Almost no one would care about mercy as strongly as evangelicals do, or for the same reasons (emotionalism), if they did not hope to receive mercy for every applicable thing they or someone they personally love has done. In other words, they care about mercy or care about it in the way that they do for the sake of real or hypothetical benefit for themselves, or at the expense of caring about rationality and justice. I have long appreciated my tendency to not show mercy, especially to the glaringly unrepentant among the church or outside of it. Non-rationalists were my personal enemies for their betrayal of reality, and I could not have been in the wrong for simply being unmerciful as opposed to being unjust. Unexpectedly, very unexpectedly, the permissible hatred I harbored for them changed.
Yes, if anyone is not willing to live, kill, and die for the truth, they do not love it above all else as they should (and a love of truth without assumptions attached is the love of reason, since truth is grounded, dictated, and revealed by reason). If truth does not have moral value, then nothing does, and thus they are in error for believing that anything does or would have moral value apart from this, including kindness, tolerance (which is not kindness), or affection. Only an irrational person indeed would choose anything less than to live, kill, and die for the truth--the truths of reason and whatever moral obligations exist, more specifically, not happenstance scientific laws or the truth that something is traditional or subjectively preferred--and it is logically impossible for them to be the equal of a rationalist even if human rights exist.
All the same, while my worldview has remained identical to what it was before, I have experienced a major change in my attitude towards people as a whole. With rationalists and friends, no error or sin was formerly beyond my desire to forgive and show mercy towards, but with non-rationalists, I was knowingly, intentionally, increasingly brutal with them in my words and attitudes over the years. The belittling things I said about them here or elsewhere as those years passed, although never once did I make assumptions, believe in an error, or slander anyone, reflected my intensifying hatred of a rational, just kind. I would have been perfectly content and happy to have unrepentantly lesser people shocked or frightened by me as long as I had my small number of close Christian rationalist friends.
However, several factors brought about an active, eager turn towards mercy in me not just for an elite handful of fellow Christian rationalists, my truest brothers and sisters, but for all people: the ideological improvement of certain people in my life, a sudden and intense focus on the afterlife and how I do not want anyone to perish (literally, to cease to exist in hell as the Bible really teaches), and a close relationship with a concerned person that exemplified how I might be perceived by even allies. Of course it is by necessity true that mercy does not trigger redemption in others and it would be erroneous to care about it for utilitarian reasons, not that people need assistance to discover many logical truths as it is, but I now have the desire to not be as harsh with people.
It is vital that to be merciful does not mean one is emotionalistic or that one shuns justice. To forsake justice is irrational and sinful, but not to forsake mercy. Still, I am an overtly, actively merciful person at this point. I now enjoy it and seek out ways to express this. It will take many months before the blog posts I have already written and scheduled out will reflect this in their less confrontational, belittling writing style, for I have many posts completed ahead of time (through next year). Gradually, regular readers can expect for there to be far less utter brutality in my words to match my turn towards mercy, a turn that is not obligatory and yet one I crave now. I wanted to affirm these things before the currently scheduled posts arrive with their remnants of my past intensity.
No comments:
Post a Comment