07-07-2013, 09:14 PM
David Healy Wrote:Frankly, I think the founding father's would be appalled at the reverence we take in flag worship. In this country faux patriotism has become a national religion.
Indeed, what other nations require their children to recite an oath to a FLAG every morning in school? Perhaps we have not gone far enough ... should we also require them to dip the flag's tip in blood?
As for pride vs. false pride, I personally think this is a theological distinction on the same order as "honest" lending vs. usury or "just" vs. "unjust" war.
But I also wonder how relevant the medieval ordering of these sins is to contemporary "morality", intent as it is on decrying almost exclusively the evils of the least (lust), largely because of its destabilizing threat to the established orders of domination. I don't hear very much these days about gluttony (supersize me), avarice ("free market economy"), anger ("just war"), or envy (you can fill this one in ...) either, although I suppose the Reagan "welfare queen" would qualify in some way as one of the many vestiges of our puritanical (i.e., capitalist) hatred of sloth (though in its medieval sense, sloth wasn't just laziness, but was also a kind of spiritual sluggishness).