My Complaint

Not quite the Complaint of Peace by Erasmus

First Erasmus. Now, if I, whose name is Peace, am a personage glorified by the united praise of God and man, as the fountain, the parent, the nurse, the patroness, the guardian of every blessing which either heaven or earth can bestow; if without me nothing is flourishing, nothing safe, nothing pure or holy, nothing pleasant to mortals, or grateful to the Supreme Being; if, on the contrary, war is one vast ocean, rushing on mankind, of all the united plagues and pestilences in nature; if, at its deadly approach, every blossom of happiness is instantly blasted, every thing that was improving gradually degenerates and dwindles away to nothing, every thing that was firmly supported totters on its foundation, every thing that was formed for long duration comes to a speedy end, and every thing that was sweet by nature is turned into bitterness; if war is so unhallowed that it becomes the deadliest bane of piety and religion; if there is nothing more calamitous to mortals, and more detestable to heaven, I ask, how in the name of God, can I believe those beings to be rational creatures; how can I believe them to be otherwise than stark mad; who, with such a waste of treasure, with so ardent a zeal, with so great an effort, with so many arts, so much anxiety, and so much danger, endeavour to drive me away from them, and purchase endless misery and mischief at a price so high? https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/erasmus-the-complaint-of-peace

We are born with intelligence and as we grow older we conform more and more with our class or culture and refuse to think about why we have opinions shared in lock step without original reflection. We know dismantling the unborn is evil but legal. We buy into the current culture. War is a great crime but we pay the price to keep the militarism alive with 106 million unemployed and a decaying infrastructure. Why? My past is in fighting back against the insanity. As a child I wrote letters against Vietnam war. As an adult I was fighting against atomic weapons by supporting with I confess tremendous reluctance SANE/Freeze. I favored the idea of Erich Fromm. Disarm one bomb at a time and invite the other powers to do so. I fought Contra Aid. I opposed both Gulf Wars but after Gulf War 2 I decided that the nation was doomed and tyranny inevitable because Americans fail to think for themselves but go with the the flow like a dead fish. Americans in every social class refused to think about Covid lies that were more than obvious but locked down, masked up, and prayed for a vaccine to bring secular salvation. And here we are now after a putsch 3 years ago thinking we are free to vote with the context of incredible vote fraud, About which none in Congress care. I am not a pundit, nor prophet, nor politician. I am a political person favoring human freedom and human dignity and human rights. My writing is based off the philosophers I have read. My opinions belong to me and I share. The only difference between me and being homeless is that I have a studio apartment and very little income. I shout out fire 🔥 and the fact that the smoke and flames are obvious signs is ignored by people who think in groups. They say everything will be better when Trump returns and the Restoration of the rightful Pontiff President has been accomplished. Or they say RFK Jr. hypocrite extraordinaire is the new anointed leader and all must support him. BAH. The people want a kinder task master to steal from them but do not want to do the job themselves. Eh, we pretend to hire them to work for us. They work hard for Mammon not you and no partisan faction can do otherwise because Mammonry is acceptable. As accepted as harvesting body parts from the dead and in China from the living. Can a culture remaining ignorant be free? Jefferson said no.

Gabriel Marcel offers an opinion as well. The metaphysical problem of pride-hubris-which was perceived by the Greeks and which has been one of the es­sential themes of Christian theology, seems to me to have been almost completely ignored by modern philosophers other than theologians. It has become a domain reserved for the moralist. Yet from my own standpoint it is an essential­ if not the vital-question. It is sufficient to recall Spinoza's definition of superbia in his Ethics (III, clef. XXVIII) to see how far he was from grasping the problem: "Pride is an exaggeratedly good opinion of ourselves which arises from self-love." In reality, this is a definition of vanity. As for pride, it consists in drawing one's strength solely from one­ self. The proud man is cut off from a certain form of com­munion with his fellow men, which pride, acting as a principle of destruction, tends to break down. Indeed, this destructiveness can be equally well directed against the self; pride is in no way incompatible with self-hate; this is what Spinoza does not seem to have perceived.

Now, as at any other time, the philosopher is placed in a given historical situation from which he is most unlikely to abstract himself completely; he would deceive himself if he thought that he could create a complete void both within and around himself. Now this historical situation implies as one of its essential data the existence of the Christian fact-quite independently of whether the Christian religion is accepted and its funda­mental assertions are regarded as true or false. What ap­pears to me evident is that we cannot reason today as though there were not behind us centuries of Christianity, just as, in the domain of the theory of knowledge, we can­ not pretend that there have not been centuries of positive science. But neither the existence of Christianity nor that of positive science plays in this connection more than the role of a fertilizing principle. It favors the development of cer­tain ideas which we might not have conceived without it.

I would point out that no revelation is, after all, conceivable unless it is addressed to a being who is involved-committed-in the sense which I have tried to define-that is to say, to a being who par­ticipates in a reality which is non-problematical and which provides him with his foundation as subject. Supernatural life must, when all is said and done, find a hold in the natural-which is not to say that it is the flowering of the natural. On the contrary it seems to me that any study of the notion of created Nature, which is fundamental for the Christian, leads to the conclusion that there is in the depth of Nature, as of reason which is governed by it, a funda­mental principle of inadequacy to itself which is, as it were, a restless anticipation of a different order.

To sum up my position on this difficult and important point, I would say that the recognition of the ontological mystery, in which I perceive as it were the central redoubt of metaphysics, is, no doubt, only possible through a sort of radiation which proceeds from revelation itself and which is perfectly well able to affect souls who are strangers to all positive religion of whatever kind; that this recognition, which takes place through certain higher modes of human experience, in no way involves the adherence to any given religion; but it enables those who have attained to it to per­ceive the possibility of a revelation in a way which is not open to those who have never ventured beyond the fron­tiers of the realm of the problematical and who have there­ fore never reached the point from which the mystery of being can be seen and recognized. Thus, a philosophy of this sort is carried by an irresistible movement towards the light which it perceives from afar and of which it suffers the secret attraction.

https://ko-fi.com/s/e1d8b67501

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