Newsgroup: it.cultura.religioni.cristiani
Titolo: i laici totalitaristi

dedicato ai laicisti, sempre più integralisti.
ottimo articolo di Tobias Jones. La traduzione è pubblicata sull'edizione
cartacea di internazionale n°680 del 16.22 febbraio
Secular fundamentalists are the new totalitarians
Militant secularists like Richard Dawkins are taking their revenge on us
believers for refusing to stay in the closet
Tobias Jones
Saturday January 6, 2007
The Guardian
There's an aspiring totalitarianism in Britain which is brilliantly
disguised. It's disguised because the would-be dictators - and there are
many of them - all pretend to be more tolerant than thou. They hide
alongside the anti-racists, the anti-homophobes and anti-sexists. But what
they are really against is something very different. They - call them
secular fundamentalists - are anti-God, and what they really want is the
eradication of religion, and all believers, from the face of the earth.
In recent years these unpleasant people have had a strategy of exploiting
Britain's innate politeness. They realised that for a decade overly
sensitive souls (normally called the PC brigade) had bent over backwards to
avoid giving offence. Trying not to give offence was, despite the excesses,
a noble courtesy.
But the fundamentalists saw an opening. Because we live in a
multiconfessional society, they fostered the falsehood that wearing a
crucifix or a veil or a turban was deeply offensive to other faiths. They
pretended to be protecting religious sensibilities as a pretext to strip us
of all religious expressions. In 2006 Jack Straw and BA fell into the
fundamentalists' trap.
But Britons are actually laissez-faire about such things. And so the
fundamentalists deployed an opposite tactic. Instead of pretending to
protect religious sensibilities, they went on the offensive and sought to
give offence. The subsequent reactions to the play Behzti in Birmingham, to
Jerry Springer the Opera and to the Danish cartoons were wheeled out as
examples of why religious groups are unable to live with our cherished freed
om and tolerance.
In recent years the nastier side of this totalitarianism has become
blatantly apparent. It emerged with the hijab issue in France. With the
hijab ban in French schools, a state was banishing religion not only from
its corridors, but also from its citizens.
It was an assertion that after centuries of the naked public square (denuded
of religion referents) the public now too had to go naked. The former had
been true tolerance, something exceptional and laudable. It allowed everyone
to bring their own cosmic testimony to the square. But this new form of
"tolerance" changed things. From everyone being welcome, it had become
everyone but.
There's a background to all this. Since 2001, lazy intellectuals have been
allowed to get away with repeating the nonsense that terrorism and war are
the consequences of belief in God. Believers are ridiculed for being, in
contrast to the stupendously brainy atheists, very dim. Listen to Richard
Dawkins' comment on Nadia Eweida (the BA employee who refused to take off
her cross): "she had one of the most stupid faces I've ever seen." Nice.
There's also the fact that we live in a cultural milieu dominated by
postmodernism. Broadly speaking, it attempts to deconstruct power and its
narratives. It tries to rescue the marginalised. A noble intent, but because
it doesn't believe in truth, anything goes. The tyranny of orthodoxy has
been replaced by the tyranny of relativism. You're supposed to believe in
nothing, and hence nihilists and atheists are suddenly rather chic.
Postmodernism has taken tolerance to the extremes, where extremists thrive.
It's a dangerous form of appeasement.
The greatest appeasers, however, have been the believers. Until recently
many hid their religion in the closet. They conceded that it was something
private. Until a few years ago religion was similar to soft drugs: a blind
eye was turned to private use but woe betide you if you were caught dealing.
Only recently have believers realised that religion is certainly personal,
but it can never be private.
The reasons for that "outing" of believers are complex. But what is certain
is that wise agnostics pleaded with believers to take a public lead again,
because the point about believers is that they are obeying (and disobeying)
all sorts of commandments that the state doesn't see or understand. Because
they are able to differentiate sin from crime, they have a moral register
more nuanced than most. Even a wise atheist (and I've met a few of them in
church, as they desperately try to get their kids into the local C of E
school) knows that believers can deal with social anarchy much better than
the state ever can.
That is why these fundamentalists are so in evidence. They're not only
needled by their own hypocrisy; they are also furious that believers have
broken the old pact to stay out of public debate. Witness, for example, Mary
Riddell's astonishing sentence in the Observer last month (try replacing
"religion" with "homosexuality" to get the point): "secularists do not wish
to harm religion or deny its great cultural influence. They simply want it
to know its place." In other words: get back in the closet.
Christians feel particularly aggrieved because we believe that Jesus
invented secularism. Jesus's teachings desacralised the state: no authority,
not even Caesar's, was comparable to God's. As Nick Spencer writes in Doing
God, "the secular was Christianity's gift to the world, denoting a public
space in which authorities should be respected, but could be legitimately
challenged and could never accord to themselves absolute or ultimate
significance". Christianity, far from creating an absolutist state,
initiated dissent from state absolutism.
And so for centuries a combination of British agnosticism and pragmatism
meant that believers were judged not by the causes of their belief, but by
its consequences. Everyone could taste the fruits, even those who couldn't
believe in a sustaining, invisible root. These new militants, however,
believe themselves to be the only arbiters of taste; they want to eradicate
the root and cause. They will dictate what you can wear and what you can
say. That, after all, is what totalitarians do.
· Tobias Jones is the author of The Dark Heart of Italy; his new book,
Utopian Dreams, is published this month

dedicato ai laicisti, sempre più integralisti.
incredibile. Non so se ridere o piangere.
Ma se quella povera baldracca di prodi è andata carponi fin sotto la
sedia di Ratzy a elemosinare comprensione e spiegare posizioni... ;-)
E Ratzy niente: tiè, prodi, tiè. La prossima mossa non sarà calarsi i
pantaloni perché sarebbe ghei. Il Bologna si proporrà da chierichetto.
-- 
Gigi, 38°54'N, 16°36'E
Foto, news e altro dal mio pianeta
http://www.esnips.com/user/jamesleopard/

 pantaloni perché sarebbe ghei. Il Bologna si proporrà da chierichetto.
è un vizio tutto italiano. non c'è giorno che la fiat annuncia successi di
mercato, e ieri, ovviamente, ha fatto firmare al governo l'accordo per la
mobilità lunga di 2000 dipendenti.
Però, mi sembra più preoccupante la mentalità da fattoria degli animali,
ironicamente stigmatizzata da T. Jones.
y

mobilità lunga di 2000 dipendenti.
molti di questi non potranno sposarsi o (se sposati) avranno crescenti
difficoltà a mandare avanti la baracca. La Fiat non rovina le
famiglie? Qualcuno lo grida su Avvenire?


 famiglie? Qualcuno lo grida su Avvenire?
sulle pagine dell'unità si grida al servilismo del governo verso la fiat?

sulle pagine dell'unità si grida al servilismo del governo verso la fiat?
non so, non compro l'unità.
