We Are Repaganising

I get the uncomfortable feeling that there are post-hoc and genetic fallacies floating around this piece, especially when the author keeps implying certain attitudes or beliefs are inseparable from Christianity. (Directly or indirectly, historically or potentially.)

> When we accept the Christian emphasis on weakness as a crucial prior, many other moral conclusions follow.

Perhaps... but it does not follow that emphasizing something while Christian is the only possible way to maintain those practical moral policies.

> Here’s the problem for the feminists busy sawing at the branch on which they sit: The same Christian ideas that grant feminism its moral force carry other implications.

This sounds an awful lot like "Feminism has to be Christian because it involves caring for the weak and Christianity is the only real way to do that."

> Whether we like it or not, we cannot place the protection of the vulnerable at the heart of our ethical system without reaching the conclusion that the unborn child ought not to be killed.

By that logic, when the "protection of the vulnerable" is "at the heart of your ethical system" then all those believers must be vegan.

Yet, strangely enough, Christianity has existed through many centuries without being notably known for that! The discrepancy means Christianity does not reeeeealy prioritize protecting the vulnerable... or else it means that additional conditions--like considering personhood--are permitted.

> There’s a very short and very brutal poem by the Scottish poet Hollie McNish, written in 2019 and titled “Conversation with an archaeologist”:

> he said they’d found a brothel on the dig he did last night I asked him how they know he sighed: a pit of babies’ bones a pit of newborn babies’ bones was how to spot a brothel

> “It’s true, you know,” said the writer and lawyer Helen Dale when we had lunch in London last year and I mentioned this poem, which I chose as one of the epigraphs to my book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. Helen was a classicist before she was a lawyer, and as a younger woman she had taken part in archaeological excavations of ancient Roman sites. “First you find the erotic statuary,” she went on, “and then you dig a bit more and you find the male infant skeletons.” Male, of course, because the males were of no use to the keepers of Roman brothels, whereas the female infants born to prostituted women were raised into prostitution themselves.