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.

For God So Loved the World That He Gave His Only-Begotten Son

The most familiar and beloved verse in all the Holy Bible is the sixteenth verse of the third chapter of the Gospel according to St. John.   It has been called “the Gospel in a nutshell” and “the Bible in miniature”.   Here it is in the English rendition of the Authorized Bible:

 

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

 

One would think that if there was any verse in Scripture that all Christian believers would agree should be beyond acrimonious disputes about interpretation it would be this one.   That is not however the case.   There have been several such disputes about this verse.   We shall examine three of those here, each having to do with a different word in the Greek text.   Here is that Greek text:

 

Οὕτω γὰρ ἠγάπησεν ὁ θεὸς τὸν κόσμον, ὥστε τὸν υἱὸν αὐτοῦ τὸν μονογενῆ ἔδωκεν,

 ἵνα πᾶς ὁ πιστεύων εἰς αὐτὸν μὴ ἀπόληται ἀλλ' ἔχῃ ζωὴν αἰώνιον.

 

The above is the text as it appears in the Textus Receptus, the text underlying the Authorized Bible.   The Nestle-Aland and UBS critical editions have Οὕτως instead of Οὕτω as the first word and leave out the αὐτοῦ.   Neither of these differences affects the meaning of the text.   Οὕτως and Οὕτω are two different ways of spelling the same word.   Most often the former is used before words beginning with vowels and the latter before words beginning with consonants but it is not a hard rule.    αὐτοῦ is the word that means “his” in “his only begotten son”  (1) but this meaning is implicit in the text even without it.  

 

The easiest of the disputes to dispense with is the one pertaining to the seventh word in the verse, κόσμον.   This is the word for “world” and in the first clause of the verse it stands as the direct object of the verb ἠγάπησεν (“he loved”), with ὁ θεὸς (God) as the subject.   A certain type of Calvinist objects to this word being taken in its ordinary sense in this context but it conflicts with his idea that God only loves a tiny portion of the people of the world, His elect, and hates all the rest, having unalterably determined their eternal damnation from before the beginning of time.    This kind of Calvinist argues that κόσμος does not always mean the world in its entirety but can be used in a more limited sense.    This is true, but it by no means follows from this that the term can be used in the specific limited sense that the Calvinists imply, i.e., as referring to God’s elect.   Technically, the basic meaning of the word is “order”.   It can have the subordinate meanings of “good behaviour” and “government” and can even mean such things as “ornament” and “ruler”.  From the basic meaning of “order”, however, it developed the sense in which it was used in serious abstract thought, i.e., the world or universe, considered in regards to its structure and order.  It is in this sense and its subordinate meanings such as “the present world” (as opposed to that of a future age) “mankind in general” (as opposed to a specific people) and the like that we find it in the New Testament.   “Mankind in general” is the sense in which most people would understand this word in John 3:16 and it is itself a subordinate sense to “universe”.  If the common understanding is erroneous, a strong case could be made based on passages like the eight chapter of Romans that the error is in understanding κόσμος in only this limited sense rather than as meaning all of Creation which clearly is part of God’s redemptive plan.   Another limited sense of the word that is prominently used elsewhere in the New Testament is as the designation of the spiritual forces arrayed against God’s kingdom operating in and through human society.   This could hardly be the sense in which the word is used in John 3:16.   What both of these limited senses of the word have in common is that they both refer to something that is so large in scale that calling it by the name of the whole created order does not seem ludicrous or inappropriate.   This could hardly be said of the hyper-Calvinist interpretation of the word in John 3:16.   Yes, hyper-Calvinist is the appropriate term for the interpretation that “world” in John 3:16 does not mean the whole of mankind but only a select number chosen from out of the whole.   “Hyper-Calvinist” suggests taking the ideas of John Calvin and taking them to an extreme beyond what he himself taught.   Here is what Calvin himself had to say about this in his Commentary as translated by the Rev. William Pringle:

 

That whosoever believeth on him may not perish. It is a remarkable commendation of faith, that it frees us from everlasting destruction. For he intended expressly to state that, though we appear to have been born to death, undoubted deliverance is offered to us by the faith of Christ; and, therefore, that we ought not to fear death, which otherwise hangs over us. And he has employed the universal term whosoever, both to invite all indiscriminately to partake of life, and to cut off every excuse from unbelievers. Such is also the import of the term World, which he formerly used; for though nothing will be found in the world that is worthy of the favor of God, yet he shows himself to be reconciled to the whole world, when he invites all men without exception to the faith of Christ, which is nothing else than an entrance into life.   (bold indicates italics in the original, underlining indicates what I wish to emphasize).

 

Calvin went on to mention election in the sentence that immediately follows this quotation, but unlike many of his followers he had the good sense not to force its intrusion into the meaning of the universal terms within the verse.

