[lit-ideas] Re: (no subject)

Jack,

 

It’s difficult to respond to this since you miss so many of my points.  Perhaps 
in my old age I don’t communicate as well as when I was younger.  Behind your 
comments I see people I’ve argued with about all of this hundreds of times. . . 
or maybe it was just Mike hundreds of times.

 

A Sunday School class is not a Catechism.  In Sunday School the teacher 
encourages discussion.  Sunday School lessons by definition “search the 
Scriptures.”  Catechism is fixed doctrine.  Sunday School assumes a Reformed 
premise.  Catechism assumes an authoritative handing down of doctrine.  

 

Study and searching the Scriptures is something Calvin, Luther, Zwingli, etc 
encouraged and the RC did not.  You like History; and I could recommend 20 or 
30 books on this subject.  This is at the heart of the Reformation.  If 
“authority” was at issue, Calvin and Luther would have stayed in the RC.  

 

 

Lawrence 

 

From: lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On 
Behalf Of Jack Spratt
Sent: Monday, September 05, 2011 5:15 PM
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: (no subject)

 

Lawrence:   Protestants have Sunday Schools, Catholics do not. Protestants have 
Bible Studies, Catholics do not.

 

 

J.S.  Of course Catholics have Sunday School, they have catechism class.  Mike 
can fill us in.

 

 

Lawrence:  A favorite “Proof Text” for Protestants is the story in Chapter 17 
of Acts about the Bereans who searched the Scriptures daily to see if what Paul 
and Silas were telling them was the truth.  This is not a Proof Text used for 
Catholic authority.

I am not intending to assert that all Catholics accept authority without 
exception or that all Protestants are freethinkers, merely that the RC 
discourages its members from thinking through theology based on the 
Scriptures.. 

 

 

J.S.:  You have not showed that this proof text questions authority, only that 
it confirms authority.  Has any bible scholar anywhere ever disproved the 
scriptures?  Of course not, they can't, it's the authority.  All they do is 
prove it over and over.

 

 

Lawrence:  An RC doctrine is that Church will teach and explain Scriptures as 
necessary.

 

 

J.S.   The oral tradition has a long history, Homer, etc.  The Protestants 
learn what they already know just like the Catholics.  They just have less fun 
doing it.

 

 

Lawrence:  Now as to how I got from this Protestant predilection for searching 
the scriptures to studying Stoicism and various other things, it came readily 
to my mind that if I was in doubt about something, that I should “search the 
Scriptures.” I mean that to be an attitude of reading to find answers, not 
necessarily reading the Bible exclusively although I did that as well.  A 
Catholic in my situation would be encouraged to ask his priests for answers. 
Again, these two structures, Catholic and Protestant were never followed 
“religiously” by all its members, and the percentage following them has 
probably dropped over the years, but that was my predilection, and I gather 
from Billy’s various notes that his predilection has been different.

 

 

J.S.  People who want to do something just do it.  Those who go to a priest or 
minister know what they'll be told or they wouldn't go.  Do you really believe 
that if you had been raised Catholic that you would not have read the Stoics 
after being introduced to them in college?  In other words, only Protestants 
read the Stoics?  Is that a little hard to believe Lawrence?

 

 

Lawrence:  [snip] Now as to becoming a free thinker, my “searching the 
Scriptures” caused me to disagree with what I had been taught during my college 
years, so I studied to find a resolution. And while I wallowed about for 
several years, I ended up with a resolution and am, today, a Protestant.

 

 

J.S.  It sounds as though you may have started with the conclusion (religion is 
true and I need to find one that suits me).  

 

 

Lawrence:  Billy on the other hand rejected the authority of the Catholic 
Church and, unless he has recanted recently, became and remained an atheist.

 

 

J.S.  Your original premise was that RC's accept authority.  Now it seems this 
good Catholic rejected the authority and thought for himself.   Generalization 
never work do they?  

 

 

Lawrence:  As to Marx, I think Marx would see the Western predicament as just 
another Capitalist cycle. We violated Keyne’s dicta in order to pursue Liberal 
goals. 

 

 

J.S.   Briefly, Marx saw the internal dynamics of capitalism as bringing about 
its downfall.   Marx predicted that capital would be concentrated in fewer and 
fewer hands, which has been happening for decades and is especially pronounced 
today, which then creates an instability because money can't move, it can't 
circulate, it can't be productive.  At that point the monied interests 
essentially destroy the money, as happened during the  housing boom with bad 
mortgages and gambling the money away betting, among a lot of other things, 
that the housing market would crash.  Then they ran to government to give them 
back the money they lost.  Marx didn't say capitalism runs in cycles, but 
rather it runs from crisis to crisis.  Marx looked at how things work in real 
time, and it's applicable today.   

 

Lawrence:  For example, we found a way (a sort of Ponzi scheme) to sell houses 
to people who couldn’t afford them. 

 

J.S.  The mortgage market was not a Ponzi scheme.  It was simply handing out 
money to anybody with a pulse, whether they had a prayer of repaying it or not. 
 A Ponzi scheme borrows from Peter to pay Paul and borrows from Paul to pay 
Harry and borrows from Harry to pay Susie until it runs out of people to 
collect money from.  Then it collapses, as it always does.

 

 

Lawrence:  Keynes would have been appalled. As a result of that and some 
good-old-fashioned Capitalist greed we are having a Marxist crisis. 

