So it is with Lee. Moreover, claims Guelzo, property was another primary motivator, as Lee was concerned that if he sided with the Union, Virginia Confederate forces would commandeer his estate at Arlington. This is straining at gnats. Like Lee, I have deep roots in Virginia, over several generations, and with family and real estate in many parts of the Commonwealth.
So in that sense I am more deeply bound to Virginia than other places in America something I take pride in. But my allegiance to Virginia cannot be separated from my family and my property. If all my family departed the Commonwealth, and all our property was sold, my love of the Old Dominion would undoubtedly wane.
All of this was done for the sake of a political regime whose acknowledged purpose was the preservation of a system of chattel slavery that he knew to be an evil and for which he felt little affection and whose constitutional basis he dismissed as fiction. For Christians, our first commitment is to God, followed by our families, and then our patria , both as we understand it and as the law dictates. And yet, as the example of the founding generation demonstrates, sometimes what counts as our true patria is a thorny question indeed.
Lee after all. His dignity, his manners, his composure, all seemed to create a peculiar sense of awe in the minds of observers. Mocking the dead often says more about those who do the mocking than the alleged deceased offenders. Moreover, as so many other recent events demonstrate, the defaming of Lee is a canary in the coalmine for what awaits our anti-historical America. And a nation unable to honor or simply respect its ancestors, however flawed they may have been, is one on its way to being no nation at all.
I have to take issue somewhat with Mr. Chalk on Guelzo. That is to say, Guelzo is hardly any better than the woke, ideological extremists who have excoriated Lee and all things Confederate, all things Southern for that matter. In brief he and they are in the same echo chamber of leftist drivel. Well, now, that is just awfully big of Mr. Guelzo, not only an historian but a dispenser of mercy to boot. My eyes are already beginning to water just thinking about it. I hope to develop this point at greater length on the future — even though to me it seems like needless elaboration.
Yes, you have Stated the obvious. Why this is so difficult a concept to grasp is beyond comprehension. The Confederate States merely evicted a foreign power from Confederate territory while making various efforts to do so peacefully and with compensation for improvements in said properties. Sending warships to resupply a fort in foreign territory is an act of war if these actions are not agreed to by the sovereign. The United States did so except in two ports, if the US had not abandoned all the remainder of its properties in the CSA, perhaps the US could have made the case to resupply was indeed not an act of war but of a continuation of ownership.
The CSA knew slavery was legal and always would be until the States themselves changed the economic system, yet to remain a colony of the United States was more than the former Slave States could bear.
The globalist empire is demanding the US remain in the fold…we will have our jobs offshored and we will have rights stripped away until we are on par with the rest of the globe. People have difficulty admitting the reality because it involves admitting a monstrous crime at the foundation of the Lincolnite polity.
Southerners should be proud of their resistance to the domination of the historical narrative by the yankees…now the yankees are having their history revised and we are being carried along for the ride. How many slave uprisings occurred during the war between the northern States and the Southern States? Who actually facilitated the trans-Atlantic slave trade? What were the names of the African kings who supplied the trade?
Why did it require European colonization to end slavery in Africa and why has slavery in Africa regenerated itself? Answers: Zero; Zero; The Queen or King, but from until it was whoever was in charge in Washington City; No one knows and no one cares because that money has already been squandered; because slavery works and whatever works, works; because the people who enslaved the Slavs were allowed to buy a vowel, Yes. Your enemies care not for the accurate portrayal of history.
Some west point moron writes a career booster and that is to be expected since west pointers seem to have followed the rest of the nation in selling out their family honor for a bowl of stew. We are tired of footing the bill for your federal government. Useful idiots are necessary for the new owners to foreclose on old properties…or propertied….
Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. But, for many people, so do drinking, drugs, infidelity—to name just a few of the least amoral activities. For him, a happy person was a person who has fulfilled its moral purpose, i. According to Aristotle, the same holds true for men, as well.
