I loved the idea; it was a great antidote to tradbro, Cathbro silly shlong-waving nonsense. Sadly it never caught on. I saw one post, maybe two, and that was it.

But the image stuck with me. When I decided to go to church and become an active Christian, I did not want to become over-intellectualized or pedantic. In my Leftist years I already was that. Low key, sit in the back of the pews sort of guy was my goal. No over-reading, no silly philosophical fights. If I didn’t understand something, I would just shrug and pray until it made sense. Or it didn’t. The bookish, educated Leftist drive to “understand” everything was an exhausting treadmill I wanted to leave. Not in the least, because it never led to understanding anything. Not in the heart and soul at least.

So. Dirt-bag Anglican. I’ll take the name. Here in no particular order is a list of the deliberately imprecise, half-knowing and often lazy ways I am a Dirt-bag Anglican Christian.

Bible Editions:

At my church we use the English Standard Version, which is nice. Readable and precise. The previous church used King James Version which was beautiful but often a mouthful. My daily reader is NIV because that’s what I had as a kid so I’m used to it. It’s very readable. I also have a New Living Translation which the IndyCar Ministry gifted me because I have a monthly tithe set up for them. It’s ok, my main complaint is that the text is painfully small.

The best part is, dude, its got a race car on the cover.

In a recent Note I stated appreciation for the Gideon Bible in a hotel room when I needed it.

As long as it’s a mainstream translation, I think it’s fine. The fights over “who has the best translation” are pointlessly snotty. Dude, unless you are going to read the original Greek and Hebrew, you have to recognize that every translation makes compromises. Pick one that works for you and go with it. You’re not Dr. Henry Jones Sr. Get over it.

Same for Book of Common Prayer editions. I started with the 1928 which is beautiful. Currently, being in the ACNA, I’m using the 2019. Nice and crisp language. I also have a 1662 which I dip into here and there, especially for topical prayers. They’re all good.

Also, one thing no one warned me about when I became a Christian: Bibles just show up. Like, I started with one and now I have six if you include a complete translations of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Do they multiply at night? What is going on here?

Other Denominations:

Liturgically, Anglo-Catholicism seems to be close to the Eastern Orthodox. In relation to Roman Catholicism, we respect Rome without obeying it. Pretty much any church that is sacramental, recites a Creed and isn’t too weird, we’ll talk to.

Same for me, personally. And not just our fellow sacramental Christians. I don’t get bent out of shape by everyone else. Mormons? Cool, I don’t care. Do your thing. They seem very nice and I’d rather have them as neighbors than a lot of other people. All I know is the pop culture bad cliches of their faith and who knows if those are true. I’m too busy to think about what they do or do not do.

Occasionally we get a visitor to our church who wants to discuss the details of some denomination split or favorite Bible or translations or whatever. I listen politely then try to pass them off to the priest. He’s got the academic background to discuss those things and, anyway, I’d rather go ask one of the other congregants how their week was and lend them an ear if they need it, or color with the kids.

I have a friend who goes to a cowboy church. Definitely not sacramental but she’s a cowgirl through and through and that’s her jam so heck yeah, cowboy church!

Non-Christians:

Anglicanism is blissfully void of Bible-thumpers yelling “You’re a sinner!” It’s just not our interpretation of God’s Word. As my priest is fond of saying, Hell was made for the fallen angels, not humanity. God gives us endless chances to repent and not end up there.

Probably, this arose from Anglicanism’s spreading through colonialism (oh no! Not the C word!). Being the minority religion and showing respect to everyone else was just part of missionary work in far foreign lands. Being overbearing was a great way to fail to make converts, not to mention winding up dead. Tolerance is part of the Anglican way.

So when it comes to non-Christians, I have two takes. The first one, as stated above. There’s always a chance for them to come on over. Secondly, while we know the only way to salvation is through Christ, the final judgment is his job, not yours.

For all we know He could, at the Last Judgment, look at the unbelievers, the pagans, those who have fallen away from the Church and say, “eh, you’re fine. You didn’t kill anyone, or crash the world economy by speculating on toxic mortgage assets. Good to go.” That’s unlikely, by the way. By the Bible that’s not how it is going to go; He was pretty clear about His expectations for us.

But also, you don’t know. Not really. It’s not your call. Stop acting like it is.

Humor:

Question: How many Anglicans does it take to change a light bulb?

Answer: Change?! That’s my grandfather’s light bulb!

I actually heard that at an Anglican church, told by a licensed reader. The priest laughed. We don’t take ourselves too seriously.

Once, sitting in the Lady Chapel of my previous church, while contemplating the weird story my mother told me about her almost becoming a nun, I had a series of intrusive thoughts, almost audible: “finish what she started.” (Me: “Uh, what?”). A few weeks later I was roped into serving at the altar. I now often call the Blessed Virgin Mary “Our Lady of Job Assignments.” I haven’t been struck with lightning yet. I have a feeling she nods with satisfaction.

Church Decor:

Ok, I can be a bit of a traditionalist about this one. If I could I would worship every Sunday in a medieval English cathedral. I like dark wood, rood screens and communion rails, incense and bells, sung psalms, candles, and vestments.

Well, we can’t always have that. Currently my small start up church is renting space in a building full of artist studios in Denver’s Rino district. We have exposed wood beams and floors and brick, sure, but also bright fluorescent lights and an AC that makes the candles gutter, which is a mess for this Altar Guy to clean up. The landlord won’t let us use incense.

