Tag: Christianity

Rooting Out Heresy: The Cathars

The Portly Politico20 Comments

Years ago I picked up a book with the titillating title The History of Witchcraft and Demonology by Montague Summers, an alleged Catholic priest who professed a belief in the reality of witches, vampires, and werewolves, among other supernatural critters that go bump in the night.  On the point of witches, at least, they are all too real.

I’ve never quite managed to finish the book—it’s a slog, given the scholarly writing style of the early twentieth century—but the first few chapters take a deep dive into Gnosticism and related religious movements, like Manichaeism.  As I recall, Summers traces much of European witchcraft to various Gnostic heresies.

For the unfamiliar, Gnosticism essentially argues that everything in this world is wicked, and that God is, in fact, evil.  The argument is that all physical matter is the creation of an evil god, the demiurge, and that the serpent in the Garden of Eden was, in fact, good, as he sought to bring enlightenment and understanding to humanity.  Only the spiritual is good, and the rejection of material existence is, therefore, good.  Obtaining to that spiritual good is the result of gaining knowledge, which is why the serpent’s act in Genesis is not a moment of man’s fall, but of his awakening.  Gnostic faiths are also inherently dualistic, which can be particularly enticing to Christians, who often fall into a dualistic worldview of the earthly against the spiritual.

At least, that’s one quick version of Gnosticism.  The details vary, but the broad strokes are the same.  Regardless, we can easily see that Gnosticism and its offspring are inherently anti-Christian in nature.  They reject God’s Holiness, and elevate Satan to the role of a “good” god.  Like all forms of heresy—and sin!—Satan inverts and perverts the Truth.

And what is witchcraft, then, but an attempt to manipulate the spiritual world to do the bidding of humans in this world?  The Bible makes it very clear that witchcraft is not good.  We all know Exodus 22:18, a verse that has graced the opening title cards of many a bad horror film:  “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”  1 Samuel 28:3-25 tells the story of King Saul consulting the Witch at Endor, seeking to speak with the ghost of the prophet Samuel.  For this violation of God’s Law—and its implicit lack of trust in God’s Providence—Saul lost his throne for himself and his heirs.

I’m not advocating we go around staking overweight YouTube lesbians who claim to be witches (although I love Brian Neimeier‘s non-violent and cheeky “Witch Test“), but we need to be mindful of how easy it is to fall into heresy.  Christianity is a difficult faith at times, even though in some ways, it is the easiest:  Christ Offers us the free Gift of His Grace; Salvation is available to us, if only we will receive it.  But there are certainly difficult passages, and reconciling the God of the Old Testament with the Christ of the New Testament has presented a perennial struggle for some Christians.

Of course, even that dichotomy is false—and potential form of heresy!  The God of the Old Testament is the God of the New—and the God of today and forever!  God Does Not Change.

Nevertheless, some groups have failed to make the reconciliation; coupled with the Gnostic influences from Persia (via Manichaeism), the Middle Ages saw the rise of a fascinating, complex heresy, one that was rooted out—brutally but, I would argue, necessarily—by the Catholic Church:  the Cathars.

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Buddhism in Christianity

The Portly Politico26 Comments

Last week my World History classes learned about three religions to come out of ancient India:  Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism.  These faiths are very complex—especially Hinduism—so as I stressed to my students, we were just covering the very basic facets of these faiths.

Of the three, Buddhism is perhaps the easiest to grasp, because its foundation is a series of logical propositions.  It consists of four basic principles, the Four Noble Truths, which essentially take the form of a logical argument with premises and conclusions:

  1. Life is suffering.
  2. Suffering is caused by desire.
  3. [Therefore], to escape suffering, one must end all desires.
  4. To end all desires, one must follow the Eightfold Path.

The Eightfold Path consists of obtaining and maintaining the following:  right views, right resolve, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration.

Buddhism further offers three ways to pursue the Eightfold Path:  right thought, right action, and/or religious devotion (becoming a monk or nun, spending one’s life meditating and contemplating upon the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path).

If that all sounds like a lot of work to Christian readers, it should:  we are fairly spoiled, given that our path to salvation comes through faith in Christ alone; it is a Gift freely given, although we do not deserve it in the slightest.

