A Test for False Prophets

 

Simon Magus, who exorcised in Jesus's name.

Some years ago, friend Xerxes objected to George Bush Jr.’s supposed attitude, which he said was “anyone who is not with me is against me.” And this he said was starkly opposed to Jesus, who said instead “anyone who is not against me is with me.”

I corrected him then. Jesus actually said both. See Matthew 12: 30; Mark 9: 40.

Presumably in Xerxes mind, had he known this, he must think Jesus contradicted himself; or else the Gospels are inconsistent. One must be unreliable.

But both are true. There is such a thing as the fallacy of the false dilemma. But here we have a true dilemma, a situation in which there are only two choices. Either you are with Jesus, the Truth, or you are against it. There is no third option. Creation is a constant war between truth and falsehood, good and evil.

Bob Dylan makes the point in song: “It may be the Devil, or it may be the Lord, but you’re gonna have to serve somebody.”

Anyone who is committed to Truth, which is to say, necessarily, the one true God, is on the same team. Anyone who is not so committed is, consciously or not, worshipping and working for the Devil.

This point comes to mind from noticing several talks on YouTube by Rabbi Tovia Singer. His entire programme seems to be to debunk Christianity. I say those who try to debunk or discredit any monotheistic faith are really of the Devil’s party. Their agenda, even if not themselves conscious of it, is to drive others from faith in the Lord; they are doing the Devil’s work.

Does this mean there are no possible errors in the creed of this or that denomination? Of course not; this is categorically impossible. So long as they disagree on any point, and they do, one must be right, and one must be wrong. But in comparison to the fundamental issue, of being of the party of God, any such differences must be trivial. To focus on them is to turn away from God yourself, and to attempt to turn another away. You are of the Devil’s party, even without knowing it.

This applies to nominal Jewish rabbis like Singer; they are really wolves in sheep’s clothing. It applies to those many Protestant ministers whose chief interest seems to be in criticizing Catholicism rather than asserting their faith. They are attacking faith.  It applies to any who claim to be Christian, who scapegoat Islam as intrinsically evil. Although so ffar as I can see, the strongest criticism of Islam comes not from the fellow religious, but from secularists. It applies to any Muslims who claim that Christians or Jews are evil—the “Islamist” terrorists. They are not true Muslims; they are secularists. Like the psychiatrist who drove his car into a Christmas market in Germany: these people hate Islam as well, if they hate Christianity.

I note too the conclusion to the story of the rich man and Lazarus, told by Jesus in the Gospel of Luke:

“They [i.e., like the Jews] have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.’

“‘No, father Abraham,’ he said, ‘but if someone from the dead goes to them, [i.e., like Jesus] they will repent.’

 “He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’”

A good Jew is a good Christian. A good Christian is a good Jew. 

It is important to me that the post-Vatican II Catholic church has a good record of not criticizing other faiths. I went through the Catholic schools, and never heard a peep in criticism of any other denomination. 

I had a Jewish friend in grad school who refused to believe this. She assured me that, regardless of my actual experience, all Catholics are taught that the Jews murdered Christ.

Her supposedly Jewish teachers were in league with the Devil.

This is a good test, like the test for discerning the spirits. Does the teacher support and nurture faith, or does he spend his greater energy criticizing faith?

There are many false shepherds.

The Veil Has Been Torn Open

 

The reaction on the left to Harrison Butker’s commencement speech at Benedictine College makes clear that we are dealing in modern political life with a straight contest between good and evil.  How dare he publicly praise the benefits of home and family life? Of motherhood and apple pie?

This might sound extreme; but the same was true in 1933-45, from the perspective of Western Europe. Wasn’t the same true during the Cold War? Wasn’t the same true during the fight in the US for Civil Rights? The fight against slavery? Isn’t it the usual or even eternal condition of man?

The president an foreign minister of Iran just went down in a helicopter crash. Search efforts have been hindered by snow. In May. 

God is in His heaven. The Devil is powerful, but everything must turn out well in the end.

All shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.

What's That Smell?

 

Justin Trudeau and his wife Sophie have announced their legal separation. I think Trudeau is an awful human being, but as far as his marital situation goes, none of us on the outside can know the rights and wrongs. We should not gloat or take sides. All we can say is that every divorce is a tragedy, and divorce is too frequent in our culture.

Tangentialy related, Viva Frei suggests that Justin Trudeau probably smells bad, and that may have had something to do with the separation. Bad people, he says, generally smell bad.

