MATHETΩN

“What power executed Jesus?”

“The Roman Empire.”

“What was the Roman imperial religion?”

“Paganism. Christianity eventually.”

“And you are Christian?”

“I am.”

“You have chosen the Roman imperial religion?”

“Are you trying to be funny? Look here, Rome converted.”

“What was the change? Was the empire no longer Roman–did the ruling race pass off the scene?”

“No.”

“Then were they no longer an empire?”

“Of course not.”

“And so you belong to the religion of the power that executed Jesus.”

“I am a Christian.”

The history of human knowledge has been less one of true and false than of truth and lies.

I was just reading up on a theologian who calls himself a Deconstructionist. At any rate, I noticed among his bibliography a book titled After the Death of God. Mind you, I have no notion of the contents of this particular book — but the title struck. Really with just such casual arrogance do most of the post-modernisms replace Modernism. I would rather see a hundred generations of believers dismissed as stooges, in the good old Modern way, than sneered and soothed as “belovers”. Proud and impious are their manipulations, in my opinion.

The anti-Semitism that for over a century now has passed as Biblical scholarship has taken a blow. After a year of study, researchers have been forced to admit that a pottery shard and its inscription are very ancient — and that they are material proof the Hebrews were capable of written language hundreds of years before the scholarship has generally allowed. The shard comprises fragments of text that seem to be paraphrases of Isaiah, psalms, and others and of which the language, while unique, is inarguably Hebrew.

More can be read here:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/…ertextsuggests

The modern Biblical scholarship, which began in earnest in German “new schools” in the nineteenth century, has generally maintained that the Hebrews were much inferior and dilatory imitators of surrounding cultures and that their scriptures were late pastiches of oral myth made to look like early history and prophecy.

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.”