Faith-based musings from a decidedly Biblical Protestant point of view, on just about everything, including Bogus Bibles, New Age Deceptions, Corrupt Politics and other signs of the Last Days before the World ends.
Watched the Netflix movie "Trumbo," which is about the McCarthy era when Communists in Hollywood were blacklisted for it through Senator McCathy's House Committee on Unamerican Activities hearings.
The movie is of course sympthetic to Trumbo and all those who were blacklisted and I don't want to suggest that there was anything good about that blacklisting. But at the same time we now have a nation that is on the verge of being destroyed by the Left, by Marxism, by Communism, and the way the McCarthy era played out no doubt has a lot to do with that. McCarthy was right about Communists in Hollywood and it is certainly true that Communism is unAmerican, actually AntiAmerican but the problem is that so many of us don't know what's wrong with Communism and how it is such a danger to the nation.
The movie presented the Communists as idealists full of compassion for the downtrodden implying that there is something heartless about the American system that needs to be rectified by Commyunism. Nowhere in the film was the difference between Communism and the American system even mentioned, let alone discussed. The character Trumbo seems to consider his Communist belief to be completely American, and his opponents, such as Hedda Hopper, are of course depicted as unlikable people, and none of them ever has anything substantive to say about why they are so adamantly opposed to the Communists. Just a lot of pattriotic-sounding hot air. All you'll get from this movie is leftist propaganda you'll learn nothng about the reality of the conflict it's about./
We go on in that same ignorance even today as we are now faced with an election that pits the American system against Communism in such a direct way the contrast is inescapable. It's never been spelled out so clearly before. Would the American voters actually choose Communism given such a stark contrast? I don't know. It'[s sad to think that many might reject Trump based only on disliking his personality, with no idea that they would be choosing the demise of the country itself.
The problem in the era of McCarthy was that there was no real discussion of why Communism is such a danger, at least that I recall, and I don't think many understand it today either. The blacklisting in Hollywood didn't make the issues clear to anyone, it caused severe suffering for many people who felt it was completely undeserved. Those who considered their Communist affiliation to be an expresion of compassion never got challenged about it, and blacklisting only made them bitter.
So th4e blacklisting was finallyl condemned and we never did get the education we needed on these things. McCarthyism is now a dirty word and. We aren't getting any better understaing now either. I hear some good discussions of it on conservative talk radio but those discussions never get a public airing. Sean Hannity just wrote a book that may address the issues to some extent, and Mark Levin has written many such books and talks about it a great deqal on his talk show, but the people who need to hear it aren't listening.
If the Left wins it will be because of this ignorqance, but if it wins there will be no way ever to return to the real America.
Before I became a believer I sometimes encountered writings that purported to explain religious belief, of course mostly Christian belief, in terms of the prevailing theories of philosophy or psychology or whatnot. It was frustrating and boring though I'm not sure I could have said why, since for all I knew that way of dealing with religion was all that was possible to us.
But of course such thinking is merely human beings applying their imagination to systems that long preceded our time, as if there's anything persuasive about our mere cogitations. We want truth, don't we? But how on earth are we going to find truth by such means?
Science is something else of coruse, the "hard" sciences that is, the phenomena that can be tested empirically by separate individuals arriving at the same results. That method can't be applied to questions of the meaning of life, whre we are left with speculatons based on interpretations of history and the minds of other thinkers rather than any kind of objective knowledge.
The same is true of the theory of evolution, which is often defended as a science but really isn't, at least not in the same way the hard sciences are, since you can't replicate any of it or test any of it, and as in the case of religious or philosophical meaning all you can do is make intepretations based on some principles that were never empirically demonstrated though they are taken for fact. because some thinker in the past argued them persuasively. Even if boring and frustrating this method is at least justifiable for philosophical questions, but when it is applied to an area of physical reality, i.e. biology, it becomes, in my opinion, pernicious and misleading, a body of pseudo-knowledge that erects a fake reality in the hapless minds of humanity. It just sounds silly, sophomoridc, fatuous, the way evolutionist thinkers will talk about how the human race acquired this or that attitude or behavior at such and such a time in our history, as if they could possibly know such things. Sociobiology's "altruism" of decades ago is the sort of thing I'm thinking of. They don't seem to mind that they can't know such things, they can only speculate, or that it's mindnumbingly simplistic. Evolution is also applied to the attempts to figure out religion of course.
