Bob's Blog

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Mike Pence responds to Joy Behar and the other panelists on The View who compared his Christian faith to mental illness.

Guest post by Suzann Darnall

Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive our debts, as we forgive our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen
Matthew 6:9-13

It is a mystery to me why there was outrage at Melania Trump for beginning a speech with the Lord’s prayer. If you believe in the biblical God, what is there to cause offense? If not, what in this prayer is offensive to the average moral and ethical person? If you do not believe in any god at all, are the words not a very nice, pleasant thought for the day?

While First Ladies do not run for office, they are put through the wringer of scrutiny every bit as much as their husbands who are actually vying for the office of President of the United States. Sometimes a wife can have a huge impact on her husband’s chances at winning or losing the Oval Office. They have an unpaid position for so long as their husband is in office. While not on the ballot at the polls, they are in many ways elected right along with their husband. Kinda mandatorily volunteered.

The bible speaks of the elect. Elect lady and elect sister are mentioned in various verses. An elect woman is one who exemplifies certain attributes. Often involving family and faith.

As a stay-at-home wife, mother, grandmother, Constitutional Conservative, and God-fearing woman, I am excited about Melania Trump as the First Lady. She seems to be a very positive role model, a loving wife, and devoted mother. She was successful in her own right before marrying her husband, yet seems to have no problem stepping into the role of supporter instead of star. Although, I think she is going to be a very brightly shining star of the political world for so long as her husband is President.

She is surrounded by an aura of graciousness and elegance. Despite living in the world of great wealth and power, she does not exude any hint of snobbery. While she does not have the down-to-earth persona of Laura Bush, you get the distinct feeling she would treat guests just as nicely.

I was intrigued when I read her cause célèbre will focus on Women’s Issues and Difficulties. Probably served with a sidecar of standing against Cyberbullying, which has plagued the Trump family from the get-go. Especially hateful have been attacks on President Trump’s wife, Melania, their 10-year old son, Barron, and his adult daughter, Ivanka.

I am interested to see what her take on Women’s Issues will constitute. I have a feeling it will be a much more practical approach than what some on the Progressive spectrum might prefer. I do not think she is going to be out there advocating about more freebies for women who are perfectly capable of buying their own birth control. I also do not think she is going to be in favor of ever expanding access to abortions at taxpayer expense. I realize that the Left pretty much thinks Women’s Issues start and stop at our reproductive organs (pun intended), but I think Mrs. Trump is looking to deal with the real difficulties facing some women in America.

I suspect she will be looking towards real life problems and possible solutions. Perhaps such areas as jobs, education, childcare, domestic abuse, and other concerns which have real world impact on women and their families. Not the never-never-land litany of never-ending free stuff that is demanded by Progressives, Which, if they don’t get causes them to call everyone else sexist and/or racist. Of course, most of them still call everyone else sexist and racist even when they get their free stuff ‘cause it is seemingly never enough of the free stuff.

As someone who was formerly involved, at a very low and very local level, in the beauty and fashion world, I am delighted that we have a First Lady who looks like a supermodel. Oh, that’s right, she was a supermodel! I have always enjoyed seeing attractive women, with great hair and makeup, wearing pretty clothes. When I was little it was Barbie, paper dolls and Disney Princesses. When I got older it was fashion shows, makeup artistry, and beauty magazines. So, I am going to enjoy seeing Melania and Ivanka looking fabulous!

But, I have to admit that the two things which most intrigue me about Melania Trump is her commitment to her son and her faith. As a woman who is very family and faith oriented, it is appealing to me when we have a woman of faith who is first and foremost a mother as First Lady. Someone who I feel will not be disparaging of those women who choose to put family and God first on their list of priorities. I am pretty sure Melania will not sneer at those of us who actually like to bake cookies and are clinging to our religion. At the same time, I believe she will have very real insight into the affairs faced by working women and business women, having seen life from that side as well.

I am not saying Melania Trump is perfect. I am not putting her up on a pedestal or nominating her for sainthood. I am simply saying this is a woman I can admire. She seems to have a love of family, country, and God. What’s not to like about that? The fact that she likes to wear pretty clothes and look nice is a bonus

One of my favorite scriptural passages is Proverbs 31:10-31:

10 Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies.
11 The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her, so that he shall have no need of spoil.
12 She will do him good and not evil all the days of her life.
13 She seeketh wool, and flax, and worketh willingly with her hands.
14 She is like the merchants’ ships; she bringeth her food from afar.
15 She riseth also while it is yet night, and giveth meat to her household, and a portion to her maidens.
16 She considereth a field, and buyeth it: with the fruit of her hands she planteth a vineyard.
17 She girdeth her loins with strength, and strengtheneth her arms.
18 She perceiveth that her merchandise is good: her candle goeth not out by night.
19 She layeth her hands to the spindle, and her hands hold the distaff.
20 She stretcheth out her hand to the poor; yea, she reacheth forth her hands to the needy.
21 She is not afraid of the snow for her household: for all her household are clothed with scarlet.
22 She maketh herself coverings of tapestry; her clothing is silk and purple.
23 Her husband is known in the gates, when he sitteth among the elders of the land.
24 She maketh fine linen, and selleth it; and delivereth girdles unto the merchant.
25 Strength and honour are her clothing; and she shall rejoice in time to come.
26 She openeth her mouth with wisdom; and in her tongue is the law of kindness.
27 She looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness.
28 Her children arise up, and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her.
29 Many daughters have done virtuously, but thou excellest them all.
30 Favour is deceitful, and beauty is vain: but a woman that feareth the Lord, she shall be praised.
31 Give her of the fruit of her hands; and let her own works praise her in the gates.

To me, this quote speaks volumes about what each and every woman has the potential to become. Wife, mother, homemaker, business owner, woman of God. Prospects abound. I see a lil bit of this in Melania Trump. I strive to see this in myself. It is a pretty good goal.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could all be elect women? Let’s hope we can support one another to be the best we can be. Build one another up. Not tear each other down. Not just women supporting women, but people supporting people. Let us all be elect. The chosen, the elite, the favored, the crème de la crème. And, just as importantly, let us all treat one another as if every person is just as special as any other.

At A Holy Experience Jennifer Rothschild is the guest blogger today.

Often, when we’re down, all we can see is the valley, the wasteland – we feel like our lives are a mess. But our loving God does not see us and our low places that way. The stuff you think may be just too messy, too ugly, too far gone is the stuff God is infusing with purpose.

The sorrow that hurts you? God fashions it into faith that sustains you.

The sin you’re ashamed of? God uses it to create beautiful humility.

The failures you regret? God turns them into wisdom.

The grief that shattered your heart? God crafts that into unshakeable faith.

The missed opportunities? God uses those to make you reflect His grace.

The loss you never expected? God molds that into strength you can’t explain.

God can make your low place a stepping stone to climb higher with Him.

Read more here.

At One Cosmos Bob writes today,

...isn't faith just the bright side of doubt? In other words, a functional faith opens the space between man and God, allowing for genuine adventure, discovery, and exchange of energies. Likewise, in order to make any progress, a scientist must doubt the present state of knowledge, while at the same time having faith that a deeper understanding is just over the horizon.

Even -- or especially -- the catechism of the Catholic church is hardly meant to be some kind of intellectual prison, but rather, the road map for a liberating journey.

...progressives have been attempting to undo and override the constitution for over a century. Achieve that, and our whole beautiful tradition crumbles.

Which is why this election is so cosmically important. America began with the promise of a new birth of freedom, even a relaunch of mankind -- of mankind 2.0 (not coincidentally rooted in a tradition that sees Jesus as 2.0 to Adam's bug-ridden 1.0). In America one would be free to be good, which is the only way to be good. A slave has no choice in the matter.

The healthy restraints that bind us to truth "were absent in the Continent," where the movement "was antireligious from the start." As such, it "imposed no restraint on skeptical speculations," such that unhinged reason prevailed over truth. When this type of moral inversion occurs, the guillotine -- or gulag or concentration camp -- isn't far behind.

...Call our line of thought obscure if you like, but it points directly to why Europe is right on schedule to auto-destruct due to a pathological liberalism that has opened itself to barbarian hordes happy to exploit its rejection of the universal truths upon which a functioning liberalism must be founded.

If you do manage to free your society of the obligation to truth, don't be surprised if you find yourself displaced by people who have no such qualms about their own possession of absolute truth. Note that neither side -- leftists nor Islamists -- has the functional faith described above, only a myopic certainty of uncertainty at one end, and a blind certainty of certainty at the other.

Read more here.

At One Cosmos, Gagdad Bob writes,

Ultimately we might say that faith is the answer to the problem of God, just as scientific faith is the answer to the problem of dealing with physical reality. This is one reason why science developed only in the Christian west and nowhere else: our faith in a rational creator.

Faith is "knowledge of an approaching discovery." To bring it down to bobworld, I approach each post with an attitude of faith that one will appear. They are very much structured by an attitude of open not-knowing, such that I am guided by what it is I am looking for. It very much feels as if there is an invisible attractor out there, and as soon as it starts tugging at me, it attracts the right ideas and books and other resources to fill it out.

