As my old pastor put it perfectly, liberal is from the word for “free”. A liberal is is one with whom you are free to agree. Scratch one and beneath the veneer you find a nazi.
Check out the Catholic Herald. Chad Pecknold explains the hornet’s nest which the author of the Harry Potter books, J.K. Rowling, infuriated with a single tweet. Rowland supported a woman who was fired from her job and excoriated by a British court for saying that biological sex can’t be changed.
Dress however you please.
Call yourself whatever you like.
Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you.
Live your best life in peace and security.
But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real? #IStandWithMaya #ThisIsNotADrill— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) December 19, 2019
I urge you to read Pecknold.
However, before you click away (come back sometime!) let this be a lesson to every reader.
Rowland is no conservative. Nevertheless, she stated a plain, common sense fact and the lib Left and trans and homosexualists are bringing the sky down on her for it.
This is how fast the lib Left turns on anyone who strays from their ephemeral orthodoxies.
The quasi-religious fanaticism of the lib Left, where abortion is a sacrament, gender is a variable vestment, and sterility a red-hot flaming idol, demands compliance or with your shaven head you will be whipped through the byways.
This is true in the Church as well.
Remember how Fishwrap’s official tricoteuse Madame Defarge called for Pecknold to be fired from his position at CUA. He had to be made an unperson for his crimethought.
Si vis pacem para bellum!
Merry Christmas!
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At Westminster School I discovered early on at the hands of the famous Dr. Rae that there is nothing so illiberal as a liberal who meets someone who disagrees with him.
The reason is that if your only reference point is your own beliefs, dialogue is impossible. Only conservatives can dialogue because their starting point is that right-and-wrong existsoutside themselves and they are not therefore the owners of it.
The Left simultaneously holds that sex can be changed at will, but that sexual orientation is immutable and any attempts to help someone change their attractions should be outlawed.
It becomes increasing clear that, in the West, priests will eventually thrown in prison for helping people who come to them for confession or counseling over homosexual and transsexual issues. Canada and the UK can arrest/fine people for saying the wrong thing. Various local governments are cracking down on religious freedom with hate crime/ anti free-speech laws. A priest in the US in being blamed for the suicide of a young woman who had SSA because of how he counseled her.
The trial case is not hard to imagine: a priest counsels an SSA or trans person and the person ends up committing suicide. The family of the poor person goes after the priest in anger and some DA is only too eager to prosecute. The priest ends up in jail. It’s coming, and considering that we are talking about a group at elevated risk of suicide, it will probably not be an isolated incident.
The public is already enraged at the Church because of the abuse scandal, and few will speak up. The active homosexuals in the clergy will most likely not defend their brother priests who are a thorn in their side and a reminder of the unchanging law of God.
chantgirl says:
The Left simultaneously holds that sex can be changed at will, but that sexual orientation is immutable and any attempts to help someone change their attractions should be outlawed.
Excellent point.
They also accuse anyone questioning Global Warming of being anti-science but insist that gender has no DNA basis.
Leftists and the new Cult of LGBTism have abandoned even the principles of classical liberalism(if ever they valued them). They have no first principles upon which their philosophy is founded. Hence, there isn’t even an internal coherence or interior logic to their beliefs. This is also why for these leftists the end always justifies the means. This is how we get Antifa and the like, as well as the LGBT activist groups that have zero capacity for self-reflection when it comes to questioning the legitimacy of the actions they employ in the pursuit of their “ideals”.
An interesting side-note. On Twitter recently, someone noticed that the imagery that makes up the backdrop/banner for J.K Rowling’s Twitter account are in fact illustrations from several tarot cards from Aleister Crowley’s tarot deck(a.k.a : Book of Thoth). If I had any hesitation before about letting my kids read Harry Potter, there is now NO way that I would expose my kids to that.
And yet, Rowling once posted that Albus Dumbledor had SSA, though in the novels (and so far in the “Fantastic Beasts” movies) he as never acted on them. Actually, as far as I know, her world of muggles and wizards has always depicted “magic” as merely another human faculty (i.e., a gift of the Holy Spirit) to be used for evil – or wisely for good. Evil has never been made as a “positive thing”, in any of those stories – always as destructive to those who succumb to it.
Dear Chantgirl and robtbrown,
You are definitely onto something. This list of internal contradictions must be enlarged.
