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Christianity brings equality and tolerance...

Christianity brings equality and tolerance...

Postby Brian » March 2nd, 2009, 3:19 am

In the all too brief time I had for personal reading while on a business trip last week, I ran across this thought provoking assessment on Christianity's role in fostering equality and genunie tolerance. Apologies for the length, but I can only edit very little and still convey the message:

From Anthony Esolen - The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (2008)
"Sometimes in the history of may one idea, well expressed and preached by people afire with zeal, makes all the difference. Consider the ringing cry, a garbled echo of Moses and Jesus and Paul, 'All men are created equal.' The affirmation that man is saved by Christ, in Christ, is such an idea. For most pagans, this made no sense. You were created chosen or not. For an athiest, this makes no sense. In our material selves (our atoms, our genes, our muscles) we evidentially are all different from birth. But Christianty affirms that in our dignity before the Lord, we are equal.

That faith is meant to leaven one's life, and in this way the new Christians are at one with their elder brothers, the Jews. But it is not a set of cultural rules. It is a relationship to the person of Christ, adaptable to all cultures, at all times, everywhere. It could be Jewish or Armenian, Ethiopian or Persian, Greek or Roman, and soon after Paul, it would be all these. We now preach 'tolerance' by which...we mean two contradictory things: a refusal to distinguish between true and false and good and evil, a supine submission to the politically correct rules of an intelligentsia. It is intolerance, with hair spray and a smile.

The first Christians, who endured periods of persecution and long ages of contempt, set upon by spies after their property or emperors after their blood, learned tolerance by living it. They dwelt among people who traded in slaves, exposed babies on hillsides, seduced young boys, and made homicide into daily entertainment in the arena. And they brought them to the faith without making them a whit the less Roman or Greek, rather returning them to the noblest virtures of their own traditions.

For Christianity, rightly understood, fairly invents the virture of tolerance, precisely because, as Saint Paul says, the Lord wants sons (and daughters - my insert), not slaves."

Esolen goes on to make this distinction between Christian tolerance and the forced external submission/compulsion of the Roman Empire and Emperor prior to Constantine and Islam from its early years under Muhammad to this very day. He also makes the same case against the Political Correctness philosophy rampant in in much of academia today. While an English Professor at Providence College in Rhode Island, his history and current assessment of postmodern concept of equality and tolerance vs. genuine equality and tolerance rooted in the Christian faith are very much on target.
In Christ alone,
Brian

Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die, even the undertaker will be sorry. Mark Twain
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Re: Christianity brings equality and tolerance...

Postby litfan » March 2nd, 2009, 3:36 am

Thanks for sharing this interesting discussion, Brian. So how did we (I'm including myself with the Christians) become associated with intolerance? Are we failing to live out our faith's insistence on tolerance? Or do we just have a PR problem? Or is it a bit both?
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Re: Christianity brings equality and tolerance...

Postby deadwhitemale » March 2nd, 2009, 6:13 am

"It is when we try to grapple with another man's intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun." -- Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim(1899?)
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Re: Christianity brings equality and tolerance...

Postby mitchellmckain » March 2nd, 2009, 10:57 am

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Re: Christianity brings equality and tolerance...

Postby friendofbill » March 2nd, 2009, 1:06 pm

Indeed it is as you say: dunno. On more than one other message boards (some of which I am now banished from), a large, even predominant percentage of the posters just assume that Christianity is extraordinarily and uniquely oppressive and intolerant, particularly to what thyey like to call the Gay-Lesbian-Bisexual-Transgendered Community. "Christian" is used as a synonym for "Fundamentalist," often shortened to "Fundy" (plural, "Fundies"). And it's a dirty word to them, an epithet, only slightly less serious than "racist."

As for "why?" ... I think it is an ego thing. Religion in general, and Christianity in particular, can be liberating and transforming, or it can be used as a prop for the ego. "Those people [gays, blacks, Irish, rednecks, Latinos, etc.] are not like me, so they are bad and I am good and God should take note of that fact." It is simply the modern extension of "I am not like that publican over there."

Not that there is a problem with only the "religious" side of the conflict. There is also a problem with any group of people who choose to believe that their pet sin is exempt from the requirement to repent and make changes in one;'s life. Not one of us is qualified to cast the first stone; the point of the Resurrection, and of Pentecost, is that no matter what our pet "sin" may be, we stop defending it and set about relinquishing our life, liberty and will to the One Who can transform us into His likeness. I find that if I am occupied in that endeavor, I do not have either the time or the inclination to point fingers at anyone else and figure out what God plans to do with them. That is the message I get from the last chapter of John, when Peter, having been given his marching orders, points to John and says "What about him?" Jesus answers, "None of your business. You follow Me."
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Re: Christianity brings equality and tolerance...

Postby archenland_knight » March 2nd, 2009, 5:22 pm

Romans 5:8 "But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us."
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Re: Christianity brings equality and tolerance...

Postby Brian » March 3rd, 2009, 2:47 am

In Christ alone,
Brian

Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die, even the undertaker will be sorry. Mark Twain
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Re: Christianity brings equality and tolerance...

