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Religion as the Opiate of the People

When Marx said that “religion is the opiate of the people” what he was getting at is that religion becomes that means by which oppressed people put up and live with their oppression. They continue going on being oppressed because their religion somehow tells them that their oppression is a good thing and that God is pleased with their oppression and that if they are just patient God will sort it all out. This religion Marx saw as creating passivity in people against injustice.

And I must say that when I look at the current Romans 13 crowd who teach that God is pleased with their being ruled by tyrants and usurpers I must quite agree with Marx. In such a scenario Christianity is serving as an opiate of the people deadening Christians to the call in Scripture to have no God but God and to throw off oppressors.

However, you can see from Marx’s teaching how this idea of religion as the opiate of the people once removed would work in people in such a way as to create a revolutionary uprising. If you can convince perverts, feminists, and minorities that they have been oppressed by Christianity (and Christianity should always oppress wickedness) then naturally perverts, feminists, and minorities are going to want to overthrow the religion that is Christianity.

What I can’t figure out though is why the church wants to make friends with those that want to destroy them. The only way to evangelize these people is to defeat them in the public square. We will not win them to Jesus by surrendering to them our principles or way of thinking. They must understand that Christianity offers to them as in the public square either more oppression given their ongoing wickedness or a rescuing from their wicked lifestyle that is destroying them. No in-between.

Our enemies understand this better than we do. Our enemies understand, that in terms of the public square that they have to completely defeat us. This is the whole idea behind cancel culture. They are not interested in “friendship evangelism,” in the sense that they hope that if they are just nice enough to us by bringing cookies over and watching the house when we are gone they will convert us to their way of thinking. No, they understand that Biblical Christians must be defeated if they are going to be able to freely pursue their perverted polymorphism. As such, they go on economic purges to destroy their enemy.

Most Christians are not going to agree with me but Christians must come to this same understanding. We must defeat the enemies of Christ in the public square lest they succeed in rolling Jesus Christ off His throne. Oh, we can continue to seek to show kindness to them in the more personal and private realms. We can lookout for them and care for them when they are sick. We can try to help their children. We can shovel the snow off their sidewalk. However, as it pertains to the public square, we must defeat them. We must thoroughly dismantle their worldview by breaking up their worldview furniture. We must push them back into the societal closets so that it is not our Christian children who are forced into the closets they once inhabited. We must make their “love” to be once again the love that dare not speak its name.

However, I think this is all quite unlikely for now because Christians do not yet understand that they are now in the fight for their lives. We are still too interested in being seen as various versions of Rev. LoveJoy from the Simpsons. We no longer have the grit in us of a Charlemagne or a Sobieski. Because of that we will continue to see Christian civilization sink into the abyss all the while embracing Christianity as an opiate as an excuse not to fight back.

The Remnant — A Personal Observation

This morning I opened up my e-mail and found that I had received correspondence from one of the remnant in Virginia.

Then I paused again to realize how blessed by God I am to know the people that I know.

These remnant types who write me are the cream of the country. It is unfortunate that they are scattered so thinly across the nation. But they are out there and I hear from them regularly and I am the one who is blessed by that. I don’t think that I could have kept whatever little sanity that I have left if it were not for the 7000 who have not bowed the knee to Baal who resolve to stay in touch with me.

I hear from them in text, e-mail, pm, proton-mail, telephone, skype and just about any other way one can imagine. The thing we have in common is a longing for the glory of God to be seen and a return to the halcyon days when the insanity could be navigated. We also have in common the realization that that is not going to happen in our lifetimes and so our job is now to play the watchmen on the wall who shouts out the warning — a warning that is neither wanted nor can be heard.

There they are all across the country. Sunday it was texting with one of the several who lives in Georgia.  Today it was an e-mail from a Saint in Virginia. Once a month it is a phone call from England. Then there are the lads in Idaho. Their numbers might be able to support a small church. Tennessee checks in with a dear couple who introduced me to a radio format — now the radio format guys are part of this not large enough remnant. There are the Saints here in this congregation. They deserve a higher place in heaven just for putting up with me through the years. No better group of people could a minister hope for. There are other Saints spread across the WOKE state of Michigan. One of them is closer than a brother. Texas is another spot where several of the warrior-priests live and it is conversational heaven to engage with them. Louisiana, Alabama, South Carolina, Indiana, Kentucky — the remnant is out there, it is just that we are spread too thin like too little butter over too much bread. They will never know what a blessing to me they have been. I weep for them because there are not enough of us.

