Thursday, February 01, 2024

where we're headed



Over the last several years, we've undergone a shift in how we operate as a family. We're coming to what we hope is a better understanding of how the Christian life should be lived, particularly in our increasingly pagan western world that is largely helped along by an anemic and dare-we-say-it incompetent church. Ours is an apostate culture that has rejected Christ, and in its place there is a resurgence of ancient paganism. All the big talking points of our culture are modern expressions of ancient pagan practices. Pro-choice Molechites delight in the child sacrifice of abortion, and those who have embraced the sexual rebellion, transgenderism, etc. are nothing more than woodwork Asherites. Our American culture used to be largely Christian, but by the time my wife and I were in high school, the positivity of Christianity became neutral. It wasn't bad to be a Christian, but it wasn't good, either. Our culture was beginning to drift away from Christ, and it needed to be reminded of its historic roots. Fast forward to today, and our culture has completely shorn itself from its Christian foundation and is gleefully hostile to God and His people. The question becomes, 'How should a Christian family operate in such a situation?' In the 90s you could argue that the best approach with culture was being winsome, being an example, showing people the goodness of the Christian life; now, however, we are faced with pure warfare on a spiritual level, and the paganism of our culture - its feminism, its sexual license, its child sacrifice, its rejection of truth and beauty - is doing everything in its power, from social media to state sponsorship, to woo our children to its side.

The church hasn't helped. We've aimed to convert people by being winsome and relatable, and in the process most churches have succumbed to the propaganda. It was just a few years ago that our local Crossroads evangelical church hosted a guest preacher who quoted scripture on homosexuality and affirmed the biblical teaching against it, and people - including many in the congregation! - lost their minds. Many churches, for fear of pushing people away with hard truths, have loved them - and their congregants - to hell. We need to acknowledge where the church has gone wrong, and we need to make sure our kids know it - because people claiming to be Christian are deceived and won't tell them the truth. Fathers have passed the buck of religious education to the church, and the church has failed to prepare youth for the propaganda and warfare of pagan culture; the result is that youth are leaving the church in droves. Out of all the youth at Southwest in the early 2000s when I was a high schooler, only a handful have remained openly Christian; and most of those I was friends with at CCU have gone apostate. We cannot continue to operate as we have been.

Perceiving all this, years ago I began taking my family in a different direction, and we changed a lot about how we operate. Here are a few things we've embraced to be a more consistently Christian household:
(1) We joined a solid biblical church with sound doctrinal teachings, strong community, proper administration of the sacraments, and church discipline. We have been adamant about not missing Sunday worship except in extreme circumstances (debilitating sicknesses or lack of a vehicle). 

(2) We pulled our daughters out of public schools which are openly hostile to Christ.

(3) We have been catechizing our children. We subscribe to the Westminster Confessions, which are conveyed through the Larger, Shorter, and Children's catechisms. The Larger Catechism is geared towards adults and seasoned believers, the Shorter Catechism towards older children or new converts, and the Children's Catechism is geared towards children ten and under (Naomi is doing great!). 

(4) We practice family worship or family devotions that include reading Scripture, talking about it, and praying together. This is a subset of our continued evolution in grafting traditional Christian practices into our family's rhythm.

One of the reasons we joined East River Church in Batavia is that we saw the writing on the wall. We moved out of West Chester and into the foothills of Appalachia after two years plugged into that community. Since joining East River, we've grown close to several families who are serious about the Bible and living traditional Christian lives, have been afforded a deep well of theological truth in the Reformed tradition, and have been learning how to hopefully raise our daughters to be strong Christian women. This wasn't a hasty decision, and we weren't fleeing anything. I had been moving into the Reformed camp for a while, and I'd grown disillusioned with the lack of depth, lack of church discipline, and empty theological traditions of the standard Church of Christ churches. Our shift to homeschooling happened because we saw Chloe's 7th grade homework during the remote learning of that first year of covid-19; the propaganda machine was heavy at work, and suddenly the 'conspiracy videos' on TikTok and Reddit didn't seem so farfetched. What does English literature have to do with transgenderism? Apparently much, for Chloe's literature class was promoting transgenderism to seventh graders! As icing on the cake, for Religious Week, no Christians were allowed to preach the gospel or present their beliefs, but the students were taught to recite Muslim prayers. It was madness.