That is too crazy a comment for me to ever make, but since Viva has raised it, I have always found the same: bad people smell bad. Perhaps not always, but usually. I have often pondered why. Is it because, loving themselves, they also love their own smell, and so do not think much about personal cleanliness? No: I know of one who showered at least once a day, but still stank. Is it because they are chronically nervous, fearing their conscience, and therefore sweat more than the rest of us? This could be; lie detectors work on something like this principle. 

Or is it something supernatural?

After all, good people conversely often smell good. Including, I read, their uncorrupted corpses. This must be more than the absence of perspiration. And I also find that bad people look different: they have a dark, sickly pall about them. I do not mean a dark skin tone-their skin can be quite pale. It is more like shadows on their face. Something about them looks less lifelike, more waxen.

Okay, it sounds crazy. But Viva Frei apparently notices it too. Perhaps others do.

It might be that many others experience this, but it does not register, because they are committed to the belief that there is no such thing as good and bad people.

On Drawing With Strong Lines

 

When the Sistine Chapel murals were cleaned some years ago, many complained that the restoration made the images too clear and vivid. They preferred the murkiness of centuries of smoke and oil.

Teaching a student to write well, one essential piece of advice is to be clear, and avoid qualifiers. The purpose, after all, is to communicate. This is exactly the opposite of what I was told as a grad student, even in the humanities: I used to be criticized for speaking too plainly, for refusing to use them. It got me branded “arrogant.”

Many students struggle to do this, to write clearly, although it seems the simplest possible thing. As Mark Twain put it, “Writing is easy. All you have to do is take out words.”

There are two opposing forces in culture, one trying to make things as clear and simple as possible, and one trying to make things as obscure and difficult as possible. I remember on first reading Milton Friedman, being shocked at how clear and simple his ideas were. Can this be academically legitimate? Can this be right? After all, unlike Keynesianism, it actually makes sense. Yes, breaking windows really does cost money. When you spend money, you no longer have it. The obvious truth had been obscured.

Plato or Descartes are also clear and well-spoken. What a shock to discover, after always being told otherwise, that the best thinkers actually wrote plainly. Yet, in most academic courses, the works of these great thinkers are kept from you, on the claim that they are too difficult, and you are required to read prevaricating commentaries on them instead. Which are far more difficult to understand than the works they are supposedly explaining to you.

How can this be? What is going on here?

The truth is, most of us are in denial. Which means we are in frantic flight from reality. The academic elite—the scribes and Pharisees—are clearly more in denial than most. 

But so too even many current poets.

The theme for this year’s National Poetry Month is “joy.” 

I don’t think any real poet could have chosen that theme. After all, no prominent poet seems to have written memorably on it. I cannot conceive of Leonard Cohen writing about how happy he is. I cannot imagine T.S. Eliot doing so. William Blake did, it is true. But he followed it with the symbol of the tyger devouring the innocently joyful lamb. Schiller wrote an “Ode to Joy,” which became embarrassingly popular. But he himself disowned it, as “out of contact with reality” and “of no value to either poetry or the world.” Browning seemed to do so with “Pippa Passes,” but later he denied having any idea what the poem meant.

A fraudulent joy is the resting face of all delusion. Happy happy joy joy. Accordingly, it is virtually impossible to write an honest poem about it. 

I think of the vacant smiles on the oldest Greek statues: a smiling sphinx about to tear you limb from limb; a smiling soldier about to skewer his enemy through the heart. Perhaps an ironic comment; but chilling. I think of Pogo the Clown, aka John Wayne Gacy.

A student of mine was assigned “coming of age” as his poetic theme. He wrote well of casting off the lines and drifting out to sea. And then, in the final stanza, wrote, “after all, if things go wrong, the reins are still right there by my side.” 

A deliberate confusion? But of course, in the metaphor he chose, they are not. Nor are they in real life. You cannot go back to being a child. 

When I pointed this out, he froze up. “But that is too sad.”

Denial.

I had to finish the poem for him.

True art must always tell the truth. That is the reason for art. If it does not, it has no purpose, or worse.

This is really the war between good and evil. Those who are committed to good will seek truth, and do everything they can to write or speak or paint clearly. Those who are committed to evil will have things to conceal, and will work hard to be obscure. And to silence those who speak truth.

George Orwell once observed that his real talent was an ability to honestly and unflinchingly face the reality of evil. It is a rare talent.

William Blake insisted that all visual art worthy of the name must have clear lines. He railed against “the Flemish ooze.” 

I agree with him. It is immoral. All unnecessary lack of clarity is immoral.

