Zeitgeist

Yes I agree with those basic principles. Humanity is in an imperfect fallen state. The cause is disobedience, eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. I think that the Garden of Eden story is, much like the Tower of Babel story, about human arrogance and presuming to be God. When humans commit this act of hubris, a fall is inevitable, which is all the more reason to resist our narcissistic proud secular values. This isn’t just storytelling. There are many historic examples of humanity pretending to have all the answers and to know who is worthy and who isn’t. The Holocaust is a great example. He who forgets the sins of the past is likely to repeat them.

Violins. I’ve identified some problems and solutions. Wait, did you, Hardner, Herbie and Exflyer help cause these problems? I was trying to tell Hardner but his head is still buried in the sand.

So lost

Trump’s frailties are obvious and relatively harmless. He isn’t going after free speech or supporting strange radical agendas. He’s basically a small government tycoon who wants to retain American living standards and Judeo-Christian values, even if he fails short of them in his personal life. I don’t think any of the politicians running are great. I do value debate of policies and open dialogue. There’s simply less of that on the left now.

I never said half the country is crazy. I said that radical left activists have infiltrated the major political parties. It’s the main reason we’re in these culture wars, because the mainstream electorate is starting to wake up. I say starting because I think the mainstream media and the activists continue to push an agenda that’s essentially antithetical to healthy values. What are healthy values? Values that strengthen and develop democracy (especially at the local level, including the family), competence, prosperity, and virtuous action. The affirmation of destructive behaviour is the result of undemocratic and anti-Judeo-Christian policies and practices. Not anything goes, but that’s not the same thing as inordinate censorship and the ability to question and debate. It’s clear that the US Democratic Party is stifling debate and free speech. The Liberal Party of Canada’s track record on this over the past several years is dismal and documented across hundreds of pages on this site. It’s important not to be an apologist for bad policy and positions. He who stands for nothing falls for everything. I think the main reasons we got here are that most people assumed that government advanced their interests and wouldn’t cower to radicals. Most people are busy, afraid of losing what they have, and simply aren’t equipped to take on the professional politicians and upper managerial class who have revealed themselves to be largely self-serving. Some will even advance policies that work against constituents in order to win favour with unaccountable elite bodies. Frankly I’ve stopped posting much here anymore because the sleepy willful blindness is painfully obvious. Until most of the electorate are aware of the problems, we won’t do much to address them. I do see an awakening happening, but it’s slow-going and tends to get buried in the hysteria over Trump or similar bellicose figures who are checkered people trying to sort through the mess. No politician is perfect. We’re often choosing the lesser of evils.

You stopped reading because you’re willfully ignorant and in denial. Your mentality is trapped in 1995. That world is gone.

Unfortunately Canada is run by radical left activists who dominate all mainstream political parties, including the Conservatives. In the US there’s still some hope for the Republican Party. I say some hope because the trajectory for Western Civilization, which was founded on Judeo-Christian values, legal precedents, and democratic rights, is towards extinction. Simply put, a civilization that renounces the foundational principles that caused it to thrive and grow is on a bad path. That civilization now provides free infertility drugs, hard drugs, unhealthy prescription drugs, provides assisted suicide, relies on mass immigration to perpetuate its economy (even when some imported cultural ideas clash with Western Judeo-Christian values), makes basic necessities unnecessarily expensive (through carbon taxes and redistributive socialist high taxes), has chemically altered the environment and food supply in concerning ways, and has created new rights that undermine the family and natural reproduction. The high cost of living urban West has forced individuals to work harder for less, such that both parents have to work in order to raise kids who are often perceived as a burden. Efforts to provide more than the basic necessities are stymied by an increasingly draconian and activist government and tax structure that is aided by greater surveillance and digital tracking. Education systems are undermining parents and families by facilitating unnatural narcissism and Marxist values. All of these changes are happening so fast and furious that we don’t know what hit us. We haven’t even absorbed the implications.

I hadn’t believed that he was actually Castro’s son until your post. Based on your radical left stances, it seems more likely.

Actually my parish has annual/quarterly financial reports. It’s pretty transparent. I agree that it hasn’t always been this way, including at the Vatican.

How can you be so uncritical? It’s crystal clear that Fauci benefited from big pharma which has also worked hand in glove with governments to suppress legitimate criticism of vaccines and anti-covid measures. If you can’t see that basic reality and the critical importance of the questions raised about what the hell was happening throughout the pandemic, I don’t know how you can expect to be taken seriously. We saw the greatest suppression of our rights in our lifetimes and it lasted two and a half years, resulted in a form of martial law in Canada, and raised important questions about the transparency of our government and healthcare. Your dismissal of any thoughtful critique of what happened by reducing it to Chuds or other Trudeauesque rhetoric demonstrates why we have culture wars.

