Was 911 metaphysical? Maybe. I am certain metaphysical phenomenae occured in association with it. For example, there was an open Bible in one of the WTC towers that was fused to a steel girder. You can still read the page, where it is on display at the museum at the site today.
“Ye have heard that it hath been said, ‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.’ ”
Also, when I went on my mission trip to NYC last year, I was walking around with a few of my fellow missionaries, doing the tourist thing. We eventually found ourselves in the area of Wall Street, not far from the WTC, our destination. As we moved through the area, I started getting this sensation of...peace. Inexplicable peace. I was not the only one who noticed it, either.
And when we got to the area where the sites of the former towers, now reflecting pools were, the character of the area totally changed. NYC normally is busy, bustling, noisy. People going too and fro, just city life turned up to 11. You got within a certain radius of the area, things just...dialed down. People were still about, but orderly, peacefully. It had a hush resembling a library. Or a church. They were polite, courteous, orderly. Gave each other space and deference.
The aura of peace was palpable.
I was safe and comfortable enough to lay down and take a nap on a concrete slab outside one of the museums at one point.
9/11 may be metaphysical. It certainly was a stroke of luck for certain people.
Larry Silverstein, for example, who took out an insurance plan that covered terrorism just months before the attacks. After the attacks, he took the insurance company to court, claiming he should be paid double because there were two attacks. He made $4.55 billion.
It was also lucky for the Bush administration that one of the planes hit the Pentagon in the budget analyst office where DoD staffers were working on the mystery of the 2.3 trillion dollars that Donald Rumsfeld had announced “missing” from the Pentagon's coffers in a press conference the day before, on September 10, 2001.
I particularly like this speech made by GW Bush where he says the terrorists set explosives in the towers:
Re: Could there be a purer manifestation of hubris?
Teddie Roosevelt's "I'll teach them to elect good men" is in the running. And as I mentioned on another piece yesterday, American imperialism is of long standing, dating back into the early 19th century with Manifest Destiny and the war of 1812 (where our goal was to conquer Canada)
Jonathan Cahn's book The Harbinger is all about how 911 was a warning from God to America. From the book's blurb, "Before its end as a nation, there appeared in ancient Israel nine specific warnings and omens of national destruction – These same nine Harbingers are now manifesting in America". Unfortunately, it looks like we haven't heeded the warning.
re: California - I was waiting to come up because frankly I'm just stunned. The idea that schools cannot tell parents when a child has transitioned to a new name/identity - if a school can lie about that, what else will they lie about? What if a student is found to be having same-sex relations with a teacher, and notifying the parents would effectively "out" the child? Shall the school keep that a secret as well?
Metaphysical meaning? Discernment of Divine Writing on the Wall, that’s always a little dicey for me -- ‘no man knows the hour’, ‘God works in mysterious ways’ etc. Even our Lord’s Disciples were pretty uncomprehending most of the time. But Symbolic? -- you bet. It was an attack on what was perceived as Symbols of our Imperial Pride and Power. What 9-11 brought home to me was what a Populist I am, a believer in People Power. The ordinary people, the Cops, the Firefighters, the EMT’s that ran towards the flames and falling Towers took my breath away. 22 years later the Roll Call of their names still brings tears. It’s Populists against Plutocrats today. I’m inclined towards the term ‘Aristopopulism’, coined? popularized? In a Washington Post Op-Ed by J Burtka (I think that’s the name) sometime back that laid out an agenda personified by calling for a combination of Edmund Burke and Rooster Cogburn. Others may find that hybrid elsewhere. But i’ve always found it in the Kennedys -- in JFK, RFK and RFKJR, a soaring, shining eloquence, and a robust sympathy and understanding of the ‘common man’. Rooster Cogburn? -- JFK stood down the Chiefs of Staff, RFK took on Jimmy Hoffa, RFKJR is calling out the Plutocrats extending their tentacular reach into what seems like every corner of our lives. The Kennedys and ole’ Sam Houston, who knew the Iliad by heart, who at the risk of his life opposed Secession, and never looked down on anybody because like Martin Luther King he was always looking up to the sunny uplands of what America can be, of what it was meant to be by the Founders. Those folks who ran towards the Towers at the cost of many of their lives are Symbols too of an American Spirit that I don’t think has been crushed nor totally corrupted. Maybe that’s false hope. But, for me, Hope spring Eternal because He is always with us, even to the end of the world.’
