Tag: Christianity

Merry Christmas!

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.  Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.  In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
– John 1:1-5

This is the true hope and promise of Christmas. The light shines, even in the darkness that engulfs the world today, and the darkness will not overcome it.

Whether you are surrounded with love and family and decorations and presents, or whether you find yourself in a motel surrounded by nothing more festive than a wi-fi connection and few empty cans of beer, you are not alone today. You are part of the great celebration of the miracle, the great golden net of believers that reaches all the way around the world and binds the Church together.

Because at its heart, Christmas is not about togetherness or silver bells or snow. It is about the Word becoming flesh and coming to dwell among us, the spark that lit the fire in the hearts of men that will never be extinguished.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

The end of progressive Christianity

This is an insightful piece by an intelligent observer of the battle between historic and progressive Christianity, and I think his conclusion is essentially correct:

The historic Christians believe their religion is revealed by God in the person of his Son Jesus Christ, and that the Scriptures are the primary witness of that revelation. They believe the church is the embodiment of the risen Lord Jesus in the world and that his mission to seek and to save that which is lost is still valid and vital. Historic Christians believe in the supernatural life of the Church and expect God to be at work in the world and in their lives.

Progressive Christians believe their religion is a historical accident of circumstances and people, that Jesus Christ is, at best, a divinely inspired teacher, that the Scriptures are flawed human documents influenced by paganism and that the church is a body of spiritually minded people who wish to bring peace and justice to all and make the world a better place.

I realize that I paint with broad strokes, but the essential divide is recognizable, and believers on both sides should admit that “historic” and “progressive” Christians exist within all denominations. The real divide in Christianity is no longer Protestant and Catholic, but progressive and historic.

When I say “divide” I should say “battle” because both sides are locked in an interminable and unresolvable battle. Interminable because neither side will yield and unresolvable because the divisions extend the theological and philosophical roots of both aspects.

However, it is true that if you look at the dynamic of progressive Christianity, you will see that by the end of this century it will have either died out or ceased to be Christianity.

At this time, modernism still wears Christian clothes in the mainstream Protestant churches and in parts of the Catholic Church.

This cannot last much longer for 11 very simple reasons:

The most powerful reason, of course, is that progressive Christians do not actually believe in the supernatural, which means that in the most basic sense, they cannot reasonably be described as Christians at all.

Michael Sebastian makes much the same point, in rather less elevated language, on Return of Kings:

This message that God promises people a wonderful life has had a deep impact on the lives of many modern Christians. It is a message that fits perfectly with our hedonistic culture that puts pleasure above duty. Christian couples forego having children so they can travel or drive luxury cars. Lukewarm Christian women divorce perfectly good husbands in pursuit of the Prince Charming they think they deserve. Bishops and pastors preach only those parts of the gospel that make them popular with the secular culture.

Modern Christianity is also compromised in other ways. Rather than standing against the culture, Christian churches have tried to accommodate as much of the culture as possible. Some denominations have embraced Christian feminism, push for left wing social causes such as open borders, and bless gay marriages. For that reason, if you want to learn what real Christianity is, you will have to ignore recent teaching in favor of the past.  A good rule of thumb is to simply avoid reading Christian material written after 1900. Listen to your Sunday Sermon but take it with a grain of salt.

Repent. Return to the fundamentals of the faith. Read the Word. Preach the Gospel. Go forth and multiply. And ignore all who tell you to follow the world on its broad and easy path to Hell.

Race and religion

It’s one thing for one’s life to be transformed by the power of Jesus Christ. It is real. I have seen remarkable transformations of people’s hearts, character, behavior, and spirit take place in the lives of friends, acquaintances, and strangers. That being said, I’ve yet to see Christianity do much to transform one’s intellect, one’s height, or one’s intrinsic capacity for empathy or logic:

Black women have great faith in God, but they have a twisted understanding of His role. They do not pray for strength or courage. They pray for results: the satisfaction of immediate needs. One of my clients was a black woman who prayed in a circle with her accomplices for God’s protection from the police before they would set out to commit a robbery.