My wife and I have been doing a lot of learning on what the Bible says for families. We've been looking at the issue from the perspective of covenant households. The idea of a covenant household is found in scripture, and it teaches that what is true of the father (or mother, in some cases) is true of the household as well. As a believing household, we are a covenant household, which means we are part of God's covenant with all the attending privileges and responsibilities. This understanding of covenant households is leading us towards paedobaptism, which is baptizing our children as covenant members due to their belonging to my household. Of course, this understanding of baptism is markedly different from that which is found in Baptist or Church of Christ churches, but it has deep theological and historical precedence, and can be traced back to the early church as the normative practice (credobaptism as we know it today didn't emerge until the 1600s!). 

As the covenant head of my household, I am the leader, the decision-maker, charged with leading and protecting my family in all aspects, particularly when it comes to religion. My wife is to be submissive and helpful, and her main task is guarding and keeping the home. It is my responsibility to raise my daughters to know biblical truth, to know what God expects of them, and to prepare them for the propaganda of the world and tough challenges to their faith. So I have to ask, what are the biggest obstacles they will face? Here are just a few that are prominent in our culture:
(1) The sexual license of our culture. Our daughters need to know what the Bible says about fornication, sodomy, LBTQ ideology, transgenderism, modesty, etc. And it is my job to enforce these principles in my household.

(2) The selective pluralism of our culture. Our culture teaches that all religions are equal except one (Christianity). We need to stand fast against pluralism and relativism. Christianity is true; all other worldviews and religions are wrong, foolish, and to be disdained as falsehoods. 

(3) The infanticide of our culture. Abortion is the murder of innocent children, and the Bible expressly condemns it under all circumstances.

(4) Feminism. 

The fourth point - feminism - is particularly geared towards my daughters. Feminism is rampant in the church; people think it is no issue if a woman devotes herself to a career, refuses to marry and have children, or chooses both a career and children. The Bible - not to mention sociology, psychology, and biology - says that women are made for bearing and raising children. The greatest goal for a woman is to have children and be a keeper of the home. That is the glorious telos of woman, and this was known and celebrated for 6000 years until about five minutes ago. Feminist propaganda has convinced even Christian women that homemaking is old-fashioned, and liberal theologians do acrobatics to get around the plain teachings of Scripture in this regard. As faithful Christians, we promote this end goal and celebrate it - and we need to guard our daughters and educate them about God's good design. This is why we aren't promoting or paying for collages (which are just bastions of pagan propaganda, and that goes for most Christian colleges as well), but we will pay for them to get certifications or licenses outside of college within the confines of something that will help them in their natural nature. 

So how do I prepare my daughters as they grow up in the faith to live in a world hostile to Christ?
(1) I teach them biblical truth.

(2) I expose the lies and wickedness of pagan culture.

(3) My wife and I model Christian living - I am to be a joyful and firm husband, and my wife is to be a joyful and submissive wife. We are to show the beauties of the Christian covenant household; that beauty is the best antidote to our corrupt culture. This ties in with exposing the despair and emptiness of paganism: if paganism was so great, why did pagans convert to Christianity in droves? The resurgence of paganism indicates that we have forgotten its failures to deliver what it promises.

(4) I need to be selective about their influences, even their Christian influences. It is easy to say that you are a Christian, but do you live it? I don't want my daughters looking up to people who claim the name Christian but who have succumbed to the feminist lie.

Wednesday, January 03, 2024

the year in books


~  History and Religion  ~















~  Historical Fiction  ~



















~  Modern Fiction  ~
















Monday, January 01, 2024

books read: 2023

this year I read 94 books! My goal next year is to read less!

