The Importance of Nice Clothes

 In the midst of all this Godlessness, tomorrow I fly to Northern California to attend a wedding. It has been very stressful at work---multiple rounds of layoffs leaving a skeleton crew, and tomorrow will be as such, but I am to board a plane at noon and from when we arrive at the hotel, I will not have the luxury of being in a bad mood, or being tired. I will be all smiles. I will call no attention to myself that is undue.

I wlll see multiple old friends, some of whom I have not seen in many years, from before I left Facebook, and stopped being aware of their personal opinions, and let them forget about me. 

At least I have new clothes, nice ones. The best way to feel comfortable in public is to wear nice clothes.

You have to pack them though, in a suitcase that you must shepherd through a crowded public place, wearing normal clothes because your nice ones are packed in the suitcase, as you are saving them for when you need to be social among friends.

A Godless World Goes Mad From the Monsters of Reason

Tomorrow night (May 22. 2024) on Episode 69 of Spellbreakers. Among other things we discuss this movie from 2011. The mother ata the wedding opposite of the Divine Feminine. She is the witch from Sleeping Beauty (whose heroine is Aurora in some versions). She knows only how to poison youth, to fill the void in her soul. She is willing to destroy the Earth to satisfy her pain. This is what makes Lars Van Trier's films so exquisite. Probably the best movie I saw during my two-year nomadic cinema obsession was Antichrist, which came out in 2009, and is considered the first of a trilogy that includes this film below. I thought Antichrist was brilliant, but I wanted to unsee it. I'm not exaggerating. Afterwards I wished I hadn't seen it. But that is what it takes to make art these days, in the age of denial of the reality that stares us in our face, and truth that we know to be truth, but which we mock as ridiculous, lest we be seen as a weirdo.

"Our Lady of the Magnetosphere"

That's what I call it, at least, when I saw it two years ago. It almost maybe weep as a depiction of God's mercy.

"Magnetosphere" by Rob Rey on display and the 2022 National Exposition of the Oil Painters of America in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. (link to artists site)

Featured on tonight's episode of Spellbreakers.

https://rumble.com/v4v9fit-spellbreakers-ep.-68-the-science-of-solar-flare-killshots-730-pm-et-.html

You and the Land are One

original theatrical trailer

Perceval in despair.

 

I love the puzzlement on the knights' faces. What on earth is the king talking about?

Lost in the wasteland, Perceval is attacked by a mob led by an old friend who has gone made. But look what Lancelot throws at him (apologies for poor quality of clip).

The only way this makes sense in a Christian way to me is that the figure he is addressing is Christ. When he says "you are Arthur," he means "You are present in Arthur, who, in a rightly ordered kingdom, must act as Your regent on Earth." 

The Grail is the Divine Feminine, which has been lost to the kingdom through Arthur's actions, having been forced by his own law to banish his queen.

Arthur drinks from the cup and is revived (a scene that recalls Tolkein's depiction of Theoden's miraculous recovery in The Lord of the Rings). Yet the kingdom is not yet saved. The final battle lies ahead.

The battle is tense, and bloody, and at one point seems lost. Then at the bleakest moment, Lancelot, having recovered his wits but barely cleaned up from his madness, returns, fighting like a berserker with the strength of a dozen men,  and turns the tide of the battle. His line here, "it is the old wound," was mysterious to me as a young man. It is no longer mysterious to me at all.

"Guinevere, is she queen again?" This is all Lancelot wants to know before he expires.

The battle is won but the king is mortally wounded. He needed to die that the kingdom would be restored. But now the sword is too powerful. This scene makes a lot more sense to me years later. Arthur is sparing Perceval the burden of being king. His pulling the sword from Mordred's corpse is a degraded and profane echo of the divine moment Arthur pulls the sword from the stone. The look of temptation on Perceval's face is unmistakable. King Perceval will rule! Being king s not a duty any man can take upon himself, except by supernatural power.

