MATHETΩN

Bonnie’s only begun her first term in college, and it seems to me she’s already been plunged neck-deep into the strident we-don’t-know-anything dogma that is reportedly pop-postmodernism. For example, the first lesson in her writing class is about how there can be no good writing — and a teacher forbade the class to critique grammar, making the curious dodge from fiat of calling it “inborn”.

I want to laugh, but something in it all seems deadly earnest.

I wonder how many more generations can find fuel from nothing but relief at having escaped modernism? But perhaps that is not what is happening at all; perhaps I really mean to be asking, How long will it take the Boomers to die?

Ask not thyself that question very often, or risk night-scares of Boomers living forever, grimmer and loucher with each century.

I’d recently told you about the NIV 2010, which promises to remedy the “obsolete English” of the ’80s.

Now Conservapedia, a popular website begun by a homeschool-cooperative teacher who claims encyclopedias are “too liberal”, has announced a project to retranslate or paraphrase the Bible according to “conservative principles”.

Among the changes they propose to Holy Writ are these:

If the project does become a retranslation, it must be a “thought-for-thought translation” the better to remove “liberal bias”.

The version must use “powerful new conservative terms” to replace existing “defective language”. For example, to prevent anyone from using the Bible to promote “socialism”, the words “friend”, “laborer”, and “fellow-laborer” should be replaced with “the conservative term ‘volunteer’ “; “shrewd” should be replaced with “resourceful”; and “words such as ‘word’, ‘peace’, and ‘miracle’ ” should be replaced with unspecified substitutes.

“Logic” must be applied to the version “with its full force and effect”, by emphasizing the vice of sins (they mention gambling twice) and the “very real existence of the Devil and Hell”.

The version must “fully express Free Market parables”, highlighting the “numerous economic parables” in the Bible and explicating “their full Free Market meaning”.

It must “exclude liberal-interpolated passages” such as “the adulteress story” and Luke’s account of Jesus’s last words. “These quotations are favorites of liberals [but] should not appear in a Conservative Bible, because in point of fact Jesus never said [such things] at all.”

It must “prefer conciseness over typical liberal wordiness.”

Today I was browsing Eugene’s little basement used–theology-and-philosophy–book dealer — Windows Booksellers, it’s called — and came across a like-new set of the original printing of The Fundamentals. I’ve read the Table of Contents online and read excerpts here and there, but this was the real artifact.

I browsed as much of them as I rapidly could — the store was closing. Ah a maddening and depressing episode! They asked many of the right questions for their crucial time, and answered them so very, very wrongly — wrongly in a way that was cunningly effectual to build a machinery of lies to outlive them.

It’s tempting to me to spend the money and bookshelf-space to acquire them. After all, when I was more political, I used to own Mein Kampf. Or to buy them, take copious notes, and return them — I am told the store accepts returns.

Each day I feel more convinced — yesterday as I took an evening walk I was feeling it most peculiarly — that Satan has nor ever had a stronger tool than that of the Christian church.

(I think I should not have posted these emotions until I could accompany them with those copious notes.)

The X-Files episode we watched last night dares to ask the question: If there were to be changes in the human species, why would they be evolutionary?

Look at changes in human societies: Almost whenever we see a major departure from the normative, it is for the worse. Modern societies have been most notable when they became much colder, crueller, and more brutal than societies before. Nazi Germany, communist Cambodia, the “ethnic purges” of eastern Europe and of Africa — these are human societies horribly devolved, not progress.

And so why would change in the human individual be different from change in human societies?

Evolution is the scriptures of Progressivism: it is both their unshakable proof and their source of inspiration. Who of us hasn’t heard evolution nerds speculate eagerly about when humankind will grow gills or wings or expanded mental power? But what if, instead, as in the episode last night, humankind were to grow hibernatory, incapable of emotion, and cannibalistic? Would this not better match our observations of human society?

Human change of the sorts we can observe, in these modern times, is almost always very different from that prophesied by those faithful to Progressivism.

… Only let me not give up my life irrationally, only let me not give up my life faintheartedly, or from some casual pretext. For again, God does not so desire; for he has need of a good universe and of good men to go to and fro upon earth. …

What then? Must I explain these things to the multitude? When the children come up to us and say ‘Happy Saturnalia!’ do we say to them, ‘No, all this is not good’? Not at all; but we cheer too. And so you, therefore, when you are unable to make a man change his belief, realize that he is a child and cheer with him or hold your peace.

All these things a man ought to remember, and then, when he is summoned to meet some difficulty, he ought to know that the time has come to show whether he has learned. Wrestling students act displeased with the youths of light weight: ‘He cannot lift me,’ says one — ‘bring me a sturdy young man.’ But when the crisis comes, sometimes they weep and say, ‘I wanted to keep practicing!’ Why, what did you practice for! Now, I like to think that someone among you reading this is in travail within his soul, saying, ‘Alas that such a difficulty does not come to me now as came to such-and-such good man! Alas that now I must be sitting in a corner!’ You ought all to be thus minded.

If one should take away from a good tragic actor his paraphernalia, is he lost or does he abide? And so it is in actual life. God may say, ‘Take the governership’: I take it and show how a man educated in the good comports himself. ‘Lay aside the robe of state and put rags on’: What then? Has it not been given to me to mount the stage now as a witness summoned by God?

What kind of witness do you bear for God? ‘But, O Lord, I am in sore straits and in misfortune; no one regards me, no one gives me anything, all blame me and speak ill of me.’ Is this the witness that you are going to bear, and disgrace the summons so important?

