Red Wedding, Song of Ice and Fire, and Blood-Colored Glasses Lie

just as much as rose-colored glasses.

**Language and Spoiler Alerts!**

Why I couldn't get into A Game of Thrones. (**SERIOUS SPOILERS AHEAD!**)

..."So - when you eliminate just about every character that I care about, then continue to kill anyone with any sense of moral compass with such vengeance so as to punish them for even thinking that principles mattered, allow the wretched and evil to win over and over again and gain more power, and basically remove any and all hope of anything good ever happening (because how can I enjoy a show when every character I liked is now dead,) why is it exactly that I should continue watching?" wrote Tony...

Truly hilarious Twitter commentary as well (language and general despair alert.  Oh, and spoilers).  And this is a gem.  Excerpts:

A plane on route to the San Francisco International Airport tonight had to make an emergency landing when passengers watching pirated versions of the HBO series Game of Thrones began hyperventilating, screaming hysterically, and violently damaging their tray tables. The situation turned more volatile when an airline stewardess unintentionally spoiled the ending of the episode for the captain, after which he stormed out of the cockpit shouting obscenities, forcing his co-pilot to land the plane on his own...

“This chick next to me just started freaking out” says Martin Lodge, 39. “She was sobbing and kept saying ‘why, why, why’. At first, I thought maybe her boyfriend had just broken up with her by email or something, but then I heard this guy at the back of the plane yell ‘no way! no f**king way!’ and I knew something was going on. But what really tripped me out was the lady behind me. She started laughing!”

That lady was Angelica George, 32, who says she would have given anything to have had a video camera. “This was one of the most hysterical things I’ve ever seen. I’m a huge Game of Thrones fan and I’ve read the books, so I know exactly what happened in tonight’s episode. I just couldn’t help but laugh at their reactions, especially when the captain ran into the cabin shouting “f**k you George RR Martin!”

After landing, the plane was unloaded quickly and the affected passengers and captain were rushed to a nearby emergency room where they were treated with oxygen, heat blankets, and a pint of Ben and Jerry’s Rocky Road Ice Cream.

There is no word yet on their condition...

Anyway, humor aside.  I posted about the whole "slaughter everyone with a conscience; bad guys full speed ahead" problem with the series.  A friend commented:

How like life...GRRM likes to make a mockery of the noble class, who proclaim chivalry and honor but snuff it out wherever they see it. He reminds me of a plebian Cormac McCarthy in a way.

And yet proclaiming that there are no more good guys is no way to generate new good guys. Resigning yourself to the prevalence of vice today is no way to become virtuous yourself. The response of St. Benedict to the collapse of the Roman civilization was heroic sanctity, and he and his helped save civilization. I refuse to accept the counsels of despair. The day we all accept them is the day we collectively commit civilizational suicide. Only in hope is there life, and realism.

The response:

Yet it's not about vice TODAY it's about vice in history--a critical look at the kings and lords of medieval Europe.

An utterly unrealistic one. What role--I mean a real, substantive role--has religion played in Game of Thrones? Where're the great saints, bending history around themselves--Thomas Becket, Catherine of Siena, Benedict of Nursia, Francis of Assisi, Dominic, Thomas Aquinas, Thomas More, Margaret of Scotland, Elizabeth of Hungary, and so on and on and on? Where are the people who won't be bought or bent, and why aren't their triumphs included, as well as their deaths? Because there really have been such people in every century. Bad men haven't always had their way, and sometimes good is so powerful that it shall never be forgotten. Criticize the sins of the Europeans all you want, but unless you at least nod to their saints, you are being as unrealistic as the person who wears rose-colored glasses.

The response:

It's a point, though I suspect secular figures who won't be bent are more common in life as well as art.

It would take a lot of time and effort to prove either way, but I'd bet that, given the prevalence of religion across times and cultures before the modern age, you'd be hard pressed to muster enough folk unmotivated by any religious impulse to make that a really provable point. That debate is irrelevant, though, because it reinforces the underlying problem with the Song of Ice and Fire: namely, he seems to not have room in his world for people who will not bend before temptation or evil, for grace and goodness that wins, rather than simply being eradicated by the ruthless. He's not writing a realistic saga. It's not even Machiavellian--it's barely even modern realpolitik. It's certainly ahistorical and antithetical to human nature. He may be demonstrating John Wright's point about the challenge some writers face when attempting to write realistic human beings. Excerpts:

...[W]hy are my favorite authors, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Gene Wolfe, Mike Flynn, G.K. Chesterton, all members of this monstrous Syriac cult known as Christianity? I do like my freethinker authors just fine, but Bob Heinlein, Ayn Rand, Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke seem to have trouble with realism in characterization, both with their invented people, and with their invented societies.

