M
mercyalways
Guest
From Crisis magazine, an article by Anthony Esolen:
Esolen argues a dying culture would show "a preoccupation with death…It would promote a right to die on your own terms, but no right to live, rather only a permission to live, provided that you possess certain qualities that people acknowledge as useful … Life is no gift, but a mere thing, to be disposed of at will, like garbage. Nothing is sacred —not the body, not the soul, no place, no object, no name, no human persons, no history, no songs, no God.
A dying culture would have "willed sterility… First, a hatred or fear of one’s own fertility, leading to voluntary sterilization; for the sterile is, anthropologically, next door to the dead. Second, a refusal to marry, or a complete lack of interest in marriage, whether the ordinary marriage of man and woman, or the spiritual marriage one enters as a religious; the wedding feast to which Jesus compares the kingdom of God has no appeal. Nothing is sacred.
It would "crush, dismember, or fry in salt that astonishingly beautiful child in the womb…(and) not scruple to invade the haven of a child’s blessed innocence…since nothing is sacred , the people of a dying culture will be eager to have children join them in corruption and meaningless hedonism, festooned as always with euphemism, like lipstick and false hair on a skull.
"The people of a dying culture not only smother their future in the womb. They murder their ancestors too… . Down come the statues in the public squares,
"Utopian schemes abound, even while the decadent art of the age sees but vast networks of human misery to come. For utopian towers are cemented with hatred for what is .
"Optimism, grinning and gold-toothed, steps in to take the place of hope, holding forth not forgiveness, redemption, and new birth, but a merciless judgment against the past, and change, vague and undirected, some change, any change, as a sick person on a bed tosses and turns for relief that does not come.
Has he nailed it?
Esolen argues a dying culture would show "a preoccupation with death…It would promote a right to die on your own terms, but no right to live, rather only a permission to live, provided that you possess certain qualities that people acknowledge as useful … Life is no gift, but a mere thing, to be disposed of at will, like garbage. Nothing is sacred —not the body, not the soul, no place, no object, no name, no human persons, no history, no songs, no God.
A dying culture would have "willed sterility… First, a hatred or fear of one’s own fertility, leading to voluntary sterilization; for the sterile is, anthropologically, next door to the dead. Second, a refusal to marry, or a complete lack of interest in marriage, whether the ordinary marriage of man and woman, or the spiritual marriage one enters as a religious; the wedding feast to which Jesus compares the kingdom of God has no appeal. Nothing is sacred.
It would "crush, dismember, or fry in salt that astonishingly beautiful child in the womb…(and) not scruple to invade the haven of a child’s blessed innocence…since nothing is sacred , the people of a dying culture will be eager to have children join them in corruption and meaningless hedonism, festooned as always with euphemism, like lipstick and false hair on a skull.
"The people of a dying culture not only smother their future in the womb. They murder their ancestors too… . Down come the statues in the public squares,
"Utopian schemes abound, even while the decadent art of the age sees but vast networks of human misery to come. For utopian towers are cemented with hatred for what is .
"Optimism, grinning and gold-toothed, steps in to take the place of hope, holding forth not forgiveness, redemption, and new birth, but a merciless judgment against the past, and change, vague and undirected, some change, any change, as a sick person on a bed tosses and turns for relief that does not come.
Has he nailed it?
