Yes, Jesus was a refugee for a relatively brief period when his family went into a neighbouring country to escape King Herod. But I don't suppose they received any financial assistance from that country and nor would they have had a say in how it was run. Furthermore, they returned to their own country as soon as they could. The Holy Family's situation was not parallel to that of most refugees today which point I only make to show the weakness of the Jesus was a refugee argument made by those who somehow seem to think it can be applied to any and everyone who claims refugee status nowadays and used in the broader sense to justify the modern phenomenon of mass immigration.
Mass immigration inevitably destroys a country. The physical entity will remain, a society of some sort may endure but it will be nothing like the country that existed before. That is effectively destroyed. You might say time changes a country anyway but there is organic change and then there is complete revolution. One is growth but the other is replacement. Mass immigration is replacement. There are no two ways about this. I was brought up in London. The city now is a totally different place with totally different people. Obviously times change but this is not change. It is radical transformation. You might say this is not a bad thing. It just is what it is. However, the fact remains that London and its people as they were for a very long time have gone.
People emigrate to a country because they think they will have a better life there but might it be that human beings are not all the same and that the people who made the better off country have certain qualities that others do not have or not to the same degree? That means that any country that undergoes mass immigration will, over time, begin to resemble those countries, worse off, from which the immigrants came. This may not be inevitable if the newcomers can be properly integrated but the whole point of mass immigration, such as almost all Western countries have endured over the last 2 to 3 decades, is that the excessively large numbers means they cannot be integrated. Then trust between the various communities diminishes to the point that social cohesion starts to dissolve and the sense of nation identity is lost.
Jesus tells an often quoted parable about the sheep and the goats in Matthew chapter 25. He relates how the righteous will be rewarded for their good deeds on Earth. These include feeding him when he was hungry and looking after him when he was sick. When those so commended are puzzled about this he tells them that what they did for the least of his brothers they did for him. Note that word. Brothers. There is no suggestion that this has a universal application. It surely refers to those who share Jesus's vision of life and whose hearts are set on the Kingdom of Heaven as opposed to this world. Your spiritual brother is not every other human being, regardless of what he believes and his attitude to life, but those human beings who acknowledge and accept God. This doesn't mean you shouldn't help others when you can, you certainly should, but nor does it mean that a nation is spiritually obliged to have an open door policy. Besides which personal morality and national policy are not and should not be the same thing. And after all, isn't loving your neighbour primarily to do with loving your neighbour? Mass immigration by its effect on a country is very likely to harm many of your actual neighbours, i.e. fellow countryman and women, in the sense of putting pressure on house prices, welfare, education and health budgets and many other aspects of life not to mention the general culture and sense of nationhood. There is a glib, sentimental morality that just looks to the obvious and the immediately pleasing, and there is a more mature and spiritually balanced morality that looks at the wider picture and takes into account the deeper ramifications of a particular act.
The fact is that mass immigration has been used as a specific tool, one of several but a significant one, to destroy the West. The West must be destroyed because its civilisation and culture were grounded in Christianity. To that end compassion has been weaponised and turned against itself. I have to say that only the naive and those of bad faith are duped by this but there are a lot of them especially in the intellectual classes. These people want to feel morally superior and so they adopt certain attitudes that will help them do so. They also live in the world of abstract theory as opposed to reality and thus are easy victims to ideological propaganda which a simpler mindset would see through because it clashes with everyday reality.
The Archbishop of Canterbury may have good intentions or think he does but we know what they say about those. No doubt he means well but what does it mean to mean well? Does it mean he's doing what he thinks is right or Christian? What if he doesn't know what is right or, indeed, Christian? His Christianity is clearly heavily mixed up with, and I would say confused with, Enlightenment humanism which was a specific rejection of supernatural Christianity and promoted its social aspect, its least important aspect, to become not just the totality of moral understanding but also to a universal plane. So, the Archbishop may mean well according to his limited grasp of spiritual reality but his morality is grounded in Enlightenment humanism rather than Christianity. He is a materialist.
The left doesn't like boundaries but God does. He has created very strict boundaries between spirit and matter, Heaven and Hell and even, so esotericists inform us, between the various levels of the higher worlds to which you can only ascend when spiritually qualified to do so. This does not mean that boundaries should never be crossed but nor should they be totally disregarded. Boundaries protect and good things need protection in a world in which the darkness is always trying to overcome the light.
I am not against immigration per se but like everything it depends on the time and the place. It is sometimes right and often wrong, depending on circumstances. A country's first responsibility is to the people who live there. Certainly, if it can, it should extend a welcome to others who may be persecuted in their own lands but this cannot be an endless process or the nation will effectively be committing suicide. The Bible says that we should welcome the stranger but it doesn't say you should carry on doing this until you have destroyed your own nation. This is the disastrous path the West is set upon.
The kind of thinking you describe with regard to immigration was dealt with extensively by the late Lawrence Auster on his blog View from the Right. He often discussed what he deemed “nominalist thinking” here is an excerpt: : “The basic problem, as I’ve discussed many times, is that contemporary, over-intellectualized people don’t look at things whole; they look at one part of them and draw conclusions from that one part. It’s analogous to the people who say, “Islam is an Abrahamic religion therefore it is compatible with Christian society.” Or people who say, “Hispanic immigrants are Christians therefore they are compatible with our society.” They are looking at one part of the phenomenon under discussion, not at the phenomenon as a whole. Or conversely because the liberal is at heart a moral relativist, he can’t or won’t distinguish between a gun in the hand of a psycho and a gun in the hand of a level-headed, responsible citizen, and he won’t recognize that the responsible citizen could do good with the right weapons at his disposal. Instead, “violence” and “killing” are labeled as bad across the board…..”Another example he used to use (at the time) was “the tallest person in the world is Chinese so the Chinese must be a tall people.”
ReplyDeleteThis is what he called “not being able to count to three.”
"Contemporary, over-intellectualized people don’t look at things whole; they look at one part of them and draw conclusions from that one part'. Yes, that is quite right right. As I mention in the post simpler people, not seduced by abstractions, are more likely to see things as a whole.
ReplyDeleteThat's interesting but doesn't alter the general point that even if they did go to Egypt it was only for a while and then they went home.
ReplyDeleteJesus and His family were not refugees. At the time of their flight from their home, Egypt was also a province of the Roman Empire which makes their movement akin to going from France to Spain today.
ReplyDeleteI only make this point because secularists routinely use this line against us as a way to undermine our faith in the face of their globalism. It behooves us not to inadvertently take on their deceitful arguments.
Excellent point, Adam. I only used that fake argument to show its complete inapplicability to the present day but what you say adds extra weight to the counterargument.
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