The Antidote to False Religion

 

Everywhere we look in Western Civilization people are being forced to affirm the false doctrines of false religions and to bend their knees to idols.   A couple of years ago, in the insanity that ensued after George Floyd died in police custody, the genuflection was even literal.   Today there are several dogmas which if one does not uncritically accept them all, questions them, or argues against them one will find himself deplatformed, defenestrated, and the way things are going perhaps eventually decapitated.   Here are a few such dogmas:

 

I.                   The world’s climate is changing, the change will be for the worse rather than the better, it is all man’s fault and to atone for his misdoing man needs to accept a radical transformation of society and economy that will greatly lower his standard of living, eliminate most if not all of his personal freedom, and drastically reduce the size of his population.

II.                The traditional category of sex which divided people into male and female on the basis of biological differences is, despite its appearance of being essential to human reproduction, a false one, invented by those with power solely for the purpose of oppressing others.   The proper category is gender, which is what you think or feel that you are.   This may correspond to the sex you would have been assigned under the old system, or it may correspond to the other sex, or it may be something different altogether because it is all about you and your feelings and so there are in infinite number of possibilities.  Nobody else is allowed to in any way challenge your self-chosen gender and if somebody calls you by the wrong pronouns or the name your parents gave you before you chose a new one to fit your gender identity that person has committed the worst crime in the history of the world and should be completely and utterly de-personed and removed from society forever.

III.             Race is also a false category invented by white men to oppress all other people.   When white people speak of race or otherwise employ this category they should be told that they are being racist and that race does not exist.   They are not allowed to think of themselves as a race or a distinct group within mankind except if they think of themselves as distinctively evil which they are required to do.   Other groups can speak of race and think of themselves as races and are encouraged to do so.   White people aren’t allowed to call this racist and preach colour-blindness to these other groups.   White people are supposed to practice colour-blindness, except when they are required to  acknowledge their own wickedness and the virtuous racial self-awareness of other people.

IV.             If a new viral respiratory disease is circulating, even if poses no significant danger to anyone outside the group that is most vulnerable to all respiratory disease, it is alright for governments to suspend everyone’s basic freedoms of movement, association, assembly and religion, order them into isolation, shut down their businesses, and basically act as if there were no constitutional limits on their powers, in an effort to curb the spread of the virus.   It is alright for the government and the media to deceive the public and spread panic in order to get people to comply, but if anyone contradicts the official line that person is spreading dangerous “misinformation” and “disinformation” and needs to be silenced.

V.                The way to prevent mass shootings and other gun crimes, overwhelmingly committed with guns that are not legally owned and registered but rather stolen or smuggled, is to pass more gun legislation and take guns away from people who are overwhelmingly law-abiding.

VI.             The most important and valuable way in which  the people who in the old dispensation were called women but whom in the new are called birthing persons and can be of any gender can contribute to society is not by bearing and raising children as mothers but by seeking self-fulfillment in careers outside the home.   That many of them think and choose otherwise in no way contributes to the wage gap between what used to be erroneously called the sexes.   The only acceptable ways of explaining this gap are patriarchy, male chauvinism, and sexism.

VII.          When somebody commits a crime, unless it is a “hate” crime or the perpetrator happens to be white, Christian, male, cisgender, heterosexual or all of the above, it is not he who has failed society and owes society a debt the amount and manner of payment of which are to be determined by a court of law, but society that has failed him and owes it to him to rehabilitate him, no matter how long it takes, even if it takes the remainder of his natural life.

VIII.       While tobacco and alcohol, which for centuries in the case of the former and from time immemorial in the case of the latter, have been comforts enjoyed by people from all walks and stations of life even those who have had little to nothing else beyond the essentials of subsistence, have to be driven out of polite society and cancelled because they can have harmful effects on people’s health, marijuana should be enjoyed by all and a “safe” supply of cocaine, heroin and other opiates, methamphetamine and other hard narcotics along with a place and paraphernalia to use to them should be supplied by the government.

IX.             Masked thugs who go to lectures given by speakers with non-approved ideas and shout them down, disrupt the event, or intimidate its hosts into cancelling, and vandals who damage or destroy statues and monuments or who deface valuable art in order to make some sort of statement that nobody gets but themselves about the environment are all legitimately employing their “freedom of expression”, but if someone says something either in a lecture in person or online which disagrees with any of the tenets of the new progressive religion this is “hate speech” rather than “free speech” and he must be silenced.   Anybody who attempts to prevent the thugs and vandals from exercising their “freedom of expression” is a terrorist and should be treated as such.

X.                The primary purpose of schools should not be to teach children such basic skills as reading, writing, and mathematics, much less to teach them anything about history other than how many bad –isms and –phobias the leaders of their country were guilty of in the past.   Rather the primary purpose of schools is to encourage children, as early as possible, to choose a gender identity other than what would be their sex in the old, obsolete, way of looking at things, to expose them to every conceivable form of sexual behaviour as early as possible, and to instill in them anti-white prejudice or self-loathing if they happen to be white, along with Christophobia, cisphobia, heterophobia and misandry.   Teachers have a duty to do these things and should not be accountable to parents.

XI.             “My body my choice” is only valid in reference to when a birthing person, vide supra VI, wants to terminate his/her pregnancy, even though doing so means terminating the life of his/her unborn child.  The right of a birthing person to an abortion is absolute and not subject to limitations, unlike the rights of all people to life, liberty, and property.   “My body my choice” is not valid when medical experts tell the government we all need to be injected with man-made substances that have never before been used and for which there are no long-term studies because they were rushed to market in under a year.

XII.          Although the relative cost of commodities is determined by such factors as supply and demand – if there are a lot of apples and few bananas, this will make apples less expensive and bananas more so – this does not apply to the means of exchange, money.   Therefore government can print and spend as much money as it wants, this will not cause the price of anything else to go up.   If the prices of commodities such as food go up, this is because of greedy vendors, not the government.   Indeed, it is because of all the greedy businessmen who would prefer that only a few people be able to afford to buy their products rather than many or all people that government needs to keep doling out money so that people can buy things.   Although this does not cause the prices of things to go up, even if it did it would still be the right thing to do, despite the fact that rising commodity prices and devaluation of currency by the unit would harm the most the people that such government spending is supposed to be helping, those with the least purchasing power in society.

