Let’s start with the National Prayer Breakfast. You laugh? Perhaps rightly so because, as usual, Zhou—the current occupant of the Oval Office—spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast. And Zhou, if you can believe it, in this day in America, spoke of mutual respect. Bradley Devlin covered the moment for TAC, and then some:
Excellent observations, Ive said for the longest time I can't proselytize but I can recognize it's influence on history and while today only negative aspects of the Faith are observed while the plethora of bounty and more so the HOPE derived from traditional Faith is not matched with the Satanic Cults. In fact no lasting society has ever come from the faithless that I know of. Excellent points here!
I personally believe God created this existence down here to be somewhat on a teeter totter, leaning whichever direction collectively the people's hearts are leaning. Satan has convinced folks he doesn't even exist, so his carnage ultimately gets put on God's shoulders. He's the prince of this world by our own choice, in that he basically only gets what we empower him with. Regardless, he is running amok today.
Lots of things bother the crap out of me today, but at the top of my list is how the "deep state" today decides who we like or hate. Line up the people that hate Putin, and I pretty much despise most if not all of them. So what feelings does that engender towards Putin? I gotta like the guy.
As a result, when I hear or see
"which explains the remarkable—even demonic—hatred for him in the decadent West."
that is exactly what comes to mind.
DEMONIC.
These are very sad times, mass hysteria would be the more scientific phrase.
Thanks Mark. You dip into the firehose of Dreher and catch a glass of water for us.
One of the most frustrating things about the covid pandemic has been the implication by some of our most able thinkers that we can defeat the bad guys just by being smarter than they are. We just have to win the game of game theory. Bitcoin can permanently end the threat of having to get the Mark of the Beast to buy and sell. Create your own wallet!
Or we can defeat the bad guys by showing them that they are violating the sacred pillar of Enlightenment thinking in which all scientists stride towards universal truth. If only the other scientists knew they were heading in the wrong direction, away from truth. Striving for truth is sacred because truth is sacred; they just forgot! Quick, somebody tell them!
Or we can defeat the bad guys by building a better, purely secular government from the get-go to prevent bad guys from hurting the little guys while preserving all of our sacred individual liberties. Grow your own food!
We LOVE that Space Trilogy! It is indeed prophetic of the decline of the West, specifically the former Christendom.
So much of what poses as Christian doesn't even qualify as a pale imitation. Like Steghorn21, I was not an "observant" Christian for some years in my younger days. But I didn't blame the Faith itself, but rather the practitioners of the money-grubbing empires that were, and are, being built on the distortion of it.
Lusts! Power, Sex, & Financial are the fall of many a human!
Thanks again, Mark, for your efforts. You’ve given important commentary on “THE WAR,” monetary issues, intelligence matters, and even such things as literature and how it helps us see. Funny enough, my daughter is taking a course on CS Lewis at a solid, non-woke, Bible-using college. Just today she asked me what I know about “That Hideous Strength.” I was happy to tell her that when I read it, I felt like Lewis was describing today. Is the remedy the same today as it was in that novel: Faith in Jesus Christ; a return to truth; celebration, not embarrassment, of the old ways?
I have most of Lewis' books--I was introduced to his work in a college philosophy class around 1970. Here's another quote from "That Hideous Strength" that I have used several times in blog posts and comments that bears on where we have been for some years now: Professor Dimble is speaking:
"If you dip into any college, or school, or parish, or family--anything you like--at a given point in its history, you always find that there was a time before that point when there was more elbow room and contrasts weren't quite so sharp; and that there's going to be a time after that point when there is even less room for indecision and choices are even more momentous. Good is always getting better and bad is always getting worse: the possibilities of even apparent neutrality are always diminishing. The whole thing is sorting itself out all the time, getting sharper and harder."
We have been living in that situation for a long time. The divisions have been getting harsher, and common ground harder and harder to find.
I tutor young kids. Today one of them had a science assignment that had to answer who had faster reaction times, girls or "other gender groups". I crossed out those awful words and wrote "boys" over them, and explained to the student why I did this. It was one of those moments that we are all going to face more and more until something happens to change things. Do we shut up and hide our true beliefs or do we use the power of "No!" and fight back? I'm not very brave but I really can't stand any of this crap anymore. I'm a former Christian, for reasons I won't go into. However, I never gave up on God. I found myself more and more turning to the idea that prayer is the only hope we have right now. The level of insanity and the denial of reality is so great that normal reasons cannot explain it. It is demonic and it is coming for us.
