Posted on 09/04/2016 5:10:53 PM PDT by ReformationFan
Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor agreed that “tenderness leads to the gas chambers,” and what they were trying to get through our thick heads is that tenderness without truth is tyranny.
As Rodney Stark has pointed out in The Rise of Christianity, the Roman Empire was a harsh, unforgiving, cruel, and relentless society in which to live. Women were little better than possessions, children were considered undeveloped human beings. Slavery, violence, bloodshed, and revenge mingled with fire, famine, flood, pestilence, and plague. In the midst of the horror Christians rescued discarded babies, despised abortion, loved their spouses, tended the sick, nurtured the dying, and fed the poor. Compassion had arrived in the world, and it revolutionized everything.
In Atheist Delusions, David Bentley Hart makes a similar point about the concept of innate human dignity. The Christian message was a startling turning point in human history. Because the Son of God took human form, humanity was redeemed. On the first Easter a remarkable and formerly unthinkable truth entered and enlightened the world: Each human being had eternal worth.
As a result, slavery would eventually crumble, children would be treated as treasures, and women would be considered as equals. The revolution would continue until aristocracy and worth by birth would eventually wither. Revolutions and the civil rights movement would call for freedom, brotherhood, and equality for all.
Now, two thousand years later, generosity has entered the genetic code of humanity. Everyone understands that war is bad. Killing is out. Kindness is in. Defending and feeding the hungry is de rigeur, and helping the homeless is everyone’s obligation. We must be kind, tolerant to all, and constantly compassionate.
Bullying must be banned. Foreigners must be welcomed. Criminals must be forgiven. It is hugs for thugs and grins for gangsters. Animals must be adored, and nature nurtured.
Tenderness has triumphed, and compassion has conquered all.
This is all fine and dandy up to a point, and everyone must certainly be amazed at the continued triumph of tenderness, but we now face an unusual problem: Tenderness is biting back.
The triumph of tenderness has been so complete that it has turned into the tyranny of tenderness.
So, for example, one of the ploys of the homosexual activists is to dress up their campaign as a battle against bullying. School anti-bullying campaigns are a cover for the sub-agenda of complete homosexual acceptance. Those who may have good reasons to be opposed to the homosexual campaign are portrayed as bullies, homophobes, and possible gay bashers.
Thus tenderness and compassion for those who are bullied is turned into a campaign point for acceptance of homosexuality, and anyone who dares to oppose will be vilified. “How can you be against this wonderful campaign that opposes bullying and supports the poor children who are being bullied!!!???”
Anyone who professes to follow Jesus Christ will be instantly silenced. How, indeed, can anyone who follows the compassionate one be opposed to a campaign against bullying?
The same technique can be used against most anything by most anyone who learns the trick. Do you think Suzie and James ought not to cohabit before marriage if they call themselves Christians? Do you happen to believe that this is something called “fornication” and that it is condemned by the Bible and the Church?”
“How can you be so judgmental and hurtful? Susie and James LOVE each other!!! All they are doing is affirming their love!! You’re a Christian?! I thought you were supposed to be in favor of love!”
Do you think immigration should be sensibly moderated, welcoming the deserving but screening possible terrorists?
“So cruel! So heartless! How can you reject these poor homeless refugees! And you call yourself a Christian!”
Do you think the unborn child deserves the right to live and to cut him up and sell his body parts might just be a crime that cries to heaven for vengeance?
“You want to criminalize these poor women who need to move forward in life! How can you deny these women the right to choose? Are you in favor of enslaving women once again? How can you be so judgmental?”
This is sentimentalism, which is one of the serpent heads of the Hydra demon called Relativism. It is tenderness without truth, mercy without justice and compassion without morality or meaning.
This is no longer the triumph of tenderness, but the tyranny of tenderness, and the final result will be a literal tyranny. Benedict XVI’s famous phrase, “the dictatorship of relativism,” will lead to political dictatorship because human beings cannot live for very long in the anarchy of boundless and undiscerning compassion.
Eventually, the pendulum will swing back. People will demand justice, and if we thought compassion without truth was bad, “justice” without truth will be no more than the rule of brute force.
I've been telling my daughter that since she was five: "Kids are not people."
She's gonna be 18 next month. And I tell her: "You're almost a person now."
Funny!
I used to tell my son that at 8 or 10 years old he was quite brilliant. It was when he would turn 13 and onward, that he would become stupid... until he chose to grow up.
In many of these cases, the behavior that is trying to hide behind tenderness is actually quite markedly untender. Buggery is a good example.
In cases like this we don’t need to suddenly hate tenderness — rather, calling the crypto-cruel out on their hypocrisy is what is needed.
I guess you would have little use for a personhood amendment, huh.
I would boldly speak to the LGBT folks who make such a deal out of being anti-bullying, and challenge them to make it true.
Like quit carrying out a cruelty-based ritual in bed, and quit teaching it to our children, and quit being bullies yourself to further it.
We don’t have to be mean here; only forthright.
The author credits Christianity with the abolition of slavery (along with every other good result, apparently).
This claim is not supported by the facts.
For millennia, the amount of work done per day by one man roughly equaled the amount of work done by one horse. Slavery had a rational justification, at least when it came to farming (the occupation for 95 percent of every population); which labor force a practical landowner ought to keep, was a toss-up - horses ate more (but cheaper) food, but weren’t so great at understanding instructions. Neither were they given to staging uprisings, as human slaves might.
All this changed when the horse-collar was invented, circa AD 1000. Suddenly, the horse became far more valuable, at least in fieldwork; slavery was on the skids as the rational excuse for it evaporated. Nearly 1000 years passed before it was abolished in western civ: things moved slower then.
Too bad that horses could not be taught to pick cotton and tobacco.
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