Still, it could be worse. I’ve attended big non-dom churches which don’t even display a cross.

So yeah, I like it old school when it comes to churches. But in the case of our church, we work with what we have. Our priest was lamenting the lack of incense, and I reminded him that in war field chaplains held Mass on the hood of jeeps, with cordite as the incense. It could be worse. We adapt and make it work. And it does.

There is it, my dirt-bag Anglican ways. More general dirt-bag Christian ways, I guess. What it comes down to is be humble, don’t overthink it, pray often. Think about the people around you, not the boring ecumenical fights that do nothing to save souls and make life better. Just go to church, you dirt-bag.

Back when I was around late grade school and early middle school age, and so past the age of toys but also not really an adult, I got into the hobby of toy soldier collecting as, perhaps, a way of extending childhood. I don’t remember how I discovered the hobby, but for several years they were an obsession.

Up to the mid-20th Century, many toy soldiers were made of metal, lead mostly, and hand-painted. Wm. Britain was the biggest producer, though most countries had their local brands as well. In the U.S. a sort of primitive, doughy looking “dimestore” style was prevalent. As the production of metal soldiers tapered off and was replaced with cheap plastic, a nostalgia-based collecting hobby sprang up.

Eventually the prices of the old sets grew so much that collecting them became difficult. Small manufacturers of new “old” toy soldiers came into being, recreating the classic look of the old sets and concentrating on the Victorian British military settings of the original toys. They were meant not as toys for children but as collectables for adults. Eventually, the new cottage manufacturers branched out into different historical eras to meet other military history interests such as the U.S. Civil War, the Alamo, Roman history, World Wars 1 & 2, and even modern wars.

Looking at these now, they’re a bit embarrassing. Or would be if I cared as much about Leftist opinions as I used to. Childish, and not even my childhood—metal soldiers were long gone off the market when I was a kid. Colonialist! I mean, we’re celebrating the British Empire here! And White men with guns conquering the world! The shame!

The art style, oof. I can imagine the ghost of Frantz Fanon rising from the grave.

But then again, the toy-like art style isn’t flattering to White men either. I’m pretty sure I don’t look like this.

My collection stays in a big plastic bin because I have no place to display them, they’re difficult to dust, and I don’t know how some visitors to my home would react. I still have some pretty Lefty friends, because they are good friends. And I suppose I should be respectful to those who might be offended by colonial history, and so on.

But then I read that Frantz Fanon thought I should be killed anyway based solely on my skin color. So my attitude now is, fuck it.

Despite their odd toy style, expense, and general uselessness (as it true of all collectables) I love these little figures. Any man who is a man would agree: toy soldiers are cool. When we were kids we just played with them for fun. Now as adults when we see them at toy stores or we find them in an old box somewhere, or maybe it’s your son’s miniature army, we can’t help ourselves. We feel the need to take them out, line them up, and knock them down in battle.

Why is that? What do toy soldiers teach boys?

The first thing, at least for me as a kid, was organization. I used to take great pleasure in sorting the soldiers, noting the different types of armaments, lining them (for pre-modern wars), putting them in marching order, etc. After learning about the wars these soldiers fought in, I gained a better idea of how the battles were fought. So, I began to put them in formations, squads or lines depending on the era. Then I made sure they got into the correct box or container after I was done.

After setting up the battle, war commenced. I got down to the soldiers’ level and looked at lines of sight, tracing the direction of fire to see who hit who. Soldiers fell, soldiers took cover, soldiers maneuvered, soldiers regrouped. They had to be physically moved around, made to stand up straight on wobbly bases sometimes. I built tanks and fortifications and planes for air support and so on.

So, playing with soldiers was a physical experience. It teaches boys the techniques of material manipulation, model building, fine motor skills, and three-dimensional and geospatial thinking. It taught tactics; if I was a soldier on this battlefield, how would I get the opponent? How would I win?

Who are these soldiers? I started to wonder at some point. What were their wars about? What was their equipment like? I should learn, I thought, in order to make their battles more accurate. Fortunately I grew up in a bookish household, with a father who loves military aviation and naval history, so frequent trips to the library let me make connections between the soldiers on the living room carpet and the history books I was able to check out. Almost all of my history and geography knowledge I learned from military history, motivated by those toy soldiers. And because I learned it all while young, I retain that knowledge to this day.

* * *

I tried playing Call of Duty WW2 recently, the one with updated graphics through xBox Game Pass. I thought, this will be fun, I get to storm the beaches of Normandy! Slogging through the French countryside, then through the Ardennes and over the Rhine into the heart of darkness itself.

After a few hours I stopped and uninstalled the game. Instead of a historical experience all I got was a frantic twitchfest. Instead of taking my time to examine the artificial reality, highly detailed for sure, I was endlessly rushed by the game to go go go. I was insulted on behalf of the game artists who had poured themselves into their creation.

The viewpoint was first person, normal in this genre of game. Immersive but I couldn’t help but think, what is going on around me? What is the rest of the squad doing? What’s the overall picture of the battle? Where are we going? I felt blind.

There were quick historical introductions to each mission, so okay there was some context. But not the depth of a good book. I hope some players were inspired to go follow up and learn more about the great conflict on their own.

Is this what has replaced the quiet pleasure of toy soldiers? Of course, there are great tactical war games out there for computers and consoles but for the most part, the hyperactive Call of Duty and Battlefield games seems, as far as I can tell, to have been the replacement of boys playing with toy soldiers. I don’t think it has been an improvement.

