CLIMBING THE WALLS

As with most prophets, Jeremiah was not especially popular among his contemporaries. Of course, after his warnings proved true, and with the safe passage of time, we effortlessly assume we’d have agreed with him. But we probably wouldn’t have.

It’s important to note, parenthetically, that the one and only test of a true prophet in ancient Israel was whether his or her prophecies proved accurate. There was no such thing as a genuine prophet whose predictions turned out to be false.

All things considered, we don’t much like prophets. That’s because they say things we don’t want to hear. They are the proverbial skunk at the picnic. And, boy, are they ever negative! Why not lighten up a bit, for God’s sake? Why get all bent out of shape?

The reason is that they’re after the truth. Thus, they reject the convenient lies and comforting half-truths we prefer. They refuse to play to our pet biases, assuring us everything’s just hunky-dory. And they’re not afraid to go against the crowd and its unquenchable thirst for conventional wisdom and soothing clichés.

Prophets seek neither plaudits nor personal affirmation. Just truth.

Continue reading “The Mirage of Immortality”

I have it on good authority that many church-going Christians don’t care for the liturgical season of Lent, which began this year on March 2.

The reason? I think it has to do with Lent’s emphasis on repentance. Yet what is repentance? Isn’t it bad? And isn’t it just a holdover from the church’s unenlightened past?

Well, no, it isn’t. A local pastor years ago, writing in his church’s newsletter, likened Lent’s call for repentance to periodically changing the oil in your car, to remove all the gunk that prevents it from operating at full efficiency. It’s the same for us. To repent serves as a prerequisite to experiencing life at its fullest, and in a godlier way.

Repentance, therefore, is aspirational. It involves giving up something that diminishes life in order to embrace something that enhances it. And don’t we all want that?

Continue reading “Losing Our Souls”

Manicheansim is an ancient Persian religion notable for its belief in strict dualism. The world is divided between the good – the spiritual world of light – and the material world of darkness. Thus, there are only two teams, if you will. One good, the other bad.

O, to be on the side of the good! O, to be on the right team!

When war breaks out, the lines are drawn. Not to sound too much like a Putin puppet, but aren’t there at least two sides to every conflict? After all, wars don’t happen in a vacuum. More to the point, is it in any way possible, amidst the fog of war, to engage in sober analysis? To ask questions? To have doubts? Or does entertaining any of these necessarily suggest callous disregard for the victims of war?

Apparently, the only legitimate stance these days is: Stop thinking and go along with the crowd! Get on the bandwagon! Beat the drums of war! Get ‘em! Get ‘em! Get ‘em!

Continue reading “Manicheanism”

Søren Kierkegaard, the 19^th century Danish philosopher, once characterized a certain personality type as continually “fighting for what has vanished.” Times change, but they stubbornly refuse to let go of the past, spending all their energy trying to recapture that which no longer exists.

In his landmark 1998 book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Samuel Huntington countered his former Harvard student Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 thesis that the collapse of the Soviet Union had signaled the “end of history.” Communism had lost, the West had won. The whole world would now align with Western values and live happily within a new world order orchestrated and administered by the United States and its Western European allies. Case closed.

Huntington contested this view, outlining a much more sophisticated and nuanced view of geopolitics. While it is true that WWII left much of the world in shambles, economically and culturally, and that America emerged as the ascendant, dominant force, the world since has changed.

Continue reading “Fighting for What Has Vanished?”

For years I’ve argued that Pilate, the Roman governor of ancient Judea, is the prototype of contemporary thought.

During his interrogation of Jesus at trial, the prisoner declares, “Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my Voice.” In response, Pilate utters these (in)famous words, “What is truth?”

Like Pilate, we tend to blanch at the word “truth.” For one thing, it betrays unwarranted confidence. It’s too definitive, too black and white. It’s not inclusive enough. It might offend. “Your” truth and “my” truth necessarily differ. Besides, to assume such a level of understanding – that objective truth might exist – seems, well, arrogant.

