We live in the age of insanity, so given that we are insane, it is controversial to state that men love beautiful women and women love being desired. A little research will show that the billions of dollars spent on shoes, clothes, jewelry, makeup, breast implants, nails, plastic surgery, etc is not spent by men. Nor do married men regulary say "honey, are you SURE that you have enough shoes?"
The reason we live in the age of insanity is that we have "abandoned the natural for the unnatural" to paraphrase Romans. Our culture glorifies the unnatural -- homosexuality, strange genders without limit, pornography, and even "kink" -- I have to study "cultural awareness" for a certification at work, and "the kink community" was one of those cultures to be aware of -- google was required.
When I was in college, a "dirty book store" was a sign of a blighted area. When I came to Rochester, there were a couple on the southern (seedy) edge of downtown that the city worked hard to get removed. Now there is the "WalMart version" with the GIANT electronic sign for "Pure Pleasure" right off the I-90 / US 63 interchange south of the airport. "Progress'.
The article is worth a read through to get some more data to cover the obvious in this age where reality is the horror that may not be spoken ... "Jerusalem is the Capital of Israel"! It closes with this ...
We can’t expect people to act like machines with one another, disconnected from their own desires. Our bodies, our sexuality, and our physical longing for one another—all of these essential parts of ourselves—are beautiful. We should cultivate those aspects.
"But they are not the most important, and they can’t be acted on unchecked. We are not animals, ruled by appetites. We have deeper aspects of ourselves that need to be nurtured. We have a rational mind and moral conscience to inform us of what is right and what is wrong. We have a spirit that has a beauty all its own, and it’s a beauty that never diminishes, unlike the physical, which passes away too quickly."
I completely agree with what the author wants, however I don't think there is likely to be motion in that direction anytime soon because the spirit that IS, and is meant to be, our "true self" is denied by our modern world and we ARE expected to behave as "machines" -- machines made out of meat. Materialists (and they are a common philosophical branch in these times) believe exactly that -- there is NOTHING more to us than "meat"! We are ONLY organic machines.
The divine intention of our sexuality is to be BOTH spiritual and physical. Our insane materialist world of meat creatures celebrates strange physical sexual pairings, imaginary genders, and most of all the killing of the natural outcome of sex, children. In the insane materialist world, we have become much LESS than animals -- so we no longer understand the natural, as all animals do, and are drawn to the UNnatural.
Why? Because consciousness / spirit is decidedly not "natural" in any way that we can discern save divine intervention -- and the search for the divine, the "higher", delivers a morality that has little to do with materialist "nature" -- red of tooth and claw. When our spirit looks up to God, we rise, when our spirit looks down to our own flesh, we fall.
Our flight from the embrace of the divine -- the transcendent, has left us to attempt to define moral structures based on power (might is right), while feeling that the powerful "taking what they want" is somehow "immoral" according to? What? No doubt the "still small voice", but where oh where does our post modern, post truth society think that voice comes from? In confusion, many have decided to put government in the role of "god" as if humans acting in large unionized bureaucracies were somehow likely to be "virtuous".
We looked for "the good" in more government and found nothing but evil.
Much of the modern moral struggle is the war between entitlement and obligation. Raise a boy to live for himself, with a sense of entitlement, and he will often unleash that enormous inborn energy in the most destructive of ways. Raise a boy to live for others, with a sense of obligation, and that same energy can build a nation and sustain a culture. We can’t make a perfect world, but we do have a choice. Better or worse? It’s time to recognize and respond to human nature, or — despite the best of intentions — we will continue to choose to be worse.
Matt 23:11 "The greatest amoung you will be your servant". These ideas were once well understood. As we watch BOistan tear at itself like a dying animal the the words of Lincoln paraphasing the Psalm 19:9 in his second inagural comes to mind ... "The fear of the LORD is clean, enduring for ever: the judgments of the LORD are true and righteous altogether."
Western civilization had these answers solidly understood -- and now we are lost.
I assume that all BOistanis except a cynical few are rising up today in unison to call for the prosecution of failed Senate candidate Roy Moore! Clearly a ton of people found the evidence amassed against him to be terribly damning to the extent that he has been referred to as a pedophile by many mainstream media outlets and high minded social media posters (poseurs?).
I took the position that their charges were "all about political gain", which certainly many on FB found to be "cynical" as they virtue signaled their high minded morals on Moore's "crimes". Unless they were and are in fact the cynical ones, I would expect a massive wave of demands from media outlets, Democrats and easily led Republicans alike for immediate prosecution! We all know that child molesters are nearly always repeat offenders, so there is little doubt that the prosecution will find a seamy string of sad victims over the past 40 years according to those who only did this for "justice".
OTOH, if there is no outcry -- or even a complete lack of concern for any investigation after this supposed awful man who many said would be "impossible for a Christian to support" just because the election is over, what would that mean? Why would sane people virtue signal about how "good" they were to come out against Moore, even to the point of questioning others religious beliefs if they did not sign on to what they saw as the completely damning nature of these 40 year old charges?
My belief is that we live in an amoral age where actual standards are becoming exceedingly rare. Today's world is ruled by the left wing "Scribes and Pharisees" who are ALL about judgment and virtue signalling, however are in fact "whitewashed sepulchers" -- their only goal is POWER, political and otherwise, and they seek to make their idea of power synonymous with "virtue".
If all those who wasted time virtue signalling on FB and in the media do NOT seek to put this known (to them) child molester behind bars, I think we have pretty solid evidence what BOistan is REALLY about! Same thing with all the fake virtue signalling relative to Trump -- as the link I put above (repeat) makes very clear in the linked Village Voice article, the supposed virtuous elites are anything but!
The BEGINNING of wisdom is the fear of God! Only by constant devotion to Bible, prayer, sacraments, etc, can any of us hope to escape the snare of "the wide road" of being in agreement with the MSM, elites, "the popular ones" through the constant bombarding of media manipulation from all corners.
Perhaps I will be proven wrong and a huge outcry for Moore's prosecution is about to rise. If I'm correct however that it is not happening, do we not all KNOW that the charges were actually just a political smear job? How could they NOT be if the supposedly sanctimonious believers in those charges don't even have a twinge of thought about all the children that they MUST believe that Moore molested over 40 years, and is no doubt molesting today?
Search your heart, you KNOW it to be true at a visceral level that if denied puts your soul in eternal peril!
First of all, it is time to introduce "intersectionality". The link takes you to the wikipedia discussion -- the quick definition is "grievance bundling", with a special need to make sure that white women are dutifully sorry for their "white privilege" before they are really accepted by "the sisterhood".
The biggies are "racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia (country having borders in their parlance) and honoring all other religions except Christianity, with SPECIAL honor to Islam.
Think of an "Intersectional Feminist" as the opposite of a deplorable -- "secular sainthood"! I will tend to refer to them as "IFs" ... seems about right.
The other aspect that you pick up from their writing is yet another new height in arrogant smugness. To the article. I'm guessing that some readers of this blog will assume it HAS to be satire, however I looked around a bit just to be sure -- though a Christian that fears for mens (and even IFs souls), wishes it were -- it's not. No "fear of God" for these women ... er, "things"!
The imaginary vignette of this column is that a "cis male" (identifying as birth gender male) has taken an IF out for a date (hey, men think with the wrong organ sometimes!).
The list of "ten" is largely a misrepresentation ... it links off to specific grievances, each of which has their own lists of many grievances ... patriarchy, rape culture, prison-industrial complex, etc. I'll just include #8 as a representative.
We live on a tiny planet, with land and water within a galaxy surrounded by a universe with an inconceivable number of other galaxies and planets. Yet here we dictate where we are and who is allowed to be where we are. It’s mind-boggling that borders are even a thing, so to call people “aliens” or “illegal immigrants” is so inhumane and despicable.
White Americans stole this land, colonized this land, created so many borders, pushed out, killed and enslaved people of color and somehow they have the audacity to claim that this land is theirs and that black and brown immigrants are stealing their jobs, land, and homes? Miss me with that bullshit.
