… everybody knows that schools are sociopathic, outdated, Industrial Revolution–era warehouses, but the media Left hasn’t figured out how to say this out of fear of the powerful teachers’ unions, so this provides a back door into a great untold story. This last point is worth a moment’s attention.
A psych study a few years ago had a large random sample describe a facial expression in a picture. The vast majority of children and adults identified the facial expression as neutral or positive, while more that 70 percent of teens identified the facial expression as negative, hostile, and judgmental. Teenagers are constitutionally insecure. We all know that. Now everyone intuitively knows the danger of cascading negative social reinforcement; that is, when you put together a bunch of people with the same phobia, the likelihood of the phobia emerging and eclipsing everything else is very high. And unless you are in complete denial, you probably remember that this was a huge part of the high-school experience. Most of high school is terrible. Teens feel insecure, and their feelings of insecurity are further heightened by the insecurity they detect in each other and on it goes. Teens probably did much better before the Industrial Revolution, working alongside their elders and mentoring their younger siblings. For a long time, schools had some justification in laying a unifying foundation and a standard base of skills, even if it did hold back the development of most students most of the time. But now, online learning can be as varied and individualized as the millions of students who might use it, with goals achieved years earlier at a fraction of the cost.
–Thus Joe Bissonnette
Friend of the Junior Ganymede and occasional guest contributor, Kent G. Budge, is celebrating what he calls his 27th annual Kent Is No Longer 29 event. If you live anywhere near the Santa Fe – Albuquerque corridor, it’s an opportunity to scramble up a mountain while Kent talks your ear off about local geology.
a.k.a.: “Godlessness: the First Step to the Gulag” or Solzhenitsyn’s Templeton Address.
July 5, 2011. by Chris Banescu.
From: http://orthodoxnet.com/blog/2011/07/men-have-forgotten-god-alexander-solzhenitsyn/
(Cross-posted without permission. There are likely other sources for Solzhenitsyn’s talk, but the intro here is good. “Link rot” means things like blogs can eventually disappear, so duplication of things worth remembering increases odds of its survival.)
As a survivor of the Communist Holocaust I am horrified to witness how my beloved America, my adopted country, is gradually being transformed into a secularist and atheistic utopia, where communist ideals are glorified and promoted, while Judeo-Christian values and morality are ridiculed and increasingly eradicated from the public and social consciousness of our nation. Under the decades-long assault and militant radicalism of many so-called “liberal” and “progressive” elites, God has been progressively erased from our public and educational institutions, to be replaced with all manner of delusion, perversion, corruption, violence, decadence, and insanity. (more…)
Michael Brown’s book is available in Kindle format for only $.99.
The book uses Evangelical/Pentecostal language, but its call to holy living, as a prerequisite to opening the windows and power of heaven, parallels closely to what we hear at General Conference.
Free Kindle reading apps are available for Windows, MacOS, iOS and Android.
… believing that religion is a botched attempt to explain the world … is like seeing ballet as a botched attempt to run for a bus.
Would you like to sin
With Elinor Glyn
On a tiger skin?
Or would you prefer
To err with her
On some other fur?
–Robin Fisher Cisne
Oh! all of you poor single men,
Don’t ever give up in despair,
For there’s always a chance while there’s life
To capture the hearts of the fair.
No matter what may be your age,
You always may cut a fine dash,
You will suit all the girls to a hair
If you’ve only got a moustache,
A moustache, a moustache,
If you’ve only got a moustache.
–Also sprach Stephen Foster
I recently came to the surprising realization that there are important commonalities between the religious principles of Jordan Peterson and those of the Mormon Transhumanists. Surprising to me, at least, because I really like Jordan Peterson and find Mormon Transhumanism repellent. (more…)
Family began with the celestial marriage of our Heavenly Parents; by which the primal man and woman became Man – which is the permanent, unfused-yet-inseparable dyad of the complete Man of which men and women are the complementary elements.
Then, and only then, could Family begin – with the engendering of spirit children.
In this metaphysical sense, marriage necessarily precedes family – it is the pre-requisite of children.
Thus true creation also began with a marriage.
