Matt Walsh is Not A Christian

For some reason, this fellow named Matt Walsh is granted a lot of credibility as a Christian speaker and writer. This is a puzzling phenomenon because a cursory look at Matt Walsh’s writings makes it exceedingly obvious that he neither gives a damn about Jesus nor the Bible.

Take one of his pet peeves: abortion. The Bible says literally nothing good or bad about a woman choosing to have an abortion. The closest to a statement on abortion that it makes is a law that requires a man who accidentally hits a pregnant woman to pay a fine if her pregnancy is aborted as a result of the hit. This law is vitally important, since it demonstrates beyond any reasonable objection that the Bible does not consider a fetus to be a person–if the fetus were a person, the man who accidentally caused the abortion would be sentenced to exile to one of the cities of refuge, just like the man who accidentally kills a person.

The favorite Psalm of the anti-abortion crowd (Psalm 139) is no help to them either. Sure, it praises G-d that “you knitted me together in my mother’s womb“, but the reality is that G-d knitted everything, everywhere together, but that doesn’t give everything, everywhere the status of person! All the Psalmist is saying is that “whatever it is that I was when I was in my mother’s womb was yet another of the things that you, G-d, knit together by virtue of your status as Creator.” A goat is also fearfully and wonderfully made, yet that doesn’t prevent us from killing and eating goats (well, many of us, anyway).

Of course, we need go no further than the opinion of Jesus to decide if Matt Walsh is a Christian. What did Jesus say?

“Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ Then they also will answer, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to you?’ Then he will answer them, saying, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

“I was hungry and on welfare”–and Matt Walsh took away their food. “I was thirsty because I live in Flint and my water was full of lead”–and Matt Walsh did nothing to give them water. “I was a stranger from Syria”–and Matt Walsh did not welcome them. “I was sick and in prison because of a marijuana offense that cops targeted me for because my skin is black”–and Matt Walsh did not visit them. Jesus is very clear what he thinks about Matt Walsh: “Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.”

Matt Walsh is no Christian–just a small, angry snowflake lashing out at a society that no longer grants him the undeserved privileges he feels entitled to.

Sensitive People

You were my first love
The earth moving under me
Bedroom scent, beauty ardent
Distant shiver, heaven sent

I’m the snow on your lips
The freezing taste, the silvery sip
I’m the breath on your hair
The endless nightmare, devil’s lair
-Nightwish

Sensitive people are under-appreciated in our society (at best). The beauty they see in life and humanity inspires us with hope for meaning, and it compels us to protect what’s valuable. But their sensitivity makes them much more aware of how things we take for granted in our laws and customs can be damaging to people, and that awareness frequently sets those sensitive people at odds with the society around them.

People tend to ignore things they find painful. This sets up filters in their brains that rejects such information before it even reaches their conscious mind. But realize what this means: such people have deliberately made themselves unable to see reality for what it is. Sensitive people, who feel pain too strongly to ignore it, can’t do this, and consequently have an automatically better understanding of what is really going on.

When someone opposes you, your inclination is always to fight back, instead of understanding why the person is opposing you. If that person is a sensitive person, however, your fighting back is going to overwhelm them and make it hard for them to explain why they’re opposing you. In your mind, they’ve become angry belligerents, and their sensitivity to beauty is lost to you. That makes it easy to write off their concerns, which results in an unfortunate loss of necessary feedback — much like cutting out your eye because you don’t like what you see.

There are some people who are belligerent because they want to take power. But others do it because they want to make things better and minimize people getting hurt. Opposing the latter group results in a harsher society for everyone.

Remember this: to his society, Jesus was a belligerent. But his desire was to help people. That doesn’t mean every sensitive person is Jesus. But failing to take sensitive people seriously contributes to the destruction of people and increased suffering in society.

Christianity and Mysticism

I read an article on Challies Dot Com about the increasing influence of mysticism on Evangelicalism (http://www.challies.com/articles/the-boundaries-of-evangelicalism). The author is concerned about this influence, given that the two ought to be opposed.

I find the attempt to distinguish between Christianity and mysticism interesting, because one thing that becomes readily apparent when one studies Judaism is that Christianity is mysticism. That is, the topics that form the core of Christian belief are, in Judaism, the material of mysticism: heaven and hell, the nature of G-d, the nature of the soul, the Devil, the supernatural understanding of history. The idea of Jesus dying on the cross for sins is a mystical concept. So is the idea of becoming part of his body. And so is the idea of the trinity.

Core Judaism isn’t as worried about making sure your beliefs on hell, or the structure of G-d, or whatever, are correct. In Judaism, you don’t follow the Law so that you don’t go to hell. You follow the Law because you’re a Jew, and the Law is what Jews do. G-d founded the Jewish nation, yes, and you’re obeying Him by following the Law, yes, but at the end of the day, the Law is proscriptive. You’re supposed to do–why isn’t as important. (To be fair, due to the influence of Chassidism, this description isn’t entirely accurate.)

Christianity is mystical to its core. Its main concerns are the nature of G-d in the Trinity, the meaning of Jesus’s death on the cross (understood as the ultimate victory), and eternal reward or punishment in heaven or hell. As a whole, it rejects the idea of following the Law. Some parts (Protestantism) even reject the idea that doing anything has any importance. Everything happens via the vehicle of the mystical Grace of G-d for the purpose of the Glory of G-d, and the only proper goal of life is the understanding that everything that exists is only an emanation of that Grace. The goal is understanding, not action–that’s mysticism.

What’s really interesting is that for some reason (or reasons), much of Christianity has felt the need to see itself as non-mystical. Thus came the “canon law” of the Catholic Church, that tried to essentially become a new law-based religion while still rejecting Judaism. So also comes the article at the beginning, trying to strictly and logically define what is proper, based on rules and guidelines–including rules for the proper way to feel awe at a sunset! It is certainly a curious experiment: making a practical religion out of a mysticism.