popping back up for air and holding onto the life buoy…seek while you can

Not all saints have the same sort of holiness.
There are those who could never have lived with others saints.
Not all have the same path. But all arrive at God.
St. John Vianney

(commercial recreation specialists)

During this somewhat self-imposed fasting from the world, I have been forced afforded the opportunity to step back from the world’s madness while sinking into my own moving madness.

Yet whereas I may be currently focused on the latest box to sort,
the latest immediate crisis repair screaming for attention,
or the simple task of navigating new and unfamiliar terrain…
I am not totally unaware of the continuing idiocy reigning supreme in this world of ours.

A pandemic remains.
Isolation is a reality for many.
Socialism and Marxism continue to be the current ideological darlings.
Civil unrest, Antifa, and protests just won’t go away.
Impeachment is a never ending taxpayer’s nightmare demanded by politicians who
don’t seem to care for said taxpayers.
Persecution of The Church is rampant.
The media is a rabid dog.
Zero tolerance for the unborn looms large as abortion is seen as some sort of unalienable
right.
All the while a cancel culture hopes to cancel out us middle Americans.

Yesterday marked the day of remembrance for the Holocaust.
It appears that it went largely ignored by our oh so pious news outlets.

Ode to the shifting tide.

And so I wonder…why have I even bothered coming up for air?
Is it any wonder that I opt to cling to a life buoy?

I suspect it would behoove all of us to cling to that life buoy…

That we must seek Him while we can.

That we pray while we still have the opportunity—
the only life line to He who is Holy.

Prayer is, as it were, being alone with God. A soul prays only when it is turned toward God,
and for so long as it remains so. As soon as it turns away,
it stops praying. The preparation for prayer is thus the movement of turning to God
and away from all that is not God.
That is why we are so right when we define prayer as this movement.
Prayer is essentially a ‘raising up’, an elevation.
We begin to pray when we detach ourselves from created objects and raise ourselves up to the Creator.”
Dom Augustin Guillerand, p. 91
An excerpt from
The Prayer of the Presence of God

You still don’t get it??

“Thus Heaven I’ve forfeited,
I know it full well…
My soul, once true to God, is chosen for Hell.”
Karl Marx, The Pale Maiden

I received this latest email from The Catholic Company yesterday regarding an interesting
new read about Karl Marx…Can a Catholic Be a Socialist?

My disclaimer is that I have not read the book, but I did find the promo most interesting,
as well as distressingly telling.
Or perhaps that is actually more foreboding than anything else.

Plus I can readily answer that question…NO!!! No, a Catholic, nay any Christian, cannot be
both a practicing believer as well as a Socialist…plain and simple.

A Christian cannot serve two masters and Marx and his love of isms consists of a myriad of
evil-minded masters.

Marx seems to be all the rage these days as everyone seems to be flirting with all
things “ism”—
Be it Communism, Socialism, or even fascism.

Ism is as ism does…

So this is not necessarily a plug for a new book…because I’ve not read the book…
but it is a plug against all things Marxist…

Marxism is and will always be anti-Christian.
It is in actuality anti-human being
It is totally anti independent thinker.

Plain and simple–it is anti-everything you hold dear.

If you think otherwise, you are lying to yourself.

Marx is not pro-life.
He is not pro-democracy.
He is not pro independent business.
He is not pro independent voter.

Everyone should be aware of the immense
evil produced by Karl Marx when he wrote his
devilish Communist Manifesto two centuries ago.

No other theory in all of history has led
to the death of so many innocent people.

Claiming the lives of over a hundred million people
in the 20th century alone, it comes as no surprise that
the dark origin of Communism lies in Hell itself.

And yet—some people are defending Marx today.

They believe that his system of government
has never been implemented correctly.
They say he was a benevolent hero who dreamed
of equality, peace, and happiness.

The truth is far more sinister.

The alcoholic, violent, drug-addicted Karl Marx
was absolutely fascinated with the devil and
penned some downright devilish things.

Well before he was writing
about the hell of communism,
he was writing about Hell.

Marx’s terrible philosophy is making a
comeback not only on college campuses
and talk shows, but even among Catholics
who are well-meaning—and confused.

And communism isn’t the only concern.

Some people think that socialism could
be the answer to greed and other ills.

They argue that it’s the best way to obey
Christ’s command to help the poor.

“Let’s give socialism a fresh chance,” they say.
“A democratic socialism this time, friendly to
religion and ordered to the common good as
the Church says the economy should be.”

They forget that socialism
is not friendly to religion.

In Can a Catholic Be a Socialist?
Trent Horn and Catherine R. Pakaluk
refute the belief in “Catholic Socialism.”

Drawing on Catholic social teaching,
Scripture, history, and basic economic
reality, they show us why Catholicism (as I will add all of Christianity)
and socialism are utterly incompatible.

It’s a fascinating read.

http://enews.catholiccompany.com/q/Hu0WrJ_aRW-f-l3bmuQtNBRPkAHN45S-gR6maxHFnhKHSVBQuFunO3dz8

antithesis gone mad meets brute facts

Seventy-five years after the end of the Second World War,
Winston Churchill has once again come under attack.
This time, however, the crowds are not made up of young fanatics wearing armbands
with swastikas and parading through the streets of Berlin.
Today, mobs of young fanatics believing that they are the antithesis
of the Nazis parade through the streets of London denouncing Churchill as a racist.
David Freeman

I’m currently reading a great book by Erik Larson—The Splendid and the Vile
A saga of Chruchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz.

The reviews were predominantly positive but I also read the negative as I
do like to see if there is balance.
In this case, the predominantly positives fully overrode the negatives.

