One of the things I have to do daily is turn to the word of God. It is not new: I have been doing this for years. In sickness, in health, in times of peace and times of trouble, I turn to the word. I do not choose the passages: I follow a lectionary and let the scholars choose them.

Today there is much pressure on us to compromise our faith. It is at these times that we need, above all, to stand in the faith. This requires not our strength, but that of God. For alone, we would crack and break, and our broken state become a parade proving that the narrative wins again.

Though the narrative is currently destroying much if not all that is good in traditional organizations: they were pressured into compromise, the people voted with their feet and wallets, and they are now running deficits.

2 Thessalonians 2:13-3:5

13 But we ought always to give thanks to God for you, brothers beloved by the Lord, because God chose you as the firstfruits to be saved, through sanctification by the Spirit and belief in the truth. 14 To this he called you through our gospel, so that you may obtain the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ. 15 So then, brothers, stand firm and hold to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by our spoken word or by our letter.

16 Now may our Lord Jesus Christ himself, and God our Father, who loved us and gave us eternal comfort and good hope through grace, 17 comfort your hearts and establish them in every good work and word.

3 Finally, brothers, pray for us, that the word of the Lord may speed ahead and be honored, as happened among you, 2 and that we may be delivered from wicked and evil men. For not all have faith. 3 But the Lord is faithful. He will establish you and guard you against the evil one. 4 And we have confidence in the Lord about you, that you are doing and will do the things that we command. 5 May the Lord direct your hearts to the love of God and to the steadfastness of Christ.

It is quite likely that I will take a blogging break. I have moved to a new platform, but it is time for a road trip. It would be good to turn to the word of God on paper, as I used to, and perhaps pray more than I blog.

So, for the next three weeks, while I am on the road, and during the remainder of Lent and Christmas, this place will be silent.

I am unsure if we have that great deciever, the man of Lawlessness, who will by works of power decieve many and preach a false gospel. I consider Francis, who is making the Papist church a haunt of the gender confused and the predators while preaching against those false sins of toxic masculinity and racial discrimination. Nor is it Trump, or the Yellow Vests. They are symptoms of the peoples of Europe considering that the mantle of heaven has left the elite with good reason.

But there are men of lawlessness, and their works are clear.

The information is still fragmentary on the Strasbourg shooting spree. Therefore, the attacker might not have a link to the (don’t laugh) “religion of peace”. However, the attacker has a name that sounds rather Arab to these ears. We shall see.

The fact is, though, that before the massive influx of the followers of a certain Violent Paedophile these things did not happen. Christmas Markets, which were not called “holiday markets” yet, were peaceful affairs and considered just part of the social fabric.

Now we have multiculturalism, which means that we have very expensive security measures to allow Europeans to live their lives the European way. These measures are also insufficient, as the attacker in Strasbourg was allegedly able to get past them before firing his shots.

The attacker may or may not have an Islamic motive. But one would have to be blind not to notice how the entire fabric of Europe is being changed, slowly deformed into a tragically botched experiment in multicultural utopia.

Europe needs to go back to being European; which means, in its matrix, Christian.

Unless we recognise Christianity as our common cultural matrix, to be respected – if not worshipped – by everyone, we will keep sliding into a bigger and bigger multicultural mess. And yes, the attacker with a very foreign sounding name was, in fact, born in Strasbourg.

The sins of the politicians of yesteryear are being paid by the citizen of today, and very fittingly so
Mundabor

Photo by Akira Hojo / Unsplash

Do not expect our leaders to change, unless forced to. They have their project, and it is of the spirit of this world, who wants the church broken and the people decieved into damnation. This will happen, and we have been warned. By the Gospel and by Brecht

The Solution

After the uprising of the 17th June
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

Bertolt Brecht

But it is not the people who need to give the government confidence, but the reverse. The Prime Minister is the first servant of the crown, and the crown sits on the king's head because he leads the people, with their consent.

Revolutionaries and Fools hate this, so want to import a new people who will consent to them, for they love power more than their nation.

The test, as in all things, is Christ. The new elite reject him, but they will last no longer than summer grass.

2 Thessalonians 2:1-12

2 Now concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered together to him, we ask you, brothers, 2 not to be quickly shaken in mind or alarmed, either by a spirit or a spoken word, or a letter seeming to be from us, to the effect that the day of the Lord has come. 3 Let no one deceive you in any way. For that day will not come, unless the rebellion comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of destruction, 4 who opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God. 5 Do you not remember that when I was still with you I told you these things? 6 And you know what is restraining him now so that he may be revealed in his time. 7 For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work. Only he who now restrains it will do so until he is out of the way. 8 And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will kill with the breath of his mouth and bring to nothing by the appearance of his coming. 9 The coming of the lawless one is by the activity of Satan with all power and false signs and wonders, 10 and with all wicked deception for those who are perishing, because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. 11 Therefore God sends them a strong delusion, so that they may believe what is false, 12 in order that all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness.

I don't often screenshot Facebook Harry Potter Memes, but what the elite fear is that the people will turf them out. They hate and despise Christendom and the peoples of Christendom almost as much as they hate and despise the gospel.

So subverting their myths makes me smile.

The millenials, who cannot stomach the gospel or the mythology of the West, who are taught to hate Tolkein, Lewis and Heinlen, are left with no examples but Harry Potter, which was written to get tween boys into books.

Strong delusion? More like weak tea. The narrative of this age is the strong delusion, and it will destroy you.

Choose the gospel. Take the blindfold off. Do not live as the narrative tells you to.

Live instead for Christ.

Over the last week I have been reading an author from my youth: P.D. James Death of an Expert Witness. This book was set in the 1970s, when the traditional ways of Rural England were dying, and the misery of our modern ways were becoming apparent. There is unfaithfulness, divorce, childhood misery and murder. There is a good discussion of the tawdry politics of civil service. But James writes with an assurance, an sense of moral code, and an ability to describe men and women, heroes and villains, as flawed. This is unlike modern books, where the hero has to be some form of superman, without flaw. We have moved from fiction to myth.

A bit more on why the whole notion of "gender" is altogether nonsensical:

If you (the progressive) define "gender" as being the same thing as biological sex, then you are committed to either 1) conceding that gender is a biological, objective, observable reality that is determined by genes and genitalia and not feelings, or 2) conceding that you ARE in fact asserting that objective, biological sex is an illusion and are claiming that sex is determined by feelings.

If, on the other hand, you claim that "gender" is real, but is the biological sex that you FEEL like rather than the biological sex you are, then you are making an incoherent claim, because you are attributing physical properties to an abstraction. If male and female are objective, physical, biological properties, and gender is a subjective, abstract feeling that you have, then it is logically impossible for gender to be male or female. If sex is objective and biological and gender is abstract, then "My gender is male" is a category error and a nonsense phrase, the same as saying "My self-esteem is twelve kilograms" or "The number five is cold."

