Stephen Roney's Blog, page 45

No Love Is Free

 

One of my Chinese students, by chance, brought up another problem with birth control and the current sexual climate that did not occur to me yesterday. He has no desire to spend any time with his classmates, or those of his own age generally, because all they are interested in is hooking up. And this, he rightly sees, is selfish. “Free love” is ultimately profoundly selfish. Aside from taking no thought for possible or eventual children, it sees the partner as an object, no more than a tasty cut of meat. One loves them no more than one loves the cow. It is insensitive to the emotional universe, and deadens the heart within.

As a result, sensitive and intelligent kids like him are left socially isolated. There are no good partners.

Others have also noticed that, given the difference between men and women, “free love” means that women will have sex whenever they want it, but with only about 20% of the men—the most attractive 20%. Who will in turn have little incentive to ever marry and give up this constant attention. So most men get no sex, and most women get no family. Nobody gets companionship.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Ireland Rises

 

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

The Price of "Free Love"

 

I heard a suggestion recently that the birth control pill is causing serious health issues for women. Moreover, this source argued that it disrupts women’s emotional health by interfering with their hormones. 

So how about banning the birth control pill?

It does seem, after all, that the pill and the “sexual revolution” it inspired have turned out to be disastrous on a social level. People have stopped having children. To compensate and just to keep systems and structures going, governments have turned to mass immigration. Mass immigration has begun to cause serious social problems. Not to mention, it will cause the eventual disappearance of the culture, as efficiently as any genocide. Marriages no longer stay together, causing endless grief and financial ruin to many individuals, parents and children, and tremendous expense to society as a whole. Sexually transmitted diseases are rampant, and the risk of some new epidemic like AIDs is high. People crave crazier and crazier, riskier and riskier sexual thrills. Sex for pleasure turns out to be a dangerous addiction: you want more and more and get less and less out of it. Sexual assault and sexual blackmail is everywhere, as the sexes mingle now in daily life and there are no firm rules or boundaries. Trying to prosecute is always “he said/she said.” Injustice is inevitable, and lives are ruined.

Is it time to reconnect sex firmly to childbearing?

Ban the pill, ban abortion. End no-fault divorce. Make adultery illegal.

We are so eager for social experiments; here’s one to try.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Peace, Order, and Good Government

 

In Shakespeare’s MacBeth, MacDuff flees to England to join forces with Malcolm, the rightful Scottish heir, in hopes of overthrowing the tyrant MacBeth, Malcolm tries to convince him that he would be the worst king possible. It is a subterfuge, but, among other things, it allows Shakespeare to define good and bad government. He summarizes a bad ruler in these words:

“Nay, had I power, I should
Pour the sweet milk of concord into hell,
Uproar the universal peace, confound
All unity on earth.”

The purpose of government is, in a phrase, to keep the peace. It is to promote unity among citizens, to settle disagreements. “Peace, order, and good government,” in the words of the BNA Act.

Multiculturalism obviously goes directly against this, by emphasizing differences among groups of citizens. Pandering to and favouring special interests, whether women, gays, blacks, indigenous people, or some professional elite, obviously goes against this, pitting one group against another. Even any “activist” government goes against this, as any dramatic change is a breach of the peace.

But Shakespeare is surely right about this. The very word “devil,” “diabol,” implies division—to put things apart. Compare “symbol,” to put things together.

The Trudeau government in Canada is thus a classic case of bad government. Trudeau declares there is no Canadian mainstream; there is no Canadian unity, and unity is actually undesirable. He slanders opponents as “Nazi sympathizers,” an “unacceptable fringe.” He picks fights with the premiers and with foreign governments. He panders openly in his rhetoric to any and all special interest groups, from Lavalin to aboriginals. He keeps promising handouts.

More broadly, leftist government today seems to be intrinsically bad government.

When, in the Beatitudes, Jesus says “blessed are the peacemakers,” this is what he is talking about. He is not endorsing pacifism or “peace at any price”; these stances are immoral, and lead to more war. He is endorsing those who make and enforce just laws; for the purpose of laws is to preserve the peace. He is blessing those who, given any social influence, use it justly rather than stirring up trouble. Those who do not gossip or flatter or pander.

All of us are, sooner or later, in such a position—not just those in government. It applies in the family, the essential social unit. An evil parent will play one child against another, sowing tumult and dissent. A decent parent will treat their children openly and fairly, rewarding and punishing only as warranted for their own ultimate good.

