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Be it mine to look up to your light, even from afar, even from the depths. Teach me to seek you, and reveal yourself to me, when I seek you, for I cannot seek you, except you teach me, nor find you, except you reveal yourself.  Let me seek you in longing, let me long for you in seeking; let me find you in love, and love you in finding. Lord, I acknowledge and I thank you that you has created me in this your image, in order that I may be mindful of you, may conceive of you, and love you; but that image has been so consumed and wasted away by vices, and obscured by the smoke of wrong-doing, that it cannot achieve that for which it was made, except you renew it, and create it anew. I do not endeavor, O Lord, to penetrate your sublimity, for in no wise do I compare my understanding with that; but I long to understand in some degree your truth, which my heart believes and loves. For I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand. For this also I believe, –that unless I believed, I should not understand.  (From Anselm’s Proslogion)

Plato gave the intellect priority over faith but Anselm reverses this so that where Plato’s system leads the common man to put his faith in ‘philosophers’ who have seen ‘the light’ (Plato’s metaphor of the Cave), Anselm would have all men put their faith in God and see the light.  Of course, Anselm is simply echoing the ultimate book of wisdom.

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight. (Prov. 9:10 ESV)

The two major competing political ideologies in the west can be traced back to Anselm and Plato.   Modern progressives would have us place our faith in enlightenment figures who are experts in their fields whereas conservatives are suspicious of claims of ‘enlightenment’ and would seek to protect us from the evils of fallen humanity.

The following is an excerpt from a letter that Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of State, wrote to the relatives of a boy who survived the Holocaust.

I feel it necessary to write to you because I think a completely erroneous picture exists in the States of the former inmates of the concentration camps.  Concentration camps were not only mills of death, they were also testing grounds.  Here men persisted and, in a sense, fought for survival with the stake always nothing less than ones life.  With the slightest slip, a fatal error.  Such was the filth, the compulsion, the debasement, that a person had to be possessed of extraordinary powers, of physic and of will, to even want to survive.  The intellectuals, the idealists, the men of high morals, had no chance.  Having once made up ones mind to survive, it was a necessity to follow through with a singleness of purpose, inconceivable to you sheltered people in the States.  Such singleness of purpose broached no stopping in front of accepted sets of values.  It had to disregard ordinary standards of morality.  One could only survive through lies, tricks, by somehow acquiring food to fill ones belly.  The weak, the old, had no chance.  And so liberation came.  The survivors were not within the ordinary pale of human events anymore.  They had learned that that looking back was sorrow, that sorrow was weakness, and weakness synonymous with death.  they knew that having survived the camp, surviving the liberation was no problem. So they applied themselves to the peace with the same singleness of purpose, and sometimes with the same disregard of accepted standards as they had learned in the camp.  Above all, they wanted no pity.  Pity made them uncomfortable, jumpy.  You would make a terrible mistake if you were to expect a broken boy.  Helmut is a man.  He has seen more than most people in a lifetime.

Kissinger’s letter plays on a theme that recurs throughout his career: the tension that exists, at least in his view, between morality and realism.  Survival sometimes required a disregard for for moral standards that was inconceivable for those who had led sheltered lives.  Isaacson notes that “Kissinger contrasted the cold realist, who survives, with the men of high morals who, in brutal situations, have no chance.”   Kissinger describes the world in stark terms, “Life is suffering, birth involves death, transitoriness is the fate of existence. How can it be overcome?  Only through the personal awareness and inward conviction that we each have of our own freedom”, Kissinger concludes.  Having observed that, “the generation of Buchenwald and the Siberian labor camps cannot talk with the same optimism as its fathers,” Kissinger proclaimed his new historical creed,  “The experience of freedom allows us to rise above the suffering of the past and the frustrations of history.”

Kissinger took the lessons he learned from Buchenwald and applied them to the political realm.  Freedom is the power to defend ones own self-interests.

