India, Fable Vs. Truth

 Thinking of this while watching the Ms. Marvel show. You have the history in India and what is now Pakistan of mothers leaving their babies out exposed as sacrifices to the gods, which still gets practiced some today. You have the Hindu practice of Sati, that of widows being burned to death after their husbands died. These things began to change after Christianity came to India in the form of missionary activity and trade with the British.

Throughout the history of the world, Christianity has been the great civilizer. And what is peddled as Islam and Hinduism today in the West is Islam and Hinduism that has been trained in what it is to be civilized by Christianity. 

And the fact that this is true is evident in where we are today in America. As people have abandoned Christianity, they have turned to killing their own children and celebrating it. For many of us, we are too far gone to know what it is to be civilized anymore.

Today’s Decision

What has happened today needs to be understood first and foremost not as a political or legal issue, but as a spiritual issue, as an act of God’s mercy. To merely regard this as a Constitutional or States’ Rights issue, or as one of political power, is to miss the fundamental reality at work. I have said often in the past that the murder of the unborn has been one of America’s greatest sins, and that we have brought the judgments of the past few years on ourselves largely due to that. Today was an act of grace, a turning of God’s favor toward us, a sign of His willingness to forgive us and heal us. It is entirely undeserved.

But it is also a test, as to what we will do with this favor. If we continue down the path of wickedness that we otherwise seem to be traveling, His judgment will come back on us worse than before. This is true of the country in its entirety as well as in its parts, whether in individual states, counties, cities, communities, families, or persons. He does not take ingratitude and the despising of His kindness lightly.

If, however, we repent and look to Him in humility and gratitude, in worship, in prayer, and in service to Him and our neighbors, His favor will continue and increase. 

Holiness manifest in obedience to God’s Law is key in this. Our abortion epidemic is an extension of the epidemic of sexual immorality in this country - the main reason we abort our children is because we do not want to accept responsibility for our sexual sins. Some of the needs in that area may be with regard to politics and laws, but they aren’t primarily so. Worship and obedience toward God are the only way. Anything else will simply lead us back to where we were before.

The Predictable “Lightyear”

The new Pixar movie “Lightyear” is coming out this weekend, and the general plot seems fairly obvious. The white male Buzz Lightyear will be an idiot, time will have passed him by as a relic of a former era, and the really competent leader, the real hero, will be the black female. Because pagans do meta social commentary and propaganda constantly. Most people, even Christians, are oblivious to it. So many college lit classes passed, so little ability to apply what we were supposed to have learned.

And then somebody I know will see it, and come back to me and say, “no, it wasn’t quite like that.” And then I’ll go see it and realize they just didn’t get it. Because this happens every time.

The recent Chip and Dale movie? Same plot. Heavy metaphor in that one. The Obi Wan show? Same thing. Reva is the real hero. The marginalized, opppressed, innocent hero. And incredibly, inexplicably, omnicompetent.

I’ve lost count of how many people have told me they loved “Thor Ragnarok” and couldn’t pick up on the fact that it was a deconstruction of Asgard as portrayed in the MCU up to that point, and more broadly a deconstruction of/a critical historical myth making about American/Western imperialism and colonialism. The white heterosexual male is always the villain. Why do you think they made Thor and Bruce Banner into such idiots, and killed off Odin? Why do you think they destroyed Asgard, and said “Asgard is a people, not a place”? All globalist Leftist propaganda. Asgard was a metaphor for how they believe America should be conceived, all ideology and no physical borders. Why do you think they shaved Thor’s head? He was put in the place of a slave. He was put into the arena, made to dance in the minstrel show to entertain his owner. It was his penance, his purgatory, as the representative of the world’s collective oppressor. They might as well have shipped him to Sakaar on the Amistad. That would teach him, for sure. Why do you think they picked a black homosexual woman to play Valkyrie, who has mostly been white in the comics? And why did she behave crassly like a man? All agenda. Then there was the character’s implied relationship with another woman. And now she’s “King Valkyrie”.

And we the crowds eat it up, cluelessly, because we’re suckered by humor.

And then on the other side, reacting to all this, is a rising white nationalism, those blaming Jewish people for the world’s ills and thinking they’re going to recover 1955 demographics.

Clowns to the Left of me, jokers to the Right, and here I am in the middle. Feel free to join me.

