Easter Sunday & Cognitive Dissonance

Easter Sunday & Cognitive Dissonance

Indeed, Christ has risen!  It is a miracle.  It is the miracle of our salvation.

However, the stone wasn’t rolled away to find an empty tomb just so we could cleanse our soul.

Jesus gave us something to do.  

I truly am amazed at the posts that occur on the Facebook in celebration of Easter Sunday.  The same people who proclaim the Resurrection seem to spend a good deal of their time posting opinion regarding opinions that seem to be in complete contradiction to the Great Commission (Matthew 28:16-20) to spread his teachings.  

I think one of the most specific teachings given to us is contained in Matthew 25:31-46.  

We are called to be the “you” in verses 35 & 36:

For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat,

I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink,

I was a stranger and you invited me in,

I needed clothes and you clothed me,

I was sick and you looked after me,

I was in prison and you came to visit me.

On a friend’s Facebook page, a college friend posted “The tomb is empty."  Celebrating the resurrection of Christ from the grave.  Something I surely do celebrate as well. 

Directly below my college friends' proclamation, he posts a a video blog entry from a person named Jonah Goldberg of Prager University, mocking the concept of “social justice.”  

Celebrating Christ’s resurrection and then subsequently mocking social justice takes some serious cognitive dissonance.  

Per Wikipedia: The first modern usage of the specific term "social justice" is typically attributed to Catholic thinkers from the 1840s, including to the Jesuit Luigi Taparelli in Civiltà Cattolica, based on the work of St. Thomas Aquinas.  He argued that rival capitalist and socialist theories, based on subjective Cartesian thinking, undermined the unity of society present in Thomistic metaphysics as neither were sufficiently concerned with moral philosophy.  

Likewise, at my own church, The Book of Discipline of the United Methodist Church says, 

"We hold governments responsible for the protection of the rights of the people to free and fair elections and to the freedoms of speech, religion, assembly, communications media, and petition for redress of grievances without fear of reprisal; to the right to privacy; and to the guarantee of the rights to adequate food, clothing, shelter, education, and health care."

So my friend is either not smart enough to connect the dots that his political stance mocking social justice is in contradiction to the Great Commission OR he is engaging in cognitive dissonance. Because I know him to be intelligent, in fact I believe he graduated Cum Laude, the conclusion must be a form of cognitive dissonance. 

The point of this Blogpost is not to embarrass or mock my friend.  

The point of this Blogpost is to ask the serious question, of yourself, about how can one celebrate Jesus’s Resurrection and his teachings and then reconcile supporting a society where each person that needs help if he or she is hungry, thirsty, alone, naked, sick, or in prison is told that they are to blame for their own woes (which is sometimes true, and sometimes not true, but usually a mixture of both) and that the consequences of those woes mean that those suffering people are no longer (or never were) worthy of Christian assistance in fighting the systemic issues that keep them hungry, thirsty, naked, sick or in prison?