Both [Nixon and Kissenger] were practitioners of real politik, that blend of cold realism and power orientated statecraft that tended to be, to use Kissengers description of Bismark, unencumbered by moral scruples.  They believed, as Kissinger had once written of his 19th century subjects, that foreign policy had to be based, not upon sentiment, but on an assessment of strength.  In a conversation with Golda Meir, Nixon once twisted the golden rule into a power game, telling her, my rule in international affairs is, “Do unto others as they would do unto you” to which Kissenger interjected, “plus 10%”.  Honorable men were often ridiculed by Nixon as prissy and weak.  He preferred those who could be brutal, from Patton, to Conelly, to Colson.  A willingness to talk tough and applaud ruthlessness was the best way to become Nixon’s co-conspirator against a hostile world.

In contrast, Christianity teaches that strength is found in sacrifice, not grasping after life.  Freedom is found in exerting our will to do what is right, not what is in our self interest.  This does not make the dilemmas of ruling a nation any less, but it provides a different framework for decision making; one that is rooted in humility and the fear of God.  Is this idealistic rubbish?

The cold hard reality is that we cannot know what is in our own interest.  It must have seemed like it was in our interest to sign a comprehensive trade deal with China, to make Saudi Arabia our main ally in the Middle East, and shovel billions at our bankrupt financial sector.  What if we had tried to what was right instead?

Source:

Timeline

The Bordeaux Pilgrim (333) – Mary is absent from the map of the Bordeaux pilgrim, even in Bethlehem.

Egeria (fifty years later)  – Egeria makes no mention of specific sites dedicated to Mary.

Epiphanius (320-403) – In his Panariaon Epiphanius presents aberrant beliefs about Mary’s death as ‘popular misconceptions that he thinks could lead to heretical devotion’.

Jerome (347-420) – Jerome relates that Mary took part in the Nativity and the Flight into Egypt, but he mentions no distinct site dedicated to her. (386 A.D.)

Theodosius (530) – Theodosius mentions three places devoted to Mary : the Kathisma church on the road to Bethlehem; the tomb in the valley of Jehoshaphat and the site in Jerusalem where she was born, near the pool of Bethesda.

Pilgrim of Piacenza (570) – The Pilgrim of Piacenza states that he saw in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher an icon of the Blessed Mary, her girdle, ‘and the band which she used to have on her head’.  In addition to the other, he mentions the New Church of St Mary (Nea) built by Justinian.  This church was bigger than all the other churches in Jerusalem.  Justinian wanted its glory to exceed that of Solomon’s Temple.

Observations

Most traditions relating to the biography of Jesus are based on the NT; most related to Mary derive from Apocryphal literature.

After the adoption of Christianity by the Roman Empires, Constantinople was made into ‘the City of the Virgin’.   As early as the 4th decade of the fifth century, the Armenian lectionary bears evidence of a feast commemorating Marin in the Kathisma church on 15 August and other feasts followed: Annunciation (25 March), Mary’s Nativity (8 Sept) , her Presentation in the Temple (21 Nov) and, most importantly, her death (15 Aug).

At the Council of Ephesus in 431 Mary is declared Theotokos – Mother of God.   By the 7th century the cult of the Virgin in the East “had reached a pitch that could hardly be surpassed”.

The 11th and 12th centuries saw rise of Marian devotion in the West.  She was called Maria Regina, crowned, radiant and surrounded by angels; the mediatrix, mother of all humans.

“Pilgrims coming from Europe in the twelfth century could see the site of Mary’s original house, not its replica; the cave of the milk in Bethlehem, the source of the milk relics; the place where she tore her hair during the Crucifixion and the tomb in which her venerated garments were left behind. They could locate in space the events narrated in hagiography and celebrated in liturgy.”  (Mary in Jerusalem 2014, 17)

The cult of the Virgin reached its peak in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries among the Franciscans.

Source:

Bianka Kuhnel, G. N.-B., Hanna Vorholt, Ed. (2014). Mary In Jerusalem. Visual Constructs of Jerusalem. Turnhout, Belgium, Brepols Publishers

In his 3rd Satire, Juvenal tells us what it was like to live in Rome in the late 1st century AD.

