brekin, it's fine.
At this point I feel you should not mind my saying that yours is not an empirical approach. You proceed from first principles, and you're not interested in modifying them. Apparently your God doesn't allow that.
Umm, excuse I haven't seen you throwing down studies refuting anything I've said. And let's face it we are projecting out quite a bit about something that is more then a little hard to determine. I think Porn is bad (specifically online porn), you think it is good. Fine, but that makes you the darling of the scientific method now? And guess what? I'm not Catholic at all. But I'm not afraid to read books written by one.
Based on what you say and especially on the books you recommend, your principles are those of a fundamentalist Catholic doctrine that stands in violent antagonism to Vatican II, modernity and the French Revolution (and presumably the Reformation), and that demonizes Jews as the agents creating the social ills it defines (among which sexual freedom is one of the worst).
There's no reason for you not to say so. If this is your flag, why not fly it? Because this isn't an Inquisition, and no one here is going to sanction you in the real world, and probably no one here would want to sanction you if they could. In the real world, anyway.
I think those things should be examined. I keep an open mind even with things which at first may seem totally implausible. And the book The Brain that remakes Itself doesn't speak to any of the things above. Christ, it's more like a Nova episode if anything.
Nor is anyone going to put you through the Ludovico technique, though it would be typical of your world-view to confuse outside criticism with torture and martyrdom.
Most of us here are simply not going to share your first principles, or even understand how anyone can seriously advance them. They will seem very remote from anything we should use as a guide to understanding.
Some of us will care just enough about your faith to reject it as irrelevant, wrong, or even pernicious. In my view, the ideas you share are more at the root of the ills you attribute to "pornography" than pornography is.
Again, I don't think you understand the first thing about my first principles or my "faith". I think the Catholic Church has historically been for the most part as benevolent as the Mafia has been.
But so what? I'm just a voice here, like yourself. Your model of reason is God-given, with an unerring and unchangeable internal moral compass. You might as well be honest, and stop presenting your faith in the guise of argument from observable evidence.
Because there isn't going to be a reconciliation, or a persuasion of one or another of us by the other. In fact, there isn't going to be very much of a common perceptual ground, one with agreed-upon definitions and referrents, within which we can engage in fruitful debate.
Again you are ascribing my motivations to a comfortable category of non-believers to the things you ascribe to. Because I think Porn is bad and I've recommended a book by a Catholic writer who has wrote in depth on the issue I believe my reason is God-given? There are a lot of things I disagree with the writer, but I don't just read books that I already agree with.
You live in a different universe, in which the Catholic God is in a rage about the Jew manipulating His flock into engaging in fornication, sodomy and baby-killing. That's what matters to you, so say it.
You know if that's what matters to me I would say it. But can you tell me where anything I've posted has even alluded to that? And your basing this on having read his book? Oh, wait no, you've read some reviews.
http://www.culturewars.com/Reviews/Libi ... views.html
Quote:
Excerpts from reviews of Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control ($28 + S&H) by E. Michael Jones, Ph.D.
"a brilliant tour de force of history and interpretation. Libido Dominandi alerts Catholics to powerful enemies of the Church who have harnessed the Enlightenment idea of sexual liberation to the manipulative power of the modern media in order to gain political force. ... this book is a monumental and compelling account of the program to dismantle the Judeo-Christian culture ... a Herculean task in terms of research and documentation ... This book sounds a warning: Until Catholics stop responding to the seductive voice of the dominant culture and instead resist its covert ways, they will continue to lose their unity and their civic and moral freedom." Rosemary Hugo Fielding, Our Sunday Visitor.
SNIP
"This reviewer values the content of this book. ... a Christian culture once directed the country - even its raw capitalism - and now this influence is no more. Michael Jones provides his own well-researched explanation of this phenomenon." Msgr. George Kelly, StAR.
"E. Michael Jones, Catholic muckraker extraordinairre, has written his most compelling book to date - the quintessential history of the sexual revolution. ... part history of sexual liberation, part history of modern psychology and part history of psychological warfare - all woven masterfully into a coherent tapestry of conspiracy, evil genius, and subtle manipulation revealing the tragic consequences of the sexual revolution in the modern world. ... not for the faint of heart or those who blush easily." Joseph O'Brien, Times Review.
http://www.staugustine.net/libido%20dominandi.html
Quote:
Libido Dominandi – the term is taken from Book I of Augustine’s City of God – is the definitive history of that sexual revolution, from 1773 to the present.
