Davis Aurini - Politics & Theology: Logos, Agape, & Forgiveness

April 2, 2013 - Davis Aurini

15:54

Politics & Theology: Logos, Agape, & Forgiveness

My novel: http://www.amazon.com/Walk-These-Broken-Roads-ebook/dp/B009RZYO2O/ My blog: http://www.staresattheworld.com/ My Twitter: http://twitter.com/Aurini

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	Now in this video, we're going to be discussing theology, but what we're actually talking about is politics.
	You're going to need to bear with me, because theology is the DNA that goes into all of our thought.
	Political, cultural, artistic, romantic, but it's very hard to notice.
	So we're going to start with theology, then we're going to get to the politics and show how the theology influences the politics.
	And we're going to start with logos and agape.
	First, there was the word, and then the word was love.
	That God created the universe through reason, through intellect, through coherency, through mathematics, and that love comes afterwards.
	That you need to start with reason.
	You need to start with rationality, with thinking, with thought, before you can get to love.
	This is why a human woman with all of her imperfections and blemishes is more beautiful than the perfect plastic sex doll.
	This is why the small business that's sustainable, that makes a moderate income and does good work, is beautiful, while the scam artistry is ugly.
	This is why a rational, challenging, and even frightening argument is beautiful, while post hoc rationalizations are ugly.
	Logos, then agape.
	Reason, then love.
	Now what happens when you turn this on its head?
	What happens if you start with love, then follow up with the reason?
	So you meet a woman, and you love her.
	Why do you love her?
	What is it about her character that you love?
	What is the substance to it?
	If you start with love, then you come up with a rationalization for why you love this woman.
	You're going to end up with a dysfunctional relationship.
	The thing is that if you love somebody, be it a friend, be it a song, be it a loved one, you start with rationality.
	The reason you should love a person in the first place is because of who they are, because of what their nature is, because of understanding what they represent, and love is the natural outgrowth of that.
	Now if you start with love, you wind up in the non-judgmental society.
	You wind up in a society of relativism, a society where all things are equal.
	There is no fundamental basis of love, and you have no right to judge anybody else based upon whom and how they love.
	No standards.
	Standards are post hoc.
	You start out with the love, then you come up with the standards, then you figure out the rules.
	That you start with animal passion and then try and use reason to regulate that animal passion with no possible judgment ever being applied to this passion in the first place.
	Obviously, this is the philosophy of our time.
	Putting agape before logos.
	But what does this mean, the political sphere?
	Like, how do we start?
	Obviously we're talking about the non-judgmentalism, the relativism of the modern day.
	But how do we go from just saying that that's relativism, that's bad, that's icky, to actually showing that relativism is actually ugly and terrible and harmful to people?
	Let's look at the matter of forgiveness, of mercy.
	Justice and mercy.
	One of the most disgusting things I see in the modern day is quote-unquote Christians forgiving people that murdered their children when the people are unrepentant.
	This celebration of forgiveness, the saying that you shouldn't stay angry at people, that being angry at somebody just poisons your own soul.
	You need to learn to forgive everybody, that everybody gets the agape, whether or not they have the logos to deserve it.
	This is one of the most evil and destructive and wrong and unmanly things I see out there, this forgiveness of criminals who have never shown contrition.
	So let's say you forgive a criminal.
	Let's say you're a judge.
	Your responsibility is to administer justice tempered with mercy.
	That if you have a criminal who's showing contrition, a criminal who recognizes that his action was wrong, that this man does not need as much of a punishment as the one who is unrepentant, who shows no contrition, who never apologizes, who never admits any wrong to the act that he performed.
	So what happens if you give forgiveness to everybody?
	All of a sudden you have no law.
	You see this with the modern socialism, where we forgive everybody their life choices.
	What, you screwed up and you had a kid way too early when you weren't married?
	Oh, oh, what?
	You screwed up and you didn't get a useful education.
	You never figured out how to work hard.
	You screwed up and you got involved in the drug trade when you were a kid.
	You know what?
	You know what?
	Everybody is equal and everybody deserves that equal love of Jesus, even though that's not what the Bible says.
	So we're going to give everybody this equal love.
	We're going to give everybody welfare.
	We are going to encourage degeneracy.
	Think about children for a moment.
	Now, Dr. Spock, if you're listening, you can get out of here, because I don't want your ugly agape before logos in this freaking video.
	But for any sane person, raising a kid, you need to set boundaries.
	You need to have consistent rules.
	You need to start with the logos.
	And if you, then you get the agape.
	You set the standards.
	You set the rules for your children.
	Reasonable rules with a little bit of play in them.
	Not a lawyer.
	You're not a Nazi.
	But reasonable, consistent, steady rules.
