Evolutionary Christianity

So, instead of just whining about middle class Christians and their willingness to follow the college bubble into the grave, I figure I should give my still cold-addled mind permission to ramble a bit about what Church probably ought to look like.
One of the big things to dawn on me, despite my conservative/traditionalist tendencies, is that liturgy and education aren't 'the answer'. This is because people are, generally speaking, stupid. The vast majority of people never learned much of anything, and only a handful ever really had any understanding of liturgy. This is not to say liturgy isn't important, but it isn't the sort of thing you expect people to understand. You put it out there. It needs to be in the vernacular so they at least understand the words. It ought to be ad orientem. You don't need a lot of lace- plain white cloth will do.

Married clergy are helpful too, not only because they might have a clue how to hold a marriage together, but because we'd have to stop playing like the 24/7 Eucharist Mart. Liturgy means more than just the Mass, more than just the Eucharist. I am not denigrating the Eucharist, but if you don't have the week, the times and seasons, vespers, benediction, whatever else- because let's face it, I am talking about a lot of stuff I haven't had a chance to experience- you don't really get the chance to receive the Eucharist as it should be received. Might as well open up a drive-through the way things are going.

Also, the Eucharist is something God is doing. It is action. The bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ, so that we get to become the body and blood of Christ. I get a little worried about the adoration stuff, because it is kind of like taking a verb and treating it like a noun.

But I digress. The baseline, deal is this Church ought to be a hospital. The really awesome cool stuff about this hospital is that sometimes we actually get to experience Christ. The more normal, and often annoying reality is that we also, everyday, have to experience reality. So, it would be good to grab a page out of evolutionary pyschology. Some of these better, but probably still atheist guys post the idea that the concept of God exists to bound our own drive for what's good for us to what is also good for humanity in general. We've got an evolutionary need to not destroy humanity while trying to get ahead. Of course, these guys are apparently unaware of how unbalanced most so-called gods are. We've got one God of the Living, and then a bunch of jerks like Zeus, or Shiva. I say this because I think most of these evpsych guys try just explain away God, like we can just understand the evolutionary reasons of our conception of Him and then run off and play in blissful rationality happily ever after. No. We'll just end up with a bunch of jerks again. Most people are stupid, remember?

Meanwhile, the God of the Living, aware of the fact that people get too focused on things not important to Him, made the sex drive strong. He wants us to get married first and be able to provide for the children, but there is also an element of anarchy built into this thing. If you don't have a place ready for it, it will happen somewhere else, and you won't have much influence on the feral.

So we get college instead, spread out over most of the space where young families would be thriving if we hadn't had just adopted a completely fraudulent model only made possible by contraception and government backed debt. We get single moms instead, and a whole bunch of women with jobs, tattoos, drinking problems, and a preference for making a series of sexual misadventures rather than marry. We get singe guys who live in video gameland because at least there they have guy things to do, and a sense of accomplishment when they finally level up.

Whatever. I get tired of this post all of a sudden, because I feel like I am running over the same ground. I am not against mysticism, but I am against people putting their head in the sand and pretending everything would be okay if ____________. I don't think God is interested in whatever that is, unless maybe it is freedom. God wants more life. Jesus said he came so that we could have life and have it more abundantly. It is not wise to abstract that to the point where it means nothing. If your understanding of that doesn't include more humans, raised humanely, your understanding is flawed.

I cannot imagine God wants children to deal with the pain of public school, or even many Catholic schools. I don't think He wants children to eat stuff that is not actually any good for us, like soy, while being deprive of stuff that is good for us, like saturated fats. How much you want to bet even Catholic schools have lunch programs that labor under the lies we've been told about food? And what is true for children is true for adults. Is your workplace actually healthy for you? Probably not, unless you are blessed enough to work at home, or you control the environment in some way.