I presume Mathew Hennessey at the WSJ. He had one line that answered Ted's points in part, saying church, although not Mass.
"Remind yourself that in the United States of America a madman killed two children and wounded 18 in a church attached to a school."
Mathew Hennessey has previously written about being Catholic, and the heartbreak that Covid disruptions broke family habits. While the rest of the family adjusted, his child with Down Syndrome who had previously attended Mass just fine could not get in the habit of coping again. I think they were going in shifts in response rather than as a whole family.
You write, “Note well that this outrageous attack on free speech will likely not be reported in the US media. So much real and important information that goes against the Narrative can only be learned on X and Substack. Thank you for subscribing. I know this newsletter is hard to read some days, but I try to keep you informed about things that matter.” In fact, this newsletter is remarkably easy to read because your writing is so lucid and your take on an extraordinarily wide range of subjects never fails to engage me. That the subject matter is sometimes hard to bear is simply because the world is sometimes hard to bear. You at least make reading about the hard-to-bear world interesting.
By the way, I will be adding clanker to my vocabulary. I could have used it last week when “Darren,” the hotel-booking AI assistant, attempted to engage me in normal conversation. Because Darren sounded very suspicious, I asked, “Are you a human or are you a robot?” He replied that he was in fact AI but then hurriedly added some anodyne gobbledygook about how he “would like to believe that I am capable of answering all your questions and . . . “ “REPRESENTATIVE!” I shouted. He tried pleading his case again and again I shouted “REPRESENTATIVE!” I sure wish I had known to shout “I said Representative, you clanker!”
Thanks for all your hard work and excellent writing, Rod. Stay safe out there.
I've encountered statements like this when lost in the phone options, ineffectually shouting "Representative" over and over: "We know you'd like to speak to a human, but that option is no longer available." Why not? A lot of people are without work presently. And why does every customer service rep I reach have such a thick accent that I can hardly understand what they're saying, what with so many "native speakers" laid off?
Anne, you know why and why not. We used to say "It's all about the Benjamins" and it is, certainly, largely about the Benjamins, but in the case of unavailability of humans, it's also about the idolizing of machines over people. Machines don't take sick days, file work comp claims, sexually harass co-workers, ask for raises, question policies, or go outside the chain of command to report on bad supes. Those risks not only translate into Benjamins lost to the company but also keep customer expectations low and therefore suppress competition in the marketplace.
Hardly a day goes by in which I don't daydream about being Amish.
Dan, excellent analysis. But even the Amish have issues. They do seem to have dodged the autism plague by refusing to vax. Still, I don't think I'd want to be Amish. For one thing, there is the practice of shunning, which is absolutely brutal. I've gotten a few whiffs of shunning from former friends and alienated relatives, and it's excruciating. There are people one cannot replace.
Shunning is overplayed. If you haven’t joined church you aren’t shunned. If you have, well, it varies by community but withholding endorsement in many things is a powerful and necessary message to our children.
Ah, but the Amish, being highly inbred are prone to their own cluster of genetic conditions. How exactly do you know their autism statistics? How likely are their children to be screened, given that milder levels of autism wouldn't be that much of a handicap on a farm? They also don't school their children beyond 8th grade in their own particular schools.
I got that information from watching Congressional testimony about the lack of autism among the Amish children--some news snippet. Yes, the Amish have some particularly serious inbred-type diseases. This has also been written about in print media (low rates of autism among Amish children). Here's a print report attached. General US population autism rates are running 1 in 36 children I believe (different figures are being bandied about). According to this article, Amish have 1 in 15,000 children with autism. There are also reports that Amish babies don't have SIDS. There is now a suspicion that SIDS is mainly a post-vax fatality in babies. May or may not be true, further research will be requied on all these suppositions.
I think that remains to be determined. One in 36 children is now autistic. Could vaxxes be part of the explanation? We are going to find out I think one way or other now that RFK Jr is at the helm and Fauci is out.
There is zero evidence of a link. RFK-I-can-diagnose-children-just-by-looking-at-the-Jr has been spewing widely debunked nonsense about vaccines and other topics over the years. He has no credibility on the topic. Live in the truth, Anne.
For now, there is a still value in real customer service as a strategic differentiator versus robots or cheap, outsourced-to-south Asia call center labor. But soon enough, to Dan's point, all customer expectation will be so low that an actual, English speaking human on the other end of the line will be a luxury no business needs.
Yes there is value among those of us who have been fortunate enough to have had the experience of direct and motivated customer service from real people, but as those memories fade what we knew will be forgotten. “Customer Service” will become a platitude only.
I was Amish adjacent for 6 years from 95-2001 and we resubscribed to their publications a few years ago for a little perspective. Our kids would’ve had trouble making a living, converts take two generations to fit and stay second class citizens, but….there are days I regret leaving.
They do have their problems. The internet and smart phones keep coming up in articles. It may destroy them if they can’t hold the line. A recent article compared buying a smartphone to use as a phone to buying out a grocery store when you only needed a pound of flour. A good analogy.
Being a Christian of any sacrificial stripe is going to take a lot of effort in the future.
There are different rules, depending on the sub-sects (Ordnungs, as they call them). For instance, in many Amish businesses they will allow the use of phones, or even computers, and credit card processing, but they'll keep any machinery kerosene or diesel powered. But the phones will be banned for homes.
Phones are kept out of the house in phone shacks on the edge of the property and are often shared. Their businesses will state an hour or so when they are available, and be connected to an answering machine.
Well, e.g., if you feel like paying nearly $395 or $695 a year to American Express for a Gold or Platinum card respectively you can speak to an American. They got you coming and going.
Concierge customer service. Maybe a new business model akin to concierge medicine. A B2B product you sell to a business for it to offer its customers who are willing to pay an AMEX platinum card type premium for the ability to speak to an actual English-speaking human being. I like it.
I once got into a loooonnnng conversation with a teleworker from Mumbai. I asked him for a recipe for Aloo Gobi . He gave me one and than helped me solve my problem.
Four years ago I had such a nightmarish time getting answers out of UPS' automated help (with no option to speak to a human) that I completely lost my temper and cussed it out in Russian-- a language with some obscene phrases that could curl one's eyebrows. The phone tree immediately put me through to a live human-- but in some foreign country where the guy just read from a script ending with "We are very sorry you having difficulty and we assure you we are looking into it." I ended up reporting UPS to the Better Business Bureau.
Over a decade ago, I had a six-month war with All State. We had a kitchen fire, the adjuster guaranteed funding, and I didn't hear from him again. I had to call the President of All State to get repair funding. The adjuster had broken his leg and the bureaucracy had broken down.
I believe this is about profit margins. It is cheaper for a company to a worker in India, or Philippines, etc. The “clanker” doesn’t have a country and doesn’t require a wage. A company is non human and only purpose is to make the best profit it can make. I wonder when drones or driverless vehicles deliver our cheap Amazon packages to us? We are between stories now, the old…and what’s coming.
Quite a few things here. First off is “dead internet theory.” This is the idea that the internet is becoming useless because of the amount of AI created content, to where you couldn’t tell what was what on the internet and it becomes useless for that specific reason of not knowing what is real and what is artificial.
Another thing about this is when AI starts creating its own training sets (if it already hasn’t started doing so). In other words, everything then is a mirror of a mirror. The first generation of AI is trained on real things, the second generation of AI might be trained on what the first generation created (for you highly technical folks, I’m trying to keep this simple).
I had tried to start a movement many years ago to start preserving written works in expectation of collapse happening at some point and a need to maintain hard copies of things. I forget the technical term for it, but there is also the problem of converting data over time to newer formats and technologies. So, you might not be able to open older files at some point and digital versions need to be updated to newer ones and maintained. I can think of many instances of stuff from fifteen or twenty years ago that has been lost. Of course, there is plenty of AI clickbait to fill the voids with empty mental calories.
I had not considered that the AI debasement of knowledge would be an issue that people would have to prepare for. That physical copies would be essential for that reason had not crossed my mind, but it is a truly scary thing as well. What happens when AI is trained to be a “fact checker?” There has already been issues with AI created from sets which create racial bias, an impetus towards anti-social behavior, etc. What happens if you wind up with AI that decides that anything by dead white males should be excluded? The memory hole there exists, but no one would even know it exists.
Fahrenheit 451 then becomes a little more plausible. What will people trust? Their crazy great uncle raving about times when words were on pages or will they listen to the seashell and be calm about it all? (with ear buds, we already have that, so….).
Last, Rod, I would strongly recommend reading Neal Stephenson’s Anathem. I would not consider it a religious work, but Stephenson is/was involved in The Long Now foundation, which has considered the issue of data preservation over a thousand years or something like that. Some of that thinking clearly bled back into the novel, which dealt partly with an anti-intellectual society forcing scientists and whatnot into monasteries. Not the same exact thing as the Benedict Option, but not unrelated, if you begin to consider the Benedict Option also as seeking to preserve learning in an age when information no longer equates to knowledge.
First, if the Butlerian jihad happened against the machines, I wouldn't mind, but I need to learn how to use a slide rule first.
Second, and I suspect some of the commenters on here will agree, if AI starts training on its own output, I don't see how it doesn't spiral into its own destruction. The data we feed it now is already imperfect; using its own outputs is like a dog repeatedly returning to its own vomit for sustenance (to quote a famous proverb).
So I'm still skeptical of AI's long term relevance.
Oh I'm sure of that; in my line of work c-suite people are no doubt salivating at automating the entire white-collar department into irrelevance. I'd say their hopes are misplaced, but that doesn't mean they won't try to gut their workforce (until they find they're cutting into the essential sinews instead of bloat).
I deal with the same thing in my line of work. My experience lately has been that most technical folks see AI as being overhyped and far less useful than it first seemed, while the non-technical people are amazed at it and don’t realize it is sort of a glorified search engine in a lot of ways. Of course, there is also the third group in all of the enterprise-level discussions, that being the people who are staking their careers on AI and want to stay relevant.
The corporate hype train might be coming to an end, though. We had an intern who was graduating with a degree in AI something or other, had good experience here, and good credentials, but didn’t have anything lined up after graduation. Market is kind of crap lately for generalist junior devs, but if AI is the hot ticket, demand might not be so great there either. I don’t necessarily think offshoring is the issue with AI jobs as at least our org makes no use of contractors for AI work, rather the opportunities just aren’t there.
This is my husband’s experience too as a 40 year IT veteran, everyone, including some under qualified, or just inexperienced IT people overestimates this stuff. They think it’s infallible magic.
There are videos online of AI doing this with a picture that it has produced. It is prompted to recreate the picture again and again. Fifty iterations later, you end up with something almost totally different because of some tiny flaw in the first iteration that just got amplified over and over again.
Well, I'm doing my part by keeping an extensive paper library that I return to again and again. I think something is going to break, because there is no reason for these 2 wars to go on and on (esp. Ukraine), and yet, the wars persist and fester. When will the two local infections to the body politic erupt and cause global sepsis? Only the Father knows.
I think we are already seeing global sepsis in many ways. The modern American lifestyle is becoming untenable and it is only a matter of time before it collapses entirely. There may be a few haves and a hell of a lot of have-nots, for one.
Gioia has to cover his flank with the reference to paper books, and he could have done the same thing with CDs and LPs. And wacky as e.g. the Metropolitan Museum has become I still believe when I climb those stairs that what's at the top was painted by Giambattista Tiepolo and not a machine.
And a lot of this is not new. Downstairs at the Met if you look at the Greek sculpture, much of it is "2nd Century copies", or completed with plaster. The critic Hugh Kenner once wrote that ALL sculpture purporting to be ancient Greek is actually fake to some degree. I don't know about that, but it's true to an extent.
Have you ever been to The Venetian at Las Vegas. You can dine by a fake Venetian canal where the light changes from morning to starlight every hour or so. The vast majority of people there prefer it to the real Venice I'm sure.
Where I think this is going is the creation of a caste system. Remember in 1984 when O'Brien offers Winston and Julia a drink and says, "It's called wine"? That's what we're headed for. There's going to be a remnant of people who can tell the difference between Toscanini conducting the Eroica and those who think they're listening to Beethoven and aren't. You say that the people with paper books and Compact Discs predating 2025 will be a "remnant", but that's the thing I'm talking about. All of this goes to a Servile State and the Benedict Option. All of it.
I keep a hard copy of certain things. I only buy hard copy books, I keep a written log of bloom times and the garden. I do keep the harvest on google docs but I will print that off at the end of the year. I have a few journal entries that might even be interesting to posterity such as when I first became aware of Covid in either Dec or Jan of 2018/19 and wrote about what was going on.
Levenger's sells a 5-Year Diary, so you can write 5 or 6 lines about what you were doing on, say September 2, for five years in a row. I've kept these diaries since 2011 and record everything from what I made for supper to when the first hummingbird appeared in May to my mother's death and my grandchildren's births. It has been a wonderful way to keep track of my life and times. And yes, I chronicled the whole sordid mess of COVID and the vaccine disaster.
I need to do that. I also have some online threads that I need to make hardcover for memories. I make a picture book for each kids birthday. Kinda getting expensive now
The "Dead Internet" term started because people were noticing that websites and pages they had cited or linked to had gone offline. This is a problem, for instance, in legal opinions, where footnoted citations included web links to government pages that had since been moved, or offline-archived, etc. It's basically the erasure of history.
Yeah, after your reply, I went back and reviewed it. I think it encompasses a number of ideas, but maybe most of all the brittleness of the medium as a source of truth. I forget what year it was, but people proposed that the internet would collapse because images and video clips would consume so much bandwidth that the technology would not be able to keep up with demand. In spite of the advances in technology over the past few years, I’m not entirely sure this still isn’t the case. If you factor in the need to generate AI content, even if done with good intent and purpose, this consumes both power to create it and physical space to store it.
