Religion and Man Post

Cross-posting here a rather elaborate comment I made at The Spearhead earlier today.

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1. There isn’t really any precedent for having consensus moral rules (beyond a few least common denominators) without these rules being based on some consensus transcendent reality – a higher purpose, at the very least. This is missing in our current society because almost all of the contemporary philosophy rejects transcendent reality as a concept, and instead has embraced relativism in one form or another. In a very real way, relativism is the inevitable philosophical outcome of a society which places individual autonomic freedom as its core value – as ours does. The “price” of having that as the core social value is that there are no other consensus values beyond a few common denominators, and even there, there is no consensus (murder would seem to be a consensus moral rule at first blush, but the abortion debate demonstrates how easily even the most baseline consensus moral rule can crumble in the face of the absolute value of personal autonomic freedom).

2. It’s for this kind of reason that the idea that there can be wide-consensus moral rules outside a wide consensus about the content of faith is, while understandable, rather far-fetched and misplaced. A division, therefore, between “theoretical truth” and “practical truth” is not workable, in practice, and is incoherent even in theory when viewed from the perspective of someone standing inside any of the main faith traditions. The reason for that is, again, the reality that relativism acts as an acid that dissolves consensus moral rules – and there is nothing more relativistic than the notion that “all faith traditions are basically the same”. In fact, this is a fantastically contemporary notion which has no basis in history, and is incoherent in its perception of reality.

3. The trouble with the West at the moment is that it has literally lost its faith. It has been tried (and some are still trying) to cobble together a secularized, non-transcendent “practical faith”, but of course this doesn’t work, because there truly is no reason for consensus to emerge. A society simply cannot extol individual autonomic freedom as its core value while at the same time having consensus moral rules – for consensus moral rules will always act to suppress individual autonomic freedom to some degree. So our thinkers have lost their faith in Western religion (mainly Christianity), but try though they might, they have been unsuccessful in “replicating” what they consider to be the “good parts” of Christianity, in order to forge some kind of a socio-moral consensus – but this will never work without a religion as the glue. And religion is outright rejected by our contemporary thinkers, for the most part. That is the crux of the issue.

4. It’s always humorous when someone tries to portray Jesus Christ as some kind of democratic national committee chairman or something like that. The notion that is often lost is that Christ did not advocate “social justice” – rather he advocated “personal justice”. His admonitions to feed the poor and tend to the sick and so on were directed at individual persons, and not at the state apparatus. In fact, when pressed by his followers about the political issue (and the pressing need to rebel against the Romans who were “oppressing” the Jews of the age), he famously responded that they should pay their taxes, rejecting the notion that the faith he was preaching was a socio-political movement, or one which was directed at uprooting the oppression of the state. It was nothing of the sort.

5. As far as “sola scriptura” goes, that idea is part of the core problem we face today. But of course the issue goes back much further than that. To me, the beginning of the problem was the alienation of the Eastern and Western empires, which eventually led to a separation of the Eastern and Western churches. That separation created problems for both Eastern and Western Christians. For the East, it meant being cut off from the rising West, a gradual shrinking in power, and eventual conquest by Arabs and Turks, and later, communists. Cut off from the Western church, the Eastern church suffered as a result of its weakness and isolation. For the West, it meant being cut off from much of the tradition of the early church fathers, merely for the reason that Greek became largely unknown in the West, and few Greek texts made their way there. This paved the way for the development of scholastic theology in the West (based as it was, on the translation into Latin of Aristotle by Arab scholars in Spain). Scholasticism developed the way that it did in many ways, I think, because of the “newness” of the encounter of the Christian West with Greek philosophy. The Greek fathers of the first millenium were of course quite familiar with Aristotle and the rest of the Greek canon, and had never pursued a scholastic approach based on them, but, as I note, the heritage of the Greek fathers was not available in the West at this time, and so the scholastic movement created its own momentum, reinterpreting anew the proper relationship between philosophy and faith in a way that the early church would not have recognized. There were a few contacts in this period between the rising Scholasticism in the West and the continuing tradition in the East, and they were not particularly cordial. But, in any case Scholasticism led directly to the Protestant Reformation, because in many ways the reformers were reacting against the Aristotelian-esque soteriology that had developed in the wake of scholasticism in the church. The battle cry of “sola scriptura” was quite understandable seen in this context, because it was a rallying of theology away from the winding paths of scholastic theology and back towards the core elements of the Christian faith. However, sola scriptura led to its own problems as time moved forward, as Protestant and Reformed Christianity splintered again and again and again over different interpretations of the Bible – a process that continues today. For while in theory it is attractive to hold that the text of the Bible is a baseline criterion of shared truth, in reality a text like the Bible is subject to many different interpretations, and so while the text is authoritative for all Protestant Christians, the text itself does not serve to unite them, but rather serves to divide them, because there is nothing other than the text itself (which, again, can be interpreted differently) which can resolve a conflict of interpretations. As a practical matter, we know what this has resulted in: a splintering of Protestant/Reformed Christianity into a sea of “denominations” and, now, “non-denominational churches”. But, more importantly for the purposes of what I am discussing here, this way of thinking about absolute truth led inexorably and directly to the relativism we see around us today.

