This week we continue on the theme of impiety, with a bit longer article in honor of the Sacred Triduum.
Last week, we mentioned that impiety is the virtue of showing respect for our roots and those joined closely to us in them. We also saw how modern society is based upon impiety, piety’s opposite—hence, its obsession chiefly with sex and gender, internal class struggles and racism. In attacking sexual matters, it eats away at the very root of society. It attacks whatever survives, by teaching the people to hate themselves, their parents and their ancestors, most effectively along lines of class and race tensions. The net effect is to impede people from putting down roots, or retaining any connection to the roots they had.
In the Passion of Christ, on the day whereof this article will likely post, we find that impiety and piety were in special conflict. The Lord knew that His Passion, the center of history and the greatest act of Piety, would necessarily provoke the great impiety, an exacerbation of the Mystery of Iniquity long working in the world. St. Augustine has well summarized this by contrasting two cities—the City of God, and the City of Man.
The first parents of the human race, in degrading themselves, degraded the origin of all men, and ruptured the friendship they had with God their maker. The Lord, however, in pronouncing the curse upon them, was actually providing the means of remedy that would one day come: the decree of suffering, which God would take upon Himself. The first and long part of this process, was to consecrate a single people (i.e., separate them from the rest of the world), and prepare them gradually to produce the Messiah. The Old Testament is full of foreshadowings of this mission, which, sadly, are beyond the scope of this article.
When the fullness of time arrived, the Lord began by purifying again the human race in its origins, laying the groundwork for a revived and truer piety. A woman was conceived by barren parents, her nature prevented by grace from contracting the ancient contagion; the Lord would take the entirety of His nature from her purity, having no human father. One must understand, here: we have the Lord God Himself, the All-Father, the one most due our piety, Incarnate. And, for the Hebrew people, we have here the final result, the summit, of the entire Hebrew race. Here, is the Son of Abraham, Issac and Jacob; the Son of Jesse, David and Solomon; a “Hebrew of Hebrews,” to use St. Paul’s phrase and, moreover, the Son of God Incarnate by a seedless conception, a New Adam drawing the whole of His human nature from the New Eve which He had prepared.
Yet “He came unto His own, and His own received Him not.” The very first event in Jesus’ life, draws our attention to a Jewish people dominated by foreigners—Caesar Augustus has commanded a census, and the Holy Family, with great inconvenience, makes its way to Bethlehem. His own people have no idea, of Who is in their midst, but foreigners—Persian Magi—know Whom they seek, the King of the Jews. Yet when they come to those lands they find a supposed king of the Jews, who is unaware of what is occurring. His reaction, upon hearing, is not to honor God and rejoice in the visitation of his people; rather, he rages with impiety. He unleashes an army upon the people he claims as his own, killing all young boys. The Holy Family is forced to abandon their own nation and people for Egypt – insult to injury, that the promised Messiah should have to retreat to the land from which He delivered Israel, so long ago.
At the Presentation of our Lord in the temple, His own mother begins to enter into the sympathy, the compassion, which she will experience for her Son until the bitter end. The elder Simeon prophesies to her: “Behold, this child is set for the fall, and for the resurrection of many in Israel, and for a sign of contradiction; and thine own soul, a sword shall pierce.”
The Fathers comment on this verse, telling us that the Virgin experienced an interior revelation of the fact that her Son, Whom she knew would suffer, would actually be brought to His suffering precisely by His own people; that His suffering would be rejected by them and held in contempt. She experienced this sorrow, not as we fallen men do in our passions, but with the acute and clean grief of a pure soul apprehending this great Mystery as fully as any mortal may.
Throughout the whole of His ministry, it was this way. When He announces Himself publicly to the people of His hometown, Nazareth, He mentioned that none of the Jews’ prophets were accepted by them, but had to be sent to widows and lepers in far-off lands. “And all they in the synagogue hearing this, were filed with anger. And they brought Him to the top of the hill on which their city was built, that they might throw Him off it headlong.” The scene is hardly unique in His life.
