Survey: Fewer Americans Believe in God, Atheism Driven by Leftist Political Convictions April 26, 2018
Posted by Tantumblogo in asshatery, Basics, demographics, disaster, Ecumenism, error, General Catholic, horror, Revolution, scandals, secularism, Society.comments closed
Ever since the “New Left” captured the leadership of the democrat party in the early 70s, both that party and its adherents have undergone a closely tied, two-element transformation – they have moved ever more radically to the Left, and they have become increasingly atheistic. These movements are not unrelated. Indeed, they are incredibly closely coupled – Leftist politics becomes a substitute religion for those who reject traditional morality informed by religious belief, especially Christian belief. Or, as I have noted in the past, leftism is religion for immoral people. That is to say, personal immorality, in the Christian sense, very often (if not invariably) both proceeds and informs those who develop and adhere to Leftist political beliefs. There are exceptions, but they are increasingly rare. Speaking across the broad spectrum of millions of people, my aphorism is much more true than not.
Of course, I have written at length on the subject numerous times in the past, so as not to bore you, some recent data shows the increasing secularization/paganization of American society, and its tight correlation with the leftist political-social outlook (with the usual caveats that polls can be wrong, the way poll questions are answered have a huge impact on the results, as does the accuracy of the sampling, etc). First, a new poll reveals that only 56% of Americans self-define as believing in the God of the Bible (Good Lord, Jordan Peterson could spend 50,000 words dissecting what “believe” and “God of the Bible” mean), but this disbelief is centered in one particular cultural political grouping – white democrats:
Solid majorities of black Democrats as well as Republicans of all races describe themselves as Bible-believers, but the numbers fall off the table for white Dems — so much so that the number of white Dems who don’t believe in God at all is slowly catching up to the share that counts themselves as Bible-believers. In fact, if you count the share that believes in some vague “higher power” or “spiritual force” as not belonging to a “faith” in any meaningful way, then fully two-thirds of white Democrats are post-religious. The share of white Dems that describe themselves as Bible-believers is so low that, even with a strong contingent of black Bible-believers, just 45 percent of Democrats overall say they believe in the God of the Bible. Effectively, the Democratic Party is post-Christian.
The supporting data for that paragraph is below:
But the overall survey purports to show that 19% of Americans overall are atheists, or fall into the yellow category –
Now, not to undermine my own point, but this data does not make sense to me. If 19% of Americans don’t have any belief in God or a higher power (are avowedly atheist), but only 5% of Republicans AND non-white democrats are atheists, how do we wind up with an overall population that is 19% atheist, when only 21% of even white democrats describe themselves that way? That would imply there is an even higher percentage of atheist independents, which doesn’t make any sense, either. This makes me wonder whether this survey was not severely skewed to include white democrats in its sampling – if Pew interviewed 80% white democrats for this survey the overall results would match the more detailed ones, but it would not be a valid representation of the nation overall.
That aside, the collapse of Christian belief among white liberals/leftists is amazing. So is the divide between Republicans and democrats – goodness, white (native) Republicans are nearly 2 1/2 times more likely to believe in God than similar democrats. This is very troubling for the future of this nation, and points to the increasing irreconcilable differences between vast swaths of this nation’s population. I would like to see the age breakdown on those white democrat believers – I would hazard they are far older than the general democrat population. Which means liberal Christianity is dying breed – which our Church leaders should really take note of. The future of the Church in this country is not they and their cohort – it is those they loathe and have sought to ostracize and ignore.
Back to the main point, another poll on a more generic question of “how religious are you” does provide further evidence of the correlation between leftism and atheism, as if we needed it after reading Solzhenitsyn and doing even the most rudimentary study of 20th century Russian and Chinese history:
This month, Gallup released the results of their annual poll on religious practice in America.
The most religious state? Mississippi, which has held the crown since 2008. According to the poll, 59% of Mississippi’s residents report being “Very religious,” meaning that “religion is important to them, and they attend religious services weekly or almost weekly.”
And the least religious state? It’s Vermont, where 59% of their residents report being “Not religious,” meaning “religion is not important to them, and they seldom or never attend services.”
Gallup also noted that only 16% of Vermont’s residents reported being “Very religious”—a figure that was six points lower than any other state.
If you look at the map of the poll’s results below, you’ll see that religious behavior tends to be a regional phenomenon. The most religious states in America are in the Southwest and Southeast—which is heavily Protestant—and the least religious states are clustered in New England and on the West Coast. After Vermont, the least religious states—in order—are Maine (55% “Not religious”), New Hampshire (51%), Massachusetts (49%), Oregon (48%), and Washington and Alaska (both 47%).
Some of the least religious states are also states that have, or had, a substantially higher number of Catholics than the national average. Establishment Catholicism is dying as fast or faster than any major Church group aside from reform Judaism and a handful of “mainline” sects. One wonders how many of these new atheists are former Catholics. Probably millions. And what role have the attempts to radically redefine the Church into some nebulous humanist construct by the neo-modernist Vatican II crowd played in that unprecedented falling away?
In spite of serious quibbles with the Pew poll’s methodology, the fact that a growing number of Americans describe themselves as atheists or non-believers is not in dispute. From low single-digits forty years ago to repeated surveys that indicate 15-20% self-describe as atheists today, a huge swath of the nation has never held, or in most cases fallen away, from some kind of belief, almost always Christianity of one form or another. Similarly, there is no doubt that an increasing number of Americans – and the number has soared in the last 20 years – embrace far left political views, largely as a result of thorough propagandizing in the schools and university. Historically and worldwide, there has been an extremely strong correlation between atheistic belief, and leftist politics. From the French Revolution through all the 19th century social upheavals through the communist empires of the 20th century and down to today, hedonism tends to presage leftism which leads to widespread atheism. It is unbelievably sad to see the nation I grew up in becoming everything it stood against when I was a kid, but there it is.
