Feast of the Assumption

Two NOVA episodes of a series called First Peoples suggests that when Homosapiens met both Neanderthals and Erectus, there was interbreeding rather than violence, etc.  The genetic evidence is clear in the first case, since all non-Africans have some Neaderthal DNA admixture.

The images and re-enactments in the series, however, assume that this interbreeding was peacefully consensual.

No room whatever is given to the notion that bride-stealing or raiding and taking the females, etc (while killing all the males) entered into it.

Who is making an unlikely assumption here, me or them?


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A pattern

Watching an updated program on the Neanderthals, I find echoes of an attitude I often run across in contemporary discourse, a combination of self-absorption and self-hatred.

The older view was that when Homosapiens entered Europe, we competed with them and drove them to extinction. Result: we are evil genocidal murderers.

The newer view is that we mated with them on a more or less equal basis and that they show evidence of behaviors much like ours. Result: we are arrogant to have thought we were better then they were.

A lose-lose.

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Happy Hallowe'en!

Kid, I know how ya feel.

Happy Reformation Sunday!

On the 500th Anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, the end results:

And lest I be accused of (post) Catholic "triumphalism," behold the Church of Rome that the Reformers once feared as the Great Dragon that devoured the saints...

(Some days Islam looks like a much less embarrassing alternative...)

Neither with a bang nor with a whimper, but with a

The anti-pope

I read the final speech of Francis the Talking Pope after his mess of a synod. I have no idea what the hell he is talking about, except that Mr Compassion and Humility likes to scold everyone in sight.
What an embarrassing disaster.

He is the master of confusion.

And along with the tellingly disempowering metaphor of "accompaniment," we have his discovery of "the God of surprises." One I never heard of.

The man is a pontifical dog's breakfast.

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Getting what you want

Although I would be separated from Mr B, who, lamentably, votes for Democrats,  I'd like to see the outcome of splitting the country based on the 2012 vote: everyone who voted Republican in one country, all the Democrat voters in another. And then let it all play out to its logical conclusion.

In the Republican country, there'd be a mass trial of the Republican leadership, followed by public hangings, at which most of the citizenry would show up armed.

In the Democrat country, Obama would be President For Life.

Yup

Be careful what you ask for

A Dominican website footer quotes St Gregory of Nyssa to the effect that the end goal of a virtuous life is to become like God.

Which God, I ask?

The dickless Mr Rogers who does nothing but ooze mercy and compassion like Oprah, the one currently popular with a dying Western Christianity?

Or the bipolar and multiple-personalitied cosmic storm deity in the Old Testament?

Or merely the Creator of this planet, where everything that lives lives by eating other things that live, until all of them die?

Theosis. Not what your Grandma thought it was.

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Mea maxima culpa

I have made a great many mistakes in my life. Tons, in fact.

Perhaps I am making more right now.

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Scylla and Charybdis

The two great extreme temptations of the West are nihilism and utopia. And it is not rare when a hunger for the latter turns into the former.

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Retractationes

In a classroom exchange years ago with post-Jungian guru James Hillman --whose Jewishness was covered up by his apparently Anglo name, like Jon Stuart-- he took me to task for using the phrase "Judeo-Christian" to describe the West.

I forget precisely why he objected. It had something to do with either condescension or colonialism, I think. I had used it in the generously inclusive sense that I had been taught as the Right Thing To Do in Post-Vatican II Catholicism, where Jewish roots were as enthusiastically praised as they had been systematically rejected prior to that time.

I have now come to the same conclusion as Reb Hillman, although for my own reasons. It is not a phrase I will use anymore. Western civilization is not Judeo-Christian. It was created by Christians. And until the Enlightenment rejection of Christianity, Judaism was virtually always seen as the alien Other. Ask any Jew. And what is now condescendingly condemned as Christian "supercessionism" --yet another fraudulent ism-- was for 2000 year simply orthodoxy.

Hillman played it both ways. When he was part of European tradition, he could claim the whole thing as his inheritance (although his loathing of Christianity was never far from the surface) but when he wanted to gain traction as a sacred outsider, he'd drag out his Judaism. Well, not his Judaism, since he was not remotely religious in any traditional halachic way, but his Jewishness.

