The Death of the Churches

An Anglican priest commented to me yesterday that the Anglican Church in Canada, on present trends, will disappear in fifteen years, by 2040. There are only grey heads in the pews now, and they are dying off.

My friend Xerxes, who is United Church, estimates 2035-2040 for their extinction date.

These are the two largest Protestant denominations in Canada.

The decline has been going on since about 1960; but apparently there was a big drop with COVID. Sources also blame the residential schools scandal, or, as I would call it, the residential schools hoax.

The Catholic Church is not doing that much better. Extinction not in sight, but affiliation and attendance is definitely declining, mostly in Quebec. I cannot find figures for Canada outside Quebec, but for the country as a whole, in ten years from 2011 to 2021, the Catholic population declined from 12.7 million (38.7% of the population) to 10.8 million (29.9%).

One should, perhaps, not worry. “Let go and let God”; He will manage affairs. On the other hand, one thinks of Sodom and Gomorrah. We cannot assume He loves Canada unconditionally. It does not help that we have embraced child sacrifice and various sexual perversions, the stated reasons that he obliterated Canaan and the cities of the plain.

It is true that more evangelical denominations, collectively, have shown “stability or slight growth.” But this does not make up for the mainstream decline.

On the brighter side, these figures may be unnecessarily alarmist. They seem to be based on census figures, so that the last year for which figures are available is 2021-- the height of the Covid pandemic. If Covid was responsible for a large drop in numbers, as is said, and certainly put people out of the habit of going to church, it seems possible there has been some recovery since, or will be over time, which will not show up in these figures until 2031.

The culture may also have been turning since 2021. It has politically, after all, with the resurrection of MAGA and the striking failure since of wokery in advertising, in the media, and in Hollywood.

There are signs of revival since 2021, if largely anecdotal, among Catholics and evangelicals.  Record numbers of adult baptisms, celebrities publicly converting, reports of miracles, and of descents of the spirit at mass prayer meetings.

When I turn my head at my local Catholic church, most of the heads are not grey. There are many children, young families. 

It is also perhaps natural that mainstream Protestantism is dying. It is perhaps not so much that the people have left the churches; it is more that the churches have left the church and abandoned the people. I went to grad school with Protestant ministers; the faculty was almost entirely Protestant ministers. They tended to scorn traditional belief; it was uncool among them to profess faith in anything. The people on the pew were ignorant peons, clinging to their superstitions. Anglicanism and the United Church preach no consistent doctrine, seeking only to reflect back to the congregation whatever they think they want to hear. Religion bores them, or frightens them; they have pretty much shifted their interests to politics and vaguely “doing good” for the poor or otherwise supposedly disadvantaged. 

This makes them redundant: why belong to the United Church instead of the local NDP constituency organization, or the local Red Cross or soup kitchen? Indeed, aren’t you just wasting time and effort by comparison?

The remaining reason to join a church, surely, is to hang out with people you know and like; as a social club. This gives little reason for anyone new to join the organization, or this organization instead of another; when the present cadre dies off, that will be the end of it. 

And as a social group, a weekly Sunday meeting, these churches face new competition for everyone’s free time and interest: endless streaming and reading on the internet, social media, video games, online conferencing, AI companions. All voluntary organizations, from the Masons to the St. Andrews Society to the bowling league, are bleeding members. There is too much else to do.

The mainstream Protestants, I think, aew doomed. Yet there is a path for Catholicism, and a crying need, if Pope Leo and the hierarchy have the wisdom, let alone the piety, to seize the times. They need to emphasize what makes going to mass most different from an ordinary day, a Catholic life most different from just living your life. That is, they need to give a solid reason to spend your time in Church instead of somewhere else. The very opposite of the direction things have been going since Vatican II. 

Catholicism has a secret weapon here: the eucharist. It requires your physical presence. It cannot be replaced by anything online. It significance and its infinite value should be emphasized by surrounding it with as much distinctive ritual as possible: more bells and smells, more organ music and choir, more reverence in its handling, and yes, a return of the option of a Latin mass. 

I am encouraged to see that my local cathedral, last Sunday, started reserving the front row of pews and kneelers for those wishing to receive communion on the tongue. This is, in effect, a return to the communion rail. I asked after the mass where this innovation came from. The celebrant said it was from the bishop; he did not know if it came from higher up.

Perhaps the Holy Spirit.

At the same time, the evangelical groups also demand physical presence for their celebrations, with the electric presence of the Spirit and laying on of hands. Catholicism shares this in the charismatic movement, and this too should be leaned into.

All this is desperately needed, by the many souls abandoned by their own churches, and to restore Canada to God’s grace.

Lolita and the Hellfire Club

I have long suspected that Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, was blowing the whistle on some kind of Hellfire Club going on among the prominent and wealthy.

Revelations since about Jeffrey Epstein and P Diddy and Hillary Clinton’s Russia hoax seem to confirm this. There really has been some sort of immoral cabal at the top running much of the society. And this explains many things, like large corporations seeming to act against their own self-interest, politicians going against the popular will and fearing free speech, and, not least, Trump Derangement Syndrome.

But for how long has this been going on? Is it new, or are we only hearing about it now?

 Kubrick’s far earlier film, Lolita, 1962, might also have been a blow on the whistle. It deals with ephebophilia, which seems the dominant obsession of the Epstein cult. That is, having sex with young, but post-pubescent, women. An obvious attraction for the rich and powerful: all societies and cultures see youth and innocence as highly desirable in women. So it is reasonable to foresee this as an ideal commodity for a corrupt blackmail cult.

Kubrick filmed Lolita as his first independent production, after breaking a multi-film contract with Kirk Douglas. The two had a bitter falling out.

In the opening scene of Lolita, James Mason asks Peter Sellers, “Are you Quilty?” And Sellers responds, “I am Spartacus. Why, have you come to free the slaves, or something?”

The film is relatively sympathetic towards Mason as Humbert for his obsession with underage Lolita. It is a natural enough desire. But Quilty is the real villain. As the movie’s plot unfolds, he kidnaps the underage Lolita and takes her to a “dude ranch” full of his “weird friends.”

It sounds so much like the Epstein arrangement.

Spartacus, in Kubrick’s previous film, was played by Kirk Douglas. By saying “I am Spartacus,” Quilty/Sellers is identifying himself with Douglas. And implying Douglas in some sense kept slaves, as Quilty does. Perhaps young female slaves, as Quilty does.

In 2021, soon following his death, Douglas was accused by the family of Natalie Wood of having brutally raped her when she was a child star of sixteen. She and her family had kept silence all these years due to fear of his power and influence.

There are suspicions around another starlet, Jean Spangler. Not underage; but she disappeared. Her purse was found, with signs of a struggle, containing an unfinished note that read “Kirk: Can’t wait any longer, Going to see Dr. Scott. It will work best this way while mother is away,” She was three months pregnant. Like the pianist in Eyes Wide Shut, there has been no sign of her since.

Whatever his experiences with Douglas, as soon as he was able to get out of that contract, Kubrick decamped to England for the rest of his life, a very strange move in terms of career. Although Lolita was set in the US, Kubrick awkwardly filmed it in England, using what American or Canadian actors resident in the UK to get the accents right. As he did for all the rest of his films. Surely a striking eccentricity. As if there was something in Hollywood he feared or needed to escape.

Kubrick’s wife has said he had wanted to make Eyes Wide Shut for years, but felt he was not ready to yet. Not ready? What held him up? It was not an expensive story to film in terms of special effects, like some of the other films he made before it. It did not require great historical research, like some of the other films he made before it. And as soon as he did make it, he suddenly died. A heart attack in his sleep, age 70, six days after the film’s final cut.

Did they get to him?

Did he let go and die knowing he had finally said what needed to be said?

Did he die of the stress of possible reactions from powerful quarters?

I hope one day we know.

Jesus Was No Socialist

Why are haunted houses never small or modest?