The Lady of the Lake, like the Holy Grail, is the Divine Feminine, but a different aspect of it. She is Divine Justice, the intervention of God's mercy by the delicate hand of woman when the powers of men have failed them and nothing else can save them. At that moment, she bestows great power on men, so that they can (temporarily) do what needs to be done to restore order and justice. That it comes from a woman is significant in that in a sense, they are granted God's approval ahead of time, through His mercy. Such a weapon granted this way can never fail.

There are many retellings of the Arthurian stories. The 1981 movie Excalibur remains my favorite. I saw it as a high school student in 1981, twice when it first came out---I think it was playing at the CSU theater on campus as part of their semester film program. It is campy, flawed, and at times uneven. It crams a great deal of material into two hours, compressed for purposes of the story. In many ways it is a typical medieval fantasy genre of that era, when we saw such films at the drive-in. It has scenes of gory violence that can turn one's stomach, as well as raunchy almost explicit sex scenes between witches and knights. But there are few movies that have stayed with me over the years like this one, including the lines I have quoted above. I went looking for them again recently and found these clips.  It is little surprise to me that despite its flaws, it has become a cult classic.

Making Perceval the hero of the story was brilliant. That he initially fails the last task Arthur gives him, He began as lowly commoner, a page, and winds up being the hand by which Excalibur is returned to the Lady. In that way, the story is very democratic, and, fittingly, very American, even though it is a British film.

Here perhaps is the entire movie in one scene, where Guinevere, now betrothed to God, furnishes the missing puzzle piece of redemption.  Arthur pulls the sword one last time, this time from the swaddling cloths of a child---perhaps the holy ones of the infant Christ. 

"In the hereafter of our lives...It is a dream I have." They will not meet again on Earth.

The great power here is that Guinevere is not the Divine Feminine. She is a mortal woman. 

Some say Guinevere was a Pict. My people!

All We've Got Left

The exchange of letters between friends and intimates no longer being a thing possile for humanity, we limp along with the next best things, a pastiche of emails, texts, social media posts, and above all, the last tool we have to effectively communicate one person to another, which is the telephone. I have noticed that the last friends I had, who gave a hoot whether I was still alive, tended to catch up with me with calling me on the phone. It is awkward for me to admit how much I now treasure phone calls, because I was on the early edge of pathological phone avoiders, preferring text the same way the young generations now do, almost a stereotype. I have memories of vivid phone calls recently. I have screamed at over the phone, by people who inferred my ideologies, and stood with zipped list while I listened to the pleas of friends who honest-to-god believed I had become a baddie out of 1930s Germany. I now realize the depth of their anguish. They actually freaking believed all that bullshit. But I loved the human connection, the warm greeting, even if it devolves into agry screaming. In one case, sitting on the beach of Lake Tahoe right after the 2020 election, 

I was able to talk my friend down of the ledge of bewildered rage and confusion. In another case, a friend used the amicable endings of our strained phone calls---which he was alway the one to incite---to lie in wait for me to see visit him in person at his home, at which time he lowered the boom on me, and we haven't really spoken since. I don't expect to see his What's App number pop up again. I think he is done. I forgive him   Nevertheless we had good phone calls for a spell, when I needed that. Now, when I dream of reconciliation with long-lost friends, I sometimes wish for a surprise email, as I did from Janusz, after we fell out of the habit of writing to each other years ago. We don't call each other. Instead I went to visit him in Poland. Otherwise, phone it must be. 

 Sadly, however, even our phone calls these days are diminished, for all of us who still use the phone. They have effectively abolished analog phone lines, by which the electromagnetic representation of the human voice and other sounds was captured in a travelling wave form . Among other things, this allowed for true duplex communication---the sound could travel both directions at once down the copper wires. You could hear each other, even as you both spoke. You could hear silences, and sighs. You are no longer allowed any of this. The human voice is reduced to 1s and 0s, and the sound of one party tramples on another. We effect clumsy attempts to communicate important things, as if we are back in the time of Meet Me in St. Louis, half-yelling over the wall phone long distance.  One must confirm that one was heard. Mostbrutually, one begins to open up, speaking from the heart, and one goes on a two-minute monologue sharing something of great value that was not shared before, maybe to another human being. And one then realizes the call has been dead for some amount of time. 

