A woman running the Young Christian Activity Group is every bit as incompatible with Christianity as an openly gay bishop, and like gay bishops, results in most of the boys and all of the manly boys dropping out of their religion. People may tell themselves that Christianity can be compatible with progressivism, but each step to reconcile them empties the churches.
If you accept the progressive position on “marital rape”, that sex requires the continuing consent of both parties, and reject the Christian position that consent to sex is given once and forever, and that for a married couple to abstain from sex requires continuing mutual consent or physical inability, then you pretty much have to accept the position that divorce is at a woman’s whim, which is the end of marriage as traditionally understood.
Since the Church is the family writ large, an echo of the family between the earthly family headed by the father, and the divine fatherhood of god, abolishing marriage as traditionally understood ends Christianity. So, if Christians deviate from the New Testament on male authority and irrevocable consent to sex, Christianity ends, and it is apparent that it is ending.
Pagan morality differs from Christian morality because it is egoist. Attempts to revive paganism are fatally flawed in that they attempt to revive paganism with a universalist morality, a morality compatible with progressivism. The true pagan treats the loser as though he has an infectious disease. The pagan concept of virtue is barely distinguishable from the pagan concepts of strength in men, manliness in men, and femininity in women, if it can be distinguished at all.
Around 390 BC, Brennus, King of the Sennones, was negotiating with the Romans over their Etruscan intervention, an intervention suspiciously resembling conquest. The Romans murdered a Sennone diplomat sent by King Brennus. King Brennus sent some more diplomants. The Romans cut out their eyes.
The Sennones under King Brennus then marched on Rome. During the march his army purchased food supplies from the locals, rather than looting, raping, burning, and killing. The Romans fought the Sennones a short distance outside Rome. Their army was defeated and scattered, and the Sennones marched into the now undefended city. The Romans reformed on the Capitoline Hile, the oldest part of Rome, a wall within a wall. The Sennones looted and burned the rest of Rome. King Brennus demanded one thousand pounds of gold to leave Rome.
The Romans agreed, and Brennus set up a steelyard scale to weigh the gold. When they Romans arrived, they noticed that the weights were heavier than they should be, and complained the Sennones were cheating, to which King Brennus famously replied by throwing his sword on the scales and shouting, “Vae Victis!” which means, “Woe to the vanquished”. So the Romans, having given King Brennus a thousand pounds of gold, had to go back to the Capitol for more gold. A steelyard scale has arms of unequal length, so they had to provide many times the weight of King Brennus’ sword in gold.
Darwin, and Darwinian theory, predicts that social animals will evolve certain moral characteristics, to facilitate cooperation and avoid killing each other too often. Those conspecifics that Darwin thinks we should kill, and that Darwinian theory predicts that we will be inclined to kill, we call evil, and those that Darwin thinks we should prefer to associate with, and that Darwinian theory predicts that we will be inclined to prefer to associate with, we call good.
The resulting moral system has a fair resemblance to Randian enlightened egoism, Aristotlean ethics, and the moral principles expressed by Xenophon when justifying the conduct of the ten thousand.
Xenophon was an economist and a mercenary. He was one of a group of mercenaries assisting a Persian King, far from Greece. Their employer was killed. The officers of the Greeks were invited to a parley, to which they went hoping for further employment. Their officers were treacherously murdered. Xenophon then announced he had received a message from the Gods that they should elect new officers and get the hell out. The ten thousand slaughtered,looted and burned their way from Asia to Greece. Getting close to Greece, Xenophon was criticized for the trail of corpses the ten thousand had left across Asia.
To which Xenophon replied that they only slaughtered and looted when the locals tried to stop them from passing through, or denied them supplies, that when the locals provided a market, the ten thousand paid for their supplies.
A Darwinian should care about his offspring, and their offspring, and generally does, and therefore cares about the collapse of civilization.
Traditional Christianity would, and did, lead to the kind of society I advocate, in particular Restoration England. But traditional Christianity is dead, save for a remnant small as mustard seed, and shows no obvious signs of being more capable of revival than Greek paganism, though a Christian might reply that coming back from the dead is their specialty. Today’s Christianity is progressive, at most trailing behind the official and orthodox progressivism by a few years.
It is probably true that a society needs religious or quasi religious underpinnings, needs a theocracy, or something functionally similar. I am a big admirer of Restoration England, which founded the scientific revolution and the industrial revolution. But the Established Christianity of restoration England can no more be revived than the official paganism of republican Rome. Julian the apostate tried and failed to revive the old paganism, and got an undead religion.
Christianity contains the seeds of the leftism that devoured it, in its universalism, and in its sympathy for losers. The old paganism inherently had less tendency to head left.