 

 

In Western Civilization, which is the name given in Modern times to what has become of what used be Christendom in the days since liberalism began to wax and Christianity began to wane there, these are the main tenets of the new religion that progressives have sought to establish in the place of Christianity.   That this is a fair characterization is evident from the way those who raise valid questions about the first tenet are treated.    If you point out that climate has constantly been changing throughout history, that human beings thrive better in warmer climates than colder, that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant but rather is to vegetable life what oxygen is to animal life, that despite irresponsible journalists’ efforts to portray every weather disaster that takes place as a “worst ever” moment recent decades have not experienced the most volatile weather on record nor have they been either the hottest or the coldest, and a host of other similar arguments you will likely be met with the accusation that you are a climate or a science “denier”.   This very accusation demonstrates that to your accuser the idea of man-made, apocalyptic, climate change is not a hypothesis that begins with observations, is supported by evidence gathered through experiments and test,  and rests upon such evidence while being open to being overthrown by other evidence, i.e., science, but an article of faith which we have a moral obligation to accept.

 

Now I am not opposed to articles of faith.   On the contrary, I think that for communities of faith such as the Christian Church, these are essential.   The articles discussed above, however, are not a statement of faith to which a community of faith akin to the Church asks its members to confess, but a set of beliefs to which progressives demand adherence from all members of every civil society in the West.   This is not a new phenomenon.   Progressivism began as an attack on Christian kings, the Christian Church, and the throne-altar alliance in Christendom and ever since the same progressives who scream “separation of Church and State” against the old order of Christendom have sought to wed the State anew to a different religion.   In early sixteenth century England this was the heretical form of Calvinist Christianity known as Puritanism.   Subsequent generations of progressives have pretended that their substitute religions were not religions at all but secular ideologies.   Communism is one obvious example of this.   The set of propositions that American liberals and neoconservatives claim define what it means to be an American, a citizen of the first country to have a separation of Church and State clause in its constitution, is another.

 

Now, while Americanism is in many respects less evil than Communism, the popular idea that the new false religion that we have been discussing is a rebranding and reworking of Communism is mistaken.      Communism and Communists contributed to its development, for sure.  Many of the dogmas of this new false religion were spreading through the academic world decades before they spilled out into popular culture, and the Marxists who outside the old Communist bloc had more influence in academe than anywhere else undoubtedly contributed to this.    Nevertheless, the new false religion of woke progressivism is more accurately described as a reworking of Americanism than it is of Communism.   It developed in the Western countries that aligned with the United States during the Cold War rather than in the former Communist bloc which has proven to be relatively immune to it.    While acknowledging that Cold War agents of the Soviet Union and the Communist bloc had infiltrated the West and were working to undermine it from within – Joseph McCarthy was right about this – and that academic Marxists disappointed with the Soviet experiment  and the failure of the World Wars to produce Marx’s general revolution had begun revising their ideology in a more cultural and social rather than economic direction as early as the 1930s, the development of the new false religion is more directly a consequence of a) post-World War II American policy with regards to the rebuilding of Europe that tied assistance in rebuilding to indoctrination in American liberalism with the aim of preventing a resurgence of fascism, b) the United States’ having become the leading power in Western Civilization at the very moment that American liberalism was beginning to transform itself into an unhealthy obsession with racial and sexual grievance politics, and c) the concurrent emergency of mass communications technology as a medium for the spread of news and culture, newly manufactured for mass consumption in the United States.   Indeed, the central tenet of the universal propositional nationalism aspect of Americanism, i.e., that anyone anywhere in the world is potentially an American if he subscribes to the propositions that define America, is the seed from which the rotten plant of woke progressivism springs.   Implicit within the notion is the idea that someone who was born in the United States, to American parents, whose ancestors going back to the American Revolution were all Americans, but who does not believe all the American propositions is not himself an American or at any rate is less of an American, than a new immigrant or even someone somewhere else in the world who does subscribe to all the propositions.   All that is necessary for this to become woke progressivism is for the propositions to be changed from the classical liberal ones acceptable to “conservative” Americans to the sort of nonsense contained in the twelve articles enumerated at the beginning of this essay and for the emphasis to be shifted to the implicit idea (“you do not really belong if you do not agree that…”) rather than the explicit one (“you belong if you agree that…”).   While some might point out that in many places in Europe as well as in the UK and here in Canada this new false religion of woke progressivism has seemingly gone further and become more powerful than in the United States this does not rebut the fact that it is essentially a reworked Americanism but speaks rather of the weakness and ineffectiveness of the resistance to woke progressivism. Note that here in the Dominion of Canada, the most aggressive promotion of woke progressivism in recent years has come from the currently governing Liberal Party and especially its present leadership.  Ever since Confederation the Liberal Party has been the party that sought to make Canada more like the United States economically, culturally and politically.    The weakness of the resistance to its aggressive promotion of woke progressivism can be partially attributed to the fact that the only party in Parliament other than the Lower Canadian separatists that is not a party that takes part of the Liberal platform and pushes it further and faster than the Liberals themselves do, the Conservatives, have in recent decades been controlled by neoconservatives who share to a large degree the Liberals’ masturbatory attitude towards America and are consequently Liberal lite.     The Liberal Party is a textbook example illustrating the old maxim “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.   The woke Liberals such as the current Prime Minister are constantly preaching the virtues of “diversity” to us even as in the name of that “diversity” they seek to impose a stringent and narrow uniformity of thought upon us.   As the great Canadian Tory historian W. L. Morton once observed, however, the ancient principle of allegiance to a reigning monarch upon which our Fathers of Confederation had wisely built our national unity already allowed for racial and ethnic diversity without the sort of pressure to conform that exists in an American-style compact society.    An updated version of this observation could be that a monarchical allegiance society, allows for racial and ethnic diversity without imposing such as a dogma of faith that everyone is required to believe the way Liberal dogmatic multiculturalism does, and so the older principle allows for a greater diversity, or a more diverse sort of diversity that includes diversity of thought, than does the Liberal cult of diversity.    