There is no room in the city for respectable skills, ‘he said, ‘and no reward for ones efforts. Today my means are less than yesterday; come tomorrow, the little left will be further reduced.

Those who got ahead were those willing to compromise and work as slaves for the wealthy elite.

…let those remain [in Rome] who are able to turn black into white, happily winning contracts for temple, river, harbor, for draining flooded land, and carrying corpses to the pyre-men who auction themselves beneath the owner’s spear… they are the sort that Lady Luck will take from the gutter and raise to the summit of worldly success, whenever she feels like having a joke.

Juvenal lists the frivolous kinds of tasks performed by servants for the super wealthy but he [Umbricius] would never stoop to doing such things to make a living.  He writes,

…none will get help from me in a theft; that’s why I never appear on a governor’s staff; you’d think I was crippled – a useless trunk with a paralyzed hand.

The only ones who received patronage were those willing to lie and thieve.

Juvenal blames Rome’s decrepitude on the Greeks but he reserves his most vicious attack for the Syrians.

 The Syrian Orontes has long been discharging into the Tiber, carrying with it its language and morals and slanting strings, complete with pipe, not to speak of its native timbrels and the girls who are told by their owners to ply their trade at the race-track.

Juvenal despises the change of dress, and with it, the loss of manhood.

Romulus, look-your bumpkin is donning his Grecian slippers…

I must get away from them and their purple clothes… We may as well face the truth. In most of Italy no one puts on a toga until he’s dead. On grand occasions, when a public holiday is being held in a grassy theatre,.. even then you will see similar clothes being worn by the stall and the rest alike; as robes of their lofty office, the highest aediles are content to appear in plain white tunics.

People lived beyond their means, purchasing clothes they could not afford.

Here the style of people clothes is beyond their means. Too much tends to be borrowed here from another’s account. That is a universal failing. All of us live in pretentious poverty…

Men were effeminate, speaking with high pitched voices, and playing the part of a woman on stage all too well.

What of the fact that the nation excels in flattery, praising the talk of an ignorant patron, the looks of one who is ugly, comparing the stalk-like neck of a weakling to Hercules’ muscles as he holds the giant Antaeus aloft well clear of the ground, admiring a squeaky voice which sounds as wretched as that of the cock, which seizes his partner’s crest in the act of mating?

We, of course, can pay identical compliments; yes, but they are believed. No actor from elsewhere is half as good when playing Thais, or the wife, or Doris who’s clad in no more than her tunic.

—————-

The ancient Romans are something of a mystery to me.   Now and again, I come across a conservative Roman writer like Juvenal or Sallust who clings to an earlier, Roman ideal that was very different than that of the Greeks or the Etruscans.   Where did the Romans come from?

St. Augustine viewed the ancient Romans with a mix of admiration and criticism.  Their lust for glory was less bad than the “vices of the men of other nations or to the avarice, profligacy and love of luxury characteristic of the Romans in the latter days of the Republic and in the Empire…”  (H. Deane, The Political and Social Ideas of Augustine, 51)

Glory they most ardently loved: for it they wished to live for it they did not hesitate to die. Every other desire was repressed by the strength of their passion for that one thing.  (Augustine, City of God, 5:12)

Like many students, Augustine wondered what benefit his studies had been.  He had mastered Aristotle’s Ten Categories but this knowledge did not bring him any closer to the truth he desired.  Augustine thought that most who read and taught on the Ten Categories did so out of vanity and not out of a sincere desire to discover the truth.  He eventually came to the opinion that the mastery of Aristotle’s Ten Categories actually led him further from the truth because through them he came to believe that everything that existed could somehow “be comprehended under the ten categories” and that there was no essential difference between himself and god.

So what good did this do me? I thought that you, Lord God and Truth, were like a luminous body of immense size and myself a bit of that body.  What extraordinary perversity!  (IV.xvi.31)

Augustine did not see any alternative to this pantheistic view of god for he was as yet unacquainted with the God worshiped by the Christians.  Although his mother was a Christian, he had come under the influence of Manichean teachers who taught him that the God revealed in the Old Testament had a human form and that the Old Testament contained laws belonging to a barbaric age.

