@Clinias
It's emotionally difficult to answer your questions, because they are embarrassingly dumb. Your Marxism and Christianity question involves a false analogy.

You are saying that since Marxism is incompatible with nationalism, therefore those who say Christianity is incompatible with nationalism have the same goals as Marxists.

Well, Hitler didn't smoke, therefore those who advocate non-smoking have the same goals as Hitler. This is your fallacy.

I say that Christianity is incompatible with nationalism relying on verses such as, "Is he the God of the Jews only? is he not also of the Gentiles? Yes, of the Gentiles also" and "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus." (Romans 3:29, Galatians 3:28) Putting your nationality or nation to the same level as your Christianity is incompatible with this.

Clinias wrote:

Again, God says, "Thou shalt not sow thy field with mingled [diverse, in other translations] seed". As St. Paul extrapolated the verse about muzzling the oxen treading the grain to pertain to the clergy receiving recompense for their labor, this verse, connected to the second, surely can be extrapolated to condemn the propaganda of diversity and multiculturalism by the American Catholic hierarchy, right?

Please understand rather sooner than later that when you have "American" there, it makes your whole point completely ridiculous. USA is not a nation-state the way e.g. Poland can claim to be. USA was created by British colonists and populated by various European ethnicities with diverse affiliations by expulsing natives and adding Africans to the mix.

USA is diverse from the very beginning. Its history is a history of population growth by immigration and territorial expansion by conquest and annexation. It's as antithetical to a nation-state as can be.

By the way, are anti-miscegenation views and laws biblical/Christian?

seigneur wrote:

Please understand rather sooner than later that when you have "American" there, it makes your whole point completely ridiculous. USA is not a nation-state the way e.g. Poland can claim to be. USA was created by British colonists and populated by various European ethnicities with diverse affiliations by expulsing natives and adding Africans to the mix.

USA is diverse from the very beginning. Its history is a history of population growth by immigration and territorial expansion by conquest and annexation. It's as antithetical to a nation-state as can be.

By the way, are anti-miscegenation views and laws biblical/Christian?

​There may be issues even with Poland depending on how nation is being defined. I think in linguistic, cultural, shared history terms the Soviets did ensure in 1945 that the current Poland was like a model nation state. In genetic inheritance terms though, the long history of the larger more multi-ethnic Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Polonization as Lithuanians, Belarusians, Ukrainians etc. took up speaking Polish and Polish culture to join the ruling classes might mean that they are hard to distinguish from present day neighbouring nations.

​Since the 1990s Poland has also had this policy of issuing Polish cards to citizens of neighbouring states (Belarus, Ukraine etc.) that used to be part of Poland before 1939, if they could prove any Polish ancestry or connection to Poland (i.e. were of Catholic faith). As far as I know these cards make it possible to live and work in Poland and are like a fast track to citizenship. So there are a good number of Western Ukrainian and Belarusian immigrants currently living and working in Poland.  
 

Now, there is a discussion. Now, people are laying their cards on the table. Now, there is some knowledge being passed around. FZM seemed to me to play dumb, but now I see the guy is quite knowledgeable about Central Europe and Orthodox teaching. A lot of good points laid out that we all should get to.
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First, there are a lot more parameters to throw out there in part of this discussion for consideration--which has to put into the hopper. I put out a paper on the many forms of genocide and posted it earlier in this thread. Only one person availed it. Philosophy is about Knowledge. And when people don't want to learn more--they can not come to the truth, or apprehend it, understand it. 

I sense an undercurrent in the thread and that is Libertarianism. Libertarianism is quite favorable amongst many Catholics. I believe Dr. Feser is a Libertarian. Libertarianism is an ideology of individualism. That runs counter to race/nation. It is on purpose that way. Again, I guess I am the only one to bring up Aristotle's scientific observation on the essential character of man--and that is being a "Social Animal".  The Greek word is "politike" and many translators and others calque the word into "political", but that is not the meaning of the word in Greek. The word in Greek means "social". 

[1253a] [1] and self-sufficiency is an end, and a chief good. From these things therefore it is clear that the city-state is a natural growth, and that man is by nature a political animal, and a man that is by nature and not merely by fortune citiless is either low in the scale of humanity or above it （like the “ clanless, lawless, hearthless
” man reviled by Homer,[url=http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:abo:tlg,0086,035:1:1253a#note1]1[/url] for one by nature unsocial is also ‘a lover of war’） inasmuch as he is solitary, like an isolated piece at draughts. And why man is a political animal in a greater measure than any bee or any gregarious animal is clear. For nature, as we declare, does nothing without purpose; and man alone of the animals possesses speech. The mere voice, it is true, can indicate pain and pleasure, and therefore is possessed by the other animals as well （for their nature has been developed so far as to have sensations of what is painful and pleasant and to indicate those sensations to one another）, but speech is designed to indicate the advantageous and the harmful, and therefore also the right and the wrong; for it is the special property of man in distinction from the other animals that he alone has perception of good and bad and right and wrong and the other moral qualities, and it is partnership in these things that makes a household and a city-state. (ref: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:abo:tlg,0086,035:1:1253a 

Here is the pertinent verse: "And why man is a political animal in a greater measure than any bee or any gregarious animal is clear."  The Bee is a Herd animal. The term "gregarious" means "living in flocks". The term "politike" in Greek means "social" in English and is furthered by the word "gregarious" as Herd. That is the hidden meaning behind the word. Aristotle finishes the paragraph with "family" and "city-state". A Family is a Herd. A city-state is a herd. 

