johnjankovic

[johnjankovic]

DÚNEDAIN

Verily, verily I say unto you, unless a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. 12:24

The adherence of Christianity to a codex of ethics dispensing with society’s monomania for classical hierarchies where the hapless were otherized came to fledge into the raison d’être for the many orphaned by their kith and kin. A compass of virtue assimilating mercy and peacemaking made manifest in the Beatitudes of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount would gainsay the narcissism of old with its attributes like glory or affluence. Pagans left alone in the wilds of polytheism thus began to find a truth wherein the universe was neither cold nor indifferent but rather warm and forgiving for what was otherwise a stark departure from past superstitions. Whatever omnipotent entity governed the cosmos it was anything but a passive timekeeper. Somewhere deep in the stuff of life there lived a God who commiserated with the lot of Creation insofar as He sent His Son into the world so that it might be saved through Him (3:17-8). Such heresy at the time unsettled a people who sought only power and celebrity. How could a God bleed? A harrowing death by Crucifixion betrays mortality which was atypical for the deities lionized by centuries of folklore. Lost on the layman however was the wisdom that a good shepherd layeth down his life for the sheep (10:11); that God is not secluded in some gilded palace atop Mount Olympus but rather walks amongst us in rags.

Jesus epitomized a tribune for the masses not a warlord akin to Islam’s Mohammed. Martyrdom was to be the alchemy of saving souls through one’s own persecution devoid of retribution or hate rather than its perverse definition of having coitus with seventy-two virgins upon killing infidels for sport. A barbaric practice fit for barbarians. How is Jihad any different from the afterlife coveted by Vikings fetishizing feasts in Valhalla in a quid pro quo for rape and murder? Colonialism’s legacy is not the reason why Muslim countries in Africa and the Middle East are time capsules for the Stone Age. Singapore and Honk Kong would agree. If a culprit is to be sleuthed out a reflection in a looking glass might be the place to start. A doctrine breeding animus for anyone outside of one’s ilk does not conduce to discovery nor peace but only a cycle of bloodshed. The Quran reads like a wish list scribed by an autocrat as inconsistencies abound: the Surah An-Nisa (4:24) condones the enslavement and rape of women; the Surah Al-Baqarah (2:191-193) and the Surah At-Tawbah (9:5) agitate for murder; the Surah Al-Ma’idah (5:38) lauds the mutilation of thieves. Such poison is easier understood when its author’s own scruples made bedfellows with evil. What a paragon of virtue was Mohammed who impregnated his nine-year-old wife — quite the gentleman.

Observe what grace was showed to an adulteress when Jesus stood athwart of a rabid lynch mob in His full-throated diatribe exclaiming ‘He that is without sin amongst you let him first cast a stone at her’ (8:7). This message sits as the polar opposite to the death worship of Mohammed who commanded in the Surah An-Nur (24:2) that a promiscuous woman should be lashed a hundred times in a public spectacle. Ergo the epidemic of ‘honour killings’ in Islam uniquely flummoxes the ignorant not the critical thinkers who are privy to the fraud. It is a prodigious feat of mental gymnastics to reconcile a man of God with a penchant for pedophilia abreast of the rape and slaughter of innocents yet Islamists insist on whitewashing their pedigree. Whilst it may be true Jesus bristled at sin by overturning tables in an apoplectic rage whereupon the zeal for Father’s house had consumed Him He was nevertheless anything but vindictive (2:17). A paternal disciplinarian sympathetic to the duality of man colours the instruction stenographed in the Gospels. Albeit His threshold of patience might have been scarce on occasion in virtue of man’s stupidity much like the admonishment reserved for a child prone to tantrums the impetus of love was never lost. To wit grace is a far better instrument of edification than meting out punishment (1:17).

It is unsurprising that a Hammurabi code of an eye for an eye finds expression in the Quran when Mohammed was a prolific marshal of war himself. Casting aspersions on the snake oil he peddled is one thing but the warmonger should be credited for his territorial aggrandizement whose cadence would arouse even the jealousies of Napoleon. Six centuries after the birth of Christendom Mohammed founded a faith to butcher us with terrible efficiency. In a single decade Islam annexed the Arabian Peninsula. Within an abbreviated timeline the caliphate further arrogated the Middle East in toto, North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula to its rule. Mohammed’s doctrine laid waste to the Holy Land and made apostates of our kinsmen who kowtowed to the ultimatum of conversion. Islam colonizes through the spectre of death not missionaries. 'Renounce thy faith heathen lest you should fall upon the sword' is quite the catchphrase for a religion of peace! The Surah At-Tawbah (9:29) explicitly calls for the persecution of infidels who resist such proselytization. It is no mystery why the carnage of rape, infanticide and immolation of entire families in Sderot next to Gaza was feted by satanists. Feigning victimhood under the guise of Islamophobia is the pièce de résistance peculiar to this faith just as it scapegoated the Crusades to explain away its provocations.

Today’s histrionics over Gaza likened to an ‘open air prison’ is a farce as mouth-breathers buy into its narrative: (1) the exodus in 2005 saw Israel unilaterally vacate that tract of land; (2) Gaza’s per capita wealth approximates $6.2k juxtaposed with Europe’s post-WWII reconstruction costs of $478 per capita from the Marshall Plan’s succour; (3) like a kleptocracy Hamas’ leadership class are all egregiously billionaires; (4) utilities remain gratis courtesy of Israel’s magnanimity; (5) work visas are liberally granted to Gazans analogous to North and South Korea’s Kaesong manufacturing park for the sake of rapprochement; (6) a marrow-deep deference for the Hippocratic oath was what excised the brain tumour that once beset the Hamas architect of the latest pogrom; (7) Gaza’s pecuniary resources are all ploughed into the labyrinth of tunnels whose entry points for terrorists lie beneath mosques; (8) Arabs account for a quarter of Israel’s demographics versus the Jewish extinction in Palestine; (9) it betrays ignorance to calumniate Jews with the misnomer of colonizer since they have inhabited the land for three millennia; (10) it was Roman Emperor Hadrian upon the Bar Kokhba Revolt who rechristened the landmass with the Palaestina nomenclature to make the Jewish identity verboten. How convenient it is to paper over history.

Israel should not escape criticism for its settlements in the West Bank nor should the community be immune to reproach about overwhelming Christendom with faux refugees via their NGOs. Nevertheless the half-baked hyperbole of Islamophobia needs to be retired. To wax lyrical about some coexistence of utopia with Islam is an exercise in futility. Christianity radiates a civilizing effect but upon a critical mass of Muslims the West’s legal traditions rooted in the Church will fall prey to the tyranny of Sharia Law. London, Paris and Milan portend this ominous future. History shall repeat itself. War informs Islam’s very DNA whereas the catechism of Christianity espouses unconditional and even unrequited love. Where the Quran vindicates violence the Gospels red-pill the masses into abstaining from it. ‘To him who strikes you on the one cheek, offer the other also. And from him who takes away your cloak, do not withhold your tunic either. Give to everyone who asks of you. And from him who takes away your goods do not ask them back. And just as you want men to do to you, you also do to them likewise (Luke 6:27-31)’. Our noblesse oblige exorcised slavery, misogyny and every other vile artifact proper to Satan from this world. Islam culls the opposite. No reconciliation can be had when one is the antithesis to the other.

[johnjankovic]

DOOM

Therefore whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock: And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock. And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand: And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it. Matthew 7:24-7

Emperor Nero elevated the sadism wrought upon Christians to an art form in the wake of the Crucifixion. As the feedstock for the Colosseum’s diversions we partook in the spectacles of damnatio ad bestias in the guise of delicacies for starved beasts until the release of death before revellers baying for blood. Another crowd pleaser were the nocturnal displays of human torches lighting garden parties for the glitterati’s amusement. Chroniclers like Eusebius, Tacitus, Suetonius, Pliny, Lactantius and Cicero all bore testimony to the brutality visited upon the early Church which repudiated the deification of Rome’s Emperor into the pantheon of gods. This affront to idolatry aroused the oppression against all seedlings of our faith. Any dissent proved anathema to the Empire’s highly stratified society. A family that pulled the lame, slave, woman and other social pariah into its bosom where masters and their subordinates were equal would be decreed persona non grata. Such treason at loggerheads with the anthropocentric belief of man being the centre of the universe had to be blotted out. The humility of serving others rather than being served belied the fetish for material things that was the body politic’s hallmark. This weltanschauung risked obsolescence from a believer who was anaesthetized to comfort and pain.

The doctrine of almsgiving in redistributing wealth unto the poor ran afoul of class divisions long curated by Rome’s elite between the likes of patricians and plebeians. A status quo of great opulence for the privileged few put the act of charity in its crosshairs lest this counterculture subvert the establishment. Fear of state reprisal however did not find any quarter in the hearts of Christians who were bent on showing how the emperor had no clothes. Altruism from missionaries threw open this black box of Rome’s dereliction towards its own people when it was these alleged bohemians who remedied the scourge of deprivation not the state. Our family’s resistance reminded the disaffected about the follies of tyrants. The more we cast aspersions on slavery, gladiator games and other hedonism did the cracks in the regime propagate. The spectre of unrest from citizens who tired from hitching their fate to a superficial culture of bread and circuses run by despots came to be the impetus for why rulers took umbrage at our precepts. The boogeyman of revolution caused the worry. What further piqued the Pretorian Guard amidst this war of ideas were Christians who courted martyrdom with fervency. Our cavalier attitude towards authority and death alike bewildered thought leaders. Christian armour betrayed no hint of vulnerability.

Emperor Nero’s pogrom of Christians in 64 AD would be the first of many in our pedigree. Vilification of our family whenever woes beleaguered the ruling class found utility in self-preservation so the masses could be hoodwinked into forgetting the rot of men and institutions. Demagoguery thus masked discontent. Nero exploited this subterfuge to distract from his depleted treasury most notoriously in the throes of the Great Fire. Two canards therein would impugn the monarch who flouted the stoicism of Rome with abandon. The potentate was first accused of masterminding the inferno to raze the real estate for his vanity project dubbed the Domus Aurea complex. A second caricatured the autocrat as serenading the blaze with his lyre as the city succumbed to the fire. In his Machiavellian ways Nero seized the animosity towards Christians to be the pawns for his misdirection in a desperate bid absolving himself of blame. Since we were already otherized with slanders of cannibalism in virtue of the public’s flawed understanding of the Eucharist this propaganda found an ally in our genocide. So began the systematic culling of Christians for millennia to follow. That foul usurper’s legacy set a precedent haunting us to this day. But know this brethren: Greater love has no one than this; to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.

This persecution continued in fitful bouts across antiquity under Caesars Domitian, Marcus Aurelius, Decius and Diocletian who were harbingers for the wrath upon our kith and kin. As Christians balked at paganism the authorities spun the narrative that we were paradoxically atheists for our want of acquiescence to the veneration of their gods. Under Domitian his fiscus Judaicus tax penalizing Jews was expanded to make Christians liable in forfeiting income for our obstinacy against sacrifices to Rome’s many deities. Such conscientious objection deepened a rift between us and pagans. The yoke of taxation in Domitian’s crackdown became one of several manifestations of his animus towards the faithful. For the persecutors our defiance was read as jeopardizing the superstition of Pax Deorum wherein Rome’s prosperity hinged on a détente between gods and mortals. Outright refusal to propitiate this polytheism by a religion birthed in the backwaters of the Empire in the little known place of Jerusalem shook the mores of a society built upon the aesthetics of Venus or the militancy of Mars. Christians then would be mercilessly hunted. Under Marcus Aurelius yet again did we find a noose around our neck as incursions by Germanic tribes and the Antoine Plague beset his throne. History repeated itself.

By the time Decius ascended to the seat of power our faith was no longer whispered about in hushed tones. Our numbers although still a minority removed us from the forgotten fringes. But riven with discord internally it behooved Decius to consolidate his rule whose method of choice was the homogenization of values. The Emperor summarily authored an edict making compulsory the public rite of offerings to Roman gods in return for a libellus or certificate of proof officiated by a magistrate. Either the fearful apostatized or the strong were ostracized by way of imprisonment or death. Lost on this impostor of a man however was how martyrdom was perennially the seedbed for our faith harkening back to the seminal act of Jesus mounting the cross. Akin to Saul’s metanoia into Paul from an epiphany upon the road to Damascus despite his imprimatur in the stoning of protomartyr St Stephen a Christian’s death is but fertilizer. We look blithely upon mortality for it has no purchase on our soul. We court suffering for our psychic inheritance of the trauma borne by Christ reminds us of our raison d’être. We drink from His cup in bearing our own cross for this legacy. So whilst Decius weaponized the bureaucracy to systemically cull our siblings these persecutions intensified the proliferation of our ethical code in homage to Him.

