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.

Stanley, Chauvin, and the New Barbarism

 Three years ago, when Saskatchewan farmer Gerald Stanley was acquitted of the charges of second-degree murder and manslaughter for having shot the twenty-two year old Colten Boushie when the latter with a posse of friends had invaded his farm, I spoke strongly against those who publicly denounced the verdict, including the Prime Minister and the  then Minister of Justice Jody Wilson-Raybould, and, indeed, said that the Prime Minister and Minister of Justice ought to resign or be made to resign over their remarks.    That I disagreed with them about the case and the verdict – I thought and still think that the RCMP were wrong to charge Stanley in the first place, that the case ought never to have made it to trial, and that “not guilty” was the only sane verdict possible – was only part of my reason for taking that stance.   There was also the fact that for Trudeau and Wilson-Raybould to politicize the verdict in the way in which they did was an abuse of their office.   Ironically, less than a year after this, Trudeau and Wilson-Raybould would find themselves on the opposite sides of a huge scandal about political interference in the affairs of the criminal justice system.   In this scandal, Wilson-Raybould accused Trudeau of inappropriately pressuring her to retroactively apply to an ongoing case certain changes that had just been snuck through Parliament by being tagged on to a spending bill so as to benefit a large corporate donor to the Liberal Party that was under prosecution for bribing a foreign government.    In this scandal, Wilson-Raybould was in the right in resisting Trudeau’s pressure but in the earlier incident, the two of them had both been guilty of political interference in the criminal justice system and in a much worse way.   As bad as politicians putting pressure on prosecutors to extend leniency may be it is far worse for them to denounce jury acquittals.   This is because doing the latter is a dangerous affront to the most basic principles of our criminal justice system, the very principles which distinguish civilized legal justice from tribal blood vengeance.   These principles prioritize the protection of the innocent over the punishment of the guilty by giving everyone the right to a fair trial when accused of a crime, placing the burden of proof upon the prosecution, and entitling the accused to a dismissal of the charges if the conditions of a fair trial cannot be met and an acquittal if the prosecution cannot meet the standard of proof.   Boushie’s family and several Native Indian organizations were taking the position that the acquittal was unjust because Native Indians were not represented on the jury due to the prospective jurors of this ethnicity having evinced prejudice against the defendant that disqualified them from performing that civic duty.   In their public display of support for this position, Trudeau and Wilson-Raybould were basically saying that the system needed to be changed to make it harder for the accused to be acquitted by weakening his right to a trial by an unbiased jury.    

 

This week the verdict was announced in the trial of Derek Chauvin.   In this case the verdict was guilty.   Chauvin was found guilty of three charges – unintentional second degree murder, third degree murder, and manslaughter – despite there having been only one body.    As strange as that seems it might perhaps simply be the latest stage in the apotheosis of George Floyd.   When Floyd died in police custody in Minneapolis last year he was at first proclaimed a victim of racism and police brutality but has since climbed the ladder to martyrdom and then sainthood.     If he has now been deified and made into a trinity that would explain his death being treated as a three-in-one.    

 

Greg Gutfeld of Fox News responded to the verdict by saying “I’m glad that [Chauvin] was found guilty on all charges, even if he might not be guilty of all charges”.   The exact opposite of this is the just and sane position to take – that Chauvin should have been acquitted of all charges even if he was guilty of all charges.

 

The reason this is the only just and sane position is because of the same principles discussed with regards to the Stanley acquittal in the first paragraph.   There was not the slightest possibility of Chauvin having received a fair trial, therefore the principles of justice say that he ought not to have been tried at all and that he is entitled to be cleared of all charges.