First Reading: Ecclesiastes 1: 2; 2: 21-23

Vanity of vanities, says Qoheleth, vanity of vanities!  All things are vanity!Here is one who has labored with wisdom and knowledge and skill, and yet to another who has not labored over it, he must leave property. This also is vanity and a great evil.

For what profit comes to man from all the toil and anxiety of heart with which he has labored under the sun?

All his days sorrow and grief are his occupation; even at night his mind is not at rest.

This also is vanity.

Second Reading: Colossians 3: 1-5, 9-11

1 Therefore, if you be risen with Christ, seek the things that are above; where Christ is sitting at the right hand of God:

2 Mind the things that are above, not the things that are upon the earth.

3 For you are dead; and your life is hid with Christ in God.

4 When Christ shall appear, who is your life, then you also shall appear with him in glory.

5 Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth; fornication, uncleanness, lust, evil concupiscence, and covetousness, which is the service of idols.

9 Lie not one to another: stripping yourselves of the old man with his deeds,

10 And putting on the new, him who is renewed unto knowledge, according to the image of him that created him.

11 Where there is neither Gentile nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian nor Scythian, bond nor free. But Christ is all, and in all.

Gospel: Luke 12: 13-21

13 And one of the multitude said to him: Master, speak to my brother that he divide the inheritance with me.

14 But he said to him: Man, who hath appointed me judge, or divider, over you?

15 And he said to them: Take heed and beware of all covetousness; for a man’s life doth not consist in the abundance of things which he possesseth.

16 And he spoke a similitude to them, saying: The land of a certain rich man brought forth plenty of fruits.

17 And he thought within himself, saying: What shall I do, because I have no room where to bestow my fruits?

18 And he said: This will I do: I will pull down my barns, and will build greater; and into them will I gather all things that are grown to me, and my goods.

19 And I will say to my soul: Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years take thy rest; eat, drink, make good cheer.

20 But God said to him: Thou fool, this night do they require thy soul of thee: and whose shall those things be which thou hast provided?

21 So is he that layeth up treasure for himself, and is not rich towards God.

These mass readings for this Sunday amount to a clear rejection of the left-wing idea of “equity.” Justice, Ecclesiastes asserts, requires that a man keep what he has earned from his labour. Not just his physical labour, but also what he has earned from his wisdom, and knowledge, and care. No doubt it is legitimate for government to take some in return for services rendered. No doubt it makes sense to provide a “social safety net” as group insurance. But for a government to get into the business of wealth redistribution is, in the words of Ecclesiastes, “a great evil.” That should settle the matter.

If not, the Gospel conveys the same message. Someone comes to Jesus demanding that his brother divide their inheritance equally. And Jesus refuses.  So much for Marxist equity.

Jesus says “who hath appointed me judge over you?” This is odd, and commands our attention, because Jesus is the rightful judge of the deeds of all. No one has to appoint him. How is it he has no authority in this case?

Because there is no moral issue involved. In an inheritance, neither party has earned the money. Neither has a moral right to it. So it is an administrative issue, a matter for king or Caesar: what does the law say? 

Jesus then goes on to address the moral issue: demanding equity is the sin of covetousness. 

This is not to let the rich off the hook. This is not to praise the rich. As the second, epistolatory reading tells us, their pursuit of riches is idolatry.

I worked for some years in Toronto with and among the “mentally ill.” Some of the names of these street people might surprise you. You might recognize some of the family names. A striking proportion of the severely mentally ill come from prominent families. Few seem to emerge from wealthy families with psyches fully healthy and intact. Most large old houses are haunted, and have closets full of skeletons. We know this, as a folk truth.

Thoe who are rich are likely to be covetous; for those who are covetous are likely to grow rich. This is obvious on the simple and self-evident principle that when we try to get something, we are more likely to get it. The same will be true for those who strive for social prominence. They are almost inevitably idolators.

Mental illness is spiritual illness. Mental illness naturally comes of growing up in a family with values askew. And the sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons, unto the third and fourth generation.

The rich are not to be praised or admired; at the same time, it is folly to envy the rich. 

Are the Times Still A'Changin'?

 

I recently inadvertently uncovered the essential difference between right wing and left wing perceptions. 

In a poetry group, I was given Dylan’s “The Times, They Are A’Changin’” as a prompt.

My immediate thought was that, if that song is still relevant today, times have been a-changin’ since at least 1964. Over sixty years. And yet, all the things we wanted changed then seem still to be with us, or back with us, or many claim are still with us—notably those on the left, so I thought this point was uncontroversial. We have endless foreign wars; we have rogue government; we have continuing racism and discrimination. 

The only difference, I thought, is that we now lack the same enthusiasm for change that we had back in the Sixties. Nobody is singing any longer. Which stands to reason, after sixty years barking up the same tree. We are exhausted; we need transcendence.

I wrote a prose poem to this effect. I read it to another poetry group to which I belong. I thought my sense would be universally shared, among those who knew the original song. 

I was wrong. Most folks who style themselves poets these days are leftists, and from them I got, unexpectedly, immediate pushback.

First, according to the left, the arts today, including most specifically popular music, are just as vital and vibrant and popular today as they have ever been. The quality of art is a constant, regardless of time and place.

So there was nothing special going on in Greenwich Village in the early Sixties, nor in Haight-Ashbury in the later Sixties, nor in Paris in the 1920s, nor in English poetry during the Romantic era, or Italian painting and sculpture during the Renaissance, or English drama during the Elizabethan era. The perception that it is so is all just prejudice.

I id not expect this; I would have thought the assertion mad. It is as if there is no such thing as quality in art, no standards. 

Yet this actually makes sense from a left-wing perspective. It is consistent and in fact seems to follow necessarily from their contention that all cultures are equal. Moreover, that all women are equally beautiful. 

It then seems necessarily so that eras in a culture must also be equal. Indeed, one could extend this: the works of all artists are equal, so that one chooses for a gallery or a publication only for proper ethnic representation. Which is pretty much how it works these days. I would see a decline in quality as a result; to the left, apparently, this is not possible. 

But that was not the strongest objection. The leftists in the group also objected to the assertion that we are facing all the same problems, in essence, that we did in 1964. 

They must believe this, I suppose--despite also insisting often that nothing has really improved in non-white lives since the days of slavery, indeed since the days when European empires controlled the world. Despite the contradiction, the inexorability of social progress is after all the core of their belief system as “progressives.” The left-wing agenda is to them after all, as an article of faith, the “right side of history.” Even if that left-wing agenda once included such failed ideas as prohibition, eugenics, pacifism in the face of Nazism, or segregation. Progress has to be a given.

“At least,” one fellow insisted, “You have to agree that society has become more tolerant.”

This floored me. Growing intolerance is my strongest impression. Back in 1964 there was no political correctness, no deplatforming, no cancel culture, no shouting down the other side. The Fifties saw blacklisting under McCarthyism. The Sixties had thrown off that yoke. Now we have it worse than in the Fifties. 

You might cite sexual freedom. After all, nowadays men can walk around wearing women’s clothes. But this is not the whole story. Things were freer for heterosexuals then. The Sixties have been called “The Golden Age of Porn.” Now that is largely shut down by fears of disease, “me too” and the like. And the growing legal requirement to pretend that men are women is, for 99% of the population, a decrease, not an increase, in freedom and tolerance.

You might point to the civil rights movement. But that was a fight for the 1950s. It was already capstoned by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the year the song came out. I recall Martin Luther King adjusting his program accordingly, to focus on poverty instead of race; that war was won. Since then, the movement seems to have been in the opposite direction: towards greater segregation, now often by black demand; in most recent years, greater hostility among the races; and even a higher poverty rate among black families. If whites are more tolerant of BIPOCS, BIPOCS are less tolerant of whites. There seems an even greater and more clearly binary us-them divide than ever.

And antisemitism is now at a level I would not have imagined possible after WWII.

It feels absurd even citing these matters—they seem obvious. 

Yet apparently they are invisible to the left.

To my mind, the left is trapped back in 1964, and cannot get out.

