Wordism cannot adjust to reality. It is not based on truth, it is based on Truth. To paraphrase Heidelberg, every time a scientist looks down into a microscope or up into a telescope truth changes. When the Medicogenetical Institute of Moscow did a huge study of identical twins and concluded, as all such studies do, that heredity was overwhelmingly important, the head of the Institute “confessed his ideological error and was shot.” (Garrett Hardin, Nature and Man’s Fate).

An old geneticist, actually a Fellow of the Royal Society, whom I knew later watched his Russian colleagues disappear. Lysenko took over Soviet genetics.

Marxism requires that man be totally changeable by Social progress into a peaceful, universal, classless being. Fundamentalism is at war with evolution here and in the Islamic World.

The one time I simply gave up arguing with commenters here was when I quoted St. Paul as advising that all unmarried women remain sterile for life and a group of Christians here said that that was just Good Old Families Values. After all, they said, Paul conceded that some women could not abstain, so they should “marry or burn,” with the fires of Hell or the flames of lust, which he did not specify.

How, exactly do you explain that that is not Good Old Family Values? Don’t marry unless you are too horny not to is not what Mommy tells her daughters.

Jesus defined Christianity, specifically and totally, as being the Golden Rule and loving God. You do your best and you depend on the Name of Jesus. In the course of history, the Church developed a lot of ways it felt would help people do that. Saint Paul added on the Zoroastrian ideas that were all the rage in his time, just as the Dialectic was the intellectual Forever in Marx’s youth.

For the Wordist, these extras constitute Christianity. In his sequel to The Screwtape Letters, Screwtape Proposes a Toast, Screwtape bitched about the QUALITY of the Modern Souls being served at the Tempters’ Banquet.

But at the end, Screwtape admitted the wine was excellent. It consisted of a mixture of those who had spent their entire lives persecuting others who did not have the Biblical Faith and others who were all hunger and vigils and ceremony. Their constant unending hatred of each other gave the mix a wonderful tang to the tongue of a Demon of Hell, and it would go on forever.

For these Religious Wordists, the Golden Rule was nothing. Their entire faith consisted of building huge altars or tearing down huge altars.

My natural tendency is toward traditionalism. I think ”adjusting” is too often to substitute one fad for another without any consideration for the faithful. That’s why I left what was once my family’s church and is no longer a church at all.

What is never noted is that it is Marxism, not the Christian Faith, that has died because it cannot deal with new truths. It is the Progressives who cannot live with progress.

New facts will always be coming at us. But the way of dealing with reality, of asking the right questions and being fully aware there is a lot we do not know, no matter what Magic Year we may live in, does not change.

END OF ARTICLE