 

The next controversy that we shall look at pertains to the word μονογενῆ.   It is the singular masculine accusative form of μονογενής, a third declension adjective belonging to a class of adjectives that are highly irregular even for the third declension.  This is the word translated “only-begotten” in the Authorized Bible.   A great many today insist that this is a mistranslation and modern versions tend to use “only”, “one of a kind” or “unique” in place of “only-begotten”.   I have addressed this in the past in the context of discussing the closely related contemporary theological problem in which many recent prominent evangelical leaders have denied the doctrines of the Eternal Generation and Eternal Sonship of Jesus Christ and taught instead Incarnational Sonship while claiming to be sound Trinitarians, a problem compounded by the fact that an even larger number of evangelical leaders who do not reject Eternal Generation and Sonship have nevertheless accepted the claims of the Incarnational Sonship teachers to be orthodox Trinitarians.   The Eternal Sonship of Jesus Christ is part of the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity, of course.   The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is not merely that the three co-equal, co-eternal, Persons of Father, Son and Holy Spirit are One in Being, but Three in Person, so that as Persons they are distinct from each other, but each is fully God, and the same One God as the other two.   It is also that the three have distinct relations to each other.   None of the three are created, all have no chronological beginning but are co-eternal, however, the Father is neither begotten nor does He proceed from another Person, whereas the Son is begotten of the Father (eternally, not in a moment of time to which there was a before), and the Holy Ghost proceeds in a manner distinct from what the Son’s being begotten denotes from the Father (the entire Church affirms this, the Western Church adds “and the Son” which the Eastern Church considers to be heresy).   If you fail to see the importance of this, note that Incarnational Sonship, taught by the late Walter Martin, and John F. MacArthur Jr. before he recanted, confuses the Persons of the Trinity.   The Agent in the Incarnation is identified in the Gospels of SS Matthew and Luke as the Holy Ghost, and if Jesus’ being the Son is due to the Incarnation and not to His eternal pre-Incarnation relationship with the Father, that makes the Holy Ghost the Father. 

 

With regards to the word μονογενής the claim is made that while this was previously thought to have been formed by adding μό̂νον (only) to γεννάω (beget) it was actually the noun γένος rather than the verb γεννάω that went into the compound adjective’s formation and since γένος means “kind” the adjective means “one of a kind” or “unique” rather than “only-begotten”.   This first thing to observe about this argument is that even if it is correct to say that μονογενής is formed from γένος rather than γεννάω, the conclusion by no means necessarily follows.   While γένος can be translated “kind” this is somewhat misleading.   The first meaning that Liddell and Scott give to this word is “race, stock, kin”, and the other meanings given are arranged in such a way as to indicate that they are all derivatives of this primary meaning.  A clarifying subhead to the first meaning emphasizes that it refers to “direct descent” as opposed to “collateral relationship”.   The second meaning given is “offspring, even of a single descendent”, which the subhead “collectively, offspring, posterity”, and the third meaning is “generally, race, of beings”.   The meaning “class, sort, kind” is the fifth in the list, and the subentries to it demonstrate that even here it is classes, sorts, and kinds of things that are biologically related that is primarily intended.   The significance of all this is that γένος is a noun that incorporates the verbal idea of γεννάω in itself.   This should surprise nobody as the two words are closely etymologically related.   It is not that γένος first means “kind” or “sort” in a general sense and “race” or “kin” is derived from the general meaning through specific application.  It is the other way around.  The word γένος first denotes groups that share a common biological descent and it is by metaphorical extension that the more general sense is arrived at.   In other words the meaning of γεννάω cannot be eliminated from μονογενής simply by tracing the second part of the compound to γένος rather than to γεννάω.

 

A look at how μονογενής was used both in the New Testament and in ancient Greek literature as a whole shows that those who object to rendering this word “only begotten” have no sound scholarly reason to do so.   The adjective appears nine times in total in the New Testament.   Five of these, including the one we have been discussing, refer to Jesus Christ as the μονογενής Son of God.   One is a reference in the book of Hebrews to Abraham’s offering of Isaac.   The other three, all in the Gospel according to St. Luke, are references to children – the son of the widow of Nain, Jairus’ daughter, and the possessed son of the father whom Jesus encountered upon coming down from the Mount of Transfiguration – and in each case μονογενής was used to indicate that the child was the only child of his or her parent.   This same pattern occurs throughout Greek literature as a whole.   The adjective μονογενής is almost as tied to nouns like παῖς, τέκνον, υἱός and θυγάτηρ (child, child, son, daughter) as Homer’s πολύφλοισβος (much roaring) was to θάλασσα (the sea).   This is a strong indicator that the primary meaning of the adjective pertains specifically to children and that when it is used in a more general sense this is the secondary meaning derived from the primary.  

 

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that this insistence that μονογενής means “one of a kind” rather than “only begotten” has less to do with Greek scholarship than with hyper-Protestantism.   Orthodox Protestantism rejects the errors that are distinctive to Rome, especially the Rome of the late Medieval Period, but accepts what is genuinely Catholic, that is to say, the doctrines, practices, etc. that belong to the whole Church going back to the earliest centuries before the major schisms.   Hyper-Protestantism goes beyond this and opposes much that is Catholic as well as that which is distinctively Roman.   Orthodox Protestants confess the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed.   Hyper-Protestants do not all reject the Nicene Creed per se, but their thinking is filled with all sorts of wrong ideas that generate suspicion of the Creed as being too “Catholic”.   It is from this sort of thinking the idea has gained traction in certain evangelical circles that one can have orthodox Trinitarianism without the doctrine of Eternal Generation.   The Fathers of the Nicene and Constantinopolitan Councils of the fourth century had it right, however.   It is because we confess about Jesus that:

 

τὸν ἐκ τοῦ Πατρὸς γεννηθέντα πρὸ πάντων τῶν αἰώνων

 

(He was begotten of the Father before all worlds),

 

and that He is:

 

γεννηθέντα οὐ ποιηθέντα

 

(begotten, not made),

 

that we can confess that He is:

 

ὁμοούσιον τῷ Πατρί

 

(of one substance with the Father).