To be fair, when I held firm to my opinion, even without getting into detail or citing evidence, the leftists in the group seemed to back down.

They had to, I suppose. All opinions, after all, are equal. [sic]

The Evils of Urban Planning

 

Here in Saint John, back in the Sixties, they tore up Main Street, full of old shop fronts and city life, the traditional immigrant neighbourhood, to widen it to six lanes.

After all back in the early Sixties, one did not want ghettos. Ghettos were segregation. One did not want slums. So one wanted to knock them down to improve the city. Urban renewal was the thing. 

Moreover, in the Sixties, planners assumed rapid growth; the hugely expanded road capacity would surely be needed. Saint John would one day soon have a population over a million, and everyone would have a car. Overpopulation was the future. One needed to plan for the future. 

Saint John has not grown since the 1960s. Main Street is a dead zone—a stretch you drive through to get from here to there. There is no street life. There are no shops, and no residences. Just drive-ins and large institutional buildings. Historic buildings are gone. Many lament the loss of their old home, their old neighbourhood. The area is referred to locally as “The Lost City.”

Seeing the excess capacity and wasted space, town planners are now cutting Main Street back to four lanes, and putting in two dedicated bicycle lanes.

My cyclist friends say they will never use these new lanes. They cross on-ramps from the highway below. Cars cannot see a bicycle zip by until it is too late. The bicycle lanes are too dangerous.

Why does urban planning always cause more problems than it solves? 

I feel urban planning has been a blight on my life; on the lives of all of us. Consider the old towns and cities of Europe and Asia, which grew organically through a million individual decisions. Each has a distinct character; each block and corner has a sense of place. Compare the numbered grids of so many North American towns and cities. One place is just like another. The individual seems as insignificant as an ant, and daily life feels meaningless. There is no reason to be any one place rather than another. This was urban planning. 

Worse are the postwar suburbs, with their spaghetti streets and zoning prohibiting any storefronts or workplaces or diversity. They are designed to force everyone to own a car and burn fuel to do anything, to prevent you from knowing your neighbours or developing a community. It all seems deeply sinister. Among other ill effects, I think these suburban deserts prompted much of feminism: housewives felt trapped and isolated in their homes.

It is consistent: allow urban planning, and everything gets uglier. In Bulgaria, they refer to such Stalinist architecture as “roughneck baroque.” In the UAE, it is breathtaking to drive from freewheeling Dubai across the border into urban-planned Sharjah. It is as if a light suddenly goes out. 

Urban planning is always central planning. It is some expert or experts controlling the lives of other people. Since people are not objects, this cannot work. 

Worse, anyone who seeks to do this cannot have good motives. No one wants to be controlled; everyone wants to make their own choices. And so such planners are always breaking the golden rule, of “do unto others.” They are looking down on others as their inferiors. It tends to follow that they are acting with malice. It is not just that they will not foresee their subjects’ wants and needs. To show their superiority and confirm their control. They will tend to deliberately make the lives of those they control worse.

And make us pay for the privilege.

If we want to fix the current housing shortage, the quickest and most effective thing we could do is ban municipal zoning.

The Canadian Cyclist Genocide

 

Here’s how out of hand Canada has become: the Ontario government’s plan to remove bicycle lanes in Toronto has been declared unconstitutional by a court of appeal on the grounds that it violates “the constitutional protection of life, liberty and security.”

Presumably because, if cyclists insist on still using those roads, it is more dangerous for them.

Yet abortion, assisted suicide, child genital surgery—all quite okay. In fact, constitutionally demanded.

Canada is now run by unelected judges simply imposing their will.

Because they have an exclusive right to interpret the constitution, it is hard to see how this problem can be fixed without a new constitution. And the amendment formula for Canada’s constitution is impossibly difficult.

Perhaps leaving only two options: either provinces separate, or the US takes over.

Sydney Sweeney Conquers All

 Sydney Sweeney now dominates the culture. 

Ben Shapiro says that, aside from prompting outrage on the left, boosting her career into the stratosphere, and selling a lot of jeans, she is also splitting the MAGA base. Blonde power!

There are, Shapiro says, two kinds of Trump supporters: the conservatives, and the anti-woke. The anti-woke love the Sweeney American Eagle ads, because they are a poke at the woke. The conservatives, like him, will dislike them, because they are immoral, using sex to sell a product.

I agree with him on the first part of this. Joe Rogan, Tulsi Gabbard, RFK Jr., are not conservatives. Trump himself is not a conservative. But by becoming a mad cult, the woke left united everyone else in opposition.

And his analysis works in my case. I am not a conservative, never was, but I support MAGA from a distance. I can respect the conservative position, but I have always been a liberal, in the proper sense of that term. And I rejoice in the Sydney Sweeney ads, because they are anti-woke.

But I disagree with Shapiro that they promote sexual immorality, or that they are using sex to sell a product—which would be, in effect, prostitution.

Sex itself is not a bad thing. Sex is a very good thing, so long as it is directed, as is proper, to male-female companionship and the procreation of children.

And I see the Sweeney ads as promoting exactly this. Not casual sex, but companionship and procreation. The tag line, “Sydney Sweeney has great genes” makes this about as direct as it could be: you are attracted to Sweeney because, having good genes, she would make good children. 

People also comment on her “girl next door” vibe. This speaks of companionship as opposed to callous lust. Aside from cleavage, Sweeney is really not showing much skin. She is quite modestly clad in most of the commercials, by current standards. Arms covered, legs covered down to the floor. Loose jeans not showing the shape of her legs. Shoulders covered. Midriff covered. Usually just head and hands visible. "profile and hands, please." That's all you get. 

If she nevertheless provokes lust in you, I’d say that’s on you. Surely we can appreciate feminine beauty without immediately thinking about jumping into bed.

I’d say she comes across instead as the kind of level-headed, just-folks woman most men would want to show a ring to, and settle down with, if they could.

I think Shapiro has slipped into puritanism. But maybe that’s why I’m not a conservative.

On Prayer

“One day Jesus was praying in a certain place. When he finished, one of his disciples said to him, ‘Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples.’

2 He said to them, ‘When you pray, say:
“‘Father,
hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come.
3 Give us each day our daily bread.
4 Forgive us our sins,
   for we also forgive everyone who sins against us.
And lead us not into temptation.’”

5 Then Jesus said to them, ‘Suppose you have a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread; 6 a friend of mine on a journey has come to me, and I have no food to offer him.’ 7 And suppose the one inside answers, ‘Don’t bother me. The door is already locked, and my children and I are in bed. I can’t get up and give you anything.’ 8 I tell you, even though he will not get up and give you the bread because of friendship, yet because of your persistence he will surely get up and give you as much as you need.

9 ‘So I say to you: Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. 10 For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.

11 ‘Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead? 12 Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? 13 If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!’”

“ask and you will receive; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.

For everyone who asks, receives; and the one who seeks, finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.”

This familiar passage of the Bible implicitly condemns both atheists and those who call themselves “spiritual seekers.”

If God will reveal himself to whoever seeks him, it is not possible to honestly be an atheist. One is in denial. One also cannot claim to have long been seeking and not found. 

I submit that this is so. I say this although there was a time I too might have called myself a seeker, not a committed Catholic.

But that was actually out of fear. I recall I actually prayed that God send me no miracle, did not appear to me in any obvious way. Because if he did, I would fear I had gone mad. 

And getting past that fear felt like jumping off a cliff.

Others fear that accepting God would mean a heavy obligation on our part. We could no longer do what we want. We would need to feel guilty for things we have done. This seems to be the case for Jordan Peterson. I can remember it being the case for me. I can remember reading Jesus’s promise, “my yoke is light,” and not believing it. Fasting, abstaining from sex outside marriage, forgiving enemies… 

It is not that we think there is no God. It is that we are, like Adam and Eve, hiding in the bushes.