…and it was as if some sharp intelligence were persuading me to consent to the stupid deceivers [Manichean teachers] when they asked me: ‘Where does evil come from?  and is God confined within a corporeal form?  has he hair and nails?  and can those be considered righteous who had several wives at the same time and killed people and offered animals in sacrifice?  In my ignorance I was disturbed by these questions…

What changed Augustine’s mind?  Augustine said that it came through the teaching of Ambrose of Milan who opened the Scripture to him.  He learned from Ambrose that the God revealed in the Bible was not anything like what his Manichean teachers had taught him.  In particular, Augustine was struck by the truth that God exists apart from nature and is not to be found in one of Aristotle’s ten categories!

I was unaware of the existence of another reality, that which truly is…  (III.vii.12)

In his Confessions, Augustine tells how he became suspicious of the appeal to reason made by the Manichee’s.  In turn, he became more open to the possibility that not everything could be proven rationally.   Augustine writes,

I thought it more modest and not in the least misleading to be told by the Church to believe what could not be demonstrated – whether that was because a demonstration existed but could not be understood by all or whether the matter was not open to rational proof – rather than from the Manichees to have a rash promise of knowledge with mockery of mere belief, and then afterwards to be ordered to believe many fabulous and absurd myths impossible to prove true.  (Confessions VI.7)

Modern man mocks faith and believes the promises of science.  But these same mockers end up believing many “fabulous and absurd myths impossible to prove true.”  ie. the theory of how the first DNA molecule evolved from the primordial soup; or the multiverse theory that has been proposed to account for the fine tuning of our own particular universe for conscious life.   Sometimes the modern Scientist looks a lot like the ancient Manichee.

Now, as individuals differ greatly from each other, in intelligence, sagacity, energy, perseverance, skill, habits of industry and economy, physical power, position and opportunity, – the necessary effect of leaving all free to exert themselves to better their condition, must be a corresponding inequality between those who may possess these qualities and advantages in a high degree, those who me be deficient in them.  The only means by which this result can be prevented are, either to impose such restrictions on the exertions of those who may possess them in a high degree, as well place them on a level with those who do not; or to deprive them of the fruits of their exertions.  But to impose such restriction some them would be destructive of liberty, – while, to deprive them of the fruits of their exertions, would be to destroy the desire of bettering their condition.  It is , indeed, this inequality of condition between the front and rear ranks, in the march of progress, which gives so strong an impulse to the former to maintain their position, and to the latter to press forward into their files.  This gives to progress its greatest impulse.  To force the front rank back to the rear, or attempt to push forward the rear into line with the front, by the interposition of the government, would put an end to the impulse, and effectually arrest the march of progress.

Calhoun opposed the leveling of society because nature has not made all men equal.   (Or to summarize Burke: ‘All me are equal before God but they are equal in no other way.’)  He feared that a simple majority would begin to vote against the interests of minorities (ie. southern farmers).  Although the South and its plantations were the first to suffer oppression from a voting bloc, they would not be the last. In a remarkably perceptive statement, Calhoun believed that industrial workers would eventually face the same fate as the southern farmer.

After we are exhausted, the contest will be between the capitalists and the operatives [workers]; for into these two classes it must, ultimately, divide society.  The issue of the struggle here must be the same as it has been in Europe.  Under the operation of the system, wages must sink more rapidly than the prices of the necessaries of life, till the portion of the products of their labor left to them, will be barely sufficient to preserve existence.  For the present, the pressure is on our section.”  (John Calhoun, 1828)

Calhoun wrote two decades before Marx and Engels but he perceived some of the same problems inherent in an industrialized, capitalist society.  But Calhoun did not believe that a classless society was possible or desirable.  Instead, he sought to protect each group’s interests from a ‘simple majority’ through the Constitution.  Western society never bought into Marx’s Utopian ideals but neither did it adopt Calhoun’s conservatism.  It chose instead to be ruled by ‘the Calculators’.  This is the legacy of the Benthamites, of whom Coleridge writes,

