A misleading stereotype has been imposed on the public debate about same-sex marriage. That stereotype is that those who oppose it and the broader narrative within which it fits are religious fundamentalists, while those who are for it are fighting to rid society of religious intolerance.
In reality, however, the broader narrative that the woke agenda serves, of which same-sex marriage is part, is a manifestation of the hard core of Western Christianity. As this writer argued in an earlier SLpress article, the broader narrative is the denial of the different gender roles in a family, that of father and mother. And this arises from the denial of the existence of biological differences between the sexes and ultimately the denial of the very concept of biological sex. Gender is seen as an arbitrary ‘imaginary’ construct and nothing more.
However, this denial of biology itself, which would be impossible for any other civilization in the history of Mankind, is made possible because of the enormous self-confidence that the worldview of “man-god”, which is part of the hard core of Western Civilization and comes from Western Christianity, has given to the man of the post-modern West.
Who gave birth to ‘man-god’?
More specifically, the decline of Christianity in the West and the rise of Humanism essentially led to the replacement of God in the collective consciousness of humans by a belief in the possibilities of Man himself. In other words, the worldview of the “anthropotheos” was created, as Dostoevsky describes it in his book The Possessed. Simply put, Man attempted to hijack the powers and capabilities of God and deify himself.
As Professor John Gray writes in his book “Straw Dogs”, “Humanism is not a science but a religion”. This conclusion is also reached by the religious theologian and Oxford University professor Karen Armstrong, who in her famous book ‘The History of God’ argues that ‘humanism is itself a religion without a god’. But Humanism and the Enlightenment were not the product of parthenogenesis. They stepped on the mentalism of Western Christianity, the self-worship of the human intellect that characterizes Western Christianity.
Because the separation of Church and State is an idealism
As Professor Giannaras writes in his book “Orthodoxy and the West”. The ratio is the individual mental faculty (faculty rationalise), the sophistication of the mind to know things according to their essence (per se) since by definition the human mind is a miniature of the divine intellect, where the substances of all beings are contained as mental conceptions.”
Killing God
Subsequently, the Enlightenment imaginatively “kills” God, but the self-determination of the human mind as a “miniature of the divine mind” remains. Thus, people in the West, from the Enlightenment years onwards, when they were “liberated” from God, did not see themselves as just another primate mammal with superior intelligence to the rest, but as a completely separate being that has no relation to the rest of its biological relatives.
In a way, the banishment of God from human things, instead of reducing man’s perception of man to the level of the intelligent animal, elevated it to the level of God! From being a “creature of god” man saw himself as a god himself, or at least as a being who could have absolute control over his destiny, the world and himself. And he achieved this control through his intellect and his will. He “freed himself” imaginatively from nature and considered that he could achieve anything.
As Professor Matsoukas writes in his book “Protestantism”, “The Great 20th century Protestant theologian K. Barth notes that the 18th century is characterized not only by its logic but also by its demonic and Mephistophelian impulse. It deconstructs man by putting God inside him. Thus, man begins to believe in his omnipotence. He is now convinced that he will accomplish everything, from the organization of his personal life to the organization of states.”
The Superman, the Nazis, and the woke agenda
The self-worship of Western Man’s intellect was combined with a metaphysical belief in the possibilities of his will. Thus, volitionalism emerged as a kind of substitute for divine faculties. Western mentalarchy needed metaphysical volitionalism, the transformation of the human will into a superhuman power so that it would have a “power base” on which modern man would base his attempt to control the world and his destiny.
Thus, the modern post-Christian, volitional individual emerged, who by his will could dominate the world around him, as the Nazis believed they could do, putting forward a distorted reading of the Nietzschean concept of Superman. The superman, then, is the cultural matrix that gives rise today to theories of gender non-existence and its social derivatives, such as same-sex marriage.
The difference with the Nazis is that the postmodern superman aims to control his small inner universe, believing, with metaphysical fanaticism, that he can choose even his gender, free from any notion of external forces, such as nature and biology, which he perceives as arbitrary “imaginary constructs”. It is worth noting that this deconstruction of human identities and, more generally, the relativization of reality, which is a key element of so-called postmodernity, is directly linked to intolerant historical readings, such as Holocaust denial. For more, one can see Robert Eaglestone’s book
“Postmodernism and Holocaust Denial”.
The problem, then, with the larger narrative served by same-sex marriage is not equality vis-à-vis society and law, but the ontology of the human person. It is how man is defined and whether the very concept of man makes sense. So let each person make their own choices, let them take their own responsibilities. But let us not hide under the ‘sling-backs’ of progressivism that supposedly fight against religiosity. Deconstructing gender is cruel and fundamentalist bigotry. It is just mutated and camouflaged…(Kostas Grivas slpress.gr)
