Solzhenitsyn to Harvard

I meant to post something on the structure of the book of Revelation but got waylaid by Solzhenitsyn's address to Harvard in the late '70s. Here's a bit of it:

"I am referring to the calamity of a despiritualized and irreligious humanistic consciousness.

To such consciousness, man is the touchstone in judging and evaluating everything on earth. Imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects. We are now experiencing the consequences of mistakes which had not been noticed at the beginning of the journey. On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility. We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. In the East, it is destroyed by the dealings and machinations of the ruling party. In the West, commercial interests tend to suffocate it. This is the real crisis. The split in the world is less terrible than the similarity of the disease plaguing its main sections.

If humanism were right in declaring that man is born to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature. It cannot be unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life. It cannot be the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then cheerfully get the most out of them. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one's life journey may become an experience of moral growth, so that one may leave life a better human being than one started it. It is imperative to review the table of widespread human values. Its present incorrectness is astounding. It is not possible that assessment of the President's performance be reduced to the question of how much money one makes or of unlimited availability of gasoline. Only voluntary, inspired self-restraint can raise man above the world stream of materialism.

It would be retrogression to attach oneself today to the ossified formulas of the Enlightenment. Social dogmatism leaves us completely helpless in front of the trials of our times.

Even if we are spared destruction by war, our lives will have to change if we want to save life from self-destruction. We cannot avoid revising the fundamental definitions of human life and human society. Is it true that man is above everything? Is there no Superior Spirit above him? Is it right that man's life and society's activities have to be determined by material expansion in the first place? Is it permissible to promote such expansion to the detriment of our spiritual integrity?

If the world has not come to its end, it has approached a major turn in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will exact from us a spiritual upsurge, we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life where our physical nature will not be cursed as in the Middle Ages, but, even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon as in the Modern era.

This ascension will be similar to climbing onto the next anthropologic stage. No one on earth has any other way left but -- upward."

I agree with the above, you may not, but I'd say it's interesting regardless. You can read the whole thing here.

God bless,

LSP

Barnyard Face-Off

Lent seems to be proceeding apace and with it an increase in neighbouring poultry, which kick up a row at most hours of the day and night. Sometimes they fire up the local dogs, who answer their strangled crows with fierce barking, but there seems to be less of that lately, thank God.

I tell you, it's not easy to concentrate on the sacred mysteries of the Mass when there's some kind of barnyard face-off between bird and pitbull.

Still, there's plenty of peace of mind to be gained from riding and shooting; who knows, maybe one day I'll be good at both - at once.

I'd say that was a fine ambition, unlike the strange new "hate database" for children in the U.K., where there's evidently a rash of overweight preteens calling each other "gay boy".

Just say no to dhimmitude.

LSP

Horsing About

Got to the barn this morning to find horses getting a good brush down, which they needed,

then rode about for bit in the fresh air - windy, but sunny with it. Practiced riding without stirrups, good for balance and seat, evidently, and generally carried on in the equine way. Fun.

Barndom over, I took a picture of bucolic utopia and stopped at the oddly named "Karen's Authentic Mexican Food".

Well, I don't know if it is or not, but I like their Bean & Brisket tacos, which always seem to go down well after a bout with the quadrupeds.

So that was the morning - "ride more" objective lived up to - shooting? Not today, sadly, but tomorrow will be a different story, probably involving pistols and AR, along with scouting out set-ups for a night time coyote call.

More on the Book of Revelation later.

God bless,

LSP

Eschaton

Along with the ride and shoot imperative goes a bit of reflection on the Revelation to St. John the Divine. Why? Because apocalypse seemed suitably Lenten and I foolishly told one of the Missions that I'd teach a course on it - something I've never done before. Farrer gives a powerful account; here's an excerpt, on bestial numerics:

"The number of the Beast reveals him as both the instrument of judgement on the wicked and the object of judgement himself. But that is not all. St. John takes up two mathematical properties of the 666. First, 666 is what we should call the recurrent decimal for 2/3. St. John's age did not talk about recurrent decimals, but of course St. John could recognize 666 as two-thirds of that standard quantity, the thousand. Why is Antichrist two-thirds? because the angels of the trumpets (showing the enthronement of pagan power) have destroyed one-third of everything before he begins to reign, and the angels of the vials return with total destruction as he comes to his end. In the interval he reigns over a kingdom of two-thirds."

