With Dwight on Fundies, Again

1) Φιλολoγικά/Philologica : Fable and Allegory, 2) Correspondence of Hans Georg Lundahl : With Dwight on Definition of Fundies, 3) Dwight Longenecker Not Knowing What Computers Are, and Not Answering a Challenge On It, 4) With Dwight on Fundies, Again, 5) One item on Dwight, related to Teen Marriages, 6) Was Dwight Ever Outright Heretic? If So, it is Here I Blamed him, 7) Φιλολoγικά/Philologica (again) : Dwight Longenecker and Bildungsroman

I

Me to Dwight

08/12/15 à 10h27

This is Why I tend not to adress you as Father

Longenecker, here is what you wrote on on Fundamentalists and Progressives:

Above all both types believe themselves to be right. This is what we call pride. This is not just a sickness. It is sin. The devil never. Never. Never for all eternity will admit that he was wrong.

Though pride will make one unwilling to admit one was wrong (no one, presumably, ever fully admits he is wrong about sth he still is holding to : the moment you admit it is wrong, you have put it in the past and are admitting you WERE wrong), so will truth, clarity and being right.

I agree. Fundamentalism is a sickness, but that depends of your definition of fundamentalism. I’d say fundamentalism has several characteristics.

Are all of them sick? Does one occur without the other ones or without some other ones, and is it then not sick?

Let us take them, one by one:

• "First is an extreme literalism about religion and religious texts and teachings."
  
  This is indeed the very first thing people think of when they hear the word fundamentalism.
  
  Someone who is saying "fundamentalism is a sickness" will most often be taken as saying "it is sick to be extremely literal about religious texts and teachings.
  
  
• "This is also combined with legalism–in which adherence to the moral code and strict rules become the be all and end all of the religion."
  
  If by extreme legalism you mean a firm no to contraception and abortion and divorce and remarriage, well, Fundies and Catholics go together among Progressive Protestants as being stamped as having this sickness. If it were one.
  
  
• "Thirdly, fundamentalism is also marked by a tendency to paranoia, blaming others and eventually scapegoating others."
  
  If Fundamentalism is in today's society a minority, I don't see how this is totally avoidable. At least an unpopular minority. Not a cool minority.
  
  When Christians were a minority among Pagans, they were both unpopular and cool depending on before whom, but they were at leat sufficiently unpopular to be persecuted from time to time.
  
  Were they blaming Pagans? Yes. Were they right in blaming Pagans? Yes.
  
  
• "Fourthly, fundamentalism has a fortress mentality in which those on the inside are the true, right and righteous believers. Those on the outside are infidels, apostates, heretics, the damned and the lost."
  
  You have described very accurately:
  
  
  • Early Christians among Jews and Idolaters,
  • Medieval Catholics facing Mohammetans, Jews and the new batch of Heretics that arose after year thousand : Petrobrussians, Albigensians, Valdensians.
  • Counter Reform Catholics facing Reformers and the Tyrants helping them, and later also a new rise of Jewry plus of course the Secret Societies, and the Revolutions (from English 1640's to Russian 1917 and beyond).
  
  
  How marked the fortress mentality is, depends on how much one is required to confront oneself with those outside. But it was always there. If you call this is sickness, you are agreeing with Swinburne's curse on the pale Galileean.
  
  If you object that people like Chesterton were very genial, well, Chesterton was also very much a fortress mentality man. It does not always go with chronical anger or fear.
  
  
• "Fifthly, fundamentalism is, as a result of all this, an unhappy, frightened and often angry place to be."

The social situation of being stamped as sick is also an unhappy, frightened or angry place to be.

So, supposing fundamentalism were a sickness, stamping a fundamentalist as sick because of it is making the sickness worse. Or at least the occasion for it.

Thus, you are inciting people in general to treat Fundamentalists in such a way as to provoke, if possible, fear, loathing of your company, anger at not getting rid of it and so on.

The situation does not always have this effect on the victims of such a trial.

If I rejected Ratzinger twice over, because he bowed down to Psychiatric diagnoses and that sham expertise, namely 2006 in the fourteenth world day of health and 2010 after he had "forgiven" Susana Maiolo, but put her in mental hospital for a week, why should this self erection into super shrink on Bergoglio's side make him any more acceptable than Ratzinger was?

I had and have a soft spot for Ratzinger, even while rejecting him as Pope or Pope Emeritus. I had to the last moment hoped he would call some kind of counsil to find out who was Pope if there was one, instead of presuming without further investigation that Alejandro IX, Michael, what's the name of the current Palmarian - yes, another Gregory, Gregorio XVIII - were just to be ignored. Since he has left off papacy and no longer prolongs the guilt of posing as a Pope while not teaching Catholicism, I hope for his salvation. But the gestures about World Day of Health and Susana Maiolo told me he was not promoting accurate Catholicism.

Nor are you. The KIND of things you consider as sicknesses are actually the KIND of things that are either virtuous or sinful, that are actus humani and not actus hominis (a man sleeps or sneezes - an actus hominis - a man makes a valid confession, an actus humanus). Therefore you have lost the compass.