What got me into all this is that I listened to part of a couple of lectures on religion by the psychologist Jordan Peterson, who became known a few years ago for his very trenchant answers to some popular leftist political correctness. He doesn't consider himself to be a conservative although many of his views are congenial to the conservative positions. It's interesting that he also has a strong attraction to biblical Christianity, having given many lectures on the Bible, but it's all from the psychological/philosophical perspective.
In a nutshell this could be said to boil it all down to a very complex way human beings learn to aspire to high wisdom in conducting our lives. That is, he reduces God to such higher wisdom, that some special human beings learned how to access, or something like that. Which I gu3ess explains why it got written down and preserved for future generations.
Although he considers this to be a noble thing, to my mind it is the same kind of thinking I called silly and fatuous above in relation to evolutionist explanations for human behavior. And evolution is certainly part of his framework too, of course, as it's all about how humanity learned this or that, grew over time to develop, say, greater wisdom about life or whatever.
So the story of Abraham is all about how he learned life's lessons, it's got nothing to do with what the Bible actually says, that believers understand it to mean, that there really is an objective God Who really did call the man Abraham for purposes of God's own that have nothing to do with ordinary human life. Peterson's view would imply that all humanity could learn from this God that is really a reservoir of higher wisdom about life, or perhaps some special people could, but we understand the Bible to be telling us something absolutely unique that God chose to convey through Abraham, for the salvation of fallen humanity. God chose Abraham for this unique purpose, as He chooses all thos4e through whom He speaks to us in scripture. God is not just a wisdom by which Abraham can learn to conduct his life, God is teaching Abraham about Himself and His plan of redemption. He is not teaching Abraham some abstract wisom about, say, sacrificing to gain higher knowledge, He is teaching us through Abrqaham's willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac, about the necessity of trusting God that some day a great sacrifice of His own Son will bring salvation to eternal life for all who believe.
How is it that unbelievers can permit themselves to impose such an alien philosophical system on the Bible? In one of his lectures Peterson kept referring to what "we" think about the Bible, how "we" used to believe it but no longer do, which of course ignores the millions of us who do believe it even today. How does he justify reducing God to a sort of faculty of our own minds? How does he justify gnoring what the Bible actually says about the transcendent objective reality of God? I wonder if he can answer that question. It can only come down to the subjective statement, Well I just can't believe what it actually says. And somehow that is enough for him? No matter what millions have understood it to mean for thousands of years, his own psychological cogitations are sufficient against all that.
Much the same thing as the "contemporary biblical scholars" who don't believe in the supernatural so they arbitrarily date the most prophetic books after the prophecies they so clearly state, with no regard for whatever how they destroy the whole fabric of the writing.
Oh well. Nothing new under the sun there I guess.
It's so simple really. Just believe it. That's what it says, just believe it. It's a simple honest account of things that actually happened, and it's only a deep prejudice embedded in your own mind that gives you the arrogance to think you can make it into something else. Of course if someone did that to an honest accounting of your own about your own experiences you would be very unhappy, but no matter, you can do it to God's revelation that has taught millions over millennia. Jung? Nietsche? Ugh.
The prophetic frame of reference surrounding the idea of the Pre-tribultionat Rapture requiresz a "revived Roman Empire" as having to be in place for the final events of the tribulation to unfold. This is because the prophecies place these events in the Roman Empire, which we g4enerally think of as long dead in the distant past. It all has to occur in the Roman Empire because that's what the prophecies show, at least the prophecies in the book of Daniel. The succession of great empires is prophesied from Bablyon through Medo-Perisia through Alexander's Greece to a fourth empire unknown at the time which is to be the last, after which God himself will reign on the Earth. All these prophecies came true in their time and the fourth empire was reigning in the time of the Messiah, which makes it the Roman Empire.
According to the current prophecy about the timing of the Rapture of the Church and the following Tribulation, this final empire is no longer n existence and therefore must be revived in order to be the setting for the final events. The formation of the EU in recent years is regarded by many as the needed revival. There are various elements associated with this formation that are taken to be signs of its role as this revived empire, including an empty seat in the Parliament with the number 666 and the statue of Europa that seems reminiscent of the woman riding the beast in the book of Revelation.