I was so hoping you would repost your experience with the torn flag, and was happy to wake up to the retelling this morning. I was thinking about your story yesterday, and I do think 9/11 has metaphysical meaning. In some sense, the world many of us above a certain age knew, loved and were raised to inherit died on 9/11; and a new America has emerged over the past 22 years, one that may have all the familiar sites and sounds, yet is drastically not the America prior to 9/11.
Was 9/11 a metaphysical event or not? I want a third option on that. Being Christian means that superstition has no place in one’s worldview. Superstition is wholly a pagan concept. At the same time, to ignore the metaphysical and describe it as superstition is also not Christian. The pagan view is that there are events which are driven by forces that cannot be understood, while the secular view is that all things which happen originate from a physical explanation, even if the causes are not yet understood.
The Christian worldview is that what we see as anomalous behaviors have an explanation that is known but not fully understood in cause or meaning. Nevertheless, there is a framework that reconciles the physical and metaphysical. This is true at least for Christians who hold to an orthodox Christian worldview. Too many Christians point to rational events, like a child dying of cancer, as part of “God’s plan,” which is a superstition. Others refuse to even consider a supernatural cause for something or even accept the existence of evil in any literal sense.
Without laying out that framework, it becomes impossible take something like 9/11 and give it any substantive meaning like Rod has done above. On top of that, the things which do happen are often a lesson, whatever their origin. God can turn all things to good, even the wicked things, but it is not always in our definition of good. We want to see good as things which are pleasing to the senses, bringing comfort, or providing a reconciliation with our expectations. Often, what is seen is good is simply satisfying the basic needs on Maslow’s hierarchy. We do not take an event such as 9/11 and see how God blessed it by revealing truths about us as both a warning and a reminder of the covenant that binds all Christians.
The warning was that God permitted evil to act in this way. The reminder of the covenant was both to see this warning and to see the small miracles that happened within that warning. The point of God’s interactions within this world is never to resolve the everyday consequences of original sin, but to provide the framework for Christians to be saved before the final hour of either their deaths or the return of Christ. Taking 9/11 within that context provides perfect reconciliation of either a superstitious or secular interpretation.
With regard to 9/11 itself, the warning was clearly to turn away from our excess and hubris and to return to the Christian values and nature of America. It is not saying that America is a Christian nation, for a nation is an earthly thing, but that a nation can be Christian in how it acts. It’s also not to say that America has ever at all been perfectly Christian, but that at least a Christian viewpoint has informed much of the character of American life.
I think that the rejection of Christianity happened after World War Two, when America found itself occupying what was essentially a deserted imperial stage and realizing that it had the economic power to conquer all around it. Materialism became the greatest virtue of a nation that had taken the first chastisement of the Great Depression and ignored it. Hedonism, both overt in popular culture, and hidden in the form of “swinging,” the embrace of Randian-style economic greatness as a virtue unto itself, sexual “liberation,” and so on, showed that we took the blessing of victory over evil and squandered it. On top of that, American life mocked the world and any sense of decency. Being able to eat to excess at all hours of the day while people make mud pies to fill empty bellies, to provide a better existence for our pets than many people would ever see, to consume and pollute a world shared by all, to engage in the worship of money and technology…and most of all to not just tolerate sins like pornography, abortion, gambling, and gluttony, but to promote them as being positive…I think you could make a good case for the values that many modern American hold as being wholly satanic in even a loose interpretation.
In that sense, 9/11 was a call to redirect ourselves to a Godly behavior, not any sort of call to defend American virtue, because that virtue no longer exists. In other words, everyone pretty much missed the point of the whole thing. The attackers had their own reasons - the significance of 9/11 as a historical date is lost on most people. In a meta sense, it also marked a civilizational reversal of an era of security for Christendom, because Christendom no longer exists.