Things come to a head, when He raises Lazarus from the dead a week before coming to Jerusalem. From that point on, the leaders of the Jews are very intent on putting Him to death; the news of that particular miracle was hard to conceal, and the Jewish leaders resented and feared the people. The one time His people greet Him with something like recognition, the irony is bitter. He is greeted as king, as the Son of David! The Hebrew children run before His foal, throwing their clothes, and fronds of palms, and flowers, before His feet. Yet this same crowd shall, in five days’ time, clamor for His execution.
And how does that death come about? One of His own chosen disciples. For what? Because the Lord was not delivering the political revolution and liberation, which the Jews expected of their Messiah. So, for a bit of money, Judas Mercator Pessimus sold his Friend, Brother, Countryman, Messiah, King and God. One moment he shares bread with the Man, and the next, he arranges His betrayal.
For if my enemy had reviled me, I would verily have borne with it. And if he that hated me had spoken great things against me, I would perhaps have hidden myself from him. But thou a man of one mind, my guide, and my familiar, Who didst take sweetmeats together with me: in the house of God we walked with consent.
And in our Lord’s betrayal, what do we find? His own Apostles are positively bored with the situation. They’re tired. They can’t be bothered. Their Friend and God is sweating blood in the garden; the perfect humanity of Christ is preparing itself to endure a Passion which, precisely because of the perfection of that nature, shall be felt more keenly, and shall be more heinous and atrociously evil, than any suffering could otherwise be. And when the moment of capture comes, they all scatter and flee—the first collegial act of the pope in union with the bishops of the world! His chief apostle denies not once, but thrice, that he even knows the Man.
The crowning moment of impiety comes. His countrymen, not wishing to be blamed, connive to have him killed by the foreign invaders. Normally a country under occupation experiences an increased sense of solidarity; selling a countrymen out to the occupiers would be the most despicable thing one could do. Yet, wonder of wonders, even the foreigners are not so impious and bloodthirsty against this Judaean Peasant, no friend or brother of theirs! Even the unprincipled Pilate was embarrassed to kill Him. But the leaders of the Jews are busy winding up the crowd; come hell or high water, He’ll die.
On the hill of Golgotha, we find our Lord still being mocked by His persecutors. His blessed mother and a few women are all that attend Him, along with St. John, the only Apostle who, after fleeing, returned to see things through. His mother, the Gospels tell us, had “treasured up all that was said, pondering them in her heart,” from His earliest childhood, when the shepherds and Magi had come, and when Simeon had prophesied, and when they had lost Him as He taught in the temple as a boy. This was it, the last remnant of faithful Israel: the Mother of God, some ladies, a young man. A single one of Israel’s teachers, St. Joseph of Arimathea, remained, offering to His Messiah his own tomb.
The events of HIs life are familiar to many of us—so familiar, that we easily read them without much surprise or reflection. Sometimes it helps to use an analogy; in our day, many men watch the joy of their domestic life wane, as the country turns immoral, wives turn bitter, children turn disobedient and ungrateful. Yet the men keep working and tending for them, out of love, and duty. This is a point from which to begin sympathizing with the Lord, for this is similar to what He endured, albeit on a vastly greater scale.
What Mystery of Iniquity is this, that the God and Savior of Mankind, should come to endure such universal and pervasive ingratitude, treachery and betrayal, especially from His own people and intimate friends, as a constant feature of His life? “And he shall turn the heart of fathers to their sons, and of sons to their fathers, lest I come and strike the earth with a curse.”
Rejected by all but a last remnant of His own, the Lord would invite others to join Him, instead. He told of a parable, in which a great man had prepared a wedding feast, but all of his kin and friends made excuses and absented themselves from it. The man therefore invited anyone that would come in from the streets and alleys, lest the rich banquet he prepared should be wasted and lacking in good cheer.
Those who come to this Marriage Supper, prepared on the gibbet of the Cross, become the new people of the Lord. Piety is sown anew in this race, grafted into the True Israel, Christ, through Baptism. Those who consent to be joined to Him are inducted into citizenship in the City of God, the City that perdures in piety. The rest, rank amongst the citizens of the City of Man, where only God’s grace can liberate a man from the constant struggle against impiety. And the cruelest princes of this City are those who, having once belonged to Israel, whether of the Synagogue or of the Church, have become guilty of betraying the Body and Blood of the Lord.
