Adam and Eve and Joel and Steve

Religion, as well as sex and politics, is one of the interests of ExC.  His oldest one, actually. A lot of Amurrican religion bores me, so I don't pay that much attention nowadays. Especially to dying Mainline Protestantism. As a religion, it always bored me: Bibles, hymns, preaching by bland ministers, potluck suppers. That's it. As a shaper of culture and of my sadly fading homeland, much appreciated.

Today it amused me to post about two radically variant faces of US religion of the ProtChristian kind, for your edification and puzzlement.

Top pic is Joel Osteen, megachurch superstar from Texas. He's the kinda guy that women might call handsome. He's a feel-good preacher, relentlessly upbeat and worth $50 million+. His book titles tell the story: Your Best Life Now, 7 Steps To Fulfilling Your Full Potential, Become a Better You. Norman Vincent Peele with an aw shucks style, some seriously tailored suits and a killer haircut.

Below pic is Steve Anderson, pastor of a tiny strip mall, King-James-Only church in Arizona. He's the kinda guy that I might call handsome. He's a feel-bad preacher, relentlessly downbeat and probably --with his tiny congregation and 8 kids*--- worth no more than 5 figures. His sermon titles tell the story: The Jews and Their Lies, The Truth About Sodomites, Attributes of a Godly Woman, The False Religions of Mormonism and Islam. A Baptist Savonarola with an ordinary guy style, some local salesman suits and a basic buzzcut.

The awful truth is, Joel gives me the creeps but as Herod with John, Mark 6:20b, I like listening to Steve.

Joel wants me to feel good about myself. Steve, well, he can be a very very Old Testament kinda guy and Leviticus is very clear about mens what lie with mens and he agrees. Literally. Nevertheless, for some reason Steve  doesn't freak me out. Joel makes me roll my eyes.

Why? It's simple. I always know that Joel is manipulating me so I'll like him. I always know that Steve is telling me exactly what he thinks, bluntly, clearly and without inner conflict, whether I like him or not. Which makes me kinda like him.

If I were to be driving past Joel and Victoria's mansion and compound house ) and they were outside gardening and waved hello, I'd wave and keep walking. If Steve and Zsuzanna were playing with their kids in the front yard and waved hello, I'd be very tempted to walk over and start to chat. With both and them, and the kids.

They got a 30% Priceline discount for their family trip to Tahoe.

By all rights, I should consign extremely anti-gay Pastor Steve to the outer darkness. Pastor Joel may not be able to give me a high five, but he really doesn't wanna hurt my feelings, much less Leviticize me. Yet I guess it's part of my quirk that I'd rather deal with a man who wasn't bullshitting me all the time than with one who was afraid to give me a straight answer.

Oh, well. Maybe someday I'll "evolve."



*His wife Zsusanna has a blog about their daily lives called "Are They All Yours?!!?" She is one smart, capable, energetic and charming woman. My only fear, her description of one of the boys--Our quirky child. Too smart for his own good. Loves dressing up. Extremely artistic. Loving older brother to his younger sisters. Always mommy's baby boy at heart. Keeps us in stitches every day.-- makes me think that maybe some day, tragically, Pastor Steve might find Leviticus 20:13 in his own house. For everyone's sake, I hope not.


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Mandating the impossible

Back when I worked with a shrink training program, they became trendily "concerned" about their lack of "diversity." They wanted to have more of a racial rainbow. Blacks and Latinos, specifically. I did a quick assessment of their chances and basically told them to forget about it. They were not grateful.

The form of therapy they did was psychoanalysis. Very class connected, since it required a commitment of years of at least weekly, sometimes more, sessions that would cost someone several thousand dollars annually.

Psychoanalysis is a cultural practice as well as a class practice. If Blacks and Latinos go to counseling at all, it's for problem solving, not the archeology of consciousness.

So any Blacks and Latinos that go into the therapy field --only 17% have a BA and very few of these aim for psychology to begin with --it is a hugely White female profession-- they will not be aiming for this kind of work.

If you checked out the tiny numbers of Blacks and Latinos in the therapy field, then filtered for those likely to be training for psychoanalysis...well, you didn't need to be Einstein to see that there's a very very small pool. Very.

So why, asked I, set yourself a goal that is empirically very unlikely to be reached? Or make your success or failure to reach it some kind of moral judgment on yourself?

(It's the kind of question a good therapist might ask a patient driven to self-loathing because of unreal or perfectionistic expectations, after all.)

Silly me. They were not grateful.

As Jonathan Haidt makes clear in The Righteous Mind, when a group's sacred object is in question, rationality and evidence have nothing to do with it.



I make a similar assessment about the likelihood of Black influxes into all the elite and high status Numinous Negro roles that we see them playing in our relentlessly Potemkin Village media and entertainment. Short version: Blacks --despite our huge national obsession with them--are only about 12% of the population. Their average IQ is 85, compared to the White average of 100*. Mapping the distribution of IQ reveals that there are very few of them with scores over 120. (Putting aside for the moment the chaotic homelives, cultural dysfunctions and dreary educational outcomes of a population where almost 3/4 are born outside a marriage.) A tiny minority within a minority.

According to one study, whose provenance I have been unable to discover but which is not an outlier among these kinds of efforts, the number of Whites in America with 120+IQ is just 10% of their population. For Blacks with the same score, it's a tiny 1%.