The deepest meaning of all is perhaps that it is a sign of the end times. COVID showed that we are not secure, in spite of our belief in technology. Likewise, to see that much of the world rejected what we had to offer meant that we can no longer see our position as the most powerful and wealthy nation on the face of the earth as being any sort of shield against bad things happening. I tend to have a quiet unease about so many things these days, both big and small, and I am sure I am not alone in that. If you take that deeper meaning, then 9/11 was a wake up call and sign to find out way back to God before it is too late. Instead, we got further chastisement in the form of two disastrous wars.
I am wondering what the next chastisement is going to be. Maybe a simple implosion of our currency as the world standard. That would certainly do it. Whatever form it comes in, we Christians need to reject any superstitious or secular interpretation and discern if it is a sign from God, then act accordingly.
it felt metaphysical. after the attack cities were very quiet. it felt as though a violent, brief cataclysm / conflict of spiritual proportion had just occurred. and that that cataclysm has re-ordered the world. or perhaps more accurately, the spiritual balance of power in the world (or both). since that day Christianity, and western civilization - have moved into a swift decline. where are we headed? well, if the west continues on this path - perhaps to the fall of the west as we know it and a new world where the west (and the rights it protects) will be subordinate to a digital/theocracy alien to historic western values. It feels as if Christianity has fallen and that fall is embodied in the events of 911. And the descent is continuing and the future is terrifyingly bleak (hence the cultural despondence in the west post 911). That despondence may be an unspoken reality we all live with contained in the unconscious/primordial brain. I feel it is there after 911. In a modern world, Christianity is now not as much a place as a constellation of believers across the earth, some (and increasingly more and more) practicing their faith in secrecy.
In the second section of Rod's essay, he complains mightily about California's descent into tranny totalitarianism and quite specifically laments that the churches aren't doing enough to resist it.
Then in the third section he goes on to excoriate Christians who are resisting it. Because they're icky. And the way they go about it is icky. He won't go sit down with Wilson, less his presence offer Wilson and his accolytes some sort of endorsement.
However, at the end he goes so far as to admit that he has "a strong feeling that there are many people within the broader Christian community in Wilson’s church who are not Christians-and-mad-as-hell-about-it. I hope they prevail, somehow."
So we should want them to prevail against the Progressive cultural zeitgeist but not be icky in how they do it.
Rod wants people, especially Christians, to resist tranny totalitarian madness, to pick one issue. What forms of resistance to this are acceptable and not icky?
Pray against it privately. Sure. Not icky and something I'm sure Wilson and Isker would agree and probably do so in their daily prayers.
Pray against it publicly in front of facilities where the procedures are done, like the pro- lifers do. Sure, but you'll start running into the same resistance that they did from the legislators and the courts as you do it. In fact, the laws are already in place to blunt the effectiveness of those demonstrations because of the abortion wars so they'll immediately be turned on the anti- tranny prayer warriors.
Write letters to the editor, vote moar harder, use the courts (somehow), sign a petition. In other words, keep trying to make change using the tools of a broken system run by people who hate you. These people have the upper hand, politically speaking, on the Left Coast, the Northeast, and large swaths of the Upper Midwest and the backing of a Medical Industrial Complex that stands to make billions of dollars performing unnecessary medical procedures on healthy boys and girls with the added bonus of creating patients for life who have to pay for hormones and other medications to maintain the charade.
But at least you're not being icky.
If a man is serious about these procedures as being evil, then he shouldn't be afraid of getting icky to stop them. Particularly when so far the only method of of being icky currently on offer is Isker's rhetoric.
Sad to read about the strife within the Christian community of Dreher. This happens way too often.
But remember what Jesus said about judging others: "Judge not and you will not be judged. For with what judgment ye judge shall be judged; and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. Why do you see the speck in your brother's eye and ignore the log in your own?" Matthew 7:1-3.
I say this because that guy from Moscow Idaho, and his padawan, seem to be fixated on Rods shortcomings while ignoring their own. And their own seem quite ghoulish if true.
Stay in the peace of Christ. Shake off the dust.from your feet.
Rod, Doug Wilson might be right about one thing. You tend too much to punch right and to believe the worst about people on the right. Your statement yesterday at EC about J6 protesters is typical:
"Don’t get me wrong: the January 6th riot was an assault on the American political order, one that deserves harsh punishment. We can argue over whether or not the heavy sentences being handed out to convicted rioters are proportionally just, but there’s not much real debate over the extraordinary villainy of the acts."
