Murder and Culture

https://pastorjameshein.wordpress.com/2019/01/31/abortion-then-now-what-we-can-learn-from-how-the-early-church-dealt-with-abortion-infanticide/

A good article discussing a bit of the history of abortion and it's logical link to infanticide. 

If you believe abortion is fine,  then "morality" has been replaced by "practicality / individual choice / the search for pleasure / convenience / etc in your mind. 

 

As Nietzsche observed, "without God, all things are permissible". 

A Thousand Small Sanities

https://www.amazon.com/Thousand-Small-Sanities-Adventure-Liberalism/dp/154169936X

I was recommended this book by a friend associated with a small left Lutheran (ELCA) college. I wasn't very far into it before I thought of Bill Buckley's "God and Man at Yale" .. I imagine unsuspecting parents sending youth off to a school that they think is "Christian" only to find them returning as godless atheists worshipping pleasure and self -- the book puts up as "heroic"  adultery, cohabitation, atheism, and homosexuality ... or anything new that comes along that trips their trigger.

I'm a traditional liberal -- certainly people have a right to any manner of idea they want to have, and even to proselytize such beliefs. I just fervently wish that anyone who even marginally maintains any sort of even remotely Christian belief would realize that there is no need to waste time at a supposedly faith based university exposing them to more atheist, relativist, materialist, hedonist, etc views. They get LOTS of that from the general culture!

The title and subtitle tell your this is not in any way an objective book  -- if "liberalism" is "sane", then conservatism must be "insane", and if "liberalism" is "moral" ... (in it's own estimation of course), than those who are not of the "liberal faith" are "immoral".

On page 232 we find: "Liberal tolerance includes tolerance of non-liberals and anti-liberals as long as they accept the rules of pluralism." (as the book clearly states, those are admittedly muddled "rules" that are ever changing, so beware! -- one best stay very current on what is "sane", lest you be declared insane.

Your only defense is to bow at the "liberal" altar de jour -- Trump was fine for the left as long as he was one of their team! Oh, the book is a reaction to Trump, seeded with the standard gratuitous criticisms. In the universe inhabited by this author, the thought that there might be a "sane" other side just as disgusted with Obama would be impossible -- certainly, by definition, those people would be INSANE!

So why were the adulterous lovers Mill and Taylor "moral"? On page 12 we read:" What they were is realists - radicals of the real, determined to live in the world even as they altered it". In simpler terms. the "liberal" form of "morality" ... "If it feels good, do it" -- and as it becomes more "advanced", force others to celebrate the "morality" which you feel.

The main point of the book is that "liberalism" is a forever changing, but always the best "muddle" -- his "aways true/just/factual/moral" and ever "advancing" defense of liberalism reminded me of the movie "The Blob", or very much like "The Borg" on STNG -- you WILL be assimilated!

Reagan said it best: "A liberal will defend your right to agree with them to your dying breath".

So how are we to begin to "know" what the ever changing "liberal rules" are? On page 27 we see: "And that (Montaigne quote) meant we had to base our social behavior on compassion, skepticism, and uncertainty rather than on dogma, justice and utopianism." Got that? -- in short, no fixed rules.

The "compassion" is interesting -- based on the actions of today's "liberals", that means forcing other people to transfer their earnings to the "less fortunate" -- or just less successful relative to the liberal ever evolving standard of "enough", which conveniently is never reached.

"Compassion" and "sympathy" are themes of the book. On page 37, we see of Hume -- "He saw, and showed the sharp limits of reason--and the power of sympathy, rather than either reason or faith, to make humankind one".  Later on that page, "Sympathy lets us turn ideas into emotion".

On page 39 we see why Hume is especially dear to the author -- "have little patience only till I have the pleasure of seeing the churches shut up, and the clergy sent about their business".

"Sympathy" for me, but not for thee.

On page 51, we see the attempted cleavage of "liberals" from "left activism" (although the "heroes" of the author are the radicals) -- so allowing freedom of speech by purchasing ads, and the electoral college are declared "not worth saving" by the hard left, the authors unicorn "liberals" think it is acceptable to "get there slowly" ... but nevertheless, inevitably!

Page 72, "Where conservatives believe in the renewal of traditional community, liberals believe in the flight from family and tradition into new kinds of communal order" ... a Montaigne type skeptic might ask, "and how is that working out?" We see rising suicide rates, declining lifespans, addiction, hopelessness and mass shootings, all of which were declining or non-existent under tired old Christian culture as late as "1960".

On page 238, "Liberalism isn't a political theory applied to life. It's what we know about life applied to political theory." Nice claim, however given the previous discussion of page 72, is that a truthful claim? Eric Fromm says in "The Sane Society":

"We find then that the countries in Europe which are among the most democratic, peaceful and prosperous ones, and the United States, the most prosperous country in the world, show the most severe symptoms of mental disturbance."