I’ve read books by Erik Larson before–one of the best was
In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin

I even featured that book a few years back with a post.

I admit, that as of late, my morale has been flagging a bit.
In great part due to my sheer dismay over the current civil strife plaguing
our Western Civilization…and in particular, that being here at home.

Pandemic pandamonium isn’t helping— but if the truth be told,
I really think that the utter political lunacy, the unprecedented vehemence
directed toward a sitting president, the disrespect, news turned into twisted emotionalism,
a blatant disregard for human life, the endless bald-faced lies,
the push toward politically correct cover-ups,
the frightening lack of law and order, the march toward the cliff
of Marxism and socialism lead by an ignorant populace…

It is like I told Kathy yesterday—it is as if we are currently living
in what was once a draconian futuristic novel.

So what time is this in which we live when groups that on the surface say
they support black lives but when in reality they are a violent
Marxist organization bent on violence, hate, and death.

What time is this when support for a proposition called a Green New deal is actually
a thinly veiled cover for all-out socialism?

When Hitler began his insatiable gobbling up of Europe…there was initially dismay,
there was skepticism, and there was disbelief.

But all of that quickly changed when the tanks rolled into sovereign nation after nation…
and as the bombs began to explode across villages, towns, and cities.

Those of us who know our history, are well aware that Great Britain went it alone
against Hitler’s raging Nazi machine for years before the United States joined the war.
Our President simply wished them well…year after year after year…despite the desperate
pleading for help from their Prime Minister.

Yet this small island nation stayed the course, dug in her heels, and braced itself against
what appeared to be impossible odds.

She thankfully had a stubborn and resolute leader.
One who, just months prior, had been maligned, ridiculed, and certainly
not taken seriously.

And just when things indeed turned dire, she also had citizens who were willing
to sacrifice–doing what was needed to be done in order to make their nation as
prepared as possible.

All were willing to stand up rather than kneel to fascism.

And the sad irony today, these 75 years later, is that Western Civilization
now seeks to embrace fascism, socialism, Marxism…ideologies she once
vehemently stood ardently against…
all the while vying to defend her dear democracy.

So what happened in the time span of 75 years?

I suppose we’ll begin to look at this question in the coming days…

‘United wishes and goodwill cannot overcome brute facts,’
Churchill wrote in his War Memoirs.
‘Truth is incontrovertible.
Panic may resent it.
Ignorance may deride it.
Malice may distort it.
But there it is.’

I can’t (don’t want to) hear you….

But if Western Civilization is evil, that means all the elements that
went into creating Western Civilization must also be destroyed.
That includes Christianity.

The reason for the attacks becomes clearer when considering that
Black Lives Matter and Antifa are Marxist organizations and
Marxism is an enemy of Christianity.
It has to be.
An atheistic system that sees economic Hegelianism as god will have to
consider all transcendent religions the enemy.
It’s why the Soviet Union was an atheistic state,
which replaced God with the Communist Party.
Nathan Stone
from an article appearing in The Federalist

(hearingaidknow.com)

You may remember my mentioning about having had a discussion with Tricia,
over on Freedom Through Empowerment, the other day—and that conversation
evolved into a post.

When Buzzards Come Calling…
https://cookiecrumbstoliveby.wordpress.com/2020/07/20/when-buzzards-come-calling/

We were lamenting the fate of The Church as she, and in turn, us her family
sits in the crosshairs of the Marxist Left and the oh so Woke Cancel culture.
We both hoped that we could and would stand up to the plate when the time comes to
stand firm in our faith when those wishing to destroy it and us come calling.

Because that’s the thing, they are going to come calling.
It is not a matter of if but rather when.

Yesterday Oneta over on Sweet Aroma made a keen observational comment
“We are going to learn a lot in a few months about vultures and an
impotent church. But…there is the other side.
The Holy Spirit remnant! I believe many believers will be empowered
in ways we know not…yet.”

And so Tricia shared an article with me that she had read on The Federalist.
An article by a young man named Nathan Stone.

Nathan is wise beyond his years…
for he notes…

“Because Christianity teaches that all men are created by God,
it ushered in a radical idea of equality not seen in the world before.
And because every person is made in the image of God,
all people are endowed with inalienable, natural rights,
a strain of thinking first proposed by the later Scholastic philosophers.

The reason for the attacks becomes clearer when considering that
Black Lives Matter and Antifa are Marxist organizations and Marxism
is an enemy of Christianity. It has to be.
An atheistic system that sees economic Hegelianism as god
will have to consider all transcendent religions the enemy.
It’s why the Soviet Union was an atheistic state,
which replaced God with the Communist Party.”

And so we as Christians, in this tumultuous 21st century of ours,
have a choice as well as a responsibility.

We can either stuff our fingers in our ears, pretending that what is happening
all around us is a mere apparition or we can stand our ground…our Holy ground!

https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/30/why-rioters-will-eventually-turn-their-rage-on-christianity-if-not-stopped/

Herschel for President!!!

“Not to question you, Mark, but do you know what the organization stands for?
Besides saying, Black Lives Matter.
Because I say one of the things that we have to address is Americans’ lives matter.”
Herschel Walker

(Herschel Walker circa 1981/82 / UGA / Julie (Nichols) Cook)

HERSCHEL WALKER FOR PRESIDENT!!!
It was a chant often heard ringing throughout Sanford Stadium in Athens, Georgia on any
given fall Saturday during the early 1980s.
It was a time when both football and Herschel were each king in my small world.

I actually took that rather grainy little picture of Herschel…
it was either the spring of 1981 or 1982, I can’t exactly remember.