The Scriptures teach that all citizens of the City of God have a part in “making up whatever is lacking” in the sufferings of Christ, of following Him in His struggle with the impiety of lost man; following this, the Fathers and Doctors have often remarked that the Church, through time, often goes through periods that bear a resemblance to His Passion, where she imitates her Lord in His suffering and betrayal.
Of no age would this be more true, than of the last and final contest between the Church and the Anti-Church, the City of God and the City of Man. When our course on Philosophy ends, I’ll begin to address how the modern age is the age of that conflict, and how the mystery of impiety which we see all around us—the apostasy, the class warfare, the ethnic strife and betrayals, the whole of it—is the most complete recapitulation of the Lord’s Passion in the Church, helping us to understand the failures and crises we perceive all around us.
On this day, however, contemplate the Blessed Virgin, who pondered and remained faithful to her Son in suffering, from her first glimpse of this at the prophecy of Simeon, through to the bitter death, the deposition from the Cross, the laying of His most pure Body in the tomb. What did she think, when that stone hid Him from sight? No, she did not despair; she waited to see what the Lord would do.
But that was not the end of His story; nor is this present evil the end of the Church’s story. There is yet a day to spend with the Lord in Hell. And then…
When it comes, I wish a glorious Day of Resurrection to you all.
Read More: Why Is Modern Christianity So Wimpy?
I would love to know what Moner thinks of this:
It is vital for the Church to show mercy to individual Muslims, for the purposes of evangelisation. Show them Christ’s Mercy in contrast to the hate inherent in their own belief system.
The Arab influx is a call to repentance before it is a call to arms, although it will probably have to be the latter also.
The influx provides mission fields for evangelisation among three groups: lapsed/lukewarm European Christans; Europeans looking for solid rock as opposed to the shifting sands of postmodern relativism; individuals who want to escape from the so-called Religion of Peace.
Jesus said “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” This is a hard saying indeed; but it also requires us to identify the fact that we do indeed have enemies, which the Liberal Left is reluctant to do.
What Francis is doing is 100% compatible with the Year of Mercy.
Revealing God’s love to individuals who are open to it is part of our mission as Catholic Christians.
This is not to say that the prototype of the war against the Amalekites is not also relevant to our situation.
I’m sympathetic to what you’re saying here, but how can we evangelize Muslims when the Catholic Church in Europe doesn’t even want to evangelize Catholics?
I thoroughly agree and would add a fourth group: it is a time for those with eyes to see to evangelise those within the Church who are blinded by the spirit of the age aka the Blue Pill.
Ha! Yes, a good start is reading old divines on men, women, and marriage. When reading Escriva and Richard Baxter (the Puritan Aquinas if you will) I frequently laugh out loud; these guys knew what was up before any of us were born.
Slightly OT: If anyone’s interested, I can also provide a quote of Aquinas defending lingerie.
Evangelize muslims?
I have a very brave friend who does precisely that. He has bigger cojones than anyone I know.
…..sure. If nobody else is going to ask, I’d love to see that quote.
May God bless your friend for his commitment to spreading the Gospel of Christ.
And may God raise up and send more like him.
I’ve been doing some of that lately, but very few are receptive: it’s like dealing with the Pharisees (not that I am to be compared to Christ).
Slightly OT, I have come to the conclusion (in my prayer life) over the last 2-3 years that America is past the Jer 15:1-2 stage, and I furthermore believe that Trump is instrument of judgment God has chosen on the US Christian Church.
Whether or not he wins the election is immaterial; America is doomed sooner or later (since God brings judgment on His Chosen before the general populace, and the thought of THAT keeps me from personal arrogance and on my knees praying for mercy).
It is my opinion Trump will be allowed to win the nomination and the presidency because otherwise the Blue-pillers would whine and complain we didn’t nominate the Ted “the face of God’ Cruz to beat the Democrat.
But the latter is only my perception. His Will be Done.
Ha, sorry I didn’t see your reply earlier. In the section on modesty in Secunda Secundae Partis dealing with modesty
“…regards the adornment of women, we must bear in mind the general statements made above (Article 1) concerning outward apparel, and also something special, namely that a woman’s apparel may incite men to lust, according to Proverbs 7:10, “Behold a woman meeteth him in harlot’s attire, prepared to deceive souls.”