And this was in 1956! Fromm for one would say that we "know" very little about "life". Wikipedia says: There is currently no consensus regarding the definition of life. One popular definition is that organisms that maintain homeostasis are composed of cells, have a life cycle, metabolism, can grow, adapt to their environment, respond to stimuli, reproduce, and evolve. However, several other definitions have been proposed, and there are some borderline cases of life, such as viruses or viroids.
Given that, how can one claim to "know about life"? I'd assume, in the same way as pretty much all "liberalism" posits, it is "whatever the most "powerful" (most votes, most scientists polled, etc) think, or even feel it is -- and thus "know".

Page 81, we see a core of the liberal faith -- "These values are rooted in a simple idea about human capacity - a moral idea about the source of meaning in the human imagination. This just means that people make up their values, they aren't handed down from the past or on high. This humanist ideal is what inspects and animates liberalism with moral energy."

Translation -- man makes it up his own morality as he goes along, and he declares it to be "very good". Niche figured this out long ago -- God is dead, so might is right.

From 184-190, Gopnik goes from the Mill definition of free speech. -- "unless the speaker is actually ready to cut your throat, you have to let him work his jaw". To applauding a Canadian court ruling preventing a Christian from passing out pamphlets critical of homosexuality, to saying that while "suppression of free speech on campus is alarming to "liberals"", to "real though the problem of civil liberties on campuses might be, it is infinitely less concerning than the power of corporate speech or the daily presence of hate speech from the highest source of power directed against threatened groups".

My "highest source of power is God". The Bible says; "If a man lies with a male as he lies with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination. They shall surely be put to death. Their blood shall be upon them." ... or Rom 1:22-32. Both God and Nature abhor homosexuality (it isn't adaptive ... doesn't reproduce, the holy grail of evolution).

So clearly, although I'm sure he meant Trump, and recognizes not at all my higher power, Gopnik would seem required to see the Bible as "hate speech" -- and the definition of what "hate speech" would be whatever he sees "liberal" orthodoxy saying it is at this "advanced time". (stay tuned ... no doubt it will "advance")

I love his heartfelt defense of one of his huge heroes, Red Emma Goldman, on page 160; "Throughout her life she never compromised either the purity of her anarchist, sensualist and libertarian principles in the face of left-wing totalitarianism". So much for the "reality based" theme of supposed "liberalism" -- what it really means is "my view wins" ... always, no matter what it actually turns out to result in.

p 319, "But few ideas could be more fatuous than that secular ideals are really just as religious as religious ideals.". hmm other than the idea that "religion" is what you hold to be the highest value, and secularism holds itself to be "the highest value". Or maybe he just doesn't understand the definition of "fatuous"?

And on what basis would that statement have merit? Well, the same basis as all metaphysical claims -- "belief". At the base, one either believes that there is some metaphysical standard, or there isn't. If God exists, and he has declared standards for us to follow, then there IS a standard. If not, then NO STANDARDS beyond might is right! For a more complete discussion of what is "fatuous".

There has been a lot of ink wasted on trying to "prove" the "liberal / progressive / humanist" faith (of any given moment -- it's "strong point" is it's constant "evolution". What used to be Western civilization was based on Christianity. The fervent hope of the left was that you can just pull the foundation of Christianity out from under it and things would still be fine. (so why don't they look "fine"?)

Nietzsche covered this topic very well -- and seeing this shallow book being proffered for review by impressionable youth with little comprehension of the depth of the danger, it is good to be living deep in fly over country!

Godless Tribal Life and Death

https://www.nytimes.com/1997/11/02/magazine/why-they-kill-their-newborns.html

New York now allows infanticide and the passage of the law has been duly celebrated by the left. The top link points to a deeply scientistic article from '97 that ought to be kept around, here is a summary from near it's end.

So how do you provide grounds for outlawing neonaticide? The facts don't make it easy. Some philosophers suggest that people intuitively see neonates as so similar to older babies that you couldn't allow neonaticide without coarsening the way people treat children and other people in general. Again, the facts say otherwise. Studies in both modern and hunter-gatherer societies have found that neonaticidal women don't kill anyone but their newborns, and when they give birth later under better conditions, they can be devoted, loving mothers.

Ah "the facts" ... you know, "statistics say", "studies say". I found this excerpt to be prophetic;

Full personhood is often not automatically granted at birth, as we see in our rituals of christening and the Jewish bris. And yet the recent neonaticides still seem puzzling. These are middle-class girls whose babies would have been kept far from starvation by the girls' parents or by any of thousands of eager adoptive couples. But our emotions, fashioned by the slow hand of natural selection, respond to the signals of the long-vanished tribal environment in which we spent 99 percent of our evolutionary history.