That said, faith without works is dead.  There is a certain seductive appeal to the asceticism of classical Buddhism, and it seems to offer a productive way for one to live one’s life.  Given that classical Buddhism is inherently atheistic, in the sense that it does not require worship of any particular gods, it theoretically could slot into almost any faith tradition.  Indeed, one reason Buddhism had a greater impact outside of its birthplace in India is because Hinduism was able to absorb Buddhist teachings (for the most part—the Buddhists were far more egalitarian than the highly-segregated Hindus with their exceptionally rigid caste system) into its existing spiritual hodgepodge.

Furthermore, in our troubled times, retreat from the world’s obvious sufferings seems like a pleasant, even necessary, choice.  That is essentially the argument of Rod Dreher’s influential—and hotly debated—The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation:  conservatives have failed to prevent the secularization of culture, so it is time to batten down the hatches and retreat to cloistered religious enclaves.  In other words, we must separate from the world [note that the link to Dreher’s book is an Amazon affiliate link; should you make a purchase through that link, I receive a portion of the proceeds, at no additional cost to you. —TPP].

But Dreher’s prescription and the growing influence of Buddhist thought in modern Christianity are not the way forward, as seductive as they may seem.  Dreher may or may not be veering into despair, which is a sin (one of which I am frequently guilty); Christians who adopt Buddhist precepts—wittingly or unwittingly—are certainly veering into heresy.

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TBT^2: Chapel Lesson: Listening

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Today marks the first Chapel of the new school year.  My school holds chapel every Thursday, and we have a really excellent chaplain.  He is an Episcopalian/Anglican reverend originally from England, and he is a true man of God.  He is also a towering figure, and he makes an impression.  I am teaching one of his sons in my Middle School Music Ensemble this year, too, which is fun!  The young man plays cello.

When the good Father can’t be there to give the chapel devotional, though, I am typically asked to substitute.  For awhile, I was informally taking on occasional chaplain duties with and from our last chaplain, a very sweet young man who was shy about speaking in front of large crowds, which made it a bit difficult for him to muster up the courage to deliver the weekly devotional.

Thus it was that this short little lesson was born, as I was the “warmup act,” as it were, to show this young former chaplain that it’s not too difficult if you just listen to the Holy Spirit and speak from God’s Word.

With that, here is 31 August 2023’s “TBT: Chapel Lesson: Listening“:

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Cruel Christian Women

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I’m officially announcing my retirement from an ill-fated career of attempting to date single Christian women over 30.  I gave it my best shot, but this demographic consists of some of the most broken, spiritually confused, and cruel people I have ever encountered.

To be clear:  “not all Christian women over 30 are like that”; indeed, the ones that have been married and have kids are ironically among the best of that group.  After all, they’ve fulfilled their God-Given function:  they’ve birthed and reared children.  Something snaps in most women if they haven’t given birth by 30 or 35; they truly become unhinged, and it manifests itself in a number of unpleasant ways.

But childless “Christian” women over thirty are particularly awful.  Here is the pattern I’ve noticed:

  • Woman spends her twenties riding The Carousel
  • Woman experiences major conversion or reversion experience right as she is hitting The Wall and her sexual marketplace value (SMV) is starting to crater
  • Woman’s newfound “faith”—and plenty of man-bashing/woman-affirming pastors—convinces woman that she is a “pearl of great price” (which doesn’t even make sense biblically) or “more precious than rubies,” giving her an inflated sense of her value in the dating pool
  • Woman demands wealthy, physically fit, tall, aggressively-masculine-but-gentle-as-a-lamb man with the desert-sculpted physique of Jesus on the Cross because she’s a “holy princess” or some such nonsense
  • Woman brutally critiques any weaknesses or shortcomings in a potential partner and justifies it as helpful honesty and as a “guarding her heart“
  • Woman likely still sleeps around with Chads, chalking it up to “struggling with her faith”; woman continues to reject decent, normal Christian men
  • Woman occasionally develops a weird, Christian-adjacent mutation, such as being too interested in Judaism or insisting on only eating “organic” foods; this mutation becomes the centerpiece of her personality and she demands total adherence to it as a qualification, not understanding things like “compromise” and “reasonableness” exist

The delusion among this demographic is through the roof.  Instead of their alleged “faith” encouraging introspection, humility, and gratitude, it manifests itself as a perverted sense of self-worth.

The Blood of Jesus Washes away our sins, but it does not make us sexier.

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Myersvision: Cryptid Epistemology – A Possible Second Chapter

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On Wednesday I posted a piece entitled “Cryptid Epistemology,” which was more about academics’ desperate attempt to monopolize “truth” through a campaign against “disinformation” more than it was about searching for Bigfoot.  That said, the two topics are intertwined, and the piece is an exploration of why access to information, and the ability to parse and analyze that information, is so important.

