The Coming Flood

Genesis 6: 5 The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.

11 Now the earth was corrupt in God's sight, and the earth was filled with violence. 12 And God saw the earth, and behold, it was corrupt, for all flesh had corrupted their way on the earth.

This is all we are told in Genesis of the pre-flood corruption on earth.  Yes, there is mention of the sons of God and the daughters of man, but nothing condemning this.  Then we get this:

7 So the Lord said, “I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens, for I am sorry that I have made them.”

13 And God said to Noah, “I have determined to make an end of all flesh, for the earth is filled with violence through them. Behold, I will destroy them with the earth

Now, there was no “law” yet, no Ten Commandments.  We are told nothing of specifics, nor – at least in Genesis – on what basis such corruption could be identified.

In the Book of Enoch, there are further details.  This book, apocryphal for all Christian traditions and denominations except for the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, begins by describing the judgment coming on all the earth, except for the elect who will be saved.

In chapter 6, we are told that the act of angels taking the daughters of men was known to be a sin…a sin by the angels!

And it came to pass when the children of men had multiplied that in those days were born unto them beautiful and comely daughters. And the angels, the children of the heaven, saw and lusted after them, and said to one another: 'Come, let us choose us wives from among the children of men and beget us children.' And Semjaza, who was their leader, said unto them: 'I fear ye will not indeed agree to do this deed, and I alone shall have to pay the penalty of a great sin.'

The angels swore an oath to each other, removing Semjaza’s concern, and then did the deed.  But why did this sin by the angels require a punishment of men, wiping them off from the face of the earth?  It wasn’t this sin, but another, described in the earlier chapters, 2 – 5.  First, the purpose of each aspect of creation is described:

·         Observe ye everything that takes place in the heaven, how they do not change their orbits, and the luminaries which are in the heaven, how they all rise and set in order each in its season, and transgress not against their appointed order.

·         Behold ye the earth, and give heed to the things which take place upon it from first to last, how steadfast they are, how none of the things upon earth change, but all the works of God appear to you.

·         Behold the summer and the winter, how the whole earth is filled with water, and clouds and dew and rain lie upon it.

·         Observe and see how (in the winter) all the trees seem as though they had withered and shed all their leaves, except fourteen trees, which do not lose their foliage but retain the old foliage from two to three years till the new comes.

·         And again, observe ye the days of summer how the sun is above the earth over against it.

·         And you seek shade and shelter by reason of the heat of the sun, and the earth also burns with growing heat, and so you cannot tread on the earth, or on a rock by reason of its heat.

·         Observe ye how the trees cover themselves with green leaves and bear fruit:

·         And behold how the sea and the rivers in like manner accomplish and change not their tasks from His commandments'.

Every being in creation has a purpose, an order for which these were created.  Chapter 5 explains this:

An Attempt at Neutrality

There was one modern state in which republicanism was neither revolutionary nor inherently antireligious.  This was the United States of America.

The Age of Utopia: Christendom from the Renaissance to the Russian Revolution, by John Strickland

There was this idea of popular sovereignty – yes, in a republican form, but underlying this was the vote.  Strickland offers that this idea had its roots in the congregationalist polity of churches during colonial times.

This tradition was brought to North America by the Puritans in the early 17^th century, a tradition that wanted to move away from the earlier tradition of a hierarchy with a bishop at the top.  Institutions such as Harvard University, Bowdoin College and Yale University, were founded to train Congregational clergy.

…by embracing a postmillennial view of history…[Jonathan] Edwards and other evangelicals stimulated hopes that a broadly equitable society could be created.

Which inevitably leads to Murray Rothbard, who has commented on these post-millennial pietist Protestants:

From the 1830s until after World War I, northern, "Yankee," mainstream Protestants (with the exception of old-style Calvinists and high-church Lutherans) were captured by an aggressive and militant post-millennial pietism whose objective was to use government to stamp out "sin" (especially liquor and the Catholic Church), and who made the lives of Catholic and German Lutheran immigrants miserable and put them under constant attack for nearly a century.

