Pessimistic and Optimistic 19th Century Views on Cities and the Future of Christianity

– 17 May 2024 –

Barzillai “19th Century” Bozarth:

The author of the first view, Samuel Loomis, writing in 1887, presents a pessimistic vision of the future of Christianity with regard to rapidly growing cities in the United States. In the second view, John B. Robbins, presents a response to the first pessimistic vision two years later, and he offers a more sanguine future for Christianity in the United States.

Excerpts from Modern Cities and Their Religious Problems, by Samuel L. Loomis:

The Threat of the Cities

“Is our civilization perishable?” To this startling question, which a recent writer answers in the affirmative, one’s first impulse prompts the reply : “By no means. With Christian faith for the soul of it, the free school for its breastplate, and the printing-press for its weapon, the modern civilization can never perish.” But careful attention to the perils of the times must modify the answer. If our civilization stands, this will not be because it is incapable of destruction, but because its sons and daughters, roused by its dangers, rally to its defence.

There can be no doubt that a state of society like the one in which we are living would be impossible except for the Christian religion. So vast and complex a structure as that of modern civilization could only stand on the solid foundation of public integrity. Unless the majority of the people were honest you could not have confidence and credit sufficient for the conduct of commercial transactions; unless a spirit of order and justice were abroad, property would not find secure protection and enterprise would be discouraged. Domestic purity is the corner-stone of civil liberty. Popular intelligence forms the chariot-wheels of progress. Thrift and prosperity ever follow industry, economy, and temperance. The degree of advancement in any state depends chiefly upon the prevalence of such qualities as these among its citizens. But these qualities are distinctive marks of Christian character. They are the fruitage of the tree of faith, and never have been known as popular traits except in nations whose God is Jehovah.

Moreover, the degree of the nation’s civilization depends upon the purity of its faith. The better the religion, the better will be the public integrity resulting from it; and the stronger its basis in public integrity, the higher will become the development and the more complex the organism of society. There is no need of showing that those countries in which degraded forms of Christianity prevail have lower standards of morals, and consequently lower degrees of civilization, than they enjoy who cherish a purer faith. Nor is there need of pointing out the truth that the evils which pervade our own land and sadly mar the beauty of its freedom, arise from the corruptness and incompleteness of our Christianity, our far-off following of our Master and our failure to accept His teachings and put His principles to practice. Many earnest men, indeed, are thinking that civilization in the most enlightened nations of the earth has reached a point where it falters, and can be urged no higher until men eschew the selfish plan of competition, which is now omnipotent in trade and industry, and substitute for it the essentially Christian principle of co-operation.

Now, if a community whose social system has been organized amid Christian influences and upon the Christian plan should at any time lose its religious faith, such loss would inevitably be followed by the slow decay of its morality, and the subsequent collapse of its civilization. The higher and more complex that civilization had become, the greater would be the ruin of its overthrow; for the body of Christian civilization cannot live without the soul. Let faith leave society and the lapse back toward barbarism will commence at once. Or if a purer and higher form of faith should give place to a lower and more corrupt form, such a civilization as had naturally grown up under the influence of the purer faith could not be sustained, but must certainly give place to civilization of a lower type.

Again, if from any portion of the society of modern times Christian life and power should be cut off throughout that portion the process of integration would speedily ensue. If from certain strata of the people the preserving strength of the “salt of the earth” be taken away, those strata, whether high or low, would forthwith commence sinking toward the normal plane of heathen living; and in their decay would bring distress, if not ruin, upon the whole of society. The portents of such perils as these are, as we believe, plainly to be seen in the present religious condition of American cities.

We have already observed that a gulf broad and deep divides the people of our towns into an upper and a lower class; and that by no means the smallest element in the difference between these two sections of society is a difference of religious belief. The pure high faith of our fathers, the faith that promoted at once free-thinking and right-thinking, power and purity, personal liberty and personal responsibility, —the faith on which the nation was founded, and through whose strength she has endured the shock of battles and stress of stormy times,—this faith has almost no place among the working-class. But the working-class holds a preponderance of power in the cities; and the cities, already mighty, in their fearful growth, promise at no distant day to have a preponderance of power in the nation.

It will not be difficult to convince those who are acquainted with the life of our cities, that the Protestant churches, as a rule, have no following among the workingmen. Everybody knows it. Go into an ordinary church on Sunday morning, and you see lawyers, physicians, merchants, and business men with their families : —you see teachers, salesmen, and clerks, and a certain proportion of educated mechanics: but the workingman and his household are not there. [. . .]

[. . .]

There is no more striking illustration of the alienation of the masses in the cities from the Protestant churches than the meagreness of their accommodations. If the laboring class should contribute its due proportion to the congregations, the churches, many of which are now half empty, would not begin to hold the people. In 1880 there was in the United States one evangelical church organization to every five hundred and sixteen of the population; in Boston, counting churches of all kinds, there was but one to every 1,600 of the population ; in Chicago, one to every 2,081; in New York, one to every 2,468; in St. Louis, one to every 2,800. In New York below Fourteenth Street, where the people are principally laborers, there are only half as many Protestant places of worship in proportion to the number of people as above Fourteenth Street in the well-to-do parts.

The worst of it is, that instead of improving, the condition of things has been growing worse every year. [. . .]

[. . .]