~  Nonfiction  ~

HISTORY
  The Roman Revolution (Nick Holmes, 2022)
  The Fall of Rome (Bryan Ward-Perkins, 2005)
  Scipio Africanus: Greater Than Napoleon (B. H. Liddell Hart, 2004)
  Justinian's Flea (William Rosen, 2008)
  The History of the Medieval World (Susan Wise Bauer, 2010)
  Life in a Medieval Village (Francis Gies, 1975)
  Victory of the West (Niccolò Capponi, 2006)
  The Greatest Knight (Thomas Asbridge, 2014)
  The Glory of the Crusades (Steve Weidenkopf, 2014)
  A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain (Marc Morris, 2008)
  Marco Polo: His Travels and Adventures (George Makepeace Towle, 1880)
  Worldly Saints (Leland Ryken, 1986)
  A Helmet for My Pillow (Robert Leckie, 1957)
  Rampage: MacArthur, Yamashita, and the Battle of Manila (James M. Scott, 2018)
  The War Below (Scott, 2013)
  Goodbye, Darkness (William Manchester, 1980)
  With the Old Breed (Eugene Sledge, 1981)
  Hiroshima (John Hersey, 1946)
  Plutarch's Lives
    Theseus
    Romulus
    Lycurgus
    Numa Pompilius
    Solon
    Poplicola 
  Nick Needham's 2000 Years of Christ's Power 
    The Early Church (2016)
    The Middle Ages (2016)
    Renaissance and Reformation (2016)
RELIGION
  Thoughts for Young Men (J.C. Ryle, 1886)
  The Gospel of Jesus Christ (Paul Washer, 2016)
  Commentary on Galatians (John Calvin, 16th century)
  Commentary on 1 and 2 Thessalonians (Calvin, 16th century)
  Essential Truths of the Christian Faith (R.C. Sproul, 2021)
  Salvation Belongs to the Lord (John Frame, 2006)
  The Case for Heaven (Lee Strobel, 2020)
  When Watchers Ruled the Nations (Brian Godawa, 2020)
  Giants: Sons of the Gods (Douglas Van Dorn, 2013)
  Chosen by God (Sproul, 1984)
  Prayer Changes Things (Charles L. Allen, 1964)
  Developing a Healthy Prayer Life (James and Joel Beeke, 2010)
  On the Christian Life (Calvin, 16th century)
  The Boniface Option (Andrew Isker, 2023)
  Post-Christian (Gene Veith, 2020)
  The Return of the Gods (Jonathan Cahn, 2002)
  Origins Controversies
    The Genesis Flood Revisited (Andrew Snelling, 2022)
    Biblical Geology 101 (Michael J. Oard, 2021)
    The New Creationism (Paul A. Garner, 2009)
    The Young Earth (John Morris, 2007)
    The Global Flood: Best Evidences (Ham & Snelling, 2009)




~  Fiction  ~

HISTORICAL FICTION
  Noah Primeval (Godawa, 2011)
  The Priest: Aaron (Francine Rivers, 2004)
  Clash of Empires (Ben Kane, 2018)
  Centurion (Simon Scarrow, 2007)
  The Gladiator (Scarrow, 2009)
  Holy Warrior (Angus Donald, 2010)
  The Bastard (John Jakes, 1977)
  The Rebels (Jakes, 1975)
  Redcoat (Bernard Cornwell, 1987)
  Rise to Rebellion (Jeff Shaara, 2001)
  Cain at Gettysburg (Ralph Peters, 2012)
  The Old Lion (Shaara, 2023)
  The Iceman (P.T. Deutermann, 2018)
  The Last Paladin (Deutermann, 2022)
  Cross of Iron (Willi Heinrich, 1956)
  A Gentleman in Moscow (Amor Towles, 2016)
  Thin Red Line (James Jones, 1962)
  Tales of the South Pacific (James Michener, 1947)
  The Frozen Hours (Jeff Shaara, 2017)
  Fields of Fire (Jim Webb, 1978)
MODERN FICTION
  20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Jules Verne, 1870)
  The Passenger (Cormac McCarthy, 2022)
  The Sentinel (Lee Child, 2020)
  Salem's Lot (Stephen King, 1975)
  The Long Walk (King, 1979)
  Christine (King, 1983
  Later (King, 2021)
  The Outsider (King, 2018)
  Motor City Blue (Loren D. Estleman, 1980)
  The Mediterranean Caper (Clive Cussler, 1973)
  The Chase (Cussler, 2010)
  Iceberg (Cussler, 1975)
  Mirage (Cussler, 2012)
  Science Fiction and Fantasy
    By Schism Rent Asunder (David Weber, 2008)
    On Basilisk Station (Weber, 1993)
    Hunter's Run (George R.R. Martin, 2007)
    Lost in Time (A.G. Riddle, 2022)
    The Call of the Bone Ships (R.J. Barker, 2020)
    Red Country (Joe Abercrombie, 2012)
    The Poppy War (R.F. Kuang, 2018)
    Animorphs #16: The Warning (1998)
    Animorphs #17: The Underground (1998)
    Animorphs #18: The Decision (1998)
  American Westerns
   To the River's End (Johnstone, 2022)
   Blood on the Divide (Johnstone, 1992)
   Outlaw Country (Johnstone, 2021)
   The Book of Murdock (Loren D. Estleman, 2010)
   Journey of the Dead (Estleman, 1998)
   Gun Man (Estleman, 1985)
   Horseman, Pass By (Larry McMurtry, 1961)
   The Oregon Trail (Ralph Compton, 1995)
   The Dark Horse (Craig Johnson, 2009)
   Carry the Wind (Terry C. Johnston, 1982)