Well, actually they defeated their opposition by force, which in a world without transcendence is the most morality you ever get. Read the entire list of 10 -- as an IF, you DO have the right to not date anyone who doesn't agree with your opinions because there are a bunch of people that could kick your ass that will defend that right -- including me, who disagrees with pretty much everything you stand for, however still sees your right to make a dating decision without coercion of any sort as being "endowed by your and my Creator".
Transcendence was the idea that there were values beyond force -- "endowed by the Creator". For the general population, that idea is dead, therefore IFs need to find some way to defeat their opposition by force in order to get their ideas to hold sway. The traditional alternative to God is the all powerful state -- set up a bunch of secret police, military, tribunals, gulags, etc, and "re-educate" or kill people that don't bow to your "list of 10". Given the 2nd Amendment still existing even in BOistan, I'd guess the IFs are going to need A LOT of range time to have "a shot" at making much of their list of 10 a reality.
Without transcendence, ideas of "right / wrong / good / evil / better / worse ... etc" come down to might makes right. The issue of who can kick whose ass.`
The physically, intellectually, financially, etc less capable need some method to "incent / coerce / create compassion within" those with more power to protect them. In Western Culture for 2K years, that was Christian Morals -- be kind to even those who hate you, care for those that are weaker, etc -- it worked quite well in general terms.
Women got the right to vote, the lame, the sick, the mentally less abled, etc were cared for, most often in religiously based hospitals. The whole ethic that got Western civilization to the spot where a woman (or what she wants to be called ???) could have a platform to write this was Christianity -- those that lack understanding of human nature might assume that a really big "Thank You!" to Christianity and Western civilization would be in order.
Lose the battle of Poitiers (Tours) in 732, and this woman and billions more might well be wearing burkas, not voting, not driving, not going to school, etc.
Nietzsche hated Christianity as well, especially the idea of "care of the weak".
Christianity is called the religion of pity. Pity stands opposed to the tonic emotions which heighten our vitality: it has a depressing effect. We are deprived of strength when we feel pity. That loss of strength which suffering as such inflicts on life is still further increased and multiplied by pity. Pity makes suffering contagious.
Clearly the writer of the list has FAR abandoned any concept of Christianity, so who is it that will stand up for her against those stronger than her, and WHY will they desire to do this?
Perhaps there are deeper questions for her to ponder.
We live in an age of amoral insanity, and have for a good long while. My assertion is that it is completely foolish to think of this current Democrat / media round of faux puritanism as anything other than a desperate political ploy to steal a senate seat and at least imagine they will make headway toward causing Trump to resign or be removed "somehow". If it wasn't for the stupidity of the Republican party, they would have no chance.
As a Christian, I also want to point out that there is no Biblical injunction on who you vote for -- "Democracy" was pretty much unknown in biblical times, Policy seems different. Voting for candidates that support abortion, let alone gay "marriage", or "gender" equality seems to be going out on a limb. None of us as Christians get to decide if it is "too far" for others, however (judgement is beyond our pay grade).
The supposed idea that you as a Christian "vote for the most virtuous candidate" rather than for a candidate that supports Christian policy seems doctrinally indefensible. Christians know that ALL of us are totally sinful, and that the difference between "lusting with your eyes" and actually committing adultery isn't so large in God's eyes as ours because he sees the spirit, while we only see the flesh.
The idea that "Christians must vote for a virtuous candidate" pretty much crept in with with the effort to impeach Nixon ( He SWORE on tape! that killed him in the church I grew up in). It continued with Reagan -- "how can you vote for Reagan when he is DIVORCED and rarely attends church!!!", then obviously became a "theme" as Bob Packwood and other R's were drummed out for "sexual harassment", a weapon to be used by the left without any fear of collateral damage because OBVIOUSLY, "Christians" HAD to "vote their moral conscience" (and Democrats of course did not!).
Really? And Teddy, Slick, Gary Studds, etc, etc were then "proof" that there were no "Christian Democrats"? A sad part of modern Christianity is that MANY people who want to be identified as "christian", and apparently a BUNCH of the sort that rarely grace a church or open a Bible, like to "virtue signal" about how much they are against the "sins" of Trump, Moore, Clarence Thomas, or the next R to get the scarlet "sexual harassment" letter. It's an odd development -- they are OK with very old and serious problems on the D side, yet they are exceedingly proud of their "virtue" when the MSM tells them to tar and feather one of their supposed "own".
You know that Teddy Kennedy left his car parked upside down under water with his soon to be deceased secretary in it in '69, yet the Democrat party kept him seated as the "lyin of the Senate" until his death in 2009. He never changed his MO ... drinking, wild parties, sex with young staffers, rape accusations for his nephew when out with "uncle Ted" in FL ... Teddy set the moral standard for Democrats -- kill the unborn, kill young women if they cause you trouble, have your way with any of them that you want with impunity ... 40 years in the Senate AFTER an actual dead body in your car! The proud Democrat standard has been "If it feels good DO IT!" since the '60s.
The linked column from the Village Voice in 2008 needs to be read by all BOistanis so we can be "on the same page". Once you read it and realize it was PUBLISHED in 2008, you will know that our "sophisticated coastal elites" live to a set of "standards" like the "standards" of Sodom and Gomorrah, Babylon, Rome, etc. The behavior covered in the Voice is simply not something to which the term "standards" apply.
Here is Katie Couric at the roast of Lauer doing a top ten about Matt ...
10. According to his wife, he’s not really an early riser, if you know what I mean.
7. When Katie did the colonoscopy live on television, doctors found Matt’s head.
“2. He loves to eat Curry.”
The room loved that one, and Ann Curry blanched. Great moment.
Here is Gilbert Gottfried ...
He had recently given Today’s Asian-American co-host Ann Curry some lessons in stand-up comedy. “People ask me, does Ann Curry’s pussy go sideways?” Gilbert said to gasps. But he was just getting warmed up.
He finished with: “How do you get a faggot to fuck a woman? Fill up her cunt with shit. Thank you.”
Nice to know what our "betters" really think of Asian women, women in general, and gays isn't it? You probably think those lines sound "bad", which just shows that you are more of a fly-over country prude than a true sophisticated coastal elite! Remember, there were over 1500 people there and this was PUBLISHED in the Village Voice -- they figured that the "lower classes" would "take it wrong", so the blessed TP controlled MSM didn't bother to say anything -- hell, NBC did the roast!
Certainly the people "in the know" in our great Democrat / media complex fully understand that this kind of stuff goes on pretty regularly. Those people are the ELITE! They are above mere petty prurient "morals" --- they MAKE the rules! Let the flyover prudish idiots with their bourgeois values eat cake! (or maybe drink light beer in modern parlance)
So after having a guy that drowned his secretary in the senate for over 40 years AFTER drowning her, they want to tell us there is some "question" about a guy they managed to dig up some 35+ year old "charges" on being SEATED in the same senate???? Hello? This whole sorry nation sat by while Teddy sat in that body for FORTY YEARS after screwing up and ACTUALLY leaving a cold dead body of a young woman in his car!
Show me a body, or at least a 35 year old "love child" that passes the DNA test on Moore! These "accusers" are WAY old enough to be grandmas now and they didn't see fit to bring this up for 40 years? People that had even a minute sense of morality had to live with Teddy sitting in the Senate for 40 years after Chappaquiddick, and the NEW "standard" is supposed to be unsubstantiated CHARGES the same age class as Teddy's aqua parking ticket, and he stayed in the Senate after actually leaving a body?
In a sane world, NOBODY would take that seriously at all. They want the Stupid Party (R) to buy into 40 year old charges as the "new standard"? Let's see, we were supposed to believe forged documents on the "important issue" of how good a fighter pilot W was supposed to have been 30 years prior. OTOH, the fact that BO wrote a book that originally indicated he was a Kenyan, and contained lots of discussion about how his "real roots" were in Kenya and he had dedicated his life to "destroying the colonial powers" along with a few gems about "pussy", "niggers", and "filtering white blood", was not even an issue that needed covering? "Dreams" was just not something that needed to be even talked about! (old news! ... a week old if you are a D, MORE THAN 40 years if you are an R)
It’s easy to see how both Hoke and Clinton might have been imbued with a foolhardy fearlessness and a flatfooted misperception that they were untouchable. Washington was like summer camp, providing a suspension of certain rules and self-consciousness. If a guy knew how to play it, it was a pretty good place to swing.