And the greater the general evil in a society, the worse the art.

What'sHerFace Gets In Yer Face

 

“The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist,” said somebody. The original source of the well-known quotation is uncertain. 

In 1836, John Wilkinson wrote:

“One of the artifices of Satan is, to induce men to believe that he does not exist: another, perhaps equally fatal, is to make them fancy that he is obliged to stand quietly by, and not to meddle with them, if they get into true silence.”

In 1856, William Ramsey wrote:

“One of the most striking proofs of the personal existence of Satan, which our times afford us, is found in the fact, that he has so influenced the minds of multitudes in reference to his existence and doings, as to make them believe that he does not exist; and that the hosts of Demons or Evil Spirits, over whom Satan presides as Prince, are only the phantasies of the brain, some hallucination of mind. Could we have a stronger proof of the existence of a mind so mighty as to produce such results?”

Baudelaire said something similar. The first quotation is usually attributed to him.

It is so true and evident that it has occurred to many minds. Most people will adamantly deny the existence of evil, on the apparent premise—a classic example of denial--that if they ignore the Devil, he will ignore them. Examples abound: the silly notion of “rape culture,” that some men rape women because they do not know better, and need the matter explained to them. The idiotic pacifist idea that any conflict springs from some “misunderstanding,” and war can be averted by negotiation and compromise. That if there is a conflict, the victim must be in part to blame. That anyone who does something unquestionably immoral, like taking a gun and shooting up a school, must be insane rather than evil. Or it must be the gun’s fault. Or it must be society’s fault, or the system’s fault, or religion’s fault, or capitalism’s fault.

And in What’sHerFace’s talk, it manifests as the idea that we who fight for liberty and fairness ought to and can strive for unity in the present political circumstance. And should avoid offending. Peace is not possible; there is no chance of compromise between good and evil. It only ends in Munich, betrayal, and unilateral disarmament. 

We cannot honestly pretend that men can decide to be women.

We cannot honestly agree that “white” people are inherently evil.

We cannot honourably or safely compromise on free speech.

People like Scott Adams are waking up to this, it seems.

What Are Guilt and Shame?

 

Xerxes and his readers have spent the last week trying to decide what the words “guilt” and “shame” mean.

This is superficially odd, of course, because both words occur in the dictionary.

The obvious reason is that they do not like the dictionary definitions. Because they imply the existence of good and evil.

From the Oxford English Dictionary, the ultimate authority:

Guilt:

The fact of having committed, or of being guilty of, some specified or implied offence; guiltiness.

The state (meriting condemnation and reproach of conscience) of having wilfully committed crime or heinous moral offence; criminality, great culpability.

Shame:

The painful emotion arising from the consciousness of something dishonouring, ridiculous, or indecorous in one's own conduct or circumstances (or in those of others whose honour or disgrace one regards as one's own), or of being in a situation which offends one's sense of modesty or decency.

Whenever folks start tinkering with the meaning of words, you know they are up to no good.

The worst culprit here is psychology, the main intent of which is to strip modern life of moral considerations. Thereby actually generating rather than healing most of what we call mental illness.

A therapist writes to Xerxes, “Guilt is an uncomfortable feeling resulting from the commission or contemplation of a specific act contrary to one's internalized standards of conduct."

By this definition, a Nazi who kills Jews is guilty of nothing. Indeed, we must all strive to be psychopaths.

And the issue with shame, according to her, is not that we have done something wrong, but that it might cause us to withdraw from others. We ought to be more shameless.

And a parent must never say to a child, “shame on you.”

A perfect recipe for breeding psychopaths. We are now beginning to see the results of this sort of parenting in society at large. It has been forty years—two generations—since the publication of The Drama of the Gifted Child. Narcissism is everywhere, and social norms are breaking down.

A Christian—presumably Protestant—respondent writes: “We are assured in our absolution each Sunday that God removes both our guilt and shame.”

No he doesn’t. He removes the consequences. The eternal punishment for sins is waived, and only if you feel shame. We are still obliged to do penance, in this world and the next. 

Anyone who declares themself righteous, who ignores the mote in their own eye, is a Pharisee. This is the high road to Hell.

It seems that many people are now on it.

Why I Was Silent Yesterday

 

Speaking frankly, I’ve been depressed. I did not immediately know why, and had to meditate on this. 

A useful practice, by the way. Whenever you feel down or experience floating anxiety, you need to meditate on exactly why. Until you do, you cannot deal with it. Until you do, it will victimize you.