That is, of course, if the boys are even allowed to play war. The emasculation of boy culture has gutted the military toy industry. As I walk through the toy aisles of Target I rarely see anything military; if there’s anything that portrays war it’s cartoonish, or a safe science fiction or fantasy franchise (always a franchise with those sweet licensing agreements). Your basic bags of plastic soldiers and toy guns are rarely to be found.

And of course, California being themselves just had to mandate gender-neutral toys.

We would be told, of course, that this is about toxic masculinity and making sure our blank slate boys (if they identify as such) don’t grow up to be killers because of the patriarchy. That’s obviously nonsense; generations of boys played war and didn’t turn into violent men.

Much like the dissolution of the Boy Scouts this is about eliminating the differentiating traits of boys. Making sure they don’t learn on their own those traits and pieces of knowledge I described earlier; organization, tactics, spatial skills, history and geography. They might learn some of those things, of course, but only through the most approved methods of the Longhouse school system.

And the boys absolutely won’t learn that violence is part of life, part of history, part of today’s world. The “violence never solves anything” crowd wants to make sure no boy knows that being strong, being ready and being able to fight is an option; actually not just an option, but an intrinsic part of manhood. Men defend that which we love and care for.

Not that all men are ready to pop off at the slightest provocation, of course. Being aware of your violent abilities as a man also means having the maturity of restraint. We used to teach this as part of the process of turning boys into men, a path we have all but eliminated in Western culture.

We were told this was going to make the world a safer place. No more war. War and violence, of course, being only a product of masculinity. But is our world safer now that we’ve emasculated our boys? Look around you.

There are a lot of things we can do to counter this fantastical programming that is weakening, depressing and demoralizing our boys. But instead of dreaming up big schemes, I like to think of the little things we can do that start to turn the tide. The things our opponents might not notice.

If you have a son or a nephew or a step-son or any young boy in your life, get them some toy soldiers.

The nice, metal hand-painted collectors grade soldiers I’m describing here is a dying hobby. The collector conventions are shrinking. Recently I came across an auction site where a collection of one of the labels I have, Edmunds Toy Soldiers, was going for about $70 a box. I believe I paid near $200 for my Edmunds sets, each. Maybe I could sell my collection, but to whom? The collectors are old and dying, the manufacturers are nearly gone. Military history is seen in the Longhouse as at best of hobby of weird old men; at worst it’s a right-wing indicator and something to be ridiculed and, if it ever started to get real cultural traction, suppressed.

What do I do with mine, though? I don’t want to collect more; I don’t do collectables anymore and I don’t have display room anyway. They’d have to be in a glass case, locked, lest they become very high-priced cat toys.

I’ll keep them, I think. Maybe someday I’ll be blessed with a son who, when he’s old enough and has grown out of his plastic drag-em-in-the-dirt soldiers, can be gifted this inheritance that teaches us boys and men the role we play in this society of ours.

The Old Farmer’s Almanac is a yearly publication, in a square-bound magazine and newsprint paper format (like Reader’s Digest) that was first published in 1792. The founder, Robert B. Thomas, claimed to have a formula based on the Sun’s magnetic storm cycles that would predict weather for the year day by day, week by week. In this year’s edition, the 234^th, editor Carol Connare admits to only an 80% accuracy but, compared to the often disappointing forecasts on modern meteorological sites such as Weather Channel and Weather Underground, I would say that about matches.

Seeing that the nut counter had finally finished his transaction and moved on, I flopped down the bag of seed on the register counter and put the Almanac on top of it, with some embarrassment. Why would I be embarrassed?

Once, as a child long ago in a different store in a different state, I asked one of my parents about The Old Farmer’s Almanac that was sitting there in a display rack. How could it predict weather for the whole year in advance? Did it work? They scoffed, saying it was a bunch of superstitious crap. This was the era of Cosmos and Carl Sagan, the triumph of scientific progressivism. How could some man from the 18^th Century possibly have anything to say in the face of Science ™ ? And all with a “secret formula” based on sunspots or something. Nonsense.

Like the dutiful child of the Progressive Left that I was, I forgot about it. Until last week. I suppose my ongoing decompression from the Left tugged me to give the Almanac a try.

So what is this thing, exactly? Besides the core predictions of weather, it’s also a collection of essays covering small scale farming, recipes, jokes (“I’ve started telling everyone about the benefit of eating dried grapes. It’s all about raisin’ awareness”) an essay contest, articles about American history, general science, and more; all in a quaint G-rated easy reading style.

But there’s also a deeper element here. The astronomical data is complex and thorough. Every planetary rise is noted. There’s a list of eras. Did you know this is the year 7535 according to the Byzantine calendar? 1743 by the Diocletian calendar? Along with all the light-hearted frivolity of silly jokes and jam recipes the Almanac also reminds us we are here, in deep time. Originally meant for the independent farmers of a young America, the Almanac told them: you are only here for a while. This soil is old and time will wear. Take care of it, even in this young country. This is the task God and Providence have given to you, American.

The Almanac is an American original, and one of those vanishing artifacts of pre-internet America. It’s always there, something you see and forget about until one day you wonder where it went. Each time something vanishes we become a little bit less than what we were, and more just another undifferentiated mass of World Culture. But the Almanac, as long as it exists, holds the line and, like the cycle of vegetative life both wild and domesticated that it was founded to track and nurture, it protects the roots of an old America that can inform the new one, here in our 250^th birthday year.

