A few comments about the recent October Suprises:
1. The fact that you waited until three weeks before a Presidential election to accuse one of the candidates of something that allegedly happened decades ago, immediately makes your story non-credible.
2. Kissing a woman without explicit consent isn’t in any way equivalent to groping.
3. Groping someone out of the blue is totally unacceptable, but it isn’t sexual assault (that is, it isn’t a forcible sexual imposition).
You may have heard of the documentary hypothesis, the theory that the Pentateuch was written by several different schools, J, E, D, P, B, and S. You may have also heard that this theory was advocated by Julius Wellhausen. However, that’s actually a myth that only superstitious dolts believe in. We modern educated people know that Wellhausen didn’t really exist. In truth, the books attributed to him were actually written by hundreds upon hundreds of different authors, and then randomly redacted and edited by The Worst Editor Ever.
And if you don’t believe this story, then you’re stupid.
You’ll notice a correlation between these things. People who are well off don’t care if their churches are banal and ugly, they don’t care if their liturgical music sounds like a bad rock band, they don’t care about any of it.
People who are poor, on the other hand, do not build banal churches. Their masses are usually beautiful and reverent, and their churches are the prize of their communities. Indeed, if you travel through certain parts of the American plains, you’ll notice that the only buildings which rise above the plains are the churches.
Modern people tend to be befuddled by this. Why would people who live in squalor be so concerned with building beautiful churches. Most moderns who consider this are at a loss to explain it, and consequently they usually dismiss such poor as ignorant people whose outlook is so obviously wrong that it is beneath their contemplation.
Getting beyond modern arrogance, the reason is fairly straightforward. People who live in dirt houses need something beautiful in their lives, something that stands apart from the ordinary troubles of life. This is why they are so concerned with building good churches. On the other hand, those who are well off materially have no need of such respite, so they’re happy to make their liturgy as banal as everything else.
One might also put it in terms of the extreme poor being more concerned with the things of God because they are less attached to the world. This is also valid. Either way, you can tell a lot about the people who built a church by how it looks.
“Thou shalt love thine enemies, and hate thy neighbor as thyself.”
Some have wondered how it is that the penalty of burning in Hell forever can be a just punishment for a single mortal sin. To start, let’s consider the difficulty of salvation. Objectively, salvation is remarkably simple, just be reasonably diligent in knowing your moral obligations, and don’t choose to do anything you know to be grave matter. It is of itself not that hard.
Where the difficulty arises, is in that we as humans have many sinful inclinations, and our wills constantly try to rebel against our intellects. It is thus that we would choose to commit mortal sins, it is not because God made things difficult, it’s because we do.
And it is because we choose of our own free will to reject God’s commands, that we deserve punishment. And when one dies in a state of mortal sin, then one utterly rejects grace, and the possibility of ever repenting.
You know whenever a leftist says that we need to have an honest conversation about racism, that the ensuing conversation will be anything but. Still, let’s give it a shot.
First of all, some definitions of terms:
Racism: Hatred (as in wishing evil on) of people because of their race
Subracism: Holding of negative opinions about people because of their race
Racial generalization: Acknowledgement or understanding of general tendencies among a given racial group.
Racialism: Particular attachment to one’s own race.
It should be fairly obvious to anyone not mired in the mental fog of PC that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with racial generalization. Jews do tend to subversion and greed, blacks do tend to violence and criminality, whites do tend to degeneracy and metrosexuality, etc.
It should also be fairly obvious, to anyone not ensnared by monomania, that racism is evil. Fortunately, this ill seems to be fairly rare, and to the extent it does exists it seems to be mostly a matter of hatred felt by blacks for whites. It is moreover to be expected that racism would be very rare, and would only emerge when subracists perceived that members of another race were superior is some way (numbers, intelligence, power, etc.).
Now, subracism is a bit more widespread. Subracism is wrong because it takes racial generalization beyond its proper limits, by extrapolating general tendencies to be universal, which will result in the holding of rash or calumnious beliefs about individual people. Now, it should be clear that in modern America, the most prevelant type of subracism is by whites against whites. I once even heard a priest say that whites all have an inclination to murderous hatred of blacks, this inclination being so innate in whiteness, that even hispanics are affected by it (the priest was an anglo, for reference). As far as I can tell, most nonwhites who denigrate us tend to be more moderate in their statements, and clarify that there are of course good whites out there. Obviously, most white critics of other races are careful to be so clear.
What of racialism then? Many people, mostly anti-white white subracists, claim that any form of white racialism necessarily is motivated by racism. White right-liberals tend to make an even more expansive claim, that any form of racialism, on the part of any race, is motivated by racism. Is this true? Obviously not, since one could have people who were attached to their own people, but never interacted with others, for whatever cause. Introducing the fact that interracial interactions of whatever kind happen doesn’t change this.