Those to the manner born who’ve been in trouble -- Ted Kennedy and Chris Dodd, for instance, who participated in the famous “waitress sandwich” at La Brasserie in 1985, while their dates were in the bathroom -- have tended to get out of it by claiming that their boyish high jinks had simply gotten out of hand.
As Gaviglio enters the room, the six-foot-two, 225-plus-pound Kennedy grabs the five-foot-three, 103-pound waitress and throws her on the table. She lands on her back, scattering crystal, plates and cutlery and the lit candles. Several glasses and a crystal candlestick are broken. Kennedy then picks her up from the table and throws her on Dodd, who is sprawled in a chair. With Gaviglio on Dodd's lap, Kennedy jumps on top and begins rubbing his genital area against hers, supporting his weight on the arms of the chair. As he is doing this, Loh enters the room. She and Gaviglio both scream, drawing one or two dishwashers. Startled, Kennedy leaps up. He laughs. Bruised, shaken and angry over what she considered a sexual assault, Gaviglio runs from the room. Kennedy, Dodd and their dates leave shortly thereafter, following a friendly argument between the senators over the check.
The '98 Slick defense article closes with this ...
Now and forever, whatever is happening behind closed doors, what Washingtonians constantly emphasize is the city’s sexless environment, a notion that is partly fact, partly fig leaf. Last week, a giggling Democratic congressman was heard telling a lobbyist that part of him wanted to condemn Clinton. “On the other hand,” he said, “I want a blood transfusion from him.”
At least since Chappaquiddick, the DC ethos has been a very seedy "summer camp". As the article makes clear, lots of Republicans tried to hide out, got caught, and lost their jobs. Democrats didn't bother to hide -- as long as the "Teddy Standard" was in place, there was no reason to. Once the "Slick Standard" came in, it is certainly no wonder that guys like Franken just "grabbed away" -- hell, even perjury in the supposed "highest office" (all be it stained with presidential "emissions") could be excused!
A lot of the "Stupid Party" (R) is happy to go for this sort of scharade, hey, at least they get to "virtue signal". The D's know all about WINNING ... they are going to "sacrifice" the village clown dwarf from loony MN who likes to actually grab private parts (not talk about it like Trump) in order to get another baby killing D in the senate. How many baby killers does it take to make a "moral quorum"?
We don't like to admit where we live. We still like to imagine we live in "America" which once even had CHRISTIAN morals! We don't live there! This has been a disgusting amoral declining state since at least Chappaquiddick, through Roe V Wade, "Borking", the Clarence Thomas Lynching, Slick Willie, gay "marriage", 57 genders ... There really has never been a "culture war", only a cultural retreat so far!
Read the Village Voice article and tell me that the "elites" in BOistan have ANY sort of "morals" beyond POWER -- WINNING--PLEASURE!!! If you find "moral people" in that article, you need to take a long sniff for brimstone and a careful listen for demonic laughter!
The ONLY thing that is going to return us to morality is a Christian revival -- and then, from our knees, we can pray that God restores "America"! DON'T let the Republican party get stuck with the "Moore Standard" -- 40 year old "accusations" never heard before with no other accusations of misbehavior over 40 years are "disqualifying", while the D party returns to the "Teddy / Slick Standard" after their short little virtue signalling scharade!
Never trust the "morality" of a party that believes that killing babies in their mothers womb is "moral". "The Party" (TP-D) is as out of power as they have been since FDR. Both the SCOTUS and the Administrative/Deep State are being attacked by Trump. They are DESPERATE, and amoral desperate people will do ANYTHING!! They still own the Administrative State (the most powerful branch of government that was never supposed to be a branch of government!), most of the media, the popular culture, academia, and even most of corporate BOistan!
Worse, there are a number of RINO R's that rather like the amoral world of TP and the Administrative State -- Trump is very much a threat to them as well, so they would love nothing better than to take him down in some sort of manufactured "scandal". If 30-40 year old "charges" are all it takes, then TP and the MSM (but I repeat myself) will be back on top and forcing you to be celebrating gay "marriage" and 57 genders again VERY soon!
This one is definitely worth the read -- it falls one "parent" short, GOD, but it hits the earthly target very well. I'd argue that killing "god" in the Nietzchean sense was definitely on the road to killing daddy, mommy, and family in general. A people that still honored God could not have legalized abortion, dishonored their parents, and abandoned their children in the name of earthly sexual pleasure and other "progress".
I'm about 1/3 of the way through "The Secular Age" by Charles Taylor. It tells the story of how the west went from a fully enchanted world at the time of the Reformation, to the nearly totally DISenchanted world we live in today. Everyone believed that the Cosmos was ordered with a sacred purpose that included each of us -- embedded in our family, church, community, nation, and yes, an ordered cosmos where everything included elements of the spiritual, the sacred.
Today, we are DISembedded and disenchanted --
The legalization of same-sex marriage, as observers both for and against the 2015 Obergefell decision came to agree, owed most to one factor: empathy for the moral claim that attraction to one’s own sex is like pigmentation or DNA, immutable and immune to change. Yet a split cultural second later, exactly the opposite case has come to be made for the intersex, transgendered, and other sexual minorities: that identity is fluid, indeterminate, perhaps even recalcitrant, rather than born that way.
In this head-on collision of purported creation stories about sexual and gender identity that cannot possibly both be true, we see once more that the question Who am I? is the most fraught of our time. It has become like a second skin: something that can’t be sloughed off, or even scratched, without excruciating pain to the subject—reason and logic and the rest of persuasion-as-usual be damned.
As we have attempted to make "meaning" a material thing, it is not all that surprising that we would have completely incompatable "required views" on one of the most basic elements of our identity, our gender. Science says there are two genders, society says there are 50 some and more every day.
So why have we become "tribal"?
It’s not that “America Wasn’t Built for Humans,” as the title of Sullivan’s piece has it. It’s rather that America, like other civilizations, was built for humans who learned community not from roving bands of unrelated nomads, but from those around them—beginning in the small civilization of the family.
Our macro-politics have gone tribal because our micro-politics are no longer familial. This, above all, is what’s happened during the five decades in which identity politics went from being unheard of to ubiquitous.
Pretty much all of us understand this at some level. Our "families" almost all now involved 2nd, 3rd, etc marriages, and often many sorts of other relations. In the Bible we hear "who is my neighbor", today we hear "Who is my Daddy? my Mommy? my Sister? my Grandparent ... etc, etc". Clearly, lots of the people we know have decided that "what THEIR heart says" is what must be truth.
Jerimiah 17:9 says "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?"
Naturally, when God was supposedly killed, such ancient wisdom became foolish. Today we "follow our hearts", and attack those who fail to agree with our own godlike view of "truth".
When a mob of young men attack a 74-year-old man and a middle-aged woman, as happened at Middlebury College in March in the case of Charles Murray and Allison Stanger, something deeper is afoot than American individualism run amok. When debate after campus debate is preemptively shut down due to social media threats of violence, reasoned talk of a “Reagan Dispensation” doesn’t begin to capture the menace there. Berkeley spent $600,000 on “security” for a visit by the conservative author and pundit Ben Shapiro. Non-progressive speakers who have nothing to do with racism or supremacism are regularly harassed, threatened, disinvited, and shouted down on campuses across the country. To ascribe these transgressions to identitarian narcissism alone is to miss what’s truly novel about them. And most chilling.
Many of the 4500 and rising posts in this blog call out the horror that we have (mostly) unwittingly unleashed. I could link you to MANY, however, I think "Darwin's Cathedral" is key ... a short excerpt from that post, all from page 228 of that book.
" It is true that many religious beliefs are false as literal descriptions of the real world, but this merely forces us to recognize two forms of realism; a factual realism based on literal correspondence, and a practical realism based on behavioral adaptiveness."
