Theological Truth

Christmas is interesting. The origins are debatable. Though it’s easy to dismiss modern interpretations as revisionist, the questions are valid. Why would so much occur during winter when cold weather and inept clothing would make travel difficult? Why would shepherds be out in the freezing middle of the night? What about the similarities between Christmas and pagan celebrations?

As neither a historian nor a theologian, I am ill-equipped to answer such questions. Similarly, I wonder if they matter.

In other words, the savior arrived. Perhaps it was around now or perhaps it was in summer. Regardless, He entered the terrestrial realm.

My question is, what is important? That is, should we concern ourselves more with the truth of the timing or more with the Truth?

I rather enjoy Christmas even as I realize it may be based on fallacies. The season fills me with bonhomie and selflessness. As many of you readers are more biblically erudite, is the fact that the the history may be constructed enough to shed it? Or does the theological truth supplant the literal truth? Conversely, am I simply wrong in thinking the historical telling contradicts the biblical telling?

 

On Voting

Many around the ‘sphere choose not to vote as it just encourages the bastards. Others abstain for religious reasons. A few of us still vote. Regardless of whether or not we participate, it seems these arguments focus upon federal elections–president and congress– and seldom include discussions of school boards, zoning, and millage. While it is true that one vote generally doesn’t matter at the national level, one vote can matter locally. Tax increases, local officials (who wield more power than you realize), liquor sales laws and a variety of other decisions arise from the local level. These decisions directly affect you as a resident of those areas.

For those who abstain from federal elections, do you also abstain from local ones? Regardless of answer, why?

 

Father Knows Best: Father’s Day edition

Father’s Day was Sunday, but that means all the posts didn’t come out till then. Enjoy these offerings, as well as othes that have nothing to do with the “holiday.”

Tanner: Happy Father’s Day

Professor Mentu: Father’s Day 2012, The Man in the Middle, and If I Perish, I Perish

Keoni Galt: Hau’oli La Makuakane and Perspective Makes a Difference

Rollo Tomassi: Daddy Issues

Chuck: Single Mother’s Day

Frost: A Letter to Fathers

Alkibiades: Where would we be? and The easy path

Dalrock: New and improved Christianity, inner goddess with extra Moxie edition!

An Unmarried Man: Early Father’s Day. . .the Dilation of Time

Booch: The 100% Reactive Model is Wrong

The Poet: Emerson’s Essay: History

Matt Forney: You’ve Got Bigger Problems Than Game

The Geographer: Out of Hell

Foseti: Review of “Bonfire of the Vanities” by Tom Wolfe (Incidentally, my dad recommended this book to me)

Generation Nihilism: The problems come from actively looking for emotional connections

Pukeko: Living Well and Avoiding Revenge

Vox: Why she’s not married and Lie to your kids

 

Shall I Poke a Hornet’s Nest?

I shall.

Vox Day is debating Calvinists. Here is part 1 and here is part 2.

Vox is winning the debate at this juncture, though some, perhaps all, of my co-conspirators will surely disagree. Which is not to antagonize, but instead to open the floor for debate.

Is Vox winning? Where do papists fit in this discussion?

 

The Punk and Priest Both Walk the Earth, One Just Holds His Knuckles Higher

GLP wrote a post arguing that feminism is a direct result of Christianity.  The comments have offered good refutations, including some by our own Will S., but I wanted to elucidate on what I view as the fatal flaw in GLP’s argument. Like the meaning of the word ‘is,’ we’re about to get caught up in semantics, but with a few tautologies thrown in for fun.

Christianity came before and fed into female-centrism. It wasn’t the other way around. It is incorrect to only blame feminism for the recession of masculinity and patriarchy in both society as a whole and the church in particular. Because Christianity holds both men and women to the same moral standards, –especially as it pertains to sex – Christianity would naturally be a precursor to the female pedestalization that many MRA-ish decry. Christianity, in my eyes, greased the wheels for feminism.

The word that GLP is looking for is not Christianity, it’s churchianity.

Churchianity
1. (pejorative) Any practices of Christianity that are viewed as placing a larger emphasis on the habits of church life or the institutional traditions of the church than on theology and spiritual teachings; The quality of being too church-focused.

In other words, Jesus ain’t the reason for our present tumultuous and discordant season.

GLP correctly points out that men left churches when teachings were watered down to accommodate women; he incorrectly identities the source of the law and teachings. As he is a nonbeliever, we at Patriactionary will forgive him for citing terrestrial concerns and biology as the source.

