Monday, November 21, 2011

A Few Points.

This is a religious post, so whilst I'd encourage my atheist readers to have a look at it, I can understand them if they don't.

I  felt that I should clarify a point with regard to my last point. Unlike Dalrock, I don't believe that there is a collusion between Feminists and Social Conservatives. People need to understand that the two movements are, at their core, fundamentally opposed to each other. I personally think that the claims about  Social Conservationism deliberately assisting Feminism are wrong. Rather, the traditional mainstream conception of femininity is synergistic with Feminist conception of it. Indeed, the more I think about it, the ascetic romantic conceptions of Gender may have laid the groundwork for feminism. Gender is rooted in biology, not spirit, and hence any weakening of the legitimacy of biology strengthens an ascetic conception of it. 

The reason I wanted to make this comment is because I'm Catholic and pro-Christian, and many of the manosphere crowd are profoundly hostile to both, and I want to clearly disassociate myself from them. In identifying a weak point in mainstream Christianity I hope to assist it, not destroy it which does not seem to be the case with a large portion of the manosphere, who seem to feel that some sort of western renaissance can occur without the foundation stone of European Culture: Christianity.

Some commentators have (on other sites) have accused me of painting a caricature of Western tradition.
I suppose Benedict's Encyclical Deus Caritas Est, should be mentioned here;
This is due first and foremost to the fact that man is a being made up of body and soul. Man is truly himself when his body and soul are intimately united; the challenge of eros can be said to be truly overcome when this unification is achieved. Should he aspire to be pure spirit and to reject the flesh as pertaining to his animal nature alone, then spirit and body would both lose their dignity. On the other hand, should he deny the spirit and consider matter, the body, as the only reality, he would likewise lose his greatness. The epicure Gassendi used to offer Descartes the humorous greeting: “O Soul!” And Descartes would reply: “O Flesh!”.[3] Yet it is neither the spirit alone nor the body alone that loves: it is man, the person, a unified creature composed of body and soul, who loves. Only when both dimensions are truly united, does man attain his full stature. Only thus is love —eros—able to mature and attain its authentic grandeur.

Nowadays Christianity of the past is often criticized as having been opposed to the body; and it is quite true that tendencies of this sort have always existed [ED]. Yet the contemporary way of exalting the body is deceptive. Eros, reduced to pure “sex”, has become a commodity, a mere “thing” to be bought and sold, or rather, man himself becomes a commodity. This is hardly man's great “yes” to the body. On the contrary, he now considers his body and his sexuality as the purely material part of himself, to be used and exploited at will. Nor does he see it as an arena for the exercise of his freedom, but as a mere object that he attempts, as he pleases, to make both enjoyable and harmless. Here we are actually dealing with a debasement of the human body: no longer is it integrated into our overall existential freedom; no longer is it a vital expression of our whole being, but it is more or less relegated to the purely biological sphere.
Benedict here acknowledges the existence of anti-corporeal tendencies in the Christianity (I presume here he means all of Christianity. Catholicism had its puritanical elements as well as the Protestant and Eastern Orthodox religions). So, I suppose my fellow Catholics who feel I'm being revisionist with regard to the Church may want to take the matter up with the Pope. The impression I get, from a historical perspective, is that the Catholic Church has been trying to re-emphasise the legitimacy of the body recently. JP II was particularly active in that regard.