That is one of the great tragedies of Emancipation, that now Jewishness rather than Judaism is the religion of most Jews, as Dennis Prager points out. And for most, Jewishness --like gayness for now for homosexuals-- requires worship of the gods of the Left.

"Judeo-Christian" is now fashionably used as a way of getting Christians to feel a kinship with Jews that is rarely reciprocated by the official organs and the many organizations of the Bnai Israel. Individuals are another matter, but in collective terms, it's a one-way street. Hence, my eschewal of the term from now on.


BTW, WWII was not all about the Jews and what happened to them is neither the center of history nor the worst thing ever to happen, despite what the Hitler Channel would like to make us think.

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Hard sayings, continued

Unless we embrace the very thoughts and attitudes which we are most powerfully forbidden to think or hold --or even consider--, we will not be able to survive.

As I watch the European Eloi standing in the streets, staring helplessly as the hordes of Muslims invade...as if they had no armies who could stop them...I think that only the banned and excoriated beliefs --which to our ancestors were common sense-- can possibly awaken us to our real situation.

What is most taboo is in fact most necessary.

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Hiatus

Houseguest for the last several days. Ranting to resume soon. (He had to listen to some of it!)

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Exploding head

A stupid story about some SNL and ACLU thing about White Male Privilege made my head explode this morning on Facebook:

Any of you Foolish Caucasians who fail to realize that these people and their allies and enablers are out to destroy you, wake the fuck up. Whites have privilege because Whites create Western civilization. It's called culture and all culture includes structures of privilege. Whites, as a group, have "privilege" because we have EARNED it as a group, creating worlds where other groups get to be eternal parasites and then moan about it. Example: People like this fraudulent bitch, whose people cannot create or maintain civilizations, (and who are only 1/8 of the population, not the 2/3 who are White) get Victim Privilege, which lets them whine and blame eternally to avoid the blunt facts that they are responsible for their own failures. The whole privilege game is an Alinsky strategy to get you to commit suicide so these losers can take your stuff. I am so sick to effing death of this BS.

To quote a very reactionary and rayciss meme: If we had a country of our own, this shit wouldn't be happening.

Lions and hyenas can never be anything but enemies.

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A sample of what goes through my head in a morning

I think I have learned more about real female psychology from reading Chateau Heartiste than I ever did by listening to psychologists. Female psychologists especially.

The extent to which envy drives the world is vastly underrated. Not for nothing did God put it into the Ten Commandments.

I have a new post-American Commonwealth fantasy. Two changes to the septic tank under the National Mall's restrooms. First, I will mingle the bones of Saul Alinsky --the Archetypal Ungrateful Jew-- with those of Teddy Kennedy, who proved that the Nativists were right about Catholics. But in order to prevent their cursed remains from dissolving entirely, I would have them encased in some kind of silicone box so that the new nation's people could literally crap on their bones for a very long time to come.

It is psychologically impossible for me now to take seriously --except in moments of atavistic regression-- that there is anything on Earth such as The One True Religion. Not that all faiths are equal. No, not by a long shot. It is not the diversity of religions that brings me to this state, as in the PoMo leap from disagreement to pseudo-relativism. I say pseudo-relativism because the PoMo's are absolutist about their "social justice" agenda and only relativist about yours. No, it's videos like this:

I can make an intellectual argument that size, either in space or time, is only meaningful to finite beings like us and that to Being Itself, the non-finite Creator who is eternal and ubiquitous, size is utterly irrelevant. As irrelevant as the "effort" it takes to make and hold in being this unimaginably vast universe, of which we are an unimaginably tiny part.

Yet, this context makes One True Faith talk sound tinny to me. I may be wrong, but that's my current response to it, be it Islam (especially) or Mormonism.


I have some unprintable thoughts about Joe Biden and about the condition of White men generally.


I really wonder, when it comes time for me to die, how much of my life I will see as a. a rich tapestry of experience that I would do over again or b. a series of mis-steps that took me too long to figure out.

