Stephen Roney's Blog, page 98

You Need to Know This

 

Something of a public service announcement.

Also shocking.

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

We Need to Talk about Canada

 

Tucker Carlson, on air, has asked whether it is time for the US to intervene in Canada. After all, does America want another Cuba?

I remember when I was younger saying I would be ready to die if necessary to stop an American invasion.

Now I think I would welcome it. My concern is only that freedom and democracy in the US is not that much more stable than in Canada. Give me a DeSantis or Trump regime in Washington, and I would feel good about it. The Americans are our guarantee against tyranny, and tyranny is plainly developing in Canada at the federal level.

I expect in military terms it would be an almost bloodless affair. Whether the Canadian forces would even bother to put up a fight is doubtful. Why resist? If the Americans annex Canada, life goes on, only with more freedoms, full democracy, and greater prosperity. And potentially much less fuss crossing the border for a job or a vacation. 

I could live with that.

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

Denial in the News

 

We are seeing currently what denial looks like. 

Sometimes it is caused by a guilty conscience, as when Adam and Eve hid from God in the bushes of the Garden of Eden. Sometimes it happens when one has been lied to for a long time. One finds it difficult to accept this; it is too disorienting. It is the “sunk costs” fallacy: if I have spent $200,000 on the car, it must be a great car. As someone once said, it is easier to fool someone than to get them to admit they have been fooled.

We are seeing this sort of denial in the general refusal to notice the high excess death rates since the Covid vaccine was rolled out, and the many younger people dying of myocarditis. 

Of course governments have a vested interest in suppressing this. Of course the drug companies do. And both government and the drug companies put a great deal of money into advertising in the media. So the media too will suppress it. 

But I think we are seeing it among ordinary people as well. Tim Poole reports others reacting violently when he raises the possibility that the deaths might be due to the vaccine. Denial normally becomes violent when challenged. Those who have been vaccinated cannot face the possibility that they made the wrong choice, that the vaccine might now be a time bomb moving through their veins. Even people who have already been diagnosed with myocarditis seem often to be in denial. They will ascribe it to a cold, for example. Rum luck. It is too hard to accept that they did it to themselves, by dutifully taking the word of the authorities. No doubt it is hardest for those who were most critical of the “anti-vaxxers.”

At times like these we discover who the honest people are, and who is delusional. The honest seem on present evidence to be an overall minority.

We see this in other things as well: the “mass graves at the residential schools” claim is now untenable. But nobody is covering it, and most people till assert it as if it is true. The “Trump was colluding with the Russians” hoax is untenable, but you still hear people insisting on it. And so forth.

It all makes life easy for con artists.

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

No More Pink Hair

 

Trump is certainly getting my blood pulsing. If he can actually accomplish this, it sounds like just what we need. And he has a reputation for keeping his campaign promises.

I hope he is reading the political climate correctly here; but I think he is. This platform should appeal strongly to blacks, Asian-Americans, and suburban moms—three groups the Democrats have in recent years depended upon. I have thought for some time that getting CRT out of the schools is the winning issue for the right.

Pierre Poilievre here in Canada is going instead after economic issues. But he has no choice—education is  provincial matter.

This is definitely enough to make me want to see Trump as the Republican nominee; I had been leaning to Ron DeSantis.

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

Do Muslim and Christians Worship the Same God?

 

I am usually in awe of William Lane Craig as a philosopher. But in his claim that Christians and Muslims do not worship the same God, I think he is off the mark. 

He argues that there is cause to accept the possibility that we worship the same God; but not sufficient warrant. It is possible, he says, that it is not the same God, and then he leaps to the conclusion that Yahweh and Allah are not the same God. 

Surely, at a minimum, he is actually giving no better justification for his own claim than for the claim that they are the same. It is possible; that does not make it necessary.

But it is not even possible. We are actually obliged to accept that it is the same God. 

Craig offers two analogies: first, we see a man treating a woman well, and observe that her husband is kind to her. But as it turns out, that man is not her husband, and her actual husband abuses her. In this case, if we say her husband treats her will, and another insists her husband abuses her, we are not talking about the same person.

His second example is the Immaculate Conception: Protestants commonly assume this Catholic doctrine refers to the birth of Christ. But to Catholics, it refers to the conception of the Virgin Mary. Accordingly, the two are not speaking of the same thing. Mistaken identity.