My sorority was hosting a 24-hour rock-a-thon in order to raise money for
the international medical organization Project Hope.
We were rocking all night, having raised various pledges for our time and effort spent rocking.
Campus celebrity Herschel Walker came by to sit and rock awhile in hopes of boosting our pledges.
Hence the picture.

If you’re any sort of college football fan, then you know the name
Herschel Walker.

His time playing football for the University of Georgia is the stuff
of legends.
He won the Heisman Trophy his junior year and he helped the college
win a National Championship in 1980.

Athletically, Herschel was a track star, a football player, an NFL player,
a United States Football league player, an Olympic bobsledder as well as a boxer…
and it should be known, he’s still not finished.

So I won’t go into his lengthy and legendary biography here, but just know that
I have the utmost respect for Herschel.

And I have that respect not because he’s from my home state.
Nor because we went to college together.
Nor because he was and is an incredible athlete.
But because Herschel, like many of us, had demons.
Herschel fought those demons through his faith in Jesus Christ–
he has been very public about his battle and his victory through Christ.

I caught a news story yesterday that Herschel and Mark Cuban had got into a bit
of a tit for tat the other evening during a FOX news special hosted by Harris Faulkner.

Cuban is the owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team and has been very
vocal in that he will paint Black Lives Matters on his basketball court
and will allow and support his players in expressing themselves however they may
so choose during the coming season.

Herschel, however, questions the logic behind such as he wonders if Cuban,
as well as many others, truly understand what Black Lives Matters actually represents.

Herschel noted that “One of the problems I think that we have
is a lot of these sensitive topics we don’t want to address,
you know, we don’t want to address these sensitive topics
so what we try to do is water them down and try to shout people down,”
Walker told host Harris Faulkner on the special
“The Fight for America” on Sunday night.

“To say that you’re going to put BLM [Black Lives Matter] on the field or on a jersey,
well some people may not believe in BLM,” the Heisman Trophy winner continued.

“For myself … there’s no doubt BLM is important,
but American lives are important. …
The organization of BLM, I’m not sure what they stand for.
And so how could an NFL say we want to support BLM or we’re going to do this here
without having the players to say what they want?
Because you cannot put that on a player who may disagree with it.”

Cuban disagreed with Walker but I for one agree with Herschel.
Do those such a Cuban, who are jumping on the bandwagon, truly know and
understand what BLM means or what it stands for?
Do they realize it is a violent organization rooted in Marxism?
Or do they really care?
Is placating the mob more important than exercising real knowledge?

I for one do not want sports to be so politized.
The National anthem and flag brouhaha was just the starting point…
now we have more anthem issues with the addition of a “black” anthem
and we have teams, players and owners who want to politize their
sport…

Sports in the US has always been a unifier and not a
divisive tool.
So now we might as well just say so much for simply loving the game
for the mere sake of the game.

The notion of games, fun, hard work, competition, bragging rights, etc have
been traded in for something much more sinister.

I’m just glad that we still have a few steadfast voices such as those of
Herschel, along with those other voices of average men and women,
each who question the bandwagons and the pushing of agendas down the throats
of both players and fans despite the fact that not all stand in agreement
with the current direction, we seem to be headed.

So yeah, thought-filled and thoughtful rather than angry, emotional, and reactionary.

Yep, Herschel for President…

https://www.foxnews.com/media/herschel-walker-mark-cuban-black-lives-matter-nfl-nba

When buzzards come calling…

When vultures surround you, try not to die.
African proverb

(close up of a turkey buzzard / Lifescience.com)

Look at that face would you?
Look how the nostril just opens through to the other side…
I’ve always heard that, as the garbage men of the bird world, buzzards
can’t smell…well I would certainly hope not!

It is supposedly by their keen eyesight that they are able to scope out and zoom in on the
latest roadkill.

So over the past weekend, since it has been so miserably hot and while we are still
supposedly in some sort of social distancing lockdown…
just don’t tell everyone out on the roadways that, we opted for some idyllic countryside driving.

I don’t know about you but I’ve come to realize that I feel very heavyily burdened.

Be it this ongoing Pandemic mess…total civil unrest across the nation and world…
political persecution should you support the sitting president…
Christian persecution…

All the while questions loom heavy overhead…
Will there be school, will there not be school…
will there be a second wave…did we ever finish the first wave…
will they open Chruch…will we just succumb to Marxist ideology and the church will be
rendered dead…should we don a mask or not…

And so pray tell, how much longer will all of this mess go on!?

So as we started driving and I was looking out the window, with the weight of so much
heaviness on my mind, I focused my eyes on something a bit odd…
I noticed a black image sitting atop the steeple of a small country church.

(youtube)

“Oh my gosh,” I exclaimed to my husband, “do they not have any sense of reverence?”
“Who?” my husband surprised by my question responds a bit bewildered.

“Buzzards!”
“There’s a buzzard sitting on top of that church’s cross on its steeple.

“No respect” my husband chuckles.

I wish I had been able to get out my phone to take a picture but the one I found
on-line gives you some idea of what I’m talking about.

I went back to staring out the window while musing the symbology of a specter of death
perched on a cross atop a steeple.

And so wouldn’t you know it, when we were out driving around the following day,
I saw the same thing…but this was another church with another buzzard perched up top.

What are those odds?

Coincidence?

Who knows…but what I do know is that there’s got to be a heavy dose of irony
buried somewhere in two different visions of death birds perching on top of a cross,
an image of life.

Yesterday, Tricia, over on Freedom Through Empowerment,
and I were chatting back and forth about the implications of the news over Hagia Sophia
becoming a “working” mosque again mirrored by the Marxist push to attack
Christianity here at home.

We both noted that whatever is to come from any of these latest digs at
the global body of Believers was not going to be good.