That is the appeal to me of the Almanac; the aesthetics of a new Americana. If you’ve read County Highway (which has a similar art and typography style to the Almanac) you’ve picked up on something that I think is growing in our country, what I call “Leave Me Alone” America. Not fully Left or Right, closer to libertarianism but also not exactly that either. A desire to build a new America where we are left alone to run our own lives, failures and consequences and triumphs alike.

Where we don’t need to take your damned pharmaceutical, I have an herb for that.

A desire for quiet law and order; not based on surveillance and control but on high trust society, knowing your neighbors, and responsible citizens casually armed.

Where we can publish and read whatever we want, by anyone.

With cars that run on gas, if we want. And go fast. But if you want an electric, hey go for that too.

A record collection (physical media, please) that includes both John Coltrane and Merle Haggard.

Where hippies can take any psychotropic drug they want while living next door to the strict teetotalling Baptist and everyone exchanges vegetables from their gardens.

America lived at the smallest community level possible.

In other words, an America without the Professional Managerial Class to tell us what to do. How we used to be, at the beginning.

Leave us alone, we’ll figure it out ourselves. Such is the American birthright.

As for those weather predictions, the Almanac says for March here on the Front Range (Region 12), we’ll get rain on and off from March 1-9^th, but generally warm. A snowstorm between March 14^th and 19^th. Another one 23^rd to 31^st. Over all warm and mild. Early spring.

Sounds pretty good to me. Accurate so far, as of today (March 5^th). Let’s see what happens.

I haven’t read all the Discworld books, but I have read a good number of them. My science fiction/fantasy mass paperback book shelve is mostly Discworld right now, as I’ve rotated out older books I haven’t read (regretfully—the purge happened before the book censorship became public knowledge, and now some of those may never go in print again; I hope someone picked them up and is preserving them). I like the City Watch books the best due to the police procedural structure and Sam Vimes’ weary demeanor. The silliness of the wizards of Unseen University are a great lampooning of academia. Death (sorry: DEATH)* is the most fun character of them all, and lets Pratchett make many thoughtful musings on the meaning of life.

Hogfather was still a pleasant read. Pratchett’s writing elicits at least one smile or chuckle per page, rife with puns and word play (about the activities of a group of thieves and occasional murderers: “There was always something that needed transferring from A to B or, of course, to the bottom of the C”). The scene when the replacement Hogfather (no spoilers) does the mall Santa thing is fantastic, a great send up of consumerism and bratty children and bossy parents.

But I also found myself wincing at a few things, where in previous Discworld readings I did not.

Foremost is Pratchett’s idea that human (and dwarf and troll etc.) belief leads to the existence of the gods, not the other way around. This goes for spirits as well, so in Discworld Santa Clause/Hogfather exists because people believe he does. If the belief fades, then he/she/it fades as well. Pratchett expands this idea to its full extent in Small Gods, which coincidentally was the first Discworld book I read, at the recommendation of an atheist friend.

This is straight up post-modern “I’m spiritual not religious” nonsense, and the perfect summation of the idea that people can determine their reality by their belief. If I don’t believe there’s a God or gods, then I’m not subject to their rules. If I don’t believe, they just go away—as does all the moral requirements they put on human behavior. It’s the crystal-gazing, New Age solipsism acted out in a fantasy world where it can really come true.

In the real world, this self-definition of reality leads to all sorts of problems, which I’m not going go expound on again here. We know what they are. But over all, it leads to a disintegration of shared values that make a high-trust society difficult. Everyone gets their own special reality, right? And as a recent Christian convert, I can say it’s definitive that God exists if I like it or not. He’s certainly not asking me for permission to rule all of His creation.

Violence is always a problem in Discworld, but not for the reasons you may think. There’s an uncomfortable dichotomy between “good” and “bad” violence, based not only on “is this violence for the reason of protection of the innocent?” but also, “is this violence being performed by charming people?” Earlier, I quoted a line to demonstrate the cleverness of Pratchett’s writing, but it also demonstrates his Dickensian weakness for the extra-legal activities of those at the lower end of Discworld’s society. It’s cute when the poor do it.

Violence is also acceptable when the rich do it, if for the right reasons. Early in Hogfather the leader of the Assassin’s Guild is retained to remove the Hogfather from existence.

Lord Downey was an assassin. Or, rather, an Assassin. The capital letter was important. It separated those curs who went around murdering people for money from the gentlemen who wished to have removed, for a consideration, any inconvenient razor blades from the candyfloss of life.

The Assassins, being men of good breeding, are allowed to take life for their various reasons, much like how dueling was once a perfectly acceptable, even socially encouraged, manner of addressing issues between gentlemen. If the rich and powerful want to use violence against each other, what is the issue? It’s not being used against the poor after all. Never mind that the poor don’t get a say in their leadership anyway, regardless of who is assassinated or not. The deadly game among the elite is an acceptable and, in Discworld, a humorous way of weeding out those who are undeserving of power. Because, as per the moral structure of that universe, the right side conveniently wins. Always.

