I do not think that, as a community, Christians have been reflecting adequately upon what is lost in the promotion of the secular-liberal anti-ethos. In light of Smith\u2019s and Giussani\u2019s observations, it is notable that, whereas the neo-pagan dispensation extends maximum indulgence to certain kinds of human characteristics (sexual preference, gender \u201cchoices,\u201d race, etc.), it increasingly withholds approval for this other \u201clayer\u201d of human identity. This denial is justified implicitly on the basis that religion is a \u201csoftware\u201d issue, a matter of choice, whereas the others\u2014sex, race, etc.\u2014 are \u201chardware issues,\u201d outside the control of the implicated person.<\/p>\n
To see religion as \u201csoftware\u201d is to see things from the perspective of the skeptic, the unbeliever, from a position of hostility. We know why neo-pagans might choose to see things in that way, but more mysterious is why religious people increasingly limit their pleading to petitions for tolerance, space, freedom-to-practice, etc.<\/p>\n
By Giussani\u2019s analysis the religious sense is concerned not just with membership in a church, or with prescribed lists of dogmas, rules, beliefs, or theologies, but with the notion that there is an element of the human person to which only transcendent concepts are capable of providing a correspondence. Recently, Pope Francis compared the hope offered by faith to \u201cthe air we breathe,\u201d an apt metaphor. When religious rights are suppressed, so too is the capacity of the human being\u2014including the secular human being\u2014to breathe fully in reality.<\/p>\n
Religion deals with those aspects of the human that concern imagining ourselves before, during, and after our earthly existence\u2014in and on either side of the \u201ctunnel\u201d of the earthly trajectory. Neo-pagan culture cherishes the human in the tunnel of this existence only. When we are dying and frightened, society offers to sedate us but refuses to do any more than \u201ctolerate\u201d notions of a further journey beyond this dimension. In the pope\u2019s metaphor: Our breathing becomes subject to cultural constriction.<\/p>\n
If the idea of \u201clive and let live\u201d is applied only to the right of Christians to privately believe in daft ideas, there will come a time when each of us is excluded from the protection of the human community in the context of its institutions, laws, and enabling ideas.<\/p>\n
Read it all<\/a>.<\/p>\n When religious rights are suppressed, so too is the capacity of the human being to breathe fully in reality.https:\/\/t.co\/6cqKXZnOQs<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 First Things (@firstthingsmag) November 4, 2019<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n