Or consider, again, the drunkenness of the cities. The fearful statistics of the vice need no repetition. But it should not be forgotten that, unlike the churches, the drinking-saloons find the majority of their patrons among the workingmen. A machine moulder recently said to the writer that he did not know a person in his trade who is not a drinking man. Drinking-saloons are both causes and effects of a city’s degradation. They are effects; they come where poverty makes the home dingy, squalid, and unattractive. Day and night their doors are open, offering to the weary laborer retreats that, with their polished brass and stained glass, their light and warmth and cheery company, are immeasurably more attractive than his home. Apart from the drinking, the drinking-places have a strong fascination for their patrons; but the drink too is made the more enticing by the misery of the drinker. Exhausted by long hours of monotonous labor, or by a still more trying search for labor when ” out of a job,” the man has an irresistible craving for some stimulus which will lighten his heart and banish his sorrows for an hour. The relief is close at hand; it is cheap and easy to take. That ” at last it biteth like a serpent and stingeth like an adder,” no one knows better than they who are most familiar with the ruin of it. But those that have the least are the most reckless. For the sake of relieving present discomfort they are willing to run the risk of future misery. You find the saloons thickest in the poorest quarters.

[. . .]

According to the census of 1880 the city of Boston had one saloon for every 329 persons ; Cleveland, one for 192; New York, one for 179; Chicago, one for 171; and Cincinnati, one for 124, or one for every twenty-five families. This calculation does not include groceries or drug-stores where liquor is sold. The amount of drinking has been increasing from year to year. Do not these facts betoken a serious decline from the high plane of Christian civilization?

Other evidence in the same direction appears in the increase of crime that the past thirty years have witnessed. In 1850 Massachusetts had one prisoner to 804 of the population. In 1880 she had one to 487. The criminal population in proportion to the whole population had nearly doubled in thirty years. The report of the prison commissioners for Massachusetts for 1884, shows that the entire number of arrests for the year ending September 30, 1883, was 65,000, or one arrest for every twenty-nine of the population. Who these offenders were becomes evident when you read that Suffolk County, the county of Boston, had in proportion to its population more than twice the number of prisoners of any other county, and five or six times as many as those counties that do not include large towns.

The census makes an even worse showing than this for the whole country. Between 1870 and 1880, the population of the United States increased 30 per cent. Meantime crime in the United States increased 83.32. The superintendent of the police reports that in Chicago, in the year 1883, there were 37,187 arrests in that city, or one for every sixteen of the population. Of these, 159 were for murder, manslaughter, and intent to kill. The same sad story comes from every great city of the land, and one of its saddest features is the increase of what may be called seed crimes—those of the women and boys. Have we not here, too, ominous indications that the foundations of Christian civilization are rotting away beneath us?

[. . .]

Another token of the same thing is seen in the desecration of the Christian Sabbath. Can we have Christian civilization without a Sabbath day? Granting that the Puritanic Sabbath is not adapted to the needs of our time, no one will deny that we need some sort of a Sabbath day,—a day, too, which in all essential elements shall not be one whit inferior to that which our fathers handed down to us. Where is the city in which the Sabbath day is not losing ground? To the mass of the workingmen Sunday is no more than a holiday. The conception of it that they have brought with them from Europe has not been improved. It is a day for labor meetings, for excursions, for saloons, beer-gardens, base-ball games, and carousals.

As a final token of the threatening dissolution of the fabric of Christian society, notice the nature of the new gospel for workingmen which many of the socialists are preaching. This is not the place for the discussion of socialism. “We have no time to speak here of its wide and rapid spread in our own country and all over Europe, nor to consider how much of what is true and valuable may be mixed up with its teachings; nor can we notice the extent to which it has influenced the thinking of multitudes who have not accepted its doctrines as a whole—an influence clearly seen in recent labor troubles, in the late elections, in the formation of the Anti-Poverty Society, etc. But the thing to be observed is the tendency of the doctrines that are at present advocated by its leaders. The International Workingmen’s Association, which is the principal socialistic society in this country and the world, makes it its direct purpose to promote the very thing which, as we have tried to show, is now threatening us, namely: the overthrow of the present system of society. These anarchists have most vague and varied notions of what should take the place of that which they wish to destroy. Whenever they attempt to tell how the new society should be organized, they become involved in hopeless confusion. The one plan upon which they all agree is that of destruction. Many of the leaders go so far as to advocate the abolition with private property of religion, the State, the Church, and even the family. Give such men their way, not that they are likely to get it, and they would dash the proud temple of civilization with a single blow to the ground, and leave the world in as dense a darkness of barbarism as ever enveloped our fathers of the Northland. It is hoped that these will not be regarded as the extravagant words of an alarmist. So surely as God is faithful, that Gospel which Jesus Christ brought to the poor must reach the poor, or else they, perishing in their blindness, will involve all Christendom in common ruin. Are not these things already rolling in upon us like a mighty stormcloud,—this increasing drunkenness and crime, this Sabbath desecration, this pauperism, this lawlessness and strife between rich and poor, this worse than heathen poverty and degradation? Do you answer, “Oh, well, but the cities have always been full of drunkenness, poverty, and disorder; they are the feversores of the land”? True: but do not forget that while the “fever-sores” grow redder and more angry, they are growing larger every day. It was a comparatively small thing that the cities were vicious when they contained one-thirtieth of the people, but now they contain nearly one-fourth; soon it will be one-third, one-half ; such fever-sores must not be ignored.

