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Showing posts with label Edward Lucas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Edward Lucas. Show all posts

Thursday, 14 January 2016

Elizabeth Oldfield of Theos does not address the points Edward Lucas and I raised

"Christians believe a hopeful habit of mind is worth cultivating." Elizabeth Oldfield - 14/01/16
In the early hours of yesterday morning, President Obama gave his last State of the Union address.
It's always a difficult speech, with time running out to propose a legislative agenda... Instead, as well as delivering a robust defence of his legacy, he returned to the language of his presidential campaign, with a speech focused around hope.

Political rhetoric often swings between two poles, two defining elements of human experience: hope and fear.

Sadly, fear is the one that usually comes more easily, both in life and politics. And so despite the President’s efforts, the current political landscape in the U.S. is evolving into a competition to see who can paint the most apocalyptic vision of the future.

Neither side is immune from using the politics of fear, painting a picture of horrors to come - that only they are qualified to deliver the nation from.

Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks recently raised serious concerns about this trend, calling on the Republican presidential candidates to back off from what he calls a “fear-driven brutalism” and adopt a more hopeful approach.

The trouble is, hope is hard, and not just politically. It feels naïve and dangerous. Many people listening to the President will feel sceptical. I certainly did. Surely all this ‘Hopey changey” stuff just leaves us open to disappointment and mockery. In the ancient biblical book of Proverbs, it says "hope deferred makes the heart sick". The hard headed, grown up thing to do often seems to involve taking Camus' advice to "think clearly and not hope any more".

I spend quite a lot of time thinking about what Christians might be able to offer a society, which in the main, no longer calls itself Christian. What we could give, as those who feel we've been given much. And maybe it's partly this: acting as cheerleaders for the gritty work of hope. Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Marilynne Robinson has written repeatedly on this. She makes two points: “first, contemporary America (and I would argue the UK too) is full of fear. And second, fear is not a Christian habit of mind”.

Christians believe a hopeful habit of mind is worth cultivating. Not because hope is easy, or that there is nothing to be afraid of, but because there is something to hope in. And because, as behavioural psychologists would agree, our habits of mind become habits in our lives, and habits affect outcomes.
Choosing to hope draws us out beyond ourselves, while fear drives us inward. Hope gives us courage to face the very real pain and horror of the world, and not to cower in fear, but to set about doing what we can to make a dent in it.

Bet Noel fancies Elizabeth something rotten. What do you think, dear reader?


I am not the only one who thought this sermon was more than a bit lame.



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Thursday, 22 May 2014

What Charles should now say about comparing Putin to Hitler

Proposed Statement from Charles:

"I really don't know what came over me. Of course Putin isn't like Hitler, unless anyone who invades another country is like Hitler, and I do not feel, now that I have thought things through properly, that the British who once had a world empire and is even now behaving in a way that can only be described as an unedifying display of unseemly military aggression disguised as liberal interventionism, is in a position to get on their high horse on this matter. The British are after all these days merely poodles of America.  If the Americans want us to bark at the Russians then we bark at the Russians.

When we fought the Crimean War in 1834 it was was against the Russians, and they have always regarded the Crimea as their backyard.

As for what I said about Hitler, I can only say that I really really really did not mean anything by it.  I was in the presence of a Jewess who was also a Holocaust survivor. This situation made me feel socially obliged to bring Hitler into the conversation to show that I sympathised with her on the one hand, and on the other relate it to something that was topical.  That really was all. Although that tiresome man Edward Lucas has rushed to my defence at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2635617/Hitler-Putin-Charles-right.html there really was no need, and I entirely disagree with him about Winston Churchill, who lost the British their world empire in his fits of drunkenness, depression and the desire to take reckless risks in order to aggrandise himself as a wartime leader.  

If, as A J P Taylor said, WW2 was a continuation of WW1 then what was WW1 really about? Belgian neutrality? Surely not.  The military opportunism the Germans displayed during WW1 was probably because they felt left out in the scramble for Africa and wanted a place in the sun over which they could place their towel, but they are good people really. Perhaps we should blame ourselves for not being more nicer to the Germans who are after all our Teuton cousins who also brew good beer. It seems incredible that the British could have lost their empire over something as trivial as Belgian neutrality.  I suspect the British lost their empire because their policy of being nasty to the Germans for the sake of being nasty to the Germans turned around and bit their sorry asses.  It is now perhaps time to question our political system that allows only fools and knaves to govern us. There.  Why don't you people put that in your pipe and smoke it?"

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Why-not-have-a-one-party-state-if-it-makes-more-sense/353471931432677 
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The ultimate dispute resolution is the Ultimate Political Theology

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