The Liberal Catholic Church

No, not the theosophical group, but the Great Whore of Babylon herself, the Holy Roman Church.

Who knows how the detritus from the synod will be assembled into some kind of papal bull, but the disarray on view is what made for that title.

Here's a very telling paragraph from the new Bergoglian bishop of Chicago, who basically said in his press conference that if your "conscience" tells you it's ok, it's ok. And to add to that, the Church should just accept your judgment. Thomas Aquinas, who is the father of the doctrine of conscience, would be rolling over in his grave, except that, well, another story for another time.

Here's His Grace:

In Chicago I visit regularly with people who feel marginalized: the elderly, the divorced and remarried, gay and lesbian individuals and also couples. I think that we really need to get to know what their life is like if we’re going to accompany them,” he said.

Note the fundamentally Liberal assumptions:

Life is about how you feel. And Liberalism is about making you feel good.

And feeling marginalized...whatever the hell that is...grants you immediate and authoritative claim to...anything you feel. Wow. Marginalized...one of the seven capital sins, right? Awful crime...

Note the Liberal "we" and the attitude of noblesse oblige toward these exotic creatures and their imprecisely unhappy feelings.

Then there's this new metaphor infecting the whole discussion, "accompanying." It's origins are French, I am pretty sure, since that was the only place I ever encountered this usage.

Consider the alteration it entails. The "marginalized" groups you've now elevated to victim status are marching along and having their lives, and your job as a pastor is not to lead them or inspire them or challenge them but to accompany them....as they wander around, leading you as you tag along trying to make yourself feel useful. Bad metaphor. Like the completely unscriptural "building the Kingdom."

And notice the opening group of "the elderly." What the hell has simply being old got to do with the moral clashes involved in homosexuality and remarriage? Just makes the whole thing cuddlier.

This is the classic Liberal set of assumptions and attitudes, which leads to huge traditional majorities being led around by the nose by tiny minorities...most of whom hold you in contempt...and rejoice in your destruction.

As usual, let me note that my distress at seeing this is because the Church has been, until recently, a backbone of the West and every new self-inflicted wound makes the West weaker, too.

Bloke

Young Mr Russell Tovey.


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Conquest Day 2015

Columbus Day used to be a celebration of the founding of our* civilization in the Western Hemisphere. Now it's shadowed by the suicidal narrative of pomo liberalism. Things like "Indigenous Peoples' Day", etc. and becomes an occasion for victimist resentment of "500 years of genocide" and what I call "White Lent"....the long cultural season of Caucasians repenting for their success, in this case over the earlier inhabitants of the continents.

Bullshit.

Happy Columbus Day.

It was customary to speak of the Europeans who came here as "settlers". Well, that's true. But it's only partly true. They were also invaders and conquerers, who often behaved just like every other groups of invaders and conquerers on the planet. But now, in these enlightened times, we know that invading and conquering is something that you should be sent to the principal's office for.

Well, if "they" hadn't done their regular human thing of invading and conquering, I would not be here. And since I am happy to be here, I am glad that they invaded and conquered. Willing the end, I must will the means.

But, you may ask, incredulous, surely you don't approve of everything they did?

Wrong question! Pointless moralistic masturbation. When was the last time any of us approved of everything anybody did? More bullshit.

But what about the Native Americans? How do you think they feel today?

Don't know. You'd have to take a survey. It's not my concern.

But I do remember them on Columbus Day. They are a warning to me, and to us. Leaving aside things they could do nothing about --their defenselessness against European microbes, the massive technological superiority of the Europeans and their eventual overwhelming numbers-- they did not, as a group, mount a successful defense of their land. They did not see the danger fast enough, did not change their traditional ways enough and so remained --like many of us now--in denial, divided against each other, stuck in the past and in habit...until it was too late. In the end, they could not have held out, but they might have made a tougher enemy and slowed their destruction. They are what we will become in the face of Jihad and Reconquista unless enough of us wake up.