Nevertheless a woman may use means to please her husband, lest through despising her he fall into adultery. Hence it is written (1 Corinthians 7:34) that the woman “that is married thinketh on the things of the world, how she may please her husband.” Wherefore if a married woman adorn herself in order to please her husband she can do this without sin.”
So we see that part of the danger of immodesty is inducement to list, however a married woman is permitted to use these means to induce desire in her husband.
Great, great video by the way. Knew some of it, but there’s a lot that I didn’t know and I’ve been studying it for a while.
Man, Spain was a graveyard.
Unless those Muslims convert to Christianity and Believe Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and Mohammed and Allah are a lie they’ve been taught their whole life, then what the Pope is doing is not in vain. But if he’s just washing their feet and he hasn’t talked about Jesus to them I’d have to say that what the pope is doing is nothing more than a Publicity Stunt. Christianity is about spreading the Word of Christ and Loving the Lord with all thy might. Here’s how a Christian should act according to Jesus. Matthew 10:11-15. Notice the Unbeliever who doesn’t accept the word, is not Getting their Feet washed anywhere in that passage.
I would presume that the footwashing is in the context of the Maundy Thursday Eucharist. Every Eucharist is a preaching of the Gospel of repentance and salvation.
Doesn’t the Pope usually wear a big cross? Got in the way, or doesn’t want to offend, or…?
It’s been said that Islam will be converted by the virgin mother through the Rosary. Pray the Rosary.
If they are all Muslims as presumed then they are neither repentant or saved, just bemused.
My main objection to this is that the foot washing was given in context of Jesus’ command to His disciples to wash one another’s feet. A Muslim who has not abandoned Islam for full conversion to Christ is not a disciple of Christ. How can he be if he serves two masters? He may receive mercy, but to wash and kiss his feet is, to me, akin to casting pearls before swine.
That picture is a Metaphor for how Europe will look under Sharia Law.
I had to Google this to believe it. At what point do we take up the sword? My God we are being conquered and have no fricking clue.
Hundreds of years ago the Pope rallied his faith to defend itself from would be conquerors.
Now we have what appears to be a freemason welcoming his foot soldiers for the coming crusade against Christianity.
I’d be curious to hear Autelius’ comment as well. As for me, I feel his new norms…that anyone can be invited to be one of the 12 whose feet are washed on Holy Thursday, further erodes the symbolism and imagery of the act for a simple symbolism of multicultural virtue signaling. Christ washed the feet of his 12 disciples, all men who followed him and would die for their belief in him save for the one who betrayed him. During that, he gave them a new commandment.
Washing those who have yet to convert seems similar to giving the Eucharist to someone who has yet to believe. If something matters, it must have boundaries. If there are no boundaries, then it clearly does not matter.
I would pay good money to see an Imam kiss the grungy foot of an illegal Christian refugee. Somewhere, Pope Urban II is rolling in his grave.
I will tell you what is going on in the picture, even though I am not Catholic.
It comes from a scripture in John 13. Jesus was dining with his crew, including the traitor that sold him out. His crew wanted Jesus to live as a king and overthrow the Romans and restore the Kingdom. Jesus spent a lot of time hinting at what was really about to happen, but didn’t tell them outright. In one instance Peter was really in denial that Jesus was hinting at being martyred, and Jesus said, “Get behind me Satan.” Seems like a pretty strong rebuke, Peter must have really been expecting Jesus to be a glorious King that would overthrow the Romans and restore Israel. Jesus explained that this was Gods plan and Peter only wanted what Peter wanted, not God.
At that dinner before his death Jesus started washing his disciples feet. They were confused and even told him no. But he used it as a teaching, as he often did. Although he was confrontational with Pharisees and Sadducees, and he was sometimes confrontational with his disciples, he was also often gentle and serving. His disciples didn’t like it many times he did this.
When he washed their feet he explained that he was a servant, even though they “rightly called him Teacher and Lord.” He was hinting at what Paul later fully reveals, that all Christians are equal in the Lord, in their salvation (not their abilities and gifts.)
