Christian love

[Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema]

Did I say that Christianity "caused" anything specific? No. I imagine that we can
all agree that causality is very complex and needs careful examination in any
instance. Instead, from the start of this thread I was trying to make the point
that Christianity is a broad, diverse, multifarious phenomenon. Hence I introduced
the correspondingly diverse concept of sado-masochism. Chip, for reasons I do not
know, seemed to think I was asserting that all Christians are like what the people
who run the Heartland Christian School seem to be. Perhaps he was misinterpreting
the concept of sado-masochism, and thinking I meant it in its colloquial,
whips-and-leather meaning.  Reading my initial post from start to finish (It wasn't
all that long -- ten lines of text.) should have sufficed to show that I wasn't,
and that I specifically gave credit to those kinds of Christians that Chip and I,
no doubt, would both find more or less politically congenial. There is no
"put-down" in this.

Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema

Carrol Cox wrote:


> Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema wrote:
> >
> > Also, if you notice, I didn't say it was "a crock" in my original post, which
> > responded, just to recapitulate, to Kevin Dean's posting data on gross
> > brutality in a Christian school in Missouri. Nor did I "trash" Christianity
> > as Chip accused me of doing. I pointed out that the brutality in the school
> > was only one aspect of Christianity, and referred to others, which we on the
> > left tend to see as positive. Barely even a criticism in any of this.
>
> Class society entails extreme brutality -- and various ideologies will
> emerge to justify that brutality. Platonists of various sorts will then
> turn this upside down and explain the behavior in terms of the ideology,
> with the implication that another ideology would not lead to the same
> behavior. This is incoherent.
>
> >
> > Perhaps Christianity is even deeper difficulty than we realized if Chip feels
> > compelled to defend it even against analytic description.
>
> One version or another of Christianity has at one time or another been
> invoked to explain, justify, or attack almost every form of human
> behavior. That is, substitute almost anything for X int he following
> sentence, and you will be paraphrasing the actual thought of some group
> in the last 2000 years: "Christianity causes X." Since Christianity (in
> the abstract) explains everything it explains nothing. For explanatory
> force we would have to show why a given selection of doctrines in one
> instance, or among one group, leads to one set of behaviors, and in
> another instance or among another group leads to another set of
> behaviors. And since these differences do in fact occur, the common
> element (the given set of doctrines) has no explanatory force.
>
> And hence Chip is at least partly right in seeing this as an attack on
> _people_, not merely an analytic description. To be blunt about it, the
> whole thing strikes me as what could be crudely called a put-down. "What
> can you expect of people who believe X" -- they don't have any objective
> reason for believing it, so it must be their internal make-up." Like all
> forms of baiting, there is no way to respond to this. That's the point
> of a put-down -- to make it impossible for the other party to respond,
> for whatever they say has been disqualified in advance.
>
> Saying that Christianity is a crock is perhaps not the best
> argumentative decorum, but Doug is right it is not bigotry. Saying that
> all Christian thought necessarily exemplifies such and such a motive
> _is_ reprehensible -- whether bigotry is the correct label I don't know,
> but a nasty label is called for.
>
> Carrol
> >
> > Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema
> >
> > Doug Henwood wrote:
> >
> > > Michael Pollak wrote:
> > >
> > > >Nope, it's a creed, as in "no discrimination on the basis of race, color
> > > >or creed."  You've never heard of anti-religious bigotry?
> > >
> > > Not hiring someone because s/he's a Christian would be
> > > discrimination; saying that Christianity is a crock isn't bigotry.
> > >
> > > Doug