Tuesday, February 01, 2005
Bill Moyers' Tomorrow
I imagine most people who surf around to Catholic or Christian or Conservative blogs have already seen plenty of comments on Bill Moyers' recent article, "There is no Tomorrow" in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Moyers argues that Christians believe that the world will end and there will be heaven on earth, therefore, Christians really want the world to end, therefore Christians in Government are a very bad thing because they will all support end-of-the-world policies on the environment, war, etc.
Since Moyers was born and raised in Texas, I imagine he had Christian roots... just a guess. I was reading G.K. Chesterton's "The Everlasting Man" the other day and really liked this part:
Yes, I think that fits Mr. Moyers to a tee... "already weary of hearing what he has never heard."
Since Moyers was born and raised in Texas, I imagine he had Christian roots... just a guess. I was reading G.K. Chesterton's "The Everlasting Man" the other day and really liked this part:
The best relation to our spiritual home (Christianity) is to be near enough to love it. But the next best is to be far enough away not to hate it. It is the contention of these pages that while the best judge of Christianity is a Christian, the next best judge would be something more like a Confucian. The worst judge of all is the man now most ready with his judgments; the ill-educated Christian turning gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic, entangled in the end of a feud of which he never understood the beginning, blighted with a sort of hereditary boredom with he knows not what, and already weary of hearing what he has never heard. He does not judge Christianity calmly as a Confucian would; he does not judge it as he would judge Confucianism. He cannot by an effort of fancy set the Catholic Church thousands of miles away in strange skies of morning and judge it as impartially as a Chinese pagoda. It would be better to see the whole thing as a remote Asiatic cult, then at least we should not lose our temper as some of the sceptical critics seem to lose their temper, not to mention their wits. Their anti-clericalism has become an atmosphere, an atmosphere of negation and hostility from which they cannot escape. It would be better to walk past a church as if it were a pagoda than to stand permanently on the porch, impotent either to go inside and help or to go outside and forget.
Yes, I think that fits Mr. Moyers to a tee... "already weary of hearing what he has never heard."
