What does Jesus think about abortion? The answer is like what most religion and secular ideology is, whatever you already believe, your tradition is on your side. To escape this, there must be a philosohical framework with which to answer. My answer is Jesus is not a pundit and Christianity is not a platform of contemporary political issues, it is a philosophy and cosomology which trades principally in the perennial and the timeless. It is about attachment to the world and freedom from that attachment, it is about human love and fraternity and how to forge and foster that, it is about what constitutes a fulfilling life and what constitutes a vacuous life, it is about ultimate justice triumphing over the fleeting nature of shiny things so that the meek are vindicated against the macho.
I was raised Christian but became an atheist, then spiritual but not religious, and finally converted back and I converted back to Christianity because its answers to those questions were better than my next preference: Buddhism. Christians did not, for the most part, contribute to my conversion and did almost nothing to convince me that Christianity was better than Buddhism. Just going by the superficial, the Buddhists looked better. The idea that existence is ultimately not worth suffering for and the individual is evil and should lose all identity just left a bitter taste in my mouth but their presentation and stance on contemprary issues left a very sweet taste in my mouth.
Jesus and the Buddha had hippie messages but Jesus came out ahead in that he ultimately didn’t advocate for spiritual suicide and joining a formless blob regarding all art, science, and personality as Mandalas ultimately to be wiped away and forsaken for the blob of oneness. The individual, instead, being a special child whose existence is precious and should be loved for who they are was much better. Despite being raised in the Deep South, that very convincing argument was never presented. It was not that the Christians were too hateful or intolerant but just not terribly sophisticated.
When it comes to contemporary issues, my great problem with Christians is while they rage against or for gay marriage or abortion or the trans community, they ignore the poetry of the human condition. They don’t mourn wars or rejoice for peace treaties. They don’t raises glasses to medical advancements or come together to make them happen when they’re needed. There is no joy in the triumph of light over darkness or lamenting the presence of darkness. It is like what I recently remarked about the left and their rhetoric about romantic relationships. If you took it from them, you’d believe the overwhelming majority of sex was nonconsensual. Living on the left, the first word I associate with the word “boyfriend” is “perpetrator”.
Romantic intimacy, in their paradigm, has no happiness or magic just terror and death. If romantic intimacy is mostly episodes of Nancy Grace and SVU and society’s relationship to it should be a military occupation kicking in doors to oust the rapist underground and rescue the hapless damsels therein; you won’t have a city on a hill, you’ll have a city that looks like Mosul after they drove ISIS out in 2017. It looked like Dresden in 1945. After the exciting and thrilling dopamine-filled rage of being a crusading culture warrior vigilante hunting bad guys, the culture is left in a state of terror, anxiety, and omnipresent hatred. Which is what the intra-Christian cultures wars do. What they don’t do is manifest the geist and meaning of the Christian religion. In their Verdun of the culture, there is no good news, there is no grace, and there are no humans on the other side.
The Autistic Resistance 