The graph is old, but the stats have changed very little in the intervening decades

So where are all these brilliant scientists and CEOs gonna come from?

Same petite pool as the psychoanalysts.

Same game with the females. So far, in the military, women have been completely unable to fulfill the requirements for combat training that men must undergo. GI Jane/Hunger Games, meet the reality of boot camp. And yet our films and TV are filled with lethal viragos who effortlessly crush male groups with ease.

To quote Instapundit, "With these people it's Potemkin Villages all the way down."

For the sake of which falsehood we turn ourselves inside out about "racism" and "sexism" and other suicidally metastatic delusions. As one young UltraRighty has said (I paraphrase from memory), "Despite the unparalleled achievements of Western culture, there is no more pathetic creature in the universe than a White person in the throes of a moral panic."

Even the medieval pope Boniface VIII understood reality better than we do, when he set limits on the scope of his code of canon law by writing this radical piece of prefaratory wisdom:  Nemo potest ad impossibile obligari: No one can be required to do what is impossible.


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*Liberals, and more than a few conservatives, freak out when you start talking IQ differences between Blacks and Whites. The defense mechanisms could fill a psychology textbook. However, they completely ignore and are apparently unruffled at all about the higher average IQ (6 points) that East Asians have compared to Whites. Or the even larger gap between Whites and Ashkenazi Jews (10-15 points). Or the correlations between those groups' intelligence and their superior achievements and wealth.  No denials there. It makes the real issue apparent.

Dolly L strikes again

Answering social psychologist Jonathan Haidt about how he would set up a Tibetan government, the much kowtowed-to Dalai Lama says quite clearly that he is a Marxist socialist --but not a Leninist....---because it is the only economic system that cares about "equal distribution."

I have thought that Dolly was an idiot for a long time now. After this revelation, QED.

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White im/morality

I can't find the original article now, but this past week I came across a study about styles of morality among different ethnic and racial groups. The "take-away", as they say, is that Europeans/Whites, especially Northerners, focus on two elements when assessing moral action: justice as "being fair", and "caring."

What they leave out are two other elements that everyone else on the planet uses when thinking ethically: the responsibilities of your social role within your family/clan/people, and the demands of sacred order or divine command.

Most advanced Whities would find this second set actually un-ethical, because these considerations are "selfish" and "dogmatic."  Reminds me of the old saw that a liberal is someone who will not take his own side in an argument.

Rather than being an advanced form of morality, this is a truncated and mutilated form, incomplete to the point of being invalid.

In short, most humans do not abstract themselves from the moral equation, compulsively making abstract high-minded choices that damage or doom their own tribe or their own culture because "it's the right thing to do."

Whites: The Most Foolish People On The Planet ©.

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Out of the mists, a bit of snark

In 1977 Jungian analyst Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse published --through the Episcopal Church!-- a volume entitled Homosexuality: A Symbolic Confusion. She later went on to get herself ordained as an Episcopal priest, cross-dressing in garments that had hitherto in all of history been worn only and entirely by males in an all-male profession.

Talk about symbolic confusion.

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Alienation

I recently posted this comment at GayPatriot.

Am I alone in being largely convinced that, to paraphrase Clausewitz, American politics is now simply war carried on by other means?

As the Left/Liberal/Progressive world reveals its true self more and more, and as its power become more solidified, –demographics alone will cement that–am I alone in thinking that any kind of conversation, dialogue, debate or argument is a waste of time?

That what we knew as America is swiftly on its way to oblivion and that the two sides (speaking broadly) are just as hostile as, if not more than, the North and South before the first Civil War?

It’s basically about wealth, power and status –as always– but here in what is IMHO dying America, the driver is race, followed by gender (with the LGBTQXYZ thing a subsidiary): the straight White male as the embodiment of all evil.

Environmentalism, transnationalism, secularism, pacifism complete the new religion, which will never slow down, retreat or compromise. Either one side dies, or the other.

Am I missing something that would allow for a more optimistic assessment of outcomes?

I waited two days. No one responded.

So I guess I am alone there!

I do not like the way that I currently see things. Whatever unconscious or characterologically fixed needs in me it responds to, it does not make me happy or comfortable. I am genuinely interested in hearing arguments that might lead me to say, "Well, I guess I over-reacted and things may in fact turn out tolerably well."



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The One and the Many

As along as I can remember, I have had very different attitudes to individuals and to groups. This is true form me even about the non-human world. I dislike yappy little dog breeds. But I am quite fond of my brother's Pug and liked my mom's Brussels Griffon. Put a singular organism in front of me and a different set of radar and antennae shift into play.

In the last year --and it is not unusual in this respect-- my practice at work has included men of quite varied types: from their 20's to their 70's, Amurrican and European and Australian, gay and straight, married and single, childless and fathering, immigrants and natives, White, Black, Asian, Hispanic, Muslim, atheist, Catholic and Christian Scientist.

Some of these fellas belong to groups that, as groups, ExC has a distinctly dim view of. (If one were of a critical frame of  mind, and slightly unkind, one might be moved to ask about which groups ExC does not have a distinctly dim view. Point taken.)  But that factor, while undenied by me and, when therapeutically helpful, directly addressed by me, does not at all overshadow for me their individual contours, their one-guy among many here-and-now-ness.

It's extremely rare, btw, for any of them to make an offhand or even pointed comment about politics, race, gender, etc. which strays from the SF Liberal playbook. My general attitude toward these comments, of whatever type, is to ignore them unless they connect directly to the issue at hand that we are dealing therapeutically with.