"Rationality is not the gold standard on which all other forms of thought are to be judged. Adaptation is the gold standard against which rationality must be judged, along with all other forms of thought."
and then ... "... factual realists detached from practical reality were not among our ancestors. It is the person who elevates factual truth above practical truth who must be accused of mental weakness from an evolutionary perspective".
We pretty much all actually operate on a practical realism based on adaptiveness ... and we pretty much all think that OUR tribe really operates on a factual realism based on literal correspondence, and the other tribe is a bunch of evil lying "progressives", or "deploreables" depending on which tribe we identify with. The core problem is that without any transcendent meaning in our lives, "pleasure" tends to cloud our judgement, and any perceived threat to our determination of "truth" becomes ever harder for us to face with maturity.
Maybe that cultural scream of “mine!” is issuing from souls who did have something taken from them—only something more elemental than the totemic objects now functioning as figurative blankies for lost and angry former children. As of today, less than 65 percent of American children live with both biological parents, even as other familial boughs have broken via external forces like the opioid crisis, criminality and incarceration, and globalization. Maybe depression and anxiety have been rising steadily among children and teenagers for a reason. Maybe the furor over “appropriation” unveils the true foundation of identity politics, which is pathos.
The columns closing paragraph is powerful, and WAY too true in the world I see around me. I'll be reading some of the links and I'll continue to howl at the despair of our broken modern world with the only thing which I believe can save us individually or collectively -- The Grace of Jesus Christ through Faith Alone! On this 500th year of the Reformation, revive us again Lord Jesus!
Anyone who’s ever heard a coyote in the desert, separated at night from the pack, knows the sound. Maybe the otherwise-unexplained hysteria of today’s identity politics is just that: the collective human howl of our time, sent up by inescapably communal creatures who can no longer identify their own.
The modern pagans continue their hard work of pulling man up by his moral bootstraps. The technique works no better for morality than it does for flying.
The following from a tweet in the attached article ...
So much cultural & personal hurt due to sexual sin. Maybe the church should see its sexual ethics as a gift of common grace to the world.
There is nothing common about Grace -- it cost divine suffering beyond imagination, and yes, Grace and God's morality are a HUGE gift!
The article is short and worth the read -- mutual desire is not morality no matter how much lipstick one puts on it.
The practical result of consent-focused morality is the sexualization of everything. With the line drawn at desire alone, there is no longer any space that’s sex-free. Work meetings or restaurants can be creative locations for steamy liaisons. Not even marriage or existing relationships stand as a firewall against potential hookups.
Morality transcends -- or it isn't morality, it is just applied power. Without a transcendent standard, "morality" comes down to "might is right". At this moment, The #METOO movement has some power because of the political calculus of the left having sudden "morality" because they would like to remove Trump from power.
Transcendent morality is eternal, power faux "morality" is situational, political and transitory.
But one of the first and most leading principles on which the commonwealth and the laws are consecrated, is lest the temporary possessors and life-renters in it, unmindful of what they have received from their ancestors, or of what is due to their posterity, should act as if they were the entire masters; that they should not think it among their rights to cut off the entail, or commit waste on the inheritance, by destroying at their pleasure the whole original fabric of their society; hazarding to leave to those who come after them a ruin instead of an habitation—and teaching these successors as little to respect their contrivances, as they had themselves respected the institutions of their forefathers. By this unprincipled facility of changing the state as often, and as much, and in as many ways, as there are floating fancies or fashions, the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth would be broken. No one generation could link with the other. Men would become little better than the flies of a summer.
Or, to understand it in more modern terms ... just destroy everything! (yesterday, August 29th was Skynet self-awareness day).
Or in God's Word 1 Peter 5:8
Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour:
Creation vs Destruction -- The super free to view (but not to lose) fight of the ages.
We all understand what is happening here, it has happened many times. Tear down the statues, burn the books, declare views that you disagree with to be "hate speech" / "subversive" / imperialist / capitalist ... in other words, "bad". The important thing is to DESTROY THEM!!!
The Creator or the Destroyer? The modern destroyers seek to deny any "creator" save randomness -- very very unlikely things "just happen". There is really no other explanation -- for there to be a creator would mean that some level of respect was owed to that creator. Or even classical civilization, Christianity, Founding Fathers, or, dare we say it ... parents / elders.
But then how could each and every modern be "god" --- each with their own "sacred view" (well, at LEAST as "sacred" as the next guys, gals, ????)
Raze the earth of it's past -- the PRESENT is so much better, and the future? Well, no doubt it will be better still in the "progressive" model -- it will have to be, it will be NEW ... for a bit, and then it will be gone ... ever replaced by the latest and greatest "more perfect" level of knowledge
Thus saith the "progressives"! Materialist "knowledge" ( depending on a universe randomly ordered) is god, wisdom is bunk.
Matt 4:9 "All this I will give you," he said, "if you will bow down and worship me."
If you would like to see where we watched it, follow this link. In the sandhills S of Alliance NE -- we avoided the crowds. We were going to watch it from York NE, the clouds looked bad, so we abandoned our friends and just headed west ... for a spell just outside of Ogallala NE, it appeard that we would be punished for our sin ... it actually got a bit worse than this picture!
We found our spot, and we sat and watched the slow occlusion in bright sun, then we got some high clouds just before totality ... they broke for totality, and then it clouded right up. Whew!!
Here is my one 360 degree video -- I hesitate to include it because like so much of our modern world, it is FAKE -- the real experience is what is awesome, our reading, videos, movies, documentaries, "first person accounts", etc have more and more given many the idea that real experience isn't all that important. I'm starting to feel more and more like there actually isn't anything except real personal experience, with others, when at all possible.
The video underplays the darkness with the 360 degree "sunrise/sunset" effect. You can see that you are in a special spot of totality. It gives you a LITTLE of the feel that "things are not what they have always seemed". Go look at the best movies of the corona that you can find -- it is ALIVE, and the naket eye shows it in all it's majesty during a total eclipse. I had always assumed that the beautiful corona pictures were from special high resolution telescopes -- Nope! There it is in all it's mysterious glory. The mystery is that the surface of the sun is at about 6K degrees, but the the temperature increases very steeply to a few million degrees in the corona, in the region 500 kilometers above the surface,and we don't know why.
The other amazing thing is how light it is right up to that last "flash" as the sun totally disappears -- it looks like a super cloudy day, with a "weird filter", but not enough to really make you look up if you did not know what was going on..
"Experience vs Knowledge". Mike is orbiting at the Hubble spacewalking, looks around and EXPERIENCES the billiant light of the stationary sun as the earth rotates out of darkness ushering in a new 90 min Hubble "day". Mike EXPERIENCED the fact that the sun is stationary (relative to earth) and the day and night are caused by the rotation of the earth. Of course he "knew" that, but experience is much more. Telling someone about being a grandparent is not the same as being a grandparent.
You "know" what is going to happen, yet when it happens there is an emotional effect -- it "feels odd", how can this be? Even when you have been a space nut your whole life and watched men walk on the moon in rapt attention, there is something about the experience of the moon blocking the sun that you sense is rare, and it is an honor from a greater source to be able to experience it.
As a believer in divine creation, an eclipse is especially poignient, as it feels like a direct message from God ... "As you grow in knowledge of my creation, you are able to discern my joy in creating the moon 400 times smaller than the sun, yet having the sun 400 times farther away so that at special times because of the eliptical orbit of of the moon, and the tilt of the earth, you may see my hand of creation as the sun is blocked perfectly. I give you these signs so that you may know that I am God".
Alas, for many today it is but one more random phenomenon in a cold and random universe that is so far beyond exceedingly unlikley that the fact of an eclipse would add a few exponents to the number of required universes were the God deniers to consider the ramifications of not only there being a universe that can sustain life at all, but one in which intelligent life arises -- nay, even CONSCIOUS intelligent life that can survey it's place in the universe AND, just happens to live on a planet that experiences perfect total eclipses ... where the sun is EXACTLY blocked, making it's corona visible!
One "explanation" is what Elon Musk believes ... we are in a "simulation" a sort of "Grand Matrix movie". This explanation is really no "explanation", since it just makes "god" to be whomever programmed the simulation. According to modern physics, there ISN'T any explanation -- it's pure randomness all the way down, so there "must be" something like 10 to the 400th UNIVERSES in order for the extreme unlikelyness of our existence to happen.