 

While I do not wish to belabor this point too much further I will observe that last week began with the entire United States with a few noble exceptions joining in the worship of a false idol.   American “conservatives” and liberals alike paid homage to someone they call “Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.” although he, like his father, was given the name Michael King at birth and he obtained his doctorate through serial plagiarism.   Everything else about the man was as phony as a $3 bill as well. He was ordained a minister of the Baptist Church even though he did not believe in the essential tenets of faith either of that Church or Christianity in general.   He was launched to fame as a crusader against segregation the year after the American Supreme Court had already dealt Jim Crow a death blow.   He talked a good talk about evaluating people on the basis of the content of their character rather than the colour of their skin in his “I have a Dream” speech, the only thing about him his “conservative” worshippers choose to remember, but the Civil Rights Act which he promoted and the passing of which was his biggest achievement laid the foundation for affirmative action, the racial shakedown industry, and every other sort of anything-but-colour-blind progressive race politics.   Similarly, he cultivated an image of himself as someone who practiced the kind of non-violent civil disobedience preacher by Thoreau, Gandhi, and the like, but there was a great deal of coordination between his talks and marches and sit-ins and the actions of those whose preferred methodology was looting, riots, and burning cities down.

 

We have looked at several of the tenets of the false religion that woke progressives seek to make the new established faith of the West.   We have also briefly looked at how this false religion evolved out of the earlier false religion of Americanism.   The title of this essay, however, is “The Antidote to False Religion”.  It is time that we turn our attention that.

 

The antidote to false religion is true religion.    The True and Living God satisfies the longing for the divine in the human heart in a way that none of man’s inventions, made with his own hands, can do.   The salvation man is in need of is spiritual salvation from sin, which has been given to us freely in Jesus Christ.   The salvation through political activism, legislation, and regulation that progressivism seeks is a poor substitute.  Unlike in the world of finance, where “bad money drives out good” as the law named for Sir Thomas Gresham states, in religion light drives out darkness, as it does in the literal sense.  Consider the ancient world.    St. Paul in the first chapter of his epistle to the Romans describes the darkness of moral depravity into which the nations of the world had descended by turning away from the Creator into idolatry.   Much ancient discussion as witnessed in the writings of Herodotus and Aristotle focused on the question of happiness, how a man attains it, and how he can be rightly judged by others to have attained it.   The answer was not to be found in the pagan religions and the writings of Plato and the tragedies of Euripides, testify to a growing dissatisfaction with gods who were merely more powerful human beings with all the moral failings of mortals and, indeed, often more.   Calls had begun to arise for reforms of the pagan religion.   Into this darkness, St. John attests, the Word, Who became flesh and dwelt among us, shone as the Light of Men, satisfying the hunger and thirst attested to in the writings of the philosophers in a way that paganism, no matter how reformed, never could.   The darkness of today’s false religion was able to creep back in because over the course of the past several centuries, Western man was lured into once again putting his faith in the creations of his own hands, now called science and technology, through the promise of wealth and power.   Initially, the new idols seemed to impressively deliver on their promises but now they are starting to fail as all such false gods eventually do.   Man now stands at a crossroads.   The Light of Jesus Christ is still there calling him back.   Or he can plunge himself further into the darkness of the new false religion. 

 

There is a difference between the false religion of today and the false religion(s) of the ancient world.   Ancient paganism was pre-Christian, the idolatry in which men indulged before God sent His Only-Begotten Son into the world.   Concerning this idolatry St. Paul, speaking to the philosophers at Mars Hill, said “And the times of this ignorance, God winked at; but now commandeth all men everywhere to repent”.    The false religion of today is sometimes called post-Christian, that is to say, the idolatry into which men sink after they abandon the true faith of Jesus Christ.   A more Scriptural term for this might be Anti-Christ. 

 

It has often been said that someone who has turned his back on Christ is far harder to reach than someone who has not yet heard of Him for the first time.   This seems to be true and the difficulty may be greater when it comes to nations and an entire civilization rather than just individuals.   However this may be, the true religion has not changed and we must call those who have abandoned it back.

 

We started this essay by looking at several articles of the new false religion being dogmatically imposed upon us.  Twelve of these were given and this number was chosen for a reason.  Since the earliest centuries of Christianity, the true faith has been confessed in a statement we call the Creed from the Latin word for “believe”.   There are two basic forms of the Creed, the Apostles’ and the Nicene.  (1)  Ancient tradition says that the twelve Apostles themselves composed the Creed, each contributing an article.   Whether or not that is the case, the Creed consists of twelve articles, one for each of the Apostles.   The Nicene Creed, or more accurately the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, composed and revised at the two first Ecumenical Councils of the fourth century, is the most universal form being accepted by all the ancient Churches.   While this is a longer form of the Creed, it too contains twelve articles which mostly correspond to those of the Apostles’ (Article III of the Nicene Creed contains matter not found in the Apostles’, Article IV of the Nicene includes everything in both Articles III and IV of the Apostles’, the Descent into Hell is included with the Resurrection in the Apostles’ otherwise the Articles of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan are longer or fuller versions of the corresponding Articles in the Apostles’).

 

I intend, the Lord willing, to give each of these articles an essay-length exposition this year.  The text of both forms of the Creed will be commented on, with the essays following the order of the Articles of the Apostles’ Creed, covering Article III of the Nicene Creed under Article II.   I have not yet decided whether to do this over the next couple of months or whether to spread it over the year covering one Article a month.   Either way, the purpose of the series will be to remind people of the true faith so as to call them back from the false one.

 

Here are the twelve Articles of the Apostles’ Creed:

 

I.                    I believe in God, the Father almighty,
    maker of heaven and earth;

II.                And in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord;

III.             who was conceived by the Holy Ghost,
    born of the Virgin Mary,

IV.             suffered under Pontius Pilate,
    was crucified, dead, and buried.

V.                He descended into hell.
    The third day he rose again from the dead.

VI.             He ascended into heaven,
    and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father almighty.

VII.          From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.

VIII.       I believe in the Holy Ghost,

IX.              the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints,

X.                the forgiveness of sins,

XI.             the resurrection of the body,

XII.           and the life everlasting. Amen.

 

(1)   The Athanasian Creed is not, properly speaking, a Creed, but is more like a commentary on the Apostles’ Creed.   This can be seen in the fact that whereas the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds are both in the first person, expressions of what I or we, believe, the Athanasian is in the third person, a declaration of what must be believed.