The Chicken
There are other famous feminists who share Rowling’s view. Germaine Greer said last year “Apparently people have decided that because I don’t think that post-operative transgender men are women, I’m not to be allowed to talk. I’m not saying that people should not be allowed to go through that procedure, what I’m saying is it doesn’t make them a woman.” and recently “If you’re a 50-year-old truck driver who’s had four children with a wife and you’ve decided the whole time you’ve been a woman, I think you’re probably wrong,”
Somehow I am reminded of the organisation in the UK the Paedophile Information Exchange, which existed from 1974 to 1984, and was for a time accepted by the National Council for Civil Liberties. We were told that they had a ‘legitimate point of view’, and much was made of mores in Ancient Greece. Many of the members of PIE were subsequently jailed.
Scratch a liberal hard enough and you’ll watch a fascist bleed before your very eyes.
The sex you are born in is immutable, who ever disputes that is living in the land of lets pretend.
We are XX or XY. As a rarity someone may be something in between, but that is rare.
No one can show someone went from one to the other. I can’t believe I’m joining the ranks of the outraged, but I do feel it’s offensive when men say they are women. Being a man has certain positives and negatives, and being a woman does too. I can’t say what it’s like to be male and no male can say what it’s like to be female, in honesty anyway. It’s all let’s pretend. You sneak in at the last moment and think you know the experience? No you don’t.
I made up a ‘bumper’ stick that has the two symbols for male and female entwined and next to it “that’s organic!” Its been ripped off my truck (so much for free speech) and my tire was slashed while parked in a university parking lot. yeah, stoopid me.
HvonBlumenthal makes a great point on why liberals are impossible to talk to now. There’s certainly no dialogue. They reference themselves as Truth. Of course now they have mob mentality behind them, which has made them more angry, violent, and fascist. Satan uses what he can.
TRW: Good points. There is more going on with Harry Potter than meets the eye of its enthusiasts.
As for JK Rowling’s banner on her Twitter account: take a close look at the sword on the left. The Greek letters on the blade spell “Thelema.” Thelema is Aleister Crowley’s diabolical religion that, among other things, mocks the Catholic Mass and the Eucharist. “Do what thou will shall be the whole of the Law.”
Crowley was a dangerous “useful idiot” who constantly stole stuff from Christianity and Catholicism.
For example, “thelema” is the Koine Greek word for “will.” As in the Bible in Greek saying, “Thy will be done. ” Similarly “Do what thou wilt” was swiping from St. Augustine pointing out that saints don’t need a lot of rules because they just freely do what is right, out of love for God and neighbor, and therefore you can “Love, and do what you will.” Repeat ad nauseam, with similar stuff in Wicca, Asatru, and other occult silliness. They all think they are so clever.
The Lord only knows what is going through Rowling’s head.
Anyway, I used to know someone who was going through a Crowley phase, and she was always complaining about how Rowling’s heroes were an example of how not to do magic with a CK, and how the Deatheaters were much closer to a theistic ideal, although obviously them going evil was a mistake.
It sounded a lot like hardcore Ayn Rand people talking about Harry Potter, actually. Except more love for the poor misguided Deatheaters. (Snark)
Thelemic, not theistic. Although she was of opinion that more characters should have been like gods. Aeh, you hear from all kinds when you argue fictional universes.
Thoth is the ancient Egyptian God of wisdom and writing. Thoth was the “messenger of the gods.” The ancient Greeks equated their god Hermes with Thoth.
Hermes Trismegistus “Thrice-great Hermes” is the supposed author of the “Hermetica”- a collection of 2nd century “wisdom texts” written in Greek.
The Hermetica were translated into Latin in the 15th century and English in the 17th century.
In 1945 additional Hermetic texts and the Gnostic (“hidden knowledge”) Gospels were discovered in Nag Hammadi, Egypt.
Briefly, the “Gnostic Gospel of Thomas,” in which among other things Peter is ignorant of Jesus’ identity and mission, was the topic of a BBC documentary. In 2006 National Geographic ran a documentary repeating the claim of the “Gospel of Judas” that Jesus taught the “true Gospel” only to Judas.
Returning to Hermeticism, in the late 19th century the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (though other esoteric texts besides the Hermetica were involved) was founded in London by three Freemasons. Aleister Crowley was a member, then moved on to other activities.
Thelema (Aleister Crowley’s diabolical religion and JK Rowling’s tarot cards) and Wicca have most of their roots in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
Hermeticism is the belief that all religions are true because all religions trace their roots to a single ancient theology.