Don’t get me wrong, I love their books, love and reread them many times, but the people who don’t believe in souls don’t seem to be able to portray their characters three-dimensionally and solidly, that is, as if their characters had souls.

Or as if the world were only this:

And this:

And never this:

Did Jesus Exist?

Mark Shea writes:

...Here’s the thing about the gospels. There really is nothing quite like them in the annals of world literature and the sooner you confront that fact, the less chance you have of the media making you stupid about them.

On the one hand, the gospels clearly have a sacramental and theological view of the world.  It is a world charged with meaning and sacramental power.  So every detail they record has symbolic significance.  Jesus is born, not just anywhere, but in Bethlehem, the House of Bread.  He is laid in a manger–a feed box, and Luke notices that because Jesus is the Bread of Life.  Luke will make the same eucharistic connection at the other end of his gospel by recording that he was made known “in the breaking of the bread”.  So it becomes easy, once you have gotten used to reading the gospels for all their massive amount of sacramental symbolism, to start imagining that the symbols are being invented and not reported by the authors.

Only here’s the thing, the gospel writers absolutely insist that they are reporting, not inventing this story.  The action takes place not in cloud cuckoo land, but in various locales around the Holy Land.  It happens not once upon a time, but “In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberi-us Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysani-as tetrarch of Abilene, in the high-priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas”.  Indeed, Luke explicitly tells us, “Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things which have been accomplished among us, 2* just as they were delivered to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word, 3* it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely * for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, 4* that you may know the truth concerning the things of which you have been informed.”

Sorry, but this ain’t the language of myth even though the events reported have a mythic quality.  This is the language of an ancient chronicler. Moreover, it is the language of an ancient chronicler who is quite careful to get his facts straight and has been shown, on repeated occasions, to know what he is talking about *better* than modernist scholars who are ready to dismiss him as having made crap up...

Here’s some reality: actual biblical scholarship by real, you know, scholars (even, by the way, unbelieving scholars) laughs to scorn the notion that “Jesus never existed”. What is quite clear is that the gospel are eyewitness accounts of a very real Jesus of Nazareth. And what is most solidly and definitely established by any reasonable assessment of the records we have is that, in the words of Tacitus, “Christus… suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus.” Only a crank–or a member of American Atheists–denies this...

For more on this, see here.

John Wright, Utter Geekiness, and the Baptized Imagination

Guh. As a commentator observed:

I’d think you were joking if you hadn’t written a book where King Arthur was reincarnated as Batman.

No, seriously. If you've never read a John Wright novel, you've denied yourself a brain-sucking, universe-bending, magnificent mashup of the classical Western canon, sci-fi, and fantasy.

I mean--LOOK at it!

...I had also been toying with the idea of writing an Anti-Dan Brown novel, one where the Roman Catholic Church, through the Knights Templar, had indeed been engaged in a two-millennium-old secret war against Harvard Symbolists and other servants of Satan to save the world from vampires and werewolves and mummies and giants and astrologers. I envisioned the Church as secretly funding and organizing the Knights Templar like the special ops vampire hunters in VAN HELSING starring Kate Beckinsale.

The two ideas came together when I struck on the happy thought of having the millennium-old secret known to the Church, but not to the world, to be the existence of parallel timelines, where biblical history had gone differently.

By “Biblical history” I mean that the secret history of the world is what is written in the Bible, and in the parallel timelines history went differently: the giants come from a world where the Flood of Noah never happened, so they were not wiped out; vampires come from a world where Christ was never crucified; evil astrologers rule a world where the Tower of Babel was never smitten with the confusion of tongues; mummies rule the world where Moses never freed the Hebrews from Egyptian bondage; werewolves rule a world where Nebuchadnezzar never repented of his lycanthropy, but instead spread the affliction; immortals come from a world where Fallen Eve stole the fruit from the tree of life; and so on.

I also wanted to write a novel where the witchcraft is bad for a change. Compare the way witchcraft is treated in the characters, for example, of Willow Rosenberg from BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER and Serafina Pekkala from THE GOLDEN COMPASS and the Halliwell Sisters from CHARMED on the one hand versus the way witchcraft is treated in Samantha Stevens from BEWITCHED and Gillian Holroyd from BELL BOOK AND CANDLE and Eglantine Price from BEDKNOBS AND BROOMSTICKS on the other… Ditto for vampires and werewolves. I wanted to write a book where the monsters were, you now, bad. And one where the Christians were good. This is not because I am bigoted against monsters or particularly fond of Christians (all the ones I know are sinners), but just because I am weary of the stereotypes.

What genre does this fall under?

I have no idea...