I ultimately realized it was because evil seemed to be triumphant everywhere. Most especially in the suppression of the Canadian truckers, as clear an example as I can imagine of a group of good people. This revealed that the Canadian government, the Canadian media, the Canadian police, the Canadian banks, were all in the command of resolutely evil men.

And now Ukraine. While the Ukrainians have done a magnificent job so far of defending their country, underlining their own goodness, here too evil plainly has the upper hand. What outcome now does not mean terrible suffering for the good?

Almost at the same moment, we are learning that dangerous side effects of the Pfizer vaccine have been deliberately suppressed, that the Covid virus was almost certainly manufactured in a lab using patented gene sequences, and that Ivermectin is an effective treatment, and this fact has been suppressed. We had already been more or less aware that there was no real scientific justification for lockdowns, or wearing masks. Government and the drug companies seem to have been ready to murder large numbers of people so long as this w3as to their advantage.

Now look at the hopelessly venal and incompetent administrations in Washington, Ottawa, and London, at a moment when we need someone to rally behind against a dire foreign threat. I at least half suspect that Biden and Trudeau are personally in the pay of foreign powers. Look at a pope many faithful Catholic commentators are now openly suggesting is a heretic. At best, he has been supporting rather than rooting out venality in the church.

Look at how the tech oligarchs have shown themselves to be out for power, and are trying to silence dissent. So much for business as a check on government.

I hope this is all overreach. Overreach is why the darkest hour is often just before the dawn. The devil may be showing all his cards. And this may be a sign of desperation.

The truckers suggested that there is a vast well of good and decent people still. The Ukrainians are showing the same.

I look forward to, someday, a statue of Tamara Lich on Wellington Street, perhaps at about the spot she was arrested. We could probably privately fund it today, if we could prevent the government or the banks from seizing the money.

The Year That Was

 

This past year has been absolute hell. I have no more patience, if I ever did, for the Hallelujah chorus Christians with their happy happy joy joy attitude. There is, as Ecclesiastes says, a time for joy, but it must not be unrelenting. There is also a time to mourn.

Suppose God has indeed been good to you. Can you ignore the millions who died in Hitler's camps, or on Pol Pot’s killing fields? Will you dance on the unmarked graves of the millions of unborn? Can you ignore those two little abandoned leper girls living in a makeshift tent in the Liloan churchyard? 

I'm not saying you should rush off a cheque or join a protest. That sort of thing is fine too, but you know perfectly well, if you are an adult, that it does not change much. It just makes you feel a little better, and perhaps you shouldn’t. It hardly feels moral to declare this world relentlessly wonderful in front of two little leper girls. It seems callous. Truth must be our aim, not comfortable dishonesty.

A few years ago, young and innocent, my daughter wrote a Mother's Day card thanking her mom for, among other things, not aborting her. Canadian friends, all pro-abortion, were alarmed. What a thing to think! Has she not been sufficiently assured she was loved and wanted? 

They miss the point; perhaps deliberately. Abortion is not okay simply because it turns out I was not aborted. Others were; I might have been. There but for the grace of God …

Evil is real, evil is evil, and evil is powerful. It is the more powerful the more we pretend it is not there.

Blessed are those who mourn. There is something wrong with anyone who does not. Our hope is in a better world. 

Do we have assurance of a better world? There is no proof of heaven. There is no historical proof that Jesus even existed, let alone was God incarnate. Even great saints like Mother Teresa or St. Therese have admitted doubt. And even if it is all true, we have no right to expect that we will achieve the goal.

Yet we know that things ought to be better. We are aware that they are deeply wrong. That is our warrant that something more is possible. That in itself seems adequate to explain evil in the world. Were we never to experience darkness, we could not be aware of the light. Were we never to experience ugliness, we could not conceive of beauty. Were we never to experience evil, we could not know heaven.

Lose our sense of discontent, that hunger and thirst after righteousness, and all is lost.

A Trump Endorsement

 

Time to say it straight out. This US election is a contest of good against evil.

Those inclined to pshaw will pshaw. We adults are not supposed to think in these terms, are we? Where’s our civil discourse, if we are going to demonize our opponents?

But the demonization is already well-advanced, by the side I would identify as the axis of evil. It is they who first declared this war. Never mind references to “deplorables.” Never mind cheap accusations of racism. The Biden camp has apparently now released a campaign video depicting Trump as a Nazi.

If the curtain were ripped away, we would see that this universe is always a war of good against evil. Not good men against evil men; not most times. We speak of spiritual forces, of powers and principalities, warring across as well as among human hearts.