The mothers and grandmothers pray in the hallways–not for justice, but for acquittal. When I explain that the evidence that their beloved child murdered the shop keeper is overwhelming, and that he should accept the very fair plea bargain I have negotiated, they will tell me that he is going to trial and will “ride with the Lord.” They tell me they speak to God every day and He assures them that the young man will be acquitted.

Before you dismiss the observer as a hateful racist hater, consider that as a public defender of liberal persuasion, he not only spends more time than anyone reading this with low-income Africans attempting to help them, but has probably bled a considerably greater quantity of hearts-blood over their fates as well.

There was a fair amount of talk about EQ a few years ago, and there is an increasing amount of discussion of pathological altruism. What is gradually becoming apparent to me is that Western civilization not only requires a base level of intelligence, but also a base level of empathy. Any population group with an average level of either intelligence or empathy that falls below that level is not going to be able to participate in European civilization or sustain a reasonable facsimile on its own.

Christianity certainly helps support the development of empathy in an individual by providing a strong rational justification for it, but it observably does not create it ex nihilo in the human breast. I suspect it would be eucivically useful if there were standard tests for empathy as reliable as those for intelligence.

Churchian theocrats

It’s always easy to tell when a group of people have given themselves over to untruth. Their philosophy, their theology, and their politics all rapidly become observably incoherent. Evangelicals, and many of the evangelical organizations, are now following the example of other Christian denominations in walking the broad and easy path towards Hell, and they are doing so on the basis of their mealy-mouthed Sunday School Churchianity.

As the election retreats like a hurricane heading back out to sea, first responders are assessing the damage left in its wake. One casualty is the reputation of evangelicalism. Evangelicalism was closely associated with the campaign of Donald J. Trump, and more than 80 percent of white evangelicals voted for the president-elect. This, despite large numbers of African-American, Latino, Asian, young and female evangelicals who were fiercely opposed to the racism, sexism and xenophobia of Mr. Trump’s campaign and the hypocrisy of a candidate who built a casino empire while flouting morality.

As a result, much of the good that went by the name “evangelicalism” has been clouded over; now a new movement is needed to replace it.

When it comes to religious identity in America, the fastest-growing group is the “nones.” Nearly a quarter of all Americans, and over 35 percent of millennials, report no religious affiliation. Nones, many of whom grew up within evangelicalism, often still affirm faith in God. They left the church because they gave up on evangelical leadership. Nothing sums up their objections more clearly than evangelicals’ embrace of Mr. Trump. Didn’t Jesus say, “Blessed are the meek” and “Love your enemies”?

Throughout the campaign, there was dissent even within the ranks of evangelicalism’s most conservative institutions. While the old guard, like the Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, were ardent Trump supporters, the best-selling evangelical author Max Lucado and the Southern Baptist leader Russell Moore were both early critics. At Liberty University, the largest evangelical college in the country, thousands of students signed a petition denouncing the support of its president, Jerry Falwell Jr., for Mr. Trump and insisting that they were more interested in being Christian than in being Republican.

Andy Crouch, the executive editor of Christianity Today, criticized both candidates, writing that enthusiasm for Mr. Trump “gives our neighbors ample reason to doubt that we believe Jesus is Lord.” He added, “They see that some of us are so self-interested, and so self-protective, that we will ally ourselves with someone who violates all that is sacred to us.”

As white male evangelists, we have no problem admitting that the future does not lie with us. It lies with groups like the National Latino Evangelical Coalition, led by Gabriel Salguero, or the Moral Monday movement, led by William Barber II, who has challenged the news media on its narrow portrayal of evangelicals. For decades, we have worked within evangelicalism to lift up the voices of these “other evangelicals.”

But we cannot continue to allow sisters and brothers who are leading God’s movement to be considered “other.” We are not confident that evangelicalism is a community in which younger, nonwhite voices can flourish. And we are not willing to let our faith be the collateral damage of evangelicalism.

We want to be clear: We are not suggesting a new kind of Christianity that simply backs the Democratic Party. Jesus is neither a Democrat nor a Republican — even if, as William Sloane Coffin Jr. once said, his heart leans left. Many faithful Christians did not vote for Hillary Clinton because of their commitment to a consistent pro-life agenda. True faith can never pledge allegiance to anything less than Jesus.

