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The Heresies of John F. MacArthur Jr. h

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Friday, October 25, 2024

The Heresies of John F. MacArthur Jr.

I had not intended to write this essay.  I was only going to share a link through e-mail to a video that the online Christian (Presbyterian) apologist Redeemed Zoomer had made about the Nestorianism of John F. MacArthur Jr.  In what was supposed to be a brief explanation of why I thought the video was important, I mentioned that MacArthur had taught several other false doctrines.  That grew into a full essay so I decided to share that here.  Here is the Redeemed Zoomer video: Is John MacArthur HERETICAL??? – YouTube

Nestorianism is a heresy that many prominent evangelical leaders of the last century or so have shared with John F. MacArthur Jr.  Several years ago, for example, I pointed out in an essay that an article the late R. C. Sproul had written criticizing Charles Wesley’s hymn “And Can it Be” for the line “that Thou my God shouldst die for me” was based entirely on Nestorian assumptions and reasoning.

Nestorianism is not the only heresy that John F. MacArthur Jr. has taught over the years.  The only one of his heresies of which he has publically recanted is Incarnational Sonship.  This was his doctrine, shared by J. Oliver Buswell Jr. and Walter Martin among others, that Jesus Christ was eternally the Logos, the Word of God, but that He became the Son of God in the Incarnation.  This is heresy.  Many evangelicals don’t recognize it as such because they think “he’s got three co-equal, co-eternal, Persons, Who are one in essence, that’s the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity, this is just quibbling about names and titles.”  This is not the case.  If Jesus is the Son of God only because of the Incarnation, in which He was born of the Virgin without a human father, then the persons of the Father and the Holy Spirit are confused.  This is because in both St. Luke’s nativity account and that of St. Matthew, the Holy Spirit is identified as the Agent in the conception of Jesus by Mary.  If Jesus’ Sonship is due to this then the Holy Spirit is His Father.  The confusion of the Persons of the Trinity is one of the most ancient heresies.  Tertullian addressed it under the label Patripassionism in his second century work Against Praxeas.  Historically it was known as Sabellianism after Sabellius who taught it in the early third century.  Today it is called modalism and is taught by the kind of Pentecostals who call themselves “Unity” or “Oneness” Pentecostals.

The orthodox doctrine is the Eternal Sonship of Jesus Christ.  The Father was always the Father because He always had the Son, and the Son was always the Son because He was Son of the Father.  Closely related to the doctrine of Eternal Sonship is the doctrine of the Eternal Generation of the Son.  Jesus Christ is eternally the Son of God because while there never was a time when the Father was without the Son, the Son’s sharing the Godhead, the numerically singular essence/nature/substance of God is derived from the Father in a relational sense that is called Generation because begetting/siring/generation is the closest analogy we have to it.  The implication of the Scriptural references to Jesus as the “only-begotten”, it was articulated by Origen of Alexandria in the third century and was incorporated into the Nicene Creed to combat Arianism in the fourth.  It has been denied by apologist William Craig Lane and theologian Wayne Grudem, although Grudem has apparently since recanted the denial.  MacArthur taught Incarnational Sonship from 1983 until the end of the twentieth century.  He apparently recanted it in 1999, although the article on his website containing the recantation was published in the Journal for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (the flagship publication of complementarianism, the weenie compromise position promoted by John Piper and Wayne Grudem for evangelicals who have enough sense not to fully buy in to feminism and egalitarianism but don’t have the gonads to take a stand for patriarchy) in 2001.  The doctrinal statement of Master’s Seminary has finally been redacted to teach the orthodox view of Eternal Generation and Eternal Sonship.  This was not the case a couple of years ago.  It only took him a quarter of a century after his recantation to do this.

MacArthur has not recanted to the best of my knowledge for the false teaching over which Bob Jones Jr. of Bob Jones University raised the first red flag in an article for Faith for the Family back in 1986.  This is his teaching that the blood of Jesus Christ has no value in se but merely as a sign or symbol representing the death of Jesus Christ.  The following is from a sermon MacArthur preached in April 1976:

The term “the blood of Christ” is a metonym that is substitute for another term: “death.” It is the blood of Christ that simply is a metonym for the death of Christ, but it is used because the Hebrews used such a metonym to speak of violent death. Whenever you talk about the blood of somebody being poured out, to the Hebrew that meant violent death. And when you commune with the blood of Christ, it doesn’t mean the literal blood of Christ, that is a metonym for His death; you commune with His death.

Now let me say something that might shake some of you up, but I’ll try to qualify it. There is nothing in the actual blood that is efficacious for sin. Did you get that? The Bible does not teach that the blood of Christ itself has any efficacy for taking away sin, not at all. The actual blood of Christ isn’t the issue. The issue is that His poured out blood was symbolic of His violent death. The death was the thing that paid the price, right? “The wages of sin is” – what? – “death.”

He died for us. It is His death that is the issue. The Hebrews spoke of it as His outpoured blood because that was something that expressed violent death. And they believed, for example, in the Old Testament it said, “The life of the flesh is in the blood.” And so, the pouring out of blood was the significance of death.

And so, when it says here we are communing with the blood of Christ, it does not mean the literal blood of Christ is efficacious, it does not mean the literal blood of Christ is involved; it means we enter into a genuine, vital participation in His death. But it is not the blood; the blood is only the symbol of the poured out life. 

Do you recognize what is wrong this doctrine (which MacArthur shared with the late Col. Robert B. Thieme Jr. of Berachah Church in Houston, Texas)?

There are different aspects to the Atoning work of Jesus Christ.  The Scriptures speak of it as a ransom paid for the release of hostages.  This was emphasized in the early Church.  The New Testament and the book of Isaiah also use the language of vicariousness and substitution to speak of Christ dying for us.  This was emphasized in the Reformation and this is what MacArthur emphasizes.  There is nothing wrong with that.  However, when the language of blood specifically is used, it is the Atonement as a sacrifice that is being emphasized. 

Now a blood sacrifice involved more than just killing an animal. In the Old Testament, there are three identifiable elements to animal sacrifices – the slaying, the offering, and the eating.  The first is when the animal brought as an offering was killed at the door of the Tabernacle/Temple. (Lev. 1:3-5) This killing of the animal alone did not make it a sacrificial offering.  Indeed, the priests were not the ones who did the killing unless they were offering the sacrifice for themselves.  The priest would burn the portion of the animal that was to be burned – the fat and fatty portions – on the altar (Lev. 1:8-9).  The priest would also take the blood of the animal and sprinkle it on the altar (Lev. 1:5) which was near the door of the Tabernacle/Temple.  If it were Yom Kippur and he was the High Priest he would take it further into the Holy of Holies and sprinkle the Mercy Seat (Lev. 16:14-15).  It is these actions by the priest that turned what otherwise would have just been the slaying of an animal – which the Israelites were permitted to do themselves in their own homes if they lived too far from the place (Jerusalem) appointed for sacrifice (Deut. 12:15, 21-22) – into a sacrificial offering.  Finally, except for the olah or whole burnt offering which was entirely burned,  the rest of the animal was divided between the portions assigned to the priest (Lev. 7:31-35) and the portions assigned to the ones who had brought the offering and eaten (Lev. 7:15-20, ; Deut. 12:6-7). 