But at this moment, the sides seem to have strangely parted and coalesced. The forces of destruction and giving in to animal urges are all to one side. Ranged behind Biden are voices supporting chaos in the streets. Voices threatening and trying to silence any voices with which they disagree. Voices supporting killing the unborn. Voices spreading slanderous falsehoods, “fake news.” Voices subverting the democratic system seemingly in any way they can: with voting that is obviously open to fraud, and likely to result in a contested result. Suppressing news. Threatening to stack the Supreme Court, undermining any public trust in it. Calling for defunding the police. Calling for statues to be torn down. Calling for the constitution to be abandoned. Calling to elect a man who is senile, as if they deliberately want a power vacuum and nobody in control—or to pass the seat of power to some unknown force. It all looks like an urge to destroy for the sake of destruction: a satanic urge.

The left now aggressively endorses all kinds of sexual promiscuity; now at last seeming to semi-openly include pedophilia. Surely we all knew this was coming; Jeffrey Epstein was their prophet. They are increasingly hostile to religion, targeting it as their enemy, trying to limit or end religious freedoms and freedom of conscience. They are now increasingly open about being antisemitic: the ultimate historical litmus test of evil.

Some will counter, of course, that Trump is personally immoral. 

It is traditional too for his defenders to apologize for this and admit that he is an imperfect vessel. I will not; I do not care. Abraham was an imperfect vessel. King David was an imperfect vessel. Winston Churchill was an imperfect vessel. Moses was an imperfect vessel. Mother Teresa was an imperfect vessel. I am an imperfect vessel, and so are you. What matters is not our personal sin, but that, when the clarion calls, we form up on this side or on that in the cosmic battle.

I make no predictions as to the upcoming election; the Holocaust is ample evidence that God will let evil have free rein. 

On the other hand. If he were to let Trump miraculously win decisively—it might be shocking enough to begin to turn the culture around.

Happy Hallowe'en.

The Immorality of Pacifism

Kitty Genovese.

It is more or less reflexive to most of us to refer to conflicts as “misunderstandings,” and to assume or insist that there must be blame on both sides. After all, in the real world, there are no good guys and bad guys.

“Teach men not to rape,” is one common example of this cockeyed logic. The same logic makes pacifists think of themselves as morally superior.

There is indeed a risk in dehumanizing one’s opponent. That is a different issue, arising in a different situation. What if you are a third party, seeing two others involved in some conflict?

Our true moral responsibility is not to chide them both, but to side with the right. Consider the classic, extreme, example of Kitty Genovese, being raped and stabbed in an apartment stairwell. Did or did not her neighbours have a moral duty to call the police, or even step outside their doors to try to stop it?

Should they have instead scolded Genovese for failing to get along with the rapist?

If there is a serious conflict, it is naturally unlikely to be caused by a misunderstanding. People would have to be remarkably stupid to come to blows or worse over a mere misunderstanding; and if they did, the matter would necessarily be easily set to rights.

It is, on the other hand, necessarily likely that a conflict would arise because one party wants to take the rights of another, and believes they are powerful enough that they can. That is, someone is doing evil.

This, therefore, must be assumed to be the case whenever a conflict is encountered.

We do not always do so, because we are morally weak. It is always safer and easier to stay out of it. One could, after all, get hurt; one could end up another victim. But when we claim moral superiority for our pacifism, for our neutrality, we have drifted into settled vice.

History is immensely valuable, because it gives us objective and well-documented examples of social and of moral dilemmas. This is why history was always studied. When we look at history, do we find many conflicts in which both sides were on equally solid moral grounds, and it was all just a misunderstanding?

Surely everyone accepts that the Second World War was a case of good against evil. Surely everyone, too, given the current demands to pull down statues, understands that slavery was a pure moral evil, and it would have been immoral for the Union government to allow it to persist.

Similarly, the Cold War, with all its minor ancillaries, was in the end best summed up as Reagan boldly did, to much criticism at the time, as a struggle with an “evil empire.” Now that the conflict is over, we can surely see that clearly.

I dare to say that almost all past conflicts can, when clearly seen, be seen as a conflict between good and evil. Back to the Punic Wars, between a Roman republic and a Carthaginian mercantile empire that practiced child sacrifice. Or the Peloponnesian War, between the Athenian democracy and a Sparta that was, in effect, a proto-Fascist state.

Right now, I think we see a struggle of good against evil in the streets of America, and in the growing aggression of the Chinese Communist Party.

It is the eternal battle, and it is real.

Sympathy for the Devil?

