I’ve studied history a long time, and I can see that I often rely on a historical point of view when I am confronted with interesting ideas. This is Easter weekend…from a historical perspective it seems like a rather dismissive term to apply to the most important day of the year (if you are a devout Christian). Times and tastes change…seemingly.
I see a lot of conscious and unconscious revisionism in our society regarding church issues. But I can also see that the trends have been pretty consistent for the last several hundred years. A good example of this, and something to which you could apply some down home parochial values to would be how our ancestors came up with, and jumped at the chance to get into monastic life (obviously they couldn’t be our direct ancestors…vows of chastity and all…at least for a time…).
This seems so strange to many in our more modern, secular culture. I find it interesting to see in common perspectives so much ridicule leveled at those who have deep religious convictions. Of course this is not consistently applied across the board. I rarely see sarcasm and ridicule leveled at Buddhists, (Tibetan or not…), Confucians, or even members of Falun Gong (unless you live in East Asia). Even more interesting is the fact that many of the ‘chattering caste’ in our culture have more respect for Feng-Shui than for any comparable western ideas…I guess the grass is always greener…
Of course a deeper knowledge of eastern values and philosophies would lead one to at least a passing veneration of our ancestors. The overwhelmingly vast majority of our ancestors were Christian (and some Jews, of course…). It strikes me as rather tasteless when we, as freedom loving Americans feel the need to belittle those of us who espouse religious beliefs, especially when they are in direct disagreement with my (or your) values.
Saint Benedict of Nursia came up with the basic plan for monastic life in the early 500’s CE, and with due respect to Benedictines all over the world (some of my teaches…long ago).There is something here which does demand that we take this movement seriously…all those years ago.
Without this movement, there are some reasonably solid arguments to make to prove that western civilization wouldn’t have made it through to the year 1000CE without them!
I wonder if this is worthy of our respect these days… I didn’t say fealty, admiration, or even agreement…just respect.
It seems like this is happening on at least a couple of different levels. One is white anglo saxon Christians who are intolerant of whatever they happen to fear, without understanding the gradiations of behavior within a particular religious ideology (obviously Islam is the example most likely to come to mind these days). Conversely, a lot of the behavior which drives radical fundamentalist Islam is probably driven by fear of Christianity, or at least fear of what they perceive as the manifestations of our supposed take on Christianity.
Then there are the atheists, agnostics and moderate Christians who are intolerant of the deeply religious because of the rise of what I call "faux Christianity". These "faux Christians" are the people that are part of a fundamentalist Christian ideology that has everything to do with money and politics and very little to do with actually espousing the virtues of Christianity. They make a lot of noise about values, morals etc. but when it comes right down to it do very little to walk the walk. What I have noticed is lately is those who are truly "devout" being lumped in with the "faux Christians". Fear drives the impulse to refuse understanding which drives more irrational fear and the circle continues on......
- spam
- offensive
- disagree
- off topic
Like