Which is why I hate to say it, but an amicable, agreed upon divorce is about the best option I can see for this nation. I don’t see how two such radically different belief sets, and ones which are growing apart at an accelerating rate!, can long coexist in the same nation.
What do you think, along that line? Is it simply silly, or unthinkable, to prophecy the breakup of these United States? Pending some kind of miraculous Catholic revival, is there any way to co-exist without increasing violence and disaffection from each side to the other? If they regain the presidency, will the democrats ever give it up again? (and mind you, the endless furor over the supposedly “unprecedented” immorality and illegality of Trump would have been applied to ANY other Republican/non-member of the statist monoculture who won – just as they are now rehabilitating the once “worst ever Republican” Bush 43 into a “relatively good one.” Remember the protests? Remember the assassination fantasies? Remember all the loathing and jeering from Hollywood and the statist media? And yet I heard Bill Maher over the weekend relate how leftists wouldn’t be freaking out to the degree they are if Trump were another Bush or a Romney. That Trump somehow represents a “unique threat to American democracy.” BUT THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT THEY SAID ABOUT BUSH! Just like they called McCain and Romney racists. Give me a break. The freakouts and attempted impeachments are just a means to the same end they are always after -power).
But what happens if they succeed? What if upon some travesty of justice they hound Trump from office? How will 100 million Americans react? As Jordan Peterson tries very gently but insistently to infer below – this will not end well, and they had better reconsider what they are doing before they do something that can’t be undone (language warning):
Islam is the State Religion of Britain, While the Secular Pagan Religion Increasingly Falls Apart April 23, 2018
Posted by Tantumblogo in Basics, catachesis, Christendom, disaster, Ecumenism, error, foolishness, General Catholic, horror, Immigration, persecution, Revolution, scandals, secularism, sickness, Society, unbelievable BS.comments closed
A couple of brief videos for you, one from a fairly unlikely source, a professor of physics at UC-San Diego who presents an argument that modern science’s attempt to explain all creation through natural processes absent God is becoming increasingly frayed and desperate. While it is not stated in the video, the key fact that is driving belief in the multi-verse is detailed study that has shown that for macro-evolution to work, and to have resulted in the diversity and advanced forms of life presently on earth, far, far more time would have to have elapsed than actually has, even by the enormous ages of “scientific time” (going back over 10 billion years) to have resulted through Darwinian “natural selection.” That is because the “evolution” that can be actually observed directly takes place so agonizingly slow (for the scienticians), and major variations like severe mutations are almost always evolutionary dead ends, not major breakthroughs.
So major public scientists like Steven Weinberg and Steven Hawking have opined that, since evolution must be true (it is the cardinal belief the God-denying scientists, basically taking the place of God in this mode of thinking), but not nearly enough time has passed for all the multivariate forms of life now found on earth, there must be an infinity of universes out there (existing so that every possibility that can occur in a given situation does occur in one universe or another – like Star Trek’s Mirror, Mirror episode), each one somehow invisibly interconnected with the other, so that there is now plenty of time – indeed, an infinity of time – for evolution to take place. Voila! Problem solved. But as the professor notes below, there is no way to prove these other universes exist, and thus, belief in the multiverse is just another article of faith for the God-denying sexular pagans (which, I would argue, evolution is, as well, since the “evidence” there is largely contrived, or fully explainable by other means):
In the next video, a young woman in Britain who has received numerous death threats for having the temerity to criticize islam (the invasion and subsequent conversion of Christendom by islam is far more advanced in Europe than here) is told by the state – in the form of the police – that it is acceptable to criticize Christianity but not islam. Mind, she has not been told this by one police official, but by several. Coupled with the state’s continued cover-up of muslim pedophile rape gangs that pray exclusively on non-muslim girls, general prohibition by cultural elites of any public criticism of islam as “hate speech,” and a growing kow-towing to islam in virtually every major sphere of life, it appears the successful devolution of Britain from “Our Lady’s Dowry” to muslim despotism is moving apace. Note that gutting of Christianity both in concept/meaning and unity through the protestant revolution was a central part of this process, since protestantism led to a self-serving conception of God/Christ and our relation to them, which led to collapse of belief, which led to rationalism/endarkenment values, which led to where we are today. Painting with a broad brush but I’ve written about this before.
Britain is simply ahead of the US by about 30 years, but the exact same process is at work, here. Why do the powers that be allow hundreds of thousands of muslims to emigrate to this country a year (mostly legally), while legal immigration from the same countries for Christians, or from Christian-majority nations, is extremely arduous? It’s all about replacing the native population, and, more importantly, the native culture, with a multi-culti dystopia. Given the paltry progress on the wall so far, this nation is going to be a disaster for our children and grandchildren to inhabit (sorry for the bare shoulders, it ends pretty quick):
This ascendance of fealty, perhaps obeisance is a better word, towards islam, is a classic case of seeing cultural suzerainty in action. Even though islam has grown at an explosive rate in Britain, it still constitutes a small minority. Muslims constitute barely 5% of the British population, but their political and especially cultural influence far outweighs their numbers. Why is this? It’s because few in the “Christian” majority have any kind of certainty in their beliefs, while the muslims are very convicted. Thus a small minority is dictating much of the cultural/societal norm to the vast majority, which, thus far, has gone rather sheepishly along with this, and has managed to completely co-opt the political class and cultural elites. In terms of actual numbers, there may be far more devout muslims in Britain today than there are devout Christians. Certainly, there are many muslims quite willing to impose their culture and their moral norms on Britain, and very few British willing to defend their rapidly deteriorating legacy culture.