To accept 10 to the 400th universes or "being a simulation" is considered intelligent and rational in these times -- God is however something that only the most backward and out of touch with reality believe in.
I pray that others may feel a little "sense of small" as I did in their observations of the eclipse. Our greatest shared loss, and with it, our ability to see our fellow man as similarly tiny short lived entities in a vast and timeless cosmos, is our sense of small. It isn't just our elites that have lost it or at least heavily distracted ourselves from it. Nobody with any sense of their smallness in the universe would waste their time tearing down statues of any sort if they were part of a very small and temporal humankind. Even all of human history is such a tiny blip in time that we barely have any history at all ... let alone any to tear down.
As it has been since Adam and Eve, the human sin that exceeds all others is PRIDE. for me, the eclipse was a visceral experience in being very small and very finite in the face of God and eternity.
Thanks be to God for allowing me to witness this example of his greatness.
As an avid NPR listener, I DO know how I am SUPPOSED to think about Charlottesville. Charlottesville is FINALLY the turning point for Trump. It unmasks him completely as the racist he has always been and shows once and for all that conservatism is racism! It's SIMPLE, as the positions of NPR tend to be -- oh, and if you refuse to agree with this obvious truth, then you too are a RACIST -- end of story. There are correct thinking progressives -- Democrats, the MSM, etc, and then there are the racists. We live in a very simple and easy to understand world -- at least for the standard NPR listener.
The linked article gets long, but it can be summarized in a valid fashion pretty easily -- you won't get it all from here, but you will get the sense of it.
The ALT-right is the modern equivalent of the campus radical left "Weathermen", etc from the 1960's. Acolytes of Saul Alinsky -- rebel revolutionaries and faux revolutionaries like Tom Hayden, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama (Obama worked as a "Community Organizer", the main foot soldier in the Alinsky revolutionary vision). The key words are YOUNG, radical and transgressive ... as the young often are.
The '60's lefty revolutionaries grew up and became Senators, Presidents and such -- somewhat less rabid than when they were young, but still with the same far left views. The left grew up, suffered under Reagan, then mostly took over the levers of power and gave us a stagnant economy, gay "marriage" and gender confusion -- not everyone was excited about these developments, so now the youth are "Alt-Right".
These young rebels, a subset of the alt-right, aren’t drawn to it because of an intellectual awakening, or because they’re instinctively conservative. Ironically, they’re drawn to the alt-right for the same reason that young Baby Boomers were drawn to the New Left in the 1960s: because it promises fun, transgression, and a challenge to social norms they just don’t understand.
Of course, just as was the case in history, the parents and grandparents just won’t understand, man. That’s down to the age difference. Millennials aren’t old enough to remember the Second World War or the horrors of the Holocaust. They are barely old enough to remember Rwanda or 9/11. Racism, for them, is a monster under the bed, a story told by their parents to frighten them into being good little children.
Naturally, the dried up leftist old fogies like Hillary, BO, Bernie, Nancy and their buddies at all the major news outlets want to go as negative as they possibly can on the Alt-Right, so it is important for them to link the group with skinheads, National Socialists, white supremacists, etc, and those groups of course DO exist, just like the Black Panthers, Students For a Democratic Society, SLA (kidnapped Patty Hearst), Charlie Manson, etc existed in the '60s ... and the "right" attempted to tie them to the general anti-war, peace, free love movement. (when the media is on the other side, it never works)
Repudiating National Socialists, skinheads and actual white supremacists is great and correct. We don't want to be like the left is with "Black Lives Matter", Nation of Islam and Islam itself. BLM is obviously a black racist group that needed to be repudiated from the left a thousand times over, but of course it has not been. Likewise, the difficulty which BO had with uttering the term "Islamic Terrorism" would be funny if it were not so sad.
The problem is that since the left media is dominant, and the left are EXPERTS at identity politics, Trump is on very dangerous ground here. He would have been FAR better off sticking with his initial statement about "ALL SIDES". Absent the old world of actual principle -- eg. "we all revere God, Country, the Constitution, Apple Pie and Chevrolet", the "burn your bad actor "allies"" strategy is only demanded of one side. BO can cozy up to BLM even when they are yelling "Pigs in blankets, fry em like bacon!" with no MSM outcry to "repudiate BLM"!. (why would the media want to repudiate BLM? they are on the same side!!!) In a world with no actual shared values, WINNING is the only "value" that counts.
Racism is indeed wrong, although it is inherent in the human condition. "White Privilege" is the current black equivalent of calling whites the equivalent of the N-word. Every white has it, they can't escape it, it is evil, it invalidates whites, etc ... They are a bunch of white N-words! We all have racism in our DNA -- the magic for the left is to be allowed to use it for their side BOTH to make their own identity groups (BLM) feel superior, but to label the other side as "bad racist", while blacks braying about "white privilege" have "dog whistle privilege".
So what is a "true conservative", the sort that has values beyond economic success to do? The article covers the "true conservative" (they call it "natural conservative") definition pretty well.
For natural conservatives, culture, not economic efficiency, is the paramount value. More specifically, they value the greatest cultural expressions of their tribe. Their perfect society does not necessarily produce a soaring GDP, but it does produce symphonies, basilicas and Old Masters. The natural conservative tendency within the alt-right points to these apotheoses of western European culture and declares them valuable and worth preserving and protecting."
Needless to say, natural conservatives’ concern with the flourishing of their own culture comes up against an intractable nemesis in the regressive left, which is currently intent on tearing down statues of Cecil Rhodes and Queen Victoria in the UK, and erasing the name of Woodrow Wilson from Princeton in the U.S. These attempts to scrub western history of its great figures are particularly galling to the alt-right, who in addition to the preservation of western culture, care deeply about heroes and heroic virtues.
So the Alt-Right has a strongly shared value with "natural conservatives" -- which is likely why we more natural conservatives are reticent to throw the whole Alt Right movement out with the bad apples travelling with them. We are perfectly willing to repudiate David Duke, skinheads, National (and other) Socialists, but draw the line at tarring the whole Alt-Right with that broad brush.
The left OTOH, won't even repudiate BLM -- let alone tar NAACP, Black Caucus, "White Privilege" intellectuals, etc with a validly repudiated negative label! In fact, they cowtow to BLM because they know how identity politics is played! Repudiation rhetoric is for SUCKERS -- which means Republicans to them.
I found this paragraph to be very intriguing:
Some alt-righters make a more subtle argument. They say that when different groups are brought together, the common culture starts to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Instead of mosques or English houses, you get atheism and stucco.
Sadly, this is often the case. Decide you want "Christian Unity", and soon you have women ministers, gay ministers, ministers that can't tell you what they are, atheist ministers, no historical Jesus ministers, etc, etc. As long as America was a "melting pot" where everyone signed up for AMERICAN values -- hard work, self-reliance, reverence for the Constitution, Christianity, speaking English, etc, etc (ie. "American Culture"), it was fine to be an "Italian AMERICAN" who did some different dances, drank some different wines, and served some tasty food -- but spoke English and revered America.
The current sort of BOistani balkanization is more like the Italians would own a section of the city, speak Italian, throw out non-Italians, and the Mafia would be in charge -- and that was OK, cuz it was "their culture", and there was no thought that there was any sort of "American culture". (why would there be? We live in BOistan). If the left Davos elite succeeds in defeating Trump, natural conservatives and assorted disenfranchised Christians, workers, misfits and hangers on (the likely outcome), the Alt-Right will be less than a footnote in a few years. **IF** however by some amazing luck, act of God, etc, "America" -- or something like it rises from the swampy wasteland of BOistan, then the Alt-Right likely contains the leaders of the future -- 30, 40, even 50 years in the future, as the Alisky left contained the leaders of today's now "mainstream left" -- even including avowed socialists like Bernie. Will Natural Conservatives stick around as researchers like Haidt would say they must because the position is "wired in" to everyone ... and dominant in many?