The Ups and Downs of Deviancy

I  have commented in the past on the sick, twisted, irony that the same period that saw tobacco use demonized, driven out of public spaces – even outdoors ones – and increasingly private spaces as well, saw the legalization, normalization, and glorification of the use of marijuana.   Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who sat as a Democrat in the American Senate representing New York in the days when Democrats, even Democrats from New York, were not all open cheerleaders for civilizational collapse, wrote an article for The American Scholar in 1993 entitled “Defining Deviancy Down”.   The gist of the article was that many were responding to the explosion of social and moral problems, such as family breakups, single-parenthood, and crime by simply lowering standards and expectations, and that this was not a good thing.   Later that year neoconservative columnist Charles Krauthammer responded to Moynihan’s article with a speech to the American Enterprise Institute entitled “Defining Deviancy Up” in which he argued that the Senator was right, but that he addressed only half the story, the other half being the imposition of new standards on ordinary people so that “once innocent behavior now stands condemned as deviant”.   A few years later Robert H. Bork, the American jurist and law professor whose appointment to the American Supreme Court by Ronald Reagan had been defeated in the Senate, expanded upon both of these themes at book length in his Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline (1993).   The war on tobacco which is carcinogenic, especially when chemicals have been added to it as is the case with cigarettes, but which can both calm and stimulate minds without impairing them in the slightest, fought simultaneously with a campaign to promote marijuana which is known to mess up people’s minds, is this set of complementary phenomena, defining deviancy both down and up at the same time, manifesting itself in the realm of substance use and abuse.   One could, of course, take the position that the old ideal of mens sana in corpore sano calls for opposition to both tobacco and marijuana, but the position taken by our contemporary culture shows just how much it has come to elevate the body over the mind.   Plato would be appalled.

 

Here in the Dominion of Canada we are now seeing the combination of defining deviancy up/down manifesting itself in yet another way in this same area.   Earlier this week, an organization called the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction made international headlines.   Before commenting on how it did that a few words about the organization itself are appropriate.   The CCSA was established by an act of Parliament during the premiership of Brian Mulroney in 1988.   At the time it was called the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse, which name is still reflected in the acronym, the new name having been adopted for reasons of political correctness.   The organization’s board is appointed by the Governor-in-Council and it operates under the oversight of Health Canada.   Therefore, while the organization was set up as a non-profit charity that accepts private funding and claims to occupy the space between government agency and non-government organization, it is questionable as to how large or how real the distance between it and the government it answers to actually is.   It made headlines by releasing a report, commissioned and funded by Health Canada, on alcohol use which basically said, in about 90 pages, that there is no safe level of consumption, that there are no health benefits to drinking, that bottles of booze should come with warning labels, and that Canadians should limit themselves to a maximum of two “standard” drinks per week.   This attracted so much attention because of how radically out of sync these recommendations are with those of health agencies in the United Kingdom and the rest of the Commonwealth, the United States, France, and basically all of Europe except the Netherlands.

 

The admirably reactionary David Warren, retired Ottawa Citizen columnist and former editor of the sadly defunct Idler, sees this as a step towards a revival of prohibition.    While some might say that this is reading too much into the report I am inclined to think that Warren is right, as he usually is about most matters that don’t pertain to the patriarch of Rome’s claim to supremacy over the entire Church.   The same media that spent the last two to three years demanding total suppression of Canadians’ basic freedoms of movement, assembly, and religion because “experts” said that “social distancing” and “lockdowns” and basically enforced isolation were “necessary” to stop the spread of a virus that they were depicting as far more lethal than it actually was (even at the beginning) and insisting that anyone who disagreed with them was promoting “misinformation” and “disinformation” and must be silenced, even as they gaslighted everyone with obvious nonsense such as their denial of natural immunity, has been promoting the CCSA’s report and recommendations in much the same manner.   Take the CBC for example.  CBC writers Ioanna Roumeliotis and Brenda Witmer wrote up the story with the same attitude of “the experts” have spoken, we must all bow down and obey that has become so nauseatingly familiar since 2020.   With regards to the CCSA report saying that “no amount of alcohol is safe” they use the words “points out that” rather than the more objective and accurate “claims”.   The appeals to the authority of the World Health Organization are there too and the gaslighting.   The gaslighting is most obvious in the denial of there being health benefits alongside the risks.   Even the claim the most Canadians are unware of the risks is highly dubious.  While the claim applies specifically to the risk focused on in the report, i.e., the risk with regards to cancer, it is absurd to say that most Canadians are unaware of the many other risks attendant upon drinking alcohol, and I very much doubt that anyone undeterred by the risk of DTs, liver cirrhosis, getting into a brawl, driving into a tree or making a total ass of oneself in public and alienating one’s friends and family, is going to care much about a risk of cancer.   Sunlight is carcinogenic.   Is that good reason to either adopt a vampire’s schedule or erect a sunblocker ala The Simpsons’ C. Montgomery Burns?   Bill Gates, in the unlikely event you happen to be reading this, the answer to that last question is “no”.