But Jesus-centered faith needs a new name. Christians have retired outdated labels before. During the late 19th century, when scientific rationalism fueled the questioning of Scripture, “fundamentalism” arose as an intelligent defense of Christianity. By the 1930s, however, fundamentalism was seen as anti-intellectual and judgmental. It was then that the term “evangelicalism” was put forward by Christianity Today’s first editor, Carl F. H. Henry, as a new banner under which a broad coalition of Jesus followers could unite.

But beginning with the culture wars of the 1980s, the religious right made a concerted effort to align evangelicalism with the Republican Party. By the mid-’90s, the word had lost its positive connotations with many Americans. They came to see Christians — and evangelicals in particular — as anti-women, anti-gay, anti-environment and anti-immigrant and as the champions of guns and war.

Mr. Trump did not create these contradictions, but his victory has pulled the roof off the building we once called home. It’s time to build a new home.

The amusing thing about their philosophical ineptitude is that they don’t realize they are making an overt case for Christian theocracy, the reality of which would of course horrify them because they have absolutely no intention of abiding by anything genuinely Christian at all; this is nothing more than shallow pandering to the worldly zeitgeist using a few inappropriately applied Bible verses as justification.

Moreover, it demonstrates that at least when it comes to Churchianity, race trumps religion in the hierarchy of identity politics. As usual, the Alt-Right perspective is the only one that makes any sense of this incoherent and degraded evangelicism.

Here is a useful metric for Christians: if the New York Times Carlos Slim’s blog is affording you space for your views and generally striking a positive tone about them, you are absolutely wrong and whatever you are pushing is antithetical to genuine Christianity. No one – no one – is ever going to be inspired to follow Jesus Christ as a result of your pandering to the approval of the global elite. It is literally anti-evangelist evangelicism and its new home is godless churchianism.

Happy Thanksgiving!

First, I know you’re all feeling grateful to Squanto and the Great Chief Massasoit today, so on behalf of the American Indians, you’re welcome. Enjoy the turkey, the pie, and the manifold blessings of the Almighty God.

Second, there are a number of things for which I am grateful this year.

  • The health of my family. 
  • President-Elect Donald Trump
  • The advice of Mike Cernovich
  • The Castalia House authors, particularly my fellow Indian and co-author, John Red Eagle.
  • The readers who support the Castalia House authors so fervently
  • The Original Galaxians
  • The Brainstormers – don’t worry, we’re getting active again soon, so strap in your seatbelts
  • The Infogalactic Council and techstars. We have a great team coming together there.
  • My social media allies: Mike, Milo, Stefan, Roosh, Andrew, and the Deconverger.
  • The Alt-Right. Never mind the occasional bumps. History is, quite literally, on our side.
  • The Castalia team. I’ve never seen or been part of a more relentlessly productive team.
  • The VFM and the Dread Ilk, who are, deservedly, more widely dreaded than ever.

2016 has been amazing. We’ve seen site traffic double. We’ve seen the God-Emperor ascending. We’ve seen the Alt-Right rise. We’ve witnessed the birth of Infogalactic and the Alt-Tech. Many of you have been a part of one or more of those things, but before we congratulate ourselves on them, let us not forget to be grateful to the Creator God who gave us the gifts of creativity and free will required to make those things happen.

The Churchian corruption

One reliable metric, when dealing with Christians, to sort out the honest ones from the liars, is to observe how they quote the Bible. Anytime you are dealing with a self-professed Christian who quotes only part of a verse when the full one is contextually relevant, you can safely conclude that he – or in this case, she – is a Churchian who has no interest in the truth. They are merely using the Bible as a cherry-picked weapon to rationalize their pre-existing position.

Consider, for example, these questions from a Churchian at Mark Shea’s site:

Boy, am I afraid to ask, but here goes . . . I am only just learning about the Alt-Right. If they are Christians, what do they think Christ meant when he said to love your neighbor as yourself? To do to others as you would have them do to you? What did he mean by “love your enemies” and the parable of the Good Samaritan? What did Paul mean when he said “there is no longer Jew or Greek (etc.) but all are one in Christ Jesus?” What do they make of all Paul’s exhortations to avoid faction and seek unity in the body of Christ?