 

As it so happens, the evidence does not support the conclusion that Chauvin was guilty of any of these charges.  Floyd had committed a crime and resisted arrest, which was why he found himself on the ground being restrained.   The knee-hold restraint Chauvin used was a nasty looking one but it was not lethal.   The police bodycam video shows that his knee was not on Floyd’s neck as it appeared from the angle of the bystander video that went viral but on his shoulder blade.   It was clearly not the reason Floyd couldn’t breathe and at any rate the video shows that Floyd’s breathing troubles had started before he was on the ground and under this restraint.   There were at least three other factors that were more likely to have contributed to his breathing difficulties than the police hold.   One of these was Floyd’s heart condition, another was the amount of fentanyl in his blood – three times higher than the dosage that nobody has ever survived.    The third factor was his infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus.  A difficulty in breathing is one of the main symptoms of the disease this virus produces when it bothers to produce a disease at all.   For over a year now every death that occurred to someone infected with this virus was counted a COVID-19 death even if other morbidity factors included automobile accident injuries, gunshot wounds, or being eaten by wild animals.   George Floyd, who was experiencing symptoms at the time of death that actually correlate with those known to be caused by the virus, is the sole exception of which I am aware.

 

Even if none of this was the case however and Chauvin’s knee actually had caused Floyd’s death he still should never have been charged and tried.   I don’t say this because he is a cop.   I say it because the media, professional and social, had already tried and convicted him in their own forum within a day of Floyd’s death.   If this were not sufficient in itself to preclude his ever having a fair trial before an unprejudiced jury, the long hot summer of rioting and violence in Minneapolis and other major American urban centres constituted mass intimidation of prospective jurors.   Then there was the blatant interference in the outcome of the trial by American political leaders including the present occupant of the White House and, most notoriously, Californian Congresswoman Maxine Waters.   Unlike Trudeau and Wilson-Raybould in the Stanley trial, these did not wait to make their inappropriate remarks as ex post facto commentary on the verdict, but instead made them prior to the jury’s deliberation.

 

The trials of Gerald Stanley and Derek Chauvin were heavily politicized due to the racial aspect of the trials.  Stanley and Chauvin are white men, Colten Boushie was a Native Indian and George Floyd was black.   To the progressive commentators, activists, and politicians who politicized these trials, this was all that was necessary to come to the conclusion that racially-motivated murder had been committed.   All this demonstrates, however, is just how toxic the racist ideology of progressives has become.   When you politicize a trial in this way, refusing to allow the courts to do their job and decide the outcome based on law and evidence, but instead demand a guilty verdict for reasons of racial politics, the consequence of your own actions is that the only just outcome of the trial is dismissal or an acquittal regardless of actual guilt or innocence on the part of the accused.   A guilty verdict, under these circumstances, would amount to a lynching.

 

The principles that I have defended in this essay are the principles that underlie justice in civilization.   While those who have been demanding Chauvin’s head have been framing their demands in terms of “racial justice” this is not really justice in the civilized sense of the term at all, but a tribal blood vengeance that elevates blood and skin colour over law, evidence, rights and due process.   This is a sign indicating a rapid slide into barbarism, one of several that we have seen recently.  The insane drive to erase history (1) which kicked into high gear at the same time and in conjunction with the George Floyd riots is another.   Ironically, the institution that the Left, seizing the opportunity afforded them by George Floyd’s death, sought to indict alongside the man Chauvin, the police, is also indicative of the decay of civilization into barbarism.   In this case it is the slower, more gradual, decay over the course of the Modern era that is indicated.   The police in the modern sense of the term is a semi-military force employed by government to spy on its own people in order to terrorize them into obedience.   Like the near ubiquitous false equation of democracy – mob rule – with constitutionally restrained government, the police are an indication of how we have gradually moved from civilization towards barbarism in its totalitarian form in the Modern era.  (2)   What we are seeing now in the racialized bloodlust against Chauvin is a much faster move into barbarism in its anarchistic form.   Both forms of barbarism are equally undesirable with the paradoxical combination of the two, which the late Sam Francis dubbed anarcho-tyranny, being the worst of all barbarisms.   This is the barbarism into which we are rapidly descending.

