Category: Culture

Scholars and authors will often speak of our increasingly “secular” culture, but this is a confusing speech habit that does not tell the whole story. Noting the secularization of our culture is only half of the repentance equation that is being played out.

Repentance is a matter of turning from course while turning to another course. When we read of secular culture or how the West is being secularized or of our ongoing secularization what is being noted is only the negative movement of Repentance where something is being turned from. That which is being turned away from, when scholars write of secularization, is the Christianity that has so influenced America since its founding.

There is however a positive movement in this secularization process. The repentance we are experiencing in secularization is not only a turning away from Christianity but also a turning to and a movement towards pagan belief systems (various expressions of humanism). Not only are we becoming more secular we are also becoming more anti-Christ.

To speak of our secularization without also speaking of our secularization thus is significantly misleading if only because it suggests that Christianity is being moved away from to a realm that is not identified by some kind of faith expression. Whenever you read of the “secularization” of the West you should insert the word “paganism” along with it. It is not just that the West is becoming more secular but it is also that the West is becoming more secular because it is becoming more pagan. In turning from its Christian roots it is turning to and planting roots in a pagan faith system.

Religious Secularism Begins To Awaken To Its Peril

Wherein the religious fundamental Secularists realize the only way they can defeat fundamental Religions is to become more self-consciously religious and fundamentalist complete w/ a Missionary sense..

Fascinating article.

http://newhumanist.org.uk/2267/battle-of-the-babies

Teaser —

“I ask him what he thinks we should be doing about the rise of religious fundamentalism that threatens to swamp liberal enlightenment Secularism…

“It may be necessary for secular people to have slightly more children but it would be nicer if we could get fundamentalists to have fewer children.” A strangely authoritarian notion to fall from the lips of a self-confessed liberal. “Yes,” he admits, “imposing restrictions would be condemned as discriminatory. But there are carrots as well as sticks….

Another scenario he imagines in his conclusion is that secularism might start to do a better job of winning over the children of religious fundamentalism. But at the moment he sees no statistical sign of this, and he seems gloomy about the prospect. Why? “Part of my argument is that religion does provide that enchantment, that meaning and emotion, and in our current moment we lack that. This is the challenge for secularism: can it come up with such an ideology?”

To my mind this looks a worrying prospect. Counter religion by producing a new kind of secular enchantment? Doesn’t it also betray a lack of conviction about the values that underpin our current society and the appeal they might hold for anyone who comes into contact with them? In a review of Christopher Caldwell’s book on European migration, which made similar warnings to Kaufmann’s, Kenan Malik undercuts the scaremongering that so often accompanies discussion of demography by suggesting that we already have a powerful weapon against the trends, if only we could see it. “What has eroded,” he argues, “is faith in the idea that it is possible to win peoples of different backgrounds to a common set of secular, humanist, enlightened values. And that is the real problem: not immigration, nor Muslim immigration, but the lack of conviction in a progressive, secular, humanist project.”

What Kaufmann and Malik are certainly in accord on is the need to displace the multicultural “celebration of difference” model of toleration with one that contains a far more robust sense of common values and a far more stringent rejection of reactionary fundamentalism. “We need a stronger sense of liberal values,” Kaufmann told me. “We should answer back to all fundamentalisms.”

Romans 13 And The Subjection Of the State to God

Here is a link where Rushdoony does a bang up job looking at Romans 13. RJR is seeking to correct the current Christian notion that the State is to be given absolute allegiance.

http://www.chalcedon.edu/blog/2007/08/rushdoony-on-romans-13.php

Teaser –

“It should be apparent by now that Paul not only places civil government under God, but he implicitly and surely requires that civil government comply with God’s law. This is clear from Paul’s references to civil government: it is “ordained of God,” as are all things, and, like everything else in the universe, must serve God. This same verse 1 also requires everyone to be “subject unto the higher powers.” Both words, ordained and subject, have reference to a God-established order, and both every man and every ruler are placed under that order with a duty to comply to it. The declaration by “Peter and the other apostles” that “We ought to obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29) applies equally to the subject and the ruler, to the state and to the citizen. There are no exemptions from God’s law.”

“Even the optics must be irritating. A woman (Nancy Pelosi) pushed the health care bill through the House. The bill’s most visible and vocal proponents included a gay man (Barney Frank) and a Jew (Anthony Weiner). And the black man in the White House signed the bill into law. It’s enough to make a good old boy go crazy.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/27/opinion/27blow.html

This NY Times opinion article is interesting because it insists that the direction that this country is taking is unchangeable. People who don’t like Marxism are told in this article that they just need to get used to being obsolescent, and that the country that they love will never come back.