We were speaking of the demand to smash all images of Jesus. Now another clear sign of the true direction of the current winds: in the UK, a demand to delete the image on the Queen’s Medal of the Order of St. Michael and St. George. It shows St. Michael with his foot on the head of Satan. An image of the battle of good against evil.

According to the Guardian, the activists say the badge “resembles a depiction of a white angel standing on the neck of a chained black man.” Tracy Reeve, who has begun an online petition, says: “This is a highly offensive image, it is also reminiscent of the recent murder of George Floyd by the white policeman in the same manner presented here in this medal.”

Any resemblance to the killing of George Floyd is of course coincidental and in the imagination of the beholder. The award dates back to 1818. 

A modern Russian depiction of St. Michael

The image of course comes from the Bible:

“There was war in the sky. Michael and his angels made war on the dragon. The dragon and his angels made war. They didn't prevail, neither was a place found for him any more in heaven. The great dragon was thrown down, the old serpent, he who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world. He was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him.”

St. Michael’s foot on the Devil’s head is a reference to Genesis:

“Yahweh God said to the serpent, ‘Because you have done this, you are cursed above all livestock, and above every animal of the field. On your belly you shall go, and you shall eat dust all the days of your life.

I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring. He will bruise your head, and you will bruise his heel.’"

It is hard to imagine this was instead about race relations, back in Palestine in the 5th century BC. 

Italian depiction, 1708

Probably the majority of the current knights and commanders of the Order are themselves not “white”: former or present ministers from Africa, the Pacific Islands, the Caribbean, Papua New Guinea.

Sir Simon Wolley insists “the figure … is clearly a black man,” because it “has no horns or tail.”

This claim is blatantly false. The figure does have two horns and a tail. It is a serpent below the shoulders, and has wings.

How accurate is this as an ethnic description of sub-Saharan Africans? Note that Satan’s facial features are, as usually portrayed, sharp, with thin lips and a longish, thin nose. Very European.

Bumi Thomas, a black activist, claims the St. Michael of the portrait is “a white, blue-eyed figure standing on his neck.” 

Another view of the medal.

His facial features are about as European as Satan’s, it is true. His eyes, in the image, are black; his foot is on Lucifer’s head, not his neck. And Michael too has wings. More likely, he is an angel.

The complaints, in sum, seem delusional. They seem paranoid.

It is true that the prone figure of Satan is dark-skinned, and Michael has pale skin. But, given that this is an image of good and evil, the obvious explanation is that darkness represents sin, understood as a stain, and light represents virtue. This is a standard metaphor in the Bible, and in every world culture. Mankind naturally fears darkness and favours the light.

At least, you do if you do not consider yourself on the side of sin. There is that critical passage in John:

“This is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the light; for their works were evil. For everyone who does evil hates the light, and doesn't come to the light, for fear that his works would be reproved. But he who does the truth comes to the light, that his works may be revealed, that they have been done with God."

There seems to be a Freudian inadvertent admission behind it all. Apparently the protestors spontaneously identify themselves with Satan and with evil. They do so even if they have to stretch the evidence beyond credulity to make the notion work.

They do so against the interests of blacks. What could be worse than to identify Africans with Satan and evil personified? They are doing this; not the artist.

If this claim sounds extreme, that the underlying issue here is to declare it wrong to discriminate against evil, this is not the only example. Not by a good measure. Never mind smashing statues of Jesus. “Critical theory,” the academic ideology behind much of the protest we see in the streets, does just this systematically. It loves to take traditional fables and fairy tales, and argue that it is oppressive to portray the villain as being in the wrong. This is “discriminatory.” We must instead take the side of the witches, giants, dragons, and ogres. 

This is significant, because there is no way they can be portrayed as representatives of an oppressed class. To the contrary, the witch, giant, dragon, or ogre is always immensely powerful, and has a cache somewhere of vast riches. Jack, by contrast, is a poor boy; Rapunzel is abandoned by her poor family; and so forth. It is the privileged whom critical theory wants to support.

More significant is that the purpose of the fairy tale or fable is explicitly to teach a moral lesson. Aesop’s fables and Perrault’s collected fairy tales always conclude with a moral. When Hans Christian Anderson chose to publish his own literary tales without an explicit moral, there was considerable popular outcry.

So the real intent of making the villain the hero is to subvert the moral lesson. The villain, the witch or giant, is not human, so that he or she can be a representation of pure evil or vice.

It is evil that must not be “discriminated against.”

