January 3, 2011

David Bentley Hart - yksi kristinuskon [ehkä] viimeisimpiä mutta myös kaikkein briljanteimpia vartiomiehiä nihilistisen luonnontieteen sekä lattean modernisaation väkivaltaisessa ja pornoistuneessa maailmassa

David Bentley Hart on julistanut poleemis-retoris-argumentatiivisen sodan uusateisteille [joista mainittakoon etenkin Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens ja Sam Harris]
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". . . [Nietzsche] had the good manners to despise Christianity, in large part, for what it actually was--above all, for its devotion to an ethics of compassion--rather than allow himself the soothing, self-righteous fantasy that Christianity’s history had been nothing but an interminable pageant of violence, tyranny, and sexual neurosis. He may have hated many Christians for their hypocrisy, but he hated Christianity itself principally on account of its enfeebling solicitude for the weak, the outcast, the infirm, and the diseased; and, because he was conscious of the historical contingency of all cultural values, he never deluded himself that humanity could do away with Christian faith while simply retaining Christian morality in some diluted form, such as liberal social conscience or innate human sympathy."
— David Bentley Hart (Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies)
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"I can honestly say that there are many forms of atheism that I find far more admirable than many forms of Christianity or of religion in general. But atheism that consists entirely in vacuous arguments afloat on oceans of historical ignorance, made turbulent by storms of strident self-righteousness, is as contemptible as any other form of dreary fundamentalism. And it is sometimes difficult, frankly, to be perfectly generous in one’s response to the sort of invective currently fashionable among the devoutly undevout, or to the sort of historical misrepresentations it typically involves."
— David Bentley Hart (Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies)
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"God's pleasure--the beauty creation possesses in his regard--underlies the distinct being of creation, and so beauty is the first and truest word concerning all that appears within being; beauty is the showing of what is; God looked upon what he had wrought and saw that it was good."
— David Bentley Hart (The Beauty Of The Infinite: The Aesthetics Of Christian Truth)
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"God's love, and hence the love with which we come to love God, is eros and agape at once: a desire for the other that delights in the distance of otherness."
— David Bentley Hart (The Beauty Of The Infinite: The Aesthetics Of Christian Truth)
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"For indeed Christianity was complicit in the death of antiquity, and in the birth of modernity, not because it was an accomplice of the latter, but because it, alone in the history of the West, constituted a rejection of and alternative to nihilism's despair, violence, and idolatry of power; as such, Christianity shattered the imposing and enchanting facade behind which nihilism once hid, and thereby, inadvertently, called it forth into the open."
— David Bentley Hart (In the Aftermath: Provocations and Laments)
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"Christianity has from its beginning portrayed itself as a gospel of peace, a way of reconciliation (with God, with other creatures), and a new model of human community, offering the 'peace which passes understanding' to a world enmeshed in sin and violence."
— David Bentley Hart
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"[O]nly if the form of Christ can be lived out in the community of the church is the confession of the church true; only if Christ can be practiced is Jesus Lord. No matter how often the subsequent history of the church belied this confession, it is this presence within time of an eschatological and dvine peace, really incarnate in the person of Jesus and forever imparted to the body of Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, that remains the very essence of the church's evangelical appeal to the world at large, and of the salvation it proclaims."
— David Bentley Hart (The Beauty Of The Infinite: The Aesthetics Of Christian Truth)
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"Christ is a persuasion, a form evoking desire, and the whole force of the gospel depends upon the assumption that this persuasion is also peace: that the desire awakened by the shape of Christ and his church is one truly reborn as agape, rather than merely the way in which a lesser force succumbs to a greater, as an episode in the endless epic of power."
— David Bentley Hart (The Beauty Of The Infinite: The Aesthetics Of Christian Truth)
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"For if indeed God became a man, then Truth condescended to became a truth, from whose historical contingency one cannot simply pass to categories of universal rationality; and this means that whatever Christians mean when they speak of truth, it cannot involve simply the dialectical wrestling of abstract principles from intractable facts."
— David Bentley Hart (The Beauty Of The Infinite: The Aesthetics Of Christian Truth)
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"These are attitudes masquerading as ideas, emotional commitments disguised as intellectual honesty. However sincere the current evangelists of unbelief may be, they are doing nothing more than producing rationales--ballasted by a formidable collection of conceptual and historical errors--for convictions that are rooted not in reason but in a greater cultural will, of which their arguments are only reflexes."
— David Bentley Hart (Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies)
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http://davidbhart.blogspot.com/
The David B. Hart Appreciation Blog'ista löytyy loistavia artikkeleita; esim. Daniel Dennett Hunts the Snark, jossa Hart - tekisi mieli sanoa: laulaa Dennettin suohon yhdistämällä tieteenteoreettisesti kokonaisvaltaisen ja laaja-alaisen argumentaation intuitiivisesti oivaltavaan retoriikkaan (Lewis Carroll'in The Hunting of the Snark'iin)
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http://cruciality.wordpress.com/2010/03/08/david-bentley-hart-interview/ [D. B. H. livenä]
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http://www.nettikirjakauppa.com/fin/tuotekategoriat/?id=33&selProduct=2737&selGroup=77

