Article by Thomas D. Williams, PhD.
Category Archives: Christianity
Why the Carbon Hysteria is a Huge Threat to Your Personal Freedom and Financial Wellbeing
Interview of Doug Casey in International Man
Excerpts:
International Man: Western countries are leading the charge in restructuring their economies around the issue of climate change. They’re committed to a comprehensive agenda to “decarbonize” their economies by 2050.
What’s your take on this?
Doug Casey: To sum it up in one word, it’s insane. In two words, it’s criminally insane.
[. . .]
Look, this is all about politics and money, but disguised as a religious movement, which is quite clever. There’s no question that Greenism is being promoted as a new religion.
Christianity is a dead duck in Europe, and it’s dying in North America. But people need some type of religion, a replacement for Christianity, to hold on to.
People will be encouraged to treat their taxes as tithes to wash away their sins against Mother Nature—much the way they tithed the church to expunge their sins in the Middle Ages. It’s an exact analogy. They’ll buy “carbon credits” as an analog for building cathedrals and monasteries.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Forgotten Lesson on Good and Evil
There are neither good people nor bad people, but individuals struggling between good and evil from within.
Article by Annie Holmquist.
Excerpt:
Although a decorated commander in the Russian army, Solzhenitsyn was imprisoned near the end of World War II for disparaging comments made privately about Joseph Stalin. His years in prison were hardly pleasant, but as Solzhenitsyn writes in The Gulag Archipelago, those years gave him striking insight into the reality of human nature:
It was granted me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer, and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains … an unuprooted small corner of evil.
Solzhenitsyn goes on to say:
Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.
This realization led Solzhenitsyn to recognize the problem with revolutions, namely, “They destroy only those carriers of evil contemporary with them…. And they then take to themselves as their heritage the actual evil itself, magnified still more.”
Descent Into Madness: Dostoevsky and the End of the West
Article by Boyd D. Cathey.
Excerpts:
Of course, it is not at all fashionable to believe in a literal Hell these days. Yet, the imagery of such a state envisioned by a number of our greatest authors over the centuries describes a reality which is becoming all too palpable in our day, at least for those who care to notice.
As tiny individual specks in the Universe we are as atoms, at times self-important, but in the scheme of things, miniscule and falling back continually on our own very limited powers and abilities, with the great leveler, Death, our conclusion.
Has this not been the insight and wisdom of our Christian civilization, that without that spiritual understanding, life becomes a mere few short years of banging about until our time is up?
It is Hope, that belief in something beyond ourselves, eminently spiritual, which enables us to lead lives according to both the Natural Law and the Divine Positive Law, which properly and superbly fit, guide and measure our own human natures.
Dostoevsky, through Father Tikhon, reminds us that there is a way out of the fetid and poisonous bog we are drowning in. In his day it was not taken by the revolutionaries who eventually would have their way in Russia and later in the world, with the charnel house counting eventually 100 million victims.
Like Verkovensky, that frenzied youthful demonstrator against Confederate symbols back in March 2019 was possessed, incapable—unlike Stavrogin—of recognizing his diabolical possession.
Good and evil stand in eternal conflict; one must triumph and one must be extinguished. Dostoevsky fully understood that, and so must we.
The Discovery of Civilization
Article by Jayant Bhandari.
Excerpts:
Unknowns lurked in every corner of my stay in the UK, crystallizing many ideas I had never known or thought of in my wildest imagination. Lacking anything akin to the Ten Commandments, India has no prohibitions for sins, certainly not lying. I grew up firm in my view that you say what makes you look good and what gets you the most resources. It would take me a year after my arrival in the UK to realize that people might speak the truth for the sake of speaking it.
At the office where I worked in Manchester, I compiled a newsletter, placing the list of all the projects they were working on at the back page. To create the impression of a more extensive workload, I would add old projects to make the list appear crowded. One day, a consultant told me I had overblown his contributions. I was surprised. Why would he want to undercut the promotion of his work? In those days, political correctness and multi-culturalism weren’t the thing. If you strayed too far away, you were told.