Now, all that may be true. I am yet undecided whether or not the hour is to late in this country for it to return to the religious and theological roots that contributed significantly to what it once was. However that turns out I find it interesting that the people this African-American writers cites in the quote above are all representatives of the people groups that cultural Marxism have employed as their cultural neo-proletariat shock troops to tear up the theological and religious roots that once supported what this country leaned towards. Remember, that in the Cultural Marxism of Gramsci, Georg Lukacs, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno and others of the Frankfurt school, those employed to overturn the old “oppressive Christian social order” are those who believe that they have grievance against that old system. Women (Pelosi) have grievance against its patriarchal nature. The Sexually deviant (Barney Frank) have grievance against its heterosexual monogamous nature. The pagan Secularist Jews (Anthony Weiner) have grievance against its Christian nature, and the Blacks (Barack Obama) have grievance against its White nature. All of these groups, as embodied by the above representatives, also have in common allegiance to a religious theological and ideological system that overthrows both the Christian faith and the culture that it creates. To these groups anybody who supports the previous order is a racist, xenophobe, homophobe, sexist, anti-semite.

This is why the writer of the NY Times piece so easily implies that those who don’t support the ideological tending of the country are racists, uneducated, irrationally enraged, rednecks. In his cultural Marxist multi-cultural world anybody who isn’t Marxist and who doesn’t agree w/ political correctness or multi-culturalism is, by definition, a nekulturny troglodyte.

Recently, I am interacting w/ one of the Ph.D’s at my college Alma Mater. Dr. Schenck and I are about as polar opposite as one can imagine in our belief systems and our notions about the nature of reality. Recently, he wrote a brief bit about the dangers of “labelism” that you can read below. It suspiciously reads like it was a treatise born of a liberal and post-modern agenda. Now, certainly some of what Dr. Schenck wrote was true. It is absolutely true that we all need to be careful about hasty generalizations, false compositions, and false divisions. However his piece struck me as one that could as easily been written concerning the opposite dangers of “Label-phobia” (my new word to be submitted to the Webster Dictionary people) to describe many of Dr. Schenck’s positions.

I interact w/ Dr. Schenck’s material because I still have a soft spot for the Wesleyans in my heart. Nothing will ever change how much the Wesleyans did for me in my first 22 years of life. As such, I’d like them to be as orthodox as it is possible for Wesleyans to be. Dr. Schenck is dragging them away from that Wesleyan orthodoxy.

I am coming to have a growing admiration for Dr. Schenck for I find him to be a person who can get my creative juices flowing. Perhaps, I am finding in him a muse?”

Dr, Schenck wrote,

I have a suggestion for a new word for the dictionary:

labelism: The tendency to skew diverse particular ideas, events, people, and so forth by grouping them under overly generalized labels in the service of argument.

Examples:

* Those who favor women in ministry are liberals because radical feminists push for equal rights and pay for women.

* True conservatives are opposed to gun control because gun control is generally pushed by Democrats.

* Allowing the government to manage some area of its citizens’ life shows that we are becoming socialist like China.

* Taxing us to support the health care of the elderly shows that we are becoming communist like the Soviet Union.

* Making decisions that are unpopular shows that President Obama is a Fascist like Hitler.

* You can’t believe in the idea that Mark was a source for Matthew and Luke because that is an idea that comes from higher criticism.

* The students at Oberlin were transcendentalists like Emerson who didn’t believe in a personal God because they put a high emphasis on religious feeling like the Romantics.

All these statements are logically fallacious, even though they are the stuff of common rhetoric. They take diverse realia and oversimplify them because the human mind has difficulty processing complexity.

Logical fallacies involved: 1) hasty generalization, where differences between one observation and a general conclusion are ignored in the midst of argument; 2) fallacy of composition, where a whole is assumed to have certain characteristics because some parts have certain characteristics; and 3) fallacy of division, where all parts of something are assumed to all have certain characteristics because of some characteristic of the whole.

Explanation: The human mind is generally unable to process large amounts of particular facts without grouping them together into schemata, as Piaget called them. In deductive reasoning, where all the data can be accounted for and where all the data is usually of a simple nature, universal groupings can be fully coherent.

In inductive thinking, however, which is the nature of our lives in the world, all the data can rarely be accounted for, and the data is almost never a simple nature. People, events, and various other particular data are extremely complex and interwoven together. Simple ideas thus can hardly represent them without skew of some kind.

Beware of generalizations bearing fallacies! The Devil is in the details.”

Bret responds,

I have a suggestion for a new word for the dictionary:

Label-phobia: The tendency to skew related particular ideas, events, people, and so forth by refusing to properly generalize them in order to put them in the service of argument.

Further, this would be the state or condition of refusing to see patterns or the refusal to speak in generalities unless 100% compliance was held in each and every generality. Un-labelism or Non-Labelism or Label-phobia would flinch at Universals preferring instead to see the world only in terms of mass and total differentiated individuation. Label-phobia, Un-labelism or Non-labelism would be something consistent w/ a kind of post-modern reading of reality where, if universals exist, they only exist on a (you guessed it) an individual by individual basis.

