The Sacred And the Profane

“…they have put no difference between the holy and the profane…”

Ezekiel 22:26

Like Pavlov’s salivating dogs, the predictable liberal calls for gun control in the wake of tragedy seem to have moved to the realm of conditioned response rather than any reasoned connection to reality. The shooting of two journalists by a disgruntled fellow employee elicited the all too expected cries for increased gun control for the rest of us who don’t shoot our co-workers. Short of abolishing the second amendment, it’s hard to envision the law that would have kept a legal gun out of this man’s hands. Imagine if you will if somehow we could have kept this angry black man, a homosexual unafraid to play the race or gay card, from having a gun while his more “privileged” white counterparts were allowed to have one. How would that have played? And having been denied a gun, do we honestly believe that this horrible excuse for a human being would have chosen instead to just write a biting FaceBook update? No, of course not. He would have found a machete, a bomb, an axe, or a car to express his rage, and unfortunately you can’t regulate rage.

For those who believe that axe regulations would have given Lizzie Borden an intact family, it is difficult to have a reasonable conversation about what causes tragedies like this, and how we might change our society to diminish them. They are the true believers in the magic of big government, that laws can eliminate crime, that you can regulate morality, that you can litigate a shortcut to goodness and humanity. Real fixes usually require hard work. We so want to believe that a bottle of mystery oil will fix that bad head gasket, that some tropical berry can make us lose 20 lbs., that a pill can cure mental illness, or that laws can fix societal breakdowns. Our misplaced hopes only waste time and money, and excuse our procrastination in beginning the work it will take to fix the problem.

In our increasingly secularized society, and as we unnecessarily sacrifice Faith on the altar of Science, we have allowed the lines between the sacred and the profane, or common, to be blurred. There was a time when things were sacred, that are not so sacred anymore. Marriage was sacred, sex was sacred, how we treated women was sacred, how we treated children; our word was sacred, Truth was sacred, sacred honor, sacred dignity; our work and self-sufficiency were sacred, our treatment of our fellow man was sacred… life was sacred. These things were important to us, and while we have diminished the importance of the sacred we have raised the importance of the common to a point where the profane things of life cast a shadow on the sacred. We all have basic needs and desires, and in the past those needs and desires occasionally caused us to turn a blind eye to what was sacred; but we have moved beyond that in equating the two. We have equated a woman’s right to choose with a tiny human’s right to life, we have equated a man’s desire to be respected with the right of another man’s right to live, we have equated a politicians need to diplomatically lie with the idea of Truth as an absolute. We consider those who work with no more honor than those who choose not to, we render no praise to those who succeed in marriage, to those who maintain purity before marriage; we make no distinction between a whore and a lady, a gentleman and a pig; success is no more lauded than relying on government assistance. If life were a sport, we would all be receiving participation awards.

In a society that has so blurred the lines that prison is considered a lifestyle choice, and it’s wardrobe high style; where our very DNA is being treated as a suggestion, secondary to how we “identify”; where we have so diminished the sanctity of life that we are lackadaisical with trafficking in the heads of infants, even joking about “closing their eyes” so the recipients won’t be startled… in that society where our common needs and desires are put on equal footing with that which should be sacred, we must expect the less balanced among us to fail to see the lines they should not cross. Having moved the bar so low, we have made it far easier to step over.

IMHO: There is indeed a time for every purpose, and even the sacred must occasionally be infringed upon. There are times when marriages must end, lives be taken, truths left unsaid, wars be fought. We have however made those exceptional infringements commonplace, and the idea of sacred things has been diminished. As shown by Peggy Hubbard in her recent rant against black on black violence, even well placed profanity can be sacred; yet we have even profaned profanity by making cursing common. In so doing we diminish both the uplifting effect of pure conversation, and the dramatic effect of the times when taboo words actually should be used. Likewise, we have made the taking of lives common, with Planned Parenthood franchises springing up like McDonalds, and inner-city shootings as normal as school yard brawls once were. Whether through war, police actions, or drone strikes, there is never a time anymore where our government itself is not in the business of killing people. We have greatly become that people who call good evil, and evil good, and sacred things have become the collateral damage.