In the epistle to the Hebrews St. Paul, for it is he who wrote that epistle, tells us that Moses was given a vision of Heaven on Mt. Sinai, that the instructions for the Tabernacle and system of worship he was given were imitations of the pattern he had seen there, (Heb. 8:5) and that it was into this Tabernacle made without hands that Jesus Christ, as High Priest after the order of Melchizedek, entered with His own blood to make the one offering that effectively takes away sin (Heb. 9:11-14, 23-28).  This is not symbolic language for the crucifixion.  The crucifixion took place in time and history, in a specific place on a specific date.  It corresponds to the slaying of the animal in the Old Testament sacrifices.  Note that as the OT sacrifices were slain at the door of the Tabernacle, so Jesus was crucified on Calvary outside the walls of Jerusalem.  Of course, His suffering and dying had precisely the vicarious significance with regards to our salvation that MacArthur et al. assign to it.  However, the offering of His blood that makes the whole thing a sacrifice is not something that took place in time and history, in a specific place on a specific date.  This offering occurred once, but in the Holy of Holies of the Tabernacle in Heaven, which is situated in eternity, outside of time and space as we know them because time and space are dimensions of Creation.  The death and the offering of the blood are two very distinct elements in the dispensation of Atonement, this is clear in both Testaments, and MacArthur missed it all.  Astonishingly, he repeated this error in his commentary on Hebrews of all places.

In each of these instances MacArthur’s serious doctrinal error are arguably the result of his taking Protestantism too far.  Protestantism, in the sense of the branch of the Christian tradition that emerged from the sixteenth century Reformation, is alright in itself, since the Reformation was a necessary response to real abuses on the part of the Roman ecclesiastical authorities in the late Middle Ages.  When one acts as if the history of orthodox Christianity took a hiatus after the completion of the New Testament canon until All Hallows Eve in 1517 and so sets his Protestantism against the Catholicism that is the general tradition of first millennium Christianity prior to the East-West Schism, then one can go very far astray.  If he looks with suspicion on Catholicism as defined in the previous sentence, then he feels free to ignore the Creed with which Christians around the world have confessed their faith for almost two thousand years when it says that Jesus is “the Only-Begotten Son of God, Begotten of the Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God, Begotten not made.”

Furthermore he feels free to ignore the rulings of the Ecumenical Councils to which the bishops of the entire Church were invited (whether they attended or not is another matter) to address problems of doctrine and discipline, the decisions of which were received as authoritative by the Church such as the ruling of third Ecumenical Council, that of Ephesus in 431 AD, that it is heresy to reject the term Theotokos, God-Bearer or Mother of God, for Mary, as Nestorius did on the basis that Jesus did not derive His deity from Mary, because in Jesus deity and humanity, while remaining distinct natures, are united in One Person of Whom Mary was Mother.  John MacArthur wrote “It’s heretical to call the blood of Jesus Christ the blood of God, and it demonstrates a failure to understand what theologians have called the hypostatic union, that is the God-man union in Christ.”  Ironically, it is MacArthur’s sentence here which is heretical precisely because he himself fails to understand the hypostatic union a consequence of which is that whatever is the property of Jesus in either of His natures is His property as a Person and can be attributed to Him as such even when speaking of Him in terms of the other nature.  For example, a counterpart in the Scriptures to calling Mary the Mother of God (an equivalent of which also appears in the Scriptures in Luke 1:43) is when Jesus tells Nicodemus “And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven” thus identifying Himself by His humanity in the same breathe in which He references His omnipresence. 

Finally, it is because of His suspicion of the Catholic tradition of the first millennium that MacArthur refuses to acknowledge that Christ’s offering of His blood is not just metynomic language for His death on earth, but is rather referring to the one offering Jesus made in His priestly office in the Heavenly Tabernacle in eternity.  If he acknowledged that, then He would have to admit that it is from that offering in the Heavenly Tabernacle, which being situated in eternity is therefore equidistant to every single point in time in history from Creation until the Last Judgement that the benefits of Christ’s Atonement come to us where we are in space and time.  This would be admitting the foundation of the Catholic understanding of the Eucharist (the first millennium understanding before it got twisted into a caricature of itself in the late Middle Ages) that the earthly offering of bread and wine in the Eucharist is mystically united to Christ’s Heavenly oblation so that when the faithful receive the bread and wine, Christ’s one sacrifice becomes the meal that sustains the new life as Jesus explained in His Bread of Life Discourse in John 6, which completes the correspondence of the New Testament sacrifice with those of the Old Covenant.  Slaying of animal – Crucifixion.  Offering of blood on altar/Mercy Seat – Offering of blood in Heavenly Tabernacle.  Eating of the sacrifice – the Eucharistic meal.

One might think from this that MacArthur must at least sound in the teachings that were important in the Reformation.  MacArthur certainly sees himself as a champion of Reformation orthodoxy.  When Hank Hanegraaff, Walter Martin’s successor at the Christian Research Institute, joined the Eastern Orthodox Church in 2017 MacArthur acted as if Hanegraaff had converted to Islam or Buddhism or just apostatized.  Hanegraaff, quite capable of defending himself, provided clips from MacArthur’s remarks in his response. By joining the Eastern Orthodox Church, MacArthur felt, Hanegraaff had abandoned or was close to abandoning the Gospel.  Not the Gospel as St. Paul identified it in 1 Corinthians 15, that Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures, and was buried, and rose again the third day according to the Scriptures, of course, because that Gospel is confessed in the Nicene Creed which Eastern Orthodoxy confesses, but the doctrine of justification by faith alone. 

Justification by faith alone is, of course, a central doctrine if not the central doctrine of the Reformation.  While it was not until the sixteenth century that it was put in that wording it is essentially identical to St. Paul’s doctrine of justification by faith and not by works.  In St. Paul’s epistles, especially Romans, it is stressed that justification is by faith and not by works.  It has to be by faith and not by works, St. Paul argued, because only then can it be by grace, that is, by God’s favour, a gift freely bestowed.  If it were by our works it would be a wage or reward rather than a gift.  This is an important truth and, indeed, in Ephesians 2:8-9 St. Paul says that salvation, which is larger than justification, is a gift of grace by faith and not works.  The importance of this truth should not be minimized, but it does need to be kept in perspective.  It is a truth about what is sometimes called the mechanics of salvation.  The Gospel is the Good News of that salvation proclaimed to the world of sinners, Jew first then Greek.  Its content is Jesus Christ, the Son of God, Who He is and what He did.  The Gospel is all about Jesus Christ.  Justification by faith and not works is about us, what we believe and what we do or rather what we don’t do to receive what Jesus Christ has done.  It is an important truth, but truths in which we are the subject rather than Jesus Christ are not on par with the Gospel truths about Jesus Christ and we ought not to make them out as if they were.  The evangelical Protestant habit of referring to the doctrine of justification by faith alone as if it were itself the Gospel rather a truth about ourselves derived from the Gospel is a very bad one.  Any truth can become a heresy when it is taken out of its proper context.  The proper context for Sola Fide is as the answer to the question “what is the hand with which we reach out and appropriate to ourselves the gift of salvation that God has given to us in Jesus Christ” because this is the role that belongs uniquely to faith. 