I am not one that thinks we should never punch right. But to paint Wilson as a Orwellian foot stomp totalitarian (and you have not apologized for that to my knowledge) or to call J6 an assault on American political order when they were protesting the rigging of the 2020 election, which really was an assault on the American political order, is out of line.
I love most of your writing. I am teaching Live Not By Lies to a Christian study group. But maybe Wilson is right. Maybe you do need to get a grip. I will be praying for you.
I agree that in some sense 9/11 was the beginning of the end, and it is interesting to cast it in the light of 'God's judgment against a people'. I say this as someone who served in the (what would become) long, long wars following the attacks, who lost many a solid teammate in these wars, who met their widows and young children.
I remember in the days following 9/11 all of the talk was about "not letting the terrorists win". If you didn't do whatever thing was prescribed, often by GW Bush or the government more broadly, you were "letting the terrorists win." Mostly stopping the terrorists from winning comprised returning to pre-9/11 everyday life as quickly as possible. Go shopping, we were told. Only by doing this could we show they didn't rock us, bad. And it didn't take long--by the end of October of that year, if memory serves--for the enterprising amongst the government to seize upon the moment to pass the PATRIOT Act, and forever change our relationship to government, surveillance, and our Creator-endowed inalienable rights. Like many, I didn't know any better. I was a young man. I supported this stuff.
And now, more than 20 years later, I can't help but feel deep sadness in thinking that yes, indeed, the terrorists did win. In 2001, we said they'd win if they could knock us off our routine, cause us to falter, make our financial system collapse. It took a while, and, let's be frank, most of the damage was more due to an auto-immune response than anything the attacks directly did, but at the end of the day...I think they won. They caused the freest, greatest nation in the history of the earth to trade in its liberties for the security of an increasingly totalitarian state. The surveillance and forefeiture of rights at the center of the PATRIOT Act is directly linked to the social instability, lack of trust in institutions, lack of transparency, lack of accountability, and all the rest that has convinced us that free speech shouldn't be too free, censorship is ok, everything we do should be surveilled, and that coming things like CBDC will be logical extensions of this mindset. These may seem like tenuous connections, but look carefully. The connections are there.
The terrorists did not overrun us on 9/11, but they did seed a slow and steady infection that, decades later, has achieved exactly what they'd hoped: the crumbling of the Great Satan they set out to take down that clear September morning. I pray our nation will repent while there still might be time. But who will risk, who will stand, against this new tyranny and against this rebellion against reality itself?
The terrorists showed us dumb Americans that we are not alone on this planet. There are many other ideological systems at play. Mostly there is a war between the East (Communist collectivism) and the West (democratic individualism). The 9/11 attacks didn't start the war, but it exposed it. Since then, America has been enduring a religious war that is transforming our society.
For Massachusetts, the battleground is in the schools. Public school curriculum have been changed to promote Marxist goals (through SEL, social and emotional learning). Teachers are being replaced by therapists, whose goal is to dumb down the students. Critical thinking skills are being replaced by Communist gobbley gook (SEL). Computers are replacing teachers, in the classroom. Now they are trying to get rid of MCAS altogether (the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System). They know that any form of accountability will embarrass them, because Marxists are not about being intelligent. They are about compliance to totalitarian goals. They need an uneducated population to achieve this. Marxists don’t wait. When they see an opening they run for it, grab the power and transform the system. Their ultimate goal is to make more Marxists. This means taking over the schools and transforming the people. The people are largely unaware of what is going on.
James Lindsay describes why Marxism should be classified as a religion. If the Supreme Court would do this, the whole mess could be undone with a single blow. (Teaching Marxism in the schools violates the Constitution's First Amendment, that ensures a separation of church and state.)
Why leftist Marxism is a religion, by James Lindsay:
I had to post quickly before I completed Rod Dreher's post because I found Dreher's quoting of Karl Rove to be unusually amusing. What a hubristic fool. This was my first laugh of the day. Thanks!
Was 911 metaphysical? Maybe. I am certain metaphysical phenomenae occured in association with it. For example, there was an open Bible in one of the WTC towers that was fused to a steel girder. You can still read the page, where it is on display at the museum at the site today.
