{"id":106716,"date":"2018-12-13T12:15:12","date_gmt":"2018-12-13T19:15:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/?p=106716"},"modified":"2018-12-13T14:33:49","modified_gmt":"2018-12-13T21:33:49","slug":"meme-lisa-simpson-is-right-and-eupocrisy-is-real-thank-god","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/2018\/12\/meme-lisa-simpson-is-right-and-eupocrisy-is-real-thank-god.html","title":{"rendered":"Meme Lisa Simpson is Right and Eupocrisy is Real, Thank God."},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Today I ran across a little meme starring Lisa Simpson declaring, \u201cIf you claim that morality is subjective, then your moral condemnation carries no weight.\u201d<\/p>\n

She\u2019s partly right, you know. But she\u2019s also partly wrong. Because Eupocrisy.<\/p>\n

What is Eupocrisy? The opposite of hypocrisy. A hypocrite is worse than his best word. A eupocrite is better than his worst words. Jesus tells a parable about a hypocrite and a eupocrite:<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat do you think? There was a man who had two sons. He went to the first and said, \u2018Son, go and work today in the vineyard.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2018I will not,\u2019 he answered, but later he changed his mind and went.<\/p>\n

\u201cThen the father went to the other son and said the same thing. He answered, \u2018I will, sir,\u2019 but he did not go.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhich of the two did what his father wanted?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe first,\u201d they answered.<\/p>\n

Jesus said to them, \u201cTruly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you. For John came to you to show you the way of righteousness, and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes did. And even after you saw this, you did not repent and believe him. \u2013 Matthew 21:28-32<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s one of the little ironies of how history has gone in the past twenty years that people who professed moral relativism 20 years ago are now some of the most hard-charging moralists in the world. Christianist hypocrites call them hypocrites. I call them people who have experienced moral growth and an encounter with lived human reality. Christianists actually sneer at people who were once moral relativists for making professions of belief in good and evil in the Age of Trump. Because Christianists have abandoned the gospel and the hope of repentance and change and instead are focused totally on destroying their enemies by any means necessary. So repentance, change, and growth are all\u2013for that antichrist cult\u2013signs of weakness, not of the working of the Holy Spirit.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, these same Christianists, who have had full access to the Christian tradition and have chosen to sell their birthright for a pot of Trumpian message, are the real hypocrites, because at some level they know the gospel and have chosen to betray it for a criminal traitor and antichrist who led them to an exceeding high mountain and promised them, \u201cChristianity will have power\u2026you\u2019re going to have plenty of power. You don\u2019t need anybody else.\u201d And so they have spent every day since prostituting themselves to this dimestore antichrist and deforming themselves into the image and likeness of this liar till the lie has become their native language, like his. They lie constantly to defend Trump\u2019s incessant torrent of lies. And their chief lie is the moral relativist claim that Trump\u2019s lies are all justified because \u201cboth sides\u201d lie. In the words of Rudy Giuliani: Truth isn\u2019t truth. And when confronted with the claims of justice, that Cult (which rationalizes sadistic cruelty and sexual assault against children at the border with \u201cThe law is the law!\u201d) applauds Cult hero Orrin Hatch when he says he doesn\u2019t care about law<\/a> when it comes to the criminal traitor who leads the Cult.<\/p>\n

The point is this: One of the many weird side effects of Trump is that he has managed to reveal that many Christians are, in practice, atheist moral relativists who reject, for the sake of a grab at power, the reality of the living God who will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead. Meanwhile, he has been forcing people who have long claimed they were moral relativists to acknowledge that, professions of moral relativism aside, they believe in their heart of hearts in an objective moral standard. Some of them are slowly facing the fact that this implies the existence of the living God.<\/p>\n

As the real <\/em>modern atheist, Richard Rorty, pointed out, there is, apart from revelation both natural and supernatural, no universally valid answer to moral questions such as, \u201cWhy not be cruel? Why not lie your head off like Trump? Why not grift, betray, live for self totally and nihilistically defend all this crap if you can, like Trump, get away with it and die in your golden bed, old and full of years?\u201d Quoth Rorty:<\/p>\n

Anybody who thinks that there are well-grounded theoretical answers to this sort of question . . . is still, in his heart, a theologian or a metaphysician. He believes in an order beyond time and change which both determines the point of human existence and establishes a hierarchy of responsibilities.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Good people who claim they are moral relativists and even atheists have revealed themselves by the millions to be no such thing. They have the perfectly Christian moral insight that, \u201cDamn it to hell, this is wrong, dammit! Wrong!\u201d and do not fill the air with piffle about how Trump and his Cult wanting to send deport Vietnamese refugees who have lived here for 40 years<\/a> are simply not to their personal taste. They do not say to filthy Christianist liars who defend this monstrous evil, \u201cYou have a legitimate point of view. Your love of inhuman cruelty is exactly the same as my preference for cheddar cheese. Let us agree to disagree.\u201d Nope. They call it what it is: evil. And in doing so, they please the God they think they don\u2019t believe in.<\/p>\n

And they demonstrate it in that most Christian and incarnational way, by living it instead of talking about it.<\/p>\n

This is what I mean by Eupocrisy, the reality that, while a lot of people are worse than their best words, there are also an awful lot of people who are better than their worst words. The Christian tradition, to be sure, spends a lot of time trying to get the words and ideas right. As Islam and Iconoclasm show, a small miscalculation in theology can end up smashing all the statues in the world. Getting its thinking straight about the person and work of Jesus was the labor of the first seven ecumenical councils and I praise God for them.<\/p>\n

But Jesus\u2019 parables of judgment make clear that if you get the words right, but do not have love, if you say \u201cyes\u201d but live \u201cno\u201d, if you participate in correct liturgy but step on the face of the beggar at the Church door, you\u2013I\u2013shall not be saved. It is better to be the loud and self-proclaimed moral relativist sheep who says with surprise, \u201cWhen did I see you hungry and feed you?\u201d than the loud Christianist goat who \u201cowns the libs\u201d proclaiming his belief in right and wrong while defending lies and selling the righteous for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today I ran across a little meme starring Lisa Simpson declaring, \u201cIf you claim that morality is subjective, then your moral condemnation carries no weight.\u201d She\u2019s partly right, you know. But she\u2019s also partly wrong. Because Eupocrisy. What is Eupocrisy? The opposite of hypocrisy. A hypocrite is worse than his best word. A eupocrite is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":92,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[384],"class_list":["post-106716","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-eupocrisy"],"yoast_head":"\nMeme Lisa Simpson is Right and Eupocrisy is Real, Thank God.<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Today I ran across a little meme starring Lisa Simpson declaring, "If you claim that morality is subjective, then your moral condemnation carries no\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/2018\/12\/meme-lisa-simpson-is-right-and-eupocrisy-is-real-thank-god.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" 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