And finally, if you claim that "gender" is real, but try to divorce it entirely from biological sex, you end up with a circular definition. If having "male" gender doesn't refer to the male sex, but merely a feeling of being "male," then it becomes meaningless. The answer to "What does 'male' mean?" becomes "to feel male," which is circular and a tautology and hence meaningless. Furthermore, if gender has nothing to do with sex at all, then there's no reason your gender can't be "attack helicopter" or "waffle."

So no matter how you try to define it, the whole concept of "gender" is either complete nonsense or a completely redundant way of referring to biological sex. Of course, progressives never actually choose a consistent definition and stick with it. They are deceitful, remorseless sophists who switch between these three definitions on the fly as the needs of the moment demand. The truth doesn't matter to them, and the ends justify the means.
--Ian Bibby, Facebook

The problem is that this sophism never satisfied. It is akin to the official soviet realism -- novels produced to be pulped and ignored while people read samizdat. The soviet virus, sadly, has now infected Hollywood and the big publishing houses, and I now walk out of bookshops, not with a bag full of reading, but not even a note to acquire the text for my e reader.

Thanks to the accelerating erosion of the West's Christian foundations, the converged entertainment industry can't tell a good vs evil story anymore. See the mewling sub-pagans who denounce Tolkien for depicting orcs as morally inferior to elves.

Generating catharsis by appealing to the audience's shared sense of right and wrong is right out when you hold your audience's morals in contempt. Post-Christian storytellers must endeavor to scratch a different fundamental human itch. No, I don't mean smut. Lust certainly has a profitable track record, and you can bet it'll show up as window dressing, but it's a poor substitute for good triumphing over evil. The best postmodern alternative to justice is pride, and a Smrt Story is the favored vehicle for massaging the audience's ego.

Your boilerplate Smrt Story follows the basic mystery template with a key twist: The answer to the mystery involves debunking a central tenet--or perceived central tenet--of Christianity. I call such propaganda "Smrt" instead of "smart" because the author's theological knowledge is usually so deficient that the "dogma" he's debunking is a nonsensical straw man. But his ignorance sets a vicious frame wherein Christians may be lured into defending one error to refute another. Think of all the Dan Brown critics who argued that it didn't matter if Christ survived the crucifixion.

Baiting Christians into tilting at windmills isn't the main point of a Smrt Story. The Smrt author works his evil spell by taking the reader aside and whispering, "Look at all those rubes stumbling around in their superstitious fog. I can tell you're not like them. You can handle the truth, and here it is..."

Here's how the trick works. The Smrt author presents himself as a sort of Gnostic oracle who's got the dirt on some formerly sacred Western tradition. He doesn't break the fourth wall and make these claims overtly. Instead he establishes his credentials by portraying the skeptics attacking the fable as cool, informed characters the reader wants to emulate. At the same time, those who cling to traditional Western beliefs are mocked as credulous--often violent--dupes. The Smrt author carefully frames the window of allowable debate in his world to exclude any compelling arguments for the defense.
--Brian Niemeier

The left lies. It cannot help themselves. They have taken over mass media: mass media is now dying. They have redefined eligibility for sports – and women's competitions are now fixed so the transgender athletes will win. (I don't mind them competing – like men who juice – in a separate enhanced catergory. It would give amateur sports back to those of us who train unaided and like a tad of competition).

But it is now infecting general medical journals.

Ok, first, you can’t put a phrase like “gender-diverse person” into a definition without defining it. I have no idea what one of those is. The mind boggles. Please help me with that.

Next, a phrase I’ve never seen in a medical journal: “this term should be used to describe distressing symptoms rather than to pathologize.” I was previously unaware that the word “pathology” could be used as a verb. Pathology essentially means disease. I think they’re saying that when you “pathologize” something that you’re describing it as a disease. And I think their point is that we shouldn’t do that to common, normal, healthy behaviors, like transgenderism.

Just as a reminder, this article was written by physicians, in a scientific journal. Or apparently, as Andrew Klavan would say, a former scientific journal.

I won’t review the entire article. I have better things to do than write silliness like that, and you have better things to do than read it.

The modern left is beyond satire.

And now, their experienced dysphoria has pathologized my beloved medical journals. It’s tragic. It really is.

So now, I’m not even allowed to study medical research without having Democrat talking points shoved down my throat. It’s everywhere. Like a metastatic cancer.

With a similar impact on the host.
Dr Bastiat, Ricochet

We are now communicating by blogs, obscurely. I am writing my research notes on paper. And carefully selecting my journals.

The only saving grace is that the left is so clueless that they can no longer write a believable myth.  

When I was a child, I thought the persecution of the church was something that happened in communist China and Russia, but not here. Not now. I thought that New Zealand was nominally Christian. We had two cultures: Maori and Pakeha, and that was enough.

Both had been converted to Christianity: the Pakeha were English who dated it back about a thousand years, and the Maori 150 years. We sang Te Haranui, about the first sermon preached on Christmas Day, 1814, to the Maori.

Not now. The church is under attack in the West. We are multicultural, and all religious festivals must be celebrated, unless Christian. The elite are again casting us in the role of traitors: their definition of being a New Zealander is to be fair, tolerant, compassionate, and they state that Christ is none of the above.

The most recent tragic murder shows this: it has been blamed on white men, and all men must take responsibility. We are damned for what we have not done.

For this to happen is to share in what happened to Christ, true. We are not having Christians killed, as happens in Muslim countries (for blasphemy), yet.

And we can speak still: for that we should praise God. For we may be able to turn back.

Because their will be recompense, and that utu will be ugly.

2 Thessalonians 1

1 Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy,

To the church of the Thessalonians in God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ:

2 Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

3 We ought always to give thanks to God for you, brothers,[a] as is right, because your faith is growing abundantly, and the love of every one of you for one another is increasing. 4 Therefore we ourselves boast about you in the churches of God for your steadfastness and faith in all your persecutions and in the afflictions that you are enduring.

5 This is evidence of the righteous judgment of God, that you may be considered worthy of the kingdom of God, for which you are also suffering— 6 since indeed God considers it just to repay with affliction those who afflict you, 7 and to grant relief to you who are afflicted as well as to us, when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels 8 in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. 9 They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from[b] the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might, 10 when he comes on that day to be glorified in his saints, and to be marveled at among all who have believed, because our testimony to you was believed. 11 To this end we always pray for you, that our God may make you worthy of his calling and may fulfill every resolve for good and every work of faith by his power, 12 so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you, and you in him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ.

We live in a time of big lies and virtue signals. The trouble, for the elite, is that the lies stoped being believable. The current example is not the German propaganda from last year, but the Yellow Jacket revolt of this one.

