{"id":8399,"date":"2023-01-02T15:08:26","date_gmt":"2023-01-02T20:08:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/?p=8399"},"modified":"2023-01-02T15:08:26","modified_gmt":"2023-01-02T20:08:26","slug":"%e1%bc%90%ce%bd%cf%84%ce%b1%e1%bf%a6%ce%b8%ce%b1-%e1%bc%b5%cf%83%cf%84%ce%b7%ce%bc%ce%b9-ancient-greek-for-here-i-stand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/?p=8399","title":{"rendered":"\u1f10\u03bd\u03c4\u03b1\u1fe6\u03b8\u03b1 \u1f35\u03c3\u03c4\u03b7\u03bc\u03b9 Ancient Greek for &#8220;Here I Stand"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h1 class=\"wp-block-heading\">                                      <a href=\"https:\/\/thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com\/\">Throne, Altar, Liberty<\/a><\/h1>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">                                                             The Canadian Red Ensign<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image is-style-default\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/2.bp.blogspot.com\/-ShJ56ncRijQ\/Vic7ppYOalI\/AAAAAAAAABc\/d3gWM-vfhbM\/s1600-r\/red%2Bensign.jpg\" alt=\"The Canadian Red Ensign\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Sunday, January 1, 2023<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center\"><a><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-heading\">\u1f10\u03bd\u03c4\u03b1\u1fe6\u03b8\u03b1 \u1f35\u03c3\u03c4\u03b7\u03bc\u03b9 Ancient Greek for &#8220;Here I Stand<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>It is the Kalends of January once again.\u00a0 \u00a0On the civil calendar this is, of course, New Year&#8217;s Day, and the year 2023 AD is upon us.\u00a0 \u00a0On the liturgical kalendar, it is the Feast of the Circumcision of Our Lord, falling as it does on the octave day of\u00a0Christmas, that is to say the eighth day of\u00a0Christmas\u00a0when &#8220;eight maids a-milking&#8221; is one&#8217;s true love&#8217;s gift by the old carol and, more relevantly, when Jesus was circumcised in accordance with the prescriptions of the Mosaic Law.\u00a0 \u00a0This is also the day upon which I post my annual essay telling about myself, who I am, and where I stand on various matters.\u00a0 \u00a0As usual I shall begin by mentioning where I picked this custom up.\u00a0 \u00a0I learned it from a man who was one of my own favourite opinion writers, the late Charley Reese, who was a career op-ed columnist with the\u00a0<em>Orlando Sentinel<\/em>\u00a0whose thrice-weekly column was syndicated by King Features.\u00a0 \u00a0Reese wrote a column like this once a year, sometimes at the end, sometimes at the beginning, and recommended that other writers do the same.\u00a0 I believe the Rev. Chuck Baldwin has also followed Reese&#8217;s recommendation in this matter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><br>This is on the one hand the easiest essay I have to write every year and an the other the hardest.\u00a0 \u00a0It is easy in the sense that I know the subject thoroughly and intimately and no research is required.\u00a0 \u00a0It is the hardest because it pertains primarily, not to my thoughts on passing events, but to my more basic convictions and principles underlying these thoughts, and since these remain very constant it is something of a challenge to write this every year in a way that is fresh and not one that might as well just say &#8220;see last year&#8217;s essay&#8221;.\u00a0 The title can be the biggest part of this challenge and this year as in 2019 I have recycled the title of the first of these essays, the quotation &#8220;Here I Stand&#8221; from Dr. Luther, by translating it into a classical tongue.\u00a0 \u00a0It was Latin in 2019, it is Greek in 2023,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><br>I am a Canadian and a very patriotic Canadian provided that by &#8220;Canada&#8221; is understood the great Dominion envisioned by Sir John A. Macdonald, Sir George \u00c9tienne Cartier and the other Fathers of Confederation, established by the British North America Act of 1867 which came into effect on 1 July of that year.\u00a0 \u00a0If anyone is offended by this mention of our country&#8217;s founders, I assure you the offense is entirely intentional on my part, you will never hear one word of apology from me for it\u00a0 no matter how entitled you feel to such an apology or how imperiously you demand it, and nothing would delight me more than to offend you further.\u00a0 \u00a0I was born and have lived all my life in Manitoba, which is the eastmost of the prairie provinces situated\u00a0 pretty much smack in\u00a0 the middle of the country.\u00a0 While I have lived in the provincial capital of Winnipeg for almost a quarter of a century, I still consider myself to be a rural Manitoban rather than a Winnipegger.\u00a0 \u00a0I was raised on a farm near the village of Oak River and the town of Rivers in the southwestern part of the province.\u00a0 \u00a0In between growing up there and moving to Winnipeg I studied theology for five years at what had once been Winnipeg Bible College, was Providence College and Theological Seminary when I studied there, and has subsequently become Providence University College.