The "invisible hand" of amoral evolution, whose only possible morality is exactly the same as the "morality" of Science ... "what works", "might is right", "the fittest survive". Science provides "the facts" ... it sets up the experiments or studies and Science decides what are "legitimate questions". "Truth" is a "repeatable experiment".

Strange though, the article was written in 1997 and the scientific minded author assumed that tribalism was "long gone"! Yet, in less than 20 years, BOistan has moved back to being a completely tribal state. The Governor of Virginia agreed with the 1997 article from the left one week, then an old picture of him was found wearing blackface a week later. The R tribe is very angry about killing babies. The D tribe is fine with baby killing, however the blackface was enough to momentarily label him an R before they went back to their usual practice of just not putting a party label on a badly behaving D (CNN)!

What would the "Scientific Facts" say about the morality of wearing blackface in 1984? See "the facts" don't support any sanctions against infanticide, so we ought not have them. What does Science tell us about wearing blackface, supposedly in a Michael Jackson dance contest? Does the fact that Michael Jackson attempted to LIGHTEN his complexion and enjoyed having sleepovers with underage kids affect the "morality"? 

What one would think would be completely obvious at this point is that tribalism is a natural behavior of humans, and the largest single thing that allowed us to rise above it was religion, with the grand champion religion being Christianity, one of the foundations of Western civilization. Some of us older people are still vaguely aware of Western civilization, and I know, ULTRA amazing, are still believing practicing Christians! 

As late as the late '90s, one would have to have journeyed to Borneo, Paupa New Guinea, or the deep jungles of the Amazon to observe humans in their natural tribal state. Now we can watch congresswomen dress all in white and synchronize their actions like native women in the jungle on live national TV as they assume that they are doing something that the rest of their tribe will be impressed by! 

Without transcendence, usually provided to the masses by religion, humans operate in the way their genes tell them to. "Education" about "facts" does nothing with emotions, and as even science is increasingly aware, our "reason" is largely used to explain our emotions. We are rationalizing rather than reational creatures. 

Infanticide, genocide, slavery, the use of might to vanquish and even exterminate the weak -- all are exemplary of homo sapiens in our natural state, and Civilization / Culture was the UNnatural "cultivation" that allowed us to be more than "natural humans". We gave that up though ... so we could more like the "very flower of  humanity" as Star Trek explored in "Mirror, Mirror". 

12 Rules To Live By, An Antidote to Chaos, Jordan B Peterson

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/05/jordan-peterson-new-york-times-hostility/

This is the first book (other than the Bible) that I've read and then just turned around and read it again. As the linked review indicates, for a practicing Christian or Jew, a lot of what Peterson covers is pretty basic, but for many modern secularists, it is a bit like Dr Strange discovering that maybe they missed a couple things on their way to their assumed total intellectual victory party.

If you are not a reader, then this video covers the high points of the book quite well. 

The message is very old and very simple -- MEANING is what is important to human life rather than "happiness", which is at best fleeting. What the meaning of your life is to be is the one great question posed by the universe(the Holy Spirit for Christians, Satan for others) to each of us (see "Man's Search for Meaning"). Once we find that meaning we have RESPONSIBILITY to be TRUE to it! 

Meaning, responsibility and truth (the wisdom triad), rather than happiness, rights and tribalism (the leftist triad). Simple, but extremely powerful for lives worth living vs lives ended in despair -- too often by their own hand.

Peterson is an engaging author and speaker, so there is really no excuse to not hear what he says. Yes, of course he has been politicized, only because EVERYTHING is part of a zero sum tribal political game in the failed "liberal" West. From a traditional rendering of knowledge however, there is nothing political about him. He is as basic as Socrates, Jesus or Buddha -- What is the good? How are we to know it? How are we to practice it? How might we live our lives? Is this all there is?

My favorite quote from the NR review linked above ... 

And so, as the secular Left pressed up against the church, it looked behind and saw the flames in its own camp. Peterson held the match, but the kindling was all around him. It’s not that men (and many women) failed to adjust to the new gender ideologies, it’s that the new gender ideologies too often fail to reckon with our deepest human longings and fail to recognize our fundamental human nature. As Peterson writes in 12 Rules, “We cannot invent our own values, because we cannot merely impose what we believe on our souls.”

What kind of a world might we live in if the small phenomenon that is Jordan Peterson grows and matures? Perhaps one where a majority finally accepts that we are not soulless automatons! Perhaps one rich with meaning and truthful relationships!

A worthy prayer!

Jordan Peterson and Dr Oz

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AscPHmLWo-M

One of the best 2+ hours I've spent in a long time ... 

Why Liberalism Failed, Patrick Deneen

For the non-academic, "liberalism" here is classical liberalism -- individual rights (especially property), government at the consent of the people, and freedom of economic activity (often capitalism).

This book is so important I'm including a negative review -- from of all places, National Review!

