Category: Apologetics

In Praise of Hatred

“Hate that which is evil. Cling to that which is good.” Romans 12:9

“A kind Providence has placed in our breasts a hatred of the unjust and cruel, in order that we may preserve ourselves from cruelty and injustice. They who bear cruelty, are accomplices in it. The pretended gentleness which excludes that charitable rancor, produces an indifference which is half an approbation. They never will love where they ought to love, who do not hate where they ought to hate.”

Edmund Burke


Hate gets a bum rap. Here all hate is doing is being the visceral counter-reaction to all that is loved and hate gets hated on. Hate gets maligned with ideas of “hate-crimes,” and “hate-speech,” and “hate-facts.” No one ever faults love when it is invoked for lust and yet hate takes it on the chin by receiving all the bad press and that even when employed properly.

You literature fans… where would you be without hate? How could you have a five star novel without the nobility of hatred in the building conflict? Could Dicken’s, “A Tale of Two Cities” ever have gotten off the ground without building our hatred for Madame De Farge? Would you have ever read Tolkien without Gollum? What would be Beowulf without hatred for Grendel? Even in the Scriptures we keep turning the pages to finally see the Serpent’s head fully crushed.

And what of history? History would be boring if there weren’t people to justly hate. Whether it is Vikud Quisling or Benedict Arnold. Whether it is Judas or Julian the Apostate. Whether it is Pope Francis or Bloody Mary, history wouldn’t be history without a proper hatred for the proper people.

For these reasons alone I think hatred should be toasted. Love gets all the credit but without hated hatred love would just be another ho hum passion losing the ability to be repulsed by what contradicts it.

Consider, for a second, the consequences to our culture because so many have decided that hate is bad. Because we are seeking to ban hate that which fills the vacuum of its absence is tolerance. The consequence of embracing tolerance in place of a full on loving of hate is not that hate disappears but rather is subtly re-directed. We are taught hate is bad and tolerance is good with the result that we now hate ourselves all the while telling ourselves how loving we are being. We used to properly hate those who were seeking to overthrow our the values of a culture that was, at least in part, Christian. Now, we are convinced that it is horrid to hate the opposite what we used to love. It used to be noble to hate sodomy, hate abortion, hate LGBTQ’ism, hate the stranger and alien whose cultural baggage promised the overthrow of our own beloved cultural values. So, hate hasn’t gone away. It has merely changed zip codes. We used to hate the opposite of that which we loved. Now we merely hate ourselves as we tolerate that which is destroying us. We once hated sodomy but we were taught that particular hate was bad and so we replaced our hate with tolerance with the result that we ended up hating our sons as we created a culture wherein they could more easily embrace sodomy. But… hey, it’s all good because we now have the ability to tolerate our sodomite sons. We once hated abortion but we were taught that particular hate was bad and so we replaced our hate with tolerance with the result that we ended up hating our daughters as we created a culture wherein they could more easily secure that needed abortion. We once hated tattoos but we were taught that particular hate was bad and so we replaced our hate with tolerance with the result that we ended up hating our sons and daughters as we created a culture wherein they could more easily ink themselves up. Again… hatred, being an inescapable concept, hasn’t really gone away, it’s merely relocated itself so that we hate ourselves and our kin.

If the God of the Bible hates (Ps.139:22; 119:63; Prov. 6:16-19) , and if we are supposed to aspire to character of God as seen in Christ then hate should be lauded. We see the hate of our Lord Christ in the way He spoke to His enemies and in His expertise in driving out the Bankers out of the Temple. Hate, glorious hate.

Indeed Scripture presses upon God’s people to properly hate.

Ecclesiastes 3

There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under the heavens:

8 a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace.

Psalm 139

Do I not hate those who hate you, Lord,
and abhor those who are in rebellion against you?
22 I have nothing but hatred for them;
I count them my enemies.

Proverbs 8:13

The fear of the Lord is hatred of evil. Pride and arrogance and the way of evil and perverted speech I hate.