 

The final dispute that we shall look at concerns the first word in the Greek text, οὕτω.   Again, it makes no difference to the meaning of this word whether it is spelled with the final sigma or not.   This is the word rendered “so” in the Authorized Bible.   It precedes the word for “for” in the Greek, γὰρ, because γὰρ cannot stand in the first position in a Greek clause, although “for” has to stand in the first position in English to convey the same meaning as γὰρ in Greek.   It is frequently maintained that the Authorized Bible misrepresents the meaning of this word in its rendition of the first clause of the verse “For God so loved the world”.   Worded this way, “so” is an expression of extent or degree.  “For God so loved the world” means the same thing as “For God loved the world so much”.   οὕτω, however, means “so” in the sense of “thus” or “in this manner” and so, we have often been told, the Authorized rendition is inaccurate.

 

That οὕτως does indeed mean “thus”, “in this way” or “in this manner” is not in dispute, nor even that this is the primary meaning of the word.   The problem with those who insist that it must have this meaning in this verse is that they maintain that it cannot have the meaning “so much”.   This is demonstrably false, and furthermore, this verse employs the very construction in which οὕτως is most likely to have the meaning of “so much”.  

 

The word οὕτως is the adverbial form of οὕτος.   οὕτος is a demonstrative, or if you prefer the term with Greek rather than Latin roots, a deictic.   Usually classified as pronouns, demonstratives or deictics are words that serve as both pronouns and adjectives.   Unlike most adjectives, however, which ascribe qualities such as “hot”, “red”, “wet”, etc. to nouns, demonstratives point to nouns.   We have two of them in English, each with a singular and plural form – this/these and that/those.   This/these points to something near or pertaining to the speaker and so could be said to be first person.   That/those points to something remote from the speaker and could be said to be third person.   When we need a demonstrative that is second person, that is to say, pointing to something near or pertaining in some way to the person addressed we can use either this or that for this purpose.   In Greek there are three distinct demonstratives, one for each person.   οὕτος is the second person deictic, the one that point to something near or pertaining to the person addressed.  It is also the one that is generally used when you want to point back to something that has just been said, as opposed to pointing forward to what is about to said.  For the latter, the first person personal pronoun which is the definite article compounded with the suffix – δέ is normally used.   Adverbs ordinarily differ from their corresponding adjectives in application rather than meaning.   Think of “quick” and “quickly”.  We use the word “quick” in sentences like “Bob is a quick runner” which ascribe the quality of quickness to persons or things.    We use the word “quickly” in sentences like “Bob ran quickly” which ascribe the same quality to the verb rather than the noun.   Adverbs can also modify adjectives, other adverbs, or even entire sentences such as “Quickly, Bob ran to the bank and took out $100 dollars then went to the store and bought himself an apple” (Bob clearly lived in a time of Trudeau-era inflation).    Just as adding “ly” turns any adjective in English into an adverb, lengthening the final omicron in an adjective into an omega turns it into an adverb in Greek.   This is what we see with οὕτος and οὕτως.   οὕτως, therefore, in its most basic sense, is an adverb that points to verbs, adjectives, clauses, sentences, etc. in the same way that οὕτος points to nouns.   It is to οὕτος, what “thus” is to “this”.

 

While it might seem like that clinches the argument for those who claim that that the οὕτω in John 3:16 means “in this manner” rather than “so much”, note that even in English “thus” is not limited to this meaning.   It is frequently used with the meaning of “therefore” and with reference to extent rather than manner.   “Bob ran thus far” would be an example of thus used with reference to extent.   A familiar example is the saying frequently used in “line-in-the-sand” moments, “thus far, no further”, which is actually a paraphrase of Job 38:11.      Similarly, while the οὕτως was primarily used with reference to manner, this was by no means its only use.  Its second meaning, like that of its English counterpart, was “therefore”, and its third meaning, as given by Liddell and Scott, was “to such an extent, so, so much, so very, so excessively”.   The first example the lexicographers give of this meaning is from the third book of Homer’s Iliad.  This is where Priam, king of Troy, has summoned Helen to the walls and asked her to identify for him a particular warrior among the Achaeans who has caught Priam’s eye.   It turns out that Agamemnon, son of Atreus and commander of the Greek army is the one indicated.  The relevant verse is verse 169 where Priam spells out why the king of Mycenae has so caught his eye:

 

καλὸν δ᾽ οὕτω ἐγὼν οὔ πω ἴδον ὀφθαλμοῖσιν,

 

which means “but so handsome [a man], I have not yet seen with my own eyes”.   

 

Although οὕτω here is modifying an adjective, καλὸν, rather than a verb as in John 3:16, it has precisely the meaning that some have foolishly claimed it cannot have in the Scriptural text.  

