There are Bad Things that are Very Near Good Things

I just came across another instance of that old feminist cliche–wives are basically prostitutes because … sex!

Roll, mine eyes.  Anyone who has followed our virtue chart work knows that many vices are simply distortions of virtues.  That is  not a truth we have discovered.  The devil being God’s ape was a commonplace for thousands of years in antiquity and Christendom, so how can moderns . . . ok, now I see the problem.

The bottom line is that in the nature of things we should absolutely expect that there will be wicked versions of the greatest goods.  This should not shock us at all.  Sometimes it is only a hairs breadth of difference that separates shining glory from slimy abomination.  Prostitution is a soullless, sad, commercialized abomination of the glorious carnality and celestial interdependence of married life, which in no way tells us anything about married life.

Yet  you see this error all over the place, perhaps deliberately.

Wives are like prostitutes, so being a wife should be abolished.

Leaders are like tyrants, so reject all authority.

Manhood is like barbarianism, so do away with  manhood.

Anarchic rebels are like free citizens, so eliminate free citizens.

Mindless obedience and sterile conformity are bad,  so don’t obey ever and try hard not to fit in

Whole philosophies are just that stupid.

I feel a parable coming on.

A raccoon was walking a fallen log over a stream and slipped.   Spluttering and shaking himself off on the bank, he determined that the evil was not in falling, but in crossing the log at all.  After all, walking across the log on all fours was very similar, nearly identical in fact, to walking across the log on all fours and having one step slip.  That night, full of a sense of virtue, he was trapped against the bank of the stream by hounds and killed.