For many weeks now a thought has been nagging at the back recesses of my thoughts.
It’s a thought that I believe is being slowly fine-tuned.

This was my response to Tricia—a response I cleaned up when re-reading
my initial reply because there is just something about pecking out a deeply
thoughtful response on a phone while using a thumb.

“Tricia—as a kid, I was always mesmerized by the stories of the early saints and martyrs of the church.
I often imagined living life in early Rome,
sneaking about and worshiping in secret, in the cover of darkness or hidden in catacombs.
I imagine my defiance if ever discovered and arrested.
I would face the torture with fortitude.

Or so thought my youthful bravado self.

Even over the past decade, as we’ve seen more and more about the persecution of Christians worldwide,
I’d like to think I would be courageous.
But here, at home, we have something much more sinister and insidious.
No less full of persecution with the end goal being Christian eradication—
yet am I courageous in our oh so woke society?

Do I take to the streets in defense of my faith?

Churches are being attacked..both here and in Europe and it is not by Muslim extremists…
but by extremists none the less.

I can’t help but think God has prepared you, me, Tom, Kathy, IB, Wally, CS et al,
(just a few of the blogging community of Fatih)
to be those who dare to meet in the catacombs albeit the catacombs of today…
those of our neighborhoods and cities.
Am I willing to risk everything for my faith??
I hope I will be able to answer yes.
Is this a preparation of an ending, a clash of both Good and Evil—–
of course, we can’t answer that…but it sure does feel like it.”

And so I’ve come to view my buzzard friends as both a symbol as well as a reminder.

Death has always smugly desired to sit upon that which has always promised life.
Yet those of us who are true Believers, and trust me, there are many today
who call themselves “believers” but who are not…are here for a reason.

Do I think “the end is near?”

I asked this same question just the other day…and like the other day, I couldn’t say,
I can’t say… but what I do know is that it sure does feel like it.

So I think we need to get ready.
Catacombs and buzzards seem to be waiting!

Shepherds—please, lead your flocks

I am like the sick sheep that strays from the rest of the flock. Unless
the Good Shepherd takes me on His shoulders and carries me back to His fold,
my steps will falter, and in the very effort of rising, my feet will give way.
St. Jerome

(sheep farm, Killarny Ireland / Julie Cook / 2015)

Firstly—- I read the following July 4th post written by our freind and
most knowledgeable Christian sister IB.

As I read it, I felt warm tears falling down my cheeks.

I too have most recently deeply felt her words.
A sense of pleading that our Chruch leadership does what they are entrusted to do…
that being to lead their flocks—come hell or high water.
Not cower in the corner of current ideologies…

A day later, I read a post by our dear friend and former Anglican Bishop, Gavin Ashenden..
A post that mirrored IB’s thoughts and words but simply written from across the pond.

I’ve cut and copied both posts here.
I hope their words will touch your spirit.

We Aren’t going to “Get Our Freedom Back…”

So listen, I don’t want to sound uncharacteristically somber and serious,
nor do I want people to think I’m a total conspiratress.
I am you know, I do love a good conspiracy theory.
The problem being this isn’t a “theory,” it’s simply common sense.
So, I just want to say, those who are waiting patiently for things to “get back to normal,”
it ain’t happening. It ain’t going to happen.

Those who seem to believe if we just comply enough, just cooperate enough,
just do everything they say, (wear your mask you idiot,
so we can all open back up again) it ain’t going to happen.

If you’re waiting for covid 19 to go away, it ain’t going to happen either.
We could get down to no cases anywhere and there’s another “pandemic” right around
the corner waiting for us.
The media is already on it.

Government and public health officials are already trying to say we’re going to have
to wear masks for years, certainly until we get a mandatory vaccine.
Besides, flu season is coming this fall…

Never in the history of ever has anyone in government voluntarily relinquished
power over others that they have managed to attain.
The only way to get our freedom back is to stop playing the game,
stop the charades, and stop buying into the fear.
We have to say “no,” and we have to say it somewhat collectively.
None of this can continue without our consent.

I’m pleading with Christians who are just sitting there quietly accepting
a ban on singing in church. C’mon on people, some part of you knows this is not okay.
The power of life and death is in our tongues, it says that in the Bible.
If we believe those words, if the singing we do actually means something,
then we have to realize that shutting down churches, mandating we all wear masks,
and telling us it’s too dangerous to sing our praises, are all huge red flags.

I’m pleading with everyone who has ever felt the “benevolent” hand of government,
anyone who still carries trauma from those experiences.
C’mon people, we all know what this is.
It smells just like history trying to repeat itself.
It’s a power play.

We flattened the curve!
Heck, we shut down unused field hospitals and laid people off from our hospitals.
We did not get our freedom back.
We shut our businesses down, we bought the hand sanitizer,
we put on the masks, and we stayed home and we still did not get our freedom back.
It ain’t going to happen. Freedom once taken is not something you just “get” back.
There will be no passively sitting around and waiting for our freedom to be politely
returned to us once we’ve met all the requirements.

We met the requirements. So they just moved the goalposts.
They will continue to do so.

We aren’t going to “get” our freedom back, like it will just be passively
and nicely returned to us based on our compliance. That is a big lie, a total deception,
and has never happened anywhere, in the history of ever. Frankly,
I’m a bit embarrassed people still believe that. Not even God Himself,
and He is Holy, just, and perfect, just “gives” us freedom.
He may open the door to our prison, tear down the walls, and coax us out,
but even then we have to walk out under our own steam.
Or crawl.
Whatever works.
The point being, it is extremely rare we ever get anything without first opening
our hand and reaching out for it.

Jan 22, 2020, is when all of this began in my state.
We are going on seven months now! 7 months. A quarantine is for the sick,
not the healthy, and it should last about two weeks.
To quarantine the healthy is simply tyranny.