But these analogies, or any mistaken identity problem, depend on there being more than one existing item or person it is possible to be referring to: more than one man man in the world, and more than one conception. Therefore, confusion is possible.

By definition, there is only one God in the universe; and both Christians and Muslims aver it. Accordingly, it is impossible to accuse either of a care of mistaken identity, that they are thinking of another God.  By definition, Muslims and Christians simply must be worshipping the same God, whether or not they have different conceptions of Him. To disagree, Craig must first declare himself a polytheist.

If Muslims and Christians do differ in their concept of God, it is probably not very useful to argue about it. God is in his essence beyond human conception. Some things may be necessarily true, for example, by definition; but beyond such points it is unreasonable to insist that your own conception is the right one.

To demonstrate that they are different Gods, Craig points out that the Muslim God is hostile to non-Muslims, while the Christian God loves everyone, “unconditionally.”

Problem: Does the Hebrew God of the Old Testament love the Canaanites and Philistines “unconditionally”? That’s far from clear. He does, after all, want them wiped out, men, women, children and cattle.

And does the God of the New Testament, really? The scribes and Pharisees? The “goats” thrown into the eternal flames?

The term “Muslim” properly means “obedient to God.” So God loves Muslims. This seems to me the same as the Christian teaching: God loves those who love him, but those who reject him are damned.   Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, turning from God, is the unforgivable sin.

It is an odd partisan blindness on Dr. Craig’s part.

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

The Sexual Devolution

 

I don't agree with Jordan Peterson on everything, but he's making some important points. The sexual revolution was a dumb mistake.

We need to grow up.

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

The Secret of Trudeau's Succes

 

It is an embarrassment to Canada that Justin Trudeau is prime minister. And not just that—he was reelected twice, albeit with a historically low share of the vote. He is clearly not qualified for the job, his temperament is reckless and self-indulgent, and his government has been plagued by scandal throughout. Aside from our own suffering, it makes us all look like craven idiots on the world stage.

This has given Trudeau a reputation as a great campaigner. What else could explain it? But this great campaigning, such as it is, is nothing more than declaring any opposition, and the Tories, white supremacists, misogynists, homophobes, Islamophobes, and so forth. This is not great campaigning so much as Canadians being craven idiots he can play like a pipe organ.

I think much of the blame belongs to the Conservatives. They have failed in their role as Her (now His) Majesty’s Loyal Opposition.  I think Peter MacKay was right to say that, in 2019, Andrew Scheer failed to score on an open net. Trudeau should have been easy to take out. And, if this is so, it is at least as true that Erin O’Toole turned in a poor performance in 2021.

I think the problem, contrary to what many politicos claim, was that these two leaders tried too hard to run toward the centre. Scheer kept a big smile pasted on his face, which looked insincere. He could not give a straight answer on abortion. The voters, or a large segment of them, had reason to suspect a “hidden agenda.” He had beaten Bernier for the leadership in a backroom deal with the milk lobby; proving himself untrustworthy.

O’Toole also smiled relentlessly and openly criticized the former Conservative government. His slogan was “not your father’s Conservative Party.” It made the Conservative Party’s supposed misdeeds, and not Trudeau’s, the issue. It was like a public admission that the party is nefarious. And, since he had run for the leadership as a “true blue” Conservative, voters again had every reason not to trust him.  He showed himself a liar: was he lying to the party faithful then, or to the voters now? Who knows what he would do if in power.

People did not vote for Trudeau. They were voting against the Tories. They were parking their votes with the devil they knew. They were being asked to buy a pig in a poke, and this scared them.

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

Xerxes Calls for Diversity over Christian Unity

 

This is the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.

Xerxes in his latest column questions the value of Christian unity. He says it all seems to be a matter of mouthing scripts designed not to offend anyone. The real Christian unity, he suggests, would be in things like giving money to a food bank.

What, after all, he asks, does he have in common with “the gun-toting far-right evangelical fringe in the U.S. that’s now being called ‘Christian nationalism.’ Just as they have little in common with the Christian minority in India being squeezed out by the strongly pro-Hindu policies of Narendra Modi. And as they in turn have little in common with the robed guardians of priceless art treasures in the Vatican.”