Given my general character, it is wonderfully astonishing how very few of my clients I have not been able to like and how extremely infrequently I find them boring.

I suspect that if they knew of some of my opinions about the groups of which they are a part, it would be a problem for them. Understood. But that's the nature of therapy, not to know that much about the therapist so that you can create an image of your soul's healer to your needs.

I have noted before that when people make the lazy morally superior nyah-nyah point about, "But, some of my best friends are _______," they are utterly wrong. Nothing is more ordinary than for human beings to make warm bonds with people from groups that, as groups, they disdain. The classic example? Marriage. How many spouses love their partners but really and truly could do without the family from which they come? In-law jokes are as basic as air.

I never noticed my Black ex suddenly getting all warm and fuzzy about EuroCaucasians in general because he liked me. And no one would expect him to. So why should I be obliged to think well of or get all weepy about Africans in America because I like him?

A huge part of therapy is being willing and able to inhabit the other person's world and point of view and keep your own, in the service of the soul. If we only worked with people who mirrored our preferences and experiences, how useful would that echo chamber be?

But today I am very aware of the shift that happens  in me when I talk and think about groups and about strangers I may encounter who belong to those groups, and when I am face-to-face with another man in whose face or name or voice or story I recognize the presence of other worlds, even worlds apart.

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Nice, uh, stache

A Post-Catholic thought

Despite my admiration for what Catholicism once was --its present state a cause for face-palming--, its effect on me has not been one-sidedly positive.

From my current POV, and I emphasize the particularity of this moment in time and in my life, one of the harms it did was to present me with an impossible vision of how the world ought to be. Even including my characterological biases and needs, it very much got in the way of me dealing with the world as it actually is. Including myself.

I dimly recall an article by a Catholic psychologist about the perils of constantly living with the presence of what he called The Twice-Born. These are the perfect and perfected beings that dominate the Catholic imagination: Jesus and Mary and the saints. I usually speak of it as the infection of perfection, being innoculated with a drive toward a humanly impossible goal. It drove Martin Luther to invent Protestantism.

This great imbalance is the case with all monastic religions, the dharmas of India and Buddhism as well as Christianity. And it can even find a sort of home in householder revelations like Judaism, Islam, Sikhism. Perhaps it is the price of conceiving The Absolute. Pagan religions have their own drawbacks, to be sure. Imperfect gods lead to a different kind of impasse. But growing up with the propaganda of the perfect eventually became a problem in itself. I freely admit that the vehemence of my reaction to moralisms of all kinds has its root there.

My appreciation of Jung and the Gnostics is certainly connected because in them, themselves both wounded and irrevocably shaped by Christianity, I heard a voice that recognized the human condition on planet Earth as an inherently conflictual dilemma. Not of our own devising. And incapable of being other than it is. As dark as that sounds, to me it was a great relief.

It told me that I was not, and we as a species are not, as guilty as I had been led to believe. And that God was not so innocent.

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Madhouse

Video: Unborn baby shown grimacing in womb as mother smokes - Telegraph:

We live in a culture that condemns a woman for smoking while pregnant, but considers it a sacrosanct right for her to kill the child, for any reason at all. And usually at public expense.



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A la recherche du temps perdu

An oddly jerky little 2014 movie called The Historian details the unravelling of various academic lives in the claustrophobic history department on a small heartland campus.

I spent a lot of time in academia. I loved learning. Still do. The professorial culture, however, not so much.

The film contrasts the petty lives of the people whose job it is to serve great notions. Eros, of course, dismantles everything. Here, with the upbeat ending, it also brings wisdom and even post-traumatic thriving.

Pettiness is the dominant atmosphere in this part of the world. As the saying goes, the reason professorial politics is so vicious is that there's so little at stake.

From my current vantage point and interests, it strikes me that academic males have a manhood issue.

I remember a very self-important professor who asked me to accompany him to an orchestral concert one evening. It surprised me, since I was not a favorite of his. On arrival at the hall, he proceeded to ignore me entirely. Entirely. All evening. And on our next encounter, made no reference whatever to the event.

On a couple of other occasions, the famously temperamental tyranny of college teachers came my way. It is certainly no new insight to notice that high intelligence does not drive out assholery. In either males or females.

Daniel Donovan. Gregory Baum. Joanne McWilliam Dewart.

And you have no idea at all who they are.

Which is how it ought to be.

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No Escape

Watching the season finale of HBO's Looking, my excuse to watch Russell Tovey.

His new boyfriend, the wishy-washy Patrick, goes with him to a young hipster party in their new apartment building. Patrick is shocked that it's an all White group. Russell doesn't even notice. And when it's pointed out, replies, "Oh."  Later on, while the new couple is fighting, wishy-washy Patrick refers to the people at the party as "the KKK." Just because they lacked the necessary redemptive presence of peeps of hue.

Made me sick to my stomach. Literally. No, not metaphorically literally, but actually. It's a shame I have come to see this pattern. Once you notice White ethno-masochism, you see it all over the place.

But if Russell came back in Season 3, if there is a Season 3, I'd get over it. I'm shallow that way.

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Not underdone

Inevitable conflict

Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu recently outraged the tender-hearted, both Jew and goy, by encouraging his partisans to make sure to vote because the Arabs in Israel were aiming to rush to the ballot box and this would threaten "rightist" government in the Jewish state.

