Category Archives: Christianity
Three articles about the decline of the US
The world's leading power is finished
I’ve been reading lewrockwell.com regularly every day for over 20 years now. I have never seen a collection of articles like the one two days ago, Saturday. No less than three of the usual 12 articles were devoted to the coming collapse of the USA.
Here’s no. 1: James Howard Kunstler, The Season is Here
Excerpts:
The transgender movement has crystalized into the Party of Chaos’s favored instrument for enforcing its ethos of unreality on a population obdurately stuck on thinking in categories, on making hateful distinctions between things. Better to live in a protective miasma of undifferentiated sensation than a cruel state based on pattern recognition where one is incessantly prompted to understand how objects and life-forms around us differ, where things begin and end, and what all that means relative to your own ideally amorphous existence.
[…]
Now, in the spring of ’23, Woke is suddenly mutating into a general wake-up call. The animals are stirring from their long sleep of compliance as ruin stalks the land. The season of concentrating the mind is here. When it becomes a matter of sink-or-swim, people once again remember the difference between being dead or alive. The test is on.
Expect three evolving dynamics to stipulate our country’s zeitgeist in the stirring months to come. First, the collapse of our project for using Ukraine to destabilize Russia, an enterprise so feckless it could have only been conceived by the dead-of-brain. Our geniuses of foreign affairs screwed the pooch on this one. It’s almost too obvious that they never cared about the people of that sore-beset land. Notice, they do not even use the word “peace” in any of their confabulations about what’s going on there, because it is the opposite of what they seek, which is…chaos unending.
Thus, others will end the project for us — namely, our antagonist there, Russia — and the regime of “Joe Biden,” for the second time in its mortifying two years-plus of rule, will be left holding its limp, generative member in its collective hand, another humiliation for our over-reaching imperial soldiery — and the deluded empty suits commanding it. Will they be able to pretend this time, as they did in Afghanistan, 2021, that there’s nothing to see here, folks? Just a blizzard of press-releases declaring “mission accomplished” or some-such other craven bullshit? I don’t think so. The reaction may be enough to bum-rush “Joe Biden” and Company out of office. His grotesque family rackets (including the Ukraine grifts) will finally and magically come to the public’s attention, and that’ll be all she wrote for “JB”— except for the historians waking from their own long catatonic spells to record the disaster they will swear they couldn’t see coming.
Next, we will go through the tipping-point where a critical mass of the population — not just in America, but throughout Western Civ, and even beyond — realizes that they have been poisoned and injured by the mRNA “vaccines” they were so eager to line up for. It will produce a special sort of collective agony centered around a raging despair that leads with astonishing speed to prosecutions. The torpor and uncertainty of the past three years evaporates and the machinery of law actually starts cranking again, and in the right way — not as a mere instrument of coercion and intimidation, but to actually seek justice.
Third will be the transformation of a raging inflation into a ruinous debt deflation that leaves Americans, one way or another, with no money. At the same time, the people will wake to the wrecking of their energy and food supply. A line will appear drawn in the ground from sea to shining sea, as by a cosmic power, and everybody… the formerly Woke, the unvaxxed, the penitent and unrepentant, the middle and lower orders especially, who suffer most harshly… will find themselves all on one side of that line in opposition to the wicked who have brought a hard rain upon them. And there you will finally see the beginning of your long-promised hope and change. No need even to wait for it. At long last, it’s upon us.
Here’s no. 2: Bionic Mosquito, Woe to the Bloody City
Excerpts:
John 8: 44 You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies.
How did we get here? Wilson answers:
We thought we could have honesty and integrity and good government without having to confess the name of Christ. In all of this, secularism has been the foundational lie. We have been unwilling to bring our Christian faith to bear on public affairs in any direct manner. And because of this, we are now dwelling in clown world.
And this points to the institution that carries the largest weight in this fall. It isn’t even that we have been unwilling to bring our faith to bear, it is that many churches are on the side of the lying team – from gender confusion to Scofield’s dream for supporting the chosen people.
… whatever else the separation of church and state means, it does not mean you get to tell lies so long as the content of the lies was political.
