To the Editor:
I should like to, at the risk of turning the paper into a sounding board for myself and Mr. Stevenson, reply to his column entitled "Coming Out of the Closet" (Wednesday, July 24). First, however, I would like to upbraid you, editorship of The Dartmouth for altering the title on my submitted work from "The Widow's Peak" to "Rhetoric and Sacrilege."
Not only did you ruin my attempt, albeit in poor humor, to retain the word "widow" in my letter, but in your ultimate editorial wisdom, you allowed the "balding author" bit to remain. A widow's peak, friends, is what I am sporting in my advancing age.
Notwithstanding editorial blunder, I should like to take Mr. Stevenson to task on a few points he has made within his latest epistle.
Firstly, his suggestion that "liberal Christianity" emerged as a response to orthodoxy in a modernizing, secularizing society, in my admittedly limited course of study into early Christianity, seems incorrect.
In fact, Christian orthodoxy came into being as a response to heresies in the early Church. Gnostics and other offshoot sects that emerged throughout the Mediterranean and North Africa necessitated response by Church fathers (Irenaeus comes to mind) to coagulate and homogenize heterodoxy led to orthodoxy, not the other way around. Mr. Stevenson's assertion that Christian Orthodoxy is tolerant is by and large historically inaccurate.
Who were these early orthodox Christians? These were people who so zealously martyred themselves that edicts had to be issued to control the zeal of some early Christians to do so and to follow in the way of Christ.
If one reads of the martyrs, such as those of the Church of Lyons or St. Polycarp, one does see that they certainly, as Mr. Stevenson believes, felt that they did not have anything to fear from the outside world. A healthy belief, especially when shared by the sort of people that fly planes into buildings under God's watchful eye.
While I very much respect Mr. Stevenson and his intelligent insights into virtually every topic, the column he wrote ends like the tract of Talib. The lessons of history will bear out that while for an individual like Mr. Stevenson, the faith advocated in his column can be nothing but a reinforcement of the strength of the beliefs Mr. Stevenson has, vis-a-vis their sanctification in the eyes of God.
Less moral individuals, however, have a blessing to carry on their homicide bombings with impunity in the eyes of God. Perhaps not Mr. Stevenson's God, but then again, that was the God that sanctioned pogroms, Crusades and Inquisitions.
This, I hope, should highlight for those of you that need it the necessity of a code of ethics separate from the dictates of a deity. Thus, when we spoke of an objective and universal code of ethics versus a morass of relativism, I offered the distinction, or as Mr. Stevenson refers to it, the hesitancy, in my delineation of religion as a different topic of conversation.