And then he summarizes (ha!):

...What is the one-sentence synopsis of the book?

“After my boss, Professor Anthrope, Harvard Symbologist, escaped from the insane asylum, he send me a secret message revealing that his beautiful daughter, Verity, had broken into the basement of the Haunted Museum and found the Moebius Coil he had constructed there from plans transmitted to Earth from across the Sea of Uncreation during the CERN disaster, and he begged me to find her and stop her, before the Dark Tower of the Ur race cast its twilight shadow across our helpless globe; and so, borrowing my father the Templar exorcist’s switchblade crucifix relict and my grandfather’s antique Japanese sword, not to mention my squirrel gun, I rushed in to save the girl but managed to get myself yanked headfirst into this interdimensional bathtub drain; and then things started getting weird…”

That is almost one sentence...

He has a wife, you know.

Rise of the Guardians: Cool!

Am I the only one getting pretty excited about this?

John Wright's Conversion: The First Post

For whatever reason, I always have trouble finding this when I need it, so here it is.

...The Truth to which my lifetime as a philosopher had been devoted turned out to be a living thing. It turned and looked at me. Something from beyond the reach of time and space, more fundamental than reality, reached across the universe and broke into my soul and changed me. This was not a case of defense and prosecution laying out evidence for my reason to pick through: I was altered down to the root of my being.

It was like falling in love. If you have not been in love, I cannot explain it. If you have, you will raise a glass with me in toast.

John C. Wright, Atheist Turned Catholic

He was interviewed!

Coolness! For more on prayer, see here. For more on the path to God, check The Fulfillment of All Desire out. For more on evidence for the existence of God, see New Proofs for the Existence of God: Contributions of Contemporary Physics and Philosophy.

Why Do You Believe In God?

Some answers just make better stories than others.  Excerpts:

...Upon concluding through a torturous and decades-long and remorseless process of logic that all my fellow atheists were horribly comically wrong about every basic point of philosophy, ethics and logic, and my hated enemies the Christians were right, I wondered how this could be. The data did not match the model.

Being a philosopher and not a poseur, I put the matter to an empirical test.

For the first time in my life, I prayed, and said. “Dear God. There is no logical way you could possibly exist, and even if you appeared before me in the flesh, I would call it an hallucination. So I can think of no possible way, no matter what the evidence and no matter how clear it was, that you could prove your existence to me. But the Christians claim you are benevolent, and that my failure to believe in you inevitably will damn me. If, as they claim, you care whether or not I am damned, and if, as they claim, you are all wise and all powerful, you can prove to me that you exist even though I am confident such a thing is logically impossible. Thanking you in advance for your cooperation in this matter, John C. Wright.” — and then my mind was at rest. I had done all I needed to do honestly to maintain my stature as someone, not who claimed to be logical, objective and openminded, but who was logical, objective, and openminded.

Three days later, with no warning, I had a heart attack, and was lying on the floor, screaming and dying.

-Then I was saved from certain death by faith-healing, after which–

-I felt the Holy Spirit enter my body, after which–

-became immediately aware of my soul, a part of myself which, until that time, I reasoned and thought did not exist-

-I was visited by the Virgin Mary, her son, and His Father-

-not to mention various other spirits and ghosts over a period of several days–

-including periods of divine ecstasy, and an awareness of the mystical oneness of the universe-

-And a week or so after that I had a religious experience where I entered the mind of God and saw the indescribable simplicity and complexity, love, humor and majesty of His thought, and I understood the joy beyond understanding and comprehended the underlying unity of all things, and the paradox of determinism and free will was made clear to me, as was the symphonic nature of prophecy. I was shown the structure of time and space.

-And then Christ in a vision told me that He would be my judge, and that God judges no man. I mentioned this event to my wife. Then about a month later, when I was reading the Bible for the first time beyond the unavoidable minimum assigned in school, I came across the passage in the book of John, a passage I had never seen before, and to which no Christian in my hearing had ever made reference, which said the same thing in the same words.

-And then I have had perhaps a dozen or two dozen prayers miraculously answered, so much so that I now regard it as a normal routine rather than some extraordinary act of faith.

So I would say my snide little prayer was answered with much more than I had asked, and I was given not just evidence, and not just overwhelming evidence, but joy unspeakable and life eternal...

This is, of course, the conversion story of the inimitable John C. Wright, Science Fiction Author Extraordinaire and Junior Under-Assassin (Albino Division) in the Opus Dei Leet Squad of D&D Geeks (Motto:  "We Have Dice, Hear Them Roll!").  Rumor has it he's really handy with a rosary.  Be afraid.  Be very afraid.

