Why are proofs of God insufficient for the man who wills not to believe in God? The question answers itself, and goes to what we were saying yesterday about the role of will and sentiment in causing a man to deviate from truth.
Maybe a man doesn't like the implications of God's existence. If so, it's easy enough to use a little confirmation bias to make him go away.
What about my confirmation bias? Well, for starters, this is neither the God nor the religion I would invent. To the extent that I'm confirming something, it's a bit foreign to my sensibilities, especially the whole sacrifice thing.
Andrew Klavan writes that
Anti-Christians often object to the idea that Christ’s crucifixion was a sacrificial expiation of the sins of mankind. They ask: what kind of barbaric God demands a sacrifice for sin?
Well, when you put it that way. Then again,
I ask this: Where did all the sacrifices go? Not just the children and virgins and kings, but the doves, the pigs and the goats and so on. Why don’t we kill them anymore to propitiate the gods?
Wherever Christianity took hold, sacrifices vanished. Why did we stop them? If it was the sacrifice of Christ that put an end to them, then maybe the barbaric need for his death wasn’t God’s but ours? Which is just another way of saying that his crucifixion was a sacrificial expiation of the sins of mankind.
That's a very Girardian explanation, i.e., the scapegoat to end all scapegoating. If Girard is correct, then the fading of Christianity should result in increased scapegoating, although with a twist, since the culture is still implicitly Christian -- or, as Klavan puts it, "hatred of bigotry or your defense of women’s rights, or your belief in the centrality of love. Who taught you these things?"
As Klavan's son Spencer writes in response,
Overturning an established order means rejecting even its basic categories. And as you write, “the problem the radical faces is that the system he is rebelling against is the very system that shaped the terms of his rebellion.”
So now, instead of the weak and marginalized being scapegoated by the powerful, it is the powerful who pretend to be weak and marginalized in order to maintain or increase their grip on power. Why else would Kamala so desperately want to be seen as African American, when four years ago she was Indian American?
When it comes to identity politics, the money is in the basement.
As Heather MacDonald observes, back in the days of actual racism, "the way to discredit someone was to assert that he was black":
The idea that a political contender would fight back against the claim that he was anything other than black would have been regarded as surreal. Why would anyone insist on being the one thing that puts him at the bottom of the social and political totem pole?
Why? Because of the Christian concern for victims. Thus, nowadays "the benefits of blackness are so patent that it is white (and even Indian-American) individuals who on occasion try to pass as black." Conversely,
there is no evidence of black applicants labelling themselves as white; blacks today know which way the wind is blowing. If, as we have gleaned from the hysteria over Trump’s recent Harris remarks, it is now racist to question someone’s black identity, it is also preposterous to claim that that black identity subjects someone to systemic racism.
Of course, preposterousness has never posed the slightest barrier to the left. Indeed, the arms race of virtue signaling shows no signs of slowing, only moving on to encompass new victims, from the QWERTY crowd, to illegals, to people with wombs who may have to travel out of state to terminate their child. It is also why these weirdos are scapegoating the normal by pretending we're the weirdos.
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