Tag: religion

Rooting Out Heresy: The Cathars

The Portly Politico10 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 Politico13 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: 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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Myersvision: Audre’s Exorcism

The Portly Politico7 Comments

Last Thursday Audre Myers e-mailed me a comment for my post “TBT^4: Things That Go Bump in the Night” (she’s having some issues logging into WordPress to comment—d’oh!).  I asked if I could post it on the blog as its own post, and she agreed.

The title I’ve given her comment-post is a bit of artistic license; I’m sure Audre would not call it an “exorcism,” but she definitely cast something out in the Name of Jesus Christ.

It’s become a trope in horror films, especially of the demonic possession variety, that messing around with fortune telling, Ouija boards, etc., opens one up to demonic influence.  I suspect that our habitual sins open us up far more frequently, but I also strongly believe we shouldn’t mess around with the occult, even in a supposedly playful manner.  I know Ouija boards are mass-produced by Milton Bradley, which somehow takes away some of the demonic mysticism of them; still, I imagine Satan loves the Industrial Revolution and mass production.

We have victory in Jesus.  Praise the Lord!

With there, here is Audre’s fascinating tale of victory in Christ:

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Myersvision: Alexander Scourby

The Portly Politico3 Comments

Growing up, I remember pastors championing the King James Version of the Bible as the only reliable translation.  It is, indeed, exceptional—and, even for a hyperintelligent Übermensch like yours portly, exceptionally difficult to read.  I now primarily use the New King James Version, which retains the KJV’s accuracy, while updating the syntax and language for modern readers.

That said, the NKJV still loses some of the poetry of the KJV.  Christianity is a reading religion, but it’s also a spoken one, and like all poetry, the Bible is meant to be read aloud.  Not many of us do it well.  When it’s done right, however, it pierces our souls.

Audre Myers graciously wrote this beautiful piece about the recorded King James Version, available on YouTube.  Actor Alexander Scourby reads the entire Bible, and from the videos I’ve listened to so far, it’s gorgeous.

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Chapel Lesson – Taming Your Tongue

The Portly Politico4 Comments

Last week I was invited to give a brief lesson or sermon my school’s weekly chapel.  Our usual chaplain was due to be out that day, so the associate head of school asked me to deliver a message.

Earlier in the academic year I gave a short talk on listening intently and graciously, so I thought that a good complement would be to talk about the power and danger of our words—our fiery tongues!

I blog daily, and I know I’ve let my waggling tongue (in the form of a digital pen) get me into hot water.  It’s never a good feeling, and I’ve certainly written—and said!—things I regret.

For hot-blooded teens, it’s even more of a problem.  Rather than condescend to them with another jeremiad about “bullying”—such an insipid word—I decided to go directly to The Source

With that, here is my brief chapel lesson from Thursday, 2 February 2023, “Taming Your Tongue”:

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Bible Study Update II

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An eager commenter on my original “Bible Study” post prompted me to give a second brief update on my daily Bible reading (I wrote the first update back in July 2022).  Apparently, my humble daily regimen inspired the reader to establish a schedule of her own.  To that, all I can say is, “To God Be the Glory!”

That said, it’s satisfying to know that the words I scribble down on this self-indulgent blog do, indeed, reach people.  There are probably fewer things more pleasurable to a writer than to find that his words have made some impact on his readers, and the pleasure is enhanced when it’s a stranger.  We all understand that we influence those close to us, for good or for ill, because we can see the effects more clearly.  But the idea that a stranger might be reading our words is a small sign that we’re expanding beyond our immediate familial and social circles to wider audiences.  It feels good.

But I digress.  This post is about studying the Bible, not tooting my own saxophone; pride, after all, is a sin.

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Gnostic Mysteries

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There is something appealing about possessing some bit of secret knowledge or trivia that is unknown to everyone, save a select few “initiates” fortunate enough to partake in the mysteries.  The seductive allure of secret knowledge—or of just being “in-the-know” about some microniche subculture—seems to be a part of human nature.

We’d like to think in our modern age that we’re not superstitious sorts, but we are haunted everywhere.  Scientists have elevated themselves to the level of priests in a cult of scientism, worshipping the emptiness of nihilistic materialism just as the pagans worshipped lifeless idols.  Both are made of stuff—hard, material, unfeeling, insensate stuff—and both are equally empty.

But we here on the Right can fall prey to Gnostic fantasies as well.  The Libertarian dreams of a utopia in which everyone engages in frictionless free exchanges and all uncomfortable disputes are settled with cash and self-interest.  He’s as materialist and deluded as the mask-wearing mandatory vaxxer preaching loudly from the Church of Scientism.  The hyper-nationalist dreams of some impossible ethnostate that never really existed in the first place.  And so on.

Still, it’s seductive, the idea that we can possess the knowledge of good and evil, of true Reality.  After all, that’s the original sin, isn’t, it?  Eve, then Adam, could not resist the allure of being—so they were told, dishonestly—like God.  But even—perhaps, especially–Christians can fall into this trap.

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Bible Study

The Portly Politico15 Comments

Now that summertime is here, I’m using the bit of extra, unstructured time to try to develop some good habits.  This past school year was pretty brutal, between a heavy load of classes and up to twenty lessons a week.  I was thankful for the income from lessons and for the security of work, but it really took its toll as the academic year wore on.

Unfortunately, one of the first things I let go was daily Bible study.  I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve always been spotty about reading the Bible daily.  I’m often more interested in listening to someone else’s commentary on God’s Word than reading it for myself, as if I’m a medieval Catholic.

But there’s no substitute for the real thing—daily Bible reading and study.  So I’ve established a routine now that summer is here, and it’s really helped me keep on track.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Idolatry

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Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.

In this insufferable season of “pride,” when we’re apparently meant to celebrate narcissism and buggery, I’ve come across the YouTube channel of Becket Cook, a formerly gay man who surrendered to Christ and now fully rejects the personalistic cult at the center of the homosexual lifestyle.  My dad sent me his interview with Rosaria Butterfield, a former lesbian women’s studies professor who went from hating Christ to loving Him completely.  She’s now a pastor’s wife who homeschools her children (it looks like she has blue or purplish hair in the video, but I think that’s just the lighting):

Listening to Cook’s (no relation) videos over the past week has really been convicting for me, not because I’m gay (quite the opposite), but because they highlight something that permeates our culture today:  idolatry, specifically the idolatry of Self.

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