Despite the massive evidence of our species' history, our liberal schoolmarms now want us to act now as if conquest, submission and genocide are some kind of inexplicable deviation from the orderly course of peaceful civilized life beyond all that nasty tribalism and nationalism...when in fact they are the bread and butter of the human story.

In my occasional forays into the history of the conquest period, I am struck by two things that I am not supposed to notice. Many of the Indian tribes were as ruthless as any other group of humans. Noble savages not. And secondly, their longstanding rivalries and hatreds of one another often seemed more palpable to them than the threat posed by the whites. As with so many groups who are brought down, they were often far more interested in hating their "fellow Indians" --a concept that would have made no sense to them, I suspect-- than in dealing with the destruction at their door. Like so many of us.

I have been talking about the Europeans as "they". Just a habit, I guess, given my current feelings about them. But even if my genetic Irish and Scandinavian ancestors didn't get here til 1848 and after, who I am now, an American, makes the invaders and conquerers and settlers "us", not "they". They are my cultural and spiritual forebears. I am their son now.

A friend just back from a trip to China noticed how the guides softpedaled, ignored or downplayed certain parts of Chinese history in their presentations. She noticed that they seemed uncomfortable claiming parts of their own cultural story and was led to wonder how other groups, like ourselves, do a similar kind of editing. In the PomoPC version of American history, it begins from day one with a call to guilt and shame.

How can people who structure their national or civilizational identity around such a narrative be expected to endure?

As insightful ShrinkWrapped notes, to become infatuated by "idealizing the ideal" is a dead end. We are not angels. We are men. On planet Earth. Ahimsa is only for monks. And deracinated Boomer narcissists.

If I were not to mark Columbus Day with gratitude, I would be saying, in effect, that I regret my own existence. And too too many of my countrymen (and women), infected with the virus of multicultural victimism, feel exactly that way. I don't.

Happy Columbus Day!

*Multiculturalism makes it impossible to speak of "our" civilization. Diversity does not make "us" strong; it erases "us".

(An edit of my 2007 post).

Indecent exposure

One of the Alt-Right sites I read and whose podcasts I listen to engages in constant verbal transgression, using every conceivable term that our masters have taught us are not only unsayable but unthinkable.

Decent people would find the language deeply offensive or, condescendingly, adolescent. But decent people, I have come to suspect, are prisoners of their enemies, having been lured into thinking that their decency has any value at all for those who hold them in contempt.

Part of the above lingo is what decent people would call rank homophobia. But I don't blame these guys. They are young (30s+), White, straight, Gentile males. And they quite accurately realize that they are being screwed. And that the so-called "LGBT community" is one phalanx in the army raised against them.

Although pretty well every therapist I know is a garden-variety San Francisco liberal, including the Jungian analysts who imagined themselves possessors of some kind of superior insight, it is my role as a psychotherapist that has played a part in my migration to the far Right.

When I work with people, I look for the throw-away line or the Completely Avoided Subject, etc as clues to what powers might be alive in the room but hidden. Including the parts that the Waking Ego would dismiss as "crazy." These marginalized or denied images and voices often carry truths that the Waking Ego cannot bear but may --and the word is may-- need to recognize and listen to.

That's part of how I started paying attention to the "Right-wing crazies," as possible messengers of the culture's soul. And discovered that they have a lot of denied and repressed reality to show.

As I have done before in my analyses of the Seven Headed Hydra or the Seven Spoked Wheel or the Seven Pillared Temple of our masters' now hegemonic religion, I tried to find the complex, the emotion-driven image, hiding inside the discourse. And here's what I discovered:

At the heart of the multicultural fantasy is envy, resentment and ultimately murderous hatred of the White race. 

At the heart of the genderist fantasy is envy, resentment and ultimately murderous hatred of White men, especially heterosexual men.

At the heart of the redistributionist fantasy is envy, resentment and ultimately murderous hatred of economically successful Whites. 

At the heart of the pacifist fantasy is envy, resentment and ultimately murderous hatred of White male physical power 

At the heart of the globalist fantasy is envy, resentment and ultimately murderous hatred of the White nation-state. 

