The Atonement: A Simple Explanation for Children

Son:        Hey, Dad, can I ask a question?

Father:   Sure, kiddo, what’s up?

Son:        Well, I’ve been wondering about the Atonement.

Father:   O, great. Another easy one. At least it’s not about girls, so maybe I can help. What’s the question?

Son:        I can’t see how the death of Jesus helped us. I get that God wanted to help us get back to him, but I don’t understand why he didn’t just make it happen, the way he did when he created light. Why send his Son to Earth, and then have him killed? Why was that necessary? Why did Jesus have to die?

To Be a Christian

The world is wicked. Recent events have ripped away the veneer of decency from our rulers and our civilization, revealing a world of corruption.

In the Bible, God tells us that wickedness has always characterized the world, and it tells the individual what he must do in response: Believe in Jesus Christ, and be saved.

Christian salvation is independent of the conditions of society. Patriots may one day be able to restore social order, or society may continue to decay. Christians, if they have the skills and the opportunity, do not violate God’s laws if they work to improve their nation. Since a properly-ordered society is one of mankind’s greatest needs, God is pleased with genuine efforts to improve our country.

As men of the West, we note that Western Civilization achieved its greatest glory when it was Christian. This strongly implies that Christianity is necessary for the restoration of our European-based nations.

But we cannot know when, and if, order will be restored. We can know that God calls us to repent of our sins and believe in Jesus and his teachings. This will not directly heal our land, but it will lay the groundwork for national restoration and, most importantly, it will save our souls.

*

This work makes its case by quoting the Bible. Indented texts are Scripture, except for parenthetical text identifying chapter and verse, occasionally accompanied by short commentary.

This work does not attempt to describe Christianity completely, but only to introduce it. Its main goal is to show that Christian salvation has a specific nature and a specific content.

On the Solemnity of the Annunciation of Our Lord: On the Virgin Birth

A guest post by commenter PBW:

Nothing is impossible to God. Occam’s Razor cannot separate the works of God according to any principle of economy. What economy is evident in a cell, a tree, the biosphere, the galaxy, the farthest reaches of the universe? Irrespective of the models we construct to map and try to predict the behaviour of these things, all of them, in their concrete reality, are unfathomably complex, and each is a unique instance. What principle can place limits on the actions of the creator of all these wonders?

With this in mind, consider the conception, gestation and birth of Jesus of Nazareth. Accepting as an irreducible given that Mary, his blessed mother, “knew not man,” there is a minimalist scenario – Occam’s scenario, so to speak. On this view, the action of the Holy Ghost consisted in fusing a DNA strand of his own making with the DNA in a mature ovum of the Blessed Virgin, which at the moment of the Annunciation and Mary’s fiat, was making its way down one of her fallopian tubes. And with, “I am the servant of the Lord,” that fusion took place, and the Son became flesh as a single fertilised ovum.

On Our Inheritance of Original Sin

Original Sin is one of the more scandalous Christian doctrines (there are lots of them). How can an innocent baby be guilty of Original Sin? How can we be born into Original Sin, through no fault of our own? And how did Adam’s sin manage to corrupt us, all these millennia later? It seems nuts, and insanely unjust.

Most of the difficulties can be cleared up with a few clarifications.

Leaving the Blight of Higher Education: Part I – Farewell, Students

In May of 2020, my wife and I took our retirement after more than thirty years of teaching college, the last twenty years of which we spent at what I will call Upstate Consolation University, a mid-tier state college somewhere in the Northeast near to the border with Canada.  My wife taught French in the Romance Languages Program and I, a wide variety of courses, some twenty-three altogether over the years, in the English Department – concerning which more to come.  Apart from wanting what remained to us of our active lives to be ours and not the institution’s, the main motive for our decision was the intolerable decline of Upstate from a more or less serious academic organization, typically liberal but not yet politically correct or “woke,” into one more copy of the ideological collective that, in the manner of Star Trek’s “Borg,” has digested and transformed virtually every center of post-secondary education, whether public or private, in the nation.  “Resistance is futile – you will be assimilated.” In the following paragraphs, I will review my Upstate gig while highlighting the major symptoms of the aforesaid decline as I observed them over the two decades of my affiliation there.  While my situation was specific to Upstate, Upstate qualifies as nothing less than typical.  The anecdotes in what follows have application therefore well beyond the place where I gathered them.  Although all state colleges and universities shout “diversity” and preach “tolerance” at the top of their lungs, they in fact demonstrate monolithic bigotry and homogeneous narrow-mindedness.

Church Choristers Must Be, & Must Be Male

We cannot do without Church choristers – and acolytes – and they must be male:

Training in the Virtues – All of Them – With a Frisbee

As being perhaps the most practical, humble, and yet far reaching in its potential consequences, this may be the most important post I have written.

It is about a Frisbee game I played with a good friend and neighbour when we were young. I read of it in the old Whole Earth Catalog – an important early influence upon me. It is worth passing along. The rules are simple:

On Worship

Having followed the link in my latest Philosophical Skeleton Key on prayer to a prior post in which I set forth some of the metaphysical prolegomenae thereto, commenter Hambone there wrote the other day:

Kristor, you said:

Having no way to comprehend spiritual realities, I could not even understand quite exactly what the articles of the Credo properly mean, or what I was meant to be doing in worship.

I’m somewhere in the middle of understanding this post and applying it – I have long struggled with making my faith *real* rather than mental affirmation coupled with ritual observance. What ARE you meant to be doing in worship? And how does that flow from the fundamental spiritual nature of life?

Commenter Rhetocrates then suggested that my response should be promoted to a post of its own:

That’s the $64 question, isn’t it? I’m still working on it. One never finishes working on it. One cannot. Worship is fathomless. How not? Its object is infinite. We cannot begin to have a complete answer to your question.

But, I can say a few things about it.

Creation: A Simple Explanation for Children

Son:     Dad, you got a minute?

Father: Sure, kiddo, what’s up?

Son:     I’ve been reading Genesis, and …

Father: Whoa, hold on. You’ve been reading Genesis?

Son:     Well, yeah, and …

Father: [sotto voce] Thanks be to God.

Son:     … I’m worried about it.

Father: OK, no problem [girding his loins]; what are you worried about?

Son:     Well, it just didn’t happen the way it says in the Bible.

Father: And you know that because …

Son:     Well, my teachers told me how it happened.

Father: [grinning sardonically] And they know better than the Bible because …

Dogmatic Orthodoxy Is the Acme & Basis of Traditionalism

To be a traditionalist is to wager that millions of lives already elapsed have tested most notions better than any one of them might, and have found that certain notions work better than others, and are therefore likely to be true.

To be a traditionalist then is rather like being an adherent of passive investing, which adjudges the project of beating millions of other intelligent, informed and educated investors and traders – or, in respect to any given security, at least several hundred such – to be a fool’s errand.

NN Taleb puts it bluntly in a recent tweet:

Let me rephrase for the slow at getting it. If you do not treat Tradition as (high dimensional) “experience,” you stand against science and statistical significance – the spine of experimental science.

What has worked 10¹⁰ times >>> some psych paper with 60% replication error.

Have you stumbled upon some heterodox insight about this or that topic in theology – which is to say, of the science of the Ultimate?