The “Enlightened” World Of Indy Commenters

The Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, in the Independent:

Cormac Murphy-O’Connor: Why is religious belief seen as a private eccentricity?

The Archbishop’s article itself isn’t offering anything dramatically unexpected.  However, if you do read the (not very long) piece, what is perhaps most interesting isn’t so much what he wrote.  Instead, it is what one “learns” from the mass of the truly insightful Indy commenters.

For most of them, religion is bunk or worse.  They are entitled to that view, certainly.  However, no one can escape that this (very simplified offering) is definitely not bunk: The execution of Jesus Christ is an historical fact as sure as you reading this is fact, and — and here is the key — his followers said, he had risen from the dead and that they had seen him.

But that was just the beginning.  They then told anyone who would listen, and shared what they believed His rising meant.  And many of them eventually paid with their lives for their determined “spreading of the word” that that had happened.

Those facts — not whether Jesus Christ actually rose or did not, but what they said and what that has meant through the centuries — have helped create the foundations for the very civilization in which we dwell.

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And, now, most of the time, so imbued with it are we, we don’t bother to think too much about it.  Whether one believes the Resurrection happened or not is not the real issue, for the fundamental historical reality of Christianity and its impacts are undeniable.  In fact, we measure time owing to Christianity.

Some want “to free” us all from that?  But replace it with what exactly?  Christianity has already dramatically altered much of humanity’s morals.

Romans and pre-Christians had functioned largely under the assumption that the strong deserved to survive, while the weak invariably perished.  But Christianity loathes both capital punishment and abortion; killing is acceptable only in the most narrow of circumstances.  Christian Roman Emperor Constantine — who had enough of the “pre-Christian” remaining in him still to think he had the right to kill anyone he pleased; and he regularly did — banned crucifixion because “Our Lord” had been shamefully executed by that method.

Christianity similarly demands we look after the impoverished and the vulnerable; pre-Christian Romans would have considered that laughable.  If Christian Romans and Christians who followed insisted on still keeping slaves, other Christians questioned their doing so; eventually enough Christians said doing so was no longer acceptable — helped along by the Industrial Revolution, of course.  Industrialization then troubled and still also troubles Christianity, yet Christians also understand its necessity while working to mitigate its excesses.

If crusades and wars were once fought in its name, and popes took to the battlefield as another holdover from pre-Christendom, over time both have become inconceivable; war is now undertaken hoping somehow it is for the greater good and that God somehow approves, not assuming that He does.  Indeed, the Nazis felt Christianity had somehow to be purged and pre-Christian “Germanic” mores restored, because Christianity had over the centuries undermined the inherent “toughness” of the Germanic character.

Christianity has done far more for “human rights” over the centuries than hundreds of “international declarations.”  It has also proven astoundingly flexible, and capable of being reinterpreted in places on the planet no Roman in AD 400 could have imagined even existed.  We are just too close to matters often to realize all that.

Naturally, not everything changes overnight.  However, over 2,000 years, Christianity has helped remake much of the world.  And it still does.

Above all, it never ceases to make us uncomfortable, because it never ceases to remind us that none of us are perfect, that we always have more to do, that we can be more charitable, more humble, and better than we are, and that none of us are here for very long.

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Talk about a matter of the most fundamental liberal and social significance.  Were it not for Christianity, what would we be today?  It is impossible even to offer a guess.

Consider this.  Apparently not a one of those sagacious Indy commenters who disparages Christianity, enjoys music, and therefore couldn’t care less from where the notation that makes an orchestra (and, occasionally, a pop singer) possible comes to us from:

The ignorant — or are many actually quite that familiar with what, and whom, they so casually and inexpertly dismiss? — and even downright vicious tone of most of them suddenly also brought to the mind of yours truly this observation once made of Benjamin Franklin:

He went to church on occasion because he thought Christianity, while it might be untrue, was indispensible to the kind of society he preferred.

Making one’s way through those rude, nasty Indy commenters responding to a piece that was not composed in a rude, nasty manner, one hardly has to label oneself “Christian” to grasp precisely what Franklin had meant.

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UPDATE:  Worth bearing in mind also that without Christianity, there would not be Islam either.  That said, why is the Mail covering this?  Sounds like interfaith commentator Mr Choudhary could easily produce an Indy op-ed?

A bigger issue: as a “a lawyer,” why is he living on £25,000 a year in benefits courtesy of our ever-increasing taxes?

If this Government wants to coerce single mothers with no qualifications and not so young children into ringing on supermarket tills or stacking shelves, shouldn’t the “highly educated” Mr Choudhary be earning taxable income “lawyering?”  True, that may not be particularly “charitable” to demand.  But, then again, yours truly isn’t perfect.