Thread by @AstriusCatfox

On the #NotreDameFire - opinion thread.

I grew up Catholic, and for many, many reasons I chose to leave the church over 20 years ago. That's a different conversation. But let me explain why I still find this to be a terrible loss to humanity as a whole.

It's easy to say it's "just a building". So was the Library of Alexandria. "Oh, but that was a loss of knowledge!" Yes, and so was this. It's not the stones of the building that make it important. Notre Dame was so much more than just a structure.

Say, too, you take umbrage with the Holy Church on its own and therefore see the fire as "cleansing". You are basically dismissing an entire belief. Would you thusly celebrate a mosque or a temple of equal historic importance to a people?

"But Christianity has done so much damage!" So? You'd punish a whole system of believers - many of whom quietly and selflessly help the poor and disaffected - for the acts of the vocal assholes? Sounds a little like Fox News rhetoric there.

This church - this *cathedral* - is a house of *old* history. It's easy for Americans to dismiss history - we have honestly a toddler's lifespan compared to many countries. But in a place where "hundreds of years old" is actually kind of recent?

You're talking art, a way of life, wars and plagues and rises and falls of entire *empires* that passed over the roof of that building. People don't exist any more who were build during the construction of that "building".

Entire languages have shifted under her existence. Two wars that involved the globe came and went. Humanity learned to fly and went to the moon on her watch. And the artwork embedded in the stones and windows remained intact.

Entire books were written about her. Architecture students came to gape at her beauty and take notes. Millions of faithful trod her stairs, and millions more - atheists, muslims, jews, and countless others - came to marvel at the sheer beauty.

And if nothing else moves you, it's that something beautiful was destroyed.

If that doesn't matter to you, than humanity might as well just fuck itself into oblivion, because if you don't care that something beautiful was lost, what DO you care about?

Why cry over Hetch Hetchy, or the wanton destruction of national monuments? Why fight for the Great Barrier Reef? Why give a damn about a museum catching ablaze?

Because goddamnit these things *matter* to the human condition. We have, since we learned to walk upright, known art.

We know the power of a painting, the inspiration of words, the wisdom of poetry, the ecstasy of dance, the joy of song, the thrill of creation of expression in all mediums, and *fuck* you if you don't see that in architecture and stone sculpture.

The beauty of a thing can be independent of its maker and its purpose. Whether hewn from the bones of the dead in crypts, stained with the blood of sacrifices to the Sun God, or built out of the very heart of the earth herself to erect a cathedral.

So if you rejoice in this destruction, than I don't *want* to know you, because your hatred of an institution has "civilized" the Human right out of you, and you've forgotten how to see beauty, even if you don't understand it.

You can despise something without reveling in the destruction of a historic monument that was literally a roof over the heads of fugitives, refugees, and criminals seeking sanctuary from the crown.

Or did you forget that part of history?

In the end, those who hate will hate, and for whatever reasons they have.

But do not rejoice in pain, loss, and destruction. France is wounded right now. She doesn't need you to tell her to "get over it".

Je regret, mes amis. Je suis tres tristes.