\u00a0 \u00a0This is a rural school located in Otterburne, about a half hour&#8217;s drive south of Winnipeg near the small town of Niverville and the village of St. Pierre-Jolys.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><br>I started on the path that led me to study theology at Providence when I was fifteen years old.\u00a0 \u00a0That summer, the summer between my finishing Junior High in Oak River Elementary School and beginning High School at Rivers Collegiate Institute I came to believe in Jesus Christ as my Saviour.\u00a0 \u00a0 This was the type of experience that in evangelical circles is called being &#8220;born again&#8221;.\u00a0 \u00a0Interestingly, the evangelicals who borrow this phrase from Jesus&#8217; nocturnal interview with Nicodemus in the third chapter of the Gospel according to St. John and apply it to personal conversion tend to avoid the term &#8220;believe&#8221;, so emphasized in the Johannine and Pauline literature of the New Testament and indeed in the very discussion in which Jesus&#8217; introduces the idea of the new birth and replace it with language such as &#8220;invite Jesus into your heat&#8221; and &#8220;make a commitment to Christ&#8221;.\u00a0 \u00a0Infer from that what you will.\u00a0 \u00a0My conversion was certainly a matter of faith, of believing and trusting which are, of course, the same thing approached from different angles.\u00a0 \u00a0I had had some religious instruction as a child.\u00a0 \u00a0My family was mostly mainstream Protestant, United Church and Anglican, and in addition to what I learned from them, in elementary school we said the Lord&#8217;s Prayer every morning and in the younger grades had Bible stories read to us.\u00a0 \u00a0No, this is not because I am extremely old &#8211; I am a few months away from my forty-seventh birthday and a few years younger than the Prime Minister.\u00a0 \u00a0The Bible and the Lord&#8217;s Prayer persisted in rural public schools long after urban ones had abandoned them, and it was not until my sixth year that the Supreme Court of Canada gained the same power to remove these things from the schools that its American counterpart had had and had exercised around the time my dad was born, and it was much later that it began exercising those powers the way the American court had done decades earlier.\u00a0 \u00a0At any rate, in my early teens I had gained a deeper understanding of the message of the Christian faith from the Gideons&#8217; New Testament that I had been given &#8211; in school &#8211; when I was twelve, and books by Christian writers such as Nicky Cruz, Billy Graham and Hal Lindsey that I had borrowed from the library.\u00a0 \u00a0I had come to understand that Christianity taught that God is good, that He made the world and us in it good, that we had made ourselves bad by abusing the free will He had given us and sinning, but that God in His love had given us the gift of a Saviour in His Son, Jesus Christ, Who, like His Father and the Holy Ghost, was fully God, but Who by being born of the Virgin Mary became fully Man while remaining fully God, and Who, being without sin Himself, took all the sins of the whole world upon Himself when, rejected by the leaders of His own people, He was handed over to the Romans to be crucified, and Who offered up His Own Suffering and Death as payment for the sins of the world, a payment, the acceptance of which was testified to by His Resurrection, triumphant over sin and death and all else associated with these things.\u00a0 \u00a0We are unable to achieve or even contribute to our own salvation, it is given to us freely in Jesus Christ, we merely receive it by believing in the Saviour.\u00a0 \u00a0When I was fifteen, I was finally ready to do so and believed in Jesus Christ as my Saviour for the first time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><br>While I was in still in high school I was baptized by a Baptist pastor.\u00a0 \u00a0Much later as an adult I was confirmed in the Anglican Church.\u00a0 Many would probably see this as two steps in opposing directions.\u00a0 \u00a0I left the mainstream denominations after my conversion because of how heavily permeated by religious liberalism &#8211; a compromised form of Christianity that seeks to\u00a0accommodate\u00a0all the Modern ideas that are hostile to orthodox Christianity and as a result resembles outright unbelief more than faith &#8211; they were and was baptized in a fellowship where the Bible was still taken seriously.\u00a0 \u00a0Strange as it may seem, however, the same basic principle led me to take the second step and seek confirmation in the Anglican Church.\u00a0 \u00a0That principle is that Christianity should be believed and practiced the way it has been believed and practiced in every age and region of the Church since Jesus first instructed the Apostles.