One thing about the whole Regensburg event is the total malpheasance of the media in not only reporting the story but framing it in sensationalist headlines. In other cases just plain dumb reporting. Case in point.
Pope’s lecture also shakes Catholic theologians
Thomas Proepper, who teaches Catholic dogmatic theology at the University of Muenster in Germany, is one of many who argues that Kant, not Plato, is closer to Christian views, and would offer a better basis for a dialogue between philosophy and theology.
Well as Dr. Thursday recently said on the Chesterton Society blog "I can’t take the cant of Kant".
The other theologians they dug up was Johann Baptist Metz a proponent of liberation theology, Magnus Striet another Kant fan, and Tiemo Rainer Peters.
…Johannine-Hellenist theology was developed by St Augustine in the late classical period, then by St Bonaventure, who died in 1274, in the Middle Ages. Benedict would say theology has been going downhill ever since as the synthesis of Greek and Jewish thought unravelled.
Unraveled? Well at least these criticisms actually go along with what the Pope actually said.
The dumbest headline goes to this story "‘Rottweiler’ bares teeth"
Honorable mention for dumb headlines goes to Church stands by pope as also noticed by Carl Olson.
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I beg to make a slight correction. GKC did not say that. I did. (Maybe I forgot blockquotes, sorry.) But for your amusement, here is GKC on the same topic:
There is, for instance, one influence that grows stronger every day, never mentioned in the newspapers, not even intelligible to people in the newspaper frame of mind. It is the return of the Thomist Philosophy; which is the philosophy of commonsense, as compared with the paradoxes of Kant and Hegel and the Pragmatists. The Roman religion will be, in the exact sense, the only Rationalistic religion. The other religions will not be Rationalist but Relativist; declaring that the reason is itself relative and unreliable; declaring that Being is only Becoming or that all time is only a time of transition; saying in mathematics that two and two make five in the fixed stars, saying in metaphysics and in morals that there is a good beyond good and evil. Instead of the materialist who said that the soul did not exist, we shall have the new mystic who says that the body does not exist. Amid all these things the return of the Scholastic will simply be the return of the sane man.
[GKC The Well and the Shallows CW3:475]
The “Categorical Imperative” as a Christian philosophy?
Really…
The difference between Plato and Aristotle on the one hand and Kant on the other is that P and A sincerely looked for the truth and strived to find truth, as they did not know THE TRUTH. Kant knew the Truth (at least in part… he grew up in a Protestant environment, after all), but rejected it. P and A are pointing to the same goal, thus they can be harmonized with Christianity; K is pointing away from it, thus he can’t (or only in parts or only read backwards or something).
I kind of like the Rottweiler line! Everyone was so afraid when Benedict was elected–what did you expect?!
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