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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   28630 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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If I was the Catholic Church or [insert non-Catholic denominational leadership], I would be funding such groups as hard as possible and conditioning my political donations on candidates plugging the idea in their stump speeches.

Yeah, big winner there. "Let's all be lukewarm vaguely-Protestant non-churchgoers who just want to be respectable and go along with whatever is currently the Zeitgeist". Not that this hasn't happened; a lot of "go to Mass on Sunday" Catholics happily fell away when the social force of conformism round that disappeared (look at the vocations crisis).

You want people to sign up to a church-that's-not-a-church, but why would they do that? If they want to join something, they'll join a sports club or hobby group or something that gives them a sense of enjoyment in return for participation and effort, not "out of your limited after work free time, go to this meeting to agree over how there should be more litter bins on the streets".

Also the Ten Commandments are being edited down to fit in with social mores; no of course we don't approve of murder, but abortion is not murder. Euthanasia is just mercy and death with dignity. No adultery? Well me and Mrs. Jones have a thing going on, we both know it's wrong, but it's much too strong to let it go now. Anyway, divorce is now legal and why are you trying to force me to stay in a dead marriage? Lying? Oh come on, everyone tells fibs. Don't steal? Shoplifting is a victimless crime, that's what insurance is for. No taking the name of the Lord in vain? Jesus H. Christ on a fucking crutch and the bicycle he rode in on, what kind of language police crap is this? The New Commandments are pretty much Racism Bad, Phobes Bad, Capitalism Bad. (Orange Man Bad optional).

EDIT: Isn't there already Christian Atheism in America, in the guise of the Civic Religion? Fourth of July is the sacred holiday, Washington and Lincoln the blessed saints, anecdotes like Washington and the cherry tree being the new Golden Legend (and indeed nearly deliberately created to be so), we are the shining city on a hill, exceptionalism, the Heavenly Father (carefully not getting any more denominational than that) has blessed us, God (of your own personal choice or value system) bless America, hail the flag our sacred relic and emblem!

But that sort of patriotism is now bad and wicked and evil, isn't it? I think the new civic religion is growing up to be Pride Month our sacred holy days, Pride Flags in all their novel iterations the sacred emblems, Happy Holidays the festivals and feast days where we worship at the altars of Mammon, the shopping malls and online stores (Black Friday and Cyber Monday as Lenten/Advent replacements) etc. People make jokes about the blessed martyr St. Floyd but I think that's truer than you know. You have Secular Religion Christian Atheism already, you just don't recognise that yet.

Related to the American civic religion, I've sometimes wondered why the people who don't want all that actual-Christianity stuff but still want rituals and history and a framework for continence and self-development and community don't gravitate more towards Freemasonry, which would in fact provide all that. There's a requirement to believe in a Creator but my understanding is that it doesn't feature too prominently.

Anyone else old enough to remember the Flintstones cartoon (the original, not the movie remakes) and how Fred and Barney were members of the Loyal Order of Water Buffaloes? I think that, for a period, groups like this were the kind of alternate community for ritual and belonging in a secular sense for people, as they slowly transitioned away from church-going being more than the social obligation but before we got full atomised individualism.

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