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Notes -
I had quite the throwback culture war experience this past weekend. While at a family gathering, my dad was cornered by an in-law and quizzed about my “agnosticism”.
He was asked if he had led me to this lack of faith, and was then informed that it’s the patriarch’s responsibility to “get his family into heaven” – a neat little double-duty insult of both himself and me.
I tend to be a very laid-back guy in meatspace, but found myself livid. I’ve been in this family for close to a decade, and the sheer cowardice and arrogance of this exchange was breathtaking. To circle around to one of my direct family members instead of having the cajones to challenge me directly was ridiculous (and in hindsight, what I should have really expected from these people).
We’ve been existing in what I thought was a reasonable detente. As a victorious participant in the Atheism culture war, I’ve been kinda-sorta prepared to have these skirmishes with my wife’s catholic family for a long time. The unspoken agreement was that I go to church for holidays, let you splash water on my children, and don’t bring up anyone’s hypocrisy/the church’s corruption, rampant pedophilia/the inherent idiocy in believing in god.
In exchange, I get to stay balls deep in my excellent wife and should be left alone.
I’ll be the first to admit the excesses of Atheism’s victory laps and see how “live and let live” can slide down the slope into a children’s drag show. But this indirect exchange reminded me that when the culture war pendulum swings back, I should be prepared for the petty tyrants and fools on the religious right to reassert themselves. We’re already starting to see the tendrils of this, even if some of their forces have been replaced with rainbow-skinsuit churches across the US.
For Christian motteziens - No disrespect intended. I'm aware of the hypocrisy of my arrogance in this post, and it's intended to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek
So how do you want me to interact with this post other than saying "nice blog bro!"? We aren't here to be your therapist.
But yes, the detente is over and was over when the state closed churches and masses for COVID. Even when reopening occured, diktats came down as to how Churches were to administer the Eucharist, which I might remind you is the holiest and most central ritual in Christiandom.
So your father-in-law is for all intents and purposes trying to figure out if you are going to be an asset or liability in the culture war. Are you sending your children to a classical school or a public school?
Tophat, is that you?
You could make this same argument about literally any political wedge, or even tangential events. Oh, they shot Kennedy, guess the Catholic detente must be over. What’s so special about COVID lockdowns to decide that now is the time to strike?
Screwing with the Eucharist is messing with a central pillar of the religion. That is very clearly an invasion of the sacred by the state, in the way an assasination of the head of the state is not.
Why not? Murdering Christians is surely frowned upon. Yet the death of a Christian is not sufficient to end the detente, because there are other factors at play.
So why is that line drawn here, at “screwing with” the Eucharist? Why not at the death penalty? At Roe v. Wade? At every bump and scrape of a religious institution against the world’s competing secular interests?
This is silly.
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