Saturday, December 02, 2023

the reformation [III]



I'm about halfway through my second twelve-week circuit of a revamped 'Reformation' wherein I put focus on gaining strength and caring not too much about what my weight looks like (within reason). I'm doing a 'clean bulk,' pushing the weights hard 3-4 times a week and consuming on average about 250 calories over my TDEE. On my first 12-week circuit I ate right around Maintenance at 2000 average calories a day; for the past five weeks I've been consuming around 2250 a day. On the first circuit I went from 159.5 to 160.5#; right now, five weeks in to the clean bulk, I have gone from 160.5# to 163.5#, for a total of three pounds gained; in a clean bulk you want to gain anywhere between .5-1 pound a week, so I'm right in the sweet spot, gaining around .75 pounds each week.

In my last Reformation post, the plan laid out was to continue eating around Maintenance and continue slowly gaining muscle without putting on any fat. After much consideration, I decided to scrap that and do a clean bulk. One of my concerns was putting on more fat around my waistline; I've always had a belly thanks to bullheaded Prussian genetics, and I was afraid about that getting more severe. Eventually I came to the conclusion that abs are for high school boys, and the wife likes my belly, so what's the big deal? I'll continue the clean bulk for a while, with the aim of not going over 175#. Once I hit 175# (at this rate that would be another 13 weeks, around the end of February and beginning of March), I'll engage a slow cutting phase at 1750-1850 calories a day leading into the summer. 

Tuesday, October 31, 2023

The Boniface Option: Potent Quotables

'[The] homosexual is both the apex consumer and the easiest personality to manipulate and lord over. Therefore the gayness of Trashworld is our rulers’ social engineering of the population to create the exact same ethos of the homosexual in everyone, regardless of their sexual tastes. They want you to be spiritually homosexual whether or not they can make you actually homosexual. They want everyone uprooted and alone. They want you to be only concerned with satisfying your immediate desires. They do not want you to care about the future. They do not want you to have children. They want your entire purpose in life to be “Consume today, for tomorrow we die.”' (10)

'If the Christian has a passionate love for the truth of God’s Word, the goodness of God’s justice, and the beauty of holiness, he will necessarily have an intense hatred of the lies, injustice, and sin.' (20)

'They want children stripped away from loyalty to their parents as much as possible, which they accomplish through public education. Loyalty to parents is severed, and loyalty to (usually) popular culture is mediated through peers or, in the worst cases, the ideology of the regime mediated through teachers is established. From there, most go to college to be physically separated from their parents totally, in addition to being spiritually and emotionally severed. There they are presented with a Pleasure Island where hedonism and sexual exploration are the carrot to the stick of ideological cajoling by leftist, anti-Christian faculty. The individual, who was once part of an organic whole, part of a family, a people, and a place, is now separated and stripped bare of all other loyalties and loves and made a tabula rasa, a willing vessel for the religion and culture of the globohomo world order.' (21)


'From before he could speak until he became an adult, he has watched tens of thousands of sermons shaping and forming his heart to love Trashworld. We don’t recognize them as sermons because we think they are religiously neutral TV shows and movies, but they are fundamentally not mere entertainment, but religious training. Here you are trained to believe that all of those that came before you were stupid, close-minded, bigoted, barbaric, and superstitious. All of Chesterton’s fences are torn down; every tradition that formed you both as an individual and member of a people or nation is either removed or looked upon with deep suspicion. You are trained to believe you are a total blank slate. All your beliefs, everything your heart holds to be true, good, and beautiful, you believe you have formed as a totally independent, free-thinker (when, in reality, they have been carefully crafted by insidious social engineers to make you the apex consumer).' (23)

'The globohomo cinematic universe that the modern bugman lives in must be chopped down. All of it is a seamless garment. Trannies, open borders, acceptance and promotion of sodomy and other sexual perversion, feminism, abortion and antinatalism, anti-white race hate (so-called Critical Race Theory), pornography, and the entire consumerist lifestyle are a single Donar’s Oak that must be sent through a woodchipper.' (24)

