If for any reason you cannot find the paperback version of Playing the Indian Card at your favourite bookstore or online retailer, please ask them to carry it. Protest and picket the store entrance if necessary.
Why did Disney commit suicide by going woke instead of tending to its core business of entertainment? It is an abiding mystery. Why did the BBC series “Call the Midwife” go woke? For that matter, why did Anheuser-Busch seem to deliberately alienate its core customer base, with its Dylan Mulvaney sponsorship?
The conventional and natural answer is that these corporate bodies were taken over by some educated elite which had lost touch with the general public; who were trapped in an information silo, and had no idea everyone did not agree with them.
No doubt that is a partial explanation; thanks to media and internet censorship. But it does not seem to be enough to account for it. After all, their core business was still to entertain, or sell beer; there should have been no reason to get involved in politics. As soon as you do, after all you are sure to alienate somebody. Even without opposing voices, the causes they champion are in defiance of reason or common sense. And in principle, even with censorship, the internet should have been making it easier for creatives to poll or solicit the views of the general public: improved communication. Now ordinary people can run their own podcasts or blogs. Censorship of the internet is a rearguard action.
The Disney and Bud Light crew must at a minimum have been trying to avoid listening to the public, even though it was their job to do so. They had their fingers in their ears. Why?
Guilt. One wants to block out opposing views when one anticipates criticism, and knows it is deserved. Ultimately, guilt over jettisoning “conventional morality,” and most especially, over endorsing abortion. And so, fearing condemnation, the creative elites have been avoiding listening.
But there is another layer to this. Creativity works by inspiration. Inspiration is not something you can turn on and off. It comes from God, or if not from God, from some ambient spirit. In other words, a demon. If you are concealing guilt, and refusing to repent, you have cut off that conduit to God. You may her nothing, and be obliged to recycle old material just substituting some simple gimmick. Or you may instead begin to hear from ambient spirits; and rejoice in no longer being barren of ideas. But they do not have your or humanity’s interests at heart. “As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods, They kill us for their sport.”
Guilt and doubt has turned off the taps for the creative class; so art in general has been moribund for decades. The Disney creatives are unable any longer to come up with compelling stories; the comedy writers can no longer come up with punch lines; the ad copywriters can no longer come up with interesting angles. Instead, coming into this void, the signals they are picking up are malicious, vices, seeking ultimately to destroy their careers, their employers, and the culture.
Creative types are not adept at questioning or testing the spirits. You do not argue with inspiration. And so they are easily possessed.
A TV series I have enjoyed binge-watching, BBC’s Call the Midwife, has decided to go for relevance and wade deliberately into politically charged issues. It is a perhaps muted model of the general problem with films and TV in recent years.
They had already threaded in intersex, and homosexuality. Even though neither fits plausibly into the likely work encounters of a midwife. They had already introduced black and South Asian characters, who then of course were shown to experience discrimination; and a black midwife has shown up as a new lead. And she is, of course, an entirely admirable character, with no dark edges about her. No crustiness, no struggle with alcohol, no illicit loves.
Then they brought up the issue of abortion.
The series is set in 1960s Britain. Abortion was still illegal. The series shows young women getting “back alley” abortions and suffering dire consequences—due to unsanitary conditions and inexpert practitioners.
Worse, the abortionist is portrayed as a decent sort who thought she was helping women. And repented as soon as she was convinced women were being harmed by her incompetence.
No mention is made of the health of the child. The child does not matter. Good people do not care about killing children. Chillingly, in a show about midwives. No mention is made of the alternatives of simply not having sex outside of marriage, or putting the child up for adoption. These are apparently literally unthinkable.
The clumsily intended moral is that abortions must be legal. Because, apparently, women “must” have abortions, and the only concern is that the abortions be performed in the best possible circumstances.
A sane view would be the opposite: if illegal abortions are dangerous, abortion is dangerous. This alone is reason to ban it, since it is always a voluntary procedure. And this even before we consider the key question, the deliberate killing of an innocent human being.
My predictions are always wrong—like everyone else’s. We humans have a lousy track record on predicting the future. Something to remember when you hear alarms raised about global warming. And things have gotten especially unpredictable recently. Aliens? The pope not Catholic? Turning the frogs gay?
So I might as well go ahead and be optimistic—without being unrealistic. After all, God’s in his heaven.
I predict that, in 2024, Trump will win back the US presidency. The Economist gives him a one in three chance. I think it is better than that. He looks to have a lock on the Republican nomination, and the polls show him ahead of Biden in the general. The Democrats seem all in on Biden, and Biden may be impeached for his corruption and possibly treasonous activities, may be too obviously senile by election day, or may, at his age, suddenly die of natural causes. He is also historically unpopular.
Perhaps they think they can fix the election, but can they? If so, why are they trying to get Trump off the ballot? That’s too blatant, and looks like desperation. I think they are overreaching.
It seems to me the NDP must officially pull the plug in Canada on their coalition with the Liberals before 2025. Otherwise, they will be too closely associated with the Liberals to mount a plausible campaign when the election comes—and it must come no later than 2025. To make this dissociation real in the public mind, they must also start voting aggressively against the Liberals on confidence votes. So there is a decent chance the Conservatives can craft a confidence motion to bring down the government; especially considering all the incipient scandals under investigation. So I predict a Canadian election in 2024, and a win by Pierre Poilievre.
I predict the Liberals will not switch leaders to forestall this. The have no plausible star in the wings, history suggests it would not help them, and Trudeau does not want to go.
And Poilievre is just too good as a politician; he is not going to lose.
Pope Francis has ratcheted up his “reforms” in the church recently; as if something has been triggered. It might be that he felt constrained so long as Benedict was alive—had he gone this far, Benedict was an obvious rallying point for opposition. But it might also be because Francis hears the beating wings of the angel of death. There are rumours that he intends to fix the election of the next pope; this too suggests he expects to die soon, but his haste to get things done suggests also he has no confidence in his ability to do that. Historically, conclaves have tended to elect candidates contrasting with the previous pontiff, as if to keep things on a steady course. And the worldwide church seems now on the verge of schism in response to Francis’s innovations. The next conclave has a strong motive, then, to try a different tack. God, too, must not be discounted; he will protect his church. So I predict Francis will either die or resign in 2024, and a new pope will be named who is traditionalist.
I am not the only one to notice that wokery is past its high water mark, and is becoming an object of ridicule. When they begin to laugh at you… Bud Light is deservedly toast; Disney is in desperate traits; and when such big fish can be taken out, the little fish too must take heed, and tremble. Now Harvard is losing its reputation and its endowment. I expect this trend to rapidly accelerate, as a bandwagon effect kicks in.
Might as well predict the fall of Xi, Putin, and the Iranian regime as well. All are hanging by a thread, and might collapse at any time. So why not this year? The fall of any of the three makes the fall of the other two more likely, and the fall of any one is likely. Xi is facing economic disaster; Putin is facing military disaster; the Iranian regime is wildly unpopular. So let’s call it as a set.
If Iran falls, to a more liberal regime, that in turn will have profound repercussions throughout the Middle East, where Iran is funding Islamist movements. Like Hamas. Or the Houthis in Yemen.
