Here's an interesting passage from a Dana Milbank WaPo piece on Newt Gingrich from last week. Here's what the Newt's eye is on-
"I believe the most important question in the United States for the next decade is: 'Who are we?' Are we in fact a people who claim that we are endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights?" Or, are we "just randomly gathered protoplasm -- and lucky for us we're not rhinoceroses -- but that in the end our power is defined by politicians and their appointees? Once you decide on this, almost everything else gets easier."
That choice of animal, rhinoceros, is interesting, especially when Newt was on the wrong end of a intra-Republican dustup in the NY-23 bi-election, where he backed the center-left "RINO" (conservative pejorative for Republican in Name Only- pronounced "Rhino") Republican nominee rather than the Conservative Party upstart. The RINO dropped out as she fell into third place and endorsed her Democratic challenger, who has won a squeaker pending a count of absentee votes.
However, lets talk about Rhinos rather than RINOs.
I'm still coming around to a coherent reply to the Patrol piece dancing on the Evangelical grave that Michael Spencer has commended. Strangely, I find this Gingrich paragraph a good starting point to get an edge to approach things.
The Patrol editorial castigated modern Evangelicals as being "[c]onfined to the paramaters (sic) of liberal rationalism" and "blinded by its symbiotic relationship with the Enlightenment." I'll hit the theology of the piece a bit later, God willing, but we are talking some form of "rationalism" if we talk truth.
The Wikipedia for Rationalism states that "the criterion of the truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive." If there is a capital T-Truth, it isn't left up to what we feel physically or mentally. Jefferson was no theological conservative, but even he had a vision of a set of moral truths that weren't up for modification.
If that Enlightenment rationality that the Declaration of Independence and Constitution is founded on gets tossed out the window, so do Jefferson's unalienable rights that Gingrich references. If we're ruled by the emotion of the day rather than timeless truth that can be found, all bets are off, both politically and theologically.
The post-modern doesn't buy the concept of Truth and especially don't like it when other people think they have it; if I have the idea right, truth is not fully knowable and we can only talk and observe our way towards something resembling it.
That's a dangerous place to be.
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