Farrer goes on to describe 666 as the triangulation of 6 x 6:

"666, therefore, is a 12 fold triangle with a periphery of 30 x 3 1/2. St. John's calculation of the period of the Beast's reign, in days, is 12 (months) x 30 (days) x 3 1/2 (years). The coincidence between this reckoning and the factors of the 666 triangle is no mere accident... the purpose of the artificial reckoning is to exhibit the Beast's fatally limited reign as a function of his number."

There's a lot of mathematics in the Revelation, unfortunately for me, but whoever said life would be easy?

Speaking of maths, my Revelation class added up the number of horses that were collectively owned by the people in the room and came up with 21 beasts. A decent little force multiplier if things get all eschaton and we have to leave the Union of the False Prophet.

God bless Texas.

LSP

Shoot More, Ride More

You'll have to forgive the recent lack of posting but I've been busy, not least with self-examination, which is a Lenten discipline leading to penitence, confession and amendment of life. With that in mind, several things have become very clear after Ash Wednesday, including:

Shoot more

Ride more

So I've been doing both and think it's time to up the ante on the former with a night-time coyote call - there's been plenty of paper punching lately but precious little hunting and it's time to put the AR to practical use. Viz. horses; it's all very well to spend a couple of hours a week on the quadruped, but how are you ever going to really advance on the basis of such minimal acquaintance? A bit like someone wondering why they don't get very far spiritually when all they do is spend an hour and a half in church on Sunday.

Speaking of church - today's Gospel was St. Luke's variant of Our Lord's temptation in the wilderness. Different than Mathew's because the mountain temptation is placed in the middle of the narrative.

With that in mind, it struck me last night that what Luke portrays is an inverse, or diabolic mirror image, of the giving of the Law on Mount Sinai - successfully resisted by Christ, who refers "Old Scratch" to the "first and great commandment" (gotta love the old Prayer Book), by way of Deuteronomy.

If any theologians would like to comment, well, I'd welcome the thought.

Have a blessed Lent.

LSP

Ash Wednesday

They say that the word Lent comes from the old English for Spring, and it was like that here today after such unseasonably cold weather. Regardless, I always find Ash Wednesday has a bleakness about it, "Remember O man that thou art dust"... But whoever said a penitential season was supposed to be fun.

Still, a parishioner lent me a red-dot optic (Aimpoint copy) for the carbine - well done that man, and the missions seem to be pulling together in a good sort of way. Quite unlike NASA's climatologists, who appear to be little better than a "Kantian fact factory in full swing." Then there's the Arlington Pipebombers that got busted before they could strike a blow for the jihad, or mental instability, or both.

Horses tomorrow and perhaps a shoot - might be interesting to check out the new scope.

Have a blessed Ash Wednesday and a holy Lent.

LSP

Shoot the Snow

It began to snow, which prompted the question,

"What you gonna do LSP, shoot the snow?"

Resisting temptation to put rounds down range, I got on the highway,

and drove to Dallas, which had a record 12" of the "white offender".

Remarkable weather for Texas and caused, evidently, by "warming". Last year, when it was colder, we were having BBQs on the back lawn. Well, its hotter now, so we can't.

Have fun in the snow.

LSP

A Sign

Some people might say that the above sign is a piece of gun-toting redneck badness. Others might think it greatness. I incline towards the latter.

Thanks, Tom, for the image.

Appointment with horse cancelled due to sleet (for goodness sake), so its back to the Book of Revelation and Austin Farrer. Farrer is genius and, to my mind, the greatest Anglican theologian of the twentieth century - there were several good ones back then.

If the sleet stops might venture out for a shoot.

