Most people are damned

Tuesday, January 23rd, 2018

Accepting that most people are damned, Razib Khan explains, allows for liberal pluralism:

Once upon a time in the West, the Church aimed to save all of society by bringing everyone under the umbrella of the Truth. The shattering of Western Christendom with the Reformation caused a problem. If the Catholics were right, then the Protestants were damned, and if the Protestants were right, the Catholics were damned. You know all about the “Wars of Religion,” which occupied Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Ultimately this led to the Westphalian system and a gradual acceptance that there would no longer be One True Religion in the West. Monarchs who even took a skeptical view on religion, such as Frederick the Great, arose in the 18th century. In this case, you had a Calvinist Hohenzollern dynasty which could not bring its Lutheran populace on board. In Saxony, you eventually had Catholic dukes ruling over a Protestant populace.

But another aspect of the collapse of universal Christianity in the West was the emergence of radical Protestant groups which understood most of society to be damned and beyond redemption. The separatism of the Amish is an extreme case of this. They don’t even attempt to convert anyone to their religion, which has turned into an ethnicity. This withdrawal of radical Protestants from attempting to force the temporal world to their will has expressed itself most fully in the United States of America, which never had a state-supported religion on the federal level, a radical innovation in its day.

This strain of Christianity is suspicious of the state and society in part because of the suppression their beliefs and practices by both the state and society in which they first emerged. But their relegation of the majority to the ranks of the damned also allows for a modus vivendi in this life.

Comments

  1. Graham says:

    I wonder if post-Christian progressivism can be convinced that most of us are damned, and to leave us alone.

  2. Isegoria says:

    I got a chuckle out of that. “We’re damned. Leave us alone.” I don’t think Westerners are allowed to opt out like that, but other cultures seem free to continue their unprogressive ways.

  3. Graham says:

    Well, up to a point. Any point at which their actions attract the attention of the US military and/or NGO community, or to some extent Euro/international versions of the latter. Then those cultures are boned like the rest of us.

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