Month: June 2015

Fun with Jim and Gene: Get ready for sacramental gay marriage, Episcopalians!

The General Convention of the Episcopal Church convenes in about two weeks, where they will consider an amendment to the canons smoothing out a discrepancy between the Book of Common Prayer and the canons and the “pastoral response” to gay couples; a liturgy in use since 2012 which clearly violated them. The Anglican Curmudgeon has a useful post on the problem. Others include a BDS resolution, fossil fuels divestment, and a quasi-presbyterian restructuring,

With this in mind, I was doing my normal blog reading yesterday afternoon, between publishing Daily Caller op-eds, and came across this post at Anglican Samizdat, claiming that the gay marriage blessing was more for the benefit of clergy than the laity, which tracks with how it passed in the U.S.; overwhelmingly supported by the bishops, opposed by much of the laity. Never expecting him to respond, I asked what the Center for American Progress’s resident gay “bishop” Gene Robinson thought of it.

To my great surprise, he hit me back:

I asked whether the current blessing goes far enough:

What I should have said at that point is that all sacraments are for everyone, but that the Church has no right to redefine them. Alas: (more…)

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Books that we want

These are books that we’d like to get our hands on to read and review. Our wishlist can be found here.

If you want to buy these for yourself, I’ve linked them with our Amazon associates link, so any purchases made from them give us 5% of the cost with no extra cost to you.

Marxism

Feminism

Conservatism

Progressivism

Reaction

Mass Media

Liberty

Non-interventionism

Economics

Hard Science

History

Civilization

Religion

Philosophy

Novels

Did we miss anything good? Leave a comment.

Voters and the fanciful stories they tell themselves

It’s only June, 17 months out from Election Day, and the 2016 primary contest is in full swing. The field is swelling with potential candidates, both serious and long shot. And surprisingly enough, the media is doing its job of asking the presidential hopefuls tough questions (everyone except Queen Hillary, that is). The number one inquiry this election cycle is a highly uncomfortable topic for Republicans: was invading Iraq was really worth it, given that the intelligence of Saddam Hussein’s weapons program was heavily flawed?

Our intrepid journalist class wants nothing more than to entice GOP nominees into violating the Eleventh Commandment, and trashing George W. Bush’s ill-fated Iraq invasion. Thankfully, most Republicans are finding their marbles and recognizing reality: the invasion wasn’t worth over $1 trillion and thousands of American lives. As Iraq descends into chaos, each candidate, both declared and undeclared, has said it was wrong to topple Saddam’s regime. That’s a safe answer, seeing as how most American believe the Iraq War was poorly conceived and too costly, and President Obama was elected largely based on voters’ misgivings about the invasion.

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Magicians of the Outer Right

It’s a common error to think that mystics and magicians are generally liberals or leftists. At least in America.

Most Boomer Americans, monolingual, insulated from the rest of the world and from history, associate “magick” with hippies, the “60s”, Tim Leary, pot and acid, and sexual freedom. When they think about it at all which isn’t often, these days. Most younger Americans don’t think about it at all, being too busy sexting, face booking and in other ways competing for visible status. Ritual, programmed self-hypnosis and other inner work are less common now, since they don’t yield outward signs of wealth or cool.

At least not right away.

I don’t know as much about Europe directly, but my impression is that there’s bit more attention to these subjects still, especially in Eastern Europe, and across the age groups. But as a rapidly shrinking population of young people plugs in, turns on and tweets out, I suppose the same thing is happening there, too.

In truth, ritual magick, symbolic meditation and related practices have always been the tool of a tiny, cognitive elite, in all societies and across all civilizations. They’re simply too difficult, too esoteric, too scary and too uncertain. And while I jest about status-signaling today, it’s always been important to most people, and occult practices have never brought the kind of status boost that killing the biggest buffalo, having the biggest automobile or (nowadays) being the biggest “victim” did.

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