I think Dave got a bit confused about 14 minutes in. He said that rebellion is the seed of witchcraft. Off the top of my head, I think the Scripture he’s referring to is in fact something like “rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft”, and taken in context, is simply a comparison — God is saying through one of the prophets that His people’s rebellion is in His eyes as bad as if they were practising witchcraft (a sin they would have known was terrible and would have shunned). …I should go and look up the verse, but I’m too tired!
Dave also seemed to suggest that Antonio Gramsci was a Fabian (though I may have misunderstood what he was saying). Gramsci’s ideas were independent of those of the Fabians: both were quite separate schools of thought, although both were strands of Socialism. Dave was right to say that the Fabians believed in evolutionary rather than revolutionary Socialism — not a swift violent change, but a gradual, “delayed” one, hence their choice of name (Fabius Maximus was a famous politician and general of the Roman Republic, nicknamed cunctator, “the delayer” — a description of his military tactics).
Conversely, Antonio Gramsci and his fellow theorists at the Institut für Sozialforschung (the Institute For Social Research in Frankfurt am Main) were Marxists who concocted a strategy for softening up resistant Western-type democracies in order to render them susceptible to a Marxist revolutionary overthrow. …And I wouldn’t identify today’s China as being an exemplar of Gramsci’s theories: indeed, his tactics were not necessary in China, since China underwent a fairly conventional Socialist/Communist revolution, and did not need to first undergo the cultural undermining process formulated by the Frankfurt School Marxists.
I enjoyed all the other stuff Dave said though! 🙂
…And Doug, the passage you quoted from Habakkuk was very interesting: I’d overlooked the modern application of that! What you said (about our exchange of worthless IOUs for goods of genuine value produced by poor people) really took the words out of my mouth — I have been saying exactly the same thing for some time, to anyone who will listen. The more I think of it, the more the situation in the West fits the picture in Isaiah 3, and there’s a line there which says, “the plunder of the poor is in your houses”. When we look around our houses at all the inexpensive foreign goods we enjoy, and consider the currency we used to buy them, it should give us pause…
As for the atheist you mentioned, I think his view would change if he saw the seriousness of his sin: it was only when I realised just how bad I was that I was finally prepared to give the Bible a fair hearing (and even then I had to wrestle with it, since it’s so at odds with the world and its ideas). A person who believes that they and others are basically good are highly unlikely to understand Scripture, much less believe it — assuming they even bother to read it in the first place!
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Paul
I think Dave got a bit confused about 14 minutes in. He said that rebellion is the seed of witchcraft. Off the top of my head, I think the Scripture he’s referring to is in fact something like “rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft”, and taken in context, is simply a comparison — God is saying through one of the prophets that His people’s rebellion is in His eyes as bad as if they were practising witchcraft (a sin they would have known was terrible and would have shunned). …I should go and look up the verse, but I’m too tired!
Dave also seemed to suggest that Antonio Gramsci was a Fabian (though I may have misunderstood what he was saying). Gramsci’s ideas were independent of those of the Fabians: both were quite separate schools of thought, although both were strands of Socialism. Dave was right to say that the Fabians believed in evolutionary rather than revolutionary Socialism — not a swift violent change, but a gradual, “delayed” one, hence their choice of name (Fabius Maximus was a famous politician and general of the Roman Republic, nicknamed cunctator, “the delayer” — a description of his military tactics).
Conversely, Antonio Gramsci and his fellow theorists at the Institut für Sozialforschung (the Institute For Social Research in Frankfurt am Main) were Marxists who concocted a strategy for softening up resistant Western-type democracies in order to render them susceptible to a Marxist revolutionary overthrow. …And I wouldn’t identify today’s China as being an exemplar of Gramsci’s theories: indeed, his tactics were not necessary in China, since China underwent a fairly conventional Socialist/Communist revolution, and did not need to first undergo the cultural undermining process formulated by the Frankfurt School Marxists.
I enjoyed all the other stuff Dave said though! 🙂
…And Doug, the passage you quoted from Habakkuk was very interesting: I’d overlooked the modern application of that! What you said (about our exchange of worthless IOUs for goods of genuine value produced by poor people) really took the words out of my mouth — I have been saying exactly the same thing for some time, to anyone who will listen. The more I think of it, the more the situation in the West fits the picture in Isaiah 3, and there’s a line there which says, “the plunder of the poor is in your houses”. When we look around our houses at all the inexpensive foreign goods we enjoy, and consider the currency we used to buy them, it should give us pause…
As for the atheist you mentioned, I think his view would change if he saw the seriousness of his sin: it was only when I realised just how bad I was that I was finally prepared to give the Bible a fair hearing (and even then I had to wrestle with it, since it’s so at odds with the world and its ideas). A person who believes that they and others are basically good are highly unlikely to understand Scripture, much less believe it — assuming they even bother to read it in the first place!