	The kid screws up.
	Kid gets punished.
	That's how you love your children.
	That's how you create somebody that's a reasonable, responsible adult.
	But the modern tactic of child rearing, again, starts with the agape.
	Starts with the love.
	It starts with the giving your children whatever they want.
	Just be nice to them all the time.
	Don't spank them.
	Don't ever punish them.
	Just be nice to them all the time.
	And what you wind up creating is a generation of little self-centered, irresponsible monsters, as likely to end up in jail or get stabbed in a bad drug deal because they've never learned standards of behavior.
	They've never learned reason and logos and decency.
	And we see the exact same thing.
	That the ironic thing is that the groups most dedicated to voting for the Democrat Party are the ones most harmed by their socialist policies, by the infinite unjudgmental love coming out of the Democrat Party.
	Whereas the Republicans, to some degree, at least have a few standards left.
	Though there aren't very many.
	There's an interesting visual hallucination you can cause.
	Where if you, and maybe some of you guys have noticed this, if you've ever been playing a video game and the camera goes inside the skull of your character, you see a very, very uncanny valley, very funny and screwy looking face staring at you.
	Well, that's because it's not a perfectly painted mask.
	But if you take an inverse of a three-dimensional object and put it on a two-dimensional YouTube screen, or if it's just far enough away that your binocular vision doesn't kick in, the inverse of something will look exactly like the real thing.
	If you want to screw with people, take a painting and put parabolas behind the eyes, and it'll actually cause the eyes to follow them all around the room until they get close enough to actually see that they're inverted.
	And see, this is what, for lack of a better term, this is what demonic morality looks like.
	You see, like, true morality, true standards and honesty and the pursuit of truth starts with logos negape.
	But if you take it and contrast it to demonic morality, you know, like certainly this blind acceptance of all people and all lifestyles, of not having any standards but being a cultural relativist, at a distance, it looks nice.
	It looks like morality.
	Demonic morality, this inverted morality, doesn't look like black masses, doesn't look like witches dancing around.
	It looks like you're happy, friendly, loving, liberal, not judging anybody, and donating to charity.
	The thing is that you start to twist this.
	If you have an inverted mask, if you take a mask of a face and you paint the face on the inside of the mask, and if I were showing it to you right now, it would look like a face.
	You wouldn't be able to see, I could even twist it side to side.
	It'd still look like a face to you.
	But the instant you start to get to that 180, things snap.
	All of a sudden you can see the ugliness to the whole thing.
	And so this modern world built upon loving first and reasoning second, you can increasingly see the ugliness appearing in all of this.
	The funny thing is that, because if you take, again, let's go back to justice and mercy.
	Mercy is clearly the side of love.
	Justice the side of reason.
	And so these modern liberals, postmodernists, leftists, their typical response to all this, that you should have standards that sometimes need to spank your children, is that you don't have enough love, you don't have enough mercy.
	That you're all dictatorial judge.
	You are all these harsh and unforgiving standards without an ounce of mercy to them.
	Except that's the thing, is when you're doing logos negape, mercy is built into the equation.
	Mercy is naturally there.
	It doesn't happen until after justice.
	First you figure out the justice, then you figure out if mercy is deserved, but it's there.
	And it's acknowledged that reason without love is ugliness.
	You need both.
	but reason needs to come first the ironic thing is they they accuse the the traditionalists the truth seekers the sane people they they say that we have insane standards of behavior and yet just go look at the very first rebellion against the catholic church
	Look at Luther, a man that said it was okay to kill a thousand people as long as you had faith that you'd go to heaven.
	Faith was all that mattered.
	Love was all that mattered, not the behaviors that resulted.
	Whenever you see these extreme, Kafka-esque, insanely bureaucratic organizations, it's always the leftward organization.
	It's always the organization dedicated to a gape first and logos second that is the most insane and abusive and violent.
	Look at the Puritans.
	Look at all of the people they murdered.
	Look at Cromwell, a man that used to murder peasants and rape women for fun in his childhood.
	And quite frankly, look at the current leadership of the Democratic Party.
	A party that is dedicated to acceptance of all and love of all, and yet isn't afraid to use steel-toed boots to force their policies through.
	They start with love and then use whatever reasonable behavior will achieve this end.
	That is never thought about.
	This end is never considered.
	The end is love.
	The end is innate, and any sort of means are justified.
	Sane people reason first, and their love and their beliefs flow out of that reason.
	To put love, to put belief, to put instinct up on a pedestal, and then let reason flow, then let the means flow, that's how you get tyranny.
	That's how you get a demonic world.
	And that's how you get the world we live in.

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