Racism!

Well, Israel is, supposedly, a consciously-constructed ethno-state, a political entity designed specifically for Jews. And no one else, really.

Trapped by the Enlightenment/Liberal paradigm of modern Jewry, it has to speak the language of "democracy" and to make believe that the Arabs who remain in its borders are fellow-citizens.

Maybe on paper, but who's kidding who?

So BN spoke the truth and now the embarrassed spokespersonettes of supposedly "trans-national" Jewish orgs are having the vapors, pretending to really care about the potentially lethal Fifth Column in the heart of Eretz Israel.

Of course, given the relentless promotion of multiculturalism by the same Jewish orgs throughout the West, they kinda have to speak up to keep face. Otherwise the double-standard that rightish goyim have noted might become more obvious: celebrating Third World invasion in the White West, but expulsion for those same BlackBrownies who dare cross into the land of the Jews...

Bibi had a choice though, which eventually confronts every racially mixed democracy. Maybe you finally have to stop lying about who "we" are and tell the truth.

For that, whatever you think of Israel or Netanyahu, you gotta give the Bib credit.

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Alternative lives

When I get a little restless about my life, even at my age I sometimes imagine others. As an adult, I have passively envied* carpenters, constitutional lawyers, music video producers, professors of Italian literature, and the food critic of the New York Times (with the metabolism of a greyhound...)

Watching one of his many fascinating nature programs, Flying Monsters, I think that having a life like David Attenborough would be great fun.

Or being a fiction writer like Brad Thor. (Is that his real name? Sounds like a gay porn actor's.)

*Passive envy: wishing one had something someone else has, but without the intent to take it away from its rightful owner. It's the virtue of a slothful man.

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Scatterings

A low-key evening with Mr B. He apologized for not being quite "on", with a combination of tiredness and work distractions, timing of things, etc. His not being quite on is better than most people's best day.

Listening to Pilgrim At Tinker Creek. I used to read it every Lent. Before I gave up reading actual books. The author has both a style of writing I like --echoes of Hopkins-- and a set of responses to the world that used to feel familiar to me. I still like the book; it's refreshingly not political at all. All nature and theology and poetry and philosophy rolled into one. Minute observations of the details of the world jumping right into The Grand Questions. She has a simultanous eye for nature's endless brutality and its endlessly jawdropping beauty. But it makes me a little nostalgic for a me that I no longer am.

Neither is Tinker Creek what it was. Completely suburban now.

Watched two films about young men in love. By young men, I mean high school guys. One flick is American, a very arty piece about the last summer together of two boys in a small Arkansas town. Like Big Eden, it is counterfactually uncontroversial for men to love each other. That fiction at least removes the need for all the LGBT posturing; a blessing. One thing that it was successful at was creating the memory of lush, wet and humid eastern summers when I was a teenager. The second is Dutch. Less arty but still foreign-feeling. Though it maps the tentative and life-changing experience of first love.

I generally don't find youfs attractive much. Gangly and underdone. But the memories of that phase of life --its intensity and its confusions--came back with the images of the boys and their stories.

One thing I do miss is how I could run!

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Liberal Orthodoxy

Unorthodox: S.F.'s Counterculture Churches Offer a Road to Redemption | Feature | San Francisco | San Francisco News and Events | SF Weekly:

A feminist Goddess-worshipping group inside the Lutheran church. The new MCC minister at least admits that they are "post-Christian." This means that support for gay marriage is absolute, but the divinity of Christ, well, let's not be dogmatic....There's also the drag queens of genderbender spirituality, above. And the old standby, Glide, which is slightly to the right of Jim Jones. Oh, and a black church based on the revelation of John Coltrane.

What is all self-congratulatedly and edgily "unorthodox" is in fact just another orthodoxy of "shared (leftwing liberal democrat) values." Counterculture? Ha.

The funniest section, when the MCC minister...well, just read it and laugh:

Shively refers to his mission as "LGBTQQAAI," the latter half of which stands for "queer, questioning, asexual, ally, and intersex." If that sounds like it encompasses everybody — and it does — that's because Shively is convinced everybody can feel like an outsider and need healing. He says that when a straight woman once confronted him about heterosexuals' exclusion from the abbreviation — and by extension, the church — "I was like, 'No, you already get everything.' Then I thought, 'No, they don't.' And that's the whole point. Oppressions and systemic stuff are bad, but personal pain transcends all those letters."

Christ.

Endgame

Liberals never have enough government or enough "social change."
Victims groups are always victims.
No problem is ever solved. 
New "solutions" are endlessly required.

New "issues" and "crises" constantly discovered. 

I am old enough to remember a time before
the 60's (although you can look back and see the cracks earlier.)
Huge areas of life that were once
nobody's business,
are now highly regulated
both by state and society.
The expansion of control has been staggering.

So, what then, is the endgame, the final outcome, of Liberal politics?
If, for example, the Democrat party were to become so dominant
that no legal opposition to it were possible
and one party's platform were to be translated
without effective resistance
directly into policy

Play out to their logical conclusion

• multiculturalism
• feminism (and lgbtqism)
• wealth redistribution
• environmentalism
• secularism
• pacifism
• transnationalism

The short version?

Another form of Marxist Communism:
an effectively totalitarian egalitarian state

based on the destruction of all previously

successful groups and culture
in favor of sanctified racial, gender and economic
victim groups.

Sound crazy?