Such notions often put me at odds with friends, family,
even some churches. The problem being, I know I’m right,
I know that everything I see points in the direction I am observing.
We get our freedom back when we stop voluntarily consenting to hand it over.
That easy, that simple.

Happy Independence Day!
https://insanitybytes2.wordpress.com/2020/07/04/we-arent-going-to-get-our-freedom-back/

The State, freedom of conscience, and civil disobedience.

The state and the Church have a history in our country.
The relationship status might read “it’s complicated”.
It ranges from the conversion and Christianization of the state to the deepest antipathy
of the State and its persecution of the Church.

Even when Christian, the Church has had to challenge the state.
Becket took on Henry 2nd and won. It cost him his life, but he won.

Thomas More took on Henry 8th. It cost him his life.
While he won the moral argument he lost the legal and political one.

The narrative in this country is of course set in the far wider and more
complex contest for a system of values fought in a variety of states
with a variety of aspects of the Church.

Glancing from the dynamics of Daniel and Nebuchadnezzar,
through the Maccabees up to Bonhoeffer and Hitler, Solzhenitsyn and Stalin,
the contest for setting the values by which human beings live,
across states and cultures, defines one of the most powerful narratives in human history.

The pendulum swings from benign to malign.

In our day we are moving with some speed towards the malign.
Any reading of 20C history demonstrates a three-cornered fight between
two totalitarian ambitions, Marxism and Fascism, and Christianity.
All three make absolutist claims on humanity that are irreconcilable.
The anaemic relativism of our decaying culture in the West disguises
the sharp and brutal quality of the contest.

Christians are rightly wary that the in 21st C there is no reason for thinking
that the contest has been suspended. Fascism’s toll of Christians (and Jews)
in Germany and Spain was horrendous but dwarfed by the toll wreaked
by the Soviet Union and Marxist China.

In each period of attrition, the sign that the struggle to the death
had begun was the control of Churches and worship by the authorities.

The beginning of this century has exposed the oncoming depth and intensity
of a cultural revolution of values that are inimical to the faith in the west
and suddenly out of nowhere, for medical rather than political reasons,
the state suddenly closes the churches and prohibits worship.

There are three patterns of Christian response.
The first is the highly secularized and spiritually incompetent one, which says,
“places don’t matter; your private thoughts are everything,
corporate worship is overrated.
We are not worrying about the implications for a weakened church losing financial
and philosophical traction becoming ever more bankrupt in both.
There is nothing to see here, move on, don’t fuss.”

The second response, more literate historically but still
underdeveloped spiritually says “yes it’s a terrible sign that that the churches
have been down unilaterally. Yes, it looks authoritarian and apocalyptic,
but check out the facts. It was a pandemic.
It was medicine and science, not politics.
Calm down.
Nothing to worry about.”

The third group is more inclined to the view,
“if it walks like a duck, looks like a duck and quacks like a duck,
it may well be a duck”.
There is no value free science; everything has a political dimension;
more importantly, everything has a spiritual temperature,
character and metaphysical flavour or dynamic.
Whether there was intentionality or not, the state took upon itself the right
to close churches, prohibit worship, and deny the autonomy of personal
choice and informed conscience. And although this was a temporary measure (it seems)
it set a precedent which should have been exposed, challenged and repudiated.”

This is not the place to argue that the science on singing, water droplets
and infection is contested, as is the nature of the virus itself.
But it is the place to make common cause with Lord Sumtion and vociferously claim
that civil liberties require us to make a distinction between those who want to withdraw
from public life in order to protect themselves in a situation that is scientifically
and medically ambiguous, and those who chose to take certain risks congruent with a
personal value system and the dictates of their conscience.

It is the place to say that Christians do not recognise the power or authority of
the state to prohibit gathering for worship in ways that are not
medically or scientifically lethal or antisocial.

It is the place for insisting that the bar that state has to cross to
outlaw worship, close churches and outrage Christian conscience is considerably
perhaps impossibly higher than the secular state recognises.

It is, therefore, a legal and moral duty for the Church to challenge
the jurisprudential and ethical authority of the state to have set a precedent
in the authoritarian closing of churches and prohibition of worship.

It is for this reason that Christian Concern and a number of Church leaders
(amongst whom I am the least) have issued a challenge to the government by means
of judicial review to test the legality of this programme of church closure.

Further, if the legal challenge should be lost, many of us believe that Christians
could argue that we had a moral and ethical duty to refuse to acknowledge
the legitimacy of unjust law that not only acted as a threat to civil rights
and liberties that our forebears fought so hard to defend, but also struck
at the heart of our religious, spiritual and moral allegiance and identity.https://ashenden.org/2020/07/06/the-state-closure-of-churches-and-civil-disobedience/

The intolerance of tolerance

“Our Western Nations have both forgotten God and forgotten where they have come from.
Now they are attempting to complete the process of severing the roots of Western civilization,
destroying its root system poisoning its soil and ruining its entire spiritual,
moral and social ecology”
Os Guinness

Only a renewal of Biblical Christianity will save Western civilization…
otherwise, we are doomed to go the way of the great Roman and Greek civilizations.
David Robertson

(gulls enjoying a morning looking for fish / Rosemary Beach, Fl /Julie Cook / 2019)

It seems that our favorite cleric from down under…
you know the one…the one who use to be from merely across the pond
but who is perhaps technically now under the pond rather than across it,
has recently offered some wonderful insight into our latest cultural woe…
that being Cultural Marxism.

We’ve talked about this before.

And we’ll just keep on talking about it because it is a real and present evil..
one that is currently burrowing its way into our lives…and please note
that is a fact and not merely right-winged hysteria.

