Hate Mail

THE RECENT DEATH of Prince Phillip certainly reminded people that Elizabeth II is certainly in the last years of her long life and long reign as Queen of England. You'd have to be in her age cohort to have an adult memory of a Britain with someone other than her as the monarch of that constitutional monarchy and an old person to have any memory of her father as King at all.

With her death will come the coronation of Charles or, if he, no spring chicken, either, dies before his mother or otherwise doesn't succeed her, his son William, as king in a quasi-sacramental religious ceremony in which the Christian Church of England will crown the next monarch as Christian monarchs have been crowned, I would guess since the first monarch declared Christianity as the state religion of their empire or country, which was Armenia, when King Trdat adopted it as the state religion in 301 AD, well before Constantine adopted Christianity for the Roman Empire, a good day for Christians, socially, politically, legally,  who were far less likely to get killed or dispossessed or imprisoned or tortured, a far more arguably bad day for the Gospel of Jesus who declared that his kingdom was not of this earth. Morally, the establishment of Christianity as a state religion anywhere can certainly be counted as something of a catastrophe.

I'll leave it to you to read about King Trdat, who may have actually been a bloodier and more ruthless guy than Constantine. If his behavior after his conversion was any less violent, cruel, capricious and ruthless than his behavior before is hard to say. One thing is clear about his post-conversion conversion, a result of him being cured of sickness, legendarily brought on by his slaughter of a bunch of what were, sort of, nuns when the prettiest of them refused to marry him, he didn't buy much into the teachings of Jesus.

The Gospel is often a hard fit to modern, egalitarian democracy, its morality and especially its radical justice and economics has never been put into practice by even the best of democratic rulers with the best intentions, being the chief executive of any state, especially a major military power is a guarantee that they will not be able, on behalf of the nation, to turn the other cheek or to meet opposition with love and forgiveness.

As can be seen in the Republican-fascist Christians among Catholic hierarchs, clergy, religious and lay people, among those who are called "evangelicals" and others, policies and laws that would attempt to even somewhat approximate the actual teachings of Jesus would meet with their rejection, their violent opposition, their use of the media to use that against politicians who would attempt to do that, even as they are already doing that against Joe Biden who has, actually, been engaged in doing something like that, while not putting it in terms that violate the artificial secularism enforced by the Constitution and the demand of secularists. A lot of us who have actually read some of Catholic social justice teaching can see how much of what he is doing actually leans in that direction, though much of it as written is indistinguishable from a secular articulation of the same thing. I think it would be as accurate to say that the Catholic social teaching he may be influenced by is UCC or Episcopal or Presbyterian social teaching. I would dare say that a lot of it would be reflected in official teachings of even many of the reactionary denominations that are officially opposed to Joe Biden BECAUSE THOSE TEACHINGS ARE BASED IN THE LAW OF MOSES, THE PROPHETIC TRADITION, THE GOSPEL AND THE APOSTOLIC BOOKS and early documents of the Church. I recently listened to an interview with the Orthodox writer and philosopher David Bently Hart in which he said a lot of what he believed in that regard was in the earliest Patriarchal writing, such as those of Basil of Ceaserea. whose brother Gregory of Nyssa and their sister St. Macrina the Younger have influenced me. Others, such as Marilynne Robinson have made a very good case for the influence of the radical economics of Moses through the influence of John Calvin on, especially, the liberalism of New England and the former liberalism of the upper mid-west, down as far as Kansas - now obviously a thing of the past.

What can be said of a modern egalitarian democracy having an uneasy, if not necessarily unwelcome or unproductive relationship with the Gospel is even more true of late classical, medieval and later monarchies, perhaps up to the period in which the last of real political power was taken from some of the European monarchs in the 20th century. The trappings of Christianity, the relationship of civil state and church that are a hall mark of the Medieval up to the early modern period in Europe and elsewhere were a cover for what was and still is a largely non-Christian culture.

The teachings of Jesus as set out in the Gospels, as attested to in the other books of the New Testament are about as radical as can be and as unlike most of so-called European and American "Christianity" as could be. Other than a few sexual prohibitions left over and rather vaguely defined in ancient scriptures AND A VERY SELECTIVE READING AND APPLICATION OF THOSE and a totally non-scripture based prohibition on abortion and contraception, the most Christian identifying of Americans and others don't have much truck with what any of the Bible says and certainly nothing much even about those as contained in the quoted words of Jesus.