This is one reason that the Protestants walked away from the Pope. This is why Protestants don’t do funny hats and dresses for their Pastors, and the Pastors sit and eat and live with the commoners. The Pope wants to look like he’s their equal. If they are Muslims then the Pope is in my understanding in error. This Pope especially loves to have shows of being humble. He especially likes to screw up theology to lend support to the wicked, the hateful, the sworn enemies of the Church, at a cost to the traditional faithful Catholics out there. He thinks that all we need is more understanding and forgiveness after decades of so much understanding and forgiveness that our own sons and daughters have not kept the faith and live like heathen.
He eventually overthrew the Romans, in his death and resurrection, and he and his followers restored the Kingdom of God to the Earth, which I now live in, a spiritual kingdom of fellowship, brotherhood, and eternal life in God.
Jesus Christ, open our eyes !
Novus Ordo watch summed it up quite nicely:
“The fact that even infidels, that is, people who are not even baptized,
are now going to have their feet washed by the “Pope” himself during a
ceremony that is supposed to recall the Last Supper, raises an
interesting question in light of the decree Francis directed his
so-called Congregation for Divine Worship to release in January 2016, in
which those who receive the washing are referred to as “part of the
people of God” (see Decree In Missa In Cena Domini). Can you put two and two together? There is simply nothing that is holy that Francis can stand to leave untouched. His impious hands must wreck everything that still reminds
him of the “old” Catholicism, of which barely anything is still left
after decades of Vatican II in action.
Francis is a demagogue of the most cunning sort. He conveniently fails to
distinguish genuine refugees from mere “migrants” and thus exploits
people’s good will and naiveté. His moralizing appeals to people to “welcome migrants” and “open hearts” consist of one-sided, dangerous half-truths that are not derived from Catholic principles but are simply an expression of pseudo-spiritual sentimentality. His bogus Naturalism is ultimately founded on a denial of original sin, that is, on a denial of the fact that our human nature is fallen. This is something he has in common with Benedict XVI.
By the way, there is nothing good or holy or worthy of compassion in being a migrant per se. The word “migrant” simply denotes someone who moves from one place to another. In and of itself, this is neither good nor bad; it is morally indifferent. Just because someone wants to move from one country to another doesn’t mean the desire is justified, prudent, or holy, and the
destination country certainly has no moral obligation to grant entry to
the migrant. On the contrary: A country which allows entry to anyone who
asks, merely because he asks, is in grave danger of destroying itself. A
nation without borders is not a nation, and a country’s first obligation is towards its own citizens, not towards everyone else.
Thisreally isn’t complex philosophy, this is basic common sense. We all
lock the doors of our homes. We are not “welcoming” in the sense that
anyone can just come in, no matter who and no matter why or when. Does
this make us cruel or heartless? No, it simply makes us prudent and
sane. Mindlessly opening doors and borders has nothing — repeat: nothing —to do with the corporal work of mercy known as harboring the harborless
(aka “sheltering the homeless”, which has since been upgraded
to “welcoming the stranger” in the New Church). It is high time to tear
the mask off Francis’ sentimental, pseudo-spiritual twaddle: Through his
irresponsible words and actions, Bergoglio is doing his part to advance
the globalist agenda of erasing all nation states so as to make
straight the way for the ultimate goal of having one governing authority
for the entire globe — the sine qua non scenario for the Antichrist to be able to rule the world, which we know he will do for three-and-a-half years (see Dan 12:7).”
No kratom refrences yet. Good.
Gave it up for lent. Nothing makes sense anymore. My boners have gone awol, I have the build of Toby McGuire, (not even Spiderman Toby McGuire, just the regular version), & ‘The View’ somehow keeps finding its way to auto record.
All work and no kratom….
Hi Aurelius, another good one, although there is an important typo in the second paragraph where you mean ‘piety’ but you’ve typed ‘impiety’.
Oh no! The devil’s Bible all over again. Maybe someday a copy of Aurelius’ article will be worth some money.
Excellent article Aurelius. Your articles have been helping me get in touch with the faith I was introduced to in my youth but never properly educated in, and have been illuminating and insightful in rediscovering the Holy and finding the path in these darkening days.
Looking forward to your next article.
Well said, I feel the same.
I am finding the same thing. Raised a Catholic, it was mostly about procedure, with little real thought for the “why”. I get the feeling that Brother Aurelius is giving us the Catholic education one would have gotten in the 60s/70s (or even much earlier) before it was watered down.
