Count me as one person who is glad he walked away from Christianity and its denial of self and personal worth.
This remark comes in the course of Gerencser’s analysis of these remarks by a young woman who is a Calvinist.
Well, sorry, culture, but we don’t deserve happiness. We’re human beings who lie and cheat and steal and fight and hold grudges and hurt our loved ones, and we don’t actually deserve anything.
Remember: Y’all were born no damn good, deserving eternal punishment even as you sucked for milk, and there isn’t anything you can do about it.
That is Christianity’s indispensable metaphysical claim. Calvinists obsess about it, and Methodists rarely think about it, but for both the fact remains: If you don’t believe in Original Sin, and more bizarrely that Jesus’ crucifixion was a blood sacrifice to a different 1/3 of himself as propitiation of that Original Sin on your behalf, Christianity has nothing on offer.
I can’t think what might be done about it, in view of our First Amendment, but raising this young woman to believe something so degrading and crippling seems to me to be a form of psychological abuse. There is the further problem that her parents doubtless intended good, to spare her an eternity on fire; they are painfully stupid people, that is — not malevolent people.
The rest of us need to be clear-headed about something, though: Christianity cannot flourish where men are healthy.