In Rome’s final effort to exterminate our family four edicts were pronounced over a decade in the midst of the Great Persecution where each escalated in draconian effect. From the despoliation of churches to executions en masse it was Diocletian who looked askance at Christians once more as a fifth column of the Empire. The first decree of AD 303 bypassing the purview of the Senate sanctioned that all places of worship be destroyed and scriptures be consigned to the flames. The second bore its fangs squarely upon the clergy to coerce a recantation of their faith lest they be imprisoned. The third broadened the persecution in a dragnet from the shepherds to the sheep whereby the laity were forced to partake in Rome’s rituals or else relinquish legal rights and submit to be trafficked as slaves. The fourth demanded a blanket conformity to the orthodoxies of the pantheon under penalty of torture or death regardless of age or gender. Genocide and infanticide were the functions of the mobilization in this machinery for the sinister purpose of carnage. No child or babe was spared. With cold precision the bureaucracy loosened the banality of evil upon us when administrators sought to outdo the other in their zeal for graves. This chapter of our persecution was closed with the Edict of Milan in AD 313. Others would follow.

[johnjankovic]

SHEPHERDS AND WOLVES

I am here. Anonymous

Christianity as the progenitor of Western society has been the proverbial mortar of a great many institutions shaping man’s upward march. Between constitutional governance inspired by St. Thomas Aquinas, the Renaissance’s gallery of art the Church commissioned or capitalism’s Protestant seedbed this influence remains ecumenical. Across a spectrum from politics to science our ethics moulded civilization despite how modern philistines erase them. Reforms allowing criminals to rape and beat innocents with impunity inveigh against the moral compass of Christian jurisprudence upon which English Common Law was founded. Wild hoaxes of Catholic places of instruction murdering aboriginal children saw arsonists set a firestorm upon churches. The Marxist usurpation of government whose policies denounce Christianity impoverish people both materially and spiritually. A long decline over the preceding thirty-five years now crescendoes into a chessboard eerily set in the final few seconds before a great war between Manichean forces. The very strangeness of these times marks the hour. The medical profession gaslights how men purportedly menstruate and breastfeed. Toddlers elect their genders. Pedophilia is mainstreamed. Beliefs once held inviolable are violently twisted under the thrall of Babylon.

A nefarious funhouse exploits man to precipitate the perversion of a world on the eve of its damnation. Yet akin to the Third Law of Motion that for every action there prevails an opposite reaction if Lucifer is an interloper here anew then so too is something far more purposed. That something issues from an anomaly that ripped the fabric of space and time two thousand years ago. It is something condemned to wander the cosmos for eternity for it can neither forgive nor forget. The paroxysm of chaos afoot telegraphs the imminent conflict as the tit-for-tat grows tiresome in the search for a conclusion. The reason for this crossroad hails from a galactic stride humanity is about to embark upon into the final frontier. What ideas man exports to Mars and beyond will determine the fate of his species for millennia and it is incumbent that he be reminded of the catechism that led him here. Much like how Christopher Columbus discovered the New World upon his flagship christened Santa Maria this next expedition will be of a missionary sort. What appears lost on laypeople is how Columbus fancied himself a crusader to reclaim Jerusalem from the Muslims through precious metals sourced in newfound lands. The voyage did not manifest orthogonally to Christianity but quite the opposite. Faith was the cynosure.

Neither vainglory nor hubris coloured Columbus’ feats but rather it was the Catholic convictions he harboured that did. This self-effacement for the sake of a greater cause can be extrapolated onto the entire history of Western civilization. Sacrifice is the marrow and sinews of modernity’s sustained growth. Of course society belies this claim by infantilizing adults into a perpetual state of denial. You see these very people everyday clutching to their mortality through their promiscuous habits or ‘reliving their youth’ in debauchery. These degenerates are wayward children in a sandbox who stink of milk. Pay little heed to them as no more than a cautionary tale. The sons and daughters of our creed do not cower at hardships when their contemplation of the Crucifixion stoutens their resolve to glorify Jesus in their proper comportment. Flesh and bones decay but Christianity’s love suffers no such affliction. Perhaps you have been privy to this phenomenon yourself in the midst of a Sunday Service when a worshipper sobs inconsolably whilst the Holy Spirit imbues them with peace likened to an exorcism. There is power in the blood precisely how the eponymous hymn incants. Indeed the Gospels have been a source of beauty that has incubated a kaleidoscope of wonders from the corpus of Shakespeare to Copernicus’ heliocentric model.

To say things men dare not say or to do things men dare not do describes the invincibility boasted by a believer. Republican President Lincoln bellowed in Congress about the scourge of slavery by citing the Gospel of Matthew that a house divided against itself cannot stand. Such moral turpitude was further upbraided by Frederick Douglass who aroused the conscience of a nation in defence of a Christianity not perverted by predilection towards race. Clara Barton clad in the armour of her faith tended to the injured upon the bedlam of battlefields in the Civil War before founding the American Red Cross. Baptist Minister Martin Luther King purged prejudice in agitating against the tyranny of segregation. Britain’s William Wilberforce in his fervency for Christ became the fountainhead for the Slave Trade Act of 1807 that brought an end to institutionalized slavery. The young maiden Joan of Arc in a parable of David and Goliath was guided by providence to be a lodestar when bloodshed engulfed French sovereignty. Florence Nightingale in her Christian altruism saved scores of soldiers by her sanitary reforms gleaned from statistics. The Augustinian friar Gregor Mendel hailed as the patriarch of modern genetics authored scientific canons he observed in his monastery’s garden. Salvation and discovery are fruits of Christendom.

This pantheon of virtue in its rising watermark for humanity’s lot to forge an ideal society continues with George Washington Carver who reconciled his faith with science. The fruits of this labour with a reverence for Creation heralded a revolution in sustainable agriculture based upon the scientist’s tenets on crop rotation. Then there sits Harriet Tubman identified alongside Moses as birds of a feather in her emancipation of slaves via the Underground Railroad. For this firebrand her physical missions were pilgrimages she attributed to supernatural visions that guided her deep into the bowels of the antebellum South. Tubman fought the good fight for our family. This same gauntlet Archbishop Desmond Tutu confronted through his activism against the inequities within the dark recesses of South Africa’s apartheid. Another vignette would be the philanthropy towards social welfare by the Methodist William Booth who masterminded the Salvation Army. Soap and soup saved many souls in keeping vigil over the marginalized. Far from performative the organization abided by a strict military ethos for its war against sin whose legacy continues to this day. In the firmament of literature Christian allegories between such themes as sacrifice and redemption pervade J.R.R. Tolkien’s anthology of repute.

Brick by brick has the modern world been architected upon ecclesiastical works of Christian men and women. Yet Marxists who are pigmies amongst creatures deride this fact by revising history with their nihilism. These craven sociopaths are quite clever in their biddings for the devil by browbeating dissidents into conformity analogous to how Joseph Stalin secularized Russia. Perhaps the most apposite parallelism harkens back to the Spanish Civil War when a cohort of leftists alienated Catholics by raping their nuns and turning their churches to ash. Again Isaac Newton’s Third Law of Motion echoes in the comeuppance from General Franco who brutalized these godless zealots. History now repeats itself as the sheepish masses are led astray anew. The machinations remain conspicuously the same. Marxists inundate Christendom with military-aged men not persecuted refugees to rouse chaos by exploiting our goodwill and bastardizing the written word. Sin is proselytized to children as captains of the LGBTQ+ cartel groom them. A whole canyon of disparity exists between silently partaking in vice and its celebration. But sheeple kowtow to these orthodoxies by parading their pronouns despite how they enable the mammaries of minors being lopped off or the erosion of women’s autonomy under the jackboot of this social contagion.

A third cause célèbre is the climate change alarmism which is a pretext for humanity’s genocide. You are the carbon the champagne Marxists wish to expunge by doing away with staples like meat for synthetic alternatives laced in chemicals or shuttering farms wholesale. The mendacity reveals itself in how goalposts are so protean as they are moved further afield. The falsehoods of pseudo-scientists continue to be debunked as polar bear populations flourish, Earth’s verdant canopy expands, or corral reefs are rehabilitated. Vandals need to start forest fires just to shore up the narrative although the many fissures betray the ruse. Data is doctored by neglecting to edify the public on how surface temperatures are sampled close to urban heat islands like cities or airports in biasing anthropogenic causes. These same charlatans fail to adjust their models for the Minoan, Roman or Medieval warming periods whose thermal variations conduced to prolific yields from farmlands and vineyards. In fact the sole reason for the diaspora of Vikings inhabiting Greenland and Newfoundland adverts to these kinder climes. Be weary of such frauds indentured to another master. Jesus said, ‘Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves; so be wise as snakes and innocent as doves (Matthew 10:16)’. Do not be stupid.

[johnjankovic]

AGINCOURT

From these ashes shall Constantinople rise anew to reunite the seven churches in the North where the bonds between Heaven and earth are made again.

4 John 1:3

Christianity’s decline fomented by stalwarts of secularism is a carbon copy of the same guerrilla methods used amidst the Enlightenment age or Bolshevism’s rise which in increments sought to rid the world of the Church. Today’s higher income in lockstep with education attainment telegraphs the same eventuality wrought by scientism and atheism despite how Christianity seeds such social mobility. Like an apothecary our faith confers a shot of strength to the marginalized who better themselves from squalor and yet the totems of postmodernism like abortion, gender theory, or race theory conspire to purge this good thing. Ironically progressives intercede in Providence with their belief that Christianity is the yoke of tyranny rather than the source for civilization’s progress. The irony stems from how yesteryear’s progressives freed their black brethren by appealing to the kinship of Christian doctrine. From emancipation to women suffrage the most seminal acts of equality were borne by Christians who baptized their cause like missionaries in the antebellum-South or the testosterone-laden halls of Congress. This iconoclasm at odds with the likes of Neros and Caligulas from Rome has never deviated from our pedigree.

Now in this algorithmic age does nihilism become symptomatic of a secular society. Obsession over telegenic clickbait by filming strangers in distress as a bystander or being in raptures about some vista but only vicariously through the clumsy lens of Instagram are points of inflection away from Jesus. Abortion’s popularity is itself a referendum on Christianity. Promiscuity gains prominence in polities. People mope in misery without some lodestar to track their lives. So an inverse relationship comes to fruition between living standards and the West’s happiness index as the creature comforts of Mammon fail to substitute for Prozacs against melancholy. Materialism merely papers over the soul’s infirmity like the fig-leaf worn by Adam. Lost in the thicket of such abundance is how it thrusts social justice upon society to somehow fill the void left from Christianity’s exile. Identity politics thus become a new version of alms to express solidarity with rich kids who think themselves oppressed when secularism is then the lifestyle of affluence. This counterculture declares war on Christianity while it is waged in more primal ways across the Third-World where African and Syriac Christians defend the faith more so than doormats who feign observance in the West.

Pews here are emptying in the face of creeping secularism. When Jesus spoke ‘Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s (Mark 12:17)’ the lesson was to give a wide berth to any type of theocracy but still allow for a foothold in the public square. The state wedded to intersectionality instead sees fit to retcon our family with the false equivalence of white-supremacy despite our genesis in the cradle of Asia Minor and Africa begotten from the exports of the twelve apostles. ‘Go therefore and make disciples of all nations baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit ([emphasis added] Matthew 28:19)’. Since politicos are too stupid to read history their ignorance becomes de facto tenets inculcated in schools and workplaces whereby we are culled via machetes in the developing world and ‘deprogrammed’ in the West lest we find ourselves on the outs with orthodoxy. Akin to Rome’s clampdown in the prelude to Constantine’s Edict of Milan we are once again forced underground in the West, China, North Korea, the Middle East, and Africa under the bounty of public enemy number one. Outlaws we have always been.

Rebels gravitate towards Christianity due to its legacy of sedition against tyrants. Without the fear of death man has no leverage over others which is the Achilles heel of despots. Untold in the Cold War mythos is how the Berlin Wall collapsed in large measure due to such marrow-deep faith by Americans and Eastern Europeans. Evangelist Billy Graham who was himself a zealot against the red scare was the tip of the spear when he baptized President Eisenhower in office and goaded him to insert ‘under God’ for the Pledge of Allegiance abreast of ‘In God We Trust’ as the official motto in 1956. Co-existence with atheism was a non-starter to the dismay of cosmopolitans. Reverend Graham’s crusades to sold-out crowds galvanized Americans to find refuge in faith rather than some politburo in his subliminal attacks against Stalin who was too dumb to fathom the Gospel’s power when he sneered at the Pope’s number of army divisions at the 1943 Tehran Conference. China is now fraught with the same spectre of insurrection from the cottage-industry of house-churches as the progeny of Christians who democratized Taiwan bang war drums in the streets of Hong Kong. By 2030 the hegemon booming with church spires will boast the world’s largest population of our kin.