All this accompanies the idea that the Antichrist is an unknown figure to be revealed during the Tribulation period, an evil political leader who has inspired many creatire interpretations. Well, Hitler was an Antichrist figure so the idea isn't far-fetched. There were elements of his reign that were very religous in tone, and the Third Reich over which he presided was consciously modeled on the Roman Empire. Also to be noted is that the title "Kaiser" in German and "Czar" in Russian are translations of "Caesar" which add to the general European identification with the Roman Empire.
The Holy Roman Empire in this case, the Second Reich. The thing is, in a real sense the Roman Empire never died, it was carried on by the Roman Catholic Church headed by the papacy, for about a thousand years, during which it put to death every kind of dissident against its rule and its doctrines. The prophesied fourth empire is said to be "different" than all the others, which would certainly describe the Roman Church. Not your typical political entity, although the Vatican IS in fact a political state.
Although the Holy Roman Empire no longer exists the Roman Church does exist and boasts a membershup of a billion people all over the world. It lost its political clout at the Protestant Reformation but its essential structures are still in place and could easily be revived under the right circumstances, such as the disappearance of the true Church. Since the Roman Church and the papacy have continued despite the loss of its former political power, it doesn't seem unreasonable to think of it as the continuing existence of the Roman Empire itself. Besides being described as different from the other empires in the prophecy, the fourth empire in Nebuchadnezzar's dream of the statue, has legs of iron but feet and toes of iron mixed with clay. Although some divide this into a fourth and fifth empire, the vision Daniel had in Chapter 7 describes only one fourth kingdom, not a fourth and fifth, and since his vision parallels Nebuhadnezzar's dream it seems right to think of it as one kingdom or empire that has two phases, the solid iron of the original Roman Empire, followed by the iron plus clay of the empire ruled by the papacy, the Roman Church. It is not like the other kingdoms or empires, it has weak "clay" or human beings mixed in with the institutions of its power, which probably indicates its its vast human memership, many of whom will defect and be saved during its reign under Antichrist.
The Reformation exposed the essentially Roman pagan nature of most of the pracdtices of the Roman Church. The priests wear the garb of the priests of the old Roman pagan religions, the rosary is a pagan practice, as are candle lighting and many other superstitions. The papacy, which was identified as the Antichrist by the Reformers, had also taken on the Roman pagan title "Pontifex Maximus." All of its outward forms and rituals are pagan and Roman, none of them are Christian although Christian symbols and doctrines are absorbed into them. Although the Bible is quoted in many of its ceremonies, they deny the biblical teaching on salvation by faith in Christ alone without workd. In fact in their Council of Trent they lay all the biblical teachings of the Reformation under anathema, or curse, favoring the specifically nonChristian faith-plus-works formula for salvation.
So in a sense the Roman Empire is right here in our midst, hiding in plain sight, and has never gone away. Reinstatement of its world political dominion to become the ferocious final power of the book of Revelation would seem to be merely a matter of an opportune change inb the political climate, which isn't too hard to imagine occurring soon considering our current global distresses. Exit the true Church then, leaving it for the RCC to define Christianity and put its Pope in the place of the Savior.
There is some idea we won't know who the Antichrist is until after the Rapture, but the Reformers considered him to have been revealed in 606 AD when the Bishop of Rome was declared Universal Bishop, after which the Roman Church grew to be the religio-poltical power over the Holy Roman Empire. There could of course also be a revelation of THE particular Antichrist-Pope still to come, after the Church is Raptured. It's also true that the Pope himelf might not play that ultimate role, but one of the kings over which the RCC once reigned, meaning a political leader from today's kingdoms under the papacy, the way Hitler was the Antichrist figure supported by the Pope of his day. In the Holy Roman Empire the Popes had power over the kings and something like that could characterize this final global empire.
People ask where the United States is in Biblical prophecy. Well, I have no trouble seeing it as one part of this continuing Roman Empire resuscitated to its former power. We already have the abominations of a bulding that looks like St. Peter's basilica in Rome even down to the obelisk that fronts it, in our case the Washington monument. And then there is that very romanesque painting in the ceiling lof the rotunda of the "Apotheosis of Washington" presented as a god, a very Roman pagan idea and certainly not Christian or in any way consistent with the principles of the fonding of America. Or Washington's character for that matter since he could have been king but refused the honor. However there is a very persistent rumor that he became a Catholic on his death bed.
