War Without End, Amen

Peace and rest are the enemy in the progressive war against the natural order.

This blog is dedicated to “progress with God”, as without Him, none is possible. We live in a time beset by the belief that progress without God is not only possible, but the only way it can happen. Anthony Esolen has written an article in the magazine Chronicle that refutes this mindset as completely as it does poetically.

Excerpts:

One who is a pioneer on principle is the Christian soldier gone wrong. The man who will not let his neighbors rest, but who must always be “transgressive,” is one who doubles down on Sodom, tears down a statue here and an institution there, and who lives in ceaseless and unforgiving hatred of anything that can claim to be permanently good and deserving of our honor. He is what you get when sin is transferred from your own heart, where it has settled, to social structures, conveniently vague, and traditions, stolid and defenseless.

Satan is like many an environmentalist who hates man more than he loves trees. He cannot let even the natural world alone if it means that Adam and Eve may enjoy their lives in peace and harmony with God. Satan knows that the world is beautiful, but its beauty, the peaceful tranquility of its varied and sweetly interchanging orders, goads him on to hatred. “The more I see / Pleasures about me,” he says, grumbling, “so much more I feel / Torment within me.” And when Adam and Eve fall, condemning the world to fall with them, Death, Satan’s incestuous son and grandson, is not satisfied, because his essential emptiness and nihilism admit no fulfillment, no peace. 

If art tells permanent truths about man, the progressive will not hear them, because he has set his face against anything permanent. It’s not that he produces bad art with drearily predictable political intent. The problem is worse than that. It is that the thing itself, art, suffocates. It needs air, it needs leisure, it needs vistas that span the ages. It needs a humble openness to the eternal. And to the extent that our minds are occupied territory, whether we oppose or cheer the occupiers, we too lose our humanity; we too can neither make nor receive good and great art. The progressive can say with Satan, “Only in destroying I find ease / To my relentless thoughts.” The rest of us can hardly remember what has been destroyed.

“We Are Human, We Are Free”

“The Great Reset” Must Be Defeated

Article by Anita McKone. Excerpts:

These elitists have become masters at co-opting all movements of self-respect, self-care and solidarity – their use of double speak means they claim to be supportive of community, fair wealth distribution, truth in the media, ecological sustainability, diversity, racial equality, women’s equality, freedom and nonviolence (for example) while working to implement an agenda that supports none of these things. And their increasing use over the past 70 years of NGOs that sound ‘friendly’ and ‘independent’, but which in fact pursue corporate, imperialist and other elitist agendas, has led to enormous numbers of ordinary ‘concerned’ people putting their money and energy into organisations and movements that dissipate their capacity to genuinely act in their own interests and the interests of life on the planet as a whole.

To take just a few examples – the environment movement has become dominated by the demand for a massive ‘green’ tech revolution that requires further rape and pillage of the peoples and natural environment of Africa and anywhere else rare minerals are found, union movements around the world have become utterly neutered and no longer act in the interests of their working members, medical ‘science’ is most likely to be a profit-making anti-scientific enterprise rather than one designed to further people’s health through use of genuine scientific methodology, and (particularly close to my heart) campaigns using nonviolent tactics have been used to simply achieve ‘regime change’ in centralised states, furthering the interests of transnational corporations, even though this was never the intention of the majority of activists involved.

The Propaganda Playbook

By Edward Bernays, published in 1928, is available for free online

Writes Ryan Matters:

The world is a volatile place right now. Things seem to change quickly and no one knows what might happen next. However, amid all this chaos there is one thing that has not changed and is unlikely to change any time soon, and that is human psychology.

Because of this, the tactics used to manipulate people’s thoughts, beliefs and actions have not changed either. In fact, most of them were outlined in detail 100 years ago by Edward Bernays in his 1928 book, Propaganda.

That’s right, the Puppet Master’s playbook isn’t a secret. It’s right there, freely available to anyone who cares to understand how the powers that be seek to influence them on a daily basis.

Propaganda by Edward Bernays has now been added to our Forbidden Library. Read it now, along with other forbidden books.

Vaccine Skeptics are the True Critical Thinkers

A former student of a "nudge" theorist speaks out

Article by Igor Chudov.

Excerpts:

The Asch Experiment, conducted by Solomon Asch, found out that most people, when seeing a “consensus” of participants agreeing on something that is fairly obviously false, actually ends up agreeing with those false opinions just because everyone else seems to think so.

The experiment was originally set up with eight persons, only one of whom was an experimental subject, and the rest were actors. These stooges, who the subject thought were other subjects, were all asked the same question, to which they gave an obviously wrong answer. The subject, who did not know he was the only real subject, was to speak up last.

It turned out that subjects of this experiment (it was repeated multiple times), seeing a consensus of seven smartly dressed men, would end up giving the same (obviously incorrect) answer as the stooges. This conformance experiment literally was a clever way to make people hold and express obviously false opinions.

This experiment was repeated many times, and in the most skillfully conducted experiments, they got 62.5% of subjects to agree with obvious nonsense at least once.

Oddly enough, vaccination rate in the US on Sep 1, right before federal vaccine mandates started, was 62.3%. Vaccination was running out of steam, just as Delta was showing that vaccines were not really “effective”.

