Religion

The Covington story and hatred of Catholics.

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The past week has been occupied with the story of the boys from Covington Catholic high school in Kentucky. These boys came to DC in a bus to attend the 2019 March for Life, an event in which hundreds to thousands demonstrate against abortion in the streets of Washington DC. This event is usually ignored by the American press. This year, two small activist groups also planned to demonstrate. One was called The Black Hebrew Israelites, A small fringe group.

groups of Black Americans who believe that they are descendants of the ancient Israelites. Black Hebrews adhere in varying degrees to the religious beliefs and practices of both Christianity and Judaism. With the exception of a small number of individuals who have formally converted to Judaism, they are not recognized as Jews by the greater Jewish community. Many choose to identify themselves as Hebrew Israelites or Black Hebrews rather than Jews in order to indicate their claimed historic connections.

The group that collected near the Lincoln Memorial, was a particularly obnoxious group that shouted slurs at the teenagers waiting for the bus to take them home.

“They called us ‘racists,’ ‘bigots,’ ‘white crackers,’ ‘faggots’ and ‘incest kids.’ They also taunted an African-American student from my school by telling him that we would ‘harvest his organs.’ I have no idea what that insult means, but it was startling to hear,” Sandmann wrote.
The remark about harvesting organs may reference Jordan Peele’s horror-satire “Get Out,” a 2017 movie in which the black boyfriend of a white girl discovers her family is harvesting the organs of blacks.

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Summer Rerun: Lewis vs Haldane

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J B S Haldane was an eminent British scientist (population genetics) and a Marxist. C S Lewis was…well, you probably already know who C S Lewis was.  In 1946, Haldane published an article critiquing a series of novels by Lewis known as the Ransom Trilogy, and particularly the last book of the series, That Hideous Strength. Lewis responded in a letter which remained unpublished for many of years. All this may sound ancient and estoteric, but I believe the Lewis/Haldane controversy is very relevant to our current political and philosophical landscape.

In  That Hideous Strength–my review is here–Mark, a young sociologist, is hired by a government agency called NICEthe National Institute for Coordinated Experimentationhaving as its stated mission the application of science to social problems.  In the novel, NICE turns out to be a conspiracy devoted to very diabolical purposes, as Mark gradually discovers.   See the review for more detail

Here are some of the highlights of the Lewis/Haldane controversy:

1)Money and Power. In his article, Haldane attacks Lewis for the latter’s refusal to absolutely condemn usury, and celebrates the fact that “Mammon has been cleared off a sixth of our planet’s surface”…clearly referring to the Soviet Union. Here’s part of Lewis’s response:

The difference between us is that the Professor sees the ‘World’ purely in terms of those threats and those allurements which depend on money. I do not. The most ‘worldly’ society I have ever lived in is that of schoolboys: most worldly in the cruelty and arrogance of the strong, the toadyism and mutual treachery of the weak, and the unqualified snobbery of both. Nothing was so base that most members of the school proletariat would not do it, or suffer it, to win the favour of the school aristocracy: hardly any injustice too bad for the aristocracy to practise. But the class system did not in the least depend on the amount of pocket money. Who needs to care about money if most of the things he wants will be offered by cringing servility and the remainder can be taken by force?  

This lesson has remained with me all my life. That is one of the reasons why I cannot share Professor Haldanes exaltation at the banishment of Mammon from ‘a sixth of our planet’s surface’. I have already lived in a world from which Mammon was banished: it was the most wicked and miserable I have yet known. If Mammon were the only devil, it would be another matter. But where Mammon vacates the throne, how if Moloch takes his place? As Aristotle said, ‘Men do not become tyrants in order to keep warm’. All men, of course, desire pleasure and safety. But all men also desire power and all men desire the mere sense of being ‘in the know’ or the ‘inner ring’, of not being ‘outsiders’: a passion insufficiently studied and the chief theme of my story. When the state of society is such that money is the passport to all these prizes, then of course money will be the prime temptation. But when the passport changes, the desires will remain.