Usually, when you speak to an atheist, it is not that they don’t think God exists. They are angry with God. Why does he allow the innocent to suffer? Why does he not give me what I ask for? Why is he such a Fascist? This is abundantly clear of Christoper Hitchins.

You cannot be angry at someone you believe does not exist.

Given that he does exist, why indeed does God not instantly answer prayer? If he is good, why doesn’t he give us whatever we want?

Jesus explains by analogy: God is like a parent being petitioned by his son.

We immediately should understand that the parent knows better than the child; what children ask for is not always in their own best interest. They want to stay up all night and eat ice cream. God similarly knows better than we do what is good for us.

So why bother to pray at all?

Not for “stuff.” There is nothing wrong with praying for our daily bread, but beyond that, stuff is just candy.

But God wants us to pray, and to be persistent in prayer, to “annoy” God with the frequency of our prayer—like someone knocking on a door at midnight.  Not to allow God ever to ignore us.

Which really means, not to allow ourselves ever to ignore God.

And Jesus, in the last quoted verse, tells us exactly what prayer is really for: “If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”

The thing we should pray for, and what prayer is there to obtain for us, is the Holy Spirit, the abiding voice of God, “who has spoken through the prophets.”

And with this, I aver, comes true peace and meaning. All else is just candy and childish toys.

The Death of Canada

 

"I am Canadian, and freedom is my nationality." -- Laurier

The current Sean Feucht controversy—an American pastor-performer being harassed and prevented from performing in Canada, even in a church—underlines the sad reality that Canada is not longer a free country. Canadians demonstrably do not any longer have freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of association, equal treatment before the law, property rights, freedom of conscience, the right to have a nation, or even right to life. 

To be fair, neither any longer do Britain or France.

I have lived in Saudi Arabia. The atmosphere of oppression, of having to mind what you say, of government intrusion into your life, is stronger now in Canada than in Saudi Arabia even at the height of its autocracy. 

It is shocking how casually Canadians, and Britons, and the French, have accepted this, even voted for it, even demanded it. I grew up imagining everyone believed in human rights.  And France and Britain were among the cradles of liberty. Hyde Park Corner, the Oxford Union, Magna Carta, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and all that. It is more than sobering to see how gauze-thin the commitment ever was.'

At least, pushing back against errant government, earning eternal honour, we do still have the United States. This is a recent phenomenon even there; under Biden, the US was going the same way as Canada and Europe, even in some ways leading the charge.

This gives hope that a similar turn may come in Canada. But time is running out. Canada just voted in a Liberal government once again, probably for four years. Britain is in a similar situation, and France has banned the leader of their opposition from running.

I have felt since 2022 that the brutal suppression of the Freedom Convoy, which is ongoing with the prosecution of Tamara Lich and Chris Barbour, made Western separation, or at least Alberta separation, inevitable.

The federal government cannot or will not make a new trade deal with the US. They are insisting on preserving supply management, and this is something the US, reasonably enough, will not accept. It has also been torpedoing trade deals with the UK, perhaps others. The feds dare not negotiate this away, because the system is too popular in Quebec.

So everyone else is making deals with the US to get lower tariffs, and Canada can’t make a deal. Alberta energy is the one bargaining chip Canada might have had, and it is gone. 

Canada may not last another four years. Not to mention the effects of mass immigration, which look about to erase Britain and France too.

That being so, and liberty and human rights being vastly more important than any petty tribal loyalties, the most I can say is that I would not oppose an American invasion. At worst, there is little left to lose.

Sydney Sweeney Has Great Genes

 

American Eagle’s current ad campaign for their jeans featuring Sydney Sweeney is getting a lot of attention. Not all favourable. Some are objecting to it as being full of “Nazi” or “Fascist” “dogwhistles.” 

This puzzled me at first, but now I think I get it. It is seen as a celebration of “white superiority.” In one short, Sweeney starts by saying she is a product of her genes. Including her eye color. The camera wanders down to her cleavage. “Eyes—up here,” she says. The camera moves to her blue eyes. She says “My jeans [genes?] are blue.” Then the overlay, “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.”

This supposedly endorses eugenics, and the supposed superiority of “white” genes. Never a Fascist idea, but a Nazi one.

This objection is itself racist, however, unless you would also object to a black model, or a Native American model, being featured in the same way, as having “great genes.” It can be no more than a thought experiment, but I cannot imagine anyone doing so. 

But it is “white” people who are being discriminated against if they are not permitted to be called beautiful or have their genes praised.

You might counter with a claim about white privilege, some ancient wrong that needs to be redressed.

But Sydney Sweeney has no white privilege. 

Sydney Sweeney is Irish. At least until the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, most educated people were aware of historic discrimination against the Irish; those who did not despise the Irish themselves. Attending university in Canada in the 1970s, the student newspaper ran an editorial titled “Let’s Sink Ireland for a Day”—an actual call, if not entirely serious, for genocide. There was no blowback. I have been told several times by women that they had promised their parents never to bring home an Irishman. T.S. Eliot used Sydney Sweeney’s very own surname in these lines to describe an Irish character in 1920: 

Apeneck Sweeney spread his knees
Letting his arms hang down to laugh,
The zebra stripes along his jaw
Swelling to maculate giraffe.

The Irish were never considered by the larger Anglo world part of any master race with superior genes. More often as a separate, subhuman race. 

There is a reason so many “black” Americans have Irish surnames. Look at Mariah Carey. Look at Rhiannon Giddens. They are probably half Irish. Irish and blacks were long considered the same social class, and commonly intermarried.

“Dumb Blonde” jokes may be part of this continuing prejudice—and such jokes are still perfectly permissible in polite company. As are comments like “do gingers have souls?” 

Talk about blackface? How about whiteface—the usual clown makeup. Note the red hair. The conventional North American clown is actually a stage Irishman, including the bulbous red nose suggesting a drinking habit. An ethnic stereotype.

It is time the Irish had a right to celebrate their genes, and their beauty.

The Times, They Are A'Changing

 

I was there and I was young and everyone was young and the world was young and we believed the world was changing and it was. 

Some of the changes were good. Some of the changes were bad. But it was not what we imagined. It never is, never was, never will be.

And then, too drugged, we missed the cosmic moment. We got trapped in our traffic jam on the way to Woodstock and the garden. Some of us made it even to the gates, chanting, dancing, shaking fists, brave behind our placards. We wanted the world, and wanted it now, when we should have wanted heaven and forever, and then fell back into sex and money and paranoia and confusion and joined the 27 Club or became disco zombies or learned to code and retreated to cyber monasteries or taught in Asia.

And now, oh God, flashbacks, it seems to all be happening over again. There are wars and rumours of war and rogue criminal governments and thought crime and racism and discrimination and tumult in the streets.

But something else is wrong, has gone wrong, has gone most utterly wrong. 

This time the bones creak, and no voices rise in song.

This time there is no music.

Why Women Are Obsolete

 

There is much talk in the culture now about Men Going Their Own Way, and many 30-something women complaining on YouTube or TikTok that there seem to be no available men.

 Younger men seem to have lost interest not just in marriage, but in women.

The surprise is that it took seventy years. Wives have been obsolete since the 1950s. As of the postwar years, thanks to automation, the traditional women’s role in the home became relatively trivial. She was replaced by the washing machine, the dryer, the refrigerator, the vacuum cleaner, the electric oven. A suburban housewife had nothing but free time—this was essentially Betty Friedan’s complaint. At the same time, as Hugh Hefner realized, men could live perfectly comfortably alone, in a “bachelor pad.” Why marry?

However, rather than doing anything to restore their attractiveness to men, women took the opposite tack—of declaring that they did not need men anyway. Hence feminism: “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” 

Declaring that they disliked or hated men, they withdrew companionship—the second reason for men to want to marry, or spend time with women. Now, for men, spending time with women only meant being criticized. And dropped at any moment, thanks to no-fault divorce, with potentially huge financial penalties, should they happen to be successful in their career.

Leaving only one possible reason for men to want to be around women: for sex.