'The need of the hour is to teach especially Christians to hate the fake and gay globohomo cinematic universe. You must despise it. You must learn to reject it for the fakery that it is. It is a world that is not real. It is a world designed to make you reject the faith of your fathers. It is a world designed to make you an Esau, selling your birthright for a mess of pottage.' (25)

'Every sociological statistic signaling cultural destruction has risen exponentially in this period. Divorce, out-of-wedlock birth, decline in marriage rates, decline in birthrates, single-parent homes, etc. have all skyrocketed as the traditional household was broken up.' (30)

'[The] lifestyle that is idealized and glamorized and highly sought after by all—the cosmopolitan, independent, urbane, hip, affluent young person free from all responsibility—is one you must learn to hate. That is the end to which the murder of children, the abandonment of all sexual mores, and the destruction of the household is dedicated: so that you can live on Pleasure Island without ever turning into a donkey. That is what the pro-life movement consistently fails to recognize, the end to which the murder of babies is sought. People murder their offspring because they want to enjoy this fake and gay world, but in order for Christendom to return, it is a world that you must learn to hate. The “nice things” we are desperate to enjoy are the chains that keep us trapped in this world, and you must learn to associate them with everything you are fighting against.' (34)

'We are totally awash in despair. There has never been more depression, anxiety, mind-altering SSRI use, illegal drug use, drug overdoses, and suicide than there is today. Think about the comparison to our current standard of living to the past. Think of all the times when suffering and death were an ever-present specter haunting every moment of each man’s existence—the innumerable periods of war, famine, and disease, such as when the Black Death was killing one third of the population of Europe in the thirteenth century. Are we any happier today than these men? If anything, despite living in widespread material conditions as close to a utopian state as any time in human history, we are the most depressed, anxious, and tormented people who have ever lived. We have been all but liberated from material constraints yet have never been more miserable.' (40)

'[The] strong bonds of friendship among men, that very thing that both builds cities and also conquers them, has been made lurid and an object of derision. Close male friendships with intense expressions of love, like Frodo and Sam, David and Jonathan, Alexander and Hephaestion, or Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed, are assumed by the porn-addled brains of bugmen to of course be homosexual. It is not just because the bugman is hypersexualized and cannot fathom any kind of love but the erotic; it is also because they have never experienced anything like love from another man. They are like men who only drink from a fetid swamp encountering fresh, spring water. This is why they attack it.' (41)

'We live in an anti-polis, something that increasingly looks like a collection of millions of random and anonymous individuals, not one single individual with a relationship with others beyond what is necessary for bare economic utility. Would not a place like this be awash with anguish, depression, anxiety, mental illness, drug use, suicide, and other deaths of despair?' (42)

'But as much as modern man deludes himself into believing he has killed God and set himself upon His throne, he has hilariously fallen short. Shaving down the cartilage in a man’s Adam’s apple, giving him silicone breast implants and female hormones, and removing his genitals and replacing them with a rotting, putrefied, permanently open wound—which is only possible with antibiotics that already have rapidly diminishing returns—does not transform a man into a woman. It only creates a horribly disfigured man. It is putting a man in a dress and makeup, and stuffing a brassiere with tissues, but with several extra and irreversible steps.' (56)

'Any and all boundaries that God has made immutable are the object of the idolator’s fury.' (58)

'The idolatries of the ancient world and modern age are the same in that they both seek to invoke the power of their demon gods to transgress the immutable boundaries God has set. Compare a pagan to the denizen of Trashworld. Imagine a Germanic woman offering her firstborn to Odin for a good harvest and houseful of children. Compare this to a twenty-first century American woman offering her firstborn to Mammon so she can keep sending emails all day between Bumble dates and margaritas. The only difference between the two is that the latter gives up her soul for far less in return. They will do heinous, unspeakable things because they cannot bear the fact that God has made the world the way that He has made it; He has set us within impassable mountains and the deceitful gods promise a way over them.' (58)

'As the late thinker Roger Scruton said, “In discussing tradition, we are not discussing arbitrary rules and conventions. We are discussing answers that have been discovered to enduring questions. These answers are tacit, shared, embodied in social practices and inarticulate expectations.”' (77)

