We are investigating the question of what the proper Christian is obligated by his love of Christ to support on the matter of illegal immigration. That a Christian nation has some moral obligation to help refugees in need is clearly announced in Scripture: but this is not the sole word the Scripture speaks on the issue.
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In an issue where emotions run high, it is crucial, it is necessary, to put all emotion aside and weigh the arguments on both sides with cold clarity of thought, according to objective and dispassionate rigor.
Such is the issue of legal and illegal immigration in America and Europe.
To the one side are those who see an economic benefit to allowing newcomers no matter their numbers, their nation of origin, or their religion, to flood into the nation; or who see the greater wealth and peace of the host country as creating an automatic obligation to welcome any aliens wishing entry, regardless of their numbers or intent.
To the other side are those who fear the flood will shift the political power in the host country to the disadvantage or even the displacement of the native population.
Wandering into this debate comes some Christian writers and leaders, claiming that the charity Heaven demands from the faithful requires the adoption of just such an open borders policy.
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Junk science leads to more Junk Science leads to death.
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If you were the Devil’s Advocate and wished to see his party prevail, one method you would advise the Prince of Darkness to adopt would be to find ways to silence objections. The witnesses must be silenced before they reach the witness box of public opinion.
One way of silencing objections is to accuse any objections of denying settled authority. This is the claim that the debate is over and that the science is settled [1]
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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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One of the central ideas, so basic that it forms the foundation of all Western thought not just in political philosophy but in nearly all topics, is the idea of the dignity of man. So much so that even the worldviews acting most dramatically to rob and undermine the notion of the dignity of man do so in the name of some notion like equality, justice, or evenhandedness which are all notions that spring from this idea and make no sense outside of it.
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The signature peculiarity of the modern age that one must explain the obvious to the oblivious.
One must explain the self-evident to audiences to whom evidence has no persuasive power. One must point out the paradox of any belief that blithely contradicts itself to audience to whom self-contradiction forms no obvious impediment to belief.
One must then explain why an untrue statement cannot be just as true as a true one to an audience whose majority claims truth is optional, or insignificant. And, finally, one must explain why one ought not to deceive others by saying false things, or to deceive oneself by believing them, to an audience that is offended by the very notion of honesty.
Surely in every prior generation there were stubborn students, young children, and madmen unable to comprehend the differences between true and false, logical and illogical, virtuous and vicious.
But if there were any in any prior generation preaching and teaching that these distinctions were insignificant or incomprehensible or both, no record has survived.
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The pressure of time and other tasks prevent me from writing the essay I intended for this week. In lieu thereof, I reprint here an essay on the same topic from three years ago:
To be a man means to seek a truth that satisfies the mind, a virtue that sates the conscience, and a beauty that breaks the heart. Deprive a man of any of these things, and he will find neither happiness nor rest.
The most precious, profound and important of the great ideas which the Left has raped from us is beauty. I need spend no time on the proposition that life without beauty is a nightmare: those who have seen true beauty – sublime beauty, if even for a moment – have nothing to which they can liken it except the ecstasies of mystics and the transports of saints. Beauty consoles the sorrowing; beauty brings joy and deepens understanding; beauty is like food and wine, and men who live surrounded by ugliness become shriveled and starved in their souls.
Why, if beauty is so important, is there so little discussion of it? The victory of the Left in this area has been so sudden, so remarkable, and so complete, that the discussion of beauty has lapsed into a desolate silence. Have you, dear reader, read anything discussing beauty, putting forth a coherent theory of beauty, or even extolling beauty’s central importance of the human soul in a year? In 10 years? Ever?
Yet the topic is one of paramount importance. It is a matter of life and death not for the body but for the spirit.
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On this day, when infinite love clothed in living truth more brilliant that the sun, crowned with all virtues, descended into the finite sphere of Earth, and was greeted with indifference, jeers, hatred, humiliation, torture, and death, it behooves us to reflect on the nature of truth and mankind’s hatred of it.
This is a perennial defect of the human race. The hatred of truth is more enflamed in some men than in others, more in some nations and eras than others.
Now, hatred of truth is lauded as a virtue, truthfulness is blackened by many evil names, called extremism, partisanship, meanspiritedness, and love of truth is equated to terrorism. Truth is denounced as inappropriate, as bigotry, and as inciting violence.
Speaking truth is held to be as culpable as the physical violence it allegedly provokes, and for this reason trample truth with violence and the threat of violence is called laudable.
Truth makes moral cripples feel unsafe.
These feelings are not based in reality, but are held to carry more weight than reality carries. In schools and in life, places where the free words of free men are not to be tolerated, ironically called safe spaces, are erected to banish truth and crucify it.