And I mean that in a moral sense, not in a "pathological" one. You are, like Bergoglio, inciting to consider Fundamentalists as "he has an impure spirit" - in the modern counterpart. Even if you are pretending to yourself that you can reserve sanity for a small middle strip, with equal pathologisation of the other side, of the progressives. Modern society is NOT buying that, it IS progressive and therefore will not treat them as mental cases, just because you say so.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre University Library
Immaculate Conception of the BVM
8-XII-2015

PS, you are in fact basically endorsing the criminal behaviour of Norway which just took away five children from a couple (Norwegian mother, Roumanian father) for them giving the children "a Christian indoctrination"./HGL

Dwight to me

No answer in mail.

Was based on post of his:

Standing on my head : Is Fundamentalism a Sickness?
December 4, 2015 by Fr. Dwight Longenecker
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/standingonmyhead/2015/12/is-fundamentalism-a-sickness.html

Page 2 : Is Fundamentalism a Sickness?
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/standingonmyhead/is-fundamentalism-a-sickness

II

Me to Dwight

16/12/15 à 10h03

Are you trying to ruin me, or what?

"In fact none of these labels work because, of course there are plenty of conservative Catholics who aren’t rabid anti Semitic, flat earth fundamentalist crazies."

Give me one fundamentalist among Catholics today who is flat earth.

I personally corrected James Hannam who had suggested that Church Fathers were taking liberties with literal inerrantism when accepting roundness of Earth.

As for the rest, well, guess if I am NOT a happy man when so many want to isolate me from potential readers, while I am a writer.

I have study loan debts for five years or so of study loans (I have exams for five years and one week, spent more years, read more than I needed for exams, though not always on same subject) and stepping down to streetsweeper with such a debt to pay is not really offering any prospectives of a decent life.

Meanwhile people like you, demonising fundamentalism, are doing what they can to keep me not read by blog readers and ultimately also not by book readers who would pay for paper format and thereby help me give something back to dear old Sundsvall - a city which centralises study loans in Sweden.

And you suggest that if I am joyless it is all because I am a fundie?!

Give me a break!

"So think the best, give them the benefit of the doubt, don’t argue, wish them well and be at peace."

Well, let us put it like this, if there is one thing you learn from Academia, apart from subject, it is arguing. Except me, I learnt it earlier from C. S. Lewis, things like Fern-Seed and Elephants.

Telling people not to argue with me is like raising a plague flag.

Hans Georg Lundahl

Dwight to me

No answer in mail.

Was based on post of his:

Standing on my head : The Discontented Catholics
December 15, 2015 by Fr. Dwight Longenecker
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/standingonmyhead/2015/12/the-discontented-catholics.html

III

Me to Dwight

17/12/15 à 09h40

Just in case you imagined sth - I am NOT "deeply saddened"

I am not deceiving you, if you were here and were telling me those things about me, you would risk a whiplash or sth worse.

That enemies* of the faith give me as rough a time as they can, perhaps I am too patient, perhaps not. But when I see a priest (or supposed such, Pope Michael thinks even Father Hesse was not really a priest) who is giving water to their treadmill, I am not "saddened", I am not "deeply concerned", I am fuming.

And your line about discontented Catholics yesterday is precisely doing their work./HGL

* Open and declared such - Mahometans, Protestants especially Huguenot, thinking I am too rough on the Cévennols, thinking I ought to agree on their version of the Calas case, which I do not, Atheists and Pantheists and other Marxists, Jewry with a "declared scepsis" about the Faith ... you know what I mean.

Dwight to me

No answer in mail.

Was based on post of his:

Standing on my head : I’m Saddened. Deeply Saddened. Not.
October 22, 2013 by Fr. Dwight Longenecker 50 Comments
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/standingonmyhead/2013/10/im-saddened-deeply-saddened-not.html

A post which I most providentially found when asking myself why there were no answers.

And if Dwight is a priest, or even (despite heresies) a pious man, his prayers may have sth to do with the decisions of God.

IV

Other post by Dwight

Standing on my head : Why I Converted to the Catholic Faith
December 29, 2015 by Fr. Dwight Longenecker
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/standingonmyhead/2015/12/why-i-converted-to-the-catholic-faith.html

Quote:

Yes, there were actually lots of different groups. The uncomfortable problem for the Protestants is that these different sects were identified by the apostolic church as heretics and schismatics.

Comment

Now, non-literal belief or literal non-belief in Genesis, where were they found?

Non-literal belief about six days, in favour of one-moment creation, was found in the Apostolic Church - along with literal belief.

But literal non-belief (and frankly, believing in millions of years is MUCH closer to literal non-belief than to non-literal belief) in Genesis was ONLY found in certain of the sects that St Irenee stamped as heretical.

Not sent

As a separate mail. You saw how he treated the other three mails. No answer. If he bases this on my calling him a heretic in an earlier mail (will be published in other post) ... well, he could have tried to defend himself? I mean, what I wrote is here as that other letter, an attack on what he represents as claiming to be a "Catholic" priest.