 

 

J.S.  Keynes would have been appalled because he said that government should 
stimulate the economy (as FDR did with the works program) when things are bad, 
and then, the part that everybody forgets, pay it back when times return to 
normal.  The U.S. has been borrowing without paying back for decades, at least 
since Reagan.  Paul Krugman today advocates stimulus spending,  get the people 
spending and working, but he's been shouted down.  Unfortunately, the 
government has to borrow the money for any stimulus from China and others.  
That's why the republicans want to cut the deficit, as if it can be done, so 
they are refusing additional stimulus money.  So, pick your poison:  an 
inflationary depression like in the 30's without stimulus, or hyperinflation 
from too much money in the system that the Fed in pushing in.  The latest 
prediction is that we'll have deflation and inflation together; houses and 
unsold goods are deflating; oil and food is inflating.  WWII of course was a 
huge stimulus package.  Today we're fighting two wars and cutting taxes, 
meaning how are we funding these wars?  

 

 

Lawrence:  I am not a fan of the Welfare mentality. No Western state should 
provide more welfare than it can afford.

 

 

J.S. In other words, you don't support the bank bailout in 2008.  Or are you in 
favor of welfare for corporations and against welfare for people?  Should the 
banks not stand on their own feet without being propped up, especially after 
acting so irresponsibly?

 

 

Lawrence:  After a few years of crisis you, Jack, declare Capitalism in the 
United States a colossal failure. 

 

J.S. This crisis is decades old.  It began with Reagan and Thatcher, probably 
even earlier with the guns and butter of Johnson.  But with Reagan is when 
production began to decline and the financial sector began grow 
disproportionately large and factories moved overseas.  Unless you're living in 
the movie It's a Wonderful Life, the financial sector today is like the 
advertising sector, somewhere between useless and destructive, especially with 
banks, who are a force that needs to be controlled.  Adam Smith said that banks 
need to be kept small.  Letting banks be too big to fail is against the advice 
from the father of capitalism. himself.  Are you giving the banks a pass 
Lawrence?  Do you think they were at all complicit in this Marx predicted 
crisis turning into a disaster?  The banks gambled, they lost, Uncle Sam bailed 
them out, and they're out there gambling again and will be demanding another 
bailout, "or the economy will crash, quick, quick give us the money!"  Does 
this sound a bit like extortion or even terrorism (fly this plane to Cuba or 
I'll crash the plane; give us the money or we crash the economy!).

 

Lawrence:  After far more extensive and extended crises than ours, Marx never 
declared Capitalism a colossal failure.  

 

J.S.  I'm not sure what you mean here.  He wasn't around for the big panic of 
the end of the 19th century, then 1907 and of course the 30's.

 

 

Lawrence:  He thought a revolution was necessary to unseat it. 

 

J.S.:   There are revolutions aplenty in Egypt, Syria, Libya.  They're being 
called the bread riots.  Ironically, if foodstamps weren't keeping a huge 
percentage of the population eating, American hungry people may not be anymore 
gracious than any others.  Lenin is actually who popularized revolution.  The 
neocons believe violence is the answer as well, meaning invading Iraq, 
Afghanistan, threatening Iran, generally using the military as a first resort. 

 

 

Lawrence:  Every few years for the past 20 or 30 there has been hand-wringing 
over some other nation superseding us. While still in Engineering, for example, 
I attended scores of classes on the way the Japanese did things because their 
way was so superior to ours that they were going to drive us into bankruptcy. I 
retired before the next round of “Advisors” could show up to conduct more 
classes, probably on how much better the Chinese did things than we do.

 

 

J.S.:  It's not that their way is superior, it's that they own us.  Without 
them buying our treasuries, who's going to pay your social security and your 
medicare and pay for your bloated military?  Corporations are sitting on 
trillions of dollars cash and paying no taxes and not hiring.  In France the 
wealthiest class has offered to pay more taxes.  They realize that a bifurcated 
society is not a society worth living in.  

 

 

Lawrence:  The term Capitalism in modern times has been replaced by “Liberal 
Democracy.” 

 

J.S.:  Capitalism is an economic system.  Liberal democracy is a political 
system.  The two are not the same.

 

 

Lawrence:  There have been so many “Welfare-type” concessions to the working 
man that the Capitalism of Marx’s day no longer exists. 

 

 

J.S. And a good thing that is, even if it won't last forever.  Be careful what 
you wish for Lawrence.

 

 

Lawrence:  You say you have been a Lurker, Jack. Have you read any of the 
discussions of Francis Fukuyama’s ideas? In his The End of History and the Last 
Man, he presented arguments showing that there isn’t anything out there that 
can compete with “Liberal Democracy.” I subscribe to The American Interest 
which was created by Fukuyama, and which I (figuratively) “read daily” to see 
if what is happening in the world conflicts, in Fukuyama’s opinion, with his 
theory. It does not. Neither Fukuyama, nor any of the other writers in this 
publication think the current crisis is “the big one.” There is no “big one” in 
Fukuyama’s thesis. There just simply isn’t another system out there that can 
compete with Liberal Democracy. A lot of people may be discomfited and have to 
cut back or work at different less rewarding jobs, but Liberal Democracy isn’t 
going to collapse, at least not in Fukuyama’s opinion, and I agree with him. 

 

J.S.   Fukuyama is all over the place. He signed the Kristol letter to Bush in 
September 2001 encouraging an attack on Iraq.  Now he says that war should be a 
last resort and that the Iraq war was a mistake.  He was a neoconservative, now 
he identifies neoconservatism with Leninism (in a NYT magazine article in  
2006).  He endorsed Obama in 2008.  He called the Bush presidency a "disastrous 
presidency".   Fukuyama goes with the flow.

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