Monday, September 27, 2004

A letter to Dr. Bouteneff

Dear readers,

If you followed a link to this post and were looking for my words to Dr. Bouteneff, well.... I deleted them. I wish I had never written them. After he wrote back to me I realized that he is well intentioned and even though I think he is wrong in politics, he is more holy than I am.

2 comments:

Huw Richardson said...

Your choice of parties based on one (and only one) issue seems weak: neither the evil party nor the stupid party, having been in power, has done more or less to abortion. Only the court cases have effected it, and there is no statistical evidence linking the appointees of one party or the other to "prolife" activities. The recent partial birth bann had all the effect of Clinton's Don't-Ask-Don't-Tell policy on same sex attraction in the armed service: ie, none, really.

The odd politics of pro life would have me say person A is better than person B just because person A is prolife. It matters not that person A passes hundreds of laws a year that are opposed to life after birth: ravaged country sides, standing armies engaged immorally against, etc. That can't be the case: that is exactly the same as the democratic party in SF expecting me to vote for a democrat just because that democrat self-identifies as gay... no matter what other policies he may have to support.

A decision can't be made, as the good Doctor wisely points out. One human system (political party or otherwise) is just as good *for our working out of our salvation* as another. But no human system will ever come close to anything other than, well, human.

Beyond working out our salvation we have no business playing. We may, under the blessing of our SF, vote... or we may not vote, again, under the blessing of our SF.

Yet if it causes us to judge our brother, to condemn those who "vote" other than we, to feel as if one has done the only "proper" Orthodox thing, to insist that, apart from all the teachings of the Church one knows better than one's own SF... well then, I don't think participation in the system is a very good thing at all.

Matt said...

I don't know enough to agree or disagree with what you said.