More Fair than Dark Magic

by WFTD, posted in Apologetics, Literature, worldview
narrow pathway near tress

Now we can see what the modern world is missing, aided by the admirable clarity of the blindsight of BLINDSIGHT. The Anarchist is rightfully devoted to destroying everything in the world, including himself, if in fact there were no truth, goodness, nor beauty in the world, or no way to achieve them. If we are all just programmed meat machines, suicide is the noblest option.

But if there is beauty, even it is ineffable, something never to be captured in words, a mystic feeling elusive as a ghost, then the Occultist is right to eschew all talk of truth and virtue, and right to tolerate any man’s approach to the inapproachable.

But if there is truth, even if it is hard and cold and tinged with bronze, the Cultist is right to impose it on the world, no matter the cost in human suffering, and let all competing truths and claims of other virtues be damned. The only beauty is what serves the Cause.

But if there is virtue, then men must get along with each other, and also go along with each other just enough to maintain the public weal. The talk of truth can be tolerated as long as no violence is done in its name, and beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

But if there is magic, then there is a force in the world which sets the standard of truth and beauty and goodness, and bright magic is both more fair than dark magic, and merits our loyalty. Each man must find that light for himself, because no authority is to be trusted.

But if there are miracles, and I mean miracles from God, then there is an authority, a divine and loving Father who has both the natural authority of a parent and of a creator and of king. If one of those miracles is the Resurrection, then to all these other claims of authority, the divine can also claim the most romantic authority of all: the authority earned by merit. Christ has authority because he earned it by suffering the quest to the bitter end, and rescuing the fair bride from the red dragon. The crown of thorns is his reward.

If there are miracles, there is at once truth and beauty and goodness, for all these flow from the same source.

John C. Wright, “Transhumanism and Subhumanism”

Day Bidet #13

by WFTD, posted in Day Bidet

Seven days, seven links:

  1. “[T]he ascension of Christ is far more important than a brief footnote to the resurrection.”
  2. “[S]chools of education … sought to make education about ‘consciousness raising’ and instilling a ‘critical conscioussness’ into children as an educational priority.” Most schools are indoctrination camps. Homeschool your kids! (Related. Related. Related. Related. Related. Related. Related. Related. Related. Related. Related. Related.)
  3. “[T]he dominant influence agents—media, parents, government, schools, peers—do not seek to develop a biblical worldview among those they influence.”
  4. “[T]he conformists to ideological fashions of today also erroneously imagine themselves to be some beleaguered minority of independent thinkers and heroes fighting against … The Man keeping them down. … When in reality, they are the very mechanism of the system’s power. They are The Man.” (Related. Related. Related. Related. Related. Related. Related. Related. Related. Related. Related. Related. Related. Related.)
  5. “Some early Christian readers of Revelation separated the economic prosperity they enjoyed as a result of Rome’s widespread trade from participation in the imperial cult. But here in Revelation 17-18, everyone who thrived from Rome’s economic power will weep and mourn [when] the empire is finally judged.”
  6. “Only irresponsible barbarians can have as an objective the rejection of this invaluable treasure which is so critical to the betterment of our humanity.” (Related. Related. Related. Related. Related.)
  7. “[W]hen the Voice arrives, it doesn’t act as the Eye would, it doesn’t force or compel Frodo. Rather, the Voice sets Frodo free, creating space where Frodo can become aware of himself.”

More:

Lots of respect for this woman. Pray for her son, her family, and for our country. (Pray also for Nick Wall and Laura Anderson and their family; Seth Smith and his family; and Kyle Rittenhouse and his family, among many others.)

Philippians 4.8 “is less about doing right and more about reflecting on and pursuing what is good and beautiful.” (Related.)

“[S]ix to 11 million Uyghur people are currently unaccounted for.” (Related. Related.)

“Despite all the Sunday school stories you heard and what they implied or stated, the synoptics never say that Jesus had never met Peter and Andrew prior to the famous ‘Follow me’ scene.” (Related.)

“Sorry New York Times, I decline to be interviewed.” Right answer. (Related. Related. Related. Related. Related. Related.)

“[T]he Jewish Revolt was precipitated and prosecuted by the king and the princes of Edessa.” (Related.)