2)Centralized scientific planning. Haldane: “Mr. Lewis’s idea is clear enough. The application of science to human affairs can only lead to hell.” While denying that this is a correct statement of his views, Lewis goes on to say:

Every tyrant must begin by claiming to have what his victims respect and to give what they want. The majority in most modern countries respect science and want to be planned. And, therefore, almost by definition, if any man or group wishes to enslave us it will of course describe itself as ‘scientific planned democracy.‘

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My fears of such a tyranny will seem to the Professor either insincere or pusillanimous. For him the danger is all in the opposite direction, in the chaotic selfishness of individualism.   I must try to explain why I fear more the disciplined cruelty of some ideological oligarchy. The Professor has his own explanation of this; he thinks I am unconsciously motivated by the fact   that I ‘stand to lose by social change’. And indeed it would be hard for me to welcome a change which might well consign me to a concentration camp. I might add that it would be likewise easy for the Professor to welcome a change which might place him in the highest rank of an omnicompetent oligarchy. That is why the motive game is so uninteresting. Each side can go on playing—ad nauseam, but when all the mud has been flung every man’s views still remain to be considered on their merits.

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How Long?

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Hail, thou ever blessed morn,
Hail redemption’s happy dawn,
Sing through all Jerusalem,
Christ is born in Bethlehem.
Edward Caswall, 1858 Hymn for Christmas Day (Also known as See Amid the Winter Snow)

I have a deep and abiding fondness for certain choral music; Christmas carols or even sort-of-Christmas carols, especially the English ones which weren’t part of my growing-up-Lutheran tradition. That tradition tended more towards the Germanic side of the scale, save for hymns by the Wesleys and Isaac Watts. The English Victorians … sufficient to say that a lot of such hymns and carols were pretty ghastly as poetry, music and theology combined, but time has done some sifting out and the best of them usually turn up in seasonal presentations like the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from Kings’ College, Cambridge. I make a point of listening to the BBC broadcast of it, every year on Christmas Eve morning. I’ve become so very fond of some carols I’ve heard through that broadcast that I’ve made a point of searching out YouTube recordings of them to post on my various websites. All In the Bleak Midwinter is one, Once in David’s Royal City is another and See Amid the Winter Snow is another still. (Link here) I’ve replayed the video so often in the last few days, I have finally learned the melody by heart … and the chorus haunts me this particular Christmas. Sing through all Jerusalem, Christ is born in Bethlehem!

It’s not just that the UN has resolved, in the face of an abstention by the US, to back a claim by the Palestinians to Jerusalem, or that a Jewish infant born in Bethlehem these days might be a hate crime in progress according to pro-Palestine activists. Once a town largely Christian, most local Christians have been chased out, just as Jews and Christians have been from practically everywhere else in the Islamic world. Well, that’s the Middle East for you, everywhere outside of Israel. The ethnic-cleansing of everyone but Muslims of whatever flavor goes on, unabated in the Middle East accompanied by a chorus of indifference sung by the Western ruling class, who seem intent on an Olympic-qualification level of virtue-signaling.

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Day of the Dead

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(A diversion from all the seriousness of this week; a brief excerpt for today – All Saints’ Day in the Christian calendar, and commonly celebrated as one of the Days of the Dead in the borderlands – from Book 1 in the continuing series of the Chronicles of Luna City)

Day of the Dead

The dead are always with us their memories, if not their actual presence. Some of the residents of Luna City do claim a casual speaking relationship with the dead, through some medium or other. Judy Grant claims to see auras and to sense otherworldly presences. The rest, especially those over a certain age are acquainted with the dead. The oldest residents; Miss Letty McAllister, Dr. Wyler, Adeliza Gonzales, all of whom have passed into their eighth decade at the very least, are now in the curious position of having more friends among the dead than they do the living.

Such is the custom in the borderlands, which includes Luna City; there is a time to formally acknowledge those gone on before. In the Catholic Church, the first and second days of November — All Saint’s and All Soul’s Days are set aside to honor and celebrate saints and martyrs, and then to remember all the others. Such orthodox Catholic rites and traditions of observing All Saints and All Souls merged, or were grafted onto more ancient customs. In Mexico, such observances merged with a traditional festival honoring an Aztec goddess of the underworld. It is believed that over the Days of the Dead, they are allowed to return for a visit to the living. It is considered a fond and courteous gesture to put out refreshments for those visitors, especially the deceased’s favorite food and drink. In Mexico and in the southern borderlands, the dead are honored with representations of skulls, and offerings of marigolds and special food and drink. Families visit the graveyard, and adorn the grave of a loved one with flowers, or build special private altars adorned with pictures of the deceased, with flowers, candles and significant memorabilia. It’s just one of those things.

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