/OT – can someone PLEASE tell me the magic keyboard incantation necessary to get italics and/or bold to work for this comments page? /end OT

Rick,

“I very strongly take issue with your statement that Europeans have “lost faith” unless it is narrowly defined in a religious context. They have, in the majority, lost religious faith and a belief in Christian principles.”

Well, strongly taking issue with what I said is, to my mind, a good thing

No, I had a larger scope of “faith” in mind than Religious. Since I do not consider myself religious in any way I am able to detect (at least not by any traditional definition of “religion” – I understand that various “isms” can become quali-religious), I was attempting to avoid, or at least transcend, the religious sense of the term “faith”.

“We must remember that much of what passes for European thought derives from the elevation of “Reason” to the staus of godhead at the time of the French revolution.”

Well, that’s what the knuckleheads get for following the French strain. What a bunch of dopes. Any impartial ovserbver can see that the Scottish strain had much greater promise and delivered more upon its promise.

“Currently, the center of European faith is found in the “New Rome” in Brussels. The fact that Europeans embrace the logical fallacy inherent in an appeal to authority is unsurprising. They are little different than Americans in that regard.”

Hmmm… it seems possible to me that we are talking about a difference without a distinction here, Rick. Bear with me a moment if you’d be so kind.

It seems to me (an outsider looking in) that there are two non-exclusive “flavors” of “Religion”. There’s the faith part – believing, without question, in the revealed truth of one’s religion. Then there is the “ritual” or “conservative” part. To try and illustrate my point here consider the Roman Catholic religion. A formalized heirarchical structure, dogma developed over many centuries and infrequently revised, ritualized sevices, etc. It is possible, I assert, that there are some who accept the “ritual” portion of whatever religion but do not have access to the “faith” aspect of it (clearly some religions strongly emphasize faith over ritual).

It seems to me what the Euros are trying to create, or recreate, is some modern version of the Holy Roman Empire (very loosely defined!). Its not the faith they are after with this but the structure of it that ritualizes and codifies. They have (at least in their own eyes) solved the daily material challenges of life and are now looking for some way to create a bureaucratic structure which removes from them the “political” challenges of life. They would very much like to be well kept peasants and skilled guild workers who served some “benevolent bishop” building cathedrals so long as everybody pretended it wasn’t a “church” and that nobody worked for the “bishop”.

I’ve probably confused the issue rather than helping anything. When all is said and done I think what the Euros want, deep down in their heart of hearts, is a Europe run by a very nice and caring person who was otherwise just like Hitler.