However there is one form of violence that is always unacceptable on Discworld and that is, of course, the violence of bigotry and racism. But don’t worry! The City Watch is on the job, keeping the Discworld safe for all species. In Thud!, a generations-long fight between the dwarfs and trolls (Pratchett’s main stand-in for racist conflicts) erupts on the streets of Ankh-Morpork, the greatest city on Discworld and the center of most of the stories in the series. In his investigations City Watch Chief Sam Vimes discovers a magic box that, acting as a tape recorder, reveals recordings of ancient dwarf and troll leaders saying that, actually, they made peace a long time ago and everyone really should get along. Meanwhile, back in Ankh-Morpork, young trolls and dwarfs are making their own peace by playing the board game Thud! in gaming cafes (no, really. That’s the plot). (And you too can buy Thud! The Board Game from Amazon or your local game shop. Arrange a game night with your local Muslim Brotherhood chapter to help promote interfaith dialogue).

But in the end, when all else fails and the peace cannot be kept between the various factions and species of Discworld, there is the final arbitrator (besides DEATH of course); the defacto dictator of the city of Ankh-Morpork, Lord Vetinari. Himself an Assassin, Vetinari in many Discworld books uses subterfuge, dishonesty and manipulation to achieve the “right” outcome for the plot, an outcome that always is fair, leads to justice, and punishes the wicked. He is the very model of the benevolent dictator.

Why would Pratchett, who otherwise demonstrates a great love of humanism and the potential of individuals to live a free life, put such a figure in power over his characters?

Vetinari exposes, unwittingly I assume on Pratchett’s part, the Boomerlib Leftist dark desire for authoritarianism. Yeah things would be awesome if everyone was cool and got along. But there are still some bad people out there and they stubbornly won’t be nice and actually they point out where our great ideas don’t seem to work so well and the people might start listening to them so it sure would be good if someone with power would just…make the bad people go away.

Those who are morally correct, or at least charming, in the Discworld universe are allowed to use all the violence they wish. But some violence is still bad, the violence begat by bigotry and racism. Naturally in Discworld the good always wins and everyone gets along more or less. The trolls don’t say “screw it, let’s genocide all the little dwarves, the bastards.” Or vice versa. The peace is conveniently kept, nicely or not.

Towards the end of his life, especially in one of the the final Discworld books, ’Snuff, Pratchett seemed to be boiling over with frustration that the Boomerlib world of infinite empathy and acceptance wasn’t going to come into being. In this book (again, about racism) Vimes and his wife fight bigotry against goblins by hosting a music recital at the Ankh-Morpork Opera House for the city’s nobles and glitterati who, of course, are moved to open their hearts to the previously-despised goblins.

Look, I get it. Really. It would be nice if old hatreds could be solved with a harp recital or a board game but…

It’s all so naive.

The old bugbears of racism, sexism and class warfare are not going away. Even when the West fully acted out its liberal ideals, that didn’t mean that non-Western societies were impressed and wanted to emulate us; instead, it made us easy marks for those with a more tribal, illiberal worldview. Often, the neo-bigotry came from Leftists inside the house. Pratchett, who died in 2015, didn’t get to see the extreme bitterness generated by Leftist “Wokeness.” Would he have been able to write a “reverse-racism” Discworld book, addressing the degradation of men, Whites and heterosexuals in post-2015 Western culture? I doubt it. That reality is something the Boomerlibs still can’t see. The John Lennon song didn’t happen, and they don’t know why. They’re just angry.

Every once in a while I run across a mention of some once-famous but now forgotten author (“Charles Smoodley-Essex, bestselling author in Great Britain in 1889!”). Someone who was a big deal in their day but for various reasons no one alive today has heard of them or their books. Perhaps the writing style is too archaic, or the subject matter didn’t age well. For various reasons, their work, once lauded, did not stand the test of time. The world moved on while the author didn’t. Whatever they had to say in 1889, it wasn’t universal or timeless. I have a feeling this will be Discworld.

I don’t want to give the impression that I hate Discworld, or Pratchett. The books are still enjoyable, humorous, and good for taking a break from heavier reading. If you’re a D&D player whose games tend to devolve into entertaining silliness, you’ll be right at home. But I now get sad when I read these books.

Reading Discworld now is an exercise in nostalgia. It depicts the world the West was reaching for and failed to reach. Not because a universal idea of peace and good will is necessarily bad—it’s just impossible. Human nature is not the “be a heckin’ good person!” wishful thinking of the Reddit secular humanists. Our nature is dark and there are monsters. Wishful thinking, benevolent dictators, convenient plot twists and board games with your enemies will never change that.

I’m not saying don’t read Pratchett. The Discworld books are still a lot of fun, the writing is clever and funny, the characters delightful, and the world warm and cozy. But realize they are relics of a fading ideology. It’s a Boomerlib fantasy.

* I tried to get the small cap for Death’s name but Substack’s writing tools didn’t have a way of doing it. Grrrr.

Our rector retired and a choice had to be made. A new priest-in-charge and rector had to be chosen.

Choice A) A deacon who has tirelessly worked for two years to grow the church, talks to every new face who comes through the door, learns their name, gets their number. He meets with them, makes them welcome so they want to come back. He meets or calls every congregant on a regular basis. He even does prison visits to a son of one of our congregants. He has contacts all over the urban area and has lined up one former Roman Catholic priest who wants to be a priest again, an Old Catholic group who needs a new place to worship and can pay us rent, and at least one more conservative contingent of a local Anglican church, priest included, who is not happy with the liberal bent of their church and wants to join us. He was also contacted by a religious-based nursing home down the block from our church who wants him to do a Mass for their residents, with the idea that when their families visit they can come down to the main church with grandma or grandpa, especially on the big days—Easter and Christmas. Deacon has plans to double or triple the size of our congregation in the next two years and the contacts to do so. All that would have to happen is that he gets elevated to the priesthood.

