Lazy Sunday LXXIX: Forgotten Posts, Volume III

Lazy Sunday is rolling on with some more “Forgotten Posts” (check out Volume I and Volume II).  Again, the criteria for selection is pretty loose—I scroll through my archives and find posts I don’t link to very often, or which I’ve largely forgotten that I wrote.  Even that’s not a hard-and-fast rule.

This week’s selections come from June 2019.  The summer is always a slow month for new; ergo, it’s a slow month for blogging.  But with a self-imposed daily post requirement, I’ve gotta come up with something.  Here’s a taste of those somethings:

There’s another Lazy Sunday in the books.  Speaking of books, I’ll be cracking them pretty hard this week, as school resumes this Thursday.  It’s going to be an interesting year.  Wish me luck.

In the meantime, enjoy your Sunday!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

TBT: Self-Righteous Virtue-Signalling Lives On

The capacity of human beings to be busybodies never ceases to amaze me.  Aristotle wrote that “man is by nature a social animal,” and he is a political animal as well.  As such, virtue-signalling and puritanical social policing are probably here to stay, whether we like it or not.

Still, I’m always struck by how willing people are to butt into others lives—not just the curiosity of gossip, but the desire to control other people’s behavior, and even thoughts.  I’m all about enforcing social norms through the soft power of culture, and even I don’t want to hassle people.  I think hard drugs and prostitution should be illegal, sure, but only because those do demonstrable harm, physically, mentally, and spiritually, beyond the individual partaking in them.  Otherwise, I’m more than willing to let people make their own mistakes, and to believe whatever kooky nonsense they’d like, so long as I’m afforded the same courtesy.

Maybe I’m not the best spokesman for a laissez-faire social life, but a broadly Jeffersonian-Jacksonian, rural outlander mentality should apply to our daily lives:  you chase your squirrels, and I’ll chase mine.  Often the very last thing I want to do is to give someone else a hard time about their lifestyle, beliefs, or the like, so long as they’re not forcing their insanity on me.

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Losing the Faith

I’ve written quite a bit about the “God hole” in modern Western life, and how that place—intended for the indwelling of the Holy Spirit—is being filled with everything but.  We desperately search for meaning wherever we can find it—politics (for the progressives and some conservatives), witchcraft, power crystals, celebrity, money, sex, etc.

Part of this state of affairs stems from the persistent onslaught of postmodern, relativistic ideas that permeate our culture, so much so that they effectively infiltrate even our churches.  The ethos of “if it feels good, do it” sinisterly insinuates itself into Christian teachings in a form of Christology that reduces Jesus to a spiritual boyfriend who is unfailingly supportive of our bad life choices.

But Jesus is not a soy boy, and Christianity is not a pick-and-choose faith that is copacetic with sin.

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