Now, I am not sure the higher purpose that religion offers its adherents can ever be replaced by any other human enterprise. Nor do I discount religion’s positive contributions to the building of community, or to the development of our culture. I am just not convinced that there was ever a way for religiosity to have fully survived Charles Darwin. Even if secularization is in some ways undesirable, it is at least partly inevitable. Most of Europe, for one, has renounced Christianity. Deneen mourns the death of God, and understandably so, but as a political theorist in modern society he cannot just assume that the strength of organized religion can be easily regenerated. He must grapple with, rather than just complain about, the rise of secularism. And his inability to cope with it, ironically enough, serves to demonstrate the wisdom of liberalism — for part of liberalism’s genius is that its pluralistic capacity to foster freedom of association can incorporate atheists and people of faith into the same body politic.

And then a "less negative" review from David Brooks of the NY Times!

When your argument is that the only remaining "ism" after Communism, Socialism, and Fascism have failed many times is ALSO a failure, it is not all that surprising that pretty much everyone in the modern intellectual elite would have a lot of negative things to say about your thesis.

NR shows it's true colors by siding with godless atheism as a "value" of the liberal project, and Brooks vacuously points out that something so old can't possibly be wrong ...

Deneen’s book is valuable because it focuses on today’s central issue. The important debates now are not about policy. They are about the basic values and structures of our social order. Nonetheless, he is wrong. Liberal democracy has had a pretty good run for 300 years. If the problem were really in the roots, wouldn’t it have shown up before now?

I think if Brooks read just a little closer, even in his own review, he would see his problem ...

The problem, Deneen argues, started at the beginning. Greek and medieval philosophies valued liberty, but they understood that before a person could help govern society, he had to be able to govern himself. People had to be habituated in virtue by institutions they didn’t choose — family, religion, community, social norms.

  While liberalism was far from perfect in basic construction, the fact that up until maybe "1930 or 1940", "culture" at least in the US still involved the CULTIVATION (root of "culture") of the basic virtues of governing yourself as Buckley expertly pointed out in "God And Man at Yale". Unfortunately NR, founded by Buckley has obviously strayed from this key quote from that work ...

"The duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world, and the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level".

Without the transcendent foundation of Christianity, a country like what America was is impossible -- Buckley saw that in 1950, Reagan saw that in the '80s, and by 2008, such knowledge was all but gone -- which is why Rod Dreher outlines "The Benedict Option".

NR may find that Nietzsche was right and god is dead ... however, God doesn't agree, and that is far more important. Nietzsche is well dead, NR is showing definite signs. Evolution is MECHANISM -- it is a HOW, not a cause. To the extent it operates, it operates in a universe that it did not create, and it operates because of underlying principles in that universe that were not created by evolution.

If I write a program you like and you say, WAIT! You used C++! (a programming language, "mechanism"), therefore you do not exist! You would be using the same argument as "Darwin disproves God).

Whatever science "proves" (and it can only EVER prove by induction), the fact remains that for the vast majority of "common people", "the rank and file", Faith and Hope found in religion and family is the only way to a decent life in THIS world. For those of us that believe, the life in this world is only the preseason for the next, but for the purposes of this book, we are dealing with the here vs hereafter.

Shorn of the deepest ties to family (nuclear as well as extended), place, community, region, religion, and culture, and deeply shaped to believe that these forms of association are limits upon their autonomy, deracinated humans seek belonging and self-definition through the only legitimate form of organization remaining available to them: the state. Nisbet saw the rise of fascism and communism as the predictable consequence of the liberal attack upon smaller associations and communities.

("deracinate" -- remove from native environment and/or culture) Once both social and economic "liberalism" have "freed" you from all your "obligations" save to the State, you find that the State is never going to be able to love you or even "care" about you, since it MUST, (by definition) consider you a 100% interchangeable "citizen", "consumer", "taxpayer", etc. that is to be treated "equally".

Our “community” was now to consist of countless fellow humans who shared an abstract allegiance to a political entity that would assuage all of our loneliness, alienation, and isolation. It would provide for our wants and needs; all it asked in return was complete devotion to the state and the elimination of any allegiance to any other intermediary entity. 

Say that when you discover that you are completely alone with only a cold uncaring state as a constant companion, you decide to make some friends of your fellow "citizens". Remember the root of "culture" so gleefully fled and then destroyed was "cultivation" -- both you and they needed to have an actual culture to CULTIVATE what it means to be the sort of human that can have meaningful relationships with other humans.

These three cornerstones of human experience—nature, time and place—form the basis of culture, and liberalism’s success is premised upon their uprooting and replacement with facsimiles that bear the same names.

So now you realize that you truly NEED to relate to other HUMANS in order to live, but you find that both you and your peers are not humans of the sort that relate, but rather deracinated "individuals". The problem has cartoon simplicity!

