Offsite Post: ‘St Brigid vs Taylor Swift: Examining What Is Truly Beautiful for Our Daughters’

 

The Taylor Swift phenomenon appears to be another sign of the de-Christianization and re-paganization going in the United States.  Statues, graves, street names, holidays, etc., of Christian soldiers, statesmen, missionaries, and others are destroyed, but things in honor of Miss Swift are increasing:

So far on her sold-out Eras stadium tour, Swift has not responded to any of the host cities’ symbolic offers — Tampa declared her “honorary mayor” and gave her the key to the city; Glendale, Ariz., temporarily renamed itself Swift City; Arlington, Texas, named a street Taylor Swift Way; and Las Vegas lit up its 80-feet-tall Gateway Arches in colors representing all of her albums.

And what kind of a person are these cities honoring?  An open Leftist:

Now — this is a Decline-of-the-West tragedy at hand — see what she released nearly a decade later, when she came into political consciousness in the Trump era. This is 2019’s You Need to Calm Down, which is on the surface level a love letter her gay / trans fan base, but on a deeper level a hate letter to her traditionalist fan base of mostly Christian girls from the 2000s. Just watch and you’ll see, it’s loathsome and revelatory.

 

As it happens, Swift the next year released a documentary about herself, Miss Americana, for the specific purpose of showcasing her arrival at progressive-left political consciousness. 

Worse, an open Leftist who is trying to redefine Christianity:

The singer-songwriter's beliefs appear to differ from the more traditional Christian values. Mainly, this includes Taylor's support of the LGBTQ+ community as well as support for abortion access.

 

Taylor told Variety in 2020 about breaking away from her previous apolitical public persona: "This was a situation where, from a humanity perspective and from what my moral compass was telling me I needed to do, I knew I was right, and I really didn't care about repercussions."

 

In a 2019 interview with The Guardian where she discussed her disdain for President Trump and the current atmosphere of U.S. politics, Taylor noted that she supports abortion rights and wants to bolster political candidates who will expand access to it.

 

"Obviously, I'm pro-choice," she said at the time, as Tennessee was gearing up to vote on an abortion ban. "I can't believe we're here. It's really shocking and awful. And I just wanna do everything I can for 2020. I wanna figure out exactly how I can help."

 

If one thing is clear from all of this, it's that Taylor has established her own relationship with faith. Although her beliefs deviate from some of Christianity's traditional values, she stands firm in her faith and the causes she supports.

Now, whatever the Taylor Swift phenomenon is – whether feminist subversion/goddess worship, an intelligence agency culture creation psychological operation, or a mass mental illness, it is quite distinct from the Christian inheritance of western Europe’s past.  In traditional Western Christian culture, the women who were most exalted were women like St Brigid of Kildare, Ireland:

The most venerated Irish woman saint, St. Brigid (Bridget, Bride) lived in the second half of the fifth century and the early sixth century. She was most probably born between 450 and 454 and reposed between c. 523 and 527. Her name means “light-bearer” (other possible translations: “power”, virtue”, “exalted one”). In truth the saint by the light of her virtuous life justified her name. She is often nicknamed “Mary of Ireland”¹ and “the pillar of Ireland” and is venerated on a par with Sts. Patrick and Columba. . . .

Her Christianity is the opposite of the ‘progressive’ version of Miss Swift:

 . . .

The rest is at https://thehayride.com/2024/02/st-brigid-vs-taylor-swift-examining-what-is-truly-beautiful-for-our-daughters/.

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

Offsite Post: ‘Elements’

 

The cold winter rain echoes through the darkness

As it falls steadily, melancholically,

Through the trees and upon the roof and the fields.

Within his simple wooden home, a man rests before the fire

Burning within the hearth, warming his earthen body,

Feeding upon griddle cakes and memories of his forefolk.

The winds then begin to swirl, the clouds descend

And violently scatter the matter in their path.

The man, now sitting soaked upon the soil,

Muses like Job, “The Lord Who gave, has taken away.”

He falls asleep, he dies, his body returns to the earth.

The soul ascends to God, Who is spirit like herself;

To God, Who was crucified and rose to life again –

Who at the end of time will reunite the soul

With a body glorified and imperishable, like His own.

The new man will live upon a new earth.

No one there will fear the Fire, which, divine, does no harm,

 . . .

The rest is at https://www.newenglishreview.org/articles/elements/.

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

Offsite Post: ‘The First Amendment Has Got to Go!’

 

In an essay at the Chronicles magazine web site - ‘Will Africa Save America?’ - Mr. Daniel McCarthy makes some rather extravagant claims about Europe and the United States:

Early Christians believed that the Roman empire, for all its sins, served a providential role by creating the worldly conditions for the spread of Christianity, even among the peoples who ultimately conquered the Roman west.

 

Europe and the United States have likewise fostered an environment in which Christianity flourishes, on a global scale. Will a post-Christian Europe and America sustain that environment—or if Christianity succumbs to culture wars here, will Christianity everywhere be in mortal danger?

