[Orig to FB]
Today’s Imma-up-this-from-a-comment:
As it happens, when I was younger I spent some time reading about the two swords, as it’s called, so I’ve been thinking about it on and off for nearly forty years now — through the rise of liberation theology, the end of the Cold War, the revival of Catholic organicist McLuhanism that attended the early internet, the Global War on Terror, and (of course) through a series of increasingly corrupt popes. When I started to read this essay, my first reaction — which took about one sentence — was 🙄 another f—ing paleo Catholic 😴. What am I missing in this essay that’s interesting? On one level, the centuries-old debate amounts to little more than what Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty said of words: “The question is which is to be master — that’s all.” Pope or potentate, pick one. I might not have sided with Boniface VIII during the capital-C Crusades, but in a post–Vatican 2 world where billionaires own global surveillance systems and can buy nuclear weapons, I do. The author of this piece doesn’t, and mostly what I see is another sad little whiny-bitch reactionary rightist who’s upset that he just passed the Zeitgeist galloping in the other direction.
Oh, and for the record, I’m not Catholic or even religious — I just studied theological history because (as I framed it with excess youthful zeal) it was the highest form of history: pure bullsh—. I’m still not religious in the sense of believing in a deity or whatever, but I learned to respect religion and, more important, to respect the religious. It’s why I’ll criticize zionism but not zionists. As the old Christian saw goes — and, provenance aside, it’s a good one — judge the sin not the sinner. There’s one exception, though: people who work to violate others’ civil and human rights at scale. They deserve the pointy end of both swords and neither of the protections they reject.