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Christianity as a Synthetic Religion

Posted February 1, 2024 By John C Wright

In an earlier column I listed the synthetic religions proposed as speculation from science fiction writers from the Pulp Era onward.

Most the writers listed propose some sort of pagan pantheon or another, or worship of a mortal as goddess. Only one proposes using the God of the Christians as a synthetic religion, meant an an opium to lull the masses into a somnolent acquiescence of their own oppression.

Foolishness. No religion on earth is more likely to undermine and overturn society on every level, legal, social, scientific, personal, and improve it markedly, while never drawing the sword nor striking a blow.

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The Fruit without the Root

Posted January 25, 2024 By John C Wright

Tradition, of itself, is inadequate to justify itself. A tradition can only be justified, or, if unsound, criticized, from its own roots.

Of late, more and more of our agnostic or atheist conservative brethren, seeing the confused if not diabolical current state of the world, and foreseeing it fate if current trends continue, confess that the secular philosophy of the classical liberalism of the Age of Reason seems woefully inadequate to mount as robust defense against the Seven-Headed Beast nihilist philosophers, dogmatic subjectivists, cultural vandals, puritanical sex-deviants, socialist plutocrats, totalitarian anarchists, and pro-jihad atheists, variously referred to as Progressives, Postmoderns, Pervertarians, Wokesters, Critical Race-Hustlers, Cultural Marxists, and Morlocks.

Public men of letters including such figures as psychiatrist Jordan Peterson, mathematician James Lindsay, and ancient Akkadian emperor Carl Benjamin, with a degree of reluctance more or less, have admitted with a degree of candor more or less that only the Christian tradition embedded into our laws and customs stand a chance of fighting the foe.

These men admit that Christian tradition alone is robust enough to fight the Antichrist. But they are secular men, and godless. They see the fruit but doubt the root.  Such is their conundrum.

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Permit-Free Gun Carry in Ohio

Posted January 18, 2024 By John C Wright

I rarely find statistics persuasive, since it is too easy to manipulate them to support either side of any argument, and rarely are the assumptions and definitions visible. What, for example, is included in “gun violence”? Does this include use of a firearm in a suicide?

However, when a statistic confirms what common sense already shows, I do not mind quoting them.

Gun violence in 6 out of the 8 largest Ohio cities dropped significantly after Ohio legalized permit-free carry of guns across the entire state in 2022:

Columbus: -12%
Cleveland: -6%
Toledo: -18%
Akron: -18%
Parma: -22%
Canton: -5%

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Europe Died in Auschwitz

Posted December 8, 2023 By John C Wright

 As ever, I ban for anti-Semitic remarks.

In the spirit of fairness, I will ban for remarks repeating any Anti-Defamation-League-style anti-Japhetic remarks.  (Anti-Japhetism, also called Anti-Whitism, is the hatred of Europeans in general and Christians in particular, and includes recklessly false accusations of Fascism, Supremacism, and Anti-Semitism.) I regret living in a time, and among a people, for whom such a warning is necessary.  

The following is a copy of an article written under the pen name Sebastián Vivar Rodríguez appearing in the anti-Communist website Gentiuno [11 Nov 2004]. The original version of “Europe Died in Auschwitz” has been deleted from the website.

My comment is below the column.

***   ***   ***

I walked down the streets in Barcelona and suddenly discovered a terrible truth: Europe died in Auschwitz. We killed six million Jews and replaced them with 20 million Muslims. In Auschwitz we burned a group of people who represented culture, thought, creativity, talent.

We destroyed the chosen people, truly chosen, because they produced great and wonderful people who made great contributions to the world, and thus changed the world.

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A Matter of Definition

Posted November 27, 2023 By John C Wright
A cultist is someone who clings to a false belief out of loyalty to his cult, regardless of evidence. He believes what he is told to believe because he trusts and loves the witchdoctor or false prophet allegedly speaking a truth rejected by the world, a special truth, a personal truth.
A cultist takes pride in being deaf to reason.
The sad thing is, that there are legitimate times and places when an honest man should not listen to reason, such as when Nazi spies are trying to give you reasons for betraying your flag, or when a seductress is trying to give you reasons for betraying your wife. The cultist puts his falsehoods of his cult on the same high pedestal where an honest man puts his faith.
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Thanksgiving: The Vanity of Plato’s Conceit

Posted November 23, 2023 By John C Wright

As a public service, we reprint last year’s column for any readers who may have missed it.

For this Thanksgiving, let us give thanks for the lesson learned by the Pilgrims in the first harsh years of their colony.

The real history of the Mayflower Pilgrims was recounted by their leader, William Bradford, in his book Of Plymouth Plantation (1647).

The words below are his, where he explains how, at first the colonists attempted to hold all property in common:

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The Anti-Cassandra of Overpopulation

Posted November 22, 2023 By John C Wright

Regarding the eco-scaremongering which has been a constant force and clamor in modern life since at least 1950, a reader with the leviathanic yet flatulential name of KrakenFartz observes:

Thomas Sowell coined the term “Teflon Prophet” to describe the scientaster, Paul Ehrlich, because even though his predictions have turned out to be wrong every single time, nothing sticks to his reputation.

