How’s this grab you?
The USA is not a state of all its citizens. According to the Nation-State Law which ought to be passed, the USA will be the nation-state of the Catholic People – and them alone. As is clear, there will be no problem with the non-Catholic citizens of the USA — they will have the same rights as us all and the coming government will invest in the non-Catholic sector more than its previous government.
Fine idea. I don’t see anything wrong with it. Fits kind of nice. When spoken aloud, it sort of fills the mouth with round tones. Declaring the once United States Catholic would restore the unity we now lack. For one, it would empower government to deal with all these Church officials running around defining themselves by their sexual desires.
I’m basing my exercise on words Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu posted on his Instagram account. Seems an Arab—a celebrity, which is how we know about it—living in Israel isn’t pleased about the situation regarding Arab parties in government. This celebrity said (the news report was paraphrasing, we gather) “Israel is a country for all its citizens.”
On Sunday morning, Netanyahu responded to Sela on his own Instagram. He uploaded a picture of himself against the backdrop of an Israeli flag, and wrote, “Dear Rotem, an important correction: Israel is not a state of all its citizens. According to the Nation-State Law that we passed, Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish People – and them alone. As you wrote, there’s no problem with the Arab citizens of Israel — they have the same rights as us all and the Likud government has invested in the Arab sector more than any other government.”
As I’ve said before, I’m no judge about that land on which the current state of Israel sits. I believe it ought to be Christian, given Our Lord sacrificed himself there. The Holy Land is, well, the Holy Land. Lot of evangelization needed in that crook of the desert.
Yet like my dad always says, if IFs and BUTs where candy and nuts, every day’d be Christmas. The Crusades failed. Israel isn’t going anywhere, so let’s deal with her as she is. We can’t make Israel Christian. At least, not until the Parousia.
We might be able to turn the USA into the Catholic USA, though. Maybe not the entire land mass. Perhaps just a good chunk of it. We can acknowledge real politics and give the entire Left coast to the atheists. They already have it. Everything from upstate New York on over to Michigan, and then down through Arizona, or so, and continuing through Florida will be The Catholic States of America. CSA! CSA! CSA!
There will be some serious gerrymandering needed to sort all this out. All change comes with a cost. We shouldn’t shy away from hard work.
Don’t misunderstand me and think I am against what Israel is doing. It must be clear that Jews are a minority in the region and that if Israel was not officially Jewish, in the inexorable application of Conquest’s second law, it would soon become something resembling, say, South Africa. Having a legal position of living apart is smart.
The Nation-State Law states (among other things) “Israel is the historic homeland of the Jewish people, who have the unique right of national self-determination” and “Israel will be open to Jewish aliyah”—open immigration of non-Israeli Jews. The law also speaks of a “Diaspora”, which is rather dangerous language, implying that a Jew’s natural home is not the country in which they might reside. But let that pass.
None of these declarations sound any worse by swapping in “Catholic” for “Jewish.”
Now some will complain and say Jews aren’t a religion, but a race, so that my analogy doesn’t work. There is no problem. We declare instead “According to the Nation-State Law to be passed, USA is the nation-state of the White People – and them alone.” The cuts we’d make to divide the land would be different, but we can leave that to the cartographers.
On the other hand, if Jews aren’t a religion or a race but both simultaneously, which is no contradiction, then “According to the Nation-State Law to be passed, USA is the nation-state of the Catholic White People – and them alone.”
Doesn’t have to be just the USA. Any country can, and maybe even should, get in on this.
I may be old fashioned but if you believe about national and ethnic identity what every man of every race color and creed believed about it in 1950 (including the Soviets(!)), you’re probably not far off.
I think it’s kind of fun to see the so called alt “right” and the left join hand in hand in hand in hand in a marvelous display of group hand wringing over Israel. A country wants to preserve its own identity and survival! How dare they!
Satire though it is, nothing you said sounds crazy, it just sounds like what Maryland was supposed to be, replacing white with English or Anglo-Saxon. Although I might shed an unironic tear for Americans of founding stock being left without the country they started.
Brilliant analogy, Dr. Briggs.
How about another analogy: What if the UN and the UK decreed that the Lenape Indians, whose tribal homeland is Manhattan island, forcibly seized Manhattan tomorrow, to create a Lenape Nation-State. The Lenape tribe, and their religion, would be the chosen ones in the new Nation-State.
There are just as many reasons to give Manhattan to the Lenape, and just as many reasons that it is an insane idea with no connection to the real world, as there were for the US/UK/UN violent action of 1946.
Jewish is not merely a religion, but an ethnicity, a nation.
Let every state be a nation, and let every nation have a state.
“The USA is not a state of all its citizens. According to the Nation-State Law which ought to be passed, the USA will be the nation-state of the Catholic People”
Cool what would you call it ? The Republic of Gilead??
A serious critique would compare Israel’s new ‘Nation State Law’ and compare & contrast where that goes vs the ole Balfour Declaration that endeavored to, then, create what on the surface, reads to be pretty much the same thing.
Israel / Jews/Hebrew are a kind of historical special case ‘class’ that even the ancient Romans recognized — and tolerated because they were older than Rome itself. That’s how those ancient Jews could live in Rome without being considered traitors for not believing the Roman gods, and why they were not considered a risk of bringing those god’s wrath on Rome.
