You may be facing a HUGE and shrill reaction to your message, Todd, but many of us our applauding and hoping we will find the courage to speak up as calmly, clearly, and directly as you have, here. May God give us strength to stand firmly on testable truth!
I feel ambigious about this subject. For a while my youngest daughter said she was a boy. (she was aged 11 to 14). I decided to be supportive but hoping this would blow over. One day she asked me to buy here a type of bra that would hide her growing chest. I refused because of the cost involved. In those years it seemed to be more normal to wish to change your sex than to celebrate it. Then, at 15. my daughter decided she was actualy female and had been since then.
Probably this is the normal way of things, and I sincerely hope parents in the same situation will keep calm and let youth and puberty rund its course. Actual transsexualism must be in the order of 1 in 10.000 I guess.
The Founders were classically educated, which is why the system they created was pretty non-democratic. (Only male property owners can vote and the federal govt is elected by state legislatures; the original construction was a masterclass in oligarchy.)
They did that because of Plato's definition of democracy (paraphrase): "Democracy is a crew of sailors who, having mutinied and locked the captain in his cabin, went on a bender with the ships rum and are now arguing about who gets to use the tiller, despite all being drunk and none having any navigational training."
If you've ever heard the term "ship of state", that passage in Plato's Republic is where it comes from. And Plato was convinced that democracy would run it aground.
Adams himself was channeling Aristotle's teaching that only a group of people who have mastered personal self-government (virtue) can ever be capable of its collective form (democracy).
Always harkening back umpteen hundred years to make your case, like as if we haven't honed things since then!! Democracies go through the Tytler Cycle and slide into tyranny. You'll note that it's religion that gets them out of said tyranny, and to my point, we become less religious with the success of freedom said religion gets us.
The correct question is, how do avoid the Tytler Cycle without civil war as the solution suggested by Gearoge Washington (The Tree of Liberty will have to be refreshed from time to time with the blood of tyrants and patriots). I've come up with a pretty solid solution. Have you tried your hand at it? Try being productive for a change!!
I was agreeing with you, not arguing with you, John. (Although re-reading my comment, I can see why you took it the latter way.) I wasn't implying that you (or Adams) were wrong, rather that his view wasn't original but considered self-evident in European civilization for a couple of millennia. What's remarkable is that we managed to forget it in just a couple hundred years.
I'm not as convinced as you are about Tytler's veracity. I think he was played fast and loose with history to make a point. However, I think you (and he) are correct that sans-God, most of the West's cherished "liberal" institutions (incl democracy) can neither be derived nor defended. As I tell my civics students: "All men are created equal" is utterly nonsensical without some form of "man made in the image of God". If you're just a smart ape, who gave you those rights?
Sorry I gave you the impression I was arguing. :-)
I'd say that to them it really WAS democratic, and certainly a lot more democratic than obtained elsewhere in the world. It took a while for the modern idea of mass democracy to really take root. Which is understandable because it's quite the undertaking, and it had never been done before.
I'm less enamored with mass democracy than you are. I may not be ready to sign on to "philosopher kings", but overall, I tend to agree with Plato. Or Burke. Or (oddly) with John Stuart Mill: "despotism is appropriate when dealing with barbarians." Although the phrasing is different, Mill sentiment there rhymes with Aristotle's.
In the United States, the sexual revolution began in the summer if 1967 and was centered in San Francisco. These social changes have continued on ever since. Just the rambling thoughts of an old hermit.
Regardless of its underlying veracity, Christianity (and most religions) provide psychological tools and rituals for forgiveness. Take that away, and you end up with all the moralistic puritanism of a 17th century Quaker (although re-tuned to 21st century racial and sexual grievances) without any hope of redemption. The fact that such a futile and nihilistic worldview produces so little violence, is in indication of how much its Christian anthropology roots still echo in the Western world.
For all the talk of religion causing wars... in the modern world, institutional atheism has been far bloodier.
There are a lot of assumptions in what you say here that I think are distinctly open to question, James. I completely agree that being Christian is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for being smart, decent or moral. However, I don't believe that is what the article is saying, and I'm not saying it either. Rather, the point is that a Christian worldview makes it more feasible for a greater number of people to live in a way that is profitable on all levels; spiritual, material and intellectual. This, we may say, is borne out by the actual history of the West, with the unprecedented levels of innovation and wealth it has created. (See The Book That Made Your World - written by an Indian intellectual - for more details.) But I would also say that this makes sense on a conceptual level too. Where Classical thinkers tended to assume that nature should conform to models that were "rational", the Biblical idea of God as a free agent above and beyond nature led Christians to explore nature itself for the clues to its inner workings. Since they believed in a Divine Lawgiver, they expected to find laws in nature. And that, of course, is exactly what they found! There is much more that one could say on these matters. For example, how there is a much more coherent basis for morality in the Bible than in the creeds of other religions. However, my dinner is ready and I think that is probably sufficient material for starters!