Funny you should hit upon that. One of the things that had brought ordinary people into the streets was related to the fuel-tax hike but was not the tax itself. Part of that whole "package" prohibited people living in certain arronidssements of Paris from driving their used cars in certain parts of the city. That therefore also made it impossible for these ordinary people to sell their now largely useless cars. There's a certain degree of unsubtantiality or "unnoticibaleness" to something like a gasoline tax because it ends up just being part of the retail price, so you don't notice it. But when you are forbidden to drive your own car, that is very noticeable and immediate indeed, and it was that which drove infuriated working people and retirees into the streets. And on French websites there was a lot of bitching about how the Muslim down the street with four wives and 18 children was getting welfare to the tune of 5000 euros a month AND a huge apartment--ALL "free"--while French working people and retirees are living on FAR less, and so on. And Christine Tasin published that editorial saying point blank that this is a nationalist uprising (one day last week). And so on.

So, yeah, it's a nationalist/identitarian uprising. The global warming fuel tax was merely the trigger--like the assassination of the Austrian archduke in 1914. The explosion was ready to happen, but it needed a trigger. Funny thing is that the global warming tax ended up increasing France's carbon footprint because of all those burning cars.

Mr Darcy, Vox Popoli

To the elite, our rulers, I say this: your course will lead to not merely the destruction of your political projects (for all politics ends in failure) but the damnation of your souls. Go back to first principles. The duty of the King is preserve the nation from enemies within and without, so that the people can live in peace and are encouraged to live Godly, Sober and upright lives.

It is not about being praised in the United Nations or the EU: they are converged, evil, and will burn.

If you do not allow a peaceful reform -- a change of power in reality between the conservative and reforming parties that exist in every country -- then change will come, and it will not be by the ballot or judiciary or treaty.

It will be on the streets. And, if history gives us patterns, it will be by violence.

The path you are on leads to destruction. Change it.

For we will not align with this path, nor will we be like you.

I had a restless night, full of dreams: that the European Union had imploded. The yellow vest movement is but a beginning: it is a protest, not a revolution. You can tell a revolution, for the judges and members of tribunals are not merely killed, but their bodies left in public. This is still a time of words. It is a time of pushback. People are still voting, they are not shooting. But the time of shooting may come, and often it is started by those who are weak but are in power. Because violence works, sort of.

Force breaks up protest movements, atomizing them into fleeing individuals. Almost always. Except in those rare cases where it forges a mob into a cohesive group, with goals (usually big ones) and leaders. It is a gamble that government leaders are willing to take when mobs threaten to end their careers. Macron may be rolling those dice. Reuters reports that the French government fears major rioting this weekend, and plans a major mobilization to fight: 89 thousand members of the security services (including “about 10 armored vehicles belonging to the gendarmerie”).

The “yellow vests” movement comes when Europe is under tremendous strain. Britain is leaving the EU. Other nations, such as Italy and Poland, are in near-rebellion. The flood of immigrants is producing fantastic stresses on the societies across Europe. Now one of Europe’s largest nations has street protests backed by a large majority of its people. The bolts are coming out from Europe’s social machinery.

This could get interesting for France’s leaders. Survival is always interesting.
Fabius Maximus

Violence can break up riots, and that brings a sort of peace. But the elite can forget about monitoring hate speech and preaching against racism, sexism, and their infernal slippery slope to the destruction of the peoples of the nation.

Once they bring in the blue helmets and grapeshot, it is not hate speech they need fear, but hatred. Their only lever left is fear, and that works only for a while: the Soviets found that out the hard way, as did Caligula.

Our elite has tried to ensure that all are credentialed but none educated, in case the people hear the word of the LORD and repent. But they are placing themselves against God, and that is never the way to bet.

Isaiah 5:13-17
13 Therefore my people go into exile
for lack of knowledge;
their honored men go hungry,
and their multitude is parched with thirst.
14 Therefore Sheol has enlarged its appetite
and opened its mouth beyond measure,
and the nobility of Jerusalem and her multitude will go down,
her revelers and he who exults in her.
15 Man is humbled, and each one is brought low,
and the eyes of the haughty are brought low.
16 But the Lord of hosts is exalted in justice,
and the Holy God shows himself holy in righteousness.
17 Then shall the lambs graze as in their pasture,
and nomads shall eat among the ruins of the rich.

Photo by Natalya Letunova / Unsplash

Luke 21:29-38

29 And he told them a parable: “Look at the fig tree, and all the trees. 30 As soon as they come out in leaf, you see for yourselves and know that the summer is already near. 31 So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near. 32 Truly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all has taken place. 33 Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.

34 “But watch yourselves lest your hearts be weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and cares of this life, and that day come upon you suddenly like a trap. 35 For it will come upon all who dwell on the face of the whole earth. 36 But stay awake at all times, praying that you may have strength to escape all these things that are going to take place, and to stand before the Son of Man.”

37 And every day he was teaching in the temple, but at night he went out and lodged on the mount called Olivet. 38 And early in the morning all the people came to him in the temple to hear him.

Some of us saw this coming. I was recruited to a small university town over a decade ago. If I had stayed in Auckland, which was dividing into ghettos -- I saw the Indians take over Sandringham up close and personal, and they have now taken over Papatoetoe, where I grew up -- I would be sitting on a much more valuable hunk of land but I would not be able to trust my neighbours. At all.

I now live outside my new city. The family I visit -- and they have moved either ou t of Auckland completely or live on the outskirts of that multicultural, international conurbation.

If you can do so, move to where the people are like you. Find a church which is faithful: grow your food, and live soberly, carefully, watching the signs of the times.

Because all the prophets and revelation say that the end times will be a test for those of faith. The enemy will rage and claim those he can: using his usual tools -- our lusts, our greed, and our wish to be seen as good by the elite of our land.

But know this: the elite hate us. Their damnation of hate speech is projection.

The times are historic. Let the atomized and desperate protest. Mistrust your princes. Care for your family and the congregation you belong to.

Ignore those who would signal virtue.

And this elite? Do not ally with them. Do not be like them.

Above all, do not become converged, and one with them.

One of the big problems with doing this daily is finding illustrations that fit the text. (I do not mean graphics, though at times that is difficult: the beloved has seen me scroll through pages of twitter. Now I'm no longer on twitter, it has become a lot more efficient, with a lot less "what the hell is that you are looking at).

I am talking about counter examples. Here other bloggers are more useful than the local papers, which are completely in agreement with the left project. Despite the fact that they have sown the seeds for their own destruction.

Allow me to give you a little advice, Googlers. You will NEVER stop the leakers because a not-insignificant percentage of your colleagues are the very kind of people you have targeted for your ongoing anti-right hate campaign. They knew to keep their mouths shut, or in some cases, to present a convincing SJW front, so you think they are in accordance with your insane social justice program.

But they're not. And they're very, very motivated to make sure that the outside world knows exactly what you are up to. Because they think you are insane.

