2min chapter

The Moral Imagination cover image

Ep. 48 Jonathan Bi: Rene Girard - Social Pressure, True and False Desires, Sacrifice, and Belief

The Moral Imagination

CHAPTER

Christian Theology - Humanitarianism

Gerard Shailor: Humanitarianism is a secular hollowed out version of Christian love. He says charity in the Christian understanding is to seek the good of the other. It's to will the other person's good, and it can challenge you to be your best self," he says. "So what are we going to do? We're going to provide comfort for you"

00:00
Speaker 1
Yeah. So this is very interesting. I mean, there's so many ways we could go here, but I think one of the things that's very interesting is I mentioned Shailor before and that humanitarianism thing. So like Dan Mahoney has a book on humanitarianism as well that kind of deals with this. Actually, what's very interesting now, I gave a lecture on this a couple of years ago, is to look at the values that dominate right now. And I'm Catholic, so I have confirmation bias on this, but I think there's a lot of data to show it as well. So charity becomes humanitarianism. Peace becomes pacifism. And so what you see is a, as it were a falsification and a secularization and a falsification of Christian virtues. So humanitarianism is a secular hollowed out version of Christian love. We've talked about this a lot. So what are we going to do? We're going to provide comfort for you. So what's underlying that? Well, it's a materialist concept of the person. It's a materialist concept of success or happiness that's transactional. So charity in the Christian understanding is to seek the good of the other. It's to will the other person's good. That always requires truth, and it can challenge you to be your best self. Humanitarianism has a limited horizon that focuses on providing comfort. So it's very interesting because there's, I think that going on and this piece to pacifism, right? Peace is very important, but just war is always a very central part of Christian theology, right? Jewish and Christian theology war is not, war is something to be avoided like Saint Thomas Aquinas says, look, you don't want war as if you can avoid it because it's going to unleash all these kinds of evils that people wouldn't normally do. And of course, you talk about this in your lecture, Gerard saw that, right, in World War II, but there is a place for just war, right? The pacifist sees kind of takes it and then exacerbates it. So GK Chesterton talks about how what happened to the modern virtues is that they were actually let loose on the world as opposed to being tempered. So I think that's actually it's a parallel. Right, right. It's a
Speaker 2
corruption. It's a corruption of the Christian message. It's what we were saying.

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