Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Moderner Nihilismus: sowohl als auch (both/and); Inklusivität (inclusivity); Chesterton; "Botschaft" des Nihilismus (keine Werte, Natur usw); Bild: des Kaisers neue Kleider (umgekehrt)

Kurzinhalt: This nihilism comes dressed up in a variety of styles and colors, but everywhere the message is the same. There are no absolute truths, no absolute values, no absolute judgments, because there is no objective reality in which such absolutes could be ...

Textausschnitt: MODERN NIHILISM

13b This modern sentimentalism, which always attempts to embrace "both/and", recommends itself to us as the "virtue" of inclusivity. Under the umbrella of this inclusivity, we are told, we must welcome both the birth of children and the abortion of children, both the "lifestyles" of heterosexuals and the "lifestyles" of homosexuals, both the belief that marriage is irrevocable until death and the belief that there is nothing wrong with divorce and remarriage, both the rightness of natural death and the rightness of euthanasia, and so forth and so on. Inclusivity as preached today seems to suggest that no ultimate judgments or choices about the nature of reality can or should be made, and therefore we must construct one large umbrella under which all varieties of human experience, belief and action can be sheltered. Conversely, any umbrella incapable of including all manner of belief and action must be regarded as too narrow, too exclusive, too intolerant to be itself any longer tolerated. (Fs) (notabene)

14a This kind of inclusivity, as Chesterton notes, supposes at bottom that there is no constant in human affairs. People are always changing and therefore cannot be held to any one standard of belief or behavior. While it might be charming to envision all human beings, in all of their metamorphoses, sheltered beneath the frame of a single umbrella, what might be missed in that picture is the fact that both the people and the umbrella, like the cartoon character who rushes off the precipice, are hovering over the abyss of nothingness. For there is, in this inclusive view of things, no solid unchanging ground beneath anyone's feet. There is no objective reality upon which anyone can rely. (Fs)

14b Nihilism is the one constant confronting us in the works of postmodern, post-Christian, deconstructionist and liberationist philosophers and theologians. This nihilism comes dressed up in a variety of styles and colors, but everywhere the message is the same. There are no absolute truths, no absolute values, no absolute judgments, because there is no objective reality in which such absolutes could be rooted. There are no texts, only conflicting interpretations; there are no compass points, only differing perspectives; there is no human nature, only changing human beings. We are all familiar with that innocent little boy of yesteryear who recognized the emperor to be wearing no clothes. It would take a particularly astute little boy to recognize that there is no emperor beneath the layers upon layers of nihilistic clothing paraded before us today. All clothing, no emperor—it could not be otherwise. For nihilism robs us of the substance of things, leaving only an ever-changing pageant of empty forms. (Fs)