It is this accursed practice of forever considering only what seems expedient for the occasion, disjoined from all principle or enlarged systems of action, of never listening to the true and unerring impulses of our better nature, which has led the colder-hearted men to the study of political economy, which has turned our Parliament into a real committee of public safety.  In it is all power vested; and in a few years we shall either be governed by an aristocracy, or what is still more likely, by a contemptible democratical oligarcy of glib economists, compared to which the worst form of aristocracy would be a blessing.  -Coleridge’s Table Talk – (cited by Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind)

Surprisingly, for me at least, even J.M Keynes recognized how badly Bentham’s utilitarian philosophy has served the West:

I do now regard [Benthamism] as the worm which has been gnawing at the insides of modern civilization and is responsible for its present moral decay.  We used to regard the Christians as the enemy, because they appeared as the representatives of tradition, convention, and hocus-pocus.  In truth it was the Benthamite calculus, based on over-valuation of the economic criterion, which was destroying the quality of the popular ideal.

Coleridge worried about an “oligarchy of glib economists” and Keynes thought that there was an “over-valuation of the economic criterion”.    They were right.  Today, our monetary and fiscal policy is entirely dictated by the markets.  Who cares who the next president or prime minister is so long as central banks have the power to print money at will and lend it to investment ‘banks’ without cost.  This perverse situation would not have arisen if a powerful oligarchy had not been able to buy the votes of a ‘simple majority’, as Calhoun fore saw.

Source: The Conservative Mind, by Russel Kirk

Just noticed an interesting parallel between two historical episodes in the book of Isaiah. Isaiah warned both kings Ahaz and Hezekiah against making foreign alliances. Ahaz rejected Isaiah’s warning explicitly whereas it is not as clear where Hezekiah stood in relation to the prophet in the days leading up to the Assyrian invasion.  Hezekiah would eventually come around, but only after Egypt proved to be every bit as unreliable as the prophet foretold. The Egyptian army was defeated on the coastal plains.  Jerusalem was up to her neck in the raging Flood (Is. 8:6-8), “like a flagstaff on the top of a mountain” (Is. 30:17), “like a booth in a vineyard, like a lodge in a cucumber field, like a besieged city.” (Isa. 1:8b ESV)

	Hezekiah and the Covenant with Egypt (Is 30:1-14)	Ahaz and the Covenant with Assyria (Is. 8:12-20)
Futility of foreign alliances	Egypt’s help is worthless and empty; therefore I have called her “Rahab who sits still.” (Isa. 30:7 ESV)	“Do not call conspiracy (or “alliance”) all that this people calls conspiracy, and do not fear what they fear, nor be in dread. But the LORD of hosts, him you shall honor as holy. Let him be your fear, and let him be your dread. (Isa. 8:12-13 ESV)
The prophet’s testimony inscribed in a book	And now, go, write it before them on a tablet and inscribe it in a book, that it may be for the time to come as a witness forever. (Isa. 30:8 ESV)	Bind up the testimony; seal the teaching among my disciples. I will wait for the LORD, who is hiding his face from the house of Jacob, and I will hope in him. Behold, I and the children whom the LORD has given me are signs and portents in Israel from the LORD of hosts, who dwells on Mount Zion. (Isa. 8:16-18 ESV)
The rejection of the prophet	For they are a rebellious people, lying children, children unwilling to hear the instruction of the LORD; who say to the seers, “Do not see,” and to the prophets, “Do not prophesy to us what is right; speak to us smooth things, prophesy illusions, leave the way, turn aside from the path, let us hear no more about the Holy One of Israel.” (Isa. 30:9-11 ESV)	And when they say to you, “Inquire of the mediums and the necromancers who chirp and mutter,” should not a people inquire of their God? Should they inquire of the dead on behalf of the living? 20 To the teaching and to the testimony! If they will not speak according to this word, it is because they have no dawn. (Isa. 8:19-20 ESV)

The Stoic philosopher, Epictetus (late 1st century AD), emphasized the importance of education for living a moral life.