You Can’t Trust the Experts: Brace Yourselves, Braces Are Coming

by WFTD, posted in Carnivore, Health, You Can't Trust the Experts
No dentist necessary

The New York Times:

On a Friday in August, I met with an anthropologist named Janet Monge in a ground-floor classroom at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia. … Since the early 1990s, she has been the keeper of one of the world’s largest and most geographically diverse collections of ancient skulls, housed at the University of Pennsylvania. … In a plastic container, Monge had placed skulls from the Middle East, West Africa, Eastern Europe and beyond. When I asked her if she’d ever seen an ancient specimen with crooked teeth, she didn’t hesitate: “No, not one. Ever.” Most of the skulls in the Penn collection date from a 40,000-year period starting late in the Stone Age and ending around 300 years ago, yet “they all have an edge-to-edge bite,” “robust” jaws and “perfect” occlusion, Monge said.

But then, in specimens from people who lived two centuries ago or less, Monge noted a striking change: The edge-to-edge bite completely disappears, and malocclusion suddenly runs rampant. She pointed to a skull on a nearby shelf — that of a woman who lived in 19th-century North America. Unlike the ancient skulls, this postindustrial woman’s maxilla was crinkled and small; the teeth that remained sat crammed together. “I always told my students, ‘Something happened 200 years ago and nobody has an edge-to-edge bite anymore — and I have no freaking idea why,’” Monge said.

(Related. Related. Related—see especially Figures 53-57 in Chapter X.)

In this case, as in many others, “Progress” has created a problem instead of solving one. Preindustrial people without dentists, braces, toothpaste, etc. had better teeth and jaw development than we do.

What’s the root (pun intended) of the problem? There are probably a few factors at play—the two orthodontists rather unfairly smeared in the NYT article above hint at some of them. Cutlery may also be a factor. As with most health issues, however, diet is almost certainly the key. Especially for children, whose jaws and teeth are still developing. (And brains. And bones. And everything else. Raise your kids on fatty meat!)

(Did your orthodontist ever mention that people didn’t used to need braces? Would orthodontists make more or less money if that fact became widely known? You can’t always trust the experts!)

Day Bidet #12

by WFTD, posted in Day Bidet

Seven days, seven links (back on track!):

  1. “Help must come from the outside.”
  2. “I have to remind my kids yet again that they do not live in a free country, all that stuff is lies now, and so they must never speak to anyone about certain topics.” (Related.)
  3. “[D]econversions are all too likely to happen when the inquiring Christian is unwilling to ‘graduate’ from a simplistic or childish concept of God to a more complex, difficult, and deeper concept of God.”
  4. “Anti-racism” continues to be quite lucrative (and totalitarian). (Related.) (Related.)
  5. “Men in a totally planned world will find themselves unspeakably lonely. If they have completely lost sight of God, they will feel the whole horror of their poverty. Then they will discover the little flock of believers as something wholly new.”
  6. “[T]he first Black Lives Matter era (2014–2016) saw the total number of homicides in the U.S. grow a record-setting 23 percent in two years. … Black Lives Matter has gotten more incremental blacks murdered than all the lynchings in American history.” (Related. Related.)
  7. “[T]he fragility of that ‘big box’ expression–church as WalMart–has been exposed.”

More:

“#China’s consulate in #Houston promoted riot techniques among #BlackLivesMatter protesters through social media micro-targeting.” (Related.)

“A New Opportunity to Learn Greek and Hebrew”

“Yale rejects scores of Asian American and white applicants each year based on their race.” (Related.)

“Even as sick as Lori was, she loved her children and would have loved more of them. The joy they have brought us at every stage of life is beyond measure.” (Related. Related.)

Nature is healing.

“Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy?”

Spotts on Modernism

by WFTD, posted in Art, History, politics, worldview
How We Can Stop Building Ugly Architecture | The Plaza Perspective

Modernists were indeed revolutionaries. They rejected the notion that art must be rooted in a nation’s history, and they deliberately sought change and experimentation. ‘To every age its own art’ was the founding principle of the Vienna Secession in 1897. It was permissible for art to be ‘ugly’ and to emulate the blunt energy of ‘primitivism’. They were more concerned for truth and doubts than for beauty and certainties, more interested in questions than in answers, more anxious to communicate feelings … than to portray visual reality. … Modernists celebrated disorder and uncertainty. Far from shunning the epithet of elitist, they raised it to a high principle that artists were independent of society and that culture was a sphere unto itself. The gulf that had opened between Modernists and the public was not their fault; it was the public that had lost its aesthetic sense and gone its own way. Nothing could have been more foreign to the Modernists than the idea that they had an obligation to society. Inculcating national pride or providing the public with security, beauty and joy, not to mention a refuge from life’s travails, was not what they had in mind.