[…]

Regarding mRNA “Covid vaccines”: anyone who would think for a minute, would realize that there was not a way to know for sure that vaccines were safe and effective, simply because not enough time has passed. Similarly, anyone could see that the masterminds behind the lockdowns and vaccinations, the billionaires behind the scenes, and the corrupt governments, all ensured that any dissent would be silenced. Thus, the purported consensus did not, in fact, exist at all.

Islam and the making of the West

Does Islam have a circular view of history?

That’s the title of an article by Helene Guldberg.

Here’s the section that interests me most:

The 14th-century Andalusian Arab, Ibn Khaldun, was described by the Florentine philosopher and diplomat, Niccolò Machiavelli, and the German Enlightenment philosopher, Georg Friedrich Hegel, as one of the greatest philosophers of the Medieval world. As Islamic scholar Adam Silverstein explains in Islamic History (2010), rather than see history as ‘teleological’ or ‘God-driven’, Ibn Khaldun described it as ‘cyclical and subject to rules and patterns.’ And in doing so, he helped put man more at the centre of history.

The author seems to think it’s a good thing that Machiavelli and Hegel thought highly of Khaldun. I don’t. It’s more like a health and safety warning. That Khaldun believed in a cyclical pattern of history, rather than the linear, biblical model, is highly interesting. How is this compatible with Islam? Is it compatible? And if yes, does Islam not believe in creation and judgment? Which is the logical outcome of a linear view of history. But ultimately contradicts a circular view.

The Jews Who Didn’t Leave Egypt

A lesson from the past about choosing freedom over servitude

An article by Alana Newhouse. She basically says these kinds of people (and they are not just Jews) are still among us.

Excerpts:

Now when Pharaoh let the people go, God did not lead them by way of the land of the Philistines, although it was nearer; for God said, ‘The people may have a change of heart when they see war, and return to Egypt,’” states Exodus 13:17. But it is in the next sentence that a mystery emerges: “So God led the people round about, by way of the wilderness at the Sea of Reeds. Now the Israelites went up chamushim out of the land of Egypt.

Wait—what? The Jews went out of Egypt how? What does “chamushim” mean? It is generally translated as “armed,” but nearly all commentaries note that its definition is, in fact, uncertain.

Into this breach arrives the legendary medieval Torah commentator Rashi, with a startling assertion. After acknowledging the “armed” option, Rashi offers, with casual sangfroid, another idea: That “chamushim” relates to the Hebrew word for five, and the text should be understood to be saying that only one-fifth of the Jewish people chose to leave Egypt.

Continue reading →

Jordan Peterson and the Puffer Fish

The famous psychiatrist speaks about consciousness and sexual selection

Check out his answer at a Q&A at Cambridge University (prompted, about 10 minutes long). He is answering a question about the notion of humans as simple biological machines. He describes how biologists concentrate on the natural selection of Darwin’s theory of evolution. However, they ignore that Darwin also talked about sexual selection. And that, says JP, presupposes consciousness. That means that consciousness must have been there before humans became what they are. As an example of an animal that appears to have consciousness, JP describes the work of the puffer fish male. And of a spider.

Continue watching after he finishes to hear one of the organisers wrap up the event, and explaining how happy he is that, despite being “cancelled” by the University three years ago – because he was photographed shaking hands (after another event) with some guy who was wearing a t-shirt with some text on some on it someone found offensive.

Here’s the puffer fish he talks about in action, creating an unbelievable structure on the seabed to impress a mate.

Criticising the Church of England’s Position in the Trans Debate

"There is no woke bandwagon senior clergymen will not jump on"

An article by Charlie Peters on spiked-online.com.

Excerpt:

Perhaps these governors of dwindling flocks have noticed that the only two growing religions in Britain today are Islam and progressivism. They can’t preach the former, so they have dived head-first into associating themselves with the latter at every available opportunity.

Re “dwindling flocks”, see also here.

Two Books that Influenced Gary North’s Thinking

Rushdoony’s 'Institutes of Biblical Law' (1973) and Ray Sutton’s 'That You May Prosper' (1987)

North writes about ‘The Two Most Important Books in My Life‘.

Excerpts:

Rushdoony’s thinking was shaped by his commitment to Van Til’s Bible-based defense of the faith. But he did not share Van Til’s Dutch Reformed amillennialism, which teaches that Christians will always be in a defensive minority condition. Rushdoony was a postmillennialist, which had been the common view of American Presbyterianism until after the Civil War. It teaches Christian victory in history before the Second Coming.

[…]

It was only with my book on Exodus 20, meaning the Ten Commandments, did the covenant model begin to shake my thinking. I wrote The Sinai Strategy from 1985 to 1986. It reflects the five-point model. But I did not do this self-consciously. I was working with Sutton’s manuscript. I had developed a sense of the model. My book was structured as if I had fully understood Sutton’s model. I didn’t. I structured the Ten Commandments in terms of Sutton’s five-point covenant model: two five-point sections, each with the same five-point order. The first five commandments are priestly; the second five commandments are kingly. That only became clear to me when the book had already been typeset.

Continue reading →