Faithful Christians Should Confront Evil Ideas

Have you ever wondered what Jesus was like as a person?  I have.  And I have wondered: would I have like Jesus?  The truth is I am not so sure.  There are many passages that tell us that 'being nice' was not high on the Lord's priorities.

As it turns out, 'being nice' should not be on our priority list either.  Instead, we should be proclaiming the faith and confronting evil.  August Meyrat has an excellent article on this very topic at The Federalist today entitled How Making Christianity A 'Nice People Club' Is Destroying The Church

So what do these two news items have in common besides having to do with the Catholic Church? They are both a result of the same phenomenon that has plagued the church and nearly every other political and cultural institution in the developed world: deadly indifference.

I take this term from the new book from Catholic writer and editor Eric Sammons who explains how the church went from being a large, influential community of practicing Christians to a hollowed-out cultural relic run by out-of-touch Boomers. In short, he argues that church leaders in the 1960s took radical measures to “open up” to different viewpoints and practices. In effect, they became “indifferent” to frequently incompatible systems of thought.

Every faithful Christian should confront ideas that are fundamentally at issue with God's will. Abortion is one such issue. Divorce is another. And yes, we the faithful have committed sins. But through our repentance, and the Grace of God, we are free to now confront these evils.  But we can not do these things if we are being 'nice.'

The Three Percent

 Today there are two intertwining articles at the American Thinker that speak to the Leftist takeover of our nation. The first, written by Eric Utter is entitled Government Is Forgetting That Our Rights Are Unalienable

I hate bullies.

And government is the biggest bully of them all. Always. Everywhere. Since governments were instituted. Kings. Tyrants. Dictators. Banana republics. The Soviet Union. The Third Reich. Chairman Mao. Pol Pot. Idi Amin Dada. Fidel Castro. Hugo Chávez. Etc., etc., etc. And now Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un, the Iranian mullahs, the Biden administration, Justin Trudeau, and Scott Morrison.

Two hundred forty-five years ago, Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence proclaimed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Note that Jefferson invoked Providence in his formulation of our unalienable rights. But the Left wants to push God out of the public square, indeed, they want to get rid of God all together.

Leftists detest God because they are jealous of Him and wish to usurp His power...and be worshiped themselves. They believe they have unalienable rights, but no one else does. Consequently, these are the people who most fervently wish to be in government.

The Founders, now often reviled, believed in every individual's right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Let's make the obvious clear once again: government has no right to lock up — or down — innocent people. It has no right to issue mask or vaccine mandates, tell us our jobs aren't "essential," or prevent us from visiting our families and neighbors. It has no right to ban weddings or funerals of more than a certain number of celebrants or mourners. For that matter, it has no "right" to the fruits of our labor. As it has no right to indoctrinate our children or tell us how to raise them. Period.

The idea of "rights" and who gets to excercise them is important to our Founding. The Constitution does not recognize any "rights" as belonging to government. Rights are only recognized as belonging to the people, and the people as individuals. There are no collective "rights," only individual rights.

Utter's piece is generally pretty pesimistic, noting that the Left has generally taken the cultural high ground. On the other hand, J. B. Shurk has a more optimistic article entitled The Case For Optimism. I would liken his article to the military commander who, when informed that he is surrounded, replied that "We have them where we want them." Shurk lists a whole host of horribles that we have seen afflict this once free nation:

The whole thing is so absurd and so unfathomable to most Americans that it is causing them to lose faith in any future at all. We can't vote our way out if vote counts can't be trusted or if the Uniparty just continues seeding battleground states with tens of millions of illegal aliens who will either be granted immunity and voting privileges in short order or be encouraged to break our voting laws, just as they were encouraged to break our immigration laws. Big Tech and Big Media have strangled information so successfully that the need for samizdat has returned. Big Business and Big Government have worked together to transfer all the wealth of the middle class to the richest one percent of the one percent. Vaccine passports promise a future of completely controlled movement. Central bank digital currencies promise a future of completely controlled commerce. Quarantine camps provide a convenient excuse for housing all the troublesome skeptics immune to groupthink socialism. And Americans who are just itching for a chance to push back against the government's abuses are reminded daily that a few hundred unarmed January 6 Capitol "trespassers," whose technical crimes, if any, paled in comparison to those we've been forced to endure from the hands of the FBI-approved BLM and Antifa Marxists for several years, are still languishing in solitary confinement going on a full year now with laughably bereft American due process, proving that justice in the United States is, indeed, two-tiered.

Now, who could read through all that mess above and be optimistic about what is to come? Easy. Anybody who has been watching the Marxists' long march through history trampling over American freedoms one decade at a time, just hoping the day would arrive when enough people would wake up to the severity of the situation to do something about it.

...snip...