So Much To Think About Today
Excellent observations, Ive said for the longest time I can't proselytize but I can recognize it's influence on history and while today only negative aspects of the Faith are observed while the plethora of bounty and more so the HOPE derived from traditional Faith is not matched with the Satanic Cults. In fact no lasting society has ever come from the faithless that I know of. Excellent points here!
I personally believe God created this existence down here to be somewhat on a teeter totter, leaning whichever direction collectively the people's hearts are leaning. Satan has convinced folks he doesn't even exist, so his carnage ultimately gets put on God's shoulders. He's the prince of this world by our own choice, in that he basically only gets what we empower him with. Regardless, he is running amok today.
Lots of things bother the crap out of me today, but at the top of my list is how the "deep state" today decides who we like or hate. Line up the people that hate Putin, and I pretty much despise most if not all of them. So what feelings does that engender towards Putin? I gotta like the guy.
As a result, when I hear or see
"which explains the remarkable—even demonic—hatred for him in the decadent West."
that is exactly what comes to mind.
DEMONIC.
These are very sad times, mass hysteria would be the more scientific phrase.
Thanks Mark. You dip into the firehose of Dreher and catch a glass of water for us.
One of the most frustrating things about the covid pandemic has been the implication by some of our most able thinkers that we can defeat the bad guys just by being smarter than they are. We just have to win the game of game theory. Bitcoin can permanently end the threat of having to get the Mark of the Beast to buy and sell. Create your own wallet!
Or we can defeat the bad guys by showing them that they are violating the sacred pillar of Enlightenment thinking in which all scientists stride towards universal truth. If only the other scientists knew they were heading in the wrong direction, away from truth. Striving for truth is sacred because truth is sacred; they just forgot! Quick, somebody tell them!
Or we can defeat the bad guys by building a better, purely secular government from the get-go to prevent bad guys from hurting the little guys while preserving all of our sacred individual liberties. Grow your own food!
And so on.
We LOVE that Space Trilogy! It is indeed prophetic of the decline of the West, specifically the former Christendom.
So much of what poses as Christian doesn't even qualify as a pale imitation. Like Steghorn21, I was not an "observant" Christian for some years in my younger days. But I didn't blame the Faith itself, but rather the practitioners of the money-grubbing empires that were, and are, being built on the distortion of it.
Lusts! Power, Sex, & Financial are the fall of many a human!
Great post Mark!
Thanks again, Mark, for your efforts. You’ve given important commentary on “THE WAR,” monetary issues, intelligence matters, and even such things as literature and how it helps us see. Funny enough, my daughter is taking a course on CS Lewis at a solid, non-woke, Bible-using college. Just today she asked me what I know about “That Hideous Strength.” I was happy to tell her that when I read it, I felt like Lewis was describing today. Is the remedy the same today as it was in that novel: Faith in Jesus Christ; a return to truth; celebration, not embarrassment, of the old ways?
I have most of Lewis' books--I was introduced to his work in a college philosophy class around 1970. Here's another quote from "That Hideous Strength" that I have used several times in blog posts and comments that bears on where we have been for some years now: Professor Dimble is speaking:
"If you dip into any college, or school, or parish, or family--anything you like--at a given point in its history, you always find that there was a time before that point when there was more elbow room and contrasts weren't quite so sharp; and that there's going to be a time after that point when there is even less room for indecision and choices are even more momentous. Good is always getting better and bad is always getting worse: the possibilities of even apparent neutrality are always diminishing. The whole thing is sorting itself out all the time, getting sharper and harder."
We have been living in that situation for a long time. The divisions have been getting harsher, and common ground harder and harder to find.
I tutor young kids. Today one of them had a science assignment that had to answer who had faster reaction times, girls or "other gender groups". I crossed out those awful words and wrote "boys" over them, and explained to the student why I did this. It was one of those moments that we are all going to face more and more until something happens to change things. Do we shut up and hide our true beliefs or do we use the power of "No!" and fight back? I'm not very brave but I really can't stand any of this crap anymore. I'm a former Christian, for reasons I won't go into. However, I never gave up on God. I found myself more and more turning to the idea that prayer is the only hope we have right now. The level of insanity and the denial of reality is so great that normal reasons cannot explain it. It is demonic and it is coming for us.