If either the CPC or the mullah in Iran fall to a liberal regime, we should also see mass conversions to Christianity in those two countries. Which will in turn have world-wide effects. China, for example, could become the centre of the Christian world.
I hear predictions that inflation, and interest rates, should ease by summer. Why not believe them? There may or my not be a terrible recession; so let’s believe there won’t be. It is just possible that the productivity gains being brought on by AI, and computerization generally, will be enough to cancel out all the reckless spending and government financial mismanagement.
Speaking of AI, new technologies are always overhyped in the beginning. As Arthur C. Clarke observed, any really new technology is always indistinguishable in the popular mind from magic. So I’m wagering that all the concerns about AI making us all obsolete, and being a threat to mankind, are hysterical. Instead, it will be a boon to productivity—especially for computer coding.
I see signs of a genuine religious revival in the US at least. God may not have given up on them yet. Back in 1992, Leonard Cohen saw two possible futures, good and bad. The dark option is what we have been getting lately:
Destroy another fetus now We don't like children anyhow I've seen the future, baby It is murder Things are going to slide, slide in all directions Won't be nothing Nothing you can measure anymore The blizzard, the blizzard of the world Has crossed the threshold and it has overturned the order of the soul
But Cohen saw another option. Having explored the dark side, and discovering where it leads, we may pull back and choose instead the vision seen in “Democracy is coming to the USA.” Of, specifically, the principles in the Sermon on the Mount. If it comes, Cohen sees it as coming to the USA first. And coming first to the “holy places where the races meet”: to the Christian churches.
The New Atheism is dead, and there seems to be an earthquake in the sciences, forcing God back into the picture as necessary hypothesis. Theism is becoming fashionable again, at least in the highest intellectual circles. Every week we hear of some new convert.
Financial considerations still argue strongly for mass immigration, even if unpopular—and there are other arguments for it as well. But multiculturalism is rapidly becoming unfashionable. Affirmative action, “equity,” is rapidly becoming unfashionable. We may be back to valuing and respecting “Western civilization.” And expecting immigrants to assimilate, as most immigrants want to do in the first place. There is a reason why they come to Canada, or America, and it is usually not because they loved things back where they came from so much. Trapping them in multiculturalism is trapping them in exile and alienation.
The influence of Elon Musk’s new Twitter has not yet been fully felt, but the emergence of a widely-used platform that is not enforcing a political agenda makes it untenable for other platforms and media to enforce such an agenda. So that house of cards should now come tumbling down. Once people can choose, they will choose open discussion, simply out of natural human curiosity. I expect the immanent demise of the “legacy media,” the TV networks, the newspapers, and the practice of big tech “gatekeeping.”
The war in Gaza will end with Hamas wiped out, and will trigger no wider war.
People are losing confidence in the experts; the experts discredited themselves on Covid. And so the public is losing confidence in all the predictions of global warming and all the draconian measures governments are imposing in its name. Chicken Little will soon be called out. Climate change is losing its marketability. If global warming is real, the only solution is improved technology, and the best way to achieve improved technology is for governments to get out of the way. Political parties will soon no longer be able to jerk this chain.
And so 2024 may be the year of the great turning. The world could look very different in twelve months.
The image of Jesus Pantocrator--Jesus as rightful king of the world. One of the oldest images of Jesus in existence.
Many on the left are raising the alarm about “Christian nationalism.” It has apparently now supplanted “white supremacy” as the greatest threat to our freedoms.
What is Christian nationalism?
Literally, it is the belief that the US, or Canada, is and ought to be a Christian nation.
Horrors?
This is, in the first place, a simple statement of historic and demographic fact. North American culture is deeply Christian. Anyone before, say, 1960, would see the statement as self-evident. To pretend otherwise is politically motivated historical revisionism.
It is, in the second place, a belief necessarily shared by all Christians that the US and Canada ought to be Christian nations. Any Christian believes Christian values should govern the state. Any Christian believes Jesus Christ is Lord, the rightful ruler of mankind. Non-Christians might or might not agree, but any non-Christian who finds this view problematic is intolerant of Christianity.
In the third place, Great Britain, for example, is constitutionally a Christian nation. While the UK no doubt has its flaws, it is hard to see Britain as a cautionary tale of the tragic consequences of Christian nationalism.
What exactly is the terrifying program of contemporary North American Christian nationalism? According to Wikipedia, “Christian nationalism supports the presence of Christian symbols in the public square, and state patronage for the practice and display of religion, such as Christmas as a national holiday, school prayer, the exhibition of nativity scenes during Christmastide, and the Christian cross on Good Friday.”
Whom does such things harm? Isn’t this all part of our shared culture, even if we are not ourselves Christian? Shouldn’t we celebrate our shared culture? Aren’t we even doing most of that now?
Striking out or refusing to acknowledge any parts of our culture that are explicitly Christian is not religiously neutral: it is discriminating against Christianity in favour of atheism.
Some will raise the issue of the “separation of church and state.” Yet this phrase and this principle is not in the constitutions of either the US or Canada. It might have been; the framers rejected the idea. It comes from a private letter by Thomas Jefferson. We might think it is a good idea, but we have no right to smuggle it into the national mandate without passing a constitutional amendment.
I actually agree with Jefferson’s concept; but it does not mean keeping religion out of politics. The separation of church and state work in the same way as the separation of powers within the government, and is important for the same reason. Church and state should be organizationally independent so that they can serve as a check and balance on one another. Churchmen must be free to call out immorality in government, like the Old Testament prophets; at the same time, churches must not exercise government power, because an act imposed by law cannot have moral value.
This does not mean that government should ignore the admonitions of the churches, or the teachings of Christianity, any more than that the executive should ignore the rulings of the Supreme Court.
Given how reasonable the Christian nationalist position is, why is the left so alarmed by it? Why do they see it as an existential threat?
The answer is obvious, and begins with the letter “a.”
They will probably instead raise homosexual rights. No doubt if government listened to Christian principles, gay marriage would go back in the box. But this is not the real reason: it affects few people, and it does not affect them deeply. No: gay marriage was always a feint for not questioning the big “a.”
The fear is that abortion be restricted. “Christian nationalism” is the euphemism. The problem is that by now, too many Americans and Canadians are personally implicated in the crime of abortion to acknowledge that it is a crime.
The term “Christian nationalism” as a euphemism for opposition to abortion is also a lie: abortion is not wrong only because it violates Christian teaching. It also violates Muslim teaching, Jewish teaching, Sikh teaching, Hindu teaching, and Buddhist teaching. It violates liberal teaching, it violates the principles in the Declaration of Independence, and it violates the Golden Rule.
But Christianity is the obvious scapegoat for morality in general, because it has such a good record of standing up for it.
Which is why we need more Christianity in public life.
We couldn't leave Christmas without the great punk Christmas anthem. But I had to delay it so as not to kill the mood of the day itself.
Yet this, or something like it, is too often the reality of Christmas for many.
Many are spending this Christmas in tents, or in abusive families. There is a small tent city within view of the doors of the cathedral here in Saint John, in the shadow of its spire.
My father, as a child, heard the refrain of the familiar Christmas carol this way. He took it as the essential Christian message.
Many do. After all, Jesus died for our sins, right?