You may recall that the Rev. David Roberston resigned his post as head pastor
at St Peter’s Free Chruch (reformed Presbyterian) in Dundee, Scotland after
27 years in order to move to Sydney Australia.
He continues to write, preach and blog away just as he continues to be
what I like to call a modern-day Christian soldier…

The post that I’m referencing today is actually a post that is based on the notes used
for a recent talk, David gave at the New South Wales Parliament Round Table Forum.

He opens the post with a small disclaimer to his readers…

David states that he is a white, middle-aged male who hails from a historically
imperialistic nation.
He notes that he also has, and most likely still, considers himself a socialist
as well as a Christian.
He also extols that he went to school not to merely get a degree in hopes of
procuring a job, but rather that he went to school in order to learn.

“I think education is in and of itself a good thing and should not be about
social engineering in some kind of Brave New World dystopia.”

So I will state my own disclaimer.

I am a white, late middle-aged, woman who hails from a leading
world power, democratic nation.
I am a Christian.
I am college-educated.
And I am from the South of this said democratic nation.

I think folks like to call where I hail from the Bible belt of the Nation.
But I don’t know if that is still applicable as no one seems to be a local
anymore but rather imports.
Imports who don’t give two hoots about Bibles or belts.

I am not a socialist but rather a moralistic conservative.
I don’t know if that’s a thing or not, but it pretty much sums me up in a nutshell.
Moralistic.
Conservative.
Oh, and don’t forget, a woman.
All that girl power out there should give me points where the
moralistic and conservative aspect take points away…
or so say the current culture gods.

David pulls heavily from a couple of books for his notes.
One of the books is actually a book I’ve alo pulled heavily from as well,
Melvin Tinker’s book The Hideous Strength

I learned of this little book actually from David and his posted review of
the book some time back.
It was written in 2018 and is based on the fictional a work of C.S.Lewis of
the same title, That Hideous Strength.

The other book David pulled from is Rob Smith’s book Concocted Conspiracy or Revolutionary Reality
A book I am not familiar with.

And so yes, before we begin, we all know that I’ve written about the ills of Marxism
before just as has David…
however, David is offering us a bit of an updated timely reminder as he also throws in
the recent dangerous push of identity politics.

David notes that
“Marxist theory leads to three aims –
the abolition of private property, the abolition of the family
and the abolition of the Church.”

I think most of us over the age of 50 will agree,
all but maybe Bernie Sanders, that Marxism is a scourge.

However a scourge it may be, sadly our youthful progressive liberal culture seems
hell-bent on implementing it and won’t rest until it does—

This misguided and out of touch with reality post-Christian, progressive
youthful culture is equally supported by many of our own Democratic hopefuls
running for President of the United States, along with their fellow House
Democratic members who seem equally hell-bent on the Marxism quest.

Why am I now thinking that the word pandering must be somewhere behind all of this??

Think the Fab 4…but again, we digress.

Marxism, as history has so blatantly demonstrated, does not work– end of sentence.
Nor will it ever work in a conventionally democratic nation.
Again, end of sentence.

And once again, as previously stated, history emphatically teaches us this.

And yet we are apparently such slow learners, as well as products of amnesia,
that it appears we’ve all but forgotten our own history lessons.

Think the Soviet Union and Karl Marx.

Think 1987 as President Reagan tells the current sitting leader of
the Soviet Union, ” Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall”….

It took from about 1917 until 1987 but that wall did indeed come tumbling down.
However, I fear most of our youthful progressives wouldn’t be able to
actually name said wall of which we speak, and as to why we even speak about it…
but I digress.

Oh and I forgot… we might just be able to thank our heavily angst-ridden liberal colleges
and the equally liberal professors for this lapse in history teaching as they have been
busily rewriting that very history…one event at a time.

But David explains what this lastest Marxist and totalitarian scourge will eventually
do to life as we know it if we as a society continue on this same trajectory.

Things that were once embraced will be rejected and that which was once accepted as
normal behavior will be forbidden.
Look at what the PC culture is doing, has done, to Christianity and morality
along with your right to hold on to such as sacred and true.

“Another tool is the totalitarian (as opposed to the Christian) view of tolerance.
Things which are perceived as preventing freedom or happiness cannot be tolerated.
“certain things cannot be said, certain ideas cannot be expressed,
certain policies cannot be exposed, certain behaviour cannot be permitted without making
tolerance an instrument for the continuation of servitude”.

Political correctness is driven by two things,
group identity and the discounting of truth as valuable.
Some groups are beyond criticism.
Some truths cannot be said.

And it appears that Christianity, the Judaeo / Christian tradition,
the traditional family, traditional Western Civilization, differing opinions,
white males, morality, truth, conservativism, etcetera…
have all fallen into that category of that which may no longer be uttered…

All the while, abortion, gender fluidity, transgenderism, fake news, liberalism, safe rooms,
LBGTQ_____ (fill in the blanks with any letter that pleases you), atheism, racism, fascism,
‘isms’ of every shape, size, and description… are all the rage as are those
who embrace such…
Embrace anything other than the aforementioned and then you my friend will be ridiculed,
sued, attacked, heckled, disgraced, run out of business, run out of town and gleefully obliterated.

Yet David offers one last piece of closing wisdom in which we all must reach…

“You cannot have the fruits of Christianity if you do not have the root of Christ.”

Cultural Marxism in Modern Society…

Is our post modern cultural Marxism rooted in a sexual revolution that was disguised as a women’s movement?

