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!
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!
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.
If they weren't so evil, I would almost feel sorry for them. Imagine being HRC or Pelosi. All you want is power over other people. There is nothing else. Love and genuine human relationships count for nothing. Just Power! They will never know the pleasure that ordinary humans feel. No wonder they end up like those two evil women: embittered and alcoholic.
Agreed. The existence of the non-demonic, the innocent, the good is a terrible insult to the evil ones. I think Good will win, but boy, it's going to be a fight!
Hello S'21, (Appreciate Mark's endurance; I managed to get Substack's issues w/my goofy email fixed. Glad to 'be back').
Forgive any personal intrusion; I've found your comments and thoughts shared very valuable hence I've a bit of connection. My big-brother had a bumper sticker that read: "I'm NOT religious. I just love the Lord". Took me a few years of wandering the secular-world before it made any sense. Religion is really anti-faith, altho' most who are faithful think of themselves as religious. Part of the diversion or wrong-think that has enabled so much of what this Posting of Mark's addresses. My best to you! (WRH)
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!
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.
"firehose"
LOL!
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.
That's the nature of the demonic--it's never content. It always comes for the non-demonic.
Yes. That is so. Always in rebellion. Always seeking to upend. No other reason for existence, it seems.
If they weren't so evil, I would almost feel sorry for them. Imagine being HRC or Pelosi. All you want is power over other people. There is nothing else. Love and genuine human relationships count for nothing. Just Power! They will never know the pleasure that ordinary humans feel. No wonder they end up like those two evil women: embittered and alcoholic.
Agreed. The existence of the non-demonic, the innocent, the good is a terrible insult to the evil ones. I think Good will win, but boy, it's going to be a fight!
Hello S'21, (Appreciate Mark's endurance; I managed to get Substack's issues w/my goofy email fixed. Glad to 'be back').
Forgive any personal intrusion; I've found your comments and thoughts shared very valuable hence I've a bit of connection. My big-brother had a bumper sticker that read: "I'm NOT religious. I just love the Lord". Took me a few years of wandering the secular-world before it made any sense. Religion is really anti-faith, altho' most who are faithful think of themselves as religious. Part of the diversion or wrong-think that has enabled so much of what this Posting of Mark's addresses. My best to you! (WRH)
That's one of the areas in which Dreher is sadly deluded. He seems not to understand how far down the slippery slope Ukraine has gone already.