And yet we are still told my our clergy corps that Christians ought not to hate instead of being taught that Christians ought not to hate unrighteously and so improperly. In being taught not to hate by our Clergy what we are being taught, by force of inevitability, is the virtue of tolerance, which, as we enumerated above, merely re-locates the address of the inescapable hate so that we become self-haters.

Ironically, in the Church’s “war on hate,” as led by our emasculated clergy, what ends up happening is that Western Christians are having their auto-immune system shutdown so that everything that would have been rejected by the glorious work of auto-immune hate is now slipping through and sickening the Christian faith unto death. Instead of our hate energized auto-immune system spitting out the Aimee Byrds, Greg Johnsons, and Sean Michael Lewis instead without Biblical hate we are infected by their viruses.

No other faith system is doing this to itself. It seems that Western Christians alone have decided that Christians need to love everybody in a multicultural orgy which is promissory of the death of Western Christianity since it can no longer resist the death viruses of a border-less world, New World Order globalism, and the diminution, disappearance or enslavement of the Occidental Christian race which Christ has been pleased, as seen in history, to retain as the carriers of His faith across the world.

Another way this demented war on haters is seen is in the rabid opposition against opposition. The only thing that can be strongly opposed is strong opposition. To strongly oppose is to be “too intense,” or “not morally sensitive,” or even “Fascist.” It is just not good form or socially acceptable to bare one’s teeth at anybody or anything. It is possibly acceptable to be pro-life, pro-borders, pro-marriage, pro-truth in media, pro-just hiring practices but just try being anti-baby killers, anti-immigration, anti-sodomites, anti-lugenpresse, and anti-race quotas. Just see how the invitations to the societal soirees begin to decline. We are so afraid of rabid and reasonable opposition that we will not tolerate plain speaking and insist on circumlocutions in order to avoid being labeled (gasp) “haters.” Of course being “anti-racist,” and anti, “anti-Semite” still is considered acceptable hate and will get you a pass into all just the right parties.

Whence comes this war on hate? Let me offer a few guesses,

1.) A few days ago a friend of mine who is one of the sharpest laymen I know wrote me and reported,

“Yesterday morning we tuned into the church webcast to learn that it doesn’t really matter what you know (those were his words) because all you need is LUV. He then spent 20 minutes expounding on that theme.”

I have no empirical data but I suspect that this kind of preaching is not that uncommon in Churches (conservative and liberal) across the nation. If all you need is LUV then hating hate is the preeminent virtue for any Christian.

2.) The ubiquitous conviction by dumbed down Americans that “all is well.” Despite the fact that we are living in an epoch that never called more for hatred of the best vintage we remain convinced that “all is well,” and anybody who says to the contrary is to be shunned. Dr. Andrew Joyce says it well,

“Merely sharing your feelings of intense dislike, now termed “inciting hatred,” has been deemed criminal conduct in scores of Western countries. Criminal conduct! This despite the fact there has never been a point in our history more deserving of the deepest loathing, the most scathing contempt, and the most vicious hatred.”

Here we are living with effeminate Churches, chaste queer clergy in skinny jeans and sleeve tattoos, mass immigration of strangers and aliens for whom toilets are a novelty, public library Tranny reading hour, the enstupidification of America’s students, and we are being told that it is just so gauche to express the finest hatred, loathing, barbs of detest, rancor, enmity, and bitterness, that one can find within them. If there was a time for Menckenian opprobrium this is it. If ever we should marshal the sarcasm of Ambrose Bierce, this is it. Let us call down the giftedness of skewering as found in Nock, Johnson, and Chesterton. Our great love for the pure makes this properly a “time for hatred.”

3.) Post-modernism disallows us to characterizes anything as objectively bad. Nothing is intrinsically virtuous and so to be loved and nothing is intrinsically vile and so to be hated. We can handle hearing people say, “I love this or that,” because post-mondernism and deconstructionism teaches us that these kinds of value statements are person variable. However to say, “I hate this or I hate that,” we immediately recoil since that has the ring of a universal statement. How care anybody hate anything since nothing is intrinsically hateful.

4.) We hate Christ. Christ had no problem hating that which was hateful but since we hate Christ we refuse to hate what His Word identifies as hateful.