That soil where weeds grow rankest is ever a fertile soil, capable also of yielding rich harvests of grain. If the towns of modern times furnish extraordinary facilities for the deadly work of the destroyer, at the same time they give no less advantage to the armies of salvation; they afford unrivalled fields for the triumphs of the Redeemer. God has rarely given His servants greater opportunities for doing good, and bringing forth much fruit unto His praise, than one can find in the troubled hearts of the great cities to-day: for the “sword of the Spirit” is never so mighty as when wielded amid the multitudes.

Excerpt from Christ and Our Country; or, A Hopeful View of Christianity in the Present Day, by John B. Robbins:

The City as a Peril.

No argument and no statistics are needed to prove that the population of the city is increasing much more rapidly than that of the country outside of the cities. Professor Loomis, in “Modern Cities,” gives us many interesting facts in regard to the enormous growth of the cities. He does not see any danger in the growth of cities per se. “The formation of great cities is a normal result of a high development of human society.” He shows that the decreasing death-rate, commerce, mechanical arts, manufactures, and the desire of men to be in multitudes are all causing the population of the cities to increase very rapidly.

Another principle of great interest presented by Mr. Loomis is this: That the evangelization of the city means the salvation of the country. All the facts presented by him are of a very hopeful nature until the fact is made known that the supply of churches is woefully out of harmony with the increased populations. He seeks to account for this in many ways. Here are some of them: The crowded tenement-houses, the indifference of the inmates to religious influences, the mixed populations, or a population made up of foreign elements. In New York, for instance, 80 per cent, of its inhabitants are foreign-born or the children of foreign-born parents; in Chicago, 87 per cent. In New York in 1840 there was 1 Protestant Church to 2,066 souls; in 1887, 1 to 3,750. It means only this: That the Christianity of the past fifty years has not been able to cope with the increase of population in New York and a few other large cities. In the whole country there has been a great increase in Church-membership. In 1788, for example, 1 in 30 of our population was a Church-member; in 1888, 1 in less than 5—really 1 in 4— is a Church-member. As 36 per cent, of the population is under ten years old, the figures show that more than half of adult American society is in the Church. While there has been a decrease in church-buildings and religious influence in New York City, there has been a wonderful increase in the United States at large.

Dr. Strong sees dangers in the crowded streets and alleys, and in the prevalent saloon. We may now ask: Why is there a decline of moral influences and an increase of evil forces? It is not due to an increase of wealth, or to growing populations, or to crowded tenement-houses, or to the indifference of the poor, or to lack of church-buildings, or to foreign populations, or to skeptical opinions, or to the open saloon. Many of these things are good, some partially evil, and some totally so. Those that are evil must have been placed under conditions favorable to their development. Skepticism is not a product of prayer, nor the saloon the offspring of righteousness. The existence of these evils is due to the imperfect notions and lifeless character of the Church in the cities. This defective character creates conditions favorable to the growth of many evils. Here is a straw that shows which way the wind blows. Mr. Loomis relates this incident: “The recent experiment of an enterprising newspaper reporter, in a certain American city which has the reputation of being the model Christian city of the world, will not be forgotten. He donned the garb of a decent laborer, and in turn presented himself for admission at each of the principal churches. At some he was treated with positive rudeness, at others with cold politeness. Only one or two gave him a cordial (and even then a somewhat surprised) welcome.” A man, no matter how poor or how rich, does not often go where he is not wanted. This gives rise to indifference, to skepticism, and to irreligion generally.

The greatest evil of all (the open saloon) is fast disappearing. It has cursed the race of men and blighted hope about as long as civilized people can endure it. In 1873 the popular vote of the Prohibition party was 5,608; in 1877, 9,522; in 1881, 10,305; in 1885, 151,062; in 1888, nearly 3,000,000. This shows growth, but not all of it. Many counties, districts, townships, and cities have established prohibitory measures by local option; and this has been clone where the Prohibition party did not receive a vote. There is a growing conviction and an increasing disgust against the saloon and its political corruption. It will not be a peril much longer; for the better sense, the conscience, and the reason of the American people are against its continuance. The tide rises faster than did that against slavery.

For the present we only say that the need is not for more liberality, more women workers, more lay help, more, church-buildings, more so-called ministers of the gospel, more complications in Church work, more societies, unions, and organizations, more religious literature, but the need is more of the Spirit of Christ, more of the Christ of Christianity. Cities and wealth ought to increase, and religion ought to increase along with them, while the evils ought to decrease.

Which Christian view from the 19th century, then, has turned out more accurately: the pessimist’s or the optimist’s?

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by Janus on 17 May 2024  •  Permalink
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On Reading the News; and How the Weird Religious Cult Falun Gong Provides More Serious Journalism in The Epoch Times Than Every Other Mainstream News Source

– 10 May 2024 –

C. F. van Niekerk:

If you haven’t noticed, if you ever try to find serious and detailed news these days, your efforts will make you want to tear your hair out for the lack of serious options. That’s especially true since 2015 when Donald Trump started to run for president, when the media launched into full-fledged, lying panic-mode. The mainstream media explicitly scrapped their old veil of objective neutrality and began to spew nothing but cockeyed, hysteria-based, political propaganda.

But the devolution started before that, of course. Outlets like The New York Times, NPR, The Christian Science Monitor, and even The Daily Mail once really did provide detailed information that was pretty much objective, if not exactly neutral. They did so even ten years ago. But now that the common people have gotten duller, shallower, and more emotional (thanks to the media), journalism has followed suit.