I think cloud computing has contributed heavily to a broken mental model about all this. Since the cloud is just someone else’s computer, the reality is that all the content and storage has to be prioritized in terms of cost, maintenance, and money. Manual content creation, even with all the tooling out there now, is still a lot of work. If you get AI to do it, faster and cheaper than humans, you are going to increasingly fill more cloud capacity and compute with AI creations. Newer stuff pushes out older stuff, especially as companies which can produce more cheaply can afford the storage and compute, where individual content creators less so. For that matter, I haven’t looked into it, but I would guess that storage is increasingly more optimized for AI content than human created. Computers don’t really care about readable metadata or interfaces. Naming doesn’t matter to them.
All that goes together to suggest that the internet will become increasingly barren of meaning. I’ve found myself referring to online content far less these days and am spending more time in bookstores.
As a photographer myself, I am acutely aware of the challenges here. Maintaining personal local storage, with all the imperatives in place about backing up one's work, is a running battle, as it the retrieval of said work when needed. The really important ones, ultimately, I print in some form as that will be the best way to really preserve them.
The AI garbage now competing with use shutterbugs is just adding to the pollution.
I’ve not so secretly been hoping that AI will destroy the internet and render it useless. I’m quite serious.
Going back a number of years, I’d already concluded that for all of the good the internet does, its harms may well outweigh its benefits. That’s a pretty subjective opinion, obviously, but I think it’s basically been a massive solvent that’s steadily eating away at basically everything that holds society together - friendships, romantic relationships, institutional authority, a broadly shared understanding of reality, etc. It’s the most radically liberating invention since the printing press, and I do not mean that in a good way.
Complicating the preservation of hard copies is that the acidic paper mostly used since the late 19th century deteriorates after a few decades. Short of hand copying manuscripts on vellum, the best protection against digital censorship would seem to be digital copies stored on say, DVD. But then, what if the formats such as pdf later become obsolete, and or the lights go out on civilization, literally and figuratively?
I need to get around to reading that book. I own it but the only Stephenson book I have read is Snow Crash. From what I've heard, for every book he has a different topic that he focuses heavily on.
" . . . information that goes against the Narrative can only be learned on ____ ,"
Well, possibly just so. But how do you know? Footnote your sources - but there's a quaint practice, isn't it? Still, how do you know what you know in this day and age? Is Rachel more authoritative than Sean? Why? How does any source prove more honest than another now that Uncle Walter is dead and in his grave?
Here’s a clue. Back when publishers had to commit real money, also known as CAPITAL, to producing an edition of something, they had to make as certain as they could that the quality of what they were publishing was accurate, non-libelous, and well edited.
That vast amounts of text can now be transmitted at a microscopic fraction of that old cost is one major reason for these problems we now have.
Right. And it's a good reason not to read anything except current events online and to avoid podcasts. That's what staggered me when Carlson called Cooper an historian. No books, so no footnotes, no nothing.
That and some math and science videos are worthwhile. It’s easier to visualize a lot of math by video animation than it is to portray it on a blackboard.
Perhaps that was so . . . back in the day. Problem is - and I regret that it is a problem - we don't live back in the day. Today, most people don't read . . . don't read books, that is. If they are old enough, they might not just listen to podcasts and actually read something online. But either way, they have no way of knowing how the writer or podcaster knows what he knows. Today they . . . and here I'm not talking about us, just the 99,9999% of those not us . . . simply accept the word of those that agree with them and mock those who don't. Not only are we divided against each other, but we're increasingly ignorant for it.
Those dwindling numbers of us who still “believe in” the moon landings, to use a new metaphor that seems to be emerging here, will be the last people who remember the era of the True. We’re entering a Foucauldian nightmare world of power assertion.
It also helped that competition among writers, publishers, broadcasters, and so on had a chance of allowing certain more or less objective truths to emerge. The existence of third parties who stood to gain little from the fates of two rivals, unless those rivals were found to be collusive, proved useful in keeping things more honest than they might have been.
Note that I am nowhere saying that anything could be 100% known with certainty, not in the news/current events category at least, unless we are talking about brute facts like the moon landings. (Those who think those are faked reveal a total ignorance of how multiple spheres in real life actually work, from rocketry to Hollywood production.)
Regarding the first sections about the “Unknown Soldier” and “Trans Tyranny":
The irony is hard to miss. What begins as a lament against tyranny ends up practicing it. A homeless man cooking by the Eternal Flame isn’t seen as a person in need but reduced to a symbol of “civilizational decline.” His story—poverty, hunger, sheer survival—disappears into a ready-made tale about migrants and socialism.
The same thing happens in the “Trans Tyranny” section. A single arrest is inflated into proof that Britain has collapsed, while trans people themselves are turned into caricature and slur. The complexity of their lives, their dignity, their voice—all written out in order to make the point.
That’s the trick of authoritarian thinking: people become props. In denouncing suppression, the author suppresses. In defending speech, he erases others from the conversation.
And unless we’re careful, any of us can do the same.
William, you make good points. They strike me as essential contemplation angles for aspiring Christian disciples to bring to prayer. Your last line in particular speaks to me. Just wondering aloud: Are you a practicing Christian yourself?
I don’t know London at all, but when we visited for the first and last time even the nice residential areas ( by the vehicles) looked seedy, covered in graffiti. The English substackers I follow, not given to hyperbole, are basically hopeless as to Albion’s future.
Theodore, it's not good enough because we're looking at a both/and situation, not an either/or. It can be true that post-Christian Europe is stupidly committing suicide and no less true that some otherwise good Christians will stumble into embracing sins of malice over the scene.
Well, that's where people like this Green character get me. How does he know about my sins? He seems to have an awful clear picture of his own virtue, though, I'll give him that.
Those items are part of an ongoing narrative about decline that I follow here, not just one-offs. You might be a new subscriber, so don't know that I've been writing extensively and for a long time about the decline of Britain, esp of free speech. About the homeless and the Eternal Flame, the idea is not so much about the homeless person as it is about a nation that doesn't seem to care to look after its sacred monuments, or care about itself. That's what a "condensed symbol" is: an image that carries a dense amount of meaning. That is Belgium today -- as I've been writing here for some time.
I take your point about condensed symbols—they do compress a lot of meaning. But that’s also why I worry. Symbols can flatten the very people inside them. A homeless man becomes “Belgium today,” when he’s also simply someone hungry by a fire. That doesn’t cancel the larger point about decline; it just reminds me that decline narratives risk turning human beings into props.
I know you’ve been writing about Britain and free speech for a long time. My concern is less with the theme than with how easily symbols drift into scapegoats. When “condensed” too tightly, they squeeze out the very complexity that tyranny itself always tries to erase.
I read you because I care about the broader story you’re telling, even if I often don’t agree.
The story "erases" no one. What it does is look at the bigger picture and focuses on the symbolic desecration of a national landmark, meaning the story is about cultural and national decline, not on the "Dog Bites Man" idea that someone somewhere may be homeless and hungry.
Take it from a California resident, when every issue is moralized and personalized and framed through the prism of individual suffering, you end up with a society filled with bum camps and street tents and drug zombies on almost every corner, with the govt and NGOs insisting that these people must never be moved or challenged but must be first priority in all situations with their needs always more urgent than the needs of larger society.
Sanctimonious virtue signalling solves nothing, but makes everything actively worse, as no problems can be solved if solutions can be vetoed by people shrieking Think of the Children! or Why Don't You Care as much as I Do??!
Also, we are always someone else's props, symbols and totems for better or worse, is the inevitable result of politics and discourse. We would not be able to communicate via language without this shorthand.
Symbolism matters, but shorthand about “decline” or “zombies” risks erasing people just as much as sentimental moralizing does. Politics may need symbols, but when they harden into caricature, they obscure solutions. What we need is less posturing—whether virtuous or indignant—and more clarity about what actually works.
I write from LA's Sepulveda Pass area, where multiple neighborhoods have been repeatedly menaced by fires because of (let me check appropriate language) "the alternative living arrangements of our unhoused community" aka camps filled with drug addicts who start fires (some of which have spread into wildfires causing housefires and local evacuations).
This has been an issue ignored for many years by our political leaders, because solving it would wound the tender feelings of the unhoused and unleash sanctimonious screams from our "philanthropies" aka the Homeless Industrial Complex, thus targeting our local pols for a primary opponent.
And if you want to talk about symbolic caricatures, all you have to do to magically transform from an antisocial nomad into a sacred victim of our evil colonialist capitalism is cross the border into Cali—then our ruling coalition (pols, media, NGOs) will swoop down and provide a halo and a handy list of rights you can demand: free housing, doctors, food, lawyers, storage etc. Our entire state is built on posturing! (But the virtue is privatized while the decline is socialized.)
There is nothing wrong or evil with honest, straight talk and accurate descriptions. Maybe inside church everyone is a child of God, but in the rest of the world there are people and communities that need law and order and we are unraveling this basic foundation one virtue signal at a time.
I don’t doubt the reality of fires or the failures of leadership—you’re right, they’re serious. But come on: calling people “zombies” or “nomads” doesn’t make solutions any clearer. We already have enough sloganeering. If the problem is fire hazards, drugs, or zoning, then let’s talk about what actually fixes those instead of recycling caricatures.
"What begins as a lament against tyranny ends up practicing it."
FFS. There's nothing tyrannical about keeping homeless people from misusing public property. Sorry, words have definitions independent of what you personally would like them to mean.
Clearly “frakkin toaster” is the superior AI slur to “clanker”.
Come to think of it, why isn’t everyone talking about Battlestar Galactica these days? It’s a show about AI trying to genocide humanity and it eventually becomes a giant meditation on religion and how God intervenes in unexpected ways…
This is an excellent essay. Perception of reality--which Rod correctly suggests is at risk with AI--requires physical presence. However interesting it may be to see a video of the Grand Canyon or Notre Dame cathedral, it is not the same as actually being in those places. Likewise, a video conference serves a purpose, maybe even a video call with a friend. But it is not the same as being in the room with your friend or those people. And looking at a photo of a great painting in a book is useful, but not the same as actually standing in front of the painting. Likewise for musical performances. And the Church requires physical presence for sacramental efficacy. What does this have to do with AI? Simply that digital simulations of reality--of whatever sort--will never be the same as the real thing. What AI fundamentally lacks is the ability to perceive reality in this physical sense. That's because of the way it works: it uses images on a sensor and processes them. We as human beings have the ability to perceive things as real because we intuitively recognize that being real transcends individual things. This ability to perceive reality in this transcendental way is something that AI does not and cannot have. Likewise, the AI model of knowing--statistical word order association--can never substitute for human knowing, based on abstract ideas and abstract entities. I discuss this at length in my forthcoming book on AI (printed by the way, not e-book!). That is why physical experience of the world is so important, because it prevents us from falling into the trap of confusing digital simulations with physical reality. That confusion is at the root of many psychological problems today, because those who think that because digital simulations can make anything happen, we can do that in the real world. Transgenderism is a perfect example. As Rod notes, keeping reality straight in the digital age is going to be a serious challenge for us, but the place to start is reminding people of the unbridgeable gap between the digital world and the real world.
"digital simulations of reality--of whatever sort--will never be the same as the real thing". In some ways, digital can be better than reality. Look, I've been to the Grand Canyon multiple times and no picture ever captures the depth of seeing it in person. And yet, I can't fly over the edge like a drone can. I can't see it the way time-lapse photography can capture it. I can't zoom in on people hiking the trails far below like a large telephoto lens can. My point is simply that each has its place. Each media has pros and cons.
Some day, we'll be able to have displays that go from floor to ceiling with incredible resolution. You'll be able to sit in your home and go anywhere in the world, immersed in the beauty God has created. You wouldn't want that?
Have you ever used Zillow (or similar) to look at houses for sale. They often show photos where it says, "Virtually Staged". The simulated photo is to help you see what the room could look like with decent furniture in it, as opposed to staring at an empty room. The furniture is not real, but so what? It helps you to see what the room was meant to look like. And given they tell you it's not real, then there's no question.
Isn't that all we need to do then? Any AI generated content should simply be labeled "AI Generated" (or "AI Assisted").
Hardcopy books are not all that great either. I heard about a book written about one of the Scottish reformers, but as new editions came out over the years, they edited the content. Students who read the later editions had no idea that content had been removed. Later editors didn't like the miracles that the first edition mentioned and so they were deleted.
A decent AI should be able to show you the original edition and compare it to the later editions telling you exactly what was changed. A bad AI might lie to you and tell you the first edition said something else, but if you have multiple AI's you can compare what each says, and catch the ones that can't be trusted.
And that's the key for me. Trust. Who do you trust for things you can't verify yourself? As AI gets smarter, more and more people will begin to trust what AI tells them over what humans do. My daughter was telling me about the toxic chemicals in hand soap, and how she didn't want to use it. Is she right? I have no idea. But I can ask AI about it. But can I trust what it tells me? Maybe not now, but in the future, when it will be able to answer all sorts of questions, what's to stop me from believing it? Am I going to believe somebody who tells me what some book says instead? Likely not, given that books are often full of erroneous information.
And by the way, once I get my own super high resolution floor to ceiling displays, I'll very much want the AI to create simulations of things that aren't real at all. Like a scene from the Lord of the Rings. Or a scene from the helm of the Starship Enterprise. Seems pretty cool to me. No?
I don't dispute that photography can show things that are simply not visible in any practical way for normal access, and also photography can show things that the eye simply cannot see. For example, in astronomy, there are limits to how many photons the eye can capture in about 100 ms, and this means that images of galaxies, nebulae, etc. need to be obtained by long exposure camera. Obviously we can't see what the Rovers see on Mars, etc. But for Mars, the Rover photos, though very good and the best that we can do, are still not like actually being there. Seeing any photo, you must use your imagination to put yourself there, just as you do reading a novel or a play, no matter how detailed the display. Physical presence is and always will be different than any display, however useful such displays are (and they are very useful in many cases, as you point out). As for AI's capabilities, if you read my book, you'll see why it is inherently limited and will never be able to achieve the goals that pundits claim for it. So it will never be trustworthy, and worse, it may never be possible to eliminate the hallucinations that plague it today.