Research the growth of State regulation
and the cultural hegemony of Liberal Leftism
over the last 50 years,

think through each one of the above-mentioned

Seven Principles of Progress
as they continue to unfold for another 50 years,
and then describe the outcome.

What other outcome is possible?

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As requested

2B or not 2B

I was recently informed, to my discomfiture, that there are folks who read ExCathedra whom I never had any idea would even know of this rant-blog's existence, must less read it. And who know who I actually am.

I didn't like it.

Even though these supposed readers are far away, I have chosen anonymity for the perfectly rational reason that I need to make a living in a place where anything to the Right of the Democrat party line du jour is grounds for summary execution. For me to publicly espouse a position, say, on gay marriage that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton espoused for years...years...is now utterly beyond the pale.

I had assumed that not only my anonymous handle, but my Alexa ranking of 17 millionth+ in popularity would keep it well hidden away. Even though I have had 1.5 million pageviews, reaching a peak of about 135k in October 2014, I am quite sure --especially due to the very few comments I get-- that these are robotic trawlers, not people.

To give myself time to think over this revoltin' development, I temporarily turned it into an invitation-only blog for a little while. And invited no one to read it.

This brought into relief for me a sense I have had for some time now, that I am just uncreatively repeating myself. The rant, as a literary form, has definite limitations. And it's the very rare creature who does not eventually fall into repetition. Especially if you put your thoughts down in print --or pixels-- almost every day for several years.

If you've ever had the displeasure of reading the Koran, you'll know that in Islam, even God is a repetitious ranter. Ironic, no? Me and Allah as literary buddies.

I certainly never expected that today I would be writing my 4,607th post more than 8 years after I started. My initial resistant to doing a blog at all was the likelihood that I would make three or four entries and then get bored and leave it there, like countless others. I did not expect it to become addictive.

And like addictions of all kinds, the initial pleasure derived from the activity eventually devolves into a need to do it in order to avoid the discomfort of not doing it.

So, while I suspect I will keep it going for a while, I am plotting either a) retirement from the blog biz or b) starting a new one under a new title somewhere else deep in the blogosphere.

Or, I might just get over my current uncertainty and carry on.

After all, changing my mind is something I know I can do.

---

Oh, and Happy St Patrick's Day to all your Hiberanians or Hibernians For A Day. Hibernia, by the way, is in deep trouble, along with the rest of Europe. Third Worlders invading and, of course, a priest is celebrating the death of his own people, along with the other secular bien-pensants. 

Zzz

What isn't?

One cheer. Maybe.

Utah Passes Antidiscrimination Bill Backed by Mormon Leaders - NYTimes.com:

But prolly not.

A gay Mormon friend sent this link, calling it "noteworthy." Very diplomatic.

I could be wrong...but the whole legal regime of "anti-discrimination" seems,
like the worldview that births it, poisonous at its root.

Any protections for religious bodies will eventually be wiped away. Because
in this worldview the Liberal State is The Church.

No other beliefs are tolerated.

And any complaints of "discrimination" can only be solved by more regulation
and restriction...and there is no way to stop it. And for the utopian Lefties and
their Social Justice Warriors, no reason to.

---

PS. The funny spacing is a technical problem, not an attempt at free verse.

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Hindsight on nature and grace

Courtesy of Mr Blake,
Lamentably Sane: Breaking glad

Reflections from an orthodox Catholic man on why he's glad he left the seminary and why the priesthood is dwindling:

"Men are willing to give their lives for a mystery, but not for a question mark."

He was unable to fly beneath the radar of the VatII Boomer establishment and keep his mouth shut.

"There came a point where I finally said to myself, "Fuck that noise." It's that kind of thinking that has led to the Church's current fugue state. That unwillingness to speak the truth, that hesitancy to declare that the emperor has no clothes has led to decades of ecumania, of a crippling lack of confidence, of grown men having to sit in silence as clip-haired, mean faced old broads in pantsuits henpeck them in umpteen committee meetings because the seminary drills you hard on whether you have a "problem with women."

Gays in the priesthood are, alas, part of that problem, willy-nilly. Yet even a gay Jesuit like the late Patrick Arnold wrote about the entrenched hostility to men and masculinity in contemporary Christianity.

Contemporary Western Christianity is deeply infected with liberalism, even among its conservatives. As ExC has realized, once you accept the existence of modern chimeras like "sexism" you have effectively surrendered to the levelling agenda of the Left. You can deny it all you like, but you will lose, eventually. The only way out is to refuse to play the game at all.

And although feminists attack Christianity as patriarchal, on the ground, in the parishes, it is a female-dominated institution. Check out the website of Catholic churches: one male pastor surrounded by a smiling resentment of females doing "ministry."

But more deeply, Catholicism has forgotten one of the seminal insights of Thomas Aquinas: Gratia non tollit naturam sed perficit. Divine grace does not erase created nature, but moves it toward its goal.

In this case, the created nature of men. Men aim for work --and a religion*--that provides them with respect, with status. That is nature's map for them. And it is what draws women to them. Fill a field or a profession with women (or gay men) and most males will flee. Mainstream Protestantism, Reform/Conservative Judaism...all these create feminized ghettos. Often filled with a lot of masculinized females.

What healthy young male would say,
"Gee, I want to be part of that!" ?