...Notice that this is one of the functions of the liberal media, albeit in reverse. That is, they work furiously to "inform" (unform?) us what not to pay attention to, such as Benghazi, or the Clinton Foundation, or what actually happens during an abortion, or what happens when you raise the minimum wage, or the risk factors of homosexuality, or the science of human intelligence. Liberals literally have no faith, in that they cannot permit themselves to ask questions about these and countless other subjects.

Commenter Julie adds,

One of the liberating things about having faith in God is knowing that there is no reason to fear truth, scientific or otherwise, because nothing that is true can negate God. Science grounded in truth (as opposed to propaganda) is simply further evidence of God.

Conversely, anyone rooted in leftist faith must guard vigilantly against the hatefacts of life, because to acknowledge them is to acknowledge that they are living the lie.

...With my kids, I often talk about the presence of God as being like the air: nobody has ever seen air, but we know it exists because of how it moves other things. Another good analogy we used this weekend is radio waves, wifi or Bluetooth. These things are not visible, and without the equipment to detect the signal they may as well be nonexistent. They can't be seen, heard, touched, tasted or smelled. Nevertheless, here we are, sending invisible messages to each other using those very unseen wavelengths, and they have a profound effect upon the everyday lives of modern humans.

Read more here.

Ann Voskamp writes at A Holy Experience,

...Yeah, sure, there may be those who think they have all the answers, but there’s a comfort walking with those who have questions, those who are wrestlers and wanderers and wonder-ers, who find the leaning into the questions lets them live into stronger answers.

...And I can stand on the heat of a July porch and watch the sun set with the Farmer across those wheat fields and feel how though we once started as curled and embryonic as a comma, a pause in the timeline, a space looking for answers, we can grow into the curved, open-handedness of question marks.

And maybe that is the exact posture of faith — faith is the empty hand curved to willingly receive.

There is faith that believes the most astonishing truths in the face of the dire headlines: “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in Me, though he die — yet shall he live.”

...There is faith that stands or falls on the truth that the future with God is more fulfilling than anything forecasted by either the fortunetellers or the fearmongers. (The power of sin and worry and fear over us is always the power of deceit over us.)

There is faith that in the midst of the setbacks, God is setting up everything for the comeback of your joy.

...The Farmer nods toward the fields in the thickening dark, “We’re all just living in a sea of faith.”

And for days afterward, when I feel like I am drowning in questions and news and life, it rings me, like the answering song of surrendered old chimes—

That is all — we are all just living in a sea of faith.

Read more here.

Chateau Heartiste comments on today's news headline story:

Poor, middle-aged White Americans are dropping like flies. Their death rate “increased by 134 deaths per 100,000 people from 1999 to 2014.” The primary causes of the mortality increase for this group of maligned Americans are suicide, alcohol poisoning, and drug overdoses from painkillers. Environmental shocks.

Think about the ingredients of a happy life:

Family — destroyed by welfare, feminism, gogrrl careerism, obesity, and sinking earnings for working class men.
Community — destroyed by population density and Diversity™.
Work — destroyed by open borders, automation, and oligarchic greed.
Faith — destroyed by SCALE-induced materialism and noblesse malice.

The working poor and less-educated need these four pillars, perhaps more than effete SWPLs do, to feel like their lives have purpose. Instead, malignant elements in our ruling class have done everything in their power to knock those pillars over and smash them to dust.

I’d like to suggest other reasons for the suicidal ideation of underprivileged White Americans:

– Middle-aged Whites were born during a time when America was still predominantly White and native. Over their lifetimes they have witnessed the country turned over to brown world hordes. They are the only generation to have spent their formative years enjoying Peak White America and their productive adult years suffering the insults and antagonisms of Post-White America. They therefore have a dispiriting perspective other generations lack (or, in the case of the elderly, lack the ready memories from which to draw comparisons).
– White Americans have lost the protection and loyalty of their government. When your government stops “having your back” and treats you simultaneously like a sponge to be soaked for gibsmedats and an evil blight hindering social justice, you tend to feel like a stranger in your homeland.

– Obesity is driving men to suicide and drugs. Not directly; through their fat wives. Men’s romantic desires are visually centered. It is cruel to mock men for this biological reality and to expect them to “man up” when their wives get fat and unattractive. Obesity is rampant among the lower classes and White men stuck in these larded-up marriages have to feel desperately alone with their repudiated desires.

Read more here.

Personally, I think the impact of alcoholism and other addictions (pain-killers) is significant. People with less education work the more physical jobs, often resulting in painful injuries. Addictions of all kinds are always harmful. They are based on lies: ("I can do this with no consequences to my health")

So writes Patrick J. Buchanan at CNS News. Buchanan analyzes who has the will to fight, and who does not.