Fellowship cannot be hemmed in. Part of the reason China’s one-child policy was sunset by apparatchiks has to do with the chorus of dissent on abortion by us. A ballpark headcount pegs Christians outnumbering members of the communist party in the mainland by a large margin. It might be said Marx and Mao have lost their monopoly over the public conscience regardless of what Sinophiles suggest. So feckless is the centralization of command economics that churches have taken to provide education, healthcare, and nursing homes to the needy in the country’s hinterland. Because of discontent the thought control prosecuted by the state begins to wane as people grow weary of saying the emperor has new clothes when in reality the veneer has been wrested away. Like George Orwell’s satire the truth about communism eludes discovery for only so long until even hardliners stumble upon the bait-and-switch of how ‘all animals are created equal but some animals are more equal than others’. The revolution eats its own. Visit Paris and her posh boulevards are awash with Chinese shoppers. The phenomenon remains an incubus for China’s rulers who worry such materialism will fill a vacuum after our persecution to the effect of defanging their own anti-capitalist philosophy.

Those buccaneers from South Korea’s hotbed of Protestants sow the very same ferment in Pyongyang just north of the border. Our family’s ubiquity here has long been sourced in the country’s arc of aversion to Shinto Japan and Buddhist China. Since social change and Christendom are bedfellows which is sui generis amongst every other creed in existence do Korean missionaries cheat death from Afghanistan to their own peninsula for the sake of exporting the Gospel. Judging by this standard Marxism fails to win the hearts and minds of a people in any land. The foil to such a deficit of mindshare are the many Protestants who seek to oust the cult of Juche across the demilitarized zone whose dynasty of god-kings has wielded power for over half-a-century since the Korean War. For years the spin doctors north of the 38th parallel have stirred up a frenzy of paranoia to lull the masses into conformity but Christianity will upset the applecart before long thanks to the pluck of South Koreans. An autocrat draws his power from invertebrates who privilege their life over others and should that link be severed so too is his legitimacy (15:13). Roman emperors seethed at Christianity because of how poised we were to be animal feed in the Colosseum.

[johnjankovic]

MJÖLNIR

When the thousand years are over, Satan will be released from his prison and will go out to deceive the nations in the four corners of the earth—Gog and Magog—and to gather them for battle. In number they are like the sand on the seashore. They marched across the breadth of the earth and surrounded the camp of God’s people, the city he loves. But fire came down from heaven and devoured them.

Revelation 20:7-9

Christendom inspired by the Son from Galilee who tramped about on roads and fields to lift the masses endures as the seedbed for modern civilization. The paradox of this faith from classical antiquity which is the progenitor of the West is how the lot of Jesus made Pontius Pilate who condemned Him a slave rather than a viceroy and vice versa — sacrifice being greater than the power to kill. Such an anomaly in the lore of the time belied what was then the prototype of polytheism like the many paeans to Zeus who chained Prometheus for gifting fire to mankind or effigies of Jupiter who led men to a premature end for their hubris. If in some hypothetical these same gods were racked by agony in the throes of martyrdom would their folklore be the definition of blasphemy thus pagans from Roman stock took umbrage at Christians whose exegesis of life begged the question: How are the bedfellows of pain and suffering any index of power? The answer to this enigma would be nestled nowhere else but in the cradle of a new religion still in its infancy: For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world but to save the world through Him (3:17).

Crucifixion so scandalized Romans and Jews that its minutia survives in a single eye-witness account as discrete from the New Testament’s Synoptics. Harrowing details anathema to civilized company would have otherwise stayed a black-box left to oblivion had they not been recorded for posterity. Because of the sadism endemic in these processions were they hence confined to wastelands beyond city walls away from polite society. Even Christians alive in the Middle Ages when freighted with the gravity of such a death practiced discretion as they were loth to recreate its gore on pictograms until the advent of the Renaissance when a more sober account was elected. The Son hanging limp on a hill so became the cynosure of our faith whose gesture of a cross was ritualized by practitioners in prayer. Even pariahs orphaned by society were keen on finding solace in Jesus who died so others may live. At the crown of Golgotha would ultimately be where the most binding of covenants between Father and Man was wrought to reveal the very kernel of existence for creation: God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him ([1] 4:16).

This pearl of wisdom in search for meaning answered the many secrets sought by philosophers over aeons. Sitting cross-legged in meditation with the ambiance of singing bowls and the incantation of hums is no substitute. Pain purveys perspective and the rarest relic of love is a tonic to buck up the souls prostrate with hurt: The love of Father who coos in your ear to carry on is nirvana; The fraternal love from a phalanx of young sappers at the Somme in a hellfire of lead is nirvana; The love of the Son whose lungs were collapsed by Man’s schadenfreude as a billboard for gawkers is nirvana. Love of this kind is a balm for those bloodied by the ranks of evil amidst a war of attrition between heaven and hell since Original Sin. Each event sources its inspiration from a common well of how ‘there is power in the blood’. The debt borne by Jesus in a semiotic way thereby comes to epitomize something like ironclad armour in the lives of ordinary Christians. Over a series of seasons and cycles between birth and decay have the faithful mounted great feats and forays into the unknown for the betterment of their brethren with the same pugnacity seen atop Golgotha.

It is this pledge of service to others which subverts the narcissism of so many creeds that was itself a fillip to the flourishing of the West. Self-denial by abstaining from life’s wish-list would be roundly mocked by outsiders as meek but it was a gateway to humanity’s most productive years in the spectrum of existence. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends (15:13). A stoic lives under this cardinal rule not for reward but rather to honour the love inherited from Jesus which passes down from one generation to the next like an heirloom until a scion comes of age to assume its burden. Why burden? To love thine enemy who is beneath contempt as he rams a spike into your wrist summons a crie de coeur for a species of strength alien to this world. And yet at this very juncture do all the stars align to jolt the sinner from his stupor in breaking free from Satan’s seduction akin to Paul the Apostle who killed scores of Christians before his own conversion. The said burden therefore is knowing evil can only be defeated by the blood of a peacemaker however masochistic it may sound to the layman.

What eventuates is a schizophrenic split allowing for one’s conscience to take stock of its wayward ways long enough to defect from a history of wrongs. The primer to this epiphany is the ugly deed itself which in the universe of celluloid compares to sunlight upon the cursed who wilt in its path. Much like popular culture’s caricature du jour of dualism does the reality of being born again manifest likewise in the renewal of a soul. The introspection breaks the spell just enough to restore agency in knowing right from wrong. So the war between good and evil is carried about in the open as much as it is waged inside of you. Each person in her own right decides who she wants to be whether good or bad though the pity is most opt for vice rather than be an instrument for what is holy. Why? The road is a solitary one. Being good is heresy when the greater part of the world indulges in those acts and lies indigenous to Babylon. Being a persona non grata becomes a birthmark as the rest shun you for your ethics. So the path we plod is not one for the faint of heart neither is it for the weak of mind.

Christendom is inherently contrarian and has been since its formative years. Christians themselves are birds of a different feather who spurn the world’s rehashed idolatry which sycophants are so eager to adopt in earnest. Those cut from our cloth knowing the real world stakes do not shirk from the truth that like Jesus who fell at the behest of sin does this dynamic survive to this day in the highest reaches of power to the lowest alleys of pimps. By analogy we can do more than merely read the hours and minutes of a timepiece — we are the watchmakers. The esoteric wisdom therefrom beseeches us to see the world for what it truly is: a pockmarked battlefield laid to waste by two camps. Scarce few bother to stray from the smoke and mirrors of everyday monotony but behind them are forces aligned to different stripes in service to separate causes. A firefighter who barrels into an inferno to save a pregnant wife versus a rapist who sets his victim afire are a microcosm for the humanity and lack thereof on this earth. Love and hate are the root of Man’s checkered history and Christians are shrewd enough to be skeptical of any authority he purports to dispense.

[johnjankovic]

WE ARE ASTRONAUTS

You will be hated by everyone because of me, but the one who stands firm to the end will be saved. When you are persecuted in one place, flee to another. Truly I tell you, you will not finish going through the towns of Israel before the Son of Man comes.

Matthew 10:22-3

Ideologues of globalism vilify nationhood to create the homogeneity of a post-Christian world. Vatican leaders with bovine conformity endorse the idea akin to Asia’s dechristianization in the thirteenth century. The fertility of sciences, quality of life, and upward mobility in one hemisphere sources from Christianity, Arab autocracies rely on oil markets instead. Why did spacefaring Christianity send a man to the moon and not Islam? The one privileges freedom, that all men and women are equal, that life equates with a choice and the fruits thereof are thus savoury or spoiled, the other plumps for control. Europe’s crisis of economic migrants and refugees speaks for itself in spite of how guests exploit her hospitality only to then prohibit our prayer lest it offend them. The advances in medicine, media, freight, robotics, and energy are derivative of the seed sown by Jesus which the Church has nursed between the workmanship of Syriac, Catholic, and Protestant thought leaders. By the sweat of their brow did the West, as capitalism’s vanguard, industrialize for the lot of the commoner unendowed with royal birthrights. Christianity would create a system of wealth to escape servitude; a prodigious constitution we authored in Philadelphia; on the moon did Buzz Aldrin partake of Communion.

That seed sprouted the stoutest of oak trees though setbacks abounded when, in the Middle East, Christians were destitute of their homeland via genocide from Islamists, or the Church was riven with fissures in theology. By the 1500s did the Protestant Reformation restore Christianity to its primeval roots with no sale of indulgences, no sort of absolution for sin by the clergy, and no species of ritualism derogating from the message of Jesus. This departure from the papacy signalled the sunset for the abuse of doctrine and for intermediates whose agency as middlemen intervened in our relationship with Father: No man, not one, pardons you, nor does he dictate your life. We decide our fate. The intermediacy of saint-worshipping in Catholicism further aroused Martin Luther to defect from the growing superstition of Rome as the Reformers returned the primacy of the New Testament to Christendom. Our past was of an understanding for Father by way of love not orthodoxy, of persecution not some antiseptic record, and of shrewdness not credulity. This truth epitomized the cynosure of our faith for all of us who died on a cross, pyre, or arena. Protestants thereby would colonize the New World whilst Roman Catholics in Europe would be mired in the fratricide of the Inquisition.

In the wake of the Pope’s excommunication of King Henry upon the annulment of his marriage in 1533, which the Reformation preceded sixteen years earlier, did its offshoot of Anglicanism wed the Protestant and Catholic faiths together within the Church of England. Whereas the heterodoxy of Martin Luther’s ‘Ninety-five Theses’ was a rebuke for the snake oil of bilking money towards salvation from the sinner, King Henry’s impetus to break from Rome was for a remarriage to birth a male heir in his dynasty, therefore the genesis of Protestantism in Europe’s mainland and in the archipelago of British society was differently sourced. A hundred years later an atavism of this ‘protest’ against the papacy manifested once more in the internal strife of Puritans who sought to ‘purify’ the Church of England of Catholic customs entirely and whose diaspora later found them expatriated to colonies in the 1620s: schism within a schism within another schism colours the history of Christianity all of which will be reunited in the North. Then as did their Syriac brethren in Edessa, Nisibis, and Gundeshapur, or Catholics in Bologna, Oxford, and Sorbonne, the heirs to this scholasticism planted the same seeds in Harvard, Yale, and Princeton from which a nation germinated and was educated.

To remake civilization in the Protestant faith was closely aligned with the theology of John Calvin whose ideas actuated Anglo-Saxons more so than Lutherism. Upon Anglicans settling Jamestown two decades earlier in Virginia was there to be the first exodus of Puritans aboard the Mayflower to till the virgin lands of Plymouth in 1620. Ten years later John Winthrop founded the second colony of Massachusetts Bay in Boston. The fealty of colonies south of Virginia deferred to the Church of England with its vestiges of Catholicism, north of there was the monoculture of Protestantism sprawling from New Jersey up to New Hampshire in between of which Dutch Calvinists settled New Netherlands whose mishmash of denominations worshipped unmolested from government in Manhattan. Pennsylvania was next to this enfant terrible and became the preserve of Quakers, Scottish Presbyterians, and German Calvinists who abutted the Swedish Lutherans in Delaware. Southern Colonies were Anglican, Middle Colonies were a kaleidoscope of Protestants, and New England Colonies were Calvinist. The very founding of the United States was, therefore, an exercise in Christianity for dissidents of Rome akin to Europe’s influx of Christian Arabs three hundred years prior.

The seaboard gave vent to the revival of Christianity during the Great Awakening unlike the prevalence of secularism back in its metropole amid the Age of Enlightenment. By 1765, the American Revolution enshrined Protestantism in its unalloyed form when Anglicans, devout to England, absconded for Canada or New York as the end to monarchy would democratize a country in the company of its faith which the many carveouts spoke to between the Latter-Day Saints (Mormons), Seventh-Day Adventists (Millerites), Methodists, Baptists, or Episcopalians. Though the Founding Fathers were at pains to disestablish the clout of government in religion, what was never the case with English kings or Roman emperors, their abstraction of the state from the New Testament resurrected an earlier form of Christianity that did not mistake the profane for the divine in some variation of theocracy. Wise and Christian folks would try to edify you but never under duress from the hand of the state. Any aberration to this cardinal rule would always be the product of a Christian public clamouring for reform as in the cause of abolitionism, or in the temperance, sabbatarian, and women’s rights movements. Otherwise, it would be your choice, yours alone, to be a part of our family.