Despite our completely incompatible political and originally Protestant religious character, given how we've deteriorated over the last half century or so I have no problem including the USA with the EU as one of the nations within the final Roman Empire/Church. I have my guess as to who might be our king at that time too...
(Need to inform you that I've had to go through this a few times and edit for typos and clarity. Sorry I'm so disorganized but I think it's easier to understand now.)
One of the signs, among many underway these days, that we are speeding toward the very last days of planet Earth, is plans in the works to set up a world government. According to the Book of Revelation such a global government, headed by a man known as the Antichrist, will be in place at least by the midpoint of the seven-year Tribulation period. There seem to be many events spelled out in Revelation for the Tribulation period already underway these days, as if to give us a heads-up that it is definitely very close. Although the signs of the last days given by Jesus Christ in His Olivet discourse of Matthew 24 and parallel passages in Mark and Luke, are fulfilled at the beginning of the Tribulation, since it's all about when we are to expect the return of Christ and the first phase of His return is the Rapture of the Church, it makes sense that the signs would be operating before the Rapture as well. Then in Revelation 6 the same signs become the judgments of God as the first of the seven seals are opened and we see "the four horsemen of the Apocalypse" being sent into the world, bringing first spiritual deception in the form of a false Christ or antiChrist, ushering in a false peace, then war and famine and death by pestilence among other things. So begins the outpouring of the wrath of God known as the Day of the Lord in various parts of the Old Testament. All these things can be seen somewhere or other in the world right now, and a sense of global catastrophe is already brewing. The formation of a global government has been in the works for decades and now seems to be gaining strength from the global pandemic.
Guess I was preoccupied with unimportant things and missed it, this radio broadcast from Jan Markell's "Understanding the Times" series done at the beginning of May, but God in His mercy didn't let me miss it altogether. Here she is interviewing Gary Kah who has been following the developments toward The New World Order for decades and sees it shaping up now through the work of Pope Francis. This of course buttresses my own view of this Pope as at least a major player in the end times, but specifically as a likely candidate for the Antichrist of the Great Tribulation period. Antichrist would have to be both substitute for Christ and a political leader, which historically happens to describe the papacy already, so the idea isn't at all far-fetched. The papacy as both religious and political power was once the leader of the western world at least, through the centuries of the "Holy Roman Empire," until Luther and the Protestant Reformation gave it what could have been thought of as a mortal blow. But the RCC didn't completely die though its power was severely curtailed. Various Popes since then have presented themselves as some kind of world leader, and Pope Francis is one of the most aggressive about it, as Gary Kah describes him in this radio show.
The papacy itself has a Latin title (VICARIVS FILII DEI) which in itself is a definition of Antichrist ("In the Place of the Son of God,") whose Roman numerals add up to the infamous number "666," and this particular Pope was elected under odd signs that include a flurry of thirteens and even a 666. I'll try to remember to find the posts where I lay out these things. I suppose even such auspicious signs may not identify him as the final Antichrist, though it is hard for me to see how anyone else could come with better qualifications. Note that IF he should be slated for that role, since he is in his eighties all these events must be very very close.
After Gary Kah the radio program turns to Pastor J.D. Farag who discusses his sense of urgency about these being the very last days before the Rapture, because of the COVID-19 pandemic and its likely impetus to the formation of the World Order.
Surely it is at the very door. The Rapture must be right around the corner, the event that will restart the clock ticking where the prophecy of the Seventy Weeks of Daniel left off-- that was at the end of 69 of those weeks, at the announcement of Jesus the Messiah in Jerusalem on the day we still commemorate as Palm Sunday. We couold say that Old Testament time came to an end on that day and God's dealings with Israel will then resume to fulfill the last week of Daniel's prophecy, or the seven years of the Tribulation or Day of the Lord, as the Church age comes to an end with the Rapture. Those who are to go through the following seven-year period have a lot of catching up on biblical prophecy to do. I pray for faith and courage for all those the Lord will save during that time. . .