"...our governing authorities are prepared to encroach on our most intimate spaces, families, faith, and very lives to enforce a new, radical and utterly destructive view of morality. It is now commonplace in Western democracies to require complete subservience to what social elites deem to be right and good, regardless of reality."
"at a more basic level, this orthodoxy paints the very idea of objective truth as oppressive"
Either in arrogance, mockery, or genuinely devolved detachment from reality, Pontius Pilot asked; "What is truth?". ......and that trajectory of peaking societal denialism saw Rome eventually fall inevitably.
I agree with this article but would just add the crucial point that secularization contributes to wokeism and political extremism precisely because human beings, by our vary nature, require some kind of religious worldview (we are Homo religiosus, as described by Mircea Eliade), so that when one faith is abandoned, another takes its place: in this case Leftism, which can be decribed as a functional religion or para-religion (i.e., it serves the same function as traditional religions, providing community, identity, ritual, a sense of ultimate importance and meaning). This is distinct from the essentialist definition of religion. The big difference, though, between Judeo-Christianity and Leftism is that the latter is idolatrous (or, in the case of woke Christianity, heretical) because it worships the ideal of a Utopian society. This requires the symbolic destruction of the ancien regime, the world it seeks to usurp, which is what leads to the religious violence of the Left -- which is not unlike Islamic jihad in that respect.
Yes indeed. "Self-evident" truths are really only self-evident in a Judeo-Christian context. Equally, the modern West's obsession with destroying gender, killing healthy people and erasing national borders can only truly be understood in terms of malign spiritual influence. It goes beyond mere social contagion or indoctrination, in my view. There is something downright demonic at work.
Yeah, the magical thinking related to believing in an invisible, unprovable omnipotent sky daddy has *never* resulted in extremism, no sir.
I hate the woke stupidity as much as anyone, but did you actually read what you wrote? I find it's a useful exercise to try to figure out if my argument can be used against me. I'd suggest you try it, because Christian morality may be a valuable part of the Western ethos, but it's not necessary to believe in an Iron Age folk tale to agree with the moral principles. There's also nothing about Christianity that encourages scientific epistemology. Just ask Galileo.
Not true. It's true Christianity was against science at one point. But they did a 180 and became the most advanced and powerful military in the world as a result. If humans didn't need religion, it wouldn't exist, b/c human are like empty vessels, and what you fill them with matters!! And there's no denying the success of Christian-based western democracies. And no denying as we become less religious we become more evil. I don't practice religion myself, but I was raised with Christian values, and on reflectioin, they're pretty darn good. Do you believe in treating others they way you want to be treated? (Do unot others as others do unto you) ? Yeah, that's a Christian notion. It didn't come from Left wing communists or Islamists or atheists, as but one in 100 examples.
Humans are not empty vessels, our human nature is a deep part of all of us (and we don’t get our nature from religions like Christianity, rather religions derive from our natures). As for the Golden Rule, it was espoused before Jesus (by Confucious, the Buddha, Hillel, and others). It is essentially empathy, and any mother of two squabbling children would arrive at it herself.
Are you aware that Galileo was a Christian, as were basically all of the pioneers of modern science? Many of the so-called battles between Science and Religion were actually battles between Christians holding to different philosophies. In many cases, it was actually Classical ideas of how the world and the cosmos worked that were holding back scientific progress.
Well, yes, but Hebrew cosmology and classical cosmology are equally wrong. My point is that being Christian is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for being smart, decent, or moral. Any connection between Christianity and material success, scientific progress, or moral excellence is accidental. There are plenty of examples of people who have been Christians and argued against science, and who have been terrible people, and there are, conversely, plenty of examples of non-Christians who have been good people and/or great scientists.
The original article was arguing that it's dropping the "Judeo-Christian" heritage that gets you transgender insanity. There's *no* evidence of that at all, because what gets you that insanity is dropping a scientific, evidence-based, empirical epistemology. Christianity and Judaism are both predicated on a non-scientific, non-evidence/faith-based, non-empirical epistemology. Are there people who are both Christians and hold an empirical worldview? Sort of? But the core belief of monotheism, that there is an omnipotent, omnibenevolent, omniscient creator deity, is *exactly* as provable as a private, ineffable sexed soul (or "gender identity"). They are both based on non-empirical epistemologies.
You may be facing a HUGE and shrill reaction to your message, Todd, but many of us our applauding and hoping we will find the courage to speak up as calmly, clearly, and directly as you have, here. May God give us strength to stand firmly on testable truth!
