The Neutralizers

In any society there exists people and organizations whose real function (whatever they may tell you) is to allay annoying anxieties or lull peoples' annoying conscience to sleep. They give outlet to your real concerns or bury annoying truths so as to make you feel better without actually changing anything.

These are the Neutralizers.

Neutralizers keep you from the dangerous tendency to actually do or change anything. They are priests and pastors, doctors and psychiatrists, political activists and charities.

You go to the doctor and tell him you feel that life is pointless. He gives you a pill, and the pill does indeed remove some of that, but whatever caused you to feel that way is unchanged. But hey, the pain is gone, that's what you care about.

You are really worried that humans may be damaging the natural world in terrible ways, and so you give money to a charity, like the World Wildlife Fund or (ugh) the Nature Conservancy and then you feel better, but the money mostly goes to the well-stuffed salaries of their leaders and sometimes even helps petroleum companies. The Nature Conservancy for instance quite often sells land that is donated to them or which they buy with donated land to people who will frack it for natural gas. But you feel better because in your ignorance you imagined that your money was actually going to help heal the natural world.

You go to church hoping that you will encounter the kind of Christianity of the early disciples or the Book of Acts, even though you certainly won't. What you will encounter are some soothing rituals and some nice conversation and coffee, and that's great, but you might be able to do that at your local Starbucks too (with better coffee.) You could achieve that at Starbucks more honestly perhaps, because you won't be lying to yourself (which virtually all us believers of whatever stripe do) that you are doing adequate service to G-d.

Go re-read the book of Amos, and then read it some more. You think this is just talking about the ancient Israelites?

Really?

I hate, I despise your religious festivals;
your assemblies are a stench to me.

Even though you bring me burnt offerings and

grain offerings,
I will not accept them.
Though you bring choice fellowship offerings,
I will have no regard for them.

Away with the noise of your songs!
I will not listen to the music of your harps.

But let justice roll on like a river,
righteousness like a never-failing stream!

~Amos 5:21-24

But I would not have you believe that the Neutralizers are just a sinister plot to keep us from changing anything. An evil conspiracy to maintain the status quo. Not at all. We WANT the Neutralizers around. We positively demand that they exist. If they didn't exist, we would create them. Because if we actually took responsibility for what is, we couldn't bear it. And if we acted on that responsibility, well, that could have very poor consequences for our standard of life, the respect of our peers, or even our physical well-being. If Jesus took responsibility, his reward was getting nailed to a tree. If Gandhi took responsibility, his reward was getting shot and killed. Taking responsibility can be very bad for our health.

Here's an example of some Neutralizers. You think abortion is wrong, so you go stand on a street corner in front of an abortion clinic with a sign. This saves approximately ZERO POINT ZERO lives.  But hey, you're doing something, right?

Some liberal one time (I don't have the exact quote on hand) said that pro-lifers cannot really believe that fetuses are human lives, or else they'd storm the place in a mob and tear down the doors and break the equipment with sledgehammers. If this really was the modern Auschwitz, the modern Dachau, more clinics would have burned to the ground in the 46 years that abortion has been legal.

This of course ignores the fact that nobody stopped Auschwitz or Dachau either.

And the minute a pro-lifer actually does something, actually burns down an abortion clinic or shoots an abortion doctor, who is the first to denounce him as a terrorist?


Pro-life groups like Operation Rescue.


Even the name, "pro-life," gives them an out. They don't take violent action because they are Pro-Life! They are pro- everyone's life, and pro- everyone's property, and now everyone kiss nice and they will sit on the corner and pretend they are doing something!


Imagine we were back in slavery times, and someone set up a protest at a slave auction. And they said, "We are pro-freedom! We want more freedom! Voluntarily free your slaves, you slave owners, that would be very nice of you!" If that was the extent of the movement to free the slaves, we would still have slavery to this day.

No, they weren't called Pro-Free. They were called  ABOLITIONISTS.  John Brown wasn't Pro-Free.

The truth about most Pro-Lifers is not exactly that they don't believe the unborn are people. They may think that the unborn are less-than, but thinking that people other than yourself and your own are less-than is pretty common anyway. People care about themselves, their family, and their own circle. Everyone else is really less-than. Lots of Germans who stood by as Dachau burned corpses probably thought that Jews were really people. They were just less-than.

If the average Pro-Lifer is guilty of anything in his ineffectual defense of the unborn, he is guilty of breaking this commandment:

LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF.

Of course, aren't we all guilty of that?