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. 


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...