My comment:

First, I salute the use of the term scientaster as a clever play on the underused word poetaster — referring to an overly self-important versifier with underwhelming skills.

Second, I suspect nothing sticks to Ehrlich’s reputation as a prophet simply because those who believe him do so for unadmitted emotional reasons related to earth-worship, to discontent with freedom and prosperity, and to the Gnostic world-view that inverts moral values. He tickles their ears with what they want to hear.

You would think folks would not want to hear that they are doomed, and more doomed, and most doomed. To the contrary, prophecies of Armageddon and Ragnarok quell quotidian worries, open a vision of life’s larger issues, and firm the resolve to heed and follow one’s prophet of choice. Such prophecies set the stage with a large picture of the war between Heaven and Hell, and the battle for the soul of the nation.

The only problem is that the false prophets are on the wrong side. Those who follow heaven obey the command to be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it. The opposition wants to subdue man, cull the population like cattle, and worship the earth as an idol, a Carthaginian idol that demands human sacrifice.

Paul Ehrlich is a false prophet. It  has not eroded his support one iota.

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Believing is Seeing

Posted November 15, 2023 By John C Wright

Jordan Peterson’s roundtable discussion on Exodus, has much to recommend it, not the least of which is a digression which addressed an error I have often made in my godless youth, which many Americans, also godless, also make.

  1. The  Vantage from Nowhere

The Idolatry of Reason — one unwelcome legacy of the Enlightenment Era — involves the idea that one stands apart from the laws and customs, mores and ideals into which one was born, and judges them as if from an objective standpoint: the vantage from nowhere, so to speak.

Right Reason, let us hasten to add, disapproves of the Idolatry of Reason as unreasonable.

Right Reason is humble, and rightly so. Idolatry seeks to dethrone the Most High in favor of an usurper. Whether that usurper is the faculty of reason, or the pride of man, or the vanity of some high-sounding ideal, is no matter.

Putting the lesser good above the higher good makes it bad. Even the brightest angel seating himself above heaven’s highmost throne becomes a devil.

In reality, reason only operates when grounded on first things themselves not open to reason.

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The Superversive World of Harry Potter

Posted November 13, 2023 By John C Wright

A trip down memory lane for my longtime readers. Here I reprint my first column where I used Tom Simon’s wonderful term SUPERVERSIVE. As one can see from the internal references, this was back a few years. Not much has changed.

September 15, 2014 By ISI Archive

In reality, the best way to find reality is through fairyland.

Fairy tales of any sort are more truthful about the eternal verities of the human condition than many a tale told in the realistic style. Stories about a bold champion of Camelot or the enchantress of Aeaea, or the great dragon beneath the Lonely Mountain, will tell you more of sin and salvation, love and loss and love found again, than a yarn about a cuckold in turn-of-the-century Dublin, or a decadent drunk living in West Egg, Long Island. This is because so-called realistic tales deal only with the surface features of life, what we see with our eyes, so to speak; fairy tales touch the mystery and wonder at the core of life.

This is true even of tales that treat the matter of ancient epics and ballads lightly, as when a young orphan discovers he is not of our world but a wizard from the land of magic hidden from human eyes.

Harry Potter somewhat cheekily, and with tongue in cheek, puts all the tropes of once-upon-a-time into modern garb, so that broom-riding witches play rugby in midair, and the sorcerer’s apprentice goes to boarding school straight out of Tom Brown’s School Days to face bullies as bad as Flashman.

But even a lighthearted treatment of the eternal things will brush up against eternal themes: Harry must face a Dark Lord who is a dark reflection of his own soul, and he bears the wound of his mother’s love, which saved him as a babe, upon his brow.

Harry Potter is the most successful book of all time next to Pilgrim’s Progress and the Sear’s Catalogue. And so, naturally, there is a certain cult, known in his world as Deatheaters, and in our world as Political Correctness, that seeks repulsively to claim that success as their own.

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Virginia Election Results

Posted November 8, 2023 By John C Wright

The Election results are in. Virginia lost.

The Dems retains control of the state senate, and regained control of the House of Delegates.

Meanwhile in Ohio, prenatal infanticide was enshrined as a right in the state constitution. Dems outspent GOP 9-to-1 on propaganda, and the corrupt matriarchy voted enthusiastically for Moloch.

That there are still a majority of voters sufficiently motivated to vote for openly self-destructive and irrational policies confirms fears of civilizational suicide.

Or perhaps there is still a majority of citizens insufficiently motivated to curtail voter fraud. In the modern age, which historians will one day call the Misinformation Age, truth is impossible to discern from fiction.

