The Ontological War

Richard Land, the president of the Southern Baptist’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC), and Rev. C. John McCloskey III, Catholic evangelist and Opus Dei member, both hate liberals.

In an ERLC statement about its public policy battles of 2009, Land and ERLC VP Barrett Duke write:

As we predicted, we spent most of last year resisting liberal efforts to undermine biblical values. … Considering the daunting challenges we faced at the beginning of 2009, we believe traditional Judeo-Christian values won out in most cases. It is likely that we will be defending these values from liberal attacks in 2010 as well.

Rev. C. John McCloskey wrote his doctoral dissertation on John Henry Newman, “Liberalism and Newman: The Anglican Vision and Response,” but the work is really of more value for its descriptions of several of the main intellectual events in a man’s, McCloskey’s, ontological failure in his own life:

In this thesis we see Newman grappling with the same problems that afflict us today; we call it secular materialism, he, Liberalism. …

I originally planned the work as a study of the prophetical nature of Newman’s statement on Liberalism, after being struck by how well he diagnosed the situation in which modern man finds himself today after nearly two centuries of the infection of liberal ideology. …

The contribution of this work is small although in as far as I have been able to ascertain, it is original. I aim to show that Newman is one of the first to recognize religious Liberalism, based on what he would call the “non-dogmatic principle,” as a destructive force for modern society, mainly in the fact that it does not recognize the claims of objective truth.

Land and McCloskey both think they hate “liberals,” but that’s not what they truly hate. Instead, they hate increasing realself people and increase realself ideas, or more specifically, they hate everything that has anything to do with the realself.

Land and McCloskey think they are fighting a religious war, but their battle is purely ontological. To those who are a little more insightful, they might see this battle as actually an ideological battle, which is partly true, this battle is more ideological than religious. But those who are even more insightful will see that this battle is entirely an ontological battle between those who are weak and fearful ontologically and believe we desperately need to become more alienated and those who are not like that and don’t believe that.

Land says he is fighting “liberal attacks” and defending “biblical values,” but as people increase their degrees of realself they will clearly see how false, empty, and damaging these two belief are. For those who are absolutely clueless about the realself’s existence and who are terrified of increasing their degrees of realself, it’s probably pretty easy to rewrite reality into thinking that those who think we all need to become our authentic selves are “attacking us!” Likewise, it’s probably pretty easy to cherry-pick the bible to find ontologically alienated passages that one can then use to support one’s warped view of human life.

All of this is unfortunate for folks who are genuinely religious because these two men and other likes them have turned religion and religious freedom into little more than weapons to give themselves a little extra muscle in their battle to make all of us more alienated. These men have helped change religion from being something holy and sacred to being just another ideology—like thousands of others—and in this case an ideology built around a core of hypocrisy.

I will be writing more about Rev. C. John in the future. He has written enough so that it will be possible to go into some detail in describing decreasing realself people and why they believe as they do.

In an earlier post I wrote that when people meet Southern Baptists they should think in the back of their minds Danger! Danger! Alienation! Alienation! Well these people should definitely think the same thing when they meet “traditional” Catholics.