[johnjankovic]

ATLAS

For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your ancestors, but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect.

1 Peter 1:18-9

Christianity’s Eurocentrism is an overstatement. Before the Great Schism in 1054 between Catholic Rome and Orthodox Constantinople, christened Istanbul in later years, had Christianity spread with runaway growth in Syria, Israel, Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Armenia, Egypt, and Ethiopia, long preceding its diaspora from the Mediterranean into Europe. Large tracts of Mesopotamia, a Roman fiefdom, were hospitable to Christianity yet Europe’s primus inter pares in the measure of faith materialized afterward by default since elsewhere had our family been terminated with extreme prejudice wherefore the Middle East could just as easily have industrialized and laid claim to a colonial past. A third of world Christians inhabited the region, then the Church’s epicentre, well into the eleventh century when earlier they imported classical learning from Greece to prompt the halcyon of sciences ahead of Europe as holy sees from Mosul, to Damascus, to Baghdad, to Basra, to Tehran (Rai), to Herat, to Merv all dotted the region. Since the lingua franca dispensed with Latin, substituted instead with polyglottism, the enculturation of Syriac, Coptic, Persian, and Turkish into liturgy orientalized our family. Lost in history, or more honestly rewritten by Islamic negationists, is how Iraq from a bygone age was Christianity’s heartland for over a millennium.

The universality of the Church was honoured in letter and spirit beginning in the East under the aegis of Syriac Christians. Before Saint Benedict inaugurated his first monastery, holy sees of the Nestorian Church had been founded in Iraq and Iran, before the advent of England’s first archbishop had Afghanistan and Turkmenistan become holy sees themselves, before Poland’s christianization were provinces in Uzbekistan and India governed by bishops in Samarkand and Patna, simultaneously had churches sprawled in Sri Lanka, Tibet, and China. Christian Arabs leapfrogged past medieval Europe in science, philosophy, and medicine sourced from how Damascus and Baghdad manifested into wellsprings of knowledge. Predecessors to the flagship universities by Catholic monks in the West were Turkey’s Nisibis and Iran’s Gundeshapur established by Syriac and Nestorian bishops, respectively. Patriarch Timothy I later help found the House of Wisdom first led by Christian Arab Hunayn ibn Ishaq under Caliph al-Ma’mum. Of the triumvirate, that is Imperial Rome, Byzantine Constantinople, and Baghdad, the third wielded the most clout as a matter of geographical size ideally situated along the Silk Road. In the other two did Muslim Saracens and Moors in the company of pagan Vikings and Magyars pillage monasteries and Saint Peter’s Basilica amid the eight and tenth centuries.

Promising though it was by comparison, evangelization in the East could not coexist with Islam. Politics and jihad rather than theological failure wrought a post-Christian Asia. Of the greatest ironies is how we intimately informed Islam between such influences as the Orthodox Church domes atop mosques, the facsimile of Lent in Ramadan, the uncovered feet, prostration, and prayer mats from Nestorian worship, the daily devotionals by monks replicated in the Salat, or more indelibly the Quran’s deference to the ‘prophet’ Jesus and Virgin Mary. No immunity, however, would avert our genocide from a demographic of 21 to 3.4 million between AD 1200 and AD 1500, or circa the time when minarets squared off and repurposed the Hagia Sophia Cathedral under Ottoman rule. In the interim were the Crusades wrongly set upon the region to reclaim the Holy Land of Syriac Christians. So seminal was the Middle East that the Nicene Creed of AD 325 reconciled all churches under one ecumenical council here to decide for posterity the doctrine of our faith. The difference in density could be no more stark, Rome was the lone patriarchate in the West, in the East were Alexandria, Constantinople, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Baghdad — their memories and those of the seven churches in Asia Minor from the Book of Revelations erased.

Christian Arabs built the Muslim world and spurred the Islamic Golden Age but retelling of this history is verboten. As Norsemen and Muslims plundered Europe, existentially destined for ruin, a bipolar world emerged between two stubborn strongholds seeking hegemony: the Orthodox Church in Constantinople and the Nestorian Church in Baghdad. Of these two the latter similarly fell to ruin culminating in the crescendo of death perpetuated by Turks during the Armenian holocaust of 1.53 million Christians and by Iraqis amid the Assyrian pogrom in the twentieth century. These purges accounted for the term ‘genocide’ coined thereafter. The Europeanization of our family came to fruition only in the sixteenth century when the Orthodox Church, exiled from Constantinople, shifted further to the East and the toehold of Rome gained currency across the West later in lockstep with the Reformation. Yet of the manifold traditions in Catholic Rome a large share of them was begotten from Syriac Christians six of whom were chosen to be popes as successors to Saint Peter between the seventh and eight centuries. No less in importance is how the Eastern Church became the fountainhead of Christian music from Gregorian chants to hymnbooks, and the impetus behind habituating the West to the feasts of Mary’s Nativity and Dormition.

Eastern Christianity’s earlier footprint actuated the remote outpost of Rome though the evangelism of both in their infancy proliferated much the same way along land and sea routes from the older Persian and later Roman metropoles thus enabling the missionary work, for example, in India by Saint Thomas. The scope of Christianity in the East was bespoken by the first Christian kingdoms of Osroene and Armenia ascribed to the efforts of Saints Bartholomew and Jude, the next was Saint Matthew’s Ethiopia, or ancient Abyssinia, thereupon Nubia situated south of Saint Mark’s Alexandria in Libya and Sudan declared itself a sovereignty of the Church for nearly a millennium. The Mediterranean littoral functioned as a staging  ground into the mainland from the patriarchates of Alexandria, Jerusalem, Antioch, and Constantinople long before Rome espoused Christianity. By AD 431 at the Council of Ephesus, however, did Baghdad formally sever its umbilical cord to Antioch, uncoupling itself from the Roman empire writ large as a result of its differences over Jesus’ humanity and divinity ex post the Crucifixion hence spurning the orthodoxy of the Virgin Mary as the ‘Mother of God’ at the cost of Christ’s manhood which ran afoul of its monophysitism. Semantics and pedantry split the Church at every turn in the Nestorian Schism, Great Schism, and Reformation.

This mutiny from, and disaffection with, the Imperial Roman Church by the patriarchate of Baghdad (Seleucia-Ctesiphon) followed by the exit of Alexandria at the Council of Chalcedon in AD 451 engendered a third and fourth axis in Christendom: 1) Rome, 2) Constantinople, 3) Nestorian Baghdad, and 4) Alexandria’s Oriental Orthodoxy. Modern cartography associates the territory of Rome to Europe, of Constantinople to Asia Minor, the Balkans, and Russia, of Baghdad to Mesopotamia-Persia, and of Alexandria to a patchwork of Egypt, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Syria, Armenia, and India. The Christianization of Asia manifested with an alacrity unknown to Europe. Although a demographic parity of twenty-million existed between both continents by the turn of the millennium, the genus of churches were poles apart, those in their thirtieth generation in Asia were ancient whereas the proselytization outside of Imperial Rome was jejune by this standard: Syriac Christians in Egypt and Baghdad originated the mores of monasticism for monks and nuns working in hermitages so common in Europe; Marian devotions were made ubiquitous by them; the works of Antiquity they translated for scholarship in the West. These apostolic roots of the East whose Semitic traditions were closest to the teachings of Jesus were in time erased. This is our history; our past.

[johnjankovic]

CROSSING THE RUBICON

There is not one amongst you who is deserving of Father’s love so what was then built in His name shall be put asunder in His name.

4 John 1:2

In the early pedigree of Rome were Christians subjected to experimental deaths of being doused in wax then immolated as human candles perched above dimly lit streets, fed upon by wild animals, boiled in cauldrons, dragged behind horses in extremis, crushed by stone mills, flayed, racked, scourged, crucified, all macabre ways by which the Church in its first three-hundred years was indelibly carved. The Edict of Milan finally did, under the aegis of Emperor Constantine in AD 313, bestow permanent sanctuary onto the multitude of the persecuted amid this pogrom. Yet what confounded magistrates, emperors, and famously Marcus Aurelius, was the readiness of Christians to die, not by retribution for violence exacted onto others but rather by torture and death in spite of innocence either at the behest of Jews thinking them heretic or the Romans thinking them seditious. Proconsul Gnaeus Arrius Antoninus in exasperation once berated an eager mass of Christians for openly avowing their faith, ‘You wretches, if you want to die, you have cliffs to leap from and ropes to hang by’. This phenomenon if not borderline pathology that was Christianity so bewildered pagans that they stood in disbelief at its canon of unconditional love for whomsoever believed in Jesus neither did the authority of man, nor pain, nor even death have any purchase, none whatsoever, on her conscience (John 8:32).

However heavy the yoke, and contrary to conventional wisdom, Christians were not at all martyrs but witnesses. Throughout Rome’s attrition we died by horrific ways neither to galvanize nor to inspire, we simply elected not to renounce what we knew to be true, whether iron spikes were forced into palms, wooden cudgels cracked skulls, or scalding oil and flaming pyres blistered flesh, we understood forces well beyond man were afoot to dispose of us with brute expediency in an internecine war waged since Creation. Angels and demons are not storybook creatures, nor are heaven and hell contrived artifices, totems like these between good and evil scattered across frescos from the Renaissance are materially real. Though for all of Father’s omniscience, He still could not speak of such things in their entirety until humanity had matured enough to learn about them from soothsayers like Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, or John the Baptist who each foretold of a Messiah (Matthew 16:13-6). The eschatology of man would then be learned in increments. Jesus would be, culminating from generations and genealogies of prophets, the proverbial Prometheus spurring man to great heights with an idea akin to the discovery of fire for civilizations to follow. Expressing kindness, patience, and love in the face of abject cruelty would be the cadence to which Western civilization was built.

Let us, you and I, analogize this learning curve together. How does an infant assimilate the science of physics? She is first taught to count abreast of recognizing patterns, then to add, subtract, multiply and divide, subsequently she learns geometry, after which algebra is inculcated in her, then calculus, until finally she ascertains the universe’s secrets from gravity to quantum mechanics although no longer is she a little girl but, in her stead, a woman. There is a time for ignorance as for truth, for youth and old age, from Adam, to Noah, to Abraham, to King David, to Jesus, and all the interstices of descendants between them, Father’s grand design germinated along the Abrahamic and Davidic lines until they crested with a birth in a manger. Every generation heralded the advent of prophets vested with knowledge on the philosophy of Father’s work with the final act on a cross epitomizing what was its apogee — love. If man were effaced from this planet, no longer would evil exist in the universe, there is nothing inherently sinful about nature, nothing Machiavellian about survival, no malevolence when predators consume prey. It is sui generis to man that in him lives a duality whereby a choice is made between prosecuting either good or evil, between espousing love or hate.

Over two thousand years of animus and stigma against Christendom has wrought the genocide of over seventy-million brothers and sisters. In Mosul as of late where its presence was unbroken since the second century, scores of Christians, monasteries, and manuscripts have been purged. An exodus has materialized with the near extinction of our family in the Middle East. Aramaic Christians in Turkey whose language Jesus spoke have been culled from half-a-million at the twentieth century’s outset to a mere two thousand today. Nigerian Christians have been indiscriminately butchered by Boko Haram. In Asia, the police states of China, Myanmar, and Burma politically suppress Christianity to assert authoritarian rule similar to the Third Reich’s ‘Gleichschaltung’ whilst North Korea exterminated three hundred thousand of its Christians. Swathes of the same in India were hacked to death with machetes by Hindu nationalists in the last decade. Legions of priests in the narco-states of Mexico and Columbia have been murdered for agitating against cartels and communism respectively. In Africa’s Eritrea, thousands are housed in internment camps. Egypt’s Coptic Christians have sulphuric acid poured on the crosses tattooed on their wrists. Altogether the compendium of statistical modelling from government and relief agencies estimates 100,000 deaths per annum and forty-five million more in the last century alone.

More furtive has been Christianity’s erosion in the West where the embattled community has been ejected from the public square as the ascendency of secularism in tandem with anti-colonial grievances dismantle nativity scenes, discard the Ten Commandments in courthouses, bowdlerize salutations of ‘Merry Christmas’, abrogate school prayer after 170 years, counterfeit love through pornography, pervert the institution of marriage after five thousand years for the sake of progressivism, and murder the unborn on demand. When Sri Lankans were killed in Churches, the liberal ruling class referred to us as ‘Easter worshippers’ not Christians. When mass shootings aroused widespread prayer, we were derided by smug politicians for our faith. The moral decay is rampant. New social policies shored up by mainstream Hollywood, historical revisionism, and liberal judges destroy whatever is left of a spiritual compass in favour of cultural marxists who think themselves as great emancipators of the human race despite being themselves indentured to Satan who, in a redux, exhorted the hubris of Adam and Eve saying, ‘Then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods’ (Genesis 3:5). These same people, depressed in their own right, labour to impose their loose morals on others so as to vindicate their pathetic existence. Be shrewd as snakes and wary of this truth.

