3 Comments

Ray Ingles
August 4th, 2011 | 1:09 pm

Out of curiosity, how come some “First Links” allow comments, and others don’t?

Alessandra
August 5th, 2011 | 6:00 pm

•13% more likely to switch to a mainline Protestant denomination that is “less strict, less likely to impose rules of behavior on your daily life” than their childhood religion.
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I know so many of these churches and people. They are like a middle-class country club-type church.

I call them the “comfortable-anything-goes”-type Christians.

And the majority of these pastors are very happy to have them in their churches, especially if they make the church seem more populated, like a measure of success. And the pastors like the monetary contribution from the anything-goes members.

Obviously, these people are obsessed about normalizing homosexuality.

Blake
August 6th, 2011 | 10:54 pm

Obviously, these people are obsessed about normalizing homosexuality.

I do not believe it is normalizing homosexuality that is the obsession.

I believe the problem is more fundamental than that. At the top you have people who just want power, and how do you get power? Medieval kings gave away land, but that’s expensive. Today people gain power by promising something cheaper: an end to limits.

People don’t like limits. They don’t like being told there are some things that just have to be accepted (see Elizabeth Scalia’s wonderful post on the “sentimentalism” at the root of relativity)…they will vote for you and give you money if you promise them that everything can be a “choice”.

This is the “competitive advantage” that the Enlightenment has brought to the “marketplace of ideas” – the promise of Utopia, of a world that can be made perfect. Of course one problem with Utopia has always been that people do not agree on what “perfect” looks like – but the Enlightenment gets around that with its ideological improvement: the recognition that a set of ideological assumptions (the “scientific method” taken as ultimate truth rather than as purely conditional if/then assumptions) can separate the Elite from the peasants. The Elite can perfect the world – and the peasants, meanwhile, are exempt from the thing that restricts every other religion in the world, that pesky Golden Rule, because “it’s for their own good” – because they’re “ignorant”, you see?

Most people who get all frothy in favor of gay marriage don’t really care about gay people (many of them are actually astonishingly hostile to gay people). And the gay marriage model isn’t likely to actually meet gay peoples’ needs, or suit their lifestyles – their whole goal is supposedly that they DON’T want to “live a lie”, and gay marriage is all about lies. But gay marriage is important because it’s about LIMITS. The redefinition of marriage is a redefinition that fundamentally alters both marriage and family, so that there are no inherent limits such as defining family as being a group related by “kinship” (under the new definition, family is a “choice” – adoption stops being limited by things like genuine need or “child’s best interest”). Marriage becomes all about the feelings of those participating in the ceremony – and it’s the idea that feelings shall be made the top priority in society that people are really fighting for.

No limits! Down with duty and obligation and reciprocity! It is how I feel that should dictate what’s “fair”.