\u00a0 \u00a0I would later learn that St. Vincent of\u00a0L\u00e9rins\u00a0had beautifully encapsulated this principle in his fifth century canon:\u00a0&#8220;<em>In ipsa item catholica ecclesia magnopere curandum est, ut id teneamus quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est&#8221;,\u00a0<\/em>which means &#8220;So in the Catholic Church itself, great care must be taken that we hold that which has been believed always, everywhere and by all.&#8221;\u00a0 Liberalism remains a problem in the mainstream churches, indeed, it is much worse now than thirty-some years ago, and so when I joined the Anglican Church it was a parish that had been associated from the beginning with the Anglican Essentials movement that had started up to combat liberalism about the time I was graduating from High School.\u00a0 \u00a0In my continued study of the Bible and theology, however, I had come to see that the principle of St. Vincent&#8217;s canon should not apply merely to the absolute fundamentals but to the faith as a whole.\u00a0 \u00a0 While I remain firmly Protestant in my Pauline and Johannine conviction that salvation is a free gift that we are incapable of earning or in any way contributing to but must receive simply by faith and in my conviction that the authority of the Church &#8211; and God has established authority in the Church &#8211; and her traditions &#8211; beliefs, practices, etc., handed down through from one generation to the next, an essential safeguard against reckless experimentation and so overall something that is very good rather than bad &#8211; are and must be both subject to the final authority of the written Word of God, the Holy Scriptures, I have come to strongly oppose what I call hyper-Protestantism.\u00a0 \u00a0 Hyper-Protestantism rejects not merely the sort of things the early Reformers like Dr. Luther had fought against, which were generally things introduced by the patriarch of Rome after the Church under him had separated from other equally old Churches &#8211; the Byzantine Churches in the eleventh century, the Near Eastern ones in the fifth &#8211; and so were properly distinctively Roman, but much of what is genuinely Catholic &#8211; a good rule of thumb is that if it is shared by these other equally ancient Churches it is probably Catholic not Roman.\u00a0 \u00a0It holds the same view of Church history &#8211; that the Roman Empire, after legalizing Christianity, immediately created a false Church, the Catholic Church, that those who held to the true original faith opposed as a persecuted minority throughout history &#8211; that is common to all the heretical sects from the Mormons to the Jehovah&#8217;s Witnesses that hyper-Protestants call &#8220;cults&#8221;, although ironically what distinguishes the &#8220;cults&#8221; from the other hyper-Protestants is that they, that is the cults, are more consistent and take the logic of this deeply flawed view of Church history to its logical conclusion in rejecting the Trinitarian faith of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, an irony that is all the more poignant when one takes into consideration how reluctant hyper-Protestant evangelical leaders have been to expel from their midst leaders who have prominently defected from Nicene Trinitarianism themselves by rejecting the Eternal Generation of the Son.\u00a0 \u00a0I think that re-inventing the wheel and fixing that which is not broke are among the stupidest things human beings try to do and that this holds double when it comes to religion and faith.\u00a0 \u00a0 Nobody has been able to produce a statement of Christian faith that better expresses the core essentials than the Apostles&#8217; and Nicene Creeds, nor one which does a better job of shutting out all opportunities of heresy than the Athanasian.\u00a0 \u00a0 Nobody has been able to devise a form of Church government than that established in the New Testament.\u00a0 \u00a0Christ placed His Apostles as the governing order over His Church, establishing them as a new albeit different sort of high priesthood &#8211; this no more conflicts with the universal priesthood of all Christian believers than the establishment of the Levitical priesthood under the Aaronic high priests conflicted with the proclamation in the Torah of the universal priesthood of national Israel and St. Paul uses Greek words in Romans to describe his ministry as an Apostle that can only be used of an established priesthood, and they used that authority to establish two other orders to assist them, the deacons (ministers) first, who were charged with looking after food distribution and the like, then as the Church spread beyond Jerusalem, the presbyters (elders) who were also initially called episcopoi (overseers) because they were the administrators of the local Churches who answered to the Apostles, and to admit others such as Timothy and Titus to their own order, which appropriated the\u00a0\u00a0title episcopoi from\u00a0the presbyters to itself\u00a0 soon after the Apostles died in order to reserve &#8220;Apostle&#8221; for those directly commissioned by Christ.