The Same Old Song

     As long time readers of this broadside are aware, we here at Bloody Nib Manor as Christians. The ever lovely Lady Nib is an Anglican and your faithful correspondent is an Old Baptist, as well as being an old Baptist.
     This fact matters to this entry because this entry deals with the shrinking Christian ethos in the West and the results of such shrinkage.
     The West, specifically Western Europe, the United States and Canada, were heretofore nations and cultures based on the Christian ethos, whether Roman Catholic or Protestant. The Church and the teachings from the Bible were as important, or more important,  to the average citizen or subject in personal and public life as were the dictates of the governments. For the highly educated there were such teachers as Socrates and Marcus Aurelius and the histories of Greece and Rome to draw upon for wisdom and ideas of governance, but even these eggheads always referred to the teachings of the Bible to make their case to the wider world. We, as societies like to natter on about the Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence, the Icelandic republic and so forth. But in the end, it was always the Judeo-Christian ethos and belief in Judaism and Christianity that have put the best parts of those documents into effect. When we look at the results of the French Revolution and the de jure banning of the Jewish and Christian teachings and ethos we see the results of the abandonment of the things that made life in France livable for the average Frenchman. We see mass executions of the aristocrats, the unfavored, and the religious -- including a convent of Carmalite nuns---, the assumption, in a way that no monarchy had before been assumed in the West, that the citizen was a tool of the state, and the assumption that they, the revolutionaries, have not only made a government anew, but the world anew i.e., the establishment of a ten day week and the first year of the Revolution being called Year one. The silliness, in its self is overwhelming. Or it would be if the Soviets in the Russian Revolution, the Nazis, the Chinese Communists and the Cambodian Communists had not done the same thing in spades.
      What we have in the West now is the result of more than seventy years of de-Christianization which was led, not only by atheists and agnostics, but by liberal Christian theologians. One cannot blame atheists and agnostics. They are what they are; fools. But liberal Christian theologians are to be blamed. They are to blame hard and heartily condemned. They are fellow travelers in the same way that many wealthy persons supported the Soviets  back at the beginning of the 20th century or as actors support mere idiocy now. They saw a what they thought of as a "better idea" that was new. They still reverted Jesus, but not as the Truth. They saw, and still see Him as a Jewish version of Socrates and Plato; a man with some pretty good ideas. And when one is dealing with man instead of the Son of Man one can pretty much ignore the things that that man said in favor of the new flavor. Mohammed said a few (two nor three) things that make sense, so one might as well put an illiterate Arab trader on the same level as the Son of God.
     Female genital mutilation is considered by the New Theologian, a sad thing, but excusable in the same way that women in the church were expected to wear a hat or veil (your writer remembers those days in Protestant churches). Abortion on demand, while sad according to the New Theologian, is also sad, but a woman's happiness is more important than a child. We all deserve to be happy, don't we? And same sex marriage is just a matter of courtesy to our gay brethren and sisters; they are nice people and are born that way. Meanwhile, if a dirty drunk stumbles into the New Theologian's church, is confronted by the New Theologian and the drunk says that he wants Communion the New Theologian will probably give the drunk the address of a rehab clinic and send him on his way despite the drunk saying that he can't help being a drunk. He was born that way.
     The New Theologian kicks out the props of Western society while saying that he loves, not Western society or Jesus Christ, but the world. And this intellectually poor educated dope actually thinks that he's doing God's work by ignoring God's Word. After all, the New Theologian has a B.A., an M.Div and maybe a T.Hd. Jesus never made it to high school as far as we know. The old Scottish crofter, the American sharecropper, the mechanic, and the boy behind the plow read the Bible and studied it more in a year than the New Theologians does in a lifetime. And the reason that he comes up with such silly and destructive ideas and pronouncements is because he want to be liked and respected in the world at large. He has forgotten, or does not want to remember that Christians have three enemies; the World, the Flesh and the Devil.
     The New Theologian is more dangerous to Western society than the atheist or agnostic because he operates under the cover of Faith. He is, in a sense, antiChist in that he misrepresents the teachings of Christ under the cover of Christ. And because so many people who regard themselves as Christians have no knowledge of the Bible or their faith, they will follow the New Theologian over a cliff like lemmings. And along the way they will do their best to change Western society to an anarchic and at the same time fascistic society while they insist that they are being "nice."
     The odd thing is that back in the 18th century and before "nice" meant "silly."  They condemn themselves with their own words and don't realize it. And they condemn us with their ideas and don't realize it.