You're right that a photo is still short of being there in person. On the other hand, a photo can be better than being there in that it captures the scene when it is especially nice, with a mist hanging over it, or the sunset playing on the clouds. We just don't have the time to go everywhere multiple times waiting for the few times that is appears spectacular. Or consider a Monet painting of a haystack. It's a LOT better than seeing the haystack in person. And no, I don't care for a photo of a Monet painting. There, I do want the real thing - and not in an art gallery either. I saw two Monet haystack paintings in a Connecticut home that were stunning in part because they were in a regular living room.
Regarding the AI, I've been having Claude write a few small programs. The last one it did, it really struggled to get it to work correctly, which in a way shows how dumb it is. On the other hand, it worked at fixing it through repeated iterations and debugging until it got it to work - just like some junior level programmer might. It was even proud of itself when it got done!
It was easy to see, that it wouldn't take too much more to have it move up from a "junior" level to something much higher. And yes, I often have to start over as it gets stuck saying it changed something when it didn't. But you just give it the last program it wrote and its "fresh" self works on it like it had no problems at all. It fact, I've seen the "fresh" self improve the previous program significantly.
"To start, we need mechanisms for preserving the past that can’t be tampered with by technology. Physical books are an example..."
A couple years ago it occurred to me that mundane act of borrowing a physical book from someone was in fact a revolutionary act against the age we find ourselves in. There's no record in any library, Amazon, Audible, etc. for any government or corporation to trace of one having obtained / been influenced by said book. Also, the inability of the same to digitally alter its content on demand.
The physical books strategy will be tough. The Modernists who run most libraries can simply scrap old books they don't like. Individual collections are hard to assemble, not widely available to others and may not be appreciated by heirs who just want to be rid of 'all this stuff'.
So we need thousands of us to be collectors, as most commenters here already are, and we will need some means of organizing and communicating with one another which The Borg cannot hack. It may come down to carrier pigeons.
In my harmless maddening obsessive way I have written in several Substack comments sections about the decision of the Edward Stratemeyer syndicate quite a few years ago now to "update" The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and the rest of the members of their stock company to make them politically correct. The Hardy Boys! Man, have you no humanity?! I don't know what was done to Frank, Joe, Nancy Drew, Tom Swift and friends. I do know that a few years ago, there was a Facebook group whose members were almost all aged Boomer men, which was dedicated to the sharing of information about where to hunt for original copies of Hardy Boys books, the occasional proud displaying of a volume someone had found in a thrift shop in Green Bay or a Goodwill in Escondido, and a general, therapeutic raging.
Recently, whoever has the Orwell estate published a new edition of 1984. They got Thomas Pynchon to write the foreword, but the considerably longer introduction was written by a young anonymous who according to extremely reliable sources spends most of the words of the intro apologizing for several aspects of Winston's personality which, according to the anonymous, are clearly lamentable, but which we readers must understand were byproducts of poor Orwell's boundedness by time and commonly accepted prejudices.
Really it’s just the bindings and cover illustrations. The clothes are more modern on mine, but the rare interior illustrations are still the 30’s style clothes. I think you had to have dust jackets to have cover illustration in the 30’s, otherwise plain cloth bindings. Mine are screen printed on the covers, yellow background, with the list of titles on the back.
What was the name of the Italian kid in The Hardy Boys who was always cracking jokes?
Orwell is a great scandal to the Left, and you're going to see more of this. In the Penguin Homage to Catalonia the "political" chapters are quarantined at the end on the basis of a letter the great man wrote right before he died to the effect that the book would be more effective that way. But it never happened. It also of course inoculates the reader from Orwell's experiences with the POUM in Barcelona. And it suppresses the epigraph, the greatest in history, in my opinion ("Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou be like unto him. Answer a fool according to his folly lest he be wise in his own conceit".)
I can't bear to read that Pynchon thing. That's an example of a born novelist who has managed to write nothing but garbage for more than 50 years, as opposed to Orwell, whose fictional technique is painful, but who managed to write a great book (1984).
We preservationists could call ourselves "Bookleggers" a la Canticle for Leibowitz. As for obtaining old books, haunt library and yard sales, patronize Bookfinder.com (150 million books available). I think the history, art, and culture of the Middle Ages could be reconstructed from my own holdings. But while we worry about classics, I hope somebody will be keeping basic and useful science books around, too. I nominate the old Rubber Handbook for openers.
Excellent, Rod. There has to be a lot of dark money changing hands (among the WEF members, Soros (father and son), Klaus Schwab's successor, and all the politicians who hate their own) for the crazy policies of "trans the children", "forever wars" and "let's depopulate" and "let's harm the citizens and elevate the invaders" to persist. And all of this is coming at a time of "let's bless the Sodomites from the Vatican as a general policy" and "let's put on display a Pachamamma idol and worship it" times. Yes, I know that was Francis. Well, Leo XIV is continuing some pretty strange patterns of heresy it seems. Why is Fr. James Martin still in the Vatican? Or in the church? Are his appointees orthodox or heterodox? Heterodox it seems. Can the Vatican Bank EVER be cleaned up? Let's pray it can. Why does the TLM have to be crushed? Why can't it be given a separate rite, such as the Eastern Catholics have? We seem to be living in the times of the fultillment of Akita and 3rd Fatima and Good Success (etc). Garanbandal is still a question mark in my mind.
Keep praying everyone. Prayer can move mountains and move out bad politicians (see Biden's retirement).
Pope Leo XIV promises to be a more politically astute version of his patron, Pope Frannie I. Pope Leo XIV looks healthy. We Catholics are stuck with him for twenty-five years.
There are two questionable assumptions in today’s blog first, that Calvinism has “….thrown all the mystery out;” and second, that Christian mysticism provides a way for God to reveal spiritual knowledge about Himself and His being to humankind.
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To start it helps to be precise in our definitions. Christian mysticism involves seeking direct spiritual knowledge through direct communion with the Divine. Mystery describes something that is difficult to explain or beyond human comprehension.
It’s easy to understand why non-Protestants believe Protestants reject mysticism and mystery because the stereotypical face of Protestantism that most outsiders see are mainline Protestant denominations and big box evangelical churches. Mainline Protestant denominations, particularly those of a more liberal bent, have made God very small, unmysterious and remote by applying historical criticism to their exegesis of scripture and postmodernism to the application of their Christianity and to their worship services. Big box evangelical churches still have a very big God, but their emotion filled, entertainment and conversion-focused seeker sensitive worship services obscure any element of mystery in their practiced theology. These churches believe in the mystery of the anointing of the Holy Spirit in conversion and the mystery of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in a Christian’s life, but that mystery is obscured by their weekly focus on the conversion experience, praise bands, smoke machines, large video screens and jeans-clad tattooed pastors.
A group of Protestants that are less visible and who do not feed into this stereotype are traditional, creedal orthodox Calvinist or Reformed Protestants. These Protestants believe that mysticism as a means to find and experience the Divine is unscriptural and dangerous, however, they do believe that mystery in Christianity is alive and well. John Calvin rejected Christian mysticism because total depravity means that human reason, senses and desires are distorted by sin including the desires and attempts to have spiritual experiences. Calvin warned against mysticism to guard Christians against vain speculation, idle curiosity, and the sinful desire to go beyond the only sources of divine knowledge given to humans which are Christ, creation, and Scripture. Any genuine spiritual insights gained through Christ, creation and scripture must be an act of God’s grace effectuated by the Holy Spirit, not a result of a mystical connection by God utilizing innate human spiritual capacity.
Calvin did believe that mystery did exist in Christianity. He believed in the mystery of the union between believers and Christ and in the mystery of the presence of Christ in the eucharistic elements. Commenting on both the mystery of this union and its enactment in the Lord’s Supper, Calvin wrote, “We acknowledge that the sacred union that we have with Christ is incomprehensible to carnal sense. His joining us with him so as not only to instill his life into us, but to make us one with himself, we grant to be a mystery too sublime for our comprehension, except insofar as his words reveal it.” Calvin and orthodox (conservative) Protestants have not “…thrown all the mystery out,” they just put boundaries on the means and degree to which God reveals his presence and substance through mysticism and mystery.
Orthodox (conservative) Calvinists do agree with Charles Taylor’s three bulwarks of metaphysical realism. The question is can the bulwarks of metaphysical realism lead to a saving relationship with God? An orthodox Calvinist would say metaphysical realism only gets you part of the way.
An orthodox Calvinist believes in something called general revelation which states that God reveals His existence through His creation as stated a number of Psalms, and as stated by Paul in Romans 1: 18-22 which states that this general revelation is sufficient to reveal the existence of God and to humankind and for humankind to incur punishment from God if they reject His existence. The key question is whether or not this metaphysical realism is a sufficient means for individual humans to enter into a saving knowledge and relationship with God, and an orthodox Calvinist would say “no.” A saving relationship requires a next step beyond general revelation which is God’s intervention at a personal level to convince someone of their sins, the need for redemption and the acceptance through faith that Christ’s death on the cross provided that redemption and justification through penal substitutionary atonement. The Holy Spirit then works through the process of sanctification to make us, though imperfectly, more and more like Christ.
The current problem is that humankind has made God progressively less sovereign and smaller and smaller over the past 400 years. This in turn has reduced the ability of general revelation to lead people to conclude there must be a God. However, this is not the Calvin’s fault. Calvin, in particular, believed in a very big sovereign God who sustains and directs everything that happens in the universe including the direction of the individual droplets of spray coming off the prow of a speeding boat.
Don't blame Calvin. Blame Ockam who forgot that God is unchanging as well as sovereign. Blame Darwin who provided a non-Divine means to achieve the complexity, mechanisms and wonder of the natural world. Blame Freud who removed sin and guilt from the understanding of human behavior and hence the need for God and redemption. Blame Marx who shifted the focus of Christianity from God to the poor and under privileged (not necessarily a completely bad thing) and hence the need for God and redemption. Blame the historical criticism of 19th century German theologians who reduced the authority of God and the Bible. Blame post-modernism that gave sanction to the idea that one’s feelings and desires are the true bases of reality, authority, and self-definition and eliminates the need for God and religion in life.
Would the mysticism inherent in majestic cathedrals, the lives of the saints, icons, incense and ringing bells have preserved a big sovereign God over the past 400 years. I don’t think so. Humankind is fundamentally sinful and is always seeking ways to move away from God. I think the ideas of Darwin, Freud and Marx or their equivalents would have still happened.
Pardon me if my rationalist Calvinism is showing here, but metaphysical realism engenders emotions like awe and wonder. However, Christians whether Orthodox, Catholic or Protestant need to move beyond how their Christianity makes them feel and focus on the factual underpinnings of their faith and the implications of their faith to effectively apply Christianity in world. Emotional experience cannot be a foundation for belief, nor can it be the standard by which to judge truth, goodness, e.g. Belief and the standards by which we live a Christian life can only be based on a knowledge of the facts of salvation as presented in the Bible and the basic theological principles derived from these facts.
A final thought experiment. A fundamental characteristic of mysticism is that it is an emotional experience and touches something beyond our selves. However, both religious and non-religious experiences can engender a mystical feeling and a connection beyond our selves. How do we know what mystical experience is God revealing himself and what mystical experience is not from God.
For example, Voces 8 singing Danny Boy, --https://youtu.be/RorRJPhQfaM?si=0FW60gpLbwQS5u3f; Sydnie Christmas singing “Over the Rainbow -- https://youtu.be/GBgNKRw5BQ8?si=wWts62RlkRGWMiay; songs from the Orthodox Funeral Trisagion and Troparion -- https://youtu.be/TACo9ekOfas?si=G4oe5pYmnLiYqRNnT; and the Hymn of the Cherubim by Tchaikovsky -- https://youtu.be/KhbuNZ8p3hg?si=cPO5Zo-g_Zgim2aA all engender a mystical feeling of longing for and hoped connection to a better place beyond our current selves. However, which of these emotional longings for something or someplace outside ourselves is from God? Can we assume the mystical and emotional experiences engendered by songs from the Orthodox Funeral Trisagion and Tchaikovsky’ Hymn of the Cherubim are from God just because they have a religious theme?
Calvin would say we cannot reliably know because of humankind’s total depravity, and that is why and that is why he believed only nature (general revelation), Christ and Scripture were the only reliable means of Divine revelation. Calvin still believed in mystery, but not a reliable basis for a saving relationship with God.
The problem isn't Calvin, it is modern Calvinists, who often reduce Calvinism to just soteriology. That's where we get the bizarre creature; the Reformed Baptist who thinks he is a Calvinist, even though he doesn't baptize infants. Confessional Calvinists and Lutherans are different from the bulk of modern Protestantism.
Wonderfully written. Thank you. I get frustrated with Rod's ongoing conflation of high Church Protestants ( Calvinists, Lutherans, orthodox Anglicans ) with Anabaptists in their various forms. He has been told before that he isn't right about that but persists in writing as he did today.
I would even go so far as to separate Lutherans and Anglicans for Calvinists. One of the most unique and odd to me relics from early Anglicanism is that they used to believe in the healing touch of the king. Well that ended when they took Charles's head
Queen Anne (Charles' grandaughter) was still touching the heads of infants to safeguard them from what we now call tuberculosis. I think it was the Hanoverian kings who stopped the practice since it was alien to their religious culture.