I also find his writing style quite masculine (for lack of a better word) in that he writes “this is how it is, take or leave it”. Modern Catholocism has had its every essence compromised out of it.
The way Brother Aurelius writes is how I imagine Catholocism should be; self discipline, strength through faith, honouring of our biological and spiritual ancestors and adherence to more traditional (and wiser) lifestyles, that serve to strengthen society as a whole and as individuals.
Happy Easter brothers.
Three words for which I’ve been looking for since childhood : Christian Masculine Virtue.
A complimentary and worthy read…
https://churchpop.com/2015/09/01/this-one-quote-convinced-me-to-convert-to-catholicism/
Terrific reflection brother Moner. Happy Easter to all my brothers at ROK. May Christ be with you all!
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You guys should fix that typo in the first line of the 2nd paragraph, this is too good a piece to be stuck like that forever. “…piety is the virtue of…” not impiety
I just read this and thought it was relevant.
No moral equivalence.
http://www.breitbart.com/jihad/2016/03/25/rebecca-mansour-devout-catholics-inevitably-led-toward-being-like-mother-teresa-devout-muslims-led-toward-jihad/
a rather good article
I see Cadburys the chocolate maker in the UK is no longer calling its EASTER eggs EASTER eggs. They’re just plain eggs as the word EASTER may cause offence to people of different faiths even though nominally 80% of the population call themselves Christians.
http://www.snopes.com/cadbury-banned-easter/
The link shows many of their products still refer to Easter, and in HUGE text. It’s too hard to not offend someone–the traditional Christians think it’s blasphemy that eggs and the Easter bunny have any association with Christ’s resurrection, and the mainstream shoppers want to be outraged at any small appearance of minimizing the correlation between a holy day and a product they are buying. Sounds like much ado about nothing.
Too often there is a sense of hopelessness among people who find themselves in a position contrary to the Modern Era. So often I have heard that it’s “too late” and that “all is lost”. I can understand the differentiated individuals who feel hopeless against what appears to be a tidal wave of degeneracy backed by a greedy, profane elite. There seems to be nobody on our side, and that the conspiracy is simply too vast, too entrenched to take on. There is a sense among many of this type that this something has been lost, or has dissolved completely, and there is nothing that can be done to revive the ancient ways.
For a long time I was confused as to why Faith was such a central tenet in Christianity. Why not Courage? Discipline? Honor? You know – virtues that one can defeat Evil and save a civilization with. This is why:
“Piety is sown anew in this race, grafted into the True Israel, Christ, through Baptism.”
When one supposes that one is beaten, and that all is lost, but still holds to Faith and perseveres as before – this is most often when this previously dissipated energy is sown anew. When everything outside of ones-self is lost – all material possessions, all human connection, even all virtue, one still always has Faith to hold onto. Nothing can take Faith away, and if even all seems lost – Faith will sow the seeds anew.
The classical virtues (Courage, Discipline etc) can be mastered through an exercise of the will and through self-training.
The theological virtues (Faith, Hope, Caritas) are gifts from God.
The parable of the sheep and the goats, the parable of the prodigal son, and the story of the good Samaritan signal to us that we will be judged by our Caritas, not by our virtue.
In comparison to Caritas, our self-made virtues are as dirty rags.
http://biblehub.com/1_corinthians/13-13.htm
νυνὶ δὲ μένει πίστις, ἐλπίς, ἀγάπη, τὰ τρία ταῦτα· μείζων δὲ τούτων ἡ ἀγάπη.
Aurelius, is there a way to contact you personally?
A fake Christian kissing a fake muslims foot.
It would be nice if Brother Moner could preach more often here at ROK. His sermons have always helped me out, and I’m sure that goes for other believing ROK readers as well.
Amin.
He seems to be posting pretty regularly on Fridays. A good start to the weekend if you ask me.
I’m in the process of investigating Protestant churches to join(sorry, Catholics, but my French Huguenot and Prussian Lutheran ancestors would smack me upside the head if I joined the Roman Church). I know it seems gauche to “shop around” for a church but I need to find a middle ground, a church that isn’t totally cucked but isn’t preaching nonsense about the earth being 6,000 years old either.
