Is It Time For Manly Christianity to be Unleashed?

 https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/05/against-the-new-paganism/

A little long, but an article that needs to read in its entirety in order to understand where Western culture are today, and may need to be in the future.

The most prominent exponent of vitalism today is Costin Alamariu, a Romanian political-science Ph.D. (Yale), who goes by the moniker “Bronze Age Pervert” (BAP). As BAP, he is the author of Bronze Age Mindset, an intentionally provocative, discursive, and ungrammatical “exhortation” outlining his thought. In two previous essays, one in the Daily Beast and one in National Review, I described the work, attempted to explain the origin and nature of its popularity, and assessed it critically

So what is vitalism? 

a call for the deepest possible return of all: a breaking of the fetters of secular liberalism and Judaism and Christianity alike, a recovery of a more elemental way of being-in-the-world. The nostalgia of neo-vitalism is for humanity’s most ancient days: for blood and war and shamans and the fierce exaltation of the kill.

The post makes a number of references to "Bronze Age Pervert" which I covered here.

We are all familiar with the current state of affairs in Christianity, 

Over the past few decades, Christianity has both retreated from the public square and from mass culture and been pushed from them. Its once-venerable pillars in this country have atrophied. Catholics continue to disaffiliate, and many Protestant denominations can barely be distinguished from unbelief. “The crisis of the Western world exists to the degree in which it is indifferent to God,”

One of my many weird and possibly heretical paths of thinking is correlating the OT with the NT, and Yahweh with Christ.  On one level God is presented as "unchanging",  and Christ as "fully God and fully man". The OT God seems very different from Christ ... 

Deuteronomy 20:16-18 New International Version (NIV)
"However, in the cities of the nations the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the LORD your God has commanded you."

Certainly in the Judgement, God will kill all the wicked ... eternally. He is a God who desires to show his mercy, but if it is refused, Judgment is his. .  

A book that helped me at least understand the problem a bit was "Jesus and Yahweh, The Names Divine".

The following quote is from the post linked at the top, not the previous line. 

Easter reminds us that the Resurrection remains true — even if the work of revitalizing Christianity today might require an approach different from the one Paul took in the Areopagus, with an emphasis not only on the truth of the Christian faith but also on its muscular application.

During the Reformation, Christians certainly fought valiantly. It was basically the equivalent of the American Civil War. Can/must Christians today be more like the Christians of the the Crusades, who "turned the other cheek" until the battle of Covadonga?

Today we are often given the message to "stand down", and "obey the authorities" because "God is in control". I agree with God being in control, but his often explicit battle plans in the OT. 

Malachi 3:6

“For I, the Lord, do not change; therefore you, O sons of Jacob, are not consumed."

God "allows" a lot of things, and "directs" a lot of other things. Which is which is "seen darkly" at best by even the most devout Christian.

Is it time for a new Reformation or Crusade? God will decide. 

White What?

 "Privilege" you say? 

I'm still waiting for mine. Why do we have an MLK day, when his values have been brutally rejected? 

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” (MLK) 

This Spectator article does a decent job of explaining why it is a very bad idea to judge people by the color of their skin.

Underlying the white-privilege thesis are two basic claims: first that “white” is a useful category in which to place everyone from Elon Musk to a cleaner in a Tesla factory, and second that being in such a category imbues people with privileges denied to those outside it.

Are Jews "white"? Are Asians? This article points out the fact that US colleges discriminate against Asians and Jews ... and it is increasing.  Why? Based on merit, the majority of our top universities would be Asians or Jews. Are they smarter? No, they have a culture that values education, hard work and strong families, even  when living in a country that in general values neither. High achieving Black students are often castigated by their same race peers as "acting white"? 

JD Vance covered some not so privileged whites in "Hillbilly Elegy". 

There are a lot of poor white people that have started to have the same culture as is common among blacks ... broken homes, addiction, welfare, no parental or community push to be educated, etc. 

Could the real factor be culture, community, family, hard work, and the concept that nobody owes you anything at all? Nah, it must be my White Privilege thinking heresy like that! 

We are already at the front edge of the time where your pilot or surgeon might have been more a product of DIE (Diversity, Inclusion, Equity)  ... of course they prefer the acronym DEI, because when your surgeon was primarily "qualified" by his contribution to the high DEI score of the hospital, DIE may be a bit too accurate. 

Woke Culture, Nick Cave

 https://www.amazon.com/Faith-Hope-Carnage-Nick-Cave/dp/0374607370

I subscribe to the American Spectator because it challenges me in especially arts, music, wine, food, travel, and architecture. It is considered to be "conservative", but in the classical sense of the word "liberal", meaning free markets, radical free speech, civil liberties under the rule of law, limited government, and some sense of  "enlightenment". 

It often covers people and topics that are "out of my lane", which I find to be important.

I would likely have never ran into Nick Cave, save for a review of the linked book from the current issue of the Spectator. I would normally have just done an incomplete blog and waited for Spectator online to catch up with my paper copy.