Frederic Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics

Day Bidet #11

by WFTD, posted in Day Bidet

Seven days, seven links (late again—busy couple weeks!):

  1. “Torley lists several alleged contradictions among the Gospel burial accounts, but all of these are manufactured.”
  2. White liberals are far more mentally ill than any other group of Americans. (Related, also from Zach Goldberg.)
  3. “[T]hree of the four great founders of American Zen ’caused major public sex scandals’…. The two most famous US teachers of Tibetan Buddhism, Chongyam Trungpa and Sogyal Rinpoche, both caused major public sex scandals. Trungpa’s immediate successor Ösel Tendzin caused a particularly horrifying major public sex scandal, and the current head of Shambhala Buddhism, Sakyong Rinpoche, also caused a major public sex scandal.”
  4. “1946 into the 1970s was a golden age for broad-based middle class and working class prosperity in the U.S.” (What changed? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?)
  5. “Did Old Testament Saints Know Scripture Was Authoritative?”
  6. Good music. Good music. Good music.
  7. “By and large, secular moral systems are broadly and functionally christian. … [W]hy is your vision of the good just a warmed over version of Christianity?” (Related: “[W]ithout the underlying metaphysical commitments, the moral consensus of the West stands upon nothing solid.”) 

More:

Typos now a cancellable offense. (Related.)

“For Paul, the resurrection is central. To ‘go back’ would be to shift emphasis away from that key event. Yes, he talks about Jesus’ death, but this is necessary—it is what makes resurrection possible!”

“[T]he descendants of American slaves, again, taken as a whole, are the richest and most powerful and influential population of African descent on the planet.”

“Huge Kingdom of Judah government complex found near US Embassy in Jerusalem”

“[H]uman racial groups are more genetically diverse than previously assumed.” (Related. Related.)

“[O]n earth the great prostitute appears sovereign.”

Day Bidet #10

by WFTD, posted in Day Bidet

Seven days, seven links (one day late this time—apologies!):

  1. “Was there a guard at Jesus’ tomb?”
  2. “Marx writes of his triumph after he shall have destroyed God’s created world…. An insatiable spender of other people’s money, Marx continually complained about a shortage of financial means. … Marx affected a hatred and contempt for the very material resource he was so anxious to cadge and use so recklessly.”
  3. “Torment in the dark was the danger that I feared, and it did not hold me back. But I would have never come, had I known the danger of light and joy.”
  4. Fake news. Fake news. Fake news. Fake news. Fake news.
  5. Peter Goeman argues that Nero is not the man whose number is 666.
  6. Carnivore success story. (Related. Related. Related. Related.)
  7. “Your being increases in the measure that you give it away. Your being decreases in the measure that you cling to it.”

More:

“Conservatism” hasn’t conserved anything.

“The healing in John 4 that Jesus performed in Capernaum while he himself was in Cana could well be what Jesus refers in Luke 4.”

Clown World. Clown World. Clown World. Demon World. Demon World. Demon World.

“King Uzziah’s life has been affirmed and illuminated through archaeological findings over the course of more than 100 years.”

You can’t trust the experts: “[T]he economic cost of social distancing and lockdowns will likely be more than $1 trillion. And that’s an understatement of the costs when you consider increased suicides and other social losses not captured in gross domestic product. For example, parents of young children have widely noted their kids’ gloomy outlook when not allowed to be with friends.”

“Bible Briefly Consulted to See if It Supports Already Formed Opinion”

the preacher

by WFTD, posted in faith, Literature, Personal

qoheleth
son of david
king in jerusalem
sought to find out
through much study of
the words of the wise
and the reading of books
the conclusion of the whole matter
concerning love
its nature privy properties
and essential elements
but did not understand until
the broken pitcher brimmed
with still water
then he going forth
from the sparrow gate said
love is not the tearlit moon
vaulting the blind sea the
lipless night at the door
starved by dizzy wind and
love is not the fire but
love is a quiet death that sows
new life into spring
love is a resurrection

Palestrina’s Missa Papae Marcelli

by WFTD, posted in faith, music

At the closing sessions of the Council of Trent, the question was raised whether polyphony in worship should be banned. Legend has it that Palestrina composed the Missa Papae Marcelli to avert such a ban and that the Council found the mass so beautiful that it decided against one.

The whole mass is worth listening to. Here is the Kyrie: