Christians did not build the Cathedral – but Churches did.

The Orthosphere is always apologizing for Christianity, supporting it, and defending it, while I treat as merely markedly less harmful than the belief systems that people are likely to believe when they stop believing in Christianity. And today the Orthosphere publishes a guest post that asserts Christians Did Not Build “The Cathedral”

Which tells us:

you should begin to doubt the internet authors who tell you that the leftist programs of what they like to call “the Cathedral” originated in the Christianity of the churches of New England.

Indeed, it originated not in the Christianity of the churches of New England, but in the heresy of the Churches of New England.

And which also tells us.

because the Puritan believes that he is “better than other people,” he “feels bound to keep ‘watch and care,’ as the phrase runs, over other people’s affairs.” And in order to satisfy this implacable itch to keep watch and care over other people’s affairs, the Puritan is ever eager “get hold of some great ‘moral idea’ … and get into power with it.”

Which does not seem very different from what those internet writers he complains about wrote.

111 Responses to “Christians did not build the Cathedral – but Churches did.”

  1. […] argument in placing the blame on Northeastern American Protestants. This thesis has become a kind of trope around the so-called “reactosphere” and even among some Catholics. That being said […]

  2. […] by descendants of the neoreactionary clade — of varying religious persuasions — Jim (here), Foseti (here), and Nick B. Steves (here, here, and here). Foseti reacts with some bemusement to […]

  3. Zach says:

    I’ve always thought the comments to a position whether book or blog are the most valuable.

    Glad this shit is rockin’. Long past due.

  4. Red says:

    I was wondering why none of the normal christian reactionaries had popped into this thread. Jim’s not very popular with most of them, but they’re always interesting to hear from. So I took at look at the comment thread:
    http://orthosphere.org/2013/08/25/christians-did-not-built-the-cathedral/

    It’s amazing how one leftist chick can destroy the dialog on what should be a pretty important topic for christens. It’s a pretty impressive trolling operation.

    • jim says:

      Sunshine Mary says that feminists are making threats against her children.

      Used to be they would not touch us, for fear that our thought crimes might be contagious. Now, there is a problem. Hidden Author seems reasonably civilized, but Lydia is going full Alinsky. Because Sunshine Mary is a woman, and was careless with her true identity, they are trying to physically intimidate her.

      • B says:

        It’s pure chimpery, and the smarter a leftist is, the more prone to it, because on one hand the pleasure of dominating someone abstractly is more accessible to him, on the other the less socially acceptable opportunities for dominance he has in his everyday life. Add to that cognitive dissonance’s constant hum, and that’s a lot of hatred ready to spill on you.

        As neoreaction becomes more of a prominent threat, I expect more and more stops to be pulled out, and more and more of its adherents to bail or pipe down.

      • Red says:

        I’m guess being drowned by leftist trolls is the next step. That’s what they did to wikipedia and reddit.

        • jim says:

          Lydia summoned reinforcements, and the Orthosphere shut down the comments, which had ceased to be useful or interesting, just lefties throwing their faeces at people from the trees like howler monkeys while proudly congratulating each other on their vastly superior intellects.

    • Peter Blood says:

      I was wondering why none of the normal christian reactionaries had popped into this thread.

      I didn’t see anything to disagree with in this instance, and much of the discussion was about Turks and other things.

      It’s amazing how one leftist chick can destroy the dialog on what should be a pretty important topic for christens. It’s a pretty impressive trolling operation.

      It’s the blog owners’ fault. I don’t even bother answering Lydia Shrillchick (although I did cherry-pick some of her nuggets of hysteria). The conversation is out of her control and she just escalates. If you want a good discussion on a blog you have to tell people like her to shut up and let the men work.

  5. […] Christians did not build the Cathedral: the humanist heresy. A response. […]

  6. Neener says:

    Hey Jim, have you read these two papers:

    http://www.brandonkendhammer.com/democratization_winter2012/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/13868711.pdf

    http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic965299.files/Woodberry%20APSR%202011.pdf

    It explicitly ties together Christianity and Democracy, which may be of interest to you.

    • jim says:

      The first link tells me:

      First, the writer is not an ‘orientalist’ deserving of Edward Said’s censure for making invidious comparisons between Christianity and Islam.

      Now, in fact what he wants to say does make him an orientalist, but, being afraid of Edward Said, cannot speak the truth. Whosoever is afraid of Edward Said, cannot not say anything true.

      The second link does tell the truth – from the left point of view. Yes, according to him, protestants were leftists, and leftists were protestants – because protestants were such good guys.

      • VXXC says:

        Of the many manifest reasons why Intellectuals cannot rule, their extremely low thresholds of intimidation are the most damning.

        • B says:

          Lenin and co. did ok with intimidation, and they were intellectuals (albeit self-hating ones: Lenin said “the intelligentzia is claimed to be the brain of the nation, but I say that is is not the brain of the nation, but rather its shit.”) The US today lacks an actual intellectual class.

  7. fnn says:

    SWAT raids are often used for trivial purposes:

    http://reason.com/archives/2010/03/01/45-swat-raids-per-day

    Over the last six months of 2009, SWAT teams were deployed 804 times in the state of Maryland, or about 4.5 times per day. In Prince George’s County alone, with its 850,000 residents, a SWAT team was deployed about once per day. According to a Baltimore Sun analysis, 94 percent of the state’s SWAT deployments were used to serve search or arrest warrants, leaving just 6 percent in response to the kinds of barricades, bank robberies, hostage takings, and emergency situations for which SWAT teams were originally intended.

    Worse even than those dreary numbers is the fact that more than half of the county’s SWAT deployments were for misdemeanors and nonserious felonies. That means more than 100 times last year Prince George’s County brought state-sanctioned violence to confront people suspected of nonviolent crimes. And that’s just one county in Maryland. These outrageous numbers should provide a long-overdue wake-up call to public officials about how far the pendulum has swung toward institutionalized police brutality against its citizenry, usually in the name of the drug war.

    Caution: Of course they don’t want to go into the demographics of Prince George’s County.

    • B says:

      The cops prefer to have speed, surprise and violence of action when arresting or searching known violent criminals. This is obvious.

      • VXXC says:

        Yes. But it’s not obvious if you’ve never done anything more than football.

        To cut through the shit, we don’t want it done to white people. I think this lesson was quietly internalized by the police after RR and especially Waco. Of course there was pushback from Waco. Sad but true.