This is one more sense in which the Biblical edict “by their fruits you shall know them” applies. Or the story of the blasted fig tree. Whether a man or woman is good or bad is hard to determine. Most evil is done in secret. A good test is to ask, are their children happy, ”well-adjusted,” and on good terms with one another? 

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Cornwallis

 

In Halifax, they are busily erasing all traces of their founder, Lord Charles Cornwallis. The rap against him is that he put a bounty on local Indians, payable on submission of either the Indian or his scalp. So he is responsible for genocide.

Except that this was in time of war. In a war, it is rather part of the process to kill enemy soldiers. The bounty was supposed to be payable only for killing or capturing Indian warriors. If the means of mustering men to arms was irregular, this was a guerilla war, with no front lines, in a sparsely-settled territory. Every man might need to defend his home. 

It is also worth noting that the Indians initiated the conflict, in violation of treaties; and that the French at Louisburg were offering bounties for British scalps. 

So if Cornwallis is unmentionable, despite his accomplishments, for such an edict, surely so is, say, Sir Robert Borden, given that Canada used poison gas in World War I in response to German use. In war, if your enemy starts using some irregular or unethical means of combat, you must respond in kind or simply surrender.

But the real reason Cornwallis, with so many others, is being erased, is because of the unworthy human instinct for envy. The great are resented by the small for their accomplishments. For every Kennedy, there are a hundred Oswalds.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Becalmed on the Ship of Fools

 

A sign of how delusional—and immoral—our current society has become: going out for a social evening can feel like walking on eggshells. Just like life in a dysfunctional family, in a dysfunctional society there are many truths you cannot say, and many untruths you are compelled to say. Or else all hell breaks loose.

At a poetry reading Sunday last, for example, we had to begin with a “land acknowledgement,” saying we were grateful to be allowed to exist on the traditional land of three or more indigenous tribes. This is nonsense: the fact that three or more tribes always need to be named illustrates the fact that none had secure possession, and therefore none owned the property. Leaving aside that any residual hypothetical claims to sovereignty were formally renounced centuries ago, in return for compensation. These “land acknowledgements” violate the fundamental principle of human equality: the land was made by God for all. Nobody has a greater claim to it only due to ancestry. Immigrants are not third-class citizens.

Then one poet came up to the stage with a transgender flag hanging out of her pocket, and pointed out that today was International Day of Transgender Visibility. We all had to politely applaud like seals. And then the host came up and apologized for not mention this at the beginning of proceedings. We all had to acknowledge that people can be transgender, and they are oppressed if they are, and this girl was a boy.

But in reality, only words have genders. People have sex, and one’s sex is a physical fact, coded in every cell. Webster’s Dictionary, 1913: “Gender is a grammatical distinction and applies to words only. Sex is natural distinction and applies to living objects.” Human Gender is a nonsense concept. It began as “gender roles,” a feminist claim that one’s behaviour need not be conditioned by one’s sex. That claim itself was demonstrably false; men can’t have babies. But now the horse is out of the barn, has contracted mad cow disease, and is cannibalizing feminism itself.

Then, in conversation, a new friend reveals that both her children have ADHD. But she loves them despite their disability. 

Poor kids. ADD is just having a strong and lively imagination, now stigmatized as a disease. One might as well stigmatize high intelligence as morbid. That’s pretty much what we’re doing. Dangerous, no doubt: being smart and not doing what you’re told needs to be stomped on early, else who knows what these kids might say as they get older? Perhaps that the emperor has no clothes. Yet again, I have to bite my tongue, and leave those poor kids to their Ritalin-addled fate.

Such is life in 21st century Canada. A big reason why I feel compelled to keep this blog: my little sane space.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

I Am Risen! Hallelujah?

 

For Easter, friend Xerxes speculates on how it must have been for Jesus to wake up from his coma in that cave outside Jerusalem, and realize he was still alive.

He bases this speculation on the fact that the Gospels do not account for the time between Jesus being laid in the tomb, and rising again on the third day.

This is a strange argument, surely. If Jesus was lying dead in the tomb, what was he supposed to be doing in there? As to the apostles, the gospels point out that it was the Sabbath. What were they supposed to be doing on the Sabbath, when no action was permitted?

It is wrong to say there is no account in the Bible, if not in the Gospels, of the time between Jesus’s death and his resurrection. 

1 Peter 4:6

“For this is why the gospel was preached even to those who are dead, that though judged in the flesh the way people are, they might live in the spirit the way God does.”

