FSTDT

proph #fundie collapsetheblog.typepad.com

Christianity and Authority

Want to turn someone off to Christianity immediately? Explain to them that it is a foundationally authoritarian religion.

It is. Really. Christ did not say "Follow your conscience"; he said "Follow me."

The Bible bristles with commandments and instructions, often to excruciating detail and with elaborate (and frequently violent) punishments for infractions. And it is soaked through with authoritarian imagery: crowns (of thorns), yokes (Christ's gentle one vs. the heavy one of sin), thrones, kingdoms and kings, Fathers and mothers.

Modern man hates all order and authority and therefore cannot tolerate this. So when he does not reject Christianity outright (95% of the time) in favor of either atheism or something that appeals to his instinct for solipsistic self-worship (e.g., Buddhism), he will try to rationalize this business away through flimsy neo-Marcionite heresies, declaring Christ to be the completion and perfection of the mean old fuddy-duddy God of the Old Testament. (For why exactly this is a heresy, consult John 10:30).

So Christianity is necessarily and foundationally authoritarian, and the logical consequence of this is that Catholicism, which adheres most closely to this authoritarian ideal, is a very easy religion to comprehend. The rules are laid out: simply follow them. If you don't like it, if you have doubts, just shut up and follow them, anyway. And it's for this reason that the talk of conscience in the present Catechism strikes me as especially dangerous. Nearly everyone nowadays is pregnant with the spirit of Protestantism and so interprets conscience to mean "whatever I intuit the good to be," which of course has led us to the present catastrophic collapse in the moral integrity of the Church. How many contracepting Catholics have I argued with who have cloaked themselves in the armor of "conscience" and thereby rendered themselves invincible to every appeal to reason, tradition, Scripture, and Catechism? I've lost count. Conscience has become the dagger with which Catholic quislings backstab the bride of Christ. In practice it is not much more than the will to disbelieve.

When I try to explain this -- even to Catholics -- I'm invariably accused of conformity and blind submission. All of which is not only absolutely true but absolutely mandatory of all Christians, which has precisely been my point all along!

Submit to God's will completely and without reservation and be saved, or insist on your autonomy and rot in Hell. It shouldn't be a hard choice.

Proph #fundie collapsetheblog.typepad.com

Seriously, who's a greater menace? Take a moment to think about it. Is it the black guy from the inner city with the grill and the baggy pants who can barely read and will probably wind up in prison before he's even old enough to vote? Or is it the mild-mannered, white, middle-aged professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota who, over the course of a career, will contaminate the minds of 50,000 impressionable young students with androgynous, utilitarian, Marxist horseshit? The former may rob or rape or kill you, maybe, in a fit of desperation or bravado or madness. The latter will deliberately endeavor to consign the souls of several generations to eternal Hell, and congratulate himself for doing it -- and, let's not forget, he'll make you foot the bill for it.

Proph #fundie collapsetheblog.typepad.com

My present city is a pretty horrible place to live. I had previously attributed it to the general poverty and dustiness of the area, the general grossness of the infantrymen who populate it, and the general horribleness of the south's social order. But I'm increasingly convinced demographics are the reason why. I live in a military town with a median age in the mid-20s. Nearly half the population is under 25. These people don't have kids.

The result is a predictable lack of civic virtue. People get in fights. They speed violently. There's strip clubs, grillists, decal shops, and the like everywhere. Everything sucks and everyone hates it here.

Children civilize things. They promote awareness, respect, and awe for the order of being, through which God has permitted man to participate in the act of creation (hence the near-religious reverence parents feel holding their newborn children for the first time). They remind parents of their obligations and encourage them to behave -- not only to set a good example but to contribute to the betterment of society for their children's sake. Children make obvious the goodness of obedience to authority, the dutiful care for one's family, and reverence for elders and ancestors.

A society without children is a markedly deficient society -- one that has no reason to live at all, much less live well. I suspect this is why liberalism so desperately hates the idea of parenthood and children: it's only possible in a society with comparatively few children.

Proph #fundie collapsetheblog.typepad.com

I know I shouldn't be at this point, but every so often I'm amazed at the extent to which Christians (especially Catholics) will delude themselves in order to fit in as good Americans.

Modern America requires Christians to profess falsehood: that their religion is essentially false and therefore unworthy of being entertained on the public stage. The atheist/agnostic will say, of course, that it requires no such thing, that it simply requires them to profess that while they may believe their religion to be true, they cannot know their religion is true, and thus they have no right to act in accordance with their belief by demanding that the state establish and protect their religion. Usually, the rationale is epistemic weakness.

(Peter Drucker made this argument. It's about 75% of the reason I disowned him. It never even occurred to him to question whether or not it was actually true).

But Christians can know their religion is true: they inherited it directly from God Himself. He came down from Heaven in the form of a man and told us of our obligations to Him. If you don't believe that, you aren't a Christian at all. So to say they can't profess belief in the fundamental reality of their religion is to say their religion is false: that a central claim it makes is false. And to require them to act according to this belief is to require them to jettison their faith entirely.

Thus the visceral horror to which, for instance, otherwise good Catholics react when a fellow Catholic (like myself) says, "The state ought to formally establish Catholicism" (or at least "mere Christianity"). Chritsianity may be true, they say, but we only believe it's true, and other people don't believe it!

Well, those people are wrong. That's all. And there is no right to falsehood and error.

Anyway, when did "belief" come to mean something less than fact? Belief is the adherence of the intellect and will to a perceived truth. We all believe the sky is blue, for instance. Because it's blue.

"But what if they take control and outlaw your religion because they believe it's false!"

They do that all the time, though. Why should we unilaterally disarm? (Not that we're talking about outlawing competing religions; such confusion over the historical norm of religious establishment is woefully common nowadays).

And who cares, anyway? We preach Christianity because it's true, not because the state graciously permits us to do so without harrassment. If the state decides to martyr us for not playing along, well, we will be glorified in Heaven and God will avenge our blood. If you don't believe that, you're not a Christian, either. You're just a liar, going to church every week to set a good example for the kids or to keep up appearances (or something). Your real religion is comfort, and you will be stripped of every last speck of it when your soul is dropped into Hell.

Proph #fundie collapsetheblog.typepad.com

A Little More on Bullying

I mentioned in a recent post that, like Bonald at Throne and Altar, I actually support bullying under certain circumstances. Let me flesh that out a little more.

Actually, let me just state my rule for bullying: if it's used as a means of enforcing normative behaviors, I'm all for it. And yeah, that means giving shit to fairies and tomboys and so on.

Normative behaviors exist for a reason. Like tradition, social norms tell us provide us a measure of what is good and just, especially for those who are too stupid to figure it out on their own. Social disapproval of immoral behaviors (like homosexuality, adultery, etc.) is often a more powerful disincentive to commit them than legal consequences; there are limits to others' ability to probe into your legal indiscretions, but the stench of a social brand in some degenerate's ass can linger in a community's collective hindbrain for generations. And so it was that, for a long time, it was wholly unnecessary for governments to police morality: communities did it their own damn selves.

Of course, one can say, "Well, who are you to force the norm of traditional family on, say, some good-hearted, hard-working single mother?" But one would be an idiot for saying that, given the abundance of studies (at least one by no less-respected a medical journal than The Lancet, a casual Googling revealed) demonstrating that childen raised in single-family are worse off in pretty much every way: they exhibit higher rates of mental illness, suicide attempts, injury, alcoholism, drug addiction, and all-cause mortality, even after adjusting for socioeconomic status and parents' health. Traditional societies knew and understood that children did best who were raised in a norm-conforming household; it is only in our (supposedly) enlightened modern society that we make virtuous angels out of the sluts and cads who ruin their kids' lives so that they can find themselves (or whatever). That's why traditional societies ostracized such people while modern societies make movies about them while ignoring all the evil they bring into the world. Likewise with the destruction of traditional gender roles (in the form of flamboyant homosexuals, cross-dressers, and transgender freakazoids).

So to the extent that people bullied today are serial violators of perfectly rational social norms, they ought to be subject to social disapproval -- even quite severely so. Those who imagine there is a "right" to attend a school without being bullied are deluded: one never has a right to behave however one wishes without consequences. Accepting this fact is a key step toward maturity. I'm torn on the extent to which this ought to entail physical bullying (certainly, I think it's justified when one is being an asshole about defying social norms, as in the case of the transgender abomination that got his/her ass unceremoniously pummeled into a seizure at a Baltimore-area McDonald's recently for belligerently insisting on using an occupied women's restroom), but I see nothing wrong with quite persistent verbal ribbing.

But to the extent bullying represents mindless, irrational cruelty (for instance, assaulting those whose only crime is being skinny, awkward, smart, or whatever), it ought to be brought under control. Unlike defiance of social norms, being skinny or fat or awkward or smart really doesn't hurt anyone -- and there's no sense in punishing them for it. It's intrinsic to the nature of demographics, after all, that not everyone can be ripped, engaging, and of modest intellect). Of course, that's no reason to have to associate with them (and awkward people really shouldn't have any friends until they learn to go out and make some on their own), but again, it's no reason to subject them to punishment, either. An Unmarried Man has a good post on the topic related to fat (and pregnant) women; it's worth a read.

One may object to my characterization of bullying in defense of social norms as not only valid and reasonable but right and good as fighting fire with fire. It is, of course -- but sometimes that's perfectly advisable, as when one stops the spread of a firestorm by burning away the flammable brush in a certain circumfrence around it. It's worth bearing in mind that the same liberals who decry bullying are perfectly content to bully in defense of their own social norms, at the expense of Christians and non-sexual deviants and so on; FIRE is dedicated to fighting these types of bullying in universities, where it has the potential to devastate a person's future to an extent routine beating-up-fags stuff doesn't . If there is, in fact, something like a war going on to determine whose social values ought to be ascendant, I see no reason why one side should be expected to unilaterally disarm.

Even for the sake of the children.