I spent so many years disparaging religion but it’s dawned on me that a church is an important social center and a source of comfort for many. And it’s not just seeing so many friends successfully networking and meeting marriage-material women through their churches. It’s the existential threat Islam poses to the West. We need Christianity as a rallying point because secularism creates a lacuna that is filled by hedonism(and its attendant low birthrates) or conversion to Islam.
it blows my mind how atheists are blind to the threat of Islam. I can’t even comprehend their idiocy. They readily submit to the goat-fuckers.
Perhaps that’s the point – you lose Christ, you are destroyed by your own choices?
I find it fascinating that God has limited influence in this realm, however.
I.E. we turn against God, it’s not like God comes to punish us himself. But Muslims and other enemies make our life a living hell, essentially achieving the same punishment.
Did the Armenians leave Christianity before they were genocided by the muzzies?
Setting aside the Leftist contrarians who are completely lost to reason, I think there’s a sizeable contingent of people who (privately) acknowledge that Islam is a violent religion but believe they’ll be able to defang it as easily as they did Christianity given enough time. Which is a grave mistake of course.
>I find it fascinating that God has limited influence in this realm, however.
The omnipotence issue is one of my big problems with Christianity, to be honest. I’m not just talking about the “problem of evil”, I mean the logistics of it all. God offering himself up as a blood sacrifice in a backwater region of the world to try to set people on the right path strikes me as a desperate but earnest gesture by a God with finite power, like Jor-El sticking his infant son on a spacecraft and packing him off to Earth hoping for the best.
(I’d have probably opted for Persia right after Alexander’s conquest, personally. The new faith would have been taken back to Europe and Egypt by the Macedonians and spread to India and China via trade. And that’s a lot of souls saved.)
>I.E. we turn against God, it’s not like God comes to punish us himself. But Muslims and other enemies make our life a living hell, essentially achieving the same punishment.
We definitely see a lot of this in the Old Testament. References to the afterlife are sparse but sin tends to result in an enemy gaining the upper hand on the Israelites.
as far as omnipotence – http://www.amazon.com/The-Hidden-Reality-Parallel-Universes/dp/0307278123
I read this book it blew my mind.
There’s multiple realities existing at the same time. Not speculation, it’s a mathematical fact.
The sacrifice was God’s way of ‘dumbing it down’ to a method we could understand (a sacrifice).
We have limited perception. We are presented these ideas in simple terms. (right, wrong, sacrifice, forgiveness, etc)… to see if our minds are prepared for a much higher state of being?
So in theory, if there was an afterlife you would have a chuckle at our primitive state of being as humans and the silly choices we make.
We Aremenians never left our faith. We are the first people to declare Christianity as our faith and by God we’ll be the last to abandon it. My own family in the US were refugees from the Aremenians genocide. They were faithful members of the Armenian Apostolic Church (they attended Mass at the lovely basilica in NYC). The AAC is an Oriental Orthodox that has decent relationships with Rome but is not in communion with them.
As for me, I grew up in the AAC and the RC, declared myself agnostic when I was 13, atheist when I was 17. Spent my college years popping the cherries of sweet Christian girls. I had a conversion though 10 years out of college and a journey over 4 years from non-denomination to RC. And now, I spend my days in the RC arguing with my co-religious on their wussified, feminist, multicultural, SJW-zobbified take of the faith. Perhaps that’s why I was lead back, to support people like Aurelius in pushing out the Modernist infection, and reaching out to fellow men to persevere and see the fullness of the faith rather than the PC version usually preached on the pulpit and put into practice by all the SJW twits.
Anyway, happy Easter everyone. Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!
I can’t advise you, other than to suggest you explore and try everything. I do occasionally attend an Episcopal church, which I enjoy, and understand it is one of the most Catholic-like of the protestant religions. But there are so many religions today, I guess it’s a question of what you really want from your church. You’ve covered a vast array (social center, source of comfort and empathy, place to rally against Islam). It may be hard finding a church that combines those three and still provides any positive level of spirituality.
If you do not find a Church, you can always refer to the Bible. In Fact whether you find a Church or not, The bible is a good thing to have.
