In order to get perspective on the religious dilemmas of 21st America (and to some degree elsewhere), let’s rewind a couple of millennia to a period that in some ways, looks surprisingly (or unsurprisingly?) familiar.
In the first century, an embattled religious minority were terrified of the encroachment of external authorities upon their people and their faith.
They were really scared of all the untoward ideas and practices that were being disseminated by disloyal insiders and hostile outsiders alike.
They felt that the powers that be were either enemies or collaborators, that their national character was being destroyed, and that maybe within a matter of years, or decades at the most, their unique and precious society and way of life would be eliminated, and truth would at last be teetering on the verge of extinction.
They were about to be spiritually and materially dispossessed by elitist outside forces who looked down on them and talked down to them, and considered them to be backward and primitive rednecks; and beside these enemies, there were also their submissive stooges among the more disloyal elements of the population.
Then a brilliant teacher, yea, and more than a teacher, arrived upon the scene.
He said that he was not here to revise or redefine the fundamental norms and laws, but rather to fulfil them, by showing them that letter kills, and the spirit gives life.
The authorities were amazed at how he spent time with drunkards and people commonly despised for their highly unconventional and controversial sexual behaviour.
They murmured that he was only PRETENDING to follow the divinely revealed law, and secretly wanted to destroy it, by undermining it from within.
Any attempts to defend the targets of their wrath was met with accusations of collaboration with foreign enemies.
The only possible explanation for this behaviour is that he is promoting THEIR agenda.
If he really believed in our religion, he would keep well away from these people, and not be an enabler.
He seems more interested in listening to them than warning them of what God has commanded.
He seems to think that by simply hanging around these people, some kind of virtue might somehow rub off on them.
Well, good luck with that one!
NOTHING good ever came from half measures.
We need to avoid all those misguided ones who do not follow our teachings, and who want to either subvert and change our religion from within, or indeed to destroy it completely.
You cannot negotiate with terrorists.
All these people want to do is to change things that cannot be changed.
They may say ‘Nobody ever listened to us before, apart from this man!’ but what is the purpose of listening to such manipulative, narcissistic sexual deviants?
It’s just a power play.
We all know what they’re like.
They may be all nice and cutesy and cuddly now, but it’s pretty obvious they are only trying to garner sympathy so they can get everyone to follow them, and recruit more people to the path of ungodly ideas and behaviour.
By all means show compassion, but this is not really compassion now, is it?
God is angry with the wicked every day, and if they do not turn first and be clean, then those of us who know the truth should not risk being corrupted by unhealthy company.
Better a few people should perish from their obstinacy and lack of virtue, than the whole country perish from letting these people worm their way in and start confusing people and looking for opportunities to indoctrinate us with their dangerous mindset and filthy habits!
Eventually, the murmurs turned to howls of rage.
The people decided that they had been too patient with this perilous troublemaker, and that, in a moment of weakness, they had tried to be sympathetic to these notorious moral deviants and let things die down.
But giving them a chance just didn’t seem to have done any good, and with hindsight, it had been deeply misguided.
Warning the faithful about these terrible people just didn’t seem to be enough.
For despite their leniency the pious had shown towards the thoroughly undeserving, these unspeakably wicked enemies of the truth had only thrown it back in their faces and continued to enable this uninformed, unreflective, sentimental fence-sitter, who kept lying and pretending to love God, when he was really out to destroy the religion by trying to reconcile irreconcilables and giving a platform to people who were only trying to elicit sympathy…
When really, what the drunkards and sexual deviants were trying to do was to make everyone like them, completely blind to the most obvious and fundamental basics of morality.
And so, they finally decided enough was enough.
This has just gone too far.
There is absolutely nothing ‘loving’ about lending a listening ear to the kind of people who stubbornly refuse to learn, but who insist on demanding to be heard themselves, sometimes with crocodile tears about how hard done by they are.
Well, enough is enough.
We won’t let someone compromise our message by paying lip service to all our laws on what behaviour is forbidden, while all the time, he is causing scandal by legitimising all these insane people and perpetually disturbing the peace with his disorderly band of lunatics and rejects and social outcasts.
More and more people are following him, and every day, we are hearing that abusers of strong drink and the sexually immoral are just getting too big for their boots.
Some of them are not even showing the basic rudiments of repentance, and are simply a little bit better on some secondary matters, while they continue to wallow in their major sins.
And these superficial, secondary improvements are deemed more important than their manifest sins?
And this is the people he is enabling.
He says God is patient with everyone.
On the contrary, God is patient with the repentant sinner.
He is not patient with those who commit major faults, because minor sins he can overlook for the sake of his own mercy, but if people want to work gradually on small matters and work their way up to the things that really matter, then God will never endorse that.
God does not hear the prayers of a notorious sinner.
Let them forsake the error of their ways first, and then, once they have completely renounced their worst errors, they can be received back into the fold, and be further perfected.
We are not doing this out of hatred.
We’re just doing it because we don’t want the whole of our people and our faith to risk being corrupted, and all because of a handful of morally unstable and foolish people.
We don’t wish any ill on these people, who God after all, in his inscrutable wisdom, has made in his own image, for reasons best known to himself.
But we would rather have them establish the basic, non-negotiable elements of virtue first, than let these entitled agitators and hustlers and lobbyists, with all their addiction problems and weird sexual behaviour, just flood into our houses of worship and cause confusion.
After all, we know that their passive-aggressive pleas for understanding and sympathy and a listening ear are just a way of manipulating us into changing our teachings, which are from God, not from man, and are not subject to human revision by people who are just following the fashion of the times.
Our religion is eternal, and eternal truths cannot be reconciled with the kind of behaviour this man is showing.
He keeps saying to everyone he is not rejecting the commandments of what ought to be done and ought not to be done, but that on the contrary, merely trying to spread the truth to everyone, rather than letting us all be ‘comfortable’ and ‘isolated’ from others.
This is an incredibly naive and reckless way of looking at things.
The road to hell, as they say, is paved with good intentions.
Imagine if everyone started behaving like this.
It would just be anarchy.
How long would people be able to keep up the pretence of reconciling letter and spirit?
Anyone who follows this man and enables the dangerous extremists and lobbyists and agitators constantly swarming around him, is only making a pretence of virtue.
Everybody knows that, deep down, he is only pretending to believe.
In reality, he is embittered and resentful, and whether he knows it or not, he is simply trying to destroy the faith.
There is simply no other possible explanation.
And yet, as he prepared to undergo his final torments, his very last day on earth, he never changed.
For as the nails were hammered in, his look of love said:
I forgive you.
The authorities winced in disgust, so appalled it took them a full minute to finally join in with all the baying mob mockers and the scoffers.
Even now, even now, he is trying to manipulate us into pitying him and his ridiculous cult of moral relativists, entitled druggies and deluded perverts.
How is he able to carry on this pretence of virtue, right til the very end?
From here on in, until the very end of Eternity itself, this is something we will just never understand…