Feminists at least at first emphasized this: being a “liberated woman” meant having sex often and with abandon. 

However, women killed off this attraction too, with the “Me Too” movement. Now not only was marrying too risky for men; even having sex with a woman was too risky.

So of course men are staying away from women. It is a credit to their gallantry and sense of self-sacrifice that they stuck with it so long—seventy years, a human lifetime!

As technology marches on, it is now looking able to replace women for sex—with profuse porn available on the internet, perhaps virtual reality and sexbots soon. And it can even offer a kind of artificial female companionship, with emerging AI avatars. 

It is a sad situation. Women are alone; and men are alone. And no children are born. It is the death of the species itself.

And men can fare better alone than women can. Women by instinct crave community, children, affirmation, security; men have a natural drive for independence and self-reliance.

So women’s levels of happiness are nose-diving. Men’s are too, but not so much.

Blame technology; and blame feminism.

Why did women react so badly, hastening their own misfortune?

It seems to be a common human reaction: when one is accustomed to privilege, and it is threatened, one tends to lash out in denial. So the Boers, feeling vulnerable, imposed apartheid. Austria-Hungary, Europe’s shakiest Empire, provoked the First World War. The current wave of Islamic militancy, similarly, looks to me like a rearguard action. 

So feminism. Methinks they do protest too much.

The Dead Don't Die

 

I recently stumbled across Jim Jarmusch’s “The Dead Don’t Die” on Apple Prime. When I saw it was from Jarmusch, and starred Bill Murray, I had to watch. And for most of the movie, I thought it was great. Lovely absurdism, lots of Americana, lots of cultural references. Lots of famous cameos. Very deadpan and low key. My cup of tea. 

But I really felt Jarmusch lost it with the ending. The movie has not had a great reception, and I think it is because of the weak ending. It just fizzles out. Not to give any spoilers, I will not say how it does end, at least more than I need to for a setup.

Here’s exactly where it goes off the rails: Jarmusch has Bill Murray as police chief turn to Adam Driver as his deputy, sitting in a police car surrounded by zombies, and say, “how is it you have a feeling this is going to end badly.”

And Driver says, “I read the script.”

To me, too obvious. An old Crosby/Hope Road gag. And it makes the ending predictable—a deadly dramatic error. No punchline, no climax, just a winding down.

Here’s how I would have done it, from this point:

Murray: “How is it you have a feeling this is going to end badly.”

Driver: “It’s all like a book I read once.”

M: “What was the name of the book?”

D: “War of the Worlds.”

M: Seriously? Ronnie, that book isn’t about zombies. It’s about Martians.”

D: “Oh yeah. I got confused. Martians. But it ended badly.”

Pause.

M: “It didn’t end so bad. Some virus killed all the Martians.”

Pause.

D: “Cliff…”

M: “Yeah, what?”

D: “What if we’re the Martians?”

Pause

Tilda Swinton appears on a hill nearby, with the cemetery below, police car to the left. She is carrying her samurai sword.

A saucer-shaped UFO appears and lands. Swinton strides forward, decapitating zombies right and left.

A panel in the saucer slides open. A mustached middle-aged man steps out, in a black business suit, holding a pipe. 

Swinton: “Mr. Wells?”

H.G. Wells: “The same.”

S: “Tell me, how does it end.”

Wells: “Well well well. We can’t use a virus, can we? Science tells us it is a virus that causes zombies. We can’t use that one again.”

S: “Pity. Are we doomed, then?”

Wells: “But what happens to you if you catch a virus.” Pointing his pipe.

S: “You die, or you get better.”

Wells: “And the dead don’t die…”

S: “They’re already dead.”

Wells: “So…”

Zombies begin slowly falling all around them.

S: “They get better.”

Wells: “And they go back to being dead.”

S: “Anyway, until the next apocalypse.”

Zombies continue to fall. Wells smiles contentedly and draws on his pipe.

S: “Officers? You can come out now!”

Murray and Driver get out of the police car and slowly approach, looking around at all the fallen and falling zombies.

M: “What happened?”

S: “Gentlemen, let me introduce you to Mr. H. G. Wells. He’ll explain it all to you during the credits.”

D: “Mr. Wells! Can I have your autograph?” Pulls out his police note pad.

M: “I loved you in Citizen Kane.”

Wells: “What?”

S: “No, that was Orson Welles.”

D: “Wait—you mean there’s two of you?”

M: “That’s spooky.”

Roll credits.

On Consensus in Media

 

Russell Brand

Here is a recent wise quote from Russell Brand, paraphrased for brevity: “A consensus in mainstream media is not a verification. It is the opposite. The more you see the mainstream media making a point of claiming something is true, the more likely it is false.”

For “mainstream media,” I would substitute the term “broadcast platforms”: any information channel that is directed at a broad general audience. A more obvious example of a broadcast medium in this sense than even the traditional television networks is the education system. But it will also include newspapers at the local level, and large-circulation magazines: a National Geographic, a Scientific American, a Rolling Stone, a Time Magazine.

These are likely to be spreading false information, because these are the platforms on which it is most profitable and effective to spread false information. So if any powerful interested party can exert control of one, they are likely to do so for their purposes. Most probably, the government; but also business interests, professional groups, and other special interests with a lot of money to advertise.

If there really is a consensus on something, it should go without saying. Nobody needs to belabor the fact that the earth is round. So if a broadcast medium is repeatedly pointing out that something is true, this is almost in itself proof that it is not. You are looking at a propaganda campaign.

What about a “consensus of experts”? Good question. I would add that group who claims a consensus, or any organization that claims to govern by consensus, is really a dictatorship. Consider those elections in Eastern Europe in which the leader used to reliably poll over 90% of the votes. That’s consensus. It is not a good sign. It really means a situation in which nobody dares object to whoever has the strongest arm or the loudest voice. So beware any consensus of experts too.

We are all fortunate that the broadcast media are dying. It is a brave new world, in which what was long hidden should begin to appear in the light.

The Death of Late Night

Stephen Colbert and the Late Show are being cancelled. News, but not a surprise. Apparently the show was losing 40 million USD per year.

The problem is that they were no longer attracting enough of the key demographic, those aged 18 to 54. This is the only TV audience advertisers care about.

Why, exactly? Don’t older people have money to spend?

Yes, but they also tend to have already made their choices. They are loyal to their preferred brands. They are no longer in the open market.

The loss of this key younger demographic tells us network television itself is dying. Only old people still watch, loyal to their preferred medium, out of force of habit.

The decline is probably irreparable, thanks to improving technology. It is not just that there is greater competition; the new competition on the Internet can narrowcast, offering a more targeted market for an advertiser. For most brands and products, this makes more sense than paying for everyone’s eyeballs.

But here is a second puzzle. Why are the late night comics seemingly doing their best to jump off that cliff, to hasten their own downfall? For years, they have become increasingly political and partisan. And stopped telling jokes. This obviously alienates a large portion of their potential audience: obviously not what you want to do if you are broadcasting.

Colbert, for example, will be forever best remembered for one skit in which he simply danced with a troupe dressed up as hypodermic needles, with no setup or gag, just the shout “vaccine” at the end of each bar. A sad legacy.

Was this some desperate and incompetent attempt to narrowcast on a broadcast medium? To fight for  bigger piece of a shrinking pie?

I think it illustrates instead a saying often wrongly attributed to Mahatma Gandhi, about how you change the public consciousness. “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

This describes well the evolution of the political and social tendency often these days called “populism”; or, in the US, “MAGA.” It too is a product of the new technology.  With greater access to information, people are increasingly disinclined to trust the received consensus—that which is socially “broadcast” to them.

The late night comics, by the nature of their position on the networks, were committed to the old “broadcast” paradigm.  Being comics, they naturally saw their greatest influence and their main chance at the “then they laugh at you” phase. For some years, ridicule of this rebellious new turn of thought was the obvious and easy go-to for a gag. And it gave the comics great prestige and social influence. I remember not so many years ago the common comment that “I get all my news from the comedy shows.” Shows like the Daily Show.

