Interlude Before Continuing

Thinking about the end of the passage from Hans Kung that I posted last night, it is no wonder that the most useful weapon which has been used against Democracy in the collaborative campaign of billionaire gangsters in the United States, in Canada, in Britain, in Europe and Australia to bring back overt fascism has been racism, bigotry, hatred of minorities, a sense of cowardly resentment by lower income members of the privileged races, ethnic groups which they can be easily convinced to turn on those beneath them in the power structure built to have ever increasing inequality, squeezing the cowards and those beneath them for the benefit of the billionaire gangsters.  It is no shock that they use the media, especially entertainment media to do that - if they used what people aren't obsessively paying attention to, it wouldn't work so well,  Trump, a product of entertainment media would be one of the lower level multi-millionaire grifter-grafter-crooks instead of the chief executive of the most powerful and once most influential government on Earth. 

The insight of Jurgen Habermas that egalitarian democracy is founded, not on the shifting sands of dialectical history - remarkable considering he is the last surviving member of the Marxist-Hegelian Frankfurt School - but that egalitarian democracy, indeed the concepts of personal integrity, personal autonomy are founded in and solely and directly nourished by the Christian interpretation of the Mosaic Law as it has had influence on societies in which that has influenced thinking and acting.   Democracy is entirely dependent on that conception of love as it is made real in human beings and human societies and governs the nature of human governments.    It has certainly not been the most powerful force, not in the late classical period in which the late Roman empire coopted Christianity and as it spread during the subsequent feudal period nor has it been after that but its influence has been crucial in the development of egalitarian democracy - much of the articulation of the abolition movement was the shaming of nominally professed Christians who did not live up to the profession of their faith.   

Even when that shaming used the secular documents of American history, it was the Jeffersonian formula of Christian egalitarianism, that it was the by act of The Creator who endowed people with rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness that slaves and former slaves used to make their claim of freedom and rights.   The alternative reading that some of the Founders wanted, replacing "happiness" with "property" was rejected - certainly if it had been adopted it would have been useless to assert that the "property" in the form of Black People had a right that overrode the liberty given by the secular documents of American Republicanism to rich white people to own them.  That was essentially the holding of the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott decision made on purely secular law.   As must be mentioned, the author of that secular formula, it was the Priestlian- Unitarian-deist Jefferson who turned Jesus into a harmless figure even as he ignored his own formula so he could retain his many Black slaves and expand his wealth through them.  I have come to suspect that Jefferson's deistic "Christianity" was adopted, the better to not have to think about what his wealth was based on. 

The current events we see in the attack on and destruction of democracy is a direct result of the mass media, the general culture of materialist secularism, consumerism, are the product of that vital source of egalitarian democracy being replaced by cynicism and calculation and anger and resentment and the cowardly attacks on the even lower underclasses instead of realizing the real source of the pain of the margin to put a Trump or a majority to put a Putin into power.  It has put every one of the dictator replacements for democracy in power.  Any alleged Christian church or figure who has done that is as in on the workings of that Antichrist as Trump or Putin are. Whether they are a member of the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops, some white evangelical figure, some mass media Bible waver or the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church, they are whited sepulchers and money changers in the temple.  They bring Christianity into a disrepute which, ironically, helps to empower the forces destroying egalitarian democracy, a sense of personal integrity and autonomy, a sense of decency and, as can be seen here and abroad, even any ability to discern reality instead of on-screen illusion.