At the heart of the secularist fantasy is envy, resentment and ultimately murderous hatred of the White religion of Christianity 

At the heart of the environmentalist fantasy is envy, resentment and ultimately murderous hatred of the White consumer.

I have never before explicitly included the racial element in all the seven points, but it has become clearer to me that this qualifier is accurate. Reb Benjamin Disraeli said that, "All is race. There is no other truth." All the exceptions that the Left makes in each of these areas --hating the One Percent except for Hollywood, HipHop and Sports-- shows how central to the whole business is anti-White and especially anti-White Male hatred. As long as they are not allied to conservatism, People of Color are almost universally exempted from the excoriations of the SJW's and their leaders.

If you accept the very wise taxonomy of Samuel Huntington about the spectrum of group relations ranging from friends to allies to competitors to antagonists to enemies, you can see that if you are a
White male, the new religion is your enemy, that is, seeks your destruction.

And if that's the case, then the pretense of decency and the requirement of  "civil discourse" is simply mystification. Although Marx used the term from his perspective, it is now the "decent" people who are its victims. To paraphrase RD Laing's version,

mystification is a plausible misrepresentation of an activity or a goal, in the service of the interests of one group over/against another group . By representing forms of attack as forms of benevolence, the attackers bemuse the attacked into feeling at one with their attackers, or even into feeling gratitude for their attack, and lulled into feeling bad or mad even to think of rebellion."

When your existence is under threat from a group and a religion fueled by envy, resentment and ultimately murderous hatred of you, all mystified as a quest for a cosmic justice which you, as a decent person, should support, what is your option?

The very bad and mad language of these younger White males is a necessary response to their Blue Pill entrancement, an assertion of Red Pill awakening to the murderous Matrix in which they now find themselves.

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Dust of ages

Getting my guestroom ready for an end of month arrival, I spent a couple of hours...yes, hours...cleaning it. I am an orderly man but apparently blind to dust. Which was copious. Shocking.

Speaking of dust, which we are and to which we shall return,

Her Grace of Stockholm*

the lesbian bishopette of Stockholm...you already know this is not going to end well..has ordered one of her priests to de-Christianize a chapel so that Muslims can pray it. It's a matter of "hospitality."

Part of the complex process of dissolution that we are going through is that our elites no longer believe. This is a process which has been going on since the Renaissance and accelerated with the rise of science and the self-destruction of philosophy. As The Closing of the American Mind showed three decades ago, they are all both absolute relativists and absolute egalitarians.

Gee, what could possibly go wrong?

One of the elements of Western greatness was Christendom. For as long as it lasted, the Empire of Christ asserted without doubt the truth of its creed and its ways. And the possession of this truth is part of what made Europeans the self-confident world-changers that they were.

But that is all gone now. With the death of God, science has become scientism and reason has become  skepticism. The classical unified trinity of the Beautiful, the True and the Good has been reduced to rank polytheism, where they are no longer One but competing forces, squabbling like the Olympians and the Aesir/Vanir.

When a Western elite who no longer believe in access to truth is met by a mass of dark-skinned believers who doubt not for a moment that they are in full possession of it, they have no choice whatever except to surrender and commit suicide. They'll call it "hospitality" or "openness" but it will be suicidal surrender. They have no grounds on which to say no.

With the exception of a few fundamentalists, all the Protestant churches of the West have surrendered the notion of theological truth, dumping "narrow-minded, exclusivist and dogmatic orthodoxy" for "the bracing challenges of fearless and prophetic orthopraxy." That is, they have lost their faiths and become liberal activists and social workers.

But if you've ever met a liberal activist or social worker, the phrase "narrow-minded, exclusivist and dogmatic orthodoxy" will not have lost its utility. Human beings are a species of believers. They only appear to dump a religion; they always find another to replace it. The crypto-religion of Western progressivism, with its babbling about "human rights" and, well, you know, is in every way the successor of the previous faith, except that it makes believe it is simply seeing things as they really are...which is an odd thing for a relativist to say, doncha think?

Did it never occur to anyone that an immune system is just Nature's own xenophobia?