Downright inhuman. But it's all we've got left.

How Civilization Fell

 

Postage stamp from the late-stage era when people still wrote letters to each other. 

As the years pass, more and more I am convinced that civilization is not about to fall but rather it has already fallen. Somehow we have managed preserve the material trappings of civilization--the working economy and its comforts and convenience, at least for most people. Yet it feels as if we live in a time of barbarism.  When one looks for certain hallmarks of civilization beyond the economic, one sees that certain aspects of our culture that were continuations of phenomena from the earliest days of human civilization have disappeared.

One of these things that has disappeared is the written word. The hand-writing of ordinary language is happening less and less by the day. We press buttons on a keyboard and pixels on the screen in front of us change their luminosity and hue. Pixels on monitors elsewhere in the world may change as well. This is not writing. This is pixel manipulation.

Hand writing has all but disappeared except for white boards in corporate offices, where the scrawl is often barely legible. Is there anything more pathetic that a white board with someone's brainstorm ideas from two months ago? Likely no one really understood it at the time, not even the person doing it.

What no longer exists at all is letter writing, the kind that friends, family, and lovers wrote to each other since the invention of the postal service.  Email destroyed it but without replacing it. It has been a barbaric conquest, suitable only for business communication. Among intimates, it only serves to highlight the separation. It would drive lovers mad with frenzy, this false sense of connection.

I am one of the last letter writers, holding out while others fell by the wayside.  One day I got sad thinking that my nieces, born in 2005, will never get a love letter, nor any of the young women of their cohort. 

None of them will know the joy of true correspondence, which as opposed to email, happens at a human pace. We build up thoughts in our head, one's we want to put into the consciousness of people who we know and love (or hate, etc.). At some point they build up enough that we feel compelled to write these thoughts  down, and they never come as we intend, but as some shadow of what we meant to say. Yet we know the joy the other person will have, to receive a letter, and with all the groundedness of material existence, we fold up the paper, words inked out, written over, with arrows and inserts, and we put it in an envelope, perhaps one of fine material befitting our esteem for the other person. Perhaps we add festive extras. We lick the envelope and seal it, knowing they will open it.

We place it in a mailbox and we wait. Days go by. We know the letter is en route, but it has not arrived. It will be found by the addressee at some time unknown to you. They will read it, and be guided through the thoughts and emotions that were manifest in in by you, the writer, but days or weeks before.  It is like a boat going through the locks of canal, taking its time on each stage.

Perhaps the addressee holds the contents of your words in mind, for days and even weeks, returning to consider them, and building up an itinerary of reflections and responses to your words, one they wish to share to you. Or perhaps they let them go, leaving only the intention to write back to you at some point.

Perhaps they do write back, at some frequency of time that is appropriate to your friendship, family relationship, or otherwise. One need not leap to action in most cases. One savors the build up to writing a response. 

As such one experiences, a mental and spiritual overlap of brain states with another person, asyncronously and at a distance, over time. Such a thing can be very healthy for one's mental health. My great-uncle Dick wrote to his surviving sister, ping pong back and forth almost daily from Nevada to Nebraska and back,  until around 2018, when his last sister died. 

With good friends, the time lag need not be constant, frequent, nor even all that regular. Six months or a year may go by. Yet the friendship can be retried at any moment. We could not only follow, but participate in, each other's lives over time. Become small or large characters in chapters of each other's lives.

None of this is possible anymore. Email destroyed all this. It gave us an illusion of connection. And yet that was only the start. If we still had only email, and not text and social media, we might have stumbled our way through the darkness. Now email seems retrograde.

