MATHETΩN

I do not think that the defenders of traditional marriage can in the end win this raging fight, even if they were to find a spokesman who can be erudite. For supposedly Americans’ minds are to sort out a legal purpose for marriage — is it a smattering of economic rewards? is it a merit-badge? is it a license to venereal congress? — but all the while their hearts have no legal sensation, but a personal feeling hot-sweet as nostalgia: that marriage is one person’s promising another to love him always and become his family and recording that for the world to see.

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.

What is the Evangelicalist religious symbol? It is not a headdress, like the Sikh’s. It is not a saffron robe, like the religious Buddhist’s.

I began to think of this today as I read a newsstory. A cashier at a Home Depot store in Georgia was — cashiered for wearing a button that said: One Nation Under God Indivisible. Company policy is that no employee may wear non-store symbols and badges. However, the cashier is suing, claiming religious discrimination. Said his lawyer: “There are federal laws that protect religious expression.”

An analyst — a law professor from nearby — countered: “This sounds more like a political message. Wearing a button of that sort would not easily be described as a traditional form of religious expression like wearing a cross or wearing a yarmulke.”

Such a symbol may not be a tradtional religious garb, and yet it is a perfect Evangelicalist one. Upon consideration, I predict that, if ever Evangelicalism becomes venerable enough to have an accepted “traditional form of religious expression”, it will be — a pin of the American flag.

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.”

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.

When last hope was the same as blood, in me, rather than a distressing thorn in the side — I say, when last hope was the same as living, as acting, I was — oh — about eighteen. What were my hopes back then?

Some were (and I choose the most-shameful ones on purpose):

• to be “comfortably wealthy”
• to live in the safe country near a grand city
• for my wife to be subservient to me
• to be her luxurious provider
• to be in an idolized “leadership” position, preferably in a church
• to relax in the bosom of institutions such as a corporate employer, a church, a political party, an extended family
• to have lots of pretty clothes
• to collect thousands of books and lots of records and some art

(I need to discover that useful item, a paper journal.)

John Climacus’s “thirty steps to heaven” go something like this:

• Renounce the world
• Detach oneself from one’s habits, wishes, &c.
• Exile oneself from one’s career, family, &c.
• Become wholly obedient to God’s orders
• Repent and learn always to be repenting
• Remember, every moment, one’s death
• Shed tears for one’s evil, others’ suffering
• Abandon: anger, maliciousness, judging others, talkativeness, lying, depression
• Overcome: lusts for food, sex, money; cynicalness, fears; looking good, egoism
• Live frugally
• Desire humiliation
• Discern right and wrong for oneself and others
• Be still without
• Pray
• Be still within
• Love

Here are descriptions of a follower of Jesus by two churchmen; I quote rather-randomly from the first few chapters of their principal works.

Rick Warren, ca. 2000

The disciple:

• makes “a difference in the life of a relative or friend”
• will be “remembered after death”
• “owes it to himself” to accept God’s rewards
• will be more physically, psychologically “well”
• anticipates a reward “too good to be true”
• “balances his earthly concerns with his heavenly values”
• becomes “more responsible”, “more energetic”
• “attends church on a regular basis”
• attains a superior “reputation”
• is now “on a team”; “connected”, “comfortable”
• becomes “healthier, more-capable”
• “respects the ruling political system”
• runs a business “on spiritual principles” and so runs “simply a better business”, for “these things work in the real world”
• is “getting the pie right now because he is following an eternal recipe”
• “sticks to a task” and thus “builds character”
• has his “questions answered”
• has “Someone to help him hold on, in life”

John Climacus, ca. 600

The disciple:

• “freely accepts death”
• bears “a chastised heart”, “unrecognized wisdom”, and “an unnoticed life”
• is always “striving to be humble”
• “wishes for poverty”
• “longs for what is divine”
• “pours out love”
• “denies himself empty pride”
• dwells in “a depth of silence”
• endures “hardship, simplicity” in his “chosen route of great grief”
• is “separated from everything”
• is “set on fire, in the darkness”
• “sits like someone of foreign speech among people of other tongues”
• “drives out his love for family”
• “is a fugitive”
• “mortifies his appetites” and “constantly toils”
• drinks “the bitter cup of dishonor: derided, mocked, jeered”
• “denies his will; he must patiently endure opposition, suffer neglect without complaint, put up with violent arrogance”
• “has undertaken to travel by a short and rough road” of “self-mistrust up to his dying day”
• “turns away from earthly concerns, from human ways, from family; cuts his selfishness away”
• must “never grieve the loss” of these things

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.