Hello A-G! Noticed you and Hank were chatting, and he dropped my name. I thought my description of Stalin, Hitler, et al., accurately reported by Hank, was a pretty objective one. You can tell it's true simply by looking at the victims. Hank asks if we have a Christian duty to love these men "in the same way as we love God, our wives, our children," et al.
It is easy to love one's spouse, one's child, etc. -- "do not the publicans likewise?" Yet Christian love sets a much higher standard, to love others as ourselves even when it's difficult, even when we find people to be wholly repugnant, even when they are our enemies. The point is God asks us to love our neighbor as a witness to our love of Him. He asks to to forebear judgment, leaving that up to Him.
Basically, Christian love calls us to acknowledge the common humanity that we share with all God's human creatures, to not forget that they are still our fellow men, despite the fact that we may hate the things that they have done or may do. They may treat their fellow men as animals; but we must not forget that those who do so are still men, still God's human creatures -- despite the fact that they revile God and have turned away from Him.
The turning away from God's ordering Word pertaining to human kind is the reason why they can treat their fellow human beings in the manner they do. They reject God and His law, setting up their own "laws" instead, and ordering their own lives according to those "laws."
And thus does evil enter the world that God made "Good." The willful rejection of the Good is the mystery of iniquity, spreading evil and disorder throughout creation. Men do not cease to be men when they do this. And God will judge them as men, not as the animals they so often appear to resemble.
When men utterly reject God's ordering law of love and justice and live according to their own "wisdom" and ways, they become disordered; and can only act disorderly toward others precisely because they do not recognize those others as their fellow men. Thus the "unfavored" classes that become their victims may be treated like animals with impunity, for with the rejection of God comes the rejection of the idea of accountability for the Judgment that God renders.
But "freedom from God" is an illusion. God cannot be "killed." Men can turn away from God; but God does not turn away from men. His Judgment falls on each and every man, be he a believer or an unbeliever.
This insight is much older than Christianity, dating back at least to Heraclitus. He observed that the divine Logos "was one and common" for all men. But that "the many" withdraw into their own "private worlds," as if dreamers asleep.
This may be a good opporunity to renew my dialog with Hank:
Q: “…a strict individualist is self-sufficient and never uses coercion against anyone else. Tell me how that leads to personal and social disorder.”
A: “Because the concept isn’t capacious enough to describe human existence.”
It seems to me that a person who can think of himself as a “strict individualist” is focusing on only one aspect of human personality. Arguably, to omit “the rest” of what affects the human condition and experience is to develop a false picture of human reality, personal and social. In effect, to let self-selected moral criteria supplant the absolute authority of the Logos is to turn way from reality into a "private world."
Clearly, there is an individual self, a psyche. But there is also built deep down into human nature – into individual psyche -- natural connections to larger wholes, such as family, community, society, nature, and God.
To say that our entire moral duty consists in non-aggression and self-sufficiency may well be an abstraction designed to relieve us of any further obligation to our fellow men, such as the duty to respect and honor them as our brothers in the sight of God.
There have been some incredibly cynical and contemptuous things that have been said about man on this thread. To the extent that such views seem to become increasingly common, even "fashionable" these days, is an indication of how far we humans have gone in expressing contempt for our neighbors, and thus of God's law. How a decent society can be expected to result when the common opinion turns on contempt for our fellow human beings is, to me, the main question of our age.
I can't help but think such views may evidence a certain self-contempt. For the things we say about others may be less indicative of the actual status of the person(s) being criticized, and more indicative of our own existential experience of order (disorder). Such comments may, in a certain sense, amount to a confession of character.
I'm not criticizing anybody here, just trying to shed light on problems. Though it does hurt to read some of the "slanders" that have been written about man on this thread. FWIW.
I’m only 57 and I can remember being able to walk safely in downtown San Antonio as a teenager, unaccompanied. But now, at least one shopping mall has a sheriff’s office to deter the random violence.
And I suspect this cynicism is why we have so many legal agreements these days, to anticipate what may go wrong – not what may go right. It used to be that a man’s word was his bond.
IMHO, it is sad testimony to our modern society that we are forced to consider the worst possibilities. At least though - even now in this small rural town, we still leave our houses unlocked. But for how long?