“They are thieves and robbers,” you may say.

What do you mean by thieves and robbers?

“They are mistaken about good and evil.”

Ought we then to be angry with them, or to pity them? But show them their error, and you will see how they desist from their errors.

Epictetus goes on to argue that the thief and the robber are simply ignorant of what is good.  They suffer from a deficiency in moral faculties like that of a person who cannot see.  If the thief understood his true good, he would not have done it!  Thus, there is no real basis for retributive justice.

“Ought not then this robber and this adulterer to be destroyed?”

By no means say so, but speak rather in this way:

“This man who has been mistaken and deceived about the most important things, and blinded, not in the faculty of vision which distinguishes white and black, but in the faculty which distinguishes good and bad, should we not destroy him?”

If you speak thus, you will see how inhuman this is which you say, and that it is just as if you would say, “Ought we not to destroy this blind and deaf man?” But if the greatest harm is the privation of the greatest things, and the greatest thing in every man is the will or choice such as it ought to be, and a man is deprived of this will, why are you also angry with him? Man, you ought not to be affected contrary to nature by the bad things of another. Pity him rather: drop this readiness to be offended and to hate, and these words which the many utter: “These accursed and odious fellows.”

The robber is like the blind and the deaf and so we ought to pity him instead of judge him.  Knowledge is the solution.  Educate him to his true his good and he will turn from his ways!

The essence of Greek philosophy may be summed up in the two words inscribed on a plaque and placed above the door of the temple of Apollo in Delphi: “Know Thyself”.    The gnostic sects that emerged in the late Roman period likewise emphasized the importance of self awareness.

 “Ignorance is slavery. Knowledge is Freedom. Seeking the Truth, we discover its seeds within us. If we unite with It, It will receive us in the Primordial Consciousness.”  (“The Gospel of Phillip,” The Gnostic Society Library, http://gnosis.org/naghamm/gop.html)

Although modern humanism is more secular in outlook, it also begins and ends with man.  And it also places a great deal of faith in education.

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man.  (Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, Epistle II)

In contrast, the Bible tells us that we can and must know God, that we do not begin to live apart from God, and that only through the knowledge of the Holy One do we come to a true understanding of ourselves.  The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom.

In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord… and I said Woe is me, for I am lost!  (Isa. 6:1a,5a ESV)

 

Todo, I have a feeling we are not in Kansas anymore.  We must be over the rainbow!  – Dorothy

The traditional way of life in America and Europe is actually quite unique when viewed alongside other models for civic society.  Many of the recent changes to our laws bring us closer to Greek ideals for society which in turn share striking similarities to 19th century Socialistic theories.

Plato’s Republic:

1. The Unborn / Newborn – It is lawful to expose a newborn child if it is not convenient. ¹
2. The Aged and Sick – Medicine is dispensed according to the value of that individual to society.   Although euthanasia is not actively endorsed, medicine may be withheld.   ²
3. Equality of Sexes – Men and women strip naked and exercise together so that all barriers between the sexes may be destroyed.  Women fight alongside men in the military.  ³
4. Children – Children are raised by a state appointed Nanny.   ⁴
5. Marriage – consists of temporary unions arranged by the casting of lots at a fertility festival.  Philosophers rig the system in order to ensure that desirable traits are selected and propagated in the children. ⁵
6. Sex – Sex is reduced to its purely natural and physiological functions.  Homosexuality and pederasty are the norm.  ⁶
7. Education – Man is saved through education.  The philosopher who serves his city is guaranteed a place on the Island of the Blessed in the next life.
8. Property – Property and homes are shared among the Guardian class.  ⁷
9. Government – The city is ruled by philosophers.  Honesty is taught as a virtue for commoners and the guardians but philosophers / rulers are allowed to lie for the good of the people.  All natural relationships such as that between husband and wife and between child and mother must ultimately be dissolved in the State.  ⁸
10. Religion – Myths about the gods are rewritten or new myths are invented to serve the needs of the State.  Religion and propaganda are indistinguishable.   God is resolved into an ideal and removed far away from everyday life.

