Archive for August 27th, 2005
C.S. Lewis’s Great Heresy
I think every reader is just like me. If I try to find a quote in a book it disappears.
So I remember a quote from C.S. Lewis’s little book, “The Screwtape Letters,” that I am going to use here without being able to find the exact words.
“The Screwtape Letters” is a set of letters from Screwtape, a Senior Demon in Hell, a retired Tempter, to his nephew Wormwood, a new Tempter, about how to persuade a person go to Hell. It is a great book for ANYBODY to read, not just Christians.
When I was in alcohol and drug rehabilitation, I sponsored a lot of people.
I would give “The Screwtape Letters” to my sponsorees to read. The same advice on the plausible excuses the Devil gives people to sin are exactly the same ones a drug addict can give himself for going back to using drugs.
Drug rehabilitation is not the only place the advice in that little book is useful.
If you’re in politics, “The Screwtape Letters” is a warning against all the exuses you give yourself for misusing power. It reminds you that you are not the genius you think you are. The excuse you thought you came up with is as old as Adam.
Anyway, back to the book.
In “The Screwtape Letters” God is the Enemy.
In one case Screwtape says to Wormwood, “You and I have never been human (Ah, that great advantage of the Enemy).”
God had been human in the form of Jesus.
But what Screwtape was saying was that God had LEARNED something by being human.
I do not know of a single Christian denomination that would not consider that statement to be heresy. According to all Christian dogma, Jesus already knew everything anyone could ever know about human beings. He could learn nothing.
I think about Lot, when he persuaded Jehovah to go down from a hundred righteous men to a single righteous man. I think of Moses when he tried to persuade Jehovah to have mercy on his people despite their lapse into sin.
A human being like Moses or Lot understands how much easier it is for a man to understand the weakness of humanity than it is for an All Powerful Entity to understand it. Try to imagine the Old Testamment Jehovah being whipped and condemned to the cross and then crying out, “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.”
I am now twice the age Jesus was when he died on the cross. I cannot hate anybody, though I am capable of doing things to bad people that would make a normal person tremble. If someone is doing evil things, I will do absolutely anything to stop him.
But not because I hate him.
At my age I cannot see anybody making a mistake that I have not made over and over and over in some other way.
In fact I cannot see anybody doing something wrong that I WILL not do in the future.
I am not only fallible, I am incurably fallible.
Buddhists have written endlessly to prove that Buddha was never in the womb, which they consider dirty. Confuscius, to whom it never occurred that he was ever anything but a philosopher, is now worshipped as a god.
Everybody tries to make the founder of their faith into a perfect being.
So every denomination says Jesus was The Perfect Man. He could learn nothing by being a man.
To me, The Perfect Man is not human like me.
I hope Jesus wasn’t perfect. I want him to judge me the way he would judge himself. But that’s heresy.
Orthodox Christianity teaches that Jesus, The Perfect Man, learned NOTHING by being human.
Lot and Moses may have persuaded Jehovah to be a bit merciful. But Jesus, who suffered the ultimate agony, was persuaded of nothing because he was perfect already.
So C.S. Lewis slipped into a very common heresy, condemned by every Christian denomination, in saying that Jesus LEARNED by being human.
It may be the wisdom of my Odinist ancestors. I cannot believe in a god who never learns.
The Closet’s Oddest Occupants
When a person who is thought to be straight announces he is actually a homosexual it is called “coming out of the closet.”
But sometimes the closet door doesn’t swing exactly this way.
Back in the 1970s the biggest hit was a group called “The Village People.” Greenwich Village in New York City was at that time the largest enclave of homosexuals on earth. So The Village People dressed themeselves in macho homosexual outfits, The Cop, The Indian, The Cowboy and so forth and sang a bunch of songs that became wildly popular.
All the hits had homo themes, like “YMCA,” since the Young Men Christian Association was at that time getting a reputation for being where homosexuals stayed. So everyody assumed the Village People were all gay.
I doubt anybody will mistake me for a fan of Gay Liberation, but I think the songs were good. They were professional grade. And therein lay the problem.
You can’t just wander into Greenwich Village or anywhere else and just accidentally pick up five excellent artists. So they found the best five they could get.
Anywhere they could find them.