 

Whether or not our government is about to repeat the famously failed social experiment of a century past when, due to the estrogen poisoning brought on by having given women the vote, we temporarily imposed a total ban on alcoholic beverages, (1) by sponsoring this ridiculous report they are certainly engaging in Krauthammer’s “defining deviancy up”.   One does not have to look far to find the corresponding acts of “defining deviancy down”.   The province of British Columbia is currently decriminalizing the possession of hard drugs, something that its largest city Vancouver did two years ago.    As of the last day of this month, it will be legal for adults in British Columbia to possess small amounts of cocaine, opiates, and methamphetamine.   Both city and province required the cooperation of Health Canada for this, as the federal agency needed to grant a waiver under the Controlled Drug and Substances Act.   It was not difficult to obtain such an exemption as the current Dominion premier is on board with British Columbia’s approach to the drug crisis.   Neither the Prime Minister nor the government of British Columbia nor the city council of Vancouver are libertarian purists who support decriminalization because they don’t think the government should be dictating personal choices.  These are the same people, remember, who a year ago were telling people that they had to have a new, man-made, substance injected into their bloodstream if they wanted anything resembling a normal life in society.   Their argument for decriminalization in the midst of a drug crisis is that they think it will decrease the number of drug deaths.   The reasoning behind this is that as long as hard drugs are illegal, those who use them must rely upon illicit sources, which may be tainted with such substances as fentanyl and down which can cause overdoses in amounts that are miniscule compared to other drugs.   This is also the reasoning used by those who argue that the government should provide, at the taxpayers’ expense, “safe” drugs, needles, and places to use them.    Indeed, those who argue for decriminalization for other than libertarian reasons and those who support government provided “safe injection sites” are generally the same people.    At the very least, this way of thinking can be criticized as myopic, focusing on the danger that fentanyl and other contaminants pose to drug users as if this were the whole of the drug problem, and ignoring the countless other dangers posed by hard drugs, often to other members of society who don’t use them themselves.   A man who is walking down the sidewalk, minding his own business, and gets his head punched in by someone whom he doesn’t know from Adam, because that someone is in a meth-induced paranoia and thinks that he, the man he punches that is, is an alien hitman sent after him by the demonic overlord of a planet in some distant galaxy, will require just as much stiches, hospital time, or morgue space depending on the severity of the attack, if the meth was obtained from a government-funded “safe” site as if it were obtained on the street.   At least if it were obtained from the street, the man would not have been forced to contribute to his own assault with his taxes.   Note that those who advocate this approach of dealing with the drug crisis are the ones who speak about the need to “destigmatize” drug use.   To destigmatize something, however, is to remove societal disapproval, and, as we have already seen with regards to marijuana this, if not nipped in the bud, will become a demand for societal approval of hard drug use and a cultural campaign to promote it.   We are already witnessing this taking shape around us.

 

To summarize, we are being told by the CCSA, Health Canada, and the CBC that there is no “safe” amount of alcohol that can be consumed at the same time that we are being told that hard drugs should be decriminalized and, worse, “destigmatized” and  safe” injection sites provided for their use by the government at our expense.   It is tobacco v. marijuana and the defining of deviancy both up and down at the same time all over again.

 

This time around, however, there is a spiritual aspect to this that was not there when tobacco was being driven out to make room for marijuana.   Neither tobacco, which was unknown to the Old World until imported from the Americas, nor hemp, the plant from which marijuana is obtained and which was certainly present in the Ancient Near East, are mentioned anywhere in the Holy Scriptures by name.   Alcoholic beverages, however, are certainly mentioned in the Bible and the New Testament makes use of the Greek family of words from which our “pharmacy” is derived.   With regards to the nouns φαρμακός and φαρμακεία, these are usually rendered “sorcerer” and “witchcraft” or “sorcery” respectively in English translations of the New Testament.   Their primary reference is with regards to drugs.   The first is often rendered “poisoner” in uses outside of the New Testament, and the second can mean both the administration of drugs and poisoning.    They are translated the way they are in English Bibles because the idea in the New Testament is of the use of substances in magic and communication with the spirit world.   They are never used in a positive sense. 

 

The Bible speaks of alcoholic beverages, primarily wine, far more frequently and by contrast the overwhelming majority of references are positive.   Drunkenness is condemned, but wine is spoken of as a gift of God given to cheer the heart of men.   In what St. John the Evangelist identifies as the very first miracle that Our Lord performed, He instructed the servants at a wedding He attended at Cana at some point between His Baptism and the beginning of His public ministry in Galilee to fill six stone waterpots, each capable of holding twenty to thirty gallons, with water after the wedding wine supply had run out.   He then told them to take the pots to the chief steward.   The roughly 120 gallons of water was transformed into roughly 120 gallons of wine which the chief steward proclaimed to be better than that which had already been consumed.    Four chapters later, after the Feeding of the Five Thousand, the only miracle other than the Resurrection which St. John records in common with the Synoptic Evangelists, Jesus in His Bread of Life discourse with the multitude proclaimed the necessity to eat His body and drink His blood.   Later, at the Last Supper, the final Passover meal that He shared with His Apostles before the Crucifixion, Jesus would reveal how this was to be done by instituting the Sacrament of the Eucharist or Holy Communion in which His followers would partake of bread as His body, broken for us, and wine as His blood of the New Testament, shed for us and for many for the remission of sins.   Partaking of wine as Christ’s blood in this way, has been essential to the main ceremony of regular Christian worship in all the most ancient Churches ever since.   Only in the last couple of centuries in North America have certain sects – separatist groups – substituted the Islamic view of wine for the traditional Christian one, and in support of this substitution invented spurious arguments that Jesus turned the water into unfermented, concentrated grape juice and that this is what should be used in Communion. (2)   Therefore, those who define deviancy up to include the drinking of any amount of alcohol in so doing attack the central rite of the Christian faith and religion, while in defining deviancy down so as to “de-stigmatize” the use of hard drugs, they have embraced behaviour that in the Scriptures is inseparable from trafficking with evil spirits.

 

In this, the true nature of this aspect of the “culture war” is evident.   Ultimately, it is on the spiritual field, that this battle will be won or lost.

 

(1)   About the only thing positive I have to say about prohibition was that it inspired Stephen Leacock, the great Canadian humourist, economist, and political scientist to write an excellent essay against it.  Entitled “The Tyranny of Prohibition” it first appeared in the August 2, 1919 issue of The Living Age, and can be found in several anthologies of Leacock’s essays.   Prohibition is also discussed in his “The Woman Question” which was first published in 1915 and can also be found in Leacock anthologies, including Essays and Literary Studies, the first edition of which was published in 1916.   The two essays taken together can be read as a before and after look at the two big social experiments that occurred together at the end of the First World War.