Will the same happen in the United States? I think an argument can be built that it already is. Secularization and collapse of Christian belief and practice has not gone so far in the US as it has in Britain, Canada, and the rest of the West, but it is still occurring, and rapidly. Each generation becomes successively less Christian and, what is more, convicted in their beliefs. I fear the process in the US could be especially ugly, since there may be enough Christian conviction, defusely spread, in the country, to lead to much more open conflict with the implacable demands of islam, which asserts its cultural dominance wherever it gains enough numbers (and, as we see, those numbers are very far from requiring a majority). And Trump’s rise and election was due at least in part to resentment over the seeming flood of muslims into this country along with the unconstrained Hispanic immigration. But that, I fear, will just be the beginning. The elites seem determined to play this most massive social experiment in history out, even though all of history and ethnography shouts that diversity plus proximity virtually always equals conflict, and very bloody conflict.
Perhaps that’s the end goal after all. You can’t get to a “perfect” world population of 2 billion without breaking a few eggs, or heads.
By the way, on evolution, has anyone read Repairing the Breach? I got a copy for Christmas but it will be some time before I can devote the effort to reading it. It’s a massive book, really like a textbook, and some reviews claim it to be THE most thorough attack on evolution that has yet been written. I’m already pretty tied down in reading at the moment, trying to finish Solzhenitsyn, and that is no trivial task, in itself. I think I’ve brought this up before, but if anyone has read Repairing the Breach and would like to provide a review, I’d very much appreciate it.
Some Wonderful Bits of Catholic Culture April 4, 2018
Posted by Tantumblogo in Art and Architecture, awesomeness, Basics, catachesis, Christendom, Ecumenism, General Catholic, Glory, Grace, history, Latin Mass, sanctity, the struggle for the Church, Tradition, Virtue.comments closed
I’ve found a “new” channel on Youtube called Holy Faith TV. It’s not that new, it’s been around almost a year, but it’s new to me.
They’ve got a lot of great traditional Catholic content and some really outstanding history. How about this incredible color video of Venerable Pius XII:
And here is a video from what was then a mainstream educational film company on the jubilee year of 1950. Can you imagine Scholastic doing a reverential and respectful video on the Church today? How much, and how much for the worse, our society has changed since then.
“…….here lies a spiritual power that no godless philosophy may hope to vanquish.” Take it to heart, leftists!
If an audience featuring Pius XII wasn’t good enough, how about Mass from 1948, offered in St. Peter’s. Sadly it is in black and white:
And here you go, marking the end of glory and the beginning of the auto-demolition of the Faith, a film on the death of Pius XII and coronation of John XXIII, before the fanon and sede gestatoria were scrapped by John’s successor:
It’s not all from the 50s. There is content dating at least back to Saint Pius X. And some of it is more modern commentary, from a wide diversity of sources, from people known well to this blog like Fr. Michael Rodriguez and Bishop Athanasius Schneider, to more esoteric sources. I can’t say I’ve watched much of the commentary, but as for the historical stuff, I love it. So much more like that!
Apparently Youtube contains just part of the content, there is a website that ostensibly has more but I haven’t really had time to check it out. Perhaps you will, and if you do, feel free to share anything of interest you may find!
As always, of course my happiness at finding this channel is not necessarily an endorsement of everything on it. But I think there is quite a bit good to find there.
And it’s not all strictly Catholic. There’s actually quite a bit from the Orthodox Church on the channel. For an example, here is Patriarch Kirill, primate of the Russian Orthodox Church, taking on the cultural masters in a way the last six popes have generally failed to do, with occasional exceptions from John Paul II and Benedict. In fact, he proclaims a truth that is readily apparent to most believing Christians of any Church, sect, or stripe: godless elites want to destroy Christianity:
The Unbelievable Evil of Luther’s Ideology – Sin Much Better than Good Works March 7, 2018
Posted by Tantumblogo in asshatery, Basics, catachesis, disaster, Ecumenism, episcopate, error, General Catholic, horror, Revolution, scandals, secularism, self-serving, sexual depravity, sickness, Society, the enemy, the struggle for the Church, unadulterated evil.comments closed
I am reading a truly amazing book on Martin Luther and his beliefs, called The Facts About Luther by Msgr. Patrick O’Hare LLD. This book isn’t full of Catholic opinion regarding Luther’s belief; no, it is a book literally chock full of direct, in-context quotations from the diabolical heresiarch and his twisted ideology.
Luther is a case study of the lengths to which one can fall when given over to endless pride, overarching pomposity, and intractable stubbornness. Luther was in essence a Pelagian, or wanted to be a Pelagian – someone who wanted to be so very good on his own merits, even without God’s help or Grace, which he constantly refused, that he could attain Heaven on his own efforts. For nearly a decade prior to his final break into full blown heresy in 1517, he had been warned by religious superiors and others that he was on a path towards destruction with his way, way over-the-top fastings, mortifications, penitential exercises, etc. When he finally became exhausted from this superhuman effort and realized he couldn’t attain Heaven on his own efforts, did he pause and find some humility and beg God for his aid? Of course not. From a family known for its volcanic temperament and unyielding stubbornness for many generations, he instead found blame with first God, and then the Church. It was the whole economy of salvation and system of Grace that was wrong, not Martin Luther! Of course! And so he invented the most noxious single error in the history of Christendom – justification by “faith*” alone.
