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Think on These Things
Opinion by Mark Bauerlein (@mark_bauerlein), emeritus professor of English at Emory University.
Read here:
https://t.co/Cap8IM1bMa
If you ever read Tom Holland’s “Dominion,” in which he makes the case that the pre-Christian human mind is so alien to any mind infected by the ideas of Christ as to be wholly unintelligible, which he does by surveying the sheer depth and breadth of ideas which we take for granted and assume are just “human” which are in fact uniquely Christian, then you might come away thinking, “Well that’s a great catalogue of all the ways we now irrevocably think like Christians, but where can I find a book that illustrates how /they/ thought? The ancient pagans? I want to see the alien.”
The answer is simply to do what Holland did. Read those ancient works. Read the Greek epics. Read the Odyssey.
But don’t apply your own standards to it. For instance, when the hero rapes a woman, or tortures or mutilates someone helpless and begging for mercy, or kills a small child, don’t try to figure out why it was actually justified according to your way of thinking, and don’t even think about why it needs to be condemned according to your way of thinking. Rather, just sit there and wrap your mind around the fact that no one thought it needed to be justified or condemned when it was written. It was self-evidently, to them, a heroic act, part of what it means to be a hero.
Once you manage this, most of the modern controversies even over events like Oct 7 and the Holocaust will melt away. You will realize there isn’t any trouble in believing a man raped a girl with a nailgun until she died and then called his grandma to brag about it, nor that Germany and Russia created entire industrial systems of labor camps which had as their objective to ensure that no laborer survived the labor (and entire industrial systems to dispose of the bodies as the laborers died), or that Saladin’s biographer boasts—boasts, because it is a point of pride and honor for Saladin—about “miserly women forced to yield themselves, and women who had been kept hidden [nuns] stripped of their modesty … and free women occupied [meaning “penetrated”], and precious ones used for hard work, and pretty things put to the test, and virgins dishonored and proud women deflowered … and happy ones made to weep!”
It will not be hard to imagine these things done, it will be easy to believe the stories of the holocaust and all the rest, because you will come to understand, by reading pre-Christian heroic stories, that all of this is just normal human behavior. It’s what you would do, would proudly participate in, but you happen to have been born in a Christian land in a Christian time, even if you yourself are not Christian. And where lands become un-Christian, “nature heals.” Human beings return to what they naturally are: the kind of thing that considers this behavior not horrific but heroic, and to be lauded.
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