Conclusion

We have need to understand that there is an effect to this cause. When we choke off our ability to hate we, by necessity diminish our ability to love since love and hate are but the same emotion as pointed in opposite directions. We hate that which contradicts what we love and we love that which reverses or suffocates what we hate. If we cannot hate our capacity to love will be stunted and deformed. Indeed so related are love and hate that should you ever meet someone who tells you they don’t have a bone of hatred in their body, you can be sure you are talking too either a sociopath or a psychopath. Run for your life.

Godfrey Disembowels Van Drunnen & Quite Without Realizing It Enervates R2K

This below linked rebuttal of Dr. Van Drunnen by Dr. Godfrey is uneven and isn’t everything I might want it to be but it is enough to unravel the whole R2K project.

In this conversation / interview with Robert Godfrey, David Van Drunnen’s R2K ideas were exposed, not merely as weak, but as fatuous. Godfrey really bored in on Van Drunnen’s claim that there is no such thing as a Christian family and exposed Van Drunnen’s weakness in this claim.

Listen to Godfrey here,

“Is the family a common institution in every way? It seems to me that the Bible say’s “no, it is not a common institution in every way.” If it were a common institution in every way how could the Apostle Paul talk about the children of belivers as ‘holy?'” Children, it seems to me, must be seen on a Two Kingdoms approach, as Dr. VanDrunnen expresses it as a cultural product of a common grace institution, and cultural products of common grace institution are never taken over into the new heavens and the new earth.”

Now, keep in mind that if Van Drunnen’s R2K fails at any point along the line of everything the man says is common (in this case family) Van Drunnen’s whole project fails and Godfrey has completely, by a withering enfilade of probing unanswerable questions, revealed the failure of the R2K project by leveraging the issue of family.

The reason that the whole project fails is if anything outside the Church is considered distinctly Christian then there is then no stopping point. If families can be considered Christian families then there is no reason to say that, “well, one way a Christian family is distinctly Christian is by offering Christian Education.” If there is such a thing as Christian family then one reason why must be christian Education and if Christian families are made, in part, by Christian education, then R2K fails again since the whole premise of R2K is that Family, Education, Law, Politics, Arts, Civil-Social, etc. can never be distinctly Christian but are neutral and so common.

Van Drunenn sought to prove too much with his R2K project and with Godfrey’s exposure of the emptiness of VanDrunnen’s position on Christian family in relation to R2K Godfrey (perhaps without intent) destroyed the whole R2K project for those with eyes to see.

It seems upon reflection that Van Drunnen and the R2K boys have made the mirror opposite error of old Rome. Old Rome said that if anything was to be Holy it had to come inside the Church. Van Drunnen and the R2K punch drinkers are saying that nothing is Holy except the Church therefore everything is outside the Kingdom of God.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agwVVqiAr9A&fbclid=IwAR3CnpiO9tG0bkv-mZo48J4dHV31N84hEU0dpDqRO73kSm_upEJHJZEa6CA

 

McAtee vs. DeGroot; Does Secularism Exist, etc.?

Recently, I had an exchange with a chap whose claim to fame is writing for a Libertarian publication.


Christopher DeGroot wrote,

So, wars per se are driven by “secular powers”? How very convenient for one’s religious bias! Is it also true that everything good in the world derives from religion? And everything bad from secular types (and perhaps also Democrats?)

  • Bret L. McAtee

    Yes, it is true that everything good in the world derives from Biblical Christianity. And yes everything bad in the world derives from a secularism that is driven by religions other than Christianity. (Secularism, being a myth and all, it has to first be posited upon and driven by some alien religion.) Finally wars are always driven by religion. There is nothing that exists that isn’t driven by religion.


  • Christopher DeGroot

    Dazzlingly brilliant comments! How the goal posts shift with all the comfort and convenience of a La-Z-Boy Chair! Providence itself is guiding you, I have no doubt. So, there was no good in the world before Christianity? If so, why did the world exist before Christianity? If your answer is, “to make way for Christianity,” then why did it take so long for Christianity to come upon the scene? Why is it that historically most religions have not even been monotheistic? Was Plato’s life without goodness? What about that of Confucius?