In his negative remarks on Hanegraaff’s chrismation into Eastern Orthodoxy MacArthur treated justification by faith alone as an essential article of faith to which one must formally subscribe to be a Christian.  How much is such subscription worth, however, when you affirm the doctrine formally while stripping it of all real meaning?

One of John MacArthur’s best known books was The Gospel According to Jesus, first published by Zondervan in 1988.  This book was his response to a real problem afflicting evangelicalism.  MacArthur called the problem “easy believism” but it would have been more accurately called “mass production evangelism” because it was basically large-scale evangelism, designed to get as many conversions as possible no matter how shallow, through a lowest-common denominator approach to the Christian message. Had MacArthur written a book denouncing the factory assembly-line approach to evangelism and its bad “decisionism” theology and tracing it back to the neo-Pelagianism of Charles G. Finney in the early nineteenth century it could have been a very worthy volume.  It would have been a completely different book from The Gospel According to Jesus, however.  Instead, MacArthur’s book retained the basic structure of evangelical decisionism but called for the decision to be defined in the much more demanding terms of total commitment, which arguably merely returned it to the point at which it went wrong in the teachings of Finney.  MacArthur wed this with a type of Dortian Calvinism that is entirely incompatible with it producing theological incoherency.   He is heavily indebted to heretical, liberal, “God is dead” theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer for his thesis, although Bonhoeffer’s  The Cost of Discipleship is not listed in the bibliography, at least in my copy (the 1989 paperback edition), nor is Bonhoeffer listed in the index. There was a revival of interest in Bonhoeffer at the time MacArthur was writing this book, brought about in part by the dishonest promotion of Bonhoeffer as a “martyr.”  A martyr is someone who is put to death for his faith.  Bonhoeffer was not executed for his faith but for his political activities, including his involvement whether actual or merely assumed due to his associations in an assassination plot.  No matter how worthy political activism may be or how deserving of assassination an intended target may happen to be it does not make the person executed for such into a martyr, much less does it transform a heretical theologian into a sound one. Nor did MacArthur succeed in turning Bonhoeffer’s bad theology sound by slapping lipstick on the pig and rebranding it in The Gospel According to Jesus.

In The Gospel According to Jesus, MacArthur affirmed justification by faith alone as an essential article of faith, but gutted it of all its meaning.  Remember that Romans St. Paul argued that justification had to be by faith and not by works so that it might be by grace and therefore a gift rather than a wage.  A gift is something that someone gives and another person receives.  It is not something that one person gives to another in exchange for something else.  MacArthur however wrote “The important truth to grasp is that saving faith is an exchange of all that we are for all that Christ is.” (p. 143).  This does not describe the giving and receiving of a gift but is precisely the sort of transaction that St. Paul says that justification/salvation is not.  In his next sentence MacArthur says “We need to understand that this does not mean we barter for eternal life.”  However, when you say “the water is full of sodium chloride” you cannot clarify your sentence by adding “this does not mean that it is salty” because this is contradicting not explaining yourself and this is the case with MacArthur.  A barter is precisely what MacArthur had described in the first sentence.  Nor is this the only place in this book where he speaks of salvation as a two-way exchange.  Clearly the man who pastors Grace Community Church and whose radio program is entitled Grace to You understands the word grace rather differently from St. Paul.  Since he has difficulty with the entire concept of a gift of grace that is St. Paul’s reason for stressing justification by faith without works it is not surprising that MacArthur’s book is also chock full of statements like this “True faith is humble, submissive, obedience.” (p. 140).  Note that this does not say that true faith is accompanied by humility, submission, and obedience.  It says that true faith is these things.  Basic deductive reasoning here.  If X = Y and Y = Z then X = Z.  Obedience and works are the same thing.  If faith is obedience then faith is works.  If faith is works, then saying that justification is by faith and not works or that justification is by faith alone is utterly meaningless.  It would be one thing if this were a one-time slip of the pen, but is basically what MacArthur argues for throughout the entire book.  Nor is he merely saying what Jesus said when He answered the question of “what shall we do, that we may work the works of God?” with “This is the work of God, that ye believe in him whom he sent.” (Jn. 6:28-29).  Indeed, his intent is clearly the opposite of Jesus’ in this passage. 

Ironically, much of this book is dedicated to justifying disobedience, disobedience, that is, to Matt. 7:1.  True, as is indicated elsewhere in the New Testament or even in the verses that immediately follow, Jesus did not intent to prohibit all judgement in this verse.  However, statements like “If a person declares he has trusted Christ as Savior [sic], no one challenges his testimony, regardless of how inconsistent his life-style may be with God’s Word” (p. 59) variations of which complaint are found repeatedly in these pages are evidently calling for a kind of judgement that if it is not fall under Jesus’ prohibition, nothing does.

The title of the second chapter “He Calls for a New Birth” displays just how muddled MacArthur’s theology is in this book.  When Jesus told Nicodemus that he must be born again this was not a call for a new birth.  It was an indicative statement of the necessity of the new birth.  A call for a new birth would take the form of Jesus telling Nicodemus that he requires a new birth from Nicodemus, that Nicodemus is capable of meeting the requirement and needs to undergo such a birth to meet the requirement.  That, however, is not the conversation Nicodemus and Jesus had.  Nicodemus does not understand Jesus’ statement and when he asks for clarification Jesus tells him that the new birth is the work of the Holy Spirit, and is like the wind which blows where it blows, and can be identified by its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it going (Jn. 3:8).  If the new birth is the work of the Holy Spirit, it is not something Jesus calls for from us.  Jesus does identify in this same passage where our responsibility lies and that is to believe in Him.  MacArthur’s attempt to confuse the simplicity of what is conveyed in this part of the interview involves a textbook example of the meaning of eisegesis “In order to look at the bronze snake on the pole, they had to drag themselves to where they could see it.  They were in no position to glance flippantly at the pole and then proceed with lives of rebellion.” (p. 46) Exposition like this makes one wonder what the expositor was smoking at the time he wrote it.  Oddly, MacArthur’s treatment of the new birth in this chapter is very much at odds with his Reformed theology in which regeneration is very much a sovereign act of the Holy Spirit.

Less oddly, he divorces regeneration from baptism.  With regards to the water of John 3:5 he writes “This has nothing to do with water or baptism – H2O. It cannot be accomplished by a bath” (p. 40).  This comes from his Hyper-Protestantism.  That regeneration is a work that the Holy Spirit accomplishes, that baptism is the sign and seal of this work, and that as a Gospel Sacrament it is used instrumentally to convey the grace it signifies is not merely the Roman understanding but the Catholic understanding of the entire Church of the first millennium.  It is also the understanding of the Lutherans, Anglicans, and even the more orthodox of the Reformed.  Dr. Luther and the English Reformers saw no contradiction between this and their doctrine of justification because there is no contradiction.  There is no contradiction for two reasons, a) Baptism is a Sacrament not a work, and b) the role of Sacraments such as Baptism in salvation is not the same as that of faith.  Faith is the instrument we use to appropriate the gifts God gives us in His grace.  Sacraments and the Church that administers them are like the Word proclaimed the instruments that God uses to give us those gifts.