\u00a0 \u00a0This form of governance has served the Church well for two millennia, apart from the problem of a certain member of the post-Apostolic episcopal order intruding into the jurisdiction of other bishops and asserting supremacy over the entire Church, and nothing that has been thought up to replace it in the last five centuries has been an improvement.\u00a0 \u00a0 Contemporary forms of worship are hardly improvements on traditional liturgies derived from ancient\u00a0 sources.\u00a0 \u00a0While obviously many disagree with me on this last point, and many others who don&#8217;t would say that it is subjective, a matter of aesthetic preference,\u00a0 traditional liturgies are generally far more theocentric, focusing God and requiring an attitude of reverence from the worshipper, whereas contemporary worship is much more anthropocentric &#8211; or perhaps autocentric &#8211; focusing on how the\u00a0worshipper\u00a0feels about God, and\u00a0 encouraging familiarity over reverence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><br>I describe myself as a Tory.\u00a0 \u00a0I have to explain this every time I do so because in common Canadian parlance Tory is used for members and supporters of the Conservative Party of Canada.\u00a0 \u00a0There are also those who call themselves small-c conservatives to indicate that conservative refers to their political ideas rather than their partisan allegiance.\u00a0 \u00a0When I say that I am a Tory, however, it is with a meaning that I would contrast with both big-C and small-c conservatism.\u00a0 \u00a0As with small-c conservatism it is not about party allegiance.\u00a0 \u00a0It is the\u00a0institution\u00a0of Parliament that I believe in, support, and am concerned\u00a0 about, not any of the parties that vie for control of it every Dominion election.\u00a0 \u00a0Each of these parties is constantly prattling on about &#8220;our democracy&#8221; but it is Parliament the institution not democracy the abstract ideal that I care about and this is a significant part of what I mean when I say that I a Tory.\u00a0 While democracy is an old word, going back to ancient Greece where it was used for the\u00a0constitutions\u00a0of various cities, most notably Athens when she was at the height of her cultural influence, since its revival in the Modern Age it has been used for an abstract ideal.\u00a0 \u00a0Abstract ideals are as old as the word democracy, of course.\u00a0 \u00a0The &#8220;Forms&#8221; that feature so prominently in Plato&#8217;s dialogues could be described as abstract ideals.\u00a0 \u00a0An abstract ideal is something you see in only in your mind and not with your eyes.\u00a0 \u00a0While this is traditionally regarded as where Plato and Aristotle diverged from one another &#8211; Plato thought the Forms were more real than the physical world, that everything in the physical world was an imperfect copy of some Form or another, and that the Forms could be perceived only through reason, whereas Aristotle thought that the Ideas, his\u00a0 modified version of the Forms, were not in some other real but embodied in the physical world, and had to be observed in the things in which they were embodied &#8211; for both, the abstract ideals they were concerned with were universal ideas that in some way or another were connected to specific concrete examples in the physical world.\u00a0 \u00a0 Modern abstract ideals are not like that.\u00a0 \u00a0The Modern conceit is that man has the rational power to think up entirely in his head something superior to anything that exists in the concrete world and that he can improve or even perfect the concrete world by forcing it to conform to these ideals.\u00a0 \u00a0I reject this way of thinking entirely and reject the &#8220;democracy&#8221; that is this kind of ideal.\u00a0 \u00a0In my country, the politicians who speak the loudest about &#8220;our democracy&#8221; have the least respect for Parliament, its traditions and protocols, and its constraints upon their doing whatever they want.\u00a0 \u00a0Indeed, the current politician who uses the phrase &#8220;our democracy&#8221; more than any other, is the Prime Minister who seems to think that it means his right, having barely squeaked out an election win, to govern autocratically and dictatorially until the next election.\u00a0 \u00a0Nor is there any reason for him not to think so because &#8220;democracy&#8221; as a Modern ideal with no essential connection to the concrete is whatever the idealist wants it to be.\u00a0 \u00a0No, it is Parliament not democracy that I believe in, because Parliament is real and concrete, a real institution that is ancient, that has weathered the test of time and through that test proven itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><br>Since this &#8211; believing in and supporting concrete institutions that have been proven through the test of time rather than abstract ideals that Modern minds think up and seek to impose on reality &#8211; is such an essential part of what I mean by calling myself a Tory, it should be obvious that my belief in and support for hereditary monarchy is even stronger than my belief in and support of Parliament, for it is an older and more time-tested institution.