day no. 17,541: the fact of the fight

"First, we must know what to fight. And secondly, we need to learn how to fight. Our central foe is secularism—the mindset that sets itself up against the knowledge of God (2 Cor. 10: 5). And as for how we fight, that should be with the joy of the Lord at our backs (Neh. 8:10), a psalm on our lips (Ps. 144:1), and a scriptural rapier in hand (Hen. 4:12). We are to fight like cavaliers, and not like trapped animals." ― Douglas Wilson, Jehovah and the Midterms

The fact of the fight must be acknowledged first and foremost. For some, this is the hardest part. The myth of secular neutrality has led many to believe that coexisting is the most Christian thing anyone one of us can do. After the fact of the fight is understood, the tactics for fighting must be acknowledged. We are in the flesh, but we do not fight by the force of the flesh. There is a way to fight that concedes the outcome. For example, if we fight sin with sin, we might win, but sin definitely does. We must fight by faith, but by fear. We are not cornered beasts fighting for our lives, we are men fighting for the glory of God. Let us not devolved into bestial battle tactics even when the ugliness of war descends upon us, rather let us rise to the level of the angels who once cleared Heaven of Satan and his comrades.

Wage peace, saints.

day no. 17,540: pregnant people

Psalm 7:8-16

The LORD judges the peoples;

judge me, O LORD, according to my righteousness

and according to the integrity that is in me. 

Oh, let the evil of the wicked come to an end,

and may you establish the righteous—

you who test the minds and hearts,

O righteous God!

My shield is with God,

who saves the upright in heart. 

God is a righteous judge,

and a God who feels indignation every day.

If a man does not repent, God will whet his sword;

he has bent and readied his bow; 

he has prepared for him his deadly weapons,

making his arrows fiery shafts. 

Behold, the wicked man conceives evil

and is pregnant with mischief

and gives birth to lies. 

He makes a pit, digging it out,

and falls into the hole that he has made. 

His mischief returns upon his own head,

and on his own skull his violence descends.

Turns out the Left was right: men can get pregnant. And not only that, but all men are pregnant. Evil is conceived in the hearts of men and mischief grows in utero before inevitably being born out in misbehavior. And this is not unique to men, it is common to all mankind. So, again, the Left was right: we should say "pregnant people" for men and women everywhere are full of sin. The only hope is to abort the evil before it is born. Again, the Left was apparently on to something, they have just misapplied the meaning of everything.

day no. 17,539: timidity and temerity

"In peace there's nothing so becomes a man

As modest stillness and humility:

But when the blast of war blows in our ears,

Then imitate the action of the tiger;

Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,

Disguise fair nature with hard-favour'd rage."

― Shakespeare, Henry V: Act 3, Scene 1

If a man is only capable of mayhem, he is not a safe man, and if he is only capable of minding his manner, he is not safe either. The first man may turn on you and the second man cannot turn away danger. The first man is a blessing when he is on your side against a common foe and the second man is a blessing to rest beside when there are no foes, but the first man is no fun to relax with because you're always walking on eggshells and the second man is no fun to fight beside because he always gets you shelled. 

Timidity and temerity are equally dangerous. The timid can get you killed and the temerous can turn on you. The timid are perhaps more dangerous because no one intuitively sees the danger. Everyone sees the danger of the ticking time bomb, but few see the danger of a bomb with no bang.

"If you think tough men are dangerous, wait until you see what weak men are capable of." — Jordan B. Peterson

A good man must be good at being a man. He needs to know how to sit still in peace and how to rise up and rage. If he can only do one or the other, he is not safe.

day no. 17,538: emasculated liars and liberty

"Freedom is not a gift that lasts long in the hands of cowards.” ― Theodore Roosevelt

For freedom Christ has set us free. We must resist the urge to go back to slavery. Really? Go back to slavery? Why would anybody want to do that? Glad you asked. Slavery is simple. Your room and board are paid for. You don't have the responsibility to provide for yourself or decide for yourself. Freedom is expensive. It means you have to decide to get out of bed and go to work and not buy that thing and cook that other thing in order to eat. Freedom is only possible where responsibility it assumed. Free men and women must have faith because problems require courage. The faint of heart can never be free. If you hand them freedom, they will squander it or even worse, they will sell it and be right back where they were before you gave it to them. Liberty is easy to lose and difficult to keep.

That is why the lizard overlords like it when we lie to ourselves. They love it when we embrace the habits of slaves. They like it even better when we call those habits "heroic" and "liberation."

