I seldom watch news on television anymore. I'll watch the local news in the morning for traffic and weather, for what it's worth. After all, weather reporting is one of those fine jobs where you get to stay employed no matter how often you're wrong. Otherwise, I ignore television news.
Nonetheless, this morning I thought I would turn on the national news at 7:00 AM when the network morning news shows begin. Have you ever been away from someone for a long time and were shocked at the change in them? Even if you knew something had happened to change them, you still weren't expecting the degree of change?
Well, that's what happened when I turned on the opening intro segments on NBC. Story after story was nothing but rank propaganda for the Left and liberal Democrats and all who support them. The anchors didn't even try to look balanced. It was told from one point of view and one point of view only.
- First story, the vaccines and good luck figuring out what's true based on the news. The science says except for what it doesn't since we must follow the science despite nobody in the science agreeing. That's all I got from that snippet.
- Second story, the Mask fight heats up, this time focused on a grocery store where employees clearly aren't made to wear a mask (easy fix: see how many shopping and working there have contracted Covid).
- Third story, GOP split over removing controversial 'Conspiracy Theory believing' Rep. Marjorie Taylor. Note a black congresswoman was interviewed in which she called Rep. Taylor a white supremacist, and the news didn't call her out, so I'll assume the network agrees with that assessment. Meanwhile, Trump impeachment supporter Liz Cheney is being universally hailed as the superstar she is.
- Next story, the military is being ordered to stand down to face the growing threat of domestic terrorism and to ferret out 'extremists' in its own ranks. Read: MAGA types. That's our military by the way, the same ones taking knees last summer.
- Last story in the intro: some country singer was caught on video saying the N-Word that rappers use as a matter of course. Since he sports the wrong skin color, Corporate America has swung into action, canceled contracts, and fans are demanding his career be destroyed without further delay.
That was my intro, the 'news in a minute' nutshell. So let me sum up what I heard in a few easy takeaways:
Idiots who think we're still a free country are just that, idiots. We're now - and have been for quite some time - a Leftist state in the best manner of the 20th Century totalitarian states our parents and grandparents witnessed. If you bow before the Left, you will be rewarded. If, however, you deviate even slightly from the Left's ever changing demands, you'll be wrecked and destroyed, increasingly by the government itself. And the thing once known as the news media is one of the biggest factors in what we're witnessing.
So there you go. Maybe it's laziness or cowardliness on my part, but that's why I no longer watch the news. Given the rising number of Americans embracing this or cowering before it - including religious leaders and those we thought firmly entrenched in the resistance - there's not much to do on this side of heaven. That's when you say bring me a brandy, and let's prepare to go down like gentlemen, with our eyes toward heaven rather than the country we thought immune to the foolish sins of history.
Who to believe? Who to place our confidence in? There is a reason we are at this point in time and I believe that reason is Christ. If we can't believe anyone, institution or political entity and we have no more confidence in our government or society then...well maybe it's time to realize we need to place our trust and faith in God. We have no choice now do we?
ReplyDeleteThat's where I think Rod Dreher is onto something. Not that he's the person to lead us there, but he gets it. Christians are about to enter into a new phase, something the Faith hasn't dealt with in its history, and the way in which we practice our faith will not look anything like it has in the past. We won't be able to rely on easy similarities between Christ and culture, to use the phrase.
Delete"Something the Faith hasn't dealt with in its history"? Not during the French Revolution? Not during the Tokugawa Shogunate? Though I think we had better Popes at those times.
DeleteI would call those pregame warm-ups. The French Revolution being the closest in the West. Truth be told, the Orthodox experience with the communist Soviet Union is likely closer, and not without reason. But we face a global assault by a very aggressive adversary that has, in many ways, convinced many believers (dare I say, most) to accept at least part of the new religion it peddles, and what's more, convince a sizeable number that those who don't accept should be dealt with accordingly. On a global scale.
DeleteI disagree. Nearly 30 years ago I bought my first CD of Russian Orthodox liturgical music, and I remember wondering as I made the purchase whether American churches would persevere so well. I am now sadly confident they will not.