“Ye have heard that it hath been said, ‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.’ ”
Also, when I went on my mission trip to NYC last year, I was walking around with a few of my fellow missionaries, doing the tourist thing. We eventually found ourselves in the area of Wall Street, not far from the WTC, our destination. As we moved through the area, I started getting this sensation of...peace. Inexplicable peace. I was not the only one who noticed it, either.
And when we got to the area where the sites of the former towers, now reflecting pools were, the character of the area totally changed. NYC normally is busy, bustling, noisy. People going too and fro, just city life turned up to 11. You got within a certain radius of the area, things just...dialed down. People were still about, but orderly, peacefully. It had a hush resembling a library. Or a church. They were polite, courteous, orderly. Gave each other space and deference.
The aura of peace was palpable.
I was safe and comfortable enough to lay down and take a nap on a concrete slab outside one of the museums at one point.
9/11 may be metaphysical. It certainly was a stroke of luck for certain people.
Larry Silverstein, for example, who took out an insurance plan that covered terrorism just months before the attacks. After the attacks, he took the insurance company to court, claiming he should be paid double because there were two attacks. He made $4.55 billion.
It was also lucky for the Bush administration that one of the planes hit the Pentagon in the budget analyst office where DoD staffers were working on the mystery of the 2.3 trillion dollars that Donald Rumsfeld had announced “missing” from the Pentagon's coffers in a press conference the day before, on September 10, 2001.
I particularly like this speech made by GW Bush where he says the terrorists set explosives in the towers:
https://gab.com/polesowa/posts/111048356003408941/media/1?timeline=video
It's lucky the passports of the culprits were found in the rubble, otherwise we may not have known who had done it.
Re: Could there be a purer manifestation of hubris?
Teddie Roosevelt's "I'll teach them to elect good men" is in the running. And as I mentioned on another piece yesterday, American imperialism is of long standing, dating back into the early 19th century with Manifest Destiny and the war of 1812 (where our goal was to conquer Canada)
Jonathan Cahn's book The Harbinger is all about how 911 was a warning from God to America. From the book's blurb, "Before its end as a nation, there appeared in ancient Israel nine specific warnings and omens of national destruction – These same nine Harbingers are now manifesting in America". Unfortunately, it looks like we haven't heeded the warning.
re: California - I was waiting to come up because frankly I'm just stunned. The idea that schools cannot tell parents when a child has transitioned to a new name/identity - if a school can lie about that, what else will they lie about? What if a student is found to be having same-sex relations with a teacher, and notifying the parents would effectively "out" the child? Shall the school keep that a secret as well?
Metaphysical meaning? Discernment of Divine Writing on the Wall, that’s always a little dicey for me -- ‘no man knows the hour’, ‘God works in mysterious ways’ etc. Even our Lord’s Disciples were pretty uncomprehending most of the time. But Symbolic? -- you bet. It was an attack on what was perceived as Symbols of our Imperial Pride and Power. What 9-11 brought home to me was what a Populist I am, a believer in People Power. The ordinary people, the Cops, the Firefighters, the EMT’s that ran towards the flames and falling Towers took my breath away. 22 years later the Roll Call of their names still brings tears. It’s Populists against Plutocrats today. I’m inclined towards the term ‘Aristopopulism’, coined? popularized? In a Washington Post Op-Ed by J Burtka (I think that’s the name) sometime back that laid out an agenda personified by calling for a combination of Edmund Burke and Rooster Cogburn. Others may find that hybrid elsewhere. But i’ve always found it in the Kennedys -- in JFK, RFK and RFKJR, a soaring, shining eloquence, and a robust sympathy and understanding of the ‘common man’. Rooster Cogburn? -- JFK stood down the Chiefs of Staff, RFK took on Jimmy Hoffa, RFKJR is calling out the Plutocrats extending their tentacular reach into what seems like every corner of our lives. The Kennedys and ole’ Sam Houston, who knew the Iliad by heart, who at the risk of his life opposed Secession, and never looked down on anybody because like Martin Luther King he was always looking up to the sunny uplands of what America can be, of what it was meant to be by the Founders. Those folks who ran towards the Towers at the cost of many of their lives are Symbols too of an American Spirit that I don’t think has been crushed nor totally corrupted. Maybe that’s false hope. But, for me, Hope spring Eternal because He is always with us, even to the end of the world.’