We recently had our lesson on the Abrahamic covenant. This inevitably included some discussion of the Binding of Isaac.
Over the past couple of years I have been repeatedly focusing and brooding on the Fourth Gospel (‘John’s’) on the basis that it is the primary and most authoritative source – and on the assumption that it is a wholly coherent work, which ought to be studied in ‘isolation’ from the Synoptics; and which is written both literally and mystically.
I have been astonished again and again by what seems to be said implicitly, but in a manner which I believe to have been perfectly understood at the time and by the intended readership.
In what follows I am not trying to persuade, but simply to state what seems to me the case – at my present level of understanding.
The Restoration is notable for its emphasis on the importance of marriage and family to the Christian life; aspects which are generally thought to be missing from the Gospels. But the more I read and think about the Fourth Gospel, from Chapter 10 onwards; the more I perceive of marriage and family.
What the Gospel seems to be telling me concerns Jesus’s increasing involvement with the family from Bethany with Lazarus and Mary as siblings. My understanding that the raised-Lazarus is the author of the Fourth Gospel – the Beloved Disciple; that the episode of Mary of Bethany anointing the feet of Jesus with spikenard was a mystical marriage ceremony; and that Mary Magdalene is the same person as Mary of Bethany – after her marriage to Jesus.
While there seems no way I could prove these three assumptions, they cohere wonderfully with the subsequent events of the Gospel. That Jesus is described as loving both Lazarus and the Beloved Disciple – and that we do not hear of Lazarus’s fate, by that name.
The fact that the Beloved Disciple does not abandon Jesus after the arrest as do the other disciple (Jesus being now Lazarus’s brother by marriage); the presence of the Beloved Disciple and Magdalene at the foot of the cross, and Jesus’s request that his mother be cared for by this family of whom Jesus is now a part; the presence of Magdalene at the tomb and her interactions with the risen Christ – the fact she is the first to see the risen Christ, and that she touches him; and the last episodes of the Gospel including the implication that the Beloved Disciple will live until the Second Coming – which is possible since he has been raised from the dead – probably literally resurrected. (This chimes with the Pharisees desire to kill Lazarus, but apparently not being able to.)
If my three assumptions are accepted, then Chapters 11-21 of the Fourth Gospel take-on a marvellous extra dimension of which the above are only a part. I suppose that these facts were not mentioned explicitly because they were known to the intended readers, at the time of writing.
If we return to the principle of coherence – then the incompleteness of the account of Lazarus’s fate is simply that he becomes referred to as the Beloved Disciple – what, then, of Mary Magdalene – what became of her? Why is she never written of again?
My current best idea is that the exchange with Mary at the tomb implies that she would join Jesus after he had ascended – she presumably being translated to Heaven. “Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father” means therefore: stop touching me just now – we will be able to touch one another when I am ascended “unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and to your God.” Such a form of address seeming appropriate to the wife of Jesus; in the sense that God has become by mystical marriage (ie. full and final celestial marriage) her Father ‘in Law’, and her God – in the same kind of direct way as for Jesus.
I am aware that this must sound wildly speculative, indeed irresponsible, to most Christians; but although I may well be wrong, I think this interpretation is at least consistent with the Restored theology. The fact that such an understanding was ‘missed’ for 1800 years perhaps explains why the Restoration was necessary on the one hand; and on the other hand it provides a plausible Biblical grounding for some of the major substantive developments revealed by Joseph Smith.
Matt Walsh’s views on the sexual revolution also have a “The results are in, so how has that all worked out?” perspective.
Let’s Try Saving Sex For Marriage. Clearly, The Other Way Isn’t Working.
You Feel Violated After Casual Sex Because You Degraded Yourself. Not Because It Was Rape.
He uses simple and clear language to describe things, much as Dr. Miriam Grossman in her youtube videos. His essays show that it’s not just a religious matter. There are common sense reasons and real human psychology in play.
You parents may wish to preview those two articles, and maybe a couple more by Matt, to see if they could fortify your own children, and give them the word-armor and word-ammo to not only stand firm, but be a positive influence on their peers.
