Neigh Neigh

I'm sorry. This is a rrreally bad idea. It's a matter of bin Laden's strong horse vs. a 71-year little old white guy. Alas.

Compare and Contrast

Ahmadinejad Fined - No, wait …

Madder All the Time

Creative Minority Report on the Born Alive Infants Protection Act and the sole presidential candidate who opposes it. (WARNING: Brief graphic image of a voiceless victim.) Moloch worship, crowd contagion, a false prophet, and demographic winter never looked so bad. [First posted 3/08]

Skeptical About Atheists

If Only Atheists Were the Skeptics They Think They Are by Edward Tingley, The Skeptical Inquirer. [h/t: New Advent]

And, as The Anchoress reminds us of GKC's words to early 20th century atheists, Reason itself is a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.
- Orthodoxy

'Change' as Sacrificial Code Word

In the post, Who’s Your Daddy, I review the way that Jesus reveals the "father" of his interlocutors in John's Gospel, chapter 8. By their surreptitious inferences, Jesus sees that they are using their spiritual ancestry as a cover for their ostensible goal: claiming Abraham as their forebear, they bait and switch so that they set trip-wires to catch him and brand him as a certifiable "sinner". But they do not want to show him the "errors" of his ways. They want to find cause to scapegoat him. In this way, they show their true "father".

"You belong to your father the devil and you willingly carry out your father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning ... he is a liar and the father of lies" [Jn 8,44, my emphases]

Jesus offers a radical reinterpretation of the meaning of "father". His Father is not part of the primitive Sacred; rather, this Father is willing, in the Second Person of the Trinity, the Son, to undergo suffering and ultimately murder at the hands of bloodthirsty humanity to prove and vindicate His innocence - what the prophets of the Old Testament were already prophesying to a wayward, covenant-breaking people.

+ + +

The West is a product of this biblical spirit, leading away from the primitive Sacred and its satanic ways. But since the Renaissance and so-called "enlightenment", it has been moving back toward the ways of paganism.

Part of the West's crisis is that we have separated ourselves from the crowd; we are suspicious of crowds. And that is good: we know how crowds can turn on a victim and try collectively to scapegoat an arbitrarily chosen victim. This is what Hamerton-Kelly calls the "Generative Mimetic Scapegoating Mechanism" (GMSM). We value individualism to the point of worship: we have gone overboard to the point of caring little for the common good. Too, we even see the danger of the primitive Sacred in the "voice of the ancestral father."

So? So what? So the "voice of the ancestral father" presently is embodied in President George W. Bush. So we need CHANGE. Ah, (but) there's the rub.

If we do not choose the Father that Christ came to reveal, "change" leads merely and inexorably not to a way out of the "labyrinth" of the primitive Sacred. Change leads only to another curlicue of the labyrinth, as we follow a Pied Piper who fascinates us with his charisma.

What is a person who wants to follow the Father revealed by Jesus Christ to do this presidential election? The most ostensible form of the primitive Sacred is always child sacrifice. You may want, first, to check the voting records of candidates on abortion. Second, you may want to see which candidate lines up with the Magisterium of the Catholic Church's faith and morals. And, third, pray - pray fervently for the Culture of Life, that of Jesus' Father - in a culture fast slipping back into the ways of the primitive Sacred.

'Origin of Gandalf'

Der Berggeist - J. Madlener

On summer holiday 1911, J. R. R. Tolkien picked up a postcard of the above in Switzerland. According to his official biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, Tolkien carefully preserved the postcard, and on the paper cover wrote, 'Origin of Gandalf.' [59]

Our Lady's England

Sculpture Recalls Marian Shrine Destruction

Model-Rival Realities

Catholic World News reports that Pope Benedict XVI will not meet with Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who had seemed eager to meet with the pontiff.

In my opinion, this is appropriate diplomatically, but it may increase mimetic tension for Ahmadinejad. As a collective, the Scimitar is utterly beholden to the Judeo-Christian worldview for its very existence: a "model/rival" relationship from its inception. Ahmadinejad as the froth on this cauldron feels both repelled by the ontologically grounded Holy Father and intensely attracted to him.

Sadly I predict worsening relations because of the perceived snub of the model par excellence by an underling rival.

Just 'Cause

I happen to think these are two of the greatest fantasy movies made for kids: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and The Never-ending Story. [h/t: IBA]

Is it too late to remake Prince Caspian? You know, like, to include all those "boring" non-battle scenes just like in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe? The way Lewis wrote it? It is too late? Sigh. Too bad. I was just hoping ...

Shroud Expo 2010

The Holy Father has announced an ‘Exposition of the Shroud’ in 2010. [h/t: New Advent]

As the PBS documentary Secrets of the Dead – Shroud of Christ? detailed, the textile evidence is looking more and more conclusive that the Shroud (b) does indeed date to the 1st century A.D., and (b) the carbon dating applied to the most touched and contaminated corner of the cloth was flawed.

Who's Your Daddy

Jesus' inquisitors in the 8th chapter of John's Gospel want to check on his pedigree, his ancestry.

"Where is your father?" they ask him (v. 19)

"You know neither me nor my Father. If you knew me, you would know my Father also," he replies.

They say a little later, "We are descendants of Abraham and have never been enslaved to anyone..." (v. 33, as their Roman overlords probably listened in)

Jesus says to them, "If you were Abraham's children, you would be doing the works of Abraham. but now you are trying to kill me ... Abraham did not do this. You are doing the works of your father ... You belong to your father the devil and you willingly carry out your father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning ... he is a liar and the father of lies" (vv. 39b-44a, my emphases).