Lycurgus’ Sparta

1. The Unborn / Newborn- Deformed and unwanted children are thrown over a cliff.  ⁹
2. The Aged and Sick – The elderly are killed when they are no longer useful.
3. Property – All means of production are communally owned.  Silver and gold money are forcibly exchanged for iron coinage.
4. Marriage – Partners swapped freely.  ¹⁰
5. Sex – Pederasty is the norm.  At the age of 13 boys are chosen by older men. ¹¹
6. Family – Children are raised by the state. No concept of family to speak of.
7. Women – No distinction between women and men. Both go to war.  Boys and girls danced naked together at religious festivals.   ¹²
8. Economics – The laboring caste was ruled by a warrior elite.  Spartan products were known for their utility and lack of artistry.
9. Government – Society ruled by a warrior class that makes perpetual war.  Helots are condemned to perpetual serfdom.

19th Century Socialism in Europe (Fourier, Marx, Lenin)

1. Marriage – It is a social convention that is easily annulled and ideally should disappear altogether. ¹³
2. Sex – The suppression of natural instincts is harmful.  All instincts are equally fruitful and useful for society–it is only necessary to combine them and direct them in the proper way.  ¹⁴
3. Equality of Sexes – The goal of communism is the withering away of hierarchies.  Men and women should serve the commune without distinction.
4. Family – Children should be wards of the state. ¹⁵
5. Property – ‘Abolition of private property” ¹⁶
6. Government – rule by technocrats who are the Absolute arbiters of truth and justice.  ¹⁷
7. Religion – The basic principles guiding the life of an individual and of mankind in general do not go beyond the satisfaction of material needs or primitive instincts.  (I. Shafarevich, 227)

Dostoyevsky recognized that the radical 19th century social experiments undertaken in Europe would lead to disaster.

“For socialism sets itself the task of solving the fate of mankind, not according to Christ but outside God and outside Christ, and it was natural for it to arise in Europe, on the ruins of the Christian principle in proportion to the degree that this had become degenerate and lost in the Catholic Church itself.” (Dostoyevsky, A Writers Diary, February 1877) “When Catholic humanity turned away from the monstrous image in which Christ was presented to them, then after many centuries of protests. ..there finally appeared, at the beginning of this century, attempts to arrange things outside God and outside Christ. Without the instincts of bees or ants that create their beehives and ant hills faultlessly and precisely, people undertook to create something like a faultless human ant hill. They rejected the formula for salvation which proceeds from God and was revealed as ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself’ and replaced it by practical conclusions such as ‘chacun pour soi et Dieu pour tous’ [every man for himself and God for all] or by scientific axioms such as ‘the struggle for existence.’  Lacking the instincts of animals. ..people placed great confidence in science, forgetting that for a task like the creation of society, science was still in its infancy. Dreams appeared. The future tower of Babel became the ideal and, on the other hand, the fear of all mankind. But the visionaries were soon followed by other doctrines, simple and to the point, such as ‘rob the rich, drown the world in blood and then everything will somehow arrange itself.’ ” (Dostoyevsky, A Writers Diary, November 1877)

The rebellion of man against God must ultimately must lead to the rebellion of man against nature.  One can see evidence of this rebellion all around us.

– The practice of feeding meat to herbivores resulted in a spectacular kind of disease – Bovine spongiform encephalopathy

– The Aswan Dam has destroyed the fertility of the soil (once the richest soil in the world), the Mediterranean sardine fishery, and Egypt’s fresh water supply.

– The demand by feminists to be treated like men has put an end to chivalry and resulted in unprecedented exploitation.

– The homosexual lifestyle has increased the risk of death from STD’s.

– The transfer of the responsibility for a child’s education from parents to the public education system has resulted in dumber and lazier kids.

– The erosion of the right to property through inflation and taxation has diminished the productivity of the average citizen and engendered a whole class of bottom feeders.

Modern man does not think twice about cooking a kid in it’s mothers milk.

 

Footnotes