Here’s no. 3: Doug Simpson, Is It Too Late For Us?
Excerpts:
I’ve wondered if this is the same situation we face today in America? Could it be that the season has also passed for America’s healing? Could it be that it’s time to ask our Heavenly Father in all His mercy to end this facade we once knew as America? It’s just a question.
[…]
We have mistakenly believed that America is too big to fail. We have mistakenly believed that because of America’s blessed beginnings from those days at Plymouth plantation that God would always protect us no matter how corrupt we became. We understand that everything else in our lives needs our personal effort, such as, work, marriage, and family, but somewhere along the line we bought into this notion that how this nation turns out is strictly up to the Lord.
Sorry, but it does not work like that.
Things have now gone so horribly bad, become so utterly and profoundly corrupt — just like what happened to my wife’s body — that, as with her, we are far beyond any reasonable expectation of healing. That’s where I see America today. We are literally living on life support in the cancer ward. And no longer can we blame it on the Republicans or the Democrats, or Joe Biden, or the Bushes, Obama, or Trump. It is not their fault. It is my fault. It is your fault.
Does my saying so offend?
I, too, have never cared much for Chicken Littles who run around saying the sky is falling. But I strongly fear that it’s now too late for this once great America. We are now reaping what we have sown for at least four generations. Yet we pray that God will, by some miracle, send a hoard of angels down and clean up this mess — a mess for which we, and we alone, are quite responsible.
Doesn’t the Lord love America? Yes, I am sure He does. But He loved other countries and civilizations that went under. Did He have a purpose for America. Yes, but He seeks a people that will represent that purpose. And wasn’t that purpose to establish His kingdom on Earth — as it is in Heaven? I could be wrong, but, over time I seriously doubt the Father cares what chunk of land on which that happens. The America that was meant to be is no more. In my view, as with my wife, the season has passed.
[…]
I believe the season for America’s healing has passed. Yes, I hope I am wrong, but I desperately fear that this time I am not. The evil cancer that rages throughout our nation’s body at this time in history, is unlike any before. Yes, I do believe God is capable of stopping it and healing this nation. But He first must get our attention, so that He can use us to accomplish that task. I hate to think what it might take to get our attention.
Other than Grace, which was the only real free gift of God, everything else requires our earnest participation. Am I telling you to stop praying? Not at all. Pray harder. But this time put something with that prayer, otherwise save your breath.
Good news. God will not be denied. Because more important than America’s survival, is the establishment of His kingdom on earth. We could very well be dead as a nation, but God will raise up another people in another country, in another time — like happened one time in America — and continue to build his kingdom on earth.
And it may just happen right where you are now standing.
Why we need to mock the virus pests & the Corona astrologers & the pandemicists
Don't elevate them by calling them evil, says eugyppius
Eugyppius makes a great point about how to treat those who would impose tyranny on us.
However, he doesn’t deny that evil exists and that it was at work in the pandemic. Here’s the most important excerpt from his article:
As for the evil: It lurks in the interstices of our bureaucratic institutions, which, as they have grown in size and complexity since the nineteenth century, behave in ways that are increasingly impossible to understand and contrary to human flourishing. They are massive machines constructed of human parts, which will continue to chew up our health, our culture and our lives, until we figure out a way to stop them. At base, I think my critics also know that this is true. There were no great hopes that the American public health establishment would suddenly become more reasonable in the wake of Anthony Fauci’s retirement, for example, or that Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation means that Scotland is now safe from future pandemicist hysteria. These sorry creatures are the mere fleeting incarnations of complex institutional forces, which have no shortage of willing servants.
Stopping the Flood
Bionic Mosquito writes:
There is a theme running through many intellectuals and wanna-be intellectuals – those who at least see that without Christian values and culture the West is headed to some version of hell. It’s something like: good religion is important for other people and society, but I don’t need to really believe it. Anyway, I am too smart for that.
[…]
So, then. What was it that drove the West to this suicide? Solzhenitsyn suggested that the reason the West fell into WWI was that men have forgotten God. It is the best explanation for that otherwise unexplainable war that I have heard.
