Anyway,I agree with most of what you and that Fleming character have to say about markets and the like.But thenyou seem to go off the deep-end,as you so often do.You talk about the Roman rabble putting their faith in Caesar.What about guys like you putting their faith in Pompey?How is that any different?

I've got a bottle of Falernian here beside me.If you give me a satisfactory answer maybe I'll share some with you.

It was the former and not the latter. I do not need the secular/philosophers/psychiatrists either. My fleeting reference to Hobbes and Freud was critical of them. Jesus Christ is indeed the Light of the World. I do not know what you mean with "It's sort of self-serving."

The debate, in other words, is the same debate Americans have been having for nearly 150 years, an acrimonious dialogue between two sets of radicals: on the one hand, the philosophes and classical liberals who undermined society in the 18th and 19th centuries; on the other, the Marxists who used government to fill the void left by the liberal demolition of the traditional social institutions of family, class, and religion. Anyone who stands outside of the charmed circle of the Revolution is excluded from the conversation

Would you not throw Jefferson onto the pile,along with those philosophes and classical liberals?He would seem to belong there.If so,that raises quite a few problems for the traditional American conservative position.

The most "primative" pagan priest, let's say one five hundred years ago somewhere on some island which we now call the East Indies, perceived that "something" - a deity or deities - was pushing at him and his tribe through nature as he could sense it with his five senses. His response to that perceived "pushing" or "revelation" through and in nature was and is religion - man's response, flawed though it may be, to a deity or deities, flawed though the understanding of them may also be. (Romans 1 gives us the insight.) He understood that therapy (in the platonic sense), that worship or communion was somehow necessary to the welbeing of his people, even if it was so off the mark as to offer a virgin into the volcano. He had a sense of a cosmic order and his place in it based on his real experience with real things.

Even better, much better, than our pagan priest, the Stoics, the Aristotilians and Platonists, as Dr. Fleming has pointed out, understood this. They were much closer. If I remember my Dante correctly, and I could be in error, St. Beatrice acknowledges the light which the Greeks and Romans had as she speaks to Virgil at the start of Paradiso. There, through Virgil she pays a complement and expresses an indebtedness to the capital and cardinal virtues of the Ancients by saying that they carried their light behind them. She then complements those virtues by those made possible in Christ, the theological virtues of faith, hope and charity. (It has been nearly thirty years since I read the Divine Comedy; so if my analogy is in error, I stand for correction.)

Thus, in the end, the Second Person of the Trinity, the Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, is in His passion, death, resurrection and ascension, and God incarnate, living and real among His creation, the ultimate truth for us. In Him eternal law and divine law are lived out so that if we walk in Christ and take up our crosses daily and follow Him we are truly civilized indeed.

However, the anti-culture of modernity/post modernity does not believe in a cosmic order with a cosmological absolute. The anti-culture rejects God. Its vain rituals are not religion but mere religiosity. Modernities rituals are not even a flawed attempt, as it was with our pagan priest, to respond to a flawed understanding of the deity pushing at him through the natural order. Modernity's rituals are mere spiritual and intellectual mastrubation as the willful id intercourses with the ego, thinking that it can create a new reality ex nihilo. Freud's "id" which he "created" to be a last refuge of the "self" agaisnt the taboos of society will out of its hiding place to create the world in its image. Its freedom is its ability to come out and demand that it be taken seriously - hince all of "the coming out." The problem is, in the anti-culture, there is a potential of about six billion of these "ids" wanting their way, each a little god, demanding its freedom and its "rights." In the non-comsic order of the anti-culture the only power, itself an abstraction, created by one or more of these "selves," is the Hobbesian state. It mitgates the potential friction among the competing "selves" through the notion of "civil rights" and at the same time serves as the agent of these selves in destroying the last vestiges of culture - symbols, institutions and process.

Our pagan priest with all of his flawed notions and exercises is much closer to God than most men who walk and pretend to think in the dying West.

The anti-culture unleashes the compulsions, desires and drives of the individual by seeking to deconstruct or destroy the symbols, institutions and processes which would restrain him and placates the self-centered whims. The "freedom" of the anti-culture is, therefore, antithetical to the freedom whiche one gainst through the influence of culture.

I agree with Meng but would add that a middle-class subject of the empire may well have been more free than a taxpaying, voting American citizen. It was not, by the way, only christians who taught the significance of mental and moral liberty. Stoics, Aristotelians, and Platonists made these distinctions, which Christians took over.

For instance, in the poem and song, "Die Gedanken sind frei" one could not substitute the word "kostenlos" for "frei." In the poem/song, one's "Gedanken" or "thoughts" are free (frei) even if the body is chained and being tortured. Allied prisoners were known to sing this song in German while in the Stalags. The term "kostenlos" could never be used in this sense and in this context. At the level of the noun, there is no synonymous meaning: "Freiheit" could never under any circumstance mean "Kostenlosigkeit." The later does not even exist in standard German but is easily "coined" for purposes of comparison.