If in his error discussed in the previous paragraph MacArthur departs from where the traditions of the Magisterial Reformation are in full agreement with Rome and not only Rome but the entire Catholic tradition when it comes to assurance of salvation he departs from the Reformation tradition on what was one of the most important issues in the Reformation and one on which Dr. Luther and Calvin very much disagreed with Rome.  “Genuine assurance comes from seeing the Holy Spirit’s transforming work in one’s life, not from clinging to the memory of some experience” (p. 23).  This statement is true in what it denies.  Assurance does not come from “clinging to the memory of some experience.”  It is very, very, wrong in what it affirms.  This is because assurance and faith are the same thing.  It says so explicitly in the Bible.  St. Paul in Hebrews 11:1 writes “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”  While I am quoting the Authorized Bible and very much hold the position that translations of the last century or so are in general greatly inferior to it in this case where they generally have “assurance” where the Authorized has “substance” or “certainty” in the case of the NASB (the NIV uses “assurance” where the Authorized uses “evidence”) it is helpful in making the meaning of the verse clearer.  Faith is assurance or certainty of its object and content. The Holy Spirit’s transforming work in our lives manifests itself in works.  Saying that assurance comes seeing this transformation, then, is the same thing as saying that we must put our faith in our works.  That assurance is faith, and that faith/assurance is not to be placed in our works or anything else in us but in Jesus Christ as He is proclaimed in the Gospel was Dr. Luther’s position and remains the Lutheran view to this day.  John Calvin taught the same thing.  Both men told their flocks not to look for assurance within themselves but to find it outside themselves in Jesus Christ.  John Calvin famously wrote “But if we are elected in him, we cannot find the certainty of our election in ourselves; and not even in God the Father, if we look at him apart from the Son. Christ, then, is the mirror in which we ought, and in which, without deception, we may contemplate our election. For since it is into his body that the Father has decreed to ingraft those whom from eternity he wished to be his, that he may regard as sons all whom he acknowledges to be his members, if we are in communion with Christ, we have proof sufficiently clear and strong that we are written in the Book of Life.“  (Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3.24.5) MacArthur’s Puritanical view of assurance is a greater departure from the Pauline and Reformation doctrine of salvation by faith and not by works than that of Rome.

MacArthur, in my opinion, missed his true calling.  Instead of teaching the Bible, he should be peddling snake oil or selling used cars. — Gerry T. Neal

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Beauty versus Blasphemy

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The Canadian Red Ensign

The Canadian Red Ensign

Wednesday, July 31, 2024

Beauty versus Blasphemy

The opening ceremonies of the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris became the latest in a series of highly controversial events to have occurred this July.  I am not going to say much about the others as they have to do with American domestic politics.  Nor am I going to say a whole lot about what happened at the Olympics as I am merely using it as a springboard for a discussion of theological aesthetics.  That it shocked anyone is rather surprising in itself.   What else would one expect from the games that represent the apex of Modern man’s regression into the pagan idolatry of sports, especially when located in the capital city of a nation that at the end of the eighteenth century threw off and murdered its divine-right king and queen, threw off its ancient allegiance to the Church, and paraded a prostitute through said capital telling the people to worship her as the “goddess” Reason?   Note that the part of the Olympic ceremonies that included a blasphemous reenactment of the Last Supper featuring drag queens, a celebration of Dionysius the Olympian whose festivals threatened civilization even in pagan days (read Euripides’ Bacchae), and the same sort of tasteless garbage that takes place in those silly parades in honour of the deadly sin of Superbia, also included an honouring of the French Revolution. Despite the glorious events of the ninth of Thermidor, the anniversary of which we just passed, France never recovered from this disaster, not even to the extent that England had recovered from the mother of all left-wing revolutions, the Puritan one, in the Restoration of the previous century and even that recovery, alas, was not as complete as it should have been.  Perhaps there are some who might still be surprised that an alphabet soup fest took place at what might reasonably be expected to be a celebration of jock culture.  Such have not been paying attention to how the costume and makeup division of the alphabet soup brigade have claimed the field of athletics as their own territory in the last few years.

Christian condemnation of the mockery of a key event in our sacred history has come under criticism from two directions.  There are those “liberal Christians” who can always be counted on to condemn any act of Christians standing up for themselves and their faith as being “unchristian”, “judgmental”, “hindering the Gospel”, “politicizing Christianity” or some other such balderdash. I place little value on such opinions and do not think them worthy of a response.  The other type of criticism is almost the opposite of this.  It takes Christians to task for being too milquetoastish in their defense of their faith.  The reason people like the performers at the Olympics and those who approved their performance feel free to mock Christianity in ways they would not feel similarly free to mock other religions such as, for example, Islam, is because Christians do not respond with such things as fatwas and jihads when their faith is mocked.  A more insightful variation of this would be to say that much of the Christian response to this mockery has been based on liberal principles rather than Christian ones.  In other words it has taken the form of “you wouldn’t treat other religions this way, it is unfair that you are treating us like that, this is discrimination” rather than “you have mocked the true and living God, Who will not be mocked, and furthermore mocked Him at a key moment in the history of His having taken on human nature and become Man in order to save us, the world, and yes, even you, from the sins for which we all must repent rather than celebrate as you are now doing, and if you don’t change your sorry ways and seek His forgiveness, you will suffer forever the consequences of mocking Him .”

This incident brought to mind an earlier controversy regarding a depiction of the Last Supper.  No, I am not referring to Dan Brown’s silly book but to a painting by Venetian Renaissance artist Paolo Veronese.  In 1573 he completed a very large – 18.37 ft. by 42.95 ft. – oil painting that had been commissioned by the Dominicans as a replacement for a painting by Titian of the Last Supper that had been lost to fire two years earlier.  The middle of the painting features Christ at the centre of a table with the twelve Apostles on either side of Him much like other familiar portraits of the Last Supper.  The setting is clearly not an upper room in first century Jerusalem, however, from the architecture of the room and the skyline of the city in the large window behind them.  Then there are all the extras.  There are close to fifty people in the painting, including a dwarf in jester’s attire, a few African slaves, German soldiers, and all sorts of other people, none of whom one would have expected to have been present on the occasion even if the factor of anachronism were to be excluded.  There are a number of animals there too including a cat peeking out from under the table at St. Peter’s feet at a dog sitting in front of the table and tilting its head to look back at the cat and a parrot on the jester’s arm.  These promoted an investigation by the local Venetian branch of the Inquisition which, on the grounds that he had violated the rules regarding religious art that the Council of Trent (1545-1563) had imposed, ordered him to fix the painting, which he did by re-titling it “The Feast at the House of Levi.”  Monty Python did a sketch loosely based on this although they switched in Michelangelo for Paolo Veronese and the Pope for the local Inquisition.