I was so hoping you would repost your experience with the torn flag, and was happy to wake up to the retelling this morning. I was thinking about your story yesterday, and I do think 9/11 has metaphysical meaning. In some sense, the world many of us above a certain age knew, loved and were raised to inherit died on 9/11; and a new America has emerged over the past 22 years, one that may have all the familiar sites and sounds, yet is drastically not the America prior to 9/11.
Was 9/11 a metaphysical event or not? I want a third option on that. Being Christian means that superstition has no place in one’s worldview. Superstition is wholly a pagan concept. At the same time, to ignore the metaphysical and describe it as superstition is also not Christian. The pagan view is that there are events which are driven by forces that cannot be understood, while the secular view is that all things which happen originate from a physical explanation, even if the causes are not yet understood.
The Christian worldview is that what we see as anomalous behaviors have an explanation that is known but not fully understood in cause or meaning. Nevertheless, there is a framework that reconciles the physical and metaphysical. This is true at least for Christians who hold to an orthodox Christian worldview. Too many Christians point to rational events, like a child dying of cancer, as part of “God’s plan,” which is a superstition. Others refuse to even consider a supernatural cause for something or even accept the existence of evil in any literal sense.
Without laying out that framework, it becomes impossible take something like 9/11 and give it any substantive meaning like Rod has done above. On top of that, the things which do happen are often a lesson, whatever their origin. God can turn all things to good, even the wicked things, but it is not always in our definition of good. We want to see good as things which are pleasing to the senses, bringing comfort, or providing a reconciliation with our expectations. Often, what is seen is good is simply satisfying the basic needs on Maslow’s hierarchy. We do not take an event such as 9/11 and see how God blessed it by revealing truths about us as both a warning and a reminder of the covenant that binds all Christians.
The warning was that God permitted evil to act in this way. The reminder of the covenant was both to see this warning and to see the small miracles that happened within that warning. The point of God’s interactions within this world is never to resolve the everyday consequences of original sin, but to provide the framework for Christians to be saved before the final hour of either their deaths or the return of Christ. Taking 9/11 within that context provides perfect reconciliation of either a superstitious or secular interpretation.
With regard to 9/11 itself, the warning was clearly to turn away from our excess and hubris and to return to the Christian values and nature of America. It is not saying that America is a Christian nation, for a nation is an earthly thing, but that a nation can be Christian in how it acts. It’s also not to say that America has ever at all been perfectly Christian, but that at least a Christian viewpoint has informed much of the character of American life.
I think that the rejection of Christianity happened after World War Two, when America found itself occupying what was essentially a deserted imperial stage and realizing that it had the economic power to conquer all around it. Materialism became the greatest virtue of a nation that had taken the first chastisement of the Great Depression and ignored it. Hedonism, both overt in popular culture, and hidden in the form of “swinging,” the embrace of Randian-style economic greatness as a virtue unto itself, sexual “liberation,” and so on, showed that we took the blessing of victory over evil and squandered it. On top of that, American life mocked the world and any sense of decency. Being able to eat to excess at all hours of the day while people make mud pies to fill empty bellies, to provide a better existence for our pets than many people would ever see, to consume and pollute a world shared by all, to engage in the worship of money and technology…and most of all to not just tolerate sins like pornography, abortion, gambling, and gluttony, but to promote them as being positive…I think you could make a good case for the values that many modern American hold as being wholly satanic in even a loose interpretation.
In that sense, 9/11 was a call to redirect ourselves to a Godly behavior, not any sort of call to defend American virtue, because that virtue no longer exists. In other words, everyone pretty much missed the point of the whole thing. The attackers had their own reasons - the significance of 9/11 as a historical date is lost on most people. In a meta sense, it also marked a civilizational reversal of an era of security for Christendom, because Christendom no longer exists.