In almost all of the wars in which we have been engaged, those we back have superior training, weapons and numbers. Yet, for whatever makes men willing to fight and die, or volunteer for martyrdom, the Islamic State, al-Qaida, and the Taliban have found the formula, while our allies have not.

To be a martyr for Allah, to create a new caliphate, to expel the infidels and their puppets, these are causes Islamic man will die for. This is what ISIS has on offer. And the offer is finding buyers even in the West.

What do we have on offer? What do we have to persuade Iraqi Sunnis to fight to return their Anbar homeland to the Iranian-backed Shiite regime in Baghdad?

Of our Arab allies, the Qataris, Saudis and Gulf Arabs are willing to do air strikes. And the Kurds will fight -- for Kurdistan.

But if the future belongs to those willing to fight and die for it, or to volunteer to become martyrs, the future of the Middle East would seem fated to be decided by Sunni tribesmen, Shiite militia, ISIS and al-Qaida, Hezbollah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

In the Middle East, the time of the True Believers appears at hand.

Read more here.

Did you know that

The swashbuckling George S. Patton, who braved death in his drive to Germany and was worried about his role in a peacetime world, was paralyzed in a minor traffic accident shortly after the Allied victory — and on the day before he was to go home and leave postwar Europe for good. He died not on the battlefield, but painfully in bed in a military hospital in Germany.

Victor Davis Hanson ponders today about sadness, irony, narcissism, and learning from pain:

At best, all we can do, I think in our ignorance of causation, is to cover our bets and tread lightly and remain observant — keeping humble and modest in occasional good fortune (given so often that our blessings turn out to be dependent on the work of other friends and benefactors), while staying resolute in more frequent times of chaos and disaster, to be able to help and offer sanctuary to others.

It is wise to remember the good dead and emulate their example rather than to be caught up with the mediocre of the present. I certainly spend more time recalling the voice of my mother than listening to the televised psychodramas of our elite. Faith and transcendence in the end matter most, whether for us who believe in God and an eternal soul, or for the more agnostic humanists who trust that one’s good works now can affect others following them, from raising good children to planting an olive tree.

...As parents age, they gain perspective and calm, but also at the cost of growing pessimism or even a dangerous sense of preordination. These can be deadly pathologies as they take away the necessary spirit and audacity, so important in getting up one more morning and heading on to the next mission. (My 86-year-old grandfather was putting in new end posts in the vineyard on the day before he had a heart attack and died; my 80-year-old Swedish grandfather was breaking a young horse in his last few months.)

All the clichés that you all have heard about losing a child, and which we all of the uninitiated may have found strange or foreign — “I wished it was me,” “How unfair that parents outlive children,” “How did I cause this,” “Why didn’t I do that or this,” “I should have been a better parent, listener, friend, helper, benefactor, etc.” — I assure you turn out hardly to be clichés, but simply reflect over the centuries what is innate in every parent’s brain in extremis.

As we age and try to make sense of nonsense, we have only the solace that what is inexplicable now will be most explicable soon, and that we are not natives, as we assume, here, but refugees from home somewhere else, and that what seems all too real and hopeless we hope is a just a dream of what will be soon very real and hopeful.

I would amend Nietzsche’s often quoted line, “from life’s school of war: what does not kill me makes me stronger,” to something like “what does not kill me, makes me sadder,” and leave it to fate whether sadder in the end proves stronger or wiser.

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know that I try to read and excerpt everything VDH writes. This is the first time, though, that I was reduced to tears, as he tells us about his grandaughter and the death of his wonderful daughter Savannah. Read it here.

Andrew Klaven writes:

As much as I believe in capitalism as a method of economic development, a capitalist life is empty without spiritual content. Indeed, as much as I believe in individual freedom as the only worthwhile goal of any political system, individual freedom too is empty without spiritual content.

It is in that emptiness that militant Islam grows like the cancer it is.

Battered by the religious wars of the Reformation, making adjustments to a global economy and multi-cultured nations, the West has slowly become diffident in defense of its central faith. And there is some wisdom in that. Christianity is a religion, to paraphrase St. Paul, that frees us for freedom, and faith in Christ must be chosen freely to be fully realized. But to move from that position — which calls for intellectual rigor, unfettered debate and honest proselytism — to indiscriminate acceptance of all creeds as equally worthwhile is an error that does the world more harm than good.

Whenever I hear someone announce that “All religions are a path to God!” I wonder how it would work if you applied such “tolerance” to, say, medicine or science. “All medicines are a path to health! You take antibiotics, I cut the head off a chicken and dance under the full moon, really what’s the difference as long as we both believe it will make us well?” Or “All science is a path to progress! You invent an iPhone, I invent a weaponized disease, it’s all science, man, it’s all great!”