 

(2)   The sects and revivalists who thought up this idea also started up, in conjunction with the early feminists, a prohibition movement that they inappropriately called “temperance”, which word used properly means the virtue of “self-control” and “moderation”.   This idea remains in circulation largely due to the influence of the book Bible Wines: The Laws of Fermentation and the Wines of the Ancients by Rev. William Patton, first published in 1871.   This book employs the same kind of arguments that Alexander Hislop used in The Two Babylons to back up his claim that everything in the pre-Reformation Christian tradition other than the Bible itself was the pagan religion of ancient Babylon dressed up to look Christian.  There are plenty of quotes and plenty of footnotes which look very convincing unless you take the time to look up the quotes in the original sources, most of which are very obscure to discourage you from doing this.   If you do, however, you realize quickly that the entire book is pure codswallop.     I diagnose those who promote the messages of these books as suffering from a severe case of κεφαληανααυτουπρωκτόςις.  

He that Hath No Sword, Let Him Sell His Garment and Buy One

Here in the Dominion of Canada, we are now in the eighth year of the federal premiership of Captain Airhead, or Justin Trudeau to use the unkind slur by which he is often called.   He came to power in the Dominion election of 2015 with a majority win for the Liberals and has managed to cling to power ever since with slim pluralities.  Despite, however, the fact that he has been in a position of minority government since 2019, he continues to govern like he has a clear, blank-cheque of a mandate, to do whatever he wants, no matter how unjust and divisive his various agendas turn out to be.

 

Take Bill C-21.   Please, take it.   This bill was tabled (1) early last year and had finished going through its first two readings around the beginning of summer in June.   The bill is the product of all the hot air that has been coming from the Liberal government since the multiple shooting incident in Nova Scotia in April of 2020.   Shortly after the attacks, Captain Airhead announced on the Communist holiday that a ban by Order-in-Counsel would take effect immediately on what he called “assault-style” weapons.    This was all a lot of smoke and mirrors.  Actual assault weapons of the kind that match the way the Prime Minister keeps describing them, i.e., weapons designed to kill as many people as possible in as short a period of time, were already illegal in Canada and had been long before the Nova Scotia shootings.   The “assault-style weapons” that he was going after were merely non-military grade rifles that had been made to look like military rifles for those to whom such an appearance had an aesthetic appeal.    Captain Airhead then began shooting his mouth off for the last three years about the need to make our streets safe from gun crime, even as he introduced or stuck to policies on everything from border control to mind-altering drugs to bail reform that had the opposite effect.   Bill C-21 if passed would amend various Acts of Parliament to enshrine a much broader gun ban than the one of 2020 into statutory law.   It would do absolutely nothing about making our streets safe from gun crime because these crimes are overwhelmingly committed with guns that are illegally obtained – as were the guns in the Nova Scotia shootings, incidentally – because they are already illegal.    None of these acts of the Trudeau Liberals, from the Order-in-Council of 1 May, 2020 to Bill C-21, have had or will have much of an effect on making Canadians safer from crimes either of the Nova Scotia variety or of the kind that afflicts our inner cities.   Those who are most affected by such empty, self-righteous, gestures are law-abiding Canadians who own guns that they acquired legally and have only used legally.   Liberals like the Prime Minister, Bill Blair and Marco “the Mendacious” Mendicino think nothing about unjustly and unfairly punishing such people for the crimes of actual gun criminals against whom they are either unable or unwilling to act.

 

All the criticism of Bill C-21 and its drafters in the preceding paragraph applied to the bill even before it went into Committee consideration after the second reading in the House which is where it presently stands.   During the Committee stage, however, the Liberals amended it in a way that made it much worse.    The amendment, which was introduced very late in the year, the Liberals apparently hoping to squeak the amended bill through Committee and its third reading before the House adjourned for Christmas and relying upon the amendment having been introduced just prior to the anniversary of the  École Polytechnique massacre to shield the move from criticism, greatly expanded the list of guns to be banned.  While the Liberals continue to shout “misinformation” and “disinformation” at anyone, especially His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, the Conservatives, when they point this out, it is quite reasonable to conclude from the amended list of guns to be banned that rural Canadians, especially farmers and hunters, are being targeted here.    There are guns on the list that are clearly hunting guns and which are in no way connected to gun crime in Canada.   A traditional shotgun made by English manufacturer Webley and Scott for hunting birds is one such example.   There are many others.  (2)    Indeed, if you were to draw up a list of the most common guns used by farmers and hunters, you would find that many of the most prominent guns on the list are included in the amended version of Bill C-21.  The Liberal Party under its current management loves to turn Canadians against each other, to reward those who vote Liberal, and rub the noses of those who do not vote Liberal in Liberal laws, but here this backfired against them.   At present, as a minority government, they are propped up by the socialist party, the New Democrats, who agreed to support them in Parliament until the next Dominion election.   It is not just the Conservatives, however, who have a large rural base but the NDP as well.   While the NDP is led by urban socialists, much of their caucus represent northern ridings where reservations in which hunting remains a huge part of the way of life are to be found.   When the Assembly held an emergency session in early December and condemned the Liberal bill as an assault on their way of life the NDP had no choice but to join the Conservatives in opposing the Bill in its currently amended form.   When this happened, even the few Liberals who represent rural ridings felt free to break ranks with the leadership of their own party over the issue.   Call it a Christmas miracle.

 

While initially when faced with such opposition the government gave signs of being willing to make concessions, when asked a few weeks later about this the Prime Minister indicated that they intended to pass Bill C-21 and doubled down on accusing the Conservatives of “misinformation” and “disinformation” for telling the truth about how the bill would adversely affect law-abiding rural Canadians without doing anything about actual gun crime.   How this shall unfold in this New Year remains to be seen.

 

Earlier last year Captain Airhead made a remark in an interview that is quite revealing about the attitude he brings to this issue.   Appearing on an American podcast (Pod Save the World) he defended his government’s gun control policies and contrasted American and Canadian culture saying:

 

and we have a culture where the difference is, guns can be used for hunting or for sport-shooting in Canada, and there are lots of gun owners, and they're mostly law-respecting and law abiding, but you can't use a gun for self-protection in Canada. That's not a right that you have in the constitution or anywhere else.