'You have to understand that this battle is not a materialistic one. In fighting the idols of this age, you are not fighting against flesh and blood, you are fighting against principalities and powers, against the rulers of this age, against the dark hosts in the heavenly places. You don’t fight such a war at the ballot box or even with rifles and tanks. You fight it by drawing near to the presence of God on the Lord’s Day offering yourself as a living sacrifice cut up by the priestly two-edged sword of His Word and burned up by the fire of His Spirit. You are doing battle against the demons that animate this hideous dystopia you live in. That is how you have to understand worship. You are drawing near to the Triune God this Trashworld is at war with. He is feeding you from His Word and at His Table, and God and His people are dropping fifty-megaton bombs on the gates of Hades. You are chopping down the shrines of demons and building Christendom out of the lumber.' (79)

'A household is a micro-nation. A household, like individual men and individual women, has a distinct telos. It exists for a purpose, to pursue a particular goal. Unlike the nuclear-family arrangement of the postwar era, it does not exist merely to perpetuate existence. Producing and raising up future generations is one function of the household, but it is not the only function of it. Our first parents were told to fill the earth and subdue it. The household is the basic unit of conquest.' (82)

'The entire force of a multibillion-dollar media and entertainment propaganda regime has been employed for generations to psyops men and women into despising the things God has designed them to love. God designed men to love their wives and their children and to desire so intensely to have a wife and sons and daughters that he would kill and die for them. Generations of psychological and social conditioning has diverted the course of this great river of passion to flow instead to cheap consumer goods, vapid entertainment, and pornography. The deep passion has been turned inward to create innumerable legions of narcissists. A similar thing has happened to women, the fury of a mother whose child is threatened has also been turned inward and directed against the object she was designed to protect—her child—if that child threatens access to brunch. The womb, the very place of comfort, protection, and safety, has been turned into a slaughterhouse. The thing God has created us to love and protect has been turned into an object of hatred, because powerful forces have manipulated the lusts of the masses.' (84)

'The boomer might well be right that the millennial and zoomer just doesn’t have the work ethic his generation has, but he does not consider how much greater that work ethic was rewarded in his day (and how disincentivized it is today). Things are quite a bit harder than they were in 1975. This did not happen by accident. The people who rule our society have chosen to create these conditions.' (86)

'You must give up pretensions that you will have a life as comfortable as the boomers enjoyed, but a good life where you can support your wife and your children is attainable if you carefully plan for it.' (86)

'Industrialization of our food supply is a blessing to the extent that it efficiently delivers calories to an ever-increasing population, but these processes that produce food at such a massive scale have introduced kinds of foods and changes to nutrition that have never been seen before in human history. Whether good or bad, we have only seen food production like this for only one or two full generations, and it is no coincidence that we have had an exponential rise in obesity.' (105)

'Could replacing animal fat in our diet with a thing that a hundred years ago was only fit to be used as paint thinner—seed oils—be a significant cause of what is making us both flabby and ill, sapping us of all masculine energy? What if our entire food supply is designed not to provide the necessary nutrition to sustain life, but primarily to increase the consumption of food and thereby increase profits?' (106)

'The fact remains that we live in an age of universal deceit. They have told you that the foods that made your ancestors healthy and strong—eggs, red meat, butter—are all killing you. These are lies. They want you to live in a gnostic fantasy world where your sustenance is totally divorced from the created order: you will eat industrial sludge derived from soybeans and insects and you will love it—or else. They do not want you to consume foods that have come from the animals God gave us to both rule over and to thankfully feast on.' (106)

'By ripping the deep-seated, natural, creational desire to marry and have children from women, by leveling all distinctions between man and woman, and by reducing women to mere human beings, do the masters of this decrepit age make normal, peaceful, well-ordered human life impossible. If you destroy the femininity of woman, if you mangle what it means to be a wife, if you contort and disfigure motherhood, you have transformed the womb and the household into a factory for the production of bugmen.' (111)

'In order to conform such passages to Trashworld, the bugman has to say Paul was just wrong, or he must assert that any moral instruction in the Bible is dependent upon cultural context and therefore we can pick and choose what is valid or he must contort and manipulate it so badly through super-academic, crafty exegesis that only the most respectable scholars can even begin to sift through, showing that Paul is not really giving any instruction at all that anyone without decades of training in the minutiae of Greek grammar can ever hope to discern. But the plain teaching of the Bible is very clear: widowed young women should marry, have children, manage a household, and live a godly, Christian life. And if that is his instruction to young widows, how easy it to apply to young women in general! It was simply assumed by the apostle that this is what young women ordinarily did; they got married, had children, and managed households.' (113)