Men will sacrifice much but there has to be an exchange. That's the nature upon which grace acts. In return for sacrifice, men need to feel honored, respected. Why should a man accept celibacy, and go through long years of training and a lonely life only to be told that he is really no better than than the grey-haired lady catechist who did two workshops last summer. Lacking the honor of status, there is no point.**  And where there is no point, there will be no men.

Don't complain to me. Complain to God. That's how he made men.

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*The most patriarchal religion in the world is Islam, which means, ironically, Submission. But it is submission to the greatest power there is, in exchange for which, Muslim men gain honor and status in this world over non-believers and, very importantly, over women.

**On the "gestures" of humility and "servant leadership" by Jesus, or the Pope, see my reflections here.







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Trending

A great day in Amurrica.

The Great Soap Opera and Passion Play continues.

ExC, who grew up assuming that this movement was born of absolute righteousness, has now come to see it as a nothing more than a passive-aggressive attack on the host civilization which has made the very existence of this cancerously dysfunctional demographic possible. No sympathy at all. None.

Our educated class continues their treason.

Although the decision was overturned, who can deny that American academia is a nest of leftist America-hatred?

The Sacred Victim Group du jour brings down yet another poor ordinary person.

The inverted pyramid once again. 

"Classic democracy, the power of the majority, has been replaced by a new kind of democracy, represented by the rule of minorities over the majority. The minorities are being protected from the "totalitarian" and "authoritarian"-minded majority. The very semantics of democracy have been changed." 
-Alexander Dugin

White supremacy at work

While my coffee was brewing on this bright and temperate Sunday morning, I walked a half block away to the local cafe --the hallowed spot where Mr B and I first met-- to get a muffin. Not evil corrrrrrrporate Starbucks, either. A small independent neighborhood business.

(You can smell the Whiteness already, no?)

Inside were the usual suspects, the cupla dozen enlightened bien-pensants who go to local cafes in the morning. Ethnically, they were mostly White, with a few Asians and one Black guy (whom I know to be a very shy programmer on disability whom I have never once seen in the company of other Blacks). Mixed male and female, mixed single and coupled, with a few chic families, gays and straights both. And dogs, of course. Who are provided water dishes outside.

This, my friends, is a space and activity, a "cultural performance" if you will, utterly and totally Euro-Caucasian in origin and actuality.

There is nothing African, Chinese, Mexican or Muslim about it.

Orderly, polite, soft-spoken. It was so White (and LGBTQish) that you could feel your testosterone levels plummet the moment you walked in.

And yet, and yet, I bet that of that group of 25 adults, every single one would worship according to the doctrines and prescriptions of the great religion of Progress: multiculturalism, feminism, redistribution of wealth, post-patriotic globalism, pacifist answers to aggression, saving The Earth and keeping (traditional Christian) religion out of politics.

But they are --even the chicly biracial types and that one Oreo-- White Supremacists all.

And if you are at all honest, dear reader, So Are You.

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Pomo medieval nostalgia

In response to the 16th century Protestant attacks, the Roman Church unified and codified its worship in the 1570 Missale Romanum, under the pontificate of the Dominican, Pius V. For the first time, the whole of Catholic Europe would be using exactly the same words, gestures, calendar and ceremonies for the Mass.

There were exceptions made, however, for any form of liturgy that could show it was more than 200 years old. As a result, a few religious orders who had somewhat idiosyncratic customs were allowed to keep them as their own rite. The Dominican Order, founded in 1216, was one of them.

1240 copy of the Dominican Mass Book

They kept that medieval form of worship for more than 700 years until 1968 when, with the tidal wave of change brought on by the 2nd Vatican Council, they gave it up in favor of Paul VI's reformed Roman rite in the vernacular. Since Benedict XVI's 2007 dictum, the older forms of the Roman rite have been re-allowed.

Today is the feast day of the Dominicans' greatest saint, Thomas Aquinas, and the local studium celebrated a solemn high Mass in his memory, using the ancient rite that he himself would have known and celebrated in the 13th century, one whose shape was determined 400 or more years before that.

I went.

I became a Dominican after the changes, so that the Mass as it had been known to seven hundred years of my religious forbears was unknown to me. I am old enough, however, to remember what a solemn high Mass is, having been an altar server at the old Roman rite versions. I still knew the Latin music (even though the Dominican dialect is slightly different), so I can tell you that the two cantors were terrible.

The rite itself took 75 minutes, with priest, deacon, subdeacon and three young friars as acolytes. There were about 30 people in the choir stalls attending.

It was interesting, all-male, hierarchical, choreographically complex and strangely un-moving. Not fair to judge it on a single performance. These rituals are meant to be repeated over a lifetime and thru many scores of generations. And these friars themselves were largely new to it. But it did have a focus, a lack of audience-related anxiety and a seriousness compared to the modern version.

Moderns carry out the liturgy; medievals were carried along by it. These men were inhabiting ritual roles and carrying out precise ceremonial tasks. Their personalities were not at issue and only obliquely visible. By contrast, modern rites demand an almost unrelieved anxious attention to the moment by moment concoction of a "meaningful worship experience" by a performer-cleric for a consumer-audience.

I realize that it has been almost 30 years since I left. So the environment was both very familiar and felt, well, distant and other. And perhaps I would have felt less disconnected had my recent sense of the Church as active accomplice in the destruction of the West not been a barrier. Sadly, I found it hard to remember my participant Dominican self from the vantage of my current observer self.

Makes you wonder if the Boods are right, that a stable ego is an illusion.