Naturally, if one was saved by “faith” alone, and works were useless, then the whole system of the Law, the commission of good works and avoidance of sin, must be not just rotten but sinful and destructive of souls, as well. Thus Luther inverted the Faith and invented his own diabolical doctrine.
And of course, being one of history’s most unhinged temperaments, he compulsively attacked not just the Church, not just popes and Saints and Fathers, but even much of the Bible itself upon which he supposedly based his entire conception of the Faith! He had a special hatred for the 10 Commandments and its human transcriber, Moses.
Below I will place a number of quotes from Luther illustrating the perversity of his beliefs and, thus, the entire protestant project (which was significantly, majorly revamped during the Catholic Counter-Reformation, when great Jesuits and others like Charles Borremeo, Peter Canisius, and Francis Borgia utterly decimated Luther and Calvin’s noxious doctrine, showing how unscriptural and contrary to the early Faith it was, so that later protestants had to substantially re-Catholicize their sects in order to keep them intact).
These come from pp. 108-130 cut and paste to try to form an understandable whole.
As I said, Luther came to positively hate God when he found he could not maintain his Pelagian system of salvation by works alone: “the moral duties [the Law] enjoined were impossible of fulfillment and incited not love, but hatred of God” [speak for yourself, heresiarch]
To claim that the fulfillment of the Law is impossible is as impious as it is blasphemous, inasmuch as it imputes to God the injustice of commanding us to do something not just above our strength, but positively contrary to our eternal good. It is also contrary to Christ – “What shall I do to be saved? If thou wilt enter into life keep the Commandments” (St. Matt xix:17).
Luther further remarked regarding the 10 Commandments: “If we allow them [the Ten Commandments] any influence in our conscience, they become the cloak of all evil, heresies, and blasphemies.” Further – “That shall serve you as a true rule, that wherever the Scriptures order and command to do good works, you must so understand it that the Scriptures forbid good works.” “If you should not sin against the Gospel, then be on your guard against good works; avoid them as one avoids a pest.” [Thus, Christ is a liar and Scripture is full of impossible to penetrate, contrary meanings, and yet should be the sole rule of faith and open to the interpretation of all, and not subject to the understanding of the Church. What a crock.]
Under what circumstances is it allowable for a “man of God” and a “Reformer” to say of Moses, God’s chosen servant, that he should be looked upon “with suspicion as the worst heretic, as a damned and excommunicated person; yea, worse than the Pope and the devil?” [Such unspeakable blasphemy and boundless effrontery]
Luther again – “A pure heart enlightened by God must not dirty, soil itself with the Law. Thus let the Christian understand that it matters not whether he keeps it or not; yea, he may do what is forbidden and leave undone what is commanded, for neither is a sin.” [Counseling avoidance of virtue and welcoming of sin? – Believe me, it gets much, much worse]
“To the gallows with Moses.”
“I will not have Moses with his Law, for he is the enemy of the Lord Christ….we must put away thoughts and disputes about the Law, whenever the conscience becomes terrified and fells God’s anger against sin. Instead of that, it will be better to sing, to eat, to drink, to sleep, to be merry in spite of the devil.” [Luther constantly conflated the pangs of his conscience with the promptings of the devil. In fact, as we shall see later, Luther was very aware that he was doing satan’s work and did so without compunction]
“Poor soul, you have temptations, they must be overcome. When the devil comes to tempt and harass you with thoughts of the kind you allude to, have recourse at once to conversation, drink more freely, be jocose and playful and even indulge some sin in hatred of the evil spirit………If the “devil” [by which he really means his conscience] says to you,’Will you not stop drinking, answer him: I will drink all the more because you forbid it; I will drink great draughts in the name and to the honor of Jesus Christ.’ Imitate me. I never drink so well, I never eat so much, I never enjoy myself so well at table as when vexing the “devil” who is prepared to mock and harass me. Oh, that I could paint sin in a fair light, so as to mock the devil and make him see that I acknowledge no sin and am not conscious of having committed any! I tell you, we must put all the Ten Commandments, with which the “devil” tempts and plagues us so greatly, out of sight and out of mind. If the devil upbraids us with our sins and declares us to be deserving of death and Hell, then we must say: ‘I confess that I have merited death and hell,’ but what then? Are you for that reason to be damned eternally?……..” [Quite possibly, yes, if you do not repent and confess your sins]
“How often,” Luther said, “have I taken with my “wife” [a rebel nun who, like Luther, violated her sacred vows and simulated marriage outside the Church] those liberties which nature permits, merely in order to get rid of Satan’s temptations [that’s a pretty cold commentary on his concubine]. Yet all to no purpose, for he refused to depart; for Satan, as the author of death, has depraved our nature to such an extent that we will not admit any consolation. [I did not know satan had such power over us, at least those of us who do not give ourselves over to him. I would say, once again, Luther is speaking of his own conscience, his own guardian angel, calling him back to sanity and repentance] Hence I advise everyone who is able to drive away these Satanic thoughts by diverting his mind to do so, for instance, by thinking of a pretty girl, of money-making, or of drink, or, in fine, by means of some other vivid emotion.”