Finally, we find we are really "all on the same side" to the extent we lost our transcendent faith. We are one big "liberal tribe" mistakenly thinking we are "left and right"! Each a generic greedy, self-centered consuming pure creature, shorn of anything "higher" than the self save the all encompassing state!

People who are “uncultivated” in the consumption of both food and sex, Aristotle observed, are the most vicious of creatures, literally consuming other humans to slake their base and untutored appetites. Far from being understood as opposites of human nature, customs and manners were understood to be derived from, governed by, and necessary to the realization of human nature. 

Since we are now mostly atomic individuals who are proud of **OURSELVES**, we choose our vaunted "identity" -- through what we consume, where we live, where we go to school, our sexuality, our degrees, our tats,  .... always our "own creation", or more accurately, the creation of a godless state and godless corporate marketing tricking us to the false belief of our "independence".

The book ends with the following ...

After a five hundred–year philosophical experiment that has now run its course, the way is clear to building anew and better. The greatest proof of human freedom today lies in our ability to imagine, and build, liberty after liberalism.

I STRONGLY recommend reading this fairly short work. Almost certainly it will make you uncomfortable no matter what your political, religious, or philisophical stripe. Which for me is one of the most important things a book can do -- because only through pain can there be growth!

The fact "both sides" hate it is an awfully good recommendation!

Reagan's Letter To Dying Father In Law

https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/news/opinions/wp/2018/09/14/ronald-reagans-letter-to-his-dying-father-in-law-annotated/?noredirect=on&__twitter_impression=true

Back before BOistan, in America, a great Christian country, we once had this man for president! God's blessings are for this life as well as the next!

Worth the read -- maybe once a year or so. I especially liked this section -- but it is all good, and a reminder of what a great country America was,  how great a president Reagan was, and a strong foreshadowing that if we have but a little faith, we will see Reagan in eternity!

The miracle is that a young man of 30 yrs. without credentials as a scholar or priest began preaching on street corners. He owned nothing but the clothes on his back & he didn’t travel beyond a circle less than one hundred miles across. He did this for only 3 years and then was executed as a common criminal. 

But for two thousand years he has … had more impact on the world than all the teachers, scientists, emperors, generals and admirals who ever lived, all put together. 

The apostle John said, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that who so ever believed in him would not perish but have everlasting life.”

No Virtue To Signal

Virtue & Democracy -- The People We Deserve | National Review:

I've been blogging for 13 years now and thinking critically (meaning reading history, philosophy and theology) rather than buying into the "flavor of the day" from ANY news source ... left or right for 40years. I have no need to virtue signal -- I have no virtue, I am the most filthy of sinners, completely unworthy of the mercy that I pray and believe that Jesus Christ bestows on me without the least shred of merit.

In the "80's", I believed that our society had been heavily damaged by the "sick sixties", and if we merely saw the error of our ways since then, we would return to a virtuous society. Now I know it is MUCH deeper than that ... William of Occam, the Reformation, the "Enlightenment", the advance of technology (ease, mass communication, birth control, etc) and a few other things ALLOWED (not "caused") the decline of not only America, but "Western civilization" in it's entirety.

To talk of "school shootings" or "gun control" is like a 95 year old terminal cancer patient seeking treatment for acne compared to what the fact of mass shootings, massive addiction, massive death by overdose/suicide, and the utter hopelessness that most of the population of our broken excuse for a "cutlure / civilization" are experiencing . It is COMPLETELY meaningless given our plight. I covered the idiocy of concern for shootings after Vegas. Just look at FB -- lots of virtue signalling from many ... signifying exactly nothing except "this is my tribe, please agree with me, lots of people in my tribe agreeing with me gives my life the illusion of meaning".

As I posted on one friends FB lament, in 1974 when I graduated HS, we took our guns to school to go hunting after school or to work on them in shop. The idea of a "school shooting" was just as far from our minds as the idea of "texting" ... it simply didn't exist. M-16's however DID exist -- guys used the full auto versions in "Nam" and some of them started hunting with the semi-auto versions of them because they were light and accurate, and since the body mass of a deer is pretty much exactly like a person, they were of course great deer guns.

"Made for one purpose only" is one of the zanier lines out there relative to guns. It is true that guns are single purpose items ... they are built to send projectiles downrange as accurately as possible. The VAST bulk of projectiles hit PAPER or some similar sort of target, because that is what they are used for. The best comparison for me is golf -- correct, nobody NEEDS to have multi-thousand dollar clubs to put a white ball in a hole on a field, but humans OFTEN do MANY things that nobody "needs" to do. Here is Robin Williams on the sense of golf (many f-bomb warning)

Oh, "but golf balls don't kill people" ... but certainly they do, and no doubt clubs are used as weapons, carts crash, etc, etc. If it were not so sad it would be extremely ironic that it was William of Occam that declared that objects have no inherent purpose / meaning as in being "sacred", but are rather mere objects with any meaning only assigned by man -- "nominalism".