Cheers,

LSP

Apocalypse

I've been hearing rumours for months, from friends who seem to know about money, that we should expect something nasty on the financial front. I was a bit skeptical, to be honest, but this latest from the Wall Street Journal's Marketwatch seems more than a little scary. Here's an excerpt:

"The Big One is coming soon, bigger than the 2000 dot-com crash and the 2008 subprime credit meltdowncombined. A huge market blowout. And as Bloomberg-BusinessWeek predicts: "The results won't be pretty for investors or elected officials."

After the global-debt bomb explodes don't expect a typical bear correction followed by a new bull. Wall Street's toxic pseudo-capitalism is imploding. Be prepared for a massive meltdown. Yes, already the third major bubble-bust of the 21st century, triggered once again by Wall Street's out-of-control Fat Cat Bankers. And it's dead ahead.

Can your family survive in the anarchy after the debt bomb explodes?

America's already descending into economic anarchy. We're all trapped in a historic economic supercycle, a turning point that must bleed through a no-man's land of lawless self-destructive anarchy before a neo-capitalistic world can re-emerge."

I'd say that wasn't very encouraging. Off to study The revelation to St. John the Divine as interpreted by Austin Farrer - Rebirth of Images, well worth the read.

Stockpile ammo and food,

LSP

Gene Robinson - Mind Like A Steel Trap!

Surely that's not an Adams Apple?

The vocal champion of the variously gendered, Bishop "Vicky" Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, has been at it again. According to him, St. Paul's admonitions against homosexuality were really written against heterosexuals having homosexual sex, not against real homosexuals having homosexual sex. Gene thinks the latter is great but doesn't like the former, which he reckons is pretty perverted. Speaking to CNSNews.com, the pelosian pontiff stated:

“We have to understand that the notion of a homosexual sexual orientation is a notion that’s only about 125 years old... That is to say, St. Paul was talking about people that he understood to be heterosexual engaging in same-sex acts... It never occurred to anyone in ancient times that a certain minority of us would be born being affectionally oriented to people of the same sex... So it did seem like against their nature to be doing so.”

Here's what St. Paul says, Romans 1:26-27:

"For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet."

Presumably the Archdruid of Canterbury is busy apologizing for the Apostle at the fudge factory that is the General Synod; see the excellent All Seeing Eye for commentary. Myself? I find Gene's gay logic remarkable, and If you want a discussion of the arguments from a trad perspective, check out Robert Gagnon's site.

I tell you, it's enough to make me reach for m'gun(s) - but more of that anon.

Shoot straight,

LSP

Dog Hell

I thought I'd have a pleasant, relaxing ride on the horse, but no. It was Dog Hell. Don't get me wrong, I like dogs, but Stella was a bridge too far. Well, she got a shake up and quietened down - not before time. The question is, if animals can go to heaven, can they go to hell?

Had a good equine encounter after the Dog War went cold - must concentrate thoughts on Coyote Call(ing) & getting a .308.

Here's Bishop Wantland, a shooter and all 'round good man. Favors Charles Martel, as do I. Just say no to dhimmitude.

Gun Rights,

LSP

Anglican Church of Canada Hurtles into Space!

ACoC H/T BBCW

The Hubble Telescope has captured striking new images of a remarkable object in the night sky - the diminutive Anglican Church of Canada (ACoC) hurtling into deep space.

ACoC's tiny 140 meter nucleus is unusual for being "off center" and unlike larger, more powerful ecclesial bodies, this one has "no gas in its tail", say sources studying the phenomenon.

A top scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, believes the object is debris left over from a collision with the normative teaching authority of the Church, stating, "The collision likely occurred at over 15,000 kilometres per hour, five times the speed of a rifle bullet, and liberated energy in excess of a nuclear bomb."

Since 2000, ACoC has shrunk from a little over 650,000 attendees in 2000 to around 325,000 in 2010, a loss of over 20,000 people annually. Pundits predict that no-one will be left by mid-century if ACoC continues on its current trajectory between Mars and Juppiter.

Astronaut

ACoC was spotted 90 million miles away from earth.

Archbishop Hiltz was unavailable for comment.

To the Stars!

LSP