John C. Wright's Journal

Frank Luke, a fellow soldier in the Last Crusader writes a column touching on St Peter’s warning to avoid false teachers:

https://frankluke.wordpress.com/2017/05/28/the-last-crusade-against-false-teachers/

Peter took flack. Many in academic places doubt that Peter wrote 2 Peter, but we can trust that the early Church knew what they were doing when they preserved the tradition that Peter wrote this little book.

It is the duty of every Christian alive to be ready with an answer for those who ask about the hope we have within us. Peter wrote to take on false teachers. Jesus was attacked during His ministry. The church was attacked from that first Pentecost onward. False teachers tried to sneak in and lead people astray. Peter wants us to have no part of that. We are always to be on guard against false teachers and their lies.

Last Crusade 20 The Devil’s Advocate 2017 05 28

Suppose you had been hired by the Devil to be his counsellor and advisor, and your task was to tell the Prince of Darkness how best to turn souls away from light and truth and joy and bring them into the eternal woe. What would the Devil’s Advocate advocate?

The first and greatest lie of the Devil is that the devil does not exist. This, taken by itself, is not credible. No one with unclouded eyes looking at the horrors, enormities, perversions, absurdities, and self-righteous nonsense idolized by the Modern Age can fail to see the Devil’s hand in it.

In the ancient world, when men were less easily deceived, the idols to which men bowed were open and obvious. Their idols were looming things of brass or stone or painted wood, visible in the temples and town squares or perched on hilltops. Men bowed and served them and called them divine, but never knew that they were deceived into worshipping devils.

Even here, however, the deception was slight. The good things of creation, the sky and sea, star and seasons, bird and beast, the lightningbolt and earthquake, and the passions of war and love, have a beauty and majesty worthy of fear and respect. To give names and faces to these natural wonders, and to turn that respect into reverence, and then into rites of adoration, is a small step.

The impulse to serve and adore the Creator was created in us, and is fit and right for creatures of our nature, just as a child’s love for his father is natural. But it can be corrupted and twisted to inferior things, and natural becomes unnatural. When the natural stream of the spiritual life is dammed, the unnatural channel of idolatry is sought.

But even the pagans knew the adulteries of Jupiter, or the deceptions of Odin, the dalliance of Krisna with the shepherd maidens, or the infanticides of Saturn, were worthy of condemnation rather than imitation.  Even though they were called gods, the tales told by their own poets depicted them as devils; and in the case of Cybele, Moloch, or Tezcatlipoca, or Kali, so did the bloody acts of their votaries.

Pagan philosophers, such as Aristotle and Socrates, were wise enough to deduce the existence of a single Supreme Being, all good and the source of all, to condemn the adulterers and murderers worshiped by their fellows as fables. One was condemned to exile for revealing the true nature of the pagan gods, the other to drink hemlock and die.

Generations have passed. Now that the lamp of the Church has shined the light of truth on all these things and showed them in their proper forms, and more daring deception is required to cloud the eyes of the unwary. Only by denying the supernatural as a whole can the idols be revived, this time as secular idols. No longer are they monuments of marble or bronze placed where any can see. Now they are called ideologies, political parties, causes, movements, and they are placed inside the hearts of men.

No more need is there for Moloch to call for children to be flung on the fire or baked alive in a hollow brass statue, where the screams can be heard by all. Now Planned Parenthood meets in comfortable boardrooms or swank hotels, their expenses paid by you, the taxpayer, to discuss how to harvest and sell the organs of children accidently born alive and smothered by chloroform. The press goes to any lengths as needed to bury and obfuscate the story. Any investigative reporter who reveals their true nature condemned to lawsuit and libel rather than to the cup of hemlock.

Dr. Seuss writes children’s books about wise little gnomes who upbraid factory owners in defense of the harvested trees, for whom no one otherwise speaks. No one writes books about wise little gnomes who speak for the harvested children of men, slain by their own mothers.

No more need is there for the temple prostitutions and abominations of the cults of Ishtar or Ganymede. The Sexual Revolution has painted these sins with the unconvincing luster of liberty, self-expression, self-determination, and other shibboleths meant to hide the nature of the sin by changing its name.

If the Devil is dismissed as unreal, all evils are regarded as psychological or social or economic, that is, a fault of our political institutions, not of our souls. From this comes the second great lie: that Original Sin does not exist. Man in infinitely malleable, and can be cured of all imperfections by sufficiently ruthless social engineering.