The deepest meaning of all is perhaps that it is a sign of the end times. COVID showed that we are not secure, in spite of our belief in technology. Likewise, to see that much of the world rejected what we had to offer meant that we can no longer see our position as the most powerful and wealthy nation on the face of the earth as being any sort of shield against bad things happening. I tend to have a quiet unease about so many things these days, both big and small, and I am sure I am not alone in that. If you take that deeper meaning, then 9/11 was a wake up call and sign to find out way back to God before it is too late. Instead, we got further chastisement in the form of two disastrous wars.
I am wondering what the next chastisement is going to be. Maybe a simple implosion of our currency as the world standard. That would certainly do it. Whatever form it comes in, we Christians need to reject any superstitious or secular interpretation and discern if it is a sign from God, then act accordingly.
it felt metaphysical. after the attack cities were very quiet. it felt as though a violent, brief cataclysm / conflict of spiritual proportion had just occurred. and that that cataclysm has re-ordered the world. or perhaps more accurately, the spiritual balance of power in the world (or both). since that day Christianity, and western civilization - have moved into a swift decline. where are we headed? well, if the west continues on this path - perhaps to the fall of the west as we know it and a new world where the west (and the rights it protects) will be subordinate to a digital/theocracy alien to historic western values. It feels as if Christianity has fallen and that fall is embodied in the events of 911. And the descent is continuing and the future is terrifyingly bleak (hence the cultural despondence in the west post 911). That despondence may be an unspoken reality we all live with contained in the unconscious/primordial brain. I feel it is there after 911. In a modern world, Christianity is now not as much a place as a constellation of believers across the earth, some (and increasingly more and more) practicing their faith in secrecy.
In the second section of Rod's essay, he complains mightily about California's descent into tranny totalitarianism and quite specifically laments that the churches aren't doing enough to resist it.
Then in the third section he goes on to excoriate Christians who are resisting it. Because they're icky. And the way they go about it is icky. He won't go sit down with Wilson, less his presence offer Wilson and his accolytes some sort of endorsement.
However, at the end he goes so far as to admit that he has "a strong feeling that there are many people within the broader Christian community in Wilson’s church who are not Christians-and-mad-as-hell-about-it. I hope they prevail, somehow."
So we should want them to prevail against the Progressive cultural zeitgeist but not be icky in how they do it.
Rod wants people, especially Christians, to resist tranny totalitarian madness, to pick one issue. What forms of resistance to this are acceptable and not icky?
Pray against it privately. Sure. Not icky and something I'm sure Wilson and Isker would agree and probably do so in their daily prayers.
Pray against it publicly in front of facilities where the procedures are done, like the pro- lifers do. Sure, but you'll start running into the same resistance that they did from the legislators and the courts as you do it. In fact, the laws are already in place to blunt the effectiveness of those demonstrations because of the abortion wars so they'll immediately be turned on the anti- tranny prayer warriors.
Write letters to the editor, vote moar harder, use the courts (somehow), sign a petition. In other words, keep trying to make change using the tools of a broken system run by people who hate you. These people have the upper hand, politically speaking, on the Left Coast, the Northeast, and large swaths of the Upper Midwest and the backing of a Medical Industrial Complex that stands to make billions of dollars performing unnecessary medical procedures on healthy boys and girls with the added bonus of creating patients for life who have to pay for hormones and other medications to maintain the charade.
But at least you're not being icky.
If a man is serious about these procedures as being evil, then he shouldn't be afraid of getting icky to stop them. Particularly when so far the only method of of being icky currently on offer is Isker's rhetoric.
Sad to read about the strife within the Christian community of Dreher. This happens way too often.
But remember what Jesus said about judging others: "Judge not and you will not be judged. For with what judgment ye judge shall be judged; and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. Why do you see the speck in your brother's eye and ignore the log in your own?" Matthew 7:1-3.
I say this because that guy from Moscow Idaho, and his padawan, seem to be fixated on Rods shortcomings while ignoring their own. And their own seem quite ghoulish if true.
Stay in the peace of Christ. Shake off the dust.from your feet.
Rod, Doug Wilson might be right about one thing. You tend too much to punch right and to believe the worst about people on the right. Your statement yesterday at EC about J6 protesters is typical:
"Don’t get me wrong: the January 6th riot was an assault on the American political order, one that deserves harsh punishment. We can argue over whether or not the heavy sentences being handed out to convicted rioters are proportionally just, but there’s not much real debate over the extraordinary villainy of the acts."