Guy, did you even read closely? Courtney is a former Baptist, a graduate of a conservative seminary. She sent me that link -- to a LONG essay -- by Robin Phillips, who used to be a Calvinist. He quotes many academics, including Calvinist ones. If you would trouble yourself to read the actual essay I link to, you'll see he draws a distinction between Calvinists and Lutherans on the sacramental issue.
I'm aware of that, Rod. But my impression has been that you consider Calvinists to be essentially Baptistic on the matter of Communion, and they are not. They do believe Communion is sacramental, not symbolic.
If they follow Calvin, they do. But many "Calvinists" are really closet Zwinglians. And never forget that when Calvin came to an accord with Bullinger - Zwingli's successor in Zurich - over "the Lord's Supper" in 1564 it was Calvin who did all the yielding and Bullinger none at all.
This is so well written. You will see my comment on Calvin, which is quite harsh I'm afraid. Though I disagree with him on doctrinal points, I am basing my observations on the modern Calvinist churches. Perhaps that isn't totally fair. Our pastor had to take down any Christian artwork that was in the space we shared with another church. As an LCMS Lutheran, though we recognize mystery and the Sacraments of Baptism and Communion as central, we would agree that the foundation is God's Word, and not experiences or feelings. It's not an either or thing.
Most of my best friends are in the PCA. They have gone hard school reformed to the point that they took down the cross in the sanctuary. Apparently the last pastor was more liberal on that.
Re: Calvin, in particular, believed in a very big sovereign God who sustains and directs everything that happens in the universe including the direction of the individual droplets of spray coming off the prow of a speeding boat.
Sounds like something derived from Islam where God is just not the Creator and Law-giver, but is the direct cause of everything. If so, Calvin went well beyond what any medieval Catholic or Orthodox theologian posited.
Re: Blame Ockam who forgot that God is unchanging as well as sovereign.
God's Essence, being beyond Time, does not change. God's actions in Time do change (obviously, as actions in Time inherently mean change)
I find myself agreeing with you for a change, Jon. Nearly all pastors today hedge at least 1-2 letters of TULIP because the cognitive dissonance of "man is God's puppet but God holds us responsible for the performance quality" is too great.
It's not quite as bad as you say, but it takes a lot of intellectual effort to be a just so Reformed person who is well balanced and also nice to others. (Cheers to Bobby Lime if he sees this.)
"Any genuine spiritual insights gained through Christ, creation and scripture must be an act of God’s grace effectuated by the Holy Spirit, not a result of a mystical connection by God utilizing innate human spiritual capacity."
Isn't "God's grace effectuated through the Holy Spirit" just Christian mysticism in practice?
What is the difference between a Calvinist who gains a spiritual insight during Bible study, a Catholic who gains the same during Eucharistic devotion, an Orthodox who has an epiphany during Divine Liturgy, and an Anglican who finds it in meditation on the book of common prayer? Which of these can you claim is derived from the Holy Spirit and which not? And how do you know?
John Milton 400 years ago: “Every true Christian, able to give a reason of his faith, hath the word of God before him, the promised Holy Spirit, and the mind of Christ within him.” If that's the standard, how do you adjudicate among mystical experiences and decide which are legitimate? I don't think you can. You will end up either accepting everything (the path of the liberal mainlines and some of the Pentecostals) or rejecting all mysticism in favor of "just read the Bible and do what it says" (the default of the rest of Protestantism.)
To begin, I mean no disrespect to any religious tradition in what follows. The difference from a Calvinist point of view in what spiritual insights are Divinely inspired and which are not is grounded in what you believe to be the source of religious authority.
A Calvinist believes that the only source of religious authority is Sola Scriptura, or Scripture Alone . God's grace can only be effected through the Holy Spirit through humankind's engagement with scripture.
A Catholic believer believes the sources of religious authority are scripture, apostolic tradition and the Magisterium which is the teaching authority of the Pope and bishops. A Calvinist would agree that grace can be effected through the first authority, scripture, but would say that God's grace cannot be effectuated by the Holy Spirit through the second two, apostolic tradition and the Magisterium, because these two reflect the thoughts and conclusions of humankind which is effected by original sin, and unlike scripture, are not inspired by God.
An Orthodox believer believes the sources of religious authority are scripture and holy tradition including the teachings of the Church Fathers and the liturgical and sacramental life of the Church. Again, a Calvinist would agree that grace can be effected through scripture, but not through holy tradition because holy tradition is not inspired by God and reflects the thoughts and actions of fallen humankind.
An Anglican believer believes the sources of religious authority are scripture, tradition and reason. A Calvinist would again agree that the Holy Spirit could effect grace through holy scripture, disagree on tradition and agree on reason as long as the conclusions of that reason do not contradict scripture.
Calvinist, Catholic, Orthodox and Anglican believers can all receive spiritual insight through God's grace effectuated by the Holy Spirit through scripture, but Calvinists do not believe that spiritual insight can reliably be effectuated through tradition, the teachings of the church fathers, the Magisterium, sacraments or liturgy.
Sola scriptura sounds great in principle but is unworkable in practice since the Bible doesn't interpret itself. Liberal Protestants say the Holy Spirit told them the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah was lack of hospitality and that Paul's injunction against homosexuality was cultural and about Greek power imbalances not actual homosexual behavior. (No, I'm not making this up; it really is what they say.) You have no way to refute this. No Protestant does, because sola scriptura leaves us stuck in Milton's framework of reliance on the Holy Spirit for interpretation.
We were so pissed at having a single Pope that we made every man his own Pope instead -- a debatable improvement. You said it yourself above: "The difference in what spiritual insights are Divinely inspired and which are not is grounded in what you believe to be the source of religious authority." Every man is now responsible for choosing his own religious authority. Every man chooses his own Pope now.
And that's exactly what happens. People find "theologians" to back up what they already believe. So instead of papal encyclicals, we get dueling Bible commentaries. But unlike papal encyclicals or church councils, the resulting debates can never be resolved.
Von Eck's criticism at the Diet of Worms bites hard: “Not one of the heresies which have torn the bosom of the church has not derived its origin from the various interpretation of the Scripture.” Subsequent events demonstrate he understated the risk. This is a subject I have written about previously: https://brianvillanueva.substack.com/p/what-is-truth
Back to our original point. The Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican believers in my example would all say the Holy Spirit gave them a spiritual awareness of a deeper reality. (The same thing you and I would say, as I have received a few such in my own lifetime as well.) Responding that, "well, those can't be real because you believe in tradition and reason instead of just scripture" isn't an answer to that, even by a Calvinist frame of reference.
It's been an Oklahoma minute since I placed my size 12 boot heel on UK soil, the departure point of many of my ancestors. I remember way back when enjoying my time there in the countryside. Country folk are all pretty much the same; laid back, kind, hardworking, enjoy fellowship....and defensive of our way of life. Those folk seemed, I don't know, I bit sturdier than other Europeans I've met. Keep Calm and Carry On, I suppose. Did they have opinions? You betcha. I enjoyed the banter.
Now, I've felt some of my neighbors opinions weren't worth tobacco spit, but to arrest someone for their opinion? I'd like to say I cannot fathom the manifestation of tyrannical Gestaptitude happening in my fair state, but I've read enough Solzhenitsyn to know better. Many of my ancestors left to flee tyranny, and some were given a boot in the butt to boot on their way on the ship. I can't imagine those fair folk I met in the countryside are taking kindly to this new normal. Maybe they are too far away from the big cities to feel it, but I imagine they will before long. Look out when they've had enough.
Physical media is imperative. Pre-AI works must be safeguarded so that we can maintain some ability to parse even partial truth from ubiquitous lies. Fahrenheit 451 was prophetic. Keep your books, your DVDs, your vinyl records: they may be all that is left that is not AI one day.
Secondly, I am sure you know there is a Christianity that believes that Christ is still embodied after the Resurrection, though now His body is in exalted form, incorruptible and immortal. And Our Father (and Our Mother) are likewise embodied. Therefore, anything that disembodies us takes us away from our eternal destiny as the children of God. Receiving a body through mortal birth was a step forward for us on the path to that destiny. Embodiment is divine.
This is a bizarre comment. All Christians believe that Jesus has been raised from the dead, not that His "Spirit" lives on, but that He has been resurrected. Resurrection is by definition physical.
No Christian believes that The Father has a body. As for "Our Mother," that one checkmates me.
You're obviously in some cult. I have a temperamental incapability to learn about the cults, so I don't know which one it is, though I suspect it's LDS. If you wish to enlighten me please do.
As to political parties agreeing not to talk about or criticize migration....their biggest issue:
I've seen this attitude and strategy on the micro-level in my home and at my former and current jobs. It's THE REASON why problems get worse until there's a blow up. I would go so far as to say that even taking poorly planned action, that is somewhat ineffective, is better than ignoring a problem like this. They're cowards and maybe worse. If you are afraid to deal with societal problems, why run for office?.....power, ego, inside deals, and radical activism, would seem to be likely motivations.
Re: the hands of the beggar are not brown or black, but white. So it is doubtful that he is an illegal migrant, or a migrant at all.
I agree that without some sort of proof we shouldn't assume he is any sort of immigrant. However there are white migrants too. Ukraine has produced quite a few. And some Middle Eastern people, especially Levantine peoples, are fairly light complected.
Re: six AfD candidates for office in North Rhine-Westphalia — where Cologne is — have died. Six! What are the odds?
Maybe someone should get hold of their death certificates and see what caused their deaths before we start folding the tinfoil hats. I recall the old "Clinton Chronicles" - and a very thorough debunking of each and every death attributed to the Clintons.
Re: It is now possible to alter every kind of historical record—perhaps irrevocably.
Huh? How? Secondary online stuff, maybe. But most of the primary historical record is on dead tree, dead papyrus, dead parchment, dead stone and in various real world artifacts and structures.
Syrian here, never thought of myself as particularly dark, especially compared to an inevitably unclean homeless person. Now compared to my lily white German husband, I am a different paint chip.
In America on the census people from the Middle East are instructed to identify as European, at least they were last time. I had never heard the term MENA before 2023, granting me instant minority status which I don’t really need.
I do remember being very excited when Hispanic Barbie came out in the late 60’s matching my eye, skin, and hair color more closely than the blue eyed blondes.
Of course none of this makes sense. My adopted son who is 100% Mayan is not supposed to pick the Native American box but rather the Hispanic.
As I have noted before we have Middle Eastern people at my church who would easily be mistaken for Southern Europeans. And contrawise back after 9-11 a friend with Bulgarian ancestry who worked as a waiter had customers refuse his service because they thought he was an Arab.
While I can stretch my mind to try to understand the appeal of going to church in the metaverse, a fake Eucharist is always going to be a fake Eucharist. If it’s not tangible and really ingested, then I’m not sure how you can claim that you really received the Lord? That makes no sense. So your fake avatar received the fake body, so you have fake grace? What?
This reeks of fakeness, which is sadly the logical outcome of some of the things you can find in the low-church Protestant world.
It’s like being in the middle of a sci-fi movie….we haven’t hit the climax yet, but the action is definitely building.
Well, that guy's Metaverse church does not have sacraments, nor does his IRL church. For him, as a theological matter, church is about the message and emotional experience. I don't say this as a criticism, but as a description of his theology. I actually asked him if he really believes that there's no difference between the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and a Walmart parking lot. Yes, he said, I believe that.
Skynet (from Terminator) was supposed to be dystopian, not something to aspire to. It IS apocalyptic.
Re AI and unreality -- I'm already having trouble navigating a world in the blue bubble where all my friends believe that males can be women just by proclaiming themselves to be one. My current response when someone says something clearly not based in reality is to change the subject. Engaging usually doesn't go well because they're so deep in their bubble that they're not susceptible to outside information and just view you as a heretic / apostate. How did all of these people get so insane? It hurts when your friends are so deep in the cult, and you know that if you disagreed with them they'd shun you immediately.
I'm working on building a new social network with people who are more grounded in reality just so I don't feel so alone. It's hard, though, when one's family members, friends in a hobby, and coworkers are still in the bubble.
Subscribed. If you haven't already or lately, read or reread The Benedict Option. When facing so much negative the positive examples in the Benedict Option are a good thing to have thought of lately.
I just read Hennessy. Yes, yes. But it wasn’t a school. It was a church. At Mass.
Who’s Hennessy?
I presume Mathew Hennessey at the WSJ. He had one line that answered Ted's points in part, saying church, although not Mass.
"Remind yourself that in the United States of America a madman killed two children and wounded 18 in a church attached to a school."
Mathew Hennessey has previously written about being Catholic, and the heartbreak that Covid disruptions broke family habits. While the rest of the family adjusted, his child with Down Syndrome who had previously attended Mass just fine could not get in the habit of coping again. I think they were going in shifts in response rather than as a whole family.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/remember-the-children-of-annunciation-add5b127
You write, “Note well that this outrageous attack on free speech will likely not be reported in the US media. So much real and important information that goes against the Narrative can only be learned on X and Substack. Thank you for subscribing. I know this newsletter is hard to read some days, but I try to keep you informed about things that matter.” In fact, this newsletter is remarkably easy to read because your writing is so lucid and your take on an extraordinarily wide range of subjects never fails to engage me. That the subject matter is sometimes hard to bear is simply because the world is sometimes hard to bear. You at least make reading about the hard-to-bear world interesting.
By the way, I will be adding clanker to my vocabulary. I could have used it last week when “Darren,” the hotel-booking AI assistant, attempted to engage me in normal conversation. Because Darren sounded very suspicious, I asked, “Are you a human or are you a robot?” He replied that he was in fact AI but then hurriedly added some anodyne gobbledygook about how he “would like to believe that I am capable of answering all your questions and . . . “ “REPRESENTATIVE!” I shouted. He tried pleading his case again and again I shouted “REPRESENTATIVE!” I sure wish I had known to shout “I said Representative, you clanker!”
Thanks for all your hard work and excellent writing, Rod. Stay safe out there.
