Two-Stepping to Hell

From Verum Serum, via Gil Bailie:

Now I realize that the editors at these MSM institutions are probably following some style-guide which tells them that a baby inside a mother is fetus and a fetus in the hospital is a baby. What this case points out so clearly is that it’s a distinction without a difference. If we wanted to lay aside the style-guide we’d have to admit it was a baby when it was kidnapped and it was a baby when it was discovered alive in the hospital. Calling it a fetus didn’t change anything about it except its implied location. So why do it? I think the answer is obvious. You don’t have to look any further than yesterday’s NY Times hagiography of George Tiller for an answer. From the Times story:

[T]he other 2,800 abortions involved viable fetuses. Some had serious but survivable abnormalities, like Down syndrome. Many were perfectly healthy.

Those were healthy babies Tiller dismembered. Babies. More >>

I would love simply to call the prevarication by the MSM on abortuarial murder cowardice: merely fear of losing advertizers, or readership, or viewers, or the like. But at heart it stems from a baser motive: fear of the rising tide of the primitive Sacred. That is, it is hypocritical turning away from human sacrifice, lest all of us face the horror of cultural collusion that became a staple of United States cohesion since Roe v. Wade. Or, perhaps it is one and the same after all.

If our country, like so many other western nations formerly informed by the Judeo-Christian ethos, faces cultural meltdown it will be because we turned our collective back on that Judeo-Christian ethos for a heinous, softcore, "professional" - even suburban - version of human sacrifice: an antiseptic, stainless steel and latex medical "procedure".

But is it hypocritical? I fear that our collective consciousness about abortion has truly changed. It is no longer horrible. It is now "routine" for a vast majority of Americans. It is clearly a political chit in the Washington "two-step" for all but a very small minority on either side of the aisle. And if we are so blinded to the abomination of abortion, what others have become "normalized"? (Fill in the blank.)

And so I say, batten down the hatches. I fully believe in the consequential judgment of God against idolatry and paganism. Particularly when those who knew better reject what once was espoused and cherished as God's revelation and truth.

Without being asked, I'll bet

The White House posted an extraordinary photo. The saying is true: a picture is worth a thousand words.

Gutsy Judge - Australia

Confronting the Scimitar expression of the primitive Sacred, I rather like this Australian Supreme Court judge. As Gil Bailie notes in his recent London Colloquium on Violence and Religion Conference address, Christian Virtues Gone Mad, and elsewhere, when one's "shining example" was a warlord, one may without moral turpitude act in a "might makes right" way.

The textual justification for the Scimitar makes this amply clear. So, granted those presuppositions, exemplars and teachers of the ways of the Scimitar dehumanize opponents and "legitimately" (as per above) victimize them.

Blessedly, as in the case of this Australian magistrate, some in the West stand against this encroachment of the primitive Sacred. The Scimitar is one pincer of the primitive Sacred in our world; the recrudescence of the idolatrous pagan is the other pincer. I applaud Judge Peter McClellan and pray him long life and continued prosperity.

Seiyo - Meccanian Chronicles

For the record: Takuan Seiyo's From Meccania to Atlantis - Part 12 _ (1): Central Central Europe

Primitive Sacred and Victimizing Victimizers

Real Clear Religion reports on a neuvo-sexual man who attacked a Catholic priest during Mass (See here.).

One finds it very difficult to grasp the motivation for the actions of this man without the anthropological efforts of René Girard. In ancient times if one presented oneself as a "victim" of unjust dealings, one was likely to be victimized all the more ("You have been punished by the gods? Aye, then, we'll help the gods. Guards, have this man flogged!")

But the revelation of Our Lord's holy Cross has shown plainly that part of our fallen human nature is to institute and/or restore cultural cohesion by choosing a victim we can all agree on "deserves" our expelling or murder. "Better that one man dies than the whole nation be destroyed," said Caiaphus.

While the Christian revelation shows the Satanic (Gr. “to accuse”) nature of this "sacrificial victimary mechanism,” modern persons have rejected the Christian faith while hanging onto a perversion of it; namely, a concern for victims as a means of keeping Satanic victimizing.

How? How do we cling to a concern for victims – it sounds SO noble - while rejecting the “Lamb of God, Who takes away the sins of the world” AND at the same time keep on victimizing?

It is like this: in rejecting Christ’s divine revelation about violence and the Satanic primitive sacred, we place ourselves in God’s place, reject God’s Divine Victim, and lay claim to victimizing by championing the cause of victims whom we audaciously choose.

Let me repeat that: WE choose who we want to make our victims by claiming that they are “victimizing”. The Christian revelation has pulled back the veil on the unjustness of victimizing. But Satan pulls a fast one: “Okay, then we’ll victimize victimizers for victimizing!” (Conveniently ignoring the fact, of course, that in so doing one is oneself victimizing.) Talk about stinkin’ luciferian thinkin’.