What we're seeing here with Google and with Facebook is the beginning of the great Big Tech crackup that has been inevitable since they decided to publicly cast in their lots with the Left and try to thought police the Internet. That doomed them, because it sent a very clear signal to the rest of the world that they not only could not be trusted, they could not even be tolerated.
Vox Day, Vox Popoli

It is worth noting that the Psalmist described the people who live on the mounraint of the LORD as people of integrity. Who would swear the truth to their disadvantage. Who would do what is right when no one is looking. Who would not exploit.

And who would not ally with the neoconfucian communists who what to microregulate everything, because they fear the people. Google has. Google will not last.

Psalm 15

A Psalm of David.
15 O Lord, who shall sojourn in your tent?
Who shall dwell on your holy hill?

2 He who walks blamelessly and does what is right
and speaks truth in his heart;
3 who does not slander with his tongue
and does no evil to his neighbor,
nor takes up a reproach against his friend;
4 in whose eyes a vile person is despised,
but who honors those who fear the Lord;
who swears to his own hurt and does not change;
5 who does not put out his money at interest
and does not take a bribe against the innocent.
He who does these things shall never be moved

Photo by Robert Nyman / Unsplash

1 Thessalonians 5:1-11

5 Now concerning the times and the seasons, brothers, you have no need to have anything written to you. 2 For you yourselves are fully aware that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. 3 While people are saying, “There is peace and security,” then sudden destruction will come upon them as labor pains come upon a pregnant woman, and they will not escape. 4 But you are not in darkness, brothers, for that day to surprise you like a thief. 5 For you are all children of light, children of the day. We are not of the night or of the darkness. 6 So then let us not sleep, as others do, but let us keep awake and be sober. 7 For those who sleep, sleep at night, and those who get drunk, are drunk at night. 8 But since we belong to the day, let us be sober, having put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation. 9 For God has not destined us for wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, 10 who died for us so that whether we are awake or asleep we might live with him. 11 Therefore encourage one another and build one another up, just as you are doing.

We do not need to fear the end times. For us it will be a rescue from the corporate monoculture that leaves us in despair and illhealth. It will a rescue from the travails of this time, from sickness, disability, and mourning. We will be with Christ, and he will wipe every tear from our eyes.

The people who need to fear are those who reject Christ and trust in their own virtue or their virtue signalling. (And no, they are not the same). Who beleive that their intersectional oppression will save them.

It will not. There is but one way to salvation, and that is Christ.

And this cancerous corporate culture that has made compassion a weapon? It will be destroyed, slowly then suddenly. The burn rate for such is high, and all we need do is take our eyeballs from their products and use alternatives.

Do not be them. Do not be like them.

Today we went and saw the Christmas production at our local church twice. The first time because it was so good, and the second time so we could bring some relatives. Who did not like it: the angel was declaiming the lines in iambic pentameter with a strict rbyme structure and many of us are used to the bleak prose of the Authorized Version.

I am old for this church. The teenage and college actors and singers are moving again to poetry, to express what we cannot fully understand.

Donne meditated on this: on the faith of the virgin, on the risk that Josept took, on the miracle of John's conception. For it you think you understand the incarnation, you have not plumbed its depths.

Annunciation

Salvation to all that will is nigh,
That All, which always is All everywhere,
Which cannot sin, and yet all sins must bear,
Which cannot die, yet cannot choose but die,
Loe, faithful Virgin, yields himself to lie
In prison, in thy womb; and though he there
Can take no sin, nor thou give, yet he'will wear
Taken from thence, flesh, which death's force may try.
Ere by the spheres time was created, thou
Wast in his mind, who is thy Son, and Brother,
Whom thou conceiv'st, conceiv'd; yea thou art now
Thy maker's maker, and thy Father's mother,
Thou hast light in dark; and shutst in little room,
Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb

John Donne

Photo by Denise Johnson / Unsplash

I must admit that Donne is new to me. My advent poetry and music is usually bleak: the Pogues and Eliot. Eliot hins ad the mystery Donne, wiser and plainer, writes about. For Eliot writes of the external world, not the world of spirit and faith.

The kings knew that there was a new dispensation, but nothing ot the spirit of God that made it.

Journey Of The Magi

'A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.'
And the camels galled, sore-footed,
refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the
terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.

Then the camel men cursing and
grumbling
And running away, and wanting their
liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the
lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns
unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high
prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all
night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears,
saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a
temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of
vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill
beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped in
away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with
vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for
pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no imformation, and so
we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment
too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say)
satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I
remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth,
certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had
seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different;
this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like
Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these
Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old
dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their
gods.
I should be glad of another death.
T.S. Eliot

But Eliot knew that the dispensation of the pagans had ended. He saw hope in the incaration of God as a babe, and it the death of Christ to come, for most of his generation, as does a remnat in ours, prepares themselves for Christ return, for in them there is the only hope for the world.

The text from Peter discusses the end. This is the teaching of Christ. It was taught by Peter and John and Paul. There will be an end. This is the nightmare for the spirit of this age, but it is our hope.

The delay in the end is for the sake of our souls, and not just ours. Many need to find a saving faith in Christ. Many are lost, and this is by design. The spirit of this age may lie, but it is not stupid.

We need to recognise that, even though its early advocates espoused some good causes, and many individuals at the low level of the movement were basically good-but-misguided people, the Left always was from its very roots a basically false (hence evil) human motivation.

By excluding or marginalising the divine perspective; by placing mortal life, materialism and human emotion as the focus of human evaluation and action; it was always inevitable that Leftism would unfold to short-termist hedonism, despair, and nihilism - and would lead its adherents (at first unconsciously, but increasingly explicitly) to seek their own self-annihilation - both in general - by working actively for the destruction of their own marriages, families, institutions and nations).

This self-annihilation is rationalised by a publicly enforced cancerous compassion. Compassion is, objectively, a minor virtue intended as a duty in relation to a peron's immediate circle of family, friends and neighbours. But post-60s Leftism has raised 'universal, unbounded compassion' to be the ultimate virtue to be striven-for - and, of course, this is a form of suicide - both at a group level and individuals.

Self-annihilation therefore also operates personally - with its compassion-driven focus on abortion/ infanticide, and euthanasia for an expanding and open-ended scope of indications. The ideal of unbounded non-procreative sex is also justified by compassion for those with 'unconventional' desires.

Ultimately there is the increasingly-accpeted/ wanted transhumanist project of destroying and replacing humans (by drugs, genetic engineering, implanted social-mass media, microchipping, downloading etc) - again, advocated mainly on the basis of compassion for suffering.
Bruce Charlton

2 Peter 3:11-18

11 Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of people ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness, 12 waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set on fire and dissolved, and the heavenly bodies will melt as they burn! 13 But according to his promise we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.