“sorry, Catholics, but my French Huguenot and Prussian Lutheran ancestors
would smack me upside the head if I joined the Roman Church”
And their Catholic ancestors would smack them upside the head for belonging to heretical schismatic sects which split from the Roman Church because some greedy princes wanted to rob monasteries. Europe is the faith, and the faith is Europe. That means the one true Catholic and apostolic Church is the only one for the European people. That the Protestant churches succumbed so quickly to rot is proof of this.
I would argue that the plethora of sects reflects the rugged individuality of our people. When tickets to heaven are being sold and churches are filled with statues in seeming contradiction to the ten commandments, people are going to kick up a fuss.
What are your thoughts on the Eastern Orthodox church? Patriarch Kirill seems a lot more redpilled than Pope Francis.
“individualism” can often be an excuse for obstinance. I know too many dumb rednecks who refuse to go to church because they think they’re cowboys.
There was never any outright selling of indulgences or “tickets to heaven”, that was a lie cooked up by protestants to justify themselves.
http://www.catholic.com/tracts/myths-about-indulgences
This is likewise true with the argument that statues are “idolatry”.
http://www.catholic.com/tracts/do-catholics-worship-statues
Protestantism began not as a movement of reformers, but a power play by unscrupulous nobles.
I like Patriarch Kirill. The problem with Francis is that he absorbed too much of the South American “Liberation Theology (which itself was the product of Communist infiltration in the Church in South America). I’d recommend finding a Traditional Catholic church that says the Latin Mass.
Christianity is a Semitic religion, just like Judaism and Islam. Jesus was Jewish and they say he used his knowledge from Judaism to start a new religion. The same holds for Islam, but this time the so-called prophet was an illiterate pedophile from Arabia. His tribe worshipped the moon god, so he made the moon the symbol of his new religion. It’s all Semitic bullshit for me.
The Romans didn’t like Semites at all. Jews, Arabs and other Semitic people were highly despised and they were simply killed if they caused damage with their trickery. I think Christianity would never spread into Europe if the Romans didn’t push it on the people. It’s the same with Islam. If the Arabs didn’t push it on other people, then nobody would convert to that bullshit. You should imagine this: 99% of the new converts couldn’t read the Bible or Quran, so they didn’t know shit about their new religion. It was all forced on them by the Christian or Muslim rulers and over time the people didn’t know any better, because the religion was integrated into every aspect of society.
Home run.
One profound aspect of a counter-modernity revolution would be for women to abandon the arrogance of feminism and turn toward the humility and piety of the Virgin Mary. A mother who submits to her adult son rather than trying to domesticate him would cause waves.
Thank you for a great article about Our Lord and Savior. Happy Easter to everyone here.
“The first parents of the human race, in degrading themselves, degraded the origin of all men, and ruptured the friendship they had with God their maker.”
I’m a lifelong Christian, but I’ve always struggled with this and have long questioned God because of it. He hasn’t seen fit to answer, so maybe you more learned folk can explain it to me. How is it that the choice of two people affected the nature of all those who came after? That doesn’t seem just or even logical.
Hail thou once despised Jesus, hail thou still rejected King were the song lyrics that came into my mind as I was sitting in church on Easter pondering upon a certain things I had seen on Facebook. (A “friend ” ) had put up certain jokes and pictures mocking this holy day and I really wanted to call him out on it considering he loves to mock on Christmas and eastern but would dare not mock Ramadan or Mohammad.
Yellow.
Btw you Wesleyan, mate?
As always I appreciate your wisdom! Wonderful reflection. I am a Christian woman who has for years believed in the truth of the Catholic Church and patriarchy. Now, I am finally going to convert. I was wondering if you would consider writing an article about the truth of the Catholic church and conversion? Looking forward to your next article.
God bless
,,Last week, we mentioned that impiety [ correction- piety ] is the virtue of showing respect for our roots and those joined closely to us in them. We also saw how modern society is based upon impiety, piety’s opposite.”
“O heavenly city, O blessed citizens! What glorious things are said of you! All are rejoicing there at the sight and sound of God’s beauty. He is delightful to see and sweet to possess. He is all our reward, and beyond him there is nothing further to desire. He is the whole of man’s good, in this life and the next, for to know and love God is the hightest good we may ever attain” – From the book “The school of self-knowledge” unknown author from a medieval source.
heaven is crowded with cavemen. Religion? Come on..