The fetishization of guns is a pretty good proof that something in the nature of man wants to imbdue objects with purpose and meaning.

So our lives are FILLED with all sorts of things that we "don't need", many of which are even explicitly harmful (like cigarettes).  However, we DO need to feel virtuous as part of our human nature, so thousands of people signalling their virtue on FB by declaring that "nobody NEEDS an "assault rifle"", when probably 1% of them could tell you what the difference between an "AR" and some other gun was. The answer is of course "nothing but style". I have a nasty looking "black gun", a .223 Bushmaster, and a nice wooden stock Remington 742 Woodsmaster 30-06. I can put a 30 round magazine in either one of them and shoot those rounds as fast as I can pull the trigger, because they are semi-auto.

I'm not much in the shop, but given a not too huge amount of time, if I need to convert 5 or 10 round mags into 30, 60 or whatever, I can ... however the time would likely be better spent working on mag change dexterity which with even a klutzy guy like me a medium level of skill can pretty much make magazine size moot -- "wait till he changes mags then rush him" is wishful thinking if the shooter is even moderately skilled at a mag change.

Short of ceasing to honor the 2nd amendment (which just makes it REALLY clear that there are no "laws" in BOistan), or actually repealing it -- legal, but unlikely, all the virtue signalling about "Assault Weapons" is just virtue signalling. Preventing car companies from putting "SS" (Super Sport) on ttheir cars ... or wide tires, or dual exhausts, etc because "it makes them seem like Race Cars" is of similar use.

"This highlights the problem with capitalism. As Irving Kristol observed in one of his greatest works, “When Virtue Loses All Her Loveliness,” there is a difference between a “free society” and a “just” or “bourgeois” society. The Founders worked on the assumption that the people themselves would be the guardians of virtue, probity, norms, and even public safety in their own communities. And, as Kristol notes, for the first century or two of capitalism’s existence, it was largely synonymous with a just/bourgeois society."

In the 20th century, we did away with "just" step by step until we ended up with a mass of individuals with no idea of right or wrong ... and even less of the eternal consequences of "wrong".

Simply Jesus, NT Wright

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11531546-simply-jesus

This is a book which attempts to take you back to the time of Jesus using the metaphor of a "perfect storm" ...  with a "Roman Storm" of the new age of emperors who claimed a  godlike designation, thus Augustus Octavian Caesar was referred to "the son of god" (son of Julius Caesar). Rubbing up against this storm was the Jewish storm or in the book, called "high pressure system" of the Jews waiting for the messiah to come and allow them to take their "rightful place" as the empire that ruled the earth.

Thirdly, he talks of the "hurricane" ... God's agenda, which would be his own, not matching either the Roman or Jewish world view, but of course the "irresistible force". On page 56, Wright summarizes the "hurricane" as "He commands his hearers to give up their other dreams and to trust his instead. This at it's simplest is what Jesus is all about. I cover my view of that "simplest" in my old blog ... a stolen from Karl Barth, "Jesus loves me, this I know". That entry also links to "The Divine Conspiracy", a book that covers a good deal of the same ground as this one -- which one is better comes down to personal taste. This one is more historical, "Conspiracy" is more spiritual practice focused.

Being raised a Baptist, it has taken me a long time to realize the critical nature of "amillennialism" meaning we are IN the "millennium" which is a metaphorical / spiritual "1k years", rather than an actual 1k year period in the future believed by the premillennial folks. Redemption to being loved by God is the bedrock of Jesus ministry. The "story" of how this happens follows the "Exodus template" (p64):

1. Wicked Tyrant  -- Pharaoh / Rome or Herod
2. Chosen Leader  -- Moses / Jesus
3. Victory of God  -- Passover / Resurrection 
4. Rescue by Sacrifice -- lamb, blood on doorpost / Jesus shed blood
5. New life -- Israel Freed / Sins forgiven
6. God with us -- Cloud, Pillar of Fire, Ark of Covenant / Holy Spirit 
7. Promised Land  -- Palestine / Kingdom of God on Earth 

Jesus not only cleansed the physical temple in Jerusalem (throwing out the moneychangers), he BECAME the living temple of God on earth -- he IS the "holiest place". (Chapter 11, p 131). Much like is covered in "The Secular Age", **THIS** ... our earth, HERE AND NOW is "God's Kingdom". It came with Jesus ... p 140. "We can see the material world itself being transformed by the presence and power of Israel's God, the creator." 

Acclaiming Jesus as Lord plants a flag that supersedes the flags of the nations, however "free", or "democratic" they may be. It challenges both the tyrants who who think they are in fact "divine", and the "secular democracies" that have effectively become, if not divine, at least ecclesial, that is, communities that are trying to do and be what the church was supposed to do and be, but without recourse to the one who sustains the church's life...