Email friendship and love affairs exist only in the movies. They cannot happen in real life. They can only say hello to each in passing. They "drop in" and move on, until next year, or several years later, when digitially "drop in' again.  In contrast, by text and private message, people hook up.  Text is superb for clandestine love affairs with sexual contact. Imagine the insanity of a long-distance text relationship.

The functions of a working society, a civilized one, that were once supplied by letter writing, continuously so for hundreds of years, even back to Antiquity, have been abolished. 

The seduction of technology is strong. Some have begun revolting from it, including apparently youth. A couple weeks ago I read about a historical society where school kids can use typewriters.  Typewriters are fascinating technology worthy substitute for hand writing for intimate correspondence, I think. Some folks have terrible hand-writing, after all, and typewriters tend to bring out the poet in all of us. 

If the world ends this weekend

If the grid goes down this weekend and civilization collapses worldwide, then know, dear reader, that I have loved you even though I may never have met you. I pray for all of us.

If civilization is still intact on Monday, then I'll probably cover solar flares in this week's show or one soon after. One of my regular viewers has been urging me to do so for months.

The Return of Voice

 

Last night after my podcast I went out in the living room.

"How'd it go," asked Jessica, in a friendly tone. She had been listening to at least part of it, but she always asks me that in a neutral way, wanting to know my own reaction to my show.

"Good," I said. "I think I have found my voice," I added. She concurred, and said as much. I knew it would take a while---sixteen months now---but somehow I got to a place where after the show I felt neither puffed with short-term ego pride, nor deflated at a feeling I had not reached my potential. 

In this case I felt peaceful, and satisfied in a way that was without pride. It was a strange feeling, one I have not felt in a while. This was despite the fact that the title of the show was extremely provocative and controversial, and I worried about the reactions of my regular listeners, as well a people who might stumble on it.  I felt I would have to thread the needle on a complex issue while still saying something meaningful. I was astonishe at myself from the peace I felt, as I had done exactly that. I had the uncanny feeling that I'd actually contributed something of value to the world.

Something seems to have happened in the last month that has released a mode of creativity I have not felt in a long time---maybe decades. It feels like rain after a long drought. Or perhaps more appropriately, like welcoming back a long lost friend. 

It is wrong to want it to keep going?

Also I found out that Badlands has invited me to be a part of their next conference, GART 5, in Deadwood, South Dakota, in August. I had given up on being invited again, even as I kept putting my name in the hat. Did they run out of other speakers?

Hateful

 

One of the worst things one can be called in today's America is "hateful." What does that term mean?

I got called "hateful" by a commenter in the live feed of my last podcast. I was expecting, even hoping, that this might happen, although the source was not what I expected.

After my show two weeks ago, titled "Did Muhammad Exist?" (the precise title of a book I was discussing), I figured the title would draw many people to sample it in Rumble, much more than my usual tame topics, and that I would get some angry blowback from Muslims or their white liberal enforcers. Perhaps I did, in the comments, but I never read those. Like the feedback forms from my students when I tought, I am so little interested in that. If someone tells me point blank they like my show, I will thank them, but I don't read comments. Many people who are Youtube streamers say the same thing, because their comments are sometimes extremely vicious and discouraging, and it is easy to get obsessed with one that is particularly negative.

Since I extended that question about the origins of Islam this last week, and I figured now I am the radar screen of people who police opinions that regarded as "Islamophobic," another word whose meaning we never define, but which we are supposed to understand as a guide to what is acceptable public behavior.

Such accusations as "hateful", "Islamophobic", and other ones have the potential to end people's public careers, stripping them of public stature and even their livelihoods---cheered on by a mob that includes the mainstream media.

