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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