Hence politics is the idol that takes the place of Christ in the minds of the Postmodern Age. Caesar is their savior. So, any question defining the nature of rich and poor, male and female, equal and unequal, and drawing a theological or moral conclusion therefrom, is replaced with a political question: how to use the power of the state to change human nature so as to improve the breed.

The view of man involved is the same as that popularized by the high-IQ intellectual, Hannibal Lector. Man is not a soul. Man is meat. As meat, he may be bred like a bull and slaughtered like an ox. All social engineering projects, from great to small, from the Holocaust of the National Socialists Worker’s Party, to the eugenics and euthanasia proposed by various intellectuals, to the pro-LGBT propaganda taking the place of superhero tales in once-popular comic book lines, all spring from the conclusion that man is an animal, man is a meat robot, man is an object. Hannibal Lector would approve.

Now, the Devil is a spirit and knows in his damned heart that man is spirit. But to lure man away from man’s true nature and into hell, it is useful to spread a doctrine of materialism, and tell the gullible the third great lie, namely, that man is matter only.

Because of this, the Devil’s party never identifies itself as a cult with a fundamentally religious purpose, even though they act like cultists in thought and word and deed. (In this, they are like the ancient idols who claimed divinity while acting like devils.)

They use political sounding words like liberal, leftwing, progressive, socialist, communist, fascist, revolutionary, radical to hide their nature. If their concern were political, their concerns would be restricted to political questions, that is, to questions concerned with laws and institutions, the armed forces and the courts of law, meant to maintain peace and civilization. In reality, their concern is with all aspects of life, all moral questions, including unspoken thoughts.

They merely refer to these things as political because, being secular, they seek salvation from the swordhand of Caesar rather than from the pierced hands of Christ.

If it seems odd to you, dear reader, to regard the question of what human life is, of when it is proper to take human life, or why some men dress like women and demand to be called women, or when it is proper to take the private property of others for public use, or whether it is worse to kill a black man as a white man on the grounds of allegedly being a hate crime, as medical, ethical, or theological questions, and not as political questions, then the Devil’s party has successfully deceived you.

Small wonder the conservative movement in this nation has been so spectacularly ineffective in opposing the onset. By treating all these deep theological and philosophical questions as merely matters of secular politics, they bring a knife to a gunfight.  Secular matters are open to compromise; theological matters are not. The pragmatic conservative spirit compromises, and the idealistic Devil’s spirit does not. So the needle only ever moves one way: always more to the Left.

Facts overthrow the worldview of this new breed of idolater, and so facts are never consulted. To refer to reality is regarded as pettifoggery, and, ironically, called unscientific and unintelligent.

The impulse to ignore the deceptive appearances of the world and cling to spiritual truths, to walk by faith and not by eyesight, was created in us. It is an impulse of loyalty and fidelity, like the unwillingness to believe a spy or fraudster, despite whatever forged credentials he shows. When used to spurn the Earth and embrace heaven, the impulse is natural and fit.

However, in the Devil’s party, this same impulse is perverted. They cling to their ‘narrative’ and defy the facts, ignoring the true appearance of the world and cleaving to utopian fantasies, fake news, junk science, and hysterical conspiracy theories. The natural stream of truth is dammed, the unnatural channel of flattering falsehoods is sought.

In sum, if you were the Devil’s advocate, you would be wise to advise the Prince of Darkness to pursue the following three basic strategies by promoting three basic lies: the first is that truth does not exist, especially spiritual truths.

The first lie, denying spiritual reality, and say there is no Devil, is a supreme and supremely useful lie. This allows all theological and moral questions to be treated as secular, and, specifically, as political. The movement moves ever farther from the true and factual, and ever closer to the politically correct. There is no room for faith in the new world order.

The second is that Caesar is savior. Political correctness looks nowhere but toward the power of the government to define truth, change reality, create utopia. The mere fact that utopia does not exist is ignored. There is no room for hope in the new world order.

The third is that Man is meat, meet only for consumption. Political correctness, as this point, is indistinguishable from despair and damnation. There is no room for charity, peace, benevolence, love or life in the new world order.

There is no room, in fact, for anything but the Devil.

If you were the Devil’s Advocate, and if you saw what he meant to do and how he meant to do it, you would have a unique clarity of insight on nature, the tone, and the point of talking points used to shout down the voice of reason in the modern day. You would know why reason has fled.

Frank Baum, the Royal Historian of Oz, in his book QUEEN ZIXI OF IX, reports that the immortal fairytale witch, Queen Zixi, has riches, magical powers, health, and the appearance of endless youth, and everything else her heart desires but one thing only: her image in the mirror shows her to be an unsightly old hag, not the young and beautiful queen she appears to all other eyes.

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