You see, ideally, these are the people who would be your neighbor across the street or in the house next to you. The fellowship could be more immediate and the mutual support more tactile.

Whether it is the Saints in Canada or S. Africa or in America one thing is constant and that is the desire for a decent church to attend. Let me remind you again … these are the cream of Christianity. These are the remnant and yet it is this very group that laments to me that “there isn’t a decent church around me to attend.” The reason for this is that they expect the church to be the church, but what they find instead is WOKE, or R2K, or FV, or Dispensationalism, or who knows what other flavor of cultural captivity. So, they reach out to me — a minister they know who himself can’t find a denominational home for the same reason they can’t find a congregational home.

So we provide mutual encouragement to one another. We remind each other of the necessity to be optimistic — we serve the King and so can not be otherwise. We remind each other that all of what we are living through is to the ultimate end of the build-up of the present kingdom. We swap gun stories. We correlate the activity of the enemy. We talk about our families and how our extended families who do have a church to attend find us bizarre. All the kind of stuff you’d discuss with other like-minded friends in your church … if you had a church.

They are the smartest/wisest people I know. It is because I talk to them I have so little interest in talking to others. When you are in the habit of driving around a top-of-the-line Mercedes getting behind the wheel of a VW is hardly exciting. These people are epistemologically self-conscious and know what they believe and why they believe it. They don’t send their children to government schools and they don’t think the solution to our problems is by voting harder.

It is not as if any of them are made of better dirt. It’s just that they have a different worldview than the average church-going normie American bear.

One more thing — they read. Dr. Martin 45 years ago told us that “leaders are readers.” I thought it a trite thing to say then but now I know how accurate he was. All of these folks read the kind of material that seldom gets read any longer. They listen to lectures. They are seeking to think Christianly in every area of life.  And the result is that these people are the very essence of leadership. One doesn’t become a leader by listening to John Maxwell’s courses or by attending the very latest seminar on leadership. One becomes a leader by putting the meat in the seat in order to read till you bleed. These people have done that.

I wish I could know each of them and all of them better. I wish we could routinely break bread together around each other’s tables. I wish we could have our children marry one another and become grandparents together. I wish we could all worship together. I wish we formed our own community.

But until then we serve the great King’s purposes by being salt and light scattered hither and yon.

I hope they all know how much they have blessed me over the years and how much I love them. I could only wish they could be part of this fabulous flock in Charlotte, Michigan.

Charlotte’s Leering Rainbow Flag

In the small city, I live in there is a “church.” (I use that word as a courtesy. The confession I subscribe to doesn’t allow me to really believe it is a church.) It is one of the oldest churches in the city and was built right across the street from the courthouse. It is one of those large buildings, breathtaking in scope, with high ceilings, and a sanctuary that once actually needed the seating for which it was designed. I’ve often wanted to preach there just for the opportunity for the building itself to hear, one more time, the soothing and startling tones of the Christian faith once delivered to the saints coming from the pulpit. I imagine it has been decades since this facility has heard those truths. It may be the case that the building would fall down from the stress of hearing those truths again shaking the rafters.

Anyway … in the front of this full-on WOKE church stands some regal maple trees and around one of these maple trees, someone in authority in the Church has decided to send yet another message of what a “safe” church they are by wrapping a rainbow flag around the girth of the tree. As such, every day countless numbers of cars drive by this church and witness this tip of the hat to political correctness foisted upon us by the church in question.

Of course, the flag on the tree serves as a sign to communicate any number of things. Some of what it is signaling is more obvious (we embrace as a lifestyle in this “house of God” what God consumed with fire in Genesis 19) and some of what the flag is signaling is less obvious. It is to the less obvious that we turn for a moment.

The flag is a sign sending this message about the “church” and everyone attending the church; “I, the Congregational Church, live here and I know what I must do if I am to fit into the zeitgeist. This flag bespeaks that I am behaving in the manner expected of me. You, citizens of the community, because of this flag sign know I can be depended upon to ape the culture and that in this regard I am above reproach. I am an obedient member of our current death cult in the West and therefore beyond being indicted.”