DeleteAs for the global scales, well, some sort of avalanche is coming. The signs are there, just as they were before WW1 and WW2, only I don't know how it will take shape. Maybe the US will dissolve into chaos, leaving a vacuum that China exploits; maybe it will be the fact that we teach our children which pronouns to use for dozens of imaginary genders, whereas China teaches its children calculus. I suspect worldwide consequences, but not worldwide cohesion.
When it happens, it will be as much of a surprise, and simultaneously as little of a surprise, as 9-11 or the breakup of the shuttle Columbia. It will come upon us as a thief in the night, but it will have long been predicted -- but it will not be the end of time or the rise of the Antichrist, just of "little" antichrists like Stalin and Hitler and Nero. That will be quite sufficiently bad enough.
My experience with the Orthodox was that they actually had a sort of Vatican II moment a couple centuries ago (even if they wouldn't say it that way), but it ended a little differently than ours. As one priest said, Tsarist Russia prepared them for the communists. Not that the Tsars were against the faith, but they often caused the leadership to turn blind eyes at the expense of the faithful. Not unlike sometimes happened in the West. Meanwhile, to the south, the Ottoman conquests forced Orthodox into a state of persecution and oppression. When the communists came, that was old hat for them. It was during those times that the Orthodox took on the serious 'look inward' approach that so defines them today, and has in all those regions where the Faith has lived under the thumb of others (like Muslims in the Middle East).
DeleteOddly, a big problem they're having now is with Orthodox - esp. younger, and often converts from Western traditions - wanting to jump on board with the West and find ways to compromise with the world. Ironically, many Orthodox leaders see Pope Francis as the default example to turn to in terms of reaching out glad hands to the world. Others are resisting, however, and fear that the Orthodox will merely go the same way so many of the Western Christian traditions are, and have been, going.
But I think in the West it's been different. It hasn't been overt persecution - yet. It's been framing history as if the Church and, more broadly, the West in general were the bullies and needed to stop with all their beliefs, values, morals and traditions since those were the stuff of bullydom. And it worked. Most Western believers weren't forced to abandon their traditions or faith, they did so willingly, thinking that's what was needed to be a nice guy. After all, the ones insisting they do so didn't threaten with gulags of killing fields, they merely promised a world where nobody would impose values, judge, condemn, or in any way punish other people for not thinking right.
Actually, there HAS been overt persecution in the West, for example associated with the Cristero War and the Spanish Civil War, to say nothing of Britain after Mary Tudor. But the Catholic Church has a history such that we can scarcely be critical of the Orthodox. For example, high-ranking clergy not only "turned a blind eye" but actively helped members of the SS escape Europe through ratlines; and that cannot be blamed on Vatican II. Nor can Vatican II be blamed for Cardinal Richelieu putting the perceived interests of France above those of the Church.
DeleteThings are about to become very unpleasant, but that does not mean they will be particularly unprecedented.
Oh, I'm not saying there has never been persecution. I'm saying it was never like it's going to be. If Protestants and Catholics were at each others' throats in England, they both believed in God, Christ and the Bible. Today, and for generations, that has been eaten away. Many today who are Christian don't believe most of it. In fact, I've argued we more or less assume a secular model of creation and then slap a God stamp on it as often as not. So when this evangelism from secularism hits, it finds people already 9/10 there. In liberal Protestant denominations, it's nothing for them (and their clergy) to poopoo the idea of miracles or even a personal God. How will they stand up when a global wave of persecution hits and there's nowhere to go?
DeleteIn fact, there may never have to be overt persecution at all. Just nudges seem to do it. The old corruption and persecution that God's people have seen for eons will still be around. But this time it will be different, because for generations we've been primed to already question much of what people once wouldn't have been able to reject if they had to. And in some ways, the church's easy acceptance of the latest for the last several generations primed us for what is about to happen I fear.
The closest this comes to being unprecedented is the way the Church has responded. It's safe to say that no previous generation of churchmen would have thought venerating Pachamama, or even APPEARING to do so, would be an appropriate response.