I am not one that thinks we should never punch right. But to paint Wilson as a Orwellian foot stomp totalitarian (and you have not apologized for that to my knowledge) or to call J6 an assault on American political order when they were protesting the rigging of the 2020 election, which really was an assault on the American political order, is out of line.
I love most of your writing. I am teaching Live Not By Lies to a Christian study group. But maybe Wilson is right. Maybe you do need to get a grip. I will be praying for you.
I agree that in some sense 9/11 was the beginning of the end, and it is interesting to cast it in the light of 'God's judgment against a people'. I say this as someone who served in the (what would become) long, long wars following the attacks, who lost many a solid teammate in these wars, who met their widows and young children.
I remember in the days following 9/11 all of the talk was about "not letting the terrorists win". If you didn't do whatever thing was prescribed, often by GW Bush or the government more broadly, you were "letting the terrorists win." Mostly stopping the terrorists from winning comprised returning to pre-9/11 everyday life as quickly as possible. Go shopping, we were told. Only by doing this could we show they didn't rock us, bad. And it didn't take long--by the end of October of that year, if memory serves--for the enterprising amongst the government to seize upon the moment to pass the PATRIOT Act, and forever change our relationship to government, surveillance, and our Creator-endowed inalienable rights. Like many, I didn't know any better. I was a young man. I supported this stuff.
And now, more than 20 years later, I can't help but feel deep sadness in thinking that yes, indeed, the terrorists did win. In 2001, we said they'd win if they could knock us off our routine, cause us to falter, make our financial system collapse. It took a while, and, let's be frank, most of the damage was more due to an auto-immune response than anything the attacks directly did, but at the end of the day...I think they won. They caused the freest, greatest nation in the history of the earth to trade in its liberties for the security of an increasingly totalitarian state. The surveillance and forefeiture of rights at the center of the PATRIOT Act is directly linked to the social instability, lack of trust in institutions, lack of transparency, lack of accountability, and all the rest that has convinced us that free speech shouldn't be too free, censorship is ok, everything we do should be surveilled, and that coming things like CBDC will be logical extensions of this mindset. These may seem like tenuous connections, but look carefully. The connections are there.
The terrorists did not overrun us on 9/11, but they did seed a slow and steady infection that, decades later, has achieved exactly what they'd hoped: the crumbling of the Great Satan they set out to take down that clear September morning. I pray our nation will repent while there still might be time. But who will risk, who will stand, against this new tyranny and against this rebellion against reality itself?
The terrorists showed us dumb Americans that we are not alone on this planet. There are many other ideological systems at play. Mostly there is a war between the East (Communist collectivism) and the West (democratic individualism). The 9/11 attacks didn't start the war, but it exposed it. Since then, America has been enduring a religious war that is transforming our society.
For Massachusetts, the battleground is in the schools. Public school curriculum have been changed to promote Marxist goals (through SEL, social and emotional learning). Teachers are being replaced by therapists, whose goal is to dumb down the students. Critical thinking skills are being replaced by Communist gobbley gook (SEL). Computers are replacing teachers, in the classroom. Now they are trying to get rid of MCAS altogether (the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System). They know that any form of accountability will embarrass them, because Marxists are not about being intelligent. They are about compliance to totalitarian goals. They need an uneducated population to achieve this. Marxists don’t wait. When they see an opening they run for it, grab the power and transform the system. Their ultimate goal is to make more Marxists. This means taking over the schools and transforming the people. The people are largely unaware of what is going on.
James Lindsay describes why Marxism should be classified as a religion. If the Supreme Court would do this, the whole mess could be undone with a single blow. (Teaching Marxism in the schools violates the Constitution's First Amendment, that ensures a separation of church and state.)
Why leftist Marxism is a religion, by James Lindsay:
Session 1 https://youtu.be/YfwMpxhrCYE
Session 2 https://youtu.be/pTuqKOSQYdI
I had to post quickly before I completed Rod Dreher's post because I found Dreher's quoting of Karl Rove to be unusually amusing. What a hubristic fool. This was my first laugh of the day. Thanks!