Further, from chapter four of his book, The Progressive Era, Rothbard writes:

Briefly, the [Professor Paul] Kleppner thesis holds that “Pietist” religious groups tended (a) to favor statism, both in the personal and the economic spheres, and (b) therefore consistently supported the Republicans as the statist party, while the Liturgicals, consisting largely of Catholics and conservative Lutherans (a) favored liberty, both in the personal and economic spheres, and (b) therefore supported the Democrats as the Libertarian party.

Returning to Strickland, the view of these Protestants dovetailed nicely with the views of the anti-evangelical philosophes – in their case, the world will see progress to the extent it sheds the idea of original sin and fallen man: man can achieve perfection, but only when he removes God from the picture.

All of which sets as foundation the founding of this American republic.  Many of the founders were “deists” who held a neutral, if not contemptible view of traditional Christianity.  Nevertheless, this did not result in the bloodletting to be found in France.  There was freedom of religion to be found from the beginning.

But this says nothing of the attitude of many of the founders.  Thomas Jefferson, for example, would oppose the influence of Christian clergy at every turn:

For him, history “furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government.”

At the end of his life, he would compose the “Jefferson Bible,” doing away with such details as Jesus being the Son of God, the Virgin Birth, and the miracles.  Jesus was just another in a long line of Jewish rabbis who preached a morality of love and humility.  When persecuted, He, like Socrates, would choose to die a noble death.  That was the end of the story…no Resurrection.

There was Thomas Paine, who would defend French Republicanism against the writing of Edmund Burke.  Exceeding even Voltaire, he would write that…

…the historical faith of Christendom is nothing but “a fable, which, for absurdity and extravagance, is not exceeded by anything that is to be found in the mythology of the ancients.”

In any case, the government that resulted from the convention in 1787 would be thoroughly republican without being anti-Christian.  There was no state religion, nothing approaching the Holy Roman Empire, and certainly nothing like Orthodox Byzantium.

A Way With Words

Either we are being ruled by a cabal of incompetents, whose twaddlesome deficiencies rise to near criminal levels, or we are being ruled by criminals, whose master plan is to continue to poke the American bear with a short stick in hopes of getting a reaction that would justify a severe crack-down, or it is a combination of the two…

So opens Doug Wilson in his post “The Bait Lies Before You Now. Do Not Take It.”  (The video is also available.)

I have come to admire that way Wilson has with words.  While I don’t always agree with everything he writes (and it is also true for this post), he always wields a sword-defeating pen.

The post examines exactly what the title suggests, written after the Biden-as-Hitler-as-Adam Sutler speech of the other day.  It is bait – don’t take it.  As I wrote earlier: A civil war is the wet-dream of the left and of the principalities and powers behind them.

The post / video is worth your time.  I will offer one section, under the heading “A Long Train of Abuses”:

But I got distracted. What long train of abuses was it this time? What are we dealing with now? What have our scamps—whether federal, state, or local—been up to?

·         Waco.

·         Ruby Ridge.

·         Lois Lerner.

·         Russian collusion hoax.

·         Refusal to accept the results of the 2016 election.

·         Hillary’s server.

·         FBI spying on a presidential candidate before, during and after the election.

·         Hunter’s laptop.

·         Prohibitions of hymn singing in church.

·         Un-prosecuted statue toppling.

·         The canonization of the unfortunate George Floyd.

·         Abruptly changing election rules on the eve of elections.

·         2000 mules.

·         Massive lockdowns.

·         Masking orders.

·         Arrests for psalm singing outdoors.

·         Naked censorship across all Big Tech platforms.

·         Naked censorship by these entities at the behest of gummint.

·         High disdain for the value of free speech.

·         Gagging of medical experts.

·         Unbridled contempt for religious liberty.

·         Prosecution for protesting the psalm-singing arrests with stickers.

·         Fiery but mostly peaceful riots.

·         Unconscionable treatment of J6 protesters.

·         Refusal to release J6 Capitol surveillance tapes.

·         Mar a Lago raid.

·         Objecting to tyranny defined as whiteness.

·         And the current resident denouncing his political opponents as enemies of democracy in front of a crimson set with a couple of Marines standing there like they were still defending a free country or something, and the president looking for all the world like a cartoon fascist leader in a fever dream.

Listening to him speak this long train is worth the 13-minute investment in the video.