So it’s pretty difficult to parse the news these days. How, then, do I try to do it? (If I even bother anymore.)

How to Read the News

Well, first of all, I avoid video. Unless it’s raw footage, video for actual news is for ADHD retards. How are you supposed to get useful details with flickering, edited snippits while someone yammers on about what you’re supposed to be seeing?

[Their faces are so serious, but these news experts are seriously full of their own prestigious horse shit.]

And no memes, either. Meme news is useful propaganda for simpletons, amounting to something like headlines at best; but in and of themselves, memes are worthless for details and background! The internet in general, and social media in particular, has almost single-handedly dumbed down just about all of journalism to the point that most people get their news from Facebook and TikTok!

So I read articles to get news, if I can stand to do it anymore. And when I do read articles, if I’m interested in the matter, I try to use triangulation. I try to read about events from different perspectives, namely geographic perspectives, or institutional perspectives, and sometimes from different social or political points of view. Sometimes!

To do this, I first try to read about events through the most local newspapers or TV newsrooms as possible to the events in question. Oftentimes the local outlets provide more detail because the locals are far more interested and informed about their local situations. In foreign countries, it can be quite useful and informative to auto-translate news and opinions from local sources about local events. For example, the African country of Gabon had a military coup last year against their long-time ruling dynasty. Inevitably any outside international news source will focus almost totally on whatever that means for outside interests, but they will distort or ignore the facts and situations on the ground. So it’s useful to read from local sources, like in the Gabon Review in this case.

[Local sources are often best: “The descent into hell continues for Noureddin Bongo Valentin whose employees call on Oligui Nguema. © GabonReview/Capture d’screen”]

Then, if the news relates to official statements or surveys or studies, I try to find the original source, often available at a government’s or organization’s website. It’s amazing how quickly data degenerates through the media narrative process into emotion-charged gibberish. Sometimes the original sources give an enormous amount of detail.

Then, to get the big picture view, I try to read about broad-scale events through outlets that have little national interest in the matter at hand, sites like the RT, Asia Times, Al Jazeera, and still The Daily Mail (the latter for only some things, especially about seedy crimes and the like, and the Kardashians’ underwear and such garbage.) Often if a matter is controversial in a particular country, that country’s national news will hide details or give especially slanted accounts. For example, if an event is controversial in the Middle East, let’s say it’s about feminists in Iran, it might be useful to read about it in RT, The Asia Times, and maybe the Hindustan Times, on top of local or official sources. If the news is polarized in Canada, for example about an ecological disaster, then it might make sense to read about it from the perspective at Al Jazeera maybe to get a relatively neutral big picture perspective.

[Justin Trudeau himself is an ecological disaster.]

Finally, it’s often useful to get some background information. As biased as Wikipedia no doubt can be, I do find that site to be a pretty useful reference to get background information on a particular news item, whether it’s about a conflict or an economic matter or a technical matter. I also sometimes find Wikipedia useful to look up geographic and demographic information about particular places in the news, though I may use City-data.com for American cities and counties.

Most News Sources Suck

Some news sources provide better detail than others.

Out of all the professional news sources, there is one outlet that still provides a high level of journalistic research and objective details and information about the subjects it covers: The Epoch Times, out of Taiwan. They do lean to the right politically and socially, which can provide a refreshing perspective in comparison to the almost universally, tediously left-leaning “serious” outlets everywhere else. A lot of conservative-types really like The Epoch Times, and even subscribe to their physical newspaper because it’s generally wholesome and interesting on top of socially conservative and anti-Communist. (Sounds like an ad, don’t it?! Well, probably not after I continue on here…) Still, The Epoch Times also has other biases, of course, beyond the mere political.

[The Epoch Times is pretty good, but there is something odd…]

Every publication that exists has biases, even if it’s an academic journal or an official government resource. They all slant their information based on their agendas and perspectives, and not one of them is really neutral. That’s partly what any news is for: shaping opinion!

Pretty much every single mainstream news source, every Western government, and every large institution produces left-wing crap to varying degrees. So in order to filter out their bullshit, when reading their information, it’s important to first identify the agenda and slant of that source of news and information. CNN and MSNBC write shallow, stupid articles for shallow, stupid liberals who think they are smart but are too lazy to read long articles. The Daily Mail is a liberal English tabloid. RT is pro-Russian and they like to stir the pot in the West. Al Jazeera is left-leaning and globalist but pro-Islam and mildly anti-Zionist. ZeroHedge is vaguely right-wing libertarian and anti-establishment. The pathetic Fox News writes establishment Republican slop to keep an increasingly disenchanted Boomer conservative audience on the plantation. Figure out the agenda, and it becomes much more clear why the publication is writing the story at all, and why they are saying what they are saying. What’s their slant?

The Cult Behind The Epoch Times

And The Epoch Times has a weird slant. They are officially produced by a way-out Eastern religious cult called Falun Gong. A Chinese man named Li Hongzhi started Falun Gong back in the 1990’s, and it quickly grew so popular that Chinese authorities decided to crack down on it and ban it back in 1999. In the Western news of the time, it had seemed like China was cracking down on a bunch of old ladies practicing yoga in public. But Falun Gong is more strange than smiling old Chinese ladies doing yoga poses in public.

[Falun Gong in China in the 1990’s. The authorities outlawed them, and that’s why Falun Gong hates the Chinese Communists so much today.]