 

(1)   While the past itself cannot be erased, history, as John Lukacs defined it, “the remembered past” can.

(2)   Totalitarianism is the idea that we, our lives, and our persons are the property of the state which has the right to do with us whatever it wishes.  It is a Modern idea, the reverse side of the coin of Modern democracy, the idea that the people are collectively sovereign and the state is the voice of the people.  The Modern concept of democracy is not compatible with the civilized ideal of constitutional limits or restraints on government.  Totalitarianism is its inevitable logical conclusion.   The civilized ideal is compatible only with the ancient, prescriptive, institutions of monarchy and parliament.   In practice, totalitarianism requires the Modern police to impose the “general will” of the people.   This is why totalitarian states are often called police states.   The police, by contrast with the civilized institutions of monarchy and parliament, is a fundamentally barbaric institution, which is one reason why it tends to draw bullies, thugs, and other low-life scum into its ranks, offering them a quasi-legitimate venue for indulging their violent and criminal tendencies.    Ironically, Derek Chauvin may very well be one of the few police officers who does not deserve to spend the rest of his life in gaol.

Satan is the Author of the New Normal

As a filmmaker, M. Night Shyamalan is best known for his directorial work.   He directed The Sixth Sense (1999), Unbreakable (2000), and Signs (2002), to list a mere three of his better known films.   He also wrote these films and was one of the producers of Signs.    His oeuvre is characterized by suspense-filled storylines that incorporate supernatural themes often with a dramatic plot twist towards the end.

 

My favourite Shyamalan film to date, however, is one that came out ten years ago under the title Devil.  Shyamalan wrote the basic story and produced the film, but Brian Nelson wrote the screenplay and John Eric Dowdle directed.   It is on the short side being only slightly over an hour and a quarter long.  That it was generally panned by those reviewers whose opinions I respect the least merely confirmed my admiration for it.   Since the film is ten years old a spoiler alert is probably unnecessary, but just in case, be warned that in the next paragraph I am about to give the entire plot away.

 

The story is narrated by one of the characters, a Roman Catholic Hispanic security guard (Jacob Vargas) who works for the high rise building where the main events take place.   The narration starts at the beginning, although we don’t learn the identity of the narrator until part-way through.   He tells about a story that he had heard as a child about the “devil’s meeting”, in which the devil would come to earth, gather together a number of particularly bad sinners in one place, and torture and kill them off one by one, leaving the worst for last, before dragging them off to hell.   Knowing the story, he is the only one able to recognize what is happening all around him.  Someone hurls himself from the top of the building, signaling the arrival of the devil.   Then five people get stuck in the high rise’s elevator.   At the same time the communications system comes down with a few quirky bugs.   The people in the elevator can hear the people in the security monitoring station but not the other way around.   Meanwhile, the people in the station can see what is going on in the elevator except when it blacks out at intervals.   It is during those intervals, of course, that the people in the elevator are killed off, one by one.    The police detective (Chris Messina) who was already there to investigate the suicide, is called in to try and figure out who is committing the murders.   Needless to say, he pays little heed to the security guard who tries to tell him the devil is doing it all.   He is not himself a religious man and, indeed, when he is introduced in the film, we learn that he is bitter against the very idea of God because on an incident five years earlier when a driver in a hit-and-run had killed his wife and son.   This comes up in the context of a conversation with a Christian friend or colleague who is trying to persuade him to let go of his bitterness, forgive the killer, and turn to God.   Not being open to the security guard’s interpretation, he attempts to use his detective skills to figure out what is going on, but latches on to the wrong suspect.   The trapped people are killed off, until his suspect is the last one left, seemingly confirming his theory.   It is at this point, however, that one of the other people in the elevator, an old woman who had died earlier, comes back to life and reveals herself to be the devil.   The last of the devil’s prey, thinking that it is the end for himself, uses the communications system which suddenly comes back online to confess his having been the hit-and-run driver who had killed the detective’s family years before.  The devil, who can no longer claim the repentant sinner, vanishes.   The film’s conclusion has the detective take the survivor into custody.  As he drives him away he informs him that it was his family that had been killed in the hit-and-run.   Then, reflecting on the conclusion of the security guard’s narration – that the story is actually a reassuring one, because “if the devil is real, God must also be real”, he tells him he forgives him.  