\u00a0 \u00a0 I have been a royalist and monarchist all my life, and, as a citizen of Canada, a Commonwealth Realm, have been a loyal subject of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II all my life until her passing late last year, when I became a loyal subject of His Majesty King Charles III.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><br>Parliament needs monarchy.\u00a0 \u00a0The seats of the House of Commons are filled by popular election, and each elected Member has a duty to represent the constituency he represents as a whole, to the best of his ability, looking out for their interests whether they voted for or against him.\u00a0 \u00a0He also, however, faces pressure from the party to which he belongs to support their interests.\u00a0 \u00a0There is a potential conflict of interest here and in that conflict it is his duty to his constituents that ought to win out over his duty to party.\u00a0 \u00a0Some\u00a0nincompoops think the system could be improved by &#8220;proportional representation&#8221; &#8211; another abstract ideal &#8211; which, of course, would settle the conflict in favour of the party over the constituents every time.\u00a0 \u00a0Mercifully, the King, who is above Parliament as Head of State, has no such conflict of interests because he inherited his office and is not beholden to any party for it.\u00a0 \u00a0He, therefore, can do what no elected Head of State can do, and represent the country as a whole as a unifying figure, in whose name the government elected in Parliament exercises executive power and in whose name the runner-up party, His Majesty&#8217;s Loyal Opposition, holds the government accountable to Parliament.\u00a0 \u00a0While this does not eliminate the divisiveness of partisan politics altogether, it does usually prevent it from getting as bad as it is in the republic south of our border.\u00a0 \u00a0In addition to being such a time-proven source of unity, order, and stability monarchy represents the older view of society as an extension of the family, which is superior to the Modern view of society as an extension of the commercial marketplace represented by the republican model.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><br>When I call myself a Tory I mean, therefore, someone who believes in our traditional institutions, first and foremost the monarchy, but also Parliament, because they are real, concrete, and of proven worth, over and against Modern schemes to improve or perfect the world by imposing abstract ideals upon it, a political way of looking at things that I believe is complementary to my small-o orthodox, small-c catholic, traditional Christian faith discussed above, and so, like such Tories as Dr. Johnson and T. S. Eliot before me, I put the two together under the term.\u00a0 \u00a0This, as I said before, intentionally draws a contrast with both big and small c conservatives.\u00a0 \u00a0This is not because they would necessarily disagree with my support for said institutions or my faith, but because these things are not essential to what they mean by &#8220;conservative&#8221; the way they are essential to what I mean by &#8220;Tory&#8221;.\u00a0 \u00a0 What small-c conservatives see as essential to conservatism is a set of views that is no different from those held by those who call themselves conservatives in the United States who are small-r republicans and, these days, usually big-R as well.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><br>The United States is a Modern country in the sense that it was founded by men who chose to break away from the British Empire to which they had belonged and its older tradition that still included elements from before the Modern Age and to establish their country from scratch on the foundation of Modern abstract ideals.\u00a0 \u00a0While something is not necessarily bad or wrong because it is Modern, the more Modern the mindset the more one tends to be blind to what was good or right before the Modern Age.\u00a0 \u00a0Indeed, one recurring aspect of Modern thought is the tendency to view history as a linear march from the bad in the past to the good in the future, variations of which include the nineteenth century &#8220;Whig Interpretation of History&#8221; associated with the British Whigs (liberals), and the twentieth century idea of the End Of History, associated with American neoconservatives such as Francis Fukuyama who wrote the paper and book by that title.\u00a0 \u00a0Indeed, the very concept of &#8220;progress&#8221; when used in a political sense is a version of this Modern theme.\u00a0 \u00a0This theme is closely associated with the Modern take on abstract ideals that I have already discussed.\u00a0 \u00a0Both Modern thoughts are fundamentally a rejection of the truth recognized both by the ancients and by the Christian Church that human beings live within boundaries or limits, some of which they cannot cross, others of which they cross only at their own peril.\u00a0 \u00a0 Both the ancients and the Church recognize some such limits as belonging to the nature of the world &#8211; in theology we would say that these are limits built into Creation.