There are three problems with this passage and this morning. The simplest is that I am cold. It is snowing: the son is off to University early “before the snow melts and it becomes icy” and I’m facing driving up to work, after freezing yesterday.
The second problem as I face this passage is that I am quite aware that I am all too often disobedient and sinful. I can recount my sins: it will do no one else benefit. We are told however, that if we do not keep the commandments we don’t know Christ and we lie when we way that we know him.
And we are also told that Christ is our advocate, who has by his actions forgiven the sins of the world, and those are greater than what any one of us, even the most evil of us, have done. There is salvation in the name of Christ.
And the third is that if the labels people put on themselves allow them to be classified, it is hatred and violence that damn us. For those who are evil want to remain within the dark, and to say there is no light: silencing those who bear witness to this.
My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world. And by this we know that we have come to know him, if we keep his commandments. Whoever says “I know him” but does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him, but whoever keeps his word, in him truly the love of God is perfected. By this we may know that we are in him: whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked.
Beloved, I am writing you no new commandment, but an old commandment that you had from the beginning. The old commandment is the word that you have heard. At the same time, it is a new commandment that I am writing to you, which is true in him and in you, because the darkness is passing away and the true light is already shining. Whoever says he is in the light and hates his brother is still in darkness. Whoever loves his brother abides in the light, and in him there is no cause for stumbling. But whoever hates his brother is in the darkness and walks in the darkness, and does not know where he is going, because the darkness has blinded his eyes.
(1 John 2:1-11 ESV)
Now two quotes. One sounds hateful, but is the truth: Sister Ann on the Mass, and I can hear the SJW screaming homophobia now. Which misses the point: the masculine does not want to be ruled by the feminine or effeminate (and the SJW cry sexism).
I have seen several pieces recently about why men in particular stopped going to Mass since the late 1960s. Everyone dances around the answer, which is extremely simple:
Western men stopped going to Mass because heterosexual men naturally and rightly find faggotry to be utterly repulsive and repellant, and want nothing to do with it, and the priesthood was consciously infiltrated and populated with sodomite men and men who were conditioned to act like sodomites, after WWII.
Forty-nine words. Questions? Feel free to quote me.
Now,. I’m, not Roman, but I see the same thing in the Liberals. Women and Gays in ministry drive men away. Women like them, but without men something goes horribly wrong in the church. You may call this unfair, the curse of Eve, or whatever. But we live in a fallen state: we know that in Christ we are not our nations and in the time to become we will not be male or female but akin to the angels (see Jesus discussion of the woman who had nine Levirate marriages [1]). But at this time we are in out fallen state, and our mammalian biology and primate psychology is real. To say this should not be is not an error: to enforce changes makes us less than human, for it denies both masculinity and femininity.
This is what hatred looks like: one of my favourite libertarians Sarah Hoyt, commenting on the current controversy about the Hugos.
And now, there’s the controversy over … more people voting in the Hugos and voting for a different slate than the entrenched group approves of. There are many accusations flung at us, including that we’re pushing an all white slate (which would surprise some of those people) an all male slate (which transformed my friends Amanda and Cedar into guys and made Cedar’s fiance gay. He’s still in shock) and that we’re pushing inferior taste (It bears reading this post apropos that) and that we’re buying votes for total strangers to vote our slate. (No, we’re not. Mary Robinette Kowal, OTOH IS, but yeah, I know, it’s different, after all leftists are good people)I’m very tired. VERY very tired. Not of opposition. I’m never a happy warrior, but I have had huge arguments (rational, non-attacking arguments) with some of my very best friends, Dave Freer and Kate Paulk included, and emerged from them energized, because we mobilized ideas and facts and our disagreement forged a stronger bond, rather than breaking us apart or making each of us feel small and isolated.
But I’m tired of answering the same senseless accusations over and over and over again. It’s like fighting people under an enchantment that prevents them from thinking.
And all through this, there are pms on FB and emails to my old email registered with SFWA and not used much now. “I am with you, but I don’t dare say anything.” “I don’t agree with everything you say, but you have some damn good points. But if I say anything, my career is done.” “Your opponents are scary and are eating each other, but I can’t say how evil they are in public, because they’ll eat me.
The hatred of these people makes people fear them and hate them. The activists call this empowerment. It is not. For we have to remember the command we have from Christ: he agreed with the Pharisees that you can reduce the law to two commands [2] and then added a third: we should love the brothers in faith as he does. And fear has as little a place in love as darkness has in light.
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1. Luke 20: 27 -40
2 Matthew 22: 38-40.
