Liberals dominate the media in the Western world, or developed world, they have infiltrated academia to the extent you will spend your schooling and most certainly your University years without ever hearing an illiberal view,
So if Liberals hold such a sway on opinion and how we might feel about ourselves, how did it all come about, for it needs to be deconstructed, for it own sake, as there is no denying there is good as much as there is bad in the Liberal viewpoint.
As a deconstructive task let us look at middlebrow reading in shaping the religious and cultural sensibilities of twentieth-century Liberals. Modernism might be another area for deconstruction
the Enlightenment as the Cross for Liberals to follow.
But how did liberalism survive when its doctrines were shown to differ radically from traditional orthodoxy
.
Liberalism as a quasi religion flourished in the twentieth century because it avoided theology. It offered American a pseudo culture by articulating goals (all the middle brow reading)
in doing do they fostered cultural norms and advocated a pursuit of the liberal vision so that its quasi spiritual agenda became pervasive in Western life.
Trying to unearth one of Liberalism's Bibles would be to look at the pragmatist William James' Varieties of Religious Experience. The fundamental principles articulated in this ground breaking work on liberal religion gained momentum until it became the cultural religious norms in America. The liberal approaches to religion found in James were "intellectually engaged, psychologically oriented, and focused on personal experience/
Whereas conservatives in the modernist - fundamentalist controversy got their bearings from past orthodoxies, liberals embraced the present and the future. While conservatives focused their attention on theological defenses of doctrine, liberals took the lead of James who never defended a single doctrine in his pragmatic approach to religion.
If we turn to the Liberal faith, theorist Stuart Hall who states that somehow "The world has to be made to mean." People must have a framework or worldview, Liberal 'religion' in the guise of middlebrow culture, according to Hedstrom, "provided a structure that helped make the confusing modern world mean."
Earthshaking experiences of the early twentieth century (the 3 World Wars) necessitated an accessible religious worldview to enable the Western world to function in everyday life. If the needs were experiential, the means of meeting them must be likewise.
The Liberal view had to be protected and redefined to safeguard it from dogmatists and rationalists alike. So Liberalism's world Religion is not essentially rational, mediated through ideas [orthodox theology or deistic beliefs], nor is it essentially ethical, mediated by autonomous moral choice [Kantian moralism]. Instead Liberal religion is sui generis [unique, its own kind]. Religion is unmediated; it is found in mystical God-consciousness. By rooting religion in "feeling" or immediate experience [German Gefuhl]
Schleiermacher reconfigured religion to appeal to the "despisers of religion", the romantics for whom truth lay not in ideas nor in ethics but in immediate awareness. Liberals of the twentieth century simply updated the constant need to reconfigure religion - they used the middlebrow book culture to promote a pragmatic, psychological and mystical religion that appealed to a readership willing to accept its updated faith.
So if Liberals hold such a sway on opinion and how we might feel about ourselves, how did it all come about, for it needs to be deconstructed, for it own sake, as there is no denying there is good as much as there is bad in the Liberal viewpoint.
As a deconstructive task let us look at middlebrow reading in shaping the religious and cultural sensibilities of twentieth-century Liberals. Modernism might be another area for deconstruction
the Enlightenment as the Cross for Liberals to follow.
But how did liberalism survive when its doctrines were shown to differ radically from traditional orthodoxy
.
Liberalism as a quasi religion flourished in the twentieth century because it avoided theology. It offered American a pseudo culture by articulating goals (all the middle brow reading)
in doing do they fostered cultural norms and advocated a pursuit of the liberal vision so that its quasi spiritual agenda became pervasive in Western life.
Trying to unearth one of Liberalism's Bibles would be to look at the pragmatist William James' Varieties of Religious Experience. The fundamental principles articulated in this ground breaking work on liberal religion gained momentum until it became the cultural religious norms in America. The liberal approaches to religion found in James were "intellectually engaged, psychologically oriented, and focused on personal experience/
Whereas conservatives in the modernist - fundamentalist controversy got their bearings from past orthodoxies, liberals embraced the present and the future. While conservatives focused their attention on theological defenses of doctrine, liberals took the lead of James who never defended a single doctrine in his pragmatic approach to religion.
If we turn to the Liberal faith, theorist Stuart Hall who states that somehow "The world has to be made to mean." People must have a framework or worldview, Liberal 'religion' in the guise of middlebrow culture, according to Hedstrom, "provided a structure that helped make the confusing modern world mean."
Earthshaking experiences of the early twentieth century (the 3 World Wars) necessitated an accessible religious worldview to enable the Western world to function in everyday life. If the needs were experiential, the means of meeting them must be likewise.
The Liberal view had to be protected and redefined to safeguard it from dogmatists and rationalists alike. So Liberalism's world Religion is not essentially rational, mediated through ideas [orthodox theology or deistic beliefs], nor is it essentially ethical, mediated by autonomous moral choice [Kantian moralism]. Instead Liberal religion is sui generis [unique, its own kind]. Religion is unmediated; it is found in mystical God-consciousness. By rooting religion in "feeling" or immediate experience [German Gefuhl]
Schleiermacher reconfigured religion to appeal to the "despisers of religion", the romantics for whom truth lay not in ideas nor in ethics but in immediate awareness. Liberals of the twentieth century simply updated the constant need to reconfigure religion - they used the middlebrow book culture to promote a pragmatic, psychological and mystical religion that appealed to a readership willing to accept its updated faith.
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