“Be a sinner, and sin boldly, but “believe” more boldly still……We must sin as long as we are what we are…..sin shall not drag us away from Him even should we commit fornication, or murder, thousands and thousands of times a day provided we only believe.” We must take Luther’s words to mean, as they manifestly indicate, a recommendation, an exhortation and an injunction to mutiny, rebellion, and disobedience to the Supreme Lawgiver, who directed all to observe and not disrespect His Commandments.
Luther counsels that sin is better than good works – “The way to Heaven is narrow; if you wish to pas through it, throw away your good works. Those pious souls, who do good to gain the Kingdom of Heaven, not only will never succeed, but they must even be reckoned among the impious; and it is more important to guard them against good works than against sin.” Thus good works, the practice of piety, and the observance of the divine Commandments – the only way, according to Jesus Christ, which leads to eternal life – are in his estimation troublesome superfluities, of which Christian liberty must rid us. Rather, according to this false teacher, they are invincible obstacles to salvation if one places the least reliance upon them. “Faith alone,” said he, “is necessary for justification: nothing else is commanded or forbidden.” [but remember, it’s a false conception of faith]
Luther knew that his doctrine had led to collapse of morals among protestants and that sin, crime, social upheaval, and moral degradation had spread like wildfire in the wake of his teachings. He admitted this plainly, that is counsel to sin had been taken up, and that indeed it was primarily the license his false religion gave that was its prime selling point: “Since the downfall of Popery and the cessation of excommunications and spiritual penalties, the people have learned to despise the word of God. They care no longer for the churches; they have ceased to fear and honor God………I would wish, if it were possible, to leave these men without preacher and pastor and let them live like swine. [such noble concern for souls] There is no longer any fear or love of God among them. After throwing off the yoke of the Pope, everyone wishes to live as he pleases.” [Isn’t that exactly what you counseled them to do?]
So notorious was the debauchery of the followers of Luther that it became a common saying when persons proposed to engage in drunkenness and revelry: “We will spend the day like Lutherans.”
The new Gospel did not make Luther himself better. He said: “I confess…….that I am more negligent than I was under the Pope and there is now nowhere such an amount of earnestness under the Gospel as was formerly seen among monks and priests.” “If God,” he says, “had not closed my eyes, and if I had foreseen these scandals, I would never have begun to teach the Gospel.”[Luther was horribly inconsistent – he counseled men to sin but then lamented its effects. Basically he wanted everyone to follow him, to be proved to be always right and greater than the pope, for himself to be able to sin freely, but for everyone else to remain as holy or better than they were as Catholics. An impossible double standard.]
Finally, Luther had frequent encounters with satan, which he freely admitted, and he found that satan very much approved of his new doctrine, and somehow did not find that troubling –
Faith and good works are the only terms on which men can purchase happiness here and hereafter; every other scheme is a deceit of Lucifer to draw souls away from the love and service of God.
This statement is not made without foundation. Read Luther’s work against “The Mass and the Ordination of Priests (Erl. 31, 311 ff.) where he tells of his famous disputation with the “father of lies” who accosted him at “midnight” and spoke to him with “a deep, powerful voice,” causing “the sweat to break forth” from his brow and his “heart to tremble and palpitate.” In that celebrated conference, of which he was an unexceptionable witness and about which he never entertained the slightest doubt, he says plainly and unmistakingly that “the devil spoke against the Mass, and Mary and the Saints” and that, moreover, Satan gave him “the most unqualified approval of his doctrine on justification by faith alone.” Who now, we ask in all sincerity, can be found, except those appallingly blind to truth, to accept such a man, approved by the enemy of souls, as a spiritual teacher and entrust to his guidance their eternal welfare? [And who sold his false religion by creating a giant strawman of the Catholic Faith, so that his twisted notions would make some sense by comparison]
———End Quote———
I would just add in conclusion – this is the man the horrid conciliar father Yves Congar knelt before in fealty, and wished to erect a statue to his wonderful works within St. Peter’s. This is the man Francis of Rome has repeatedly lionized. This is the man, and the tens of thousands of sects he has fathered, the ecumaniacs can’t wait to suborn Catholic Truth for in order to flatter. This is the man the revolutionaries within the Church have constantly lionized and sought to emulate in every possible way, probably because they are as lost in their own sins as he was, for the past several decades. The smoke of satan has entered the Church, indeed – and the man who made that statement did as much or more than anyone to allow those filthy sulfurous fumes to enter.
Before reading this book, I knew Luther was incredibly bad, that he wrought endless destruction of souls (and the material world), that he was the ultimate author of most everything wrong in the world today economically, socially, intellectually, philosophically, and morally, but I still did not know the depths of his depravity. He was quite literally, and happily, the spawn of satan. He is a tremendous warning to me of what unyielding pride and self-pity must lead to. The thing is, he knew better, he constantly kept at least a shred of his Catholic conscience, which he drowned in drink, gluttony, prurient lusts, and every other means he could think of. But still, he knew, he knew what he was doing, and sought company in eternal perdition for himself by trying to convince as many others as possible to join him.
Well that’s all I’m going to have time for today. Hope to post tomorrow on the hole the Texas bishops, and possibly even the USCCB, have dug for themselves in that Texas Right to Life mess. Such a tragedy, once again the bishops allow themselves to become the political pawns of paid bureaucrats in this nightmare bureaucracy they have unnecessarily set up, and which Pope Leo XIII explicitly warned against.
*- Even Luther’s understanding of faith was corrupt. He substituted “fiduciary faith” – a false confidence that one is saved by Christ’s merits in spite of all sin and lack of virtue – for the dogmatic faith in the saving Doctrine of Jesus Christ of the Church.
