To sympathize with those who are less fortunate is honorable and decent. A man able to commiserate only with himself would surely be neither admirable nor attractive. But every virtue can become deformed by excess, insincerity, or loose thinking into an opposing vice. Sympathy, when excessive, moves toward sentimental condescension and eventually disdain; when insincere, it becomes unctuously hypocritical; and when associated with loose thinking, it is a bad guide to policy and frequently has disastrous results. It is possible, of course, to combine all three errors.
Dalrymple's essay brought to mind Chapter 2 in Herbert Schlossberg's magnificent Idols for Destruction: The Conflict of Christian Faith and Culture. Early in this chapter, entitled "Idols of Humanity," Schlossberg, like Dalrymple after him, calls our attention to how humanism so quickly moves from sympathy to sentimentalism with devastating consequences. Scholssberg observes:
Humanism raises sentiment to a level of command that is wholly inappropriate to it nature. In so doing, it bases its ethical structure on sentimentality, which is the doctrine of the primacy of sentiment, its elevation into a principle of truth. Humanism thrives on sentimentality because few religions are more dishonest in their doctrinal expressions. Unable to withstand dispassionate analysis, which would reveal its lack of foundation, it stresses feeling rather than thought. That is what makes sentimentality so vicious. People can get good feelings from almost anything; "sadism" refers to a philosophy that elevates feeling into a moral principle.
The better educated he is, the more likely the humanist is to believe that people are like machines and need to be programmed, and the more likely he is to believe that he should be one of the programmers. Given their premises, the logic of their position is invincible: Gods without power and wealth are an absurd contradiction.
Humanitarianism is saviorhood, and ethic perfectly suited to the theology that divinizes man. But the theology that divisnizes man, it turns out, only divinizes some men. The objects of humanitarian concern becomes less than men, so that the humanitarian can exercise the prerogatives of a god.
That god that failed is man.
We must also recognize that the Scriptures do not allow for engaging in theft in the name of caring for the poor. We cannot rob our neighbor to give to the poor. Neither can we hire elected officials and their bureaucratic friends to do so.True charity begins with our sharing our own time, money and selves with those in need.
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