American life has secularized and grand political ideologies have fallen away, but moral conflict has only grown. In fact, it’s the people who go to church least — like the members of the alt-right — who seem the most fervent moral crusaders.
.. Whatever donation I make to a charitable organization, it can never be as much as I could have given. I can never diminish my carbon footprint enough, or give to the poor enough. … Colonialism, slavery, structural poverty, water pollution, deforestation — there’s an endless list of items for which you and I can take the rap.”
.. McClay is describing a world in which we’re still driven by an inextinguishable need to feel morally justified.
.. people have a sense of guilt and sin, but no longer a sense that they live in a loving universe marked by divine mercy, grace and forgiveness. There is sin but no formula for redemption.
.. The only reliable way to feel morally justified in that culture is to assume the role of victim. As McClay puts it, “Claiming victim status is the sole sure means left of absolving oneself and securing one’s sense of fundamental moral innocence.”
.. We see events through the lens of moral Marxism, as a class or ethnic struggle between the evil oppressor and the supposedly innocent oppressed. The moral narrative of colonialism is applied to every situation. The concept of inherited sin is back in common currency, only these days we call it “privilege.”
.. the Middle East, the Israelis and the Palestinians compete for the victimhood narrative.
.. Sin is a stain, a weight and a debt. But at least religions offer people a path from self-reflection and confession to atonement and absolution. Mainstream culture has no clear path upward from guilt, either for individuals or groups. So you get a buildup of scapegoating, shaming and Manichaean condemnation. “This is surely a moral crisis in the making,”
.. I notice some schools and prisons have restorative justice programs to welcome offenders back into the community. They tend to be more substantive than the cheap grace of instant forgiveness. I wonder if the wider society needs procedures like that, so the private guilt everybody feels isn’t transmuted into a public state of perpetual moral war.
Richard Rohr: Universal Love
And I can’t deny there are numerous black and white, vengeful scriptures, which is precisely why we must recognize that all scriptures are not equally inspired or from the same level of consciousness. (This is why models of human development like Spiral Dynamics can be so helpful.)
.. Yes, you have to begin with dualistic thinking, just as you must first develop a healthy frame before you can move beyond it. Jesus often made strong binary statements, for example, “You cannot serve God and money” (Matthew 6:24); “The Son of Man will separate the sheep from the goats” (Matthew 25:32-33). We must first be capable of some basic distinctions between good and evil before we then move higher. Without basic honesty and clarity, nondual thinking becomes very naïve. We must first succeed at good dualistic thinking before we also discover its final inadequacy in terms of wisdom and compassion. Not surprisingly, Jesus exemplifies and teaches both dualistic clarity and then non-dual wisdom and compassion: “My Father’s sun shines on both the good and the bad; his rain falls on both the just and the unjust” (Matthew 5:45).
.. As long as your ego is in charge, you will demand a retributive God; you’ll insist that hell is necessary. But if you have been transformed by love, hell will no longer make sense to you because you know that God has always loved you in your sinfulness. Why would God change policies after death?
.. Could God’s love really be that great and universal? Love is the lesson, and God’s love is so great that God will finally teach it to all of us. Who would be able to resist it once they see it? We’ll finally surrender, and God—Love—will finally win. God never loses. That is what it means to be God. That will be God’s “justice,” which will swallow up our lesser versions of retributive justice.