I said the other day that every sin that can honestly and accurately be laid on official organized Christianity and Christians would, unambiguously, be a violation of the teachings of Jesus and his closest followers as recorded in the Scriptures, whether or not it could be said to be a retention of pre-Christain paganism is an interesting idea, though I think it would be more honest and productive to say it is a retention of human fallibility, human corruption, maybe even something like a Calvinist notion of human depravity, since professed Christians are as capable of doing that as any old-world pagans were. 

 

I think there has been a actual and positive effect to the Christianization of Europe and other places along with those sins, I think the effect has, in many ways, been slight and always endangered but that it is real.   

If there has been any improvement due to monarchs, those with worldly power, common people at least believing themselves to be under SOME measure of restraint due to what Jesus said, what Paul and James, Peter, the Prophets, the Jewish Scriptures taught, it has certainly not been an entire success. Any improvements due to being exposed to those things have been real - the ending of casual, legal infanticide, for example, the end of human sacrifice - but they are not more than tendencies. I don't think things get better when those tendencies are discouraged. I don't see any evidence at all that the vestiges of that moral restraint are very reliable or lasting among those whose families gave up religion in their or the previous generation, I don't think it's more than a retained cultural or family predilection in such cases, though there are some for which that is stronger than others. I don't think you can rely on that nation-wide, certainly not world-wide.

I'll break in here to note that the ultra-conservative use of sexual prohibitions as found in, for example the Torah Holiness Code - which applied primarily to the priests - to condemn LGBTQ people is matched by, in most cases, by totally ignoring the explicit teaching of Jesus against straight people getting divorced and remarried. That is something that straight people, married to someone who they didn't want to be married to someone or wanting to marry someone else have allowed themselves to totally ignore though it was about the only place in which Jesus actually forbade something on sexual grounds AND THAT IS IGNORED BY THOSE WHO PRETEND TO BELIEVE HE WAS GOD WHO SPOKE WITH THE AUTHORITY OF NO LESS THAN GOD. Even in the Catholic church which has retained a ban on remarriage after a divorce have always allowed the rich and powerful to have their marriages "annulled" and, in modern times, have expanded that to include most people who have the money to bring a petition for annulment and don't get an opposing spouse from having one. I have a close relative who had their marriage annulled and the process was about as convincing as any phony legal pantomime. Yet "evangelicals" practice such divorce-remarriage adultery (and the kind that dispenses with the divorce) at an impressive rate as they seek to impose their interpretation of the words of Paul (who very well may not have meant what they and the KJV translators thought he meant) and the Jewish Scriptures to impose their preferences on other people. 

 

So, no.  I don't feel any shame about saying that, "pagans" and atheists and agnostics in the modern era have benefited from the even yet to be more closely matched following of the teachings of Jesus by the law and politics and in societies.  If the Golden Rule, the command to do to the least among us what we would do to The Lord, etc. were put into place with the official establishment of Christianity, there would have been no slavery, no subjugation of women, no discrimination on the basis of ethnicity, there would have been no poverty, there would have been nothing like the level of injustice in the United States any single year of its existence.   The most appalling injustices and evils have been allowed here, legally and on a de facto basis under the secular Constitution from the start, let's talk slavery as a start.   The very Constitution that you claim requires the atheist dream of anti-religion in all official and quasi-official matters was the Constitution that LITERALLY PERMITTED AND EMPOWERED SLAVERY IN EXACTLY THE WAY THAT JESUS NEVER PERMITTED THE EVILS YOU ATTRIBUTE TO CHRISTIANITY.   If Christianity has to wear those evils and be discredited by it, the secular Constitution of the United States is even more discredited due to that fact. 

Update:  Don't be absurd.  As recently as last Monday I commented somewhere saying "that Nazi nun, "Mother Angelica."   Oddly, the place I left it made the same mistake you do, the National Catholic Reporter is an independent, often critical and quite often quite radical magazine,  The National Catholic Register is a far-right rag associated with the Nazi nun's EWTN cabloid crap channel.  I can't imagine me ever making a positive quotation or reference to the Register though I might point out some depravity or other it publishes.