By Eh?Nonymous
The regressive left just doesn’t understand religion. And while they pretend to be down with Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Judaism (but only when it’s pitted against white supremacists – otherwise, Judaism is Hitler, apparently) they are just as clueless about the point of these religions as they are about Christianity. You just wouldn’t know it, because they bottle up and unleash a special kind of vitriol for Christianity that makes it difficult to hide their ignorance and their prejudice against it.
They regard humble people who have the audacity to quietly ponder the big theological questions and the meaning of their life, as being somehow less enlightened than more secular people who spend their quiet moments obsessing over the Gospel of Game of Thrones.
If you were to ask a regressive leftist if there is life in deepest space beyond the reaches of our knowledge, they would probably say yes, even though there is no scientific evidence to support this. If you were to say that race and gender are genetic, and not merely social constructs as they claim, they will angrily and categorically deny it with a rabid zealotry, even though there is no scientific evidence to support this. If you were to suggest that there seems to be some kind of intelligent design at work in all of the living things that surround us, the first thing a regressive leftist will demand is scientific evidence.
When it comes to Christianity, the regressive left always gets bogged down and obsessed by disproving the existence of ‘an invisible man in the sky’. They obsess over it like puritans of the highest order.
They spend all of their time searching for that elusive ‘gotcha’ moment, and inexplicably use science to try to debunk the spiritual. Which makes about as much sense as using spirituality to debunk science.
Atheists are a lot like the fun-stoppers who try to debunk pro-wrestling. Pro-wrestling debunkers are infuriated when they see fans enjoying themselves.
“Look at these idiots,” they say. “They actually believe all of this.”
Not exactly. It’s a suspension of disbelief. There’s a difference. They enjoy the pomp and spectacle. The ritual and ceremony.
Pro-wrestling and Religion aren’t exactly the same of course, but the ignorance of those who wish to p— in the punchbowl IS exactly the same. They have no comprehension of what they criticise, yet have the audacity to feel superior to it. They see pro-wrestling and just don’t understand that whether it is real or not is completely irrelevant. They see religion and similarly just don’t understand that whether a deity exists as presented or not is similarly irrelevant.
The main point that they always miss is that Religion would serve exactly the same purpose and fulfil all of the same positive social functions whether a higher power existed or not. When you ask people why they are of a particular faith, you find that the first thing they mention is rarely the wrath or mercy of a deity. They usually mention something surprisingly practical and useful.
Some people are religious because they see it as a reliable road map to live their life by. A moral compass at a time when morality can be blurred. Some people are religious because they feel that it is a means of personal enlightenment and self-fulfilment. Some people see it as a way to focus and help others. Some people see it as the tie that binds family and community. Others see it as a way to get through the trials and tribulations of life.
It can be a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Sometimes, perusing the I F—ing Love Science Facebook page when you’ve just lost somebody to cancer doesn’t quite offer the solace you need.
In short, religion enhances their quality of life, and helps them in dealing with the ebbs and flows of the human condition. Perhaps the intelligent design that drives their faith is real and tangible. Perhaps it’s not. Who is to say? Some things cannot be scientifically measured due to our mortal limitations.
But even if faith is merely a placebo that makes us feel better about our lot in life, and instills in us the desire to better ourselves and help others, is it even in the top five of things you actively want to discredit and destroy?
While I find a lot of Christians to be well balanced, some people literally need religion to stop them from going off the rails. Is spiralling into an abyss of illegal drug addiction, or being relegated to the purgatory of being numbed to all feeling and emotion with legal psychotropic drugs, really a preferable path for the depressed guy down the road to finding God and getting through it drug free? Do we need to throw troubled people under a secular bus and potentially ruin their lives, just to keep smug progressives happy?
People need structure. Religion seems to be able to provide it by and large, way better than big government. Compare poor religious communities, to poor secular communities weaned onto a never ending welfare cycle.
Christianity isn’t perfect. Like any institution it isn’t immune to corruption. There are always monsters in society who will be attracted to environments where they can have access to children. In pre-internet times, churches, scout troops, and schools were the main places that provided these kinds of predatory opportunities.
Now you’re more likely to find pedophiles writing pieces for Salon.com about how we are the Monsters for judging them, and that not allowing them near our children is discriminatory. Cultural Marxists are understandably outraged at the thought that abhorrent child abuse was covered up by Pell and others out of self preservation, but are completely cool with the Rotherham abuse being covered up to similarly preserve politically correct doctrine. If the recently revealed predatory culture at the BBC is anything to go by, perhaps the regressive left needs to get their own house in order before they start casting stones.
In 2016 for the most part, religion (at least the more reasonable, less aggressive ones) does far more good than harm. Hospitals, education, charity, good will, the social cohesiveness of Judeo Christian societies – the benefits are obvious to anyone who is willing to consider them with an open mind.
Compare the good work of the Salvation Army to say, the non-achievements of the Greens. The former has done a lot for the disadvantaged, the latter talks a lot about helping the disadvantaged, but do considerably less (if anything) than the ‘Bible Thumpers’ they sneer at in practice.
Religious organisations generally prefer quiet, meaningful actions to conspicuous slactivism. Which is why people who volunteer for domestic and foreign humanitarian efforts tend to be religious, while people who lazily ‘raise awareness’ (mainly about themselves) are not. Religion makes real and tangible improvements in people’s lives. That’s something that actually could be analytically proven if the regressive left ever bothered to try.
The stock and trade of the regressive left on the other hand, is ordering more tunnel as soon as they see light at the end of it. All these tangible results without the intrusion of an ineffectual secular bureaucracy are problematic to the Cultural Marxist narrative, and literally drives them crazy.
Even though the regressive left scoff at the tangibility of religion, they seem at least subconsciously obsessed with replicating many of its tropes and rituals with those of their own, that are not all that dissimilar when you really look at it.
These include Catholic Guilt (white self-loathing), the congregation (fragmented, divisive support groups), preaching (virtue signalling), prayer (hoping for a hate crime), miracles (finding a hate crime that doesn’t turn out to be a hoax), penance (lazy shares and hashtags), fasting (detox), prayer rooms (yoga, pilates, safe spaces), Gospel (groupthink), shunning (public shaming), and all importantly, Revelation (Climate Change), tithings (carbon credits), and accusations of blasphemy (Climate Change Denial).
Perhaps there is a higher power, and perhaps there isn’t. For what it’s worth, I don’t really have a dog in this fight. I identify as agnostic. I just tend to notice stuff which of course makes me a heretic in regressive left circles.
So no, the regressive left does not understand the point of religion, and probably never will. They can’t even prioritise their grievances about it. The religion that won’t allow gays in the building is somehow more heinous to them than the religion that throws gays OFF the building.
Meanwhile they are pushing several of the most aggressive, destructive, oppressive, intimidating, and intrusive psuedo-religious reformations the West has ever seen in Cultural Marxism, and their tendency to default to problematic and racially condescending concepts such as moral relativism, when defending the more indefensible aspects of Regressive Fundamentalist Islam.
Eh?nonymous was a thoroughly repellent unemployed social justice warrior until a one in a million glitch in his Facebook account affected the algorithms in his news feed, omitting posts from his much loved left leaning Huffington Post and I F**king Love Science, and inexplicably replacing them with centrist and conservative newsfeed items that slowly dragged him kicking and screaming into the light beyond the safe space that Mr. Zuckerberg had so carefully constructed for him. It’s a long road to recovery, but every Mark Steyn share he sees in his newsfeed is like another day clean from social justice addiction.
Photo by elPadawan