        There’s also this idiot empty the prisons of non-violent drug offenders movement now, forgetting it was the Black Congressional Caucus and Charlie Rangel who led the charge for mandatory minimums. If you’re in jail for drugs you are either in the Drug Trade or you are a hopeless addict and the courts are trying to save you from yourself after several arrests. The courts will even by leinient on the addict who is in the Drug Trade who is clearly selling to support the addiction. The Courts don’t send you up for a stretch for smoking pot in the college dorm or your home, or the harder stuff. But since pot makes people paranoid…

        The War on Drugs was and is a War on Crime, huge penalities for Drugs allow the courts to jail career criminals and thugs who controlled vast swathes of urban America to jail for a long time. This had a disparate impact as crime is disproportionately committed.

        However since pot makes you paranoid, you think Evil Police INC are coming to put you away for your grass, man. And we know what happens in prison. You drop the soap. Guess you better pick it up.

        I’m starting to think pot is a major driver of reaction. Most flirted with Libertarian anyway. Pot. Pron and Paranoia.

        The American Police and Military are not the enemies of the People. If they were you would know. I’ve been to those places.

        • fnn says:

          “The American Police and Military” are just tools of their “blue” overlords. And no one got disciplined for Waco or RR-some got promoted afterwards. Why is Lon Horiuchi still alive? It was only a minor flap when he went public doing product endorsements for firearms a few years ago.

        • Red says:

          >>The American Police and Military are not the enemies of the People. If they were you would know. I’ve been to those places.

          If the police and the Military would tell their masters to pound sand when they go to far, then I’d agree with you, but they don’t. They’re simply tools for the elites. Local police in particular have been corrupted by federal funding and drug seizure money and are more loyal to DC than the locals these days. Every American army unit now has an EO officer who are really nothing less than political commissar soviet union style.

          The war on drugs is the war on crime. However the war on drugs has become highway robbery and is fast turning law enforcement into banditos. I have a friend who couldn’t even get the cops out to take some finger prints from a burglary because the local cops are too busy chasing drug money.

      • Red says:

        >>The cops prefer to have speed, surprise and violence of action when arresting or searching known violent criminals. This is obvious.

        No. When the police are dealing with an actual dangerous criminal they try to catch him in transit between his home/work/ect. That’s the safest time to catch someone. Busting down someone’s door who’s going to fight back is the last thing they want to do. The police busting down doors is about intimidation and degradation. It shows their overwhelming power over the people and makes sure the targeted group feels like subjects instead of free men.

        • Red says:

          >> It shows their overwhelming power over the people and makes sure the targeted group feels like subjects instead of free men.

          Which is a very good thing when you’re doing with the criminal population. The bad part is the cops now feel that anyone’s who’s not a cop is a criminal.

        • B says:

          It is true that the absolute best way to hit someone is when they are outside their house, but this is the most difficult way to do it, and you are in such an uncontrolled environment that the potential for things to go wrong is too great for most organizations. Your house, on the other hand, is a stable environment with a more predictable layout and a couple of easily controlled points of egress.

          • Red says:

            B, you may not know this, but American swat teams don’t even bother covering the back door when they raid a place. They break the door down, shoot the dogs/people, and trample the place. They don’t have things like housing plans, or know the number of people in the houses, where the kids are sleeping, ect.

            As a result children are burned by flash bangs and sometimes killed by cops, innocent people thinking that a home invasion is in progress are often shot when they try to defend themselves, and the police steal everything of value.

            I read of one case where a SWAT team killed the partially deaf home owner when he tried to defend himself with a gun. Didn’t find any of the drugs their informant said was there and then they proceeded to steal the mans antique gun collection(150k), his car, and any cash they could find in the house. This man was a retired NASA engineer.

            SWAT raids are an act of dominance, nothing else.

          • B says:

            My reply got et.

            • jim says:

              A lot of legitimate comments have been eaten lately. I may have to change my spam filtering system.

  8. Hidden Author says:

    Guys, your hankering after the pre-1789 world order is quite silly. Francisco Franco came the closest to doing so and look at how the Spanish people with the help of the Spanish Crown put the Left into power after his death.

    • Hidden Author says:

      I should add to that the regime in Portugal was similar except instead of the King restoring the left; it was the very officer corps at the heart of the regime who restored the left!

      • jim says:

        Not sure what you mean by “restoring” the left – the Portuguese coup was the result of a steady and accelerating leftward movement.

        • Hidden Author says:

          Explain.

          • jim says:

            I asked you to explain first. How can I explain when I don’t know what you are saying or why you are saying it?

          • Hidden Author says:

            Here’s how Portuguese history went in the 20th Century:

            1910: The Portuguese Army overthrows the King and establishes a republic.

            1926-1928: Tired of how the Republic tore itself apart, the Portuguese Army seized power. By 1928, the Army consolidated its power into a National Dictatorship.

            1928-1933: The Army increasingly entrusts its Finance Minister, António de Oliveira Salazar, with control of more and more ministries. He finally becomes Prime Minister and presides over the Far-Right Estado Novo (New State).

            1968-1970: Antonio de Oliveira Salazar becomes increasingly unwell and eventually dies, leaving power to his cronies.

            1974: While the senior officers are loyalists to the Far-Right Estado Novo, the junior officers dissatisfied with army regulations turn to the Far Left. A cabal of captains launch the Carnation Revolution to back up the dissident General António de Spínola.

            1975-1976: The cabal turns more and more leftist until center-left officers depose of Communist officers and ensure that the transition of power goes towards traditional democracy rather than Communism.

            1976-: While the Portuguese Republic becomes a democracy instead of a Bolshevik state, the political spectrum is slanted to the left. Parties with variations on “Socialist” and “Social Democratic” actually occupy the RIGHT WING.

            And isn’t it amazing that far-Right Portugal was propped by the Army only until the establishing generation of senior officers died off?–even their own junior officers whom they recruited did not hesitate to go to the other pole of the political spectrum!

            • jim says:

              The Army increasingly entrusts its Finance Minister, António de Oliveira Salazar, with control of more and more ministries. He finally becomes Prime Minister and presides over the Far-Right Estado Novo (New State).

              Ah, I see the point of difference. Supposedly the Estado Novo was “far right” because it was not moving leftist rapidly enough to meet the Cathedral’s requirements.

              Much as those that today endorse the positions that Obama endorsed two years ago are extreme right, or perhaps ultra extreme far right. There are of course no words capable of expressing the outrageously extreme right wing extremism of those that today endorse the positions that Obama endorsed five years ago.

          • Hidden Author says:

            The corporatism of the Estado Novo like the corporatism of the Italian fascists was a move to replace the Manchester model of capitalism with its predecessor, the guild system. But since work was done by firms rather than master craftsmen, this guild socialism was slightly different from the original version.