But in going for the partisan gags, the late night hosts locked themselves into the “then they fight you” phase. As their habitual targets rose in power and influence, they were no longer funny. It was no longer a laughing matter. A few shrewd comics have managed to navigate this by flipping sides: Joe Rogan, Scott Adams, Russel Brand, Bill Maher. Many more seem to have dug themselves in too deep, becoming publicly identified primarily as a political figure.

I feel especially sorry for Jimmy Fallon, who early on seemed to see the risk, and tried to resist it. But when broadcasting is your livelihood, you are pretty locked in. You would have to kick against your employers as well as all your closest colleagues.

And now they are losing the argument.

 

 

  

Why Women Can't Write Poetry

 

Not the usual image, but thought to be perhaps a photo of Emily Dickenson.

I once belonged to a small poetry group. It is far from a valid sample, but… 

The only qualification for membership was interest in reading your poetry publicly. 

The group consisted loosely of four men, and four women. All four of the men were pretty good poets; and all of the women were dreadful.

Was that purely coincidental? 

There are indeed far more great male poets, than female poets in the canons of world literature.

Feminists will of course say this is because women’s voices were silenced. Only men’s voices counted.

Yet against this, in most or all societies, women have had more leisure time for the arts than men. It has been up to the man to earn sustenance for the family. Women, at least among the classes that could afford any leisure for anyone, were encouraged to pursue the arts. Book clubs were always primarily women; and still are. Magazines were mostly marketed to women. TV was mostly viewed by women. Why would they not have used this time to write?

Is it that female poets were discriminated against by publishers? A female poet of my acquaintance, who has done the research, insists this is not so; and any check of the Internet Archive or old newspapers appears to confirm this. At least by the 19th century, poetry by women seems actually to have been published more often than poetry by men. They did have the leisure time, and they did use it, and they did get it into print.

And yet, with few exceptions, it is the men’s poetry that is still read today, that has survived the test of time. The women’s poetry seems to have lacked any abiding message to mankind.

In her day, Elizabeth Barrett Browning was a bigger literary star than her husband, Robert. But since, her reputation has faded, while his has grown.

 Other than Emily Dickenson, how many first-rank women poets can you think of from the 19th century? 

Of course, you can list many from more recent years. But you could have drawn up a similar list in 1850. How many will endure?

Could it simply be that men are deeper thinkers than women? Women can make words pretty, but men are better fit to plumb the depths of human experience?

Pauline Johnson was wildly popular in Canada in the 19th century. She was half-aboriginal, and would recite wearing buckskin. But her popularity faded. It has been revived recently, to some extent, for political reasons. But it is striking to me that there is really no content to her poems; they never really say anything.

If ever a literary career was built on superficial show, it was hers.

A feminist heresy, of course, to suggest that men are deeper thinkers than women. But surely plausible; we know women’s and men’s brains, after all, are physically different. Such a difference in deep thinking is implied in the Bible, if you take it seriously, when St. Paul advises wives to obey their husbands, and women to remain silent in church. 

But it is not even clear to me that women are better at the mechanics of verse, at making words pretty. Even though, if we are still talking about sex differences, tests show that women on average have better linguistic skills than men. Even though craftsmanship in verse would seem to follow.

In my local group, it is not just that the women lacked any message. They also seemed to have no sense of craftsmanship either. What they declaimed were not poems or verse at all in the technical sense. More expressions of emotion without grammar. It is the men who played with the sounds of words, with rhythm, assonance, repetition, and sometimes rhyme.

Even in the case of Emily Dickenson: the odd exception of a great female poet. She absolutely has depth. But she is not great technically. Her rhymes are loose; there is little rhythm. Her style is epigrammatic. Britannica cites a “lack of high polish.”

What then can explain this? Why aren’t women better at poetry?

I think it is precisely because women are more verbal than men. It was certainly obvious in my poetry group. In between readings, all conversation was dominated by the women, who expressed their opinions on religion, politics, and human relationships freely and forcefully. The men all stayed mostly silent, but perhaps for occasional muttered assent.

Dickenson perhps explains it, when she says of poetry: “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant. Success in circuit lies.” Poetry is for saying things you cannot say directly. It is the voice of the silenced. Contrary to the claims of feminism, women have always been freer to speak their minds publicly. They are accustomed to being listened to, as well. A woman can usually get what she wants by making her demands clearly known. 

Men, by contrast, learn to choose their words carefully. They must not make demands, emotional or otherwise. They must think before they speak, or risk a fight, or force of law. 

Consider the famous feminist complaint that men will never ask for directions. A women will do so immediately, even without consulting the map. 

Isn’t this actually an example of female privilege?

If Emily Dickenson is an exception to the rule, it interestingly corresponds with an unusual life experience. She lived her life in seclusion, with few to talk to; if only due to her own congenital shyness.

It is the pressure to shut up, or having something to say that nobody wants to listen to, that forces poetry.

An Honest Land Acknowlegement

Spanish and Portuguese possessions according to the Treaty of Tordesillas

In May of this year, Catherine Kronas, an elected member of the school council at Ancaster Secondary School in the Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board (HWDSB), was suspended from her position by the school board because she lodged a formal objection, following proper parliamentary procedure, to the board’s requirement to make a “land acknowledgement” at every council meeting. Her concern was that this was a political statement, and compelled speech.

This was equivalent to a coup by the bureaucracy overthrowing the elected government. The school board is supposed to be subject to the elected parents’ councils, not the other way around. It is also an extreme violation of human rights: of freedom of speech, of the right to petition the government, of parental rights over their children’s education.

Why would the school board act in such a dictatorial fashion over this particular issue?

In part, this is a sign of desperation. The various bureaucracies are aware they are losing control. The natural reaction is to lash out in narcissistic rage; just as Islamic terrorism is a symptom of the collapse of Muslim confidence. We have seen blatant attempts by the “deep state” to subvert democracy in the US, in France, in the UK, in Germany, recently. Canada is probably no worse.

The reason the school board is enforcing this “land acknowledgement” in the first place is, of course, that it is a lie. Forcing people to repeat a lie is an exercise in control for its own sake.

Nobody feels the need to enforce a truth. Truth can look after itself.

The various “land acknowledgements” are also violations of the principle of human equality; they imply that some citizens have, by birth, some claim to the land above that of other citizens. 

One might counter that they are meant merely as a matter of historical interest. However, if so, they are still discriminatory in mentioning only approved “First Nations” groups who fought over this land, and not also historic claims to the land by the French, the British, and, by Treaty of Tordesillas, the  Spanish.

Especially obnoxious is the common claims that some part of Canada is “the unceded territory” of this or that tribe. This is a plain lie. Sovereignty was expressly ceded by treaty across the Prairies and the north, throughout Ontario, and in the Peace and Friendship treaties in the Atlantic Provinces. Note, for example, this text from the “Articles of Submission,” 1725: “We, the … delegates from the … tribes inhabiting within His Majesty's said territories of Nova Scotia or Acadia and New England, do, in the name and behalf of the said tribes we represent, acknowledge His said Majesty King George's jurisdiction and dominion over the territories of the said Province of Nova Scotia or Acadia, and make our submission to His said Majesty in as ample a manner as we have formerly done to the Most Christian King.” 

This is a clear surrender of sovereignty. Their land was ceded, in the same sense the French Acadian lands were ceded to Britain in 1713, or the North-West Territories were ceded to Canada by the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1870. This does not, of course, directly address the matter of individual ownership of given plots of land. That would be subject to the laws of England: “We Submitting ourselves to be ruled and governed by His Majesty's Laws and desiring to have the benefit of the same.”

Interestingly, by contrast, Spain actually never has formally ceded sovereignty over North America. So that “land acknowledgement” is the only one that might be vaguely legitimate. For what it might be worth.

