In trying to think about divine violence lately I disovered Slavoj Zizek's latest offering, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections.
As always, it is a brilliant roller-coaster ride of a book. Zizerk skewers all kinds of lazy thinking in Western culture. He has a severe critique of religion and theism, but he also says this:
Science and religion have changed places: today, science provides the security religion once guaranteed. In a curious inversion, religion is one of the possible place fro which one can deploy critical doubts about today's society. It has become one of the sites of resistance. p. 70
Possibly, but Zizek also argues that only atheists can be truly ethical, because only an atheist will do something because it is right, rather than because it pleases the deity, or to earn a reward. This is an old critique which actually has its basis within the Christian tradition itself (see the 17th century Quietists, for example).
Showing posts with label violence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label violence. Show all posts
Monday, September 08, 2008
Friday, May 02, 2008
John Milbank doesn't like computers...
'Computers ... in so far as they impose the reign of information, are the enemies of truth and democracy. Our gaze at their screens is the constitution through watching and receiving of inherently violent transactions which in the end, when we step through their looking-glass, always involve real physical violence.
On line, therefore, we are clubbing each other to death, but invisibly, very very gradually and at a huge remove. When this process does appear, then we finally see what we collectively do, but assume that it has nothing to do with us, individually. But just as breathing is the most massive combustion, so also this slowed-down and distributed violence is actually increased violence, like a torture that is all the more torture through being long drawn-out.'
from Being Reconciled p. 37
Think about that when you next play Scrabbulous....
On line, therefore, we are clubbing each other to death, but invisibly, very very gradually and at a huge remove. When this process does appear, then we finally see what we collectively do, but assume that it has nothing to do with us, individually. But just as breathing is the most massive combustion, so also this slowed-down and distributed violence is actually increased violence, like a torture that is all the more torture through being long drawn-out.'
from Being Reconciled p. 37
Think about that when you next play Scrabbulous....
Saturday, February 17, 2007
Show no mercy...?
Moses says to Israel:
Deuteronomy 7:1-2 "When the LORD your God brings you into the land that you are entering to take possession of it, and clears away many nations before you, the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations more numerous and mightier than yourselves, 2 and when the LORD your God gives them over to you, and you defeat them, then you must devote them to complete destruction. You shall make no covenant with them and show no mercy to them.
What can a biblical Christian make of this? The word of God, or the word of Man?
Deuteronomy 7:1-2 "When the LORD your God brings you into the land that you are entering to take possession of it, and clears away many nations before you, the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations more numerous and mightier than yourselves, 2 and when the LORD your God gives them over to you, and you defeat them, then you must devote them to complete destruction. You shall make no covenant with them and show no mercy to them.
What can a biblical Christian make of this? The word of God, or the word of Man?
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