 

It would be interesting to know if he really believes this or if he was just shooting his mouth off without thinking.     It is, of course, nonsense.   Canadians do indeed have a constitutional and legal right of self-protection and when a right is explicitly spelled out as such in constitution and law the implicit corollary is the right to employ such means as the explicit right may require.   Trudeau may be under the mistaken impression that his father’s Charter is the Canadian constitution, a mistake about which I shall have more to say shortly, but even if we limit our discussion of the constitution to the Charter his statement would be wrong.   Section 7 of the Charter by spelling out Canadians right to security of the person, recognizes their right of self-protection.   Furthermore, the Firearms Act recognizes self-protection as a legitimate grounds for a firearms permit (Section 20) and the Criminal Code (Sections 34, 35) acknowledges the right to use force to protect one’s person and property. 

 

The Charter of Rights and Freedoms, properly understood, of course, is not Canada’s constitution, but a part of Canada’s constitution that was added in 1982.   Even the British North America Act, which, contrary to what many mistakenly think was not repealed in 1982 but renamed (the Constitution Act, 1867), taken together with the Charter, is only part of our constitution.   In Canada, we have a constitution that is both written and unwritten, and the unwritten parts are the largest.   The Charter itself acknowledges that its enactment does not annul other rights and freedoms than those spelled out it in it, that Canadians had previously enjoyed as part of our constitutional heritage of Common Law and parliamentary monarchy.   The right to use firearms in self-protection was already part of that heritage before the American Revolution and was not invented by the United States.   The only thing distinctively American about the United States’ version of the idea of the right to use firearms in self-protection is the notion that the right is absolute.   That people have the basic rights of life, liberty, and property, and the necessary corollary right to protect the same, and consequently the right to the means to such protection was recognized by both the Tory (Sir William Blackstone) and Whig (John Locke) traditions before the latter gave birth to both the American Revolution and the Liberal Party, which, for all of Trudeau’s yap about American influence on Canada, has always been the party of Americanization.

 

There is a tendency in some Christian circles to misinterpret the teachings of Christ in way that is parallel to how Trudeau misinterprets the Canadian constitution and law.   These misguided brethren have the idea that not merely the use of guns but self-protection in general is forbidden believers by Jesus’ teachings (the Sermon on the Mount specifically), and example (He allowed Himself to be arrested, falsely accused, tortured, and crucified without resisting).  In an extreme form that is associated with the tradition of the far left radical wing of the continental Protestant Reformation this interpretation of Jesus’ teachings and example is taken to mean that Christians cannot serve as policemen, soldiers, or in any other office of the state that requires the use of force.

 

With regards to the Sermon on the Mount this misinterpretation arises from the basic error of failing to give due weight to Matthew 5:17-19 or to note how these verses apply to what immediately follows in the remainder of the chapter.   These verses are the warning not to think that Jesus had come to abolish the Law or the Prophets but to fulfil them.   They come before Jesus’ saying that one’s righteousness must exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees to enter the Kingdom of Heaven and His expansion upon what that entails with a series of six contrasts in which one variation or another of the words “ye have heard that it was said to them of old time” introduces a quotation from the Old Testament, and then Jesus introduces the other side of the contrast with “but I say to you”.   These latter words are ἐγὼ δὲ λέγω ὑμῖν in the Greek.   δὲ λέγω ὑμῖν means “but I say to you” without the ἐγὼ and ἐγὼ like all other nominative case personal pronouns in Greek is only used for emphasis.   By emphasizing the first person pronoun in this way, in this sort of contrast, Jesus declares His Own authority in speaking to be on par with that of the Old Testament Scriptures.   This format could easily suggest to some minds that Jesus was telling His followers to disregard the Old Testament and listen to Him instead.   Verses 17 to 19 warn His hearers against taking His words in that manner. 

 

With regards to the first two contrasts, in which the Old Testament quotations are taken from the Decalogue, there is less need of such a warning since what follows the “but I say to you” intensifies the meaning of the quoted commandment.   The third and fourth contrasts, however, could easily be taken as contradicting the Old Testament commandments.    The quotations come from the civil portion of the Mosaic Law, the instructions with regards to divorce and swearing oaths.   Jesus tells His followers that anyone who divorces his wife except for the cause of fornication causes her and anyone who marries her to commit adultery, and tells them not to swear at all.   Verses 17 to 19 tell us that this is not to be taken as annulling the civil provisions of the Mosaic Law.   Therefore, when Jesus said “swear not at all” this had nothing to do with the courtroom, as those sects whose members won’t take the oath before testifying in court wrongly think, but with oaths in common conversation.   Swearing on a Bible to “tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” does not violate Jesus’ instructions.   Saying “by gum” in casual conversation does.   (3)

 

The same principle applies to the last couplet of contrasts.   In the first of these, the Old Testament quotation is the Lex Talionis “an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth”.  In the second the quotation is the Second Greatest Commandment, to love your neighbour.   Note that in this final contrast, in addition to the Old Testament quotation there is added the words “and hate thine enemy”, a false extrapolation from the Old Testament commandment, and it is this false extrapolation to which Jesus speaks with His “but I say to you” which here directly contradicts the unscriptural add-on with the instruction to “love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully use you and persecute you.”.

 

It is Jesus’ “but I say to you” remarks in this last couplet of contrasts that is taken by some to mean that Christians are not allowed to protect themselves against violence.   What do verses 17 to 19 tell us about Jesus’ instructions to turn the other cheek?

 

The first thing to note, is that clearly verses 17 to 19 tell us that Jesus was not setting aside the Lex Talionis as the standard of criminal justice to be applied in a court of law.   Since that is the case, the extreme interpretation that says that Jesus’ followers are not serve as officers of law enforcement or any other state office the duties of which require the use of force is a twisting of the meaning of this passage.  