You who are on the road
Must have a code that you can live by
And so become yourself
Because the past is just a good-bye.
Teach your children well,
Their father’s hell did slowly go by,
And feed them on your dreams
The one they picks, the one you’ll know by.
Don’t you ever ask them why, if they told you, you will cry,
So just look at them and sigh
And know they love you.
Lyrics by Graham Nash
Teach your Children

What do Critical Theory, Marxism, Socialism, cultural liberalism, women’s equality,
homosexuality, transgenderism, and the sexual revolution all have in common?
They are the underlying lynchpins to our current day’s ills…

And they all seem to have begotten the other in some perverse orgy of thought, action and protest.

I wrote a post last week referencing a recent letter penned by Pope Emeritus Benedict
in which he states that the ills of the Chruch today can actually be traced right back
to the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s.

“Pope Benedict XVI has broken his silence in a rare essay on the sex abuse crisis
in the Catholic Church, claiming that it was caused in part by the sexual revolution of the 1960s
and the liberalization of the church’s moral teaching.

“Since I myself had served in a position of responsibility as shepherd of the Church
at the time of the public outbreak of the crisis, and during the run-up to it,
I had to ask myself — even though, as emeritus,
I am no longer directly responsible —
what I could contribute to a new beginning,”
Benedict wrote, in explaining why he is speaking out now.

But his comments on the sex abuse crisis seem certain to inflame tensions between
conservative Catholics, who largely blame homosexuality and lax sexual ethics for the scandal,
and liberals, who say there is no known connection between homosexuality and pedophilia.

In the essay, Benedict asserts that the changes in traditional moral standards
on sexuality both in society and within the Catholic Church laid the groundwork
for the sex abuse crisis.

“Part of the physiognomy of the Revolution of ’68,” he writes,
“was that pedophilia was then also diagnosed as allowed and appropriate.”

Bishop Gavin Ashenden actually expanded on this notion albeit as a separate thought than that
of the former Pope’s, all of which I shared in that same previous post.

https://cookiecrumbstoliveby.wordpress.com/2019/04/12/silent-no-more-the-absence-of-god/

Contrary to what many critics now argue, I don’t see the former Pope’s letter as some
sort of feeble excuse for the scope of predation and the decades of lies and cover-ups,
but rather I see that Benedict is identifying a marker…
A key and crucial marker, marking much of our current ills and woes.

But before we proceed, you might need to read over another previous post.
It’s a post which might refresh your memory about Critical Theory,
The Frankfurt School and Marxism—all of which have been identified and brought to our
attention by Melvin Tinker in his book
That Hideous Strength:
How The West Was Lost
The Cancer of Cultural Marxism in The Chruch,
The World And The Gospel of Change

Here is a link to one of the previous teaching posts regarding Mr. Tinker’s book:
https://cookiecrumbstoliveby.wordpress.com/2019/01/30/new-left-not-so-new-raison-detre/

In a nutshell, however, “according to Tinker–
“In 1923 a week-long symposium was organized by Felix Weil in Frankfurt,
Germany in which they laid out a vision for a Marxist think-tank and
research centre.
The original name for the centre was the Institue for Marxism (Institut fur Marxismus),
but a more innocent sounding title was subsequently given,
The Institute for Social Research (Institut fur Sozialforschung).
Since that time the ISR has usually been known simply as the Frankfurt School.”

In the early 1940s, many of these German philosophers made a mad dash to the US once
the Nazis had shuttered their Institute—bringing with them not merely an academic philosophy
but rather a desire for a “new world order” of Marxism—
bringing it directly to the forefront of America’s academic schools of thought.

Their “school” of philosophy (a cultural Marxism) was readily accepted and absorbed into
America’s academic elite thinkers and schools.
New, refreshing and cutting edge, or so it seemed.

Fast forward to today…

As we now stand bewildered and nearly helpless while looking at the nation we thought we once knew,
I believe a key and crucial breadcrumb will be found if we look back to those heady days of 60s.

Those days of protests, revolutionary movements and a summer of love.

While we painfully scan the horizon, looking for reasons as to why we are currently in
a terrible mess, I believe we need to not only re-explore but we need to understand…
we need to understand that what appeared to be a movement by and for women vying for
equality in the mid-1960s was far more serious and far more sinister than equal
pay for equal work.
So much so that most of the women protesting had
no idea how their “movement” was to morph into a damning Sexual revolution.

Vietnam, Civil Rights, Women rights, peace, and love…
what a churning boiling toxic kettle of foreboding ills.

A movement shattering certain social norms set the stage for our
current culture’s spiraling demise.

And sex was going to be a key factor, if not the pivotal factor.

According to Max Horkheimer (one of the German philosophers) and his fellow scholars,
bourgeois society is inherently sexually repressed,
which is a major factor in neurosis and other forms of mental illness.
‘They believed,’ as Breshears makes clear, ‘that a revolutionary,
post-capitalist and post-Christian society could liberate humanity
from this repression, so sexual liberation from the restrictions of a patriarchal society
was a major theme in their ideology.’

Both Eric Fromm and Wilhelm Reich (more of the German philosophers) re-worked
Freudianism into the neo-Marxist ideology.
Fromm argued that sexual orientation is merely a social construct,
that there are no innate differences between men and
women, and furthermore that sexuality and gender roles are socially determined.
It was Reich who coined the term
‘the sexual revolution’ (the title of his 1936 book) and contended that the
innate sexual impulse should be liberated
from artificial and man-made moral restrictions.

