Prisjämförelser Religionen och nutiden
www.reason.com har en intressant artikel om Johannes Paulus II och hans inställning till den moderna världen
…Writing in a recent issue of The Tablet, a British Catholic weekly, veteran Vatican critic Marco Politi applauds John Paul II for his many achievements, but calls him “a man ill at ease in his own century.”
It was JP2’s stated view that “from Descartes onwards, there had developed in modern society an anti-religious agenda based on ‘the battle against God’ and ‘the systematic elimination of everything that is Christian.’ The Pope described it as an attack which had ‘dominated in large part the thought and life of the West for three centuries.’”
According to Politi, “Many believers were left perplexed by this interpretation of the development of critical thought from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. Non-believers found it incomprehensible that the Enlightenment, Positivism, Nietzsche, Marx and Freud could be represented as a sort of huge plot against Christianity.”
“John Paul II always had a problem with modernity,” Politi believes. “He was constantly in conflict with it. Nihilism, relativism, hedonism, materialism – these were to him the basic elements of contemporary culture, a tangled mass of ‘isms’ that wandered ghost-like through the modern world.” Of course, these are largely the same views held by John Paul’s successor. Indeed, such continuity was apparently a major factor in Benedict’s election to the Papacy. He now can be ill at ease in a century of his own.
Det här är intressant och jag tror mycket viktig insikt som vi sällan ser diskuterad i medierna idag. Speciellt den amerikanska tidskriften Newsweek har blivit religiös som bara den. De hade tre omslagsartiklar om påven på bara två månader, och dessutom flera andra religiösa omslagsartiklar per år. Just den katolska kyrkans och de amerikanska konservativa kyrkornas kamp mot den moderna världen är mycket markant och oroande.
Och vi ser, som bekant, samma fenomen i de islamiska länderna.