I've got to share one more bit of his story.  Excerpts:

...I am not a Deist because Deism is not a satisfactory model for my experience. I did not meet a generic god, the god of the philosophers, or some nondenominational new age Being of Light. I met the three persons of the Trinity, one after another.

And Mary. I spoke with her. I wish I could tell you of her kindness, her simple, unaffected goodness of heart. She is more celebrated now than any queen, and lives where joy lives forever, and bright spirits like votive candles surround her, but I wish I could do something, anything to undo the sorrows she knew in life. Poor woman. Poor, poor woman.

If this was all hallucination, if this was all madness, I tell you truthfully that I would believe it nonetheless, just on the smallest chance I might see her again in heaven, and hold her hand again. Hers was the callused hand of a working woman.

A Pro-Life Atheist

John Wright recounts his experience from days gone by.  Excerpts:

...At the time, I was a thoroughgoing fan of Ayn Rand and an avowed Libertarian, so, to me, it was a simple matter of logic: One is not supposed to blank-out reality, elude, escape, or play pretend on this or any topic. It is self defeating to use reason to elude reason.

Merely redefining words to pretend that the baby in the womb is not a member of the species of his parents is beneath contempt, or pretending not to know when life begins: all textbooks on biology before Roe v Wade were unambiguous on the point, nor was their any controversy (nor, among honest folk, is there now). By definition, if it is not alive, one needs no medical procedure such as aborticide to kill it: by definition, if it is not a baby, you are not pregnant. Reality says that oaks make acorns, ducks make ducklings, humans make babies.

The most egregious example of this phenomena, where anti-abortionists talk biology while pro-abortionists talk gibberish, was at a science fiction panel. I asked a pro-abort that if an organism were growing in Mommy’s womb and had XX but not XY chromosomes, what it a female, yes or no? How indeed could this organism be female but not be homo sapiens? It was like saying one could have a living room without a room, or a house attic without a house. One cannot have an existing property without the object in which that property exists. Mr. Doublethink assured me that the organism was only POTENTIALLY and organism, and that having XX chromosomes did not put you into the class of objects “female” but rather meant you were POTENTIALLY female, which is the same as having no sex at all, and no properties, and ergo no object in which those properties inhere, and ergo no right to live.

And by merely calling the Jew an ‘untermensch’ we find, voila, he is no longer protected by the ancient laws of the Koenig and Kaiser of the Germanic Reich, because he is no longer legally a ‘person.’ And if you write the word ‘petrol’ on a can of tomato soup, you can pour it in your automobile fuel tank, and all will run smoothly. This is what they tell themselves is scientific thinking: and we who say water is wet and fire burns, we are merely superstitious bumpkins to them (even if we have degrees and doctorates they lack).

I listened with the same open-mouthed goggle-eyed awe one would listen to Lewis Carol’s Jabberwocky, if Jabberwocky were serious rather than in play: it sounded like words, but it was not words. Twas brillig, and rather slithy at that. To that degree he was willing to prostitute his brain, and utter absurd lies and elliptical paradoxes, merely to defend the central and brain-warping evil of aborticide.

I came up with what I thought was a novel argument, which was, namely, that whether the baby was “human” or not, a parent has a duty to rear and protect the child, and that this duty exists from the first moment any act can tend to harm or tend to protect the child: for exactly this reason maidens are under a duty not to take drugs that might cause birth defects even in children not yet conceived.

Likewise, anyone concerned for the environment acknowledges a duty running to generations yet unborn. In law, a person does not need to exist, or be competent, or be known, to have a duty running to him: a tenant with a life estate in land may not ruin nor despoil the land, even if the heir of the property when the estate reverts is not yet born.

So I proposed that anyone claiming that laws should protect a child from abuse or neglect at the hands of his parents was acknowledging a parental duty of care; and that reality merely made it the case that there were chains of events one could set in motion before the child was born that could wound the child. Therefore the duty obtained from the first moment any act can be done that affects the eventual child; therefore the duty was prenatal. If maiming or lobotomizing the child prenatally was a violation of this duty, maiming it to the point of death a fortiori was a violation. And this was so whether the child was human or subhuman, alive or pre-alive, or however one characterized the condition of the child at the time of the act. The duty was not triggered by the existence of some quality, call it humanity, in the child, but only by the nature of parenthood and the nature of cause and effect.

And I found that no one would address my argument.

All I encountered were either ad hominem attacks against my character (made by people who did not know me, and were not in a position to assess my character) or the opposition would argue against Theism — and their programming of these robots of rhetoric was so strong that even after I told them I was an avowed and devout atheist, THEY SIMPLY REPEATED THEMSELVES...

