Here‘s why we need to pray for them.
They no longer “sit around in coffee shops” or “take lots of selfies”. They now stick themselves to roads and such things. However, they still “think they know most everything”. Or even more so than 6 years ago, when this song was first posted.
Yep, we need to pray for them.
A 9-minute video excerpt of Paul Joseph Watson interviewing Michael Schellenberger.
From Schellenberger’s substack:
Michael Shellenberger is a Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment,” Green Book Award winner, and the best-selling author of San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities (HarperCollins 2021) and Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All (HarperCollins 2020).
He’s been called an “environmental guru,” “climate guru,” “North America’s leading public intellectual on clean energy,” and “high priest” of the pro-human environmental movement for his work.
Schellenberger became a Christian when he was researching for his book “Apocalypse Never”, as I noted here.
See video here (17 min).
John MacArthur says we are living in paganism 2.0. What they hate most is biblical truth. (I’d go further and say they even hate the idea that there is something like the truth.)
John Piper adds that we are like exiles in this world. We have always been. We should read 1 Peter and rejoice in our suffering, for our eternal reward is in heaven. This is what Christian clergy should be preaching, not things that make the congregation hate and fear the culture surrounding them.
Here’s a passage he may have meant 1 Peter 3, 13-17 (NIV):
Who is going to harm you if you are eager to do good? 14 But even if you should suffer for what is right, you are blessed. “Do not fear their threats[b]; do not be frightened.”[c] 15 But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect, 16 keeping a clear conscience, so that those who speak maliciously against your good behavior in Christ may be ashamed of their slander. 17 For it is better, if it is God’s will, to suffer for doing good than for doing evil.
See News Punch article (and video). Highlights the anti-Christian stance of the World Economic Forum (WEF).
Here‘s another interesting (Sky News Australia) video on the WEF: “Trudeau and Rutte ‘golden pin-up boys’ for World Economic Forum”
Article by Ethan Peck.
Excerpts:
The Gnostic belief that the soul is divorced from the body may explain progressive support for both transgenderism and abortion. It’s not a coincidence that those who believe that gender identity is divorced from biological reality are also likely to believe that a human fetus is not a human being. Both are at odds with basic biology and the Judeo-Christian roots of our civilization but congruent with the dogmas of the ancient mystical faith of Gnosticism.
[…]
The central thesis of Gnosticism is that each individual is in possession of personal spiritual knowledge called “gnosis” (in other words, “my truth”), and that the object of one’s life is to pursue this personal truth in order to liberate one’s soul from the oppressive material world, which is viewed not as God’s good and true creation but rather an evil mistake. This is why the segregation of body and soul is an essential component of Gnosticism, because one of the chief ends of the belief system is to free the soul from the prison of the body.
[…]
Whereas transgenderism falsely hinges on using only spirit – or rather one’s own perception of it – to determine a person’s nature, the pro-abortion position falsely hinges on using only matter to determine an unborn person’s nature. Both clearly depend on the segregation of body and soul.
[…]
The pro-life, pro-biology movement must not depend on using mainstream euphemism-laden language that has been influenced by Gnostic dogma when defending its positions on abortion and transgenderism, but rather reorient the national conversation towards basic first principles. It must not surrender Truth to manipulative language by using terms such as “pregnancy termination” or “gender” but rather go directly to the heart of the matter, which is the Gnostic assumption that who you are and your physical body are split. That’s where our biggest societal disagreements lie – in a religious debate over human nature itself.
On the same subject, here’s Charles Burris with his article Gnosticism: The Enduring Heresy and Menace to Western Civilization.
Excerpts:
From the seductive serpent in the Garden of Eden to Marx and his delusional followers, the essential message of the Left to humanity is believe in and follow us in our path of destruction and “You shall be as gods,” and create an athesied paradise of a Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. This is the goal of the neopagan pantheist Religious Left and its syncretistic, egalitarian vision of a Sophianic Millennium — the deification of humanity.
[…]
Christianity and the West have been at war for hundreds of years with a succession of gnostic political religions and mass movements seeking to impose brutal elite rule and mastery of their subject peoples. These sinister efforts have been responsible for untold death, destruction, and misery. Over one hundred million persons alone perished in the 20th Century as a result of these murderous totalitarian regimes.
[…]
This is the penultimate menace that Western Civilization, and especially the United States, faces today. This is what has motivated the destructive riotous mobs of thugs and looters in the streets, the craven willfully ignorant “cancel culture” corporatists, the seditious professoriat in court academia, and the prestitutes in the establishment regime media.
Article by Otto King.
Excerpts:
Can language express truth? Can language give us a clear picture of reality?
Discussing Postmodernism has become almost prosaic given the intellectual climate of the 2010s. However, it has posed questions which directly challenge the most classical assertions of how we understand the world around us. For that alone it is worth responding to.
