Lyric Suite
Converting to Islam
- Joined
- Mar 23, 2006
- Messages
- 57,613
Aren't we all?Henry is a fornicator, a drinker and a petty thief.
No, and there's the rub, isn't it. Protestantism is probably at fault again. Their belief that humanity is basically irredeemable and debauched in its very nature and that neither works nor possible merits matter in terms of salvation, only turning oneself to Christ for help in guilt and prostration can help, is all well and good as long as one has that option. But what happens when a Protestant becomes secular and loses his religion? All that's left is his belief in the irredeemable debauchery of the human condition, hence openly reveling it is just being honest and thus sinful behaviors become a virtue and a matter of honor. It's also obvious why in this conception poverty implies moral superiority. If there are no degrees in spiritual advancement among individuals, if we are all equally debauched and sinful no matter what, than the most poor are just the most honest and also the less sinful as lack of wealth shuts them off from more advanced venues of depravity.
The truth is that it is the "poor" who are the most villanous, literally, as the term "villain" was literally intended to describe peasants (the word comes from the Latin "villanus", which signified those who worked on the soil, I.E., peasants precisely) and is point in fact completely analogous to the "Shudra" of the Hindu caste system. The peasant is at the lowest level of spiritual development because his world revolves around sense experience and little else. His "values" are good food, family, friends, work, comfort, everything that pertains to the material and merely emotional side of human existence. The higher castes are superior precisely because their values are of a more "transcendent" kind. The values of the nobility were superior because those values were supra material. Chivalry, honor, sacrifice, the ability to both face death and deal death in battle. And as for the clergy and especially the monks, their values were the highest of them all, for their world revolved around seeking trascendence and cut ties with the material world entirely.
All this in principle obvious the fallen nature of mankind prevents any society for living up to this ideal fully and its entirely possible for a pious peasant to be spiritually superior to a corrupt noble but that doesn't negate the reality of the principles involved and the inherent spiritual superiority of the higher castes.