According to Wikipedia (that left-slanted, CIA-funded globalist encyclopedia), Falun Gong claims that Li Hongzhi is “‘a God-like figure who can levitate, walk through walls and see into the future. His ultra-conservative and controversial teachings include a rejection of modern science, art and medicine, and a denunciation of homosexuality, feminism and general worldliness.’ Hongzhi instructs his followers to downplay his controversial teachings when speaking to outsiders.”

Hmm. Say what you want about Hongzhi’s cult deity nonsense, he’s winning me over on his social views!

Wikipedia continues: “According to the Falun Gong, the Falun Gong aspires to enable the practitioner to ascend spiritually through moral rectitude and the practice of a set of exercises and meditation. The three stated tenets of the belief are truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. [. . .] Together these principles are regarded as the fundamental nature of the cosmos, the criteria for differentiating right from wrong, and are held to be the highest manifestations of the Tao. [. . .] Li Hongzhi writes ‘It doesn’t matter how mankind’s moral standard changes [. . .] The nature of the cosmos doesn’t change, and it is the only standard for determining who’s good and who’s bad. So to be a cultivator you have to take the nature of the cosmos as your guide for improving yourself.’ Practice of Falun Gong consists of two features: performance of the exercises, and the refinement of one’s xinxing (moral character, temperament).”

[If Falun Gong took over the US government, I guess I’d like them better than the current foreign elites.]

So, overall, as far as religious cults go, Falun Gong doesn’t seem too awful, though there is no true salvation in it. Maybe it’s something like Mormonism in its deviation from God but promotion of wholesome social values. In any case, certainly Falun Gong is an improvement over the dominant fanatics of Leftist, liberal social Marxism!

For all of The Epoch Times‘ strange and alien Falun Gong cult agenda, despite being run by a man who, we are told, proposes to walk through walls and levitate and to be some sort of demigod, it’s amazing that the cult’s news outlet manages to embody classic journalistic integrity, investigative grit, and attention to detail far more than every other mainstream media news outlet in existence today. The Epoch Times provides real, concrete news the way old newspapers did a hundred years ago. Compare that with the stuck-up gravitas and journalistic loftiness of every other “professional” news outlet, and the contest isn’t even close. The Western news media has lost their depth and credibility.

It’s just one more thing that so effectively highlights the very fallen and pathetic state of the Western media today!

[Edit, 11 May 2024: After thinking more on the subject, for the sake of honesty, I have to admit that for all of the positive things I wrote about The Epoch Times, which I believe to be true within the context of my point, I personally don’t read that news outlet all that much. It’s not one of my preferred sources if I’m setting out to read news. They only let you read so much before they try to charge you, for one thing, which is understandable. And they are a little too pro-Zionist and conventional-conservative for my tastes. They’re not a bad source, and often they are a very good source, but I just don’t like them all that much.

If anybody actually cares (and even if they don’t, I guess!), my regular news sources where I casually skim headlines pretty much amount to ZeroHedge, RT, Rantingly, Al Jazeera, Military.com, and Rense.com. These sources all have their slants and their pros and cons, but those are what I’ve settled with for non-editorial, quasi-daily newsfeeds.

I used to read news much more intensely than I do now. I had RSS newsfeeds running every fifteen minutes with custom tickers scrolling all the time. But since everything has gotten so hysterical and emotional and insubstantial, I’ve pulled way back from this practice except for the increasingly rare cases when the news bug hits me. The news these days is designed to generate an impressionable state of constant fear, uncertainty, and doubt on top of outright distortion and lies. While I think it’s important to stay informed, it’s also important to stay halfway sane and unplugged.]

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by Janus on 10 May 2024  •  Permalink
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Pascha 2024

Christ is Risen!

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by Janus on 5 May 2024  •  Permalink
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St Luke, Archbishop of Simferopol: Homily on Holy and Great Friday

– 3 May 2024 –

In Honor of our Lord, by St Luke, Archbishop of Simferopol and All Crimea († 1961):

Via Mystagogy Resource Center, Via Azbyka.ru:

Lessons in Love from the Cross

Here we come again to hear about the sufferings of the Lord Jesus Christ. And this is extremely important.

What we hear and see deeply affects our souls, leaves a deep imprint on them. Whether we hear evil, whether we see crimes, we shudder, we are horrified. Are we witnesses of the good, pure and lofty – then we are touched in the heart and in the mind we say: “I would do the same!”

There have been many terrible crimes in the history of the human race. Conscience protests against them. But no matter how terrible all these atrocities are, they are nothing, a speck of dust compared to a huge mountain, they are a drop of water compared to the ocean, if you think about the greatest of atrocities, the terrible execution of the Son of God, the One who came down to earth from heaven to save the human race, the One Who was meek and quiet, Who “did not quench the smoking flax, did not break the bruised reed” (see Is. 42:3), Who was full of love for the human race, unearthly love, such as the earth has never sen and could not imagine. He is executed, His blood flows on the Cross…

Our heart is shaken by the horror of this execution, but at the same time it is filled with the deepest tenderness and joy, because this voluntary Sacrifice, the death of an innocent Sufferer on the Cross, shows us the pinnacle of Divine love, which illumined the world from the Cross. And from the Cross we hear His words, sealed with unheard-of love, unheard-of meekness and all-forgiveness, for He prays for those who crucified Him, opens the door to paradise for the repentant thief, stretches out His most pure hands to all of us sinners, thirsting for our salvation.