Being a blissful nobody, I probably don't have much to fear. In fact, the absence of push back that I have received even as I broach certain controversial topics has indicated to me what little impact I have. Having "haters" is considered an inevitable consequence of any opinion expressed online that reaches a significant audience. My ego was bruised a bit, even as I dread strongly opinionated interactions online. I truly believe I could stand on stage in front of an audience of 100,000 and speak on any subject, and somehow connect with a good chunk of the audience. Yet these anymous asynchronous exchanges in comments and social media are things I find as palatable as sewage water. When I still on Facebook, I always regretted any comment that elicited a response.  I dreaded seeing a response to controversial opinion in general. It was typically one of my old high school friends, one who cared not at all for politics back in the day, but who had become a serious enforcer of liberal thought. Such a person would deem it necessary to "correct me", as if somehow I hadn't gotten the memo about what I was supposed to believe.  They were informing me out of respect for our friendship, that I needed to educate myself and reset my thought. 

This is why I got off Facebook two months before the 2016 election and never have logged in again. I could not bear to see people I loved descend in that kind of thought thuggery. Before I left I began to see my old friends begin to ignore, even celebrate, violence against people like me, even our extermination. They didn't know they were talking about their old friend Matt. It would never occur to them that someone they had considered a friend, who was sane and intelligent, could be that way. I have experienced the meltdown of several such people, coming to frantic years in my presence, as they discovered that I was one of those people. 

I forgive all of them, and pray for them.

On my show I know that even among our side, there are people who disagree strongly and passionately. Perhaps the biggest is the Protestant-Catholic divide, something that I have lived and experienced since the moment of my birth, perhaps before. So it is no problem for me to thread that needle, especially being raised as a "traditional" Episcopalian in a way that would now be part of the breakaway Anglican Church of North America (just because everyone back then was "traditional" by today's standards). On my how talk favorably about the Catholic Church very often, especially in regard to certain theology, liturgy, and traditions. Yet I know if I mention Mary, or any form of Marian devotion, it will provoke anger among certain evangelical Protestants who consider such things to be idolatry, and who cannot restrain themselves from denouncing it as such. I ran into such a woman at the Badlands conference last year, stumbling into the subject while being naive of the strength of many people's opinions. Again, I was simply considering the opinion Catholics (and Orthodox) hold about Mary without condemning it. But condemn it she did! I could sense she was offended that I mentioned it in a neutral fashion.

On my show, however, we have dived deep on my show regarding Church history. As many people know, once you start looking into early Church history, it becomes apparent that for a thousand years or so after Jesus was born, all Christians were Catholic/Orthodox, and followed practices of those churches now abhorred by many Protestants.  As I explore these topics on my show, I do so under the cover of neutral history, and so far it has worked. It helps that I have also been able to discuss other branches of Eastern Christianity, including the Church of the East and Oriental Churches, who also consider themselves to be apostolic, and which has an ornate liturgies and saintly devotions. 

Somehow it is easier for evangelicals to find common cause with these Eatern Churches, whereas the Catholic Church is worthy only of condemnation.  Thus I can sneak in talk about saints, and Mary, without offending them. It is hard to speak against churche which existed in ancient Hindu and long Muslimized lands, holding forth to the faith for a thousand years, all under the threat of extermination even up to the present. Who would tell the Maronite Catholics of Lebanon, who have seen their country reduced from being the only Christian-majority nation in the Middle East to one with a non-Christian majority in their own lifetime, that their devotion to Mary is actually worship to a Pagan goddess?

I enjoy pointing out that many present-day traditional Catholics think the current Pope has lost the faith, and some consider him downright Satanic. I have a friend who was reading Windswept House, a hard-to-find novel written by a priest that is a fictionalization of the satanic rituals in the Vatican and elsewhere by the modern factions whose have ought to turn the Church to the Evil One. I hear it's a tough read. 

Of course if you are a hard core evangelical, or even perhaps a Baptist or an old-style Lutheran, you might say that the turning of the Catholic Church towards Satan happened centuries ago. The Orthodox would not go so far as that, but only point that heterodoxy ultimately is a path to Hell, but perhaps not as steep a one as the evangelicals would attribute to Catholicism. The Anglicans---being a Church founded on the necessity of granting a divorce, but which quickly degenerated into a intolerant slaughter of English Catholics, would simply mumble and try to ignore the issue. Won't someone please consider our Holy Orders to be valid and apostolic?