[johnjankovic]

IN NOMINE PATRIS, ET FILII, ET SPIRITUS SANCTI

Going on from there, they passed through Galilee. But Jesus did not want anyone to know, because He was teaching His disciples. He told them, ‘The Son of Man will be delivered into the hands of men. They will kill Him, and after three days He will rise’. But they did not understand this statement, and they were afraid to ask Him about it.

Mark 9:30-2

The object of scorn, a workman whose labour is reciprocated with prosperity is rebuked as of late by the Catholic Pope himself which by implication does wealth become sin, ownership deemed wicked, and riches thought to be more equitably distributed without discrimination whatsoever. What of the sloth, or the idle, or the man who loves to sleep? That this man knows poverty is not the fault of the other who toils at the outset of spring and harvests in the autumn. Such it is that Marxist doctrine infiltrates the Church issuing from sheer ignorance of worldly matters. One of the Ten Commandments asserts ‘Thou shall not steal’ to the implicit affirmation of such a thing called private property lest the fruits of my labour never be my own but yours to take with impunity. So whereas a man who labours on end appreciates the real value of his work and is made honest for it, he who eschews such activity justifies his theft by distorting the words of Scripture for his proper ends. The righteous man is then charitable indeed because he labours so hard, the sinful man is not because he is lazy and with nothing to spare. Yet to unnerving pacifism, many within the Church agitate for a system rewarding this same loafer who, neither infirm nor lame, arrogates to himself the wealth of the workman.

Now to be well ensconced behind seminary walls for you shepherds immersed in the Catechism is of no utility if illiterate to the mores and misgivings of your flock. It is incumbent upon you to be factotums versed not only in the preserve of the divine but equally in the practicalities of life whereby everyday pragmatism ought to inform your ministry. To work hard is to be virtuous, to be indolent is not. A virtuous man, austere in temperament, averse to avarice, and entrepreneurial in spirit, creates wealth for both himself and others in what is christened a providential force for the good of society. Ethics of such individualism and free will begot what we know as Western civilization upon Christianity fostering moral opposition to slavery then widely prevalent in the Mediterranean and early medieval Europe when, under its rationale of our likeness to Father (Genesis 1:27), freedom thereafter came to be understood as nothing less than an inalienable right. The result was how capitalism became an epiphenomenon of Christian thought rather than anathema to it originating in Italy’s city-republics from Venice to Genoa until finally the Reformation codified it.

Unlike Judaism or Islam which frame faith under the yoke of law and obedience, Christianity seeks to understand Father through step-by-step reason by exploitation of the critical thinking He vouchsafed to us. Christianity, therefore, is inherently concerned with development, progress, and growth, not dogma. Whereas Moses and Muhammed issued directives, Jesus authored nothing of the sort and left chronicles of His life at the discretion of the Apostles. Whereas literalism is demanded from acolytes of either the Torah or Quran, the New Testament remains by and large open to an exegesis of one’s own since Father desires the same love as from a son or daughter not the fealty of an automaton. The New Testament is imperfect and admittedly so (1 Corinthians 13:9), the Quran by contrast proclaims itself to be the law (32:2), much like the Torah which is likewise authoritative. The teachings of Jesus, a foil to these Abrahamic religions, are not to be learned by rote but rather lived by emulation and reason. What Christianity went on to become was the foremost patron of freedom giving countenance to discovery and science so that with each generation as suggested by Saint Thomas Aquinas our love for Father deepened whereby the more educated we grew, the better we understood Creation, and the closer we were to Him.

Unlike Buddhism which sets great store in the narcissism of meditation to attain wisdom, or the paganism of Hindus in their propitiation of numerous gods, or the belief in the cosmic forces of Taoism which balance mystic energies, monks of Christendom resolved to make Father’s handiwork intelligible by way of empirical evidence together with their inauguration of the universities Bologna, Sorbonne, Oxford, and Cambridge amid the twelfth century. The Scientific Revolution by the sixteenth century became an intimate bedfellow of Christian theology in virtue of how renowned scientists like Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Gallilei, or René Descartes each sought to understand Father through their rational vocations. Amongst all the aforesaid religions, none were so dialectical or curious enough to contest the status quo of the universe’s mysteries which hitherto had been too esoteric for comprehension until their respective cultures inherited the physical sciences from Christians. Neither was the polytheism of the Greeks like Socrates, Plato, or Aristotle able to concoct similar advances in spite of its rich legacy of classical learning and geometry. It follows therefore that faith in Jesus begot the West whose quest for personal salvation has been perennially wedded to the search for truth (John 8:32).

Rational theology inspired by the Church is the provenance for the truths Christians hold dear and its application to commerce by medieval monasteries in Europe made the modern world. Asceticism of other religions, their condemnation of wealth, or their prostration before a deity effectively hamstrung them from impacting humanity in the same way Christianity did. Father is not of the mind that you should comport yourselves like little drones dispossessed of free will. Whereas Judaism and Islam apply their morality akin to an ironclad diktat governing a conquered people, Christianity is an inquiry into the meaning of the universe. Determinism for this reason does not substantially figure in the life of a Christian since it runs afoul of her choice in the person she chooses to be whether good or bad. Thus the teachings of Jesus are not laws but a compass and nothing else. From this premise our progress as a civilization remains a function of our attempt to rationalize Father’s omniscience upon a very long yet winding road in stark departure of our primeval ways whose enlightenment has inspired the material comforts we enjoy today.

Not until the end to Rome’s despotism, falsely denominated the Dark Ages when canons of Christianity underwrote freedom from bondage for the first time in world history, were new technologies disseminated for the masses once beholden to the social strata of elites. This sudden void of slave labour predicated upon Christian enlightenment hence spurred mechanical production with the help of energy begotten from waterwheels and windmills which monasteries exploited to great effect for local economies, furthermore agriculture of the Middle Ages would yield foodstuff surpluses ascribed to innovations in plows across Europe, and the clergy would author hagiographies in French to bolster literacy instead of Latin which was in the monopoly of the upper echelons of society. Better fed, educated, and housed were Christians during this precursor to the Renaissance than Roman plebeians who had yet to invent the horse collar for husbandry, printing press for erudition, or chimney for ventilated warmth. Medieval Europe would go on to erect soaring cathedrals in tribute to Father far more sophisticated in architecture than pantheons, colosseums, or bathhouses strewn about the empire. Our febrile search for truth in escaping ignorance ensured greater inventions were perpetually forthcoming as Saint Augustine legitimized commerce so long as the antidote to the corrupting effects of money was the righteousness and thrift of Jesus.

Dependent on this precept did the Church procure riches eclipsing those of royalty and straddle Europe as the largest landowner when profits were ploughed back for the acquisition of more acreage. Herein began capitalism’s first division of labour between Catholic estates like the Cistercians, Franciscans, or Benedictines whose specialization in crops, winemaking, livestock, textiles, blacksmithing, and pottery led to burgeoning trade. Their ethos of hard work precipitated the rapid growth of Europe as a juggernaut of a civilization compared to the peoples of the East and was chronicled by Saint Benedict who in the sixth century made expressly known how, ‘Idleness is the enemy of the soul. Therefore the brothers should have specified periods of manual labour as well as prayerful reading…When they live by the labour of their hands, as our fathers and the apostles did, then they are really monks’. Moneymaking became an avatar for the work ethic of a man’s labour whose fruits were checked by his self-denial and in this sense there was a token of nobility in pain that coronated us kings and queens amongst men: we are good and honest in virtue of how this same self-affliction endows us with the empathy we rely upon to help our brethren.

[johnjankovic]

ORO Y PLATA

I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves.

Matthew 10:16

Death of chivalry dates to the postwar counterculture amid an era when such ethics of self-denial eroded under pressures from bohemianism in big cities. Beleaguered by crazed feminists then agitating for universal promiscuity and those now fulminating against some nonexistent patriarchal privilege, manhood has been feminized by subversive ideas dubbed ‘toxic masculinity’ to the peril of young boys ever more prone to suicide by a factor of three. Nevertheless virtue-signalling abounds as millennial parents indulge their infants to undergo hormonal therapies for gender transitions, dim-witted Hollywood superstars rear their androgynous newborns, ‘hook-up’ culture mainstreams abortifacients, transgenderism pervades school curricula, or progressivism hijacks marriage, little wonder then of how the cowboy archetype has been ousted by the skinny-jean milksop who misandrists revere in their own ideal of the manicured man. The tonic to the mythical curse of testosterone is the denial of biology by unsexing Boy Scouts of America to the monosyllable title of Scouts or perhaps feigning historical amnesia for #MeToo despite its origins as a direct externality to feminism’s sexual revolution which in itself objectified women as its promiscuity was the real author to chivalry’s obituary.

The world desperately needs the conservative morals of forgotten cowboys always in service to others which encapsulate the catechism of real men. Observe how black communities beset by a destructive culture of MTV gangsterism and an overzealous justice system of ‘mandatory minimums’ and ‘three-strikes’ for nonviolent offences are microcosms for collateral and cumulative dangers in a society of less men and fewer fathers. Single mothers seldom compensate for such absenteeism, the antisocial stigma from incarceration alone nudges adolescents into criminality if financial hardship is not the first to do so, thus inequities of the justice system orphan a boy to be left indoctrinated by less savoury forms of a culture which conduces to violence or a catharsis of sexual aggression primed by misogynous lyrics. Without a paternal figure a boy then fails to learn the difference between defence and aggression, he risks not becoming a man of principle who is solicitous of his wife, son, and daughter which today precipitates a generational crisis. If hypothetically a tragedy akin to the sinking of the Titanic were to reoccur the lion’s share of survivors would be men not women and children.

Liberal feminists cast aspersions on male identity calumniating it as a privilege that is predatory and from this persecution complex abreast of radicalizing the LGBTQ subculture has manliness devolved into an evil that must be suppressed. Curiously, what was once a social agenda propounding tolerance has mutated into a tyranny with the precise aim of establishing a genderless society. The selfless man is no longer virtuous but rather a pariah, the spillover to this phenomenon successfully marginalizes police officers, border patrol agents, and soldiers now denounced as fascists, even ‘woke’ churches convince male parishioners of emotionalism’s virtue or how expressions of vulnerability are good. This demagoguery of cowing men into emasculation normalizes the solace of ‘man-caves’ where, redolent of treehouses, they retreat to play video games away from the family. These are not men but children, what third-wave feminism partly manufactures is a wholesale generation of disempowered boys untouched by adulthood who are susceptible to alcoholism and depression. Why in the 21st century has the premeditation of mass shootings perpetrated by young men skyrocketed? Such perversity to kill toddlers in suburban Newtown or churchgoers in Charleston extends well beyond the red herring exploited by activists who run afoul of the Second Amendment.

What is happening suggests a crisis of masculinity by which feminization of men does not sensitize but rather infantilizes them and occasions an apathy to the wants and needs of others. The disappearance of the industrial labour market compounds these symptoms and moreover the knowledge economy disenchants these men who, demoralized, are subsequently averse to higher education, the very passport to middle-class life, this eventuates in a yawning gender gap on college campuses as female enrolment eclipses the latter. According to Harvard, a male minority of 43 percent enrol in colleges whilst 60 percent of graduate degrees are conferred to women. Professors at MIT spoke to the epiphenomenon of how men with minimal education proceed to earn significantly less wages throttling family-formation. Virtue-signalling by feminist partisans availing themselves of selective data in their public relations for victimhood, however, contrives a myth of a glass ceiling that misleads the lay public into believing the statistical fallacy of a wage gap which the US Department of Labour debunked by accounting for differences in workweek hours, experience, and life preferences. The diversion away from males nonetheless proves particularly inimical to ethnic minorities whilst the epidemic of unmotivated, underachieving, and underrepresented men continues unabated.

Even when matriculated in colleges, identity politics intensify the castration of insecure men with ‘safe spaces’, ‘trigger warnings’, and emotional therapy dogs further devaluing masculinity and militating against a transition from boyhood to the upward mobility of productive manhood as more elect to reside at home with their parents. This structural politicization that appeals to bachelorhood permeates into the commercial sector as well which calorie-free beers, metrosexuality, and Tinder bespeak when finally under the weight of such narcissism and sport fornication does the institution of marriage collapse. Why have a family when a handsome stud can bed as many women to his heart’s content? Missing men hence issue from the resentment for the heteronormative stereotype of domestic life that modern feminists and the rest of society have held up to obloquy for so long. Their emphasis on individualism coupled to the scarcity of marriageable men undermine the very pillars upon which Judaeo-Christian civilization was built and those married are quite often disposed to a philandering relapse from that learned narcissism. So choose instead to raise your sons like cowboys, teach them toughness, truth, and justice until at long last in your autumn years you will be blessed by the very sight of them.

