Watching, against my better judgment, Extreme Home Makeover. Ty Pennington makes my skin ache. Like a white boy Oprah with ADHD. But here's the story. A family got blended because the woman's widowed sister was gunned down by her ex-boyfriend, who was out on bail for attempting to murder her with steak knives. Out. On. Bail.
The woman had four young kids when her husband died in a car accident. When she started to date again, she met this guy, who turned out to be dangerous. She tried to end it and he broke into her house with steak knives and threatened her. After he was Out.On.Bail, she had to get a restraining order against him for stalking her and her kids...while he remained Out.On.Bail.
She found a new guy, who stayed with her at night for protection. The Out.On.Bail guy broke in and shot them both. Kids lost dad and then mom. Aunt and uncle have taken them in. But...
Now tell me that this killer should not be put down like a mad dog. Go ahead. Try.
4 comments:
"Resist not evil."
Besides the Beatitudes, a couple other also (essentially) anarchistic possibilities:
1. Christianity. Everyone has fallen short of God's glory and merits everlasting torture. Everyone deserves to be put down like a mad dog. But this would reduce God's creation to a shame to God. Therefore, reinterpret such criminals as benefactors who reveal to all of us the truth of who we are in our hearts. As Jesus is consider'd to have proved, restraint and aspiration, awe and shame, are not integral, for there is no meaningful difference between someone who murders and someone who gets angry but restrains his anger, or between someone who commits adultery and someone who lusts after another's spouse but restrains his lust, or between a hypocrite and someone who wishes to conceal the truth but wills to tell the truth anyway. ... We ought to subject "the favorites of nature and fortune" to the doctrine that they are essentially cowardly murderers of women and children who ought to feel total shame. This regime will result in total freedom-from.
-I guess Jesus didn't give the Beatitudes only in order to delegitimize the state and-or civil society and-or law (especially Moses'), but this use of the Beatitudes does make life safe for the meek and even maybe for the weak, so they can inherit the earth and appoint the lords of the earth (call'd "Mesdamoiselles" in the movie Inglorious Basterds, I noticed recently). Let us prevent the regime from having any lofty pretentions. As your own example indicates: regime personnel should have to make great efforts to establish even that "well at least we prevent anarchy": such efforts undermines in them any thought of judging values, even though this claim is quite dubious itself, for in the not even backward villages that Jesus frequented stableness or lack-of-"anarchy" occurs automatically; so there's no need for any special group of police or enforcers (cf JRRTolkien's "shire" and even it keeps officials for charismatic occasions separate from guardians of rules). Let all great cities be depopulated (cf Pol Pot: move all urbanites to rural areas; those who don't starve will get condition'd to not make trouble). A criminal of the sort you describe would not get much traction in a village. While large towns remain, such criminals should be allow'd to run rampant in order to help prove how anti-tradition and odious every abode larger than a medieval manor is. Perhaps literacy could be reversed -- freeing the meek and the weak from the OT and Big Brother's brotherhood the "thou ought police," although the ancestors should still be learned in letters so that they could exploit kabala in this grand freedom-from.
2. Regular anarchism. Such 'mad dog' criminals are products of capitalism and fundamentalist Christianity, and thus reveal the truth of capitalism and fundamentalist Christianity. Capitalism selects out the best for the 5laughter bench and accordingly ought to be put down like a mad dog and replaced by communitarian anarchist Traditionalism during a transitional era, which could employ such 'pale criminals' to hunt down and liquidate evaluators of ancestors who look to Plato, the Old Testament and Nietzsche.
3. Feminist variants on 2. This criminal is most valuable because he reveals how all white males are, or all white male heterosexuals are. etc. "Rapists are the shock troops of the patriarchy -- and even of 'decent' white males."
Love things, use people.
Aside from The Problem of Evil and The Problem of Sex, my issue with Christianity is its too-high ethics. Inhumanly high. Ok maybe for monks or wandering groups of mendicants, but not for real settled life in the world. Like rabbinic Judaism's reworking of the Torah to make life bearable under it, Catholicism has created a massive moral structure to blunt the edge of it so that the John Howard Yoder's of the world don't drive us all insane.
Do you really mean that your objection to "the John Howard Yoder's of the world" is that they "aim too high"? I might have supposed that that would be your objection to, say, attempting to make every illustrator a Rembrandt, every violinist a Paganini, etc. ... How is Yoder "aiming too high"?
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