 

That οὕτω had not lost this meaning by the time the New Testament was written can be seen in the third verse in the third chapter of St. Paul’s epistle to the Galatians.   This verse begins with the question:

 

οὕτως ἀνόητοί ἐστε; 

 

which means “are you so foolish?”   I have never heard anybody try to argue that οὕτως means “in this manner” here.   With the exceptions of one or two which paraphrase the question so that it is impossible to tell what meaning they ascribe to οὕτως, (2) the English translations all treat it as an expression of degree or intensity here.   See also Revelation 16:18 which ends with the words: σεισμὸς, οὕτω μέγας – “so great an earthquake”.   Here the οὕτω modifying the adjective μέγας (great) cannot be anything but the intensifier “so” as in “so much”.   Other New Testament examples that I will not go into at length are Galatians 1:6, 1 Thessalonians 2:8, and Hebrews 12:21.

 

Now, showing that οὕτω can mean “so” in the sense of “so much” is not the same thing as showing that this is what it means in John 3:16.   We have seen that its primary meaning is “in this way” or “in this manner” and, although that meaning would clearly be absurd in Iliad 3.169 this is not the case in the Gospel verse.   Is there any reason for thinking that the meaning of “so much” rather than “in this manner” is what is intended in John 3:16?

 

The answer is a clear yes.   In Greek, as in Latin and English, there is a category of subordinate clauses that we call result clauses.   These can indicate such things as what would naturally be expected to follow from the action of the main verb, whether or not it actually did, and what the actual result of the action was.   There are words that appear in the main clause of sentences that contain result clauses that indicate that a result clause is coming.  οὕτω/ οὕτως is one such word,   Then there are the words which begin the result clauses themselves.   The main one of these is ὥστε which means “so that”.   ὥστε is a compound of ὡς (as, so, that) which can also be used for this purpose.   There is also a kind of clause called a final clause, not because it occurs last in the sentence which may or may not be the case but because it expresses the end in the sense of purpose of the action of the main verb, or, in other words the result that the doer of the action of the main verb intended.   There are a number of words that can begin this kind of clause, the main one being ἵνα which means “in order that”.   If you look above to the Greek text of John 3:16 you will notice that it contains both a result clause and a final clause.    ὥστε τὸν υἱὸν αὐτοῦ τὸν μονογενῆ ἔδωκεν is the result clause.  The final clause is ἵνα πᾶς ὁ πιστεύων εἰς αὐτὸν μὴ ἀπόληται ἀλλ' ἔχῃ ζωὴν αἰώνιον.

 

If the final clause were the only subordinate clause in the verse then those who maintain that οὕτω means “in this manner” here would have a much stronger case.   However, between the final clause and the main clause, falls the result clause beginning with ὥστε.   It is when it is used in conjunction with ὥστε like this that οὕτω most often means “so much” rather than “in this manner”.   The two words work together to create the sense of “so much X that Y”. 

 

One example of this from ancient Greek literature is found in the first book of Herodotus’ Histories.   In his account of the life of Croesus, king of Lydia, Herodotus relates a lengthy exchange between the king and Solon, the Athenian reformer and lawmaker.  Croesus asked Solon whom he judged to be the happiest man he had ever encountered.   Solon, not unaware that Croesus expected to be named himself, nevertheless answered Tellus the Athenian, and gave his reasons.   To the follow-up question about who the second happiest was, Solon answered that it was Cloebis and Biton, and explained why.   This irritated Croesus who then asked “ὦ ξεῖνε Ἀθηναῖε, ἡ δ᾽ ἡμετέρη εὐδαιμονίη οὕτω τοι ἀπέρριπται ἐς τὸ μηδὲν ὥστε οὐδὲ ἰδιωτέων ἀνδρῶν ἀξίους ἡμέας ἐποίησας;” which means “O Athenian stranger-friend, is this our happiness so cast away into nothingness to you that you made us less worthy than ordinary men?”

 

Countless other such examples could be given.   This is a very common construction in ancient Greek literature.   Note that in the above example the verb in the result clause, ἐποίησας, is in the indicative mood, which is the basic mood of the verb,  the one used when making ordinary statements about things as they are, as opposed to things which might be, which one wishes would be, etc.   In result clauses a natural but not necessarily actual result is placed in the infinitive, an actual result in the indicative.   When the “οὕτω … ὥστε….” construction employs the indicative in the result clause this raises the likelihood of it being used in the “so much…that” sense to near certainty and this is what we see in John 3:16 where the verb in the result clause is ἔδωκεν, an indicative aorist meaning “he gave”.

 

I am not going to belabour the point much further.   Unlike the first two interpretive problems, this third one does not have much theological significance.   Saying that God gave us His Son as our Saviour because He loved us so much does not exclude saying that the manner in which He loved us was that He gave us His Son or vice versa.   Indeed, since expressions with double meanings are fairly common in St. John’s Gospel – a much discussed example is ἄνωθεν with the double meaning of “again” and “from above” which is a key element in the same discussion in which John 3:16 occurs – not a few have suggested that both senses of οὕτω are being simultaneously intended in this verse.   The reason that I thought this worthy of as lengthy a treatment as I have given it is the frequency with which I have encountered the idea that in John 3:16 οὕτω means “in this manner” rather than “so much” asserted with a dogmatic authority that the facts simply do not bear out.   It seems evident to me that this dogmatism comes from either a) the plethora of Bible-study tools currently available that allow people to pontificate about what “the Greek” means without actually studying it, b) the curious and utterly wrongheaded contemporary notion that the Greek of the New Testament is best studied by itself without reference to any other ancient Greek literature, or c) the combination of the two.   Somebody who studies New Testament Greek and only New Testament Greek might very well be unfamiliar with the “οὕτω … ὥστε….” construction.   John 3:16 happens to be the only verse in the entire Johannine corpus where ὥστε appears.   Needless to say, this very common ancient Greek construction is rare in the New Testament.   This, however, makes it that much more important that we pay attention to how it was used in other ancient Greek literature because when an author uses it rarely, or, as in the case of St. John here, only once, this is a good indication that it was chosen specifically because the established meaning is one that the author wished to particularly emphasize.