A Brief Criticism of Modernity

by the eminent scientifiction author John C Wright.  Excerpts:

...The modern educated man, having never read Kant, perhaps having never heard of him, cannot even discuss the topic of Kantian metaphysics, nor say why Kant holds all prior metaphysics to be in error: nor can I clearly explain (unless my listener is very patient, and I have abundant free time) why I deem Kant to be in error.

Let me attempt in brief, and without being too technical. Kant’s error is a paradox. If you believe the metaphysical axiom that only Empirical knowledge is true knowledge, then all metaphyiscal axioms, including this one, are not true knowledge. And if it is not true knowledge, you cannot account for believing it.

This paradox can be resolved only two ways: either accept this (and all) metaphysical axioms as blind and arbitrary acts of the will (This is the Nietzsche solution, and that way leads madness); or accept that this (and all) metaphysical axioms are contingent assumptions like the rules of a chess game, merely inventions for the pleasure and convenience of man, but having nothing to do with reality (this is the logical positivist solution, and that way lies another type of madness).

Since a schoolboy can poke holes in the paradoxes and errors that either one of the two paths to madness maintain, I need not do so here. Just take a look at the post-modern and post-rational, post-ethical world around you.

The real solution to the paradox, of course, is to reason that if the axiom leads to an absurd conclusion, instead of assuming the absurdity is the truth, assume the axiom is wrong...

"...why, when I converted, I converted to Catholicism..."

From some people, a digression is worth just as much as the original conversation.  John C. Wright is one such person, as demonstrated in what follows:

...A digression:

Here is a why, when I converted, I converted to Catholicism. I found, first, that before Henry VIII, all Christians held that divorce was forbidden except in case of unchastity, so the practice from time immemorial of ditching and dispossessing a old wife for a younger, for a time, in Christendom, was abated, if not abolished. That practice has since re-emerged.

Second I found that, as recently as the 1930′s it was not just those zany Catholics, but all mainstream denominations, who forbade the use of contraception as a grave moral evil. Obviously, there had been no new revelation from God nor change in the theological implications of contraception; no wording in the Bible had evolved nor altered, particularly not in the Bibles of those who believe Sola Scriptura.

Third, I realized how simply wise and sublimely wholesome the Catholic teaching about chastity and the integrity of marriage is.

It was when I was in China, and talking to my tour guide, a fine young man named Simon (his English name) that I had driven home between my eyes the true cost and the true horror of the One Child Policy.

I had heard it discussed theoretically before: but this was real, not theoretical.

A prerequisite for obtaining a marriage license was to vow loyalty to the One Child Policy. Abrogation of this vow meant loss of work license and health care, so violators can neither work nor visit doctors, hospitals, pharmacies.

The year came finally when Simon and his wife wanted to have a child, and he duly filled out the paperwork for permission. Without any forewarning, Simon was forbidden by an anonymous old she-bureaucrat from having sexual relations with his wife. He was told that, since the population levels in his province were above quota for that fiscal year, he had to send his wife back home to live with her mother, lest he be tempted to enjoy nuptial pleasures.

The next year he was allowed to resubmit his paperwork.

Simon told the story with the same air of worldly resignation that an American might use to tell about a long wait or some irksome delay at the Motor Vehicles Department. To him, it was just the normal thing.

I asked him if he had any brothers. He said no. I asked him if he had any cousins. He said no. I asked him if he has any uncles or aunts. He said no. The One Child Policy had been in effect long enough that the extended family, once the backbone of the oldest civilized culture in human history, that same extended family whose filial duties form the core of Confucianism, had been abolished by the secular power...

Go to the original post for the rest. And buy his books (note--most written before his conversion, so don't be surprised by the evangelical atheism. They're just darn good high sci-fi/fantasy)!

Techno-Savvy Wisemen

using the very finest Sophotechs:

Go See "Voyage of the Dawn Treader"!

John Wright does a nice review.  A snippet:

...As adaptions go, the changes made were understandable, but I think the adaptation of PRINCE CASPIAN, which was less faithful to the book, made for a better movie.

All in all, I rather liked it. I saw it in 2D, which I recommend. There are so many indecent films, and so many anti-Christian films, we really ought to “vote with our dollars” and encourage films like this.

And I will most likely see it again.

On Vampire Demographics

following the geographical distribution of religious committment--or, in other words, Wright is great at pseudo-history:

...Why, in these modern vampire stories, does the Crucifix not drive back the vampire? There are two answers, one of which I have already mentioned: you have to have the Crucifix be weak, or powered by faith, or something the heroine (because she is a vampire herself) cannot use, or else the fight scene is over before the skyscraper even catches on fire.

The other answer is that the modern audience is mildly (or deeply) offended by the suggestion that one Church might have super-powers that the others lack.