Conclave

My feeling after watching “Conclave” is that it is not truly anti-Catholic. After all, it shows the cardinals genuinely, in the end, electing the candidate they believe to be the holiest among them. Despite the temptations to simony and lust and ambition, they are on the whole sincere—a realistic, even an optimistic, appraisal. And there is an interesting question in the end. Spoiler alert. Stop reading now if you have not seen the film. 

Given that Cardinal Benitez’s medical condition is just barely possible, what are the moral issues it involves? What should Benitez or Lawrence, in good conscience, do or have do?

For what it is worth, I think the conclusion the movie offers is correct. At this point, it is an irrelevant technicality. 

My sense is more that the screenwriters have been lazy. They show a shocking lack of knowledge of the Catholic faith, and have not taken the trouble to get it right. Having spent so much, and such care, on the cinematography, it is shameful that they did not put in the effort to get the theology right. Even had the intent been to criticize the Catholic church, they have been mostly punching at straw men. I feel as though my intelligence, as audience, has been insulted.

It is not a legitimate criticism of Catholic, or any, traditionalism, for example, to associate it with racism, as they do by having Cardinal Tedesco worry about one of “those people” (sub-Saharan Africans) becoming pope. Even outside the Church, there is no reason to associate traditionalism with racism. But certainly not inside the church, where the most traditionalist cardinals are usually found in Africa and Asia. If the screenwriters want to object to traditionalism, they have to offer some genuine reason it is bad.

Part of the problem is that, in typical Hollywood fashion, they have to portray one character as an absolute villain. They even use the tired and obvious trope of introducing Tedesco by immediately showing him being rude to an underling. Sophomoric.

Far better to give each character depth and motive. But they did not bother.

More cringeworthy is Cardinal Lawrence’s extempore soliloquy: 

“St Paul said that God’s gift to the Church is its variety. It is this variety, this diversity of people and views that gives our Church its strength. In the course of a long life in the service of our Mother the Church, let me tell you that there is one sin I have come to fear above all others. Certainty. Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. Even Christ was not certain at the end

‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ He cried out in His agony at the ninth hour on the cross. Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand in hand with doubt. If there was only certainty, and if there was no doubt, there would be no mystery, and therefore no need for faith. Let us pray that God will grant us a Pope who doubts. Let Him grant us a Pope who sins and asks for forgiveness. And carries on.”

There’s just about everything wrong with that.

To begin with, St. Paul never said God’s gift to the church was variety or diversity. That’s some weird projection. My guess is that the intended justification for this claim is that St. Paul said there was neither Jew nor Greek in Christ. This is not a celebration of diversity, but a call to unity. In the Bible, the diversity of mankind is the result of sin—see the Tower of Babel. 

And necessarily no Church is about a diversity of views. People come together as a church because of shared views. If you are a Christian, you profess the Nicene Creed, and must commit to it at each mass. If you are a Catholic, you accept the Catechism of the Catholic Church, all 2865 paragraphs of it.

You are free to have diverse views on other topics; but that is not what religion is about.

Lawrence actually says certainty is a sin. Not just a sin, but the worst sin. 

If certainty is a sin, then the apostles and the prophets and all the martyrs were particularly sinful men. As are monks and nuns. They surrendered everything, even their lives, for their certainty. 

Moreover, certainty is not the enemy of tolerance—uncertainty is. This is not just an innocent error, but highly dangerous. If you are certain of the truth, you are untroubled by someone else denying it. Nobody gets agitated at hearing someone else say that the sun orbits the earth, or that the moon is made of cheese. We laugh; we condescend. 

Only if we are uncertain of truth, if we are plagued by our own doubts, do we need to plug our ears, or shout down or eliminate other views. 

You see this, for example, in the current plague of Muslim terrorism. Someone I read recently pointed out that, until rather recently, Muslims were relatively sanguine about the West and accepting Western political norms. The Middle East was mostly quiet, and cooperative, even with imperial powers like Britain and France trudging through and setting up their colonial administrations. After the formation of Israel, the PLO rose in opposition: but as a Marxist, not a Muslim, organization. There was no Muslim opposition to Israel then. The Middle East in general was secularizing, under nationalist leaders with no religious agenda: Nasser in Egypt; Assad; Saddam; all secular nationalists. In Iran, the monarchy was similarly secular.

Something happened. Something changed.

The Muslim terrorists who have risen to prominence since are almost always Western-educated.

What has changed is the internet. The Muslim world had been largely hived off. Remarkably few Western writings were ever translated into Arabic. With greater exposure to Western thought, Muslims are now commonly doubting their religion. And so they are less tolerant. They cannot any longer trust Allah to manage his own affairs.

“Let [God] grant us a pope who sins and asks for forgiveness” is also incoherent. It suggests sin itself is a good. Theologically it is incoherent, since we all sin. And incoherent since we all, as Catholics, ask for forgiveness.

And the movie, and Cardinal Lawrence, then contradict these words, when Lawrence insists that Cardinal Adeyemi can never be pope because of a sin he committed, and repents, years ago. This is heresy. Moses was a murderer. David was a murderer. The Good Thief went straight to heaven. St. Paul persecuted Christians. Redemption is what the Church is for. 

Cardinal Bellini, the “progressive,” objects to Adeyemi as pope because he “would send homosexuals to hell.” No Catholic cardinal would say that; nobody has the power to send someone to hell. Not even God himself does this. We choose hell. And this suggests that cardinals get to individually decide on faith or morals. Not even the pope can do that; not even an ecumenical council can. Should the Church be wrong in believing homosexual sex to be sinful, this error could not send any homosexual to hell; any more than not believing in gravity means you can fly.

After the bombing, which is more than a bit over the top, a cheap thrill, the screenplay has Cardinal Tedesco orate, “We need a leader who fights these animals.” No Catholic prelate is going to refer in public, among fellow cardinals, to another human being as an “animal.” That would mean rejecting basic Church teaching, not to mention Aristotle. 

And it would be so easy for the screenwriter to simply omit this word. Had Tedesco said “terrorist” instead, we would have had an interesting moral and philosophical issue to consider. Should we fight if attacked, or turn the other cheek? When is it right to fight back?

Perhaps the screenwriter inserted this word precisely to avoid an interesting moral question he did not want. But that is malpractice as a writer.

And Cardinal Benitez responds with his own howler, supposed by the screenplay to be deeply persuasive, the last word: “The church is not tradition. It is what we do next.”

Tradition is exactly what the church is: the “deposit of faith.” “Holy, catholic, and apostolic. That third term means it must not deviate from tradition. On matters of faith and morals, anything it says must be demonstrated to be in full accord with what the apostles said two thousand years ago. Unmoor from this, and the Catholic Church has no reason to exist. It is just a social club. 

It is not, in the end, an evil movie. It is a bad movie.

La Belle Dame Sans Merci

 

Fr. Calvin Robinson makes a compelling case in a recent blog post that feminism is the most destructive ideology of all time.

He does the math. 

“Add up all the wars throughout human history, and they amount to an estimated 1.5 billion deaths. That is inclusive of combatants, civilian casualties and those who died of the results of war (i.e. famine).”

For comparison, abortion, since widespread legalisation in the 1970s, “has amounted to 2.5-3.5 billion deaths.”

This is just since the 1970s, fifty years, against all of human history. And these are all innocent lives. It is, moreover, far worse to kill a child than to kill an elderly man, say, who has only a few years left to him. 

One can also consider that a good many of the deaths in war are not intended, collateral damage. Indeed, in principle, they are all unintended. Any general, any leader, tries to minimize casualties in achieving his objectives. But all abortions are deliberate, cold blooded, and certain to cause death. 

Again, perhaps fifty percent of combat deaths are legitimate self-defense: in the usual course of things, one side is in the right. No abortion deaths are legitimate self-defense. Not even in the case of rape or incest, which account for only 1.5% of abortions.

Father Robinson cites statistics showing abortions are overwhelmingly used by women simply as a form of birth control. Simply because they feel having a child did not fit into their current plans.  Saving the life of the mother? If it is done to save the mother’s life, it does not even show up in the abortion statistics.