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America's Eternal Teenagers

Why #BlackOutDay took over social media - The Washington Post:

Zzzzzzzz. "Black Is Beautiful" 1970.

It's always the parents fault and nothing is ever enough.

And guess what. It's never gonna stop.

'via Blog this'

Fragments

I never cease to be comforted and pleased by the morning sun shining on the lemon tree in the backyard.

During all my years in Catholic religious orders, I never had any sexual contact with a teenager. Hell, I never had sexual contact with a teenager when I was a teenager!

St Thomas Aquinas tries to explain why you cannot hate your neighbor in himself, but you can hate things in him. You can hate your enemy by hating his hostility to you while not hating him...God, it's all so complicated.

Twice in the last month I have had the ambivalent experience of a successful course of therapy with men who came with a problem and left with it solved. I am happy about that. But they also took with them part of my livelihood.   One of them, not an American, asked me at our last session if it was customary to leave a tip for therapists, because he want to show his appreciation. Ethics, alas, required that I decline.

My family's conflicts in the wake of my mother's death have left me walking around with my stomach in a knot for the last weeks. Given the splits in both parents' families, maybe it's just our sad genetic destiny. I hate it.


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Classic

Handsome ruddy Italian mesomorph Jason Beghe has aged well*. I'd make some remark about aged beef, but that would be unworthy of my high standards.

I'm glad his far-too-long detour in Scientology is done and over. I feel better now about liking him.
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*Unlike his real life best buddy and more successful, if messy, David Duchovny, to whom the years have been far less kind. Is it just me or do Jews and Arabs not age well at all?

Another Jewish War: Who knew?

I consider myself decently read in history. I have long been aware of two major wars between the Jews and the Romans: the uprising which brought an end to the Jerusalem Temple in 70 AD and the Bar Kochba rebellion of the 130's, which led the banning of Jews from Jerusalem .

What I was quite unaware of was the second war between Rome and the Jews, the so-called Kitos Wars of 115-117 AD under Trajan. This took place largely and apparently spontaneously among Diaspora Jews in North Africa and Egypt, Cyprus and Mesopotamia and was hugely bloody, with Jewish gangs slaughtering many of their Gentile neighbors along with the Roman military*.

All news to me.

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*I was shocked that a bunch of Jewish insurrectionists could do such damage to the great Roman army til I read a recent book about the Empire, which made it clear that our image of it as filled with soldiers is very inaccurate. The Roman military was relatively small in number, and scattered, so that it would be quite possible for many inhabitants of the Empire never to actually see a Roman soldier.
Many of their internal garrisons were quite small, so a mob uprising would be able to overtake them.

Female feelings

Being an INTP, I am certainly not without feelings, but they are pretty raw and inarticulate. No matter how I am feeling --until pressed beyond endurance-- I will default to my brain to try to work conflicts through.

Feeling types --most women, and a fair number of men I have known (and lived with)-- swim in the sea of emotion and are at home there, no matter how turbulent and tsunami-like those waters may be.

Via a reference in a  Götterdämmerung  essay about America-as-Weimar, sent me by Mr Trevor Blake, I came across this piece by a happily married male blogger. He points out the wifely feelings control-and-threat game. Even I know it well. And it never ceases to exhaust, disappoint and drive me away.

"I feel disrespected and humiliated when you do that, and I don’t know why you want to do something which makes me feel disrespected and humiliated. When you do that, I feel sad. I feel ugly. I feel like you don’t care about me and don’t really love me."

Placate me or I'll keep pouting and it's your fault. The background threat is making him sleep on the couch, or withholding sex, or even taking the kids and leaving. The rule: if the woman feels unloved, she is commanded by God to punish her man.

I watch how women use this all the time to control men. Makes me glad to be gay, as they say. (But many gay men, whose inner feminine is either teenaged or pathological, play a similar game.)

One of the many things I am glad about in my relationship with Mr B is that we are both Ts, thinking types. In fact, compared to him, I'm the emotional one in the dyad. We are otherwise quite opposite: me INTP, him ESTJ.  The oppositions make for interest, but the common T saves us.

Woe to the man yoked to a feminine power (be it in a female body or a male one) where her feelings rule.

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March 3rd

Beautiful spring sun. Sky blue. Birds singing. Quiet morning activities along the street: people walking to work, to shops, etc. A great achievement, civilization. It's a shame that White Male privilege has kept females and peoples of tint* from pulling it off on their own.

Still bouncing around from my weekend familial encounters. Mr B helps distract and ground me. He is a prince.

Netanyahu doubtlessly gave a strong speech to Congress. Funny how you cannot find a full version of it online after the live feed is over. WTF, YouTube?  No matter what you think of him, or Israel, the dude's got balls and he speaks up for his people clearly and unapologetically all the time. When was the last time an American prez did that?

But I could really have done without the drama queen Elie Wiesel routine. Enough with "the Holocaust" already. It was a long time ago, and many tens of millions of people have died badly all over the world since then. It is not the centerpiece of history, except for Ashkenazi Jews. For the rest of us, just part of the flow. I'm over it. Jewish victim exceptionalism wears thin 70 years later. The totally innocent victims of "the world's oldest hatred," etc. etc.  As I've said, for being the most intelligent group in the world, Ashkenazis don't seem to get it, that having their special pain rubbed in our noses all the time, as if it were our fault and no one else has ever been victimized like them, produces a response exactly opposite to compassion. Any man can tell you that a wife who constantly needles him about some failure of his --real or imagined-- is, as we used to say, cruisin' for a bruisin'. It's psychology 101.