When you put it this way, it becomes clear that the idea that all religions are equally worthwhile is essentially an atheist creed. To say All religions are a path to God is really saying, No religion is a path to God. There is no God, so what difference does your religion make? When something is true, when it is factual, when it is real, it excludes other options. The world can’t be both flat and round. When you accept the roundness of it, you can no longer entertain its flatness. It’s one or the other.

If God is the Christian God of love, he is not the Allah of Isis.

The objection to this approach to religion — the generalization that says “religion” is responsible for the wars and atrocities committed in religion’s name — is absurd. People murder each other in the name of love, too, but that doesn’t mean love is murderous; it simply means there are wrong and right ways to love. There are wrong and right ways to worship too, and keeping silent about the right ways only lends credence to the wrong.

If there is a God — and, spoiler alert, there is — then like everything else that exists, there are things that are true about Him and things that are false. We who have voices better start telling the Truth without fear. Otherwise, our silence, and the emptiness that silence creates, will leave all the world to the likes of ISIS and their god — who is not God at all, by the way, but another fellow entirely.

Read more here.

How has the Obama presidency worked out for us in the 99 percent?

According to University of California, Berkeley, economist Emmanuel Saez, 95 percent of all recovery gains have accrued to the much-vilified “top 1 percent.”

At the same time, the poor have become even more desperate. The number of Americans receiving aid through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (known as food stamps) has increased by almost 50 percent since January 2009, from 32.2 million to 47.7 million. One in six citizens in the richest country in the world now rely on food aid from their government.

Today, a lower percentage of Americans are in the workforce—63 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics—than at any time since the infamous days of Jimmy Carter.

Arthur C. Brooks suggests the need for transformation: personal moral transformation, and four pillars:

faith, family, community, and work.

His second recommendation is material giving:

As I found in my 2006 book Who Really Cares, the average conservative household contributes significantly more to charity than does the average liberal household despite earning less income. According to the 1996 General Social Survey, those who strongly agreed that “the government has a responsibility to reduce income inequality” gave away $140 on average to charity. Among those who strongly disagreed, the average gift was $1,637.

Of the 10 most charitable states in 2012, as ranked by the Chronicle of Philanthropy, nine went for Romney over Obama. Three times as many red states as blue states placed in the top 20 states in giving. And all but one of the 10 least charitable states swung President Obama’s way.

But we have learned three lessons from our material giving:

First, there is nothing inherently wrong with safety-net programs, be they SNAP, housing support, or Medicaid. Second, they must be designed and administered in ways that fight fiercely against dependency. And third, the safety net’s ultimate goal cannot be the perpetual subsistence of poor Americans in barely tolerable lives. We can aim at nothing less than real human flourishing.

Brooks proposes a third plank in a "social justice agenda:" opportunity.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston has shown that in 1980, 21 percent of Americans in the bottom income quintile rose to the middle quintile or higher by 1990. But those who started off in the bottom quintile in 1995 had only a 15 percent chance of becoming middle class in 2005. That is a one-third decline in mobility in under a generation. Other analyses tell a similar tale. One 2007 Pew study measured relative mobility in Canada and Scandinavia at more than twice America’s level.

How can a conservative social-justice agenda reverse these trends and expand opportunity for all? An opportunity society has two basic building blocks: Universal education to create a base of human capital and an economic system that rewards hard work, merit, innovation, and personal responsibility. So opportunity conservatism must passionately advance education reform and relentlessly defend the morality of free enterprise.

So, how are we doing in education?

Public schools in Washington D.C. spend more per pupil than all but one U.S. state (New York), yet only about 56 percent of children graduate from high school. In our nation’s capital, a city flanked by six suburban counties that rank among America’s 10 richest, only 15 percent of eighth-graders read at grade level.

But, while our education system has failed so many, our free enterprise system has

saved billions from poverty by giving them their first opportunity to rise in history. Truly, this is America’s gift to the world. Conservatives can and must champion this truth without apology or compromise. For the sake of all people, our end goal must be to make free enterprise as universally accepted and nonpartisan as civil rights are today.

So what should conservatives do?

For too long, conservatives have identified themselves as fighting against things, perpetually making war on the left’s mistaken priorities. They fight against punitive taxes, creeping overregulation, wasteful spending, licentious culture, and ruinous national debt.

The central, motivating purpose of conservative philosophy is not fighting against things. It is fighting for people.

Read more here.
Thanks to Kris Cook.

As two of her children learn to oil paint, Ann Voskamp writes today about creativity, faith, risk, art, and burying fear.