Part 1 of the interview of Gary Kah is on this page: https://www.oneplace.com/ministries/understanding-the-times/listen/the-new-world-order-cries-for-a-savior-816174.html
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Later: A Sketch of Biblical History and the Meaning of Salvation
I suppose I really need to say more in order for people who are not familiar with these things to understand what I'm talking about, I do tend to shoot off a post or an email on impulse that hasn't necessarily been written with unbelievers in mind. And I'm not particularly good at knowing what an unbeliever needs to know either.
All this is based on prophecies in the Bible, particularly the Book of Revelation which is the last book of the Bible, which describes the very last period of time on Earth. Overall the Bible is a history of God's doings on Earth starting with His creation of it all. It chronicles the history of the people of Israel, now the state of Israel, from God's calling of its founder Abraham to be the father of a great people. It follows the lives of his son Isaac and Isaac's sons Jacob and Esau and Jacob's twelve sons who become the patriarchs of the Twelve Tribes of Israel.
The story of Adam and Eve precedes all this, their disobedience of God which brought a curse on the human race under which we all are born. Their disobedience brought the whole Creation under this curse. They were made to live forever in a paradise of happiness but their disobedience brought evil and death into the originally happy world, which we call the Fall. We are all born "fallen," inheritors of the original sin of our first parents and all subject to death as a result.
But from the very beginning God promised to send us a Savior from this curse, from this fallen nature or sin nature, and early humanity looked forward to this Savior, who is known as the Messiah. From time to time the Old Testament reiterates the promise of the Messiah and builds up a view of His character over the centuries of Jewish history. From these prophecies we know that He will be God Himself and that He will live and suffer as a man. The book of the prophet Daniel includes a timeline that very precisely points to the time of the Messiah's coming which is quite accurate, counting from a particular decree of a heathen king to the day Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey which was the announcement of His being the prophesied Messiah. The following Firday He was crucified and on Sunday, which we know as Easter Sunday, He rose from the dead.
"Gospel" means "good news" and the good news is that Jesus died on the cross to save us from our sins, the sin nature we inherit from our ancestors, and all the sins we commit on top of it, that brings death and ultimately eternity in Hell. Jesus took our sins on Himself and bore our punishment for them so that we can be spared that punishement. This is what salvation is, it is being saved from eternal punishment, and to have that salvation all you have to do is believe it (though believing it entails a bigger commitment than the word itself conveys, a giving of yourself to Christ)..
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The Rapture is the removal from Earth of those who are saved, to be transported into heaven, an event that is prophesied in the New Testament by the spostle Paul. It is the event that triggers the Grand Finale of the outpouring of God's wrath in the Day of the LORD/ Great Tribulation followed by Jesus' return to Earth to rule for a thousand years.
From the Rapture on the Church is no longer on the Earth and the following seven years are when God deals with the nation of Israel and the unbelievers who are left on the earth. Many will become believers during this time, receiving the gospel of salvation.
Surely the Lord's return is close. How much worse can it get on this miserable planet before God gives the signal and the final countdown begins? I hate to think it but unfortunately I suppose it could get much worse. On the other hand we know the Tribulation period which is soon to follow His coming to get His Church is to be the worst possible time on Earth and it won't reach that level until then. And at that point the Church is not to be present. Whatever happens now we are all going through it, and it does look like a sort of foreshadowing of the events of the Tribulation as spelled out in Revelation, particularly Revelation 6.
Although in a sense all this is God's judgment on human sinfulness, it is not God's pure outpouring of wrath which defines the Great Tribulation just before the Lord's return to reign on the Earth. I confess to having some confusion about how to think of the difference. That is, all disasters are from God in judgment, yet the Day of the Lord or the Great Tribulation is to be the fullest form of it. Maybe that's the best I can do with it.
Because I have unsaved family and friends I want something to intervene to change the tide of this current wave of evil to give them time to change their minds and come to Christ before the Rapture. The thought of the misery that awaits them if they are not part of the Rapture is immensely sad. I pray nevertheless that they will be saved during that time. Many will die saved at least, and some others will live through the whole catastrophe after becoming believers.