I've encountered statements like this when lost in the phone options, ineffectually shouting "Representative" over and over: "We know you'd like to speak to a human, but that option is no longer available." Why not? A lot of people are without work presently. And why does every customer service rep I reach have such a thick accent that I can hardly understand what they're saying, what with so many "native speakers" laid off?
Anne, you know why and why not. We used to say "It's all about the Benjamins" and it is, certainly, largely about the Benjamins, but in the case of unavailability of humans, it's also about the idolizing of machines over people. Machines don't take sick days, file work comp claims, sexually harass co-workers, ask for raises, question policies, or go outside the chain of command to report on bad supes. Those risks not only translate into Benjamins lost to the company but also keep customer expectations low and therefore suppress competition in the marketplace.
Hardly a day goes by in which I don't daydream about being Amish.
Dan, excellent analysis. But even the Amish have issues. They do seem to have dodged the autism plague by refusing to vax. Still, I don't think I'd want to be Amish. For one thing, there is the practice of shunning, which is absolutely brutal. I've gotten a few whiffs of shunning from former friends and alienated relatives, and it's excruciating. There are people one cannot replace.
Ever had any dealings with the Boston Irish? They're kings of shunning. Experto crede.
Anne, I daydream about it but I don't long for it.
Shunning is overplayed. If you haven’t joined church you aren’t shunned. If you have, well, it varies by community but withholding endorsement in many things is a powerful and necessary message to our children.
Ah, but the Amish, being highly inbred are prone to their own cluster of genetic conditions. How exactly do you know their autism statistics? How likely are their children to be screened, given that milder levels of autism wouldn't be that much of a handicap on a farm? They also don't school their children beyond 8th grade in their own particular schools.
I got that information from watching Congressional testimony about the lack of autism among the Amish children--some news snippet. Yes, the Amish have some particularly serious inbred-type diseases. This has also been written about in print media (low rates of autism among Amish children). Here's a print report attached. General US population autism rates are running 1 in 36 children I believe (different figures are being bandied about). According to this article, Amish have 1 in 15,000 children with autism. There are also reports that Amish babies don't have SIDS. There is now a suspicion that SIDS is mainly a post-vax fatality in babies. May or may not be true, further research will be requied on all these suppositions.
https://www.upi.com/Science_News/2005/06/08/The-Age-of-Autism-One-in-15000-Amish/74721118251747/
There is no connection between autism and vaccines. Stop regurgitating this RFK jr-garbage, Anne.
I think that remains to be determined. One in 36 children is now autistic. Could vaxxes be part of the explanation? We are going to find out I think one way or other now that RFK Jr is at the helm and Fauci is out.
There is zero evidence of a link. RFK-I-can-diagnose-children-just-by-looking-at-the-Jr has been spewing widely debunked nonsense about vaccines and other topics over the years. He has no credibility on the topic. Live in the truth, Anne.
For now, there is a still value in real customer service as a strategic differentiator versus robots or cheap, outsourced-to-south Asia call center labor. But soon enough, to Dan's point, all customer expectation will be so low that an actual, English speaking human on the other end of the line will be a luxury no business needs.
Yes there is value among those of us who have been fortunate enough to have had the experience of direct and motivated customer service from real people, but as those memories fade what we knew will be forgotten. “Customer Service” will become a platitude only.
I was Amish adjacent for 6 years from 95-2001 and we resubscribed to their publications a few years ago for a little perspective. Our kids would’ve had trouble making a living, converts take two generations to fit and stay second class citizens, but….there are days I regret leaving.
They do have their problems. The internet and smart phones keep coming up in articles. It may destroy them if they can’t hold the line. A recent article compared buying a smartphone to use as a phone to buying out a grocery store when you only needed a pound of flour. A good analogy.
Being a Christian of any sacrificial stripe is going to take a lot of effort in the future.
I thought the Amish eschewed phones altogether, even land lines (where Mennonites do use phones and, I believe, cars).
There are different rules, depending on the sub-sects (Ordnungs, as they call them). For instance, in many Amish businesses they will allow the use of phones, or even computers, and credit card processing, but they'll keep any machinery kerosene or diesel powered. But the phones will be banned for homes.
Phones are kept out of the house in phone shacks on the edge of the property and are often shared. Their businesses will state an hour or so when they are available, and be connected to an answering machine.
That is actually a really funny response. Amish don’t experience the Satanic Hell of phone trees. 😂
Well, e.g., if you feel like paying nearly $395 or $695 a year to American Express for a Gold or Platinum card respectively you can speak to an American. They got you coming and going.
Concierge customer service. Maybe a new business model akin to concierge medicine. A B2B product you sell to a business for it to offer its customers who are willing to pay an AMEX platinum card type premium for the ability to speak to an actual English-speaking human being. I like it.
The worst are the Indians and then the Filipinos.
I once got into a loooonnnng conversation with a teleworker from Mumbai. I asked him for a recipe for Aloo Gobi . He gave me one and than helped me solve my problem.
Four years ago I had such a nightmarish time getting answers out of UPS' automated help (with no option to speak to a human) that I completely lost my temper and cussed it out in Russian-- a language with some obscene phrases that could curl one's eyebrows. The phone tree immediately put me through to a live human-- but in some foreign country where the guy just read from a script ending with "We are very sorry you having difficulty and we assure you we are looking into it." I ended up reporting UPS to the Better Business Bureau.
I reported Verizon to the BBB - waste of time!
I think the Better Business Bureau is about as relevant as Tastee Freez.
Oh yeah - I had a ridiculous fight with Verizon that went on for months . Well I tried!
Over a decade ago, I had a six-month war with All State. We had a kitchen fire, the adjuster guaranteed funding, and I didn't hear from him again. I had to call the President of All State to get repair funding. The adjuster had broken his leg and the bureaucracy had broken down.
I believe this is about profit margins. It is cheaper for a company to a worker in India, or Philippines, etc. The “clanker” doesn’t have a country and doesn’t require a wage. A company is non human and only purpose is to make the best profit it can make. I wonder when drones or driverless vehicles deliver our cheap Amazon packages to us? We are between stories now, the old…and what’s coming.
Quite a few things here. First off is “dead internet theory.” This is the idea that the internet is becoming useless because of the amount of AI created content, to where you couldn’t tell what was what on the internet and it becomes useless for that specific reason of not knowing what is real and what is artificial.
Another thing about this is when AI starts creating its own training sets (if it already hasn’t started doing so). In other words, everything then is a mirror of a mirror. The first generation of AI is trained on real things, the second generation of AI might be trained on what the first generation created (for you highly technical folks, I’m trying to keep this simple).
I had tried to start a movement many years ago to start preserving written works in expectation of collapse happening at some point and a need to maintain hard copies of things. I forget the technical term for it, but there is also the problem of converting data over time to newer formats and technologies. So, you might not be able to open older files at some point and digital versions need to be updated to newer ones and maintained. I can think of many instances of stuff from fifteen or twenty years ago that has been lost. Of course, there is plenty of AI clickbait to fill the voids with empty mental calories.
I had not considered that the AI debasement of knowledge would be an issue that people would have to prepare for. That physical copies would be essential for that reason had not crossed my mind, but it is a truly scary thing as well. What happens when AI is trained to be a “fact checker?” There has already been issues with AI created from sets which create racial bias, an impetus towards anti-social behavior, etc. What happens if you wind up with AI that decides that anything by dead white males should be excluded? The memory hole there exists, but no one would even know it exists.
Fahrenheit 451 then becomes a little more plausible. What will people trust? Their crazy great uncle raving about times when words were on pages or will they listen to the seashell and be calm about it all? (with ear buds, we already have that, so….).
Last, Rod, I would strongly recommend reading Neal Stephenson’s Anathem. I would not consider it a religious work, but Stephenson is/was involved in The Long Now foundation, which has considered the issue of data preservation over a thousand years or something like that. Some of that thinking clearly bled back into the novel, which dealt partly with an anti-intellectual society forcing scientists and whatnot into monasteries. Not the same exact thing as the Benedict Option, but not unrelated, if you begin to consider the Benedict Option also as seeking to preserve learning in an age when information no longer equates to knowledge.
First, if the Butlerian jihad happened against the machines, I wouldn't mind, but I need to learn how to use a slide rule first.
Second, and I suspect some of the commenters on here will agree, if AI starts training on its own output, I don't see how it doesn't spiral into its own destruction. The data we feed it now is already imperfect; using its own outputs is like a dog repeatedly returning to its own vomit for sustenance (to quote a famous proverb).
So I'm still skeptical of AI's long term relevance.
But in the short term, AI can make for a lot of human misery. We're living in the short term for the next 10 years or so.
Oh I'm sure of that; in my line of work c-suite people are no doubt salivating at automating the entire white-collar department into irrelevance. I'd say their hopes are misplaced, but that doesn't mean they won't try to gut their workforce (until they find they're cutting into the essential sinews instead of bloat).
I deal with the same thing in my line of work. My experience lately has been that most technical folks see AI as being overhyped and far less useful than it first seemed, while the non-technical people are amazed at it and don’t realize it is sort of a glorified search engine in a lot of ways. Of course, there is also the third group in all of the enterprise-level discussions, that being the people who are staking their careers on AI and want to stay relevant.
The corporate hype train might be coming to an end, though. We had an intern who was graduating with a degree in AI something or other, had good experience here, and good credentials, but didn’t have anything lined up after graduation. Market is kind of crap lately for generalist junior devs, but if AI is the hot ticket, demand might not be so great there either. I don’t necessarily think offshoring is the issue with AI jobs as at least our org makes no use of contractors for AI work, rather the opportunities just aren’t there.
This is my husband’s experience too as a 40 year IT veteran, everyone, including some under qualified, or just inexperienced IT people overestimates this stuff. They think it’s infallible magic.
Yes. My brother is a big technology buff. He's sure that AI is the future. I'm just hoping to can more tomatoes.
There are videos online of AI doing this with a picture that it has produced. It is prompted to recreate the picture again and again. Fifty iterations later, you end up with something almost totally different because of some tiny flaw in the first iteration that just got amplified over and over again.
I can’t wait to see what the rewritten history of the 20th century will be like.
Well, I'm doing my part by keeping an extensive paper library that I return to again and again. I think something is going to break, because there is no reason for these 2 wars to go on and on (esp. Ukraine), and yet, the wars persist and fester. When will the two local infections to the body politic erupt and cause global sepsis? Only the Father knows.
I think we are already seeing global sepsis in many ways. The modern American lifestyle is becoming untenable and it is only a matter of time before it collapses entirely. There may be a few haves and a hell of a lot of have-nots, for one.
We already have lots of have-nots-- most of us belong to the group. Deprivation is relative to one's time and place.
Gioia has to cover his flank with the reference to paper books, and he could have done the same thing with CDs and LPs. And wacky as e.g. the Metropolitan Museum has become I still believe when I climb those stairs that what's at the top was painted by Giambattista Tiepolo and not a machine.
And a lot of this is not new. Downstairs at the Met if you look at the Greek sculpture, much of it is "2nd Century copies", or completed with plaster. The critic Hugh Kenner once wrote that ALL sculpture purporting to be ancient Greek is actually fake to some degree. I don't know about that, but it's true to an extent.
Have you ever been to The Venetian at Las Vegas. You can dine by a fake Venetian canal where the light changes from morning to starlight every hour or so. The vast majority of people there prefer it to the real Venice I'm sure.
Where I think this is going is the creation of a caste system. Remember in 1984 when O'Brien offers Winston and Julia a drink and says, "It's called wine"? That's what we're headed for. There's going to be a remnant of people who can tell the difference between Toscanini conducting the Eroica and those who think they're listening to Beethoven and aren't. You say that the people with paper books and Compact Discs predating 2025 will be a "remnant", but that's the thing I'm talking about. All of this goes to a Servile State and the Benedict Option. All of it.
The upper caste will listen to Furtwangler, not Toscanini. :)
Vade retro Satanas.
Funny
O'Brien got the wine from Airstrip I and Airstrip F.
I keep a hard copy of certain things. I only buy hard copy books, I keep a written log of bloom times and the garden. I do keep the harvest on google docs but I will print that off at the end of the year. I have a few journal entries that might even be interesting to posterity such as when I first became aware of Covid in either Dec or Jan of 2018/19 and wrote about what was going on.
Levenger's sells a 5-Year Diary, so you can write 5 or 6 lines about what you were doing on, say September 2, for five years in a row. I've kept these diaries since 2011 and record everything from what I made for supper to when the first hummingbird appeared in May to my mother's death and my grandchildren's births. It has been a wonderful way to keep track of my life and times. And yes, I chronicled the whole sordid mess of COVID and the vaccine disaster.
I need to do that. I also have some online threads that I need to make hardcover for memories. I make a picture book for each kids birthday. Kinda getting expensive now
The "Dead Internet" term started because people were noticing that websites and pages they had cited or linked to had gone offline. This is a problem, for instance, in legal opinions, where footnoted citations included web links to government pages that had since been moved, or offline-archived, etc. It's basically the erasure of history.
Yeah, after your reply, I went back and reviewed it. I think it encompasses a number of ideas, but maybe most of all the brittleness of the medium as a source of truth. I forget what year it was, but people proposed that the internet would collapse because images and video clips would consume so much bandwidth that the technology would not be able to keep up with demand. In spite of the advances in technology over the past few years, I’m not entirely sure this still isn’t the case. If you factor in the need to generate AI content, even if done with good intent and purpose, this consumes both power to create it and physical space to store it.