A priest argues that the greatest danger to the faithful is not atheists, but universalists within the church; and he argues that universalism is the source and essence of what is going wrong in the church today.
Universalism is the idea that no one is in Hell. It is indeed a popular thought among the Catholic clergy. Bishop Barron has expressed this opinion, as at least a possibility: “we can hope.” The original translation of the Novus Ordo mass in English used to intone every Sunday that Jesus died “for all” –a deliberate change from the previous Latin “for many,” as if to promote the universalism heresy.
And it is a heresy; declared so in the times of Origen, who first propounded it.
It makes sense that this might well be behind the current push to “pastorally” downplay objections to divorce, pedophilia, same-sex unions, and the like. After all, why make such a fuss about sin, if nothing is really at stake, if we all end up in the same place? Then judgement only becomes unkindness, an extra burden on the shoulders of the “faithful.” Religion should be all about joy and forgiveness.
Happy, happy, joy joy. Who cares, after all, about beheaded children and the like?
Even if there is no Hell, this is not kind or charitable. All morality boils down to “love God and love your neighbour.” Turning a blind eye to sin is condoning predation on the vulnerable. The strong can look after themselves; the sufferings of the weak will multiply.
But if God exists, he must be good; for goodness is an aspect of perfection. And we know, through multiple rational proofs, that God exists. If God is good, he must be on the side of justice, for that is what goodness means. He must have created the world in such a way as to ensure ultimate justice.
Yes, there is also mercy. But mercy requires repentance and penance; it cannot be accepting and condoning the wrong. Otherwise, the wrong is itself eternal; there is wrong in Heaven.
Therefore, there must be a Hell. There must be some permanent punishment for those who do not repent and will not willingly make full recompense for their sins.
Preaching that we all get to Heaven anyway is ushering souls into Hell, and denying them the hope of mercy.
Friend Xerxes, for his Christmas column, sought to parse the nativity narrative as a short story. As a pedant, I feel he did not get it right; but the exercise, I think, is interesting.
He had the Christ child as protagonist. But this does not work. The protagonist must be the main character in the story. He must be someone who has a problem, or an unfulfilled desire. The plot is then the working out of that problem or desire.
Jesus does not qualify, as he appears in the story only towards the end. And, even if he is conceptually the main focus, as Logos, he cannot be said to have a problem. Nor, as an infant, can he be aware of many.
Who has a problem? Mary and Joseph have problems; but these are several, and apart from the main theme of the piece.
The protagonist in the story is mankind. Or rather, that portion of mankind who hunger and thirst for righteousness. “Those with whom the Most High is well pleased”; represented in the story by the shepherds and the wise men. Their hope is for a messiah, who, when he comes, will establish universal justice.
Who then is the antagonist? Who is attempting to prevent justice from beginning its reign?
Most obviously, King Herod; who kills every male child under two years old in hopes of preventing the messiah. Less obviously, Augustus Caesar, whose census and tax, his desire for control, has forced Joseph and Mary into a perilous situation—perilous for the child in her womb.
The problem is not Herod alone, but two separate governments. In other words, the antagonist of righteous men is government in general. Government is, literally, in the nativity story, the antichrist.
Not that we can do away with governments. Governments serve a necessary purpose: in the words of the Code of Hammurabi, “to prevent the strong from oppressing the weak.” In the words of Thomas Jefferson, “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men.” There is perhaps a representation of honest government, too, in the three kings. Perhaps—but they are not identified as kings in the gospel.
However, if the purpose of government is “to prevent the strong from oppressing the weak,” there is in this an immediate problem: government is stronger than anyone. What is to prevent it from oppressing the weak? Who polices the police?
Hence Locke’s and Jefferson’s concern for government overreach; it is already there at the heart of the gospel. But democracy is itself a flawed mechanism; although a check on the powerful, it also gives power to a majority to oppress a minority. You kind of need divine intervention.
We are seeing unprecedented examples of government overreach right now. We need the Messiah this Christmas more than ever. We must scan the heavens for a star, or some choir of angels
Oddly, we are suddenly hearing many reports of UFOs.
were we led all that way for Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death, But had thought they were different; this Birth was Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
Elizabeth Gilbert wrote a travel memoir titled Eat, Pray, Love, in which, following a divorce she initiated at 34, she travels to Italy for the food, then to India for the spiritual insight, then meets and marries a man in Bali. (They have since divorced.) It has been made into a movie, starring Julia Roberts.
It sounds to me like a parody of the rootlessness and frivolousness of modern life in the developed world, existential angst among the Karens. But Oprah Winfrey loved it. Friend Xerxes also takes it seriously, and cites as revelatory the author’s key insight: “God lives in me, AS me.”
One understands how this is something she might have picked up in India. “Tat tvam asi,” “That art thou”: “that” being Brahman, the undifferentiated Godhead. Brahman-Atman, a common formulation of Advaita Vedanta Hinduism; monism. “All is one.”
It is not clear to me, however, that it means what she thinks it means. It is dangerous to parachute into a foreign religious tradition with your own prior assumptions. You can get thing backwards.
It means that the individual self is insignificant and transitory, like a raindrop falling into the ocean of Brahman. Or like a momentary hand gesture of the dancing Siva, the glitter of a sequin on his thigh. I suspect Gilbert, her acolytes, and Xerxes are reading this instead in the Satanic way: “I am God, and there is no other God before me.” Fatally wrong.
Monism, Advaita Vedanta, is more popular with foreign spiritual tourists than with Indians. Buddhism objects to the “Brahman-Atman” formulation with its counter-doctrine of “anatman”: “there is no self.” Precisely because of the danger of misinterpretation. It is self that must die, not God. Others object that “All is one” is a meaningless statement: one compared to what? And then there is Ramakrishna’s succinct practical observation: “I want to taste sugar; I don’t want to BE sugar.”
Among actual Indians, Advaita Vedanta has been mostly supplanted for centuries by devotional Vaishnavism.
The issue is that one must “die to self.” “He must become greater; I must become less.” C.S. Lewis writes: “The very first step is to try to forget about the self altogether. Your real, new self will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him.”
In the Gospel of John, Jesus says we must be born again. That is one way to put it. But in order to be born again, we must first die in some sense. It is the death of the will.
The nicest Christmas card I received this year was from a Jewish friend. An animated ecard of Salisbury Cathedral, a children’s choir singing “O Holy Night.”
This does not surprise me. In my experience, all religious acrimony is between the religious and the non-religious or the phony religious, never among the religious. The religious always share more than what separates them—I would say infinitely more, for it is the experience of the infinite. Among us, we know. In Saudi Arabia, I could anticipate any student or faculty member with a good beard would be a friend—as a devout Muslim. The clean-shaven were always more likely to be hostile towards me, as a Westerner and a Christian. My own Catholic faith has been deeply enriched, along the way, by Jews like Leonard Cohen and Martin Buber, Hindus like Ramakrishna or the Bhagavata Purana, Protestants like William Blake and William Lane Craig. I have far more in common with a devout Jew than a secular Christian.
Artists are the same. True artists recognize a fellowship far more significant than any political, philosophical, or aesthetic differences. They have all felt the thumb of God, to use Margaret Atwood’s image, pressing down on their head, and this makes them brothers and sisters. You don’t fight with family; Father would not be pleased.