Now where and when would Jesus have preached to the dead?

Ephesians 4: 8-10:

‘“When he ascended on high he led a host of captives,

    and he gave gifts to men.” 

(In saying, “He ascended,” what does it mean but that he had also descended into the lower regions, the earth? He who descended is the one who also ascended far above all the heavens, that he might fill all things.)’

While these references are slight, more detail is given in non-canonical sources: the Gospel of Nicodemus, and the Acts of Peter and Paul. It is also in the Apostles’ Creed: “descended into hell, rose again from the dead on the third day.”’

It is reasonable enough that this is not mentioned in the Gospels proper, because the value of the Gospels is as eyewitness accounts, and as guides to individual salvation. None of the apostles were present for Jesus’s sojourn in the underworld. The interest in what Jesus did for those three days is theological, not soteriological. 

All that aside, the hypothesis that Jesus was simply waking up from a coma on Easter morning is incompatible with the Gospel account. The Gospels repeat that the tomb was sealed with a huge stone, and was guarded. Matthew also says that an angel was seen to remove the stone. 

Moreover, in his resurrected body, Jesus is capable of moving through walls, disguising his appearance, and being in different places at almost the same time. 

To entertain Xerxes’s hypothesis, that the Resurrection can be medically explained, you would have to assume that the Gospels are wrong, that they or their sources are lying. If so, you are free to deny anything else in them—you are rejecting them as evidence. Do that, and you might as well imagine Jesus as a female Chinse silk merchant.

Moreover, people of that time would be perfectly familiar with the phenomenon of people waking from comas after being presumed dead. Had the apostles and disciples had reason to suspect that this could explain it all, it seems unlikely they would have spread out to the ends of the Roman Empire and beyond to preach the message of the Resurrection, and accept torture and death to do so.

I do think it would be interesting to speculate on what the apostles were thinking that Sabbath. For many years, I have had it in my mind to do this as a radio play, but I’ve never gotten around to it.

“Try to imagine Jesus’ own experience of resurrection,” Xerxes writes. “He was dead. And he was alive! Hallelujah!” 

Had this been a mere recovery from a coma, where’s the Hallelujah? He is still under sentence of death. Where does he go, to escape going through that torture and execution all over again, and even if he somehow evaded that, what joy would he face as a fugitive, his life mission abandoned?

But it is pointless to begin with to try to get inside Jesus’s head. That defeats the entire purpose of the Gospels, which is to see yourself as a disciple, not as God. Jesus is God. The mind of God is inaccessible to us, as God is omniscient and perfect, and our awareness is limited and imperfect. We know what he chooses to reveal to us.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Guyana's Argument Applied to Canada

 

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Happy Easter

 

On this Easter, people are noticing that neither the Prime Minister of Canada, the leader of the NDP, or the leader of the BQ sent out any sort of greetings on Good Friday. The three leftist Canadian parties are clearly not comfortable with Christianity, and it is hard to see how any Christian could be comfortable with them. I assume they will say something for Easter Sunday.

Right-wing commentators are pointing out that Trudeau did not miss honouring Ramadan, or Diwali, or Vaisakhi. Perhaps because, unlike Christianity, they and their moral demands need not be taken seriously by politicians in Canada. They can seem harmless and colourful. Perhaps because celebrating their existence feels like a thumb in the eye of Christians and Christianity. 

Down in the US, Biden sent out a message honouring today, March 31, as “Transgender Day of Visibility.” It is coincidence that it falls this year on Easter; but the optics are troublesome. They underline the fact that transgender ideology is incompatible with Christian teaching. No government can really support both. They will inevitably end up favouring one or the other.

At the same time, churches are being burned down or vandalized across Canada; forcing them to stay closed to worshippers when services are not in progress. Denying solace to many in crisis. Priests have been assaulted at the altar. There is a private member’s bill before Parliament to remove the exemption from Hate Speech Laws for expressing a sincerely held religious belief. In the admittedly unlikely event that it should pass, the Bible itself would presumably become illegal.

Pulling our focus back to the wide view, there is more persecution of Christians worldwide today than at any other time in history; and Christianity is the world’s most persecuted religion.

All of this, should we need it, is proof of the truth of Christianity. 

One only suppresses or discriminates against opinions and beliefs one thinks are true.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Everyone in Canada Is on the Brink of Losing Everything

 

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1773879171728691395?s=20

"A huge feeling of hopelessness all across Canada."

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.