"I looked at the New Testament. There I found an account, not in the least of a person with his hair parted in the middle or his hands clasped in appeal, but of an extraordinary being with lips of thunder and acts of lurid decision, flinging down tables, casting out devils, passing with the wild secrecy of the wind from mountain isolation to a sort of dreadful demagogy; a being who often acted like an angry god--and always like a god.[...] he called himself a sword of slaughter, and told men to buy swords if they sold their coats for them. That he used other even wilder words on the side of non-resistance greatly increases the mystery; but it also, if anything, rather increases the violence. We cannot even explain it by calling such a being insane; for insanity is usually along one consistent channel." -- G.K. Chesterton Othodoxy
The most important and often only virtue in typical modern Christianity is Niceness. But Jesus wasn't particularly nice. He was unfathomably compassionate and stunningly kind, but there's nothing nice about calling the respectable citizens of one's community serpents, hypocrites, vipers, and whitewashed tombs full of dead men's bones, nor of driving merchants with a braided whip, nor of telling those who wish to follow to leave their dead lying unburied and abandon their living without so much as a good bye, nor even of telling a man that the only way he will be allowed to join the movement and achieve salvation is to sell everything he owns and give the money to the poor. Nor, for that matter, in telling people that they're going to be cast into an eternal lake of brimstone and fire. I've been rebuked by fussy old Christian ladies for merely using the word "hate", but Christ told his followers to hate their own families, and God hated Esau.
Should we be kind? yes. Should we love? absolutely. But neither kindness, nor love, nor any other true virtue necessitates the kind of bland, milquetoast niceness which is the single monolithic element of the postmodern moral code and is, in reality, very often the opposite of what is required by love and kindness.
"Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend" -- Proverbs 27:17
(and although I detest the eternal addition of "and/or she" to everything under the sun, let me qualify that, although I love kindness and feminine compassion in a woman, I also like a little bite, like dark chocolate, red wine, or the music of the violin. Give me a girl who's a little bit mean when it comes to the stupid, the modern, and the banal--give me a girl with a little Anne Coulter streak in her.)
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