After Liberalism, the Deluge?

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“Have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts.”

The author has a strange definition of Liberalism.

An interesting article, thankyou for posting it!



No he doesn't. He is using the clear historic definition of the ideology of Liberalism as a force for rationalism and individualism (and against faith, tradition and institutions). If the dictionary was the best source of definitions, we would not need academia.

The use of the term “liberalism” here does not refer to, say, the liberalism of the Democratic Party vs. the conservatism of the Republican Party. It refers to the tradition of philosophical, social and political liberalism which emerged during the Enlightenment and has largely shaped the Western world order, including the modern State, since that time. This liberalism is characterized by a confidence in reason, expertise, socio-political manipulation, and consequent progress to vastly improve human life. This liberalism also neglects tradition and either ignores, denies or transforms religion so as to minimize typical religious insights of humility and dependence on God.

In looking back when the enlightenment period came about, if not for liberalism that brought it about, Puritanism would be the ruling ideology in America today.

The Church would have the authority to imprison heretics and disenters.

Even Pope Benedict XVI gave credit to the enlightenment for moving man forward.

The Church evolved spiritually, otherwise we'd still be living in the dark ages.

As Pope Benedict XVI also wrote, change requires a progressive mind-set.

For a conservative is content with the status quo, and resist change, where the progressive seeking to improve things, advocates change.

Pope Benedict XVI is a progressive and liberal; he self-identified as such throughout the tumult of the 60s; his ideology and views have not essentially changed, although, to some outward degree, they have been slightly modified. The culture of the West having 'progressed' leftwards does not make him any less Left somehow; he still remains so.

I would not call the 'Enlightenment', good, enlightening, etc. It was the beginning of the cleaving of man's mind from faith. His detached reason became consumed by his egoism and swallowed up into the narcissism of secularist superiority of self and modernity.

In our present-day culture, in Europe and America and Canada and the West: Rationalism and Modernism co-exist and mix side-by-side; conflicting, yet permeating the culture . . . add a few dashes of relativism and we've Modernity . . . . a la the Twenty-First century.