            Compare this nostalgia for tradition with FDR’s talk about meeting the potential of the American Revolution or Stalin’s talk about meeting the October Revolution.

            • jim says:

              The corporatism of the Estado Novo like the corporatism of the Italian fascists was a move to replace the Manchester model of capitalism with its predecessor, the guild system

              Much the same program as that of the anarchists of Catalonia, who claimed their socialism to be lefter than that of Stalin’s, and wound up sliding leftwards into Stalin’s socialism. It was a socialism, though of a less extreme form than Soviet Socialism, but nonetheless more extreme than Swedish socialism.

              Portugal is no more a glorious triumph for inexorable leftwards progress than is Russia or China.

              What happened was that Soviet communism failed catastrophically, and its failure was obvious as early as 1922. To this day, the surviving left is in denial about this, claiming Soviet communism as a huge success which mysteriously went bad shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

              In response to this failure, leftists around the world cast for some form of socialism that would supposedly not be subject to these problems, or at any rate less subject to these problems. These leftists, the ones that sought a form of socialism less self destructive than Soviet Socialism, were on the losing side of the interleft conflict, World War II. The Soviet Union was the big winner, so history was adjusted that Soviet Socialism was a big success.

              So Portugal went extreme left, then went extreme lefter, and today has subsided back to something like Swedish style capitalism with heavy (but diminishing and much diminished) redistribution.

              The cathedral, recognizing that economic leftism is a dead end leading to economic collapse, but driven by its internal dynamics to go ever lefter, is quietly retreating from economic leftism, while homosexuality goes from being permitted, to being forcefully and coercively taught to eight year old boys. The ever leftwards movement has, in the US, taken a sharp turn away from economic leftism, a sharp turn that in Portugal looked mighty like a U turn. Regulation in the US continues to escalate, but this is more because the Cathedral cannot control its minions. Their rhetoric, and their intent, is de-regulation, they struggle against the drift leftwards economically like a canoe in the rapids upstream of a waterfall. Hence the enthusiastic embrace of both the transgendered and Goldman-Sachs.

          • Hidden Author says:

            Are you going to define your ideal as the epitome of conservatism like the more retarded right wingers tend to do? If the Ancien Regime is the gold standard of the Right, wouldn’t guilds and guild-like structures be more conservative than a free market? Isn’t the whole concept of the free market a theoretical abstraction versus the customs and traditions favored by true conservatives?

            • jim says:

              I define a healthy regime by its success – truth, technology, economic progress, military domination of outsiders, freedom, order, prosperity and science, (real science, what we produce today is not science but theology thinly disguised as science, produced by priests wearing robes)

              Hence my favorite is theocratic Anglican rule from the restoration to 1820 or so, the British Empire before they realized that they had an empire.

          • Hidden Author says:

            Yes you’ve stated your ideal but could a regime be rightwing without abiding by your ideal? Like I said, it is one of the more retarded conservative tendencies to equate whatever ideal one has with true blue conservatism.

            • jim says:

              Any regime that does not have a tendency to take its ideology to ever greater extremes is going to be an improvement. As I have repeatedly stated, I am fine with a Stalin or a Cromwell, someone who merely stabilizes whatever the current level of leftism is, by unleashing equal persecution of those on his left as those on his right.

          • Hidden Author says:

            Franco stood tall and four-square in favor of the traditional rights of the military, the capitalists, the aristocracy and the provinces against the forces of “Masonic Communism.” If that isn’t a reactionary program, what is? And didn’t the Estado Novo do something similar?

            In fact, isn’t guild socialism to the right of free-market capitalism because of its association with the Old Regime? Even Charles I was more in favor of the guilds and the commons than the free-market (small r) republicans!

            • jim says:

              Franco opposed Capitalism and clericalism. In the 1936 elections, the mainstream parties refused to have anything to do with the Falange, seeing no distinction between them and the communists, seeing them as just another commie faction of so many.

              The left has a thousand points of doctrine, and the right is whosoever deviates from left doctrine on any one point of a thousand points, much as the protestants were whosoever deviated from the Holy Roman Catholic church on any one point of a thousand points.

              No two rightists will disagree with the left on the same point. Usually the only thing two rightists agree on is the other nine hundred and nighty eight points. The left agrees with each other on almost everything. The right disagrees with each other on everything except what they agree with the left on.

              Since the left is always moving leftwards, points of controversy within the left become points of orthodoxy, and factions that were formerly left, become, since they disagree what has now become orthodoxy, disagree on one point of a thousand points, to be deemed right wing, and, very soon after being deemed right wing, come to be deemed extreme right wing.

              Which is what happened to Franco.

              Reactionaries are not rightists. The Dark Enlightenment are not rightists. Rightists, such as Franco, are people who are not quite adept in keeping up with the movement ever leftwards, and find themselves a few months or years behind the movement ever leftwards.

              Leftists are the inner party, rightists are the outer party, reactionaries oppose the party.

              In fact, isn’t guild socialism to the right of free-market capitalism because of its association with the Old Regime?

              The phrase “guild socialism” did not exist until the twentieth century, and was at first exclusively used by leftists quarreling with other leftists about how to move even further left and who should be excommunicated for insufficient leftism. Guild socialism was not a rightist term until guild socialists lost the debate and came to be excommunicated from the left.

              Similarly, gay marriage is now a rightist term, although a grace period is still in effect where you can use the term without excommunication. But the grace periods these days are much shorter than they were in the 1930s.

              Even Charles I was more in favor of the guilds and the commons than the free-market (small r) republicans!

              The commons was the rights of the feudal lord over his serfs. So I have little doubt that you are correct.

              Let us suppose my program for making suburbs safe and pleasant is put into effect, and undesirables, people whose presence and activities are apt to reduce property values, are moved out to certain areas into ghettos, and not allowed to leave those ghettos except by permission. Someone will be in charge of each ghetto, the lord of each ghetto, and the stuff in the ghetto whose use he more or less directly controls, will be equivalent to the medieval commons. This will provide an opportunity to coercively teach the ghetto inhabitants civilized and non destructive behavior. There will also be a resemblance to the social welfare functions of the monasteries, pre dissolution – we will attempt to coercively provide undesirables with discipline and with work to keep them busy, while restraining them from reproduction.

              Feudalism got a leftist reputation because leftists exercised the same overlordship over ordinary people, as feudal lords exercised. The difference, however, is that feudal overlords for the most part really were superior, and leftists for the most part were not. More precisely, leftists were interested in exercising feudal authority over the most able part of the population, while letting the least able part of the population run amuck. Observe an Occupy encampment. Regardless of whether aristocrats were more able or less able than leftists, aristocrats were more able than the people they exercised authority over, while leftists were and are demonstrably less able than the people they exercised authority over. Hence the tendency of left wing economies to go to hell in a handbasket.