14 Therefore, beloved, since you are waiting for these, be diligent to be found by him without spot or blemish, and at peace. 15 And count the patience of our Lord as salvation, just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, 16 as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters. There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures. 17 You therefore, beloved, knowing this beforehand, take care that you are not carried away with the error of lawless people and lose your own stability. 18 But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be the glory both now and to the day of eternity. Amen.

One of the moves made by complentarians and those who would me aligned with the spirit of this age is to distort scripture. They will call themselves Evangelical, but they are weaponizing compassion and using it to destroy righteousness.

As I noted in the first post in this series, complementarians used their trusted position as defenders of conservative christian culture to dismantle the defenses against the feminist attack. This is the same strategy Christian gay activists are using as well. On their face they seem to be protecting conservative Christianity from the charges of hate and bigotry, but their real focus is on dismantling the defenses. This is true for both the defenses protecting theology and the church as well as defenses of the family, with a special emphasis on children.

Dalrock

Contrast this with the passage. The times are short. We are supposed to be pure, righteous, without spot or blemish. We are supposed to be the protectors and nurturers of our young, the providers for our elderly, and we want to live quietly. We do not want the reaver or destroyer within the family.

The Left demands this, calling it compassion. They want us to let the orcs in.

But to do that is not righteousness. They will twist scripture. Do not be them. Do not be like them.

One of the things that desire brings is wreckage. Those of us with grey hair, scars, and have both won in lost in love say over and over, "Do not pass this point: beyond lies peril; you are ruining your life by the numbers"

Sydney knew this. He knew that if he loved overmuch he would ruin himself: he had been rejected, if not by Stella then by her family, and then the family mattered more than it does now. (The family should matter: if you marry you marry into it).

And there is a risk for Stella. She would be known as a succubi, one who ruins man by the misapplication of beauty.

Photo by AC Almelor / Unsplash

XL
As good to write, as for to lie and grone.
O Stella deare, how much thy powre hath wrought,
That hast my mind (now of the basest) brought
My still-kept course, while others sleepe, to mone!
Alas, if from the height of Vertues throne
Thou canst vouchsafe the influence of a thought
Vpon a wretch that long thy grace hath sought,
Weigh then how I by thee am ouerthrowne,
And then thinke thus: although thy beautie be
Made manifest by such a victorie,
Yet noble conquerours do wreckes auoid.
Since then thou hast so farre subdued me
That in my heart I offer still to thee,
O do not let thy temple be destroyd!
-- Sir Philip Sydney

Stella knew this, and did not know this. She eventually rejected her husband, lived with her lover (Blount), had four children to him, and (after her husband granted a divorce) married Blount in defiance to canon law, and was cast out of polite society. This was considered scandalous.

Now it is celebrated. Though the poet who wrote this (Plath) died, and was not risen from her bed of suicide.

From Lady Lazarus.
...
Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call.
...
Ash, ash—
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there--

A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

--Sylvia Plath

But Sydney would rise from his soldier's grave (we have always buried them where they fall) and say this: his Stella may be feckless, but she lied not.

Unlike the poets of this age.

There is a theology of purgatory, that led to the selling of indulgences during the early renaissance. In short:

1. In the next age, in heaven, it will be glorious and there will be no evil. (Isaiah 4 is but one of many passages that teach this).
2. However, we are fallen, imperfect, and broken. We are not worthy to be before God.
3. We therefore need to be punished, purged, pay the penality, then we may be able to enter paradise.
4. Since the church can let you into heaven and not for they own the keys to the kingdom, a pope or bishop can grant an indulgence to minimise this time. Your acts of contrition cut down the penalty.
5. This exists still in Roman theology, but it is acts, not pennies in the box for building St. Peter's as it was in the time of Luther.

I do not believe in purgatory, for our sins are too great. Our heart is desperately wicked, and only the act of Christ, dying on the cross in my place, is sufficient.

The evangelical faith -- Protestantism and the Reformed -- come because of the cross, and the cross alone. Our salvation is not our doing, it can never ben our doing.

But in this life, we are never perfect. The besetting flaw of the reformed is a belief that they are elect, uncorruptable, and need not repent. The Romans know better.

We always need to repent. The New Jerusalem will be perfect, true, but it will not be our doing.

Isaiah 4:2-6

2 In that day the branch of the Lord shall be beautiful and glorious, and the fruit of the land shall be the pride and honor of the survivors of Israel. 3 And he who is left in Zion and remains in Jerusalem will be called holy, everyone who has been recorded for life in Jerusalem, 4 when the Lord shall have washed away the filth of the daughters of Zion and cleansed the bloodstains of Jerusalem from its midst by a spirit of judgment and by a spirit of burning. 5 Then the Lord will create over the whole site of Mount Zion and over her assemblies a cloud by day, and smoke and the shining of a flaming fire by night; for over all the glory there will be a canopy. 6 There will be a booth for shade by day from the heat, and for a refuge and a shelter from the storm and rain.

Photo by Aaron Burden / Unsplash

Luke 21:5-19

5 And while some were speaking of the temple, how it was adorned with noble stones and offerings, he said, 6 “As for these things that you see, the days will come when there will not be left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down.” 7 And they asked him, “Teacher, when will these things be, and what will be the sign when these things are about to take place?” 8 And he said, “See that you are not led astray. For many will come in my name, saying, ‘I am he!’ and, ‘The time is at hand!’ Do not go after them. 9 And when you hear of wars and tumults, do not be terrified, for these things must first take place, but the end will not be at once.”

10 Then he said to them, “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. 11 There will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and pestilences. And there will be terrors and great signs from heaven. 12 But before all this they will lay their hands on you and persecute you, delivering you up to the synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors for my name's sake. 13 This will be your opportunity to bear witness. 14 Settle it therefore in your minds not to meditate beforehand how to answer, 15 for I will give you a mouth and wisdom, which none of your adversaries will be able to withstand or contradict. 16 You will be delivered up even by parents and brothers and relatives and friends, and some of you they will put to death. 17 You will be hated by all for my name's sake. 18 But not a hair of your head will perish. 19 By your endurance you will gain your lives

What does it mean that not a hair on your head will perish? Christ is not talking about our lives: in the previous verse he has said that some will become martyrs. He has said that we will be denounced to the authorities by our friends, our siblings, even our parents.

Our witness will be their salvation, or their damnation, for they heard the word of God and chose not to take that path.

In times now long past, missionaries were sent to the pagan tribes of England and Europe. Some from Rome, true: but some from the Christian Britons, in what we now call Wales, Cornwall and Scotland. Those older kings and princes listened and were converted.

In times not so distant, English missionaries went to the tribes of the South Pacific. Some were killed. Some were rejected. But the net result was that the tribes of Melanesia and Polynesia -- at the uttermost part of the world -- were evangelized.

