Updated / Apostasy is cruel. Not only does it walk “the broad way which leads to eternal destruction” (Matthew 7:13), but increasingly, in an age of bewilderment and despair, it leads straightway to temporal destruction as well, whether from AIDS, Fentanyl, euthanasia, or death by one’s own hand. Apostasy is cruel because, as St. Paul says, when the “trumpet” of Truth gives an “uncertain sound,” (1 Cor. 14:8) none are prepared for the real battle, in the real War, and the casualties must, perforce, be great.*

Since Vatican II, the Church has been sending out “uncertain” and contradictory signals. Many people, in consequence, have become exasperated and simply taken flight. They have concluded that there is no “objective” truth. And while that kind of choice must always remain in some degree culpable, perfidious theologians must own the greater guilt. These have all but put out the lights of that great City which Our Lord set on a Hill for all the world to see. A diabolical fog has ascended over that Mountain, and men now are heard to say, “There is no mountain; it was never there!”

“Thinking themselves to be wise, they became fools“.

This, we have been warned, is the work of the “father of lies,” (John 8:44: see 2 Corinthians 11:4) who today, with his diabolical powers, has wrapped darkness around the world in the apostasy of both the Church and the nations. It would appear ithat this is his Hour, the Hour when the Mystical Body of Christ undergoes the brutal anxiety of a new Gethsemane.

God, with a view to separating the wheat from the chaff for a designated time, appears again to be withdrawing the sense delights of His Presence, while His elect, chosen by grace in great tribulation, walks purely by faith in preparation for whatever may come.

“For there must be heresies among you, that they which are approved may be made manifest among you.”— 1 Cor.11:19

The world, in this Night and hour of history, spends its time taunting the Church, openly mocking: “Where is your God?”

Meanwhile man, even in his rebellion against his Maker, cannot suppress his natural desire to be reunited with Him. He remains essentially religious. This is as true for atheists as it is for anybody.

“For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them.” Romans 1:19

But, just as Eve preferred her own judgment to the Word of God, so does the “post-Christian” world arrogate all ultimate judgments to its own metaphysically seditious criteria. This is the Progressive way.

It wants something akin to religion, to be sure; but it will brook no talk of sin, atonement, or eternal judgment. It will allow only the secret gnosis which elevates initiates by their own lights. It will not tolerate a God Who delineates the “what” and “why” of being, who reveals the objective truth, the only truth, and who designates how and where He is to be found. Jn.14:6.

Many of the clergy prefer the duplicitous lies of Progressivism and so speak the language of ambiguity. Or to deceive the humble of heart they say nothing at all. No article of Faith need be denied, it need only be transvalued. Or ignored.

The world, which flatters itself as being post- Christian, is a world that would rather dream its own “spirituality” into being and project it onto the universe. All spirituality must begin and end in man who becomes “the measure of all things” on route to eternal judgment (Heb.9:27).

It is through this dreaming and projecting that the new religious adepts expect to transform what they perceive to be amorphous “being” into their own “Reality.”

Being very similar to the LSD experiences and “trips” of the sixties, it should not surprise us to find that the children issuing from that generation, now firmly holding the reins of business, education, media, the arts and government in the West, are everywhere projecting their hallucinations onto the whole of created being.

Jung

That hallucinating generation, however, despite all of its touted claims to uniqueness, has a very ancient, mixed pedigree, which emerges on close examination into a brew of pelagianism, gnosticism, alchemy, hermeticism, platonism, witchcraft, astrology and Kabbalism. It is, in fine, belief in the essential god-hood of man. Through this fantasy, post-Christian religious man creates his own reality, which is the great “mind-game” of our time. Reality becomes as diverse and as tragically schizoid as those doing the dreaming.

The occultist psychologist, Carl Jung, whom many theologians and clergy have recourse to for “spiritual” sustenance, spent a lifetime speaking of and advocating the distinctly religious significance of such fantasies. In his autobiography, he did not blush to confess to the world that his theories were born of a relationship with literal spirit-guides who led him through the spheres. Did he imagine it? Was it a psychosis? Or was he led by Satan? Whatever the case it lasted a long time.

The fall-out, as a consequence of this kind of “education,” as one might expect, has been enormous and its practical effects ubiquitous. For Jung, to reject his occult teachings indicated ignorance or some degree of mental imbalance, a lack of individuation and spiritual integration. If Freud unleashed the libidinous animal in man, Jung restored his alleged relationship to the Witch Doctor, the Shaman. For both Jung and Freud, man alone was the final ultimate arbiter of truth and reality. Darwin only put the fur on the package.

Others, however, dream of, or dwell in, psychic spaceships which Jung would place among the ancient psychic archetypes which amount to universal, inherited ideas, patterns of thought, or images that are present in the collective spiritual unconscious.. These  search the skies and Internet for UFO’S (even Tucker Carlson). Unlike the Darwinists, who wish to reduce man and reality to materiality, these neo-Gnostic initiates wish to “take flight” from it altogether! The psychic metaphors are telling.

Meanwhile, there are continuing efforts to look for a “unified theory” of everything, a unified theory to overcome the “old” biblical anthropology once and for all and put us in our place in the great evolutionary chain of animal being. For as things stand now we are of no real significance, they teach. We emerge from nothing and return to nothing.

This is the sad inheritance of those who reject the revelation of the God in Christ (Gen. 1-3) who loves, creates, speaks, directs, warns and redeems. C.S. Lewis said of those who say they cannot find God in the universe, it is like failing to find Shakespeare in Hamlet. Indeed.

Lennon, preferring his own Reality, was cold to Christ crucified. Music seduced the world.**

 But “what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. ²⁰ Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse; ²¹ for although they knew God they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking and their senseless minds were darkened. ²² Claiming to be wise, they became fools, ²³ and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man or birds or animals or reptiles.

²⁴ Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, ²⁵ because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed for ever! Amen.”

In my sins I, too, have acted perfidiously. It is time to repent.

SH.

+ See also Futurism and Accelerationism

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* Pope Paul VI: “We would say that, through some mysterious fissure the smoke of Satan has entered the temple of God.  There is doubt, incertitude, problematic, disquiet, dissatisfaction, confrontation.  There is no longer trust of the Church; they trust the first profane prophet who speaks in some journal or some social movement, and they run after him and ask him if he has the formula of true life.  And we are not alert to the fact that we are already the owners and masters of the formula of true life.  Doubt has entered our consciences, and it entered by windows that should have been open to the light.  Science exists to give us truths that do not separate from God, but make us seek him all the more and celebrate him with greater intensity; instead, science gives us criticism and doubt. 

“Scientists are those who more thoughtfully and more painfully exert their minds.  But they end up teaching us:  “I don’t know, we don’t know, we cannot know.”  The school becomes the gymnasium of confusion and sometimes of absurd contradictions.  Progress is celebrated, only so that it can then be demolished with revolutions that are more radical and more strange, so as to negate everything that has been achieved, and to come away as primitives after having so exalted the advances of the modern world.

This state of uncertainty even holds sway in the Church.  There was the belief that after the Council there would be a day of sunshine forthe history of the Church.  Instead, it is the arrival of a day of clouds, of tempest, of darkness, of research, of uncertainty.  We preach ecumenism but we constantly separate ourselves from others.  We seek to dig abysses instead of filling them in.” — Pope Paul VI, 1972

** This seduction of music is powerful, which is why I’ve always liked the song without being naive about the message.

—- Philosopher of Science and Mathematics John Lennox on the true and false in Artificial Intelligence

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