          • Hidden Author says:

            No the rights of a lord were his liberties, privileges or entitlements. The commons were lands owned in common by the village for grazing livestock, hunting game or gathering wood. There was however a hierarchical element to this arrangement: a villager’s share of the usage rights existed in proportion to the extent of his landholdings.

            What the liberals did with land reform was to partition the commons into private properties. This hurt small landholders. In France, the revolutionary government rendered copyholdings, landholdings registered in manorial courts, into properties of the landholder while in Britain, copyholdings were rendered property of the lord of the manor. Both France and Britain however changed freeholdings from fiefs granted by the Crown into private property.

            In short, if you want to lionize the free market, it is not consistent to side with the Crown and its reactionary supporters against the liberals when carrying out one’s historical analysis.

            • jim says:

              No the rights of a lord were his liberties, privileges or entitlements.

              Among the rights of the lord were to control the commons and what his peasants did upon the commons. What made it a commons was that it was a part of his domain that he allowed, and frequently required, his peasants to make use of.

              Thus part of the mechanism whereby the superior imposed productive and cooperative behavior on the inferior, the ill disciplined, and the difficult

              That is why socialists love the medieval commons so much. All people are equal they tell us, but they fancy themselves as more equal than others.

              The trouble with the socialist commons is that they wind up with one big Lord, whereas the aristocratic commons had small lords. One big Lord leads to diseconomies of scale. Often the diseconomies of scale are so severe that large numbers of people die.

              What the liberals did with land reform was to partition the commons into private properties.

              Redistribution away from the old elite is the first step to redistribution to the new elite. In place of the old commons, we now have zoning, which puts a committee of left wingers over the common people in the place of the Lord. Trouble is that zoning in practice discourages productive behavior, while the medieval lord encouraged productive behavior. This is a particular case of the general problem of modern (post Nazi) left wing rule.

          • Hidden Author says:

            The commons belonged to the village and the village was attached to the lord’s manor. Thus the lord controlled the village and its commons. But this control was not absolute. Aside from the lord’s slaves, relations were governed by the balance between a community’s ability to resist (see the original Swiss cantons) and the lord’s ability to deploy servants to enforce his will. Usually the compromise was based on customs and traditions that gave each peasant among other things a share in the commons equal to his landholdings. Also those of the lord’s serfs who were not outright slaves often had landholdings registered in the court of the lord’s manor, the copyholds. The reactionaries recognized the rights of the peasants to use the commons and to own their copyholds but the free marketers cut the peasants off from the common pastures, game and wood. In other words, they were opposite factions rather than the imaginary Grand Free Market Reaction that you seem to champion.

            • jim says:

              but the free marketers cut the peasants off from the common pastures, game and wood

              The free marketers (then the left) gave the peasants the Lord’s pastures, game, and wood, that formerly he had allowed some of them limited access to, according to rules that he set, and changed from time to time. The word “stint” used to refer to the peasant’s access to the commons, or the Lord’s permission and rules for the peasant to access the commons, and that “stint” now has the meaning that it has, implies that peasants did not find the lord very generous with that access.

              You are making the distant past much more leftist than it was, just as you make the recent past much more rightist than it was.

              Franco was viewed as extreme left, scarcely distinguishable from a commie in 1936, but was deemed extreme right wing very shortly thereafter, much as the tea party gets deemed ultra extreme super far right for advocating in 2013 policies that Obama said he supported in 2008.

              The commons worked because the lord governed its use. Privatizing the commons was the left taking power away from the lords. And now, with zoning and regulation, they are giving that power to themselves. Taking power away from the lords was a movement left, and giving that power to themselves was a movement left.

              It is movement left because leftists benefit, and, more importantly, it is movement left because the organizational structure guarantees that the power will now be used in way that is evil, inhuman, and insane, while the lord of the manor generally used that power in way that was decent, humane, and sane.

          • Hidden Author says:

            The Lord policed the commons and judged disputes over the commons in his manorial courts but generally his rules were not arbitrary but linked by custom to the extent of the peasant’s landholding. Privatization *did* benefit peasants with freeholds i.e. yeomen but since most peasants leased copyholds, their landholdings and thus their rights to a privatized share of the commons were not recognized. Thus it was in the UK.

            In France, the copyholds were upgraded from leases to property. Other lands of the Church were used as backing for the revolutionary currency and then as inflation occurred anyways the remaining land of “counter-revolutionary” lords was confiscated and added to the pile. Thus in France too the middle peasantry acquired most of the privatized land leaving the lower peasantry behind. (The lower peasantry tended to become farmhands on others’ farms or fall into debt or leave for the city or the colonies or the USA.)

            • jim says:

              Notice the striking similarity between your story of the enclosures, and the story that intellectuals and the New York Times told about the Ukraine famine – that the upper peasants were cruelly oppressing the lower peasants, and so the great and glorious party was liberating the lower peasants against the rule of the upper peasants.

              The similarity being that you are making mighty fine class distinctions between people very different from yourself, and very different from the elite intellectuals managing the redistribution. Do you think that the people managing the redistribution could see or feel the difference between one peasant and the next? Nor could the peasants. Copyholders and freeholders were brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, fathers and sons. There was no class conflict going on between the recipients of the land, in large part because after 1607, enclosures required a four fifths supermajority of landowners, meaning that the copyholders agreed on the enclosure, and outvoted the Lord of the Manor, whining to each other about how horribly he was stinting them.

              After 1607, enclosure, in so far as it had a class basis, it was the peasants complaining about the Lord of the Manor stinting them. After 1607, the enclosures were left wing class war enclosures, because after 1607 the parliamentary enclosures required the consent of four fifths of land holders, copy holders and free holders both.

              Not the consent of the owners of four fifths of the land, the consent of four fifths of the landowners. Which meant that the Lord of the manor, who had formerly controlled access to and use of the common lands, got outvoted by a bunch of smelly dirty copyholders. Land redistribution by democratic vote. Leftism running amuck.

              This was, from the latter part of the seventeenth century to the nineteenth, a left wing measure, smashing traditional friendly and paternalistic relationships between the Lord of the Manor and his people, ending social cooperation mediated and enforced by the Lord’s authority, atomizing society where society had formerly had cohesion paternalistically enforced by nobility.

              Every left wing measure eventually gets declared insufficiently left, and therefore gets declared right wing, and then, in due course, extreme right wing, and then, before long, ultra extreme far right wing.