  1. Be kind and help people in need with your private resources, regardless of who they are, when you encounter them, insofar as you are personally able to do so.
  2. Do not selfishly ignore the needs, wants and desires of others. Treat them at least as well as you would prefer to be treated.
  3. Don’t be filled with hatred and bitterness. We can be a good neighbor even to those who despise us when they are in need.
  4. There are no nationalities, sexes, or favored nations in the spiritual world. Christians are in the world, but are not of it.
  5. Don’t get too hung up on theological differences and competing Biblical interpretations, because now we do not see sufficiently well to truly understand the Will of God in all things.

But these are not honest questions. Notice that she substituted (etc) for the entirety of Galatians, 3:28: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”

As I pointed out in Cuckservative, the dishonest Churchians who rely on these verses to justify everything from illegal Hispanic workers to mass Islamic invasion do not similarly declare that the verse justifies women marrying women, men playing women’s sports, or enslaving teenage runaways, as their logic dictates.

If we’re going to descend to their level of knowingly deceitful nonsense, we need only point out that the Bible limits itself to denying that there are Jews and Greeks, it says nothing about Mexicans or Arabs, or Africans, or Englishmen, and therefore Christians may legitimately discriminate among them. As it happens, that would actually be less dishonest than the extra-Biblical position they are trying to falsely sell to Christians on the basis of Scriptural authority.

These Churchians are liars, plain and simple. They are deceivers, they are corrupted, and worse, they observably serve the globalist objectives of the prince of this world. We know they are evil by the fruit of their teachings. And once they identify themselves in this way, you can safely dismiss them and everything else they say, because they are the children of their father, the original liar.

Now, obviously everyone makes mistakes. But these deceptions are not mistakes. And no one who intentionally hides the truth can be trusted to know the Truth.

Mailvox: material evil

An email from a reader who explains that he believes in material evil as a result of his youthful encounter with a pedophile:

People need to know about the extraordinary power that some pedophiles have over other people, and the damage they do. I will omit the strange story of my recovery. I’ve been trying to find more information on that for years. You are more likely to be able to shed light on it than anyone I’ve asked before.

When I was in high school, the headmaster hired a new school counselor, Kevin John Lynch, not knowing that Lynch was a dangerous and prolific pedophile.

Few people grasp the true nature of these creatures. Lynch had charisma beyond anything I have encountered before or since. Some were suspicious of him, but for others he seemed to radiate an enchantment field that gripped you viscerally. He had the headmaster wrapped around his little finger, fending off complaints about him for years without ever realising that there may be a reason for them. Lynch was a psychological chameleon; he could become whoever he needed to be in order to gain the advantage over his intended victim.

People who have never encountered a creature like Lynch cannot comprehend how dangerous and destructive they are. Lynch severely abused at least a thousand boys from the seventies until his downfall in the nineties. I have met some of these people, now grown men. Imagine that something had sucked the life force from someone, leaving behind a husk in place of the complete human being that they once were. Suicide is a common escape for these men. Many live in poverty and their lives are chaotic.

Lynch could make teenage boys do extraordinary things, not by force, but by telling them what to do. He made two boys, who didn’t know each other, perform a sexual act together in his office. Later they ‘woke up’ to the wrongness of it, found each other and reported the incident. For this the headmaster punished them.

The greatest problem for the victims was that nobody believed these things were possible. One mother, after her son told her what Lynch did years before, deposited him at a homeless shelter and cut off all contact. I met a man who’s lawyer had rescued him from a mental institution. The man had seen a psychiatrist, who committed him for being psychotic, believing that the things he spoke of don’t happen in the real world.

Lynch was active for over twenty years. Now the full story has emerged in great detail at a public inquiry.

Fortunately Lynch did not get very far with me. Still, being groomed by a pedophile authority figure was a disturbing position for a teenager to be in. I had severe psychological trauma after I left that school. And my brother, who also had ‘counseling’ with Lynch, and reported that Lynch never touched him, nevertheless ended up like the other victims — destroyed.