Choice B) A priest in his late 60s who has stated he doesn’t want to do outreach or administrative work, just the Mass. So, like five or six hours of work per month, tops. And he wants $90,000 a year for that.

Guess who our vestry chose? Yep, not the one I would have chosen. Sort of the exact opposite actually.

Asking around the congregation and vestry members, why did you chose B)?

Sixty-something year old woman: “I don’t like the deacon, he tells us we have to pray and read our Bibles.” (That’s an exact quote).

Another woman congregant, somewhere past 80 years old: I just want everything to go back to the way it was before all these new people showed up.

Subdeacon: At Easter Mass he turned left instead of right at some point. (Or maybe it was right instead of left, I can’t remember. And I was up at the altar myself).

The bishop, mid-60s: His ambition and energy shows he needs therapy.

Male congregant, mid-70s: He just needs to be quiet and do what the bishop says.

And so on. Instead of growth the olds out-voted the young and chose stagnation. We’re a small church and can’t afford $90k for another salary. The bishop offered to cover it if the new rector would do mission work and outreach (everything the deacon is doing right now for a fraction of the money). The vestry said no, we’re good. We’ll pay it ourselves.

Well, the tithes are barely covering costs and the church is starting to dip into its last savings of about $100k. Which means they only have enough to cover the new priest-in-charge’s desired salary for about a year or so. And since they’ve turned their backs on growth there’s little chance of new tithes coming in.

When I asked the male congregant in his mid-70s about this he said, “providence will provide.”

Now I’m in no way an expert on the mind of the Lord but it has been my experience that He rewards good and righteous effort. If you just sit there like a bump on a log and ask for Him to save you, your prayers don’t get answered. At least, that’s what I’ve experienced.

And speaking secularly, choosing to take on a huge expense without a plan to pay it is just plain stupid. In any industry, company, or personal finances. There’s a reason I don’t own a BMW though I’m sure they’d let me drive off the lot with one and leave the collection agency to deal with it later.

Who is this Choice B) that they would rather have? Along with having no interest in doing much of anything except Mass, he has a doctorate in divinity from—oh wait no he doesn’t. It’s an honorary doctorate, given to him by the rinky-dink online divinity school he teaches at. They had to give him one to teach since he doesn’t have a master’s or even bachelor’s in divinity. But he expects to be called “doctor.”

Well at least he’s ordained in...um hold on. He was originally ordained in a conservative Episcopalian church that we’re not in communion with. Was he brought into our church? No one can find any evidence of that. Even the bishop said he wasn’t sure. I suspect the previous rector, who basically just winged it for twenty years, said yeah, come on in. Start doing Masses. We’ll figure it out later. But if Choice B) wasn’t confirmed/accepted into our church then there’s a doubt if any of the Sacraments he’s administered have been valid.

Including the Deacon’s recent wedding.

Oops.

But boy, he’s a stickler for ceremony and can quote Cranmer, the Caroline Divines, the Oxford Movement all day. Just don’t ask him to do any actually pastoral care or paperwork.

Want he wants is a 1650 cosplay. Just do Mass and have a cloud of deacons, sub-deacons and acolytes to do all the actual work. Ren Faire Anglicanism. He gets to suck up a big salary and look important in his vestments while the rest of us work for little or nothing.

Not only have I called it cosplay, the canonical lawyer for the whole church (who the deacon has been consulting with) used almost the exact same language to describe him. Outside our little church, he doesn’t have a fun club it seems.

This Sunday was his first day as PIC and almost as soon as I walked in the door I was given orders to do this and that to prepare for Mass. Never mind that we still had 45 minutes to go and this acolyte likes to chat with the early plain Mass congregants over their coffee. One of the reasons to go to church is to talk to your friends, after all. But no, Mr. Plan B) was relishing giving us orders in front of the bishop. Hop to it, acolyte! Really earning those two tithe envelopes that were in the collection plate on Sunday.

As for the deacon, the vestry is trying to fire him now. Probably by the end of this week actually. Partly because he’s pointed out everything I’ve described but also, I suspect, because if they pay Choice B)’s salary as well as deacon’s, the money runs out in three months instead of ten to twelve. So off he goes.

I can’t wrap my head around it. Here in the middle of a Christian revival in the West, when the young are yearning for a spiritual home and turning to Christ, this church of olds decided to say “no thanks, we’re good with fading away.” A few weeks ago there were beautiful stories of churches being filled after Charlie Kirk’s death. The young are yearning for something real, a moral rock to stand on, for Christianity. At this church? Nothing. No one new came through the door that Sunday. Communion count, 25. Which is actually less than we usually do. The feeling of the last year of energy and being at the center of something big is gone. You can feel the hand of God has been withdrawn.

Deacon and I have been talking a lot lately about the Book of Judges, and how the people cried out, Lord, send someone to save us! And He did. But then after a while the people got complacent and stopped obeying the Word of God. Then He let them experience the consequences, then they cried out, then he sent a judge, then they got complacent...over and over the cycle. This feels like the book of Judges. For about a year He sent new people to this church, including your author. And when given a chance to capitalize on this growth, this new blood and enthusiasm, the church olds said “no thanks, we’re good with our stagnation.” And so the end creeps near.