Imagine how many naysayers still existed in the American colonies after the Declaration of Independence was first published in 1776. Troubles with England had already existed for over a decade. War with England would engulf the next decade. The Articles of Confederation didn't last the decade after that. The U.S. Constitution and the whole American experiment in individual liberty almost evaporated when the British took a second bite at the apple during the War of 1812. Although Americans who have resisted the brainwashing of the Marxists rewriting American history are fond of thinking of those five decades of uncertainty as being guided by God and destiny, they were filled with moments that could have stopped America's birth. Only the unwavering fellowship of Americans clear in their purpose kept the nation on course. Only in hindsight did everything seem certain.

We, too, find ourselves in uncertain and explosive times. Enemies of freedom have hardened the battle lines. Protectors of freedom have awakened to what's at stake. And more and more people are seeing the light. If you doubt that we're gaining ground, then just consider how hostile government now is. The appeal of personal liberty — its resplendence, if you will — is far brighter and more attractive than the government would like, which is why, every day, its enforcers work so hard to keep us apart, lost, and in despair. When we find courage through each other, we make their mission impossible.

Keep in mind too, that only 3% of the population was involved in the fight for independence at any given time. Already more than that are among the awakened. Optimism indeed.

A Joyful Warrior For Christ

 Back to Normal.  It sounds so good.  And yet, a majority of people are still huddled in fear.   Too many believe the MSM and their constant Covid panic porn. I know one woman who shows up at local meetings wearing two masks, when the rest of us are mask free.  Of course, whatever makes her feel safe.  But there is no safety in the type of masks she wears. 

Today, at The Federalist Elle Reynolds has a list of things one should do right now to both get back to a normal life, and to help other to realize that they are not going to die if they too take off their masks.  She brings a bright and hopeful message.  Clearly Reynolds has a different life than I do, but I have done a number of things on her list too. You can find the list at 50 Back To Normal Things I Didn't Wait For Permission From The Covid 'Experts' To Do, And Neither Should You.

I have been attending church in person, without a mask for a number of months, and I have both sung and taken communion. Indeed, communion is central to our worship, and I don't understand how we can hold services over Zoom. Of course, I have been going to the grocery store, and indeed other errands in person and without a mask. And I have made a few trips to the gun range. Ammo being scarce, I have not participated as fully in these activities as I would have like, but I go to the range, again without a mask. And of course, I have shaken hands with friends, and sat down and had coffee with friends. But the point is, I didn't wait for permission either. If you wait for permission, you will be waiting forever. The virus and its attendent mandates and restrictions was never about your or my health. What it is about is power for the elites, who frankly don't deserve it.

Please go read Elle Reynolds short article.  She presents the very picture of the joyful warrior for Christ that we all should be.

There But For the Grace of God...

 Andrea Widburg has two stories that show the wisdom of our Founders in placing the Second Amendment into the Bill of Rights.  The story can be found at the American Thinker entitled Two stories that highlight why the Second Amendent matters so much. One story is of the United States, the other is Australia. Australia has gone full on totalitarian. As you will see, the police are beating construction workers in the streets and shooting them with rubber bullets. The construction workers were protesting the requirement to stau locked down, sonce these people must work to put food on the table.

The Founders’ wisdom has been borne out by the history of the 20th and (to date) 21st centuries. Although the drive-by media loves to lead with stories about gun crimes, there are two data points even more significant than the fact that most seem to occur in Democrat-run, heavily gun-controlled regions.

The first is that, per a CDC study published under the Obama administration, having a gun is the safest self-defense strategy. Even more significantly, defensive use of guns occurred between 500,000 to 3 million times per year, far outweighing the annual 30,000-40,000 gun deaths in America (most of which are suicides).

The second fact is that, while criminals are bad, there is no killer more efficient than a government turning on its unarmed citizens.

             In 1915, Turkey killed 1.5 million unarmed Armenians.

From the 1920s to the 1930s, the Soviet government killed approximately 7 million unarmed Kulaks.

From the 1960s to the 1970s, communist China killed between 23 million to 50 million unarmed Chinese.

From 1933-1945, the Nazis killed 6 million unarmed Jews, along with 220,000 homosexuals, 250,000 gypsies, and up to 10 million Slavic people.

From 1975-1979, Pol Pot’s communists killed one-quarter of Cambodia’s citizens.

From 1954 to the present, the North Korean government has killed an estimated 1.3 million North Koreans.

Today, we have no idea how many Uighurs the CCP is killing.

You can expect Afghanistan to become a new killing field. Just last month, the Taliban ordered all citizens to surrender their privately owned weapons.

To avoid mass slaughter, government should have a respectful fear of its citizens, so much so that it stays carefully within a constitution’s clearly delineated lines, especially because free, well-governed citizens are peaceable...

