Joachim's Children (Cont'd)
Sir:
Speaking as both a political scientist and something of a Soviet expert, a sevenfold amen to your March 9 article on "Journalism and Joachim's Children." I believe that the most important truth I have learned as a political scientist, in the study of political theory, is that the very foundation of Western democracy is Christianity.
Speaking as a Soviet ''expert" and having come into contact with a few British Marxists in the pursuit of my work, I had long since concluded that the whole key to their thinking is in no sense reason but rather a religious faith. They not only believe that man is perfectible, but in a very real sense they have placed themselves above the altar at which they worship . . .
ROY D. LAIRD
Glasgow, Scotland
Sir:
. . . The most realistic and mature analysis of the world situation to appear in a leading magazine. It is especially encouraging to any student of Christian theology in the scholastic tradition to see its realism brought out of the catacombs and applied. Education, public or private, grades or college, is epitomized by Utopianism (your excellent example, UNism). Even our educators are beginning to admit our educational system is goalless, its fruits: nationalism and relativism, and this dream belief in "the perfectibility of man," quickly shattered by the evidence of our senses. The principles of Dostoevski's Grand Inquisitor are gratefully accepted--just give us bread, and never mind freedom and responsibility . . .
JOHN M. SCOTT
Nashotah, Wis.
Sir:
[It is] the most asinine, unfactual, unrealistic, unscientific, unintellectual, dishonest, slanted, biased, prejudiced, and wonderfully written thing ever to appear in TIME . . .
LEWIS WILLIAMS
Philadelphia
Sir:
. . . Your manifesto gives hope of sane, solid journalism in years to come. It also gives evidence of the deep democratic and theocentric philosophy which is its root. Here is a magazine which realistically denies the puerile illusion that all is relative--morality, beauty and truth.
ERIC J. CARLSON
Lebret, Sask., Canada
Sir:
After reading TIME'S keynote address for the Rearward Pilgrimage to the Shapeless Void (or) Daddy Warbucks' School of Anniversary Reflections, I suggest that its Twi-speaking editors celebrate its 31st birthday with less sophistry and more eggs.
HUGH MAGUIRE
Collingdale, Pa.
Sir:
Bravo ... I want to bolster the great tide of feeling which is finally boiling up in this country against the . . . complacency that the "visionary theorists" have sneaked upon us. You have made a noble contribution to nipping it in the bud . . .
PETER GLENNER
Newark
Sir:
. . . Your set of convictions rings with soundness and clarity, unlike much of the hollow thumping which comes out of the heads of many empty-headed journalists.
. . . The people are affronted incessantly by the negative, thus creating a kind of passiveness and fear to do anything about an "inevitable" chaos . . .
GEORGE L. FISCHER
St. Paul
Sir:
. . . Your bizarre little fable . . . which purports to be a summary outline of modern intellectual history, is certainly entertaining . . . but some of your allegations are, as Huck Finn would say, real stretchers . . . You have streamlined Western history into a simple dichotomy--Platonic Christianity the mainstream, "Gnosticism" a transient aberration . . . The U.S. is not what Plato had in mind at all ...
EDWARD P. ABBEY
Albuquerque
Sir:
Nothing else you have presented to us in the 30 years of your timely existence transcends in importance, and in an understandable analysis of a difficult subject . . . When our heads are knocked off, that may be an end of our dreaming. But for the moment, we out-Carroll Carroll in our "magic operations in the dreamworld."
HAROLD E. WOLFE
Belleville, Ill.
SIR:
WHEN QUEASIER PSEUDOPHILOSOPHICAL SLUMGULLIONS ARE BREWED, YOUR WRITER WILL BREW THEM.
GORDON WILKINSON
LAS CRUCES, N. MEX.
Sir:
... The muddled thinking of the pseudo-intellectuals . . . should no longer be revered or allowed to go unchallenged . . . Such an article, with its overtones and implications, could patriotically be emulated by other great magazines which both mold and reflect public opinion.
STEPHEN E. HART
Randolph, Mass.
Sir:
... I find your recent gobbledygook about Gnosticism revolting. You and the Pope can play God if you want to, but whether or not man can ultimately attain perfection is far beyond the depth of either of you, let alone anything to do with newsreporting . . .