For many of the upper middle class fans of the Village People, the major thrill was not that they were listening to first-class music, but that they were Making a Social Statement. Gay Lib was just getting started and all the socially progressive Yuppies wanted in on it.
Then a horrible rumor began to appear in the scandal sheets. Some of the Village People were NOT gay!!!! A lot of fans were outraged, and not just the gay ones.
Finally, the PR people for the Village People made the statement so many people have issued before and since, “The sexual orientation of individual members of The Village People is not open to discussion.”
Yessir, the closet door swings both ways.
SATURDAY’S Town Hall Web Radio
Posted by Bob in SF Townhall on 08/27/2005
SF SATURDAY Town Hall Web Radio
Listen from 3 to 4 PM Eastern Time:
WHEN **LIVE** ON AIR
http://67.43.157.31:8000/listen.pls
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Bob will be on Stormfront answering questions from there or the blog comments.
SF Townhall Forum (August 27th) with Bob Whitaker and then at the upper right of the posting area near the top, hit “Last” to get the to the last page where he’ll be posting.
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http://whyjohnny.com/audio/bobw_townhall_050827.mp3
August 27 – Criticism Is Not Hate
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8/27/05 Bob’s Weekly WOL Articles
Posted by Sys Op in WOL Weekly Articles on 08/27/2005
Weekly WhitakerOnline.org Articles
August 27, 2005
Criticism Is Not Hate
Business As Usual
Stalin’s Fight for Freedom
European Jews Have Set Up The Next Pogrom
Criticism Is Not Hate
That is the title of my program this week, Saturday 3pm at the The Untrained Eye.
You can download these programs anytime you feel like it. The magic of the Internet.
One of the sure signs of a authoritarian state is the silencing of criticism.
Two rules:
1) Every authoritarian state always begins by silencing all criticism of its doctrine and
2) No authoritarian state ever says it is silencing criticism just to be mean. It ALWAYS gives a Reason.
Nationalist governments pass some kind of Patriot Act. The very name of that Act comes straight out of George Orwell. Anyone who criticizes the government is declared to be attacking National Unity.
Hitler, Mussolini and Franco are all spinning in their graves right now because they never thought of that wonderful title, The Patriot Act, for their policies.
After the defeat of the Axis in World War II it was as inevitable as the rain that the new authoritarian regimes would base their authoritarian regimes on being AGAINST Hitler and Mussolini.
Those who oppose Bush’s Patriot Act are exactly the ones who want authoritarianism in the name of being ANTI-nationalism and ANTI-racism.
An old politico like me yawns and says, “So what else is new?”
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Business As Usual
The United States is the only country on earth which has a first amendment protecting freedom of speech. The very concept of freedom of speech is alien to every culture outside the West, so multiculturalism is a good way to wipe out the whole idea.
But even in the West, Europeans have always taken it for granted that everything must be regulated, including speech. As I pointed out in “Two Europes, One America” the red (corrected) liberal states in the United States and Canada think exactly like Europeans. If Teddy Kennedy or the average American liberal sat down with the average European, they would not have a single point of serious disagreement.
Liberals and Europeans want to suppress diversity of opinion and they want to do it in the name of fighting racism and nationalism.
Of course.
This is as surprising to anyone who has the slightest grasp of political history as the sun coming up in the morning.
It is well known that generals are always fighting the last war. So France hunkered down in 1940 for another trench war like World War I behind its Maginot Line.
It is also true that civil libertarians are always fighting the last fight. When a “civil libertarian” talks about “dictatorship” he is looking for a German with a moustache talking about racism, nationalism and anti-Semitism. If we can just stop racism, nationalism and anti-Semitism, he says, we can be free.
And he is willing to go to any lengths in the name of freedom. So the state must use all of its power to suppress any mention of race or nationalism. In order to stop racism and nationalism and to preserve freedom, some freedoms will have to be sacrificed.
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Stalin’s Fight for Freedom
Stalin’s 1936 Soviet Constitution guaranteed absolute freedom of speech. The Stalinist government also sent anyone to the Gulag for ten years, which was usually a death sentence, for saying anything anti-Semitic.
No one was ever acquitted.