"A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.” — Theodore Dalrymple

Free sex, drugs, housing, healthcare, and internet access do not produce free people. They are the kinds of things slaves eat up. All the freedoms being offered to us by the government are those which they "give" to those in prison: room, board, tv, internet, gym membership, and healthcare. Choose wisely.

day no. 17,537: abortion, blood guilt, and open borders

“Europe will be destroyed by women who project onto those animals the motherhood that belonged to the children they aborted.” ― Nelson Rodrigues

Abortion has produced a bunch of blood guilt. Everywhere we go, we are walking on soil soaked in the blood of babies. This guilt haunts us in general and it haunts many women in particular. That guilt produces tension which seeks resolution. But there is no bringing back the babies who have died and many of the mother wouldn't wish them back if they could. The same selfishness that led them to terminate their own child back then causes them to forsake their them now, but the guilt remains. It seeks somewhere to go. And so, liberal woman haunted by their decisions have fallen prey to those who want to flood our lands with foreigners. In those aliens and strangers, these women see an opportunity exorcise their demons. They extend the sympathy to them which ought to have been placed on their own children. They devote time and energy to strangers that should have been devoted to their own posterity. And so, Europe is being ravaged by someone else's children because their mother's are murderers and their wombs are full of guilt conceived by their selfishness. And that guilt is growing and on the verge of being delivered after which it will turn around and slay its own mother.

James 1:15

When lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.

day no. 17,536: secular stud farms

“More is involved in raising up a godly seed than for a man to have dogmatic convictions about birth control, matched only by his unwillingness to feed, read to, educate, pay tuition for, bestow upon, and love the results of his dogmatism. There are no promised covenantal blessings for the self-absorbed proprietors of stud farms.” ― Douglas Wilson, Concise and to the Point

Some men have a lot of thoughts about having a lot of kids but do not have a lot of vision or commitment to raising those same kids. They want to be patriarchs, like the godly men of old, but instead they end up like men on the assembly line making widgets for somebody else. Kids are a blessing, but they are not an automatic blessings. They are always a resource, but the question is if they will be a resource for good or for evil. People are productive. They will either produce light or they will produce darkness. Children are compared to arrows. They will either be shot into the heart of darkness or they will blot out of the sun.

Uninvolved fathers of large numbers of children are merely secular studs. They strut around like a bull, but all of their children are taken away and eaten by someone else.

day no. 17,535: fighting to win or striving to survive?

"If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival." ― Winston Churchill, The Gathering Storm

Pursuit is perhaps one of the most difficult principles of war to consistently apply. More often than not, people fight to the point of defeating their enemies, not to the point of seeing their principles established. Men argue and fight for the sake of destroying their foe's premises, but they fall short of proving their own.

"Failure to pursue frequently reveals that the objective in the campaign was not victory, but rather some version of the 'upper hand.' Once we have fought to the point where we might be left alone for a while, we stop. This often happens because Christians are peace-loving people, and this sometimes gets them into trouble. Too often we drag a problem out and make the whole thing last ten times longer than it has to last. But when the principle of pursuit is employed, it is clear that victory is the objective." ― Douglas Wilson, Rules for Reformers

Too many settle for the upper hand when they should be striving to have their arms raised in victory. We do not fight when we should because we like peace. Peace is good and it should be preferred to war as a goal, but it should be be picked over war in practice. We must fight for peace, not forfeit peace by refusing to fight. We must wage peace.

"We are not to fight to the point of predominance, we are to fight to the point of complete victory... Pursuit is the principle neglected by the currently strong. Many wars have been prolonged because the victorious army did not press its advantage in the immediate aftermath of a critical battle." ― Douglas Wilson, Rules for Reformers

It is easy to enjoy a victory than it is to keep fighting. It is easier to settle for lesser peace than it is to strive for peach on earth. In this, however, we prove that the love of our neighbor an enemy is not part of our calculus. If it were, we would push harder in order to put an end to the possibility of future wars. We would not kick the can down the road to fight another day, we would rise to our full height and fight now in order to put an end to all the fighting.

"Willingness to pursue when pursuit is a possibility reveals, like nothing else reveals, what the true objective was. An unwillingness to pursue is equally revelatory." ― Douglas Wilson, Rules for Reformers

Our refusal to fight when victory is near is an indictment against us. We do not want to win, but we do want to pop some champagne in the winner's circle.