But the world heard from the Cross the terrible words: “My God, My God! Why have You forsaken Me?” (Matthew 27:46). How could they be uttered by the same lips that said: “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30)? Was He not always in unbreakable communion with His Father? Of course he was. What do these terrible words mean?

Bold people say that on the Cross the Lord did not experience any suffering. In the early times of Christianity, there were heretics known as Docetists who impiously taught that the Body of Jesus was not truly human, but illusory, and therefore the Lord Jesus Christ did not suffer any pain. And the Monophysites asserted that in Jesus Christ human nature was wholly absorbed by Divine nature. But we know that He was both True God and True Man. We know that His human nature endured terrible, indescribable suffering and agony on the Cross.

And these words of the Lord, uttered from the Cross, confirm this more strongly than all the arguments and refute the heretical teachings. If the Body of Christ were illusory, if in the Son of God the divine nature completely ruled over human nature, would the world hear these terrible words?

Could the Father forsake Him? Of course not. But the torments were so unbearable and terrible that, as a Man, Christ cried out to God: “My God, My God! Why have You forsaken Me?”

Here is what the Hieromartyr Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, who lived in the third century, said: “For what purpose is the Lord forsaken? So that we may not be forsaken by God. To redeem us from our sins and eternal death; to testify to the greatest love for the human race; to prove the justice and mercy of God, to draw our hearts to Him, as an example to all sufferers.”

And let us also perceive the holy grace-filled lesson of His love for His Most Pure and Most Holy Mother, Whose heart, when She stood at the Cross, was pierced by a sword, struck by a terrible grief according to the prophecy of Saint Symeon the God-bearer. She was silent, and Her silence expressed Her grief incomparably deeper than cries, weepings and lamentations. Next to Her stood Mary, the wife of Cleopas, Mary Magdalene and the beloved disciple of Christ John. She was cared for by the Son of God, who endured unspeakable torments. He turned His gaze to Her and, pointing with his eyes at the Apostle John, said: “Woman, here is Your son.” And John received the Mother of God into his house, and cared for Her until Her death (see John 19:26-27).

But here came the end of the unimaginable severity of the feat of the Son of God, who by His death redeemed the world from the power of the devil. We hear His last words, filled with incomprehensible love for the Father: “Father! Into your hands I commit my spirit!” (Luke 23:46). His mouth fell silent, His eyes were closed, His tongue became motionless, the holy head fell on His chest. But the stones could not be silent. The earth shook and the rocks cracked.

The centurion who commanded the execution, whose name was Longinus, and the soldiers who performed it, seeing all this, shuddered and were horrified. The love of Christ breaks even stony hearts. The centurion believed in Christ and exclaimed: “Truly, this Man was the Son of God” (Mark 15:39). Everything he saw and heard so shocked him that he soon accepted Baptism and subsequently ended his life as a martyr, for the enemies of Christ, the scribes, high priests and Pharisees, did not tolerate the fact that the Roman centurion turned to Christ, slandered him before Pilate, and he gave the order to cut off his head.

O blessed martyr Longinus, teach us to turn to Christ with all our hearts and love Him.

Oh my God! What praise, what thanksgiving we bring to You for what You have done for us! There is nothing we can do to be even slightly worthy of it. Oh, our Lord, Lord! Let us bring to Thee all the little that we can bring. Let us bring our tears and water with them Your most pure Body, slain by those whom You came to save. We bring you our love…

Help us, Lord, to love You until the end of our lives, help us follow the path that You have shown us. Help get rid of the power of the devil, the temptations created by him. Lead us on the path of salvation and bring us into Your kingdom. Amen.

[St Luke, Archbishop of Simferopol and All Crimea]
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by Janus on 3 May 2024  •  Permalink
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Posted by Janus on 3 May 2024

https://finesetinitia.wordpress.com/2024/05/03/st-luke-archbishop-of-simferopol-homily-on-holy-and-great-friday/

No Police for BLM Riots, A Police State for Gaza War Protests

– 26 April 2024 –

C. F. van Niekerk:

So in a week’s time, these university Gaza War protests have spread from Columbia University in New York to other Ivy League schools and then all across the country, where Leftist protesters are occupying sites to set up long-term, autonomous tent zones to screech and whine 24/7 against the white “Nazi” aggression of Israel, who are genociding the non-white, oppressed-class Palestinians of Gaza.

The liberal elites, unlike during the barely restrained George Floyd riots of 2020, have now made heavy use of the police, who have obediently broken up these protest camps before they can get established. They’re quelling the dissent, it seems. The elite university leadership, many of them Jewish and all of them liberal, people who had stood in lockstep to showcase their support for BLM and to condemn the very existence of police just four years ago, have variously denounced today’s protesters as “anti-Semites” and have threatened them with expulsion and even imprisonment. Meanwhile, the police, who meekly “took their knees” in 2020 and made themselves impotent before black criminality, pant at their masters’ orders and leap in (like the mindless bulldogs that they are) to throw wayward professors and their skanky students to the ground. It’s okay to protest and riot against white civilization, but criticizing Jews is a whole other story!

[Harvard President Alan Garber, who is himself Jewish, treads carefully with these protesters while trying to shut them down.]