This took me by surprise. The value had always seemed self-evident to me. It is as though someone had suddenly declared themselves in favour of war, as consistent government policy. Had to stop and think.

It is firstly to present a united front to God. We are all children of one divine father; disunity among us must be as troubling to him, as much against his wishes, as disunity among brothers and sisters to the father in a family. (Assuming the parent is not a psychopath. But that is another story.)

It is, second, for the sake of ourselves and one another. Any sincerely religious person is in a sincere quest for the truth. If we disagree on what we believe, it is urgent and mutually beneficial to discuss this, and see to what extent we can find agreement. If we disagree, why? This is how truth is sought, and how it is found.

It is, third, to present a consistent witness to the unchurched, to the non-religious, who need our guidance. To the extent that Christians cannot agree, it leaves the despondent without this clear guidance. 

“I have very little in common” Xerxes protests, “… with the gun-toting far-right evangelical fringe in the U.S. that’s now being called ‘Christian nationalism.’” 

He does not list the points on which he disagrees; I can only guess that it is on toting guns, voting for the political right, being evangelical, and being “Christian nationalist.” 

As to owning a gun or voting for the policies of the right, these are political or cultural considerations, not religious ones. They are not relevant; unless one can make a case that owning a gun or voting for the Republicans is immoral. Perhaps; but that argument must be made. 

Evangelical? We are all, as Christians, supposed to evangelize. That is the Great Commission—in other words, our chief duty as Christians. Leonard Cohen has referred to Christianity a “the great missionary branch of Judaism,” and I think that is about right.

I had to look up “Christian nationalism,” a new term. I don’t mean new to me; a new usage in absolute terms. It is usually used as a pejorative, not by the people so described for themselves.

I turn to Wikipedia. While imperfect, it is about as unbiased a source as we can expect to find on such a topic. Wikipedia says “Christian nationalists support the presence of Christian symbols and statuary in the public square, as well as state patronage for the display of religion, such as school prayer and the exhibition of nativity scenes during Christmastide or the Christian Cross on Good Friday.”

On that definition, I am a Christian nationalist. I like nativity scenes. If we are going to celebrate Christmas as a public holiday, why draw the line at trying to conceal what it is all about?

Moreover, if Christian symbols are barred from the public square, this is not neutral. Religion is being suppressed. This is discriminatory. 

Most fine art, architecture, and history until recent years is religious in nature. The Sistine Chapel; Da Vinci’s Last Supper; the pyramids; the Elgin marbles; Dante’s Divine Comedy; Milton’s Paradise Lost. Prohibiting it all from the public square, or refusing it public support, would be massively destructive to our culture, our cultural unity, and our quality of life.

Many of the freest and most “progressive” countries in the world have an established church: they are, constitutionally, “Christian nations.” I don’t like established churches, as opposed to support for monotheism in general, but do you really think this is a serious problem in the United Kingdom, Denmark, Norway, Greece, Malta? Are these problematic “far-right” regimes?

Note too that the idea of “separation of church and state” is alien to the Canadian constitution. (Nor does it appear in the American one.) The preamble to the Constitution Act, 1982, identifies Canada as “founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God.” That makes Canada legally at least a monotheistic state, if not a specifically Christian one. A right to expressly religious schools, Catholic or Protestant, is guaranteed by the constitution at least for the provinces of Ontario and Quebec. That includes school prayer.

So Canada is also a Christian nation, by Wikipedia’s definition. Anyone opposed to Christian nationalism is opposed to Canada.

To be fair, I can guess at a second possible intended meaning to the term: a deification of nation and nationality. This, however, would not be Christian, but an idolatry. The term in this case is misapplied.

Xerxes thinks that the  “Christian minority in India … have little in common with the robed guardians of priceless art treasures in the Vatican.”

Actually, thirty-three percent of Indian Christians are in communion with the Vatican. I have rarely attended a Catholic mass anywhere in Canada or the Middle East without at least a few South Asian faces. Apparently there is a unity in Catholic Christianity that does not occur in Xerxes’s old-line Protestantism. I have noticed that in the Middle East: even within one Protestant denomination, they seem to segregate into ethnic congregations. 

I see this as unfortunate. One of the great joys of being Catholic is feeling a part of a family that is truly worldwide. 