I think cloud computing has contributed heavily to a broken mental model about all this. Since the cloud is just someone else’s computer, the reality is that all the content and storage has to be prioritized in terms of cost, maintenance, and money. Manual content creation, even with all the tooling out there now, is still a lot of work. If you get AI to do it, faster and cheaper than humans, you are going to increasingly fill more cloud capacity and compute with AI creations. Newer stuff pushes out older stuff, especially as companies which can produce more cheaply can afford the storage and compute, where individual content creators less so. For that matter, I haven’t looked into it, but I would guess that storage is increasingly more optimized for AI content than human created. Computers don’t really care about readable metadata or interfaces. Naming doesn’t matter to them.
All that goes together to suggest that the internet will become increasingly barren of meaning. I’ve found myself referring to online content far less these days and am spending more time in bookstores.
As a photographer myself, I am acutely aware of the challenges here. Maintaining personal local storage, with all the imperatives in place about backing up one's work, is a running battle, as it the retrieval of said work when needed. The really important ones, ultimately, I print in some form as that will be the best way to really preserve them.
The AI garbage now competing with use shutterbugs is just adding to the pollution.
I’ve not so secretly been hoping that AI will destroy the internet and render it useless. I’m quite serious.
Going back a number of years, I’d already concluded that for all of the good the internet does, its harms may well outweigh its benefits. That’s a pretty subjective opinion, obviously, but I think it’s basically been a massive solvent that’s steadily eating away at basically everything that holds society together - friendships, romantic relationships, institutional authority, a broadly shared understanding of reality, etc. It’s the most radically liberating invention since the printing press, and I do not mean that in a good way.
Complicating the preservation of hard copies is that the acidic paper mostly used since the late 19th century deteriorates after a few decades. Short of hand copying manuscripts on vellum, the best protection against digital censorship would seem to be digital copies stored on say, DVD. But then, what if the formats such as pdf later become obsolete, and or the lights go out on civilization, literally and figuratively?
I need to get around to reading that book. I own it but the only Stephenson book I have read is Snow Crash. From what I've heard, for every book he has a different topic that he focuses heavily on.
" . . . information that goes against the Narrative can only be learned on ____ ,"
Well, possibly just so. But how do you know? Footnote your sources - but there's a quaint practice, isn't it? Still, how do you know what you know in this day and age? Is Rachel more authoritative than Sean? Why? How does any source prove more honest than another now that Uncle Walter is dead and in his grave?
Here’s a clue. Back when publishers had to commit real money, also known as CAPITAL, to producing an edition of something, they had to make as certain as they could that the quality of what they were publishing was accurate, non-libelous, and well edited.
That vast amounts of text can now be transmitted at a microscopic fraction of that old cost is one major reason for these problems we now have.
Right. And it's a good reason not to read anything except current events online and to avoid podcasts. That's what staggered me when Carlson called Cooper an historian. No books, so no footnotes, no nothing.
That and some math and science videos are worthwhile. It’s easier to visualize a lot of math by video animation than it is to portray it on a blackboard.
But that’s about it.
Perhaps that was so . . . back in the day. Problem is - and I regret that it is a problem - we don't live back in the day. Today, most people don't read . . . don't read books, that is. If they are old enough, they might not just listen to podcasts and actually read something online. But either way, they have no way of knowing how the writer or podcaster knows what he knows. Today they . . . and here I'm not talking about us, just the 99,9999% of those not us . . . simply accept the word of those that agree with them and mock those who don't. Not only are we divided against each other, but we're increasingly ignorant for it.
In other words, we have ceased investing in knowledge formation and validation and instead are focused on algorithmic aping only.
It sure seems that way.
Those dwindling numbers of us who still “believe in” the moon landings, to use a new metaphor that seems to be emerging here, will be the last people who remember the era of the True. We’re entering a Foucauldian nightmare world of power assertion.
It also helped that competition among writers, publishers, broadcasters, and so on had a chance of allowing certain more or less objective truths to emerge. The existence of third parties who stood to gain little from the fates of two rivals, unless those rivals were found to be collusive, proved useful in keeping things more honest than they might have been.
Note that I am nowhere saying that anything could be 100% known with certainty, not in the news/current events category at least, unless we are talking about brute facts like the moon landings. (Those who think those are faked reveal a total ignorance of how multiple spheres in real life actually work, from rocketry to Hollywood production.)
Regarding the first sections about the “Unknown Soldier” and “Trans Tyranny":
The irony is hard to miss. What begins as a lament against tyranny ends up practicing it. A homeless man cooking by the Eternal Flame isn’t seen as a person in need but reduced to a symbol of “civilizational decline.” His story—poverty, hunger, sheer survival—disappears into a ready-made tale about migrants and socialism.
The same thing happens in the “Trans Tyranny” section. A single arrest is inflated into proof that Britain has collapsed, while trans people themselves are turned into caricature and slur. The complexity of their lives, their dignity, their voice—all written out in order to make the point.
That’s the trick of authoritarian thinking: people become props. In denouncing suppression, the author suppresses. In defending speech, he erases others from the conversation.
And unless we’re careful, any of us can do the same.
William, you make good points. They strike me as essential contemplation angles for aspiring Christian disciples to bring to prayer. Your last line in particular speaks to me. Just wondering aloud: Are you a practicing Christian yourself?
No, he doesn't make any good points. I know London. Pretty well. It's done. Over. Is that good enough for you?
I don’t know London at all, but when we visited for the first and last time even the nice residential areas ( by the vehicles) looked seedy, covered in graffiti. The English substackers I follow, not given to hyperbole, are basically hopeless as to Albion’s future.
Theodore, it's not good enough because we're looking at a both/and situation, not an either/or. It can be true that post-Christian Europe is stupidly committing suicide and no less true that some otherwise good Christians will stumble into embracing sins of malice over the scene.
Well, that's where people like this Green character get me. How does he know about my sins? He seems to have an awful clear picture of his own virtue, though, I'll give him that.
You may be right. All I'm doing is acknowledging his worthwhile points in that one comment.
Yeah, he's righteous and he's quite pleased about it.
So now I must accept my plight. "Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivers him out of them all." Ps. 34:19
I don’t need to know your sins to see when a story erases people and symbols replace lives.
And not as this publican.
Yes. It's my best chance to say thanks!
Those items are part of an ongoing narrative about decline that I follow here, not just one-offs. You might be a new subscriber, so don't know that I've been writing extensively and for a long time about the decline of Britain, esp of free speech. About the homeless and the Eternal Flame, the idea is not so much about the homeless person as it is about a nation that doesn't seem to care to look after its sacred monuments, or care about itself. That's what a "condensed symbol" is: an image that carries a dense amount of meaning. That is Belgium today -- as I've been writing here for some time.
I take your point about condensed symbols—they do compress a lot of meaning. But that’s also why I worry. Symbols can flatten the very people inside them. A homeless man becomes “Belgium today,” when he’s also simply someone hungry by a fire. That doesn’t cancel the larger point about decline; it just reminds me that decline narratives risk turning human beings into props.
I know you’ve been writing about Britain and free speech for a long time. My concern is less with the theme than with how easily symbols drift into scapegoats. When “condensed” too tightly, they squeeze out the very complexity that tyranny itself always tries to erase.
I read you because I care about the broader story you’re telling, even if I often don’t agree.
Turning human beings into props is what photojournalism literally does.
You're not making a compelling case here.
Neither are the props.
The story "erases" no one. What it does is look at the bigger picture and focuses on the symbolic desecration of a national landmark, meaning the story is about cultural and national decline, not on the "Dog Bites Man" idea that someone somewhere may be homeless and hungry.
Take it from a California resident, when every issue is moralized and personalized and framed through the prism of individual suffering, you end up with a society filled with bum camps and street tents and drug zombies on almost every corner, with the govt and NGOs insisting that these people must never be moved or challenged but must be first priority in all situations with their needs always more urgent than the needs of larger society.
Sanctimonious virtue signalling solves nothing, but makes everything actively worse, as no problems can be solved if solutions can be vetoed by people shrieking Think of the Children! or Why Don't You Care as much as I Do??!
Also, we are always someone else's props, symbols and totems for better or worse, is the inevitable result of politics and discourse. We would not be able to communicate via language without this shorthand.
Symbolism matters, but shorthand about “decline” or “zombies” risks erasing people just as much as sentimental moralizing does. Politics may need symbols, but when they harden into caricature, they obscure solutions. What we need is less posturing—whether virtuous or indignant—and more clarity about what actually works.
I write from LA's Sepulveda Pass area, where multiple neighborhoods have been repeatedly menaced by fires because of (let me check appropriate language) "the alternative living arrangements of our unhoused community" aka camps filled with drug addicts who start fires (some of which have spread into wildfires causing housefires and local evacuations).
https://abc7.com/post/encino-leaders-say-sepulveda-basin-fires-are-getting-control/17679146/
This has been an issue ignored for many years by our political leaders, because solving it would wound the tender feelings of the unhoused and unleash sanctimonious screams from our "philanthropies" aka the Homeless Industrial Complex, thus targeting our local pols for a primary opponent.
And if you want to talk about symbolic caricatures, all you have to do to magically transform from an antisocial nomad into a sacred victim of our evil colonialist capitalism is cross the border into Cali—then our ruling coalition (pols, media, NGOs) will swoop down and provide a halo and a handy list of rights you can demand: free housing, doctors, food, lawyers, storage etc. Our entire state is built on posturing! (But the virtue is privatized while the decline is socialized.)
There is nothing wrong or evil with honest, straight talk and accurate descriptions. Maybe inside church everyone is a child of God, but in the rest of the world there are people and communities that need law and order and we are unraveling this basic foundation one virtue signal at a time.
I don’t doubt the reality of fires or the failures of leadership—you’re right, they’re serious. But come on: calling people “zombies” or “nomads” doesn’t make solutions any clearer. We already have enough sloganeering. If the problem is fire hazards, drugs, or zoning, then let’s talk about what actually fixes those instead of recycling caricatures.
"What begins as a lament against tyranny ends up practicing it."
FFS. There's nothing tyrannical about keeping homeless people from misusing public property. Sorry, words have definitions independent of what you personally would like them to mean.
Clearly “frakkin toaster” is the superior AI slur to “clanker”.
Come to think of it, why isn’t everyone talking about Battlestar Galactica these days? It’s a show about AI trying to genocide humanity and it eventually becomes a giant meditation on religion and how God intervenes in unexpected ways…
This is an excellent essay. Perception of reality--which Rod correctly suggests is at risk with AI--requires physical presence. However interesting it may be to see a video of the Grand Canyon or Notre Dame cathedral, it is not the same as actually being in those places. Likewise, a video conference serves a purpose, maybe even a video call with a friend. But it is not the same as being in the room with your friend or those people. And looking at a photo of a great painting in a book is useful, but not the same as actually standing in front of the painting. Likewise for musical performances. And the Church requires physical presence for sacramental efficacy. What does this have to do with AI? Simply that digital simulations of reality--of whatever sort--will never be the same as the real thing. What AI fundamentally lacks is the ability to perceive reality in this physical sense. That's because of the way it works: it uses images on a sensor and processes them. We as human beings have the ability to perceive things as real because we intuitively recognize that being real transcends individual things. This ability to perceive reality in this transcendental way is something that AI does not and cannot have. Likewise, the AI model of knowing--statistical word order association--can never substitute for human knowing, based on abstract ideas and abstract entities. I discuss this at length in my forthcoming book on AI (printed by the way, not e-book!). That is why physical experience of the world is so important, because it prevents us from falling into the trap of confusing digital simulations with physical reality. That confusion is at the root of many psychological problems today, because those who think that because digital simulations can make anything happen, we can do that in the real world. Transgenderism is a perfect example. As Rod notes, keeping reality straight in the digital age is going to be a serious challenge for us, but the place to start is reminding people of the unbridgeable gap between the digital world and the real world.
"digital simulations of reality--of whatever sort--will never be the same as the real thing". In some ways, digital can be better than reality. Look, I've been to the Grand Canyon multiple times and no picture ever captures the depth of seeing it in person. And yet, I can't fly over the edge like a drone can. I can't see it the way time-lapse photography can capture it. I can't zoom in on people hiking the trails far below like a large telephoto lens can. My point is simply that each has its place. Each media has pros and cons.
Some day, we'll be able to have displays that go from floor to ceiling with incredible resolution. You'll be able to sit in your home and go anywhere in the world, immersed in the beauty God has created. You wouldn't want that?
Have you ever used Zillow (or similar) to look at houses for sale. They often show photos where it says, "Virtually Staged". The simulated photo is to help you see what the room could look like with decent furniture in it, as opposed to staring at an empty room. The furniture is not real, but so what? It helps you to see what the room was meant to look like. And given they tell you it's not real, then there's no question.
Isn't that all we need to do then? Any AI generated content should simply be labeled "AI Generated" (or "AI Assisted").
Hardcopy books are not all that great either. I heard about a book written about one of the Scottish reformers, but as new editions came out over the years, they edited the content. Students who read the later editions had no idea that content had been removed. Later editors didn't like the miracles that the first edition mentioned and so they were deleted.
A decent AI should be able to show you the original edition and compare it to the later editions telling you exactly what was changed. A bad AI might lie to you and tell you the first edition said something else, but if you have multiple AI's you can compare what each says, and catch the ones that can't be trusted.
And that's the key for me. Trust. Who do you trust for things you can't verify yourself? As AI gets smarter, more and more people will begin to trust what AI tells them over what humans do. My daughter was telling me about the toxic chemicals in hand soap, and how she didn't want to use it. Is she right? I have no idea. But I can ask AI about it. But can I trust what it tells me? Maybe not now, but in the future, when it will be able to answer all sorts of questions, what's to stop me from believing it? Am I going to believe somebody who tells me what some book says instead? Likely not, given that books are often full of erroneous information.
And by the way, once I get my own super high resolution floor to ceiling displays, I'll very much want the AI to create simulations of things that aren't real at all. Like a scene from the Lord of the Rings. Or a scene from the helm of the Starship Enterprise. Seems pretty cool to me. No?
