Tuesday, March 03, 2020

This is how one knows one lives in a post-Christian society


They go on social media and post memes like "If you see a problem, you can pray about it, and it will be quick and easy and absolve you of the responsibility of solving it, and it won't solve anything, but if you put in the effort, it won't be quick or easy or absolve you of responsibility, but you will have solved it."

All the while assuming that what you and they might agree are social problems are things every decent human being anywhere across the world and throughout history would would also recognize as social problems that both must and can be fixed (or, at least, deserve the attempt).

This is, of course, not true.  

Look back to the founding of our country.  Most people at the time were not giving slavery as an institution a good prognosis in the long run, but there was some doubt as to whether it might be eradicated entirely and freedmen might really be able to enjoy the benefits of all that rhetoric about liberty.  

Look farther back, and you find concubines common not just in secular royal courts but even in the Vatican where it was doubted that the ideal of sexual continence was even possible.  I know, rumors and scandalous news articles these days support the notion that it's aiming a bit high, but plenty of priests and religious have shown that it is possible and that it need not settle for being honored more in the breach.  

Look elsewhere, and almsgiving is an obscure concept.  In India dying people are stepped over.  In China you are likely to be asked why you're tipping the homeless.  When religious orders go to such countries and do what little they can with the resources they can scrounge up, they're criticized for not meeting FDA standards (which no one outside the US honors, so...ethnocentric much?).

In the West, though?  Helping the destitute and lifting up the downtrodden are so built into our society that it doesn't occur to these "your faith doesn't fix things, I do" folks that helping the hopeless  doesn't occur to just everyone.  It's so ingrained in our secular culture they don't realize it came from religion--and the Christian religion in particular--or that they wouldn't even be motivated to criticize if they hadn't been raised to believe even that much.

Which leads to some interesting dynamics, where the believers start bringing science and logic to the table and it's the unbelievers who start getting wishy-washy about philosophical questions like "what's a person?" and "Who gets human rights?" when they're not even getting basic facts about embryology right--or they choose to categorically forget that there are pro-lifers who not only disbelieve in Christ, but disbelieve in any sort of god at all.

Then they come around and twist the establishment clause and try to school us with more memes like  "You have the right to hold your religious beliefs, but you do not have the right to impose them on others."  

Well, friend, I happen to believe murder and assault and theft and (perhaps with qualifications, but let's not get off track) the male gaze are sins, and my reasons are in no small part religious.  Do you want to take those off the table too?  

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