No, we must avoid “epistemic closure,” that intellectual cul-de-sac of closed-mindedness that prevents us from being open to new ideas and new discoveries. Ideologically, it’s like being frozen in amber.

Continue reading “Virtual Reality”

When I was a kid, we often would travel to Pennsylvania during summer vacation. The reason is that my father’s ancestors had immigrated to Philadelphia in 1721, settling eventually near Reading. Generations lived in the area. And though my father was born in New York City and grew up mostly in Philadelphia, his mother’s sisters still lived in Bethlehem.

One of the things I remember most vividly about those trips was the lush green cornfields that seemed to stretch endlessly into the distance. It was quite a change from suburban Connecticut.

But the most extraordinary sight, hands down, had to be the Amish. We’d see them riding along the side of the road in their black horse-drawn buggies, impervious to the rush of traffic which, or so I imagined, zoomed around them with no small amount of annoyance, if not imperiousness.

How strange they looked, the men with long beards, suspenders, and large straw hats and the women in flowing dresses, mostly black, with white embroidered headdresses and matching white aprons tied around front. It seemed like a different planet.

Continue reading “East of Eden (Part II)”

Believe it or not, the photo above depicts not a fictional Hollywood supervillain but the real Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chair of the World Economic Forum, which meets, famously, every winter in the tony alpine resort village of Davos, Switzerland.

The gathering draws the world’s richest and most powerful elites – tech oligarchs, billionaires, media titans, celebrities, top corporate executives, heads of state, royalty, high governmental officials, central bankers, and representatives from prominent international non-governmental organizations (NGOs), including but not limited to the United Nations and the World Health Organization. The Pope has even been known to get into the act!

The days-long event also clogs up the local airport with carbon-spewing private jets, this despite the WEF’s constant apocalyptic harping about “climate change”!

Continue reading “Creepy”

Increasingly we live in a morally illiterate society. But how did we get here?

To review, we first rejected the church and its teachings, then the traditions of Western Civilization (both moral and philosophical), and finally the foundations of Enlightenment thought including reason and science (not to be confused with scientism).

It was decided that objective truth is false, thus the task of discerning reality was shifted to a newly fashioned, self-appointed clerisy who would disabuse America of its stuffy, outdated mores and replace them with new and improved ones.

Moreover, because the Enlightenment had failed in its quest to establish a moral basis for ethics apart from God, a new effort became necessary. Why? Because human beings are inherently moral, spiritual beings who require moral, spiritual authority.

Continue reading “The Church of Standard and Poor’s, Part III”

Having dispensed with Christianity and its moral precepts, followed in short order by the rejection of the Enlightenment’s insistence on reason and science, after, that is, the connection to the physical and spiritual worlds had been broken and the mind unmoored from tangible reality, the floodgates were opened to all sorts of speculative and experimental ideas and attitudes.

Foundational truths became, at best, quaint. What had seemed obvious was shown to be contrived and untrustworthy. ‘Reality’ consisted of arbitrary social constructs or mere convention. Time-honored insight into human nature and creation’s immutable laws no longer reflected eternal truth but transient, random arrangements intended mostly to benefit the powerful.

Thus began what Stephen Soukup, in The Dictatorship of Woke Capital, calls the “second stream” of American liberalism. The fate of the first, early progressivism, as we saw in Part I, had foundered on the altar of post-war skepticism.

Continue reading “The Church of Standard and Poor’s, Part II”

Nature abhors a vacuum. Thus, whenever human beings attempt to eliminate a set of moral precepts, there’s always another waiting in the wings.

I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb in suggesting that one of the defining, bedrock principles of early America was Judeo-Christian tradition. Of course, there were other streams of influence as well, not least British culture which served as the repository not only of Christianity but ancient Greek and Roman literature, philosophy, government, and law, each revised and refined over centuries by considered insight and lived experience. British culture embodied the best of Western Civilization.

One basic insight shared by Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome alike, undergirding the entire Western edifice, was the fact of flawed human nature.

Continue reading “The Church of Standard and Poor’s, Part I”