{"id":1369,"date":"2017-11-02T10:21:03","date_gmt":"2017-11-02T14:21:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/troublerofisrael\/?p=1369"},"modified":"2017-11-06T06:14:13","modified_gmt":"2017-11-06T10:14:13","slug":"its-the-current-year-is-not-a-good-argument","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/troublerofisrael\/2017\/11\/its-the-current-year-is-not-a-good-argument\/","title":{"rendered":"‘It’s the Current Year!’ Is Not a Good Argument"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Why don\u2019t we burn witches in 2017? Maybe for the same reason we approve of same-sex marriage. C. S. Lewis explains in \u201cMere Christianity\u201d:<\/p>\n

\u2026one man said to me, \u201cThree hundred years ago people in England were putting witches to death. Was that what you call the Rule of Human Nature or Right Conduct?\u201d But surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things. If we did\u2013if we really thought that there were people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbours or drive them mad or bring bad weather, surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did. There is no difference of moral principle here: the difference is simply about matter of fact. It may be a great advance in knowledge not to believe in witches: there is no moral advance in not executing them when you do not think they are there. You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"Burning_witches\"You\u2019ll frequently hear people these days say, \u201cIt\u2019s 2017!\u201d as an argument for abandoning some traditional or conservative moral scruple, usually having to do with sex. They mean more than that in this enlightened era, we\u2019ve moved past such moral scruples. Surrendering principles is not, in itself, enlightened.<\/p>\n

What they\u2019re implying is that the moral scruples of yesteryear were really expressions of bigotry and hatred. The people who lived back then had no good reason for holding them. They were merely prejudiced and ignorant, and their beliefs about morality were irrational. Thus, casting aside their moral principles is a way of displaying our enlightenment. It\u2019s how we progress.<\/p>\n

But this all depends on a lie we tell ourselves. The fact is that bigotry, while always present to some degree in the human heart, is not the reason why people hundreds of years ago held the moral scruples they did. They held these beliefs because in their understanding, sexual immorality was destructive to human flourishing and contrary to the way we were created. Even worse, engaging in unrepentant sexual immorality would lead one to eternal damnation and isolation from God, Who is the source of all life and well-being. Thus, not to stigmatize sexual (as well as other types of) immorality was quite literally to doom human beings to temporal suffering, followed by eternal spiritual torment.<\/p>\n

What this means is that those who called their neighbors back from this precipice in love, or only by condemning such illicit acts, were exercising benevolence, to the best of their understanding. To look down on or patronize these ancestors of ours for doing what they believed to be beneficial to mankind, and to smear their motives as bigotry, is itself bigotry, as well as inexcusable laziness. That we no longer condemn sexual sins because we believe them to be fun and harmless, and don\u2019t believe there is such a place as Hell, is not moral progress. It\u2019s just a natural reflection of our worldview.<\/p>\n

But following Lewis\u2019 lead, let\u2019s take it one step further: What if we in 2017 are wrong, and our benighted ancestors were right? What if our self-deception is deeper than we\u2019d ever dare to admit on a large scale? What if we\u2019ve papered over and medicated and anesthetized ourselves to keep from feeling the true damage inflicted by our immorality? What if we\u2019ve covenanted together to kill the inconvenient fruits of our enlightened revelries and silence the voices of those hung out to dry in our post-morality culture? And what if\u2013worse still\u2013we\u2019ve stopped our ears and closed our eyes to shut out the memory of God, whom we really know is there, and of Hell, which we still know is a real place, in order to satisfy our lusts while we look down our noses at those bigoted denizens of our cemeteries and their puritanical moral scruples?<\/p>\n

If they were right and we are wrong, that would turn our self-important accusations around. It would mean not only that we have to answer for our sins against one another in this life and the life to come, but that these wounds will be salted by the knowledge that we, not our ancestors, were the truly bigoted ones.<\/p>\n

Maybe that\u2019s too painful. Maybe it\u2019s easier to just insist we\u2019re the moral betters of those who came before. After all, they can\u2019t defend themselves.<\/p>\n

Image: Wikimedia Commons,\u00a0Burning witches Malleus Maleficarum Montague Summers<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You’ll frequently hear people these days say, “It’s 2017!” as an argument for abandoning some traditional or conservative moral scruple, usually having to do with sex. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2783,"featured_media":1374,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,32,53,127,33,54,51],"tags":[357,99,358,356,359],"class_list":["post-1369","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-abortion","category-apologetics","category-books","category-culture-of-death","category-history","category-liberalism","category-sex","tag-burning-witches","tag-c-s-lewis","tag-its-2017","tag-mere-christianity","tag-sexual"],"yoast_head":"\n'It's the Current Year!' 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