Yes. A big challenge today is that we seem to have forgotten what good looks like and we don’t have leaders willing to point us in that direction or speak out against moral relativism. Today it’s all about affirming people’s “lived experience” rather than aspiring to be better. In fact, the good is mocked or attached to cynical denunciations of the “colonial” or “patriarchal”, as though that which has on the whole raised people up is deplorable. It’s the cultural rot of people who have stopped believing in themselves and their past achievements. The baby and our ability to reproduce ourselves are thrown out with the excuse of affordability, convenience, personal gratification, and “Why would I want to raise a child in this world?” etc. Well that philosophy has been affirmed by our governments in a society of collapsing birth rates. So you have your freedom to abort or have the state help you kill yourself or give free birth control to you and your kids. It just means that your cultural and ethnic group is dying off. Protestants are at the front line of that suicide mission. Catholics are also shooting themselves in the feet like never before. The Catholics in certain provinces held onto their constitutional right to Catholic education. The Anglicans, Presbyterians and other major Protestant Christian groups who ran our public education system took prayer out of schools. Virtually all schools have capitulated to the nebulous and dubious rainbow ideology. Protestantism? Catholicism? Buddy, we’re not going to have Christians soon, let alone sectarian conflict. Natives and Muslims have positive birth rates. We’re also bringing non-Christians into Canada in unprecedented high numbers. Their children will be running our governments. The pagan Olympic ceremonies and backlash riots in the UK are just the latest symptoms of our rapid decline. People have forgotten that the great institutions and civilizations of the West were built by people with specific values and beliefs. It didn’t just appear. Yet we seem determined to undermine the conditions that created the greatest civilization on Earth.

Again, you’re going to find examples of anti-Nazi heroism among Catholics. JP2 saved a boat load of Jews during the Holocaust. There were some Catholic political prisoners in Auswicz. Unfortunately there are many examples of collaboration with Nazis or an averting of one’s eyes away from highly probable bad actors and policies. Think of the Neo-Nazi Azov Brigade in Ukraine now. Those are the Nazis that we pretend are harmless as we arm Ukraine. Ford continued to make cars in Germany under Hitler. Bayer made Zyklon B. Krupp Steel made gas chambers. How far do you want to take this? Was the carpet bombing of Hamburg and Dresden the good kind of mass killing? Nagasaki? Hiroshima? Unfortunately we are sometimes forced to choose between bad choice A and really bad choice B, or we don’t see how some choices that appear good or are good in some ways are bad in others. I have wondered for a long time whether the institutions that we trust are what they say they are, but I can only act on what I know. I understand that where there are people there are bad seeds and corruption. All we can do is try to understand what’s happening and act on that basis, but I have misgivings about all organizations. It doesn’t stop me from working within organizations, because people organize in order to function effectively, not always for the better.

Yes. It’s a smart move. My point is that even if JT isn’t Castro’s biological son, he’d fit right in as an adopted one. Like if we found out he is Castro’s son, everyone would say, “Of course, makes good sense. I knew it.”

I disagree. No the Catholic Church didn’t create concentration camps. Christendom was involved in the Crusades much as the Muslim world was. The Catholic Church has played an important role in liberating countries from communism and corrupt governments. Consider JP2’s involvement in the Solidarity movement in Poland or Archbishop Romero’s speaking out against military dictatorship. Anyway, the Catholic Church has many challenges that go to the highest levels of the organization. I have been very critical of what appears to be infiltration within the Church and perhaps even the papacy itself. I’m not going to enter into more debate on that subject, because I also think the Protestant churches are largely in states of collapse. I certainly see rot in these organizations much as I see it in universities, government, and the wider culture.

I hear you, but I’m quite close to these topics. I’ve studied and taught religion in my past, not that that makes me an expert. I would simply say that our understanding of the divine is limited, but we do have scripture/books. I also recognize that there are many interpretations. I’ve come to the conclusion that family, prayerful reflection on the sacred, and not getting lost in vices are important in life. The West is a very confused place right now. From increasingly permissive assisted suicide to our unlimited abortion laws to our narcissistic obsessions with self-indulgence, it’s a very different world from the one I knew as a young man — and I’m only middle-aged. I think the world is worse than it was just several years ago. I see this as the result of moral rot. There’s a fear of taking a Christian stance and a capitulation to dubious lifestyles, identities, and choices. The dubious values are being pushed and in some cases required through legislation.