This message radiating by the flag sign is directed to the community, and at the same time, it is a shield protecting the church and those who attend from any accusation that it or they may be counter-cultural in any fashion. The flag sign is a virtue signal and screams conformity. The flag sign is also communicating to the church itself that it has bowed the knee to the idols of the day. It gives the church identity, dignity, and, morality even if each of those is twisted beyond recognition. It is the identity of the perverted, the dignity of the treasonous, and the morality of Mephistopheles. Even the ground under the building quakes at being responsible for being sat upon by such a monstrosity. Ultimately the flag is a display of loyalty to the zeitgeist. For those with eyes to see it is, in reality, the white flag of surrender.

If the zeitgeist suddenly lurched towards accepting pedophilia (a possibility not beyond the realm of probability) the church would soon likely put out a flag that would communicate that children are merely young adults capable of making their own decisions about intimacy and so likeminded people are “safe” in that “church.” Imagine any polymorphous perversity you can imagine and a flag would sure to be soon wrapped around that poor maple tree that stands in front of their building.

And, oh the irony in choosing a rainbow flag. That very symbol that was given by God by which God set as a sign that God would never again destroy the earth by water. Clearly, those who embrace such symbols forget that God has more means than just water by which he can visit judgment.

Every day I drive by it I see it leering at me as if it were possessed by some kind of Goblin or Wormwoodian demon. It cackles at me that soon every church and every government building and every business building will one day have flags emblazoned somewhere on their property signaling that conformity has now consumed all. In my mind’s eye, I see men wearing rainbow flag pins on the collars of their suit much as they wear the American flag pins now. I begin to think it will rise to flood level and wash over everything and then I remember…

Why do the [a]nations [b]rage,
And the people plot a [c]vain thing?
2 The kings of the earth set themselves,
And the rulers take counsel together,
Against the Lord and against His Anointed,[d] saying,
3 “Let us break Their bonds in pieces
And cast away Their cords from us.”

4 He who sits in the heavens shall laugh;
The Lord shall hold them in derision.
5 Then He shall speak to them in His wrath,
And distress them in His deep displeasure:
6 “Yet I have [e]set My King
[f]On My holy hill of Zion.”

7 “I will declare the [g]decree:
The Lord has said to Me,
‘You are My Son,
Today I have begotten You.
8 Ask of Me, and I will give You
The nations for Your inheritance,
And the ends of the earth for Your possession.
9 You shall [h]break them with a rod of iron;
You shall dash them to pieces like a potter’s vessel.’ ”

10 Now therefore, be wise, O kings;
Be instructed, you judges of the earth.
11 Serve the Lord with fear,
And rejoice with trembling.
12 [i]Kiss the Son, lest [j]He be angry,
And you perish in the way,
When His wrath is kindled but a little.
Blessed are all those who put their trust in Him.

 

A Note on Worship

So here we have gathered again to Worship He alone who is worthy to be worshiped and to learn our undoubted catholic Christian faith by the Word and Sacrament being broken and received.

We have been learning our undoubted catholic Christian faith recently by taking up the great themes of the Atonement. We have been considering different constituent aspects of the Atonement such as Reconciliation answering alienation and Redemption and Ransom answering our problem of being captive. We understand that we have been only grazing the mountain tops of the subject. We can hardly do justice to these great themes without spending months on each subject. For example, we could have spoken a great deal more about Alienation and Reconciliation as pre-figured in the OT in how God first reconciled Himself to our first parents by clothing them in skins made from animals, thus covering them at cost of blood poured out. For example, we could have looked at Redemption and ransom in the OT where Israel is Redeemed from their bondage with the payment of the ransom price of the blood of the Passover lamb. We could have talked about Boaz and the idea of a Kinsman Redeemer. All of this prefigured and shouted the coming of another who would be the fulfillment of these OT shadows.

And we come here week by week to continue to learn these and the other great truths of our undoubted catholic Christian faith because we understand this is who we are and that it makes no sense to say that we are Christians apart from knowing what we believe and why we believe it and what we don’t believe and why we don’t believe it. Why take to ourselves the name “Christian” if we don’t understand, at some level, these grand themes that we have been considering? Why take to ourselves the name “Christian” if we refuse to have an ever-increasing understanding of the faith?