Dr. Jordan Peterson Speaking in Dallas Wed May 30 2018 February 21, 2018
Posted by Tantumblogo in Basics, catachesis, Christendom, Dallas Diocese, Ecumenism, General Catholic, manhood, secularism, Society.comments closed
At 7:30 at the Majestic Theater in downtown Dallas. Tickets range from $35-$100.
Peterson remains both fascinating and annoying to me. He gave an hour long interview with former Catholic Answers regular Patrick Coffin where he talked about his approach to Christianity, and pretty much declared himself an interested and appreciative agnostic. While he has numerous brilliant takes on a huge array of subjects, and his critique of the Left is among the most powerful and well evidenced I’ve ever heard, his acceptance of evolution and his reliance on the philosophy of Jung and Piaget make him a Gnostic/modernist on the most important subjects.
Nevertheless, he is brilliant and unusually coherent at expressing difficult concepts in a way any layman can reasonably understand, and there is a huge amount of gold among the feldspar – much more gold than feldspar, generally. I think souls well formed in the Faith can partake of Peterson and sort through the good and the bad with relative ease – ignore the Jungian gnosticism, keep most of the rest.
Below is the Coffin/Peterson interview, which is important because, for the first time, it is a fairly orthodox Catholic interviewing Peterson and trying to pin him down on matters relating to the Faith. Peterson somewhat maddeningly refuses to be labeled, which I can understand to a degree (because in the current worldly context he only stands to lose if he accepts one, and he is right that many people, myself included, would love to use him as a totem upon which to hang our own particular beliefs), but I continue to be disappointed that interviewers ask such broad questions as: “Are you a Christian,” or “Do you believe in God?” These are very easily brushed off by Peterson saying “what do you mean by that?”
Here is what I want asked: “Do you, or can you, accept the Doctrine of the Faith as defined in the Apostolic, Nicene, and Athanasian Creeds?” “Have you ever read Pascendi Dominici Gregis and Quanta Cura, and could you faithfully swear the Oath Against Modernism?” The creeds are extremely specific and were deliberately contrived to avoid obfuscation. But no one, that I know of, has ever asked such questions.
When Peterson below asserts: “How do you know that you are a ‘true follower’ of Christ, or properly understand what it means to be Christian,” the Catholic can respond with infinite confidence: because Christ created a Church He promised would define the Faith for all time, that Church has 637 defined dogmas, the acceptance and practice of which makes me at least an observant follower of God’s Law for us, if not a “good Christian.”
As to whether Coffin is right, that Peterson is on his way to becoming Catholic, that would be fantastic, but I am not quite so confident. For all his good, Peterson’s “god” remains the false doctrine of evolution – he will have an exceedingly difficult time becoming a Christian so long as that remains. At any rate, he also seems much more drawn to Eastern Orthodoxy than Catholicism.
BTW, Peterson will also be speaking in Austin on May 31 as part of a 12 city tour.
Coulombe on Fr. Feeney January 11, 2018
Posted by Tantumblogo in awesomeness, Basics, catachesis, Ecumenism, error, General Catholic, history, priests, sanctity, Society, the struggle for the Church, Tradition, true leadership, Virtue.comments closed
I posted some videos yesterday from the Tumblar House video interviews of Charles Coulombe. Some folks liked the take Coulombe had on the difficult issue of the SSPX – in the video below, he tackles another very difficult issue, that of Fr. Feeney and his “excommunication.” Once again, Coulombe covers a complex matter with subtlety and panache. He rightly notes that if Feeney taught error, it would be very difficult to claim that many past popes, Saints, and Fathers did not similarly err. That’s not to say Feeney did no wrong. He may have gone a bit to excess in greatly diminishing the scope of baptism of desire, BUT at the same time the major thrust of his argument is one that cannot be rejected as false. That is to say, the process of condemning Feeney was abusive, in that there can’t be a dogmatic refutation of Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus without throwing out vast portions of the Doctrine of the Faith, and condemning numerous great Catholic theologians in the process.
Another important point brought up below is the extent to which Feeney’s belief has been misrepresented.
Perhaps this take might be a bit controversial but it aligns well with my own study of the matter. Like Coulombe, it’s not completely clear the extent to which Feeney formally taught error or was formally corrected for doing so, but I am certain that there has been a massive attempt, predating Vatican II by 20 years or more, to reduce Extra Ecclesia Nulla Salus to meaninglessness, and that this move has played a primary role in practically neutering the Church’s grand 2000 year history of selfless evangelization:
Coulombe looks like he enjoys a good meal and a drink every now and then. My kind of guy.
Note the key role Benedict XVI plays in the fleshing out of this argument. That’s my main problem with the rejection of EENS in general and Father Feeney in particular – whatever the theological fine points, the major thrust has been the total gutting of the Church’s evangelization efforts AND a collapse in the lived Faith of tens of millions of Catholics, because the modern ecumaniacal approach that more or less everyone is saved, and in fact that one is essentially penalized by being a Catholic, has an impetuous internal logic that has eviscerated the great well of evangelical power the Church possessed until recent decades.
It is interesting to me how much venom is directed at Fr. Feeney and any perceived followers of the belief attributed to him, not by liberals, but by traditional Catholics. It’s the reverse of the obverse side of the coin that says “SSPX = schismatic” as a knee jerk reaction, where the trads turn around and say “Feeneyites = heretics,” though the juridical standing of Feeney’s actual teachings was never fully settled, unless you want to go with the opinion of the same ordinary, Cardinal Cushing, who a few years later deliberately conspired with Planned Murderhood to overcome Catholic legislative resistance to get contraception legalized in his archdiocese and state.