+ + +

Jesus is juxtaposing his Father with that "father" of the Pharisees whom they mis-recognize as Abraham. Jesus first corrects them about Abraham, saying that if he were their father, they would do the works of Abraham; namely, faithfully loving God with heart, soul, mind and strength, and neighbor as oneself. Then he pulls back the veil that thinly masks the violence they actually carry out like the pagans. THIS, he says, is the true "father" of their actions. They use laws as "trip-wires" to catch new victims to throw into the sacrificial mechanism started by the "murderer from the beginning ... a liar and the father of lies."

As we noted in the series of posts on Paganism, Then and Now, mimetic theory, the cultural anthropology of René Girard, posits precisely what Jesus puts in these few words of comparing the "murderer from the beginning ... and the father of lies" of conventional human culture vs. the Father God whom Jesus came to reveal to a sinful, violent, and bloodthirsty humanity. (To get caught up in gender political correctness here would be to do great disservice to the canonical Scriptures and cannot but sidetrack the importance of these matters. "Father" it will be and shall remain.)

Gil Bailie in his extraordinary explication of Girard's opus - Violence Unveiled - notes that the pre-Socratic philosopher Herclitus saw that

War [polemos] is the father and king of all things; he has shown some to be gods and some mortals, he has made some slaves and others free ... Everything originates in strife ... Strife is justice; and all things both come to pass and perish through strife. (My emphasis)

Mimetic theory also posits that each mere human culture always tries to guarantee that (a) it is utterly unique in its ability to bring about peace and prosperity; and (b) its cultic deity "sanctions" its violence against the usurping "other" who are (clearly) less than human ("sons of pigs, apes," etc.). Each human culture promises an "Exit" out of the labyrinth of violence and evil - finally! - only for individuals to discover that the exit-sign is just another entrance into the maze of human folly and bloodshed (I borrow "labyrinth", Bailie's apt metaphor for the primitive Sacred).

Girard posits here the difference between what he calls an "internal mediator" and an "external mediator." The former is one of the myriad savior figures who have led the human race astray during our sad, mortal history "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." The latter, on the other hand, would be a truly divine figure who comes from outside our human cultural house of mirrors and, thus, is capable of informing us of a completely different and superior way of living, moving, and having our being. One, as Girard says, who comes "to turn this long page of human history once and for all."

And so we see the need for choosing with extreme care and caution who to follow, whose "father" to believe, what organizing principle to set at the center of one's being. One that will just lead us back into the labyrinth of the "same ol' same ol'?" Or, a true "external Mediator" worthy of our heart, our life, our eternal well-being?

Who you gonna trust? may well be the most important question you ever answer.

But Their Nuclear Program is Peaceful

Iran Calls On the Scimitar to "Erase" Israel

And remember, kids: Hate Crimes are a One-way Street.

His Scimitar Childhood

For the record, Daniel Pipes looks at Barack Hussein Obama's Muslim Childhood. [h/t: Real Clear Religion]

Shallow America

Americans, says Lawrence Haas at Family Security Matters, are shallow and "un-serious". Against foes the likes of which brought us 9/11 we are woefully unprepared due ideological blinders, some Democratic, some Republican. (I would add a boat-load of other blinders mainly around progressive "enlightened" multiculturalism.) But Haas states:

Even when we focus on radical Islam, we are woefully ignorant about it. Unlike Communism, which we broadly understood was shaped by Marx and applied by Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and others, we don't know from whence radical Islam came. With few exceptions among elites and the public, we don't recognize that terrorist attacks on the United States and the West over the last 30 years are the latest phase of a 1,400-year struggle by radical Islam to defeat the forces of modernity and return society to the time of Mohammed. We don't know the interconnected ideologies and roles of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Whahhabis, and the Khomeinists in reviving this struggle in the 20th Century.

Blissfully ignorant of the beliefs, the outlook, the goals, and the methods of our adversaries, we are profoundly un-serious about the dangers that they represent. We are un-serious about the military commitment, the resources, and the measures required to defeat radical Islam both abroad and at home. Democrat, Republican, and independent - we are all un-serious. But our political affiliation determines just what it is we are un-serious about. To put it another way, Democrats are un-serious about some aspects of the challenge ahead while Republicans are un-serious about others.

Read all of Lawrence Hass' A Shallow State of War: Reflections from an Un-Serious Nation

Present Crisis - Dry Tinder

It is tempting to find the present crisis in the Democratic Party amusing. But this would be a mistake from the viewpoint of mimetic theory. Not only are ALL of us living in the time of scandal and sacrificial preparation, but we take for granted too much that we are somehow exempt in the United States from the kind of social devolution and violence that we see elsewhere.

Westerners while living in the "Christ-haunted" ethos of the bare ruined choirs of Christendom rarely can articulate let alone thematize the foundational presuppositions that lent us freedom from elements of the primitive Sacred: the paganism that is premised on force majeure, pantheism and animism. But rest assured: if we continue to throw out the Judeo-Christian antinomy for paganism in our legislatures, media, and courts of law, we shall most surely see it in its hydra-like manifestations raining fire across the delapidated West.

Don't say I didn't warn you. Or, don't you know paganism when you see it in post-modern nihilism and the Scimitar?