I don’t call myself a farmer if I don’t understand at some level animals and their maintenance, crop rotation, prices on the bushel, and what is needed for return in order to provide for my family. I don’t call myself a Pilot if I don’t know about lift, flaps, and landing gear. Why should we call ourselves Christians if we don’t know about and have no interest in the great themes that we take up here week by week? Themes that include Reconciliation, Redemption, Ransom, Propitiation, Sacrifice, Penalty, substitution, satisfaction, the abiding validity of God’s Law in its General Equity? We are Christians and so we desire to always be going further up and farther in when it comes to understanding and knowing our God and our faith.

Is it really Christianity if we were to reject laboring over these great themes to understand them ever-increasingly? Is it really Christianity to say we believe in Christ and the Cross and yet have precious little concrete understanding of it? Is it really Christianity if we chop it up and say … “Well, yes we believe it when we are in the Church but when we are outside the Church, well then, we operate not by Christianity but by Natural Lawianity and a bastardized version of common grace?”

No, we want the great themes articulated here. We want to talk about not only Christ for us but also about Christ in us. We want to talk about grace but we also want to hear about how gratitude for grace drives the embrace of the ongoing validity of God’s law in its general equity. We want to hear the 1st use of the law but we also want to understand how grace makes us mavens, once in Christ, for the third use of the law. We want to understand the culture, philosophy, history, sociology, and all of life from a Biblical standpoint.

We do not gather to hear about how good we are. We are not good. We do not gather to talk about “your best life now,” or to hear how God is seeking your best. God is not seeking your best. God is seeking His best and has brought you along for the ride. We gather not in order to get God to do something. We gather to worship because God already has done a grand something … God has placed us in Christ and our gathered worship is to express our ongoing gratitude to the triune God for rescuing us from our sin and misery.

That is why we gather week by week. That by worshiping the God who is we might increasingly become what we have been freely declared to be as in Jesus Christ as instructed by the Spirit.

A Christian and a Postmodernist Walk Into a Bar… The Postmodernist says …

I’ll have a Bloody Mary. The Bar Keep says… “You find a girl named Mary, and I’ll bloody her up.”

The Postmodernist responds … “But that’s not what I mean.”

The Barkeep says… “It is in my worldview.”

Last night I tied into a Postmodernist who is a “Seminary Resident” at one of the local liberal churches in Charlotte and the conversation was a laugh riot. See if you agree.

Adam Droscha said,

First of all, it is psychologically impossible to completely erode one’s worldviews or structures and systems of belief.

BLM responds,

That is a magnificently large non-truth. Our whole current University systems, exceptions notwithstanding, specialize in doing just this. There are also other examples. If one is conversant with Mao’s re-education camps or any of the communist’s dealings with interrogation one knows that the statement that “it is psychologically impossible to completely erode one’s worldview is crapola. Even well-delievered propaganda can completely erode one’s worldview.


AD writes,

Secondly, (1) pretty much all ideas are purely subjective. Even concepts of metaphysical categories, absolute/objective truths, etc. are always subjectively described, or subjectively thought of…..

all worldviews are subjective. There are not premodern and modernist objective worldviews, and a singular subjective postmodern worldview. Peoples’ worldviews have always been subjective.

Bret responds,

Jacques Derrida … Michael Focault … please call your office.

Of course, all of this Adam is just your subjective opinion and so not one I need to take seriously. 

Adam Droscha wrote,

Bret, psychologically speaking in the context of my conversation with Matthew, what I said is true.

Bret responds,

Well, only as your subjective worldview subjectively tells you it is true. Of course, if all worldviews are indeed subjective then any talk about true is qrxiye hiyhd auty,ty6 bnwopsm arf.

AD wrote.,

The human mind is hardwired–it was quite literally in the neurophysiology of the human body–to assimilate new information into existing frames of reference.

Bret responds,

Well, that may be the case in your subjective worldview but it is not necessarily the case in any number of other subjective worldviews.

Look, old chap, if all worldviews are subjective, as you insisted earlier, then there is no objective reference point that you and I can appeal to in order to find common meaning. In your subjective worldview, the word “colossal” could mean ‘purple’ wherein in my subjective worldview ‘colossal’ could be ‘menstruation.’

