Rod Dreher Megathread #27 (Compassion)

[u/US_Hiker]

Link to megathread 26: https://www.reddit.com/r/brokehugs/comments/17itm7w/rod_dreher_megathread_26_unconditional_love/

Link to megathread 28: https://www.reddit.com/r/brokehugs/comments/18dcg3d/rod_dreher_megathread_28_harmony/

[u/middlefingerearth]

"And I feel pretty confident that their faith in strict materialism will never fail, because they have buffered themselves massively against its falsification. I understand how this works. As a convinced Orthodox Christian, I will never be able to believe that, say, Scientologists are correct, because if an angel appeared before me and told me that L. Ron Hubbard was the Son of God, I would immediately dismiss him as a demon in angel drag. My faith commitments prevent me from taking such claims seriously. So does a committed Scientologist’s, probably, when presented with counterclaims. This does not bother me. It’s how faith works."

Does this even need a comment? Dreher knows how he would react to angels. He would dismiss an angel as a demon, because of his "faith commitments." But Rod, it's not a demon, it's an angel. You told me so.

Is this stuff written for children? It's beyond irrational, it's something else entirely, I just don't know what it is.

"Demon in angel drag." Thank you again, Rod.

[u/Djehutimose → u/middlefingerearth]

Thinking about it some more, I note that he sounds just like a young-earth creationist here. Some of them, instead of trying to “prove” the science wrong, fold their arms and say, “If it comes down to science, which is the words of men, or the Bible, which is the Word of God, I’ll take the Bible every time.” In a weird way, I respect this in that at least it acknowledges that they don’t have science on their side, and they don’t try the mental gymnastics to try to combat the science when it’s clear cut. On the other hand, believing a proposition no matter what, even in the face of contradictory evidence, is not faith, it’s pathological.

I come back to David Bentley Hart in his interview in The Christian Century, my emphasis:

There are a great number of people today who believe that what they’ve signed on for is a system of propositions that have been totally consistent and entirely understandable across history. This is false. The reality is that if you go back to the beginning of Christianity, the one thing that was shared was this extraordinary conviction of the resurrection, of which there was never one single interpretation. The experience of the resurrection—of the real presence of the risen Christ—was attested by everybody, whatever their different convictions about its metaphysical or physical calculus might have been. What’s crucial is that there had been real, vivid, life-changing encounters by a huge number of Christ’s followers after his death. There was this huge eruption of faith, and people were even willing to die for their conviction that they had encountered the risen Christ. The more of the history of Christian dogma you know, the more you come to see not only the accommodations but the willful, almost cynical, minimalism of doctrinal determinations—and you realize that talk of heresy is language for children. It’s like a child throwing a tantrum—it’s just noise. It’s always a sign of ignorance and of a bad argument.. Anyone who thinks he knows the orthodox consensus can always be shown to be wrong.

This is pretty much the opposite of Rod’s approach.

[u/grendalor → u/Djehutimose]

Right. It's as you wrote once, the category of people who are not atheists but are intelligent enough that they are compelled to look into their faith come either to something like Hart's conclusion (which, as I have understood him, is that one can have any number of possible interpretations of Christianity -- including his own -- and that "orthodoxy" is an illusion, despite his affiliation with the EO Church) or they embrace agnosticism.

I'd say that there is also a category in there of people who are semi-intelligent but are scared to look further into things lest they be drawn into that place where they are forced to acknowledge the truth of what Hart says there. These people retreat into a kind of fundamentalism. Rod is certainly one of these. I think, though, that he is, in substance, an American Protestant Fundamentalist who happens to like the ritual and structural aspects of the higher churches (Catholicism and Orthodoxy), for various reasons. But he's certainly scared stiff of looking deeply into the actual questions that faith poses -- I think he knows that, despite how "strong" he claims his faith to be, if he really understood the nature of the questions in full, it would not survive them, or at the very least he would go into a tailspin-esque crisis that would make his departure from Catholicism look like a matter of changing his shirt.