A comparison of this incident with the current one brings a few observations to mind.  It goes without saying, of course, that the Church was more powerful in the sixteenth century than today.  It is also evident that Veronese’s painting was not intrinsically blasphemous like the performance art at the Olympics.  Had it been so, the Inquisition would not have been satisfied with a change of title.  One conclusion that might be drawn from this is that the Church then took lesser offences in the realm of art more seriously than the Church today takes greater offences.  Which makes it interesting to note  that this incident occurred ten years after the closing of the Council of Trent.  The Council of Trent was the Roman Church’s response to the Reformation.  The Reformation primarily had to do with ethical matters (charges of ecclesiastical corruption that began with the 99 theses pertaining to the sale of indulgences) and doctrine (the authority of the Church in relation to that of Scripture, the doctrine of salvation), but there was also an aesthetic element that was intertwined with both the ethical and doctrinal.  The Protestant Reformers considered the invocation of the saints and a number of similar or associated practices to be in violation of the second commandment, that is to say, the commandment against idolatry.  This is an ethical issue because if the Reformers were right the practices in question are sinful, because idolatry is a major sin, and if the Reformers were wrong, they were guilty of the sin of falsely judging the motives of other Christians.  It is also a doctrinal issue, because for the Reformers to be right the ancient Christian doctrine of the Communion of the Saints, that all Christians, whether in earth or in heaven, are members of the one body of Jesus Christ within which there is no veil between the living and the dead because all are one in Christ, would have to be wrong.  It was an aesthetical matter as well and became increasingly so as the Reformation progressed and newer Reformers developed traditions within Protestantism that adopted such strict views as that any artistic depiction of God was idolatry or, more extremely, that any artistic depiction of anyone was idolatry, and that consequently Church buildings needed to be stripped of all adornment.  That it was the rules of the Roman Church, adopted in the Counter Reformation, that Veronese ran afoul of demonstrates something that a lot of Christians find difficult to grasp today.  Aesthetic permissivism is not the only alternative to Puritanism, the extreme version of Protestantism that stripped Churches of their artwork, Church music of its instruments, closed theatres, and basically looked at almost any attempt at artistic expression as an offense against the God Who had given the ability of artistic expression to man.

By “aesthetic permissivism” I mean the idea that artists should not be subject to any rules external to those of their art, an idea closely related to the idea that art should not be subject to any criticism other than aesthetic.  In practice these ideas quickly translate into the artist not being subject to any rules whatsoever and his art not being subject to any criticism.  These are popular ideas today, not least among artists for whom they have an obvious self-serving appeal, because of a) the widespread notion that beauty, the standard upon which all aesthetic rules and judgements are based, is purely subjective and b) the less widespread, except among left-wing activists who think they are artists, notion that beauty is a false standard that needs to be deconstructed and so art must be made to deliberately eschew the standard of beauty by embracing its opposite.  Much of the corpus of the late Sir Roger Scruton was devoted to demonstrating how erroneous these ideas are.  Most Christians are uncomfortable with aesthetic permissiveness in its bald form as described in this paragraph although there is an idea popular in certain Christian circles that resembles an inverted version of it.  This is the idea that while artists and their art should be subject to rules and criticism of a moral nature, albeit not to the extent demanded by Puritanism, aesthetic judgements are purely subjective and should not be influenced by theology or ethics.  A version of this that arises with regards to Church worship is the notion, often supported by a misinterpretation of St. Paul, that the matter of how we worship is adiaphora. Fr. Paul A. F. Castellano’s As It is In Heaven: A Biblical, Historical, and Theological Introduction to the Traditional Church and Her Worship (Tucson: Wheatmark, 2021) is an excellent rebuttal of this notion.

Puritanism is no more an acceptable position for orthodox Christians than aesthetic permissivism.  The premise that all artistic depictions break the commandment against idols can be answered in the same way as can the premise that killing in self-defense or defense of others, in war, and as the execution of a sentence for death passed for the commission of a capital crime are forbidden by “thou shalt not kill”, i.e., with “turn the page.”  Exodus 21:14-17 and 29 prescribe the death penalty for various offences in the chapter after “thou shalt not kill” or more literally “thou shalt not do murder” in Exodus 20:13.  Only a few chapters later in Exodus 25 comes the instructions on building the ark of the covenant, with the mercy seat, with two golden cherubim (images of heavenly – in the sense of the heaven where God dwells – beings) (vv. 18-20).  The candlestick was to have representations of almonds on it (Ex. 25:33-34).  The ephod of the high priest was to have depictions of pomegranates on it (Ex. 28:33-34).  The Puritan interpretation of Exodus 20:4 as forbidding all artistic depictions cannot hold up within the context of its own book.  It cannot hold up in the context of the next verse which provides the criteria which distinguishes an idol from something that is merely a work of art.  As for depictions of God, the ruling of the Second Council of Nicaea (787 AD) against iconoclasm maintained, Scripturally, that the Incarnation had changed things, He Who as the eternal Son of God is the perfect Image of the invisible God His Father (Col. 1:15, Heb. 1:3) became Man and in doing so revealed God that He might be seen in Him (Jn. 1:18, 14:9), and so since in the Incarnate Son God and Man are forever united in Hypostatic Union, God can be depicted because Man can be depicted.  The Second Council of Nicaea was a general council of the Church prior to the East-West Schism, received by the whole Church and both sides of the later Schism, as the seventh truly ecumenical council.  Protestantism’s reasons for rejecting it as such are insufficient in my opinion.  The attitude that manifested itself in the iconoclasm against which Nicaea II pronounced judgement and then later again in Puritanism goes back prior to the coming of Christ to the aftermath of the Maccabean revolt against the Seleucids.  Zealous lay leaders of Israel, recognizing from the prophets that the Assyrian and Babylonian Captivities had come upon Israel because of idolatry, determined that Israel would not only not practice idolatry again but would not be allowed to get close, and “hedged” the second commandment, and all the other commandments of the Mosaic Law, with extra commandments making the burden of the Law that much heavier.  These became the sect of Second Temple Judaism known as the Pharisees with whom Christ interacted in His ministry.  The spirit of Pharisaism is evident in the way the English Puritans responded to the efforts of Archbishop Laud and the other Carolinian Divines to maintain the “beauty of holiness” (Ps. 29:2, 96:9) in the English Church within the limits of the rubrics of the Protestant Elizabethan Prayer Book with accusations of papist conspiracies, armed revolt against Church and King, regicide, and a tyrannical regime that stripped the Churches of everything of aesthetic value.

While the Roman Church’s handling of the Paolo Veronese “incident” demonstrates that a mean can be found between these two extremes it does not necessarily illustrate what the proper mean should look like.  Let us return to the incident that prompted this discussion.  A better Christian response to the blasphemous mockery of the Last Supper than to rely solely on the liberal principle that one religion should not be singled out and targeted for the kind of mockery to which other religions would not be subjected is to stand on the Christian moral and theological principle that the true and living God will not be mocked.  To this moral and theological condemnation, however, must be added aesthetic condemnation.  The performance was bad not just on moral and theological grounds but aesthetic as well.  It was a display of ugliness not beauty.  Performances of this nature, even when they are not desecrating events from sacred history, generally are.  The spirit of mockery in which they are conducted, even when not directed explicitly against God, is directed against standards that are wrongfully considered to be oppressive, which in the arts means especially beauty.  Mockery of beauty is ultimately mockery of God, of course, because beauty like the other transcendentals (properties of being), goodness and truth, finds its ultimate expression in Him in Whom Being and Essence are one and Whose very name translates as “He Who Is.”