Legally, the woman has the unilateral right to have an abortion. The father of the child has no say. This, therefore, must be placed entirely at the feet of women. Given that it is feminism that justifies this, feminism is the deadliest ideology known to mankind. And women,  given power, are far more violent than men.

Feminism is also responsible for the death of the family. This is by no accident: it was the family, per Betty Friedan, which was to be destroyed. Women were to accept no family responsibilities. That is “patriarchy.”

In North America, over 70% of divorces are initiated by the wife. No doubt following Ann Landers’ advice from as far back as the Seventies that the only standard should be, “Are you better off with him or without him?” No thought for the children. No thought for “For richer or for poorer, in sickness or in health.” No thought for the in-laws. No thought for the wider society. Just what seems best for her at the time.

Under feminism, women have turned against child care. They will farm their children, if they have them, out to strangers, even though we know this is worse for children. By neglecting the next generation, they are destroying the culture, the civilization itself. For family is the basic building block of society as a whole, and culture is whatever we pass on to the next generation.

And, predictably, women turning away from children and childbearing is causing a demographic collapse. The developed West has as a result seen a need to open the doors to unrestricted immigration. This causes its own problems, which are becoming increasingly apparent. Ultimately, social chaos.

It is vain to talk of legal solutions to this problem: the necessary laws cannot be passed until and unless we can change hearts and minds.

I believe that cultures worldwide had it right, before feminism threw everything off kilter. Girls were spoiled growing up, and allowed to expect a life free of responsibilities. In return, they were required to defer to men. Boys were held to a higher standard, and in return, should they pass that bar, given command.  It worked, everywhere, for all of recorded history.

Now girls are still spoiled growing up, and then put in command. Disastrous.

Trump Is Making Canada Great Again

 

As a Canadian, I support Donald Trump in the current trade negotiations with Canada. His chief complaints are, first, border security, second, the flood of drugs across the border, third, the Canadian egg, poultry, and dairy quotas, and fourth, the digital services tax. 

In each case, what Trump wants is in Canadians’ best interests. What the Canadian government wants harms Canada.

Border security: We should be just as worried about terrorist attacks as the US; why is this controversial? It is apparently fact that more terrorists are entering the US from the north than from the south. The Canadian government has been alarmingly lax about Chinese influence, Kalistani terrorism, and floods of supposed refugees from the Middle East. Canada has no land border with any nation but the US, and is separated from the rest of the world by oceans. We don’t need to build any wall, or turn back small craft at sea. It would be far easier to stop the flow of undocumented or undesirable aliens here than it is for the US, Britain, or any of the countries of Europe. Yet the Canadian government is making no effort, even opening the doors ever wider—as if they want chaos.

Drugs: Fentanyl is a major crisis in Canada as well as the US; we should want to stop the traffic just as they do. Granted that the “war on drugs” was a failure, and prohibition did not work. But the current Canadian governmental approach of legalization, turning a blind eye, and handing out free drugs to addicts, is clearly making matters worse. We ought to work with the Americans to try something else. The obvious thing is to try to cut off supply.

Cheese: the Canadian government seems far more concerned with the smuggling of cheese than the smuggling of fentanyl. The Canadian “supply management” system is an obvious violation of the free market. It is a perfect example of a cartel in restraint of trade, which should be illegal. It is the government’s job to prevent cartels from forming, not to impose them. The result of this cartel is that the very poorest among us are made poorer for the benefit of a handful of large producers. The cheapest sources of protein are made artificially expensive. It is pure evil, quite apart from its unfairness to American farmers, our neighbours. It is even bad for the Canadian dairy industry, which used to be able to compete internationally. 

Happily, the digital services tax is already suspended.  It would have made the cheapest forms of entertainment more expensive; and would have made Canadian high-tech start-ups less competitive.

I hope Trump will also go after Canadian content regulations, which cut us off from dialogue with the world.

Why Mainstream Protestantism Lists Left

Some notorious sinner who ignored the ethical concerns of his community.

 

Friend Xerxes is arguing that our sense of morality comes from the community.

This is the claim of “cultural relativism.” It is obviously false. If a given community decided murder was perfectly okay, would it be okay? Killing Jews was perfectly acceptable in Nazi Germany; do we have no right to object to the practice? Or to slavery, since it was socially condoned in most parts of the world until rather recently? To child sacrifice? 

Challenged on the point, Xerxes seemed confused. So where then did I suppose morality comes from? Where else could it come from

From the natural law. We are all born with a conscience, an innate sense of right and wrong. Kant showed that the moral law is the one thing we cannot possibly dispute, a “categorical imperative.” It can be summed up in the simple phrase, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Nobody truly believes that murder is right, or lying is right.

Since this is self-evident, why do people like Xerxes fail to see it?

Often, I’m sure, due to guilt. Many find it easier to deny the reality of right and wrong than to admit doing wrong.

But this may also be a mainstream Protestant problem, at least in Xerxes’s case. Denominations like the United Church of Canada, or the Anglican Church, really have no fixed doctrines; you pretty much believe what you want, and worship what you want. Anglicans have their rituals, but since they do not believe in transubstantiation, they amount to little more than aesthetics. So why do you go to church?

Perhaps all that is left is latitudinarianism: you go to learn how to behave better.

Hence they must cling to the doctrine that morality comes from the community you keep. It becomes their raison d’etre.

And we can perhaps go a step further. Since the basics of morality are self-evident, they have to come up with something new. They cannot simply preach “Do not lie.” 

This may explain why these churches seem to veer into weird wokery and left-wing politics. What we sometimes call “virtue-signalling” or “political correctness.” They must have some mock morality that is not self-evident. 

It cannot be anything that requires self-sacrifice, or great effort: not fasting, say or climbing mountains on your knees. Mainstream Protestant congregations are democracies, and even strive for consensus. Such strenuous requirements are sure to cause some backlash.

So it becomes a matter of using the correct language, voting the correct way, condemning the right things in others.

Who I Think Is on the Epstein List

 

BFF?

I have no business speculating on the Jeffrey Epstein list, but here’s my speculation.

I believe the most plausible reason the Epstein client list or its equivalent has not been released is that he was an intelligence agent. Exposing more would destroy some intelligence operation.

This would explain how he became rich despite no relevant background.

He was not, I speculate, Mossad, as some are suggesting. Seems to me the point of his Lolita Island was that it took him off the US coast; the CIA is not allowed to operate within the US. If he were with Mossad, there would not be this need. Mossad may come up only because of antisemitism. It fits with the eternal trope of an International Jewish Conspiracy.

And the Trump administration would not have great incentive to avoid blowing up an Israeli intelligence operation.

The names we hear of, supposedly among the Epstein clients, tend to be famous Americans. This suggests a deep state coup.

And the failure of the Trump administration to release the information suggests that the CIA has some means of controlling them as well.

The obvious explanation is that Trump too is on that client list. Allan Dershowitz says he has seen the list, and it includes some people pointing fingers at others for being Epstein clients. That could include Trump.

Countering this, it is said that Trump actually blew the whistle on Epstein originally, and cooperated with investigators when others would not. And the fierce opposition to Trump by the deep state and the media seems best explained by the thesis that they had nothing on him, that they felt they could not control him.

So we’re back to an intelligence operation.

It may be that the speculation centres around famous Americans only because of the natural local bias of the media. It is an old saw in journalism: you always want a local angle. Three locals dying in a car accident is more newsworthy than 300 people dying in a bus crash in Bangladesh. It may be that the bulk of Epstein’s actual clients were foreigners—like Prince Andrew, the one person actually identified so far.

Epstein visited Israel and was introduced by Dershowitz to government figures there? Don’t assume from that he was working for the Israelis. The simpler assumption, per Occam’s razor, is that he was working for the CIA to set honey traps for Israeli politicians.

I think the reason the Trump administration will not release the list is that it will include the names of prominent foreign allies. A Trudeau, a Macron, a Netanyahu, a Boris Johnson, or the like.