Category: history

A Belt of Courage: ‘King Alfred’s War Song’

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We think we’ve got troubles? King Alfred, twelve hundred years ago–he had troubles! Heathen poured across the sea and swamped his kingdom, they’d have killed him if they’d caught him, he had to hide out in a peasant’s shack in the middle of a swamp…

And he wrote this: King Alfred’s War Song. “For the Lord is our defense, Jesu defend us!” I don’t know about you, but I need a belt of that just now.

Psalm 127: “My hope is in the LORD, which made heaven and earth.”

Someday the heathen will either be converted or destroyed. By their own hand, most likely.

Be strong in the Lord, and in the power of His might. (Ephesians 6)

‘Down with Father Serra!’ (2016)

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They haven’t torn down his statue yet.

When leftists want to tear down everything of ours so they can put up everything of theirs, they really do mean everything–including the past. Including our memory.

Down With Father Serra!

Father Serra, in their blind eyes, committed an unforgivable crime by teaching Native Americans to be Christians instead of pagans. Never mind that he gave them hope of forgiveness of sins and everlasting life–to say nothing of making it impossible for colonial authorities to deny that the natives were fully human. Christianity and slavery are incompatible. It may take time, but eventually Christ makes all His people free.

And all the leftids boo and hiss.

Because they want to do the opposite, and make all the people slaves.

A Parable of Forced Equality

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New York wants to abolish programs and schools for gifted and talented students. There is a parable from the ancient world which seems to tell us why.

This story was told by both Herodotus, a Greek, and Livy, a Roman who lived some centuries after Herodotus. But I don’t think Livy lifted the story from Herodotus. Both presented it as a historical event, but it has much more the feel of a well-known parable.

The tyrant who ruled a certain city had one son to succeed him; but the young man didn’t know how he ought to go about being an effective tyrant. He asked his father, “How do you govern the city? How have you managed to stay in power for so many years?”

“I’ll teach you; it’s quite simple,” said the father.

Taking his son to a poppy field outside the city, the tyrant said, “Watch.” And with his cane he proceeded to knock the heads off all the poppies around them.

“This is how you rule the city,” he explained. “Even as I have cut all these poppies down so that none is higher than another, so have I maintained my power: by cutting down any man who rises to a certain height above the others, so that none is any greater than another, but all are equal; all are weak. I am the only one who towers over all. There is no one else whom they can turn to for a leader.”

You can see this sort of “diversity” has a very ancient pedigree. Tyrants have been cutting people down for thousands of years.

Fallen human nature hasn’t changed.

The Invention of… Eyeglasses

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From 1352–first painting of a monk using eyeglasses to read and write

I’ve worn glasses since I was a little boy, and I’d be lost without them. I didn’t know I was near-sighted: I didn’t know I should’ve been able to read the blackboard in school. They thought I was a bit stupid–until I had an eye test. Once I got my first pair of glasses, my grades improved, big-time. I’ll never forget riding home from the optician’s and being able to see everything that I couldn’t see on my way there.

But where did glasses come from? When were they invented? For how long did people like me have to muddle along without them?

Romans used glass globes filled with water to magnify print. The first glass “reading stones” were invented, by somebody, we don’t know who, around the year 1000 (http://www.glasseshistory.com/). In the 13th century, Venetian glass blowers started manufacturing them; and in 1284 the first paired reading stones in frames came into use for monks and craftsmen.

The first recognizable eyeglasses, in frames, appeared in a painting by Tommaso da Modena in 1352, when the artist depicted monks wearing them so they could study manuscripts. From then on, various inventors improved eyeglasses to benefit all kinds of vision problems.

Eyeglasses are one of the all-time great inventions. Imagine how much progress could not have been made without them!

It’s Killing Us Back

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It’s getting so you expect to see mass shootings in the nooze, you can’t keep track of them; and if it’s not a mass shooting, then it’s some other lurid crime that once upon a time would’ve had the whole nation goggle-eyed for months but now just comes and goes, because there’s always another one, just as awful, to crowd it off the front page.

