The Hidden Original Sin

 

The actual mandate of John the Baptist, in Luke 1:

“He will go on before the Lord, in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the parents to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous—to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.”

This suggests that the key sin necessitating Christ’s coming was a lack of parental love for children. This was the crucial of not indeed the original sin.

This is also why God made the Jews his chosen people: to end child sacrifice among the surrounding nations, most notably the Canaanites. Christianity then in turn ended the legal right of parents to murder their children among the Greeks and Romans.

Since this is the core issue in all morality, isn’t it odd that it is even today overlooked? Isn’t it odd that people commonly only speak of an obligation for children to honour parents?

That this is so shows the sin continues, unabated. We see it obviously, of course, in abortion. We see it in the callous sacrifice of the interests and lives of aboriginal children since the closing of the residential schools. We see it in the growing practice of genital mutilation of children. We see it in the unnecessary bullying of the education system.

We pretend, of course, to care about children above all. The Devil always says the opposite of the truth, to conceal his crimes.

The Real Genocide

 

Moloch: the pagan attitude towards children.

I can’t locate the clip, but Stephen LeDrew recently did a three-minute interview with Brian Lilley in which they lamented a teacher who was fired for questioning whether the Indian residential schools were so bad. I suspect it has actually been pulled. Too controversial?

Both Lilley and LeDrew took care to make clear in the interview that they themselves thought residential schools were bad—but why can’t we discuss the matter?

They ought to know why. When an opinion or viewpoint is suppressed, it is usually because it is right. Because those who oppose it, and are in power, do not believe they can convincingly argue against it. Nobody cares to silence claims that the earth is flat, or that the US never went to the moon.

Lilley does point out that he has interviewed many “survivors” who remembered the schools fondly. This despite the fact that anyone who attended has a financial incentive to say they were as bad as possible: compensation is being offered. Lilley also notes that he has read the historical documents, and knows that, when they were set up, they were the “progressive” option. They were intended, if mistakenly, to help the Indians. There was no genocide in mind.

Most of them were mostly orphanages: refuges for kids whose parents had died, or who came from a profoundly dysfunctional family, or whose parents were too poor to properly care for them. And the Indian family is still broken. Simply closing them, without offering an alternative, is in callous disregard of the interests of Indian children. This is the real ethnic genocide, and it is happening now. Scapegoating the residential schools looks like a cover to get away with it.

We pretend we have no idea why there is this problem of “missing and murdered indigenous women.” We keep demanding more investigation and more commissions. The answer is obvious: most of them are adolescent women fleeing some intolerable situation at home. We pretend we have no idea why there are so many suicide pacts among young people at remote reservations. The answer is obvious.

We don’t give a damn about Indians. We don’t give a damn about young people in general. Whether consciously or not, we want to kill them all. We abort them, we surgically mutilate them, we mock mothers who spend their time raising them, we will not give them a proper education, but force them into factory schools and indoctrination centres, we declare them “mentally ill” and refuse to listen if they say they are abused at home.

To most of us, in our post-Christian society, the young seem only to be an unwanted consequence of our sexual pleasures. Just a damnable inconvenience, and to be punished for it.

And a Child Shall Lead Them

 

The Emperor's New Clothes

They came to Capernaum and, once inside the house, 

he began to ask them,

“What were you arguing about on the way?” 

But they remained silent.

They had been discussing among themselves on the way

who was the greatest. 

Then he sat down, called the Twelve, and said to them,

“If anyone wishes to be first,

he shall be the last of all and the servant of all.” 

Taking a child, he placed it in their midst,

and putting his arms around it, he said to them,

“Whoever receives one child such as this in my name, receives me;

and whoever receives me,

receives not me but the One who sent me.”—Mark 9: 30-37

The gospel reading at last Sunday’s mass sounds like an endorsement of the Romantic notion that childhood is a state of blessedness to which we must aspire.

Matthew 18:1-5 is similar:

At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, “Who, then, is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?”

He called a little child to him, and placed the child among them. And he said: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.

Yet if the ideal is to be a little child, there is no reason for this life, with its sufferings, or for creation. God could have had us all born into heaven.

Everyone who has had children, or who has been one, knows that children are not moral paragons. They can lie; they can be greedy; they can be cruel to small animals.

But, as Father Flanagan, the founder of Boys’ Town, observed, "no boy ever wants to be bad.” Children can do bad things. However, no child has yet become vicious. They have not committed themselves to any vice; they are too young to have formed such a habit. To entertain and sustain a vice is, over time, to turn away from virtue in principle. That is how the sheep becomes a goat. That is when denial begins, and we turn away from truth itself.

Which is to say, we turn away from God.

We turn away from God, towards what? Towards self—that is, to satisfying our selfish urges. In this sense, we become big—our selves become big. To reverse this is to become again small, like children.