 

  

 

 (1)   This word is the genitive (possessive) form of αὐτός the word for “self”, which means “same” when used as an attributive adjective, and which also stands in for the third person pronoun (except when that pronoun is the subject) which is how it is used in John 3:16.

(2)   The Orthodox Jewish Bible, for example, rephrases it from a question into a statement “you lack seichel”.   The adverb in the question disappears completely when this is done.  Seichel, if it is not already obvious, is the opposite of foolishness.

When Did Asking Questions Become a Crime?

 Alfred North Whitehead, a philosopher and mathematician who taught at various institutions beginning with his alma mater, Trinity College at the University of Cambridge and ending with Harvard University at the other academic Cambridge, said a lot of things over his long career, most of them being forgettable, lamentable, or pure rot.   He did, however, produce one gem when he characterized the entire Western philosophical tradition as being “a series of footnotes to Plato”.   There would have been no Plato, however, had there not been a Socrates.   It was Socrates, the legendary teacher of Plato and Xenophon as well as a number of individuals who are otherwise most famous for the various ways in which they disgraced themselves in the Peloponnesian War and its aftermath, who laid the foundation for Platonic and all subsequent Western philosophy.  He did so by asking questions.   To this day the didactic trick of getting someone to assert something and then picking away at it with questions is known as the Socratic Method.

 

The best account of that method remains that which Plato placed in the mouth of Socrates himself in his Apology.   The title of this dialogue is the source of our English word apology although it had nothing to do with apologizing in the sense of saying that you are sorry for something.   Apologetics, which in Christian theology is the art of making arguments for the faith against the objections of unbelievers (and originally against those in the state who thought the faith ought to be illegal), is much closer to the original meaning of the word which was “defence” and more specifically the legal defence of the accused at a trial.    When Athenian democracy was restored after the short-lived rule of the hundred tyrants following the Spartan victory that brought the Peloponnesian War to an end, Socrates was charged with a number of offences such as corrupting the youth of Athens and put on trial before the Athenian assembly.   Plato’s Apology purports to be an account of the speech Socrates gave in his defence on that occasion and indeed, the full title is Ἀπολογία Σωκράτους (“The Defence of Socrates”).  

 

Early in the dialogue Socrates gives an account of how he came have the reputation that landed him on trial.   He discusses Chaerophon, who had been a friend of his since his youth and who also, not incidentally, was a friend of the Athenian democrats, i.e., Socrates’ accusers,  and one who had shared in their recent misfortunes.   Chaerophon had gone to Delphi and asked the Pythian priestess of Apollo whether there was anyone σοφώτερος (wiser) than Socrates and had received the answer μηδένα σοφώτερον εἶναι (there is no one wiser).   Socrates, when he had heard this, had thought to himself:

 

‘τί ποτε λέγει ὁ θεός, καὶ τί ποτε αἰνίττεται; ἐγὼ γὰρ δὴ οὔτε μέγα οὔτε σμικρὸν σύνοιδα ἐμαυτῷ σοφὸς ὤν: τί οὖν ποτε λέγει φάσκων ἐμὲ σοφώτατον εἶναι; οὐ γὰρ δήπου ψεύδεταί γε: οὐ γὰρ θέμις αὐτῷ.’

 

(“Whatever is the god saying and why ever does he speak in riddles?  For truly I know myself to have wisdom neither great nor small and so whatever is he saying in asserting me to be the wisest?  For surely he is not lying, at any rate, since that is not his custom.”)

 

This launched Socrates on his quest to find someone wiser than himself so as to rebut the oracle.   He began by going to a politician with a reputation for wisdom.   After having a dialogue with him he concluded:  

 

ἔδοξέ μοι οὗτος ὁ ἀνὴρ δοκεῖν μὲν εἶναι σοφὸς ἄλλοις τε πολλοῖς ἀνθρώποις καὶ μάλιστα ἑαυτῷ, εἶναι δ᾽ οὔ:

 

(this man seemed to me to seem to be wise to others and to many men and most especially to himself but not to actually be so)

 

He promptly shared this conclusion with the man in question and so earned his enmity and hatred.   As he left the man he thought to himself:

 

τούτου μὲν τοῦ ἀνθρώπου ἐγὼ σοφώτερός εἰμι: κινδυνεύει μὲν γὰρ ἡμῶν οὐδέτερος οὐδὲν καλὸν κἀγαθὸν εἰδέναι, ἀλλ᾽ οὗτος μὲν οἴεταί τι εἰδέναι οὐκ εἰδώς, ἐγὼ δέ, ὥσπερ οὖν οὐκ οἶδα, οὐδὲ οἴομαι: ἔοικα γοῦν τούτου γε σμικρῷ τινι αὐτῷ τούτῳ σοφώτερος εἶναι, ὅτι ἃ μὴ οἶδα οὐδὲ οἴομαι εἰδέναι.

