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Originally Posted by Flames Draft Watcher
WTF is this psychobabble even about peter? The western underclass is characterized by marijuana abuse, out of wedlock children and heavy pornography use? WTF are you actually trying to say here. Do you come from a heavy Christian background? Sounds like some serious bias in that direction.
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British psychologist and former prison doctor Theodore Dalrymple has been eloquently warning of the perils of the moral void and self-destructive behaviour of the underclass for some time. Maybe that's what peter is getting at.
The Worldview that Makes the Underclass
Personally, I'm a liberal atheist. However, I'm becoming deeply troubled by what the void left in the wake of the collapse of religion. Unbridled hedonism and social breakdown on one side, and the allure of dogmatic and extremist politics on the other. I know the worst thing someone in our society can do is judge others, but it's difficult to remain blithely indifferent to the almost complete collapse of marriage and family among the poor, and the ugliness of a secular culture with little impulse besides gratifying personal pleasure.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Flames Draft Watcher
This thread is a train wreck. Not sure most of the people in it know what most of the other people in it are even trying to express. Me included.
People should be trying to explain themselves as simplistically and clearly as possible. Using as much jargon as you can does nothing but obscure the communication.
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I'm all for plain language. But our modern, secular outlook has tremendous difficulty addressing the root causes of radical Islam because we look for rational and materialistic explanations for everything. In an age when we assumed the march of reason and progress would be inevitable, what do we make of dramatic upsurges in deeply irrational impulses? We reach for the standard bogeymen - poverty, political oppression, bigotry. To me, those explanations are woefully inadequate. We're dealing with people who, collectively or as individuals, utterly reject our liberal and materialistic worldview. Who crave a moral and emotional lodestone that our modern world simply does not provide, and whose response to its absence is fury, mass murder, and martyrdom.
Maybe that can be explained in plain language. I don't know. But it won't it easy.