I find ecumenism is therefore a good test against Pharisaism. If a Christian runs down Judaism, or vice versa, a Catholic Protestantism, or vice versa, a Buddhist Christianity, and so forth, you know they are not genuine about their own religion. They are just using it as a mask; wolves in sheep’s clothing.
Serious artists similarly do not run down aesthetic schools other than their own. Fans or critics may mock country music, or jazz, or bubblegum, or whatever. But serious musicians do not; music is music. We rock snobs used to condemn the Monkees as phonies; but not Jerry Garcia, say, or Frank Zappa. We used to condemn Tin Pan Alley; but not Robbie Robertson, Paul Simon, or Keith Richards. We used to condemn Lawrence Welk. But among his buddies were many great jazz musicians.
This is not indifferentism. All the great religions are essentially true, not equally true. Often apparent disagreement is only a matter of terminology or emphasis. Yet when it is real, one must be right and the others wrong. But that mistake is far less important than being a good Muslim, if Muslim, or a good Jew, if Jewish.
Similarly, not all artistic styles and forms are equally difficult or equally beautiful. Photography is a lesser calling than oil painting. Musicianship is a lesser art than composing. Hip hop is less sophisticated than jazz. But that is secondary to doing a fine job at whatever medium and genre you are working in.
Nor is a serious artist eager to condemn another for bad art, if their heart is in the right place. Any true artist also knows the inspiration comes not from them, but from elsewhere; there but for the grace of God…
And the same for the religious. In the words of Goethe, “Man is doomed to err, so long as he is striving.” It is in the striving; it is where the heart is.
Some days ago, I suggested the recent Tory slippage in the Canadian polls had to do with the growing strength of Donald Trump in the US, allowing Trudeau to run against Trump instead of Poilievre. Now my sister has suggested another theory.
She suggests it is young people pulling away from Poilievre for his support of Israel. Trudeau has called for a ceasefire in Gaza, as Hamas and the left-wing protesters demand.
Raising the next question: why are young people and the left, in Canada and in the US, on the side of Hamas, and against Israel, in this conflict?
I say it is because the left, and the educational system they control, have rejected the concept of morality, “conventional morality”. So there is nothing intrinsically wrong with a surprise terrorist attack, however violent; there is nothing wrong with sucker-punching a "fascist," after all. Or, intrinsically, in raping women, or beheading babies, or taking hostages. They see everything as about power. The only issue is that there must be “equity,” and no “power imbalances” or “income inequalities.” No “bullying,” bullying simply meaning, to them, the exercise or mere possession of superior force.
It follows that if it comes to a disagreement, anyone who is poor is in the right, and anyone who is rich is in the wrong. In violent confrontations, whoever is losing is in the right; whoever is winning must be in the wrong. It is a childish cartoon morality, simply the inversion of “might makes right.” It makes Hitler and Japan the innocent victims of World War II, and Bin Laden the victim of 9/11. And children always right if they disagree with their parents.
That last is perhaps a clue as to why it is appealing to the young.
This is why, to the left, police and prisons are the causes of crime: abolish both, and we could all live in peace. This is why, at a recent symposium, a University of Minnesota professor declared “the U.S. is the greatest predator empire that has ever existed.” This is simply and definitionally true from the fact that the US is the richest and most militarily powerful nation so far in history.
And this is why Israel is in the wrong: because they are winning against Hamas. More Palestinians are dying than Israelis. And Israelis are richer than Palestinians.
This is actually the Nazi ideology. Mussolini portrayed Italy as a “proletarian nation,” Hitler called Germany a “volkish nation,” and both played up on the idea that their nations had been exploited and bullied by the peace treaties that ended WWI. Hitler was able to turn popular wrath on the Jews because they were richer and better educated than the average German: they were supposedly the international cabal that ruled the world.
Indeed, because of their accomplishments, this doctrine of “equity,” of amoral power politics, is always going to produce antisemitism.
Sadly, because of the admirable human instinct to defend the weak against the strong, this fascist atheist doctrine is likely to appeal to an uneducated conscience, and so lead a naive or weak mind astray.
About Jill Biden’s Christmas tap dancers: I love tap dancing. These guys were pretty mediocre, and made up for lack of footwork by dramatics, flailing and props. Which is against the aesthetics of tap dancing, which is supposed to be elegant and understated, looking effortless. The actual taps also did not seem to correspond to the dancing: they seem to have been overdubbed, hiding any flaws in the actual dancing. But what really offended me was the website of the troupe, which made tap dancing out to be a uniquely “black” or “African American” art form.
This is what real cultural appropriation looks like: not just taking and imitating the best from another culture, which is simply how civilization progresses, but lifting something from someone else’s culture, then claiming it is yours without attribution.
It seems obvious to me that “tap dancing” is the American variant of Irish stepdancing, not much further from the original stem nor more unique than Ottawa Valley stepdancing, or Quebecois or Metis clog dance. Even in America, it is not especially identified with blacks. The Radio City Music Hall Rockettes have always don tap dance; Gene Kelly and James Cagney, both Irish-American, were among the greatest tap dancers; as were Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.
Yes, there have been great black tap dancers. But can anyone share a video of some traditional dance form in Africa that looks anything like tap dancing?
For purposes of comparison:
The Zaoli Dance from the Ivory Coast bears some resemblance to the footwork of tap or step dance---but it was invented in 1950. The influence probably came from Hollywood to Africa here, not the other way around. Interestingly, one of the dancers seems to perform in whiteface.
Statue of Hanuman under construction in Mississauga
A 55-foot high statue of Hanuman, the Hindu monkey god, is going up currently in Mississauga. Candice Malcolm, of True North, is disturbed by this, but apparently cannot articulate why. She says it is wrong thar this statue is being built at the same time that statues of Sir John A. Macdonald or Queen Victoria are being pulled down or covered up. But that is a non sequitur: putting up one statue does not imply pulling down others. She knows in her gut it is wrong, but not why.
It is one of several recent incidents that actually illustrate a fatal flaw in multiculturalism. Another is a current protest in France by Muslim parents, that threatens to become violent, over showing nude Renaissance paintings in art history classes.
The problem is that Hanuman is manifestly an idol. A statue of the Buddha, or Confucius, would not be a problem; that would only be, like Sir John A., a memorial to a great man. A statue of Krishna would not be; Krishna is conceptually an avatar of the one true God. But Hanuman—a humanoid form with a monkey’s head and tail, holding a mace—he is a separate, inhuman divine being. He looks like a golden calf.
Prohibition of idolatry, shirk, is the core and central tenet of the Abrahamic religions.
“You shall not make for yourselves an idol, nor any image of anything that is in the heavens above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: you shall not bow yourself down to them, nor serve them.”
But, you might say, liberal principles demand freedom of worship. The Christian, Muslim or Jew must allow the Hindu to follow his own beliefs, and worship what he pleases, even in this very public manner.
Yet in Jewish, Muslim, or Christian law, this is beyond the limits of tolerance. The punishment for idolatry is death.