DeleteBut what we are seeing now is a period of rapid change, not a glimpse of how things are going to be for the next several centuries. By virtue of The Way Things Work, a nation that really does not understand the difference between boys and girls is a nation in big trouble, and a city that celebrates riots is not a city that will prosper. A nation full of people who think ghost = energy = electromagnetic field is a nation that is not only woefully ignorant of religion, but of physics as well; yet it happens to be a nation largely dependent on STEM for its position in the world. We may be building a new Tower of Babel, but we are not merely building it on the sand, we are building it out of sand. That it will collapse is a certainty that does not require either sabotage or divine intervention; it is only a question whether the tide washes it away or if it first collapses under its own weight.
Or, to choose a different metaphor, Uncle Sam is like a man who drinks heavily every night before taking the freeway home. Even if he is "above the law" and may kill countless innocents with his behavior, the lifestyle he has chosen is one that guarantees he will not be around for as long as he could have been.
I think we’re more or less in agreement, disagreeing only about the degree. For instance, that the leaders of the church believe centering a pagan idol in the midst of a Catholic gathering was wise makes one think of the old Asherah poles of the OT. But the reason is likely the big difference. It isn’t because they’re trying to curry favor with some pagan fertility goddess or worship the true spirit of our divine earth mother. It’s because they believe, as Oprah, that one religion is as good as another (which is a backhanded way of saying they’re all wrong, because Science) – a very recent development in religious thought. And that’s where we’re at today. I don’t think we can imagine the devastation this has had on the people of Faith to live at a time when most question the model of the very faith they profess, because even their leaders seem to do the same.
DeleteYour example of the physics and ghosts is perfect. We – so many believers and leaders – accepted the dichotomy that where science is then there are the answers, but if not then ‘God stuff.’ That is, we do live in a universe best understood the way atheists do and their understanding of science, except there was a Resurrection and if it doesn’t make scientific sense, then the supernatural as good as always. I can’t fathom how that has weakened the underframe of the faithful in the modern age. So when the persecution comes – as it obviously will – how many will stay? It won’t be because of fear or cowardliness or even the usual political compromises, but simply because they believe we’re at a point where all the old religions have been debunked by Science, and there’s no way they’ll take a bullet for something they’re sure is mostly as wrong as Middle Earth or Narnia when it comes to the real universe. And that’s just in light of the persecution. It doesn’t even touch on the modern faith’s approach to so many issues that depend on that compromise that is now several centuries old and going strong.
We have to treat the media the way our grandfathers treated Tokyo Rose and Axis Sally: There might be some slight benefits to tuning in, since the broadcasts contain some useful information, but it is filtered and mixed with lies, and its ultimate intention is to undermine us.
ReplyDeleteIt's not just the media, either. Government agencies have agendas, too, and everything they say to the public is intended to further those agendas, the same as it is for agencies of Russia, China, Iran, Israel, Pakistan, Syria -- whoever. For none of these agencies is the priority providing the public with the full, uncensored, and undistorted truth.
This forces us to be much more careful in deciding what to believe and how strongly to believe it. So, for example, I accept the moon landing, for instance, not so much because I think the US government is too holy to lie to us about something like that, but because it would have been just about as hard to fake as to pull off given the technology of the time, and also because the Soviet Union was quite capable of tracking the Apollo spacecraft by radar, and they (who might have had an ideological interest in seeing the mission fail) acknowledged its success.
Yep. I think we're about to learn that, with all due respect, Gen. Patton was wrong. There was nothing unique about Americans. We inherited a specific set of values and foundations that channeled us, with many failings, toward a more positive end. But we've spent almost a century destroying those values and foundations, so now it shouldn't be shocking to see we're going places we never imagined America would go. And with each passing day, that infects more and more of the nation from the top down and side to side.
DeleteYeah, we are mostly in agreement. I think we disagree even less in degree than in precedent. For the past 200+ years, all heathens have claimed to have the support of science, just as Protestants once claimed the support of Scripture.
DeleteFull disclosure: I have a Ph.D. in physics and an M.S. in software engineering. None of that has anything to do with what CNN call "science".