 

(I am wiser than this man, for indeed it is likely that neither of the two of us knows even one good and beautiful thing, but whereas this man thinks that he knows something he does not know, I, on the other hand, as I do not know, neither do I think I know.   I seem, at least then, in this little thing at any rate, to be wiser than him, that what things I do not know, neither do I think that I know.)

 

He repeated this procedure with others reputed to be wise with the same result every time.   Later in the dialogue – apart from this it would more properly be called a monologue – he provides a demonstration when he cross-examines his accuser Meletus.  

 

The Apology presents to us the two major failures of Socrates.   The obvious one is his failure to persuade the assembly, which resulted in him losing his case, being convicted, and then largely because of his own flippant attitude when asked to propose an alternative sentence, condemned to death.   The other is his failure in his self-appointed task of rebutting the oracle of Delphi.   In failing to find someone wiser than himself and demonstrating that those reputed to be wise lacked both knowledge and an awareness of their own ignorance Socrates confirmed the oracle’s judgement - Socrates’ awareness of his own ignorance, a self-awareness that his interlocutors lacked, made him indeed, the wisest man of his day.   This awareness of a lack of knowledge, willingness to acknowledge it openly, and to seek out knowledge by asking questions, became the starting point and foundation of the long philosophical tradition of Western Civilization.

 

Is it not then perverse that in academe, that is, the collective of institutions of higher learning which takes its name from the olive grove outside of the walls of Athens dedicated to that city’s patron goddess where Socrates’ greatest disciple Plato taught his own pupils, this spirit of acknowledging one’s ignorance, asking questions and being willing to learn is no longer welcome?

 

In the academe of today the idea is almost ubiquitous that the campus ought to be a “safe space” for groups which in progressive ideology deserve special rights and protections now because of past wrongs done to them, real and imagined.   What this means in practice is that such groups are to be protected on campus from acts and, more importantly, words, that, in their opinion at least, are hostile or offensive to themselves.   This translates into all criticism of these groups or even of individual members of these groups being forbidden because any such criticism could be and often is taken by these groups as being hostile or offensive.   This in turn means that members of these groups cannot be questioned when sharing their “lived experience” (the progressive term for a member of a designated victim group talking about having experienced discrimination, marginalization, and whichever of the growing list of forbidden isms or phobias happens to apply) or “their truth” (when the word truth is modified by a possessive pronoun this is an progressive euphemism for claims made about one’s – usually sexual or gender – identity that are backed only by one’s experience and interpretation of such and not by conformity with objective reality), because such questioning is taken as criticism which is taken as hostility.

 

This is only one of many ways in which asking questions, at least if they are questions pertaining to progressive sacred cows, is discouraged, frowned upon, or outright forbidden on academic campuses.  

 

Asking questions is fundamental not only to the philosophical tradition that began with Socrates and Plato but to something that if it were properly regarded would be considered but one branch of that tradition.   That something is what we call science today.   It would be better if we still called it natural philosophy.   The term science is the Anglicized spelling of the Latin word for “knowledge” and its limitation, as in most contemporary English usage, to natural philosophy, its methodology, and its discoveries, has materialistic connotations.   Science or natural philosophy, is that branch of knowledge-seeking that has as its subject matter the physical or natural world and how it works.    It has greater utility than many other branches of philosophy which is why Modern man whose thinking is permeated by liberalism which places an exaggerated value on utility tends to think of science as something other than and superior to philosophy rather than one of its branches.   It would have no utility whatsoever, however, were it not for asking questions and/or activities that are the equivalent of question asking.   From Thales, Pythagoras and Aristotle in the Ancient world to Isaac Newton, Galileo Galilei, Benjamin Franklin, Michael Faraday, Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Francis Crick, et al. in the Modern, none of these would have discovered anything had they not asked questions and especially questions about what was already being taught as science.

 

For the past three years we have had to listen to politicians, government bureaucrats, the majority of media commentators and even many clergy speak of “the science” as something to be “believed” and “followed”.   Questioning “the science” was declared to be “misinformation” and “disinformation” and “conspiracy theory” by these same people and treated as such by the censorious tech companies who operate the major social media platforms.   The vile and odious twit whom we have been saddled with as Prime Minister here in Canada since 2015, around the time of last year’s Dominion Election equated people who according to him “don’t believe in science” with “racists” and “misogynists” said that their views were “unacceptable” and that we ought to be asking ourselves whether we should continue to tolerate such people in our midst.   All of this pertained to the “scientific” arguments that were being claimed in support of draconian government measures such as the enforced closing of schools, churches, businesses etc. that came to be known as “lockdowns”, mandatory masking, and ultimately compelled vaccination introduced in the panic over the bat flu.   Anybody who has dared to question the doomsday predictions coming from Green activists masquerading as climatologists over the last three decades or so will have already been familiar with this sort of talk long before the pandemic.   Regardless, however, of whether this talk about how we are under some sort of moral imperative to “believe” and “follow” “the science” and how those who do not are evil “deniers” comes up in the context of pandemic policy or climate policy it betrays the speaker as being thoroughly unscientific in the way he views science.   Real scientists who make real discoveries that benefit mankind in real ways do not place a definite article before science and treat it as an object of unquestioning faith and obedience.   Those who do speak about “the science” this way are speaking about something that is not really science.    It is interesting, is it not, that what those who spoke this way in the pandemic and those who speak this way about “climate change” have in common, is that they all want more powers for the government, more limitations on personal rights and freedoms, and for the ordinary middle class people in Western countries to accept a severe reduction in their standard of living?