In my worldview, your statement is still nonsense as any familiarity with Mao’s reeducation camps or the work with POWs in prison camps or even any familiarity with the work of effective propaganda reveals as I noted earlier. You’re just wrong AD. Goebbel’s Ministry of Information proves that the human mind is malleable to an incredible degree. In point of fact, the novel 1984 labored to show how malleable minds were. Quick… how many fingers am I holding up?

AD wrote

Yes, critical theories and post-structural theories originate in academic circles. To say that there are university systems that specialize in “eroding one’s worldviews, or structures and systems of belief” is a pretty self-serving, sweeping, and propagandistic claim severely lacking in context and, as I’m sure, firsthand experience.

Bret responds,

You know nothing about me. Nothing about my research. Nothing about how I know about the University system. The above statement is ignorance of stilts. Not only that, you missed the part where I said: “exceptions notwithstanding.” I did not make a Universal statement. I made a general statement.

AD writes

Yes, I’m familiar with both Focault’s and Derrida’s work (which should not be flippantly lumped together), and I’ve studied both to an extent. Invoking them here changes what I said not at all.

Whose opinion you take seriously is up to you, man. But you inserted yourself into this conversation and chose to read my comments and reply. If you don’t take it seriously, go about your day. Just know the feeling is mutual.

Bret responds,

The only thing you are familiar with is your subjective opinion. In your worldview, no communication can happen because all worldviews are subjective. If all worldviews are subjective no communication can take place because the minute I receive your subjective Worldview my subjective worldview alters it into something else subjective other than your subjectivity.

And don’t you dare disagree with me because that is just your subjectivity telling you that I am wrong.

Go away … in your worldview communication is a myth.

Adam Droscha

Lol. Imagine being this immature and expecting people to take what you say seriously.

Bret, I see what you’re doing, and please understand that I’m trying to politely level with you here. In absolutely no intelligent, good faith conversation about the topics we’ve discussed here is your response considered a logical byproduct. If you are so ill educated, if your knowledge is so lacking, that you don’t know that subjectivity and objectivity are not polar opposites, and that subjective experience is essentially an a priori truism in philosophy, psychology, sociology, epistemology, communication science, and other fields, that is your own problem, man. Absolutely nothing you insinuated about communication breakdown resulting from acknowledging the subjectivity of experience and worldviews bears any reflection on reality. Good day to you, and may God have mercy in your soul.

Bret responds,

Meh … shrug … that’s just your subjective worldview talking. Come back when you have something more than a subjective opinion to offer.

It is so hilarious that you are shocked at the thought that people would take me seriously when at the same time I howling at the thought that anybody could take a ruddy thing you are saying seriously, or that you can even take yourself seriously. You freely admit that all worldviews are subjective and then expect people to take your words seriously. If everything is subjective Adam then you’re trying to communicate with me is like you being a man of water talking about a man of water in an ocean of water climbing out on a ladder of water into an upper story made of water. If all is subjective then all is the same. There is no ability to distinguish between what you mean and what I hear you as meaning. It’s water everywhere.

What you’re saying is that there is some subjectivity in your objective and some objectivity in your subjective? If that is so then you really can not call them subjective and objective but instead kind of subjective and kind of objective. But if objective gets in the subjective and subjective gets in the objective then what does subjective and objective even mean… and according to whom? By what standard can I or anybody determine how much subjectivity is allowed in the objective and how much objectivity is allowed in the subjective? And again, I say to you, this is all born of your subjective worldview. Were I to agree with you I could do so while disagreeing with you according to my subjective worldview.

You have no ground of authority Adam. No place to stand. You have turned all those fields you mentioned (philosophy, psychology, sociology, epistemology, communication science, etc.) into tarot card reading, necromancy, seances, mind-reading, and occultic levitation.

If the subjective experience is prior to any Objective then how could you possibly know what you are experiencing? You can’t talk about subjective without an objective to give identity to your subjective and you can’t whistle it either.

Adam Droscha

I’m sure you actually think that’s clever. Whenever my ignorances are exposed to me, it definitely helps my case to quit taking the conversation seriously. You should definitely keep doing that.

Bret responds,

Sorry, Dude, I don’t take the errant presuppositions of Humanism seriously. I am a Christian after all. We believe we have an objective word from God.

In the beginning, was the Logos and the Logos was with God and the Logos was God.


I’m doing all I can to mock you and you think I’m taking this seriously?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kh9PYtmVybU