May 18, 2017

Does Christ influence Leftists too?

It's unlikely that he has much effect on their behaviour but he clearly has a lot of influence on their arguments.  They work within a Christian value system.  Their devotion to political correctness, for instance, is based on an avowed aim not to hurt the feelings of minorities.  And being kind to others, in particular being kind to the disadvantaged, is a major Christian message:  "Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth" (Matthew 5:5).

The Left don't of course see themselves as preaching Christian values.  They think they are just appealing to what most people would agree with.  They don't look at WHERE those values come from.  And they do of course come from hundreds of years of Christian culture. Many people are no longer Christian but the values their culture gives them are of Christian origin.

A good way of seeing that is to look at our own culture before the arrival of Christianity.  There are only a few literary remnants of it left but one that we do have is revealing:  Beowulf, an epic Anglo-Saxon poem.  It takes you into a quite alien world but it is the world of the people from whom we are mostly descended.  It is unlikely that there is much genetic difference between us and them.

In Beowulf, the prime virtue is heroism in battle.  And the King is not a dictator who is always telling us how to behave.  He is simply a "giver of rings" -- someone who gives formal recognition to heroism. He does NOT reward people for being kind to the poor and lowly. Physical strength and prowess is the dominant value in that world. The meek are certainly not blessed there.  Quite to the contrary.

So the Left do pay homage to Christian values, albeit indirectly. They actually PROPAGATE Christian values, while not realizing that they are doing that.  They really do preach: "Blessed are the meek".

A Christian correspondent has further thoughts on the matter which I append below:

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Even those “spiritual” lefties who despise Christianity and like to say “I’m spiritual not religious”, in the same breath call themselves humanitarians, egalitarians, etc., thus showing they do have quasi-religious attitudes. And they all hold Christianity as their reference point from which they have conjured up their leftist alternative to Christianity, and they use all the Christian concepts like non-judgemental, caring, so they are Christianised in the sense that they are what they are because of Christianity.

They would not have their ideas if not for Jesus teaching them, and themselves perverting them into their alternative, and they have made hollow poor replicas.

Leftism/lefties are the anti-Christs that John talks about that came into the world with Jesus’s message. John said that “They went out from us but are not of us.” (1 John 2:19).  John predicted the rise of Anti-Christs: People focused on Christ but enemies of him.

Every teacher of anything cannot help but also teach the opposite concept and those with dark hearts  will get the opposite idea automatically without the teacher saying it, just because that is the way they are.

Teaching something good makes bad people worse. Just like giving cognitive behavioural therapy to psychopaths just makes them better manipulators of others. In that same way Jesus created  leftism, or rather, he brought it here as the opposite concept to his own teachings.

He certainly made leftism as extreme, cunning and powerful as it is in the West today because he divided and widened our hearts with his teachings, gave each a wider potential for good and evil, he gave our hearts their extreme left-right potential, as Socrates did our minds. That is the sword that divides us that Jesus mentioned.

Not all westerners are Christian, but all westerners are Christianised, because the wide left-right expanse of the western heart is the result of Christianity. Jesus knew what he was creating in this world. His teachings are full of advice and examples of how to differentiate between his teachings and leftism.

He used the Lefties/hypocrites of his time [e.g. the Pharisees] as examples of what not to be like, (and they were only dumb and mild ones compared to the cunning treacherous ones of today) knowing that with his teachings on love that he was widening the left-right potential of human hearts and that the future lefties would be even more left, cunning and treacherous than what they were then.  He was teaching greater love/goodness than existed at that time, and that would in turn be matched in extent on the left, for the more love/goodness existed in the world, the more love/goodness they would have to learn to fake, like a see-saw getting longer on one side must get longer on the other side to stay level.  




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