In these fallen times Samoan and Fijian missionaries are being sent to the West. The west has, generally rejected Christ.

With this rejection has come a functional disestablishment of any form of the Church that does not converge with the ways of this world. The church is being purged: it is self separating into the liberals, who love the praise of this world, and will join in the campaigns against those who offend the elite.

You can tell them because they preach acceptance of abortion and damn those who love their own people as racists, or oppose abortion as sexists. They think that intersectional Christianity exists when it is an oxymoron.

And they will not be persecuted: instead they will damn those of faith.

The church is being purged of such, for their apostasy is becoming obvious, and the non apostate are no longer welcome in polite society.

These apostates are damned. Do not be them. Do not be like them.

There are three words from God in this passage, and they apply to this time as much as they did, if not more than in the time of Paul.

1. Do not act in lust We live, as did the early church, in a sexualized age. There is a lust for glamour, for beauty, for control and ruling over others, and for sexual desire. Paul tells us to be pure. He was not speaking to those who were continually and proud of their sexual sin -- and the Romans, from Cato to Nero were -- but to those of the church, and the warning is for us all: the world is filthy, and in it we can all too easily get stained.
2. Mind our own business Again, there is a temptation to gossip, to politic. The words spoken around the well were hurtful and damaging, but the words spoken on social media can be even more, because the rapidity of response leads to twitter rage and virtue signalling, and neither edify.
3. Get a trade Do not rely on inherited wealth, or patronage. Work with your hands, your skills. Do not be dependant on charity. The satisfaction of a honest day's work comes with a sense of tiredness, and if you are not regulated and managed by others there is less anxiety.

And God will give his righteous Godly Rest, and restoration.

I would add that the mental health promoters are trying to make apps which encourage people to decrease screen time, exercise, eat fruits and vegetables, and to sleep. For in this age too many young people spend all their time looking at laptops and phones, far too long, and from these they never get satisfaction.

Photo by NeONBRAND / Unsplash

1 Thessalonians 4:1-12

4 Finally, then, brothers, we ask and urge you in the Lord Jesus, that as you received from us how you ought to walk and to please God, just as you are doing, that you do so more and more. 2 For you know what instructions we gave you through the Lord Jesus. 3 For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from sexual immorality; 4 that each one of you know how to control his own body in holiness and honor, 5 not in the passion of lust like the Gentiles who do not know God; 6 that no one transgress and wrong his brother in this matter, because the Lord is an avenger in all these things, as we told you beforehand and solemnly warned you. 7 For God has not called us for impurity, but in holiness. 8 Therefore whoever disregards this, disregards not man but God, who gives his Holy Spirit to you.

9 Now concerning brotherly love you have no need for anyone to write to you, for you yourselves have been taught by God to love one another, 10 for that indeed is what you are doing to all the brothers throughout Macedonia. But we urge you, brothers, to do this more and more, 11 and to aspire to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we instructed you, 12 so that you may walk properly before outsiders and be dependent on no one.

What the Thessalonians did, instead of gossiping (Social media is monetized gossip) and being dependant on their sponsor as clients, was that they loved each other. Not as this world thinks: we conflate desire with love. But they worked for each other, lived with each other, formed community. We do not.

In the past, people grew up in small towns or rural areas near small towns, knew most of the people in their neighborhoods, went to school, got jobs, and got married. They moved if they needed more land or saw opportunities in the gold fields, but most stayed put.
We know this because we can read about it in historical books.

One of the results was strong continuity of people in a particular place, and strong continuity of people allowed the development of those “civic associations” people are always going on about. Kids joined clubs at school, clubs at church, then transitioned into adult-aged clubs when they graduated. At every age, there were clubs, and clubs organized and ran events for the community.

Of course club membership was mediated by physical location–if you live in a town you will be in more clubs than if you live in the country and have to drive an hour to get there–but in general, life revolved around clubs (and church, which we can generously call another kind of club, with its own sub clubs.)

In such an environment, it is easy to see how someone could meet their sweetheart at 16, become a functioning member of society at 18, get a job, put a down payment on a house, get married by 20 or 22 and start having children.

Today, people go to college.

Forget your highschool sweetheart: you’re never going to see her again.

After college, people typically move again, because the job they’ve spent 4 years training for often isn’t in the same city as their college.

So forget all of your college friends: chances are you’ll never see any of them again, either.

Now you’re living in a strange city, full of strangers. You know no one. You are part of no clubs. No civic organizations. You feel no connection to anyone.

“Isn’t diversity great?” someone crows over kebabs, and you think “Hey, at least those Muslims over there have each other to talk to.” Soon you find yourself envying the Hispanics. They have a community. You have a bar.

People make do. They socialize after work. They reconnect with old friends on Facebook and discover that their old friends are smug and annoying because Facebook is a filter that turns people smug and annoying.

But you can’t repair all of the broken connections.
-- Evolutionist X

What we need to do is engineer communities. My beloved and I live in the city of her family (mine is the big city, without communities, but with many bars) and she does not want to move.

But this is a college town. Where we have churches, making communities. Let our brotherly love shine, and let us again find community and certainty in the quiet ways of fellowship.

And work with your hands. For the client/sponsor relationship of the ancients still exists, and still enslaves.

This world is full of those who seek the approval of others rather than doing what is right. They either argue from authority – the UN resolutions, court rulings, or human defined rights or they argue from relativism. Authority means that they are left trying to deal with the source of authority, and from that they may find Christ.

But relativism is worse, for it is no place to argue from. There is no wrong, nor right. There is only what is approved, as the Cranky Professor points out.

Moral relativism in all its forms says that moral principles and moral descriptions are determined and validated by human acceptance. For instance, the action of torturing children for fun is neither immutably wrong (or right) for the relativist. Whether the action is right or wrong depends on whether an individual or group of individuals approve of this behavior. If individuals accept torturing children as morally right then it is objectively morally right to do it in those instances. If an individual or group of people don’t approve of torturing children then the action is said to be wrong. Moral relativism works like William of Ockham’s Divine Command theory where virtually all types of action are not necessarily right or wrong, they are only right or wrong if someone wills them to be right or wrong. However, instead of God determining the moral code like in Ockham’s theory, for the relativist it is rather people that determine the moral code.

Understanding the notion of moral relativism should already elucidate the person with good sense why it is not a sound theory.
-- The Cranky Professor (guest post at Matt Brigg's blog)

This is as wrong as utilitarianism, or libertarianism. There is wisdom in one unifying principle. However, relativism is more wrong than others, for it will require the truth is suppressed: not all ways of living are equally right, or even equally healthy, and this must be suppressed by a stultifying bureaux or five.

The liberterian right in NZ get many things wrong, but they are right on this one. The UN has no business telling sovereign states how to regulate their immigration rules.

The darkest aspect of the Compact is Objective 17 which deals with shaping public perceptions on migration through childhood education, the media, and public information campaigns.