What I admire about the more humble and intellectually honest side of the cryptid community is that they are open to the possibility that we don’t know everything.  Indeed, they carefully sift through thousands of hours of footage, interviews, blog posts, books, etc., in search of gold.  That they often come away with pyrite does not discourage them; instead, they keep looking, gently setting aside the few nuggets they find for further evaluation.

Maybe Bigfoot exists—maybe he doesn’t.  What’s important is that these folks, so often dismissed as kooks, are sharpening their minds and engaging in intense analysis of thousands of data points.  They are making healthy skeptics of themselves, even as they search for something at which most skeptics would scoff.

Who, I ask, is the real kook?  So many self-proclaimed “skeptics” are merely parroting the very same narrative that was spoon-fed to them in a high school history class, or in their freshman philosophy course at college.  They often do so with an air of condescension and derision, the sort of know-it-all-ism that derives from an excess of education but a dearth of wisdom.

The older I get, the more I realize how precious little any of us know.  Things that were taught to me as inerrant “truth” have turned out to be a vast panoply of lies and half-truths, assembled into a shambolic, Frankensteinian mess for the benefit of the government and corporations.

To give one rather benign but illustrative example, before I turn it over to Audre Myers:  as a kid, my elementary school teachers would, it seemed to me, forcefully and a bit angrily insist that the United States was moving to the metric system, and we’d all need to learn it so we could cope in a post-Imperial units world.  It was all nonsense, and even as little kids we all kind of knew it was a bit overblown.  Had our teachers said, “the metric system is important to learn because it is the standard in scientific research,” it would have been a.) truthful and b.) productive.  Instead, they tried to terrify us into thinking we’d all be European, holding our cigarettes like gay men and speaking Esperanto (yes, another lie they told us in elementary school).

To be fair, things that I have taught have turned out to be inaccurate.  The more I study history, for example, the more I realize that the narratives I teach—often derived from what my history teachers taught me—are often incomplete or even incorrect.  When teachers talk about creating lifelong learners, it is for a reason:  we can only get a small fraction of the Truth in our lives, and we should constantly undergo a refining process to purify our knowledge.

But I have overstayed my welcome in this overly long introduction.  Audre offers up an excellent continuation of “Cryptid Epistemology,” her own further refinement on the journey towards Truth:

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Cryptid Epistemology

The Portly Politico18 Comments

Ever since The Age of The Virus and the 2020 usurpation, there has been an increased focus in academia on supposed “mis- and disinformation.”  Anytime a small guild of academics champions a cause that runs cover for government and corporate propaganda, we should all activate our skeptical antennae, regardless of our political leanings; there is a good chance someone is lying to us.

The mis/disinformation racket is a lucrative one.  The federal government is shelling out big money to experts in this field to speak at conferences.  Without violating anyone’s privacy, I have direct knowledge of some of the amounts involved for academics giving presentations on the topic.  If I could pull in a cool six grand (and change) for talking about how everyone who disagrees with my positions is suffering from an advanced case of disinformation, I might do it, too.

William Briggs at his Substack Science is Not the Answer hosts a very good guest post by Jaap Hanekamp entitled “The Misinformation Dis(mis)course Revisited: The Losing Battle of The Academic Expertocracy“; it offers a very good treatment of the danger of this mis/disinformation regime.  In essence, it is simply a form of censorship.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Don’t Panic—God Is with Us!

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Introduction

What do we do when it feels like God Is nowhere to be found?  That question comes up again and again in the Gospels and, indeed, throughout Scripture.  Of course, we know that God Is Always with us; at least, we know that intellectually.  But there are times when we feel that He Has Abandoned us, even when we know that He Keeps His Promises.

Let us turn to tonight’s passage, the unusual story of the Boy Jesus at the Temple during the Feast of Passover:

Luke 2:41-52 (ESV):  The Boy Jesus in the Temple

41 Now his parents went to Jerusalem every year at the Feast of the Passover. 42 And when he was twelve years old, they went up according to custom. 43 And when the feast was ended, as they were returning, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem. His parents did not know it, 44 but supposing him to be in the group they went a day’s journey, but then they began to search for him among their relatives and acquaintances, 45 and when they did not find him, they returned to Jerusalem, searching for him. 46 After three days they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. 47 And all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers. 48 And when his parents [alternatively, “they”] saw him, they were astonished. And his mother said to him, “Son, why have you treated us so? Behold, your father and I have been searching for you in great distress.” 49 And he said to them, “Why were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” [alternatively, “about my Father’s business”] 50 And they did not understand the saying that he spoke to them. 51 And he went down with them and came to Nazareth and was submissive to them. And his mother treasured up all these things in her heart.