Churches are concerned with weekly attendance, the coffers, reputation, community acceptance, and the like; God is concerned with different matters. The former may seek to soften the truth so the widows and single moms keep tithing; the latter remains a sharp edge. Our biological impulses do not matter. It is our ability to rise above our animal impulses, to control them and behave as men, that matters.

Christianity is not a soft and feminine path. Fealty and adherence are decidedly hard. Churchianity, on the other hand, is concerned with real estate and architecture. It is a focus on optics, aesthetics.

In short, GLP argues that the Kingdom of Caesar is too rapt with the Kingdom of Caesar, while pretending to be rapt with the Kingdom of God, and that it does a poor job of understanding itself. That is a true argument. It is also an argument that has very little to do with Christianity save that it flows from a focus that has very little to do with Christianity.

 

Too Easy, Too Soft

Svar, via email, shared an interesting interview with an author I had not heard of. Tito Purdue, the author, discusses his view of modernity and its poisons.

Some people believe our decadence has been caused by loss of faith, but I’ve come to believe that loss of faith is itself caused by prolonged prosperity, which dissolves discipline and offers temptations that cannot be resisted by most people. America could have stood up to anything except this.

Rather than work too hard myself, heh heh, below is a copy/paste of an email I sent a few on the Council with regard to the article.

I don’t necessarily agree that prosperity is itself the problem. It’s the idleness that initially accompanies it and comes to be the source of prosperity. We make money not by toiling, but by shifting pieces around the board. No sweat, no exposure to the elements, no real hardship. When the flesh is insufficiently challenged, the mind has too much room to roam and dream up justifications. Having said that, I don’t romanticize agrarian dusk to dawn workdays. There needs to be a blend. The paper pushers need to make sure the bottom line doesn’t exclude the less mentally agile. That is, prosperity that includes the laborers and doesn’t destroy their jobs and seek to buy their loyalty with baubles, and doesn’t give them an abundance of free time to think of justifications for any whim they have, can prosper. The trick is avoiding the jealousy and avarice that propelled ’50s man to turn into ’80s man. Of course, successfully performing that trick is to overcome very base desires.

In other words, the turning continues and our generation finds itself in the unenviable position of either sacrificing our way to general salvation or picking up the pieces after the next great flood.

As it is said, idle hands. . .

 

All Children are Bastards

Will, in reply to a comment I left on this post, wrote:

The more highly educated and professional, the less and less marriages and therefore birthrate; in other words, the birthrate of the West will continue to drop… And insofar as we see these trends happening not only in ‘the world’ but also in the Church (because we see women in our own church circles delaying marrying and having kids in favour of education and career; I certainly do in my church circles, alas), it will not be well for us, either… IOW, things are going to get worse, overall.

Perhaps I think of things to simply, but here’s how I simplify our current predicament. Liberals* cannot admit that their “think of the children” policies subsidize and thus encourage dysfunction, for example single motherhood. So rather than stop the subsidies, they fall back on the education shibboleth. Ergo, the prescription becomes “convince junior high and high school kids that children will destroy their future.” The only group that internalizes the message are the smart kids with a future time orientation, the kids who were unlikely to pump out bastards to begin with. The subsidies continue for the proles; the smart kids stay focused on the future. The smart kids get to college and no one bothers to tell them that kids won’t destroy their lives. They focus on their careers. The proles continue to breed.

The argument takes many forms. “I’m waiting on marriage and kids because I want to establish myself/establish my career/travel/etc.”

No one has ever been able to explain to me why post-Boomer generations cannot accomplish anything after becoming parents. Anecdotally, though I have less time for frivolity, my kids drive me to achieve more. If nothing else, they’re damn expensive and I need more cash to live because of their presence.

Beyond that, it’s not just the solipsism of liberals and liberalism, it’s that it’s illogical. Kids don’t stop life, they expand it, literally and metaphorically.

But no one ever bothered to tell the smart kids that. No one told them that only bastards are bastards and that children are children. Thus, in the eyes of many intelligent people, all children became bastards, little impediments to life. The real bastards, on the other hand, have no idea that they are bastards or even who the real bastards are.

*For simplicity sake, I am talking about those who support overt and “compassionate” liberalism, regardless of how they vote or live in aggregate.

 

Whirling Dervish

On a recent night, the Council was sitting around the Round Table, ruminating on various issues, when Matthew said that conservatism offered nothing. In his words, “I’m sure the Aztecs had a culture they wanted to conserve.” I’ve argued against such lines of thinking, though I often perform as a sniper with a shotgun. It’s all wide pattern and no focused sighting. It’s one of the problems with having an ideology and not being pragmatic, namely, having an ideology means being willing to admit fallibility.