Here is the book Coulombe references in the Q&A. Seems like he rather strongly believes that the practical abjuration of EENS has played a vital role in the crisis in the Church. If you want a little peak behind the veil at the kind of tactics used by the neo-Cath crowd (a term of convenience I don’t really like), make sure to read the really abominable review by Karl Keating. Pure ad hominem – shocking, I know. But I’ve already been called – in effect – a no account scumbag almost certainly hiding some dire dark secret by Keating and his attack dog Shea for not broadcasting my “real name” on every post I make, though my name appears scores of times on this blog in various forms, so I have my own ax to grind, I suppose.
I’d appreciate reading your thoughts on Coulombe’s take on this subject.
Alexa gets one right! January 10, 2018
Posted by Tantumblogo in awesomeness, Basics, Ecumenism, fun, General Catholic, pr stunts, priests, silliness, true leadership.comments closed
This may be too old now so everybody’s seen it, but if you know the scandals that have erupted over Amazon’s “Alexa” electronic servant thingee and its overwhelming left-wing bent (see this post), the video below is something of a surprise, but if you tie the two declarations together I guess it does make a sort of leftist sense – Jesus Christ may or may not be real, but the Church He founded isn’t? Or perhaps consistency is too much to expect from these little electronic devices.
Nevertheless, when a Catholic priest asks Alexa to state the founders of various Christian sects, and then the Church, the answer is as surprising as it is delightful:
Mike drop. Walk away.
That’s awesome. I don’t know if Alexa can be coached to give certain responses – both the priest and Crowder swear the responses they got are on the up and up.
Who else can you say founded the Catholic Church, anyway? If protestants want to deny that Christ founded One Church, that the Catholic Church was founded by a human, who was it? St. Peter? St. Paul? Who would not choose those for the founder of their church over Luther, Wesley, Calvin, or Mary Baker Eddy? But in reality Christ founded the Church, as Scripture makes clear and the protestants themselves claim. But they pretend, contra Christ’s infallible statement, that the Church somehow failed, and had to be “resurrected” by failed, sinful men.
The illogic in this position is so amazing it is untenable, but millions hold to it. Then again, millions of people today believe two women can be married, and that a baby is a blob of cells………..there is no limit to human ignorance.
2nd Annual Virgin of Guadalupe Pilgrimage Tues Dec 12 @ 9a December 1, 2017
Posted by Tantumblogo in Admin, awesomeness, Basics, Dallas Diocese, Ecumenism, fun, General Catholic, Glory, Grace, Our Lady, priests, sanctity, Society, Spiritual Warfare, the struggle for the Church, Tradition, true leadership, Virtue.comments closed
My wife and kids were in the first one last year. I’m sure they’ll be there again for this 3 mile pilgrimage across Irving to the campus of the University of Dallas:
Do call Julie if you can help with shuttle driving. Bring your Marian flags, your banners, make this a work of witness! i cannot attend, I will be at work and am using my last unused vacation day for the Immaculate Conception.
I’ve been intending to return this blog’s focus to the Dallas Diocese, more as it was in the beginning as I head toward the 8th anniversary of these little rants of mine, so here is another list of the many upcoming events this December at Mater Dei FSSP parish:
Since the Feast of the Immaculate Conception falls on a Friday and is a 1st Class Feast, eating meat is allowed, yes?
Sermon on The Evil of Religious Liberty November 30, 2017
Posted by Tantumblogo in awesomeness, Basics, catachesis, cultural marxism, Ecumenism, General Catholic, Glory, Grace, priests, Revolution, scandals, secularism, self-serving, Society, Tradition, true leadership, Virtue.comments closed
Reader MFG sent the following link, and a very helpful summary, on the following sermon regarding the grave error of so-called religious liberty. The sermon generally follows the logic of Christopher Ferrara’s Liberty: The God That Failed. It is especially harsh on the founding and ordering of the US government, wherein endarkenment deists established a government built upon Lockean principles, with the state stepping into the place of God as the supreme arbiter and ultimate object of allegiance.
But I thought MFGs summary was as concise and as good (or better) than anything I can write, so here it is, along with the sermon. I add a few thoughts onto his.:
Wow – this is a quick but incisive sermon on religious liberty’s dangers. It’s from a slightly different angle than what’s covered in the past. We could unpackage it for weeks…Here are a few takeways.
- Founding Fathers thought they needed to set limits on Christ’s reign [Informed by endarkenment philosophy, especially that of Locke and Hobbes, that was indeed the case]
- They undid time and founded a government that was pre-Christian in its governing philosophy. [a return to paganism, undoing 1700 years of Christian civilization]
- They founded a government which relied on man’s own reasoning unaided by revelation or sanctifying grace (i.e. based on darkness/blindness).
- It was worse than the governments of the pre-Christian Jews who at least had revelation to guide [And had the excuse of ignorance]
- The US Govt is like the Roman Pantheon – people can have their own gods as long as these gods are not exclusive or hostile to government (religious freedom) [But what matters most to the US gov’t, or where its cultural loyalties lie, can change radically over time. For the first 150 years, the US gov’t was more or less a mainline protestant gov’t, because that was the dominant culture. But the seeds of that culture’s destruction were sewn in the US founding, so that 60 years or so ago sexular leftism became culturally dominant, and now the US gov’t serves to advance THAT culture, which is intrinsically hostile to Christianity. Of course, it took decades of unprecedented, dedicated mass infiltration and undermining of existing cultural bulwarks to achieve that switch, but here we are, and I do not think there is any going back, not with this present form of gov’t.]