But it was not anything like this that provoked the accusation of my being "hateful". What finally provoked that accusation came not from anyone commenting on my remarks about the origins of Islam or Christianity. Instead it was the fruit of my discussion of Jerusalem in the context of the Biblical archaeology of the Second Temple, the possible building a Third Temple, and the desire by many Jew and Christians to undertake a project in the near future.  I tried to give a balanced look at the topic, and simple try to become familiar with the Red Heifer controversy. I even mentioned the theory that the first and second temples were not at the location commonly ascribed to them, although I went only so far as to see that it is not considered to be reputable scholarly archaeology, which doesn't make it false, but there are apparently good arguments in favor of the current assumed location coincident with Al-Aqsa Mosque. If you are going to swim in those waters, like Jay Smith, you better fucking know how to be a scholar (pardon my French). You better fucking know to dot your eyes and tie your shoelaces. Otherwise you will get eaten alive for wasting people's fucking time (pardon my French again). Believe me, I know.

I think of Jay Smith, the American Christian pastor-scholar and Youtuber who has mostly strongly asserted claims the academic claims that Islam as we know it was invented out of a heretical Arian Christian breakaway that was ret-conned to be about an Arab prophet in a place that didn't even exist at the time he supposedly lived, but had the effect of making that place into a wealthy and powerful center of pilgrimage.

Did I ever tell you that I fucking love the history of the Late Middle Ages and the Dark Ages (Pardonne maye Medieval Frenche)

On my show, as part of the Temple discussion, I had occasion to discuss the 1973 Yom Kippur War, something I've done in previous shows, and pointed out again that n those harrowing days of October 1973, the Israelis feared running out of ammunition, and succumbing to the Egyptian-Syrian offensive. "The Third Temple is in danger," said Moshe Dayan, the famous eye-patch wearing Israeli minister of defense (see photo above).  

Fortunately for them the Americans came to their aid with giant transport planes bearing resupplies. Nixon had agreed to this on the condition the planes arrive at night, so as not to poke the eye of our Arab allies, who were willing to look the other way. But according to the story, weather delayed the planes in the Azores, and the U.S. Air Force planes with their big logos landed smack in broad daylight for the world to see. The Arab street was outraged. The Arab leaders were forced to act on appeaement of this, and this is how the 1973 Oil Embargo was born. This is the moment that the postwar period of American prosperity ended for good. We have never recovered from this. It set in motion the cycle of modern history in many ways.

Reviewing this again in my research for last week's, I had become fascinated with Moshe Dayan and had to learn more about him. He was quite a badass in the Israeli independence struggle, a subject I knew little about, expect for the broad outline of it, and having read Exodus twenty-five years ago (and boy, did I get shit for that later--but that's a story for another day).

Reading about Moshe Dayan and the activities of the Israeli "terrorist" operatoins against the British in 1944 brought to mind the curious fact that exactly as the British were fighting the Germans in Europe, the Jews were fighting the British.  This is an oddity of history that is not widely known outside Israel, nor even discused. Somehow it is considered inappropriate to point this out, even hateful.  Well, that's mind reading. I can at least asert a truth that  discussion of it is one of those things that opens one up to being called "hateful" in comments on a podcast.

I probably deserve it. Next time I will do better.

Connectedness and Momentum

 Since starting this blog over fifteen years ago,  I have gone through periods where I have written entries almost every day, sometimes multiple ones per day. At other times I have gone months without writing.

Even when I go through months without writing, it is usually not because I don't have something I want to say. Rather it is just laziness and forgetfulness, of letting the days go by. I am thankful there are people who still drop by to read what I have to say. That fact motivates me to keep going. It feels like a conversation in a strange way. If I imagine someone is reading this, someone I know or otherwise, then I can communicate to them directly and that feeling is a joy. I can't imagine not having this.