Look, it is merely a historical fact that since Maryland was colonized by Catholics, who brought nine barrels of Holy Water over the Atlantic from Rome, Seven Stars and Seven Stone and One White Tree (that can still be seen in Annapolis) whereas Massachusetts Bay was colonized by Puritans, who smashed out all the stained glass widows aboard the Mayflower, and removed the Holy Rood Screen, so that Massachusetts was therefore helpless before the devils summoned up by desperate Red Indian Medicine Men: to this day, Massachusetts has had a much more severe Vampire infestation problem than Maryland, not to mention the Deep Ones at Innsmouth, Witches in Salem, the Horror at Dunwich and the Joker incarcerated at Arkham.

By a very ancient and significant law, to this day the flagstaff of any flag in Maryland flying the state banner is required to bear aloft the sign of the Bottony Cross. Coincidence? There were no reports of vampire attacks in the state of Maryland this year, except near the Beltway, of course, but that is under the jurisdiction of the Great God Dagon, Lord of the Dark Waters and the Lower Chesapeake, who is sacred to the creatures and Congressmen dwelling in the District of Columbia.

But these historical facts, all of which I made up just now, annoy the modern and politically correct members of the vampire-loving pro-undead audience...

In the Spirit of "No Pressure"

There comes this in the latest line of odd offerings from the authorities:

If only George Orwell had portrayed the futuristic tyrants of England with music and laughter, costumes and gaiety, as the Big Brothers sings the songs of fond childhood memories about the omniscience of the police cameras, and how there is no escape, the parody could not have been believed. The chains binding the beloved magical car of my youthful daydreams to the ground is like a blasphemy to me.

I find this remarkably more chilling than a stern or officious warning, for the same reason that being beheaded by Jack Ketch is somehow worse if he wears, instead of his traditional black hood, a painted clown suit.

And, in the clearest statement of why the No Pressure video is almost incomprehensible coming from the organization which created it:

They are no longer even capable of understanding what their own "art" reveals about them. The people who created that commercial did not, for one second, comprehend in their bovine obliviousness, that they had cast their own side unambiguously in the role of the villian, in their own propaganda piece.

"I saw Christ, and God, and the Virgin Mary..."

One of the most interesting Catholic converts of the past decade (for more on his conversion, see here and here) responds to an atheist's arguments:

I am religious for the very simple reason that I saw Christ, and God, and the Virgin Mary, and they told me things that later turned out to be true, and cured me of physical ailment in a fashion that can only be described as miraculous, to the astonishment of the attending physicians. I also had the faith poured into my soul as wine into a dirty cup, and this only once I became aware that I had a soul. It is a primary awareness, like your awareness that you are alive and conscious. What would convince you that you are currently not conscious? If there is none, how can you say that you seek truth?

In other words, I am a Christian for the entirely empirical reasons. I believe because I have proof that is it unreasonable to doubt.

I believe for the very good reason that when I was an atheist and I said “I do not believe because I see no proof; show me the proof and I shall be believe” that (unlike some atheists) I was actually telling the truth.

I believe in Christ because I met Him...

In order for me to explain away all these miracles as coincidences, or these visitations as hallucinations, I would have to assume so many unsupported and ad hoc assumptions that I would have to depart from my philosophical honesty and integrity, and indulge in special pleading like you do, you who are a man who sticks to his conclusion no matter what the evidence suggests.

Further, once having become Christian, many things that were either unexplained, or inexplicable, or labored under very cynical and flimsy explanations, are coherent. My model of the universe is logical and coherent and has explanatory power; your “model” of the universe, if it can be called that, is an incoherent babble of disconnected assertions that explains little or nothing, not even the nature of cause and effect, nor the origin or purpose of natural law, nor the authority of morality, nor why and how you are awake and alive, or what you are nor where you are going, or whence the Big Bang arose.

We have written eyewitness accounts of the Resurrection, and  men willing to suffer torture and die rather than repudiate them. This is waht lawyers call indicia of reliability; and they fall under the hearsay exceptions of witness being unavailable, being supported by surrounding evidence, and being dying testaments. We have the miracles of Lourdes, investigated by the French government for hundreds of years, and doctors who will attests the cure have no medical explanation. We have the testament of astronomers who can prove that the universe is not infinitely old. We have the testament of your conscience, which, despite your protestations to the contrary, has some source of knowledge of the difference between good and evil, or else you would not speak in condemnatory tones against those you think do not seek truth. We have living eyewitnesses like me, who has seen the risen Christ and experience miracles not to be explained otherwise. We have hundreds, nay, thousands of years of such testimonies.