Creativity, it’s good theology; it’s what God did in the beginning.

The essence of creativity is essentially risk, believing enough to leap into the yet unseen. The theological terms for this is faith.

You either bury your fear in faith. Otherwise you bury your talents.

Read more here.

Read the background story here.

Some excerpts from several essays by David Warren:

How many people have said, “I am basically a good person,” without noticing that no one ever asked? And it is true that real monsters are a small minority, though I often think they are closer to being saved.

What we haven’t confronted, is that very emptiness, that loneliness, that hopelessness — together with the self-pity that explains it all away. For the modern man is a childless orphan, and the modern woman is a modern man, and this goes double when they are married to each other.

An example would be the sanctity of human life. Once it is grasped that it is wrong to kill people, as a way to solve your problems, and that a human is human from the moment he is conceived, opposition to abortion naturally follows. That is why it is incumbent on every faithful Catholic to oppose abortion, as he would otherwise oppose murder. This can’t be optional. It is incumbent, too, on every other one of us: on every Christian, and as it happens, on every decent human being regardless of religious affiliation. For in every other religious tradition of which I am aware, the sanctity of life is in some way affirmed. Even the Dalai Lama will tell you that abortion is evil, and against divine law.

Similarly, once some notion of the connexion between sex and babies has been grasped, it is no longer possible to dismiss moral guidance. Nothing so elemental to the condition of human life than our means of reproduction could be otherwise than shouting with moral significance; and far from being a side issue, sexuality is at the heart of all human relations.

The contemporary teaching that it is merely a source of pleasure — so incredibly crass — has consequences that are unambiguously evil. Consequences that can be spelt out rationally, step by frigging step. Which were in fact spelt out, very rationally, in Humanae Vitae, by the late Pope Paul. (I know this because as a clever young atheist, I read it through repeatedly, with the intention of mocking it; and could find in it not one connective that was logically unsound, and became thereby convinced, even as an aspiring young Helot, that contraception could not possibly be correct.) A rule remains a rule, and continues to be a rule, until someone can show an internal contradiction.

And in the depths, likewise, the principle of marriage must still be affirmed, no matter how many of the mad may oppose it. One woman and one man must be courageously vindicated. Deep, and deeper than that.

While it has entirely escaped media attention, the most massive public demonstrations on this continent are pretty much invariably the various annual marches against abortion — in which I have observed that females outnumber males, and the young outnumber the old, often by quite large margins. For the mainstream media, ten sign-waving feminist old crows can be important breaking news. But ten thousand marching young women, proclaiming Christian truth to their indifferent surroundings, does not quite rise to sending a junior reporter. This is how things are, and it is that craven media that impinges on public consciousness hour by hour, and day by day, de-moralizing and corrupting.

From my own experience on the pro-life “front line,” for instance walking along with fifteen thousand or more mostly young people in Ottawa a couple of years ago — and past e.g. the CBC television stand, whose cameras were trained on a small handful of old-crow feminist counter-demonstrators for the footage they would actually be using — I should like to make an observation.

First, a joyous observation, of how invigorating it was, to be in the company of so many ebullient and purposeful young. These were, in the main, the products of the catechism classes I was mentioning above: bright and cheerful young faces in contrast with the grim and cheerless I pass on the sidewalks every day. The same comment for events such as the Papal Youth Days, when quite literally millions of the children of good Catholic homes, or converts, are assembled. I wish to say about them nothing snide, but rather how much I love them.

At the Rose Dinner, in Ottawa, in the evening after the spring pro-life march, I had the opportunity to speak with quite a few of my much younger companions in arms. And again: they were impressive, case by case, as I was coming to see them not as a mass, but as many fine and particular faces, each already with a complex life story, and not one an interchangeable happy-clap zombie, of the sort the media stereotype portrays — though not entirely from malice. (In my experience, the overwhelming majority of journalists belong to a self-consciously brahmin, “progressive” social class, which eschews contact with those it considers “lower,” i.e. the worker bees and water-carriers of the “flyover country,” whose views could hardly matter to them.)

They were young, very young to my now ageing eyes, but in their ebullience we are all made timeless. Not only did I converse, I overheard them chatting about what “young people” chat about, as everyone chats: from out of the fodder of their daily lives. And in this mush, I heard so many of the clichés of the media also being mindlessly repeated, and saw the flip gestures that go with them. They, too, had inherited the wind from a godless society, and blew the wind on without even thinking. They had thought through their principles, and were basically obedient, as most young people are — whether it is to authority or to fashion. Still, do they have the deeper instinct, and the fortitude with the instinct, sometimes not to obey? To stand alone, under real and excruciating peer pressure, without external support, against the overpowering Zeitgeist?

