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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   26556 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024

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Authoritarian communists will never get there(because it's pie in the sky ridiculosity), but they'll happily tell you that the increasing power to the state is about abolishing the hierarchy between men.

And Christians will tell you we'll be all equal in Heaven. Many democratic socialists who don't want a revolutions, just socialized control of industry, want a very hierarchical burearacracy that must be obeyed. Organized crime tends to be extremely hierarchical- are they all farther right than the Nazis? There are examples of parties all over the spectrum that don't fit the pattern of "less hierarchy = more left, more hierarchy = more right". Especially when you play fast and loose about artificial hierarchies vs natural hierarchies mean.

There are plenty of Christians who will tell you that, no, we will not all be equal in heaven, and some will be closer to God than others. In fact, angels, who are by definition normally in heaven, are in Christian thought held to exist in a particularly strict hierarchy.

That's without even addressing the elephant in the living room that heaven is inherently unequal because God(duh) and also some don't get in.

"Closer" is probably the wrong word. God will be as close to the glorified in heaven as he can be; if it were otherwise there could be no salvation.

The best description of heaven in the saint-venerating Churches comes from St. Therese of Liseaux, in Story of a Soul:

To this dearly loved sister I confided my most intimate thoughts; she cleared up all my doubts. One day I expressed surprise that God does not give an equal amount of glory to all the elect in Heaven—I was afraid that they would not all be quite happy. She sent me to fetch Papa’s big tumbler, and put it beside my tiny thimble, then, filling both with water, she asked me which seemed the fuller. I replied that one was as full as the other—it was impossible to pour more water into either of them, for they could not hold it. In this way Pauline made it clear to me that in Heaven the least of the Blessed does not envy the happiness of the greatest; and so, by bringing the highest mysteries down to the level of my understanding, she gave my soul the food it needed.

In other words, all the saints are full of God, but some are capable of being fuller than others. And one among them is so full of grace that she is "more spacious than the heavens" (in any other context, a grievous insult) and so densely filled with God that he took physical form in her womb.

Maybe Christians have to sadly stay in the far right category then. But would a type of Theist that believes in something nearly identical to Christian theocracy, with the tweak that they think God is just the spiritual union of all humanity's souls and that we are all equal in Heaven(and that everyone goes to Heaven), get to be called far leftist? Again, in the material world, their actual policies are identical to something like Byzantine Rome.

Many Christians do believe this. Interestingly, they also tend to be on the left politically. Make of that what you will.

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