I didn't, because Nick lost his15 year old son Arthur in July 2015 when under the influence of LSD, he walked off a cliff and died. I have not had that exact experience, however there were times I could see something like it as somewhat likely.

The second reason is that although I'm going to have to do some typing rather than cut and paste, I didn't want this one to be semi-misplaced among the 100's of incomplete blog entries on my account.  I'm blessed to not have felt all of that pain,  but I have some of the pain of cancel culture. It seems nearly universal, though as Nick mentions, to some of the cancel purists, it is ecstatic.

A quote from the article:

For a man who by his own admission, spent much of the Eighties and Nineties in a miasma of heroin addiction, he is admirably clear-sighted about the greater hypocrisies of our age. He describes woke culture as:

... akin to to a fundamentalist religion impulse ... it may reflect on an unconscious desire to return to a non-secular society, and talks angrily of the "performative aspect to the theater of cancel culture that is essentially vindictive ... it's as if autocratic ideas of virtue and sin have come into play, and as a result, prohibitions and punishments have been put in place, enforced by a kind of callousness that, in my view, is akin to the very worst aspects of religion -- the fundamentalist, joyless, aspects of religion that have nothing to do with mercy. Cancellation is a particularly ugly part of it's weaponry and can end up as a kind of sadism dressed up as virtue"

I've been struggling through Durkheim's "The Elementary Forms Of The Religious Life". Durkheim is considered one of the main, if not THE experts on "why religion"?  In every human culture, no matter how primitive in time and space, and how similar at the base, every manifestation is ... sacred/profane, spirit(s), a creation myth, symbolic totems,  and how critical it is for every tribe/family/community/team/culture it is for a "social imaginary" to be shared for the health of both the individuals and the "group". 

I recently reviewed "The Rise And Triumph of the Modern Self" which gives some good insight as to why the woke culture came about.

Having just attended a wedding at a very fundamentalist church, it is clear that "joyless" is not a common experience of all "fundamentalists", and the Durkheim book shows that rigorous standards, prohibitions and punishments" are an integral part of obtaining the solid community and "joy" -- belonging, comfort, camaraderie, the feeling of being happy ...

Think Navy SEALs. The initiation is brutal, the bond approaches unbreakable, the sense of joy, pride and accomplishment is palpable. We can't all be SEALs, but we can be a member of SOME group of "like minded people". To "work" it has to be something "real", where you know each other F2F, have some "rituals" (like maybe just breakfast after church). The more rigor in the connection, the more likely the group will be significantly helpful.

Like exercise, training, ritual, symbols, rules, etc, there are parameters that have to be carefully aligned and calibrated  in order for the danger of the flame of faith can be properly respected and utilized. This takes decades, lifetimes, sometimes  millennia. We know that cars are dangerous, and we accept the danger (minimizing it as much as possible), in order to reap the benefits they provide. Life is often a tradeoff between risk and reward. To be real, it involves sacrifice.

 

We WILL all have a "worldview" that is either explicitly or implicitly a "religion" ... how much "choice" we have in what that is,  given genetics, family,  the probable existence of "spirits" -  Holy, Totemic, Tao, daemons, etc, along with community, mental health, physical health, etc, the range of "choices" (or enlightenment)  is a matter of little agreement for those that believe that the examined life is the only real life. 

While not a popular path today, the examined life seems like something worthy to give at least a cursory examination. 

I hope to get around to the book ... my stack is a bit deep and esoteric at the moment though.

Reasonable, Rational, Elon Musk

I ran into this wonderful quote from Benjamin Franklin;

"So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do."

Reason and rationality are bosom buddies.

There are a lot of quotes that essentially say "Man is not a rational animal, but rather a RATIONALIZING animal". Jonathan Haidt covers this extremely well in his book "The Righteous Mind". He uses an excellent elephant and rider for conscious/unconscious brain that explains an important part of our nature very well.

I love this quote from Blaise Pascal: 

"There are two kinds of people one can call reasonable: those who serve God with all their heart because they know him, and those who seek him with all their heart because they do not know him."

We all have our own "god" -- that which we perceive to be the highest good. Wealth, fame, sexual gratification, family, true love, winning the Super Bowl, etc . 

Realizing what our god really is can be quite difficult. I was a Christian for a long time before I realized that while I claimed (and believed) that I worshipped the one true God, my life showed that career, security, and money were really my god. 

Fortunately, even though I had the mistaken idea I had found him, he found me by Grace.

I throw this one in from Bertrand Russell, because I think it is a good bookend to the Franklin quote I started with. 

“It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.”
― Bertrand Russell

For each of us,  reason and rational are something we think we know when we see it. Like Potter Stewart in Jacobellis vs Ohio, 

“I have reached the conclusion . . . that under the First and Fourteenth Amendments criminal laws in this area are constitutionally limited to hard-core pornography. I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.”