[johnjankovic]

BOANERGES

‘You unbelieving and perverse generation’, Jesus replied, ‘how long shall I stay with you? How long shall I put up with you?’

Matthew 17:17

What is truth? Pontius Pilate asked Jesus (18:38).

As it pertains to the constitutionality on the right to marry, the greater argument relates to nomenclature. The ideology of conservatism, in the vein of secular thought, frowns upon same-sex marriage having little do with morality and everything to do with the meaning of the word. The procreative nature of intercourse between man and fertile woman whose generativity begets a child inasmuch as the two sexes reliably mate creates the necessary space for State interference in a household to safeguard the welfare of offspring. Scientists concur over the optimum configuration between husband and wife to dispense childcare that would not psychologically harm them, ergo the institution of marriage fundamentally exists, au fond, to protect children. As same-same couples do not procreate, conservatives insist on extending tax benefits to them, however their relationship cannot be denominated a marriage whose institution emphasizes reproduction. What should be said for infertile heterosexual couples? The potential to mate, a pregnant prerequisite to adoption, is confirmation enough of how the nomenclature for their relationship befits the appellation ‘marriage’ which unites man and woman to create a child. Otherwise, Orwellian in nature, confounding homosexual partnerships with marriage is nothing less than doublespeak: a liberal will say the sky is red, the author must agree in spite of how in truth the sky is blue; the slippery slope is manifest, a woman claims ‘he’ is a man which demands fervent acquiescence to this wordplay in fear of political correctness although chromosomes inform how this person is not; a white man professes he is black symptomatic of what is in reality transracial psychosis and yet conformity to liberalism’s new rules must be religiously followed lest the ideology’s politicization of mental illness slander the dissident a bigot and transphobic.

Identity politics become fashionable in this post-truth era as the social issue harks back to the 2000s when the orthodoxy of marriage irrevocably changed under the boot of language adulteration by Leftists. To this point, if marriage simply intimates love between two consenting adults, incestuous coupling between brother and sister, or mother and son, should soon be the next frontier in spite of the deleterious effects from inbreeding. Society long betokens how traumatized progeny issue from the demise of the nuclear family, father absenteeism, maternal want, and whichever one the negative influences to which the child is susceptible thereafter. The only difference referencing same-sex marriage, as the child is equally deprived of either a mother or father figure, is that government legally accedes to his or her harm when precipitated by perversion of the word ‘marriage’ which entails reproduction and thereby adoption cannot be denied by law. A ‘civil union’, however, would extend tax benefits, albeit not permit the trappings of marriage in the guise of parenthood for homosexuals. Yes, society already distorts childrearing with informal parenthood in the likes of open marriages, adultery, or single mothers and fathers, however in this case the State exacts harm on a child by government fiat underwritten by the rule of law which historically bears no precedence. The slippery slope anew is acutely steep insofar as the doctoring of definitions vindicates the de facto propriety of transgenderism and transracialism to the point that the State now feels it legally bound to allow a biological man into your pubescent daughter’s bathroom, and mandate that she be taught transgender sexuality at her young age despite the wishes of her parents through which totalitarianism hijacks society to usurp the freedoms of fathers and mothers alike.

Liberals as a totem of the counterculture’s casual drugs and sex succeeded in destroying family and social dynamics in the 1960s whose sown objectification of women society now reaps from its disingenuous denouncement of sexual assault, harassment, and pedophilia, yet the same objective of destroying homes and marriage continues with inexorable consistency. The entertainment industry, of an inveterate proneness to search for the next civil rights war although no equivalency exists between racism and same-sex marriage, and of a vernacular ‘wokeness’ in the patois of stupid millennials, glorifies gender dysphoria instead of addressing it appropriately whereby this make-believe is dogmatically enforced by the same pseudo-scientists who believe in the right to murder a baby seconds prior to her evacuation from the womb. The problem with such progressivism is how no end obtains evidenced by transracialism and ‘snowflake’ hypersensitivity which, in lockstep with the status quo, must be mainstreamed ere long for the sake of Leftist equality. Soon a white man who calls himself black must not be refused Affirmative Action neither can he practice yoga lest he be charged with bigotry for cultural appropriation. Language serves a paramount function to define social mores when divorced of any offence to religious sensibilities yet liberals with impunity befoul it nonetheless in conformity with their atheism whilst for some quizzical reason coward Christians ashamed of their own lore fail to protest for fear of persecution.

To my fellow Christians, my family, persecution is expected and even a rite of passage. ‘I am sending you out like sheep among wolves’, Jesus said (Matthew 10:16), ‘if you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you’ (John 15:19). Do not be surprised, my brothers and sisters, if the world hates you (1 John 3:13), ‘if anyone suffers as a Christian, let him not be ashamed, but let him glorify God in that name’ (1 Peter 4:16). I promise you shall be condemned, mocked, and vilified forasmuch as the idea you espouse does not belong to this earthly place, nor do you belong to it, man in his conceited ways for this reason will strain to violently expel you or else tear asunder your beliefs until you are like him. Do not break faith with Father, do not bend, do not be co-opted to agree with those who would instead see the Church burn, and above all else, let not the actions of the Son be lost on you.

[johnjankovic]

GOLGOTHA

Stay calm and await the gnashing of teeth, this is only the beginning.

4 John 1:1

Prior to crucifixion’s banishment, decreed by then Roman emperor Constantine in AD 341 as a defunct method of execution — Cicero notedly expressing the spectacle as the most cruel and hideous of them all —  this practice which the Romans imported from the Phoenicians three hundred years before the fateful day above Golgotha, and which historical archives document as existent even three hundred years earlier, lent itself to a display of deterrence for law and order most manifest in the six thousand crucifixions along the Appian Way to quell Spartacus’ rebellion in 71 BC. The event, in the main, involved three stages, the victim’s flagellation, public humiliation in wrestling the patibulum of what weighed one hundred pounds to the top of a knoll, and finally the nailing of palms with iron spikes to the said crossbar and feet to the anchored staticulum, both dovetailed in a hewn mortice that was stayed by gravity’s downward force upon the suspended body. The ordeal left the persecuted prostrate with pain that for Jesus on the eve of His death the mere thought of its eventuality, inescapable as He understood it from premonitions in the Garden of Gethsemane, precipitated hematidrosis, a physiological condition of acute anxiety originating from abject fear that which induces the perspiration of blood (Luke 22:44). It was this night’s mental and physical exhaustion, a prelude to the forthcoming horrors, which compounded the agony between Gethsemane and Golgotha.

Yet Jesus’ torture was atypical of Roman crucifixion, the speed of expiry even confounding Pontius Pilate (Mark 15:44). It assuredly was the most bloodthirsty of any heretofore seen ascribed to how criminals and slaves affixed to the cross ordinarily remained conscious for several days. The Son, however, survived less than three hours when, in deference to Jewish law prohibiting crucifixions on tomorrow’s Sabbath especially amid the ongoing festivities of Passover, removal of the footrest was essential to expedite death thus entailing contortion of the feet at an extreme angle for placement of the spike into the metatarsal bones. There suspended, sardonically adorned with a crown of thorns piercing the forehead as fashioned from an acacia nilotica plant outside Jerusalem’s praetorium, this bloody deed overlooking the panorama of a sadistic mob abreast of one centurion, four legionnaires, and the exactor mortis all of whom draw lots on the inheritance of His raiment (Mark 15:17; Matthew 27:35; John 19:24), Jesus brutally suffocates from pleural effusion and finally death issues from cardiac arrest primed by hours of hypovolemic and traumatic shock. The event was a climacteric to the preceding hours beginning with Judas’ betrayal and Jesus’ apprehension who in custody was escorted to the homestead of Caiaphas, a high priest of the Sanhedrin for more than a decade and ally to the Roman emperor Tiberius. Here to the Pharisees’ displeasure the subsequent proceedings were not at all of contrition even in the wake of being seriously drubbed but rather in sheer defiance the Son in a full-throated diatribe admonishes His interrogators (Matthew 23:1-36).

The death knell that night came from one of Caiaphas’ many questions on the identity of the haggard accused now before him whose rejoinder he judged as blasphemous (Mark 14:61). ‘Are you the Messiah?’ he asked, ‘the Son of the blessed One?’ Jesus responded in the affirmative. The Nazarene fated to die was quickly marshalled to the Procurator of Judea, Pontius Pilate, and always obsequious to Rome the horde manipulated Roman law to proffer that rather than offensive to their proper religious sensibilities, in more secular logic, Jesus anointed himself king, an act they argued treasonous to Cesar (Luke 23:2; John 19:12; John 19:15). Incredulous of the false charge, Pilate sought to recuse himself and court favour of an enemy hence he next despatched Jesus to Herod (Luke 23:12), tetrarch of Tiberias there in Jerusalem already to fete Passover. The legal rationale was that inasmuch as His ministry originated in Galilee only the magistrate whose jurisdiction includes the province should adjudicate the case. Yet Herod, too obtuse for the moment’s significance, solicited instead for entertainment of cute parlour tricks and some wizardry from the Galilean (Luke 23:8). These overtures Jesus spurned who, then clothed patronizingly in the garb of a king, was returned to Pilate. Intransigent still, however, the Roman Prefect continued to balk at the petition electing instead to have the Son scourged and not executed in a show of appeasement that he trusted the restive mob would accept.

Such flagellation materialized more gruesomely than what popular conception allows or what the Church seems to have sanitized as tantamount to casual whipping. Miniature size pieces of sharp metal and bone were stitched into the many tails of the flagrum whereby each of the thirty-nine welts, on account of Mosaic Law proscribing anything above, inflicted an array of gaping wounds upon the flesh of the naked victim whose hands were chained to a column fully exposing the dorsum as he first doubled then kneeled when racked with pain that radiated all throughout his body. This method did the Romans habitually avail themselves of to prosecute verdicts of capital punishment in executions of Gentiles. Shrill screams resonated, ribs fractured, pneumothorax resulted in the collapse and bruising of lungs, muscles hemorrhaged all from the alternating blows between the flogging predators each of whose fresh opportunity at this schadenfreude obstructed the victim’s ability to breath as the oedema of pleural and pericardial fluid accumulated in the chest cavity and that the effluence of blood and water from Jesus’ impalement later bespoke (John 19:34). The harrowing experience caused dehydration associated with excessive perspiration and in preceding the Crucifixion there ensued the onset of hypovolemic shock. The Shroud of Turin ultimately numbers lacerations in excess of one hundred thus it is widely accepted the flagrum consisted of three thongs to inflict one-hundred-and-seventeen lashes commensurate with the thirty-nine prescribed by Mosaic Law.

Jesus long resigned to His fate, offering no mea culpa of recantation, stood for the last time before Pilate who once already endeavoured to exculpate the Nazarene by way of a Paschal Pardon which the Jews outrightly jettisoned in supplicating instead for the release of the murder Barabbas (Matthew 27:15; Luke 23:18; John 18:39). Presently bleeding crimson from orifices all over the body, Pilate hopes clemency for the prisoner’s appearance would quiet further cries for punishment, the obstreperous crowd did not acquiesce, neither dispersing nor yielding in size and unrest. Fear now beleaguers the Prefect. From his chair with trappings of Roman authority and of prosecutorial discretion a message was borne to him from his wife beset with worry, ‘Have nothing to do with that righteous man’, it read, ‘for I have suffered much because of him today in a dream’ (Mathew 27:19). Pilate in a fit of conscience once more attempted to set free the grossly disfigured Nazarene yet the cacophony of anger grew ever more deafening, ‘If you release this man, you are not Caesar’s friend; for everyone who makes himself king sets himself against Caesar’ (John 19:12). ‘Shall I crucify your King?’ Pilate now perched atop Gabbatha bellowed to the mass of skeptics below (John 19:13). ‘We have no king but Caesar’, they reciprocated (John 19:15), so it was the lot of Jesus was irrevocably sealed.  

From the praetorium to Gologtha, the place of condemnation and execution, a half-mile of road was trudged upon at noon by the parade of Jesus who balanced the instrument of His death atop a bloodstained shoulder (John 19:14). Of the four crosses that Romans customarily used, crux immissa (t), crux commissa (T), crux decussata (x), and crux simplex (I), the configuration of the first in this case is certain which Luke the Apostle corroborates in his recording of the Titulus Crucis placed ‘over him’ (Luke 23:38). So enfeebled was the Son by midday, exhausted, dehydrated, bloodied, and symptomatic with siriasis that the exactor mortis commanded an onlooker, Simon of Cyrene, to carry the crossbeam for the remainder of the journey lest the prisoner die on route. By this time Jesus’ vestiture adhered to His body, and, akin to a bandage torn from a lesion, the fabric that papered over His open wounds which it clotted was abruptly divested upon arrival at the hilltop with agonizing hurt. Forensic pathologists concur at this point around the brutality mimicked onto the Shroud of Turin that Jesus most certainly suffered a collapsed and hemorrhagic lung prior to the Crucifixion as his body could only sustain less than three hours more of torture. What followed proved exponentially more sinister than the beating and flagellation combined in the prologue of evil about to be visited upon Him.