 

Asking questions is fundamental to yet another important discipline, that of history.   Indeed, the very name of the discipline refers to the process of asking questions.  Herodotus, who was about fourteen years older than Socrates, was born in Halicarnassus, a Greek city in Anatolia or Asia Minor, which at the time was part of the Persian Empire.   A man of means, he travelled much throughout the Mediterranean world and about five years before he died, at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and her allies and Sparta and her allies, wrote a ten book account of the peoples, customs, and past events of the region, concentrating on the Greco-Persian Wars fought in the first half of the fifth century BC, i.e., the century in which he lived.   He introduced the first book and the entire work with the words “Ἡροδότου Ἁλικαρνησσέος ἱστορίης ἀπόδεξις ἥδε” which mean simply “This is the publication of the inquiry of Herodotus of Halicarnassus”.   The word which means “inquiry” or “investigation” here is ἱστορίης which put in Latin characters is histories.  It has ever since served not only as the title of Herodotus’ magnus opus but  as the name of the entire field of looking into the events of the past to determine what happened and why of which Herodotus is quite properly remembered as the father. 

 

The remainder of the opening sentence provides us with the subject and purpose of Herodotus’ investigation:

 

ὡς μήτε τὰ γενόμενα ἐξ ἀνθρώπων τῷ χρόνῳ ἐξίτηλα γένηται, μήτε ἔργα μεγάλα τε καὶ θωμαστά, τὰ μὲν Ἕλλησι τὰ δὲ βαρβάροισι ἀποδεχθέντα, ἀκλεᾶ γένηται, τά τε ἄλλα καὶ δι᾽ ἣν αἰτίην ἐπολέμησαν ἀλλήλοισι.

 

This means: “so that the things done by men do not become forgotten with time, nor the works both great and marvelous, some performed by Greeks others by foreigners, become inglorious, and with these other things also the reason for which they went to war with each other.”

 

To this day the historical discipline remains summed up well in this introduction. The methodology of historical inquiry is most comparable to that of the courtroom and this, of course, means asking plenty of questions of first hand witnesses to events if available and of others who have relevant knowledge.  For Herodotus this meant asking the λόγιοι (learned men) of the various countries he visited for their accounts of their own customs, past events, and of various local natural, geographical, and architectural phenomenon.     As an example, the very first thing that follows the opening sentence given above is his record of the account given by the Persian λόγιοι of that matter emphasized at the very end of his introduction, i.e., the cause of the Greco-Persian Wars.   According to him the Persians traced the ultimate cause to the Phoenicians, who in the abduction of Io, princess of Argos, started a series of reciprocal abductions of women of rank (Europa, Medea, Helen) that culminated in the Greek onslaught of Troy, which event, judged to be gross overreaction by the Asians, was the immediate cause of the hatred and enmity of the Asians for the Greeks.  

 

It has been suggested by subsequent historians, including his own contemporary Thucydides that Herodotus was less critical than he ought to have been towards his sources.   Evidence, however, continues to accumulate to this very day that he was far more accurate than he has often been given credit for.   For example, until very recently the prime example pointed to by his critics of his utterly credulity was his account  in Book III of his History of a region in India where furry, fox-sized, ants, dig up gold dust which is then harvested by the locals, long ridiculed as outlandish and absurd.  It was essentially confirmed by a French ethnologist four decades ago when he published his findings about a species of marmot (big squirrels who live in burrows rather than trees) in a particularly difficult to reach part of the Karakoram mountains on the side of the range belonging to Pakistan that does exactly what Herodotus said these “ants” do with the locals, the Minaro or Brokpas, continuing to harvest the gold.   The Persians called these marmots “mountain ants”, presumably because of the similar habit of digging and making mounds, a rather more obvious basis of comparison that that which the person who gave the same species the alternative name “Tibetan snow pig” had in mind, although whatever that happened to have been was apparently also evident to whoever was the first to call the creature’s North American cousin the “groundhog”.   The relevance of this to our point regarding history is simply this – it was by asking questions, first by those who questioned Herodotus’ account where it contained elements that seemed fanciful and for which they could find no other evidence and then by those who dug deeper, questioned the original questioners, and found evidence supporting his claims, that his work has been vindicated as being far more accurate than had been previously thought.

 

History then, like Socratic philosophy and empirical science – real empirical science, which never takes a definite article, is never settled, is not an object of faith to be believed or a leader to be followed – has truth as its end, and asking and seeking as its means and method.   It is therefore rather disturbing or comical or both that our Parliamentarians seem to have adopted the attitude that historical truth is not something that is out there to be discovered by those who seek it but rather something to be declared and decided by their own authoritative fiat.

