Recently, I watched this video by some atheist guy who had been a big fan of the New Atheists back in the day. He is reviewing a recent episode of STRANGE NEW WORLDS in which Christopher Pike basically makes his peace with God–Big G God, the Christian God, not a force, entity, power, Q, or Ball of Energy, but the one from the Apostle’s Creed–and kneels to pray the Our Father:
What strikes me is that he is basically cool with it. All the Evangelical fervor of the New Atheists for the Inevitable March of Progress, all Picard’s sermonizing about the “nightmare” of darkness and ignorant superstition: gone. I appreciated his overview of Trek’s famously complex relationship with religion, from Roddenberry’s sotto voce hostility through the fruition of that hostility in the NextGen years, to DS9’s vigorous restoration of generic religious belief–and now this striking restoration, not simply of “religion” but of actual Christian belief and prayer in the Star Trek Universe. I always thought the whole “in the future we will evolve past God” thing was the most preposterous part of the Star Trek future and appreciated Babylon 5’s clear-eyed recognition that religion is a permanent feature of the human condition (because, I submit, God is real and human beings will never ever ever be able to stop desiring him). Our need to worship is as fundamental to our being as our need for water. We can’t not worship. We can only choose between worshiping God and worshiping what is not God.
One of the things that keeps striking me as the Greatest Christians of All Time keep cosplaying as martyrs of the Godless Left that stalks their self-pitying imagination is how even the gung ho atheists of twenty years ago keep softening in their hostility to questions of faith while the GCOAT keep hardening into militant crazies who think Eisenhower was a communist and who have now, themselves, mutated into the greatest persecutors of Christians on our soil, calling for the arrest, deportation and even execution of people like AOC for the crime of Christianing while brown.
Meanwhile, in the middle are millions of ordinary believers (AOC is one of them) who want the gospel of Christ without all the MAGA toxicity and whose grasp of common decency understands that you can love people *and* God, that you are not an idiot for accepting the supernatural, that faith and love are not opposites, that discipleship to Christ does not mean turning yourself into a braindead moron–and that an atheist who loves his neighbor is closer to Christ than a believer consumed with hatred.
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9 Responses
“…an atheist who loves his neighbor is closer to Christ than a believer consumed with hatred.”
It would seem to suggest that baptism is a bit superfluous then, to me at least.
Only if you conceive of the sacraments as reducing valves designed to keep as many people away from the love of God as possible. *We* are bound by the sacraments, but God is not bound. He can give grace as he pleases. His normative way of doing so is via the sacraments. Think of them as *sure encounters* with grace, not as the only means of grace. If you know for certain God is giving grace through them and refuse them, then you are directly disobeying God (and Catholics can and do commit such disobedience all the time). But if you know nothing of the sacraments and still try to obey Christ, you are responding to grace whether you realize it or not. Remember the unbaptized Good Thief!
Thoughts on American Solidarity Party?
Methadone treatment for conservative Christians who want to go on supporting Trump while taking no responsibility for their choice.
Three months before Dorothy Day died, she wrote in her diary, “I went to jail in Washington, D.C. for woman’s suffrage in the fall of 1917, but I have never voted.” And throughout her life, she made no apologies for exercising her right NOT to vote. It seems contradictory for someone so involved in social affairs, but Dorothy did not put her faith in political candidates. She prayed and fasted, and lived the corporal and spiritual works of mercy. Her preoccupation was “how to bring about a revolution of the heart.”
https://www.clonline.org/en/current-events/letters/2016-10-11-dorthy-day-the-suffragette-who-never-voted
I cant agree when it is actually the best party out there
I think you were generally supportive of the solidarity party some years ago, but memory doesn’t always serve me well.
Did they turn MAGA?
It may be the best party, but what are they doing to make themselves known? Nobody knows they exist whereas people do know about the Greens or Libertarians or other third parties. Have they made themselves known to the D party at all? Or do they stay in their cocoon? Most of the D ideas match to a large part the American Solidarity. Why aren’t they showing up at D caucuses, or campaigns or any other party events? Like it or not, the choice today is D or R (or rather MAGA). Did they endorse any D candidates like Harris or are they too “pure” to dirty their hands by saying, like it or not, we have to vote for Ds? Germany fell to Hitler because the 1930s socialists, communists, monarchists, unionists, etc. refused to believe that there were only 2 choices – Hitler or nonHitler, regardless of the parties.
I cant take you seriously when you keep making the Nazi comparisons. Its insulting to those that we know who actually endured that.