This appears near the end of the book ... the fact that to the extent we allow ourselves to be transformed by the Holy Spirit, we are encouraged to "reign" (through prayer) in God's Kingdom that is present here and now. As we are transformed, we become more aware of the presence of God in everything, and the illusion of matter/material being supreme. All but spirit will pass away, that is truth, even though the material world and our material senses cry out to us that material "stuff" is all there is. 

A worthy read. 

Comte To Hillary, The Real Goals

https://www.nationalreview.com/g-file/secret-religion-american-left-jonah-goldberg/

This column is a good example of why I love Jonah Goldberg's writing -- he has a broad expanse of knowledge, AND he is able to apply it to the world at hand.

I won't do a bunch of quotes, just one, which is actually a quote from Jonah's book, "Liberal Fascism" about Herbert Croly, one of the demigods of early 20th century liberalism:

Croly was a quiet man who’d grown up with noisy parents. His mother was one of America’s first female syndicated columnists and a dedicated “feminist.” His father was a successful journalist and editor whose friends dubbed him “The Great Suggester.” Their home was something of a “European island in New York,” according to one historian. The most interesting thing about the senior Croly — if by “interesting” you mean really loopy — was his obsession with Auguste Comte, a semimystical French philosopher whose biggest claim to fame was his coinage of the word “sociology.” Comte argued that humanity progressed in three stages and that in the final stage mankind would throw off Christianity and replace it with a new “religion of humanity,” which married religious fervor to science and reason — even to the extent of making “saints” out of such figures as Shakespeare, Dante, and Frederick the Great. Comte believed that the age of mass industrialization and technocracy would pluck the human mind from the metaphysical realm for good, ushering in an age where pragmatic managers would improve the plight of all based upon man-made morality. He anointed himself the high priest of this atheistic, secular faith, which he called positivism. The elder Croly made his Greenwich Village home into a positivist temple where he held religious ceremonies for select guests, whom he would try to convert. In 1869 young Herbert became the first and probably last American to be christened in Comte’s religion.

As I have mentioned ad nauseum, "liberalism" and "progressivism" are RELIGIONS and their faith is in experts, science and the perfectability of the human.

It's a worthy read!

Inside The Atheist Mind, Anthony DeStefano

https://www.amazon.com/inside-atheist-mind/s?ie=UTF8&page=1&rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Ainside%20the%20atheist%20mind

The subject book is an easy and fast read that covers a lot of the same ground that I've covered before in a somewhat more nasty (although not as nasty as "The God Delusion", or "The End of Faith") ... DeStefano doesn't want to do away with atheists, he just wants to talk about what he sees as their thinking.

He is concerned that "Christians have been too nice", although that is pretty much what Christ requires of practicing Christians, so it can't really be seen as unexpected.

His chapters focus on key aspects he sees atheists as presenting -- arrogance, ignorance, ruthlessness, intolerance, shallowness, cowardice, death worship, faithfulness, and malevolence. Essentially, "human nature" -- which is precisely what one would expect from people who are proud of having no higher standards than naturall, non-redeemed human nature!

You might be surprised that he sees athesists as faithful -- I see them that way as well. FAITH is the foundation of human life ... faith in your next breath, faith that the universe is rational, faith that your basic model of thought (world view) is at least not insane, faith that there is actually some reality rather than just a one of "matrix" of some sort where maybe you are all there is (or if you are a Solipist, faith that you ARE the only existing mind!).

The core of atheist faith is on page 121, "They believe that organization came out of chaos, that life came out of lifenessness, that consciousness came out of unconsciousness, that reason came out of irrationality".

None of those beliefs can be proven -- nor can it be proven that an eternal, just, ordered, intelligent and loving creator built a universe with order, life, consciousness, reason and love (echos of his nature). Both are matters of faith, and always will be until we meet God, or will be until the lights go out on humanity if there isn't a God.

It is an easy and sometimes guilty pleasure sort of a book, but it is quite shallow. I'd very much recommend "The Reason For God" instead.

A Royal Homily

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/19/style/bishop-michael-curry-royal-wedding.html


Worth a read -- or a watch. If God wills it, such is the power that can transform us for all eternity.

Why Isn't Everyone A Democrat?

Conservatives & Democratic Party: Why They Don’t Join It | National Review:

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/04/the-gops-never-trumpers-are-really-just-never-democrats.html

One of the most basic, if not THE most basic element of the US founding was freedom OF religion (not FROM religion). It is codified in the 1st Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

 Our founders -- even those who were Deists, realized that man does not live by bread alone. Whatever he holds as the "highest good" is "god" to him, AND, every man desires to look in the mirror and see himself as moral -- or at least "redeemed" if he is a Christian.