Examples of such would be,

* A refusal to label those who hold to women in ministry as “liberal” since the un-labelists refuses to see that generally speaking people who embrace women in office also embrace a confluence of other liberal positions.

* A refusal to label Obama as a Marxist even though his past associations, his past employment, his administration appointments and his current actions all testify that Obama is a Marxist.

* A refusal to label the current government as socialist even though there has been a long and decided trend in US government (which has displayed Fabian waxing and waning) for 100 years. This refusal to label is defiant even in the most egregious of evidence to the contrary such as the State taking over much of the Financial infrastructure, the Auto industry, the health industry and the student loan industry.

* A refusal to identify and label neo-orthodoxy and higher criticism even when people clearly embrace a distinction between geschicte and heilgeschicte.

* A refusal to label the Oberlin College of the 19th century as Transcendentalist even though Finney had clearly drank deeply from the Transcendental / Romanticist zeitgeist. (Indeed, so deeply had the man quaffed from the spirit of the age that when you read his systematic theology you realize that it is all ethics and no grace. All what man does and none of what God does. There is no personal God in Finney’s theology.)

All this refusal to label might be seen as endemic to the post-modern mind which refuses to see universals or organize material into universal universals. Indeed, label-phobia might be seen as the mark of the post-modern.

Beware the refusal to generalize, and to label and recognize the presence of the Universal. The devil would love for us to be forever knowing but never coming to the Truth.

Beware of non-labelists or Un-labelists who create words like “labelism” in order to demonize those who do not have a post-modern bent mind.

Simple ideas such as label-phobia can hardly represent truth without skewing of some kind.

“Sometimes long term history impacts the now, and we’re in it. A schism — like two tectonic plates that suddenly shift after a hundred years of energy building up. This is really the end of the Western Christian Empire. (The Western Christian Empire) was bigger than the British Empire, bigger than the American Empire. This is the end of all the Christian Empires for 900 years, and America is the last one (i.e. — the last expression of that 900 year Empire). When the last one changes and declines — which it is in — (and it will be very rapid), that is the end of the old system. At the same time the system that rises challenges it (the old system) far quicker as it moves into the vacuum created by the collapse of the old system. And that is the East. And we all know that there is going to be a change. The surprise will be the rate of that change. We have viewed the new administration in Washington as new hope. Unfortunately, if you look at historical precedents of underclass and the mechanism of underclass coming to the fore demographically, it is not new hope it is the beginning of the end, and we are seeing that very quickly take place.”

http://www.cnbc.com/id/36013573

David Murrin
Head Of Emergent Hedge Fund
Author — Breaking the Code of History

1.) The Christian Empire always managed to survive somehow. When the Goths challenged brought the fall of Rome the Christians missionaries brought the Gospel to the Goths. When the Muslims challenged Christianity and Christendom God raised up Charles Martel and eventually Charlemagne. When the Muslims pressed to the gates of Vienna God closed the gap with the Christian Knights of the West. When Christianity and Christendom became corrupted by the Medieval Church God raised up the Reformation. When the British Empire fell at the end of WWI the Americans were there to take up the banner of Christendom. If America falls the doddering remains of what is left of Christendom is finished and Christianity as a faith that can inspire civilization goes into abeyance.

Some, as those foul and vile adherents of R2Kt, will say “good riddance.” But their chortling will be cut short with the first blade that is drawn across their throats as wielded by those who have triumphed over the Christian faith. Ironically, the very civilization R2Kt despised also protected their ability to rail against it. When that Christian civilization disappears, so will their ability to rail and so will their “churches”.

2.) If Murrin is correct and the West really dies there will be no place to go, no place to run, no place to hide. There will be no safe havens. If the West falls the window shade of civilization is pulled and we will return to a new dark age of tyranny, chaos, and bedlam. Most people do not realize that the command and control economies of the world only work as well as they do because they have been able to rely on the wealth generation that happens in America. For example, it is a well known fact that the Soviet Union would have collapsed years prior to 1989 if the West, w/ its wealth, had quit supporting the Soviet Union. Since this is true the collapse of the West means the collapse of the World in terms of the living standard around the world. The whole world is going to go into shock and wonder what happen when the golden goose is finally killed off.

3.) I don’t think I agree w/ Murrin about the rise of the East. China does not have the infrastructure or the economic heft to practice global hegemony. I think that that it is far more likely that we will return to an era where regional powers dominate certain geographic areas.

4.) There has been rumors that have circulated in Washington that the current administration sees its role as managing America’s decline.

5.) The question we all must ask is how do each of us prepare ourselves for the short term and long term change that is coming. I don’t know the answers to that question.

6.) Murrin’s comment about the underclass coming to the fore is a nod to the reality that w/ a wealth redistribution agenda that putatively serves the poor the consequence is fiscal catastrophe.