I don't dispute that photography can show things that are simply not visible in any practical way for normal access, and also photography can show things that the eye simply cannot see. For example, in astronomy, there are limits to how many photons the eye can capture in about 100 ms, and this means that images of galaxies, nebulae, etc. need to be obtained by long exposure camera. Obviously we can't see what the Rovers see on Mars, etc. But for Mars, the Rover photos, though very good and the best that we can do, are still not like actually being there. Seeing any photo, you must use your imagination to put yourself there, just as you do reading a novel or a play, no matter how detailed the display. Physical presence is and always will be different than any display, however useful such displays are (and they are very useful in many cases, as you point out). As for AI's capabilities, if you read my book, you'll see why it is inherently limited and will never be able to achieve the goals that pundits claim for it. So it will never be trustworthy, and worse, it may never be possible to eliminate the hallucinations that plague it today.
You're right that a photo is still short of being there in person. On the other hand, a photo can be better than being there in that it captures the scene when it is especially nice, with a mist hanging over it, or the sunset playing on the clouds. We just don't have the time to go everywhere multiple times waiting for the few times that is appears spectacular. Or consider a Monet painting of a haystack. It's a LOT better than seeing the haystack in person. And no, I don't care for a photo of a Monet painting. There, I do want the real thing - and not in an art gallery either. I saw two Monet haystack paintings in a Connecticut home that were stunning in part because they were in a regular living room.
Regarding the AI, I've been having Claude write a few small programs. The last one it did, it really struggled to get it to work correctly, which in a way shows how dumb it is. On the other hand, it worked at fixing it through repeated iterations and debugging until it got it to work - just like some junior level programmer might. It was even proud of itself when it got done!
It was easy to see, that it wouldn't take too much more to have it move up from a "junior" level to something much higher. And yes, I often have to start over as it gets stuck saying it changed something when it didn't. But you just give it the last program it wrote and its "fresh" self works on it like it had no problems at all. It fact, I've seen the "fresh" self improve the previous program significantly.
I wouldn't bet on it not getting much better.
"To start, we need mechanisms for preserving the past that can’t be tampered with by technology. Physical books are an example..."
A couple years ago it occurred to me that mundane act of borrowing a physical book from someone was in fact a revolutionary act against the age we find ourselves in. There's no record in any library, Amazon, Audible, etc. for any government or corporation to trace of one having obtained / been influenced by said book. Also, the inability of the same to digitally alter its content on demand.
The physical books strategy will be tough. The Modernists who run most libraries can simply scrap old books they don't like. Individual collections are hard to assemble, not widely available to others and may not be appreciated by heirs who just want to be rid of 'all this stuff'.
So we need thousands of us to be collectors, as most commenters here already are, and we will need some means of organizing and communicating with one another which The Borg cannot hack. It may come down to carrier pigeons.
In my harmless maddening obsessive way I have written in several Substack comments sections about the decision of the Edward Stratemeyer syndicate quite a few years ago now to "update" The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and the rest of the members of their stock company to make them politically correct. The Hardy Boys! Man, have you no humanity?! I don't know what was done to Frank, Joe, Nancy Drew, Tom Swift and friends. I do know that a few years ago, there was a Facebook group whose members were almost all aged Boomer men, which was dedicated to the sharing of information about where to hunt for original copies of Hardy Boys books, the occasional proud displaying of a volume someone had found in a thrift shop in Green Bay or a Goodwill in Escondido, and a general, therapeutic raging.
Recently, whoever has the Orwell estate published a new edition of 1984. They got Thomas Pynchon to write the foreword, but the considerably longer introduction was written by a young anonymous who according to extremely reliable sources spends most of the words of the intro apologizing for several aspects of Winston's personality which, according to the anonymous, are clearly lamentable, but which we readers must understand were byproducts of poor Orwell's boundedness by time and commonly accepted prejudices.
I wish I had made that up but I didn't.
I still have my 1960’s Nancy Drew’s which are pretty indistinguishable from the originals.
They didn't do this then. It's much more recent, twenty first century, I'm pretty sure.
I wasn’t disagreeing, just saying it’s almost as good as the originals!
That makes me curious: how were the originals better?
Really it’s just the bindings and cover illustrations. The clothes are more modern on mine, but the rare interior illustrations are still the 30’s style clothes. I think you had to have dust jackets to have cover illustration in the 30’s, otherwise plain cloth bindings. Mine are screen printed on the covers, yellow background, with the list of titles on the back.
What was the name of the Italian kid in The Hardy Boys who was always cracking jokes?
Orwell is a great scandal to the Left, and you're going to see more of this. In the Penguin Homage to Catalonia the "political" chapters are quarantined at the end on the basis of a letter the great man wrote right before he died to the effect that the book would be more effective that way. But it never happened. It also of course inoculates the reader from Orwell's experiences with the POUM in Barcelona. And it suppresses the epigraph, the greatest in history, in my opinion ("Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou be like unto him. Answer a fool according to his folly lest he be wise in his own conceit".)
I can't bear to read that Pynchon thing. That's an example of a born novelist who has managed to write nothing but garbage for more than 50 years, as opposed to Orwell, whose fictional technique is painful, but who managed to write a great book (1984).
Wasn't the Italian kid Tony?
Yes, but what was his surname? Zito?
Prito.
For the win!
Prito? Prizzo?
Prito. I wouldn't have had a clue.
Well that earned a grin on a gritty day - well played.
I had to Google it.
We preservationists could call ourselves "Bookleggers" a la Canticle for Leibowitz. As for obtaining old books, haunt library and yard sales, patronize Bookfinder.com (150 million books available). I think the history, art, and culture of the Middle Ages could be reconstructed from my own holdings. But while we worry about classics, I hope somebody will be keeping basic and useful science books around, too. I nominate the old Rubber Handbook for openers.
Excellent, Rod. There has to be a lot of dark money changing hands (among the WEF members, Soros (father and son), Klaus Schwab's successor, and all the politicians who hate their own) for the crazy policies of "trans the children", "forever wars" and "let's depopulate" and "let's harm the citizens and elevate the invaders" to persist. And all of this is coming at a time of "let's bless the Sodomites from the Vatican as a general policy" and "let's put on display a Pachamamma idol and worship it" times. Yes, I know that was Francis. Well, Leo XIV is continuing some pretty strange patterns of heresy it seems. Why is Fr. James Martin still in the Vatican? Or in the church? Are his appointees orthodox or heterodox? Heterodox it seems. Can the Vatican Bank EVER be cleaned up? Let's pray it can. Why does the TLM have to be crushed? Why can't it be given a separate rite, such as the Eastern Catholics have? We seem to be living in the times of the fultillment of Akita and 3rd Fatima and Good Success (etc). Garanbandal is still a question mark in my mind.
Keep praying everyone. Prayer can move mountains and move out bad politicians (see Biden's retirement).
Pope Leo XIV promises to be a more politically astute version of his patron, Pope Frannie I. Pope Leo XIV looks healthy. We Catholics are stuck with him for twenty-five years.
"Pope Leo XIV promises to be a more politically astute version of his patron, Pope Frannie I."
We'll see. You're probably right, but hopefully there's a little more daylight between Leo and his predecessor.
There are two questionable assumptions in today’s blog first, that Calvinism has “….thrown all the mystery out;” and second, that Christian mysticism provides a way for God to reveal spiritual knowledge about Himself and His being to humankind.
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To start it helps to be precise in our definitions. Christian mysticism involves seeking direct spiritual knowledge through direct communion with the Divine. Mystery describes something that is difficult to explain or beyond human comprehension.
It’s easy to understand why non-Protestants believe Protestants reject mysticism and mystery because the stereotypical face of Protestantism that most outsiders see are mainline Protestant denominations and big box evangelical churches. Mainline Protestant denominations, particularly those of a more liberal bent, have made God very small, unmysterious and remote by applying historical criticism to their exegesis of scripture and postmodernism to the application of their Christianity and to their worship services. Big box evangelical churches still have a very big God, but their emotion filled, entertainment and conversion-focused seeker sensitive worship services obscure any element of mystery in their practiced theology. These churches believe in the mystery of the anointing of the Holy Spirit in conversion and the mystery of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in a Christian’s life, but that mystery is obscured by their weekly focus on the conversion experience, praise bands, smoke machines, large video screens and jeans-clad tattooed pastors.
A group of Protestants that are less visible and who do not feed into this stereotype are traditional, creedal orthodox Calvinist or Reformed Protestants. These Protestants believe that mysticism as a means to find and experience the Divine is unscriptural and dangerous, however, they do believe that mystery in Christianity is alive and well. John Calvin rejected Christian mysticism because total depravity means that human reason, senses and desires are distorted by sin including the desires and attempts to have spiritual experiences. Calvin warned against mysticism to guard Christians against vain speculation, idle curiosity, and the sinful desire to go beyond the only sources of divine knowledge given to humans which are Christ, creation, and Scripture. Any genuine spiritual insights gained through Christ, creation and scripture must be an act of God’s grace effectuated by the Holy Spirit, not a result of a mystical connection by God utilizing innate human spiritual capacity.
Calvin did believe that mystery did exist in Christianity. He believed in the mystery of the union between believers and Christ and in the mystery of the presence of Christ in the eucharistic elements. Commenting on both the mystery of this union and its enactment in the Lord’s Supper, Calvin wrote, “We acknowledge that the sacred union that we have with Christ is incomprehensible to carnal sense. His joining us with him so as not only to instill his life into us, but to make us one with himself, we grant to be a mystery too sublime for our comprehension, except insofar as his words reveal it.” Calvin and orthodox (conservative) Protestants have not “…thrown all the mystery out,” they just put boundaries on the means and degree to which God reveals his presence and substance through mysticism and mystery.
Orthodox (conservative) Calvinists do agree with Charles Taylor’s three bulwarks of metaphysical realism. The question is can the bulwarks of metaphysical realism lead to a saving relationship with God? An orthodox Calvinist would say metaphysical realism only gets you part of the way.
An orthodox Calvinist believes in something called general revelation which states that God reveals His existence through His creation as stated a number of Psalms, and as stated by Paul in Romans 1: 18-22 which states that this general revelation is sufficient to reveal the existence of God and to humankind and for humankind to incur punishment from God if they reject His existence. The key question is whether or not this metaphysical realism is a sufficient means for individual humans to enter into a saving knowledge and relationship with God, and an orthodox Calvinist would say “no.” A saving relationship requires a next step beyond general revelation which is God’s intervention at a personal level to convince someone of their sins, the need for redemption and the acceptance through faith that Christ’s death on the cross provided that redemption and justification through penal substitutionary atonement. The Holy Spirit then works through the process of sanctification to make us, though imperfectly, more and more like Christ.
The current problem is that humankind has made God progressively less sovereign and smaller and smaller over the past 400 years. This in turn has reduced the ability of general revelation to lead people to conclude there must be a God. However, this is not the Calvin’s fault. Calvin, in particular, believed in a very big sovereign God who sustains and directs everything that happens in the universe including the direction of the individual droplets of spray coming off the prow of a speeding boat.
Don't blame Calvin. Blame Ockam who forgot that God is unchanging as well as sovereign. Blame Darwin who provided a non-Divine means to achieve the complexity, mechanisms and wonder of the natural world. Blame Freud who removed sin and guilt from the understanding of human behavior and hence the need for God and redemption. Blame Marx who shifted the focus of Christianity from God to the poor and under privileged (not necessarily a completely bad thing) and hence the need for God and redemption. Blame the historical criticism of 19th century German theologians who reduced the authority of God and the Bible. Blame post-modernism that gave sanction to the idea that one’s feelings and desires are the true bases of reality, authority, and self-definition and eliminates the need for God and religion in life.
Would the mysticism inherent in majestic cathedrals, the lives of the saints, icons, incense and ringing bells have preserved a big sovereign God over the past 400 years. I don’t think so. Humankind is fundamentally sinful and is always seeking ways to move away from God. I think the ideas of Darwin, Freud and Marx or their equivalents would have still happened.
Pardon me if my rationalist Calvinism is showing here, but metaphysical realism engenders emotions like awe and wonder. However, Christians whether Orthodox, Catholic or Protestant need to move beyond how their Christianity makes them feel and focus on the factual underpinnings of their faith and the implications of their faith to effectively apply Christianity in world. Emotional experience cannot be a foundation for belief, nor can it be the standard by which to judge truth, goodness, e.g. Belief and the standards by which we live a Christian life can only be based on a knowledge of the facts of salvation as presented in the Bible and the basic theological principles derived from these facts.
A final thought experiment. A fundamental characteristic of mysticism is that it is an emotional experience and touches something beyond our selves. However, both religious and non-religious experiences can engender a mystical feeling and a connection beyond our selves. How do we know what mystical experience is God revealing himself and what mystical experience is not from God.
For example, Voces 8 singing Danny Boy, --https://youtu.be/RorRJPhQfaM?si=0FW60gpLbwQS5u3f; Sydnie Christmas singing “Over the Rainbow -- https://youtu.be/GBgNKRw5BQ8?si=wWts62RlkRGWMiay; songs from the Orthodox Funeral Trisagion and Troparion -- https://youtu.be/TACo9ekOfas?si=G4oe5pYmnLiYqRNnT; and the Hymn of the Cherubim by Tchaikovsky -- https://youtu.be/KhbuNZ8p3hg?si=cPO5Zo-g_Zgim2aA all engender a mystical feeling of longing for and hoped connection to a better place beyond our current selves. However, which of these emotional longings for something or someplace outside ourselves is from God? Can we assume the mystical and emotional experiences engendered by songs from the Orthodox Funeral Trisagion and Tchaikovsky’ Hymn of the Cherubim are from God just because they have a religious theme?