My recovery began suddenly, overnight, in my mid-thirties, accompanied by a profound personality shift. This remains unexplained, as I found that psychologists and others have either never heard anything like it or just find it weird. The sudden ‘awakening’ began a long healing process. The strangest part was that, every winter for three years, one day I would feel the need to retreat to my room, and there I would experience a grueling phenomenon, during which I felt the expulsion of something intangible from my body. Evil is the best word to describe my feeling about what was expelled.

I was so drained of energy after each of these events that I was ill for about two weeks after. In the fourth year it was mild, and this year nothing much happened at all. Now I feel normal for the first time since childhood, and seem to be embarking on a normal life, something I never expected to have.

I am not a Christian. My background is in atheism, science, rational thought and skepticism. After my first experience of this phenomenon, I realized the Christian notion of exorcism was the only similar story I’d heard of. However, I know little about exorcism in Christianity.

When you said that you believe in material evil, my first thought was of Lynch. He went about his acts of depravity with conscious, wilful intent. It was his day job. If anyone is wondering whether pedophiles could work their way up to powerful positions — yes, some have exactly the talents required. Lynch was small-time, but he was a shrunken, ugly wretch. Someone smarter, better looking and with better connections than him could go very far. I don’t know if Lynch was born evil or if others turned him into the creature that he was. But from what I’ve seen of the Podesta emails and the ‘pizza’ shop, I believe that these are the same kinds of people.

If you know of anything similar to this story, either from Christianity or elsewhere, please let me know. I have been pondering the meaning of all of this lately, including what you said about Christianity accounting for material evil. My experience suggests that it does exist. I am not an atheist anymore. I don’t know what I believe these days.

I suspect that Lynch was infested with what the Bible describes as “unclean spirits” and that he passed them off to the boys with whom he came in contact, whether he managed to molest them or not. The fact that he used to “hypnotise” them indicates his involvement with the occult; both hypnotism and drugs can serve as opening a spiritual door to the affected mind. I recommend that the reader, regardless of what he believes, behave as if the Bible’s account of Jesus Christ and demons are true, meditate on the Word of God, thank God for his deliverence, and pray daily for continued restoration for himself and the other victims.

As to why the reader got better despite his lack of belief, perhaps someone was praying for him, perhaps the unclean spirit got bored – they are varying degrees of intelligent, you see – or perhaps it was simply God’s will that he be cleansed of the spiritual filth. But his experience, and the inability of the average person to even begin to believe what he and the other victims were experiencing at the time, demonstrates how Lynch, and how people like the Podestas, are able to get away with their evil practices in full sight of a world that does not believe in evil.

If you think this all sounds stupid or ridiculous, that’s fine. You’re not the first to feel that way, and if one day you change your mind upon actually encountering the spiritual world, you won’t be the first to do that either.

I showed the video of Rosa’s exorcism to two of the world’s leading neurosurgeons and researchers in California and to a group of prominent psychiatrists in New York.

Dr. Neil Martin is chief of neurosurgery at the UCLA Medical Center. He has performed more than 5,000 brain surgeries and is regularly cited as in the top 1 percent of his specialty. On August 3, I showed him the video of Rosa’s exorcism. This is his response: “Absolutely amazing. There’s a major force at work within her somehow. I don’t know the underlying origin of it. She’s not separated from the environment. She’s not in a catatonic state. She’s responding to the priest and is aware of the context. The energy she shows is amazing. The priest on the right is struggling to control her. He’s holding her down, as are the others, and the sweat is dripping off his face at a time when she’s not sweating. This doesn’t seem to be hallucinations. She appears to be engaged in the process but resisting. You can see she has no ability to pull herself back.”

I asked Dr. Martin if this was some kind of brain disorder. “It doesn’t look like schizophrenia or epilepsy,” he said. “It could be delirium, an agitated disconnection from normal behavior. But the powerful verbalization we’re hearing, that’s not what you get with delirium. With delirium you see the struggling, maybe the yelling, but this guttural voice seems like it’s coming from someplace else. I’ve done thousands of surgeries, on brain tumors, traumatic brain injuries, ruptured brain aneurysms, infections affecting the brain, and I haven’t seen this kind of consequence from any of those disorders. This goes beyond anything I’ve ever experienced—that’s for certain.”