The saying goes, and it fits here, that "There but for the grace of God go we."

Be Not Afraid

 I remember a two volume set of the writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas among the Great Books collection of the canon of Western Civilization in my parents' house.  As a young man of 12 or 13, I attempted to read from these two volumes and found them too dense for me to comprehend at the time.  I should have attempted to read Aquinas at a later time, but I was too busy.  Too bad for me.  But fortunately, others have taken on Aquinas, and we have a book report on his efforts at The Federalist by Casey Chalk entitled Recovering Our Common Sense Means Rediscovering The Divine.

As Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P., argues in his Thomistic Common Sense: The Philosophy of Being and the Development of Doctrine — recently translated by Matthew K. Minerd — common sense is only coherent if it derives from a specifically Aristotelian-Thomistic understanding of being. That might sound esoteric, but the basic outline of Garrigou-Lagrange’s argument is not.

What Thomistic philosophy is describing is the nature of reality itself. The nature of being, of substance, of what the French call raison d’être or purpose of being. As Chalk points out:

This might seem all fairly straightforward, but much of modern philosophy since the Enlightenment has rejected it. Immanuel Kant rejected raison d’être as entirely subjective because of his rejection of all knowledge originating in being. Rene Descartes — who authored the famous phrase cogito ergo sum — believed our intellect knows itself before it knows being. The pantheist Baruch Spinoza rejected free will because our wills are determined in some ways.

This obscuring of reality instead of clarifying it is ultimately the sin of breaking the First Commandment:

Thus philosophy in our own day is understood not as something that clarifies reality, but obscures it. Writes Garrigou-Lagrange 100 years ago: “How many times, after leaving the courses of the Sorbonne, did the judgment of Saint Paul concerning the philosophers of his times come back to our own mind … ‘Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man.’”

Most Americans understandably look askance at philosophy as arcane nonsense, all the while drawing haphazardly from utilitarianism, materialism, moral relativism, and various other modern and postmodern systems, in order to make sense of life. Intellectual coherency matters little.

To all of this, Garrigou-Lagrange would retort: “Nothing is intelligible except in function of being.” In other words, inasmuch as any of us actually employ our common sense, we rely upon the same ideas articulated by Aristotle and his medieval interpreter Thomas Aquinas.

In abandoning reality, modern philosophy has made many decisions more complicated. Now, men believe they can simply will themselves to be women and vice versa. Indeed, men believe in a new god called the State.  And the State is all about power for itself, which definitely defies the First Commandment.  Look at the scare porn the state media constantly puts out in order to convince you to believe things that are unscientific and therefore untrue.  If you did not believe them, they would have to convince you to obey by more forceful means, which is what they are doing now with forced vaccination and universal masking.

Here, the book of Daniel shows the way to resist.  The first thing to do is not be afraid.  They want to scare you with, as H.L. Mencken, an endless series of hobgoblins, mostly imaginary.  Do not succumb.  Next, continue to pray and to worship God, as Daniel did.  Defy them when the insist you should pray to the state.  The state wants you to believe your life depends on them.  But it does not.  As always, God gave you your life, and he invested human life with certain unalienable rights, and only God has the right to take that life away. 

Pray For the People Advancing the Cult of COVIDism

 Fay Voshell has an excellent piece this morning at the American Thinker entitled The Forcible Conversion to COVIDism, in which she points out that the rituals associated with the Pandemic remind no of science itself but of a new religion. To be sure, she is not the first to notice this, but Voshell has particularly expertise in these matters. Voshell holds a Masters of Divinity from the Princeton Theological Seminary.

By now, even progressives are aware that the restrictions imposed by COVID-19 hygiene rituals are onerous. Temperature-taking, hand-sanitizing, mask-wearing, social distancing — all have become ubiquitous social practices since the arrival of the virus eighteen months ago.

Now forced vaccination and possibly vaccine passports have been added to the list of requirements deemed necessary for establishing and maintaining national health.

It strikes one that the ever-changing rituals pronounced by such entities as the CDC and WHO have become not only arbitrary and increasingly revelatory of dubious and ever-changing science, but also evocative more of religious practices than of rational, scientific measures.

Eerily, many of the rituals of COVIDism have assumed the status and significance of the ceremonies practiced by millions of Christians, who cross themselves, genuflect before the altar, and who pray the rosary. Christians believe those rituals are acknowledgement of the higher power who is God. God is represented by irreducibly Christian symbol of the cross and worshipped by the observance of sacraments, of sacred liturgies and by bowing the knee in prayer.

Devotees of COVIDism are acknowledging by their repetitious and symbolic rituals a higher power as well—that of the almighty State.