The conservative instinct, as described by Haidt,includes a preference for homogeneity over diversity, for stability over change, and for hierarchy and order over radical egalitarianism. Their instinctive wariness of the foreign and the unfamiliar is an instinct that we all share – an evolutionary safeguard against excessive, potentially perilous curiosity – but natural conservatives feel it with more intensity. They instinctively prefer familiar societies, familiar norms, and familiar institutions.
At one level, all humans want to "go home". I argue that "home" is actually Heaven (and the Garden of Eden), and the evolutionary psychology ideas of "Darwin's Cathedral" are VERY specialized wishful materialist imagination. Christ is the difference that allows Christian Conservatives to make the best attempt in world history at actually loving their enemies and viewing history / reality through the transcendent eyes of eternity.
Or we may just be deplorable white privileged racists as the left has confidently labeled us.
This somewhat longish column is a poster child for an attempted left wing analysis of "what went wrong"? How did they discover that something went "wrong"? Trump was elected. The wordy article leads us on a merry chase of how this terrible thing might have happened -- it is written by Kurt Anderson, who is a writer that graduated from Harvard and founded "Spy" magazine. An example of what "Spy" was about:
Founded by Kurt Andersen and E. Graydon Carter, who served as its first editors, and Thomas L. Phillips, Jr., its first publisher. After one folding and a rebirth, it ceased publication in 1998. The magazine specialized in irreverent and satirical pieces targeting the American media, entertainment industries and the mocking of high society.[4] Some of its features attempted to present the darker side of celebrities such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, John F. Kennedy, Jr., Steven Seagal,[5]Martha Stewart, and especially, the real-estate tycoon Donald Trump and his then-wife Ivana Trump.[6] Pejorative epithets of celebrities, e.g., "Abe 'I'm Writing As Bad As I Can' Rosenthal", "short-fingered vulgarian Donald Trump",[7] "churlish dwarf billionaire Laurence Tisch", "bum-kissing toady Arthur Gelb", "bosomy dirty-book writer Shirley Lord" and "former fat girl Dianne Brill" became a Spy trademark.
Strangely, although Anderson finds Trump to be a disaster of the first order, a quick read of the paragraph would indicate that Kurt and Donald ought to be bosom buddies ... "former fat girl Dianne Brill"? Indeed. So what IS the shape our peril according to Kurt?
By my reckoning, the solidly reality-based are a minority, maybe a third of us but almost certainly fewer than half. Only a third of us, for instance, don’t believe that the tale of creation in Genesis is the word of God. Only a third strongly disbelieve in telepathy and ghosts. Two-thirds of Americans believe that “angels and demons are active in the world.” More than half say they’re absolutely certain heaven exists, and just as many are sure of the existence of a personal God—not a vague force or universal spirit or higher power, but some guy. A third of us believe not only that global warming is no big deal but that it’s a hoax perpetrated by scientists, the government, and journalists.
Kurt certainly seems to have a solid view of "reality" -- to the extent we can discern it's base, the key point seems to be strong materialist atheism -- creation, angels, heaven, and "a personal God" (we will assume he means Jesus) come in for special snark. For those of us that believe in Christ being God made Man, the "Word of Kurt" (WoK) calling him "some guy" seems just a bit presumptions. Somehow, I'm guessing he is far less snarky about "allah" ... at least around Muslims. They don't love their enemies, they kill them.
Kurt goes on a long discussion of how "America" has gone "haywire". So why is it that Kurt's ideas on this are supposed to be of interest to anyone at all? Kurt does a great job of answering the reason for that right up front -- there is really no reason to read the rest of it.
Why are we like this?
The short answer is because we’re Americans—because being American means we can believe anything we want; that our beliefs are equal or superior to anyone else’s, experts be damned. Once people commit to that approach, the world turns inside out, and no cause-and-effect connection is fixed. The credible becomes incredible and the incredible credible.
So what are the qualification of one of the founders of "Spy" magazine to give us a psuedo-intellectual tour of history? He is admittedly Ivy League educated, but certainly not philosopher, theologian, scientist, political scientist, or even sociologist; on what does he stand to provide us the answer for the deep meaning of "haywire". Clearly KURT believes that Trump defines "haywire", however what expertise, philosophy, revelation, equation, data, "standard", dream, etc is Kurt standing on as he says it? I'd argue it is exactly like Potter Stewart's definition of pornography ... "you know it when you see it'.
Kurt HIMSELF has clearly stated "expert's be damned" -- The WoK is being proffered as useful because he himself finds his own views to be "equal or superior to anyone else's". He invalidates his own case right up front.
My view is that we forgot that "the fear of God is the BEGINNING of all wisdom". Transcendence, something unchangeable and beyond mere matter -- TRUTH. A book that points out where we left the track is from my perspective is "Ideas Have Consequences" and the point and which we first became unglued was in the 14th century.
"This was a change that overtook the dominant philosophical thinking of the West in the fourteenth century, when the reality of transcendentals was first seriously challenged."
Without SOMETHING that is at least very close to an eternal principle, we ALL lack any place to stand to make any sort of judgments at all! Science leaps from the precipice that says "the universe is ORDERED, and results that we see today are assumed to be repeatable across time and space". The foundation of science is INDUCTION -- "it worked today, it will work tomorrow, and it will work anywhere for all time".
The difficulty with this is PERSPECTIVE. The Thanksgiving turkey postulates that humans are a benevolent species that cares and provides for turkeys. On the very day in which the turkey's "proof" has gained the status of maximally proven scientific "fact", the induction crashes and the turkey finds himself at a meal in which he is the guest of honor. The turkey lacked the perspective of a larger view -- as do we humans relative to eternity.
The other problem is of course that right/wrong, beauty, consciousness, love, etc are completely outside the realm of science, as science is about STUFF ... material, matter. Human life is founded on human consciousness -- right, wrong, up, down, inside out, or non-existent, it IS what WE perceive as humans!
Kurt certainly views HIS consciousness as a superb basis for analysis ... as do we all unless we recognize a power greater than our own perspective (eg. "the fear of God" or maybe "fear of Kurt"??).
Let's look at Kurt's "analysis" a bit":
Meanwhile, over in sociology, in 1966 a pair of professors published The Social Construction of Reality, one of the most influential works in their field. Not only were sanity and insanity and scientific truth somewhat dubious concoctions by elites, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann explained—so was everything else. The rulers of any tribe or society do not just dictate customs and laws; they are the masters of everyone’s perceptions, defining reality itself. To create the all-encompassing stage sets that everyone inhabits, rulers first use crude mythology, then more elaborate religion, and finally the “extreme step” of modern science. “Reality”? “Knowledge”? “If we were going to be meticulous,” Berger and Luckmann wrote, “we would put quotation marks around the two aforementioned terms every time we used them.” “What is ‘real’ to a Tibetan monk may not be ‘real’ to an American businessman.”
Therefore, Kurt's "reality" would also be relative ... however, since he wrote this long article, we are to understand that it isn't really. Somehow, "The WoK" is privileged. (See "reality based" above}.
So what kind of heresy has failure to accept the WoK unleased?
Even the social critic Paul Goodman, beloved by young leftists in the ’60s, was flabbergasted by his own students by 1969. “There was no knowledge,” he wrote, “only the sociology of knowledge. They had so well learned that … research is subsidized and conducted for the benefit of the ruling class that they did not believe there was such a thing as simple truth.”
Ever since, the American right has insistently decried the spread of relativism, the idea that nothing is any more correct or true than anything else. Conservatives hated how relativism undercut various venerable and comfortable ruling ideas—certain notions of entitlement (according to race and gender) and aesthetic beauty and metaphysical and moral certainty.
Ah, "simple truth" --- or as we can see from the column, "the WoK". Sadly, the evil American Right thought that there WERE ultimate truths ... like the Word of God, which included Genesis, now known to fail the "reality based" test, according to the WoK. So the decried "relativism", as now apparently so does Kurt -- it's just that he finds any "relativism" according to the "Word of Kirk" to be bad -- therefore, he is a "rightwing fundamentalist" in relation to the "Word of Kirk"!