Will highlighted a great Dalrock post, and the comments therein, on Tuesday. Escoffier, at Dalrock’s blog, wrote that though the SoCons, a decidedly influential leg of the conservative stool, were averse to the shifting mores of life, they mostly sat on the sidelines and enjoyed their accumulating piles of stuff. Commenters here elaborated on that point.

Quick aside: George Carlin once joked that a house is a place where we store our shit. . .While we go out and get more shit!

Taking Carlin’s riff more literally, I’m increasingly of a mind with those who argue that conservatism/traditionalism as a policy standpoint is too deferential to the past and not sufficiently focused on the present. Moreover, that past is mostly an illusion. The conservatives and traditionalists focus on a purportedly idyllic time when the decline was already well in motion, the shit had just not yet accumulated to a level such that it could be classified as detritus.

Conservatism as an ethos is malleable. The blade may be sharpened, a scope may be mounted on a muzzle loader. But a return to the past is not coming. Instead of focusing on truths that were never true, we should instead look at natural law, our foundational mores, and adapt our tactics to the present. Always, though, we must keep an eye on the future. If we fail to do so, we risk becoming a mushy, all inclusive historical attraction for tourists.

In the symbolism of the Sema ritual, the semazen’s camel’s hair hat (sikke) represents the tombstone of the ego; his wide, white skirt represents the ego’s shroud. By removing his black cloak, he is spiritually reborn to the truth. At the beginning of the Sema, by holding his arms crosswise, the semazen appears to represent the number one, thus testifying to God’s unity. While whirling, his arms are open: his right arm is directed to the sky, ready to receive God’s beneficence; his left hand, upon which his eyes are fastened, is turned toward the earth. The semazen conveys God’s spiritual gift to those who are witnessing the Sema. Revolving from right to left around the heart, the semazen embraces all humanity with love. The human being has been created with love in order to love. Mevlâna Jalâluddîn Rumi, “All loves are a bridge to Divine love. Yet, those who have not had a taste of it do not know!”

All loves are a bridge to Divine love, huh? Not even close. All loves are a bridge to irrelevance and banishment. Tough love and adaptation are the bridges. We cannot conserve that which never truly existed.

Dervish communities, in the Middle Ages, served a central role in social, religious and political life throughout “central Islamic lands.” [Ed: Though associated with Islam, the Sufi predate them and are not part and parcel with “modern” Islam.]. Dervish orders were at one time much larger in size than they are today, as the government has taken control over most Dervish monasteries throughout this area. In 1925, Turkey ordered the dissolution of all Sufi fraternities by decree, the Mevleviyah managed to survive among small villages throughout the Middle East. In 1954, the Turkish government granted the Mevleviyah order “special permission” to perform ritual whirling practices for tourists during two weeks each year. Outside of tourist entertainment, Orthodox theologians have now vocally discounted the Dervish practice resulting in faqirs, or wandering, mendicant dervishes throughout central Islamic regions. Despite strict government control over Dervish practices, the Mevleviyah order continued its existence in Turkey until the early 21st century. [Ed: Read, now it’s gone.]

 

Reactionary Revolutionary

The great game vs. MRA debate seems to have subsided, for now. Maybe they haven’t. I only paid passing attention because I don’t really care. Oops, I just wrote that out loud.

But I do find the split interesting, if not for the reasons outlined by the debaters themselves. Namely, I’m interested in the premise a not-insignificant portion of the MRA side starts from – that we need rights and activism to demand that women give us permission to be men. That is an abdication of man’s natural role, that of leader. We don’t lead our women because they give us permission, but because that’s just how it’s supposed to be, baby.

So then, what is a reactionary to do? Perhaps the proper reaction is a revolution that says we will no longer collectively frame our responses in reaction to women. Instead, we will lead and the women will react. Or to put it another way, go make us a sandwich.

 

Intelligence

Badger is man after my own heart. Beyond the nostalgia, though, is another question. Where is the sweet spot, the intersection between looks and intelligence that produces a highly desirable candidate for a mate?

Admittedly, this is one of my hobby horses, to the point that I’ll use shoddy research just for the sake of a post with graphs.

The comments to Badger’s post show that I am not alone. Superficially, those actresses are not Alyssa Milano, in her prime of course, but the fact that they are not mouth breathers elevates them.

Which brings us to today’s question:  When looking at potential wives and mothers what is more important, the looks or the books?