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*Yellow-tinted folks obviously excepted. Unlike Ebonics and LaRazas, they have not been married to their own worst instincts and habits.

Offense

As I've often noted, in contemporary UK dramatic pieces there is a dearth of characters who are not empty, coldly raging, narcissistic, both nihilistic and moralistic. And very often, damned homely and unattractive. Males and females both.

Example, the leads in Broadchurch:

Even though the Brits are melting down, I retain some residual feeling for them. After all, a race that can produce both Shakespeare and Russell Tovey can't be all bad.

So it still offends me to see --as Broadchurch exhibits-- the colonial backwash infecting Albion, Africans and Muzzies pretending to be "British," along with the culture-killing native gynocracy.

Like em or not, they were once a very great people.


Another example. Peaky Blinders, about a early 20th century criminal gang in Manchester. In the first minutes of the first episode, we get a city with lot of Chinese and a prominent Jamaican, to let us know that Britain has always been a multicultural and Whites are just racist to think otherwise. Then we get the Powerful Female dressing down the male lead by reminding him that during the Great War, women ran the gang just fine.

It happens in every BBC piece they now put out. Pravda West.

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Victimist vandalism

A FB commentor, a female performance artist and activist, noted this great moral achievement of hers, apropos of Modesto, CA:

Once, SF drag queen Joan Jett Black went with us to check on a friends' aunts house there who was on vacation.....upon discovering they were anti gay and super religious, she licked every piece of silverware and then put it back in the drawer. Hilarious!

Yeah, a hoot, no?

Tells you much about those people.

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Ethno-masochism

Why is it that so many Whites worship Martin Luther King, Mohandas Ghandi and Nelson Mandela, when these men's achievements consist entirely in defeating Whites?

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Apocalypse now, or at least in a little while

Thoughts from 2013 on Harold Covington's post-American apocalyptic novels.

Why is it, I wonder, that Nazis are still front and center as the most widespread icons of absolute evil, while the seven plus decades of worldwide Marxist horrors --Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, the Gulag, etc.-- have gone right down the memory hole, as if they had never happened?

I think I know the answer.

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An insightful friend said it was the uniforms. Very impressive. Makes Nazis look formidable. Soviet style, by contrast, was frumpy. 

ExC described, in part

The online critic.

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March, in like a lamb

A chilly 50 degrees*, but a bright and clear Sunday morning in SF.

The longtime neighbor with whom I share a wall has moved. While keeping the rent-controlled place, he and his partner (and three dogs and two cats) have taken a lease across the bay. So they only drop in every once in a while. I find that I miss the formerly annoying noises.

I am posting partly to avoid dealing with some family stuff that makes my stomach tighten up. Given how fractured both my parents' families were, the post-mortem conflicts among my siblings about the estate pretty much freak me out. My response: procrastination, avoidance, distraction and repression.

One of my oldest friends belongs to the most liberal and very White denomination in America, one which worships the Trojan Horse MLK and all that African Passion Play. She posted something about a sermon today on #BlackLivesMatter. One of her commentors asked if their church would really matter to BlackLives and that this question made her "tremble in her boots."  I refrained from rudely replying that statistics make it abundantly clear that #BlackLivesDoNotMatterToBlacks, who murder each other with abandon. So if their own people do not really care about them, why should a bunch of White liberals?

Let them read (if they can, without clutching their pearls and fainting) The Daily Kenn, and put faces on the news stories that they probably never hear about anyway.

Nicholas Wade (see below) asserts that a genetic change made Europeans, especially in the north, uniquely non-tribal, with a capacity for benevolence toward non-kin. Very much against the human norm of kin and tribe limits. This allowed the political and economic shape of the West to occur since the Renaissance, a civil society where kinship was not the fundamental driving force. On the other hand, it has led to the above suicidal concern for dysfunctional but increasingly powerful enemy groups.

Watching a few back-to-back episode of Supernatural, brothers Sam and Dean repeatedly risk life and soul (as their father did) to save total and unrelated strangers. This, they assert, is their life's meaning. Only White people from northern Europe could come up with this.

I think I need a new pipe. The one I've been smoking for the last ten years or more has had the bowl narrow beyond fixing. Yes, I smoke a pipe. And the occasional cigar. Never liked cigarettes, though.
My tobacco use is one more reason I live on the edge, a rebel.

Watched an interview with Charles Murray about his book on the class  and culture split among White Americans in the wake of our losing the common civil culture that America used to have when it was a White country. The neighborliness that was common both in urban and rural/suburban places is now lost.

Reading the comments section, as always, convinces me that most of the human race --if the comments reflect it-- is composed of morons.

Nicholas Wade's alternately irritating and quite educational book about race and genes points out that evolution in homo sapiens did not cease many millennia ago but continues. And is "copious, recent and regional." Races, as anyone not anocranially liberal knows, are thus real and significant in their differences. Mr Wade has been excoriated, of course, because he touched the third rail.

Secular liberals condemn the Christian doctrine of the Trinity as irrational nonsense: a God who is both One and Three. Their most fervent dogma is that Race Does Not Exist and that it is The Most Important Difference In The World. A "God" Who both Does Not Exist and Is Everywhere. Who's more irrational?

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*I know. For most of North America, 50 is paradise. But this is context, boyz, context.