It is close to the truth – which C. S. Lewis said makes the best lie - and so bamboozles us into making us feel self-righteous when we whack those whom we smugly see as being nasty to a special interest group we want to champion.

The fellow in this news report, like so many “gay” activists is merely finding a way back into Girard’s “primitive sacred” sacrificial victimary mechanism. The Catholic Church “victimizes” gays he thinks, so he get to victimize Catholics, and feel smugly self-righteous about it! (Just look at the expression on his face.)

The truth that this self-appointed priest of the Satanic primitive sacred expels is that Catholic Church is the sole Proclaimer in the world that says about sexuality: (a) there is normalcy as God designed it in Natural Law - one does not use sexuality for mere satisfaction of desire; and (b) it is to produce offspring to be raised by a mother and father in lifelong, self-donating marriage and family. One learns this by means of Christian revelation, no where else. Without this, we are pan-sexual - anything goes. Why not? With Christian revelation, we find what brings the greatest Adventure in the world: marriage, family, the "domestic Church."

The Catholic Church proclaims and tries to live and teach that it is wrong to victimize, even people possessed by disordered passions. We gather around the Ultimate Victim and High Priest, Jesus Christ, in the holy Sacrifice of the Mass rather than go seeking new victims to make us feel self-righteous in accusing and persecuting them.

The latter is the way of the primitive Sacred; and the neo-paganism of the West and the Scimitar threatening to engulf Christian truth are the twin pincers of the primitive Sacred we fight.

Lithuania sweeps against the tide

For the record: A new Lithuanian law aims to protect minors from information that could be harmful to them.

Shalom Jerusalem

Don’t let them turn back the clock.

Burne-Jones PRB

Saint George and the Dragon (1868) - Sir Edward Burne-Jones

Prez Nixes Dragon Tank

Man, oh man. When you thought things couldn't get worse.

Americans Are Not Expendable Cogs

You didn't need me to tell you that he is losing ground on the health care reform, did you? Of course not.

Thing is, he is a student - and professor - of "scientific management." And, as everyone knows, Frederick Winslow Taylor - of whom Stalin was a big fan - famously stoked the fires of "abstract labor" (assembly lines being the best example) with unskilled and, therefore, the cheapest, labor in the early 20th century.

Americans are beginning to feel a serious malaise with a supreme "manager" who sees them - us - as routinizable, infantizable, and expendable "cogs" in our economy. Irksome lot, Americans.

And all I can say is, it's about time.

Computers & 'Soft Despotism'

... the computer comes to represent an ideal, in light of which real thinking perversely begins to look deficient. Thus, when the postindustrial visionary reasons from the fact that complex systems involve "the interaction of too many variables for the mind to hold in correct order simultaneously" to the conclusion that "one has to use algorithms, rather than intuitive judgments, in making decisions," he argues from the fact that the mind does not do what a computer does to an assertion about the incompetence of the mind. This seems to express an irrational prejudice against people.

- Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft [171]

Park Your Brain, and Obey

This kind of lock-step thinking and advocacy is precisely what takes entire nations into the well-deserved oblivion of the consequential judgment of God. Just trust and obey, for there's no other way, to be happy in ... Obama ... than to trust and obey.

Beginning of the end? You think? I don't think so myself; we should be so lucky. Rather, now is the beginning of a time of decidedly dangerous stinkin' luciferian thinkin' as another bloke and I have posited in similar scenarios.

I'm afraid it will get worse before it gets (possibly) better. The idolatry of the state has just begun:

The state, not God, thus decides who lies or dies.

This culture of death crowd would have us abandon the sick and the elderly to “contain costs.” Americans whose basic belief in the inalienable right to life, have an obligation to oppose Obamacare and to promote a culture of compassion, one that ensures that every person lives – every moment of life until natural death – with dignity.

Culture of Death on the March

Barbara Kay at Mercatornet:

Have you noticed that the subject of euthanasia/ assisted suicide is picking up momentum -- that it is, so to speak, taking on a life of its own? I mean in particular that we seem to be approaching one of those interesting tipping points in public debate where the tone of those supporting a once-shocking idea is shifting from defensive to offensive.

Take for a representative example one of the "letters of the day" in the Post's July 22 edition, from Alexander McKay of Calgary. Mr. McKay argues for assisted suicide with the conviction of one endorsing, rather than flouting, received wisdom. The notion that the individual not only has the right to control his time of departure from this Earth, but has the right to society's complicity in a death deliberately chosen, is embedded in the calm and confident air with which Mr. McKay projects his reasons for wishing, when his "wonderful life" dwindles down to a putative final season of debility and suffering, to "consider my options."

