Ignore and scorn Crowley, just chillax, consult your tailor and listen to the tune. See you on the Terrace.
Cheers,
LSP
Ignore and scorn Crowley, just chillax, consult your tailor and listen to the tune. See you on the Terrace.
Cheers,
LSP
We're living in a void. So says Paul Kingsworth, and he has a point. Is the dominant culture pagan, secular or even atheist? Hardly, it's nothing at all, a void or vacuum in which Christianity is taken-for-granted-rejected and thus the West itself. Call it intellectual and cultural suicide if you like, call it nihilism, call it blasphemy LARPING as lib project freedom. Anyway, here's a snapshot:
In the West today, that means that we have to live in a culture without faith. Without faith in the Christian God, obviously, but without faith in anything else either. We are not pagans because pagans, like Christians, believe in something. We believe in nothing. Most significantly, we are now even ceasing to believe in the ideas which arose to replace all religions in the age of ‘Enlightenment.’ Reason, progress, liberalism, freedom of speech, democracy, the enlightened rational individual, the scientific process as a means of determining truth: everywhere, these ‘secular’ beliefs, which were supposed to replace religion worldwide, are either under fire or have already fallen too.
Is this an atheist age, then? In one obvious sense, yes. We are perhaps the first godless culture in human history. Religious cosmologies have differed vastly across time and space, but no society has ever existed without one. Ours has tried to, for a brief, violent and explosive time. I don’t think that time has long to run. So yes, we are living in an atheist age - and yet, at the same time, that’s not quite the full picture either.
Atheism, like religion, implies some sort of confidence; some sort of actual stance. A-theism is a position. It states: there is no God, and it can state that because it has a set of alternative beliefs, usually those which emerged from the European ‘age of reason’: the ability of science to demonstrate universal truth; the objectivity of rational thought; the knowability of reality. Atheism often also refuses religion on moral grounds: religions, it is said, are archaic, irrational, unjust and oppressive. Some version of ‘humanism’ is a better and fairer fit for the modern world.
All of these are positions. They are statements of faith in the world working in a certain way, and in the way that it should work, and should be arranged. Atheism can even amount to a quasi-religious system itself. Orthodox convert Seraphim Rose, formerly a committed atheist himself, once wrote that ‘atheism, true “existential” atheism burning with hatred of a seemingly unjust or unmerciful God, is a spiritual state; it is a real attempt to grapple with the true God.’
Does our age believe this? Hardly. These days even Richard Dawkins publicly regrets the results of the ignorant anti-Christian fatwa he helped to lead. They say they are no atheists in foxholes; I wonder how many of them there are in post-religious societies. What happens when the dedicated rationalist realises that his destruction of religious faith has not led to the triumph of reason but to its long sleep, which is producing, now, increasingly terrible monsters? So no, this is not an atheist age either. It is not, I would say, any kind of ‘age’ at all. It has no shape. It has no centre. Nobody sits on its throne. It is, taken in the round, simply a vacuum. There is nothing here at all.
You can read the whole thing here, and you should. In the meanwhile, we have to ask, what will fill the vacuum nature abhors? A renewed Faith and/or Satan? At the moment it's most definitely the latter, but we know how this clash ends. Curiously enough, at the Colosseum.
Wonder at the Offertory, here's Farrer:
THE alms for which your generosity is asked are nothing exterior to the sacrament, but a part of it. If you were living in the days of the ancient church, you would be bringing not money, but cakes of bread and flasks of wine. All would be placed upon the altar; part would be consecrated for the eucharist, the remainder would be given to the sick and poor. Now you bring money. But your money is still presented along with the bread and wine, and it still means the same thing. The offering is your offering; it is you yourselves who are laid on the altar to be consecrated, and to be made the body of Christ. Your gift is a token of yourself. I break the bread for the death of Christ, and we are all sacrificed to God in Christ's death, dying in him to our own will, and receiving Christ our true life in communion.
...it is you yourselves who are laid on the altar to be consecrated, and to be made the body of Christ. Reflect on that, dear readers, all three of you, as you approach the altar with altar with joy and gladness, to say nothing of fear and trembling before the living presence of God.
If you think, in your vain, worldly conceit that you can somehow ignore this and come out smiling like a gilded loon at the other end you are sadly mistaken. I'll put it another way. God will not be mocked, not least by the risible Rainbow Cult which is a mockery in itself. Homily over and mind how you go.
LSP
It was like some kind of Golden Void on the way down 22 to Mass this evening and no complaints from me on that score, all hail the countryside. Then, ite missa est, it was time to head back to the Compound, except it wasn't.
No, a young couple asked me to bless their marriage. It was an heterosexual marriage, so I did. Well done kids, long may you reign in this dark and barbarous age. Then, no sooner Texas said than done, the Compound opened its storied doors and there it was, home.
Result, but immediately a call, "What's up, son?" a pause, "Hey dad, I'm in town." Well done you, and a few minutes later in came a soldier storming through with a Whataburger and a Green to Gold packet. Good work, kid.
Seriously, it'd be a grand thing if the erstwhile Cadet became an actual Cadet. Let's see how this goes.
Salve,
LSP
Well, not so much Hood as Cavasos because changing names and removing statues will do so much to raise the fortunes of virtue signalling hypocrite Democrats poverty stricken POCs everywhere. Except that it won't. Regardless, General Cavasos seems to have been the real deal and I enjoyed a brief tour of the post this afternoon.
The place always strikes me as well put together, unlike Killeen, and it was fun to drive around 1 Cav's enormous motor pools. Look at that, tanks! And the new JLTV (Joint Light Tactical Vehicle) which is replacing ancient HMMVs.
It comes in 2 and 4 seat variants and features a V8 power plant, advanced networking capability, scalable armor and can be fitted with an array of weaponry: light and heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, anti-tank missiles and more. You can read about this demonstrably badass vehicle here.
Tour over, we stopped at the PX for food, which meant something called a "Philly Cheesesteak," which is a kind of sandwich thing, for the boy and a small order of fries for me. Was it cheap? No, it was not cheap. It was expensive. Very expensive. Maybe I will apply for bankruptcy.
That's as maybe. Perhaps you remember when fast food was a quick, inexpensive variant to real food? Those days are well gone, my friends. But the kid liked it, so. And you know what? He's proud of the US Army and his post. I like that a lot.
Then it was back to 57 Signal, a fond farewell, and a drive back to the bucolic farming community that is LSPland. And all was good, with I35 strangely easy and to the West a massive Texan sun sank to the horizon, filling the air with golden light.
God Bless,
LSP
Your Pal,
LSP
I tell you, it's hot enough to melt porch furniture and cast it into bullets (what? Ed.), but whoever said life'd be easy? No one, but the band plays on and this mind blog's mission to document the Apocalypse continues. Steadfast.
Golden Void,
LSP
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