It implores nations to use “awareness-raising campaigns” to “inform public perceptions regarding the positive contributions of safe, orderly and regular migration”. This provides the perfect opportunity for propagandists at the Human Rights Commission to tell New Zealanders what to do and think.

The Compact would require New Zealand to “enact, implement or maintain legislation that penalises hate crimes” without specifying exactly what constitutes a hate crime. In countries where hate-speech laws have been enacted, they are being used to silence and bully political opponents. Those who define intolerance are always the last people you would ever want to have such power.

The UN also wants tougher media regulation, including by “sensitizing and educating media professionals on migration-related issues and terminology, investing in ethical reporting standards and advertising, and stopping allocation of public funding or material support to media outlets that systematically promote intolerance”. Journalists who report inconvenient facts about migration could find themselves persona non grata.
--Steven Berry, ACT, via Whale Oil

Of course, this is apparent to anyone who thinks, French included.

Along with this, the cost of living is incredibly high while salaries are painfully low, especially in larger cities like Paris. The myth of government-ordered 35 hour work weeks isn't the reality for most salaried French people. Taxes eat huge chunks of their money and the French are fed up with making the same amount in their salaries as those who don't work at all and rely on government assistance.

Parts of France are also filled with unassimilated migrants. These migrants get government assistance as well. A large part of the French are sick of paying for migrants when French people are suffering as well. There are areas that have stopped being culturally French and cities the French avoid for holidays because of the migrant problem.

In addition to this, retired people have been lodging their dissatisfaction with their retirement pensions (one woman in a video circulating around French Facebook confronts Macron about having to live off of 500€ a month) and Macron's reactions have been condescending across the board. He currently has about a 26% approval rating.

All of this started bubbling up a few weeks ago as the protests began with the gilets jaunes in November. The protests last weekend got violent. Statues at the Arc De Triomphe were broken; the Arc was defaced. In Marseille, an 80 year old woman was killed as she was closing her shutters. The police threw a tear gas canister at her window. While outside of larger cities, many police officers and firefighters are taking off their helmets and/or standing in solidarity with the gilets jaunes. There have been reports that they have also refused to shake Macron's hand and have turned their backs to government officials while serving in official capacities.

On Monday (December 2), there was a protest by the ambulances in Paris. They stood at Concorde with lights flashing and sirens sounding. Truck drivers have also showed their solidarity. They have also driven through Paris with lights flashing to show their dissatisfaction. Roads have been closed down by gilets jaunes and they are blocking access of oil in both ports and at stations. As of posting, over 650 stations are on a list of facing shortages or out of fuel. During yesterday's news cycle, many truck drivers were seen disrupting broadcasts by honking in solidarity with the gilets jaunes.

On Tuesday (December 3), the French government spoke about their plans for "appeasement" of the gilets jaunes. Their offer was to postpone the start date of 3 taxes (related to fuel). This offer has been scoffed at by the gilets jaunes, who have called it "crumbs" as the taxes haven't even been implemented yet and the offer does nothing to address the issues regarding cost of living.

Along with this, the French have begun demanding that Macron refuse to sign the UN Migration Act on December 10. This has begun appearing across the Facebook groups and events but has not been widely reported in the French media as far as I can tell.

This has culminated in everything from demands Macron step down to the creation of the 6th Republic. There are protests planned for Saturday across France. The protestors are calling the Paris protests ACT 4. They are quoting from the French National Anthem ("Aux Armes Citoyens") and planning to protest at Bastille. The medical community is also participating in the protests on Saturday.

TLDR: This is bigger than taxes. These aren't your usual French protests.

Photo by Jim Kalligas / Unsplash

Matt Briggs comments -- referring to a professor facing the sack because he deadnamed someone who wants to redefine their gender -- that the established religion will try to win us over by any means necessary.

Well, Bauer’s religion is the dominant one, in no danger of fading to a mere remnant, as is Meriwether’s. He may as well laugh. I have no wisdom to offer on the success of the lawsuit, but I can note that World War T is accelerating, as regular readers know (the phrase is Steve Sailer’s). Normal people are being persuaded bit by bit, through the blunt force trauma of repetition, to think maybe they are the ones who are insane for insisting on Reality. They (the normies) don’t think they are completely crazy yet, but they’re beginning to hold back protestations, if only a little. Propaganda works. Terror works. Our enemies never sleep.
Matt Briggs
What such forget is that by any means necessary works both ways. The Yellow Jackets in France came from such. Brexit came from such. Trump came from such.

Far better that we allow people the ability to be wrong, and preach what is right.

There is a remarkable amount of pressure being placed on all at present. That we conform to the likeness of this world, consider the glory of man, and ignore God.

For we are told and taught there is nothing spiritual in the West. The only spirituality that matters is the indigenous, and the missionaries were a mistake, the planting of churches oppression, and we should never seek rescue from our sins.

This is not the agenda of God. The pastor of my church, writing to fellow pastors, notes that God loves his church, and he will rescue and preserve it.

God opens supernatural doors. God will provide. God brings the right people at the right time. God loves his church, including the one He is has placed in you! Trust him!

Sometimes we need to push back on the pressure we feel as leaders to get results from our own strength, strategy and work and simply rest in the knowledge that God has our back. Walk in line with his principles, let God direct our steps.

For all church planters and pastors I would love to remind you of one overwhelmingly clear principle of the Bible: What you sow, you reap. It’s not overnight success that should be our goal, but enduring success. Long term fruitfulness. This comes from acting with character and conviction.

Opportunism offers the illusion of faster results, but will always lead us down the road of pain in the long run. Choose the path of conviction. Go the long way if needed, but know that God will order the steps of the one who walks rightly before Him! And plant more churches, our world needs them!!
-- John Cameron, Facebook

Photo by Edward Cisneros / Unsplash

The passage today talks about how all our glory will burn. We will be left in caves and behind rocks. There will not even be ruins. The time of the LORD will be terrible, for it will destroy our works, and our hubris with it.

We have to do what God wants, not what man does. Man is so often deluded. And, when the government is advised that one in five need mental health care, there is something profoundly wrong with us.

It may be that our pride is making us mad.

Isaiah 2:12-22

12
For the Lord of hosts has a day
against all that is proud and lofty,
against all that is lifted up—and it shall be brought low;
13
against all the cedars of Lebanon,
lofty and lifted up;
and against all the oaks of Bashan;
14
against all the lofty mountains,
and against all the uplifted hills;
15
against every high tower,
and against every fortified wall;
16
against all the ships of Tarshish,
and against all the beautiful craft.
17
And the haughtiness of man shall be humbled,
and the lofty pride of men shall be brought low,
and the Lord alone will be exalted in that day.
18
And the idols shall utterly pass away.
19
And people shall enter the caves of the rocks
and the holes of the ground,[a]
from before the terror of the Lord,
and from the splendor of his majesty,
when he rises to terrify the earth.