And it was more in overhearing little unthinking remarks that I inwardly wept for them.

To be sure, they had the rules down. I did not meet one who could not articulately expound why he (or more usually she) was “protesting” against abortion. Yet that very word “protesting” gave part of the game away.

Nor really do I think that there was one whose firm belief was not rooted in the connexion between sex and babies. Nor, possibly, even one who did not therefore follow the connexions on through a range of other Christian teachings. They’d been taught, well enough.

Yet still there was something that seemed missing from them; something that curiously had not yet gone entirely missing, even from the hippies who were my own contemporaries in youth — self-conscious “fashion hippies” who had inherited many more of the “social conventions” and “unquestioned beliefs” of their “square” post-war parents than they could ever realize.

“Rules” were being “questioned,” way back then. And yet, viscerally, they were still being followed. The profound idea of “one man, one woman” was often outwardly rejected, even volubly rejected, but it was still viscerally there. It would take another generation of media indoctrination, lewd commercial advertising, and the ministrations of Nanny State, to root the very instincts of Western Civilization out of their souls and bowels. All that my own generation had lost, in the first instance, was the power of resistance, founded ultimately on those old unquestioned rules that told one through one’s conscience when one was doing wrong.

But more than this: told one through the same conscience when one was doing right. And sometimes, filled the soul with some distant echo of a pleasure, that was our Lord’s pleasure in the creation of His world.

Conscience still exists, however poorly formed, or twisted. The propensity to guilt will always be there, so long as we are human. As well, the propensity to moral satisfaction, however twisted that becomes. But what one ought to feel sorry for, or badly about, or thoroughly ashamed by, can be quite substantially altered by the intervention of ceaseless propaganda, and ruthless fashion, and the inversion of a system of reward and punishment through the social engineering of the State.

We have faith, of a kind, shaken sometimes even by minor earth tremors. We have faith vested essentially in a political order; in the belief that, where problems arise, they can be solved, and our “human spirit” (which is incidentally no material thing) will ultimately rise to the occasion. We are, in the voice of every political commander, “the people of this great nation,” and we are repeatedly assured that we will prevail.

Failing which, we fall into utter despair. For we have no other faith to fall back on, when the earth indeed trembles and our artificial tower comes tumbling down. And, whether or not it is in our strictest modern sense “historical,” the story of Babel in Genesis tells us what will be our fate.

If there is one use for the calendrical New Year, it is provided, unintentionally, through the media, and through the accidents of social life. Towards the end of the old year, and bleeding into the new, we are exposed to a higher density of “signs of the times” than at any other time of year. Partly this is a by-product of the media habit of looking backward and forward: precisely twelve months back and twelve months fore. It is an arbitrary thing, but usually their cycle is twenty-four hours, or less with the advance of consumer electronics. Christmas, now for many years an essentially secular holiday, with little pretense of Christian thanksgiving but a modicum of “traditional” good cheer, adds more to this density. In some moments, even for those whose Christian affiliation evaporated before childhood, there are juxtapositions, contrasts.

In the media, or if you will, at a Christmas Party, or on New Year’s Eve, a lot of human experience can be compacted into a very small space, and much quickly passes before our eyes and ears. One has glimpses of the radical opposition between good and evil, beauty and ugliness, the true and the false, exhibited as if on signboards that anyone can read.

There is, especially in cold northern countries, a kind of post-partum depression that sets in after the holidays have passed. The weather plays some part in this: we who live in the vast conurbations do not look with relish on the next few months. In the countryside, a fresh snowfall can be uplifting; can be the making, for instance, of a “white Christmas”; in the city it can only mean service delays, traffic hell, dangerous sidewalks. The let-down after excessive eating and drinking comes into this, too: the sense that the party is over, and it is back to work for us.

But I think something deeper also contributes to our sense, however mildly it is taken, of emptiness, loneliness, hopelessness.

I had a dream like this, the other evening. A baby was lying in the snow and slush. He’d been left there, accidentally discarded. People were busy, they were passing him by. I thought, he is cold, he has fallen on the sidewalk. Some woman must have dropped him on her way home. She’ll want to have him back, I must get him to her. But it was Christmas, there were legs on all these shoppers; the baby on the sidewalk kept sliding out of reach. I was trying to tell them, but no one could hear me; I could not even hear myself. Why can’t these people see there is a baby? A living baby, right at their feet? Why does no one stop for this baby, why doesn’t someone pick him up? And I awoke, thinking, “Jesus!”

But what I refer to is not a dream.

Want to know what was the greatest discovery Robert Duvall ever made? Go here to read about it.