              Thus later leftists piously declared enclosure insufficiently left, much as between 1936 and 1956, they declared the Ukraine famine insufficiently left because not tough enough on those awful extremely wealthy fat cat peasants.

              After 1607, the enclosures were mad dog moonbat leftism, but once they were completed, were soon declared insufficiently left, and then declared right wing, and then extreme right, than then ultra extreme far far radical right, then hyper ultra super duper extreme far far far ultra radical right.

              Pretty much like every other lurch into radical leftism. Observe how Franco was far left in 1936, far right shortly thereafter, not because of any change in his policy or program, but because left wing orthodoxy had moved leftwards.

              It would have been a right wing measure if the Lord got to hose the peasants, which tended to happen in 1607 and before.

              It would have been a conservative measure if the enclosure required the consent of the owners of four fifths of the land.

              But consent of the four fifths of the landowners, including copyholders, made enclosure after 1607 a radical left measure, in which some agitator got a bunch of smelly peasants to unanimously overrule the lord of the manor on the basis of class warfare, turning customary noble and paternal authority on its head.

              That the word “stint” means what it now means is an echo of radical left wing agitators launching enclosures as class warfare against the nobility.

              Those radical left wing agitators then being deemed right as the official orthodoxy moves ever leftwards, then far right, then ultra extreme radical right, much as happened to Franco.

          • Hidden Author says:

            I should warn you that I have a BA in History. Granted it’s the Master’s that teaches a specialized course but the BA is better than what most people are acquainted with.

            From what I understand, the Crown found that even the mutilation and execution of “steady beggars” did not rid England of vagrants because peasants dispossessed of their land had nowhere to go. Such vagrants fell into begging and petty crime that annoyed the elite. Eventually through the indenture system such “sturdy beggars” were used to people the colonies with much of the white colonial population.

            But there was an intriguing lull in the population of “sturdy beggars” and in poverty in general in the 17th century so perhaps the law you referenced was actually passed by the government–could you give me a link to a credible source?

            We should keep in mind that the laws governing Enclosures were passed over the course of three centuries and that after 1607, Enclosure Acts were passed in the 18th Century. Certainly given the alliance between free-market, latitudinarian gentry on the one hand and the King and the Anglican Church on the other hand, any Enclosure Acts passed during the Restoration Regime would tend not to favor the peasantry as much as the 1607 law.

            • jim says:

              I should warn you that I have a BA in History. Granted it’s the Master’s that teaches a specialized course but the BA is better than what most people are acquainted with.

              History is reactionary. Since we have been moving ever leftwards for some centuries, how could it be otherwise? If the Tea Party is ultra extreme far right wing for advocating what Obama advocated in 2008, what is a book written by Munshi Abdullah in 1840 going to be?

              As a result, history books get radically rewritten at astonishingly frequent intervals, after the fashion of the Department of Truth in 1984. To learn real history, read old books.

          • Hidden Author says:

            Maybe history is rewritten but you should be able to cite a source for the 1607 law.

            • jim says:

              http://books.google.com/books?id=3aZFAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA1073&redir_esc=y

              http://books.google.com/books?id=dqUZS4k8XOwC&pg=PA48-IA6

              A major reason for the sudden flourishing of the reaction is that old books have become available, and we realized that we had been lied to about the past.

              • foo says:

                I happened across this old thread and can’t exactly expect a response, but 1607? Four-fifths of the number of landowners only? Your citations are to a statute dated 20th August 1836, long after most of the enclosures (did you misread the regnal year “6 & 7 Will. IV”?), and refer repeatedly to “four-fifths in number and value,” not number alone.

                • jim says:

                  You are right, that is not a 1607 law.

                  And you are wrong “Number and value” means number and value, does not mean “value and to hell with number”

                • foo says:

                  But neither does it mean “number and to hell with value,” which was the claim advanced – that enclosures allowed peasants with very small claims to expropriate a dominant landowner.

                • jim says:

                  Anything to the left of stinting is to some extent expropriation

          • Hidden Author says:

            It appears that you are right. I can even imagine how a leftist might spin the matter: A landholder for the sake of consolidating his holdings agrees to have a large share of the commons but a share proportionally smaller than his usage rights previously. Or he gets his fellow peasants to cede a greater share in return for canceling a debt. Or, horror of horrors for the leftist, some poor peasant accepts a lump sum payment for his claim to the common lands to start a new life in the city instead of being a good class struggle militant.

          • Hidden Author says:

            What I meant was that the leftist would hear about such scenarios and use them as “proof” that he was expropriating the poor peasant.

          • Hidden Author says:

            When I said he, I meant the rich peasant according to the leftist. Typing on a cellphone can be tricky!

            • jim says:

              Ah, yes, those irritating rich peasants.

              Poor people with a bit of property tend to be extremely propertarian.

              Immediately after declaring collectivization a success, Mao declared that ten percent of the party were traitors, and ordered that one party member in ten be found guilty.

              Which leads me doubt that collectivization was entirely successful.

          • Hidden Author says:

            Ideally people should be able to have their own patch of property. That is not something I disagree with.

            What I disagree with is your attitude that slavery is cool because minorities and poor people are subhuman and that hiding child molesters from the cops is cool because the victims are not kin.

            • jim says:

              I am not hiding anyone. I am just minding my own business.

              As for slavery:

              The trouble with abolishing slavery, is you wind up with legal equality. It is not that we cannot live without slavery. Indeed, these days slavery is as useful a third wheel on a bicycle. The problem is that we cannot live with legal equality.

              Legal equality has been tried, and has failed. Perhaps slavery was a crude way of dealing with natural inequality, and in this day and age, not much demand for slaves – in fact in cooler climates there has not been much demand for slaves since the horse collar was invented. Any work a slave can do, a horse can do better, and these days a machine can do it very much better.

              This, however, is not a good thing, but a bad thing, because it leaves us with a lot of useless people who cause problems, an increasing number of useless people, not all of them black. Paying them off is not working, killing them all is excessive. Segregation and exclusion, however, did work, and should be more broadly applied. If slavery is unthinkable, any effectual solution to the problem is also unthinkable.

              We don’t need slavery, which technology has rendered increasingly irrelevant since the invention of the horse collar. We do need the realistic attitude towards human inequality that made slavery psychologically and politically possible. Slavery is, for the most part, no longer economic. But if slavery is unthinkable, rather than merely uneconomic, reality is unthinkable.

    • jim says:

      Ah yes, the tide of history is against us. And the tide of history was with the Soviet Union until it suddenly was not.