Conclusion

I will leave this also to Wilson:

Has a people ever been given so much freedom, structure, and abundance, and squandered so much of it, in a spirit of reckless ingratitude? Americans have made the prodigal son look like Dave Ramsey. Has anybody ever squandered and thrown away so much?

This is a preacher’s rhetorical question, in case you were wondering, and the answer to the question is no.

As if to drive home the point that our problem is not economic or political:

You can’t vote your way out of something that you sinned your way into.

The issue is cultural – the loss and abuse of a specific culture with a natural law ethic built on objective truths.

The Time is Short

Democracy has nothing to do with freedom. Democracy is a soft variant of communism, and rarely in the history of ideas has it been taken for anything else.

Democracy virtually assures that only bad and dangerous men will ever rise to the top of government.

-          Hans Herman Hoppe

Here is what democracy has come to:

Barack Obama, 2008: “"They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

This was the first instance that I recall where a politician in the United States in a major position or in a major election made the supporters of his or her opponent, as opposed to the opponent, the enemy.

Here is the second:

Hillary Clinton, 2016: “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?  The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”

And the third, in a speech of an extremely malignant form of psychological projection:

The Tower

 It's party time for the guys in the tower of Babel

Sodom meet Gomorrah, Cain meet Abel

Have a ball y'all

-          Tower of Babel, Elton John

Genesis 11: 1 Now the whole earth had one language and the same words.

There was a time that I understood this in just one way: the plain reading of the text, as many would describe it.  Historical, scientific, nominal.  Over the last several years, I have come to appreciate that it need not be this way – and, in fact, for countless centuries it was not this way.

Could we not say today that everyone on earth has one language?  I can translate any document into English with a click or two of my mouse.  Do we not have “one language”? 

Yet, it is safe to say that they did not have google translate three or four millennia ago.  But they did have trade.  Significant and meaningful trade, over vast distances.  Consider just what such trade requires.  What does it require today?

Trust.  Trust in your trading partner, trust in the medium of exchange, trust in the logistics flow and supply chain, trust in the stability of prices, trust in your employees and customers, trust in the rules and regulations, trust in the weather, trust in the soil.  When you have these – even if not perfectly, but reasonably so and reasonably reliably – are you not speaking the same language with others all around the world?

And what happens when this is the case – this one language?  Does man use it for good or for ill?  Man being human, the answer is clear.

4 Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.”

Pride.  Replace God.  Remove Him from society. 

It seems this idea is not agreeable to God:

5 And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of man had built. 6 And the Lord said, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.

Or, if you want to avoid the “God” part of this story, then just consider: any universalizing governance structure or universal institution (if it isn’t under God’s authority) presents the same problem (and since this paragraph is for those who want to avoid the “God” of this story, then this means every single universalizing governance structure presents the same problem).

And isn’t this what our betters have in mind?  In store for the rest of us?  This one language, this universalizing institution for governance and control?

God has solved that problem before:

7 Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another's speech.”

This is simple: destroy the trust in all of the factors that underlies widespread trade.  The medium of exchange, etc.  This will do more to “confuse the language” than anything else that could be done today.  So, maybe it isn’t God actively destroying these factors.  Maybe God just knew that it was inevitable whenever man decides to place himself in the place of God.  The laws of economics, the laws of nature: maybe God set these in motion to do the heavy lifting whenever these were violated to the point of breaking.

Ideology, Abstractions, and Terror

The French Revolution had been a catastrophe for Christendom.

The Age of Utopia: Christendom from the Renaissance to the Russian Revolution, by John Strickland

That the optimism of the Revolution unleashed a wave of terror in no way diminished the hopes and expectations of the revolutionaries. 

Perhaps an example of what we know to be true about our time.  The peaceful methods of pointing out the hypocrisy and lies of today’s revolutionaries have zero impact on the onward march of revolution, as we know.  Why would it, when even the bloodshed offered in the French Revolution did nothing to slow down the drive and fervor?

It took a decade, until 1799, for the revolution to spend itself.  By then, a group of moderates came to the fore.  They sought a figurehead.  What they got was a strongman.