I also showed the video to Dr. Itzhak Fried, a neurosurgeon and clinical specialist in epilepsy surgery, seizure disorder, and the study of human memory. He is based at both UCLA and the Tel-Aviv Sourasky Medical Center. This was his conclusion: “It looks like something authentic. She is like a caged animal. I don’t think there’s a loss of consciousness or contact, because she’s in contact with the people. She appears to respond to the people who talk to her. It’s a striking change in behavior. I believe everything originates in the brain. So which part of the brain could serve this type of behavior? The limbic system, which has to do with emotional processing of stimuli, and the temporal lobe. I don’t see this as epilepsy. It’s not necessarily a lesion. It’s a physiological state. It seems to be associated with religious things. In the temporal lobe there’s something called hyper-religiosity. You probably won’t have this in somebody who has no religious background. Can I characterize it? Maybe. Can I treat it? No.”

I asked Dr. Fried if he believed in God, and he took a long pause before answering: “I do believe there is a limit to human understanding. Beyond this limit, I’m willing to recognize an entity called God.”

The reaction of the neurosurgeons took me by surprise. I had expected they would quickly dismiss Rosa’s symptoms as madness or unintentional fraud or suggest that she might be cured by brain surgery. They did not.

They wouldn’t come out and say, “Of course this woman is possessed by Satan,” but they seemed baffled as to how to define her ailment, and both agreed it was not something they would attempt to cure with surgery.

Three things I found particularly interesting about the Vanity Fair piece:

  • The real scientists take it seriously. The charlatans project their own fraud and refuse to do so. 
  • Father Amorth observes that Satan still rules this world, as Jesus and Paul both separately observed.
  • The demon still fears the late exorcist even after his death. Perhaps praying to the saints for their intercession is nothing more than a legitimate request for assistance, not a paganesque form of idolatry or ancestor worship.

Molyneux, Cernovich, Day

“If the Democrats get in, no more clunky Pledge of Allegiance – a simple “Hail Satan!” will do!”
– Stefan Molyneux

“Everyone knows, of course, Hillary’s belief that, ‘It takes a village,’ which only makes sense, after all, in places like Haiti, where she’s taken a number of them.”
– Donald Trump

“I’ve believed for months that Hillary Clinton sold her soul to Saudi Arabia. I had no idea she sold her soul to the devil!”
– Milo Yiannopoulos

“An amazing but disturbing conversation. As an atheist myself it really gave me pause for thought. If we accept that so much evil clearly exist in the world and appears to be focused and magnified at higher levels of governments, then it opens the door to accept there exists an opposite counter force – GOOD. These people clearly believe in Satan. Perhaps atheists need to practice the willing suspension of disbelief in order to tune in the frequency of good (and God) to fight what is really a terrible evil in our society.”
– atheist commenter

Follow the facts. Follow the truth. It is the hard and narrow path.

“Podesta practices occult magic”

Drudge is now leading with Spirit Cooking:

In what is undoubtedly the most bizarre Wikileaks revelation to date, Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta was invited to a “spirit cooking dinner” by performance artist Marina Abramovic, to take part in an occult ritual founded by Satanist Aleister Crowley.

In an email dated June 28, 2015, Abramovic wrote, “I am so looking forward to the Spirit Cooking dinner at my place. Do you think you will be able to let me know if your brother is joining? All my love, Marina.”

Tony Podesta then forwarded the email to his brother John Podesta (Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman), asking him, “Are you in NYC Thursday July 9 Marina wants you to come to dinner.”

However, in light of the increasing number of reports that allege Hillary’s inner circle consists of traitorous criminals who practice occult magic and abuse children, I think it is very important for Rod Dreher, Glenn Beck, Matt Walsh, and all the other good, morally upright Churchians and Mormons to continue to keep in mind that Donald Trump is alleged to have once called an overweight woman “Miss Piggy” and “an eating machine”.

Seriously, cucks, if it isn’t clear to you already, understand that you’re now WAY over the line. If you have any interest in retaining even a shred of credibility among sane and decent people in the future, you had better repent and recant now. Because, in what is turning out to be an epic struggle between humanity and seriously deviant spiritual evil, you are absolutely on the wrong side.