Days Of Future Past

Who cares if Christ is risen

Maybe the world has been all right without recognizing Christ’s resurrection. Maybe the world in general moves along towards some kind of an Ethiopian dream - that we may not be as bad as we think we are.

What is true at this time in our history is that we are moving into an uncharted territory. Since the French revolution, many influential intellectuals have rejected religion. But it is only now that religious ideas are ceasing to underpin general morality. Because these ideas have prevailed for so long, people tend to assume that the morality, which goes with them, is somehow obvious and commonsensical, and will continue.

“Love thy neighbour as thyself” is widely believed to be a moral imperative, which everyone can accept and try to follow without religious faith as if it were a belief which came naturally to man. But this is a terrible error. No moral doctrine comes naturally. As the derivation of the word implies, it has to be taught. It can only be taught if enough people understand the theories on which it rests upon, and have the means of instilling their consequences into the popular mind. We have entered a period in which this is no longer so, and we are beginning to see the results.

Value of mankind is diminishing. The value of the animal world is increasing instead; which is now almost set on par. Owners dress their pets up in fancy knitwear and mittens in sizes fit for infants, treating their pets as if they were “babies”. There are some who fight to stop fox hunting who would think nothing of having abortions. If members of the animal liberation front had lived in Jerusalem on that first Good Friday, they would have been far too worried about the fate of the donkey on which Christ entered Jerusalem to mind that he was being crucified before their eyes. Apes are now generally accepted as “distant-cousins” of mankind.

With this lost of a truly human morality comes paradoxically a greater emphasis on human gratification. As human beings no longer believe that they have a unique standing in the order of divine creation, they turn inwards. The great modern crime is to prevent people from doing whatever it is they want to do. Any sexual or taste of life is fast becoming equally valid. Being yourself is the thing to be, as if yourself was automatically interesting and good. The consequence is that what was once called selfishness is now called fulfillment. The word “love” is used just as much as it ever was, but now it means something else. For a Christian, the measure of love is what one is willing to give up for it. For the post-Christian, love is the most exciting state of the eagle. The social consequences are more greed, more crime, more family breakdown, more violence, and an extreme restlessness, which makes the word “contentment” now almost out-dated.

Although many non-believers dislike these trends just as much as Christians, they are almost powerless to do anything about them. For religion has an extraordinary and unique capacity to keep sublime concepts of beauty and truth, and the principles of conduct derive from them in the minds of ordinary people. Without religion, few know what to think, and into the vacuum created fall superstition and fanaticism and pure brutishness. To all of these, the atheist will answer, “You may be right about the social consequences about the loss of faith, but that is simply the pain that results from people discovering that they had been living a lie.” But another possibility presents itself – it is that our moral beliefs will decay if they are cut off from their source, just as a stream will become a stagnant pool if it is no longer fed by its spring; this is what is happening in the West today.

The injunction to “love thy neighbour” is not a statement of the obvious. It is a commandment, and one which only makes sense because it flows from the first commandment “love thy God”. We must obey it because it is true. We know it is true because of the event which Easter commenmorates.

posted by HanQiang @ 10:19 am