St. Peter commanded us to “be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you” (1 Pet. 3:15) and to give such a response as discussed in the previous paragraph to “artistic” assaults on the faith, Christians should familiarize themselves with basic theological aesthetics.  Although more has probably been written in the last hundred years on this subject than in all the rest of Christian history put together it is much more of a niche subject than its counterpart philosophical aesthetics, the field of the aforementioned Sir Roger Scruton.  Hans Urs von Balthasar’s seven volume The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics (published in German from 1961 to 1967, English translation published by Ignatius Press in San Francisco from 1983 to 1990)is a good place to start.  For anyone wanting to learn more about how in God Being and Essence are the same thing read St. Thomas Aquinas, or if you are looking for a shorter treatment E. L. Mascall’s He Who Is: A Study in Traditional Theism, originally published in 1943, just republished last year by Angelico Press in Brooklyn.  Don’t mistake St. Thomas and Mascall as starting with being as possessed by created things and equating it with God.  This would be both idolatry and pantheism.  It is God’s Being, of which created being is merely analogous, that is one with His Essence, as no created being and essence are one.  For a warning against the idolatry of equating God with anything in creation, including our idea of Him, see the first chapter of Vladimir Lossky’s The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002) but with the caveat that Eastern theology often takes its apophaticism to the extreme of denying the possibility of natural theology, a denial that is difficult to reconcile with the first chapter of Romans.  One final recommendation is Benjamin Guyer’s The Beauty of Holiness: The Caroline Divines and Their Writings (London: Canterbury Press, 2012), from the Canterbury Studies in Spiritual Theology Series.

Posted by Gerry T. Neal at 7:57 AM

Labels: 2024 Olympics, Benjamin Guyer, E. L. Mascall, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Paolo Veronese, Paul A. F. Castellano, Sir Roger Scruton, St. Thomas Aquinas, theological aesthetics, Vladimir Lossky, William Laud

One Small Step Towards Restoring Sanity

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Throne, Altar, Liberty

The Canadian Red Ensign

The Canadian Red Ensign

Friday, February 9, 2024

One Small Step Towards Restoring Sanity

We are almost a quarter of a century into the third millennium Anno Domini.  In that period the alphabet soup – LGBTTQAEIOUandsometimesY – gang has grown accustomed to getting whatever it demands, no matter how ludicrous, absurd, or even downright insane, the demand happens to be.   This is true in general across the civilization formerly known as Christendom but nowhere more so than here in the Dominion of Canada.   It has been especially true here for the last nine years since Captain Airhead became the creepiest little low-life sleazebag ever to disgrace the office of the first minister of His Majesty’s government in Ottawa.   Captain Airhead has aggressively promoted the craziest, most fringe, and least defensible elements of the alphabet soup agenda as if they were commonsensical, had the weight of universally recognized moral truth behind them, and could be opposed only by knuckle-dragging moral reprobates.  If knuckle-dragging moral reprobation is what is required to oppose such things then Captain Airhead ought to be leading the opposition.   He was never able to add two and two together and come up with four, however.   Just look at his budgets.  

One consequence of Captain Airhead’s alphabet soup policies has been a sharp decline in average intelligence in the country.   We might call this the Trudeau Effect.   It is the opposite of the Flynn Effect, the psychometric phenomenon named after James Flynn by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein in The Bell Curve (1994) that was the reason standardized IQ tests needed to be revised, updated, and recalibrated periodically to prevent the average from running significantly over 100.   The Trudeau Effect is when, due to constant government-backed gas-lighting and bullying, intelligence so declines that people no longer understand the difference between what is true in reality and what someone mistakenly thinks or imagines to be true.   Before Captain Airhead we could say in response to those pushing the trans part of the alphabet soup agenda that we don’t accept that the person who thinks he is a chicken actually is a chicken, we don’t accept that the person who thinks he is Napoleon Bonaparte actually is who he thinks he is, and neither should we accept that the boy who thinks he is a girl is a girl or that the girl who thinks she is a boy is a boy.   Today, not only do fewer and fewer people understand this, the aggressive promotion of the trans agenda has brought us to the point where there is now a demand that we regard people who think they are something other than people as being what they think or say they are.

This is why it has been rather encouraging over the last year or so to see a growing push back against this insanity.    Most recently, Danielle Smith, the premier of Alberta, announced a new set of policies and upcoming legislation for her province that would restrict the genital and breast mutilation sickeningly called by such deranged euphemisms as gender-reassignment surgery or gender-affirming care to those who have reached the age of majority, ban puberty-blockers for those under the age of 16, require that parents be notified and give their consent when pervert teachers try to brainwash their kids into thinking they are the opposite sex/gender, require parental consent for sex education and that all sex ed curricula be approved by the minister of education, and prevent the sort of situation that Ray Stevens has hilariously lampooned in his new song “Since Bubba Changed His Name to Charlene”.   In other words, policies and legislation that anyone who isn’t a total idiot, insane, under the influence of an evil spirit or a substance that turns one’s mind to goo or both, evil on a megalomaniacal scale, or some combination of these, could and would support.   Needless to say, both Captain Airhead and Jimmy Dhaliwal, the supervillain who somehow broke out of the cartoon universe and into our own and having been denied entry to India due to his connections to the extremists who want to break that country up opted to become the leader of the socialist party here, have been having conniptions over this.

Most news media commentators have joined the whacko politicians like Airhead and Dhaliwal in howling in outrage over what could be best described as the very, bare bones, minimum of a sensible provincial policy towards alphabet soup gender politics.   This will not come as a shock to many, I suspect.    Canadian newspapers have acted as if their role was to propagate the ideas of and bolster support for the Liberal Party since at least the time when John Wesley Defoe edited the Winnipeg Free Press.   Arguably it goes back even further to when George Brown edited the Toronto Globe, the predecessor of today’s Globe and Mail.   That the new technological means of mass communication seemed designed to project a distorted view of reality that served the interests of some ideological vision of progress rather than of truth was a critique made by such varied observers as the American Richard M. Weaver, the French Jacques Ellul, and the Canadian Marshall McLuhan.  It was radio, television, and the motion picture industry that these men had in mind.   The second revolution in mass communications technology that gave us the internet, smartphones, social media, and streaming services has since eclipsed the first.    It has not rectified the problem those astute social critics and technosceptics saw in the earlier mass communications media any more than Captain Airhead’s bailout of the struggling Canadian newspapers solved the problem of their heavy bias towards the Liberal Party but rather, in both instances, the problem was exponentially magnified.

John Ibbitson wrote a piece that argued that Smith’s policies were endangering all teenagers in Alberta.   Naturally, the Globe and Mail had the poor taste to publish it.   The obvious reality is that no teenagers – or anybody else for that matter – are endangered by Smith’s policies.    Max Fawcett, the lead columnist for Canada’s National Observer, attempted to argue that Smith, who has long been identified with the libertarian wing of Canadian conservatism, has betrayed her ideology.   As Pierre Poilievre, the current leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, the Conservative Party, pointed out, however, when he – finally – took a stand in favour what Smith was doing, prohibiting people from making irreversible, life-altering, decisions while they are children means protecting their right to make adult choices as adults.  That is hardly something that could be described as irreconcilably out of sync with libertarian ideals  As an indicator of just how cuckoo most of the media reporting on this has been, Ibbitson’s and Fawcett’s are among the saner of the anti-Smith pieces that have appeared.

