On Damnation

Lots of good conversation here lately on the topics of Hell and damnation thereto. Allow me to sidestep almost all of it.

Hell and Eternal Punishment II

In response primarily to Kristor and Bonald, we have:

“I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor power, nor heights, nor depths, nor any other thing in creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Romans 8:38-39

First Corinthians 13 – possibly the most profound and beautiful passage anywhere, including all philosophy and all literature.

The story of the Prodigal Son. God as the Father who forgives the truly repentant son and welcomes him home. I remember identifying with the “good” son as a kid and feeling a bit resentful on his behalf.

I was lost but now I am found. (Luke)

Seek and you shall find. Knock and the door will be opened to you.

To which we can add:

Matthew 18:21-35

21Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me? Up to seven times?” 22Jesus answered, “I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.

23″Therefore, the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. 24As he began the settlement, a man who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him. 25Since he was not able to pay, the master ordered that he and his wife and his children and all that he had be sold to repay the debt. 26″The servant fell on his knees before him. ‘Be patient with me,’ he begged, ‘and I will

Today’s Reactionary is an Apostate

I recently wrote that “rejection of equality is at the heart of all reactionary thought,” and commenters have since agreed and disagreed.  I stand by the proposition and will here add some remarks on rejection.  To reject is properly to refuse something that is offered, as when a diner rejects a bowl of soup in which he sees floating the body of a drowned fly. Thus a reactionary of the eighteenth century properly rejected the doctrine of equality when, having read one of Rousseau’s works, he threw the nasty book across the room with a cry of execration.

“Rubbish!” he may have cried, or possibly “Rot!”

Hell and Eternal Punishment

Three of the most beautiful things in the Bible are:

Romans 8:38-39

“I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor power, nor heights, nor depths, nor any other thing in creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

First Corinthians 13 – possibly the most profound and beautiful passage anywhere, including all philosophy and all literature.

And the story of the Prodigal Son.

Mystery and not knowing or understanding everything is just fine. In fact, it is good and beautiful. People who say things like, “I just don’t understand how free will is possible,” as grounds for not believing in free will, are just annoying. And really they say that because they are committed to materialism as a matter of faith, and materialism and free will do not mix.

It does seem that concerning some moral matters God has not left us in the dark. The assertion that our conscience is a direct link with God seems true, though not infallible. And, one thing our conscience prevents us from doing is being overly punitive and aggressive in our reaction to perceived wrongs. You give me a disparaging look and I burn your house down. Not cool! Avicenna points out that a God who tortured you with scorpions, whips and red hot rods in an act of vengeance for all time would be doing precisely the sort of thing that He forbids us from doing. God the Hypocrite is not an appealing character – Vengeance is Mine or no Vengeance is Mine.

American Postcards (Hunting for Trousers)

I yesterday visited a Houston shopping mall to purchase a pair of trousers.  It is a large mall in a prosperous district, but it feels empty and past its prime.

Adjacent to the food-court is a large and splendid carrousel or merry-go-round.  When this carnivalesque contraption revolves, recorded calliope music plays.  It is revolving as I pass, and on it revolves one mother and her child.  South Asian by appearance.  The operator and ticket-taker is an old white man.  He slumps, as old men generally slump, in a frugal straight-backed chair.  He wears a paper respiration mask, the fit unsuited to filtration.  I reflect that retirement is for many old white men penurious, boring, lonely, and slightly mad.

On the Lógos

There is obviously an order to things. That order must be to them prior, if it is to order them at all; if, i.e., it is to characterize their relations. For, were the things prior to their order, then whence their obvious order (whence, i.e., and to begin with, each their own coherent integrity *as things*?)? Why in that case should those things be ordered in respect to each other? Should they not rather be utterly disordered? Should they not in that case be nowise, i.e., a coherent cosmos, such as we obviously inhabit? Were the things prior to their order, then what appears to us as their cosmic order could be but speciously such; could be, rather and only, the way that chaos right now happens to appear.