 

I will point out, in passing, the rather amusing and delicious irony that in Hollywood, of which it would be very difficult to imagine an environment more hostile to Christianity, it took a Hindu storyteller  to be able to get away with making a movie that preached as overt a Christian message as this one.

 

That the reality of the devil is proof of the greater reality of God is precisely the message that is most needed today.   We are living in the year of the “new normal.”    While this expression was coined to describe the intolerable new rules that have been imposed upon us in the name of fighting the bat flu it is has not escaped the observation of those paying attention that conditions under the new normal bear a remarkable resemblance to those which the environuts have wanted to make permanent for decades.   The cynical among us might be forgiven for suspecting that, having failed to convince enough people to go along with their anti-freedom, anti-community, anti-family, anti-faith, anti-human agenda with the Bogeyman of anthropogenic climate change, they slapped a scary new label on the latest strain of influenza, lied through their teeth about how dangerous it is – it is more dangerous to people over 65 with multiple co-morbidities but less dangerous to people under 65 with no such conditions – and found success with their new Bogeyman.   It is also evident, for anybody willing to see what is right before their eyes, that there is a close connection between the new normal of the pandemic measures and the other major news item of the year, the “Year Zero” assault upon Western institutions, civilization, and history by Cultural Maoists.   When George Floyd became the one person infected with SARS-CoV-2 this year to have his death attributed to anything other than COVID-19, and Black Lives Matter and Antifa took this as their pretext to hold racist, anti-white, hate rallies in cities throughout the Western world, rallies which typically broke out into violent, destructive, riots, the public health officers who had imposed the new normal on us, gave their imprimatur to all of this while telling all of the rest of us that we still had to follow the social distancing, lockdown, protocols.

 

In the twenty-first and twenty-second chapters of the Book of Revelation, St. John records his vision of the new heavens and the new earth after the end of history, the defeat of Satan, and the Final Judgement.    In that vision, the New Jerusalem, of which an extended description is given, descends from heaven to earth.   The significance of this inspired glimpse of the eschaton, is that in eternity future, after evil has been defeated once and for all, heaven and earth will be one.

 

What we are seeing today can best be described as a Satanic inversion of that vision.   The new normal, in which the whole world becomes a prison, in which such good things as family gatherings, getting together with your friends, throwing parties, having large weddings and funerals, celebrating Easter and Christmas, assembling in Church, singing God’s praises, partaking of the Sacrament, and basically all normal social and physical interaction are forbidden to us, outward symbols of bondage and slavery – masks – are required of us, and every violent and criminal act on the part of “antiracist” thugs and terrorists is encouraged, is hell arising to swallow the old earth.

 

There are many who, recognizing the horror of the totalitarian new normal being imposed upon us, attribute it to human conspiracy.    While all of these events certainly give every appearance of fitting into some grand master plan, and unquestionably human agency is involved, the problem with this interpretation, which is, indeed, the problem with all conspiracy theories of this nature, is that are simply too many human agents with too many conflicting interests and goals, for the ultimate, overarching, agenda to have been caused by a single group of human schemers.   The intelligence which is clearly directing these human agents must be a superhuman one.  

 

St. Paul, in the eleventh chapter of his Second Epistle to the Church in Corinth, writes:

 

For such are false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into the apostles of Christ.   And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light.  Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers also be transformed as the ministers of righteousness; whose end shall be according to their works. (vv. 13-15)

 

The ministers of Satan in these verses are the people who have been troubling the Corinthian Christians, claiming an Apostolic authority that was not their own, and questioning that of genuine Apostles like St. Paul.   It would be most reasonable, however, to expect that what St. Paul says about them here, that they follow Satan’s example of disguising himself as being on the side of light, is also true of his other servants.  