When did men forget God? This can be found in the Enlightenment. The roots of the suicide of the West can be found here, when men forgot God. Sure, in different parts of the West God lived on in the fumes of memory longer than in others. But even early on, He was pushed out of polite society, to be kept in the attic bedroom like some crazy uncle.
Some will say it was earlier than the Enlightenment. It was the Renaissance, or the Reformation, or the Great Schism. Or, later: It was Marx, or Gramsci, or Marcuse. But, in the former, there was still God. And in the latter, there was not God. It was in the Enlightenment that men forgot God.
Martyrdom in the 21st Century
Persecution of Christians in the West is psychological, not physical
Pastor Andrew Isker has written a piece on “The Psychological and Social Persecution of Christians in Current Year” With the title “Martyrdom in Trashworld”. Below are some excerpts (emphases are mine).
Stories [of Christian martyrs in the past] that show the devotion of faithful Christians give us heroes to emulate. Of course, the second you begin to apply the lessons of Christian martyrs in our age, malicious people, often within the church, will attack you. College campuses are a window into the future 15 years down the road (or maybe five or ten—the pace has quickened considerably). When I was in college nearly 20 years ago, I began to see the growing hostility to the Christian faith.
[…]
Now, simply being a Christian who believes the Bible is true and who desires to live a life according to the commands of Jesus Christ, is something which is a clear impediment to pursuing a “normal life.” A successful career, finding a spouse, and gaining the respect of your friends and neighbors, all of these become much more difficult to attain if you are a Christian living in Trashworld. Then, as now, the Christians devoted to collaborating with the enemies of Christ will say, “that’s not real persecution.” Of course, it is not the same as Richard Wurmbrand having the flesh of his feet torn off or Saint Bartholomew being skinned alive. No one would dare claim such a thing. Nevertheless, it is a real thing that is happening to us. You wouldn’t say to someone who just broke their leg and was on the ground writhing in pain, “get over yourself. I know someone in hospice with stage four cancer and has way more pain than you.” Only a monster would behave that way.
[…]
Such overt, direct persecution that came at the hands of First Century Jews, Romans, medieval governments, French Jacobins, Bolsheviks, and Jihadists is not the kind of martyrdom we face. The demons that rule over us are not so direct and confrontational, not so masculine. No, the demons that rule over us are passive-aggressive and rely upon psychological and social manipulation to torment us.
[…]
If you are a Christian, you will suffer persecution for your faith. There is no way around it. That persecution isn’t always going to come in the form of men with swords or guns at your door ready to torture and kill you. But if you are a faithful man in a godless world that rages against its Creator, you are the tangible, flesh and blood representative of that Creator it is raging against. You are going to suffer. The suffering you are going to face and many of us already face is the social exclusion and intense, unremitting psychological torment of a godless society that is almost designed to get you to apostatize from Christ. There are myriad vectors and mechanisms it employs. It will use your family to pry you away. It will use corporate financial power to dangle incentives for you to compromise just a little bit. It will rob you of your children, and then hold them hostage against you. Every message, from every corner of the world is a constant, 24/7 stream of that preaches the oh-so-subtle message of: “if you believe in Jesus Christ, if you believe the Bible is true, you are a loser and we hate you. You have no place in our society. We hope you kill yourself.” That is the subtext of every form of popular culture that Trashworld pumps out. You are not being killed and tortured, but your mind, soul, and spirit absolutely are. Trashworld has perfected a kind of persecution that is even worse than lighting you on fire or feeding you to a starving lion. It has industrialized a kind of persecution of the Christian that 1. doesn’t look “like persecution,” 2. when it is successful makes it appear as if the apostate one day woke up and freely chose to just stop believing in Jesus, and 3. therefore causes Christians to not have their guard up when they face it, leaving them totally vulnerable to its pernicious effects.