For those who believe that science can answer everything, please show me an algorithm that could be used to define "hard core pornography", or admit that it is "in the eye of the beholder", therefore, subjective rather than objective. 

The reason I went off on this little excursion is because I find many people in life and especially on Twitter or other media, declaring that some opinion/person is "unreasonable, irrational, etc". Like most labels ... "that is a conspiracy theory", "that is crazy", etc, such labels don't move our understanding of whatever issue is being discussed forward. 

The Socratic method is much more productive. 

Can you tell me a little more about why you believe that? 

Well ... not always. 

They Came For Kermit, But I Was Not A Muppet

 https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/public-confessions

As I read the linked, the Marxist / Progressive / Whiggish idea of "the right side of history" kept flitting through my brain.

This article does a reasonable job of debunking the idea of history having "sides". 

The problem with this kind of thinking is that it imputes an agency to history that doesn’t exist. Worse, it assumes that progress is unidirectional. But history is not a moral force in and of itself, and it has no set course. Presuming otherwise embraces the dangerous tendency that the great English historian Herbert Butterfield dissected in his 1931 essay, The Whig Interpretation of History. Butterfield was writing about the inclination among certain historians to see the Reformation as a unalloyedly positive force—a secularizing, liberalizing movement that led inexorably to liberal democracy in the 20th century. Butterfield objected that this wasn’t at all how things worked. It was just a retrospective reading.

The philosophical term for  this thought is eschatology, thus giving rise to a somewhat common intellectual conservative criticism of liberalism/progressivism as "immanentizing the eschaton". Marxism, Christianity and Progressivism often assume an inevitable "arc of history" to a wonderful final end. With Marxism and Progressivism, "the end/goal" is some sort of hazy  "utopia", with Christianity it is the return of Christ.

Wokeism and Cancel Culture believe that they are part of this inevitable march. 

Last Friday, [February 5, 2021] Donald G. McNeil Jr., a science reporter for The New York Times since 1976, and one of the mainstays of the paper’s coverage of the coronavirus pandemic—a matter of life and death for millions of people around the planet—was forced to leave the paper. “Dean and Joe” (Dean Baquet, the paper’s executive editor, and Joe Kahn, managing editor) announced to Times staffers that McNeil had cited a racial slur in a conversation with two high school students, and therefore had to go, since “We do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent” (italics mine; I will come back to those words later).

McNiel ran afoul of the "Woke/Cancel" culture, because he had used "the N-word" in reference to someone else being suspended for using "the N-word". It offended people, so he had to go -- offence is in the mind of the offended, that is the only "standard" in exactly the same way as "sexual harassment" is proven if the "victim" feels "harassed/offended", the "perpetrator" has to go. 

The top link goes into more specific depth of the parallels of "Wokeism" to Stalinism. 

This all seems so bizarre that it is hard to take is seriously, but they came for Kermit! If you are not a Muppet, you may feel secure, but if they can get Kermit, is anyone really safe? 

Ellen/Elliot Page, Victor Victoria

 https://www.dailywire.com/news/klavan-for-the-vast-majority-gender-difference-is-a-joy

What struck me — and I think a lot of people — about actress Ellen Page’s announcement that she was now a man named Elliot was the po-faced self-seriousness with which the media accepted the lunacy. She’s a man, but she’s queer, but she’s with a woman, because she’s a lesbian, only she’s a man lesbian. Right-ho! Let’s get to work changing the credits on her old films because this is leftism, after all, and history itself has to be erased and rewritten to reflect the current nonsense.

Got that? A gay woman, married to a woman has decided she is a man.  

It reminds me of 1982's "Victor Victoria" ... a woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman. 

The decline and fall of the Roman Empire was really rather sane compared to our demise. 

Douthat does a more intellectual expose on our "Decadent Society" in his book, but Ellen/Elliot pretty much covers it ... if not. see pics below. The left is the "male" Pennsylvania health secretary, the right is Ellen/Elliott.

Thinking this is not serious? Increasingly. the trans folk are pushing to make "misgendering" a hate crime. How is that for serious? Consider that at least one site believes there are 33 genders.

So if the two above commit a crime, the left goes in with the girls and the right goes in with the guys. Hope "he" is tougher than "he" looks. 

Ah, the "woke" ... they are so intelligent that they can't figure out what bathroom to use. 

Book Burning Fires Often Spread

 https://spectator.us/five-books-penguin-ban-along-jordan-peterson/

I’ve read most of these dangerous books, commentaries and excerpts on all. I’d add the Bible part of my daily reading. 

17but you shall devote them to complete destruction,^a the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, as the LORD your God has commanded

To be completely "woke", statues and history itself need to be destroyed. The dogma of wokeness must be celebrated.  As the BLM signs say; "Silence is Violence" ... however we must be silent or censored on whatever our woke masters decide is the "dogma of the day". Ever changing, ever perfect -- as they are certain. They are indeed, "legends in their own minds". 

They only require a single thing to achieve their goals -- Power. Well, we aren't just going to let them walk away with that. Are we?