I’ve been a bit amazed (and not in a good way) at the cruel and inhuman responses of some right wingers to the story about the Tennessee subscription-based firefighters who watched a family home burn down because the owner hadn’t paid the fee — some of these people actually seem to believe the firefighters did the right thing by letting the house burn, with the family’s pets inside.

Nobody exemplifies this disgusting attitude more than the American Family Association’s chief hate monger, Bryan Fischer, who argues that not only was it the right thing to do, it was the Christian thing to do.

According to Fischer, it’s a praiseworthy example of robust, muscular Christian virtues.

The fire department did the right and Christian thing. The right thing, by the way, is also the Christian thing, because there can be no difference between the two. The right thing to do will always be the Christian thing to do, and the Christian thing to do will always be the right thing to do.

If I somehow think the right thing to do is not the Christian thing to do, then I am either confused about what is right or confused about Christianity, or both.

In this case, critics of the fire department are confused both about right and wrong and about Christianity. And it is because they have fallen prey to a weakened, feminized version of Christianity that is only about softer virtues such as compassion and not in any part about the muscular Christian virtues of individual responsibility and accountability.

The Judeo-Christian tradition is clear that we must accept individual responsibility for our own decisions and actions. He who sows to the flesh, we are told, will from the flesh reap corruption. The law of sowing and reaping is a non-repealable law of nature and nature’s God. …

This story illustrates the fundamental difference between a sappy, secularist worldview, which unfortunately too many Christians have adopted, and the mature, robust Judeo-Christian worldview which made America the strongest and most prosperous nation in the world. The secularist wants to excuse and even reward irresponsibility, which eventually makes everybody less safe and less prosperous. A Christian worldview rewards responsibility and stresses individual responsibility and accountability, which in the end makes everybody more safe and more prosperous.

I’m going with mature, robust Christianity on this one.

(Hat tip: Right Wing Watch.)