'That is the point that must be brought home in the clearest terms possible: our daughters are given the option of being wives and mothers and builders of households that will bring forth a glorious heritage for generations to come or being receptacles for the seed of a hundred different men. What were they created to be? Which option gives them dignity, purpose, and fulfillment? To birth, feed, nurture, and raise up new people and bring greater and greater glory to her household or to be a meat-puppet sex toy for countless random men who will give her rapidly diminishing attention after her twenty-eighth birthday? This is what must be presented to our young women and our daughters: that the options before you are either household or harlotry.' (115)

'To teach your daughters to hate those enticements, you must make your own household a place of deep joy. It must be a refuge from the disgusting world of filth. A place your daughters would give their lives to replicate. If your household is a place of strife, a place they cannot wait to flee from, no matter how much time, effort, and wealth you expend to raise your child in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, you are doing the job of Trashworld and you may as well sign your daughter up for OnlyFans yourself. Every single thing you do in raising your daughters, whether you do it well or poorly, is a tiny step closer to her answering the ultimate question of what she will do with her life: household or harlotry? You must be present and give her the attention you don’t even realize she craves. Every second you devote your focus to your daughter is an investment that will bear a ten-thousandfold return. Even when your daughter is in diapers, every moment you consciously devote to her is more money in the bank directing her toward a life that is in conformity with the order of the world that God created, and away from the promiscuous, degenerate anti-life of Trashworld.' (117)

'God has called you to spend the one life that He has given you to work to rebuild Christian civilization within your sphere of influence; to build strong brotherhoods with other men committed to doing the same; to shape your body, mind, and soul into being the kind of men capable of overthrowing empires; and to set your spirit on fire with the very same flame that once engulfed most of the planet in the glories of Christendom.' (127)

'Aaron Renn has offered a threefold schema that he calls Positive World, Neutral World, and Negative World. 1 In short, Positive World is where the Christian religion is viewed as a social positive, i.e., if you are publicly known as a Christian, this will be beneficial to your social status and career. Whereas in Neutral World, your public faith is neither beneficial nor detrimental, and in Negative World it is entirely detrimental to your social status and economic prospects.' (128)

'The single greatest problem with The Benedict Option, is that there is nowhere left to run. Globohomo is totalizing. Globohomo seeks to dominate every square inch of the planet. The answer is not to run and hide and await martyrdom. The answer is a Christianity that is equally aggressive and expansionary. Jesus Christ commanded His church to make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them and teaching them all that He has commanded to do (Matt. 28: 18–20). Trashworld is a bizzaro version of the Great Commission, one that seeks to repudiate the Christian discipleship of the nations, to cast off their baptism, and to subvert all that Christ has commanded. This is not something you can run and hide from.' (130)

'We are discipled in a passive-aggressive, emasculated, individualistic, consumeristic, therapeutic Christianity that abhors confrontation of any kind. It should come as no surprise that “Why don’t we just fight back?” is a thought that has not even remotely crossed the mind of our most important social critics. We are taught to believe that the bearing of Jesus Christ, and the bearing that we therefore as Christians must adopt, is that of Fred Rogers of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. The Christian man must always be calm, friendly, and, above all else, nonconfrontational. That is what it means to be Christlike, according to contemporary evangelicalism. But this of course runs contrary to the actual Jesus Christ as He is presented in the Gospels. Yes, Jesus was the very model of patience and kindness to those who were in desperate need of grace and mercy, but nearly everywhere He went He also faced incredibly hostile opposition that He manfully and assertively confronted. Contemporary American Christianity loves the sweetness and gentleness of Jesus, but has rejected His fierceness and ferocity, almost redacting it from the Bible.' (130)

Saturday, October 14, 2023

the reformation [II]



12 Week Recap. I've completed my first 12-week circuit of weight-lifting and dialed-in nutrition, and I'm pleased with the results. I have set multiple personal records and am already looking 'buffer' (as my wife says). I haven't taken actual before-and-after measurements (beyond what shows up in the mirror and on the scale), but as I've only gained one pound, it's safe to say that I've increased muscle mass while losing fat. I've been meticulous in cutting my alcohol consumption, watching my macros (I averaged around 130-160 grams of protein a day), and have kept records of my caloric intake. This has enabled me to establish baselines for the next twelve weeks. Below are some dietary records (left here for posterity's sake, as I wish I had recorded them earlier for ease-of-access):