From Twitter aka X:

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Bretigne Shaffer on Amazon’s RINGS OF POWER

Posted November 8, 2023 By John C Wright

This is from the pen of   at Lew Rockwell. She writes, in part:

Why ‘Rings of Power’ Is So Terrible, and Why It Doesn’t Matter

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Unconditional Surrender

Posted October 26, 2023 By John C Wright

Jed is my college roommate and lifelong friend. This is his letter to the Review and Outlook section of the WALL STREET JOURNAL, Oct. 24. I share the sentiments. 

To the Editor:

In 1945, the Allied powers demanded unconditional surrender of the German government, and the total dismantlement of the Nazi regime.  Civilian households throughout Germany hung white sheets from their windows as a signal of acquiescence and defeat to the advancing Allied armies.  Russian soldiers raped two million German women.  This was the heartbreaking price that Germany had to pay for the choices of its democratically elected leaders, and its quiescent citizenry.

Because Israel is the Jewish state, there will be no rape of the Palestinians.  But bad choices, even democratic ones, have their ineluctable consequences.  The necessary corrective of fire and lead which will presently descend upon Gaza can properly end only with white sheets and the destruction of Hamas.  Like the Nazis in the final days of April 1945, Hamas won’t hesitate to slaughter its own citizens who show insufficient resolve.  Regrettably, this is a price Gazans must now pay.

Only then will the stage be set for a Palestinian Adenauer to arise, who can lead his people to the peaceful prosperity that Israel has unflaggingly offered since the day of its founding.

Jed Arkin
Tel Aviv, Israel

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Tucker re Trump

Posted October 19, 2023 By John C Wright

This brief political campaign advertisement is one of the most effective in recent memory.

It perfectly sums up the reasons why I, and countless like-minded individuals both at home and abroad, have more than merely a utilitarian and political attachment to Mr. Trump and to the America-First movement.

This is not because he is a flawless man. Surely not. In some ways, Mr. Trump, with his blustery talk and New Yorker boasting, is absurd.

We like him.

We like him because he keeps his campaign promises, the only politician in memory ever to do so. This is because he record actually speaks for itself: and we are not tired of winning yet.

We like him because he is funny. But we more than like him.

We admire him.

We admire him because he is the best politician in living memory, and the only statesman since Churchill worthy of the name. In this present darkness, he is the brightest torch of defiance.

We admire him because he is the first leader in a generation that opposed, slowed, and undid even one footfall of the downfall of the West. But we more than admire him.

We love him.

We love him because he loves our nation, as shown by what he suffers for the nation.

He has paid his dues.

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Antifatherhood

Posted October 17, 2023 By John C Wright

Upon a time a few year’s back, I saw a skit or commercial where the female characters from the television show MAD MEN, secretaries and office girls from the 1960’s, were confronted by the time traveling ambassador from their future, our present, portrayed by Ellen Degeneres. She is an untalented celebrity of some sort but known to me only because of her widely publicized sexual degeneracy.

In the little skit, Miss Degeneres exclaims to the benighted damsels of the allegedly remote past that women in the future have full equal rights. She includes “the right to get married” as the crown in the list of such civil rights enjoyed by the future women.

The writers of the skit intended this to be a triumphant rather than a ridiculous statement, and intended it to mean that women of the future have the civil right to get married to each other, that is, to have an unnatural lesbian liaison with one of their own sex called marriage, and treated with solemnity and legal recognition.

As I watched in awe at the perfection of tonedeafness parochialism involved in retrofitting modern Lefty echo-chamber sentiments to the generations of our mothers and grandmothers, I could not help but wonder: by what means have we come to this?

Whether the time traveling ambassador of female emancipation also mentioned the woman’s right to alter their bodies with carcinogenic chemicals to produce temporary sterility, or to kill their own beloved offspring in the womb, and to compel the public coffers to pay for both abominations, that I do not happen to recall, and I am unwilling, due to my delicacy of digestion, to move my finger the half-inch it would require to lookup the matter on the worldwide computer system we enjoy here in the future.

I felt a moment of vertigo as I contemplated the immensity of the gulf that stretched between (1) the rational creatures of the universe and (2) the creatures that had, in all seriousness, conceived and wrote and produced this skit and aired it to the public.

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Science Fiction and Simon the Magician

Posted October 8, 2023 By John C Wright

Here I reprint of a column from years past, but still pertinent, or impertinent.

Let me propose a rather long essay and a slightly droll theory:

The aliens behind the Monolith in Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY are the same as the aliens signaling from Vega in Carl Sagan’s CONTACT. They both are part of the Galactic Overmind seeking the evolutionary transcendence of all life, and to elevate lesser races to maturity, as in CHILDHOOD’S END, also by Clarke.

On a less droll note, I am proposing that these works, and several others, are similar in their mood and theme and treatment of the plot elements, because they tacitly agree on a central myth.

It is a mythic thread that runs through much of science fiction from even before the golden age, and, if I am right about what this thread is, back two thousand years and more. Van Vogt and Heinlein and Asimov have all placed at least some of their stories in the service of this myth, the Great Myth.

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