 

The second thing to note is that just as clearly “But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also” cannot be speaking about protecting oneself against the violent attacks of others.  This is because the right of self-protection was established in the Mosaic Law.   Exodus 22 is the operative passage.   If somebody breaks into another person’s house in the middle of the night, that person – the homeowner not the burglar – is not guilty of a crime if he uses lethal force against the housebreaker.   It was a limited right – it lasted only to daybreak after which the homeowner would be guilty, presumably because other options than lethal force would then be available – rather than an absolute right, but it is there and therefore,  we can conclude from Matthew 5:17-19, that the instruction to turn the other cheek does not forbid such self-protection.    Indeed, this should be apparent from Jesus’ very words.   The verb translated “smite” is ῥαπίζω and while this word did originally mean “strike with a stick” – it is derived from a noun meaning “stick” or “rod” – or “cudgel” or “thrash”, it later came to be used as shorthand for the phrase ἐπὶ κόρρης πατάξαι which more or less means “knock upside the head” and in writings contemporaneous with the New Testament generally means a “slap in the face”.   This is what it means here in the Gospel where the right cheek is specifically mentioned.   This particular combination refers not to an attack on the security of one’s person, but to an insult, the kind of insult that affronts one’s honour and challenges one to a duel.  To accept that challenge is to take a situation in which a confrontation has been building up in words and escalate it into violence, potentially lethal violence.   The response prescribed by Jesus, however, is one that would defuse such a powder keg.   It is quite perverse, therefore, to take Jesus’ words here as forbidding you from taking measures to protect yourself in situations that are already violent.

 

This brings us to Jesus’ Own example.   There are a number of important observations to be made.   The first of these is that Jesus clearly did not believe that the use of force is never called for in any situation.   Had He thought that way He would not have overturned the tables of the money-changers and drove the merchants out of the Temple.   The second, is that prior to His meekly submitting to arrest He commanded His disciples to procure for themselves the means of self-protection by selling their clothes if necessary (Luke 22:36, from which the title of this essay is taken).   The third is that His submission to being arrested, falsely charged, falsely convicted, tortured, and crucified was necessary because it was through these events that He fulfilled the purpose for which He came into this world in the first place, to offer Himself up as the propitiatory sacrifice for the sins of the whole world.  

 

Related to this last observation is one that can be made about Jesus’ early followers, both in the New Testament and in the early centuries of post-New Testament Christian history.   While it is true that the early Christians submitted to being tortured, imprisoned, and killed for Jesus’ sake, the most important words here are “for Jesus’ sake”.   Jesus had warned His followers at various times, such as in the Olivet Discourse and in the earlier original commissioning of the Twelve Apostles (and later the Seventy), that thy would be persecuted in this manner because of His name and told them that they would be blessed and rewarded for this.   The early Christians rejoiced at the opportunity to suffer for Christ in this way.   All of this, however, had to do with their being treated in this way because they were Christians, because they publicly confessed and proclaimed Christ.   If a disciple were walking down a street in ancient Corinth and were pulled into an alley and beaten and robbed of everything he had on him and left to die, not because he was a Christian but because the robber who neither knew nor cared what his religious beliefs were wanted some quick cash, this did not make a martyr out of that disciple.   When the early Christians qua Christians, were persecuted, tortured, and killed in the name of the Christ they confessed, by submitting to such treatment they bore witness to that Christ, and by doing so persuaded many others of the truth of their faith.   Just as good came out of the sufferings and death of Jesus Christ, in that His death paid for the sins of the world and made salvation available to all, so good came out of the martyrdom of His followers which contributed to the spread of the Gospel throughout the ancient world.   The willingness of the early Christians to submit to martyrdom or rather to embrace it – St. Ignatius of Antioch, a disciple of St. John the Apostle, is said to have yearned for martyrdom his entire Christian life and mourned when he survived earlier persecutions than the one in which he finally attained it – should not therefore be taken as evidence that they thought they needed to submit without resisting to any and every act of violence.   While the death of Jesus Christ accomplished the salvation of the world and the martyrdom of the early Christians helped the Gospel to spread like wildfire, most types of violent deaths – robbing someone for his wallet, murdering someone in a fit of rage, the cold-blooded assassination of your business or political rivals, killing someone in a drunken or drug-induced brawl, etc. – accomplish no such good.   To submit to such acts can indeed do evil to others.   If you give in to the demands of a bully, for example, he will generally not be satisfied and leave you alone, but will continue to bully you more and demand more of you, and will be emboldened to bully others, until someone stands up to him.   This applies to other forms of violent aggression as well.   Those who erroneously think that the teachings and example of Jesus and His early followers tell us that we ought to submit in non-resistance to every sort of violent crime are telling us that we should be content to allow our neighbours to suffer from society being overrun by violent crime.   That is an odd way of loving one’s neighbour.  The Second Greatest Commandment, of course, is to “love thy neighbour as thyself”.   If someone’s idea of loving himself is that he should allow everyone and everything to walk all over him, submit to every sort of affront to his human dignity, and let every imaginable sort of violent crime be perpetrated against himself, I would not place much stock in his love for his neighbour.

 

 (1)   This terminology might confuse readers from the United States if they are not aware of the difference between their usage and ours. In the Commonwealth to “table” a bill means to introduce it in parliament for consideration, i.e., to “put it on the table”.   In American parlance it has the opposite meaning, to remove a bill from consideration, or to “take it off the table”.

(2)   Amusingly, one gun which somehow made it onto the Liberals’ list of guns to be banned is something called the “Butt Master”.   This gun is pretty much the exact opposite of a gun designed to kill as many people as fast as possible.   It is a single use gun in the shape of a pen that has to be re-loaded each time it is fired.  Moreover, there has only ever been one of these in existence, the one still owned by its designer, Mark Serbu of Tampa, Florida.  

(3)  This is, of course, where the word “swearing” in the negative sense of the term comes from.   Originally, “swearing” in the negative sense meant the use of oaths outside of a courtroom.   Some older Canadians may still remember a time when they would be reprimanded for swearing for saying any of the various sorts of “by this or that” casual oaths.   Ironically, as the word came to take on the generic meaning of “language you shouldn’t use” so as to include cursing, which Scripture is also against, and barnyard or gutter slang about which the Scripture is silent, the sorts of phrases it originally and literally described, dropped out of what most people think when they hear the word.