20
In that day mankind will cast away
their idols of silver and their idols of gold,
which they made for themselves to worship,
to the moles and to the bats,
21
to enter the caverns of the rocks
and the clefts of the cliffs,
from before the terror of the Lord,
and from the splendor of his majesty,
when he rises to terrify the earth.
22
Stop regarding man
in whose nostrils is breath,
for of what account is he?

The liberal project has failed. We are now atomized, unable to repair what our grandfathers made, and shocked by their sense of humour. The Soviet had better jokes. The decline has begun, and the more intelligent athiests know this.

As a bumptious adolescent in upstate New York, I stumbled on a British collection of Oscar Wilde’s epigrams in a secondhand bookstore. It was an electrifying revelation, a text that I studied like the bible. What bold, scathing wit, cutting through the sentimental fog of those still rigidly conformist early 1960s, when good girls were expected to simper and defer.

But I never fully understood Wilde’s caustic satire of Victorian philanthropists and humanitarians until the present sludgy tide of political correctness began flooding government, education, and media over the past two decades. Wilde saw the insufferable arrogance and preening sanctimony in his era’s self-appointed guardians of morality.

We’re back to the hypocrisy sweepstakes, where gestures of virtue are as formalized as kabuki. Humor has been assassinated. An off word at work or school will get you booted to the gallows. This is the graveyard of liberalism, whose once noble ideals have turned spectral and vampiric.
-- Camille Paglia, The Spectator USA

There is no utility in looking at man. Our leaders have disappeared down a post modern rabbithole, and shut the entrance behind them. The mighty now fall on a tweet (and that is why we should boycott twitter).

We need to rely no to man. Man is fallible. We do great things together, true -- for good, but as often, for evil. We need to turn to a deeper wisdom. That which comes from God.

Photo by Kayla Harris / Unsplash

Wilde was many things, but he was of the faith: a great sinner at times, true, but are not we all? Wilde had more creativity and talent than almost all of this generation. And he knew it was not enough, not enough.

San Miniato

See, I have climbed the mountain side
Up to this holy house of God,
Where once that Angel-Painter trod
Who saw the heavens opened wide,

And throned upon the crescent moon
The Virginal white Queen of Grace,–
Mary! could I but see thy face
Death could not come at all too soon.

O crowned by God with thorns and pain!
Mother of Christ! O mystic wife!
My heart is weary of this life
And over-sad to sing again.

O crowned by God with love and flame!
O crowned by Christ the Holy One!
O listen ere the searching sun
Show to the world my sin and shame.
-- Oscar Wilde

Seek Christ alone. Man and all his works are doomed for destruction. In his mercy he has given us a means of salvation and the succour of his spirit in this life, and a Church, a new family of God, that will be eternally present when the gates of hell and the towers of man are ancient dust.

It is getting closer to Christmas, so the advertisements are increasing. The flyers are being put in letterboxes, and my intray is full of merchants from whom I bought something, once, offering Christmas specials.

At the same time the Jews are noting that it is Hannukah, the festival of lights and the restoration of the temple. It is (just) acceptable in this fallen time to celebrate the festival of lights: the Jews are marginally acceptable to the woke activists who think they are running the narrative of this time.

But the useful idiots hate Christ, and like the effete pagans and the ancient Pharisees, would kill Christ to save themselves from considering that the Gospel is no mere myth of man.

Photo by Matthew LeJune / Unsplash

1 Thessalonians 2:13-20

13 And we also thank God constantly for this, that when you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men but as what it really is, the word of God, which is at work in you believers. 14 For you, brothers, became imitators of the churches of God in Christ Jesus that are in Judea. For you suffered the same things from your own countrymen as they did from the Jews, 15 who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove us out, and displease God and oppose all mankind 16 by hindering us from speaking to the Gentiles that they might be saved—so as always to fill up the measure of their sins. But wrath has come upon them at last!

17 But since we were torn away from you, brothers, for a short time, in person not in heart, we endeavored the more eagerly and with great desire to see you face to face, 18 because we wanted to come to you—I, Paul, again and again—but Satan hindered us. 19 For what is our hope or joy or crown of boasting before our Lord Jesus at his coming? Is it not you? 20 For you are our glory and joy.

Photo by Caroline Hernandez / Unsplash

For the Jews, the glory departed the temple when the first sacking occured, and since then there has been the law, the teachings, the scribes, the ritual, the ceremony, and the synagogue. From one light in Jerusalem a thousand lights, ten thousand lights spread. The Jews preached Moses to all: their religion was not merely tribal but converted.

When a Westerner says "Jew", he means a race, or in the case of Slavs, a nationality. In Arabic (at least until a few years ago), to be a Jew is to have a certain religion, a mazhab, not an ethnicity and can only be an ethnicity if the origin is from non Arab land. Being an Arab is Ibn 3arab regardless of "belief". Arab "antisemitism" (sic) is not racial like European antisemitism, it is just religious intolerance that can be solved (and has been traditionally solved) by conversion, often forced conversion. Which is why people are talking past each other when they discuss history and historical distinctions. In references, Maimonides was an Arab, so was Sa3adiah Ga3on, so were so many. They wrote in Arabic, and Hebrew was a sort of Latin reserved for learned texts. Indeed so many Palestinians claim Jewish origin, though converted...

This is not to say that there is no Arab racism, but it was never directed at Jews Ibn 3arab per se (unlike Western Jews). In Bagdad, during the Abbasites, Arabs had ethnic tensions with Persans (Ctesiphon was largely a Persian town and the Abbasides used the Sassanide imperial structure) and the Jews counted as Banu 3arab as they were favored as Arabs; the rulers encouraged them to settle there in order to lower the rate of "foreigners" , the "shu3ubiyyin", Moslems of Persian or Turkic stock... Which explains why circa 1900 30% of the population of Bagdad was Jewish. Same with the Christians. Arabic speaking Christians are Arabs, Banu 3arab, but not the Chaldeans.
-- Nicholas Taleb, Notebook 155

But this is all from man. The thousand points of light may point to Moses, and to the righteous who protect the people of God, but God cares for more than the Jews. The uncouth pagans, even those who torched the temple, he would convert: the Catholic church is now based where once the Imperial Romans, pagan to the bone, planned to conquer and destroy.

The light of the world came at Christmas. One light. One way. The end of all disputation, and any striving to deal with the damage done by our evil. The gospel has a glory greater than any temple or synagogue or ritual or subcreation of man.

And the world, from effete pagan to woke theologian, still fears this. For God, incarnate is untamed, unable to be marketed, and transcends any commercialization.

It is to him every knee will bow. Let us do that, knowing that the teaching of his resurrection is not made up story, but the salvation of our souls.