Calvin would say we cannot reliably know because of humankind’s total depravity, and that is why and that is why he believed only nature (general revelation), Christ and Scripture were the only reliable means of Divine revelation. Calvin still believed in mystery, but not a reliable basis for a saving relationship with God.
The problem isn't Calvin, it is modern Calvinists, who often reduce Calvinism to just soteriology. That's where we get the bizarre creature; the Reformed Baptist who thinks he is a Calvinist, even though he doesn't baptize infants. Confessional Calvinists and Lutherans are different from the bulk of modern Protestantism.
Wonderfully written. Thank you. I get frustrated with Rod's ongoing conflation of high Church Protestants ( Calvinists, Lutherans, orthodox Anglicans ) with Anabaptists in their various forms. He has been told before that he isn't right about that but persists in writing as he did today.
I would even go so far as to separate Lutherans and Anglicans for Calvinists. One of the most unique and odd to me relics from early Anglicanism is that they used to believe in the healing touch of the king. Well that ended when they took Charles's head
Queen Anne (Charles' grandaughter) was still touching the heads of infants to safeguard them from what we now call tuberculosis. I think it was the Hanoverian kings who stopped the practice since it was alien to their religious culture.
You might be right.
He is right. All English monarchs down to, but not including, George I, touched for "thr King's Evil," except for the dreadful Dutchman, William III.
Guy, did you even read closely? Courtney is a former Baptist, a graduate of a conservative seminary. She sent me that link -- to a LONG essay -- by Robin Phillips, who used to be a Calvinist. He quotes many academics, including Calvinist ones. If you would trouble yourself to read the actual essay I link to, you'll see he draws a distinction between Calvinists and Lutherans on the sacramental issue.
I'm aware of that, Rod. But my impression has been that you consider Calvinists to be essentially Baptistic on the matter of Communion, and they are not. They do believe Communion is sacramental, not symbolic.
That reminds me of Norman MacLean’s line, reportedly from his father, a Presbyterian minister, about Methodists: “Baptists who can read.”
🔪 but very funny.
If they follow Calvin, they do. But many "Calvinists" are really closet Zwinglians. And never forget that when Calvin came to an accord with Bullinger - Zwingli's successor in Zurich - over "the Lord's Supper" in 1564 it was Calvin who did all the yielding and Bullinger none at all.
Calvin had one fine hour after another, didn't he?
This is so well written. You will see my comment on Calvin, which is quite harsh I'm afraid. Though I disagree with him on doctrinal points, I am basing my observations on the modern Calvinist churches. Perhaps that isn't totally fair. Our pastor had to take down any Christian artwork that was in the space we shared with another church. As an LCMS Lutheran, though we recognize mystery and the Sacraments of Baptism and Communion as central, we would agree that the foundation is God's Word, and not experiences or feelings. It's not an either or thing.
Most of my best friends are in the PCA. They have gone hard school reformed to the point that they took down the cross in the sanctuary. Apparently the last pastor was more liberal on that.
Re: Calvin, in particular, believed in a very big sovereign God who sustains and directs everything that happens in the universe including the direction of the individual droplets of spray coming off the prow of a speeding boat.
Sounds like something derived from Islam where God is just not the Creator and Law-giver, but is the direct cause of everything. If so, Calvin went well beyond what any medieval Catholic or Orthodox theologian posited.
Re: Blame Ockam who forgot that God is unchanging as well as sovereign.
God's Essence, being beyond Time, does not change. God's actions in Time do change (obviously, as actions in Time inherently mean change)
I find myself agreeing with you for a change, Jon. Nearly all pastors today hedge at least 1-2 letters of TULIP because the cognitive dissonance of "man is God's puppet but God holds us responsible for the performance quality" is too great.
It's not quite as bad as you say, but it takes a lot of intellectual effort to be a just so Reformed person who is well balanced and also nice to others. (Cheers to Bobby Lime if he sees this.)
"Any genuine spiritual insights gained through Christ, creation and scripture must be an act of God’s grace effectuated by the Holy Spirit, not a result of a mystical connection by God utilizing innate human spiritual capacity."
Isn't "God's grace effectuated through the Holy Spirit" just Christian mysticism in practice?
What is the difference between a Calvinist who gains a spiritual insight during Bible study, a Catholic who gains the same during Eucharistic devotion, an Orthodox who has an epiphany during Divine Liturgy, and an Anglican who finds it in meditation on the book of common prayer? Which of these can you claim is derived from the Holy Spirit and which not? And how do you know?
John Milton 400 years ago: “Every true Christian, able to give a reason of his faith, hath the word of God before him, the promised Holy Spirit, and the mind of Christ within him.” If that's the standard, how do you adjudicate among mystical experiences and decide which are legitimate? I don't think you can. You will end up either accepting everything (the path of the liberal mainlines and some of the Pentecostals) or rejecting all mysticism in favor of "just read the Bible and do what it says" (the default of the rest of Protestantism.)
To begin, I mean no disrespect to any religious tradition in what follows. The difference from a Calvinist point of view in what spiritual insights are Divinely inspired and which are not is grounded in what you believe to be the source of religious authority.
A Calvinist believes that the only source of religious authority is Sola Scriptura, or Scripture Alone . God's grace can only be effected through the Holy Spirit through humankind's engagement with scripture.
A Catholic believer believes the sources of religious authority are scripture, apostolic tradition and the Magisterium which is the teaching authority of the Pope and bishops. A Calvinist would agree that grace can be effected through the first authority, scripture, but would say that God's grace cannot be effectuated by the Holy Spirit through the second two, apostolic tradition and the Magisterium, because these two reflect the thoughts and conclusions of humankind which is effected by original sin, and unlike scripture, are not inspired by God.
An Orthodox believer believes the sources of religious authority are scripture and holy tradition including the teachings of the Church Fathers and the liturgical and sacramental life of the Church. Again, a Calvinist would agree that grace can be effected through scripture, but not through holy tradition because holy tradition is not inspired by God and reflects the thoughts and actions of fallen humankind.
An Anglican believer believes the sources of religious authority are scripture, tradition and reason. A Calvinist would again agree that the Holy Spirit could effect grace through holy scripture, disagree on tradition and agree on reason as long as the conclusions of that reason do not contradict scripture.
Calvinist, Catholic, Orthodox and Anglican believers can all receive spiritual insight through God's grace effectuated by the Holy Spirit through scripture, but Calvinists do not believe that spiritual insight can reliably be effectuated through tradition, the teachings of the church fathers, the Magisterium, sacraments or liturgy.
Sola scriptura sounds great in principle but is unworkable in practice since the Bible doesn't interpret itself. Liberal Protestants say the Holy Spirit told them the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah was lack of hospitality and that Paul's injunction against homosexuality was cultural and about Greek power imbalances not actual homosexual behavior. (No, I'm not making this up; it really is what they say.) You have no way to refute this. No Protestant does, because sola scriptura leaves us stuck in Milton's framework of reliance on the Holy Spirit for interpretation.
We were so pissed at having a single Pope that we made every man his own Pope instead -- a debatable improvement. You said it yourself above: "The difference in what spiritual insights are Divinely inspired and which are not is grounded in what you believe to be the source of religious authority." Every man is now responsible for choosing his own religious authority. Every man chooses his own Pope now.
And that's exactly what happens. People find "theologians" to back up what they already believe. So instead of papal encyclicals, we get dueling Bible commentaries. But unlike papal encyclicals or church councils, the resulting debates can never be resolved.
Von Eck's criticism at the Diet of Worms bites hard: “Not one of the heresies which have torn the bosom of the church has not derived its origin from the various interpretation of the Scripture.” Subsequent events demonstrate he understated the risk. This is a subject I have written about previously: https://brianvillanueva.substack.com/p/what-is-truth
Back to our original point. The Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican believers in my example would all say the Holy Spirit gave them a spiritual awareness of a deeper reality. (The same thing you and I would say, as I have received a few such in my own lifetime as well.) Responding that, "well, those can't be real because you believe in tradition and reason instead of just scripture" isn't an answer to that, even by a Calvinist frame of reference.
It's been an Oklahoma minute since I placed my size 12 boot heel on UK soil, the departure point of many of my ancestors. I remember way back when enjoying my time there in the countryside. Country folk are all pretty much the same; laid back, kind, hardworking, enjoy fellowship....and defensive of our way of life. Those folk seemed, I don't know, I bit sturdier than other Europeans I've met. Keep Calm and Carry On, I suppose. Did they have opinions? You betcha. I enjoyed the banter.
Now, I've felt some of my neighbors opinions weren't worth tobacco spit, but to arrest someone for their opinion? I'd like to say I cannot fathom the manifestation of tyrannical Gestaptitude happening in my fair state, but I've read enough Solzhenitsyn to know better. Many of my ancestors left to flee tyranny, and some were given a boot in the butt to boot on their way on the ship. I can't imagine those fair folk I met in the countryside are taking kindly to this new normal. Maybe they are too far away from the big cities to feel it, but I imagine they will before long. Look out when they've had enough.
Physical media is imperative. Pre-AI works must be safeguarded so that we can maintain some ability to parse even partial truth from ubiquitous lies. Fahrenheit 451 was prophetic. Keep your books, your DVDs, your vinyl records: they may be all that is left that is not AI one day.
Secondly, I am sure you know there is a Christianity that believes that Christ is still embodied after the Resurrection, though now His body is in exalted form, incorruptible and immortal. And Our Father (and Our Mother) are likewise embodied. Therefore, anything that disembodies us takes us away from our eternal destiny as the children of God. Receiving a body through mortal birth was a step forward for us on the path to that destiny. Embodiment is divine.
This is a bizarre comment. All Christians believe that Jesus has been raised from the dead, not that His "Spirit" lives on, but that He has been resurrected. Resurrection is by definition physical.
No Christian believes that The Father has a body. As for "Our Mother," that one checkmates me.
You're obviously in some cult. I have a temperamental incapability to learn about the cults, so I don't know which one it is, though I suspect it's LDS. If you wish to enlighten me please do.
As to political parties agreeing not to talk about or criticize migration....their biggest issue:
I've seen this attitude and strategy on the micro-level in my home and at my former and current jobs. It's THE REASON why problems get worse until there's a blow up. I would go so far as to say that even taking poorly planned action, that is somewhat ineffective, is better than ignoring a problem like this. They're cowards and maybe worse. If you are afraid to deal with societal problems, why run for office?.....power, ego, inside deals, and radical activism, would seem to be likely motivations.
Re: the hands of the beggar are not brown or black, but white. So it is doubtful that he is an illegal migrant, or a migrant at all.
I agree that without some sort of proof we shouldn't assume he is any sort of immigrant. However there are white migrants too. Ukraine has produced quite a few. And some Middle Eastern people, especially Levantine peoples, are fairly light complected.
Re: six AfD candidates for office in North Rhine-Westphalia — where Cologne is — have died. Six! What are the odds?
Maybe someone should get hold of their death certificates and see what caused their deaths before we start folding the tinfoil hats. I recall the old "Clinton Chronicles" - and a very thorough debunking of each and every death attributed to the Clintons.
Re: It is now possible to alter every kind of historical record—perhaps irrevocably.
Huh? How? Secondary online stuff, maybe. But most of the primary historical record is on dead tree, dead papyrus, dead parchment, dead stone and in various real world artifacts and structures.
Syrian here, never thought of myself as particularly dark, especially compared to an inevitably unclean homeless person. Now compared to my lily white German husband, I am a different paint chip.
I’ve always found it a little odd when I’ve read people from the mid east described as non white. No they are not Nordic blondes. So what.
In America on the census people from the Middle East are instructed to identify as European, at least they were last time. I had never heard the term MENA before 2023, granting me instant minority status which I don’t really need.
I do remember being very excited when Hispanic Barbie came out in the late 60’s matching my eye, skin, and hair color more closely than the blue eyed blondes.
Of course none of this makes sense. My adopted son who is 100% Mayan is not supposed to pick the Native American box but rather the Hispanic.
As I have noted before we have Middle Eastern people at my church who would easily be mistaken for Southern Europeans. And contrawise back after 9-11 a friend with Bulgarian ancestry who worked as a waiter had customers refuse his service because they thought he was an Arab.
While I can stretch my mind to try to understand the appeal of going to church in the metaverse, a fake Eucharist is always going to be a fake Eucharist. If it’s not tangible and really ingested, then I’m not sure how you can claim that you really received the Lord? That makes no sense. So your fake avatar received the fake body, so you have fake grace? What?
This reeks of fakeness, which is sadly the logical outcome of some of the things you can find in the low-church Protestant world.
It’s like being in the middle of a sci-fi movie….we haven’t hit the climax yet, but the action is definitely building.
Well, that guy's Metaverse church does not have sacraments, nor does his IRL church. For him, as a theological matter, church is about the message and emotional experience. I don't say this as a criticism, but as a description of his theology. I actually asked him if he really believes that there's no difference between the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and a Walmart parking lot. Yes, he said, I believe that.
Oh……
Skynet (from Terminator) was supposed to be dystopian, not something to aspire to. It IS apocalyptic.
Re AI and unreality -- I'm already having trouble navigating a world in the blue bubble where all my friends believe that males can be women just by proclaiming themselves to be one. My current response when someone says something clearly not based in reality is to change the subject. Engaging usually doesn't go well because they're so deep in their bubble that they're not susceptible to outside information and just view you as a heretic / apostate. How did all of these people get so insane? It hurts when your friends are so deep in the cult, and you know that if you disagreed with them they'd shun you immediately.
I'm working on building a new social network with people who are more grounded in reality just so I don't feel so alone. It's hard, though, when one's family members, friends in a hobby, and coworkers are still in the bubble.
Subscribed. If you haven't already or lately, read or reread The Benedict Option. When facing so much negative the positive examples in the Benedict Option are a good thing to have thought of lately.
I have! And I found a local church that is very grounded and solid. It's such a relief.