Postmodernism also remains relevant because much of current thinking is rooted in Postmodern ideas. This goes beyond just academic circles: it is easy to catch Postmodern ideas in everyday discourse. Nothing is unusual about hearing someone retort in an argument “Well, that’s subjective,” or if they are more well versed and a little bolder “That’s just interpretation, there’s never really any one meaning.”
These ideas originate from Postmodern language theory in particular. What is referred to as “Postmodernism” refers to a specific idea of language and how it functions. These ideas were shaped by numerous thinkers in the 1960s and 1970s: most popularly through French thinkers like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, who took the core ideas on language and related them to concepts of power, oppression, and freedom.
[…]
The argument is that all human thought is done through language and that language has an intrinsic “messiness” to it. It relies on words and signs which Postmodernists claim can have countless meanings and interpretation. Without unified meanings Postmodernists argue that it becomes impossible to have singular representations of things in the world, meaning there is a large degree of interpretation to what is deemed reality–therefore, reality is never separated from a subject.
[…]
What Postmodernists are arguing is that the ideas of a culture limit what language can say about reality.
If true, this has significant implications, because every human body of knowledge (“epistemology”) has relied on the intuition that language can at least roughly represent reality. Without that foundational assumption, it is impossible to make any claims about the world or have any form of understanding–consequently defeating the possibility of having knowledge entirely.
To the Postmodernist, classical accounts of truth–like that of Plato’s–which use language via propositional logic, or other bodies of knowledge which rely on the experiential, reason, or narrative cannot tell us anything about the world, due to their use of language. The strong Postmodernist must therefore reject science, history, and philosophy, as they attempt to rationalize the world using language.
This is synonymous with the Postmodern rejection of “totalizing” narratives, also abbreviated as meta-narratives. We will return to this, as it is linked with Postmodern views of freedom and what is dubbed the “domination of language.”
If language cannot tell us anything about reality, then how can we understand the world?
The answer is that social construction is the prime shaper of reality. This means that, in a Postmodern paradigm, it is impossible to separate reality from the experience of a subject rooted in social-cultural circumstances. Instead, reality is something which is interpreted and must be represented, so it cannot possibly be understood objectively. The world is therefore quite literally constructed out of how it is represented by a culture through language. Language and culture are seen to shape our notion of reality to such a degree that it is impossible to understand reality outside of them.
This is why history is deemed an impossible pursuit in a Postmodern context. The argument is that the cultures and, therefore, the languages of the past and present are so different that they become alien to each other. The modern historian is detached from the framework with which people of the past understood the world–i.e.: their meanings and language. Because of this, it becomes impossible for a modern historian to truly understand the past.
Ideas such as truth, value, and justice are also seen as meanings which are constructed through language and projected onto reality. In a Postmodern context, this means that these ideas must be seen as derived from human beings–not the world nor nature.
[…]
Postmodern discussions of politics tend to revolve around this idea of language.
Power, therefore, becomes closely linked with language in Postmodern thought as a consequence of language’s ability to shape psyche. Thinkers like Foucault focus especially on power because they view language as a subtle, insidious form of power. It is seen as something which dominates people not through coercion or force of arms, but by shaping how they are even allowed to understand the world. In the view of Foucault and many Postmodern thinkers, power is not necessarily held by the rich elite or politician, but instead those that shape the discourses and ideas which everyone–from the rich elite, to the politician, to the layman–use to understand the world. Because of this, strong Postmodernists have a certain skepticism of bodies of knowledge like history, science, and religion or what they call “metanarratives,” since they are viewed as means of dominating our conceptions of the world.
[…]
Foucault posits that because language only selects certain parts of reality, it only provides a partial glimpse of reality. Those selections, to Foucault in particular, are tools of domination and power: reality is shaped in accordance with what those who have power want to be believed. Language is therefore restrictive in how it shapes reality and the fact that it only allows certain discourses, in accordance with those in power.
Before I delve into a criticism, I would once more like to clarify that “those who have power” in this view is not discussing shadowy bureaucrats or a secret cabal of world leaders planning every event throughout world history. Instead, it is framed as those who have traditionally shaped ideas and discourses in Western thought. Foucault is referencing everything from the classics, the enlightenment thinkers, and science when he talks about “power.”
[…]
See here.
Todd Hayden has written an article (“Admit You’re Wrong, Or Die“) in which he observes that people are less able to admit they’re wrong than they used to be.
What is this? I am a pretty old guy, and I do remember a time when people were more flexible. Sure, no one likes to admit they’re wrong, but they actually used to do that, at least occasionally.
He looks for reasons:
I will stick to the idea that much of this resistance to absorbing the evidential truth and changing minds accordingly has to do with a decades-long priming. People in general no longer know up from down—as they blindly navigate the bizarre-o streets of the 2000s. Not much that their senses pick up is automatically, as it used to be, identified accurately.
He blames technology:
Anything our senses are asked to evaluate as evidence is rejected as such, like in a magic show. Nothing can be trusted anymore, until some certain type of authority says it can be. There’s the catch.