Understanding that this is the real problem seems to explain everything. This is why the police are the special focus of anger: whatever their flaws, the essential nature of police is to maintain the right and oppose vice. This is why statues of heroes are a special focus of anger: whatever their flaws, the essential nature of a hero is that he or she displayed some conspicuous virtue or fought some conspicuous vice.

This is why, for decades, the focus of the fight against “discrimination” was gays, and is now transsexuals. Whether or not they have indeed been discriminated against—leaving that aside for a moment—it is odd that discrimination against them has been so central to the public and the cultural agenda for so long. They are, after all, an estimated 1.6% of the population. That figure should probably be halved, since in the real world lesbianism, as opposed to male homosexuality, was never an issue. And, of course, transsexuals would be a much smaller proportion of the population.

The issue cannot, in the end, have been discrimination against gays. It was discrimination against a behavior. Homosexual sex is a behavior. If one can establish the principle that one has an inherent right to do a thing simply because one has a spontaneous urge to do it, this makes any sin a right, and prohibits calling it sinful. Nobody sins except because they have a natural urge to do it; morality consists in resisting natural urges.

There is a reason why they are called “Gay Pride” parades: lust plus pride, two sins publicly celebrated.

We seem close now to the point of perfect inversion, where the very existence of sin is denied; or rather, the only sin is admitting that there is sin.

St. Michael, pray for us.

Crisis in Ontario Nursing Homes

Nursing home, Braeside, Ontario, 1947

The military had to be called in to Ontario nursing homes when the regular staff walked out in fear of coronavirus. Now, unsurprisingly, they are reporting terrible conditions.

We are, as a society, dangerously ignorant, if not in deliberate denial, of the fact that there are people in the world who get satisfaction out of controlling other people and making other people suffer. These are, more or less, in modern psychological terminology, “narcissists,” those who wish to feel superior to others. The problem is common, because it is a common, indeed inevitable human impulse: to be as gods, as the serpent promised Eve. It is, simply, the impulse to evil.

Because we are ignorant of, or in denial of, the reality of evil, we no longer put up any barriers against them.

Anyone who gets satisfaction out of making others suffer will naturally gravitate to jobs in which they get to deal with especially vulnerable people, ideally people under their full, unsupervised control. Nursing homes are perfect for such purposes. Unless we set up a system to prevent it, we should expect that anyone in a nursing home is being abused.

Other obvious opportunities for such predators are, of course, orphanages, hospitals, mental hospitals, or schools. Especially residential schools.

We are in the habit of blaming the eternal scandals around orphanages and residential schools on the religious groups that had been running them. But religious groups cannot be blamed in the present case. The media narrative instead seems to be that the problem is with their being “private” and “for profit.” The problem will be solved, then, by having the government run them.

This will, of course, make the problem worse. Just as secularizing the schools and hospitals made the problem worse. It will reduce supervision, improve job security, and raise the pay, rewarding the predators and making the job more attractive to them. Private employers must please the customers: family members, if not the residents themselves. Bureaucrats get to do as they want.

We used to prevent or minimize such abuse by making such jobs part of a religious vocation. The churches ran the hospitals, the nursing homes, the orphanages, the asylums, and the schools. This was so obvious a strategy that it was followed, not just in North America and Europe, but everywhere, in Buddhist lands or Muslim lands as much as in Christian lands.

This approach meant staff were selected and vetted from the outset for their moral character. They were closely supervised at all times; not just on the job, but outside the job.

We have systematically removed all such protections.

Now the vulnerable everywhere must pay a heavy price.

The Devil Is a Gentleman

Our age views Adolf Hitler as the embodiment of human evil.

That is wrong, and dangerously misleading. Hitler was a very bad man; but there are worse men.

It is not just that Stalin or Mao or Pol Pot were guilty of Holocausts as awful. We damn Hitler in large part because it is safe to do so, because he lost the war and has no living followers. This does not make him a worse man; only an easier target.

But Hitler also lacks some possible vices, and had at least one virtue. There must be others who actually have all the vices, and none of the virtues.

Even among his coterie, compare Goering. Goering endorsed all that Hitler did. But Goering was more avaricious. Goering indulged the vice of gluttony: Hitler was a teetotaler and more or less a vegetarian. Nor was Hitler visibly lustful. Stalin’s henchman Beria was far worse on this score, or Hitler’s henchmen Ernst Rohm or Reinhard Heydrich.

And Hitler possessed, in more than usual measure, the virtue of courage or fortitude. Throughout his career, he dared to take risks and do dangerous things.

