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End of Days Survivor's Guide with Paul Vander Klay and Jonathan Pageau
I took the notes below while watching this video of Benjamin Boyce hosting a conversation with Paul Vander Klay and Jonathan Pageau. The notes are pretty disjointed, but then so was the conversation. They try to situate the current state of the world in history.
We feel like the end of something is immanent, but compared to the Great Depression, Revolutionary War, War of 1812 this is in some ways the most peaceful time in the history of the world. Still we seem to be losing the glue that holds us together.
Rome held together for a time with a "god-emperor" leadership style. In a way that style never broke down. In later times, German princes fashioned themselves as Roman god-emperors.
Woke attempt to include everything doesn't work.
20 years ago we had Barney The Dinosaur singing "You are special, you are the only one, you are the only one like you." At the same time we have this radical equality and "you are special". Simultaneously "I am oppressed" cannot be deconstructed, but "all are in".
The nakedness of Noah ... there is a sin in colonialism. "We are going to invade your land and pretend we are doing it to help you." The Romans did that too. The post colonial agenda exposed this sin. The problem is how do we deal with that. How do we deal with that nakedness? There is a way to tell the story where you can inhabit the different characters - the good and evil of the colonialists and the good and evil of the colonized. We see the evils of our fathers and we want to destroy everything, but we are hiding our own evils/nakedness while we are attacking the other. Our own evil is going to come out.
With intermarriage almost everyone has a mixed heritage that conflicts with the simple oppression narratives.
The story of Christ cannot be beaten. In church the priest is both the killer and the image of Christ. St. Paul is the identity of a persecutor who unites with the identity of the persecuted. Self sacrifice is the key. St. Paul held the cloaks of the stoners of St. Stephen. St. Paul was stricken later on the road to Damascus. He manifest the colonizer and the tyrant and the killer before he manifest Christ. By analogy does the left need to manifest Antifa before they can bring in their Utopia. The spirit directed Ananias to go minister to Paul after Paul was stricken blind. Ananias didn't want to, but the spirit said he would show Paul how much he has to suffer to be redeemed. There is no release from suffering. Rather suffering can be transformed into glory. In Christianity we are told not to seek suffering, but that suffering will inevitably arrive. The left seems like a broken Christianity. The left and liberal Christianity is all about helping the poor, but it misses Christ's interactions with Judas. Judas protests that the woman washing Jesus' feet with perfume should have spent that money on the poor. Really Judas wanted that money for himself. Now the government has a huge Judas bureaucracy for helping the poor that is in fact in it to help themselves which is where most of the money goes. The poor themselves are being helped a little bit, but its the government itself where much of the money goes.
God is love. We worship by singing, praying, but also by loving others. In the secular world PRIDE has been the god claiming much of the culture's worship. The rainbow flag has been evolving recently to include more marginalized groups.
Instead of patron saints we have patron identities that are celebrated through the calendar year. But celebrating ideas doesn't really work. Nobody really celebrates Earth day or Black History Month. We really celebrate individuals and events. In Christianity everyone is the lowest of sinners. In Wokism, that is only true for whites. St. Frances was intensely aware of his own sin and so was humble towards people far less holy than him. Woke good people do not have original sin and aren't humble in that way. Woke demands to "do the work" are not self aware. It is not true that love means I have to include all the strangers into my house. The left is branding Bret Weinstein and Joe Rogan as fascist Nazis.
Reaction follows Revolution as night follows day. The French Revolution's beheading of the king was followed by the installation of the god-emperor Napoleon. The current riots are going to be followed by a clamp down at some point. Augustus Caesar followed the revolutionary Julius Caesar. At the end of the cold war, we are the empire and there is no outside force to discipline us.
The southern states were founded by colonial drug dealers (tobacco was the drug of choice at the time.) The northern states were settled by Protestant separatists to get away from monarchy. We are still working through the Protestant Reformation and the American and French Revolutions. In America we replaced the King with a Constitution and a set of ideas - a deeply Protestant project. The Constitution is not going to hold the country together. What has held us together so far is the narrative of the Revolution and the Civil War, but the nakedness or secret sin of America was the pretending to be about freedom while accommodating slavery. The world is more person and story driven than idea and principle driven. The Obama's became royalty to the left in the United States. Narratives are the Principalities and Powers. At some point the cross is the story that works. When you become aware that you are both victim and tyrant like the centurian, you are prepared to look up at the cross and confess that this is the Son of God.