One more point. A popular saying of Hermeticists, and most occultists, is “As above, So below.” That saying is from the “Emerald Tablet” which is considered to be part of the Hermetica. However, the earliest evidence of the Emerald Tablet is from an Arabic text of about the 7th century, with a Latin translation some five centuries later.
The meaning of “As above, So below” is unclear, but for Hermeticists and others such as Wiccans it appears to mean pantheism and Inner God or Goddess.
The reason they are contradictory in their views is because their only commonality is that they are all part of the Culture of the Anti-Christ…they are warring factions within it. They are only unified in their hatred of the culture of Christ.
I went to one of their Womyns marches and asked various gals why they were there, they all thought they were there for a different cause. That is emblematic of their association …but when the march terminated in the plaza in front of the Catholic Mission and I stood at the top of the steps in front of the Church with a big bold sign (there were signs supporting all flavors of perniciousness) in support of the +25 Million Unborn Women Murdered in Abortion…they were united. They threatened violence, spit and cursed and chanted…..BUT they got no clear pictures of them raising cain in front of that church for the front page of the newspapers. Even in the blurred pictures one could read the sign…
Reverend Father, that’s a stupid and historically inaccurate comparison since the German National Socialists were explicitly against the sexual perversions promoted by the (mostly Jewish) propagandists of the Weimar Republic, for example the early “sex-change” surgeries performed by homosexual Jew Magnus Hirschfeld.
If you want to point out that liberalism is demonic, just say it. Comparing everything totalitarian that you don’t like to Nazis is simple cowardice. When liberalism is evil, it is evil all on its own, without any help from Nazis.
[We require people around here to have a certain agility of mind. Stay warm and well fed!]
No, in fact liberalism and fascism are two entirely separate sociopolitical systems. That’s why they fought each other in a war, ya know?
I wonder if Farmer0831 has ever heard of the US National Socialist League, whose membership was restricted to gays only?
The Masked Chicken says:
This list of internal contradictions must be enlarged.
It’s only good for refutation, e.g., being accused of being anti-science. The lefty crowd is not interested in Truth or even science. They are ideologues only interested in power.
HvonBlumenthal: Well done.
(Before adding a few more examples, let me add that an occasional commenter here, Peter Stuart, is not amused by the activities of James Martin SJ.)
The leader of the National Socialist SA, Ernst Rohm, and his deputy were homosexuals. They were key in bringing Hitler to power and were executed in 1934 during the Night of the Long Knives because the SA was a threat to the Army and the SS. Hitler and Rohm were close, and Rohm was, if I recall, the only Nazi who addressed Hitler with the familiar “Du.”
Three more homosexual Nazis: Helmut Nicolai, Nazi ideologist who also assisted in developing Nazi race laws; Edmund Heines, Chief of the Munich SA; Achim Gerke of the Interior Ministry (his definition of “Jewishness” was stricter than that of the 1942 Wannsee Conference, he was fired in 1935 for flamboyant homosexuality (note the distinction) and died in 1997).
“Gleichschaltung” or co-ordination was the program to “Nazify” Germany by enforcing National Socialist thought in schools, universities, newspapers, radio, corporations, family businesses, and movies. That sounds familiar.
Farmer0831: “No, in fact liberalism and fascism are two entirely separate sociopolitical systems.”
For your reading pleasure may I suggest Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism.”
So, your concern is that conflating the two symbols might misrepresent the Nazis, giving them a bad rap? Or it’s historically inaccurate? Cultural appropriation? I’m confused. Perhaps the parallel is that the leftist LGBT activists are as dedicated to ideological purity as the Nazis were to their ideology of racial purity. With a little imagination, a number of analogical similarities can be observed.
Anyhow, the German National Socialist party may have been against sexual perversion as part of their platform, but there is no shortage of evidence that many of the high ranking S.S officers were degenerates. Shocking, I know. As it turns out, many of the S.S were in fact sexual sadists. A priest who survived until the liberation of one of the camps (he was kept alive because he was a polyglot and therefore useful) confided years later that every high ranking officer in the camp, whether man or woman, was in fact a sexual sadist. Not surprising, considering that their views on racial hygiene were so diabolical that they no doubt issued forth straight from the bowels of Hell.
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chantgirl, Masked Chicken, robtbrown:
Perhaps the political and ideological movements of LGBTQism and Global Warmingism could also be considered as New Religious Movements.
NRMs are not clearly defined. The earliest is generally agreed to be from 1830: the Church of Latter-Day Saints.