 

Earlier this year, in a shameless attempt to deflect public attention away from their own fascist behavior in declaring the equivalent of martial law in order to brutally crush a peaceful protest against their cruel vaccine mandates and other draconian health measures – this description has been borne out completely by the testimony in the inquiry over the last month or so – the evil Prime Minister Trudeau and his Cabinet of knuckle-dragging, simian, louts and thugs declared their intention to make “Holocaust denial” into a crime in Canada.   Since in the progressive lexicon asking a valid and important question about something progressives have declared to be a sacred cow constitutes “denial” this meant in effect that asking tough, challenging, questions about the Holocaust was to be criminalized.    As a sleight of hand it was rather impressive.  “Yes, I just suspended everyone’s civil rights and freedoms in order to crush people who were embarrassing me” the Prime Minister was essentially saying “but it’s these other people who are Hitler, not me, therefore I am going to make it so that they go to prison for saying things and asking questions that I don’t like, just like in Germany.”

 

More recently, the member of the official socialist party (the ones propping up the current government) who represents Winnipeg Centre in the House of Commons introduced a motion calling upon the government to recognize the Indian Residential Schools as a “genocide”.   The motion passed unanimously.   Now, a motion of this nature does not by itself actually do anything except send a message about who in the House has signed on to an asserted narrative.   This is bad enough, however, because a) we elect Members to represent us in the House to look out for our interests on matters pertaining to the taxes we pay, the laws we live under, the wars, heaven forbid, that we fight, and the like and not to affirm or deny some narrative or another, b) the truth or falseness of such narratives is something that cannot possibly be affected by government pronouncements one way or another – to assert otherwise is to attribute to government a power closely akin to that which those who believe in magic spells attribute to spell-casting, to alter reality by uttering words - and c) the truth or falseness of these narratives is something that can only be discovered through open and honest inquiry and government proclamations of this nature, while they don’t actually forbid such, tend to discourage it.     It is much worse that this motion passed unanimously, that not a single Member of Parliament could be found with the courage to challenge it.   What makes this even worse is that the narrative in question is a claim which a) even apart from the evidence seems palpably absurd on the face of it, i.e., that the cooperative efforts of Canada’s government and churches to provide the education requested by the Indian bands and agreed to in the treaties, whatever might have gone wrong with them in practice, amounted to something that is categorically identical to or comparable with what the Hutus did to the Tutsis in 1994 Rwanda, b) has had its evidentiary basis crumble into nothing under scrutiny (see the essay “Kamloops Update: Still Not One Body” by Jacques Rouillard, Professor Emeritus in History at the Université de Montréal, in Dorchester Review, Vol. 12, No. 1, Spring/Summer 2022, pp.27-36, and the article “Canada’s ‘Genocide’ – Case Closed?” by Michael Melanson and Nina Green posted on the same journal’s website on October 27, 2022), and c) has been heavy-handedly protected by those asserting it against the very sort of questioning which it would need to withstand to establish its truth-claims from the very beginning.   The firing, last December, of Mount Royal University’s tenured Frances Widdowson for questioning woke ideology in general, and the Residential Schools narrative in particular, is but one example that could be given of the latter point.  

 

It is unlikely to have escaped your attention if you have remained with us this far that in each of these cases where a cold, hostile, forbidding attitude towards those who ask questions has taken over an intellectual institution or disciple that had been built upon a foundation of seeking and asking the culprit has been the same each time, at least in terms of it being the same way of thinking (or avoiding thought) although often the same individuals have been involved as well.   Progressivism has never been as tolerant towards differing viewpoints as it professed to be under its liberal guise but what we are seeing in this latest incarnation of progressivism is the most illiberal face it has ever shown outside of regimes such as Cromwell’s, the French Reign of Terror, and the People’s Republics of Communism.    The new progressivism is exemplified by our idiot Prime Minister who likes to sanctimoniously lecture people in the first person plural about the need to listen to others who disagree with us even though everyone who hears him knows that he ought to be using the second person because he has no intention of ever listening to anyone who disagrees with him and that what he really means is that everyone who disagrees with him needs to listen to what he has to say and change their views accordingly.   This man frequently makes false affirmations of his belief in “free speech” and the need to defend such but never does so without including a qualifying provision that completely negates the affirmation and he has made it abundantly clear that he thinks the public need to be protected from speech that might “harm” which he calls by such terms as “hate”, “misinformation” and “disinformation” all of which merely mean speech that he disagrees with.    His attitude towards questioning is what is most relevant, however, and it is quite instructive.   Towards the end of the first term of his premiership, as his government was rocked by scandal, he bought off most of the private media companies in Canada with a $600 million bailout.   To further ensure that he never faces questions tougher than what colour of socks he is wearing he has repeatedly sought to ban reporters representing the handful of independent media companies that had refused his money from his press conferences.   Having gone to such lengths to ensure that he is only asked friendly questions, he never actually answers any of them, but instead only replies with pre-written remarks which may or may not have something to do with what he was asked.   If the reporter recognizes that he has not gotten an answer and repeats the question, the Prime Minister merely repeats his initial response, usually almost verbatim as he lacks the intelligence required to reword it on the spot.    The academic progressive thinks that members of designated victim groups should be protected from having “their truth” and their “lived experience” questioned, lockdown enthusiasts and Green activists think that “the science” should not be questioned but blindly believed and followed, and many, including members of our Parliament, think that certain historical assertions ought not to be questioned.  In a Prime Minister who avoids questions that he has not approved in advance like the plague and who sidesteps answering those that are put to him these foes of what is most basic and foundational to any genuine intellectual pursuit have found their champion.