And we have the fact that the Christian religion is not a scientific theory.
You see, again and again you make what philosophers call a category error. What I have is a marriage to the Living God, a relationship, with all the complexities and moral obligations that relationships imply. It is as if I joined an army or fell in love, and you are asking who I can prove scientifically that I joined an army or that I am in love. We must separate the purely factual claims implied by that relationship from the other elements. Being in an army implies that you think the C.O. exists, which is a matter of fact, and that he has the authority to command you in battle, which is a matter of law. You cannot prove matters of law with a microscope...

But I will answer your question honestly: show me the bones of the Virgin Mary, I will become a Protestant tomorrow. Show me the bones of Christ, I will become a Jew. Show me that the cave of Machpelah is vacant of the bones of the Patriarchs, and I will become a Deist like Tom Paine. Show me the universe is eternally old, not created, not purposeful, and that human consciousness does not exist and that moral law does not bind men, and I will repudiate even Deism.

Well? Put up or shut up. Produce your proofs. Make your case. Bring out your exhibits. The jurors are waiting.

Perhaps it is difficult to produce your proofs on demand. Perhaps the witnesses are dead or far away. Perhaps the physical evidence is hard to acquire. In such cases as this, honest and adult and rational men understand that the conclusions of rational men can differ. When you hear two witnesses who contradict, it is a matter of judgment about whom to trust, or, to use the older and more precise word, a matter of faith, which witness in whom you have faith.

If your model of the universe is correct, I am an insane man who hallucinates, even thought there is no evidence of insanity or hallucination in any other aspect of my life or family history, and, unlike every other hallucination on record, it was one which sobered and improved my life rather than served as evidence of brain malfunction. In order to believe your model of the universe you must take ON FAITH this unsupported idea that I am a madman, even though there is something of a dearth of evidence. You have not looked at my medical record; you have not spoken to my parents; you don’t know me...

The Slide to Modernity

So I was prompted by John C. Wright's rather good post on the possession of the modern age to do an overview of the current situation.

The vision of Pope Leo XIII indicates the past century held the freest action of the devil out of any age in the history of humanity--or any age to come. When one looks at the means of obscuring the truth, blinding humans to reality, and the sheer extent of the turn from reason/nature/God & supernature/Lewis's tao accomplished and set in train, it is not hard to believe that this was the time of the Lord of the Lie.

I would argue that the dictatorship of relativism described by Pope Benedict XVI and the movements towards post-modern deconstruction in academia are strong contributors to obscuring the natural order and rendering humanity far more susceptible to their own fallen natures and the lie.

Dr. Scott Hahn has been doing a discussion of fundamental/natural theology based around Romans 1:20ff, tracing out the pattern of human sin. Once God is rejected for the natural and the natural (animals, plants, whatever) are worshiped, we are given over to our fallen nature. But the slide continues, straight on past the natural to the unnatural, and eventually to the anti-natural.

Well, God was rejected for the natural a long time ago. As I'm discovering while reading Joseph Pearce's excellent biography of Solzhenitsyn, the turn began with the Renaissance repudiation of a God/spiritually centered society (in reaction to purported excesses of the Middle Ages) to an embrace of an anthropocentric society, in which Man assumed the center stage. That right there is the turn to nature, away from supernature.

Since nature is fallen and a wrongful object for worship (which belongs to God alone), worship of nature will make the devotee like the object of devotion. Sin/fallenness increases, and the process of corruption goes forward. For one bit of evidence of this, I offer you the introduction of Machiavellian realpolitik. For another, look at the spectacle of the Borgias and the explosion of clerical corruption only taken care of with the Catholic Counter-Reformation. (I acknowledge the splendors of Renaissance art, the amazing cultural contributions, and the genius pouring out of Italy during that time period. Still, the turn to Man went too far.)

From the new emphasis on Man and in revulsion against the corruptions of society/Church in the course of the Renaissance, we get the Reformation, with the turn to the personal/subjective absolute power to interpret Scripture over against any institutional authority, even if such an authority could claim the apostolic succession. And from the rejection of one external authority, we get the Enlightenment rejection of Scripture as well, repudiating all external authority in favor of the common rule of reason, leading to the dictatorship of the supposedly smarter. Worship of nature grows stronger, perhaps even reaching its height, with the enthronement of the goddess Reason in Notre Dame Cathedral in place of the Christian God. And, as Chesterton points out:

...when the dregs of Diderot's bitterness were reached; when they dragged the Goddess of Reason in triumph through Notre Dame, the smouldering Gothic images could look down on that orgy more serenely then than when Voltaire began to write; awaiting their hour. The age was ended when these men thought it was beginning. Their own mystical maenad frenzy was enough to prove it: the goddess of Reason was dead.

