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