 

This is the pattern we are seeing everywhere in the establishment of the new normal.     Tremendous evil is being done and passed off as good.    Locking people in their homes, criminalizing social contact, driving local retailers and restaurants into insolvency, selling future generations into slavery with the record public debt being accumulated, training people to fear human contact, snitch on their friends, family, and neighbours, and bully strangers into conformity with the most ridiculous of petty rules and restrictions, all of which is the kind of evil associated with totalitarian regimes like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, is being done in the name of “saving lives”, even though it has driven suicide rates up and likely caused more deaths due to loneliness among the nursing home population than the actual virus, which has not itself produced any significant amount of excess mortality this year.   Those who are deliberately stirring up violent, and sometimes explicitly genocidal, rage against white people, claim to be fighting “white supremacy” and “Nazism” even though they themselves are the only real racism problem in Western civilization today.    As for the environuts, their real agenda, which is to get people to stop reproducing and start dying so that there will be far fewer people on the earth and those few far poorer, they hide behind the mask of saving the planet, which has survived millennia of climate change including Ice Ages and periods a heck of a lot warmer than the one they claim we are entering through excess carbon dioxide production.

 

They are disguising themselves as angels of light, just like their master, the devil.

 

Earlier this month Dr. Bruce Charlton had the following insight into what has been going on this year:

 

Currently, as of 2020, the ideological-religious Litmus Tests - i.e. the three major planks of acute, 'emergency' Leftism - are, in order: 

1. To believe in the deadliness of the birdemic and the need for societal lock-down-social-conditioning-masking-etc; which schema justified the Leftist totalitarian global coup, and the consequent near-annihilation of Church Christianity, across all denominations.

2. To assert the antiracist ('MLB') agenda. Indeed, not explicitly to repudiate this ideology is (in practice) sufficient evidence of Leftism.

3. To believe the Anthropogenic Global Warming/ Climate change ideology - which is the basis of the UN Agenda 2030 and the 'Great Reset'. These are intended to lock-into-place the New Normal.

If you support any of all of these; you are objectively on-the-side of mainstream, global, totalitarian Leftist Establishment: which is the side of Satan and against God. And obviously, therefore, you are anti-Christian - despite whatever you may believe or assert. (bold indicates italics in post)

 

I concur entirely.

 

Which brings us back to the moral of our Hindu filmmaker’s Christian horror movie.   If the devil is real, and he is, God is real too.   Not, however, in some dualistic sense, as in the Manichean heresy, where good and evil are equals which require each other.   God is more real than the devil, indeed more real than any part of Creation, for He is Eternal Being.   Everything else that is derives its being from Him.   The devil is a created being, and like all created beings, was created good.   He lessened his own being, when he corrupted his nature through sin.   To side with him, is to take the side that has been doomed to defeat from the very beginning.   Although the pressure to conform to Satan’s new normal is immense, to do so is the ultimate self-destructive act.

 

Don’t side with the devil.

Narrative, Fact, and “Fake News”

Suppose that you were to pick up a copy of the long-standing Liberal Party propaganda sheet that is considered to be Manitoba’s “newspaper of record” one day. I don’t know why you would bother. Let us say that you do it on a dare. The front page headline catches your eye:

 “Common Grackle Nears Extinction”.

 As it so happens, a specimen of said species has been annoying you all morning long with its obnoxious excuse for birdsong, (1) and this is far from being an uncommon occurrence.

 Intrigued but skeptical, you read on. The story that accompanies the headline tells you that the branch of the Manitoba government that keeps track of provincial avian populations has become alarmed at the shrinking percentage of Quiscalus quiscula versicolor – the local “bronzed” version of the Common Grackle – within the total bird population. Statistics are provided that demonstrate that each year for the past fifteen years it has dropped at least one rank on the catalogue of the most common birds in the province.