NEWTON F. TOLMAN
Chesham, N.H.
Sir:
... The lost generation of our day is the intelligent class of people, known to many as the eggheads. They have lost the leadership and the respect of the common people. It seems to mean so little to them that this very class is the first to be "liquidated" when and where the Communists take over . . .
FRED I. DREXLER SR.
Mill Valley, Calif.
Sir:
. . The philosophy of liberalism is not yet dead, much as you might wish it. The scientific disciplines including the social sciences are reinforcing historical liberalism . . . rather than Neo-orthodoxy ... I wish TIME and Niebuhr would catch up to the 20th century in their philosophy.
DAVID H. COLE
First Universalist Church Chicago
... So "equality before the law is based on each man's dignity in God's sight?" . . .
Equality in law and political liberty exist because stubborn and contentious people . . have . . . forced their acceptance ... I obect to giving religion credit for democracy merely because religion momentarily approves it, as I would object to giving Communism credit for unions or the A.M.A. credit for private health insurance.
JOHN B. THOMAS, M.D.
Norfolk, Va.
... In its first triumphant march among he dispossessed masses of the Roman Empire, Christianity's appeal was not that of a heavenly salvation after death, but of the coming of a heavenly ordained society of brotherly sharing right here upon our common earth--and of the resurrection of the faithful dead to share in it. That hope met the same ardent response then as the not wholly dissimilar Communist hope meets among the dispossessed today. But the basic Christian methods of overcoming evil with active goodness was and is in diametrical opposition to the Communist methods . . The one method helps create the world it reams of; the other destroys it ... We might all profit by a study of ... those highly mystical yet practical folk, the Quakers. (Yes, I'm a Quaker!)
Louis L. WILSON
Tucson, Ariz.
Sir:
". . . The world's way out of Gnostic confusion depends largely on the U.S." If that is true, the world is sunk. Because there is, and/or are, more Gnostic influences running riot through every stage of American life than ever existed in any other country or civilization .
SAMUEL COLLIN MACDONALD
North Fourchu, N.S., Canada
Sir:
The comments on Gnosticism and ancient-world Catholicism by TIME and Dr. Voegelin are unnecessarily pedantic. Gnosticism and Catholicism were to ancient Christianity what Trotskyism and Stalinism are to today's Marxism. And just as orthodox Catholicism defeated Gnosticism in the ancient ideological battle, so did Stalinism defeat Trotskyism in the modern one; while the result in both instances was that the victorious doctrine became orthodox, its leaders and followers in political control of their areas, while the ousted ideology became heretic (or "deviationist," to use the mildest Kremlin term), its leaders and followers subject to official persecution, banishment, execution . .
J. R. HEILBRON
Los Angeles
Sir:
. . . My attention was arrested by the startling similarity of your first "conviction" to some words of Cicero found in his De Re Publica, III, 33. TIME says, "That God's order . . . includes a moral code . . . not subject to man's repeal, suspension or amendment." Cicero said, "There is indeed a true law . . . unchanging, everlasting ... It is not allowable to repeal, amend or suspend it . . ."
W. T. RADIUS
Grand Rapids, Mich.
Sir:
... It is a scornful repudiation of the principle instituted by Jefferson in the foundation of our country and of every characteristic which makes American history the distinctive successful "experiment" before the critical eyes of the world which Lincoln stated it was, namely: belief in the basic goodness and self-improvable nature of men . . .
ELMO R. RICHARDSON
Los Angeles
Sir:
... An erudite expose of the muddled thinking which has dominated Western European and American political, moral and diplomatic activities for the last half century. The obvious failure of the Welfare State, nationalization and all the trappings of economical and domestic featherbedding in Britain speaks for itself. The hasty scuttle of benevolent imperialism (a much misunderstood word in the U.S.) from backward and dependent peoples was a second victory handed on a plate to the Kremlin--the first victory was, of course, the Roosevelt idea that the Russian leopard had changed its spots in three short years of war . . .
P. B. JOHNSON
Cheshire, England
Sir:
. . . With journalism covering the story of man with such an insight ... it may be that statesmen will also catch up with reality.
CARROLL HINDERLIE
Watertown, S. Dak.
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