I came across this article just now:
www.firstthings.com
The article is nominally about a piece of art that is displayed in the European Union's parliament that depicts Jesus surrounded by gay men dressed in leather "bondage" attire. It's meant to be shocking.
"The display represents both the bankruptcy of modern culture and its inability to offer anything even approximating a positive vision for humanity. For generations now the artistic establishment has been in thrall to the notion of transgression. But transgression is only significant if there is something—some rule, some custom, something sacred—to transgress. Without such, transgression itself rapidly degenerates into a series of empty gestures that tend to become both more extreme and more vacuous at the same time. Art then ceases to be about embodying and transmitting cultural value and is instead a momentary iconoclastic performance that parasitically and paradoxically depends upon resurrecting icons that have long since fallen. Only because there is a folk memory of religion does the general public have some notion that these banal photographs are meant to be shocking. And only to the increasingly marginal numbers of actual Christians are they truly so." (Trueman)
This got me thinking. Of all religions, why is Christianity so hated? Is it because of its prevalence? Perhaps, but over the half-century of my life, Christianity in the west has grown less powerful, not more, and is hated even more as a result. You see, most religions offer some form of celestial law. Buddhists have karma; Hindus have Brahma; Taoists have Tao. Transgress this law and there are consequences. Yet none of these other religions are subject to the hatred and vitriol that Christianity is.
Why is that?
Transgression Is Passé - First Things
One of the hallmarks of the modern age has been the death of the sacred. Nietzsche’s Madman understood that this was one of the central consequences of the death...
www.firstthings.com
The article is nominally about a piece of art that is displayed in the European Union's parliament that depicts Jesus surrounded by gay men dressed in leather "bondage" attire. It's meant to be shocking.
"The display represents both the bankruptcy of modern culture and its inability to offer anything even approximating a positive vision for humanity. For generations now the artistic establishment has been in thrall to the notion of transgression. But transgression is only significant if there is something—some rule, some custom, something sacred—to transgress. Without such, transgression itself rapidly degenerates into a series of empty gestures that tend to become both more extreme and more vacuous at the same time. Art then ceases to be about embodying and transmitting cultural value and is instead a momentary iconoclastic performance that parasitically and paradoxically depends upon resurrecting icons that have long since fallen. Only because there is a folk memory of religion does the general public have some notion that these banal photographs are meant to be shocking. And only to the increasingly marginal numbers of actual Christians are they truly so." (Trueman)
This got me thinking. Of all religions, why is Christianity so hated? Is it because of its prevalence? Perhaps, but over the half-century of my life, Christianity in the west has grown less powerful, not more, and is hated even more as a result. You see, most religions offer some form of celestial law. Buddhists have karma; Hindus have Brahma; Taoists have Tao. Transgress this law and there are consequences. Yet none of these other religions are subject to the hatred and vitriol that Christianity is.
Why is that?