Even the Church of Rome, a place where you would think that "narrow-minded, exclusivist and dogmatic orthodoxy" would find its natural home and safe haven, we have the corrosive effect of its slapdash "social teaching" finally doing its termite thing in the Vatican itself, with the current papal
colazione canino currying favor with the aforementioned elites and the Third World masses of the South who are Rome's future.

From my little perch in San Francisco, I ask myself, what could be the possible ground for religion in the West to survive and also serve the West's survival rather than its suicide?



*Notice how all these types are always smiling? Even during their consecration ceremonies. The solemnity of the whole thing has evaporated into the ethos of a pep-rally. Reminds me of how I used to tease my Protestant pastoral colleagues about them always smiling and being nice, while the Roman priests, as group, were rather less pleasant: "Well, we don't have to be nice. We have the True Faith and Real Sacraments. There's no need."
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Noticeable

Hejira?

I finally got tired of all the grief it took to make my PC laptop work, so after 35 years of Microsoft, I have bought a Macbook Air and am in the process of migrating, Mohammed-like :), to the world of Apple.

Where apparently, Eve's first bite is memorialized in logo.

 I've had an iPhone for several years now and have gotten used to that way of things. Now the old dog must learn new Mac tricks.

Like any migrant --funny how loaded that word has become of late-- I look forward hopefully but I also run into puzzling changes and what appear to be cultural impasses.

One of these is Blogger.

Mac's new image program, Photo, is crapola. Everyone hates it, it seems, not just newbie me.

One of its side-effects is that I cannot upload photos or images that I have stored on the Mac. (The dog's breakfast that resulted from Photo's "importing" of my 6K image library and destroying my folder and file system is only part of it).

So, in my current mood of trying to upgrade and renew what I can in my life, --which mood often comes upon me in Octobers-- I took a shot at a Wordpress blog. And discovered much to like about it.

So, I may very well move ExCathedra to Wordpress.

If I do, I will certainly leave a link here for my dozen(s?) of dedicated readers to leave Blogger's Microsoft Medina with DrAndro aka USMaleSF aka ExC and migrate to Mac Mecca, where they will find DrExCathedra still ranting and bloviating at a new Wordpress site.

I'll let ya's know.


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Devalued currency

The now-worthless Zimbabwean dollar 

I grew up in the Church of Pius XII, the Latin Mass --whose "rote" responses and complex choreography I learned as a boy--and the Cold War. I thus remember a time when the Church was The One True Religion, and nobody inside it questioned it. In fact, this was its primary calling card.

One of the quite novel ways of thinking about the Church which came out of the blue with the Vatican Council, when I was in high school, was that we were "The People of God." So much cozier than the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.

Initially, this meant that the Roman Catholics were The People of God. Within ten minutes, that got extended...uh, made more inclusive...to the Orthodox and our more local "separated brethren" the Protestants...and well, you can imagine. It was the 60's and pretty soon everybody was The People of God. Everybody.

So now, whenever I hear a priest or theologian or pope use this phrase, I see an ideogram in my head, sorta like the ancient Mayan ones, and it means "gooey but completely empty egalitarian mush designed to lull me into feeling Kumbaya and buying some crapshit idea that's toxic."

It struck me as one of a myriad of transformations, both sacred and secular, where what began as a "new vision" of some kind of kinder, gentler more democratic POV turned into a cheap and empty nostrum used only for emotional manipulation.  It's part of human nature to value what is rare and to disregard what is easily come by. So that now, with the Liberal and PoMo hegemony well nigh absolute, the ten-minute old values of the Sixties --equality uber alles-- have infected everything in sight. And what we have is not, of course, "equality" but, a la Nietzsche, a de-valuation of all values.

What was once a source of Catholic identity and self-confidence was dumped in favor of an image and idea now droned on about in emptying and graying churches and advertized in word and deed by His Loudmouthness, who presses Mother Europa and all her children to welcome with open arms the waves of savages invading her from the south, because after all, aren't we all The People of God?

 In one lifetime to have gone from the majestic Eugenio Pacelli to Jorge Mario Bergoglio the leftist clown...and people think the West is not in decline, the One True Church of Christ along with it?