First 12 Weeks: 159.5# to 160.5# [1 pound weight gain]
Average daily caloric intake ~2000
Week 1 2050 calories per day   159.5 pounds
Week 2 1875                             158.5
Week 3 2115                             159.9
Week 4 2300                             161.6
Week 5 2000                             160.7
Week 6 1750                             159.7
Week 7 1875                             159.5
Week 8 2200                             161
Week 9 1950                             160.4
Week 10 1975                           159.8
Week 11 2125                           161.5
Week 12 1850                           160.5

Based on these measurements, I'm able to make the following deductions:
1850 or below results in WEIGHT LOSS
2000 results in MAINTENANCE
2100 or more results in WEIGHT GAIN

The Next 12 WeeksThus ends my first 12 week circuit. Next week is a deload week - reduced intensity and volume to give my body some much-needed recovery time before my next 12 week gauntlet - and then I'll begin afresh. While I've debated with increasing my caloric intake a smidgeon and going balls-to-the-wall with muscle growth, I'm leaning towards maintaining my 1800-2000 daily caloric range to slowly put on muscle while cutting down fat. I'm content with gaining some weight, but I hope to keep at or under 165# by the turn of the New Year. 

As far as an exercise regimen, I am going to continue alternating between heavy days and lighter eccentric days, while also incorporating more handle-band routines. I'm building chin-ups and pull-ups into my regular routines and am going to give more focus to isolation exercises for my chest and shoulders. The last 12 weeks were predominantly barbell-oriented with chest and shoulders, and I want to change that up; at the same time, I want to incorporate barbells more frequently into my arm workouts. I need to be more consistent with my chest and calves, and I'm going to be troubleshooting my upper leg workouts - due to bad knee joints, it's been difficult to find something that doesn't result in me waking up gasping in pain in the middle of the night, which invariably scares the little ones who end up in bed with us. 


Monday, September 11, 2023

an exorcism

Early last summer I moved my family into a new home closer to our church so we could better engage in the community. Within the first week moving in, things started feeling weird. There was a sense of dread, depression, and anxiety that infused the atmosphere of the place. Everyone felt it and was on edge. 

After a few discoveries while doing deep cleaning, and an informative 1AM visit by the police, we learned that the house had been a renowned heroin den. It was a hub for dealers from two states looking to sell their wares in bulk. A young woman died of an overdose in one of the bedrooms just months before we moved in. Further research via the rabbit hole of Facebook revealed that one of the tenants had been a practicing witch. 

Now a few weeks into our move, our oldest daughter - who always stays up late during the summer as teenagers tend to do - started reporting seeing and hearing odd things. Footsteps in the hall in the middle of the night when she was the only one upstairs; feelings of being watched or with another presence; and occasionally glimpses of what she described as a tall, dark figure with long arms and long fingers that would stand in thresholds and step into other rooms when she jerked her head around. I attributed it to her imagination and detecting patterns in normal house settling sounds (though our middle daughter also heard the footsteps), but I became skeptical of a 'rational' interpretation when I started having experiences of my own. I get up around 4-5A most mornings for coffee, scripture reading, and Zen time - we have little kids, so it's difficult to get this time when they are awake, and by the end of the day I'm beat - and after getting my coffee and retreating to the living room, I would return to the kitchen to find all the cupboards inexplicably opened. This happened a few times, and it started getting under my skin.

My wife - who has always mocked the idea of haunted houses and the like - started getting her own creepy feelings and hearing odd things in the middle of the night, usually around 3AM, for what it's worth. I decided to reach out tot the elders of our church and request a house blessing. Most of our elders came and blessed the home; we prayed, read Psalm 91 (what has been termed an 'exorcism psalm'), and they blessed the house. When we stepped back into the home, the atmosphere was different; everyone in my family reported that it felt more peaceful, like something that was previously there was now gone. My middle daughter, who had been refusing to sleep in her new room and was camping out on the sofa next to our bedroom, told us that night she was ready for her own room. There have been no more footsteps, opened cupboards, or phantasms in the middle of the night. 

I'm not well schooled in exorcisms, or demonology, or spirits, but I am confident that there was a tenant in this home who had not moved out.


where we're headed

Over the last several years, we've undergone a shift in how we operate as a family. We're coming to what we hope is a better underst...