As a Catholic, I also feel close to evangelical Protestants. That was historically not always the case, but it shows our progress towards Christian unity. A Catholic charismatic service is hard to distinguish from a Protestant Pentecostal one. And this is far from people mouthing scripts.

Perhaps old-line mainstream Protestants are the one group that feels alienated from the body, the “one holy, catholic and apostolic church” we all acknowledge in the Nicene Creed. And perhaps it is actually due to the lack of spirit—the disunity is effect, not cause, of the spiritlessness.

“The true unity of the Christian Church – if it exists,” says Xerxes, “lies in its actions.” And he lists several acts of charity. 

I see two problems with this position. First, acts of charity are incumbent on all of us, not just Christians. Atheists would be the first to insist that not only Christians are moral or charitable. Second, to Christians, acts are not sufficient. That would be earning salvation by our own merits. So charitable acts are not definitive of Christianity.

Xerxes also scoffs at prayer in general, let alone ecumenical prayers for Christian unity. “I don’t have much faith in what a former boss called ‘Gimme Prayers’: Please God, gimme a red wagon. Cure my cancer. Bring my wife back.”

But this is a serious distortion of what prayer is all about, including, surely, any ecumenical prayers. If you look through the standard prayers of the Catholic Church, “gimmes” are not prominent or that common. “Give us this day our daily bread” and “Lead us not into temptation” in the Our Father. “Pray for us” in the Hail Mary. “Show unto us the most blessed fruit of thy womb” in the “Hail Holy Queen.” “Have mercy on me, a sinner” in the Jesus prayer. No gimmes in the Apostle’s Creed, the Nicene Creed, the Confiteor, and so forth. Jewish prayers, I am advised, are similar.

Not that it is wrong to ask God for things, but it should be obvious that God is giving us what is best for us in any case. So the point of prayer is not to get stuff, but to establish a loving relationship with God.

Generally speaking, we can do that in fraternal unity despite any disagreements over points of theological doctrine.

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

Baal in New York

 

A new bronze statue supposed to represent Ruth Bader Ginsberg—although it looks nothing like Ruth Bader Ginsberg—has been installed on the facade of the New York state courthouse in Manhattan. She joins an array of great lawgivers of history, including Confucius, Manu, Justinian, Zoroaster, and Moses.

It is a non sequitor. Ginsberg, as a US Supreme Court judge, was a law interpreter, not a law giver. It is a different role.

Although perhaps this is a legitimate if not a very self-reflective comment that Ginsberg did not, in fact, follow the law, but made it up as she went along. That has certainly been argued.

The sculptor says this statue is needed now because “women’s reproductive rights [are] under siege.” So the statue might  better be seen, particularly as it does not look like the late Supreme Court Justice, as a representation of “women’s reproductive rights” rather than Ginsberg personally.

It looks like traditional representations of evil: hair curling back like the horns of a ram, like those of some depictions of the Devil; inhuman octopus tentacles sprouting from her side instead of arms; a hint of spider in search of flies to devour.

The Devil: Wade-Giles Tarot card

If inadvertently, it all seems apt. What Freud called the subconscious is better understood as a guilty conscience.

“Women’s reproductive rights” is, of course, a euphemism for abortion. Abortion destroys children.

And it destroys more than that. It is destroying our society and our civilization. It puts us in the same class as the ancient Canaanites, the Carthaginians, or of Nazi Germany: of civilizations that must, for the good of mankind, be destroyed, and the earth salted over.

It is not hyperbole to compare unrestricted and free abortion to the Holocaust: it has killed far more people. And it has killed them younger, robbing them of more life. Unlike the Germans, none of us can claim ignorance of what is going on.

To be sure, the defenders or abortion will insist that it is not murder, because the foetus is not human. It is just a "clump of cells." Right?

Exactly the tack the Nazis took: Jews were not human. They were untermenschen.

The refusal to see the victim's humanity does not absolve one of the crime. It increases it.

Abortion is also a genocide; a genocide against the young, but ultimately against whatever “race” or nation

 allows it. Governments throughout the developed world are stressing the need for mass immigration, because of a low birthrate. And what is at least one of the causes of that low birthrate? It might almost as aptly be called a high death rate.