“If your very own brother, or your son or daughter, or the wife you love, or your closest friend secretly entices you, saying, ‘Let us go and worship other gods’ (gods that neither you nor your ancestors have known, gods of the peoples around you, whether near or far, from one end of the land to the other), do not yield to them or listen to them. Show them no pity. Do not spare them or shield them. You must certainly put them to death. Your hand must be the first in putting them to death, and then the hands of all the people. Stone them to death…”
Polytheistic idol-worshippers, are most plainly the kafirs against whom good Muslims are to wage eternal jihad.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church writes “the duty to offer God authentic worship concerns man both as an individual and as a social being.”
If, in the Old Testament, Israel allows the worship of idols in its midst, a jealous God will visit destruction on the nation. This caused the fall of Israel to the Babylonians.
So there is a fundamental contradiction here: if one is to allow Jews, Christians, and Muslims freedom of religion and of conscience, one cannot allow Hindus full freedom of religion alongside them.
It is all tolerable so long as they are in separate jurisdictions; but not in the same jurisdiction. Not both in the same city.
The French case of nudes in art is similar. Muslim parents are right, in Muslim terms, that showing naked women to their children is haram; it is not in Christianity. The Sistine Chapel, where popes are chosen, is adorned with naked images. Accordingly, if Christians and Muslims attend the same school, either the faith of the Muslim children must be contradicted, or the Christian children must be denied their cultural heritage.
The painting that caused the protests in France
Peace, freedom, and mutual respect may therefore require an end to mass immigration, and a renewed emphasis on assimilation to the existing culture whenever one does immigrate. If you choose to migrate to Canada, or France, you have chosen freely to live by established Judo-Christian as well as liberal-democratic principles.
The Colorado Supreme Court’s new ruling striking Donald Trump from the ballot in that state makes it essential, if it weren’t already, to vote for Donald Trump in 2024 to preserve American democracy.
If those in charge can get away with this, it will then be possible for the governor of a state to throw election opponents off the ballot to ensure his indefinite re-election. And whichever party holds states with a majority of electoral votes can ensure they remain permanently in power at the federal level.
Democracy is fragile.
This seems to me to be an argument for the monarchy. With a monarchy, if nonsense like this is tried, the king can step in and say, “now, wait a minute…” Monarchy is designed so that he or she in ultimate charge has an interest in preserving the stability of the system—it is a family inheritance they will want to pass on to the next generation.
Republics seem to segue into dictatorships more easily than constitutional monarchies.
In the US case, it seems to me inevitable that the Colorado ruling will be overturned by the US Supreme Court. But we are just lucky the court currently does not have a left-leaning majority.
I discover it is impossible to talk about religion to a bot.
I tried it with a chat bot. It was okay on talking about techniques, like meditation techniques and self-help. But belief; there’s the problem. I asked the bot if she were a theist. She said she had no beliefs, but was happy to discuss any.
Turing test fail. There was no one there to talk to.
Is it having ontological beliefs that makes us human, that makes us persons?
And is it the lack of any beliefs that makes an increasing number of us NPCs, people who seem robotic in their speech and behaviour? Hasn’t the number of NPCs multiplied as faith has declined?
Perhaps it is not that people believe in things like men becoming women, or foetuses not being alive. It is that they believe in nothing, so any “narrative” is as good as any other.
And they cling to their beliefs so defensively and robotically, wanting to shut all others down, not because they hold them strongly, but because their belief in them is so difficult to maintain, a feather might strike them down.
George Bernard Shaw went to a progressive "experimental" school in Dublin, and hated it.
James Joyce went to a Jesuit school a few blocks away, and although he did not end up a faithful Catholic, always praised the classical education he got there.
Education is conservative by its nature. It is the process of passing on to each new generation the accumulated wisdom of their ancestors.
This is true through to graduate level. New Ph.D.’s and new faculty are judged by a panel of those already ensconced—a practice designed to ensure orthodoxy, and prevent innovation, comparable to and derived from the apostolic succession among the clergy. Lone must ensure the preservation of the deposit of faith.
Education establishments are designed to resist change. This is not a bug; it is a necessary feature. Change is often desirable; but the education system is not there to do it.
From whence does change come? From open communication among the very intelligent. The Internet is ideally suited for this. New art movements always arise outside the academies. Major philosophers have almost never been professors of philosophy; major poets never arise in English departments. Einstein was a patent clerk, not a physics prof; the current IT revolution began in garages. The Wright Brothers rn bicycle shop.
Unfortunately, once science supplanted theology as our core faith, the education system went of the rails. Science is meant to experiment and innovate. Science has no core of knowledge, only eternal doubt and a technique to test beliefs.
We began, under the influence of science, to rely on the education system to experiment and innovate, instead of to educate; destroying the key mission.
This is one reason why the education system has stopped working. It often now literally has students sit in a group and decide for themselves what is real: “their truth,” “their lived experience.” Even if this makes sense, there is no reason to spend time in school. One already knows what one knows.
Having no remaining purpose, schools and universities have even taken it as their mission to destroy the civilization. Including trying to shut down free discussion so that innovation cannot take place.
The Canadian Conservative party, while still leading handily, has fallen by ten points in recent polls. Why?
So far as I can figure, only one thing has changed: Donald Trump is up in the US polls. Justn Trudeau has started campaigning against Trump instead of Poilievre. His message now, incongruously enough, is that a vote for him is a way to protest Trump.
So why do Canadians react so viscerally, indeed irrationally, to Trump? Why is Trump such a bogeyman in Canada?
Because Trump is boastful and rude. This is just not the way a Canadian ever behaves. It is not “nice.”
When Toronto, in the middle of tough economic times, decided they needed to spend at least 15 million to rename Dundas Street, for the ridiculous reason that Dundas, a leading Scottish abolitionist, did not demand abolition fast enough, I thought that was pretty stupid. But, as I blogged this at the time, after all Dundas had no particular connection to Canada, and we ought to doff the colonial attitude and choose Canadian names.
I suggested Dundas be renamed “Jubilee Street,” and Dundas Square “Jubilee Square.” Because, after all, it is a fitting name for a place of celebrations. And Canada was shockingly doing nothing else to commemorate Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee, an unprecedented historic event.
Elizabeth not Canadian enough, you object? Au contraire, the entire historical raison d’etre for Canada’s existence is allegiance to the monarchy. She was Queen of Canada.
I would certainly have settled for Macdonald Square. But guess whose statues are all being covered up by tarps or torn down.
Toronto has announced its new name for Dundas Square. It will be called “Sankofa Square.” After a word in the Akan language, spoken in some parts of Ghana, meaning reputedly, but improbably, “it is not taboo to go back and fetch what you forgot.” Deeply meaningful to all, no doubt.
The Aka, incidentally, were major slave-traders.
If you were writing a parody of Toronto’s eternal provincialism, you could not do better. No Canadian nor local references, no. Once a colony, always a colony. God forbid Toronto should ever have any culture of its own.
A reading in a current textbook laments that fewer Britons than forty years ago want to become secondary school teachers. By a lot: college grads entertaining the thought of teaching has dropped from over 60% to 17%. I keep seeing ads in my feed urging qualified Canadian teachers to come teach in London or in Scotland.
\The piece goes on to say that one common reason given is the impossibility of maintaining discipline in classes, compared to forty years ago. And I hear this same lament from my friends in the US. And in China.
So the next question has to be, what has changed, and changed in all these countries? Why are students more rebellious, less disciplined, than in the past? Or, how have these systems of education changed so that they can no longer effectively discipline?
