The Greens are up to it again, in that house of fools, the Australian Senate. they have decided that a degenerate Jew shall be damned and any who promote him — such as conservative senators, are to be shamed, because of tolerance. Makes me want Milo to come here. He is a sinner, but we all are. At least he is a faithful Catholic.

But to have a faith, and to hold to what is right, means that in this fallen time you are damned. Consider John Wright, who discusses his favourite holiday: one that does not exist in the Commonwealth or Church calendar. Thanksgiving.

And consider the end game of the narrative is that you will be eating frozen turkey, alone, in your tiny apartment.

The demographic reason is related.

Not many people spend big bucks on turkeys and festive preparations for large family feasts during Thanksgiving and Christmas as they did in the days of Norman Rockwell paintings, simply because not many people have large families.

Since the time of the sexual revolution, few women show enthusiasm for mothering a large family. No one is going to make a big deal about a holiday celebrated by one lonely middle-aged divorcee with no children eating a can of cold turkey-meat chili above the sink in the kitchenette of her silent, dark apartment.

Thanksgiving and Christmas, to her, are simply sad.

The political reason is related to the demographic.

Family life is the basic core of human existence. It shapes our psychology and personality, gives zest to life, goals to work, rewards unselfishness, and reproduces the species. It is the foundation stone of civilization.

But the political revolution that arose arm in arm with the sexual revolution sought to undermine all this, under the rubric that family life was a trap and a straitjacket, whereas abortion, polygamy, sodomy, and fornication were the harbingers of a liberal, libertine, and libertarian utopia.

All that need be done, or so we were told repeatedly, was to normalize all untoward and unnatural sexual acts in the name of liberty; to make women artificially and temporarily sterile with behavior-altering pharmaceuticals with unknown side-effects in the name of fraternity; to persuade mothers to murder their own unborn babies in the name of equality; and replace limited government by the people with a totalitarian welfare state managed by elite experts in the name of the revolution.

Since all such sick utopian schemes have been tried and failed before, many times, during the period of the Romantics, or after the Civil War, or in ancient Sparta, the political rhetoric of the Flower Power generation had to scoff and slander and denigrate anything said by the wisdom of hard-won experience. Anyone looking at the past would see its clear lessons, and so the past had to be stuffed down an Orwellian memory hole.

Whatever was a good, solid, sound and working social institution could be roundly condemned, not for being unsound, but merely for being old.

Note that any social institution, such as monogamy, which had proven itself hale and wholesome over millennia was the prime target to be reformed out of existence.

I was in a conversation yesterday, and I went to the library and got a “clean” — by which I mean unmarked, without verses underlined or glosses in the margin, for I am a destructive reader — so we could look at the text if needed. For it is not merely tradition that we hope in, though the last thousand generations would call this one foolish.

As Peter said, the resurrection of Christ is not a clever myth, nor a meme, nor rhetoric.

2 Peter 1:12-21

¹²Therefore I intend to keep on reminding you of these things, though you know them already and are established in the truth that has come to you. ¹³I think it right, as long as I am in this body, to refresh your memory, ¹⁴since I know that my death will come soon, as indeed our Lord Jesus Christ has made clear to me. ¹⁵And I will make every effort so that after my departure you may be able at any time to recall these things.

¹⁶For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we had been eyewitnesses of his majesty. ¹⁷For he received honor and glory from God the Father when that voice was conveyed to him by the Majestic Glory, saying, “This is my Son, my Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” ¹⁸We ourselves heard this voice come from heaven, while we were with him on the holy mountain.

¹⁹So we have the prophetic message more fully confirmed. You will do well to be attentive to this as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts. ²⁰First of all you must understand this, that no prophecy of scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation, ²¹because no prophecy ever came by human will, but men and women moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.

There is a commonality in teaching shown here. Paul said that all scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, reproof correction and training in righteousness — and many of us know that text. But Peter said it was not merely profitabel, but the prophets were not speaking on their own, but as moved by the very spirit of God.

The words of scripture, those promises, are authoritative. Not our traditions and glosses. The markings in my bibles, or the comments around the lectionary, are much, much less important than the scripture itself. It is not my interpretation that matters: instead my interpretation of this time and life should conform to scripture,

Scripture should never conform to any generation. it is the parts we don’t like, and make clever post modern arguments about their irrelevance, that matter most.

Let the narrative of this world continue, but we shall not be part of it.

For in that way lies despair and loneliness and hatred and jealousy and slavery, with death in the life to come.