Why is that? There are a few reasons. The main one is that once one claims that the text of the Bible is the sole criterion for truth, yet one observes that this “truth” is disagreed about in seemingly endless ways even among those Christians who also hold that the text is the sole criterion – you end up with a crisis of “faith”, because what constitutes the substantive content of the truth appears to be “relative” → that is, some people think it means “A” and others think it means “B”. Yet both the A partisans and the B partisans are, according to themselves, using the same sole criterion of truth. This leads an observer to conclude that this sole criterion can in fact be “interpreted” in different ways – leading to the conclusion that the truth given by such criterion is, in fact, relative, and dependent on interpretation, even though, of course, neither Partisan A nor Partisan B would agree, each seeing their own interpretation as more or less exclusively true. In other words, to an outside observer, it begins to appear that the absolute truth claim based on sola scriptura is, in fact, a relative truth claim, because others use the same criterion to reach a different “truth”.

The second, and related, reason is that because sola scriptura relies on textual interpretation, with no higher authority to interpret authoritatively, the resulting approach to thinking about absolutes tends to become increasingly anarchic, precisely because authority beyond textual interpretation has been eradicated. In other words, while it is true that Christians from the beginning disagreed about the meaning of the scriptural texts, they did devise means of “breaking” these disagreements – of authoritatively picking an interpretation as definitive and, importantly, binding. The reformers understandably rebelled against this as an idea, because they perceived the church authority of their time and place as having made incorrect decisions about such interpretation. However, following the wake of reformation, the lack of such a “breaking” authority – indeed, the lack of any authority above the interpretation of the scriptural texts, something which can, in fact, be a very individual thing and which characteristically has been so in post-reformation Protestant/Reformed Christianity – led to the splintering mentioned above, rather than the coalescing of Protestant/Reformed Christianity into one main tradition. The broader impact of this was even more pernicious, and would eventually undo Christianity in general in the West: namely, the conclusion that the “truth interpreting” authoritativeness of the individual was primatial, and not in need of any higher “human” authority in order for the truth to be authoritatively grasped. While the reformed churches eventually did institute discipline inside the churches, the dangerous idea itself was already out of the bottle. The broader significance of the depth and breadth of this rejection of authority beyond the individual led, quite apart from the churches and in terms of philosophy, directly to the enlightenment, and the philosophical and political worldviews of our contemporary culture. After all, if there is no authority needed beyond the human ability to interpret reality – based as it must be on human reason – there can also be no “checks” on that ability, either. In other words, once authority beyond the individual was trashed as being a necessary criterion for determining truth, it was only a matter of time until the Bible itself was rejected as a criterion once it, itself, started to act as a kind of constraint on the power of the individual mind to authoritatively define reality and truth. These ideas led directly to the rise of the primacy of the individual and the ideas of the enlightenment, which bit by bit crept away from religion in favor of unlimited, untrammeled human reason free from any external authority whatsoever. And hence, indeed, the importance placed by our culture on untrammeled individual autonomic freedom as the core political and moral value of our age.

The core problem we face today is, again, the fact that this entire enterprise of exercising human reason without the constraints of a truly “breaking” external authority (rather than a text which can be variously interpreted) has led to a society where the ability to have shared moral rules is drastically impeded. In short, it has led to a culture which is inherently relativist. It’s true that people like Wright and Armstrong and others recognize this as a problem for the society as a whole, but it’s also true that you can’t concoct a religion, and a moral system based on that, out of a relativist stew, and particularly not when so many of our thinkers over the past 200 years have so assiduously and relentlessly attacked the very concept of religion and absolute truth – whether moral or otherwise. Relativism, as the contemporary practical belief system of the West, does not admit of many moral absolutes, and at the same time is not a system without rather deep roots in our ways of thinking at this point in time. We can see the strength of that system of thought reflected in many of the comments on this thread, it seems to me.