It was those persnickety Christians that also didn’ believe in the Roman gods — without benefit of ‘right/consideration of precedence’ the Jews/Hebrews had — that threatened to bring down the wrath of Roman gods in Rome itself. This made the Christians the atheists — unbelief in the other gods — and why they had to go.
That’s the sort of real historical influence into the present (in abbreviated “crash course” brevity) right up IW’s alley … except for the non-involvement of Russia…..
Interesting to consider that the original atheists, Christians, rejected all of the 100s of gods less one deity. Modern atheists merely go one deity further. Which just goes to show which are/were the real muckrakers.
Oh, could we start restricting the vote, too? This would be nice:
1. citizens, who are,
2. property owners, and are
3. taxpayers.
That would set things up nicely. I’m not a big fan of the Catholics only part, as I know to many others here in Wisconsin and Minnesota. But that is something that could be left to the individual states…
Interesting to consider that the original atheists, Christians, rejected all of the 100s of gods less one deity.
Not so. The Jewish God, whom the Christians worshiped, was not the last survivor after all the other gods were voted off the island. He Who Is was not simply one god among other gods, but unique and transcendent. The closest the Greeks came to it was the One of Plotinus’ Neoplatonism.
The Romans tolerated the Greek gods because they could shoehorn then into the Roman template. They could not do this with the Manicheans, let alone the Jews and Christians. To polytheists of Late Antiquity, the world was a spiritual landscape rustling with unseen presences, which had to be continually placed by blood sacrifices. It was not until the fifth century in fact that the various polytheists began to think of themselves as members of the same community and the term paganus condensed onto its modern meaning. It had originally meant something like the great mass of people who were not like us: the audience, the laymen, the non-professionals. Worshipers of Zeus felt no more kinship with worshipers of Artemis than with anyone else. Julian’s attempt to create a centralized universal pagan church to include the various localized worships failed.
http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/04/one-god-further-objection.html
The self-lauding hubris of both Christianty and Islam is to believe they each are the single universal faith that everyone in the world should follow. Actually they’re just minor later side shows of parts of Judaism. They realise that’s so, which is why they keep attempting to belitle the main trunk of their own faiths.
Gary – Jesus was born and raised a Jew.
And then he got better.
The Jews turned their backs on God.
Many people turned their back on God and still do.
Religion is not a team sport.
There seems to be a lot of pretending to be confused going on.
If God exists. What man has imagined is irrelevant unless is serves his purpose.
@ Ye Olde Statistician,
“He Who Is was not simply one god among other gods, but unique and transcendent.”
My god is more big than wot theres iz.
Mr. trombone,
God is not “more big than what there is”, he is the essence of how anything “is”. See Exodus.
Where did the village atheists, etc. come from all of a sudden?
Best brief takedown of new atheism and some of the nonsense that has popped up in this particular thread
https://sixdayscience.com/about-us/faqs/faqa/
Nobody sensible believes in a created God.
They believe that God is a creation. That’s the distinction.
Words have meaning. Meaning is transcendent.
Matter can’t mean anything unless meaning and matter matter.
Some matters are mean.
Some don’t have the means to matter.
All the others are completely confused.
I meant “nobody Christian”
Also, that they, …atheists….
Plenty of people just think the idea of God is a good one so let’s keep it.
Which is a variation on thinking God is created.
As to bigger God or older ones:
Money doesn’t stop the rain,
When it rains, it rains on everybody.
Money just buys you a better umbrella.
McChuck
Christianity has a theological need to believe it ususurped the Jewish Covenant, because that’s one of the three legs of the stool it rests on – without that theft it would tip over. Have you noticed Judaism doesn’t require everyone to be a Jew, nor does (say) Buddhism, nor Jain, nor Hindi, nor Zoroastionism, nor Shinto, etc, etc. That hubris of cosmic supremacy rests alone on Christianity and Islam.
@Garyin-Erko How do you know it’s hubris? A lot of people believe a lot of things, has no bearing on the facts.
@ R,
“God is not “more big than what there is”, he is the essence of how anything “is”. See Exodus.”
Exodus is a fantasy story with no internal logic or plot consistency, and almost no archeological or historical evidence to support it. Why should I take the claim that God is “the essence of how anything is” any more seriously than the ten plagues of Egypt?
@ Hoyos,
“Best brief takedown of new atheism and some of the nonsense that has popped up in this particular thread”
I read the article you linked to. It isn’t a takedown of new atheism per se, nor of atheism in general (assuming that there’s any difference between the two), nor is such a thing possible; you can’t takedown disbelief in God other than by providing evidence for God.
@Swordfishtrombone, if you’d read it you’d see she answered what you just said. You’re confusing a positive statement with an affirmative statement. It was right there and you blew past it.
@swordfishtrombone, additionally, she does with links as well. You’re also confusing evidence with a level of certainty that’s not possible, like disproving solipsism, which she also addresses.
@ Hoyos,
“if you’d read it you’d see she answered what you just said”
Where? The term “new atheist” doesn’t even appear in the article at all.
“Best brief takedown of new atheism and some of the nonsense that has popped up in this particular thread”
Your “best brief takedown” is everybody else’s “more of the same old pony dough”.
Mr. trombone,
You should take claims in a book which Catholics believe to be divinely inspired seriously in your arguments as to what Catholics believe. Otherwise it seems rather ridiculous to take you seriously, no?