  • Bret L. McAtee

    1.) Why, of course Providence is guiding me. There is nothing that Providence doesn’t guide. Even your smart-ass rejoinders.

    2.) There has never been a time when Christianity hasn’t been. So, naturally, there was never a time when anything good in the world existed before Christianity or its Hebrew anticipation. In point of fact, without Christianity there is no ability to distinguish good and evil and so when one talks about “no good before Christianity,” one might as well be saying, “wero 087yx zcvvbwe co98gws.”

    3.) The world did not exist before Christianity. As it is the case that God created the heavens and the earth, and as it is the case that the Christian God’s word was flouted in the Garden resulting in the Christian God casting out our first parents, it seems rather obvious that Christianity, at least in its Hebrew anticipations existed before the incarnation of the God-Man who had the title “Christ.” (It’s why we can write of “Christophanies” in the OT.) So you see, Christianity was there from the beginning.

    4.) Most religions have not been monotheistic because they were and are of their father the devil. Even the one’s which putatively monotheistic and denied Christ (Talmudism, Islam, etc.) were of their Father the devil. Besides, you don’t really think that one comes to truth by counting noses do you? All because most religions have not been monotheistic therefore monotheism isn’t true?

    5.) Yes, Plato’s life was without redemptive goodness, though on a sliding scale Plato has things in his life which were less bad than others, though in an absolute sense they could never be called good. There is only one that is good.

    6.) Same goes with Confucius. And just so we are on the same page… the same goes with Mohamed, Zarathustra, Mani, the Buddha, Joseph Smith, Mary Baker Eddy, and any other false prophet you might want to conjure up.

    Shall we continue? I promise you, by dazzling brilliance is a well that has no bottom.


    Christopher De Groot

Bret L. McAtee, frankly, I think you are a joke, so I am not interested in wasting more time on you–all you are good for is amusement. You have not answered a thing; nor, it seems, do you know what it means to make a coherent and substantive argument. It is a FACT–whatever you may think or say–that Christianity came very late in human history. This I pointed out. Your dogmatic response: “Christianity always was.” Most religions have indeed been polytheistic. Your dogmatic response: “Polytheism is the work of the devil.” And so on and so forth. Maybe you really think you have demonstrated something with these assertions. Anyway, you are just not serious, nor is your stupidity allied to conceit worth my time.


Bret L. McAtee responds,

1.) I have already taught you how it is not the case that Christianity is a johnny come lately religion. I taught you that Christianity was present in the anticipation of the faithful expressions of the Hebrew Old Testament religion. That Christianity as a religion began with Christ is really quite the heresy that no knowledgeable Christian embraces. If that were the case we would just excise the Old Testament.

2.) But Polytheism is the work of the devil. It is the work of men seeking to avoid the unavoidable Christian God so as to make an idol for themselves. I’m not sure what that is so difficult to understand.

3.) You seem to continue to be under the illusion that all because polytheism has been popular therefore polytheism is true and the monotheism that is Christianity is false. That is most strange reasoning.

Most men throughout history believe that Stalin didn’t attack Poland 15 days after Hitler did therefore Stalin didn’t attack Poland 15 days after Hitler did. You do see how strange this method of reasoning is right?

I am more than willing to allow folks to determine who is the person who is not serious in all this Christopher.

Forbidding The Strong God

“Multiculturalism focuses on disenchanting the Western tradition because it alone has a hold on our spiritual and political imagination and provides us with a home. So, for example, progressives in Europe attack strong expressions of Christianity but accommodate rigid and illiberal forms of Islam. They do this because Christianity is a strong God of the West whose return must be prevented. “

R. R. Reno
Return of the Strong Gods — p. 118

This quote inadvertently confirms what I’ve long been insisting. Multiculturalism (the Child of Cultural Marxism) exists only penultimately to get rid of White people. The ultimate target of Cultural Marxism is Christ and Christianity and Christendom. White people aren’t hated because they are White. White people are hated because they are Christian. They are the carriers of Christian civilization. As such they must be wiped out. Not for the crime of being White, but instead for the crime of being Christian.