It is not just the number of babies aborted; but that the culture that defends abortion also goes on to despise and discourage children and childbearing. In implicit defense of the right to abort, in order to allow unrestricted sex, the myth of “overpopulation” and resource scarcity has been popularized for decades, in the media and in the schools. Our underpopulation is the result. Our culture is dying off.

But it does not end there. We all know, in our conscience, in our thoughts alone in the night, that abortion is murder. We all know that we are collectively and perhaps individually guilty of a great wrong. The hysterical desire to conceal and deny this guilt rather than repent and give up sex on instinct has led to the general collapse of civil discourse. It has let to an intolerance of any disagreement or dissenting views: for truth itself becomes the enemy. If, after all, we allow people to speak freely, someone might at any moment mention the elephant in the maternity ward.

It has led to a persecution of all moral lawgivers. They make us feel guilty.

Most obviously the church. It has led to the persecution of priests for supposed pederasty. Yes, there are pederastic priests, but probably no more than in the general population. It is not, in any case, a fault of the church per se. It has led to the myth of the evil residential schools, the imaginary mass graves, and the vandalism of churches. People want to blame the church, and they will come up with something.

It has led to the toppling of the statues of other lawgivers: Sir John A. Macdonald, Thomas Jefferson, Egerton Ryerson, Henry Dundas. Not those guilty of actual misdeeds or injustices: those guilty of combatting misdeeds and injustices. Those who built the society and its structure of laws. Laws are “patriarchy.” Laws are “white supremacy.”

 It has also led to a glorification of homosexuality and transgenderism. Why? First, because homosexuals are an emblem of sex without any thought of reproduction. Homosexuality  separates sex from babies, representing the libertine ideal. But more deeply, “gays” have gained some unconscious moral cachet from the fact that they cannot be suspected of having or having demanded an abortion. They are better than the rest of us.

One can see that it also leads to a hatred for civilization itself.  Partly because civilization is law, and so makes us feel guilty. Partly because it represents us, our self-image, and we hate ourselves for the sin. The guilty conscience does this, on the group or on the individual level. It leads to self-hate and self-destructive behaviour. A house divided against itself cannot stand.

Some years ago, when she was still quite young, my daughter made a Christmas card for her mother. It was beautiful; she has great artistic talent. I posted it proudly on Facebook. 

Unexpectedly, a number of friends, North American women, commented in alarm. What was going on? Was she being abused? 

She had included a line thanking her mother for not aborting her. 

The American and Canadian women immediately saw this as “something wrong.” And they jumped to the conclusion that her mother hated her.

As I pointed out to one of them, anywhere abortion is legal, the mother makes a conscious choice whether to kill or not to kill. It has nothing to do with the child’s merits—she has not yet met the child, and cannot know its character. She could not have decided whether she liked or didn’t like her. So my daughter’s comment was only sensible. She was and is a verry bright child, and saw the implications of legal abortion.

In the meantime, their comments were obviously traumatic to both my daughter, who could not understand what she had said that was so wrong, and to my wife, who had been accused of child abuse. The commentators seemingly took neither into consideration. They were too hysterical to have thought such things through. Their guilty conscience had taken over their reason and their compassion.

So we see everywhere in the larger society. Once one embraces vice, vice takes control, and one becomes vicious. That is what the word “vicious” means. We become weasels fighting in a hole.

It is significant that none of our Arab or Filipina friends, which probably outnumber our North American friends on Facebook, thought there was anything disturbing or untoward about my daughter’s abortion comment. They only admired the lovely card.

Abortion is illegal in the Philippines and in the Middle East. 

It was only the North Americans who were upset about the comment.

In short, it was their guilty conscience speaking to them.

Since I pointed out to that one friend that my daughter’s comments were reasonable so long as abortion is legal, she has not “spoken” to me. She will not respond to any attempts to reach her.

She is not the only old friend who has “unfriended” me over exactly this issue: abortion. Not something I am vocal about; leaving aside what I might post here, I do not evangelize on the issue with friends. I only respond when it comes up; I do not bring it up.

Perhaps that is a mistake we are all making. Perhaps the only way to save civil discourse, our friendships, our families, our civilization itself, is to ban abortion. 

The future belongs to those nations in which it is banned.

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

Looks Like Something Is About to Hit the Fan

 

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