"Just before the Clintons arrived in Washington, the right had managed to do away with the federal Fairness Doctrine, which had been enacted to keep radio and TV shows from being ideologically one-sided. Until then, big-time conservative opinion media had consisted of two magazines, William F. Buckley Jr.’s biweekly National Review and the monthly American Spectator, both with small circulations. But absent a Fairness Doctrine, Rush Limbaugh’s national right-wing radio show, launched in 1988, was free to thrive, and others promptly appeared."
Here I think we arrive at the crux of the matter. As long as whatever was being stated was duly approved by a part of the Administrative State lodged comfortably in the womb of the Federal Communications Commission, all could be certain that only Administrative State, Union Approved, Ivy League vetted, Davos Certified, "truth" would be provided to the masses. Everything was "ideologically SINGLE sided", which was "the good", and the idiots that provided the alternative comic relief -- Bill Buckley and the American Spectator, were "fringe" --- as heretics ought to be!
Did his voters know that his hogwash was hogwash? Yes and no, the way people paying to visit P. T. Barnum’s exhibitions 175 years ago didn’t much care whether the black woman on display was really George Washington’s 161-year-old former nanny or whether the stitched-together fish/ape was actually a mermaid; or the way today we immerse in the real-life fictions of Disney World. Trump waited to run for president until he sensed that a critical mass of Americans had decided politics were all a show and a sham. If the whole thing is rigged, Trump’s brilliance was calling that out in the most impolitic ways possible, deriding his straight-arrow competitors as fakers and losers and liars—because that bullshit-calling was uniquely candid and authentic in the age of fake.
Perhaps there really were consequences to Slick Wille having BJs in the oval office, lying about it, and skating. Maybe calling a vast power grab and re-distribution scam called the "Affordable" Care Act, "affordable" even though it added a grab bag of new benefits to health INSURANCE thus being certain to radically increase the cost, was slightly disingenuous. However, saying that "If you like your doctor you can keep him", "if you like your insurance plan you can keep it", etc was TOTALLY a direct lie which anyone that paid any attention understood to be a LIE ... or to put it in Kurt's words, "a show and a sham".
I personally know MANY people that budgeted for retiring with healthcare TOTAL costs (insurance + deductables + co-pays) of $8K for a 60 year old couple, finding that they needed $22K for insurance along, PLUS, another 8-10K for deductables and co-pays. $30K vs $8K ... PER YEAR!
Slick Willie ushered in the age of fake. BO made it the standard.
So what do I believe caused America to "go haywire", and turn into BOistan?
We have to stand on SOMETHING! As John Adams said: "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other". That morality was founded on Jesus Christ -- we never had any other rock to stand on, and sorry to say, the WoK isn't much of a substitute.
So what does the "word of Kurt" say on this point?
What is to be done? I don’t have an actionable agenda, Seven Ways Sensible People Can Save America From the Craziness. But I think we can slow the flood, repair the levees, and maybe stop things from getting any worse. If we’re splitting into two different cultures, we in reality-based America—whether the blue part or the smaller red part—must try to keep our zone as large and robust and attractive as possible for ourselves and for future generations. We need to firmly commit to Moynihan’s aphorism about opinions versus facts. We must call out the dangerously untrue and unreal. A grassroots movement against one kind of cultural squishiness has taken off and lately reshaped our national politics—the opposition to political correctness. I envision a comparable struggle that insists on distinguishing between the factually true and the blatantly false.
What is "reality"? Is it matter only, with meaning defined by induction? Kurt, founder of "Spy" magazine firmly believes in the "World of Kurt" ... if you follow Kurt, you too can be "reality based". Isn't that special?
Choose ye this day whom you will serve ... Kurt? or something larger? Trump is only a very temporary occupant of the highest office in what is at this point the failed state of BOistan. I believe that God is bigger than Kurt, Trump, and BOistan, so God is my choice as the basis for reality -- eternal reality.
I often describe my pilgrimage as from a 1974 tiny rural HS, 1978 no name university BS graduate, culturally flat technical hick; to autodidact idiot savant pseudo-intellectual student of Western civilization, Christianity, Philosophy, Literature and Science hick, as a series of pitches going up a mountain on which I often THINK that I have seen the peak, but realize at various junctures that all I have seen are outcroppings, many of which involve yet another LONG pitch I must traverse to gain a glimpse of the next dizzying (to me) height. I've ceased to imagine it will be the peak -- that will be in the life to come.
This is a review of Smith's sort of of extended cliff note narrative summary of Charles Taylor's 874 page mountain of a book, "The Secular Age" which I now have on order (don't expect the review blog anytime soon)! Here is a review of The Secular Age" if you want a different / more extensive take on the larger work.
Smith says that Taylor "gives us an account of our cross-pressured situation -- suspended between the malaise of immanence and the memory of transcendence". Immanence meaning "matter and the physical is everything" and transcendence meaning this is not all there is -- there is a higher Platonic / spiritual / metaphysical reality that is more real than what our imperfect senses can apprehend.
Taylor perceives and makes plain to us "that transcendence and immanence bleed into one another; that faith is pretty much unthinkable, but abandonment to the abyss is even more so;" ...
"Employing a kid of intellectual colonialism, new atheist cartographers rename entire regions of our experience and annex them to natural science and empirical explanation, flattening by disenchantment. ("Graveyards of the gods" are always highlights of this tour)."
My favorite diagram from the book is this one -- I apologize for having to resort to taking a picture of it.
I think a reasonable attempt at tiny summary of the Smith book is that Taylor tells the story, AS A STORY, of how it became possible to exist in a disenchanted immanent world where the most important thing is the Buffered Self -- meaning the self devoid of attachment to culture, history, religion, or even family. A detached self that is never the less haunted by being "pushed by the immanence of disenchantment on one side, but also pushed by a sense of significance and transcendence on another side, even if it might just be an echo of lost transcendence".
We all live by a narrative -- the pure humanist narrative of "progress" is that we once lacked physical vs metaphysical explanations for what we saw around us, so we imagined "enchantment". Spirits and gods were all around, but we were only children. The definition of "progress" or "maturity" is NO ILLUSIONS ... we live in a cold meaningless universe that is ONLY matter. Meaning is only about matter ... man is the measuring creature, measurement is meaning. If it can't be measured, it is an illusion, and therefore does not exist!
"If one were to preserve God's sovereignty, one would have to do away with "essences", and with independent "natures". And the result is a metaphysical picture called "nominalism" where things are ONLY what they are named."
If you can name it and measure it, it exists. If not, it doesn't. So, with the Nietzschean "demise of God, we are the only authorizing agency left" ... these two paragraphs give the barest thumbnail of the "CWS", Closed World View -- it's matter and us, that is all the material available to try to construct meaning.
And so, the disenchanted immanent "meaning" constructed is the "Modern Moral Order" (MMO) -- it is pure humanism, bootstrapped from matter and human thought and ruthlessly applied to all as a dogmatic religion, with much more restrictive dogmas, pervasive in all areas of society, especially schools, media, and law ( like gay "marriage", transgender grooming for kids, etc).
"Because of an inadequate appreciation for moral sources, modernity fixates or moral articulation -- a fixation on more and more scrupulous codes of behavior .... we don't know how to make people moral, but we do know how to specify rules, articulate expectation, lay down the law. This happens in policy, but also informally in cultural codes of political correctness ..."
What is lacking is any sense of inner motivation -- it is all external, we will yell at you if you fail to meet the ever growing MMO -- or maybe worse, we will pass more and more laws, you MUST NOT use plastic grocery bags, you MUST recycle. you MUST drive an electric car"! Thus saith the MMO.
It becomes clear that the CWS / MMO / Buffered Self, etc ARE a form of metaphysic, and thus effectively a "religion" -- the self is not actually "buffered", unless they can exist as an effective modern hermit of constant distraction, escape, and self-delusion. The Buffered Self must BELIEVE that all of this is "the good", but part of the CWS itself is that it is a "good" completely made up of whole cloth.
Man STILL cannot live by bread alone, but must have a some sort of "social imaginary" (Taylor term), metaphysical dream, or every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.
So what exactly is the advantage of the certified manufactured illusion with ZERO parts transcendent content of the MMO, over thousands of years old moral order that at the minimum leave the thought of transcendence open to the psyche?