I think it must be close but what if it isn't? Barring a miracle through God's mercy I don't see how we can prevent what looks like the inevitable train wreck of civilization that has been picking up steam for decades. The fallenness of this world is racing wildly to its own perfection of evil if it makes sense to put it that way. I pray and search my imagination for any way to build at least some kind of refuge from it and keep coming up against a dead end. I guess there's the off-the-grid retreat into wild country for some people, but a refuge for many is what seems unlikely. Maybe someone with more imagination than I have will come up with a way.
If we are right at the door of the Rapture which itself is the door to the Great Tribulation perhaps such a refuge is also needed, a global refuge in that case but my imagination can't reach beyond the US at the moment. States opening themselves to refugees, first from the political mess in this nation but then from the events of the last days as spelled out in Revelation. Some will live through it, which is hard to imagine as you read through the horrors described in that book of the Bible, and God can certainly preserve whomever He chooses to preserve, but perhaps such a refuge would be part of that preservation strategy.
Saving the whole country seems impossible now, meaning a return to anything like what we thought of as normal life seems impossible. The forces of evil are entrenched and large enough to have their way. John MacArthur's sermons on the current situation have focused on the breakdown of the usual means of restraining evil in this fallen world, which he sees as four: conscience, the family, the police and the Church. Conscience has been undermined by decades of teaching in the universities that justifies the kind of violence we are seeing now; the family has been directly attacked by the policies of the Left, from abortion to feminism and the undermining of authority; the police are now directly under attack as the insanity of actually removing them is promoted as a solution to inequities. And the Church has been so compromised by false doctrines and capitulation to worldliness there is too little of it left to exert itself as salt and light to the culture. God COULD give us a great revival even now, but would He?
5:15 pm June 26 update:
I have two different reactions to a podcast by Sam Harris here that need to be sorted out in advance. On the one hand I strenuously object to his anti-Trump politics to the point that I hardly want to listen to even a few more minutes of what he has to say. The Leftist mentality is simply infuriating. HOWEVER, when he gets into the meat of the subject of the current uprising about supposed racist mistreatment by police against blacks he does a great job of showing statistically that the whole idea is wrong. Something similar happens with Bret Weinstein, that he's very good at this same kind of factual presentation that derails the racist assumption while at the same time expressing political opinions I strongly object to. So both reactions are in the following. The important part is the evidence that the accusation of systemit or police racism is false.
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The discovery of Bret Weinstein has led me to other discoveries as I've been gobbling up podcasts such as the Rubin Report and others that encourage hope, meaning hope in there possibly being enough sanity and reasonableness in the world to keep the current situation from becoming the disaster Weinstein thinks it could become. As do I also think it could, though I'm not entirely sure where he sees the danger coming from, the Maoist character of the uprising itself or what he sees as the inevitable exasperated reaction of armed citizens to put it down in what could become civil war.
The accusation of systemic American racism has been effectively countered in many of the videos I've seen. It's a fiction. It is the typical Leftist way of explaining disparities that have complicated causes that have nothing to do with racism, but the explanation is nevertheless enforced as if it were the truth and anyone who objects is silenced. I'm not any happier with Weinstein's strangely abstract economic explanation instead of racism though, since it still offers an external excuse for complex causes that need to be addressed in the suffering communities themselves. Not that the nation couldn't supply help of various sorts in any case.
So I've been happy to discover that a liberal/leftist can see the madness in the rioting, and generally speaking Sam Harris is another who sees it like it is. But he is still a liberal/leftist and as I found as I kept listening to Weinstein there's always a point at which I lose any sense of rapport with them. So, listening to a Sam Harris podcast on these current events is very upsetting. Although he is able to criticize the protests, he's also doing a marvelous job of demonstrating the insanity on the Left of which he is a part.
For instance, he's worried about authoritarianism coming from TRUMP!!!!!!. This is insanity. There is not one shred of a hint of a clue of any evidence whatever that Trump has any dominating authoritarian impulses whatever. To his supporters he is a champion of American freedoms. Obama could be such an authoritarian as he fears, or the Left in general as well with its PC tyranny and fingerpointing at anyone they dislike, to intimidate them into silence and inaction, Communist-style "authoritarianism." And right now we can see it in the Maoist tactics of this uprising of violence. Trump SHOULD by now have done something to bring law and order to the situation. NORMAL "authoritarianism" if you will, the kind any society needs to survive. Perhaps he too is cowed by the tyrannical tactics of this bogus "movement," I don't know how to explain it otherwise. Other Presidents have used the military to quell riots and enforce the law, why doesn't he? I can't explain it. But his inaction is certainly not authoritarianism.