And yet, oddly, even in the midst of their unparalleled victory, the corrupt lords of this world cannot relax and enjoy their ovations and triumphs.
Truth crucified has an uncomfortable habit of leaving the tomb where it was thought safely buried empty, and being seen again.
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The whole of that nameless modern movement which goes by a legion is names, whether it be called Political Correctness, Liberalism, Socialism, Collectivism, Totalitarianism, Humanism, Secularism, Hedonism or Nihilism, rests on one axiom of moral philosophy: moral agnosticism.
This axiom states that there is not and cannot be a well formed conscience, or a conscience which gives reliable, trustworthy, and universal information about the nature of right and wrong, on the grounds that there is no such thing as universal right and wrong, and that the conscience is a by-product of psychological conditioning by society.
The argument given by legion-named movement typically follows the form of questioning some traditional moral precept, such as chastity, and characterizes this rule is not being confirmed by science, and then takes some breach of that rule, such as incest or homosexuality, and justifies or glorifies it. Then if any man’s conscience troubles him over marrying his own sister, then the argument points at this as an example of the conscience misreading the nature of right and wrong.
Or, better yet, if a man’s conscience condemns the practices of sodomites living peacefully next door, teaching his children in school, or serving as his judge on the bench, but he himself suffers no immediate physical harm, this is also taken as a misreading by the conscience.
Moreover he, but not the sodomites, are condemned as standing in the breach of the public peace, on the theory that he teaching his children to disapprove of their harmless conduct will lead to discourtesy, then violence and oppression, whereas them teaching his children to embrace sexual deviance has no drawbacks.
The only cure, so say the moderns, to establish and peace and good will the man’s conscience threatens is to silence his conscience. He must be convinced that his conscience cannot tell him right from wrong, and that no one knows right from wrong.
Obviously this hoax convinces no one who believes the conscience perceives rather than invent moral reality; nor anyone who believes in the difference between a well-formed conscience and a malformed one; nor anyone who believe the conscience is the voice of God in man; no anyone who believes in the freedom of the conscience, or who believes it is wrong to coerce a man to act contrary to his conscience. This would imply that the conscience is a natural and objective faculty to perceive reality. This would imply that the conscience is natural.
The whole of that nameless modern movement rests on the axiom is that the conscience is manmade.
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The Last Crusade are all who hold faith with in the majesty of truth; the impartiality of reason; the objectivity of reality; the authority of virtue; the verity of beauty; the dignity of man; the equality of the law; the love of patriots; and we hold faith with Christ.
The enemy is a scattered and incoherent coalition of groups that support, with various degrees of zeal and various degrees of knowing evil, certain scattered and incoherent ideas, or, rather, talking points. These ideas are nihilism, relativism, solipsism, antinomianism, subjectivism, humanism, collectivism, socialism, and secularism.
These terms will be defined and examined in future columns: today we discuss antinomianism.
One of the main reasons, if not the main reason, that a crusade is needed, a holy war fought with the golden chivalry of knights and the iron faith of martyrs, is that negotiation is impossible. Compromise is impossible.
Not unlikely; not rare; not difficult. Impossible.
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Every age has its peccadilloes. In the modern age, blatantly to deny the obvious is our most obvious dishonesty. We live in the era of the unreal.
I can only offer, as an observation, what the passage of decades and the observation of the doings of modern men from my viewpoint, first from a law office, and later from the bullpen of a newspaper, have taught me. More proof than that is beyond my power to give: I can but point at the sight. You must look for yourself, and see.
What I observed is that modern men routinely would deny the undeniable, ignoring clear and evident dangers to life and liberty; while at the same time and in the same spirit, cower and shriek like Chicken Little at utterly imaginary and unreal threats.
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The Last Crusade is the eternal war against all Hellish things. The visible parts of the war, fought with sword or spear, bullet or bomb, are but sorties of a larger siege that is fought, oddly enough, with prose and poem, with spirit and prayer.
One matter where the Last Crusade must plant a banner around which to rally is what seems at first to be minor. The matter is courtesy.
But it leads to a deeper matter, perhaps the deepest: because the question of courtesy leads to the question of the role of reason among rational creatures.
Courtesy is a deeper thing than it seems. Please note the unrelenting resolve, over a period of years, during which the Enemy has branded all formalism, good manners, and good breeding to be either absurd, or unwelcome, or even sinister. If a man prefers you call him by your last name, this is regarded as standoffish and pompous. If a man prefers not to hear gutter language, blasphemies and scatological Anglosaxonism, he is unfriendly, unrealistic, and perhaps a hypocrite. If a gentleman holds a door for a lady, or a man refuses to strike a woman in the face, he is a sinister oppressor, and an enemy of women.
All these ideas are blatantly absurd. The Left has convinced the world that courtesy is rude.
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