Its like Hillary walking into a working class kitchen for the first time.
They've been shielded from even critical support of China and other AES for so long they literally, not figuratively, literally cannot process that people exist that have beliefs that aren't Reddit Approved. They immediately assume it's bots or wumao. Human beings can't possibly hold these beliefs, so they must be Oriental hordes or actual robots.
Look, they are what I, when I was a Catholic, would describe as a 'bad Catholic'. Many liberal Catholics operate the same way, with a perverse attachment to the Church as it could be instead of seeing the Church as it has been and continues to be, that isn't to say that good things don't come out of the Church (hospitals, nursing homes, monasteries, etc), just that they are better the further they are away from the central worship and money-making operation. When I was a rigorous Catholic (10-15) I was a very conservative Catholic because I read the doctrine, listened to the scripture, and understood the scripture and how it ought to be interpreted.
If was during my confirmation when I was continuing my theological study, when I stumbled upon Aquinas, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche and other metaphysical philosophers and it struck me that not only was my understanding of Catholicism incredibly shallow, but it confirmed my increasing suspicion that everyone else's understanding of Catholicism was also, if not more, shallow. Upon reading, especially people like Hume and Kant, it became clear that not only did I not actually have very rigorous grounds for what I believed, but that in order to be a 'good Catholic' you had to be a 'bad person' and that 'bad Catholics' were constantly having to deal with this juxtaposition, fighting against the structure of a Church that wants their money, but doesn't actually want them or their ideas.
It wasn't that they were 'bad Catholics' it's that they were 'good people' attempting to be 'Catholics'. That's when I rejected the entire thing and tried to start from scratch to the best of my abilities. It's been a long road and I still don't know where I will end up ideologically, but I do know that I will not make the mistake of seeing 'what could be' for 'what is'.
I've met one person even sort of like you before, and I want to say that I appreciate your existence. There is such an amazing line of theological stuff that's out there and most people (including me) don't engage with. Please keep up your great work 👍.
Thanks. I definitely try to inspect everything, for what little good it brings to me. There is just so much shit and only a short life-time to learn it.
Tell me about it :(. I hope you're proud of yourself, it's really hard to even try and hold yourself to that kind of standard.
The occasional breeze through a liberal arts class that my friends are like 'What the fuck does any of this even mean?' satisfies my ego enough to sustain me, lol. Thanks though, I appreciate it! Best of luck to you as well and solidarity!
This kinda falls in line with my Irish Irish friend (to distinguish from Irish immigrants from the 19th and 20th centuries). She's agnostic now, but has family who are a lot more devout. The Rerum Novarum is sometimes used by anticommunists saying socialism is incompatible with Catholicism. And that line of argument works for some people. The pope is infallible and Leo XIII said socialism bad. Stepping away from the church was one of the factors that led to her being radicalised.
The Pope is infallible, even when he contradicts himself, or someone comes in later and contradicts him. I think if I was still Catholic I would likely be one of those cringe Catholics that only attends Latin mass. Although, to be fair, my personal idea for a reformed Church is to lean away from social conservativism and instead way into the occult, obscure and mystical elements of Catholicism, particularly the crazy ass medieval festivals, with a rigorous return to Latin. Rationalism is not and never has been a good fit for the Church, blame that I lay squarely at the feet of the Jehovah's Witnesses.
Do they even do Latin masses outside of the Vatican anymore? I mean I'm sure they do some places but how common is it?
Usually there are a couple of churches in a diocese that do it once a week with the express permission of the diocese. There have been instances of diocese forbidding priests from doing it, or from performing the Eucharist during it (with the general ideological split being if the diocese sees these masses as an outlet for wacky conservative Catholic frustration, or as a gathering place for wacky conservative Catholics to create a different, heretical sect), but in general most of the large population centers in the U.S. will have at least one church that does one mass in Latin a week, usually on a weekday. Monasteries also generally follow their own dictata and are often done solely in Latin, with them only holding common mass in vernacular.
Orthodox Churches are even weirder about this, with them only holding mass in the vernacular that the Church came from (so a Serbian Orthodox mass in Los Angeles will be done in Serbian).
There's a little bit of metaphysics in Nietzsche, but what makes you call him a "metaphysical philosopher"? I struggle to think of any metaphysical statement from him that wasn't just a rephrasing of Schopenhauer, which is fair enough since that wasn't really what he was into as far as I know.
In any case, immense respect for successfully parsing Kant. I can only get the extremely easy texts like Foundation of the Metaphysics of Morals
I call him a meta-physical philosopher because much of what he talks about is derivations of ethics and the nature of religion and God in relationship to those ethical categories. It's arguably more tangential to metaphysics than metaphysics itself, but claims like 'God is dead' and the historical-socio-ethical reasoning behind that are incredibly metaphysical statements. However, you are correct that most of his actual metaphysical work is derived from an re-phrasing Schopenhauer, but I didn't read any Schopenhauer until college, so I didn't know that and at the time it blew my little freaking mind.
I will be honest, my preference is for Hume, as Kant is an enormous windbag, though tiny compared to Hegel. That said, you really should give 'Critique of Pure Reason' another go-around, it's one of those seminal texts that will be constantly referenced in everything forever, and really makes up the majority of his and everyone's groundwork for literally everything afterwards particularly liberalism. Regardless if or not you think he actually solved Hume's is-ought pincer and problem of causality, it is basically impossible to understand why Kant leans so hard into deontology without reading it. But if you really want to piss people off, just read and retort with Hume, he is basically the philosophical linebacker for Western philosophy.
Thanks for explaining and I'll take the bit about Critique into account.
Hume is easily one of my favorites too. Even when I think he's being incredibly stupid (e.g. missing shade of blue) you really can see that he's being genuine even about his faults, which is unusual among philosophers.
Of course, I enjoy (most of) Schopenhauer as well, but mainly the short essays he wrote as an afterthought to World as Will, like On the Vanity of Existence. I find the morbidness of it entertaining and there was a time that I was genuinely in one of the worst depressive episodes of my life and I read some of his works for the first time and howled with laughter. I can't not bear some affection for his writing after that. It's like a Kafka Comedy but where the protagonist is a metaphysicist who is just torturing himself with his own ideation, if that makes sense.
I totally understand that. I've always found the idea that Schopenhauer just forgot to eat and got cranky when he was writing sometimes to be very funny (which is an Existential comics bit). You might enjoy Kierkegaard then too, even if he does get a little preachy, he very much loves and hates his morose Christianity.
You are a wise traveller in a strange foreign land, good luck on with journey!