Or what if the priest declares, ‘He is impious’ — what has happened? ‘I have been pronounced impious.’ Nothing else? ‘No nothing.’ And if he had made a declaration: ‘When it is day, then it is dark,’ or: ‘The circumference of a circle is not equidistant from its center’ — would the educated man pay attention? So why when he passes judgment on what is holy and unholy, just and unjust?

How great is the injustice committed by us if we do so! Leave to others quibbles, grumbling about the good. For what is lacking now is a man to bear witness to these arguments by his acts. This is the character I would have you assume, so that we may no longer use old examples of good men in the schools but may have some examples from our own time!

Early in his History of the World, J.M. Roberts remarks that Modernism has made it impossible for the intelligent man to be a Christian. It is a rather silly remark in a very silly book — however, truly that was Modernism’s main goal and largely they won it. I mentioned it to my friend the Slave. Said he:

“A goal of our school of thought, so far as we can yet be said to have one, is finally to make it impossible for the good man to be a Christian.”

I might wish that Prof. Gates’ harassment was racial so that I can pretend that I myself am insusceptible to being arrested in my own home.

The stark truth is that the police can abuse in a wide variety of ways anyone they choose to. In this very valley two years ago an elderly woman was beaten by two policemen, handcuffed in such a way as to dislocate her shoulder, and afterward charged with assaulting an officer (which threatens a stiff penalty including jail time) — all on her own front porch, and all because she had not watered her lawn. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed not long ago that police may search anyone’s car at anytime in any place for no reason. When a federal agent shot and killed a boy in Idaho, was fired for the offense, and subsequently tried, his trial was dismissed by the judge per “sovereign immunity”, a Medieval doctrine tied to the divine rights of kings.

In short, if one keeps an eye on the news or talks to enough of one’s fellows, one soon learns that in this land police can do nearly anything they please and be supported in it by the courts and other government. Why? Because we, the middle class, rely on them to work our iniquities for us. The viler the deeds they do, the more we sanctify them, so that we need never do these evils ourselves nor ever think of them.

The same is true, needless to say, in the case of our armies. We need never crush the skull of a child in a foreign land because we hire men to do this for us, and we need never admit what they do for us if we always shout out “The soldier is like unto a god in his purity!” And this explains the rabidity with which his neighbors will condemn a pacifist as a hater of his country. For if he is allowed to expose the evildoing of the troops, then he has — as it were — broken a vial of poison that taints everyone.

He seeks to poison the whole land, his enemies fear unconsciously — and yet in truth he would merely throw a light upon the rotted blood we in our conspiratorial darkness already swim in.

There are more than 450,000 churches in America, according to a recent tourism census.

Tomorrow, 450,000 men shall mount to a strange elevation and tell 450,000 audiences 450,000 hours-worth of lies.

“Are you expecting me to accept some tacit meaning in the scripture-fragment you have quoted, sir? I will be quite frank: Why should I care what that fragment means when Bible-gangsters who wield it do not care: they merely point it as a dagger toward the women they wish to menace with it?

“But I will say a handful of things about its meaning; only because Paul the Envoy is dear to me and the verities he wrote dear.

“Then: ( Ist ) Where else in the Scriptures do we read someone ought to keep home? Against the heathen king Habakkuk railed: ‘He is a proud man, neither keepeth at home’ (Hab ii.5). And yet no Southern Baptist Convention resolution I’ve read suggests the President mind the linen. To insist Paul remanded wives to housekeeping because some syllables between it and his phrase are homonymous makes as much sense as to insist books be printed with fruit of the vine because ‘winepress’ can be found in Deuteronomy.

“( IInd ) Obedience to one’s own husband (not―qu’elle idée!―to any other men) is here taught by the same envoy who asserted that there is no difference between men and women (Gal iii.28) and commanded a husband to submit to his wife (Eph v.21). This too is the envoy who taught slaves to obey their masters while at the same time commanding masters to obey their slaves (Eph vi.5ff) and pleading for the freedom of a slave to his master (read the affective ‘Letter to Philemon’).

“And these are not the end of his paradoces. ‘We would know therefore what these things mean’? Much can be explained by considering the next thing I will say, the

“( IIIrd ) ‘That the word of God be not blasphemed’ is the reason Paul counsels young women to obey their husbands. ‘That the name of God and his doctrine be not blasphemed’ is the reason he teaches slaves to obey their masters (I Tim vi.1). But who would say anything blasphemous about the evangelion if he saw a wife spending on something extra or a slave seeking to escape to Gaul? Peter the Envoy tells his readers who: pagan sinners, ‘foolish men’ that in ignorance assumed that liberty was good only for ‘lasciviousness, lusts, excess of wine, revellings, banquetings, and abominable idolatries’. (Read his first letter, particularly the mid part.)

“You see, in Paul’s day the laws of the Roman Empire required slaves to obey masters and wives to obey husbands: a master or a husband who was a Roman citizen even could execute his slave or his wife. Similar laws persisted in Europe until rather recently; the first legal freedoms for women were legislated in England not long before 1800; in Russia women were not emancipated until nearly 1900!

“And so a woman who had believed in Jesus, or a slave who had, would rightly think that she had been saved to liberty (Isa lxi.1; Mat xvii.26; Joh viii.32, 36; Rom viii.2; I Cor xii.13; II Cor iii.17; Gal iii.28, v.1; Col iii.11; et al.). But Paul and Peter hastened to limn for their readers a result: a pagan sinner, observing the laws governing women and slaves unenforced among them, would blaspheme the evangelion, crying: ‘This Way is nothing but a way to evade the mores, to tweak Caesar!’

“( IVth ) And now I beg you, in deep sincerity, to think what acts of ours (be we men) toward women or others might, in our world in our times, give an unbeliever excuse to cry:

“ ‘This religion is only a pretext, a stubborn excuse to do what is unethical!’ ”