For 200 years we were largely a Christian nation. We believed that God in the form of Jesus Christ, Saviour of all willing to accept his Grace was of MUCH higher importance than government ... a typical personal priority order went something like "God, Family, Church,  Friends, Vocation, Community ... and then somewhere in there "country", although originally, "State" as which of the orignial 13 / now 50 states you lived in. "A proud Virginian", or "hailing from the great state of Ohio" was likely more important than the limited in power federal government.

Not today ... as Chait assures us in the second link...

Perhaps the Republican base as currently constituted is hopelessly immune to reason and a reasonable person such as Brooks should instead refocus his political energies on curtailing its political power.

He doesn't really mean "perhaps", he can't imagine anything else. "Reasonable people" like Chait could see a continental glacier forming and yet be totally convinced of AGW. They likely still believe that "fracking will never lower gas prices", and "Reagan was an imbecile for thinking the USSR was EVER going away!". They are simply NEVER wrong -- they are after all "reasonable" and "scientific", and most of all INTELLIGENT  -- how could they be wrong?  So why do they hate Republicans other than them being "immune to reason"? Well ...

The answer is simple: Too many Democrats believe that the divide between Democrats and Republicans isn’t political. They believe instead that the divide reflects character itself. They therefore find it puzzling that non-Trump-friendlies — whom, they now assume, are “good people” thanks to their distaste for Trump — aren’t simply embracing the other good people, namely the Democrats. In the mind of many Democrats, Republicans aren’t Republicans because they’re in favor of limited government and inalienable, God-given rights. All that is merely a cover for cruelty and nastiness. So Democrats find it puzzling when Republicans who dislike Trumpian cruelty don’t immediately switch sides.

See the modern "moral person" not only believes in AGW as much as the US government believed that avoiding the evil cholesterol and making the base of the holy food pyramid to be those wonderful carbs, but they see the killing of 60 million unborn as a sacrament, almost as wonderfully moral as gay "marriage", and currently competing for extending the number of genders to an unknown number "higher than the 50's". We don't really know the next "moral frontier" ... polyamory? pederasty? There MUST be a moral frontier, for that is how they discern "progress".

They don't believe in any of these things as "choices", or "subject to scientific / psychological / sociological results", they see them all as the dogma of their religion, and they have returned more to the old time "burn the apostates at the stake to save their souls" kind of religion, rather than the short lived chimera of "tolerance' they used to peddle.

While every Christian is required to believe not only that they are NOT good, but in fact filthy sinners in need of salvation, they are also required to at least acknowledge that their creed demands they attempt to LOVE even their enemies. (look for THAT in any other religion!)

Secular Humanism has no such tenets -- "Win baby win" and "If it feels good do it" are pretty much their equivalents of "Thou shalt love God with all thy heart and all thy soul", and "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself". Take the harsh judgement of the Scribes and Pharisees and combine it with the morals of Sodom and Gomorrah, and you pretty much have the modern Secular Humanist pegged.

Reagan used to say that "a liberal will defend your right to agree with them to their dying breath" ... apparently we are close to the place where they will defend that right to YOUR dying breath at either their hands, or more likely those of their proxies.

No society in history has survived as anything other than a tyranny unless it's population held to transcendent values that were higher than politics. Pray hard for a Christian revival!


via Blog this'

Monetizing Hatred, Democracy Dies Without Perspective

The past couple of days have given us a couple points to plot on why so many people just can't get along.

Point A. Two black customers arrested at a Starbucks in Philly  Total NPR / MPR freak out ... interviews, "shopping while black", etc, etc

Point B. Fresno State Professor glad Barbara Bush is dead. Lots of mostly right wing outrage, twitter storm, etc.

In a semi-sane world, both of these stories would be LOCAL stories at MOST!

Some worker at a Starbucks over reacted, and some cops likely over reacted as well -- or maybe the two black men got in the cops face. I don't really know, nor care to know. There is no Starbucks nor national police policy on such things, it was AN INCIDENT! Yes, I understand that the BLM race industry tribe sees this as a great manipulation opportunity, so they are using it to the max -- to create conflict, cement a narrative, etc. That is what happens in a tribal state where nobody has a sense of perspective, or an interest in getting along rather than their tribe "winning'.

Ditto the Fresno State proffessor. Of course she is a hateful shrew -- nothing new about there being people like that, the problem is IT GETS MADE INTO A NATIONAL STORY! And the right side tribes make use of it to stir up their troops, get the hate a flowing, get clicks, donations, people on lists, etc. It just weaponizes abject stupidity and lack of any sort of moral decency -- very standard human failings, which no tribe has any corner on at all.

In a CHRISTIAN nation, neither of these stories goes anywhere -- because Christians see these as localized, standardized run of the mill human behavior -- to be locally dealt with, and to say a silent prayer of "there but for the Grace of God ...".

Democracy REQUIRES a population that has a sense of perspective. As John Adams put it:

"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."

BOistan lacks morality, religion, perspective and even an honored written Constitution. So we fail!