It seems that most adherents (including the zealous and violent elements) of NRMs reject the term “religion.” Instead, they consider themselves as belonging to a “spiritual movement” or “alternative spirituality.”
To continue the theme of incoherence, it might be considered that the Global Warming and Global Mass Migration movements are quite intimately connected and are generally promoted by the same groups of people. The latter proposes the mass movement of millions from warmer climates to colder, more Northern ones, a policy which involves having to provide far more energy to keep these migrants warm in Winter than would be required in their native lands. It would not be illogical to surmise that ‘Migration is Killing the Planet!’
DeGaulle: Excellent.
In a louche Left Bank cafe, where the deconstructionist chatter is as stale as the cigarette smoke, Euro-intellectuals are reading your comment and experiencing an existential crisis. Helmut stares off into the distance, slowly chewing a baguette as he contemplates joining the French Foreign Legion. Percy, on sabbatical from Oxford, sets down his tea, whispering, “I am completely undone.”
SG said, “Perhaps the political and ideological movements of LGBTQism and Global Warmingism could also be considered as New Religious Movements.”
I’m not sure how new the Universalist Unitarian ‘Church’ down the street is but their parking lot is over flowing and their rainbow banner has been replaced twice- while getting bigger. An Old-New Church maybe?
teomatteo: Interesting. Though the UU Church itself is classified as an NRM.
That said, some NRMs appear to be self-help or self-preening centers with a noticeable ideological agenda.
In his humorous outlook on 2020 John Zmirak predicts Transmortalism will be a new thing.
“Leftist legal theorists, “woke” academics, and enterprising members of the mentally ill community will discover a new victim group. Namely, those who are biologically alive, but identify as dead.”
https://stream.org/fear-not-2020-will-be-even-stupider-than-2019/
SemperGumby,
They are ideologies, for which advocates can be filled with religious zeal.
Semper G: Is that Percy Weasley, of Harry Potter fame? Nice touch.
1. I don’t know anyone who considers the Harry Potter stories to be Christian. There are people, however, who insist on finding Christ figures in movies (cf Star Wars) or almost every literary work. There are also those who insist on finding Freudian elements or Jungian archetypes in literature. I have little use for such solve-the-literary-puzzle approaches, which I think contradicts the essence of literature.
2. That does not mean that the Rowling books do not attempt to distinguish between good and evil (cf Valdemort). Such a distinction, however, is not merely found in Christianity. Both Plato and Aristotle insist on the distinction, and both were non Jewish, pre-Christian thinkers.
3. It must be noted that in the childhood imagination the notion that there is something magic about the world is common and healthy.
Linguamater: Thank you. Percy is actually a bit of a play on words. It’s a contrast of Percy’s England with Percival’s England.
Percy’s England is: Henry VIII, Oliver Cromwell, the Bloomsbury Group, riotous university students molesting statues of Churchill, Grooming Gangs, and rampant Soyism.
Percival’s England is: Sir Percival and the Grail Quest, England Thy Dowry, Jane Austen, Churchill, Margaret Thatcher, and confronting a jihadi on London Bridge with a narwhal tusk and fire extinguisher.
robtbrown: “They are ideologies, for which advocates can be filled with religious zeal.”
I agree. Though with some problematic mass movements it’s difficult to tell which came first: the ideological fervor or the “religious” zeal? The chicken or the egg? Which-came-first could also vary from individual to individual.
During the 1930s William Shirer was a foreign correspondent and radio reporter. From his Berlin Diary, entry of September 4, 1934, the Nuremberg Rally:
“About ten o’clock tonight I got caught up in a mob of ten thousand hysterics who jammed the most in front of Hitler’s hotel, shouting: “We want our Fuhrer.” I was a little shocked at the faces, especially those of the women, when Hitler finally appeared on the balcony for a moment. They reminded me of the crazed expressions I saw once in the back country of Louisiana on the faces of some Holy Rollers who were about to hit the trail. They looked up at him as if he were a Messiah, their faces transformed into something positively inhuman. If he had remained in sight for more than a few moments, I think many of the women would have swooned from excitement.”
Shirer’s entry for the next day, September 5, is spectacularly wrong about two key matters:
Shirer wrote that he was “beginning to comprehend” Hitler’s “astounding success.” Hitler was “borrowing a chapter from the Roman church.” The morning’s opening ceremony at Luitpold Hall had the “pageantry” of “an Easter or Christmas Mass in a great Gothic cathedral.”