Poilievre also predicted that Captain Airhead will eventually have to back down on this issue.   I certainly hope that he is right about that and that soon we will have the pleasure of watching Captain Airhead eat his own words.   In the meantime, it is good to see that a rational, sane, pushback against the alphabet soup madness has finally begun.   Let us hope and pray that it continues and spreads. — Gerry T. Neal

Captain Airhead, Would You Please Go Now?

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      Throne, Altar, Liberty

The Canadian Red Ensign

The Canadian Red Ensign

Thursday, February 29, 2024

Captain Airhead, Would You Please Go Now?

 Leap Day this year is the fortieth anniversary of Pierre Elliot Trudeau’s announcement that during a “walk in the snow” he had decided that he would step down and not lead the Liberal Party into the next Dominion election.  He had been leader of the Grits for sixteen years since Lester Pearson stepped down in April of 1968.   With the exception of the six month premiership of Joe Clark he had been Prime Minister all that time.   His was the third longest premiership in Canadian history.   The longest was that of William Lyon Mackenzie King who had been a different kind of Liberal leader.   King, like Trudeau, had been a traitor to Canada, her history, heritage, and traditions, but in his case it was American-style capitalist liberalism to which he had sold us out.   In the case of Pierre Trudeau it was Soviet and Chinese Communism that was his true master.   Canada’s second longest premiership was also her first that of Sir John A. Macdonald.   Sir John had been the leader of the Fathers of Confederation and never betrayed us.   Nor did Canadians ever grow tired of Old Tomorrow.   Shortly before his death in 1891 he won his sixth majority in that year’s Dominion Election by campaigning for “The Old Flag, the Old Policy, the Old Leader” against a Liberal Party that sought to move us closer economically and culturally into the orbit of the United States.   By contrast by the time Trudeau took his famous walk Canadians had grown absolutely sick and tired of him.   The Liberals were heading to defeat, Trudeau knew it, and in the interest of preserving his legacy and what was left of his reputation jumped off the ship before it sank.

The electorate’s having grown sick of Trudeau and his party should be regarded as the expected outcome when a Prime Minister remains in office for a long period of time.   Sir John’s enduring popularity can be taken as the exception explainable by the fact that he was an exceptional statesman, identified with the country he led as no other Prime Minister could ever hope to be due to his central role in her founding, and a personable leader to whom people could relate.   When a Sovereign, like Queen Victoria during whose reign Confederation took place or like our late Queen Elizabeth II of Blessed Memory, has an exceptionally long reign this is cause for celebration and rejoicing.   It is the role of the Sovereign, after all, to embody the principle of continuity and everything that is enduring, lasting, and permanent in the realm.   The man who fills the Prime Minister’s office, by contrast, is very much the man of the moment.   Premierships, therefore, are usually best kept short.

Pierre Trudeau’s son, Captain Airhead, has been Prime Minister since 2015 and Canadians are now far sicker of him than they ever were of his father.   Personally, I had had more than enough of him while he was still the third party leader prior to the 2015 Dominion Election.   Why it took this long for the rest of the country to catch up with me I have no idea but here we are.   It is 2024 and Canadians are divided on whether they would like Captain Airhead to follow his father’s footsteps and take a walk in the snow, whether they would like to see him suffer the humiliation of going down in defeat in the next Dominion Election or whether they would like to see him brought down in an act of direct divine intervention involving a lightning bolt that strikes the ground beneath him causing it to open up, swallow him whole, and belch out fire and brimstone.  What unites Canadians is that we all wish that he would make like Dr. Seuss’ Marvin K. Mooney and “please go now.”   Thermidor is rapidly approaching for Captain Airhead and his version of the Liberal Party as it eventually comes for all Jacobins.

The Canadian Robespierre seems determined, however, not to go to his inevitable guillotine without one last stab at imposing his ghoulish and clownish version of the Reign of Terror.   On Monday the Liberals tabled, as they have been threatening to do since the last Dominion Election, Bill C-63, an omnibus bill that would enhance government power in the name of combatting “online harms.”   A note to American readers, in the Commonwealth to “table” a bill does not mean to take it off the table, i.e., to suspend or postpone it as in the United States, but rather to put it on the table, i.e., to introduce it.   Defenders of omnibus bills regard them as efficient time-savers.   They are also convenient ways to smuggle in something objectionable that is unlikely to pass if forced to stand on its own merits by rolling it up with something that is desirable and difficult or impossible to oppose without making yourself look bad.   In this case, the Liberals are trying to smuggle in legislation that would allow Canadians to sue other Canadians for up to $20 000, with the possibility of being fined another $50 000 payable to the government thrown in on top of it, over online speech they consider to be hateful and legislation that would make it possible for someone to receive life imprisonment for certain “hate crimes”, by rolling it up in a bill ostensibly about protecting children from online bullying and pornographic exploitation.  As is always the case when the Liberals introduce legislation that has something to do with combatting hate it reads like they interpreted George Orwell’s depiction of Big Brother in 1984 as a “how-to” manual.  

Nobody with an IQ that can be expressed with a positive number could possibly be stupid enough to think that this Prime Minister or any of his Cabinet cares about protecting children.   Consider their response to the actions taken over the last year or so by provincial premiers such as New Brunswick’s Blaine Higgs and Alberta’s Danielle Smith to do just that, protect children  from perverts in the educational system hell-bent on robbing children of their innocence and filling their heads with sex and smut from the earliest grades.   Captain Airhead and his corrupt cohorts denounced and demonized these premiers’ common-sense, long overdue, efforts, treating them not as the measures taken in defense of children and their parents and families that they were, but as an attack on the alphabet soup gang, one of the many groups that the Liberals and the NDP court in the hopes that these in satisfaction over having their special interests pandered to will overlook the progressive left’s contemptuous disregard for the common good of the whole country and for the interests of those who don’t belong to one or another of their special groups.  

Nor could any Canadian capable of putting two and two together and who is even marginally informed about what has been going on in this country in this decade take seriously the Prime Minister’s posturing about hate.    The leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, Pierre Poilievre, when asked about what stance the Conservatives would take towards this bill made the observation that Captain Airhead given his own past is the last person who should be dictating to other Canadians about hate.   Poilievre was referring to the blackface scandal that astonishingly failed to end Captain Airhead’s career in 2019.  It would have been more to the point to have referenced the church burnings of 2021.  In the summer of that year, as Captain Airhead hosted conferences on the subjects of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia that consisted of a whole lot of crying and hand-wringing and thinking out ways to get around basic rights and freedoms so as to be able to throw in gaol anyone who looks at a Jew or Muslim cross-eyed, Canada was in the midst of the biggest spree of hate crimes in her history.   Christian church buildings all across Canada were targeted for arson and/or other acts of vandalism.  Not only did Captain Airhead fail to treat this violent and criminal display of Christophobia as a serious problem in the same way he was treating these other types of hatred directed towards specific religions he played a significant role in inciting these attacks on Canada’s Christian churches by promoting a narrative in which all allegations against Canada’s churches and her past governors with regards to the Indian Residential Schools are accepted without question or requirement of proof. (1)

Clearly Captain Airhead does not give a rat’s rump about hate qua hate.   If hatred is directed towards people he doesn’t like, like Christians, he shrugs it off even when it is expressed through violent, destructive, crime.   If it is directed against people he likes, or, more accurately, against groups to which he panders, he treats it as if it were the most heinous of crimes even if it is expressed merely in words.   While I am on principle opposed to all laws against hate since they are fundamentally unjust and by nature tyrannical (2) they are especially bad when drawn up by someone of Captain Airhead’s ilk.