I was thinking about this a couple weeks ago lying in bed, after waking in the middle of the night. In those times I often find myself of things I want to say, words to express to anonymous world out there, or to old friends with whom I am estranged.

At that moment I had an insight that the reason I write is to get these thoughts out of my head, because if I do not write them, they will keep swirling in my head, night after night. If I write them down, then the void will allow for new thoughts to form, which themselves need to be written down. It is about keeping the flow of thoughts going through my head lest I find myself in the stagnation of thought circles.

These very words I am writing are part of that, for I was thinking about all this last night again---why I write this. Ultimately then it is about a feeling of connectedness to other people, as well as the desire to feel an internal momentum to my life. 

Love One Another

Today is Orthodox Easter---Pascha. 

For the last month on my Badlands podcast show, I have been on a run about ancient history and Christianity in late Antiquity that started with examining the deep question why the East and West use different methods for calculating the date of Easter. Coming up with ideas for shows that I can legitimately research and prepare for during the week while holding down a more-than-forty-hours-a-week day job is an ongoing challenge. Usually I go for the lowest-hanging fruit of ideas, often ones that build off the previous week. This is tempered by my knowledge that I tend to become fascinated with topics that may be rather niche to my audiences. They seem to humor me, however, even a I geek out. 

I spent two show discussing ancient church councils---Nicaea, Ephesus, Chalcedon, and how the various major branches of Christianity came to split from each other.  I did a show examining 7th century history and the scholarship over early Islamic history, specifically the question of whether Muhammad actually existed, or whether the name "Muhammad" was originally an epithet of Christ that was later applied to a fictional Arab prophet that became the center of a religion. I originally stumbled on this via this facinating book. I turns out there is a lot of scholarship in support of the idea, as generally the subject of the historicity of Islam has been off limits (as opposed to Christianity and the historicity of Jesus, which has been put under great scrutiny in that fashion since the 18th century in the West). As I told my audience, the idea that Muslims may actually revere a heretical form of Jesus (specifically Nestorian) makes it easier for me to have empathy with them as fellow "Crypto-Christians". 

The mass conversion of Muslims to Christianity is something I can easily foresee at some point, especially as many Muslims move to the West.  We should not do things that keep them from making this transition, but neither should we be shy about our faith. For what good is it, if we do not share the Gospel with others? What good are we doing for God if we say it is perfectly fine to be Muslim and to reject Jesus as Savior? If we say we are fine with it, are we, in fact, watered down Muslims ourselves? I don't have easy answers to these questions. In all things, we must act with love towards one another. Christ commands that of us. Personally I would never raise the topic with a Muslim unless they directly asked me about it. In that case I would trust the Holy Spirit to guide me in a gentle manner to provide my own testimony as a witness to the resurrection.

None of this exactly hot-off-the-presses news, but it has been fun to go through the material with the audience. Last week we examined the Dome of the Rock and its origins, as well as the efforts by Israelis (and American evangelical protestants) to promote the building of the Third Temple in its place. The earliest inscriptions in the Dome of the Rock apparently refer explicitly to Jesus and contain pre-Koranic "Koran verses" sprinkled among them. Fascinating subject.

I figure I can get one more week out of this run of topics. I could probably stay in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages indefinitely. I feel the constant need to bring in current events. The timing of my shows wa such that I was able to discuss the attack on Mar Mari Emmanuel in the context of the origins of the Church of the East, a subject I knew nothing about. 

I told my audience I would probably do one more show in this run, as I mentioned, and that it would probably be about the Crusades. I would like to discuss the counter-narrative that the Crusades were a singularly horrible incident in human history, and then in many respects they were a justifiable response to Muslim aggression. At least it will give people something to think about it. Trying to shame Christians over the Crusades has long been a vector of attack by non-Christians, including secular folk in America who want nothing more than to point out how hypocrisy of Christians.

I don't know how much of a deep dive I'll do over it. I barely have time to scratch the surface of any topic during my show.