Earlier in this podcast Harris says the reelection of Trump would be an existential disaster for the nation or something like that -- the word "existential" was in there anyway. He also said that Trump's Presidency represents such a repudiation of Obama that it SEEMS it must represent white supremacy. That's certainly a piece of Leftist insanity right there. Maybe it explains why they have attacked Trump so viciously as a racist from the getgo without the slightest justification, but then what this demonstrates is that the racist mentality is all on the Left. They can't think in any other terms it seems. It's all invented by the Marxist mentality that controls today's Left, it's all a big fat lie, but it probably really does describe how they think.
Conservatives DO NOT think that way. I can agree that Trump's election was a resounding repudiation of Obama, but without a tinge of racism to it. It's hard to describe the sense of relief and hope we got from Trump's list of campaign promises. Obama's Marxist anti-American policies were depressing in the extreme, and it was those destructive anti-American policies that led Trump to his MAGA slogan. Obama was on his way to turning America into a third world swamp, and we wanted desperately for someone to restore us to our genuine inheritance as the greatest power in the world, and the greatest power for GOOD in the world. That is the hope Trump inspired in us. But the small minds of the left can't think in such terms, they have to reduce it to racism or some other ignoble human flaw. And beyond that they can't see Trump's obvious competence and successes either, they have to hallucinate failure where there is none.
So all that undermines what is otherwise another sane analysis of the dangers of the protests as they've become violent, and in Weinstein's terms Maoist in character. If they think a Democrat's win in November is going to help that situation they really don't understand anything.
Later:
I sometimes desperately wish for someone to discuss things with, and I mean such things as the liberal view of the protests that is so hopeful while at the same time including so much insanely leftist framework I can't stand it. But such discussion is impossible as I keep finding out. No point in going back to EvC where it's always been impossible, no point in bringing it up with liberal friends where I've found out it quickly becomes incendiary even if every effort is made to be as reasonable as possible. Writing my blog is something I need to do with or without feedback but after a point I do start craving dialogue, and of course I mean sane quiet reasonable dialogue with people on the other side of the political divide, and it's sad to know it can't happen.
Later yet: What I wrote above about the Sam Harris podcast covered only the first forty minutes or so. After that he gets into the statistics about police killing men they've arrested and shows that most of them are white, which effectively derails the racist assumption. I may try to come back and report on the details but I just wanted to say this much for now. The political remarks he made in the part I talk about above that annoyed me so much aren't repeated after that so it's all what I'm happy to see is the liberal sanity I started out wanting to present.
Mulling over what Weinstein said in the Rogan interview about the MAGA slogan, how the last word "Again" pokes a finger in the eye and was intended to do so. Whose eye according to him I'm not sure. But the statement came as sort of a revelation to me, maybe explaining why that slogan is such an offense when to me and I would suppose to most on my side of the political divide it holds a promise of restoring everything good that America once stood for that it seems to us the Left has been trying to destroy for decades but most determinedly under Obama.
Weinstein says it wasn't great "for everybody" but that it could become great for everybody. That phrase "for everybody" shows an abysmal lack of understanding of the idea of America's greatness that I find both illuminating and deeply distressing. Illuminating because I would never have guessed the level of ignorance that finds the slogan offensive and it's good to know if that is the right explanation, and of course distressing because it does show such an abysmal ignorance of American history and America's position in history. In saying this I don't claim I have such a great education in these things either, I think we've all been deprived of the knowledge we've needed for decades to help fend off the powers of darkness that are trying to destroy us.
America's greatness is in its brilliant conception, it is not about anybody or everybody, it is about the concept of how to govern the flawed fallen human race for the good of all. and if it had been practiced just as it was conceived it would have been just that... for everybody. Whatever the protestors are objecting to it is not America as it was meant to be and always could have been, it is people NOT living according to what it was meant to be. However, the greatness is in the conception and not what fallen people do with it, though fallen people have been trying to pull it down for a long time now, and all Trump was saying was that we want to restore its original greatness which would be great "for everyone" if practiced as conceived.