      Shortly before the Soviet Union fell, everyone was quite sure that world communist domination was inevitable, and anyone who tried to stand in its way, such as Ronald Reagan, was being amazingly stupid and would get rolled over. Ever since 1800 or so, the anglosphere has been moving ever leftwards and has dominated the world ever more completely. But the anglosphere is the last man standing of a lot of other societies that also moved ever leftwards, and were in a hurry to reach the future before the anglosphere did.

      • Hidden Author says:

        Nothing’s impossible but surely you would want to analyze right-wing dictatorships like Franco and Pinochet and see what went wrong. Also the fact that the people voted for the Left en masse after being raised for a generation under the right-wing regime should worry you.

        • Red says:

          The fact that most children would vote to have cake for breakfast everyday indicates that children shouldn’t be voting. The same goes for the masses of the people.

          As far as I know neither Franco and Pinochet built a propaganda machine to make the masses love them and their politics. They simply ruled and made good long term decisions for their nations.

          • Hidden Author says:

            There’s a contradiction in your reactionary rhetoric: On the one hand, a radical elite is imposing radical change on the more conservative masses. On the other hand, the masses consistently vote for the radical elite to the point that they don’t deserve to be enfranchised.

          • Hidden Author says:

            Jim, did you delete my response? It didn’t go through the first time.

            Red, is the elite imposing its views on more conservative commoners or do the masses vote for this? You guys aren’t clear on that.

            • jim says:

              For some reason, my spam filter has started to pick up all your comments as spam. I have to manually rescue them.

            • jim says:

              is the elite imposing its views on more conservative commoners or do the masses vote for this? You guys aren’t clear on that.

              Which commoners?

              The answer to your question is Obamaphones.

              It is imposing its will on people who earn a living.

          • Red says:

            >>Red, is the elite imposing its views on more conservative commoners or do the masses vote for this? You guys aren’t clear on that.

            Propagandist tell the people what to think, how to think about it, and who to vote for. Unless a ruler has a strong propaganda arm they’re going to be overwhelmed by the American propaganda machine and thus wake up one day and discover that most of their people believe what the American media tells them to believe.

            Propaganda works best on a generational basis. While the parents often have enough experience to realize they’re being fed a line of bullshit, the children tend to believe the propaganda without reservation and vote that way once they are grown.

          • Hidden Author says:

            Isn’t it the whole point of a reactionary coup, that the caudillo will exterminate the sellouts and expose their treachery to the low-information citizen thereby curing society from revolution and subversion? It doesn’t work out that way.

            • jim says:

              Seems to be working in Russia.

              Worked for a good long time in Chile. It is still today unthinkable in Chile that anyone with policies and program remotely resembling those of Allende would even run for election, let alone win. The successful right wing policies of the democratically elected Chilean government following Pinochet’s retirement inspired conservative parties around the world, notably the Howard government in Australia.

              In the end, Pinochet did not permanently reverse the leftwards trend, but he reversed it a long way, for a long time. America today is to the left of America last week, and so it has been every day ever since the civil war, but Chile today, forty years after Allende, is still far to the right of Chile under Allende.

              The basic problem was that Pinochet was a leftist, reluctantly dragged into the coup, and arguably threatened with death by the coupists if he did not cooperate. Of course, the same would be true of any American coup, which is why I am more inclined to hope for a zombie apocalypse style of collapse, in which organizations descended from rentacops and mercenaries take charge.

          • Hidden Author says:

            Perhaps Putin learned the lessons from the Franco and Pinochet regime. Neoreactionaries tend not to critique their heroes in such a manner. What lessons did Putin learn? Discuss.

            • jim says:

              Franco and Pinochet are our heroes? Next you will be telling me that George Bush is our hero. We think Franco is a leftist, and Pinochet a weakling, who took the least action he could take without getting shot by one side or both sides, whose fear and weakness made it difficult to discern his political position.

              If you are a reactionary, your hero is more likely to be Charles the First. That is the difference between conservatives, who are the outer party, who are leftists who lag slightly behind the leading edge of the left, and reactionaries, who think that the entire ever leftwards program was wrong from the beginning.

              The Dark Enlightenment rejects the Enlightenment, as the transliteration of religious beliefs about the next world to this world. So all our heroes are either pre-enlightenment, or clearly opposed to it.

  9. […] is true that orthodox Christians did not build the Cathedral, but heretical Christians did, and they used Christian […]

  10. B says:

    >Discreet violence isn’t useful in controlling/pacifying a population. Mass public violence is. The secret of the surge in Iraq was putting the local terrorists on the US payroll and telling them to blow up the foreign terrorists who came into their areas. Soldiers in all cultures tend to fight for who ever is paying them.

    I was there at the pointy end of things, not just getting the mainstream press narrative about the SOI, so pardon me for thinking I know better than you do.

    Mass public violence didn’t do much for Al Qaeda in Al Anbar and Mosul long-term, and you’ll notice your government controls your population quite well without mass public violence, by decapitating any organizations even potentially posing a threat, fragmenting them, turning them against each other, etc. For instance, in Waco and Ruby Ridge, the USG did not build a pyramid of skulls in the middle of the nearest population center, and these were extraordinarily violent American counterinsurgency episodes. Most of the time, violence is applied very surgically by your local friendly SWAT team or their federal equivalents.

    Soldiers in the Iraqi Army and Police didn’t fight worth a shit for the people paying them; the Iraqi Police specifically often fought AGAINST the people paying them, i.e., us, and we once had to fire an entire town’s worth of cops after arresting their leadership.

    • Red says:

      >>Mass public violence didn’t do much for Al Qaeda in Al Anbar and Mosul long-term

      It worked quite well until we funded the Son’s of Iraq. Once the locals had a chance to rule themselves instead of bowing to evils of Al Qaeda and the fecklessness of the Americans they were able to eliminate foreign Al Qaeda and get down to the business of stealing funds from the Americans.

      >>and you’ll notice your government controls your population quite well without mass public violence, by decapitating any organizations even potentially posing a threat, fragmenting them, turning them against each other, etc.

      The large scale violence happened during and shortly after the civil war. The threat is always implicit that the USG will do what they did to the south if you don’t get with the program. Most of the time they control the populace through propaganda, FBI informants, and by pulling the best of the populace into the cathedral. Pretty normal for most centralized governments.

      >>For instance, in Waco and Ruby Ridge, the USG did not build a pyramid of skulls in the middle of the nearest population center, and these were extraordinarily violent American counterinsurgency episodes.