 “If this trend keeps up”, the Province’s Chief Ornithologist is quoted as saying “the Common Grackle will eventually be extinct. There are just under four hundred species of birds in this province. If the grackle continues to drop in rank, even by only one level a year, it will be practically extinct in less than four centuries, since it was not at the very top to begin with.”

The ornithologist and the article then go on to insist that urgent action is needed to prevent this imminent catastrophe.

You, having noticed that among the statistics cited in the article can be found the fact that whatever its percentage of the total bird population might happen to be, its own population size has not undergone a significant drop in absolute numbers within the province of Manitoba during the years in question, recognize that this is the only meaningful fact in the entire story and that it completely invalidates the “spin” of the narrative. 

You crumple the newspaper up and throw it away in disgust.

 Later that day, however, you find the same story is being highlighted on every local television news station. To your amazement, it continues to get top billing the next day, and the day after that as well. Polls are taken, which indicate that the vast majority of Manitobans agree that something must be done to “save the grackle.” This persists for week after week. You attempt, through a letter to the editor, to draw people’s attention to the narrative-invalidating fact, but are quickly branded a “denier” of the impending grackle holocaust, and start receiving threatening phone calls and e-mails, so you decide to leave the masses to their own irrational stupidity.

Now, the above scenario is, of course, fiction. The Common Grackle is classified by the conservationists as “Near Threatened”, which is the second lowest of their low risk categories. Its total North American population began to decline in the last half of the last century, after experiencing a boom in the first half. This is why it is not classified with the “Least Concern” category, but it is not likely to jump into any of the “Threatened” categories, or even the “Conservation Dependent,” for the simple reason that this species thrives on the kind of human activity – especially agricultural land development – that the conservationists argue endangers many other species. This partially explains both the boom and the decline of the last century. The decline of the population over the entire continent has not been reflected in the local population in this province – the narrative-invalidating fact from the fictional scenario is indeed a fact, even though the scenario itself is made-up.

The point of all of the above, if it is not already obvious, has nothing to do with grackles, birds of any sort, or conservation. It is about how people gullibly swallow media narratives even if the stories containing the narratives also include hard facts which completely invalidate them.

 Two obvious examples come to mind from this year alone. Beginning in March, the same mass media which two months earlier had labelled all talk of closing of travel in and out of China as “racist”, as soon as the World Health Organization declared a “pandemic” began pushing the narrative that the WHO’s recommendations – a universal quarantine/house arrest with the economically devastating closure of all business arbitrarily declared to be non-essential, and the socially/culturally/psychologically/morally devastating transfer of social interaction onto the internet to be draconically enforced by special enforcers armed with obscenely high fines and the encouragement of the kind of snitch-on-your-family-friends-and-neighbours culture previously associated with totalitarian regimes like the Third Reich and the Soviet Union – was the only option other than doing nothing at all. Since the world has survived previous pandemics without resorting to anything remotely close to this, the obvious implication of the media-peddled narrative of the “necessity” of this lockdown is that this pandemic is worse that all previous ones. The hard facts about the virus, however, from the same media sources, even the limited ones available back in March, never supported this thesis. Facts such as that a large percentage of people infected with the virus are completely asymptomatic, that the majority of those who do experience symptoms experience nothing more severe than the flu, and that even for those who do contract the harsh SARS form of pneumonia from the virus the risk of dying is quite low apart from the combination of age and multiple complicating health factors. What these facts all screamed was that even if this virus turned out to be more fatal than the seasonal flu, it is more comparable to the seasonal flu than to previous, far worse, pandemics. Which, of course, completely invalidates the narrative spin that says that inflicting all of this other damage upon our countries by embracing this form of medical totalitarianism was needed. Yet everywhere you go, you encounter people who accept that narrative, in spite of the facts.