Then we have the so-called conservatives. Naturally they have to take the opposite position of the Leftist protesters. But what does that look like? These conservatives either ideologically support Israel as our “greatest ally” in the Middle East, or they religiously support modern Israel and Jews as “God’s Chosen People,” who, when all is said and done, can do no wrong in their eyes. In both cases, the conservatives unite even more firmly behind the Jews and Israel in order to show their greater loyalty to Jewish concerns than these disloyal liberals and “terrorists” who—of course—they also call “Nazis.” Hamas is evil, the Jews are good, and if there are unfortunate civilian casualties, it’s because Hamas is using them as human shields. At least that’s how the narrative goes.

[John Hagee is like a cartoon version of an American Christian Zionist, like a blob man out of Southpark. Does he ever talk about our Lord, or does he only promote Zionist Israel? Let’s see which he talks about first.]

The situation gets even more absurd and confusing when we look at who is funding these Leftist anti-Gaza protests. Most notoriously, according to an article in The New York Post anyway, we have George Soros’ Open Society Foundation dumping piles of money on these groups, and other organizations are doing the same, including the Rockefeller Foundation, some retired Wall-Street banker Felice Gelman, and another group called WESPAC, which is run by Howard Horowitz. With the exception of the Rockefeller Foundation (which has sunk its tentacles into subversive projects for decades), each of these named groups is run by Jews. How strange that Jews would fund these supposed anti-Semites so they can riot against the Gaza War!

[George Soros is Jewish, so why is his foundation funding Gaza war protesters?]

So, to boil down the various sides here:

We have Jewish-funded anti-Israel protests erupting around the country to stop the “Nazis” in Zionist Israel and in “fascist” America.

We also have Jewish groups and liberals (many of them Jews) aggressively trying to stomp out these “Nazi” and anti-Semitic protests.

And we also have conservative leaders and groups trying to outdo their liberal equivalents by more aggressively shutting down the “Nazi” protests, while they meanwhile call the liberals “Nazis” for not taking a tough stand against the vocal, anti-Israeli elements of their base.

And all of this is happening in the United States of America, a country that should have nothing to do with an internal ethnic war in modern Israel between the Zionist Jews and the Hamas resistance in the Gaza Strip.

What are we to make of all this mess?

The first thing to take away from the situation is that Jews basically control the discourse in America. They call the shots to both liberals and conservatives all the way from the “grass-roots” bases to the swine who occupy seats in office (including both Trump and Biden), to all the major media outlets, and to all the large corporations.

Every issue that gets drummed up in America these days, by elite dictate, must be tied to some dogmatic political ideology that amounts to a secular religion, and then every conflict must be made into an ideological crusade against an existential evil, i. e., against “Naziism.”

[Everyone who is against you must be a Nazi. Why else would they oppose you?]

This notion of moral crusading is so deeply embedded in Western discourse today that it’s hard for Westerners to imagine that conflicts, only a hundred years ago, were not these all-or-nothing, life-and-death struggles against good and evil. At one time, in most cases, conflicts were simply about competing interests between two self-interested parties, and therefore the conflicts could be fought and resolved in a limited manner. But the Jews don’t fight that way, and they don’t want their proxies to fight that way, either! Every struggle, even if it’s about the price of Corn Flakes, must be life and death, good and evil, right and wrong!

The second thing to take away from this chaos is that the Jews are not united. There are several competing groups within Judaism, and their conflicts are playing out through their proxies in America because Jews have come to collectively control, more or less, the United States in particular, and by extension, the entire West.

[Religious and secular Jews, presumably, having an argument in Israel, maybe about a store owner’s price of his Corn Flakes. Jews like to argue. It’s what they do best.]

We can categorize the Jews into two major factions in how they handle the world and each other: the nationalists and internationalists. The nationalist Jews (that is, nationalist for Zionism), exemplified by Benjamin Netanyahu, tend to favor a more militaristic, direct approach to accomplishing their goals. They have militant zeal, like spiders rushing across their webs to wrap up their tangled prey. The internationalist Jews, exemplified by George Soros, tend to take a more long-term globalist approach that continues to use indirect manipulation to accomplish their collective goals. The left-wingers want to keep spinning their webs in the shadows. But both sides support Israel.

Because the United States is largely controlled by these Jewish factions, our internal politics are playing out in ways that reflect the conflict between these two major sides within Judaism. Liberals like Barrack Obama and Joe Biden favor the approach and policies of the international Jews, while conservatives like Donald Trump and this awful Speaker of the House Mike Johnson favor the nationalist Jews.

[Christian Zionist weirdos, with Mike Johnson on the right. Suckers or traitors? It doesn’t matter, the results are the same.]

In times when Jewish interests for the United States are aligned on both the right and left, both political parties who supposedly hate each other magically turn into bipartisan allies. Congress passes bill at like 366 to 58, or even more lopsided than that. And wherever divide-and-rule professional wresting is preferred by the masters, then we have hysterical political theatrics while everything important keeps moving the same way.

For example, the 2020 BLM riots served national Jewish interests because the movement further weakened what they view as white supremacy, so while plenty of people bent over backward to show BLM support, nobody in high office, not even Donald Trump, dared to stop the protests and riots, even during a so-called pandemic where everyone else had to wear masks and huddle inside their houses. Compare that situation with today, where probably 75% or more of American Jews don’t like Benjamin Netanyahu or his conduct in the Israeli-Gazi war. But these same Jews, as well as their lackey Christian Zionists, are very concerned about the ongoing anti-Israel protests, that it could breed anti-Semitism, so the police fall over themselves to stomp out the supposed riots. It’s a divided situation today for American Jews.