He was soon lost… We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. In other words, before Moses discovered God, humans were a plaything of the gods and of nature; afterward, suddenly, humans were granted both individual and communal purpose. God is unified, and there is a master plan behind everything; 2. Human beings are judged by moral, and not utilitarian standards i.
History progresses, and man has a responsibility to pursue God through all times and circumstances; 4. God has endowed man with a free will, and therefore human choices matter.
Christianity took the messages of Judaism and broadened these four tenets. However, even though it focused more heavily on grace, it successfully spread these four fundamental principles of Judaism to billions of human beings across the planet. The Bible gave humanity a God, an objective to strive for; the Greeks made humans Gods, turning the understanding of the true nature of God—Nature—into an objective. Athens teaches us that we have the ability to use our reason to reach beyond ourselves.
Athens teaches us not only how liberty can flourish, but why it should. In Chapter 2, we saw that without Jerusalem, there could be no West; without Athens, adds Shapiro, the same holds true. Consequently, they were the first to attempt to formulate the laws of the universe, believing it to be created by all-knowing Gods.
This thinking gave as many benefits: geography, history, mathematics, and, perhaps, most important of all, democracy. In Athens, for the first time in history, people started thinking of political systems which would allow everybody a vote.
But the two building blocks of Western civilization, Judaic revelation and Greek reasoning, were at war. The Nature of the Universal Truth As we said above, the Greeks sought universality in all things—and they firmly believed that they were capable of finding it. Judaism, on the other hand, set a limit on human capacity: it believed that there are some truths known only to God, and these can be communicated to humans only through revelations.
In other words, the Greeks wanted to shape individuals to best serve society as citizens; Judaism wanted to commit them both individually and collectively to the Divine Law. Apparently irreconcilable, Judaism and Greek thought were brought together and found some consonance in Christianity, which provided the next layer of foundational ideas in the building of modernity. Now, contrary to what you believe—and what the four riders of the modern atheistic movement would have you believe—Christianity and science worked pretty well together for long stretches of time:.
The problem actually arose because of Martin Luther and John Calvin, after which the Church became suspicious of where the inclusion of secular knowledge would lead to. Another deeply religious Christian mentioned in this chapter is John Locke, the man who basically invented modern freedom. Locke believed that our rights are a corollary of our duties: we have a right to property since we have a corresponding duty not to steal; a right to life , since we have a duty not to kill; and a right to liberty since we have a duty not to oppress.
As you probably know, John Locke is one of the heroes of the Enlightenment, a period of history which modern proponents of progress read: Steven Pinker et al. This was the period, they say when humanity finally got rid of the Baconian idols of the cave and started seeing the world as it is. Locke, Spinoza, Hume, Voltaire, Kant—they all thought the way a human being should think, i.
Furthermore, these advocates of Enlightenment values argue, it is religion which prevents us from making another step forward. This, finally, resulted in the at least nominally atheistic and, oftentimes, hedonistic philosophies of Voltaire, Kant, and Bentham who assumed that reason could construct morality from scratch.
But the very fact that their moralities did not coincide should be evidence in favor of the opposite. Speaking of explosions— then came Nietzsche and announced the death of god , advocating for a world where humans live in accordance with the will of self-perfection.
Of course, there was Dostoyevsky warning that in a world without God, everything is allowed —but nobody listened. The idea that we can all be reasonable and supplant traditional Judeo-Christian ideas with things like tolerance and compassion is a vestige of the Enlightenment mentality.
Unfortunately, this idea ignores the dark side of the Enlightenment hope: the French and the Communist Revolutions. The juxtaposition between the American Revolution and the French Revolution demonstrates the contrast between the strains of Enlightenment thinking. No body nor individual may exercise any authority which does not proceed directly from the nation. The Home of the Brave and the Land of the Free in the first case; the guillotine and , dead in the latter one.
As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated. Romantic nationalism, collectivist redistributionism, and scientific progressivism did away with the individual need for meaning.
The four elements of meaning collapsed downward into two: communal purpose and communal capacity.
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