      Real insurgents are usually arrested quietly and then shamed in the media or ignored. Both Ruby Ridge and Waco were designed to be photo ops show of force against people who were not insurgents to justify federal budgets. When they met real resistance the government took that implicit threat of mass violence and made it an actuality while pretending that they were not. It’s hard to be much more public than burning the women and children of the Branch Davidians to death on live TV. The effects of the raids backfired. People noticed how poorly government forces did and the actual cruelty of the government forces. This was a big disconnect from standard government propaganda and it intensified the anti government hostility. The government then returned to it’s policy of ruling through propaganda by allowing the Oklahoma city attack to go forward and used it to discredit anti government forces. This is the normal model of control the USG has used since the civil war.

      >>Most of the time, violence is applied very surgically by your local friendly SWAT team or their federal equivalents.
      SWAT raids are anything but surgical. They’re more like cossacks having a good time roughing up the population for religious reasons. When faced with real opposition they fall apart.

      • B says:

        The mass public violence is what gave the (massively overhyped) SOI the impetus for existence. SOI was not the key element by any means, but it sounded great, all in line with COIN, 3 Cups Of Bullshit, Eating Soup With A Knife, etc.

        The rest of it I won’t go into except to say that by any reasonable standards the US has not seen mass public violence since the Indian Wars. The Civil War doesn’t much count except the Bushwacker, Bloody Kansas etc. since there was no mass violence directed at civilians. If you think a SWAT raid on a specific residence is not surgical by definition, we have different vocabularies; the alternative is raiding by blocks and neighborhoods.

        • jim says:

          The Civil War doesn’t much count except the Bushwacker, Bloody Kansas etc. since there was no mass violence directed at civilians.

          They did not massacre people, but burned towns, destroyed the economy, dispossessed people, etc.

          Infrequent small scale violence suffices if there is a credible threat of larger scale violence. Which requires that you sometimes do large scale violence.

          Notice that the US did not do in Iraq the stuff it did during the civil war, let alone the Philippine-American war.

          • B says:

            That’s some “sometimes”-150 years with no mass indiscriminate violence against the controlled population.

            All you need the vast majority of the time is persistent surveillance and control, with surgical strikes for that small number not responsive o this. Most people are so docile that the certainty of even a mild punishment (losing employability in their profession, losing social prestige, a slightly lower standard of living) is enough to keep them dancing indefinitely. Look at that Onion editor who got beaten stupid by feral negroes, yet her reaction was to speak against racists. She knew to a certainty that the natural response would have lost her her job and social circle. I have no doubt that if there was no anonymity, 98 percent of the reactosphere and manosphere would fade away and most of the rest would happily accept their new role as the pet opposition, eccentric but tolerated. For the tiny remainder, there’s the surgical option. So, you see, no need for mass violence; mass violence is actually a sign of failure and weakness.

        • VXXC says:

          OK maybe you’re not so romantic.

        • Red says:

          >>If you think a SWAT raid on a specific residence is not surgical by definition, we have different vocabularies; the alternative is raiding by blocks and neighborhoods.

          Surgical would be taking the person you want with no unneeded violence. Swat teams regularly deal extra violence towards non threatening dogs, property, and humans who were not resisting. Or are you talking surgical like surgical American drone strikes where we kill the terrorists and his entire family with the same missile?

          • B says:

            Exactly. The opposite of the typical SWAT raid today is not Batman taking down the Joker; it is a pyramid of skulls, the Qahtaniya bombings or a B-52 carpet bombing. By historical standards, shooting your golden retriever and tazing you while your kids are watching isn’t even bad manners.

    • Hidden Author says:

      What does Waco and Ruby Ridge have to do with neutralizing potential threats? That seems more like power-lust than a genuine fear for security.

      • jim says:

        When the right calls a protest, vast numbers of people turn out. When the left, in other words the state, calls a protest, no one turns out, so they call up the astroturf, which shows up in government buses. Hence the need for Waco.

        • josh says:

          The DOJ and other government agencies are giving time off to attend the MLK thing on the mall today.

      • Red says:

        The weakness of the government’s regular forces were exposed at Waco and to a lesser degree at Ruby ridge. Hence the murder of the women and children.

  11. B says:

    I’ll tell you in the words of King Solomon: a live dog is better than a dead lion. Especially if the lion was stuffed to begin with.

    • Red says:

      Good luck when the Turks invade.

      • B says:

        That’s all we have to be scared of? Great!

        • jim says:

          I think Red’s thought is that Turks are tougher than Arabs.

          • B says:

            I know the Turks quite well. The ones who are smarter and tougher than the Arabs also want nothing to do with messing with us; why do you think the next day after the Moavi Marmara incident, Hurriyet ran pics of the peaceful protesters with knives dragging a bleeding Israeli commando down into the hold on its front page? The ones itching for an Islamist government and war with us are no better than the Arabs.

            In any case, today’s Turkey is less formidable than the Egyptian and Syrian armies of 1973, with their battle experience, Soviet advisors, cutting-edge equipment and element of surprise. Bottom line-the only people who can and might defeat Israel are the Israelis themselves.

            On the other hand, it is difficult to find a major American university without dozens of Muslims walking around in hijabs and Salafi beards. Hmmm.

            • jim says:

              The ones who are smarter and tougher than the Arabs also want nothing to do with messing with us;

              If the Islamists drag Turkey into war with Israel, the Kemalists will do their duty, assuming that they are allowed out of jail to do it.

              In any case, today’s Turkey is less formidable than the Egyptian and Syrian armies of 1973, with their battle experience, Soviet advisors, cutting-edge equipment and element of surprise

              It is men that matter.

              Bottom line-the only people who can and might defeat Israel are the Israelis themselves.

              Who are hard at work on the project, as for example the Lebanon debacle. As you no doubt recall, you were at war with the Lebanese government, and not at war with the Lebanese government.

              Soldiers kill people and break things. If you are fighting a war with a non uniformed enemy, you have to tell soldiers that they can kill anyone and break anything in the general area. If you tell them that they can only kill the right people, and you are not sure who are the right people and who are the wrong people, disaster ensues. And even if fighting a uniformed enemy, soldiers still need to break anything of value, even if people are sheltering inside.

          • Red says:

            [QUOTE]It is men that matter.[/QUOTE]
            That’s the point I was trying to make. Judaism creates lawyers, traders, and scholars – not fighters. It would take a major theological shift followed by breeding program aimed at producing fighters from the religious ranks.

            The secular Jews who won Israels statehood are a dying breed and with them goes the martial spirit. You’ll still be able to beat the Arabs, but the Turks may well decide to take over the middle east as the west recedes.

          • B says:

            If the Kemalists were Kemalists or about doing their duty, they would have overthrown the current gang of retards and put them in jail, instead of marching like sheep to the slaughter. The effect of such purges on an army is predictable, and was best evidenced by the performance of the Red Army in 1941.