I fear for the physical church itself. It’s a lovely old building, nearly 90 years old. Beautiful cut glass windows. Cozy Lady Chapel. It’s in an expensive part of town so I would be surprised if another denomination could scrape together the money to save it. In that area, I’m guessing $3 million at a minimum. More likely, some rich guy will buy it, scrape the lot (it is actually three lots in a prime part of the city) and build a McMansion. What an absolute waste.

To finish, there’s a joke I heard at church a few week ago.

How many Anglicans does it take to change a light bulb?

Answer: Change!? That’s my grandfather’s light bulb!

Well, the lights are only going to be on about six more months. And I’m out the door already, looking for a new church home.

A rich kid, Juan “Johnny” Rico, defies his parents and joins the Mobile Infantry, partly to follow his best friend’s example and partly out of listlessness. In the world of the book, the line between civilians and citizens is sharply demarcated by Federal Service—in the military in this story, though it is hinted there are other forms of government service. Those who serve gain the right to vote and have a say in how society is run; those who do not serve cannot vote but otherwise enjoy a high standard of living provided by a politically healthy, well-run society.

How did humanity, united in the Terran Federation, develop this government? The story is described by the narrator and in flashbacks to high school classes in “History and Moral Philosophy,” a sort of turbo-charged social studies, taught by Mr. Dubois, a veteran with citizenship:

In the late 20^th Century, a war was fought between the U.S., Europe and Russia on one side and a Chinese-led Asia Hegemony on the other. The West lost and their governments collapsed. In the chaos the returning veterans imposed order and instilled their new society with the principle of duty, as opposed to rights. In a discussion about juvenile delinquency (almost unheard of in this future society) Mr. Dubois explains (italics are original):

“But duty is an adult virtue—indeed a juvenile becomes an adult when, and only when, he acquires a knowledge of duty and embraces it as dearer than the self-love he was born with. There never was, there cannot be, a ‘juvenile delinquent.’ But for every juvenile criminal there are always one or more adult delinquents—people of mature years who either do not know their duty, or who, knowing it, fail.

And that was the soft spot which destroyed what was in many ways an admirable culture. The junior hoodlums who roamed their streets were symptoms of a greater sickness; their citizens (all of them counted as such) glorified their mythology of ‘rights’...and lost track of their duties. No nation, so constituted, can endure.”

Mr. Dubois’ dismissal of the progressive culture of rights versus a culture of duty and obligation is one of the biggest variations from our world.

Another is the prevalence, even welcoming, of corporal punishment. Not only does the military use corporal punishment, so does the civilian authorities. This not Saudi-style brutality but more like Singapore’s formal, legalistic practice of punishment. Again, Mr. Dubois:

“I do not understand objections to ‘cruel and unusual’ punishment. While a judge should be benevolent in purpose, his awards should cause the criminal to suffer, else there is no punishment—and pain is the basic mechanism built into us by millions of years of evolution which safeguards us by warning when something threatens our survival. Why should society refuse to use such a highly perfected survival mechanism?”

Compare this to the 1994 case of Michael Fay, an American visitor to Singapore who was caned for vandalism. Despite the howls of Western commentators and politicians, Fay underwent his sentence. Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of modern Singapore, responded to Western outrage: “Can we govern if we let him off and not cane him? We’ll have to close shop. That’s my view. I am an old-style Singaporean who believes that to govern you must have a certain moral authority. If we do not cane him because he is an American, I believe we’ll lose our moral authority and our right to govern.”

How would universal government service work? One of the Leftist criticisms of the book is that citizenship is only available to those who complete military service. Implied is that this would only be for the able-bodied and therefore unavailable to anyone else, regardless the strength of their desire to serve. Anticipating this criticism, Heinlein wisely and fairly makes accommodations.

In the book, during initial recruiting and processing the recruiter mentions that there is a constitutional right to serve that cannot be denied to anyone. Later, while talking to a doctor during his physical, Rico asks the doctor what would happen if he didn’t pass medically. The answer that no one fails the medical review perplexes Rico.

The doctor explains, “...(b)ut if you came in here in a wheel chair and blind in both eyes and were silly enough to insist on enrolling, they would find something silly enough to match. Counting the fuzz on a caterpillar by touch, maybe. The only way you can fail is by having the psychiatrists decide that you are not able to understand the oath.” So, if you want to serve and become a citizen you can, but only if you can complete the challenges of your term of service, challenges matching your ability.

In the world of the book, not all agree with the separation between citizen and civilian. On leave in Seattle, Rico and two fellow MIs get into a fight with a group of longshoremen. Through the narrator Rico, Heinlein mentions that the longshoremen resent the soldiers, with their union believing that the critical labor of their members should lead to citizenship just as military and government service does.

It is possible here that Heinlein was thinking of a long-simmering resentment of the U.S. Merchant Marine towards the post-WW2 benefit scheme for the armed services. Despite being critical to the war effort, and, with a casualty rate higher than the armed forces (10,000 out of 250,000 who served), it took decades for the Merchant Marine to be recognized as veterans and earn benefits the same as their brothers in the other services. Heinlein, a naval officer during the war, would have been aware of this political conflict.

Late in the novel our protagonist Rico mentions Tagalog, the Filipino national language, being spoken at home. This is significant. During World War Two many Filipinos served in the U.S. military and were naturalized as citizens for their service. Unfortunately, after the war many of the new citizens were stripped of their naturalization and veteran status in the Rescission Act of 1946. In the following decades there was much back and forth politically resulting in the restoration of veteran status and naturalization status of the Filipino World War Two veterans but not until 1990, shortly after Heinlein’s death in 1988. But I think it is possible that Heinlein was following this question about citizenship through service and pondering the significance.