\u00a0 Christianity recognizes other limits as being the result of man&#8217;s fall into Original Sin.\u00a0 \u00a0 Mankind, created good, damaged his goodness by sinning in the Fall, and was expelled from Paradise.\u00a0 While fallen man can accomplish many great things and can strive for virtue and justice and Goodness, Truth and Beauty, he cannot perfect himself and regain Paradise through his own efforts, but must rely upon the grace of God.\u00a0 \u00a0In the New Life which Christians live out in the world in this age, the Kingdom of God is present in one sense, but in the fullest sense the coming of the Kingdom and the restoration of redeemed man and Creation to Paradise awaits the Second Coming of Christ at history&#8217;s end.\u00a0 \u00a0Modern thought is based upon a rejection of this, upon a rejection of the idea of respecting limits in general, on the idea that man through Modern reason and science can perfect himself and regain Paradise through his efforts, which the Modern mind conceives of as the Kingdom of Man rather than the Kingdom of God.\u00a0 \u00a0It would be foolish to deny that Western Civilization has accomplished anything worthwhile in the centuries it has been dominated by this kind of thinking.\u00a0 \u00a0I would say, however, that as impressive as Modern accomplishments may be in terms of volume and quantity, in terms of quality the most\u00a0 valuable parts of our civilization&#8217;s heritage are those that come to us from ancient times and Christianity.\u00a0 \u00a0Another aspect of Modern thought is that when its earlier experiments fail to produce perfection and Paradise on earth, it tries again, and its new abstract ideals and new experiments, not only fail again, but tend to make things worth.\u00a0 \u00a0The longer man travels on the road of trying to achieve Paradise by his own efforts, the closer to Hell he will get.\u00a0 \u00a0The liberalism that the United States was built upon in the eighteenth century was a set of early Modern ideas.\u00a0 \u00a0In the early twentieth century a new &#8220;liberalism&#8221; emerged in the United States consisting of later, worse, Modern ideas.\u00a0 \u00a0The conservative movement that\u00a0 arose in the United States after World War II\u00a0 was largely a response of the older kind of liberals to the emergence of the new.\u00a0 \u00a0It was good that someone was fighting the new liberalism, which has since been replaced itself by something far, far worse, but I maintain that a firmer foundation to stand on is one that recognizes the greatest wealth of our Western heritage to be that bequeathed to us from ancient Greco-Roman civilization and Christendom and respects the limits recognized by these older forms of our civilization, rather than the shifting sands of early Modernity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><br>There is, of course, much in the small-c conservatism with which I agree.\u00a0 \u00a0I will list two sets of views that I share with most small-c conservatives in Canada and the United States, or at least the small-c conservatives of the generation prior to my own.\u00a0 \u00a0The first is the following:<br>&#8211; Abortion is murder and should be against the law, and the same is true of euthanasia, now euphemistically called &#8220;medical assistance in dying&#8221;.- Human beings come in sexes of which there are two, male and female.- There are three genders &#8211; masculine, feminine, neuter &#8211; but these are properties of words not people.- Marriage is a union between a man (male adult human being) and a woman (female adult human being &#8211; not so difficult to define now, was that?)- Divorce should be hard to obtain not easy.- Families should be headed by husbands\/fathers.- Children should be raised by their parents loving but with firm discipline, corporal if necessary, and not just allowed to express and define themselves anyway their immature minds see fit.- Teachers in schools are\u00a0<em>in loco parentis<\/em>\u00a0and 100% accountable to parents.- The job of a teacher is to teach children such basics as reading, writing, and arithmetic.\u00a0 \u00a0If a child fails to learn he should be held back.\u00a0 \u00a0If he learns he should be rewarded.\u00a0 \u00a0If he misbehaves he should be disciplined. If all the children in a class fail to learn the teacher should be sacked.\u00a0 \u00a0If instead of teaching said basics the teacher tries to convince boys that they are girls or vice versa and exposes them to sexually explicit material she should be arrested and severely penalized.\u00a0 \u00a0The same should happen if she tries to stuff their heads with anti-white racist propaganda.-\u00a0 The criminal justice system is not there to rehabilitate anyone.\u00a0 \u00a0If someone commits a real crime, that is to say murder, rape, theft, and the like, not some stupid thought crime that some dumbass politician or bureaucrat drew up, they should be punished, after due process has been done, of course, with a real penalty.\u00a0 \u00a0He should be given neither a slap on the wrist not made the guinea pig of some social experiment in rehabilitation.