- By keeping all religions equal, there needs to be a referee to manage or balance these religions – hence the government steps in.
- To permit the govt. to be a referee, the people elevated government above religion
- State becomes the supreme god. [yep]
My thoughts [MFG’s thoughts]: This accurately and deeply describes our situation – governing in blindness. It also explains why liberalism and to some extent conservativism (or GOP Republicanism) becomes its own orthodoxy and religion. When someone opposes a political policy that contradicts church’s teaching (unjust/unlimited wars for example), the person is treated like a heretic or apostate (whether on the left or right).
Shreds post-conciliar notions of ecumenism, don’t it?
I really liked MFG’s summary and hope it turns into a basis for discussion. As he noted, this is a very complex subject and could take many hours of argument to fully analyze, but even as it stands, I think the sermon very much worth listening to (it’s only about 15 minutes) and considering. Another great upload from Sensus Fidelium. At core, it reveals we get the society we make. If we turn away from God and try to create a secular humanist paradise, human “paradise” (as in not) is what we will get.
Whether one agrees or disagrees with the notion that the US as founded was disordered at best and a diabolical inversion of right government at worst, the key point to take away, I think, is that any government, any human society, not oriented with Jesus Christ as its visible Head and King is doomed to failure. All human creations fail. Only the Church, wounded though she presently is (and has been at a few times in the past), has survived, because the Church is not a human construct. It has a human element, prone to failure and corruption, but it will always retain its supernatural, perfect, indestructible element.
If we wish to create human societies that will endure, we shall have to do the same. But it’s been often said, our fallen natures make us prey to self-destruction.
Amazon: “Mohammad a Wise Prophet,” but “Jesus Christ a Fictional Character” November 29, 2017
Posted by Tantumblogo in asshatery, Basics, disaster, Ecumenism, error, foolishness, General Catholic, horror, paganism, rank stupidity, Restoration, scandals, secularism, self-serving, sickness, Society, unadulterated evil.comments closed
Steven Crowder ran a little impromptu experiment using Amazon’s in-home phishing/hack box Alexa (why people would put one of these things in their house is beyond me) over the Thanksgiving holiday, after noting that Alexa’s answer to many questions seemed to carry more than a little bit of bias. So Crowder started asking Alexa numerous questions on the fly, and got some amazing responses. You have to see the video for all of loaded answers, but the most significant to me and you is that Alexa finds in Mohammad “a wise prophet,” and a caring provider for his child-rape bride Aisha, while Jesus Christ is dismissed as “a fictional character:”
Now, obviously, Alexa is just a bot programmed by human beings, human beings who by and large work on the Left Coast and have powerful biases themselves. It also draws many of its “encyclopedia” type answers from Wikipedia, which in virtually any socially significant subject is unbelievably biased towards the Left (go read the Wikipedia article on North Korea, for an example).
Nevertheless, this is more than slightly revealing. Many leftists are trying to accuse Crowder of somehow staging this event or concocting this as a put-on, but he swears it’s on the up and up and released the raw footage yesterday to confirm that. From my standpoint, I’m not surprised in the slightest. In fact, I’d expect little else. To a leftist, Mohammad is a wise prophet (yet another demonstration of how the Left will happily adopt islam should Christianity ever be definitively crushed), and Jesus Christ is just a sky fairy, about as real to them as the communist slaughter of millions or the plain meaning of the 2nd Amendment. The confirmation bias inherent in all this is more than just a little troubling, however. How can people who repeat such mantras day in and day out (Mohammad great, Jesus fake) ever be converted? It would appear beyond human means, anyway.
Having said that, per the actual historical record, there is far, far, FAR more disinterested, 3rd party evidence for the existence of Jesus Christ than there is for the existence of Mohammad. Some students of islam, like Steve Kellmeyer and Robert Spencer, are very doubtful that a single individual named Mohammad ever existed. There is essentially ZERO evidence, independent of the Koran, that there was a man named Mohammad, and that he single-handedly founded his strange new cult. What probably happened is that he was invented ex post facto to serve as the instigator of that hellish melange of Jewish Zealotry and Arian (not) Christianity that became islam. With the Christ, there are both direct testimonies of His existence (Josephus) and numerous contemporaneous, or nearly so, records from the dominant power (Rome) that He existed and that He founded a powerful religious movement that rapidly swept over the entire eastern Levant and beyond. In fact, in the secular scholarly community, all but the most dedicated modernists/leftists/atheists have come to the conclusion that the vast preponderance of evidence supports the existence of an individual man (-God) Jesus Christ.
But as we saw in the previous post, leftists never let facts get in the way of a politically helpful narrative.
Seriously, why someone would get easily hacked “smart” appliances, or one of these Alexa or Google thingess in their houses, is beyond me. Even our “smart” phones are insidious evil things, with the mike on all the time and quite possibly the camera, as well. The scary thing is not so much how they affect old farts like me, but the younger generation who seem utterly unable to live without these devices 6 inches from their face 23 hours a day. All this could be taken away from me and I’d be annoyed at times but otherwise just fine. But from these kids who have never known anything different, and who no longer know how to relate to other people without the filter of their electronic opiate?
Down high horse, down. Still, the known hacking potentials alone in these devices is more than enough reason for me to say no thanks. I wonder how long I’ll still have the privilege of setting my own analog thermostat, or buying a dishwasher that isn’t connected to the internet/NSA?
A Blog for Dallas Area Catholics 