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The Deepening Crisis in The West: Rebellion Against Reality

If you could only read one essay about our current crisis and our potential future realignment, this is the one.

First Things – That Haunting Nihilism

Rusty Reno, editor of First Things explains our potential future. And nutshells the overall concern I’ve been expressing on this blog for more than two years now.

Pull quote from Reno’s essay.

I’m becoming an N. S. Lyons fan. “A Prophecy of Evil: Tolkien, Lewis, and Technocratic Nihilism” is the latest installment in The Upheaval, the mysterious author’s Substack. (He writes under a pseudonym.) This extended essay provides an arresting account of the deepening crisis in the West. By Lyons’s reckoning, Lewis and Tolkien were right. We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.

Reno agrees with Lyons that the Western culture is influenced by a rationalist worldview that rejects any objective value or meaning in reality, and instead relies on subjective feelings and desires to guide its actions. According to Reno this worldview leads to a loss of human dignity, a disregard for nature, and a dangerous tendency to manipulate and control everything, including human life itself.

He uses the examples of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, two famous Christian writers who warned about the nihilistic consequences of modern rationalism in their novels. And explains how Lewis’s That Hideous Strength depicts a dystopian scenario where a scientific elite tries to overthrow the natural order and create a new humanity according to their own whims. Reno also refers to Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, where the evil Sauron seeks to dominate Middle-earth with his dark magic and his One Ring of power.

Reno concludes that the only way to resist nihilism is to appreciate and respect reality as God’s creation, and to cultivate a sense of gratitude and awe for its beauty and mystery.

We must reject the false promises of rationalism and technology, and embrace the truth and goodness of God’s revelation in Christ. That “reveal’ must be understood, at a minimum, as Jesus’s embodied life (incarnation), bodily death, bodily resurrection, bodily ascension, and bodily return when he will finally put the world right. For us personally, that means, among other things, changed, imperishable New Creation bodies!

Blog take away?

We were given bodies by God, because we were meant to have them. Our bodies are not accessory items to be disregarded simply because we wish they were otherwise than male or female.

Read the whole thing! (The essay has ended when you see the heading “Saint Constantine School”)

Companion Posts

Disregarding The Body – Podcast
My Truth, Your Truth – Podcast

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Happy New Creation Day!

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Study of 1,655 Cases Supports the “Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria” Hypothesis

Parents report a deterioration in children’s mental health and intrafamilial bonds following gender-transition

A new study examining 1,655 parental reports lends further credibility to the rapid onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) hypothesis, first posited by Dr. Lisa Littman in 2018. The ROGD hypothesis suggests that the recent surge in transgender-identifying adolescents is explained, at least in part, by a rise in the number of previously gender-normative teens who developed gender-related distress in response to various psychosocial factors (e.g., mental health conditions, internalized homophobia, trauma, etc.). Opponents of the ROGD hypothesis claim that the surge is merely the result of greater acceptance of transgender identities by society, and hence, a greater willingness among “intrinsically transgender” adolescents to “come out.”

If true, the ROGD hypothesis challenges the premise of gender affirmation, which demands that healthcare providers confirm an adolescent’s self-identification and facilitate access to any and all desired hormonal and surgical interventions that bring young people’s bodies in line with their current gender identity. It is likely for this reason that the ROGD hypothesis generated such harsh opposition from the proponents of gender-affirming care.

Source: SEGM

Companion Post

Reuters Special Report: Little Scientific Evidence For Affirmative Care – Podcast

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Transgender Lutheran Pastor Compares Nashville Shooter To Jesus Crucified

A sermon delivered this Palm Sunday by the Transgender Pastor of St. Marks Lutheran Church in Fargo, North Dakota compares Nashville shooter to Jesus crucified.

FULL STORY HERE

Churches with leaders like this appear destined to become empty houses of worship.

I Refuse To Affirm
The Tortured Analogies of That Sermon!

“Some folks have tried to focus on eradicating trans people as a solution, because they have been waiting, just waiting for an opportunity such as this. They’ve been waiting for a reason, any reason to stoke their hatred,” Pastor Micah Louwagie said.

“Marginalized folks, those of us with the least amount of privilege and power, they need those who have more privilege and power than they do to physically place their bodies between them and the people, powers and institutions that are literally killing them,” Louwagie urges.

“Those leaders were looking for any excuse, valid or not, to crucify Jesus and they found that reason…It’s baffling to me that someone’s existence can be so threatening, that people decide they need to be controlled, that they need laws made against them, or even worse, that the people that they find so threatening should die,” Louwagie remarked.

It is not hatred to disagree with someone’s fiction about who they are.

We don’t want to eradicate the existence of any human. We just want them to be delivered from a harmful fantasy. For their sake and for the sake of our Civilization, AND the cause of Christ our Creator1He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities–all things were created through him and for him. (Col 1:15-16 ESV)

It is impossible that anyone born with a healthy body has also been born in the wrong body. Both Orthodox Christians and rational non-Christians the world over refuse to believe that fiction.

And we cannot be bullied into saying otherwise. We affirm Jesus’s view on the matter.

"Have you not read that the one who made them at the beginning 'made them male and female.'" [Matt 19:4]

This is yet another example of Radical Ideology capturing our institutions. In this case, the Lutheran Church of North Dakota and beyond…..

Companion Posts

Embrace, Don’t Affirm
Lying To Ourselves & Virtues ‘Let Loose’

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Celebrate God’s Good Creation