Atop Golgotha Jesus’ cloak and tunic were shed. Cast to the ground on His back amid sweltering heat, the executioners stretch the arms to align directly above the crossbeam. Twelve-inch nails driven into the radial sides of both palms then strike the median nerves to a paroxysm of incredible pain derived from causalgia. The crossbeam and body are hoisted to the mortice beneath the apex of the stipe, a shallow angle then bends the knees, and finally the contorted feet are disposed to suffer the same fate as the hands only this time exacted upon the plantar nerves which elicits an identical response. No more than a brief moment passes before cramping of the calves and thighs exacerbate the trauma attributed to injuries already sustained from the haemorrhaging lung, broken thoracic cage, and lacerations to the dorsum. The sleepless night in the Garden of Gethsemane has markedly lowered the pain threshold and is punctuated by the ubiquity of shock, together with this phenomenon does lactic acid in the muscles prompt hyperventilation, and the attendant pleural effusion further truncates breath. It is the advent of a new sensation inspired from the inflammation of nerves throughout the arched body which begins to intensify: Jesus is now on fire. Spectators cheer and jeer at the Nazarene who claims to be Christ, and the high elevation of the cross amplifies the acoustics of their piercing laughter to its vertex where He languishes in silence, about this time the skies above have darkened to a sullen hue (Matthew 27:45).

The Son hangs listlessly from the cross, the skin symptomatic of shock turns ashen, spittle and vomitus regurgitated at intervals saturate the body as a result of nausea precipitated by critically low levels of blood volume and pressure. A hematologist would argue at least a fifth of it has hemorrhaged by this time. The acidic content of sweat trickling down from the perforated forehead by the crown of thorns stings those abrasions inflicted from, before the march to the crest of this hill, repeated strikes of a staff upon the head (Mark 15:19). Amid the orgasm of bloodlust, the soldiers who spat on Jesus’ visage and ridiculed Him moments ago rest with grinning faces, the crowd in turn expresses its enthusiasm at the sanguinary sight. ‘He deserves to die’ (Mathew 26:66), they yell, whistle, and beam with euphoria. At this hour, poor circulation to the heart begins the irreversible reaction of organ failure, moreover keen pains still accompany every breath from the uncharacteristic brutality of the scourging from the previous morning. Much of Jesus’ plasma pools in regions of the lungs, tremors and seizures assail the body, and faint with thirst a sponge of water is raised to His lips of which He drinks in one draught. Jesus, ever pugnacious, His wretched body an icon of the malice sown in the hearts of men, knew Father’s will had finally been done. Looking up at Him with stoic eyes right before death, here on a hill christened Golgotha humanity’s most powerful words were spoken: ‘It is finished’. The Son dies at three in the afternoon, year thirty-three anno Domini, on the third day of April.

[johnjankovic]

BLITZKRIEG

Then there will issue from the stock which had remained barren for so long, proceeding from the 50th degree, one who will renew the whole Christian Church. A great place will be established, with union and concord between some of the children of opposite ideas, who have been separated by diverse realms. And such will be the peace that the instigator and promoter of military factions, born of the diversity of religions, will remain chained to the deepest pit. And the kingdom of the Furious One, who counterfeits the sage, will be united.

Nostradamus, Epistle to King Henry II

A luminary’s life as in narratology presupposes an ending worthy of himself or of a protagonist, amnesia issues from an anemic ending, memorability from the opposite, an otherwise good story fails should its coda be infelicitous to the mythos’ style, or be it that its banality dulls the senses enough to swiftly forget what was written in spite of what perhaps may have been authored with assiduous thought. In the main, an epilogue in real life or not must jar the witness or reader lest she neither think on nor talk of, if unworthy of remembrance, the ending itself. For example, a really fine book converts an ending into some climacteric which edifies the reader as in Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre-Dame where he writes, evoking love’s transcendence beyond mortality, ‘Quand on voulut le détacher du squelette qu’il embrassait il tomba en poussière’. Playwright William Shakespeare discovers tragedy alone to be the single panacea for a vendetta between two houses fraught with bloodshed, ‘For never was a story of more woe than this of Juliet and her Romeo’. Robert Sherwood’s character Myra in the film noir screenplay of Waterloo Bridge steps into an oncoming truck, years later a bereaved gentleman reads wistfully in a voice-over sequence a missive from his late inamorata, ‘I loved you, I’ve never loved anyone else, that’s the truth Roy, I never shall’.

Seeming ethereal, and something that recalls fatalism whose leitmotif typically expresses an abrupt departure of some kind by a beloved character, endings ought to eclipse their beginnings if only to teach a lesson based upon dramatic loss. Gleaned from another one of the author’s dearest films, Father O’Malley in 1944’s Going My Way shuffles off screen onto his next parish in the dark of Christmas Eve to disappear from the merrymaking and mellifluous sounds of Saint Dominic’s Church after forever changing the lives of its churchgoers for the better. Such it is that in fiction as in life no matter how treasured a person their value typically cannot be ascertained until deprivation reveals it, this is the queerness of the human condition and yet an important one to understand that without loss no lesson worth knowing can ever be learned which is oddly true with many of life’s vicissitudes. Loss epitomizes the genesis of empathy, it is the quintessential impetus to the solicitude for the welfare of others, and the meaning of life generally issues from it, from an acute and sudden emptiness in time and space, from the enigmatic loss of control to disrupt nature’s determinism, and from where the dialectic between love and loss is finally known.

The concept of love must be entertained to fully appreciate this intimation of loss wherein fondness greatly increases only after the fact. To begin, ‘Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love’ (1 John 4:8). The idea is not a panegyric to divinity but a cosmological truth, alas society in its infinite wisdom vulgarizes its usage to indifferently describe eros when its impression upon man or woman beggars description and makes meretricious any sort of explanation behind it. Here the author speaks of courtship, not the love of a parent nor sibling nor even the false kind of an evening’s diversion, for the latter is nothing other than a knee-jerk conquest at variance with the snug feeling from the arousal of ecstasy for another and not at all for oneself whose act binds two persons together ‘so that the two will become one flesh’ (1 Corinthians 6:16). The said emotion can be so remarkably intense, so mysterious, so heady, so otherworldly, that in absentia its toll may provoke suicide as in the literary, thespian, or cinematographic instances of star-crossed lovers above, a fact no less of how humans experience the world much differently than the animal kingdom animated by self-preservation.

In the chronicle of time has loss been wed to love in legends, tales, and folklore from which the epitome in some form or another entails sacrifice. ‘Greater love has no one than this’, Jesus imparted to the Apostles the night of his seizure, ‘that he lay down his life for his friends’ (John 15:13). The modest imitation of such selflessness in the vineyard of life includes austerity of a husband foregoing his wants and needs to pleasure and please his wife or vice versa, the asceticism of a mother to nurture her child’s growth, the stoicism from a suitor apostatizing love if it means his soulmate shall be better for it, or the repudiation of material things to serve the needy. The eudaemonism of sacrifice, to do for others more than for thyself, carries with it great weight in Christian theology, an attribute so contrary to the ethics of atheists and agnostics who confound humans with primates in their defence of sin and vice. The loss of self becomes the loftiest reaches of enlightenment as Jesus sermonizes, ‘For whoever would save his life would lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it’ (Matthew 16:24-25). Saint Augustine who enlarges upon this sacrifice of incurvatus in se observes how it outwardly manifests through the appearance of unalloyed love for a wife, husband, offspring, sibling, parent, friend, or neighbour.

For the Apostles their discipleship ended with the literal imitation of Jesus’ sacrifice whose act colours the identity of a true Christian for it is anticipated our pain shall heal rather than victimize another. The irrationality of it, far different than paganism’s cultic or ritual offerings to appease a deity as ransom, testifies to the superiority of a principled man versus the hedonism of the uncouth, to the reason why humans are not merely animals, or to the fact his self originates in the image of Father. What escapes Christian dilettantes is how, on the subject of the Crucifixion and persecution of the apostles thereafter, the crux of the doctrine pivots on sufferance. ‘If any man would come after me’, Jesus said, ‘let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me’ (Mark 8:34; Matthew 10:38; Luke 14:27; Matthew 16:24). A fellowship of twelve brothers, however agonizing it would later be, bespoke this omnipotent truth that the Church woefully communicates to its patrons today.

The word ‘sacrifice’, antagonistic to if not obsolete verbiage in a liberal culture of instant sexual gratification and material consumption which paints Jesus as a puritanical killjoy, occurs 271 times in the bible as a thanksgiving to Father, an atonement, or disavowal of selfish pleasure. The term has fallen into disuse or worse has become anathema, stigmatized by the egocentrism of the stupid, by the profligacy of spendthrifts, or by the superficiality of glamorous lifestyles hawked by tabloids, even war sacrifice from patriotism grates on the vox populi. Society derides the virtues of self-denial and abstinence, these are not only absurd by normative groupthink but commonly accepted as wrong, a true microcosm of how estranged people are from goodness. Jesus died for our sins (1 Corinthians 15:3), as much as he laid down a messianic template (John 13:14-15), however a great many Christians sensationalize the former believing themselves inoculated against comeuppance from sin if they partake in churchgoing, and belittle the latter in virtue of their arrogance and cupidity.

Widespread aversion to pain abreast of freewheeling promiscuity and gluttony have transformed sacrifice to embody the meekness of a hapless fool, a characteristic more craven than intrepid. This same narrative idolizes the Resurrection with passing regard for the Passion and Crucifixion as the theological ascendency of patripassianism suggests Jesus was not crucified at all but instead it was God. No man could be brutally scourged, disfigured, crucified, and skewered nor should any semblance of it be expected from armchair Christians, hitherto their cowardice remains unbecoming of our family. Were it not for the bloodletting and bloodsport by the Pharisees, for a memorable ending, for such ghastly torture, for an unforeseen departure, the world would believe Jesus an agitator and charlatan insofar as nothing would be reaped if it were unsown and such that the Son spoke to his disciples, ‘[U]nless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a seed; but if it dies, it bears much fruit’ (John 12:24). It is said 53 minutes from where there rings 53 bells such a seed shall be planted once more.

[johnjankovic]

OH LORD

The year of the great seventh number accomplished, It will appear at the time of the games of slaughter, Not far from the great millennial age, When the dead will come out of their graves.

Nostradamus, X, 74

Ambiguity of sin can be most starkly seen in the dehumanization by pro-choice activists that, as they manifest a preference for euphemisms, petition for abortion of a fetus rather than human at any interval between fertilization and birth in spite of a physician’s Hippocratic Oath or possibly the socioeconomic repercussions of eugenics. Society claims the ejection of life from the womb to be a human right and in virtue of the fact a fetus does not, according to this lore, belong to the same species, she or ‘it’ cannot be privy to this debate as the objectification suggests. Science condones this groupthink by conveniently selecting opportune trimesters to excrete the foreign body at day twenty-two when the heart pulses, at week three when internal organs and nervous system develop, or at week six when brain waves are detectable. Extenuating circumstances exist, rape, poor health, or severe disability of the offspring, however the greater part of this controversy hinges on the freedom to ‘fuck’ whereby man and woman are too ignorant to understand the beauty, rapture, and gravitas of coitus, of life, and of love. The author, a rationalist, finds it improvident and ironic of feminists to educate young daughters about empowerment only for them to be ensnarled by moral dilemmas usually as a result of predatory males.

This very same objectification of ‘things’ rather than people applied to African slaves, Armenians culled by genocide, Jews exterminated during the Holocaust, Tutsis mutilated in Rwanda, Bosnians felled in Sarajevo and a panoply of other pogroms. Science then again assails this counterargument of dehumanization by offering a coup de grâce that the fetus is in reality not human at all but a clump of tissue because, parasitically it seems, existence would be impossible outside the womb. Is a patient on life support alive? By the logic of pro-choice militants, the answer is ‘no’ and it should not be considered homicide, therefore, if this incapacitated ‘thing’ were simply to keel over upon being left unassisted. Pro-choice exponents advocate, quite simply, that promiscuity without consequence should be a new religion, in denial and deluded they relieve their conscience by contextualizing the argument under feminism which it is not. The debate relates to decency, modesty, and trust, choose instead not to be inseminated by a man who categorically does not care for you otherwise this purported maverick would have taken the precautions to avert the incubus should it be misperceived as such. If two people in love choose to consummate their relationship meaningfully, do so thoughtful of its solemnity, not at the expense of life, nor prematurely to the observance of marriage.