But what is the answer to this problem? It is to understand that you are at war against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places, no less than the saints of old. is to bear this suffering with dignity and resolve just as the heroic martyrs of the early church did. It doesn’t matter what faithless collaborating Christians say; they already have their reward. Just as St. Paul said we will suffer for pursuing a Christian life, fake Christians are going to mock us when that suffering comes. But those with eyes of faith understand we pursue a golden crown from the hands of our king. And though the scars of our persecution cannot be seen with eyes, it is a kind of suffering for the sake of the Lord Jesus Christ, one we should count as joy, having been found worthy to bear it. That is the perspective ancient Christians had of their suffering for the sake of Christ, and that is how we should view it as well. Whatever affliction we bear is adding to the suffering of Christ. Remaining faithful to Christ and losing out on career opportunities is a genuine sacrifice. Sacrificing a much more comfortable life so you can protect your children from those who seek to do them harm is a very real sacrifice. Being called a bigot, racist, homophobe, fascist, and every other slur because you refuse to bend the knee to anyone but He Who Rules at His Father’s Right Hand is a very real indignity and is very much worth it.
The Bible describes the suffering of Christians as filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions (Col. 1:24). It may not seem like it at all, but by suffering in this way, you are conquering. Just as the blood of Christ’s people spilled out does not fall on deaf ears but cries out to heaven, so also does the anguish and terror you experience for the sake of steadfastly holding to Christ. Your duty as a Christian is to band together with those who bear Christ’s name and build real, flesh-and-blood communities impervious to the terror of the “Negative World.” Christ’s enemies are forcing us to band together, which is what we must do. We must build our own society with our own economy within the one that is collapsing before our eyes. “Negative World” is not the end of the story. There have been “Negative Worlds” many times before, and they have all been overcome by the victory of Jesus Christ. So too, will the negative world of the Globalist American Empire.
China Declares War On The United States
In cool, calm terms, the ancient country has thrown down the gauntlet to the big bully
Gonzalo Lira points out in a 10-minute video how China, four days ago, basically declared war on the USA.
Today, practically all the Western media was rah-rahing for more and deadlier weapons for the perfectly pure and saintly Ukrainians (whose government’s corruption rank prior to the invasion one year ago was hardly better than Russia’s) in order to defeat the perfectly and purely evil Russians.
Consequently, the Abbey of the city I live in hoisted the Ukrainian flag today on its tower (for the first time since some weeks after the invasion). Rendering to Caesar . . .
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Eurasian landmass, the second largest boy in the classroom, who himself is no angel, has now decided to properly stand up to the biggest bully of all. And the above mentioned media has basically ignored this momentous event.
In a paper titled “US Hegemony and Its Perils” the Chinese government, on the website of its Ministry of Foreign Affairs, details with ice-cold precision what everyone with a brain knows to be true, but what most prefer not to talk about.
China, a country conscious of its 5,000-year-old culture, is throwing down the gauntlet. Let’s hope the heirs of Sun Tzu, author of The Art of War will heed the famous general’s advice: “Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.”
The Chinese are about to prove whether they are worthy of their ancestral sage. We will see.
Well, he’s not wrong
Vladimir Putin, on certain things
Says Paul Joseph Watson in this short video.
The Church will have to reconsider its position
It is being forced into a pre-Constantinian situation of marginalisation and persecution
Bionic Mosquito has read a book by Carl R. Trueman called “Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution” (2022) and written a multi-part review.
Here is an excerpt from his final part:
Trueman concludes his book with the recognition that the narrative he has told is a somewhat depressing one for traditional Christians. What, then, is to be done? First, Trueman notes: face our complicity in the expressive individualism of the day.
He offers an example that makes clear the reality that every Christian in the West is, in a manner, Protestant. We are each free to attend any type of church – all forms of Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant churches are available to almost all Christians. It is, if you will, a manner of expressing our individualism.
We go to the church that makes us feel good, or that doesn’t stress us too much. In other words, where our felt needs are met. We are more concerned with how the church makes us feel than how well the church conforms to Biblical issues that might makes us feel…uncomfortable.
Do we look back to the Reformation for the model that offers the solution to our time? The high Middle Ages in the Western Church? The synergy of the Eastern Church? No. Trueman suggests we look back to the first and second century Church, a time when the Church was also the outlaw, the persecuted minority. A time when Christianity was a marginalized sect, little understood, considered immoral and seditious.
