Thursday, December 10, 2009

Even the dead aren't safe in Europe

Photobucket

Photobucket

The Belgian web site Le Soir asks: Taboo on crosses in cemeteries?

Supposedly it's about separation of church and state. Actually it's about separation of body and soul. The Belgian bureaucratic elite want their subjects to have no God other than the state.

The deck under the headline says (my translation):
The Senate Commission of Institutional Affairs [could there be a more pompous title?] on Thursday will open consideration of a law proposed by Senator Philippe Mahoux on strict application of the separation between church and state. The text is aimed at official solemnities like the annual Te Deum. The neutrality should also be expressed in cemeteries …
According to the proposed law
The communal parts of cemeteries [where people of different religions are interred?] would have to strictly respect the principle of neutrality, which would mean for example a ban on placing crosses in these communal parts.
How does a cross on a tombstone violate separation of church and state? What does it have to do with the state's "neutrality" in religious matters? Apparently, that individuals — even when all that was mortal of them is placed in the ground — must be "neutral" as well.

Photobucket

Has anyone complained about the crosses? Unlikely. Even scientific materialists aren't so fanatical as to want to deprive the faithful of their practices. Probably Senator Mahoux and his ilk are bothered about Muslims being offended. But Muslims are hardly going to share a graveyard with infidels, and if they're offended by seeing crosses, sod them.

For all the European mandarins' attempts to efface traditional Christianity, crosses, some hundreds of years old, remain in cemeteries. Will the law require all existing crosses to be removed from tombs, or will those from earlier times be allowed via — wordplay coming — a "grandfather" clause?

Photobucket

Political issues aside, one of the plagues of contemporary government is utopian abstraction. In one form, it means taking a reasonable, even beneficent, idea such as separation of church and state and pushing it to a ludicrous extreme. There can be no exceptions, however time-honored or innocent. The law must have its pound of flesh. The principle becomes absolute, the human consequences irrelevant.

The absolutists now dominate in Europe. All that differentiates them from the absolute monarchs of the 16th century is that the power over the lives of their subjects has been distributed a little, shared by an oligarchic class.

Photobucket

12.12. A further thought, perhaps the true explanation of this state-sponsored vandalism, popped into my head without advance notice. Such a twisted concept of the separation of church and state arises in the pseudo-country of Belgium, where the E.U. headquarters is located, because the political elite have their own definition of the state.

To wit: the state is not a government limited to specific powers, as many people (but few politicians) in the United States still believe. Rather, in the soft totalitarianism of the U.K. and the E.U., individual preferences are permitted only insofar as they are acceptable to the state. The state is embarrassed by crosses in a graveyard because they do not fit with the universalism and homogeneity demanded by cultural Marxism.

The cross represents, at least ideally, a personal spiritual choice, made not in offices and meeting chambers in Brussels, but in the mysterious depths of the human heart. It is not a place that those who worship the state visit often, or ever.

Photobucket

2 comments:

MaryJ said...

The state is embarrassed by crosses in a graveyard because they do not fit with the universalism and homogeneity demanded by cultural Marxism.
---
But they only apply universalism and homogenity to anything that is Western. These loons would be happy to have Hindu or Muslim or Jewish symbols in their cemetaries.

You must always remember that the Left is simply anti-Western, anti-Christian, and anti-White. It pretends to be "universalist" but it is not. It has no principles beyond hatred of all things Western.

Leos Tomicek said...

@ MaryJ

The left is bitter that their Marxist fantasies always lead to disaster when applied in reality. I think many have already re-branded themselves from Marxists to Nihilist. The Marxists want to destroy the standing order and hopefully build a new one on the ashes. The less hypocritical Nihilist simply want to destroy without building anything.

Sadly both of these groups are heavily represented in universities that in turn produce such wondrous politicians that would make people secular even in death.