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bentley_Hart
http://orthodoxwiki.org/David_Bentley_Hart
http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/430555.David_Bentley_Hart
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=5379094151

5 comments:

Ironmistress said...

Kas, onko sinusta tullut kristitty? Viimeksi kun kinasimme, olit ateisti.

Täytyykin vaihtaa argumenttisarsenaalia.

AntiPlaton said...

Kas, Martuuna ymmärtää pelaavansa kaksilla viiva kolmilla, ellei peräti neljillä korteilla. En olisi uskonut. No, noillahan kuka tahansa voi leikkiä sofistia, ja mikäs siinä on leikkiessä, hauskaa puuhaahan se on - oman aikansa.

Raunolle menee kuitenkin pisteet "anti-sofismista".

Rauno Rasanen said...

Ei kristityksi tulla - kristityksi synnytään tai paremminkin uudelleen synnytään.

Jos sanoisin, että olen tullut kristityksi, tekisin pilkkaa kristinuskosta tai ylipäätään siitä transsendenttisesta vakaumuksesta, jonka koen omaksuneeni, koska tulla joksikin implikoi ikäänkuin roolipelinomaisesti jonkin vaihdettavan aseman suhteessa ihmisiin, yhteiskuntaan ja maailmaan.

Usko ja uskonnollisuus sen sijaan on kaiken kattava perusta, johon [platonisesti] sekä palataan [johon ei siis tulla tai edetä tutkimusten kautta] että [kristillisesti] synnytään - ei uudelleen vaan täysin uutena ihmisenä - kokonaan uutena luomuksena.

Sekä tässä laajassa mielessä mutta myös sillä ehdolla, että kristinusko ja teismi edellyttävät toisiaan, tarkasteltuna en edelleenkään katso olevani kristitty - ellen sitten hyväksy Slavoj Zizekin [vain puolittain ironista] toteamusta itsestään myös omalla kohdallani: 'Olen hyvä kristitty - ja ateisti - tietenkin'.

[Kristitythän olivat ateisteja pakanoiden mielestä, koska eivät kumartaneet kaiken maailman kivikuvia ym. idols-roskaa].

Joten vaihda ihan rauhassa argumentti-arsenaaliasi - ikäänkuin pelkät työkalut, ilman tajua ['uskoa'] siitä, miten niitä lopulta pitää käyttää suhteessa materiaan tajutun ['uskotun'] muodon ja päämäärän saavuttamiseksi, riittäisivät takaamaan älyllisen itseymmärryksen ['uskon'] pätevyyden.

Emme me kuitenkaan puhu samasta asiasta minkään argumentaation vallitessa. Olemme täysin erilaisia ihmisiä.

Ironmistress said...

Tässäpä hiukan pilkunviilausta kivikuvien kumartamisesta.

Rauno Rasanen said...

Kiitos. Mutta kuka noita tietoja [siis informaatiota] tarvitsee? Minäkö? - - eh eh -eh- älä viitsi.
Parempia/huonompiakin tragedioita on nähty.