Note, here that R2K aids and abets this Cultural Marxist multiculturalist agenda when it agrees (as it ALWAYS DOES) with the idea of ridding ourselves of Christendom. Let it be said here though, that without Christendom, Christianity wanes and become just another kooky cult like L. Ron Hubbard’s Christian Scientism or Anna Bell Lee’s Shaker community. If Biblical Christianity is going to wax then it must build a Christendom to express itself. If R2K is successful Christianity will be the religion of only hobos, derelicts, and moon-bats. A religion that cannot incarnate itself into a distinct social order is a religion that is Gnostic. May God cast R2K as a kooky religion into the dustbin of cultic “Christianity” and grant repentance in the R2K community, who in the name of Christ are pulling down Christ from His throne and may He damn R2K’s dancing partner Cultural Marxism who right now is playing girl on top in many putatively conservative Reformed denominations.

Answering R2K On “Continuing Cities”

For here we do not have a continuing city, but we are seeking the city which is to come. (Heb. 13:14)

Radical Two Kingdom “Theology” in order to prove that Christians should NOT be politically involved or political activists as armed with a Church endorsed understanding of Scripture twist this Hebrews passage to support their public square Quietism. Per R2K, Christians are to not worry about the culture because that is being culture warriors. This passage in Hebrews is leveraged by R2K fanboys in order to communicate that since we don’t have a lasting city therefore we shouldn’t be over involved in the non-lasting cities while we are seeking this non corporeal city.

How do Biblical Christians counter this fallacious handling of the text?

Well, first we understand the Hebrews 13 passage in context. The writer to the Hebrews is NOT saying that since Christians are seeking out a disembodied city we are to be unconcerned with the cities we inhabit to the point that we don’t seek to have our cities reflect the character of God.

The writer to Hebrews was communicating to the Hebrew Christians that THE city of all cities (Jerusalem) though still standing was not the beau ideal. The recipients of the letter to the Hebrews were to understand that there was a better and more permanent city that they had already come to and that was the Jerusalem of above (Hebrews 12:22-23). This was important to communicate to these Hebrews because the temptation that they were prone to was to give up Christianity in order to return to Judaism. So, the point here wasn’t that the Hebrews were to become Retreatists in terms of their place of residence but rather it was to tell the Hebrews “Don’t go back to anti-Christ Judaism.” After all, they had a heavenly city to cling to (Heb. 12:22-24) as it relates to the cult function for which they were looking. Those Hebrews didn’t need an Aaronic Priesthood, daily blood ablutions, or the venerating of the Temple. Those were obsolete because fulfilled in Christ.

In point of fact and quite to the contrary to the insistence of the R2K fanboys that Christians shouldn’t seek to transform our cities and cultures in a Christ honoring direction we see that in Acts 17 in Ephesus, the Gospel does challenge city-state power structures. There in Acts 19 the Christians, upon the impact of the Gospel, did understand their current city as lasting enough to bring magic books to be burned, old gods to be eschewed, and economic realities reorganized.

Further, Matthew 5:5 teaches that Christian are to inherit not only lasting cities but also the whole earth. How can we inherit the earth if we are to eschew it per R2K malfeasance.

Of course there remains a “not yet” to the Christian eschatological understanding. Scripture teaches that to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. Scripture teaches that these light and momentary afflictions are nothing to be compared to the weight of glory that shall be revealed in us. But until the time we join the Church at rest we are to be part off the Church militant and that means seeking to exercise the dominion that we have been given in Christ Jesus.

Christendom (and the Church as seen by the prevalence of R2K “theology”) is currently occupied by a foreign pagan people and is being ruled over by usurpers and this is, in part, due to the fact that we have putative theologians in the Reformed Church insisting that those who are most Holy are those who most quickly surrender to those who hate Christ. Quite to the contrary the role of the people of the Kingdom of Christ is to overthrow the usurpers, to turn the foreign pagan people back into hewers of wood and drawers of water unless they repent and to incarnate the ever present Lordship of Jesus Christ and His Kingdom into every nook and cranny of existence.

This is, in part, what…”Thy Kingdom come thy will be done on earth as in heaven” means.

Renounce the Mephistophelian R2K… become Christian.