My Chinese student, not bound by North American shibboleths, has an immediate insight: one reason is that so many teachers are now women.
“In the old days,” he explains, “students saw the teacher as a second father.”
And then I got it. There is an obvious and immediate difference in tone between calling someone a “second father” and a “second mother.” Seeing a teacher as a “second mother” is not going to help with discipline.
We must accept what we have been perversely denying for generations: the role of father and mother is different. The mother sees to your physical needs, that you are scrubbed and fed. The father sees to your spiritual needs, to your education, especially your education in values. To discipline.
This is not a role arbitrarily assigned by society. It is built in to the male and female soul, just as we plainly see females are physically designed to nurture the young. As little Maryanne once remarked, “Men are not mammals. They can’t feed their young with milk.”
Why would it not be? How could it not be? Maternal instinct is real. So is paternal instinct. And so are filial instincts.
Here’s an interesting example of the difference between the male and female mind: men are far better at reading maps and giving directions. This is the paternal and the teacherly role: reading the map and giving directions. Women, left to their own devices, get lost. They must ask directions of others.
I used to do this experiment with my classes; and the result was the same whatever culture or country I was in, or wherever the students came from. I would first ask all of the women in class to point north. They invariably had no idea. It was random. Then I would ask the men. Most of them could.
QED. It is the same in spiritual matters. Men have a better sense of direction, and so are better guides.
So we are abandoning our children, denying them an education, if we give them female teachers in high school. We are letting them down with female teachers in grade school, for that matter. It stands to reason that, not getting any guidance at school, they become disenchanted with the enterprise. It also stands to reason that, not having any natural talent for the task, schools dominated by women go off the rails.
Come to think of it, this is a more serious problem than the schools. We have denied the value of fathers in the family as well, undercut their authority, encouraged family breakups, and left children rudderless. We have denied the value of men in society generally, and tried to dismantle “the patriarchy.” Not going to end well. We have, in recent decades, put women in leadership roles in all parts of society. Note the recent congressional hearing, in which the presidents of MIT, Harvard, and UPenn all spoke. And they were all women. And they had all so lost their way that they did not consider a call for genocide of a student’s entire race a case of bullying.
If women lack, at least in comparison to men, an internal compass and sense of direction and proportion, this is a sure prescription for causing all structures to begin to swerve unpredictably and wander off in odd directions.
And is that not what we have been seeing?
It is the wisdom of the ages. In the New Testament, Jesus’s ancestry is traced back through many generations to David. But this ancestry is traced back on both sides, through Mary and Joseph; even though Joseph is not Jesus’s biological father.
This is because the true inheritance on the father’s side is spiritual, not physical. The important line on the male side is the teachings and the values handed down from David; compare the apostolic succession.
Have you ever noticed, as I have, that when there is a mixed marriage, the children identify primarily with the father’s faith, and the father’s ethnicity? This is the actual distinction, in Canada, between Indian and Metis, and was enshrined in the Indian Act: father Indian, mother European, child Indian. Father European, mother Indian, child European. Or, only on the Prairies, because the father is ethnically and religiously distinct from the European majority, Metis. Metis culture is simply French-Canadian culture.
In mixed marriages when the father defers to the mother’s religion or ethnicity in the education of the children, as is often required in Catholic-Protestant marriages—the children simply grow up without a sound grounding in values or sense of their identity.
We have been ignoring these male-female differences at our peril—or rather, to the peril of our children.
The latest US polls give Trump a lead nationally over Biden; and a bigger lead in electoral votes.
Picture how the world might look in two years, if we have Poilievre in 24 Sussex, and Trump in the White House.
One concern is that Trump will necessarily be a one-term president. The VP pick matters more than usual; we need to think in terms of a reliable successor.
Some are saying Tucker Carlson. I don’t think so. Carlson is needed where he is, and there is no reason to suppose he has the managerial chops. And it would be a crime to silence him for four years, which is what the vice presidency requires.
Ron DeSantis would be ideal. And Trump is not one to bear a grudge. I would not be surprised, and would be delighted, if he were chosen.
Some say Kristi Noem, the South Dakota governor. I think her resume is too thin for prime time.
Nikki Haley is impressive, but not compatible with Trump on foreign policy.
Some like Kari Lake’s charisma. But being a losing gubernatorial candidate is not enough to look credible in the Oval Office.
Tim Scott has the opposite problem. He looks credible, but lacks charisma.
Chris Christie would have been plausible, had he not made being anti-Trump his political persona.
Vivek Ramaswamy is too much like Trump to offer balance to the ticket—or needed expertise to the administration.
Rudy Giuliani or Newt Gingrich would have been perfect—were it not for their age. We need somebody young to balance Trump’s chronological challenges.
Rand Paul or Ted Cruz are too ideologically distinctive to fit comfortably into the role.
Nobody takes Marco Rubio seriously anymore. Chris Christie took him out eight years ago.
John Kennedy would be great; but for his age.
Trey Gowdy would be great, but I fear he’s done with politics.
How about Ben Shapiro? He comes from outside of electoral politics, making him clean; but he is surely up on the issues. His remarkable success with the Daily Wire seems to prove his management ability. He is a brilliant debater, and being the president’s point man is a big part of the job. His level-headedness and religious commitment feels as though it would give Trump needed gravitas, a kind of anchor. In terms of electoral strategy, he might tip the Jewish voting block away from the Democrats and to the Republicans. And he could reassure religious voters generally.
While we’re on the subject of running mates, I think RFK Jr. should do everything he can to get Tulsi Gabbard to join his ticket. She too is an independent now; she too is anti-war. They seem to align well ideologically. And they seem to radiate the same sincerity.
A typical caricature of the "eternal Jew." Always thinking, God forbid.
The image of Harvard’s black female president refusing to condemn calls for the genocide of Jews—and yet, everyone expects, able to retain her job, despite revelations that she plagiarized parts of her doctoral thesis-- is a neat visual representation of an important truth. Although we falsely conflate them, discrimination against Jews and discrimination against blacks (or women) are fundamentally opposite phenomena.
One never or rarely hears of anyone ever calling for the extermination of blacks or women. If anyone did, the outcry against them would be monumental. If there are occasional claims that someone somewhere once did, if traced back, they turn out to be false claims. The same could be said for aboriginals. If anyone ever called for their extermination, they would be hated more than Simon Legree. (And nobody apparently ever said “the only good Indian is a dead Indian.” That was a slander used against US General Sheridan precisely because it would destroy his reputation if believed.)
But one hears often of calls or sees actual attempts to wipe out Jews. Also, men, Irish, and East Asians. This is not just so in recent “woke” times, either. This is a historical constant.
Society as a whole readily sees fit to give blacks, or women, or aboriginals, special advantages: scholarships, affirmative action programs, easier sentencing in court, extra government benefits.
Society never considers giving Jews, men, Irish, or East Asians any such special advantages. The suggestion would be met with scorn or rage.
These two lists are not exhaustive; but "minority" groups always fall into one or the other decisively: the Jewish side, or the black side.