Captain Airhead’s supposed concern about “online harms” is also a joke.   Consider how he handles real world harms.   His approach to the escalating problem of substance abuse is one that seeks to minimize the harm drug abusers do to themselves by providing them with a “safe” supply of their poison paid for by the government.   This approach is called “harms reduction” even though when it comes to the harms that others suffer from drug abuse such as being violently attacked by someone one doesn’t know from Adam because in his drug-induced mania he thinks his victim is a zombie space alien seeking to eat his brain and lay an egg in the cavity, this approach should be called “harms facilitation and enablement.”   Mercifully, there is only so much Captain Airhead can do to promote this folly at the Dominion level and so it is only provinces with NDP governments, like the one my province was foolish enough to elect last year, that bear the full brunt of it.   Then there was his idea that the solution to the problem of overcrowded prisons and criminal recidivism was to release those detained for criminal offenses back into the general public as soon after their arrest as possible.   Does this sound like someone who can be trusted to pass legislation protecting people from “online harms”?

Captain Airhead inadvertently let slip, last week, the real reason behind this bill.   In an interview he pined for the days when Canadians were all on the same page, got all their information from CBC, CTV, and Global, before “conspiracy theorists” on the internet ruined everything.   He was lamenting the passing of something that never existed, of course.   People were already getting plenty of information through alternative sources on the internet long before his premiership and the mainstream legacy media became far more monolithic in the viewpoints it presented during and because of his premiership.   What he was pining for, therefore, was not really something that existed in the past, but what he has always hoped to establish in the future – a Canada where everyone is of one opinion, namely his.    This is, after all, the same homunculus who, back when a large segment of the country objected to him saying that they would be required to take a foreign substance that had been inadequately tested and whose manufacturers were protected against liability into their bodies if they ever wanted to be integrated back into ordinary society, called them every name in the book and questioned whether they should be tolerated in our midst.

Some have suggested that Bill C-63 is not that bad compared with what the Liberals had originally proposed three years ago.   It still, however, is a thinly-veiled attempt at thought control from a man who is at heart a narcissistic totalitarian and whose every act as Prime Minister, from trying to reduce the cost of health care and government benefits by offering people assistance in killing themselves (MAID) to denying people who having embraced one or more of the letters of the alphabet soup, had a bad trip, the help they are seeking in getting free, deserves to be classified with the peccata clamantia.   It took a lot of pain and effort for this country to finally rid herself of the evil Section 13 hate speech provision that Captain Airhead’s father had saddled us with in the Canadian Human Rights Act.   Captain Airhead must not be allowed to get away with reversing that.

It is about time that he took a walk in the snow.   Or got badly trounced in a Dominion election.   Or fell screaming into a portal to the netherworld that opened up beneath his feet.   Any of these ways works.  

The time is come.  The time is now.  Just go. Go. GO!   I don’t care how.  Captain Airhead, would you please go now?! (3)

(1)   Anyone who thinks the allegations were proven needs to learn the difference between evidence and proof.   Evidence is what is brought forward to back up a claim.   Proof is what establishes the truth of a claim.   That the evidence advanced for the allegations in question simply does not add up to proof and moreover was flimsy from the onset and has subsequently been largely debunked is an entirely valid viewpoint the expression of which is in danger of being outlawed by the bill under discussion.   In a court of criminal law the burden is upon the prosecutor to prove the charge(s) against the defendant.   Not merely to present evidence but to prove the accused to be guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.  The same standard must be applied to allegations made against historical figures and past generations.   They, after all, are not present to defend themselves against their accusers.   To fail to do so is to fail in our just duty towards those who have gone before us.   The ancients had a term for this failure.   It is the vice of impiety.

(2)   The folly of legislation against hate was best expressed by Auberon Waugh in an article entitled “Che Guevara in the West Midlands” that was first published in the 6 July, 1976 issue of The Spectator, and later included in the collection Brideshead Benighted (Toronto: Little, Brown & Company, 1986).    Michael Wharton, however, writing as “Peter Simple” was second to none, not even Waugh, in ridiculing this sort of thing.– Gerry T, Neal

We Iconoclasts as Barbarians Against the Globalist Order

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We Iconoclasts as Barbarians Against the Globalist Order

I read the excellent essay “Stand up to the mob : Statue wreckers and their Establishment enablers..”  just now     *     URL below
attached find a photo  the Red Ensign on me … the flag our parents fought under. 
I make a point of wearing it at the GATHERINGS to    END the God Damned LOCKDOWN

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front page story on the Timely-Colonic  ( Victoria’s pathetic excuse for a newspaper )  on Saturday, was, about the statue of Queen Victoria on the precinct of the Legislature,  being vandalized.  Yesterday, we gathered on the grounds as part of our weekly  END the God damned LOCKDOWN protest, immediately beside that statue. I spoke with the Sgt. of the Leg. protective services. He told me they have photos of the perpetrators / names of 2 of them. The perps were members of the 200 + group which had occupied the grounds, the previous day, protesting  logging at Fairy Creek. No mere co-incidence that  a couple of assholes disgraced the whole crowd. A perfect example of what Gerry T Neal’s essay explains.   The Victoria police are investigating and preparing to lay charges of criminal mischief

I was tossed in to the anti-abortion thing, in 1991.  The Everywoman’s Court case had originated   in 1988. 104 and more anti-abortionists were charged for contempt of the Court Order then in place.  As I educated me-self on that topic via 4 court actions … I discovered that,  up til early 1988, the Pro-Lifers   had been peaceful and respectful. Deliberately making way for public travel on the public sidewalk outside the abortuary. Along came KENNETH LLOYD BRIDGES and another guy. From first-hand conversation with a few folks who’d been on the scene then,  I learned that Bridges / the other guy, had rolled in to town, un-known to any of the other genuine Pro-Lifers.  Bridges / the other guy, then stoked up the protesters to block the doors of the abortuary as was the fad in the US of A.  When about 104 of them got arrested, Bridges / his sidekick were long gone.  No doubt in my mind but that they were agents provocateur,  sent in to frame up the issue the way it was down south.

the peaceful protesters … nearly all Christians … were sabotaged/ betrayed as well as mis-led by their own naive leaders.    From that moment on, anti-abortionists were portrayed as the bad guys…. even “domestic terrorists”.  One of these days I will put out a book about my experience “About a Decade”.

Gordon Watson