Thanks to Gerard

Mushroom writes,

Sometimes it is not the demons that plague us so much as how we choose to deal with them. Too often our worldly solutions are worse than the problems they are intended to solve. Trusting in God brings rest. It shackles and gags the demon, for, in the end, the devil’s only weapons are fear and doubt.

I have a hard time understanding why I can trust God regarding the destiny of my eternal soul while worrying about the trivialities and inconveniences of my day-to-day physical existence.

It really ought to be that we turn our eyes to the Lord in small things in order to enlarge our trust in Him. Perhaps, though, we are apt to think we can handle the minor stuff ourselves. In some ways, it is easier and more comfortable for us. Still, why not start with a molehill?

David Warren writes,

Faith is the great life-giving force, and the loss of faith is death-dealing. By this we do not mean only Christian faith, for the same principle applies in all cultures, and has applied since time out of mind.

The classical example is “the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.” As the pagan Romans lost faith in their own civilization, they stopped having babies. They rehearsed almost all the features of our modern West in their own later decadence: the sophisticated rejection of religious observances; the confident smugness of the half-educated; the degradation of family life; the acceptance of public pornography, and openly perverse liaisons; couch-potato obsessions with circus and professionalized gladiatorial sports; the shift from pride in productivity, to a shameless consumerism; the aesthetic decline in all manufactures; the spread of dishonourable trade practices; the inflation of money, and in all other kinds; debt crises; the growing dependence upon immigrant slaves and other cheap labour for all unpleasant work, including everything required of the Roman armies; the appeasement of enemies, and extravagant buying off of the tribal savages, now being let inside their frontiers.

The modern West will not go the way of Rome. It will go some other way; perhaps even to a restoration of sense, and recovery of faith — in our own Lord, and by extension, in our own future as a civilization. For after all, not everyone has stopped having children, as the faithless diligently weed themselves out of the garden of genes. All the symptoms of decline are there, but also symptoms of the Western “exceptionalism.” The Catholic Church, for instance, is not dead in the West, by a long shot. (See the millions of kids at those papal “youth days.”) She wins converts regularly among the best-educated, and that regardless of what is done in Rome. In the balance the Church is wanting, but she has always been wanting, in a world that has always been in a mess.

All trends are reversible, and I do not think the West can be counted out. Without the Christianity that formed it, and gives it meaning, it is of course stone dead. But we have, itching under our skin, a religion that is better than we are, and for all evidence to the contrary it will not simply go away. We evict Christ by the front door, but our servants keep letting him in the back. And in our hearts, and our worst misfortunes, we still instinctively reach for Him. Secretly, we don’t want to die.

Demography is not destiny, because the trends can change. In some parts of Europe the birthrate is such (Hungary for example, now below one child per woman) that a nation must surely go down the plug hole; in other parts, the numbers are beginning to rise again. As David Goldman (also known as “Spengler”) elaborately explains, something worse than what has happened in Europe is happening all around Europe. The birthrates in the Islamic countries (Algeria, Tunisia, Turkey, Iran, &c) have plummeted to below Europe’s. In a single generation, Iran for instance has gone from 6.0 to 1.6 children per woman, and that birthrate is still falling. Similar drops may be tracked elsewhere in the “third world,” and in the “tiger economies” of the Far East. The demographic sepuku of Japan is stunning; but also through China and South-east Asia populations must fall; India is now following them onto the slide. By its comparatively gradual decline, Europe has been holding up relatively well, and over here in North America, we have held up a little better.

The collapsing birthrates, in cultures that were intensely child-friendly, everywhere proclaim this abandonment of hope.

Whether in West or East, however, the mechanism of societal disintegration is the same. It could be described in one phrase as “the liberation of women.” The modern economy lures women away from home and family with (ludicrously false) promises of wealth, pleasure, and freedom. Industry required a more docile labour force, the State required revenues from double-income taxation. At a level more fundamental than economics, the times have offered atomizing ideologies — the promise of “democracy” in which everyone will be treated the same, whether man, woman, or some other thing.

Ann Voskamp thinks about making music:

“We are all going to botch it some days. We all sometimes get the notes wrong. But the song only goes wrong — when we keep thinking back to the wrong notes.”

“When a piece starts to fall apart — fall forward. Fall forward into the next bar. Moving forward is what makes music.“

Failing? What feels likes losing is really gaining experience. Forward!

Falling apart? Fall into whatever. comes. next. Forward!

Fearful? Fear is always the first step of faith. Forward!

Whenever you are lost, forward is always the way Home.

Ann concludes with this Scripture:

“But one thing I do:

forgetting what lies behind

and straining forward to what lies ahead…

I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.”

~Phil. 3:13-14