So why are there some Jews and Jewish groups in America bankrolling those who support these anti-Israeli protests?

[Most American Jews don’t like Benjamin Netanyahu and many of them oppose the conduct of the war in Gaza.]

That brings me to the third idea to take away from these reactions to the Gaza War protesters: the system is using these protests for other purposes.

Like so many other issues today, much of the political reaction to the Gaza War protests is a mere foil to achieve other ends. These anti-Zionist protests can potentially drive changes in the United States that serve larger Jewish interests.

First, with the participation of Jewish groups in these protests, this is a way for Jews to distance themselves as a people from the actions of the Israeli government. In this way, people can’t simply blame “the Jews” for the brutal ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip. I’m sure that most of these Jewish protesters sincerely oppose the inhuman conduct of Israel in Netanyahu’s Gaza War, but they are out there displaying themselves conspicuously as “Jews Say Cease Fire Now” and “Not in Our Name” for a reason: they are concerned that the criticism of Israel will generate anti-Semitism against them personally. Their protests are at least partially intended to diffuse criticism for Jews in general and to further claim that Jews don’t really call the shots in America and in the West overall. Zionism and Judaism are then separated rhetorically, even as Israel still gets to do whatever they want, Jews still get to call the shots, and even as Americans still fall over themselves to avoid offending this pain-in-the-ass people.

Second, the protests generate considerable bi-partisan support, even among regular people, for restrictions on supposed hate speech, especially against anti-Semitism. This so-called hate speech is a problem for Jewish elites because more and more people, especially young people, are figuring out that the Jews are running things, that their rule has ruined the country, and that their power now threatens to destroy it. Jewish elites see trouble ahead, and they want speech restrictions to help thwart any potential uprising. A few states have already passed restrictions on speech that they define as anti-Semitic. If these protests continue, or especially if they escalate, then restrictions on speech that the Jews don’t like can gain more acceptance. “Hate speech isn’t free speech!“

[Free speech and hate speech are what the system says they are. And what is anyone going to do about it?]

Third, these Leftist agitators can be used, if needed, against Donald Trump during the 2024 election campaign and afterward. For whatever reason, the Jews in America are both terrified and enraged by Donald Trump as president. He has consistently upheld the Jewish nationalist, pro-Netanyahu side, but this is a country where internationalist Jews hold the upper hand. I suspect that the system fears Donald Trump because he’s a reckless, narcissistic wild card and because he has energized American nationalists and patriots who might one day reverse Jewish societal engineering, and who might even turn on the Jews themselves.

And finally, these protesters can be energized even further to help destroy the United States as a country, if desired. We’ve already seen how many of them, interestingly enough, equate the American government with the Israeli government that is fighting the Gaza War. “Death to America!” Globalists want a different kind of America, a weaker America, whether it exists in one piece or it’s broken into fragments. The addled Gaza War protesters, when united with the millions of resentful foreigners who have magically flooded into every city in America, will have a fighting chance to demolish whatever remains of white America.

[An insurance policy for the Jewish elites against American nationalism.]

In mentioning the significance of the 2024 election, it may sound like I place great weight on its outcome. I really don’t. The outcome of the election isn’t nearly as important as the forces unleashed by the ongoing election process. It doesn’t really much matter which man is holding office. Both major geriatric candidates support similar policies that end up being terrible for the real American people. Both sides, despite all of the polarized programming, ultimately serve these Jewish elites. We’ve already seen this, even with Trump’s actions (if not his words) in his first term as president, despite all the hair-ripping hysteria and deranged insanity over it.

If we view all this mess and drama as political theater—or if you will, like professional wrestling—then it’s the reaction of the gullible audience that really holds the key! How do they react to the events leading up to the main event? How much “heat” is being generated?

[The “Biggest Wrestlemania Match of All-Time,” and all I got was this lousy Snickers ad.]

In professional wrestling, the goal is to keep people tuned in, hyped up, and buying tickets and pay-per-view. (Does pay-per-view still exist?) In the electoral charade, the goal is to herd the people into doing some other thing in addition to buying stuff. What that “some other thing” may be for 2024 is pretty hard to tell.

Are the polyglot of peoples in America supposed to rise up and start killing each other in a civil war? There is predictive programming to support that idea. Or are they supposed to mindlessly unite as a polyglot “people” in order to die by the millions fighting a war against the despotic tyrannies of China and Russia who hate butt sex? Or both?

Or will this hyper-screechy 2024 drama turn out as just another melodramatic side event in the rotting national circus, and then everything just keeps creeping along the same sad, dismal path that we’ve seen for the past several decades?

We’ll see, I guess.

[Is it time to get off this ride yet?]

All I know is, I don’t really care about any of the sides in play here. I’m not getting drawn in to all their melodrama and rhetoric, and I’m not picking any one of their sides. None of these people has anything good to offer for the real American people. These clamoring factions are all like different species of bugs fighting over the remains of a rotting fruit, only without the thin charm of the bugs in James and the Giant Peach. If we had a healthy fruit growing in a healthy orchard, then we wouldn’t have all these nasty bugs and their raucous, alien agendas infesting everything.

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by Janus on 26 April 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in C. F. van Niekerk
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Posted by Janus on 26 April 2024

https://finesetinitia.wordpress.com/2024/04/26/no-police-for-blm-riots-a-police-state-for-gaza-war-protests/

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