What is the word "idiot" come from?

It comes from the Greek meaning "individual". Those that did not want to participate in the political, or social, life of the polis were called "idiotes" which moved into the English language as a pejorative "idiot". 

Aristotle goes on about those that are "clanless" and "hearthless" as "low in the scale of humanity". 

In the paper I posted on the many forms of genocide, the holding of  anarchism, Americanism, Libertarianism, and any and all forms of the ideology of individualism are acts of soft genocide. Anarchism, Americanism, Libertarianism, Individualism is all about breaking the social bonds. That we are all individuals having no responsibility to our racial groups. That is genocide, my friends, albeit soft genocide. 

See in a Section called "Practical Philosophy", Aristotle must surely be brought up. And what also does Aristotle posit as the core of being a "social animal"?  L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E. What did I post earlier, that categorizing language leads one to racial and sub-racial categories. Language and race go-together. It is part of being "Social", being part of the Herd. 

All forms of Individualism, the teaching, preaching, advocating, promoting, individualism of any sort is genocidal. The word "idiot" is what an individualist is. Nature moves all things into self-sufficiency. And Individual is NOT self-sufficient and so is automatically damaged, automatically dysfunctional. Libertarianism is being "idiotes".

We are BY NATURE, Herd animals. We are, BY NATURE, racial animals. We are, BY NATURE, nationalistic. We were created that way by God, and Aristotle, being a true philosopher, teaches the truth. 
 

FZM wrote:

seigneur wrote:

FZM wrote:

​There may be issues even with Poland depending on how nation is being defined.
 

Yes, there may be, if you look for issues very hard. The fact remains that Poland is among the most homogenous nations in the world. As is Lithuania, Slovakia, Czech, and most of the other countries in that region. Ukrainians, Belarussians and Lithuanians in Poland's history do not add any significant variety, because they are linguistically related and racially indistinguishable.

​My point was that the homogeneity of Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Lithuania etc. is a relatively recent phenomena, post 1918 and post 1945 and that it is something that has been consciously engineered. (Find all the linguistically and culturally homogenous nation states existing in the area of present day Poland, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Hungary, Czech and Slovak Republics, Ukraine etc. on a 1917 map.)  Incidentally Marxists 
played a prominent role in engineering it. 


 

Good point, but tendentious and irrelevant to my point (because every point is in a wider context to have relevance). Poles have been in what's now Poland (named Poland for a millennium at least) for as long as human memory and historical record goes. Did Marxists engineer it to be this way? In comparison, current so-called Americans are recent immigrants and they'd do well to be aware of this.

ETA: To make it very clear what my point was, if you missed it: There are objective characteristics to determine a country's nation-state-ness from "pure" to "diverse", the characteristics being linguistic, racial, and historical at least. By these measures, USA and Poland are very different. You say Poland is somewhat mixed too. The answer: Of course there is a foreigner in every country and when you go far enough in history, it was inhabited by different people, but when we get back to my point, which was to compare USA and Poland, then USA is far more diverse, its timeline is significantly shorter and its history is a story of mass extermination of natives by mass immigrants/invaders, while Poland is as homogenous as it gets in this world, and has been so for about a millennium, admittedly somewhat depending on how you draw the territory.

Last edited by seigneur (3/08/2018 12:38 pm)

FZM wrote:

​Your point about most Americans being recent immigrants is valid. But even what seem like 'model' European nation states have quite mixed histories going back even 100 years.   
 

Yes and yes. And what is *your* point? That there are no nation-states? That everybody is deluded about their ethnicity, about to what country, language, or race they belong, or to what degree they have adapted to wherever they happen to live?

Yes, some are delusionally puffed with white pride in countries that are relatively recent conquests from other peoples and races. Then again, there are nations that were always roughly as they are now, as far as can be reasonably determined. Whether to be proud of it is another question, and in my view the answer is no, because whatever the history of your country or nation and whatever the colour of your skin, it is all accidental.

All that said, being a good citizen is the same requirement as being a good neighbour, in the Gospel sense of "neighbour". This is my opinion.

Last edited by seigneur (3/08/2018 1:24 pm)