From the Enlightenment, we reach the very strange position of the high modern mind, teetering in the wind on the edge of a cliff. Predominantly, the venerators of the Enlightenment hold that Reason is the highest thing, the governing thing. This belief is dealt some serious blows with the world wars and is only toppled in the wild times of the 60s. Reason did not secure peace or end injustice, as promised--therefore, we must delve deep into emotion, into feeling, into sheer sentimentality. If it feels good, do it.

With the repudiation of reason comes the repudiation of even the God of the philosophers, the God accessible through natural reason, who ruled the world at the beginning, even if we hold that he's never taken a hand in things since. We repudiate the natural and in so doing open the way to choose the unnatural. We repudiate the existence of the God knowable by reason and thereby repudiate his law, written into nature, also knowable by reason.

We arrive at atheism--the repudiation of natural religion. We get the defiant challenge to the notion of any God at all, even one who does not reveal, does not claim any sort of interfering authority, and merely laid down laws at the beginning of all things which ought to be obeyed. One ends up with Nietzche--antiChristly and proud of it, rejecting the Jewish religion and heritage as enslavement, rejecting the rule of reason as an awful dominance of the mind over the strength and energy at the heart of vital life--and Marx--foul is fair and fair is foul because the system is oppressive, and all that it approves merely serves to enslave the individual human. We must therefore draw every circle counterclockwise, turn every crucifix upside down (ala Frost's "objectivity training" in Lewis's That Hideous Strength), because anything evil that is done by the oppressed is really the fault of the oppressor, because we wouldn't be in this war if it weren't for God, now, would we? Cause he made us this way. And it is now all his fault.


So--gender is a cultural construct. Heteronormativity is a cultural construct, as is any imposed system of ethics such as a belief in the right to life (which depends on rational acceptance on the nature of the human person, the existence of natural law, and a law-giver as outlined in the Declaration of Independence--this country and its remarkable understanding of human freedom was founded on natural law/theology/religion), anything factual/true to reality which does not follow the party line, and cultural constructs must each be an artifact of an oppressive patriarchal society, ultimately set in place at the dawn of all things by a Father who art in heaven in order to grind the fascist boot in the face of Lucifer...who is the first Marxist rebel in the history of...history.

The ideology is systematically applied to every aspect of life. Anything which we believe is oppressive becomes a legitimate target for anything and everything necessary to "fix" the problem. We get the spectacle of Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed as well as the spectacle of "conservative" adoption of Saul Alinsky's tactics. Of course, ever since Machiavelli, the belief that the ends justify the means has dogged politics on both ends of the spectrum--the left focusing on "social justice", the right on "national defense/law and order/security/stability"--but it wasn't until the remarkably successful repudiation of natural law/natural theology/natural religion that the full force of the Machiavellian moves could be felt.

Solzhenitsyn chronicled what this looked like in Soviet Russia. Orwell predicted it in 1984 and Animal Farm. Chesterton warned of it and all the consequences of modernity throughout his works. Such moves were played out on the world stage by Hitler, and Lenin, and Stalin, and Mao, and on, and on, till the present day, the most recent political news.

So, in the name of human autonomy, liberation, and choice, we worship the anti-natural, seek to undo the natural by means of everything we have. Looking out upon the world, it is clear that we are plumbing the depths of the anti-natural as we speak. The biological engineering that promises to alter the very meaning of being human (ala Aldous Huxley's Brave New World), the refusal to see or accept the logic of the natural law, and all the revolt against even the Enlightenment faith in reason is the logical consequence of the initial revolt against revelation, against supernature, against the logic of the divine plan.

Fatima gives us the prediction that unless Russia is consecrated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary by the Bishops of the world in communion with the Pope, there shall be the spread of the errors of Russia throughout the world and the destruction of many nations. John XXIII, the pope of 1960, did not do the consecration. He said that the third secret was not for the present time. John Paul II completed the consecration in the mid 80s--it appears to have served to mitigate matters, not to heal or reverse.

The possession of the world is well in hand. The powers and principalities of the heavens, the rulers of this present darkness, cling close to their kingdoms because their time is short. Fatima also predicted a triumph of the Immaculate Heart, which is not dependent on human cooperation--it will come in time. There is a limit to the destruction permitted to the devil, as Pope Benedict wrote in his collection of essays "Values in a Time of Upheaval," and we are called as Christians to live in hope.

Heck, there's a limit to the destruction God permits, period. Even the Apocalypse is full of portions, and times, and half a time, and so forth. So the Devil grasps what he can while he still can. But we have ways to fight him--always have, always will. For more on that, Father Gabriele Amorth's books are good, as well as Matt Baglio's The Rite. For more on what we can do to help turn things around, see Carl Anderson's Civilization of Love and Fr. Robert Spitzer, SJ's Healing the Culture.