James wrote: For any Christian - or anyone investigating Christianity…
I don’t think Laurie is either of these, James. He enjoys leading others on, daring them to “prove” to him that homosexuality is wrong or that Christianity can make you happy. With no belief in God or knowledge of sin, he recalls Dostoyevsky’s line “If there is no God, everything is permitted.”
Let me quote Michael Novak: “Just as some people have no ear for music, so others (as Friedrich Hayek put it) “have no ear for God.” Still others say they have no “need” for God. They sense in themselves no round hole into which God fits.
One of the blessings of atheism seems to be that it takes away any sense of Judgment, any sense that by one’s actions one may be offending or injuring a Friend, any awareness of sin. “Sin” seems, indeed, to be a leftover from a bygone age. I’ve challenged Laurie to define Sin and he can’t. He avoids the subject and challenges others to explain how homosexuality is wrong.
“At the heart of Christianity is the sinner,” a very great Christian, Charles Péguy, once wrote. Some of us are aware of doing things that we know we ought not to have done, and of not doing things that we know we ought to have done.
We are aware of sinning against our own conscience – deliberately doing what we know to be wrong, whether from weakness or from powerful desires that are out of control. Afterward, sometimes, we feel a remorse so keen that it hurts – and yet what has been done is done, and nothing we now do can take that fault away. And at times the fault is shamefully grave, at that.
It is to this common, virtually universal experience that Jesus, like John the Baptist before him, first addressed his auditors, “Be sorry! Do penance. Resolve not to sin again.” (Even though the probabilities of sinning again are high, just as a man with a bad knee, though his knee has healed, knows that it will too easily go out on hint)
Christianity is not about moral arrogance. It is about moralism, and moral humility Wherever you see self-righteous persons condemning others and unaware of their own sins, you are not in the presence of an alert Christian but of a priggish pretender.
It was in fact a great revolution in human history when the Jewish and Christian God revealed Himself as one who sees directly into consciences, and is not misled merely by external acts. (This God would be unpersuaded by the external pietas of the numerous Greek and Roman pagan philosophers who – unconcerned about conscience – were sure to be present at religious rites, whether they took the gods seriously or not.)
The biblical respect for conscience greatly dignified and honored inner acts of reflection, commitment, and choice. Laurie has none, James. I wouldn’t waste your time appealing to one.
dj