So we’re gonna have more gun laws. Yeah, that’ll do it.

The Smartest People In America–“progressive” politicians, academics, noozies, judges, ACLU lawyers, Hollywood, teachers’ unions, etc.–have spent sixty years poisoning, debasing, and debauching our culture–that is, corrupting our national character–and now everybody’s astounded that our culture is killing us back.

All the laws you can write won’t restrain bad people from being bad. Guns are virtually banned in London, but their murder rate topped New York’s this year. Where there’s a will there’s a way.

We’ve killed our culture. How? By teaching and preaching that good is evil and evil is good. Look at it. Sixty million unborn babies massacred. Drag Queen Story Hour. “The hero of this movie is a villain!” Everything is racist. Transgender. Out of one side of their mouths they preach radical autonomy, you’re a little tin god, your truth is the only truth that matters, “Good job!”–and out of the other, they’ll tell you what you can or can’t eat, can or can’t say, can or can’t think. This stuff makes people crazy.

The worst thing they’ve done–which started with them abolishing school prayer in the early 1960s–has been to teach the nation to despise God’s laws. Oh, we can still believe in Him, as long as we don’t mind being openly mocked by Smart People–and as long as we bend the knee to “choice,” transgender, same-sex pseudomarriage, and anything else the Left demands we hail as sacred. We are expected to honor and “celebrate” abominable things. It can’t help but maim our character.

Once upon a time first Israel, then Judah, rejected God’s laws and disrespected him by trying to elevate false gods to His level, or even merge them with Him in their minds; and their depraved beliefs led them to depraved actions–child sacrifice, idolatry, murder, and the abuse of law and government for private gain. So God destroyed their kingdoms.

He will eventually intervene in history. He always does, sooner or later. He will intervene in hours.

Pray that for Jesus’ sake He leads our country to repentance, not destruction.

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Christ Pantokrator–Ruler of All

King Arthur’s Sword

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The Gundestrup Cauldron

Some new archaeological discoveries in France have shed more light on the legend of King Arthur.

Sites dated to around 300 B.C., when France was still Gaul, before the Romans came, include sacred ponds or bogs into which tribal rulers threw expensive items as sacrifices. Items like the Gundestrup Cauldron (above), from Denmark, represented no small portion of the ruler’s wealth.

They also threw in weapons, mostly swords or spearheads. The Icelandic sagas tell us of cheap swords available to anybody, that quickly got bent out of shape if you actually had to use them. But the swords cast into the bogs were kings’ swords, the best that money could buy: famous swords with names and pedigrees.

Young Arthur drew his first sword from a stone, which no one else could do. I believe that what he did was to invade a site worshiped by the crack Sarmatian cavalry left in Britain by the Romans. Originally from central Asia, the Sarmatians worshiped their pagan gods by heaping up a mound of wood or stone or earth, and planting a sword in the middle of it. I believe that what Arthur did was to seize that sword. Instead of killing him on the spot, the amazed Sarmatians became his followers. His knights.

But what about Arthur’s more famous sword, Excalibur? Where did he get Excalibur?

According to Thomas Malory, and for want of any contradictory account, Arthur went with Merlin to a “lake”, and there a hand and arm came up from the water, holding Excalibur: and it was given to Arthur for as long as he lived, although it had to be returned to the lake when he died.

Hmm… Could this have been one of those sacred lakes, a pagan holy place, where ancient British chiefs and kings sacrificed their most costly possessions?

If Arthur had such a sword, he would have aggressively demonstrated the ascendance of the Christian faith by appropriating well-known pagan relics to the service of Jesus Christ. By his time Christianity had made deep inroads into British paganism: in doing as he did, Arthur proclaimed the outcome of that religious struggle–victory for Christianity.

If Excalibur had been  a sacred sword… the whole story begins to make more sense.