This idea fits with something Justo L. Gonzáles writes in the first volume of his “The Story of Christianity” (2010), which I am currently reading, in the chapter on Constantine:
“[W]hat is of paramount importance . . . is not so much how sincere Constantine was, or how he understood the Christian faith, as the impact of his conversion and his rule both during his lifetime and thereafter. That impact was such that it has even been suggested that throughout most of its history the church has lived in its Constantinian era, and that even now, in the twenty-first century, we are going through crises connected with the end of that long era.” (p. 132)
Further on, Gonzáles adds this point:
Eusebius of Caesarea, “in all probability the most learned Christian of his time” (p. 149), a contemporary of Constantine and his “ardent admirer”, wrote about him in such a way that “one receives the impression that now, with Constantine and his successors, the plan of God has been fulfilled. No longer will Christians have to decide between serving the coming reign and serving the present one – which has become a representative and agent of the Reign of God. Beyond the present political order, all that Christians are to hope for is their own personal transference into the heavenly kingdom . . . Religion tended to become a way to gain access to heaven, rather than to serve God in this life and the next.” (p. 154)
And then, Gonzáles delivers what I perceive as a great promise:
“[A]s long as the Constantinian era endured, most individuals and movements that rekindled eschatological hope were branded as heretics and subversives, and condemned as such. It would be only as the Constantinian era approached an end, particularly in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, that eschatology would once again become a central theme in Christian theology.” (p. 154)
Eschatology is of course a main point discussed in the voluminous work of Gary North.
It’s also noteworthy that even in those early times “not all Christians regarded the new circumstances with like enthusiasm” as Eusebius (p. 155). The most noteworthy reactions were the monastic one and Donatism.
The monastic, one could say “escapist”, reaction to the Christian embrace of “Constantinianism” is highly interesting in that one can say that monks and monasteries did more than any other movement in the early middle ages to civilize the physical and spiritual wilderness of Europe. A point worth pondering.
The relationship between Christianity and feminism
Louise Perry has an unusual view of this
In a recent interview with Jordan Peterson, author Louise Perry (“The Case Against the Sexual Revolution”) and, as stated in the video description, “director of The Other Half, a new non-partisan feminist think tank, and the host of Maiden Mother Matriarch, a podcast about sexual politics”, says (prompted video):
“I have a slightly unusual view of the relationship between Christianity and feminism.” While most feminists see themselves as being in opposition to Christianity, Perry says that feminism is an “outgrowth of Christianity“, because the “fundamental idea of Christianity, which is so different from other religious traditions” is that “weakness is strength, the first shall be last, there is something valuable, rather than being despicable, about being small and vulnerable.” She thinks that feminism “completely relies on that idea, which is by no means shared by all cultures and certainly not by the ancient Roman culture from which Christianity sprung.”
In ancient Roman culture, Perry explains, the idea that a woman slave could be sexually violated simply didn’t exist. It just happened because it was perceived as “normal”.
Perry continues: “Into that came the idea of sexual equality at least on the spiritual level – and the idea that women, even slave women, who don’t have male kin, are worthy of protection.” Meaning that the community shares that responsibility of protection.
My (PwG) comment: Now that some feminists are beginning to realise that the state is not their friend and may not protect them against men (if these men claim to be women) if it suits the furtherance of the managerial class in power, this is a powerful message that churches should be amplifying.
Land and the Sabbath
And its relevance to the ecology debate
Exodus 23:10-11 says:
“For six years you are to sow your fields and harvest the crops, but during the seventh year let the land lie unplowed and unused. Then the poor among your people may get food from it, and the wild animals may eat what is left. Do the same with your vineyard and your olive grove.”
What does it mean for us today? Four things:
1. That we should not overuse the natural resources. Give nature rest, refuge and shelter.
2. That God has given us humans the world to thrive in. It is primarily for us humans. We are stewards of the world in His name (and under His laws). But the main aim of this task is to allow us humans to thrive.
3. We must not neglect the poor.
4. We must not neglect wild animals (nature). However, notice that there is a clear hierarchy: “the wild animals may eat what is left” (by the poor people). In other words: humans first, then nature. People who think they can square the circle of protecting the environment and the poor equally will have to consider this deeply.