But perhaps more than any other member of the Frankfurt School it was
Herbert Marcuse who was to have the most far-reaching influence in this aspect of
the neo-Marxist ideology.
In Eros and Civilization he
sought to bring together neo-Marxism with a version of neo-Freudianism in order
to turn the power of the throwing off of all traditional values and sexual restraints
in favour of ‘polymorphous perversity.’ The very idea of marital love and
fidelity was considered by Marcuse to be counter-revolutionary.
Although cultural change was the ultimate goal, Marcuse understood the tactical appeal
if the pleasure principle. For we are often reminded, ‘sex sells,’
and it sells politics too, what better way
to recruit revolutionaries than to convince them that sexual promiscuity
is a sure way to bring
about the revolution?
Dinesh D’Souza notes in ‘What’s so great about Christianity?’
the centrality of this tactic by quoting neo-Marxist,
‘Against the power of religion, we employ an equal if not greater power—
the power of hormones.’/em>

These are names that are mostly foreign to those of us today who are looking for answers,
yet they are names of men who were to play pivotal roles in ushering in the mess
you and I are currently living in today…

Yet as there is much more to write, share and say…I’m off to Atlanta.
So this is part I….Part II and possibly Part III will be forthcoming…

But the Mayor is calling.

It seems her chief aides are going on a little date night prior to the arrival of their new addition
and of course, the Mayor needed a babysitter.
Plus I’ll be on baby watch this weekend standing in while my son is out of town for a wedding.
His overtly pregnant wife is in no condition to trek a couple of hours away from home
this late in the ballgame…

Stay tuned…

Oh, by the way… Percy is still at the Vets…
the surgery seems to have been successful as long as he stays
in a cage, unable to jump…sigh

Whoever makes a practice of sinning is of the devil,
for the devil has been sinning from the beginning.
The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil.
1 John 3:8

death of your own culture, right under your own eyes…

“What we have in the Tower of Babel episode is in effect a rival cosmology to that of God’s;
it is an unmaking and a remaking of the world, a blasphemous human “let us’
over and against the Holy ‘let us’ of the Triune God.”
Melvin Tinker

(Le Mont-Saint-Michel / Julie Cook/ 2018)

I had a doctor’s appointment yesterday–
so as I sat in the waiting room along with all those others who were also waiting,
I was actually hard at work.

I learned a long time ago to make the most of any and all “empty” moments.
Call it multitasking or simply the survival skill of having been a working mother…
I was sitting in a corner, book open in my lap while my yellow highlighter was going to town.
I was almost disappointed when the nurse came out and called me back.

I was in the midst of the slow continuation of working my way through the marvelous,
albeit short, book by Melvin Tinker
That Hideous Strength: How The West Was Lost
The Cancer of Cultural Marxism in the Chruch, the World and The Gospel of Change

Below I want to offer you the two page’s worth of enlightenment that I managed to read
and highlight before the nurse came to get me—

It is so much on the money that I had to contain myself from shouting out
a big ‘AMEN” as I read.
Had I done so, the folks waiting around me might have thought I was out of my
meds….meds for things like sudden and unexpected outbursts—
appropriate and not…
but little did they know I was reading words of an alarming truth that is sinisterly
consuming our very lives.

“We saw how for Lewis, the ideology of his day, which he sought to expose and debunk,
was naturalistic materialism.
One of the main ideologies of our day is a variant of this, namely, neo-Marxism,
sometimes called cultural Marxism or libertarian Marxism.

A philosophy of human liberation.
It seeks to overcome human alienation, to emancipate man from repressive social institutions,
especially economic institutions that frustrate his true nature, and to bring him into harmony
with himself, his fellow men, and the world around him so that he can overcome his estrangements
and express his true essence through creative freedom.

But the liberty which the cultural Marxists have in mind is not the liberty
of classical liberalism– equality under the law or even equality of opportunity.
Unlike the classical Marxist whose main focus was economic inequality,
theirs is an equality cutting across the whole of human experience.
It was Herbert Marcuse of the Frankfurt School who argued that traditional societies promote what
he called a ‘repressive tolerance” because they do not deal with the latent inequalities of humans;
the fact that some are cleverer, wiser or harder working than others,
who are then to be considered to be oppressed because of their perceived deficiency.

As Andrew Sandlin writes:
Libertarian Marxism is all about liberating humanity from the social institutions and conditions
(like the family and church and business and traditional views and habits and authorities)
that prevent the individual from realizing his true self,
his true desires and aspirations, from being anything he wants to be–full autonomy…
Libertarian Marxism is the Marxism of our culture and time.

Peter Berger calls the ‘plausibility structures’ of a society,
that is those background assumptions, beliefs and ways of thinking and acting which are taken as given.
It is the presumption which declares “Of course, everyone now days knows that…’
The aim is to get people to think and feel for themselves that certain values and practices,
such as same-sex marriage, are common sense, fair or even natural.

Over the last 60 years or so in the West there has effectively occurred the death of on culture,
rooted in the Judeo-Christian world view, and the rise of another more secular one.
Philip Rieff observes that,
“The death of a culture begins with its normative institutions fail to communicate ideals in ways
that remain inwardly compelling.’ Once the ideology of neo-Marxism, you talk instead about ‘equality,’
‘liberation’ and ‘tolerance’–the things of which the Chruch of England speaks endlessly)
the revolution is more or less complete.
The upshot of this is that if these beliefs and practices are considered plausible,
Christian beliefs and practices become implausible more less by default,
in which case it will not do simply to argue for the cogency of the Chrisitan faith for
most people will think that there is nothing to argue about.
Many of us don’t spend that much time thinking how we might argue against flat-earthists—
we simply assume they are mistaken, out of touch and an irrelevance;
so it is with many people’s view of Christianity.

Changing the view of Christianity, one Marxist at a time…
we’ve been warned….

Only let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ, so that whether
I come and see you or am absent,
I may hear of you that you are standing firm in one spirit,
with one mind striving side by side for the faith of the gospel,
Philippians 1:27