In The First Circle Aleksander Solzhenitsyn recites from his own experience the case of a Jewish bureaucrat who used that law to his advantage. Anybody who said anything bad about him he denounced as anti-Semitic, and the police were at that person’s door within a week.
This man’s enemy was charged with anti-Semitism and, no one was every acquitted.
That’s one of the reasons Stalin’s Russia was such a model of freedom.
Many and many a liberal said so.
But for those of us who have our doubts that Stalin’s Russia was a free country, the term Hate Laws is frightening.
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European Jews Have Set Up The Next Pogrom
After World War II Jews in Europe pushed through Hate Laws in Europe which are exactly like Stalin’s. If you even say in a restaurant that less than six million Jews died under the Nazis, you are given an automatic one-year sentence in prison.
Any other form of criticism about Jews gets you straight into prison. This law now applies to any white gentile criticism of any group that is not white and gentile.
The ironic thing about this is that Europe will be fifty percent Moslem by 2050. And the average European Moslem likes Jews less than Hitler did.
Once again what is happening is as surprising as the sun coming up in the morning. Jews are going to be sent to prison in droves under the Hate Law they passed.
This process has already begun in Russia. A display put on by a Jewish group in a Jewish building was declared to be insulting to the Orthodox Church. The Jews were convicted and sentenced to TWELVE YEARS in prison. Only a world outcry by World Jewry got this sentence commuted to a heavy fine.
Over five thousand very prominent Russians have petitioned to have Judaism declared to be a form of Hate Speech. They quote extensively from the Talmud and other official Jewish documents as evidence for this claim.
These statements are still an integral part of Jewish doctrine. If they were in the official documents of any other religion, a person preaching that religion would receive the automatic one-year sentence in Europe. If he remained a part of that faith, he would be given a second, longer sentence.
Do you really think the ever-growing Moslem vote in Europe is going to ignore this opportunity as their power grows?
And once this policy becomes firmly established in Eastern and Western Europe, do you think that every word the proponents of Hate Laws have said will not come back to destroy them here?
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Want to be Patronized? Go Elsewhere
Posted by Bob in Comment Responses on 08/27/2005
Recently a person wrote me a note approving of my comments.
IN MY OPINION, he made one fatal error.
He said, “Political Correctness is a religion, or at least a set of rigid beliefs.”
I wrote him and then I wrote a piece in this blog about how, in trying to be sophisticated, he had justified the whole academic priesthood.
No, I said, Political Correctness is not “a rigid system of beliefs” as distinct from a religion. Political Correctness is a RELIGION.
The whole excuse for the professor-priesthood is that it is not a religion, but a rigid set of beliefs. The Constitution does not outlaw the teaching of “a rigid system of beliefs” or political bias. It absolutely forbids the establishment of a RELIGION.
So I invited this writer, who had been praising me to the skies, to explain to me the difference between a religion and what he called “a rigid system of beliefs.”
Remember, this is the distinction the enire professor-priesthood survives on.
He never wrote me again. He was offended that a letter of praise should be answered with such vicious criticism.
Don was one of my best commenters. He was also a great admirer of mine. I have an ego like anybody else and his praise made me feel good.
But then I jumped all over Don for something he said that, IN MY OPINION, was dead wrong.
He never wrote me again.
What really bothered me about this was that the former commenter and especially Don had long passed the Jehovah Bit. The Old Testament Jehovah, like other pagan gods, wants people to mindlessly tell them how wonderul they are.
There was nothing mindless about Don or the other commenter I raised hell about.
The guys I turned off had actually read what I said and understood it perfectly. They had gone ahead with what I said and made it the basis of further thinking. They had every right to expect a little diplomacy from me.
But this is Bob’s Blog.
There is no diplomacy here.
You use pseudonyms, so there is no reason for you to be embarrassed. I will jump all over you and you have every right to jump all over me.
If you are a mindless moron like “Sue” I will say so. I only replied to “Sue” because she was a perfect example of standard and packaged mindlessness.
I said so.
You I reply to because you are worth it and you can take it. If you piss me off, I will act pissed off.
If you are, IN MY OPINION, dead wrong on a point, I will tell you so, no holds barred. I expect you, as a thinking person, to look at what I say and deal with it.
This is Bob’s Blog.
There is no diplomacy here.
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