Living with the Reality of Sin

Most people deal with the things that haunt them - such as hurts caused by others, failures in life, addictions, a lack of peace, and a deep sense of dissatisfaction - through ways that ultimately are of no real help. Not knowing what else to do, and yet still having to cope with reality as it faces us every day, we try ignoring these things, or we add on more addictions, or we use self-deception about the facts that linger in our hearts and minds. We tell ourselves we’re good enough, but we really know that isn’t true. Or we tell ourselves that nobody’s perfect, as if that makes it okay, but we can’t get away from the sense that it doesn’t. In dealing with others, we either plaster on a shallow smile to imitate real joy, we adopt a Stoic position of coldness, or we isolate ourselves from others altogether. Deep in our hearts we all know that we are not and cannot in ourselves be enough , and we can’t get away from it. Not only do we fail to satisfy others, we fail to satisfy ourselves. And though we can’t always put our finger on it, we know that there is an ultimate standard out there to which we are accountable, something we should be striving for, and we don’t have the ability in ourselves to meet it. Instead, we try to create a false standard, a lower standard, and try to deceive ourselves into believing it’s good enough. And yet we continue to suffer the pain caused by others  in our lives, and then turn around and do the same to them as well, almost as if we can’t help it.

The Omniscient Judge

Nothing escapes the eyes of God. The temptation, especially for unbelievers, is to move through life as if God doesn’t notice sin, and as if judgment will never come. 

But it eventually will. The fact that a person thinks he can get away with evil is itself God’s judgment.

We can fool one another. But God can never be deceived.

Proposed Future Ms. Marvel Episodes

Ms. Marvel, episode #2: Word of Kamala Khan’s magical bracelet has reached the point of its origin, a small town on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. What will her parents do when they find her missing, and only a threatening message from the Muslim Brotherhood left behind?

Ms. Marvel, episode #3: Kamala Khan and the bracelet she found in her parent’s attic have been secreted away by the Muslim Brotherhood. Will Dane Whitman, the Black Knight, be able to reach her before the Brotherhood is able to sell Kamala into a life of perpetual servitude? And how was he able to resurrect so many eleventh century Crusaders to help him in his task?

Ms. Marvel, episode #4: Kamala has been safely returned to her home in America by the Black Knight, much to her parents’ delight. But what will they do when they find Kamala replacing her Captain Marvel posters with Dane Whitman posters? And how did she get her hands on that Gideon Bible she keeps carrying to school with her anyways?!?

Ms. Marvel, episode #5: Kamala has been led to Christ by her former enemy Zoe. What will she do when her parents disown her and kick her out of the house? And why is she waking up every morning with a craving for bacon?

Ms. Marvel, episode #6: Kamala, having been kicked out of her parents’ home, is now living with Zoe’s family, as she studies her catechism and prepares for baptism at the local Catholic Church. Everything seems to be going well, until she learns that her brother Aamir, having just returned from hajj, has become radicalized on his pilgrimage. Will she be able to reach him with the Gospel before things come to their logical end? Or will she need her friend Dane Whitman to come to her aid to prevent her brother’s murderous rampage?

Hegelian Disney

  With the Reva character on the Obi-Wan show, it has to be understood that Disney knew what they were doing when they created that character. And they knew what kind of response they would get. It was all deliberate. For the Left, both in media and business, it’s Alinsky tactics all the way. Never let a crisis go to waste. Any kind of attention can be turned into profitable attention, and/or attention for the sake of promoting an ideology or political/social goal. You know you’re going to get a response, because that was the point in the first place. And so you highlight the most extreme responses in the media and broadcast it loudly for the world to hear. All that matters is power and money. 

But in such a situation love and truth cannot exist, which is why the developed world is disintegrating both morally and socially the way that it is. To approach life pragmatically, only for personal gain, only for your own goals of power and money, is hate. It fragments healthy social bonds, healthy relationships. Fear, distrust, a constant state of war, a perpetual position of fight or flight, can be the only outcome.  The inevitable result is death, both individually, and socially.

Why is it that Hollywood marriages rarely last? It’s because of the commodification of the self, and of everything. When your brand is yourself, and that is what is most important to you, in a world that knows no Sabbath, humanity is inevitably lost. Man as made in the image of the Triune God fades away. All that’s left is a black hole, a vacuum that everything else is sucked into and destroyed.

When you act according to the Hegelian dialectic, you can never have anything else than the Hegelian dialectic. Peace and rest will never be the result.