Well, in an immanent sense, of course NOTHING -- since there can't be anything that isn't made up by randomly developed creatures out of nothing except "stuff" (matter). Taylor -- and Smith believe that there actually aren't any honest humans that fail to sense the haunting of the transcendent. Is it real, or is it just side effect of some old caveman brain circuits that would be best excised in our modern world to allow us to be completely "grown up" as a Nietzschean disenchanted, immanent buffered self that deserves to be tamped down and unacknowledged -- even if it means they must lie about it to make it seem that the fiction of pure rational atheism exists (which it doesn't, at least since Quantum Mechanics).
Unsurprisingly, no answers are given. The task of the book is to make Christian faith POSSIBLE in our flattened, disenchanted meaningless world, essentially by just making it clear that EVERYONE has "faith", it is only a question of "faith in what". The intellectual playing field of the world today is purely secular. Taylor sees us at the possible cusp of faith no longer being "allowable", although he does not predict that will be the actual outcome ... he believes that even the merest ghost of the transcendent cannot be ignored because "this heavy concentration of the atmosphere of immanence will intensify a sense of living in a wasteland for subsequent generations, and young people will begin to explore beyond the boundaries ..."
Even for the subject Smith book of a mere 139 pages, I have but scratched the surface lightly. Yet again, I find myself regularly running to the Internet to bone up on my definitions in order to begin to understand what I am looking at. I feel as a non-english native speaker, who after a couple semesters of English is thrust into reading Shakespeare and asked to provide commentary. And this AFTER 100's of books over decades of my attempted intellectual improvement.
In the 500 years since the Reformation, science, philosophy and religion have sold us the chimera of "reform / progress" with no concept of "to where"? It seems that in some circles the thought was "to a mature human vision of a morality built on "facts" rather than "superstition" -- however, morality is more than a set of rules, and mature human vision is perpetual change toward an unknown objective rather than a "goal" ... and it likely is merely going in circles chasing its tail.
We remain lost so tragically we often fail to even detect our lostness. Does my quest for knowledge lead me forward, or into the abyss? My prayer is that with Christ holding my hand, there can be no truly uncharted abyss (Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me). I know the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Can this mountain of human knowledge be somehow be translated into a form that allows modern man to see the truth of transcendence in Christ? or is my quest just an old guy attacking the Everest of knowledge alone without oxygen?
If you have ANY time and inclination, BYPASS ME and just GO READ THIS! It may well be the best reading of this length that I've read this year, and as you know, I read a lot.
I grew up in a church that thought Catholics were devil worshipers -- joined with the Harlot. I've come to believe that they are "THE Church". As a Lutheran, I'm still staking my faith that they are not the ONLY church.
What I love about the Catholic Church is HISTORY and PERSPECTIVE -- and the linked article is a great example of both. A huge failing of Protestants is that our churches are all certain that Christ is returning "soon", which is certainly true in God's time. After over two thousand years however, the Catholic Church well understands that God's time is not our time (which is also true). One would hope that in this 500th year anniversay of the Reformation, perhaps Protestants could begin to fathom this other important truth.
The Protestant failing that is destroying Western civilization is the idea that everyone deserves and can fashion their own god. Sure, they may often do it in a myriad of sects, splits and schizms, but at base it comes down to what I see as a heresy -- although Jesus saves each of us personally, God the Father is ONE GOD, eternal and unchanging -- we do not get to make him, and futhermore, fear of him as the **I AM** is the beginning of wisdom.
Thus ends my short paen to the Cathoic Church. The linked column is WAY too deep and rich for me to summarize. I see it as nothing short of basic blueprint of what is required for Christians to save the remnant of a tattered and bleeding Western civilization, as well as the realization that it is ONLY Christ and his followers that can save it if that is Gods plan. If we want to recover, have to find a foundation of meaning to build on, and it is not "information" or even knowledge.
Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom, not knowledge, is the framework of a fully human life; the architecture of interior peace. Scripture is the Word of God, and Ecclesiastes tells us that “the words of the wise in quiet are better than the shouting of a ruler among fools.” Wisdom is more powerful than might and better than the weapons of war (Eccles. 9:16-18). Wisdom is more precious than jewels, and once we have it, then knowledge becomes pleasant to the soul (Prov. 8:11; 2:10).
I VERY grudgingly select this 7th point to share -- I want you to READ IT ALL, because this point is in no way a summary.
Here’s a seventh point: Democracy advances equality by flattening out injustices and social inequities. But it goes much further than that. It also tends to flatten out distinctions and hierarchies of every kind. Unguided by religious faith, democracy flattens out even the human spirit because any kind of divine transcendence or human excellence also implies a kind of inequality. This is why Alexis de Tocqueville said that democracy creates not just a new and different kind of political order, but a new and different kind of humanity.
Much of our people and culture are like a cartoon person flattened by a cartoon steamroller. God's universe is infinitely dimensional, hierarchical, celebratory of TRUE diversity -- diversity of spirit, gifts, thought, experience, blessing. Spirit can't be manifest in a flattened cartoon projection of being human, and so very many of the people in our age have been totally and tragically flattened.
I can't resist one last quote, however, please realize that overall, the column is POSITIVE, unlike what my quotes might lead you to believe.
If you want to see the face of Europe in 100 years, barring a miracle, look to the faces of young Muslim immigrants. Islam has a future because Islam believes in children. Without a transcendent faith that makes life worth living, there’s no reason to bear children. And where there are no children, there’s no imagination, no reason to sacrifice, and no future.
Read the linked and ponder the richness of Grace and possibility that God wants us to live!
Mustafa Akoyl, a journalist from Turkey, writes this in his recent book, The Islamic Jesus: How the King of the Jews Became a Prophet of the Muslims. He made me think ecumenically, and I cast back to the late William F. Buckley Jr., a Catholic and the founder of the magazine I’ve worked at for 20 years. “What disturbs me most about the opposition to Mary is that it is so unchivalrous,” Buckley wrote. He pointed to her as “an exemplary woman,” as does Akoyl, a Muslim.
I grew up Baptist. Mother Mary was a subject only mildly discussed at Christmas in a positive light, and for the rest of the year, "the most prevalent idol that Catholics worship".
A major part of the Baptist message was "we are fundamental Bible believers who hold purely to the Word of God, while Catholics are the Anti-Christ, joined with the harlot" -- the "Woman who sits on seven hills" (Rome) ... they "worship Mary".
As I spent a lot more time in the Word on my own of course, THIS spoke to me:
Luke 1:39-55King James Version (KJV)
39 And Mary arose in those days, and went into the hill country with haste, into a city of Juda;
40 And entered into the house of Zacharias, and saluted Elisabeth.
41 And it came to pass, that, when Elisabeth heard the salutation of Mary, the babe leaped in her womb; and Elisabeth was filled with the Holy Ghost:
42 And she spake out with a loud voice, and said, Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb.
43 And whence is this to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?
44 For, lo, as soon as the voice of thy salutation sounded in mine ears, the babe leaped in my womb for joy.
45 And blessed is she that believed: for there shall be a performance of those things which were told her from the Lord.
46 And Mary said, My soul doth magnify the Lord,
47 And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.
48 For he hath regarded the low estate of his handmaiden: for, behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed.
49 For he that is mighty hath done to me great things; and holy is his name.
50 And his mercy is on them that fear him from generation to generation.
51 He hath shewed strength with his arm; he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
52 He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree.
53 He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away.
54 He hath helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy;
55 As he spake to our fathers, to Abraham, and to his seed forever.
It turns out that Mary is more highly revered by MUSLIMS than she is by Evangelicals in the US! I always thought it odd that followers of Christ would hold his mother in as low estate as they often do. The Bible clearly said she is the TOP among women -- you are to revere her more than your own mother, wife, daughter, etc as a Christian. She is the chosen vessel of God for the miracle of fully God fully man -- Jesus Christ.
Interesting tidbit to go with the striking picture above.
It was only on this trip that it was asked and confirmed that Mrs. Trump is Catholic and that she will soon be the first Catholic living in the White House since the Kennedys.
Now THAT is something not likely to get much attention in the media!