Note that my intention here is not to “knock” Protestant/Reformed Christianity any more than it is to “knock” the Catholics and the Orthodox for bungling their ecclesial relations 1000 years ago (the event which started the train running down the wrong track, in my opinion), but rather to point out what I see as causes and continuities in terms of how our own Western history in this area has played itself out.

One World Religion

I recently came across the latest entry in the mostly useless attempt by contemporary “spiritualists” to inaugurate a new age which is both spiritual, religious and pluralistic, based on the spurious yet all-too-common idea that all of the world’s “great religions” teach basically the same thing.  The goal here, at least, is stated more explicitly than is often the case:

One of the most urgent tasks of our generation is to build a global community, where men and women of all races, nations and ideologies can live together in peace. …

Religion, which should be making a major contribution to this endeavor, is often seen as part of the problem.  All too often the voices of extremism seem to drown those that speak of kindness, forbearance and mutual respect. Yet the founders of every single one of the great traditions recoiled from the violence of their time and tried to replace it with an ethic of compassion.

Well, there’s something to be said for honesty, particularly in a world where socio-political subterfuge and deliberate obfuscation seem to have become regrettably normative.  But the refreshing nature of the candor shouldn’t distract from the troubling nature of the substance:  one world community, and  – more or less — one world religion (albeit different “cultural faith traditions”) — one ring to bind them all.

The idea behind this is simple enough:  reduce the existing religions of the world to some least common denominator and hammer away at that common denominator in an effort to convince people that religions which are vastly different in huge ways are nevertheless “basically the same” because — lo and behold — they all share the same reductive common denominator.

In this particular case, it is supposed that the great religions of the world are all more or less the same because they all are founded on “compassion”.  This reductionist similarity is contrasted with — you guessed it:  ”extremism”, thereby painting every religious believer who does not have a reductive view of his/her faith, but actually believes what the faith teaches, as an “extremist”.  Despite the poor salesmanship involved in this kind of an effort (alienating the core audience is a pretty poor way to sell an idea), it is nevertheless instructive of the worldview of the purveyors of the one-world-religion concept.  Per the admittedly syncretistic ex-Catholic nun Karen Armstrong:

Every single one of the faiths regards compassion and the Golden Rule as the litmus test of true spirituality and sees it as one of the main ways in which we come into relation with the transcendence that we call God, Nirvana, Brahman or Tao.

The problems with the assumptions of the article are many, and perhaps are to be expected coming from someone like Armstrong, who believes in no religious tradition at all, and simply holds to an open “spirituality” based on least common denominators.  However, the idea — even if it were to have practical merit, which it does not — is bound to fail, precisely because it drastically distorts what religions actually teach.  While it’s true that in some sense many faith traditions place an emphasis on practical compassion in various ways, certainly this is not the “core” of what any of these religions hold.

To state that Christianity, for example (Armstrong’s usual bugbear due to her own background) is — as a faith tradition — principally about compassion and acting compassionately is laughable coming from a woman who used to be a Catholic nun, and a man who is an Archbishop of the Anglican Communion (well … maybe not so surprising for him!).  Christianity is about the personal and corporate deliverance from death by the incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of the Father, through whom the world itself was made, and the ongoing process of sanctification, or growth in holiness, which comes through union with Christ in baptism and subsequently “walking with Him” in the newness of life, having “put on Christ”.  Christ taught compassion as a way of being, that is certainly true, and it is a critical aspect of the Christian “walk”, but to reduce the religion to that “ethic” is simply to ignore much else of what the Gospels portray Christ Himself as saying:

“And this is the will of my Father, that everyone who sees the Son and believes in him may have eternal life, and I shall raise him on the last day” (Jn 6:40)

“Abraham your father rejoiced to see my day; he saw it and was glad. … Amen, amen, I say to you, before Abraham came to be I AM.” (Jn 8: 56, 59)

“Whoever rejects me and does not hear my words has something to judge him: the word that I spoke, it will condemn him on the last day” (Jn 12: 48)

This, of course, is not to deny that Jesus Christ often preached about the virtues of love and compassion — of course He did.  But to reduce Christianity to being about compassion when so many other aspects of the faith — including its core narrative — point elsewhere is rather beyond useless and has no hope of serving the purpose Armstrong and her ilk have in mind.   Again, it is a question of audience.  Calls for reductive quasi-syncretism will never go over well with actual believers, because these people, well, believe in the truth of their own faith.  And these faith traditions often conflict quite strongly in their core narratives.  To take a few notable examples from the Qur’an (Yusuf Ali translation):