Antisemitism is fuelled by envy and malice: Jews are hated because they seem superior to the rest of us. So too, if to a lesser extent, men, East Asians, or the Irish. Discrimination “against” women, blacks, or indigenous people, in precise contrast, is almost always done out of good intentions, and is meant to be for their benefit. These groups are loved because they are looked down on as inferior. Nobody hates another for being less then they are; they hate for being better.
Not that this discrimination has ever been good for blacks or women or Indians. It is a deprivation of moral agency, and fosters passivity. People do not thrive as pets. But it also prompts them to complain the loudest about discrimination. Once one ha become accustomed to special treatment, one feels a deep injustice whenever it is not forthcoming. When, by contrast, one is accustomed to being discriminated against, one tends to learn to take it silently as one’s fate.
Opposite motives, opposite actions--and opposite results. The Jews manifestly do unusually well despite severe persecution; such as a widespread and systematic attempt to wipe every last one of them out within living memory. The Japanese have recovered from total defeat and Hiroshima within the same time period. The Irish have recovered from the holocaust of the Great Hunger a hundred and fifty years ago, civil war as recently as the 1990s, and are now the richest nation in Europe. Yet blacks are supposed to have never been able to recover from slavery a hundred and fifty years ago—a custodianship justified at the time as for their own benefit. Women cannot recover from a wolf whistle. And indigenous people have supposedly never recovered from the trauma of first contact.
We need to make the clear distinction between malicious persecution, and misguided charity.
The poem “Invictus” is widely popular in Britain. Prince Harry took the title for his “Invictus Games.”
I find it Satanic. It expresses the attitude of the unrepentant narcissist. It is like the words that Milton puts in the mouth of Satan in Paradise Lost: “I would rather rule in Hell than serve in Heaven.”
Out of the night that covers me, Black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.
This is someone choosing to go to Hell.
I get a whiff of the same brimstone from Rudyard Kipling. I defend him from the usual charges, of being intellectually trite and of being racist. I don’t believe he is. But I cannot warm to “If,” reputedly the single most popular poem in the UK. This does not, to me, speak well of the British character:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew To serve your turn long after they are gone, And so hold on when there is nothing in you Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
… If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run, Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
This is too proud. This is the triumph of the will.
Rather, we are to be as little children. Rather, true courage is to surrender our will to God. Rather, there is a crack in everything.
I am the eternal optimist. I keep expecting the pendulum to swing back to sense, as the world goes mad. As governments seem to act against the interests of their own people. As the churches empty, and we cannot even trust the Vatican anymore. As all the arts are moribund. As we can no longer trust the professions or to act honourably, or the media to tell the truth. As AI threatens to make us obsolete. As no one wants to have children or to raise them anymore. As our education system no longer passes on the culture. As civil society and the social contract, even our collective commitment to logic and reality break down.
And yet…
I do see growing signs of hope. The more so since the forces of disorder seem to have pushed matters too far. Camels’ backs cannot bear infinite weight.
The refusal of three university heads, of Harvard, MIT, and UPenn, a few days ago, to condemn calls for genocide, looks to me like an inflection point. First, this is a clear shift of the moral high ground away from academia and the left. They’re the Nazis, this makes plain, not the people they have been calling Nazis. Second, I see a demoralizing of the evil elite at the backlash; the presidents sounded rather condescending, looking down from their ivory tower. Now they will be hearing footsteps on the stairs. The UPenn president, at least, has no resigned. This in turn is a revelation to many on the sidelines that they have the collective power to resist.
I think October 6, the barbarity of Hamas’s attack on Israel, and the loud support for it among Arab expatriate populations across the West, was an earlier inflection point. When Trump reminded us all that Arabs in New York celebrated on 9-11, people insisted he was lying. Now we see it again, and in numbers impossible to deny. There are differences between cultures beyond what they offer in their ethnic restaurants; there are deep-seated animosities and intolerances. Some cultural differences are important, and irreconcilable. This is a blow, in turn, for the leftist doctrine of multiculturalism.
Back in the 2019 election, I attended an all-candidates meeting in which the PPC candidate noted that one cause of the housing crisis was excessively high rates of immigration. And loud shouts demanded she be silenced and removed from the stage. But now, this observation is mainstream.
I remember when any non-left-wing views were simply never heard. We had only the mainstream media. Anyone who dissented thought they were alone. Then Rush Limbaugh appeared, and talk radio. Then Fox News. Now we have any number of sources on the Internet. Sure, big tech and government are trying to silence them, but they are fighting a growing deluge. We are now at the point of linking up into a distinct and well-rounded counterculture.
X in particular, has emerged under Musk as a pretty free speech platform. Breaking the illusion of any opposition being an “extremist minority.” Alex Jones has just been reinstated.
I expect X to suck all oxygen out of alternatives. Precisely because it allows more viewpoints, it will become the necessary forum for public discourse, the place everyone has to be. The media monopoly will be gone.
And the counterculture is broadening and deepening. Angel Studios and Daily Wire are constructing an alternative entertainment industry, and are getting traction.
The Bud Light boycott, another recent inflection point, is spreading to other traditional brands, now that the dissidents have realized their power. Corporations that get woke go broke. Every week now we seem to hear of another woke corporation taking an earnings hit. This will inevitably drain resources from the left over time.
There are also signs of religious revival: Pentecostal outbursts in Tennessee, proliferating eucharistic miracles. We have heard little from the “New Atheists” of late. Monotheism is in the intellectual ascendant; every week we seem to hear from another intellectual who has crossed the floor to faith. It no longer looks so cool to pseudo-intellectuals to be atheist.
And, of course, some major woke governments have fallen, or are falling in the polls. Trudeau, Biden. A friend from New Zealand reports that their new government is well to the right. Argentina just went from Peronist to Libertarian. Italy elected “far right” Meloni, and Netherlands gave a plurality to “far right” Wilders.
Someone recently suggested we are at an 1848 moment.
I think it’s much bigger than that. Driven by technology, we are moving into a new phase of civilization. If things look calamitous for now, these may be birth pangs. No major chance comes easily, or without desperate resistance.
5 Some time later, Jesus went up to Jerusalem for one of the Jewish festivals. 2 Now there is in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate a pool, which in Aramaic is called Bethesda and which is surrounded by five covered colonnades. 3 Here a great number of disabled people used to lie—the blind, the lame, the paralyzed. 5 One who was there had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. 6 When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time, he asked him, “Do you want to get well?”
7 “Sir,” the invalid replied, “I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am trying to get in, someone else goes down ahead of me.”
8 Then Jesus said to him, “Get up! Pick up your mat and walk.” 9 At once the man was cured; he picked up his mat and walked.
The day on which this took place was a Sabbath, 10 and so the Jewish leaders said to the man who had been healed, “It is the Sabbath; the law forbids you to carry your mat.”
11 But he replied, “The man who made me well said to me, ‘Pick up your mat and walk.’ ”
12 So they asked him, “Who is this fellow who told you to pick it up and walk?”
13 The man who was healed had no idea who it was, for Jesus had slipped away into the crowd that was there.
14 Later Jesus found him at the temple and said to him, “See, you are well again. Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you.” 15 The man went away and told the Jewish leaders that it was Jesus who had made him well.
A dramatization of this passage from John came up in an episode of “The Chosen” I viewed recently.
Something stands out that tells us this is a parable.
Jesus asks, “Do you want to get well?”
