so,regarding the social implementation of Marxism,
"the reality was that HUMAN NATURE fouled the nest."

What a grand, sweeping generalisations. What does it mean, Glorfindel?

How does HUMAN NATURE foul nests? Does IT foul every nest, or is it only birds of the Marxist feather that cannot quite poop over the rim?

Nice dodge, Glorfindel, but pericles isn't talking about Islam. He's talking about your howling hypocrisy in pompously claiming to be "motivated by a pursuit of the good, the beautiful and the holy", which "doesn't drive me to give gratuitous offence to people whose views I don't share", even though your posting history is full of gratuitous, offensive attacks on people whose views you don't share.

"Sells obviously has a very narrow definition of Christian if it is limited to those who conform to his Anglo-Catholic form of doctrine." - waterboy

Yes.

I think Sells' Christianity begins with Nicaea and is terminated by the Enlightenment. Here, he likes creed and dislikes independent thought. At least this the picture I have gained over months of his submissions.

Dear Relda,

Your post of Friday, 10 April 2009 11:12:05 PM is beautiful. I also feel that there is something beyond us and see worth in the Bible which I occasionally read.

I appreciate what you said about community. However, in this complex world we will have conflict unless we avoid dehumanizing those outside of our community. Too often the love we have for those with whom we share community translates into hate for those not identified as part of our community.

Individual autonomy can translate to misanthropy toward others. It is difficult to regard all human beings, even those we don’t agree with or identify with, as having the same feelings and humanity that we have.

To some extent the conflict between Christians, Muslims and Jews is a civil war because we stem from the same tradition of deistic belief. Most of us in what are called the Abrahamic faiths equate atheism with lack of religious belief. A devout Buddhist may reject both a belief in a deity and a belief in the existence of a soul. One who rejects any belief in supernatural entities may have developed a well-defined sense of ethics.

david f,

I’m highly appreciative of your post and agree, there are dangers inherent in individual autonomy. Singularity precludes the possibility of interconnected plurality. A community of one is impossible - the achievement of community is possible only in the gap between idealised and real communities. If Sells were to ‘marry’ the imaginative Trinitarian Godhead concept with the nature of pluralism, a little more coherence might be found. Community as an ideal, however, either nostalgic or utopian, has not been achieved, nor will it ever be. Paradoxically, the more individualistic a people, the less varied its culture.

I’m aware that universalism occludes the specific needs of different groups where belonging is often emphasised at the expense of identity. Neutrality exists and actually serves to discriminate - communities are offered as substitutes for the impersonal institutions bequeathed by a democratic liberalism that has failed to create equality through universalism.

Dreams of community are generated by our contemporary experiences and inevitably reflect them. One can also perhaps transcend these experiences through the vehicle of imagination, and thereby stage an ‘intervention’ in contemporary life. Some have argued that our conception of community today is too weak, and this is why we feel alienated. Liberalism imagines us as independent entities, and hence we have become such. Religious communities of the past were based upon literal understandings of their uniting features. Mass was said in Latin because it was considered to be the actual word of God. Kings’ provided the corporeal representation of their sovereignty - expanding territory was accomplished through intermarriage and miscegenation - the biological merger of two royals was needed to legitimate empiric ambitions. Perhaps a parallel may be drawn between the ‘spiritual’ and the temporal.

If the imagined basis of the community is “more concrete,” the community itself will become stronger. George Kateb notes that “human beings have always been creatures who live in their imagination and who also refuse, when it suits them, to exercise their imagination. We have the inborn mental capacity to make the absent present (on one hand) and (on the other) the present absent”.

cont’d..

..cont’d

The conception of the modern and imaginative hedonism perhaps explains, to a certain extent, why visions of community provide us with a sense of dissatisfaction with the world as it exists. We hint at the possibility of social critique and change, while at the same time draw away from the commitment to changing the world necessary to achieve that vision.

What is the ‘material’ of our imagination? Are we totally free individual agents or are we hapless puppets of collective imperatives? Fractelle suggested that ‘under the idea of God’ we perhaps become mere ‘lab-rats’. If we dismiss collective life as illusory, however, the implication is that there must be something “more real” somewhere else. Through our imagination we’re allowed us to see an intricate process at work – albeit, not always entirely logical but certainly one where the individual and the social need not always be in opposition.

In our modernity, and here Sells could enjoin with valid critique, our consumer desire is never satisfied - its object is eternally unachievable. As consumers we are driven to work progressively longer hours in order to achieve the incomes to support our desires, keeping us away from families, neighbors, churches, and other groups. When we relate to community as we do to any other commodity, as a desirable object or feeling existing outside of ourselves, we relieve ourselves of responsibility for it, making it an entirely impossible goal. As Community is often the opposite of what we have, it becomes eternally desirable as the unknown. Consumption teaches us to desire, never expecting gratification.

“But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence... illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness” - Ludwig Feuerbach, 'The Essence of Christianity'.