“O People of the Book!  Commit no excesses in your religion; nor say of Allah aught but the truth.  The Messiah Jesus son of Mary was (no more than) a messenger of Allah, and his word, which he bestowed on Mary, and a spirit proceeding from him, so believe in Allah and his messengers.  Say not “Trinity”: desist: it will be better for you for Allah is the One God: Glory be to Him: (Far exalted is He) above having a son …” (4: 171)

“Say: He is Allah, the One and Only; Allah, the Eternal, Absolute; He begetteth not, nor is He begotten; and there is none like unto Him.” (112)

“It is not befitting to (the majesty of ) Allah that He should beget a son.  Glory be to Him!” (19: 35).

And others.

Now you may say:  this is missing the point.  These theological niceties are not the core of the faith in either case.  But in order to claim that, one must have either a reductionist view of Christianity (which Armstrong and Tutu clearly seem to have) or perhaps an Islamic view of it (Jesus Christ as prophet and teacher and so on), but in either of those cases, Christianity, as a religious tradition (and as an ethical system as well), becomes unintelligible.   If Jesus Christ was not the Son of God, the entire soteriological tradition of Christianity — that is, its narrative and its raison d’etre — in both the Eastern and the Western soteriological traditions, is made impossible, and the faith of the religion itself collapses — including its ethical traditions.  To state it another way:  for Christians, it is precisely because Christ is the eternally begotten Son that true Christian compassion is made possible.  The “ethical content” of Christianity simply cannot be separated from its theological tradition, and its theological tradition cannot be reconciled with other religions.

In reality, what people like Armstrong, Tutu and Robert Wright are trying to do is to morph the existing faith traditions into reductions of themselves so that eventually they can syncretize into a new world religion — or perhaps a world federation of hollowed-out shells of former religious traditions which “believe more or less the same thing but have different cultural traditions”.  This is desired because they realize — quite rightly, in my view — that without the input of religion, societies (or at least our own Western culture) eventually tumble towards nihilism.  But a campaign to reduce the great faith traditions into shadows of themselves is doomed to fail — precisely because it ignores the actual content of the faiths themselves, and each faith’s internal raison d’etre.  People of different faith traditions can engage each other in the spirit of mutual respect, but when that crosses into syncretism or a denial of the truths of each faith tradition, it becomes reductive and disrespectful of the various traditions themselves.  It’s quite true that religious traditions conflict — this is a part of life that we must accept, and it is quite a natural one.  Seeking to overcome that conflict through a crude reduction of quite different faiths is both disrespectful and doomed — but likely that won’t stop more such calls in the years ahead from “spiritualists” like Armstrong and Wright.

A worthy link on Harriet Harperson’s shameless manipulation of the facts in the UK

The blog Exposing Feminism has posted a good, brief article on the recent quasi-reprimand received by Harriet Harperson, the deputy leader of the UK’s governing Labour Party, regarding the misleading use of statistics in claiming that there is a substantial “wage gap” based on sex in the UK.

Statistics is largely an exercise in smoke and mirrors, as any statistically-fluent academic can confirm.  Yet it is good to see that at least some voices are rising in the governments of the West to say:  it is a time to try to get past some of the worst obfuscations and stereotypes, and drill down to what the differences actually are, and, hopefully, what drives them.

Specifically, this letter from Sir Michael Scholar, the Chair of the UK Statistical Authority, states that the actual mean wage gap for full time employees in the UK is 12.8%, not the 22.6% “blended” figure spouted by Harperson and her minions at the Orwellian-named “Equality and Human Rights Commission”.  Sir Michael further notes that:

The casual reader would be surprised to learn then that median hourly earnings of women and of men (excluding overtime) are very close, with women’s median pay actually being slightly higher than men’s (by 3.4 per cent).

We should not entertain illusions about what this means.  It means nothing other than this:  feminist women in government institutions are making up statistics to justify passage of laws that will screw men when women, in actual fact, are mostly earning as much as men are if not more.

