The idea that regardless of a person's "right" to make a certain choice, an action can be so harmful that it cannot be corrected, but also that it can be forgiven is too far from how we think and live now.
In the US, at least, if you engage with conservative culture, with Christians, with rural people, with the people who are tired of "cancel culture," you will still find plenty of grace.
I'm an independent. Over the last few years, it has been entirely Coastal people who have cut me out of their lives for things like saying I think the EcoHealth Alliance might have had something to do with COVID-19. The ones left in my life are the ones that know how to give grace.
Sure, this is anecdotal, but it's cultural commentary.
And to throw a bone and not pick too much on one side of the culture war, the Red areas have their own pathologies. For instance, while they won't necessarily stop talking to you altogether if you do something wrong, but lots of them will spread shit about you all over the community if you do.
Maybe everyone could stand to listen to Christ on this topic, whether or not they believe in him in so many words
Yup.
The new thing is that we’re too smart and cool for all the things religion teaches, while we scratch our heads trying to solve all the problems it gives you the solution for.
I think I would have had much more interest in faith/religion if they acknowledged the myth component of their stories, and acknowledged the utility of abiding by the framework nonetheless.
If any theist says they have no doubt, I’d first say they’re possibly lying, maybe to themselves.
First of all, that isn't new. The Renaissance, when philosophy, science and law began to divorce themselves from religion, started about 700 years ago.
Second, nothing useful taught by religion actually requires religion itself. You don't need to believe in salvation through faith, or the Holy Trinity, or Hell and brimstone for the teachings of Jesus to be useful. That isn't religion, that's philosophy.
This hinges very much on your definition of "useful;" if you don't believe in God or the resurrection of the dead, then talk concerning them is of course pointless. But if you do, they are very useful indeed.
Now that situation seems to have shifted, and the left has adopted and re-branded ideas of original sin, absolution, performative prayer, etc. But I don't believe for a minute that folks in my hometown have discovered how to embody the idea of grace and cultural liberality. If anything I see more antagonism now that evangelism and Trumpism have created a terrible two-headed beast.
I also think it could be rephrased in a way that would make it easy to see how it describes the american political right, but I kind of trusted the readers to do that and didn't bother. But things like refusal to wear masks, wide-spread gun ownership, these are the "self-actualizated rights" that conservatives understand as needing no forgiveness regardless of harm caused.
I've been unable to find in the Bible the phrase that says "take from bob and give it to bill and you will be righteous".
My interpretation of the Bible is that Jesus encouraged people to freely give of their own to help others.
I'm genuinely curious where your leftist views derive from Christian principles.
But I am lucky enough to have received a centuries-long tradition of christian radicalism, and came to no conclusions on my own. You can read john chysostom, or mother maria, or tolstoy, or talk to your own priest. The path is well-worn and there are many ways to find it.
I believe that if one espouses honest opinions, and they don't hold up to facts and reason, one should re-evaluate those opinions, or acquire a stronger basis for them.
> In the US, at least, if you engage with conservative culture, with Christians, with rural people, with the people who are tired of "cancel culture," you will still find plenty of grace.
As is often the case with generalization born of prejudice, this effort to split good and evil along ideological lines fails to match up with reality. Plenty of Progressives give grace to people around them. Plenty of Christians ostracize and abuse even the people closest to them. The vocal hypocrites on either side loom large for their ideological opponents and the quietly good on either side are easily ignored, except by their ideological peers. This pattern holds in rural towns and huge cities.
The problems of selfishness and hate for others are difficult to solve, and unfortunately even a framework as simple as Christ's demonstrates that. Try not to get too comfortable with the belief that people who see the world differently aren't still trying to navigate it kindly.
The sjws and Christians show grace in exactly the same way: you earn it by converting.
Middle America also has it's own issues, nihilism, crab mentality (big one), and drug issues (also a coastal problem) are some that come to mind
Is that really a thing people believe? I don't think that's actually true. B/c people know they fuck up, and they will ask the people around them for forgiveness, and they think they can deserve it. And when someone who actually matters in our lives does something wrong, we can sometimes forgive them.
I think the problem is:
- the most highly visible cases are often public figures who did something wrong for a long time and only expressed when they were caught or caught and publicly shamed. It's hard to believe these people are sincere when they repent.
- the public performance of unforgiveness has itself become an opportunity for virtue signaling.
- the most sincere apologies are for these reasons given and received out of the public eye, and I think we then don't see the real response modeled very often.