A worse person would be too timid to go around killing everyone. Their gluttony and sloth would produce addiction and inaction, not the energetic destruction of Hitler. They would actually be capable of less harm. And a worse man would do all his evil by stealth.

The worst person living or the worst person who ever lived could easily be among us now, in our neighbourhood, unsuspected, living an outwardly unexceptional life.

Pope Francis Abolishes Hell?

War in Heaven: Bosch

Pope Francis has gone and created another flurry of confusion with another off-the-cuff interview. This time he has been paraphrased as denying the existence of Hell.

The Vatican has issued a “correction,” but it is itself oddly ambiguous. It simply points out that the interview was not recorded, and the Pope’s words were not quoted verbatum. Therefore, it cannot be taken as an accurate transcript. This leaves open the possibility that, yes, the pope really did deny the existence of Hell. Indeed, if he did not, you would expect a clearer denial.

Above all else, we need clarity on such matters.

I understand very well that many people do not want to accept the reality of Hell. I was one of them, when I was younger. It is terrifying to contemplate, in the first place. It seems to violate the concept of divine mercy. And why would God create souls only for eternal torture?

But the issue, obvious as it is, came up early in the Church, and was debated and decided, and closed. Origen, the great Church Father, wanted to propose a doctrine of universal salvation: sooner or later, if after an era in purgatory, or perhaps several lifetimes on earth, each soul would eventually find its way to the divine glory. But despite the attractiveness of this proposition, and despite Origen’s considerable personal prestige, he lost the argument and was declared heretical on this point. As Francis would be, if he really said this. There is apparently no wiggle room here.

Like it or lump it, the matter is painfully unambiguous in the Bible. Jesus does not say that all people are basically good, but some become stray lambs. He divides people systematically into good and bad, sheep and goats.

“But when the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. Before him all the nations will be gathered, and he will separate them one from another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.” (Matthew 25-31).

Again, at the beginning of John’s gospel:

“Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God.”

That seems like a pretty clear division. We all sin, no doubt, but some of us are dedicated followers of evil. Some are children of darkness, and some are children of light.

Jesus tells us to love our neighbour as ourself. But then, when asked, “who is our neighbour?” he does not say “everyone.” He tells the story of the Good Samaritan. Our neighbour is the one who does good; and others in the tale are contrasted; they are not our neighbour. They do not stop to help the injured man.

And how many people would, in real life, have done what the Samaritan did? How many, finding a stranger bleeding in a ditch, would put him up at an inn or in hospital at his own expense? Would it be most people? Probably only a minority, actually. In the parable, it is only one of four, or fewer. There was, after all, at least one robber; then both a priest and a Levite pass by without helping.

Awkwardly, the Bible says this plainly as well:

Matthew 7:14:

“Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.”

So we apparently cannot even use the old dodge that “there may be a Hell, but we cannot know if anyone is actually in there.”

Faust and Mephistopheles.

The Beatitudes are often quoted: “Blessed are the poor.” It is usually overlooked that they are paralleled by a list of condemnations:

24 “But woe to you who are rich,
for you have already received your comfort.
25 Woe to you who are well fed now,
for you will go hungry.
Woe to you who laugh now,
for you will mourn and weep.
26 Woe to you when everyone speaks well of you,
for that is how their ancestors treated the false prophets.”

There it is again. There are two kinds of people: the good and the bad. Those who listen to the shepherd, as it were, and those who follow their own wants.

There seems to be a class of people to whom Jesus does not even offer salvation.

Matthew 3: 7:

But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to where he was baptizing, he said to them: “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath?”

Jesus and John the Baptist don’t appear to hold back much in describing the scribes and Pharisees as evil in so many words. They are called “full of hypocrisy and wickedness,” and asked “How will you escape being condemned to hell?” Jesus blames them for “All the righteous blood that has been shed on earth,” and tells them “you do not enter the kingdom of heaven.” They are introduced as “children of hell” (Matthew 23:13).

Matthew 13: 10-15:

The disciples came to him and asked, “Why do you speak to the people in parables?”
He replied, “Because the knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven has been given to you, but not to them. Whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them. This is why I speak to them in parables: 

“Though seeing, they do not see;
though hearing, they do not hear or understand.”

Given that God is indeed infinite in his mercy, this must mean that some people have taken a basic position that they are never going to repent, no matter what. If so, Hell is necessary as a matter of divine justice. There is no point in making it temporary and corrective.

It is troubling, but nothing is gained by whistling past the graveyard. As St. Paul said, we must “work out our salvation in fear and trembling.”