I feel ambigious about this subject. For a while my youngest daughter said she was a boy. (she was aged 11 to 14). I decided to be supportive but hoping this would blow over. One day she asked me to buy here a type of bra that would hide her growing chest. I refused because of the cost involved. In those years it seemed to be more normal to wish to change your sex than to celebrate it. Then, at 15. my daughter decided she was actualy female and had been since then.
Probably this is the normal way of things, and I sincerely hope parents in the same situation will keep calm and let youth and puberty rund its course. Actual transsexualism must be in the order of 1 in 10.000 I guess.
Democracy was only ever intended for a moral society. It is holly inadequate for any other.
"John Adams"
As we've become less religious, we've simultaneously become more evil.
The Founders were classically educated, which is why the system they created was pretty non-democratic. (Only male property owners can vote and the federal govt is elected by state legislatures; the original construction was a masterclass in oligarchy.)
They did that because of Plato's definition of democracy (paraphrase): "Democracy is a crew of sailors who, having mutinied and locked the captain in his cabin, went on a bender with the ships rum and are now arguing about who gets to use the tiller, despite all being drunk and none having any navigational training."
If you've ever heard the term "ship of state", that passage in Plato's Republic is where it comes from. And Plato was convinced that democracy would run it aground.
Adams himself was channeling Aristotle's teaching that only a group of people who have mastered personal self-government (virtue) can ever be capable of its collective form (democracy).
Always harkening back umpteen hundred years to make your case, like as if we haven't honed things since then!! Democracies go through the Tytler Cycle and slide into tyranny. You'll note that it's religion that gets them out of said tyranny, and to my point, we become less religious with the success of freedom said religion gets us.
The correct question is, how do avoid the Tytler Cycle without civil war as the solution suggested by Gearoge Washington (The Tree of Liberty will have to be refreshed from time to time with the blood of tyrants and patriots). I've come up with a pretty solid solution. Have you tried your hand at it? Try being productive for a change!!
https://sam-rogers.com/blog/tytler-cycle/
I was agreeing with you, not arguing with you, John. (Although re-reading my comment, I can see why you took it the latter way.) I wasn't implying that you (or Adams) were wrong, rather that his view wasn't original but considered self-evident in European civilization for a couple of millennia. What's remarkable is that we managed to forget it in just a couple hundred years.
I'm not as convinced as you are about Tytler's veracity. I think he was played fast and loose with history to make a point. However, I think you (and he) are correct that sans-God, most of the West's cherished "liberal" institutions (incl democracy) can neither be derived nor defended. As I tell my civics students: "All men are created equal" is utterly nonsensical without some form of "man made in the image of God". If you're just a smart ape, who gave you those rights?
Sorry I gave you the impression I was arguing. :-)
I'd say that to them it really WAS democratic, and certainly a lot more democratic than obtained elsewhere in the world. It took a while for the modern idea of mass democracy to really take root. Which is understandable because it's quite the undertaking, and it had never been done before.
I'm less enamored with mass democracy than you are. I may not be ready to sign on to "philosopher kings", but overall, I tend to agree with Plato. Or Burke. Or (oddly) with John Stuart Mill: "despotism is appropriate when dealing with barbarians." Although the phrasing is different, Mill sentiment there rhymes with Aristotle's.
In the United States, the sexual revolution began in the summer if 1967 and was centered in San Francisco. These social changes have continued on ever since. Just the rambling thoughts of an old hermit.
Regardless of its underlying veracity, Christianity (and most religions) provide psychological tools and rituals for forgiveness. Take that away, and you end up with all the moralistic puritanism of a 17th century Quaker (although re-tuned to 21st century racial and sexual grievances) without any hope of redemption. The fact that such a futile and nihilistic worldview produces so little violence, is in indication of how much its Christian anthropology roots still echo in the Western world.
For all the talk of religion causing wars... in the modern world, institutional atheism has been far bloodier.
See article at:
https://newvinesintl.org/2025/12/prosperity-is-more-than-wealth-there-is-a-path-forward-and-the-wests-biblical-foundations-help-explain-why/
There are a lot of assumptions in what you say here that I think are distinctly open to question, James. I completely agree that being Christian is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for being smart, decent or moral. However, I don't believe that is what the article is saying, and I'm not saying it either. Rather, the point is that a Christian worldview makes it more feasible for a greater number of people to live in a way that is profitable on all levels; spiritual, material and intellectual. This, we may say, is borne out by the actual history of the West, with the unprecedented levels of innovation and wealth it has created. (See The Book That Made Your World - written by an Indian intellectual - for more details.) But I would also say that this makes sense on a conceptual level too. Where Classical thinkers tended to assume that nature should conform to models that were "rational", the Biblical idea of God as a free agent above and beyond nature led Christians to explore nature itself for the clues to its inner workings. Since they believed in a Divine Lawgiver, they expected to find laws in nature. And that, of course, is exactly what they found! There is much more that one could say on these matters. For example, how there is a much more coherent basis for morality in the Bible than in the creeds of other religions. However, my dinner is ready and I think that is probably sufficient material for starters!