Unlike the standard version of the sexual revolution, Libido Dominandi shows how sexual liberation was from its inception a form of control. Those who wished to liberate man from the moral order needed to impose social controls as soon as they succeeded because liberated libido led inevitably to anarchy. Aldous Huxley wrote in his preface to the 1946 edition of Brave New World that “as political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase.” This book is about the converse of that statement. It explains how the rhetoric of sexual freedom was used to engineer a system of covert political and social control. Over the course of the two-hundred-year span covered by this book, the development of echnologies of communication, reproduction, and psychic control – including psychotherapy, behaviorism, advertising, sensitivity training, pornography, and plain old blackmail – allowed the Enlightenment and its heirs to turn Augustine’s insight on its head and create masters out of men’s vices. Libido Dominandi is the story of how that happened.
The author, E. Michael Jones, has a site and magazine called
http://www.culturewars.com/
Quote:
Is Notre Dame Still Catholic? by E. Michael Jones. Revised Second Edition. When Notre Dame President John Jenkins, CSC, announced the university would give President Barack Obama an honorary doctorate, more than 250,000 people signed a petition condemning that act, and Bishop Thomas J. Olmstead joined Bishop D'Arcy in denouncing Jenkins' decision, calling it a "public act of disobedience" and a "grave mistake." This updated and expanded book collects 25 years of investigative journalism - an extensive dossier of what went wrong at Notre Dame and, indeed, in Catholic higher education in America. Read More Read Reviews
He includes a review of his book, "The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History." The review is titled, "The Revolutionary Jew would like a word with you."
http://www.culturewars.com/Reviews/NDad.html
Quote:
To do justice to this wonderful work
would take a book in itself. So packed is it with mind-numbing facts
and insightful commentary that one is tempted to embark on a trip to
a remote place and lock oneself up in a room and absorb every word.
When the excursion is over, your whole view of the world will be dramatically
changed. You will see the inner workings of life that only a
genius the likes of Dr. Jones, unclouded by the lust for power, fame
or fortune, and spurred on only by his sincere and undying love for
Jesus Christ and the Catholic Church, could give you. Not only will
it change you, but this book has the potential of changing the world.
Note well, the revelations you are about to read in Jones’ book are not
things you will ever hear in a history class at Berkeley or on the website
of the Anti-Defamation League. Be prepared to be shocked and awed.
My recommendation is: stop what you are doing, purchase the book,
and don’t come back to civilization until you’ve completed it. It is that
good. But let me also warn you. Like me, after seeing utter devastation
that has been done to our society and especially its root causes, you
may find yourself weeping by the time you get to the end, even as Jesus
once did when he wept for Jerusalem.
Dr. Sungenis is not alone in sensing that The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit is a world-changing book. Israel Shamir, author of Flowers of Galilee and Pardes: An Etude in Cabbala, writes that
The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit by the revolutionary Catholic E. Michael Jones is a long-waited-for revolt against Vatican II and Nostra Aetate with its disastrous philosemitic bias. This monumental book scoops two thousand years of troublesome relations between Christendom and the Jews, and endeavors to connect Jewish strategies of permanent revolution with the permanent Jewish rebellion against Christ (=Logos). This timely book may help to regain the lost balance between Judaic and Christian tendencies in the Western mind.
[...]
When the Jews rejected Christ, they rejected Logos in all of its forms and became, as a result, enemies of the social order. When the Jews chose Barabbas over Christ, in other words, they became revolutionaries. For 2000 years now we have been living with the consequences of their decision. For over 40 years now, a veil of silence has descended over a topic which Americans can no longer ignore. That veil has now been rent.
I hardly think it is a secret that powerful forces have historically tried to stem the influence of the Catholic Church. Some of them (gasp!) have been Jewish. I read a book by someone who says such things and I want to take society back into the middle ages?
Internet shatters focus, as we discovered on another thread.
Yeah, people will make sweeping generalizations on a person based on some book reviews of a book they haven't taken the time to read.
I already knew before about your world-view, brekin, but I'd forgotten. It might have saved me a lot of time I just wasted here trying to engage you with my merely secular, Jew-influenced, Logos-hating logic.
I think it might be time to review your logic, because I'm not seeing the logic in it.
The template through which you view society hasn't changed since Bosch painted "The Garden of Earthly Delights."
Image
Which is a reminder of the aesthetic greatness of traditional Christendom, really my favorite thing about it.
OK, to sum up: Because I don't think online porn is good I'm a medieval Catholic? Did I miss anything?