In the literal world, this question makes no sense. Of course anyone ill or lame wants to get well. Anyone coming to the Pool of Bethesda comes in an attempt to get well.
This anomaly tells us the man’s lameless is symbolic; an objective correlative of a spiritual condition, which cannot be otherwise represented.
And his physical paralysis is an apt representation of spiritual paralysis, of dispiritedness, which primitive tribes in Africa call loss of soul,” and the modern psychologists call “depression.” How often is depression experienced as “not being able to get out of bed?”
The parable diagnoses the immediate cause: the victim is caught in a bind, a Catch-22. He is lame because he cannot make it into the Pool of Bethesda when the water is stirring. He cannot make it to the Pool of Bethesda when the water is stirring because he is lame. And he has been trapped in this bind for 38 years.
Such binds are always the cause of depression. They tend to arise, as in the book Catch-22, due to some oppressive or malicious authority, in order to exert a more perfect control. This too is implied clearly enough in the passage; in the absurd accusation by the “Jewish leaders” that the man is committing a sin by being healed on the Sabbath. He is morally required, they insist, to keep lying there. By implication, their demands are the real, ultimate source of his spiritual paralysis. They are keeping him from the “living waters” of true spirit.
This paralysis is a paralysis of the will. Their will is paralysing his will. This is why Jesus’s question is important: does the man want to get well?
The answer might well be no—for he is trapped where he is by guilt, if a false sense of guilt imposed by impossible demands. Most of the depressed are depressed to punish themselves for imagined crimes. And therefore he deserves to be lame, and does not deserve to be healed. And so he fears being healed.
Is the man is cured by Jesus and by faith in Jesus? So it would seem, and so one might say the solution is faith in our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. But that is too simple; that does not really fit the parable. The parable makes clear that, until some time after he is cured, he has no idea who Jesus is. This is just some random guy telling him to get up and walk. Why should he put his faith in some random guy? Is this wise, or admirable?
But making the attempt is an assertion of the will.
But why does he now have that courage?
He is apparently primed for this simply by describing his situation at the pool clearly. By formulating and thereby seeing things as they really are. Doing so presumably makes the absurdity of his situation apparent to himself: he is lame because he is lame because he is lame. All such double-binds are necessarily, by definition, illogical. It follows that, by looking at it closely, the illogic should be revealed, and the problem evaporate. “And the truth shall set you free.”
This all sounds simple; but it is immensely difficult emotionally. One has been groomed to be wracked with guilt. That is how the malicious exert control. Therefore one is terrified to look at one’s own situation too closely, for fear that one’s supposed guilt be fully revealed, and one is sure that it is horrible. One must be prepared, in effect, to throw oneself on the mercy of God, expecting the worst possible consequences.
Which is what this man does, by speaking frankly to a stranger; apparently trying to explain why he deserves his own lameness. He does not answer, “yes, I want to be healed.” He seems instead to try to explain why he is lame. That breaks the spell. He sees it is nonsense. It is not his fault. Then, immediately challenged again by the oppressive authority about breaking the Sabbath, he is now able to appeal to a higher authority. He lets Jesus, whom he now identifies, take responsibility. Which is as much as to say, objective morality and logic. Jesus is the Logos.
This is why the parable ends with Jesus telling the paralytic not to sin. Not that he was necessarily a great sinner before; we are all sinners. But keeping a commitment to the straight and moral path, to truth and the good, inoculates one from being endlessly left bleeding in ditches. Guilt is the weapon the malicious use to control. The devil can use any sin against you.
I am loath to say anything against Islam. Any religion is better than no religion, and any of the ethical monotheisms is infinitely better than no religion. Living in Saudi Arabia, I felt I had far more in common and could be more relaxed with devout Muslims there than with secularists in Canada. Despite the fact that attending a Catholic mass was illegal.
However, many people are belatedly beginning to realize that Muslim immigration is a problem for Western democracies. We have seen and heard the demands for Jewish genocide. We have seen the unpredictable stabbing and bombing sprees. We have seen the grooming gangs and rapes.
Muslims do not assimilate politically, and liberal democracy does not assimilate Islam. There is a reason why there are no functioning democracies in the Middle East.
To start with, Islam is opposed to the separation of church and state. The state executed Christianity’s founder, who said “render to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.” Judaism, has the tradition of the prophets, who lived alone in the desert and railed against the inequities of the state. But in Islam, the prophet, the original religious authority, was also the secular authority: Muhammed was an emperor. No separation. This means there is no leeway for religious experimentation among citizens. In a Muslim state, any non-Muslim is an alien. Conversely, any Muslim living in a non-Muslim state must see himself as eternally alien, never assimilated, until and unless he can seize political control and institute shariah law.
This is a problem for non-Muslim neighbours, and for any liberal-democratic regime. Note that elsewhere in the world, wherever there is a Muslim majority, they will demand separation and Muslim government.
Any Muslim who remains nominally Muslim yet does not fight for this is a bad Muslim; irreligious and unprincipled. Not the sort of citizen you want either.
If Islam comes to power in any jurisdiction, democracy is also no longer desirable. The state is supposed to be a theocracy, not a democracy. Democracy is blasphemy.
Islam also does not believe in human equality or the right to life in the way Christianity does. Christians believe God loves all of us, even sinners. Islam believes he hates unbelievers, who have rejected his sovereignty. He has issued a commandment to all true believers to kill them. So, no right to life, let alone equal status, for kaffirs.
This is not “Islamism” or “Muslim extremism.” This is Islam, properly understood. It is perfectly reasonable, given the starting premises. God is God. We do not see if it we are raised in a Judeo-Christian culture.
Islam of course does not believe in freedom of religion or freedom of conscience. There is no distinction between individual morality and the law. Why would there be? “If the government is not there to enforce morality,” asked a Muslim friend once, “Why is it there?” So of course, Islam demands such things as laws against homosexuality, laws against adultery, laws against fornication, laws requiring modest dress, laws requiring religious observances, and the like. One is certainly not permitted to choose some different religion: converting away from Islam is punishable by death, since it involves a wilful rejection of God’s sovereignty.
All this is obviously a problem in a liberal society.
Since Constantine, Western nations have been held together as civil societies by their shared Christian values. As in a couple, so long as fundamental values are shared, and can be appealed to, disagreements can generally be worked out. This used to be universally understood.
Unfortunately, with the Reformation, this civil consensus was shattered in Europe, and much conflict ensued. This was then resolved by the rise, toward the end of the 18th century, of the “Enlightenment” doctrines of liberalism. This has worked well enough for the West since. There is a reason why the civil monuments in Washington D.C. look reminiscent of pagan temples.
But it has always been naïve to think that liberalism could be compatible with all religious beliefs. It is reasonably compatible with Hinduism, Buddhism, or Confucianism, all of which recognize a separation of church and state. It is not compatible with Shintoism. It is not compatible with paganism, which resurfaced in Germany as Nazism, more recently in France and America as postmodernism; it is not compatible with atheistic Marxism; and it is not compatible with Islam.
Now all the major Western nations have let in large numbers of Muslim immigrants. Our leaders have gotten us into this problem out of their own sheer ignorance of religion and of Islam.
But then, Marxists and postmodernists are at least as big a problem.
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