tagpride

Tim Marchman on Nosism and Presumptuousness

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If you were looking for a place to assign blame for nosism — the use of the first-person plural to refer to oneself — you might start with God (“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness,” etc.) or with papal practice, or with Henry II, who is credited with having introduced the practice of English monarchs referring to themselves in the majestic plural in the 12th century; in the end, none of this is convincing. Without getting into the intricacies of theology and Hebrew grammar, for instance, it’s quite possible that God is a trinitarian, or using an intensifier to boast about His greatness in a way that seems more understandable coming from the creator of space and time than from a middle-tier magazine columnist, while popes and monarchs are not using the plural to refer to themselves alone but to themselves and God and/or the polities for which they speak, which may be arrogant, but displays a different sort of presumptuousness than that of a writer claiming to have divined the thoughts of everyone reading them. Even then, all of this is archaic: God hasn’t said anything in a long time, popes have generally passed over the “we” business since John Paul II, and even British monarchs aren’t all that likely to abuse the royal we.

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Peter Kreeft on Autonomy

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The spirit of Antichrist says, through his deluded slaves who think they are asserting their freedom, “This is my body, not Yours. You did not create me. You have no rights over me. I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul. When I die, I will not repent in shame but I will hold my head erect and sing ‘I did it my way’ as I enter the realm of my chosen lord and model, Satan, who did exactly that same thing many eons ago. This is my body, and therefore I will fornicate, contracept, sodomize, or commit suicide as I choose. I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul. I will do whatever I please with my body because it is mine, not Yours. In fact, the tiny child I carry in my womb is also mine, not Yours. She is not even her own. She is mine. She is my body. Therefore I will kill her, because I am her God, and You are not.” You see, abortion is the Antichrist’s demonic parody of the Eucharist. That is why it uses the same holy words, “This is my body,” with the blasphemously opposite meaning.