 

Rushdoony on Fascism

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Benito Mussolini–“the patron saint of 20th century humanism,” according to Rushdoony

Fascism was defeated in World War II, but it’s alive and kicking today. In fact, said R.J. Rushdoony, “Fascism is socialism for the hypocrites”–people who want to do socialism, but call it freedom.

This essay, The Theology of Fascism, was published in 2006, five years after the author’s death.

https://chalcedon.edu/magazine/the-theology-of-fascism

Fascism, said Rushdoony, is “everywhere condemned, but everywhere imitated.” And, more trenchantly, “A Christian world without Christ is an impossibility.” So much for modern atheists’ claim that you can be “good without God.” Only by living off the capital of Christianity without acknowledging its source.

It’s an eye-opening essay, and ought to give you plenty to think over.

‘Bill Ayers, Bilge-Master’ (2014)

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From domestic terrorist to adviser to a president

We really must be crazy, to give a prominent role in public life to some Far Left parasite who’d like to blow us all to kingdom come. This former domestic terrorist, whose picture used to decorate our post offices, is now a revered “educator” and advisor to prominent Democrats: he helped mentor President *Batteries Not Included in the finer points of Marxism.

Bill Ayres, Bilge-Master

Really, why is this guy still running around loose? Why is he collecting public money? Why is he such a big wheel in Chicago’s “education” establishment?

More proof that America is “educating” herself to death.

Undermining Scripture

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I really ought to have learned by now that consulting “Bible scholars” is usually a waste of time.

But I was reading Ezekiel Chapter 1 yesterday, the vision of the “living creatures,” and I wanted to enrich my understanding. Because that’s a very difficult chapter!

Ezekiel was a scholar, a trained man: but that chapter is written by a man who is deeply frightened and terribly confused. The “living creatures” are cherubims, a familiar motif in the art and literature of the Ancient Near East. Ezekiel would have known all about them. But the way the chapter reads, it hasn’t been written by someone who has studied cherubims… but by someone who has seen them.

Enter Bible Scholars Inc. They are quick to spot parallels between Ezekiel’s vision and St. John’s Revelation. Both describe cherubims. Other motifs are repeated throughout.

There are also some differences in details–six wings for the cherubims, for instance, vs. four–which the Bible Scholars account for by saying this was how John crafted them to suit his own purpose.

In other words, he made it all up!

Not only made it up, but also got away with it. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Watch us put one over on the plebs.

Because that’s what they would do, they assume that was what Ezekiel and John did. Like Lord Chutt, they attribute their own low standards of character to everyone. I’m a stinker, so everyone else must be, too. I make things up! Therefore the writers of the Holy Scriptures made up everything!

How contemptible is this?

There are reliable Bible teachers out there. There have to be.

As someone who gets paid for making things up, and has received awards for doing it well, I declare the Bible doesn’t read like fiction. And I do know something about fiction. Gilgamesh is fiction and folklore. Homer write historical novels heavily influenced by oral tradition. It’s great fiction, but it’s still fiction.

I am as sure as I can be that Ezekiel wasn’t inventing anything. And I’ll bet he would have turned cartwheels if God had released him from being a prophet.

‘Who’s Buried in Alexander’s Tomb?’

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The ancient world was full of all sorts of neat stuff that you can’t find anymore. All those fabulous treasures that Herodotus saw with his own eyes, and described for us… and the well-preserved body of Alexander the Great.

Back in 1991, a Greek archaeologist made a big splash for a couple days by claiming to have discovered where the body was hidden.

Who’s Buried in Alexander the Great’s Tomb?

It seems reasonable to suppose that if it was still kicking around 500 years after Alexander’s death, it could have survived even longer, provided no one messed around with it. Alexander’s mother hated his father, so she taught him that his real father was Zeus, king of the gods–not that glorified peasant, Philip of Macedon.

It’s not good for anyone to believe things like that.