The emphasis is mine, to highlight what I want to discuss next. COVIDism is therefore yet another form of the idolatry that infects modern life. In the ancient times, people openly worshipping at the bronze bull were clearly idolatrous.  But, anything that calls to us and takes away our understanding of ourselves as dependent on the ever living God is idolatrous.

A Lutheran pastor once told me that if one could obey the First Commandment, one would automatically keep all the rest.  And this seems to be close to the heart of Lutheranism.  For in reading Luther's Small Catechism, on can see that the explanation for each of the Commandments begins with "You should so fear and  love God that"...  Clearly none of us can keep even the first Commandment, which is why God took it upon Himself to do the work of salvation for all mankind by Himself submitting to the Cross.

Meanwhile the reason for promoting the lie that is COVIDism is for one purpose:

While no one seriously doubts that COVID-19 is an illness requiring medical attention, it is increasingly apparent that the fear of the virus and almost superstitious practices have been factors in the rise of the cult of COVIDism, which in turn has become a useful tool for establishing the State's control over every sector of society and every aspect of life.

It is also perfectly clear the governing priestly elite foisting their quasi-religious rituals on the masses are miraculously immune from a virus that discerns who are the pure sheep of the church of COVIDism and who are the deplorably diseased goats. The high priests partying at the Obama birthday bash on Martha's Vineyard, at the Met gala, and at the Emmys do not have to wear masks. Nor do they have to observe the rules of social distancing once reserved for lepers and others deemed unclean.

But the unhealthy goats, most of them congregated in churches, the middle class, and the military, do have to follow the regulations and rituals.

Voshell offers some solutions to the cult of COVIDism. Let me suggest that there is more we the average American can do. For example, if you attend a congregation where you must be masked to enter, perhaps you should consider finding another congregation. You may be forced to submit while at work, because your employer is paying you to. But the moment you clock out, rip off that mask. Show that you will not be afraid. But at the same time you resist, do it joyfully. Do not take the resentment they ovviously desire to place upon you. Indeed, pray for the people advancing the cult of COVIDism. No, it may not change them, but that is not the point. Your prayer for them is intended to keep you sane, joyful, and focused on God.

The Corruption of Science

 I have often pointed out that the whole "climate change" theory is an utter hoax, a sophisticated hoax to be sure, but just as Piltdown Man was a hoax, so is "climate change."  The panic porn of Covid is equally a hoax.  In both cases I do not dispute that climate change is happening, or that the Cov-Sars-2 virus is real.  Rather, the notion that climate change is man made is what the hoax.  And reporting that Covid-19 is more dangerous than it actually is, is the actual hoax.  Today, at the American Thinker, Norman Rogers has an article entitled The "Science" of Climate Change that skewers both the hoaxes as unscientific.

The science surrounding COVID has been hijacked for political purposes. People who recovered from the disease are pushed to get vaccinated, even though they have a natural immunity that is stronger than vaccine immunity. People are required to wear masks even though masks are essentially useless for preventing infection. People that die are reported as dying of COVID even though they died of something else. The government demands that children be vaccinated even though they are naturally resistant to the disease and suffer disturbing side effects from the vaccine. Schools are closed for no good reason.

The “science” of climate change is also BS. That should be easier to accept after seeing what the government did to COVID science. Why do politicians want to hype a nonexistent climate crisis? In a word: power. By claiming that there is an urgent climate crisis the politicians can spend billions to fight the imaginary foe. Those billions create political allies and reward friends. H.L. Mencken put it nicely in 1918:

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”

Rogers is a real, honest to goodness scientist, and seems to know where the bodies are buried. He drops names like that of Richard Lindzen and others less famous. You will want to check out the many links he provides to these other scientists' sites.  But for many, he points out, they really can't afford to tell the truth.  To do so is the kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

I spent 10 years going to the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union. I spoke with many climate scientists including many who freely admitted in private that global warming is a very dubious enterprise.

I remember a Danish guy who visited beaches in northern Greenland by dog sled. He discovered 6,000-year-old driftwood on a beach always blocked by ice, year-round. That was clear evidence that the Arctic Ocean was summer ice-free during a time called the Holocene Optimum. Present-day global warmers claim that our coming climate disaster will again make the Arctic Ocean summer ice-free, something that happened 6,000 years ago with no help from SUVs or belching cows. Of course, the guy was afraid to make too much of his discovery because it challenges the climate doom theory.

There is no such thing as an early career climate scientist that is skeptical concerning global warming. I actually tried to find one and did a poster at a scientific meeting on the subject. The reason is simple. It is not because the science is so clear that only an idiot would question it. It is because our early-career climate scientist would soon be looking for a new job. Interfering with the flow of money from Washington is grounds for dismissal.

What we are seeing is the corruption of science by money from governments and corporate interests, who hope to gain money and power from these hoaxes.