At conception, married male and female gametes create a zygote carrying a unique genetic code which fuels cellular growth dependent on a lifetime of nutrition and oxygen. Neither haploid cells, the spermatozoa nor the oocyte, the sperm nor the egg, asexually produce life, and therefore it should not be a choice to have an abortion but instead a choice not to have unprotected sex which is lost on protesters and precedes all of the subsequent quagmire in ethics. This is the point where male architects of the 1960s sexual revolution, when chauvinism supplanted chivalry, should be excoriated. Loose morals created the injustice of being perceived a ‘tease’ or a slut, a babykiller or not and women fraught with this persecution and testosterone-induced hypocrisy seem unable to escape any if not all terms of abuse. The formulated question from this premise changes thus: Is it reproductive freedom? Or, is it freedom to ‘fuck’? Between feminists and conservative women the foregoing difference in opinion informs the antagonism between pro-choice versus pro-life arguments respectively, yet the former will insist ‘an acorn is not an oak tree’. Hurrah, your astute observation is terribly enlightening! However, neither an acorn nor an oak tree are mammals, let alone human beings, hence your stupidity is courteously pardoned.

Liberal feminists effectively politicize motherhood and contribute to a market for fetal tissue valued at $1bn in the pharmaceutical industry. Much the same, liberal judges in the 1973 Supreme Court ruling of Roe v Wade, which legalized elective abortions, enabled fetal tissue to be obtained by this heinous act for research, experimentation, and product development showing promise in Parkinson’s disease, diabetes, and blood disorders as a method separate from procurements more bioethical in nature resulting from ectopic pregnancies or miscarriages. Both episodes of progressivism did not foresee the likeness of organ harvesting that, aroused by the darker corners of capitalism, would incentivize an entirely new market for fetus farming which, in fact, does exist. Should the sanctity of love, marriage, and procreation have been taught, should the nuclear family have remained sound, should men have cared for women as opposed to their objectification likened to trophies, should the right words have been sought, none of these indefensible outcomes would have materialized.

[johnjankovic]

JUDAS’ FRANKENSTEIN

Then I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us?’ Then I said, ‘Here I am. Send me!’

Isaiah 6:8

People who hate truth hate the Son. In actuality the majority of Christians now vehemently oppose truth, fiction and tinsel appeal to them many times more. Observe the apparition of the Heavens culminating from thousands of years of prophecy, and thousands more of paganism whose search for purpose crested in the birth of Jesus. The subsequent renouncement of His teachings could only be expected since so often does verity become blasphemous thus running afoul of those who purport to be religious. ‘Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free’ (John 8:32): from this assumption follows the disposition to freedom, although it is pure fantasy, that people yearn for truth in an effort to be liberated. People are keen on lust and earthly things for reasons of the exact opposite, wishful for the comforts and conveniences of rules and institutions they covet self-validation of their existence by social media, promiscuity, or garish things intimating how vanity then is truly the greatest sin of all.

The apostle Judas, for instance, was not a bad man, misguided he was for certain, yet his betrayal issued not from malicious intent as much as a vainglorious attempt to pocket thirty pieces of silver whose consequences he could not predict. Indeed, far-reaching they were and myopic as he was this treachery which spurred the condemnation of Jesus and caused him to belatedly show contrition was of a man who loved himself more than others, otherwise the very source of vice: bachelor promiscuity which lends itself later to adultery is for a man who loves himself more than others; luxury is for a man who loves himself more than others; excessive drinking and partying is for a man who loves himself more than others; consumption of narcotics is for a man who loves himself more than others. The reader might balk at such extremity largely since heresy and truth are often quite the same, and without compromise the errancy of narcissism reveals itself, though let her be reminded that the moral constitution of man hinges on the vast spectrum of past decisions which informs whether in the future he will make right or wrong choices, and that absolutism militates against confusion for as long as the ambiguity of grey areas in sin prevail it may be justified with gusto as it is done today.

An example of how compromise justifies profligacy would be Christmas metamorphosed into commercial paganism when worldliness of false idols usurps its warmth in veneration of a portly man rather than the existence of Jesus which in so doing fetes a cascade of feasting, drinking, and carousing analogous to an impromptu weekend of indulging in revelry if little else. As for the serendipitous birth in Bethlehem, where Joseph initially travelled from Nazareth accompanied by his wife the Virgin Mary to register as citizens for a census under decree of Caesar Augustus (Luke 2:1), where no inn vacancies due to the influx of wayfarers into the city obliged the accouchement of the Messiah in a lowly manger, where shepherds came to glorify Him upon the apparition of angels bringing these tidings, the foregoing history was scarcely spoken either at dinner tables or as a bedside story on the eve or day of this ethereal event. Though in Santa Clause’s etiology the myth derives from Saint Nicholas of Patara who, in the fourth century when Roman Emperor Constantine and subsequently Pope Julius I consecrated the day of Christmas, abided by precepts pronounced by Jesus, the custom is now beholden to materialism which unseats the ethos of generosity based upon Christian doctrine of simply doing more for others than for thyself. This fulcrum of Scripture long purveys enlightenment, emotional intelligence, and empathy which in this age are of a scarce number.

This is a bewildering time: when a catch-22 of Leftist totalitarianism stifles ideas, reason, and freedom subjecting any dissent to thoughtcrime whilst the morally corrupt acquire legitimacy to govern by reactionaries; when liberal academics outnumber conservatives five to one; when gender exists no more instead replaced by non-binary pronouns and androgynous childrearing; when the sanctity of copulation by consensus means absolutely nothing and by extension the life borne of it can be readily extinguished without conscience; when the scourge of political correctness removes ‘Merry Christmas’ from greeting cards; when liberal colleges create ‘safe spaces’ and ‘trigger warnings’ infantilizing students of a ‘snowflake’ generation to quash differences in opinion; when rape culture infiltrates European cities issuing from how either chivalry has been so eviscerated such that the fairer sex is regarded with little esteem or so Panglossian are policies such that they supersede rationality; when feminists weaponizing intercourse distribute free contraceptives on campuses to ironically empower young women; when a hispanic leader kisses the cross as confirmation of his piety though blithely pauperizes his country; when the Kremlin decriminalizes wife-beating; or when fulminations from Black Lives Matter address symptoms of social malaise but not the cure as in the perniciousness and pervasiveness of social engineering from MTV gangsterism, its systemic misogyny, or its fetish for ‘bling-bling’ wherein criminality has a greater purchase on social class than does intellectualism. ‘Why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, but fail to notice the beam in your own eye?’ (Matthew 7:3) Such thoughts once more remain nothing less than heresy if measured by normative propriety.

[johnjankovic]

AND THEY LIVED HAPPILY EVER AFTER

The kings of the earth prepare for battle; the rulers plot together against the Lord and against his anointed one.

Psalm 2:2

Deep sobriety or impaired intelligence governs action or inaction, an inferior mind prompts vices, conversely an enlightened one prosecutes the opposite, whether an individual subscribes to Caligulan or Cartesian philosophy depends on their faculty to reason, such is the wellspring of sympathy, honour, and faith. A smart man aware of his limitations, knowledgeable enough to comprehend the stuff of ecosystems in the form of humanity, understands the synonymy of bad men and parasites, of a vain existence, their opulence and adultery, their money and sex, properties of these two prey upon the soul leaving a man whose decadence consumes him whole. Men of such boorish ways do not love, the caprice of their carnal pleasures informs their thoughts, it is him who manufactured society’s false emancipation of women today. The sexual revolution of the 1960s did not liberate women: Free sex, free love, let us call a spade a spade and admit the orgy of hedonism that ensued.

It is bewildering to think of gender inequality when women, by virtue of their biology, are not only equal but gracefully nurturing in contrast to the more stoic nature of man. A man cannot usher life into this earth, he merely takes it, the miracle that is a woman marshals this gift into a dystopian world and for her hard-pressed efforts man sees it becoming to marginalize her. Is this not perverse? Is this not wrong? Why, how repugnant it is, to wear a contraceptive, to introduce foreign matter into the fairer sex and say, ‘I love you’, when the feeling originates nowhere else than from the ephemerality of an orgasm. Is this a man, or is this a beast? ‘Yes, however, monogamy is risible’, the reader might grouse, ‘we are animals, remember?’ Such dopey reasoning! The predominance at the apex of the food chain where man exists should dictate, instead of cheapening  the very faculty separating him from four-legged scavengers, how congenitally a moral compass inheres in him. It is only conditioning that removes inhibition, it is a choice to abandon Father. The first time man commits adultery, depravity of this sort guilts him, the second time the ugly sin becomes less of a burden. The first time a delinquent steals a candy bar it guilts her, the second time less compunction leaves her unlikely to esteem this inhibition.

So man, prone to hubris, continues to call Father a charlatan, some gimmick, an underhanded device to steal a tithe marketed like publicity every Sunday for the masses to blind them from the reality that nihilism may be the greatest ideology to champion. Yet, arguendo, premised on the calendar of events, the genius of man cannot compare to divine omniscience. Even great paragons of intelligence like Albert Einstein produced a mere four months of erudition whereas the Bible endowed with a cornucopia of insight seems to span an eternity. Explain how in nearly two thousand years humans have progressed to unprecedented heights when in two-hundred-thousand years of existence scarcely could he populate the earth. It is thus Christian reason that is the sine qua non of civilization whose walls rebuff the legions of predation just outside yet so often does it come to pass how, akin to Rome and Visigoths, any breach originates from within, from amoralism, debauchery, and bohemianism with the effect of corrupting minds and souls. Perennially man has known the difference between right and wrong, he simply chooses to ignore it.

[johnjankovic]

VENGEANCE OF ABEL

Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God shall live forever.

1 John 2:15-7

The utilitarian concept of martyrdom for the greater good lives in Christianity unlike any other religion for it is a doctrine in theory but a family in practice formalized by the noble deed of sacrificial death for the survival of kin. Though attempts have been made to mainstream the religion the author envisages the sunset of this belief to be a fringe movement at variance with weekender Christians whose piety begins and ends on Sabbath. More than a fashion accessory the cross symbolizes a readiness to die for the creed it represents and unlike fanaticism or terrorism the victimization goes no further than oneself whereby our pain and suffering converts the pagan as the Apostle Paul did upon savaging Christians, as did Josias upon falsely testifying in the execution of James the Greater, or as the world did upon hating Jesus. As quintessential leaders of the Church we use our blood as instruments of instruction and wash the soiled feet of our followers on bended knee as did Jesus (John 13:1-17). There is a reason why Christianity preceded Islam by six hundred years and was the persecuted minority of genocide by fiat of Rome upon which the monotheistic Church fledged into its present mastodon form: ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him (John 3:16-7)’.

Paternalism inheres in a natural order described by a contract a father unilaterally assumes until such time as maturity from adolescence to adulthood engenders independence enough by the progeny to be emancipated from the progenitor. The perpetual cycle actuates posterity in preservation of a species so as to multiply and populate all corners of the earth (Genesis 1:22,28). Reverence owed from a child to a father speaks to love but more importantly fear since authority subordinates the one whose state of infancy cows them into compliance since they are more secure in their small world than a man in his wider world according to theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. Fear of being reprimanded causes the nascent stages of enlightenment or else the natural rebelliousness of the young obstructs the process of maturity in their defiance against wisdom. For the oak tree to grow straight and proper the elements must nurse the treelet. The culmination of exhortation and castigation produces a just and judicious man or woman, son or daughter, whose virtues enable them to be a loving husband or wife, father or mother. The fear of corporal punishment withdraws yielding to obedience through love.

If ‘fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’ then by syllogism the love of the Lord is its end (Psalm 111:10). The tautology would be that love of the Lord is the end of wisdom. In reality, Christians fear Father or anticipate recompense in the afterlife. Joe behaves to appease Father in fear of His wrath or does so hopeful of entry into His Kingdom but not so because he genuinely loves Him. When devotion transcends blind worship the Christian reaches nirvana, the state may be analogous to a son or daughter protecting a parent against marauders or predators at which point subordination changes into willful submission as love for the Father reaches the pinnacle of maturity and thus the worshiper is no longer an appendage of the doctrine but the very representation of it.

Love of the Father extends to the Mother. The vulgarity of machismo, however, translates into uncouth language inveighed against the opposite sex with epithets as cunt, whore, slut, bitch, and somehow by virtue of conceiving a son their new maternalism exonerates them of an apocryphal crime for simply being born a beautiful woman. A real man cares for his wife as if she were his sister and makes love to her as a husband. Instead of allotting time to a modern den called the man-cave so as to obtusely idolize the pageantry of sport and imbibe himself with beer such moments should be apportioned instead to your spouse. ‘Treat your wives with consideration as a delicate vessel’, writes the Apostle Peter, ‘and with honour as fellow heirs of the gracious gift of life (1 Peter 3:7)’; ‘In the same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves himself loves his wife (Ephesians 5:25)’. Ironically persecution of women remains a longstanding blight in the progressive movement for universal equality despite their status as the fountainhead of humanity. Perhaps Adam neglected Eve showing little affection when she submitted to temptation. Perhaps Samson wronged Delilah to provoke her betrayal. The minutia of intimacy cannot be recorded in Scripture whose general guidance interrogates existence by providing foundations of morality to which the autonomy of man adds or subtracts in deciding his own fate.