The reason for the average disparity, as compared to the mean, I would suspect is the infamous “glass ceiling” canard, which I commented on here.  Needless to say, the story is a familiar one:  when you peer past the smoke and mirrors of statistical obfuscation and selective reporting of them in “studies” generated by politically-slanted interest groups, the bottom line is that the wage gap based on sex is almost entirely due to female career choice and lifestyle choice decisions.  To blame men, the so-called “patriarchy”, or discrimination for the decisions women are themselves making is rank misandry, full stop.

It’s good to see that at least one man has the courage to raise his hand and call foul on this vile, shameless misinformation campaign by the UK’s feminist regime.

HT:  Exposing Feminism

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Note:  I have been extremely busy at work this Fall, which has led to fewer posts here.  As I speak I am getting ready to leave for the UK later today, which means another week of less than average participation in the blogosphere.  It’s an occupational hazard of mine, but thanks for reading, and I hope to be back to posting more regularly when things calm down a bit on the professional front.  Cheers — N

Men Wising Up: Exhibit A … Gavin Mcinnes

Aye, lads.  There is some reason (and humor) yet in the blogosphere.

Gavin McInnes has a fantastically funny yet poignant post here.

A relevant and hilarious excerpt:

Anyway, during our “debate” the Middle East kept getting high fives and I was starting to hear talk of the burqa being empowering. “So why is it made out of black polyester,” I asked. Why not some flowing white cotton? “It’s not made out of polyester” she retorted before adding, “Polyester is an oil based product. They export oil.” Huh? Is that why toothpicks are verboten at the lumber yard? “Get that out of your mouth Harv! We need to export that! We only use plastic toothpicks here!” Megan realized she wasn’t making sense so she pulled out the Jezebel race card: “What about rape?” she asked. As Heart’s “What About Love” played in my head with new lyrics, I smiled and said, “Honey, America ain’t got nuthin’ on the Middle East when it comes to rape.” She then said, “Did you just call me honey?” and stormed out of the bar. Thank God.

LMAO.  I was in laughing fits reading that.  Just.  Brill.

Worth much more than the price of admission I must say.  Kudos to you, Mr McInnes.

The Whining Continues

A few posts this weekend at The New York Times, the leading feminist newspaper in the United States, confirm yet again the seemingly endless capacity feminist women have for whining.

First, yesterday Times readers were harangued by Joanne Lipman, a former Wall Street Journal editor and Conde Nast magazine founding editor-in chief, complaining that, despite all of the opportunities offered to her to pursue her spectacular career, women are still far behind men.  This at a time when the recent and already infamous Shriver Report gleefully notes that women are now around 50% of the American workforce, mostly due to massive male lay-offs.  Of course, that’s a source of great joy and celebration for feminist women — because if men need to suffer in order for women to advance, feminists are more than happy to celebrate the suffering and sing the joys of a victory for womankind that has been achieved mostly because of the tremendous economic displacement being experienced by men in the current economy.  If there ever was evidence that feminism is simply about grabbing power for women at men’s expense, and that feminists view men as an afterthought, other than how men impact women themselves, the response of the feminist journalistic community to these developments should eliminate any lingering doubts in that regard.

But, gleeful as they are about the displacement of men economically, being feminists, they still manage to find things to whinge about.  What is it this time?  Oh, women are perceived badly on the internet.  Oh, men aren’t giving us the respect we deserve, dammit.  Oh, it doesn’t matter that we have made progress when there are such attitudes on the internet.

Of course, as is de rigeur for such screeds, we are assured that

This isn’t simply a woman’s issue; it affects us all. It isn’t about blaming men, or about embracing feminism, which remains a toxic term for some women. Instead, it is up to all of us to help change the conversation.

How do we get to there from here?

Her advice?  Inspire yet more confidence in young women, as if this were already lacking or something, so that they will be as pushy about pursuing raises and promotions as young men presumably are.  Allow women to have a sense of humor, and pursue a separate culture of being “girls”, taking advantage of such things as female toughness (evidenced by giving birth) and broader self-definition than men.

Not quite sure what to say about that.  It seems to me that women are quite confident, particularly younger women, especially as they outnumber men in higher education today significantly.  Trying to instill a sense of humor is an interesting idea, but it seems doubtful that this will alleviate the kind of “lack of respect” Lipman is upset about.  Nor will a revitalized “culture of being girls” — again, unclear that this is not currently the case, and similarly unclear that this would actually change anything.