I was experiencing civilization for the first time and had stepped into the unknown. The cloud that had always lingered in my mind started lifting, and my body began to change, albeit hindered by half-starvation. It would set a decades-long process to readjust my thinking and decision-making. With a crisper way of reasoning, how and what I comprehended from the spoken and written word began to evolve. I found myself less focused on converting others to my opinions and more engaged in exploration and searching for truth. Consequently, my interactions with people changed significantly, leading to fewer conflicts.
During the first few months in the UK, I initially harbored thoughts of exploiting the system, viewing it as payback time for the British colonization of India. However, this perspective began to dissolve in the face of a stream of compassionate, generous, helpful, moral, fair, dutiful, and upright people.
This chimes exactly with what Vishal Mangalwadi writes in his book: “The Book That Made Your World“, in particular the beginning of chapter 14, on “Morality”.
Christianity and Liberalism
Theologies for Life and Death
Article by “RT: Restoring Truth”.
Excerpt:
A couple years ago, I stumbled upon a copy of J. Gresham Machen’s famous book, Christianity and Liberalism. The bold juxtaposition caught my eye, so I decided to read it. I was immediately hooked; its cogency and warmth are compelling enough, but considering that it was written 100 years ago, its timelessness is remarkable, too. It easily could have been written just last week.
Visit any mainline church, and you’ll likely encounter the same ear-tickling theology that Machen denounced in his book. Under venerable old steeples, liberal shepherds feed sanctified progressivism to their unsuspecting, but hungry, flock. Instead of feeding on biblical (and now offensive) truth, congregants in open and affirming churches can enjoy vague discussions of spirituality mixed with calls to woke repentance.
[. . .]
It’s well past time to reclaim the name of Christianity from the counterfeiters on the left—not for the sake of argument, but for the sake of souls who unknowingly trade in its false currency. Theological liberalism in all its fashionable forms—inclusive Christianity, interfaith unity, and progressive Christianity— is a road to perdition. Ultimately, what we believe about God and man is our theology of life, and eventually it will be our only comfort in death.
How the West Was Defeated
Article by Pepe Escobar.
Excerpt:
Emmanuel Todd, historian, demographer, anthropologist, sociologist and political analyst, is part of a dying breed: one of the very few remaining exponents of old school French intelligentzia – a heir to those like Braudel, Sartre, Deleuze and Foucault who dazzled successive young Cold War generations from the West down to the East.
The first nugget concerning his latest book, La Défaite de L’Occident (“The Defeat of the West”) is the minor miracle of actually being published last week in France, right within the NATO sphere: a hand grenade of a book, by an independent thinker, based on facts and verified data, blowing up the whole Russophobia edifice erected around the “aggression” by “Tsar” Putin.
At least some sectors of strictly oligarch-controlled corporate media in France simply could not ignore Todd this time around for several reasons. Most of all because he was the first Western intellectual, already in 1976, to have predicted the fall of the USSR in his book La Chute Finale, with his research based on Soviet infant mortality rates.
Another key reason was his 2002 book Apres L’Empire, a sort of preview of the Empire’s Decline and Fall published a few months before Shock & Awe in Iraq.
Now Todd, in what he has defined as his last book (“I closed the circle”) allows himself to go for broke and meticulously depict the defeat not only of the US but of the West as a whole – with his research focusing in and around the war in Ukraine.
How the Bible influenced the Founding Fathers
Which political traditions and thinkers shaped the ideas and aspirations of the American founding? Late eighteenth-century Americans were influenced by diverse perspectives, including British constitutionalism, classical and civic republicanism, and Enlightenment liberalism. Among the works frequently said to have influenced the founders are John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws, and William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England.
Another, often overlooked or discounted source of influence is the Bible. Its expansive influence on the political culture of the age should not surprise us because the population was overwhelming Protestant, and it informed significant aspects of public culture, including language, letters, education, and law. No book at the time was more accessible or familiar than the English Bible, specifically the King James Bible. And the people were biblically literate.
Continue reading here.
‘Cowardly’ Churches Adopting Left-Wing Politics
Left-wing ideology has infiltrated many Christian churches in the United States because they bow down to the “false god of being nice” and the “false god of tolerance” to win approval from the world, Turning Point USA (TPUSA) founder Charlie Kirk told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview.
Within that interview, the platform (Breitbart) has linked to this interesting article:
Trans Movements as Religious Commitment
Talk by Joseph Boot, 1 h 11 min.