\u00a0 \u00a0Once the penalty has been paid, his debt to society has been discharged, and the matter should be declared over and done with.\u00a0 \u00a0It is perpetually subjecting him to efforts to rehabilitate him that is the true &#8220;cruel and unusual punishment&#8221;.-\u00a0 The guilt for crimes &#8211; again, real crimes of the type just listed &#8211; is the perpetrators and not society&#8217;s.-\u00a0 Drugs of the type that alter one&#8217;s mind bringing out violent and aggressive traits that would otherwise be suppressed and which are known to have this or similar effects even in small amounts so that they cannot be safely partaken of through practicing moderation are a huge social problem.\u00a0 \u00a0While prohibition may not be an effective solution, a government policy that encourages drug use by making drugs available at government controlled facilities in the name of looking out for the safety of the users is no solution at all but an exacerbation of the problem.- Government policy should be natalistic &#8211; encouraging citizens to have children and replenish the population &#8211; and friendly to the traditional family &#8211; encouraging men and women to marry each other, remain married to each other, have their kids in wedlock, and raise their kids together.\u00a0 \u00a0It should not do the opposite &#8211; promote abortion and encourage every kind of alternative family setup to the traditional.\u00a0 \u00a0It definitely should not do the latter and then attempt to compensate for the social problems that arise from a large number of kids being raised outside of traditional families with expensive social programs that make matters worse, nor should it practice an anti-natalistic policy and try to compensate for the children not being born through large-scale immigration.- Governments should neither discriminate between their citizens on such bases as sex and race, nor should they criminalize private prejudices or worse try to re-program such prejudices out of people.\u00a0 \u00a0If members of a minority population are overrepresented among those convicted of crimes this does not necessarily indicate discrimination on the part of the criminal justice system.\u00a0 \u00a0If the same minority population is also overrepresented among those whom victims of crime and eyewitnesses identify as perpetrators and if the same minority population is also overrepresented among victims of the same kind of crime the problem is not racism on the part of the institution.<br>That was the first set.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The second is the following:<br>&#8211; Taxes should be low and not designed to redistribute wealth.- Governments need to balance their budgets rather than run deficits and amass huge debts.- Governments should not follow the inflationary policy of using government spending to stimulate economic growth.- Governments should only intervene in their domestic markets when there is a genuine national interest at stake.\u00a0 If, for example, a country needs resource X, which it can produce at home but can import cheaper, if\u00a0 the foreign supply chain is unreliable or there is a possibility of it being cut off by war, and interruption of supply would be a disaster rather than a temporary inconvenience, the government has a legitimate reason to protect domestic production.\u00a0 \u00a0Otherwise, people are better managers of their own businesses and affairs than government are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><br>The first set of these views which I share with small-c conservatives I consider to be by far the most important and essential of the two.\u00a0 \u00a0 Small-c conservatives tend to think it is the other way around.\u00a0 \u00a0 This is yet another reason why I prefer &#8220;Tory&#8221; as I have explained it, to &#8220;conservative&#8221;. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><br>Happy New Year!God Save the King! &#8212;  <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.blogger.com\/profile\/12137796641408373451\">Gerry T. Neal<\/a> <\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Throne, Altar, Liberty The Canadian Red Ensign Sunday, January 1, 2023 \u1f10\u03bd\u03c4\u03b1\u1fe6\u03b8\u03b1 \u1f35\u03c3\u03c4\u03b7\u03bc\u03b9 Ancient Greek for &#8220;Here I Stand It is the Kalends of January once again.\u00a0 \u00a0On the civil calendar this is, of course, New Year&#8217;s Day, and the &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/?p=8399\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2896,4539,4542,1121,3324,4541,4544,4545,2573,3245,4543,4540,3622,1385,4538,2899],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8399"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8399"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8399\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8400,"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8399\/revisions\/8400"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<br />
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