Grown-up vs Infantile
I’m still pissed off with the latest issue of New Internationalist and their take on this “infantilization of politics”. Several of the articles have been written from the perspective of we know what’s right and we’re going to tell you what it is, yet at the same time they are saying it’s infantile to allow others to set your agenda.
back when I was an annoying little brother, my sister who was only a couple of years older used to lament about my lack of maturity. I used to get really worked up about that: who are you to tell me what it is to be mature? You’re not better than me. You don’t know what you’re talking about. I feel the same way about New Internationalists “Big Babies” issue now as I did about my sisters comments back then.
The reason I’m annoyed is just the way the authors have assumed that their moral high ground aka stinking dogma is the same as the one I’m hanging off. They don’t seem to have grasped the diversity of the New Internationalist readership – like how a great many readers are religious: coming from Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and any number of other spiritual perspectives. However, they haven’t stopped at religion, one of the authors just randomly slaps around the fashion industry, recreational drug use and politicians who are not serious enough. Come on NewInt, I thought you were journalists, reporting real stuff that is actually happening, not your hallucinatory half-baked philosophies on life! Or maybe you’re just getting ready to convert over to blogging.
Posted: October 8th, 2007 under Blasphemy.
Comments: 2
Comments
Comment from djfoobarmatt
Time: 9/10/2007, 10:01 pm
That reminds me, I’ve been listening to a bit of Spong this week and I need to blog about it.
Comment from Sheena Walsh
Time: 9/10/2007, 10:14 am
This is the kind of stuff that Spong produces, sad to say. He seems to think that it’s a sign of a primitive people to believe in a personal God and an afterlife etc. He believes in Christ, but I’ve never worked out what he bases his knowledge on, as he discredits almost every account of Him.
These people, and the others, make me irritated, because they seem to waste a lot of time on irrelevancies. Speculation about the benefits or otherwise of religion seem superfluous to me. Does God exist, or not? If so, what should we do about it? Was Jesus His Son, and if so, shouldn’t we take his advice about how to live, and believe what He said about His Father? If God is not real, anything good which could be accomplished by religion would be more honestly and efficiently done another way. Where do we get our ideas of what is good anyway? If He is real, we need to study Him and work out whether we are willing do what He asks. Religion is someone’s idea of how best to do that, but it cannot be more important than the central question of the presence of God.