"...our governing authorities are prepared to encroach on our most intimate spaces, families, faith, and very lives to enforce a new, radical and utterly destructive view of morality. It is now commonplace in Western democracies to require complete subservience to what social elites deem to be right and good, regardless of reality."
"at a more basic level, this orthodoxy paints the very idea of objective truth as oppressive"
Either in arrogance, mockery, or genuinely devolved detachment from reality, Pontius Pilot asked; "What is truth?". ......and that trajectory of peaking societal denialism saw Rome eventually fall inevitably.
I agree with this article but would just add the crucial point that secularization contributes to wokeism and political extremism precisely because human beings, by our vary nature, require some kind of religious worldview (we are Homo religiosus, as described by Mircea Eliade), so that when one faith is abandoned, another takes its place: in this case Leftism, which can be decribed as a functional religion or para-religion (i.e., it serves the same function as traditional religions, providing community, identity, ritual, a sense of ultimate importance and meaning). This is distinct from the essentialist definition of religion. The big difference, though, between Judeo-Christianity and Leftism is that the latter is idolatrous (or, in the case of woke Christianity, heretical) because it worships the ideal of a Utopian society. This requires the symbolic destruction of the ancien regime, the world it seeks to usurp, which is what leads to the religious violence of the Left -- which is not unlike Islamic jihad in that respect.
Yes indeed. "Self-evident" truths are really only self-evident in a Judeo-Christian context. Equally, the modern West's obsession with destroying gender, killing healthy people and erasing national borders can only truly be understood in terms of malign spiritual influence. It goes beyond mere social contagion or indoctrination, in my view. There is something downright demonic at work.
Yeah, the magical thinking related to believing in an invisible, unprovable omnipotent sky daddy has *never* resulted in extremism, no sir.
I hate the woke stupidity as much as anyone, but did you actually read what you wrote? I find it's a useful exercise to try to figure out if my argument can be used against me. I'd suggest you try it, because Christian morality may be a valuable part of the Western ethos, but it's not necessary to believe in an Iron Age folk tale to agree with the moral principles. There's also nothing about Christianity that encourages scientific epistemology. Just ask Galileo.
Not true. It's true Christianity was against science at one point. But they did a 180 and became the most advanced and powerful military in the world as a result. If humans didn't need religion, it wouldn't exist, b/c human are like empty vessels, and what you fill them with matters!! And there's no denying the success of Christian-based western democracies. And no denying as we become less religious we become more evil. I don't practice religion myself, but I was raised with Christian values, and on reflectioin, they're pretty darn good. Do you believe in treating others they way you want to be treated? (Do unot others as others do unto you) ? Yeah, that's a Christian notion. It didn't come from Left wing communists or Islamists or atheists, as but one in 100 examples.
Humans are not empty vessels, our human nature is a deep part of all of us (and we don’t get our nature from religions like Christianity, rather religions derive from our natures). As for the Golden Rule, it was espoused before Jesus (by Confucious, the Buddha, Hillel, and others). It is essentially empathy, and any mother of two squabbling children would arrive at it herself.
Are you aware that Galileo was a Christian, as were basically all of the pioneers of modern science? Many of the so-called battles between Science and Religion were actually battles between Christians holding to different philosophies. In many cases, it was actually Classical ideas of how the world and the cosmos worked that were holding back scientific progress.
Well, yes, but Hebrew cosmology and classical cosmology are equally wrong. My point is that being Christian is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for being smart, decent, or moral. Any connection between Christianity and material success, scientific progress, or moral excellence is accidental. There are plenty of examples of people who have been Christians and argued against science, and who have been terrible people, and there are, conversely, plenty of examples of non-Christians who have been good people and/or great scientists.
The original article was arguing that it's dropping the "Judeo-Christian" heritage that gets you transgender insanity. There's *no* evidence of that at all, because what gets you that insanity is dropping a scientific, evidence-based, empirical epistemology. Christianity and Judaism are both predicated on a non-scientific, non-evidence/faith-based, non-empirical epistemology. Are there people who are both Christians and hold an empirical worldview? Sort of? But the core belief of monotheism, that there is an omnipotent, omnibenevolent, omniscient creator deity, is *exactly* as provable as a private, ineffable sexed soul (or "gender identity"). They are both based on non-empirical epistemologies.