Postby deadwhitemale » March 3rd, 2009, 5:40 am

I'm all for a separation of church and state myself. I just don't thinmk that means the state should be hostile to faith, or suppress every public expression of it. I don't see looming theocracy in every Christmas manger scene on a courthouse square, or in prayers on the Senate floor, or in Ten Commandments plaques everyone just ignores in school buildings.

At the same time, I do not think religious faith, or any church, should ever let itself be co-opted and used and exploited by the state to justify or support aggressive goverenment power grabs, at the expense of the rights of the people.

I think I've been on about this before, but I'll say it again: I believe that the most-/worst-abused part of the Bible, by far, is Romans, chapter 13. One particularly nasty example:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRIDNQNsUss

Thomas Jefferson said:

"I have sworn upon the altar of god, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Thomas_Jeffer ... es_it_mean

And I feel myself bound by essentially the same oath. Back when I called myself a libertarian I was bothered by Ayn Rand's hostility to and contempt for religion. I never shared that, and I never considered myself a Randian. But for decades I believed there was no conflict or contradiction between what I thought of as libertarianism and Christianity. As time went on, though, the anti-religious (and particularly anti-Chritian) element among lebertarians came to predominate, to the point that recently I ceased to call or consider myself one.

Almost everywhere I go it is just assumed that Christianity (at least, any relatively undiluted form of it) is inherently oppressive and tyrannical, just itching to impose an oppressive, tyrannical theocratic dictatorship the first chance it gets. I don't believe that. I set very great store by liberty of thought and action, and I want to believe God does too, or that at least God is not hostile to it, and that He was serious when He said He wanted sons, not slaves. I

I know there were people in ages when all or most believed a lot stronger, and knew there way around a Bible better, than most do now. And yet some of them, at times, found reason to rebel against the powers that were then. (See: the Wars of Religion of the late 1500s, the Thirty Years War, the English Civil War (a.k.a. Parliamentary Rebellion, etc.), the Glorious Revolution of 1688-'89, and the American Revolution/War of Independence.)

I'm not saying everyone who fought on the anti-establishment side in all those wars was necessarily driven by religious motivations, but a lot of them were religious, and yet somehow didn't think the 13th chapter of Romans was universally applicable. I mean they thought there was a time when rebellion was the right thing to do, and that the time had come.

I've been on about this before, I know, but I don't think compulsory "virtue" is worth anything, or pleasing to God. In that sense films/books such as Serenity and A Clockwork Orange could be considred profoundly Christian works of art (whatever the expressed religious or anti-religious views of their authors). See my post in the Books, Film, and Music forum about Serenity being misunderstood.


' The Alliance's main problem is that it seeks to govern everyone, regardless of whether they desire to belong to the central government or not. What the crew of Serenity, and specifically Mal and his lifestyle, represent is the idea that people should have the right to make their own decisions, even if those decisions are bad.

The Operative embodies the Alliance and is, as Whedon described, the "perfect product of what's wrong with the Alliance". He is someone whose motives are to achieve a good end, a "world without sin". '


'[Joss] Whedon has said that the most important line in the film is Mal's contented promise to the Operative at its climax: "I'm going to show you a world without sin." Whedon's point is that a world without sin is a world without choice, and that choice is ultimately what defines humanity.'

'The primary and most controversial idea in A Clockwork Orange is voiced repeatedly by F. Alexander and the prison chaplain: without choice and free will, man is no longer human but a "clockwork orange," a deterministic mechanism.'


"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."

"In fact," said Mustapha Mond, "you're claiming the right to be unhappy."

"All right then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy." -- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World


"It is with your approval that criminals -- honest criminals whose hands you are unfit to touch -- are being taken from the jails to which British judges sent them, on the conviction of British juries, and packed off to Belbury to undergo, for an indefinite period, out of reach of the law, whatever tortures and assaults on personal identity you call Remedial Treatment." -- C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength


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Re: Christianity brings equality and tolerance...

Postby deadwhitemale » March 4th, 2009, 6:11 am

Huh, now I've got some of 'em (on another board) throwing this up to me:

' God says you must obey your master, slave:

“Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, with a sincere heart, as you would Christ, not by the way of eye-service, as people-pleasers, but as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart.” -- Ephesians 6:5-6 '

They seem to be suggesting that I am a bad Christian for not being in favor of slavery.

It really seems like an insincere sort of sophistry to me, but I am not a good enough counter-Sophist to answer it effectively. These people keep saying that to be a real Christian you've got to go by every single thing in Leviticus or wherever about stoning homosexuals and abstaining from shrimp and so forth. If you don't consider yourself bound by that as a Christian, or if you are opposed to slavery, they say you're hypocritical or inconsistent.
"It is when we try to grapple with another man's intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun." -- Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim(1899?)
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Re: Christianity brings equality and tolerance...

Postby friendofbill » March 4th, 2009, 4:03 pm

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Re: Christianity brings equality and tolerance...

Postby Bluegoat » March 4th, 2009, 4:51 pm

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