No, the real problem that underlies Lipman’s concern is much more simple.  Men are wiser now than they were a few decades ago when we were being hoodwinked by feminists to believe that feminism was about “equality”, at least as men understand that word.  What we know now is that feminism is about “equality” as feminists understand that word, which is to say a combination of special privileges for women coupled together with dismantling male institutions and reforming them along female lines.  That’s now rather clear, as exemplified in the tone of documents such as the Shriver Report — essentially celebrating the loss of male jobs because this is a net gain in power and leverage for women.  That’s the kind of “equality” we can expect from feminists, and more men have realized this in the past decade or so, resulting in a marked coarsening of the tone of male/female interaction in all media.  This trend will only continue as the relationship between the sexes continues to worsen and become more strained due to feminist policies.  Women can bristle with confidence, humor and girliness all they like, but the fact that men are becoming the new underclass will have substantial and negative impacts on society as a whole — all the feminist triumphalist snickering notwithstanding.

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Not to be outdone by an interloper, Maureen Dowd penned a column yesterday yet again decrying the patriarchal Catholic Church and its “unfair” treatment of nuns.  Dowd is complaining about the official apostolic visitation this blog reported on a few months ago, whereby the Vatican is sending a delegate to engage in an investigation and dialogue with the leaders of various American female Catholic religious orders.  Of course, Dowd fails to mention, in all of her typical angst and fury venting at the hated patriarchy for leaving her single and childless at 57, that the head of the Vatican team is herself a woman and a nun — that would merely undermine her screed against the privations of patriarchy, so it doesn’t bear mentioning.  God forbid that another woman could disagree with Dowd and the leftist Catholics she quotes in her column about these issues.

No, for a feminist like Dowd it’s much more productive and cathartic to whine.  Whine at the Catholic Church for not ordaining women to the priesthood.  Whine at the Catholic Church for censuring nuns who sit on boards of public agencies that pay for abortions.  Whine at the Catholic Church for reaching out to conservative Anglicans who will not support the leftist agenda of people like Dowd for the Catholic Church.  Whine, whine, whine.  Maureen’s speciality, apparently.

The reality here is that many of the U.S. female religious orders have wandered off the reservation in the several decades since feminism hit.  My mother had a close friend who was a nun at the time, and she left the order in the early 1980s because it was morphing into something other than the institution she had joined in the early 1960s.  Gone were habits, gone was the convent, gone was community prayer and so on.  In were secular clothes, including trendy/sexy clothes like miniskirts in some cases (completely the opposite of the vows these women took when they became nuns), in was working in the secular world, often in social work and other areas dominated by feminists, and in was living in apartments, either alone or with other “nuns”.  In effect, what happened during this period was that the religious vows these women took were shed, one after the other, in the ostensible name of “reform”, but in what was in reality a more or less complete rebellion against the established order in the Church.  And that rebellion was, in almost all cases, heavily influenced by feminism — much more than it was influenced by Catholicism and Catholic values.

Many nuns simply left their religious orders, like my mother’s friend did.  Her reasoning was simple:  if I am going to live a secular life, I may as well lead a secular life, and not a halfway secular one.  She became greatly disillusioned with the religious orders in general during the following period, and it afforded me a view inside these institutions that relatively few other men of my generation have had.

Not all of the religious orders are the same, of course.  There are orders that have remained more or less true to their own traditions and vows, while others went along with the secular and feminist trends in the larger society.  It is the latter which are being targeted in this Vatican investigation, and for good reason — many of them have placed the priorities of the secular society, and in particular feminism, above the priorities of the Church and its holy tradition — again, in a spirit of feminist rebellion against “Catholic patriarchy”.

What makes women like Dowd somewhat chagrined is that, unlike in the secular society, in the Catholic Church, the “patriarchy” remains firmly in control, and has retrenched substantially since the revolutionary period of the 1970s.  She knows this well enough, and so she is left with whining and fulmination against an institution which is, in itself, stronger than the feminist storm that rages around it.

New Spearhead post: The Menace of Cultural Marxism

The enlightening discussion in Hawaiian Libertarian’s latest fine post references a few works by William Lind.  I highly recommend this material to the readers of this blog, because Lind summarizes quite well what we are basically up against in the current culture — a sustained campaign of cultural Marxism.

Cultural Marxism is often criticized by leftists and radicals as being a conspiracy theory, but that’s wide of the mark.  No-one is suggesting that there is a cabal of left-wing masterminds sitting around a table in some smoky room in Sweden directing this campaign in a conspiratorial way.  No, it is instead a loose cooperative movement which operates largely in the open, and which uses methods, and teaches theories, which are clearly Marxist in nature.

… continue reading over at The Spearhead …