I grant that earthly life does often seem just like that: just one goddamn shitty thing after another …

A peek at post-affirmative action academia

Didn’t I say we’d be better off with honest quotas? From City Journal:

In January, the New York Times interviewed several high school seniors, asking them about the college-application process since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down affirmative action last June. All but one of the students told the Times that under the advice of their high school counselors, they had, following the ruling, rewritten their college application essays to highlight their race or ethnicity.

The Times described one Hispanic student who said that she had originally written her essay about a death in her family, but “reshaped it around a Spanish book she read as a way to connect to her Dominican heritage” after the ruling. Another student had “wanted to leave his Indigenous background out of his essay,” but later “reworked it to focus on an heirloom necklace that reminded him of his home on the Navajo Reservation.” The most dramatic change came courtesy of an interviewee who identified as both black and Asian: “The first draft of Jyel Hollingsworth’s essay explored her love for chess. The final focused on the prejudice between her Korean and black American families and the financial hardships she overcame.”

Not only do we discriminate against whites; we discriminate against non-whites who are insufficiently anti-white, as indicated by these students who know they’d be crippling their applications relative to the competition if they had failed to play the grievance game.

Chutzpa on Stilts

“The existence of a nation that is uniquely chosen in the flesh helps Christians avoid the trap of national election, with its tragic consequences in modern history.” 

David P. Goldman, “Christian Nationalism and Israel,” The American Mind (May 2, 2024)

I am not sure I understand what Goldman means by “chosen in the flesh,” but he seems to mean chosen all together, collectively, or as a nation.  I am in no doubt, however, as to the nation that Goldman believes has been chosen in the flesh, since after long and impartial reflection, he has clearly decided, and without reservation, that the chosen nation is his own nation, the Jews.

Lewis Carroll’s Apology for Irreverence, and Mine

“We put our man into a pulpit, and we virtually tell him ‘Now you may stand there and talk to us for half-an-hour.  We won’t interrupt you by as much as a word! And you shall have it all your own way!’  And what does he give us in return?  Shallow twaddle, that, if it were addressed to you over a dinner-table, you would think ‘Does the man take me for a fool?’”

Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno (1889)* 

My readers from time to time chide me for what they perceive as unseemly irreverence, although I must suppose they are my readers because they enjoy my irreverence towards holy cows other than their own.  I do not say this to chide these readers.  It is human nature to be amused until one’s own ox is gored.  I say it to preface some words on the uses and abuses of irreverence.

My epigraph is taken from the first volume of Lewis Carroll’s last novel, Sylvie and Bruno, which unlike his novels about Alice is today very largely forgotten.  The sentiment is expressed by Arthur, the protagonist in one of the novel’s plots, and it is one in a series of strictures on the state of the Anglican Church in Victorian England.

Readers must understand that Carroll was himself a very serious Christian, a fact that is almost always obscured or omitted in secular celebrations of the madcap surrealism of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1871).  He was born into a family of High-Church Anglicans, and appears to have died very much in the faith.

A Modest Proposal

“The Church once allowed priests to marry, and it can do again . . . . Together with this, there needs to be a new monastic order to soak up the degenerates.  Which was a function of the Church in times past, as much as we don’t want to think about it.” 

Aidan Maclear, “A Few Minor Reforms,” SettingtheRecordStraight.com (Sep. 26, 2018)

While reading the archive of an old neoreaction blog, I was arrested by the very sensible suggestion above.  The first part may be controversial, but it is familiar and I am for it.  There may once have been good reasons for a celibate priesthood, but the discipline is not necessary and now does far more harm than good.  It greatly reduces the number of vocations, and with it the general quality of priests and higher churchmen.  There are exceptions, but the general intellectual quality of Catholic clergy is fairly, sometimes egregiously, low.

You know something is seriously wrong when your deacon is more knowledgeable and articulate than your priest!