Mr. McKay does not wish to see his life "cruelly extended" (assumption: suffering and pain are unnatural add-ons to life, not as much a part of life as youth and vigour). He says, "life is for the living" (assumption: the terminally ill no longer hold the moral status of "living"). And, of course, "Canada's medical system is for those who need it" (assumption: medical "need" is an entirely fungible notion).

His trump card -- or so he believes -- is his final flourish: "What possible exercise in logic or morality (my emphasis) would deny me my dignity and force me to suffer against my will?" (assumption plus corollary: dignity is a quality that only attaches to health and personal autonomy; those who willingly suffer pain and suffering with a view to a naturally prescribed death have no dignity).

Read all of Justifying One’s Existence.

Incredulity Notwithstanding

For the record: the Top 10 Misconceptions About The Catholic Church. [ht: Spirit Daily]

Benedict to Visit Shroud - 2010

Pope Benedict XVI is scheduled to visit the Shroud of Turin the spring of 2010. Largely dismissed as a hoax after being scrutinized using Carbon-14 dating techniques, more recent research is validating the Shroud's authenticity on several fronts. (The portion of the Shroud used for samples sent to labs came from a corner most contaminated - that is: held onto - over its long history.)

One of the 2002 team members who helped clean and preserve the Shroud, renowned textile expert, Mechthild Flury-Lemberg, announced that she had seen seams used in the Shroud only once prior: in a piece of 1st century fabric found atop Masada in Israel. French scientist Thierry Castex has revealed that on the shroud are traces of words in Aramaic spelled with Hebrew letters.

Gussied Up Paganism - Federal $$ at work

Why don't we simply call what is happening politically in the United States what it is? Idolatry. To see the way our president sincerely seems to trust a human institution to fix all the ills of human existence - or a vast number of them - is wrong-headed at best. At worst, it is a Romantic form of Gnostic humanism: if we can imagine the federal government spending its way to a human Utopia, we can forget all that rot about a Doctrine of Original Sin. Who needs a truly transcendent God to help us?

Ah, but, do not go too close; do not look at what the Administration plans regarding the on-going atrocity of abortuarial human sacrifice. Nay, and do not read the fine print about the elderly. There must be sacrifices. All of us will be called on to make sacrifices.

The trouble is, this idolatrous project is reversing the Judeo-Christian understanding of sacrifice as self-sacrifice and self-donation. It seems to carry with it a new connotation that is a very old, very sin-filled connotation of a very different kind of "sacrifice". Whenever one attempts to create a "hybrid religion," it will, ipso facto, degenerate into another sad paganism.

Do not listen to the themes, however well presented by teleprompted rhetoriticians. Watch the structure of what is happening.

When the Judeo-Christian morality and faith are rejected, ignored, or forgotten, one must expect the inevitable slide back toward pagan indifference to the value of human life and worse: the gradual rise of the recrudescence of paganism.

Calling a Spade a Spade

A little snippet from our (very) early Church fathers:

Once he (Polycarp) was met by Marcion who said to him, "Do you recognize me?" and Polycarp replied, "I recognize you as the firstborn of Satan!"

- Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses, 3.3.4

'Health care reform' = Abortion Unbound

Sheila Liaugminas at Mercatornet writes,

If passed as written, health care ‘reform’ in America would expand abortion more radically than anything since Roe.

Abortion activists first introduced the misnamed ‘Freedom of Choice Act’ (FOCA) with the help of Senate sympathizers in 1989 to create a fundamental right to abortion for all women, spread its access, and limit any government regulation, including any that even Roe v. Wade allowed. Twenty years and countless successes since then, the abortion movement put a sympathizer in the White House who had promised them he would sign that sweeping and radical legislation into law if elected.

Most Americans had not heard of this until sometime around election day 2008, others are still unaware that FOCA would change life in America dramatically, and eliminate vast numbers of them. The US Bishops mounted a formidable campaign to inform and engage citizens to defend against the assault on life and laws and fundamental rights of conscience. And they energetically implored President Barack Obama to resist the pressure to sign what they and the pro-life movement identified as “the most radical abortion legislation in US history,” without the slightest risk of exaggeration.

FOCA would enshrine abortion as an absolute right and require unfettered access to it; invalidate all state and federal laws regulating abortion through term pregnancy, including informed consent, parental notification, physician licensing, clinic safety, and the rights of health care workers to exercise conscientious objection participating in abortion. And, it required U.S. taxpayers to fund it all.
Obama did not sign FOCA into law when he took office. But pro-life leaders weren’t exactly celebrating. They warned it would turn up in a stealthier form.

It has ...

More >>>

Betsy McCaughey - The Assault on Elderly

BUT WAIT! It gets even better! Here is someone who has actually read the health care reform bill, Wall Street Journal writer, Betsy McCaughey. If you are aged, a boomer, or have an aging parent, well, do the good thing for the sake of your country. Die.