52 And Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature [alternatively, “years”] and in favor with God and man.

Context

I have always found this passage to be particularly confounding.  It comes at the end of the long, famous, second chapter of Luke, the chapter we all know so well, and which we read aloud every Christmas.  The chapter consists of several scenes from Jesus’ early Life:  His miraculous Birth (v. 1-20); His Circumcision and Naming (v. 21); His Dedication at the Temple and the incredible story of Simeon (v. 22-35); Anna’s praises to God, and her instant recognition of Jesus as the Messiah (v. 36-38).  Then Mary, Joseph, and Jesus return to Nazareth until this passage.

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Alone Again

The Portly Politico78 Comments

Well, dear readers, yours portly finds himself back in his natural state of being—single.

My very sweet girlfriend of the past eight months decided to break things off this past Sunday evening.  There was no bitterness or anger involved; it was simply a matter of logistics.  Due to our conflicting work schedules—she is a flight attendant, so her schedule varies wildly from week-to-week—and the two-hour distance between us, she decided to end the relationship.

Have no fear—yours portly is doing well.  In our discussion, she told me that I am the kindest, most thoughtful, and most mature man she’s ever dated.  I think she genuinely meant it, too.  But she expressed concerns about being stretched thin between her family, her friends, and me, so I was the one-third that had to be dropped.

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TBT^2: Go to Church

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Church can be a beautiful thing.  Indeed, it should be—it’s the Body of Christ!  But many Christians are quitting church for various reasons.  The Age of The Virus gave everyone a taste of how the heathens live; unfortunately, too many Christians enjoyed it and dropped out of church almost entirely.

Perhaps the worst thing churches—and schools, and governments, and hospitals, and businesses, etc., etc., etc.—did during The Age of The Virus was to shutter their doors.  Churches should have been the last places to close down; during a pandemic, people needed access to their churches more than ever before, but the churches followed the world.  They’re suffering as a result now.

Granted, church attendance was on the decline In the Before Times, in The Long, Long Ago, before The Age of The Virus brought its authoritarian terrors.  The Plandemic was just the excuse to stop attending—“for safety!”—and it seems that many folks were not eager to return.  That’s a shame.  A church community provides so much, and while we can and should study Scripture on our own, we are part of a body.  An ear that hears but has no brain to process it or arms to react to the hearing is pretty useless.

So—go to church!

With that, here is 27 April 2023’s “TBT: Go to Church“:

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Heptadic Structure

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Yours portly took a brief break from composing to catch up on some other work, but I’m back to composing, albeit not with quite the same intensity as during the late winter months.  I released Leftovers II earlier this month, and Four Mages is coming very soon (2 May 2024).  I’ve also completed a funk album, Advanced Funkification, which is coming on 7 June 2024.

If you’d like to listen to Leftovers II, you can find it at the following sites:

I figured that was a pretty good slate of releases, and that I might take a rest.  But then I started jotting down a little melody in the incredibly rare (and, admittedly, self-indulgent) time signature of 7/16:

Heptadic Structure Prewriting

What resulted was the piece “Heptadic Structure.”  The piece itself is exactly twenty-one written measures (although it’s technically longer with repeats).

That gave me an idea:  if I wrote seven pieces in 7/X time consisting of twenty-one measures each, I’d have a total of 147 measures of music.  14 + 7 = 21.  There’s a beautiful mathematical symmetry there.

Why 21?  It’s the multiple of 3 and 7.  Three represents the Holy Trinity; seven is God’s Number, a heavenly number.  So 21 is a reference to the Trinity and Heaven.

I came upon the term “Heptadic Structure” when looking for a title for this piece.  Apparently, the concept of a heptadic structure is nothing new, and is a major concept in the rather esoteric field of Biblical numerology.  The argument is that various portions of the Bible breakdown in mathematically consistent and beautiful ways, always with the number 7.  It’s a fascinating concept, one about which I only possess a passing familiarity, but I love these mathematical structures.  Maybe it’s all a grand coincidence—or, more likely, it’s all part of God’s Grand Design.

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