 

Conservatives are right to take heart from the religion’s growth in Africa.  Yet if the civilization that Christianity created in Europe and America cannot survive here, the prospects for Christian civilization anywhere are bleak.

 

The West is not the faith—but it is the moral battleground on which the future of the faith on several continents depends.

There is a disturbing lack of knowledge about the post-independence goals of the US project present in those lines.  Yet this is far from an outlier in the US:  A large portion of Evangelical Protestants and others of the MAGA variety ardently believe, for instance, that the federal constitution drafted in 1787 is quite literally divinely inspired, making it akin to the Holy Scriptures themselves.  Some corrective notes are therefore in order.

A Roman Catholic writer, Christopher Ferrara, has written a profound rebuke of the notion of a deeply ‘Christian America’ with his book Liberty: The God That Failed.  There are some significant passages that lay bare the un-Christian foundations of the US:

As Locke foresaw, the unchallenged monism of state power that is at the essence of Liberty would be insured by a multiplicity of Christian sects.  . . . in the Essay Concerning Toleration, Locke advised that when any sect is “grown, or growing so numerous as to appear dangerous to the magistrate” the magistrate “may and ought to use all ways, either policy or power, that shall be convenient, to lessen, break and suppress the party, and so prevent the mischief”—the “mischief” being the mere existence of a dominant religious faction capable of posing a challenge to the State.  Both Jefferson and Madison, following Locke, expressly recognized the division of Christianity into sects as a primary safeguard of Liberty.  In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson observes that the “several sects perform the office of a Censor morum over each other,” preventing any one sect from installing the “Procrustean bed” of “uniformity” via government.  Likewise, in Federalist No. 51, written to persuade the holdout states to ratify the Constitution, Madison declares, with the supreme religious indifference of the Deist he was, that:

 

In a free government the security for civil rights must be the same as that for religious rights.  It consists in the one case in the multiplicity of interests, and in the other in the multiplicity of sects.  The degree of security in both cases will depend on the number of interests and sects, and this may be presumed to depend on the extent of the country and number of people comprehended under the same government. . . . In the extended republic of the United States, and among the great variety of interests, parties, and sects which it embraces, a coalition of a majority of the whole society could seldom take place on any other principles than those of justice and the general good. . . .

 

Like Locke, Madison viewed the very multiplicity of sects as necessary to secure “justice and the general good,” by which he means what Locke means:  “to preserve men in this world from the fraud and violence of one another” and “promoting the general welfare, which consists in riches and power” as determined by “the number and industry of your subjects.”  Christianity divided poses no threat to the power of the State as the guarantor of a “social peace” limited to the absence of aggression against property rights, including the right to own slaves (as Madison, Jefferson and Washington did), or, as contemporary libertarians contend, the right to abortion as incident to Lockean “self-ownership” [to which we many now sadly add things like transgender mutilation—W.G.]. . . . Lockean polities require for their equilibrium and survival a divide and conquer strategy toward Christianity as their only serious rival.  This is why, to recall Peter Gay’s startling observation, “political absolutism and religious toleration [are] the improbable twins of the modern state system” (Tacoma, Wash., Angelico Press, 2012, pgs. 542-3).

Post-1776 arrangements within the US, contra McCarthy and others, were not designed to create a Christian republic but a safe haven for a vague ‘pursuit of happiness,’ however one wishes to define that, as the Declaration of Independence famously put it.  To do that, as Mr. Ferrara says, one must neutralize Christianity.  And that is precisely what the clauses in the federal and State constitutions like the First Amendment do (by forbidding the establishment of any religion/denomination and guaranteeing the free exercise of religion to any and all).

But Mr. Ferrara is far from done.  Here is another important passage:

This business of freeing the world from its monkish ignorance and superstition [a phrase of Jefferson’s describing the effect of the ‘American experiment’ on the peoples of the wider world—W.G.] was the culminating practical project of the Enlightenment, designed precisely to preclude the intrusion of divine claims into politics—above all the claims of Christ on men and nations so handily excised from the “Jefferson Bible.”  John Adams explained in perfect Enlightenment style why the Framers had rejected any divine intrusion into their work:  “It was the general opinion of ancient nations that the Divinity alone was adequate to the important office of giving laws to men,” he wrote, but the new state and federal governments of America “have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature”—principles that had somehow eluded man’s understanding until 1787.  Further, Adams declared, it must not be pretended that those involved in devising these new governments “had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the influence of Heaven, more than those at work upon ships or houses, or laboring in merchandise and agriculture. . . .”  Rather, Adams predicted:  “[I]t will forever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses.”  Nor would Locke have had it any other way (Ibid., p. 550).

There is an interesting confirmation of Mr. Adams’s view in an article at the Tenth Amendment Center, detailing the influence of the rational, mechanical thinking of Isaac Newton upon the drafters of the Declaration of Independence and the federal constitution:

 . . .

The rest is at https://orthodoxreflections.com/the-first-amendment-has-got-to-go/.

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

Offsite Post: ‘Was Thomas Aquinas the First Modern Transhumanist?’