The other example is that of the media narrative of the “peaceful protests” that Black Lives Matter organized following the death of George Floyd. Even as the media was telling us that these were peaceful protests, and that only fascists would consider the idea of quelling them by force, they could hardly cover up the arson, looting, vandalism and violence that accompanied these “protests” in most major American cities. Nor could they hide the fact that as these “protests” spread beyond American borders throughout all of Western Civilization, they began more and more to resemble the attempts by the Jacobins, Maoists, and Khmer Rouge – groups that belong at the top of the list of the most destructive and murderous of all of history’s revolutionaries - to raze history to the ground. All of which completely belies the description of these “protests” as “peaceful.”

In the last few years “fake news” has become a household expression. It has two primary meanings which are the polar opposites of each other. Captain Airhead uses the expression to refer to the spread of information in support of views which conflict with the narratives pushed by the mainstream media. The other meaning, of course, is that those narratives themselves are the “fake news.”

The events of this year have made it obvious for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, which of these two is the real “fake news.”

The question is whether anyone is left who has eyes to see and ears to hear.

 (1) My maternal great-aunt Hazel, before she moved out of her house, had a clock which would chime with a different birdsong for each hour of the day. When I would visit her there, and the clock would go off, we would look at it and I would make the joke “this clock is missing a few birds – where is the grackle, magpie, and raven?” Her answer would always be some variation of “if this clock had a grackle, it would be in the garbage.”

Re-Open the Churches Now!

On Monday, June 15th, the provincial government of Manitoba announced that it was extending the state of emergency that we have been under since March for another thirty days. There had been no new cases of the bat flu from China reported that day. The total number of deaths from this virus in Manitoba remains at seven. There are, as of the afternoon of Friday June 19th, nine active cases in the province. Two hundred ninety-three people have recovered. Nobody is currently hospitalized here, let alone in the Intensive Care Unit, because of this disease. There is clearly no cause for extending the state of emergency. Its original justification, remember, was to prevent hospitals and ICUs from being swamped. This was always a dubious justification for suspending everyone's basic liberties and putting us under universal house arrest. Today, there is clearly no foundation for it whatsoever.

Friday the 19th also marked the fourteenth day after a radical Marxist anti-white, anti-cop hate group that many consider to be a terrorist organization, was allowed to host a rally on the grounds of the provincial legislature. The social distancing rules were not enforced at this rally which was reported to have been attended by a couple of thousand people. This rally was one of many that the same organization has been holding in cities across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Europe since the death of George Floyd. Floyd, a repeat criminal offender with multiple convictions, died of a heart attack on May 25th. Although his death is being treated as a homicide he had overdosed on fentanyl. Fentanyl is a synthetic opiod, related to heroin but much more potent. A dosage of 3 milligrams is fatal and people have been known to die just from touching the stuff or catching a whiff of the fumes. Floyd had 11 nanograms per millilitre in his blood when he died and 5.6 ng/mL of norfentanyl, which is a metabolite of fentanyl. Nobody has yet survived having more than 4.6 ng/mL in his blood. He also had the SARS-CoV-2 virus and has the distinction of being the first person with this virus to have his death attributed to something else. This is because after purchasing a pack of cigarettes with a fake $20 bill, he was arrested as he was entering into a state of Excited Delirium due to the mixture of drugs - he also had methamphetamine, morphine and THC in his blood - in him. In this state he was uncooperative and the police restrained him using a nasty-looking but non-lethal knee hold as they called the paramedics. He had already begun uttering his famous last words "I can't breathe" before officer Chauvin's knee was upon him because he was already entering into the state of respiratory and heart failure that fentanyl overdoses produce. With the amount of drugs in him he would not have survived the day even if the storeowners had called social workers to come and let him talk about his feelings over tea and cookies rather than summoning the police. Nevertheless, thanks to a video of part of the police's encounter with Floyd that portrays the police in the worst possible light, which the mainstream media pounced upon because it supports their lying narrative about how blacks - who commit a much higher percentage of the murders and robberies in the United States every year than their percentage of the population - are unfairly picked on by the police, most people were convinced that a cop murdered Floyd. Black Lives Matter and their Antifa allies took advantage of the outrage thus generated by the media to organize these meetings that they call "rallies" and "protests" but which frequently break out into violent and highly destructive riots. In other words, not something that merits a special dispensation from following all the rules and restrictions that are still being imposed on everyone else.