            With today’s tech, it is quite possible to be discreetly violent, and modern militaries are very good at this. The problem is that they are not allowed to follow up on this violence with governance, even during those times when they are allowed to be as violent as necessary. When the story of the surge in Iraq comes out, it will mostly be a story of surgical violence applied on a large scale to break insurgent networks. Very similar to the Battle of Algiers, with a couple of crucial differences.

          • B says:

            Red-all those special ops guys with kippot I know must be an optical illusion. Either that or your stereotype is outdated.

          • Red says:

            >>With today’s tech, it is quite possible to be discreetly violent, and modern militaries are very good at this. The problem is that they are not allowed to follow up on this violence with governance, even during those times when they are allowed to be as violent as necessary. When the story of the surge in Iraq comes out, it will mostly be a story of surgical violence applied on a large scale to break insurgent networks. Very similar to the Battle of Algiers, with a couple of crucial differences.

            Discreet violence isn’t useful in controlling/pacifying a population. Mass public violence is. The secret of the surge in Iraq was putting the local terrorists on the US payroll and telling them to blow up the foreign terrorists who came into their areas. Soldiers in all cultures tend to fight for who ever is paying them.

      • VXXC says:

        Red – you don’t understand soldiers.

        Whoever is paying indeed. Only if it’s acceptable to their peers. If it’s considered within the Honor boundaries.

        B is a bit romantic about Iraq, but he’s somewhat correct. We may have been applying violence as he said, but the Shia were kicking ass and ethnically cleansing the Sunni.

        Israel’s worst foe is the International Community, that is to say the State Dept. They know this. Their next worst foe is probably their own tortured talmudic logic.

        Jim the Israeli’s learned from Lebanon 2006 and applied the lessons in Gaza intervention. HAMAS looked like shit.

        And if all else fails level the place.

        • Red says:

          >>And if all else fails level the place.

          Leveling the place is the first thing that should have been done when someone attacks your women and children. If you want to understand warfare against non civilized opponents then look to the Romans. They had everything figured out by 100BC.

        • Red says:

          >>Red – you don’t understand soldiers.
          Whoever is paying indeed. Only if it’s acceptable to their peers. If it’s considered within the Honor boundaries.

          Yes I explained that poorly. Money doesn’t mean anything if what your asking people to do is not in their interest.

        • jim says:

          Israel’s worst foe is the International Community, that is to say the State Dept. They know this. Their next worst foe is probably their own tortured talmudic logic.

          Quite so. Arabs a long way down the list.

          the Israeli’s learned from Lebanon 2006 and applied the lessons in Gaza intervention. HAMAS looked like shit.

          The Jews won, but after winning, handed the place over to Egypt.

  12. B says:

    >Restoration Anglicanism was fairly protestant, and was wonderfully reactionary for a hundred and sixty years.

    60% of the time, it works 100% of the time!

    Incidentally, how do you like the reporting on St. Nelson’s state of health? Reminds me of that period in the 80s when the leadership of the Politburo started dying off; “Comrade Chernenko feels fine!” http://preview.tinyurl.com/l6mlful

    The difference, of course, is that the Russians knew what a sham that was, and jokes about the Hearse Race and the senility of the leadership were common. I have never heard Americans make jokes about their leadership or saints.

    • jim says:

      Restoration Anglicanism was fairly protestant, and was wonderfully reactionary for a hundred and sixty years.

      60% of the time, it works 100% of the time!

      Compare with Orthodox Judaism which shows hints that it might start working in the near future five percent of the time.

  13. Red says:

    In general I find any form of protestant Christianity inherently leftist, because protestant Christianity is the democratization of Christianity. It always branch out in dozens of leftist directions while removing the church’s ability to enforce good behavior. If the average man can read the bible and make his own form of Christianity then it’s not much better than each shaman reading the entrails of a goat differently. It’s simply not piratical to form a functioning synthetic tribe from such a foundation.

    • jim says:

      Restoration Anglicanism was fairly protestant, and was wonderfully reactionary for a hundred and sixty years.

      Meanwhile, today’s pope preaches progressivism, not Roman Catholicism. Theoretically the old doctrine on homosexuality remains in place, while he appoints gay Bishops.

      • Red says:

        Anglicanism locked in their basic theology for a time, as did Lutheranism after the German wars of religion, ect and they controlled that theology with an orderly hierarchy. Any religion that says that the average person can decide for themselves after reading the holy book is very adapt to be splintered by religious demagogs. As such protestant Christianity tends to be democratic and will begin lurching left once the restraints of the church fathers have been weakens.

        On the other hand the areas of Europe that went Protestant where among the most advanced and technologically creative. So it’s kind of a mixed bag on wither Protestant Christianity is a bad idea.

        • VXXC says:

          The actual medieval ages advanced science.

          And this happened because of Protestantism, or Protestantism happened at the same time? The Catholic Church doesn’t even dabble in being anti-scientific until the Counter-Reformation. Dabbling being all they did.

          Copernicus was dead a century when he was condemned. Galileo got mixed up in Italian politics.

          DaVinci and Michelangelo weren’t Protestant. They were however Italian.

          As Jim takes pains to point out, the great advance of English science happens under the restoration.

          Maybe the areas that happened to be Protestant also happened to be you know, German.

          A democratized God you kill for isn’t exactly conducive to anything but revolution and war.

      • ChevalierdeJohnstone says:

        What, pray tell, was the “old doctrine on homosexuality”?

        There has never been a doctrine on homosexuality. The doctrine on homosexual intercourse is that it’s fornication and sodomy and sinful. But all priests, like all people, lust: whether they lust after women, men, or goats is immaterial. Celibacy is an act, not a thought. If the Church appoints priests who, having been called to the vocation, are willing and able to be celibate, it has never mattered from what lustful sin they are refraining.

        You and others like you do a great disservice when you wrongly and mistakenly attribute Christianity as something that one is rather than what one does. Faith, hope, and charity are actions; it is in the act of loving God and accepting Jesus that we are Christian. You would damn people for being that which God has made them, rather than laud them for doing that which God has commanded. You would do well to remember that God is far more pleased by a man who suffers the urge for homosexual sex and resists temptation than by a man whom He has blessed with an easy and traditional psyche yet does nothing with it but call other people names.

        • jim says:

          But all priests, like all people, lust: whether they lust after women, men, or goats is immaterial.

          It matters a great deal. If one is a Darwinist, see my post “Monsters among us”, if a Christian, recall Paul on male homosexuality.

          (Female homosexuality being fine provided that they did not let it get in the way of being wives and mothers)

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