In 1792, Napoleon Bonaparte would defend the borders of France against Austria and Prussia; in 1795, he defended against a Roman Catholic royalist insurgency in Paris – firing grapeshot into the crowds.  When appointed to the honorary position of first consul in 1799, he overthrew the government.  Dictatorship followed the decade of bloodshed that was supposed to deliver a utopian republicanism.

In his domestic policy, Napoleon proved an agent of secularism.

While not a fan of Robespierre’s inclination toward terror, he did share the Jacobin’s deistic convictions.  The Roman Catholic Church would not have the authority it had before 1789, however he would restore peace with Rome.  In 1801, Roman Catholicism was recognized as the religion of “the majority” of Frenchmen. 

Yet bishops were required to swear an oath of loyalty to him…after being appointed by him.  French Christianity would be subordinate to the government.

And this is where I keep coming up against my major objection to this work by Strickland and the idea of governance as offered by the Eastern Church – the idea that the ideal government is one where the emperor would rule in a most Christian manner, being guided by bishops who were subordinate to him.

It almost never worked out well, with the one or two exceptions touted so strongly such that they demonstrate the folly of such a scheme.  The emperor would use the bishops when it suited him, and would ignore the bishops when it didn’t.  It was that simple.

In any case…in 1804, Pope Pius VII would travel to Paris to formally recognize Napoleon as emperor.  With him, a replica of the crown placed on the head of Charlemagne.  Napoleon would seize the crown and himself placed it on his head.  Subordination to the Church would in no way be tolerated.

In 1809, he would invade Italy and seize the Papal States and take that same pope as prisoner to France.  He would invade Russia with half-a-million men in 1812.  Seventy thousand would die in Borodino in September, but still he marched on.  A week later, he would enter Moscow, only to see it had been burned by the fleeing citizens.  He would turn the Kremlin’s cathedrals into horse stalls.

Within a month, lacking food and supplies, he was forced to retreat.  His attempts at negotiating with Alexander met with failure – Alexander refused to negotiate with the man who many in Europe saw as the Antichrist until every invader was out of Russia.

Natural Law and the Meaning Crisis…

…or, as an alternative title: Must I Set Myself on Fire in a Public Display of Indignation….

Paul VanderKlay did a two-hour video covering a discussion between John Vervaeke and Jonathan Pageau that was hosted by Rebel Wisdom.  I watched PVK’s video, and the comment I left at his site regards this:

Two hours on a video that is focused on the necessity of natural law ethics and objective morality in order to live peacefully among other human beings and as the solution to the meaning crisis without ever once mentioning natural law ethics while dissing the idea of objective morality. 

Yes.  His entire video talked all around natural law but never mentioned it.  As for the term objective regarding morality and ethics, this was dismissed.

That’s really quite an accomplishment.  Thank God Karl is no longer around.  The tirades that would flow would be…Biblical!

Karl used to comment often at PVK’s site.  His frustration on the lack of focus on natural law ethics as necessary in this dialogue would often result in direct, blunt, biting comments.

I understand Vervaeke doesn’t want nostalgia. 

Vervaeke doesn’t want to go back to something.

He (and, it is clear, PVK) will have to contend with Lewis and The Abolition of Man on this point.

Why?  You know why (at least those of you who have been reading attentively over the years).  Citing Lewis from this book:

This thing which I have called for convenience the Tao, and which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes, is not one among a series of possible systems of value. 

It is the sole source of all value judgements.  If it is rejected, all value is rejected.  If any value is retained, it is retained.

Unless you accept these without question as being to the world of action what axioms are to the world of theory, you can have no practical principles whatever.  You cannot reach them as conclusions; they are premises.

There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgement of value in the history of the world.

The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of imagining a new primary colour, or, indeed, of creating a new sun and a new sky for it to move in.

Nostalgia.  Nostalgia for traditional and objective ethics – the natural law.

Returning to my comment at PVK’s site:

It’s a good thing that there will be an eternity to sort this out.  At this pace, however, even eternity might not be long enough.

And then, a gift out of the blue – although, again, no mention of natural law at all.  A discussion between Jordan Peterson, John Vervaeke, and Jonathan Pageau.  This was complicated to follow, and it went on for 2.5 hours.  But I did find a few gems that were at the same time recognizable to me – including this million-dollar quote: