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I agree with you! I love "Life of Brian!" Gold?! Well, why didn't'cha say soooo?! I saw a meme last night that featured Rihanna in her Met Gala ensemble and Pope Francis and his headpiece was blowing off. The caption read, "Wig snatch." I laughed so hard that I snorted. I have to believe that the Pope would laugh, as well. He seems like he has a great sense of humor. (I also have to believe that he'll never have occasion to see it unless he hangs around, looking at memes on the innernetz. Ha.)
And guess what? If you'd been raised that way (in a society that "thought it was their right"), chances are you'd have been a slave owner as well. Societal norms of any given time have a HUGE effect on what any given individual is likely to believe or think. "Normal people" used to go watch people being eaten by bears and lions. Was it their fault? I think it's debatable, but I'll also say that their society had a huge influence on them if they thought that sort of thing was okay. Same applied to slavery. If it is going on around you every day of your life... many decent people will just go along with it because that is "the way it is." In a hundred years, society will condemn you for something (some social trait) that, right now, seems perfectly reasonable to you.
It's very easy to judge from an ivory tower, isn't it? But sometimes it's very different if you are in the trenches.
I see your point, but if that were universally true - people always conform to the standards of the day - how does anything ever change?
I see your point, but if that were universally true - people always conform to the standards of the day - how does anything ever change?
From radicals, like Christ, who challenge earthly dogma and orthodoxies.
I have a friend who is a strict pacifist. He's never used violence in his adult life and swears that even if he and his wife were attacked, he would only try to shield his wife, he would not hit the assailant. I disagree with his assumption that violence is always wrong. Most people do. So what's the value in someone like Terry, my friend, in a society like ours? A person like Terry reminds us that we should be less apt to violence than we are. Such people are indispensable, even if we as a society never embrace something like pacifism.
To tie this back to religion and God, it's entirely unsurprising to cognizant Christians why people tend to conform to the standards of the times in which they live: people are fallen creatures, hopelessy flawed and prone to behaving in ways they have been commanded not to behave. Fallen creatures destined to sin isn't nearly as great a danger as those who believe in the perfectibility of human beings through the utopias they imagine. It's when you believe that you can perfect human beings that, as Peter Hitchens rightly puts it, the blood flows. The 20th century is a chronicle of this mindset, of people in power who believed they answered to no higher power and were thus free to pursue their project of perfecting human beings and their systems.
Evangelical atheists make a couple mistakes, in my estimation:
1. They assume that religion can be largely erased from a sophisticated society. The historical record shows this to be unlikely.
2. They seem to assume that if you can just get rid of the dominant religion in a given place, that vacuum will sit empty. More likely, it will not only be replaced by a different religion, but a religion that ends up being much more antithetical to the beliefs they hold than the original one.
So, to those folks, be careful what you wish for. You may be placed first in line at the gallows, come reckoning day with the new boss.
Maybe next year will be the dress like Mohammad Gala
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I saw a meme last night that featured Rihanna in her Met Gala ensemble and Pope Francis and his headpiece was blowing off. The caption read, "Wig snatch." I laughed so hard that I snorted. I have to believe that the Pope would laugh, as well. He seems like he has a great sense of humor. (I also have to believe that he'll never have occasion to see it unless he hangs around, looking at memes on the innernetz. Ha.)