As I write this next to me is a copy of Jerusalem Pilgrimage 1099--1185, Volume 167 of Series II of the Hakluyt Society, which is a summary of primary source from pilgrims to Holy Land during the time of the Crusades. It is amazing to see that a thousand years ago, there was a "tourism" industry of westerners going to the Holy Land to see the sights, just like today. The book is a fine volume, well bound, published in 1988. I had to look up the Hakluyt Society online. 

The copy I have still has the in-house paper slip from the Burnside Powell's in Portland, priced at 21 dollars. I bought it the last time I was in Portland in 2017. There is something pleasing about having bought this book about Christian pilgrims in Portland, which has gained a reputation as a city that has rejected God entirely. I pray regularly for that city and the people there. I would like to go back there and see what it has become.

May Baskets

 When I was a kid in the 1970s, May baskets on the first day of May were still a thing. One made them with construction paper---a simple cone with a paper handle taped or stapled to hold the cone, which was then filled with candy treats of various kinds. One left such baskets on the door handles of friends, neighbors, and relatives. This was in the Midwest.

I was thinking about May baskets because they had sprung into my memory, and upon doing so, I realized that it had been many years since I had heard anyone mention them, in person on in the media. May baskets had disappeared from our cultural consciousness.

It is easy to see that such a tradition would not survive the 1980s, which is when so many aspects of culture began disappearing from our shared experience. It is not that such trends began in the 1980s. Rather they typically began by the 1960s. It's that traditions that began dying out in the 1960s still had enough momentum from the living generations of the time to continue for another decade or so.

What I just said is one of the most poignant, vibrant constant experiences of my life---that I was born at a time to see many aspects of life in America and western countries which had existed for decades and centuries, begun to be phased out?

Isn't this always happening? Perhaps, but it was unmistakable that the 1960s saw a massive acceleration in the wiping away of old thins and the replacement with new things. For example, I am somewhat of a freak for foreign language learning, especially small ones spoken only in a localized region, and which are endangered. It is a fact that there are tens of thousands of languages in the world which have been spoken for centuries but which are dying out and which, all things being equal, will not survive a living languages into the 22nd century. This includes even ones in the US which have existed for over a hundred years as niche languages and dialects, but which are severely endangered. There are still people alive who speak this languages natively and fluently, but there is a lower bound on the age of such people. There are no native speakers, or very few, younger than a certain age. This age is almost universally that of people born in the early 1960s.

Children born at that time and later ceased obtaining these languages as living languages. Perhaps they heard it spoken among adults, and they can recognize words and phrases, but they never learned to speak it themselves. It was not necessary for them to do. Universal electrification, and especially the proliferation of television, had reached a point where kid naturally used a larger language, like English, and found the use of their grandparents' tongue to be out of date and old-timey.

As I write this, I am thinking about Missouri French, which I just learned about. But it applies to probably most Native American languages, and a great many 'small languages' of Europe, especially those without status as a national language.

Even official national languages may be in danger. I recently read that Icelandic children typically speak English with each other on the playground, reserving Icelandic when they have to speak to adults. There are only 300,000 people in Iceland. Their language has been spoken in some form or another for a thousand years on that island. Will it be spoken 100 years hence? It feels like a fading dream one remembers upon waking, that one knows one cannot return to. The conditions are no longer in existence.

Are May baskets still a thing anywhere, outside cultural reactionaries who keep alive old traditions in isolation, to the bemusement of their peers. "I know someone who still does it?" doesn't count. That's a symptom of the late stage tail end of a tradition. Will children today care to keep it going, even for nostalgia, or are people my age the last one to remember? That is---is their a community in which May baskets are still a common, expected thing, and is undertaken even by children as a expected holiday event? My guess is no.

Of course I am talking about many, many things beside May baskets. But I can't think of a better example of a tradition, dying out even as I participated in it as a child, and which is apparently dead in common use. 

But at least May Day is still a holiday! A Communist one to be sure, but that goes without saying. All our holidays have been Communist versions of their former selves.