Lies Of Our Time (Esolin)

 The Lies of Our Time - Sophia Institute Press

A worthy book by a great author. It gives another view of the main crisis of our time, the rejection of the transcendent and the embrace of the material. Much of my reading and posting deals with this issue, since I believe it to be so critical for keeping us from returning to a 2nd Dark Age and preserving and enriching the lives of millions living lives of despair. 

The link is to a review from which I will pull some quotes. The following is a sort of a "table of contents". 

• The two conditions to which refusal to believe in God conforms us
• The evils that result from a utilitarian rejection of absolute values
• Seven lies in contemporary society — and the truths that they attempt to hide
• How you can become more discerning to detect the language of lies
• Ways in which beauty is illuminating and reflects the truth
• The dangers of experiments against reality (e.g., with sexual relations, gender, etc.)

The following quote from the book hints at a mystery that I suspect to be true. We all get what we really ask for. If we are adamant that "it's all about me" and join with others that will not accede to any power beyond earthly physical power, they end up living in their own hell on earth of disappointment, despair, loss of connection, never experiencing true transcendent love, etc.

I believe that when the supposedly "Godless" die, they enter the Godless experience of ultimate loneliness, hopelessness and pain beyond anything they have experienced on Earth. Each breath is a gift from God. Any sense of order is a gift from God. I believe that one of the greatest lies that many believe is "well, if I go to Hell, I'll have a lot of company!". I suspect that you will have no company, and the God shaped hole in your spirit will be an eternal fall into a bottomless abyss. 

Heaven and Hell are each what we ask for; Heaven is true, and Hell is false, not in the sense that it does not exist but in the sense that it is a self-cheat, a self-swindle. But you cannot have the heritage while you kill the father. I do not mean that you aim a dagger at your father’s heart. You aim that dagger at your own.

The following quote states what I have tried to state many times. Another way to say it is to paraphrase Dorthy from the Wizard of Oz ... " 'Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.'  ... I have a feeling, or really a conviction that we are not in America anymore. 

a society such as ours in the United States is now — it is no society at all, but a thing for which we have yet to invent a name, just as the agglutination of human beings dwelling within certain geographical boundaries is not, thereby, a nation, but a something else again, something for which we have no name. And such a thing, a non-society, is dangerous, says Marcel, as it lends itself to the impersonal, and the impersonal makes all kinds of wickedness practicable.

The primary target of the global elite today is the family, because ... 

The family, as Pope Leo XIII affirmed in all his social encyclicals, is the seedbed of anything that can genuinely be called a “society.”

Our elites, who embrace things like "Critical Race Theory" (CRT) see Western civilization as rotten to the core. They seek some undefined "utopia" that is "better" in ways they imagine but have no idea of how to actually implement. Marx, Stalin, Hitler, Mao ... the list is long, all have had similar visions. The common thread is that they all require totalitarianism, under control of what Nietzche called the "Übermensch". Strangely, each of them assumed they were that man. 

I'll close with this excellent observation. I fervently pray to be in the real Heaven before the utopian vision of the left is realized. 

But the object of all secular progressivism, unmoored from the aims, the direction, the restrictions, the consolations, and the warning of the Christian faith is an earthly Jerusalem — what Malcolm Muggeridge trenchantly called “the kingdom of heaven on earth,” which otherwise goes by the name of Hell.