Obviously, Shirer misunderstands Christmas and Easter Mass. As for “pageantry” specifically, Shirer, who arrived in Germany only the previous month, was unaware about Hitler’s obsession with Opera- an obsession from Hitler’s Vienna days before WW I.
Shirer would eventually grasp the importance of Opera to Hitler, and the effect on German viewers of Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 documentary “Triumph of the Will” (that glorified the 1934 Nuremberg Rally) when it was screened in movie theaters.
September 6, 1934:
“Hitler sprang his Arbeitsdienst, his Labor Service Corps, on the public for the first time today and it turned out to be a highly trained, semi-military group of fanatical National Socialist youths. Standing there in the early morning sunlight which sparkled on their shiny spades, fifty thousand of them, with the first thousand bared above the waist, suddenly made the German spectators go mad with joy when, without warning, they broke into a perfect goose-step.”
Gumby,
I don’t see much if any difference between religious zeal and ideological fervor or, for that matter, religious fervor and ideological zeal.
robtbrown: “I don’t see much if any difference between religious zeal and ideological fervor or, for that matter, religious fervor and ideological zeal.”
Fair enough.
During the course of the 1920s and early 1930s, many Germans no longer viewed God as transcendent but rather the People, the “Volk.” Racial “science,” grievances, and the National Socialist Party were important causes of that multi-year shift.
Though, election results in 1932 were insufficient to bring Hitler to the Chancellorship. In December 1932 the Vossiche Zeitung reported that Hitler’s political career was over. However, on January 30, 1933, Hitler was named Chancellor by President Hindenburg. Political skill, political stupidity, street violence, and the threat of more violence were important causes of that rapid shift.
In 1934 Hindenburg died, the Presidency was abolished, and Hitler became Fuhrer. Gleichschaltung, the “Co-ordination” of enforcing National Socialist thought, reached new levels in September at the Nuremberg Rally.
Some say that National Socialism is a “political religion.”
robtbrown wrote: “I don’t know anyone who considers the Harry Potter stories to be Christian…”
Good points in that comment. Michael D. O’Brien’s book “Harry Potter and the Paganization of Culture” contrasts LOTR, Narnia, and Frodo with Harry Potter, the Twilight series, and the Golden Compass.
As for childhood imagination and magic, see “A Landscape with Dragons: The Battle for Your Child’s Mind” for further discussion, and recommended reading lists in the back of the book.
In late 1933 a young Englishman named Patrick Leigh Fermor left London and backpacked across Europe from Holland through Germany to Vienna and Budapest, and down the Danube to the Black Sea. He slept in homes, barns, backrooms of pubs, in castles with royalty, and in monasteries. He wrote and made sketchings along the way. Later, he served during WW II in the Special Operations Executive and in the 1970s he wrote a classic of travel literature about his 1930s journey.
In January 1934 Fermor was in a pub one evening in a German town near the Rhine. He was invited to a cot for the night at the house of an SA man who worked at a local factory and lived with his parents.
“His room turned out to be a shrine of Hitleriana. The walls were covered with flags, posters, slogans, and emblems. His SA uniform hung neatly on a hanger. He explained these cult objects with fetishist zest…”
“When I said it must have been claustrophobic with all that stuff on the walls, he laughed: ‘You should have seen it last year! Then it was all red flags, stars, hammers and sickles, pictures of Lenin and Stalin and Workers of the World Unite! I used to punch the heads of anyone singing the Horst Wessel Lied! It was all the Red Flag and the Internationale then. I wasn’t only a Sozi [Socialist] but a Kommi [Communist].’ He gave a clenched fist salute. ‘You should have seen me. Street fights! We used to beat the hell out of the Nazis, and they beat the hell out of us…Then suddenly, when Hitler came into power, I understood it was all nonsense and lies. I realized Adolf was the man for me. All of a sudden!’ He snapped his fingers in the air. ‘And here I am!'”
Fermor asked what his old pals thought.
“‘They changed too, every single one! They’re all in the SA now. I was astonished how easily they all changed sides.’ He shook his head dubiously for a moment. ‘We’ve scarcely got any Sozis or Kommis left to pitch into!’ He laughed merrily.”
Fermor asked what his parents thought.
“He shrugged. ‘My father’s old-fashioned, only thinks about the Kaiser and Bismarck. All my mother cares about is going to church. She’s old-fashioned too.'”