Beware the Cardus Blowhards
Following hard on the heels of the Prime Minister’s ridiculous endorsement of the crank claim that a long-dead Mohawk woman holds the key to curing flesh-eating disease (but only sometimes), the Globe & Mail has printed a column by Robert Joustra of the Cardus institute, a Christian right think tank, called “Beware the Secular Atheocracy.”
The article is an excellent piece of pretzel logic, and I see no reason to critique it, because I see absolutely no reason whatsoever to bother with an intellectual refutation of a representative of an organization whose statement of purpose contains the following claim:
Drawing on more than 2000 years of Christian social thought, we work to enrich and challenge public debate.
Well, we’re off to a mathematically challenged start there, aren’t we?
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trevorus
we most certainly are.
cardus institute. P.O.S.
Sixth Estate
I would be interested in knowing precisely how MUCH longer than 2000 years they believe Christian social thought has been around.
Sir Francis
I would be interested in knowing precisely how MUCH longer than 2000 years they believe Christian social thought has been around.
Keep in mind that the Patristics and Scholastics retroactively enlisted figures from Greek and Latin antiquity into the Christian tradition: “sure, they were pagan, but they were really smart (and we’re ripping off their intellectual property big time), so they’re pretty much as Christian as you can get”. Thus, Plato and Aristotle were what Stockwell Day would call “unreported Christians”.
Sixth Estate
If a so-called think tank wants to advance such a silly claim, I would be happy to print a correction… and mock them for that, too.
Dave Reesor
Just ran across this. You won’t critique Joustra’s column because of a quibble over whether or not Christian thought includes what Paul and Augustine inherited from the Greeks?
CS Lewis called your line of “reasoning” Bulverism. So who is intellectually challenged here?
Sixth Estate
Well, first of all, I don’t think I’d term it a “critique” so much as gentle poking fun at what I think is a bit of an intellectual faux pas. But since you ask, no, pre-Christian philosophy doesn’t get retroactively classified as “Christian” in my mind. I kind of doubt you or anyone else is going to convince me to change my mind on that.