He also, briefly and obliquely, touches on education:
If you have nearly no system of determining reality (your senses and common sense), and have never been taught to critically think so you can ascertain truth with a blindfold on, then you are going to be looking for someone to whisper in your ear to describe what it is you are looking at but cannot see. [My emphasis, PwG]
I am currently reading a book by Gary North, his last, called “The Biblical Structure of History”, in which he lays out that modern historians, not basing their study on the presupposition of a creator God, have no way of referencing their perception of the past to anything fixed. Therefore, their history becomes something totally random and relative.
This perception of history became dominant soon after the first world war. It has by now percolated throughout society. The result is that people no longer know what to believe, but still must make their way through society and life. And so they latch on to “some certain type of authority” who tells them what’s up and what’s down, what’s right and what’s wrong. No matter how much it contradicts their “common sense”. And they believe it, and act accordingly.
Article by Bruno Waterfield.
Excerpts:
Totalitarian regimes set about breaking up clubs, trade unions and other voluntary associations. They were effectively dismantling those areas of social and political life in which people were able to freely and spontaneously associate. The spaces, that is, in which local and national culture develops free of the state and officialdom. These cultural spaces were always tremendously important to Orwell. As he put it in his 1941 essay, ‘England Your England’: ‘All the culture that is most truly native centres round things which even when they are communal are not official – the pub, the football match, the back garden, the fireside and the “nice cup of tea”.’
He was also worried about what he saw as Britain’s leftwing ‘Europeanised intelligentsia’, which, like the Communist Parties of Western Europe, seemed to worship state power, particularly in the supranational form of the USSR. And he was concerned above all about the emergence of the totalitarian mindset, and the attempt to re-engineer the deep structures of mind and feeling that lie at the heart of autonomy and liberty.
Orwell could see this mindset flourishing among Britain’s intellectual elite, from the eugenics and top-down socialism of Fabians, like Sidney and Beatrice Webb and HG Wells, to the broader technocratic impulses of the intelligentsia in general. They wanted to remake people ‘for their own good’, or for the benefit of the race or state power.
In the aftermath of the Second World War, this new intellectual elite started to gain ascendancy. It was effectively a clerisy – a cultural and ruling elite defined by its academic achievements. It had been forged through higher education and academia rather than through traditional forms of privilege and wealth, such as public schools.
Orwell was naturally predisposed against this emergent clerisy. He may have attended Eton, but that’s where Orwell’s education stopped. He was not part of the clerisy’s world. He was not an academic writer, nor did he position himself as such. On the contrary, he saw himself as a popular writer, addressing a broad, non-university-educated audience.
Nowadays we are all too familiar with this university-educated ruling caste, and its desire to control words and meaning. . . . [T]hink of the way in which our cultural and educational elites have transformed the very meanings of the words ‘man’ and ‘woman’, divesting them of any connection to biological reality. Orwell would not have been surprised by this development. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, he shows how the totalitarian state and its intellectuals will try to suppress real facts, and even natural laws, if they diverge from their worldview.
This totalitarian approach to history is dominant today, from the New York Times’ 1619 Project to statue-toppling. History is something to be erased or conjured up or reshaped as a moral lesson for today. It is used to demonstrate the rectitude of the contemporary establishment.
But then that was always Orwell’s worry – that intellectuals giving up on freedom would allow a Big Brother Britain to flourish. As he saw it in The Prevention of Literature (1946), the biggest danger to freedom of speech and thought came not from the threat of dictatorship (which was receding by then) but from intellectuals giving up on freedom, or worse, seeing it as an obstacle to the realisation of their worldview.
Orwell was concerned by the increasing popularity among influential left-wing intellectuals of ‘the much more tenable and dangerous proposition that freedom is undesirable and that intellectual honesty is a form of anti-social selfishness’. The exercise of freedom of speech and thought, the willingness to speak truth to power, was even then becoming seen as something to be frowned upon, a selfish, even elitist act.
Lionel Trilling, another writer and thinker, made a similar point to Self, but in a far more insightful, enlightening way. ‘[Orwell] liberates us’, he wrote in 1952:
‘He tells us that we can understand our political and social life merely by looking around us, he frees us from the need for the inside dope. He implies that our job is not to be intellectual, certainly not to be intellectual in this fashion or that, but merely to be intelligent according to our lights – he restores the old sense of the democracy of the mind, releasing us from the belief that the mind can work only in a technical, professional way and that it must work competitively. He has the effect of making us believe that we may become full members of the society of thinking men. That is why he is a figure for us.’
Orwell should be a figure for us, too – in our battle to restore the democracy of the mind and resist the totalitarian mindset of today. But this will require having the courage of our convictions and our words, as he so often did himself. As he put it in The Prevention of Literature, ‘To write in plain vigorous language one has to think fearlessly’. That Orwell did precisely that was a testament to his belief in the public just as much as his belief in himself. He sets an example and a challenge to us all.