 

One of the main tenets of transhumanism is that the mind of man can and should be liberated from the body, since the latter (in their view) restrains the intellect from ascending to higher levels of evolution.  An Orthodox priest, Fr Vitaliy Utkin, enlarges on this:

 

<<The main efforts are now aimed at using information and nanotechnology when creating the superman. The human personality is perceived by representatives of transhumanism exclusively as a set of gene information encoded in DNA, plus a carrier of consciousness — the brain — which is considered to be a neurocomputer.

 

Consciousness, in this view, consists of a certain information set based on the electronic impulses of the brain. Therefore, it is believed that by completely copying such pulses, you can transfer them to other, technical carriers.

 

When contemplating the hypothetical transfer of consciousness from a biological brain to a computer, transhumanists call it the “loading of consciousness”, “brain reconstruction”, or simply “loading”. After such a transfer has been realized, the consciousness, from the point of view of transhumanists, will live in virtual reality. And this, they believe, provides unlimited possibilities for human self-realization.>>

He is seconded by other Christians.  The Protestant Pastor Doug Wilson:

<<Now that technology and science have declared nothing in nature off limits, the despots have naturally expanded how much they want to dominate. Lewis outlined it clearly. The rape of nature was going to lead, eventually, to the rape of the nature of man, and hence the title—the abolition of man. The domineering ways of man over nature was going to lead to an assault on the nature of man himself, which was going to result in the eradication of mankind. We are witnessing the first waves of this now. This is what the tranny movement is all about, and trans-humanism is next after that.>>

The Roman Catholic Abp Vigano:

 

<<She identifies a vast raft of powerful NGO’s closely connected with the rapidly growing pharmaceutical and medical markets that profit from sexual transitioning, and which creates a growing number of people permanently consuming and dependant on pharmaceutical and medical resources to manage the life long trauma of transition. 

 

The public is not greatly aware of the transhumanist ideology that has given birth to trans sexual culture. And there is little space here to do it justice, but behind it lies the ambition for disembodiment.

 

Bilek explains: “Disembodiment is everybody lives in cyberspace. We live in a virtual reality. We don’t live in our bodies any more. We’re going to be uploaded into cyberspace.”

 

In order to sell transhumanism and disembodiment as a life to the public, you’re going to have to groom them to get them there. And the way to do that is to create this ideology that says that you can choose your sex. That’s “disembodiment”.>>

This is good!  The more allies in this fight, the better.  Nevertheless, as opponents of transhumanism do the good work of defending the dignity of the human body, they must also find the source, the origin, of this nefarious creed so that it can be eradicated, never to plague mankind again, even if uncovering that source reveals truths that are discomfiting.  And we are afraid that the truths will be disturbing for our Roman Catholic and Protestant friends.

For where do we find the origin of this denigration of the body and the exaltation of the mind?  In the two main pillars upon whom the theology of the post-Orthodox West is constructed – Blessed Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.

Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologiae says specifically that the body is not necessary for the happiness of the soul; the intellectual operation of the soul is the only essential thing:

<<But as to perfect Happiness, which consists in the vision of God, some have maintained that it is not possible to the soul separated from the body; and have said that the souls of saints, when separated from their bodies, do not attain to that Happiness until the Day of Judgment, when they will receive their bodies back again. And this is shown to be false, both by authority and by reason. By authority, since the Apostle says (2 Corinthians 5:6): "While we are in the body, we are absent from the Lord"; and he points out the reason of this absence, saying: "For we walk by faith and not by sight." Now from this it is clear that so long as we walk by faith and not by sight, bereft of the vision of the Divine Essence, we are not present to the Lord. But the souls of the saints, separated from their bodies, are in God's presence; wherefore the text continues: "But we are confident and have a good will to be absent . . . from the body, and to be present with the Lord." Whence it is evident that the souls of the saints, separated from their bodies, "walk by sight," seeing the Essence of God, wherein is true Happiness.

Again this is made clear by reason. For the intellect needs not the body, for its operation, save on account of the phantasms, wherein it looks on the intelligible truth, as stated in I:84:7. Now it is evident that the Divine Essence cannot be seen by means of phantasms, as stated in I:12:3. Wherefore, since man's perfect Happiness consists in the vision of the Divine Essence, it does not depend on the body. Consequently, without the body the soul can be happy.>>

Unfortunately, this is not an isolated statement in the West.  It is part of a larger body of teachings that reinforce the idea that the created world is a thing unloved by God.  The late author Philip Sherrard expanded on that in his slim but powerful book The Rape of Man and Nature: An Enquiry into the Origins and Consequences of Modern Science:

<<In the fallen world as seen by St Augustine—the world in which we actually live—things are far worse, and this separation between the uncreated and the created is now truly abysmal.  Through the Fall man and the rest of the natural order are deprived of even that extrinsic participation in grace which they possessed in their pre-fallen state.  Their original and true nature is now vitiated, totally corrupt and doomed to destruction.  It is a lump of damnation.

 . . .

The rest may be read here:

https://www.geopolitika.ru/en/article/was-thomas-aquinas-first-modern-transhumanist

Or here:

https://katehon.com/en/article/was-thomas-aquinas-first-modern-transhumanist

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!