The significance of the fourteen day marker is that this is the incubation period of the bat virus. This period did not produce a major spike in cases. Quite the contrary, on Friday it was announced that there was no evidence that the virus spread at all during the rally, which mercifully did not devolve into the burning of the city although it was as full of anti-white race hatred rhetoric as any other of these "protests." This eliminates anything that remains of the case for keeping the province in a state of emergency and not immediately lifting all restrictions.

By the way, the period since Floyd's death in which the media has been preoccupied with trying to stir up a race war and burn what remains of Western Civilization to the ground, saw any number of quietly underreported discoveries and admissions from public health organizations that this virus simply was not as dangerous as they were claiming in March.

I remarked weeks ago that the Churches would be the last that these drunk-with-power politicians and health bureaucrats, who consider abortions to be "essential" and have allowed marijuana shops to remain open throughout the lockdown, would allow to reopen. A petition has been started asking the Manitoba government to remove the restrictions on worship. Premier Brian Pallister, when asked about the petition, said that the Churches should "have a little faith."

I wonder if he realizes how blasphemous this is. It could be paraphrased "I want and expect and demand from you that which belongs to God alone."

He also said "We've liberalized our rules and deregulated faster than almost every jurisdiction in the country." In other words, we ought to be grateful that he is loosening tyrannical, totalitarian and draconian rules that should never have been imposed in the first place faster than the other provincial despots.

He also said:

The churches won't make health policy. Dr. Roussin and our health experts are making that health policy and they have good reason for being careful about the restrictions that are necessary to keep us all safe. I think it would be in the best interest for all of us to show respect for that and to make sure that we're, all of us, working together to protect our own health and the health of others.


Dr. Brent Roussin, whom I grew sick of seeing in the news every day as far back as March 21st, allowed thousands of people to gather for an anti-white hate rally two weeks ago, but will only allow Churches to open at 30% capacity as of Monday. That alone is sufficient evidence for me to conclude that he and his experts are incompetent at making health policy.


Brian Pallister and his chief public health officer clearly consider Churches to be less "essential" than doctors who murder unborn babies, stores that sell mind-destroying hemp by-products, and the purveyors of anti-white hate rhetoric. They have actually managed to out-Communist Pierre Trudeau. It was Pierre Trudeau who added the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to Canada's Constitution in 1982. The second section of the Charter identifies conscience, religion, and peaceful assembly among the "fundamental" freedoms of all Canadians. The above mentioned petition simply asks the government to respect those fundamental freedoms. If these freedoms are fundamental then Churches and other places of worship are essential. They ought to have been declared such at the beginning of the unnecessary lockdown, even though, as I argued at the time, the distinction between essential and non-essential is not the government's to make.

In the 365th line of his tenth Satire, Juvenal said "orandum est ut sit mens sana in corpore sano." This means "pray for a sound mind in a healthy body" and alludes to an already extant saying that went back at least as far as Thales of Miletus. It is often used today to convey the message that physical health is important to psychological health, usually to promote exercise, nutrition and other wellness programs. It works the other way around, however, that psychological health is essential to physical health and this is how the ancients used the phrase as is evident in the larger context of Juvenal's poem. The ancients were also not as prone to compartmentalizing the psychological and the spiritual as we in this materialistic age are. Spiritual and psychological health go together and are essential to physical health.

In other words, open up the Churches. The longer they remain closed, the more mental and spiritual breakdowns will occur and manifest themselves in things like anti-white hate rallies, and that will be far worse for our physical health in the long run, than the bat flu from China.