So the future Terran Federation is not a utopia but it is a successful answer to a difficult question posed to humanity in a fraught moment—how can a broken society be made whole again, and made to last? Their model, a responsibility and duty society instead of a rights society, presents an interesting alternative to our own and gives possible solutions to the issues we face in the West.

Heinlein was not a political scientist, so he doesn’t provide extensive details as to the day-to-day functioning of the Terran Federation. Do they have a legislature? States? Political parties? He adds none of those boring but necessary details to make a functional government. If we want to live in the future Terran Federation, that would be up to politicians and their staff and think tanks to figure how to build this world here and now; or lay the foundation at least.

Who, in our day and age, would want to live in the Terran Federation? To our minds, the idea of being publicly caned for, say, too many speeding tickets is unfathomable. Can’t we just pay our fines? I promise I’ll do better next time. No really, I will. But we all know we won’t, because there is no shame in looking out for number one, for asserting “rights” over personal responsibility. As Mr. Dubois points out, where has that gotten us? The results within 21^st Century Western culture are plain to see.

As for myself, being a care and duty person out of natural habit, I find the Terran Federation increasingly appealing. The idea of being rewarded for contributing to a functional society for all, that sacrifice leads to respect and acknowledgement of virtue instead of just losing to those who are more selfish and know how to work their “rights,” sounds pretty good. I think that, deep down, most people want to live in this world, because it provides for an equality of opportunity, a real one. The Terran Federation puts that ancient Enlightenment principle into practice.

And that’s the part that scares the progressives the most: the Terran Federation just works. It is able to respond to an alien threat because a society that emphasizes duty, sacrifice and protection was built long before the crisis appeared. The Terran Federation can respond constructively. Certainly, with difficulty—a story needs conflict and drama—but not only is Starship Troopers about Rico’s journey to adulthood and life as a warrior, it is a story about a society that was prepared for such a day and how it wins.

Joseph Campbell’s hero cycle is a common narrative model for story-telling. It’s not artificial but a distilling of the way humans have lived since we learned to speak. Because of these deep roots, stories written to this structure resonate with readers and often become classics. Even contemporary mythologies such as Lord of the Rings and The Narnia Chronicles follow the cycle of discovery-crisis-resolution, with wisdom gained. Sometimes the restoration is painful and often something is lost, but the result is a better, wiser world.

Compare this to the Leftist dystopian novels such as 1984, Brave New World and even post-modern dark absurd comedies like Catch-22. In these stories, the restorative cycle is broken. There is discovery and crisis but no learning and no journey to improved wholeness. Every story ends with madness, despair, death or, at best, the characters flee society and reality as best they can. They don’t fight and can’t fight. Even the act of fighting is portrayed as futile and childish. Instead, they are dropped into the abyss never to return. The lack of progress in Progressive art forms is ironic.

Starship Troopers contains two hero cycles. Most obvious is Juan Rico’s, his growth from youth to manhood via service to the Mobile Infantry, the Terran Federation and to humanity itself. In classic Hero’s Journey fashion, he gains abilities and powers through personal hardship that allows him to serve the great good.

The larger cycle in the background is the Hero’s Journey of the entire socio-political structure of humanity. But the crisis has already happened and been overcome in a complete cycle. After the restoration of human society, a better nation that is capable of facing crises reacts to the existential threat from aliens. Because of the resilience gained by growth and rebuilding a whole, healthy society, the crisis is faced.

And Rico could not take his own journey unless that society was complete and able to show him the way. Small personal hero cycles can best be taken within a societal structure that understands and values such journeys. It plants seeds for societal restoration by a hero or group of heroes for when the total crisis hits. Hero cycles are societal immune systems.

This is where 1984 and the other dystopia tales fail. They break but do not restore. The post-modern intellectual cleverness leaves us all at the end of the road in a desert with no way home. This is called “progress.”

References:

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CRECB-2014-pt5/html/CRECB-2014-pt5-Pg6226-2.htm

https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/heroic-merchant-mariners-finally-receive-compensation-over-60-years-after-their-service-to-their-country/

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/how-to-build-a-society/

https://dutytocountry.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/explainer-14-selected-laws-affecting-filipino-immigration.pdf

The sticker came from a required safety and environmental briefing for anyone new to the project. The idea was get the run-down then put the sticker on your hard-hat to show you are authorized to be on the job site. No sticker, no access. It’s a standard practice for any construction-oriented industry, including the electric utility industry in which I work. We were supposed to engineering the re-routing of electric distribution wherever it had to be moved for rail construction.

The briefing was depressing. I don’t remember much, except some maps and construction dates that we now know were completely unrealistic. What I do remember was the tone of the guy who was doing the presentation. He constantly modified his sentences with statements like, “if it gets built” or “when we get to it”. There was no enthusiasm, no energy. Even in 2018, seven years ago, there was no sense of direction, purpose or destiny. Every one was just there to collect their paycheck and go home after two weeks.

At the end of that two weeks I had to fill out my time card. What did I have to report? Well, nothing. Literally, I had done nothing for two weeks. I honestly reported overhead general on the timecard, that is, 80 hours of pure unbillable time. My boss was pissed. I told him why and he all but ordered me to fake out the billing. So, dutifully, I just entered some random project codes and entered my hotel, car rental and food costs. He approved everything.

It struck me when I got back home, even in 2018: no high-speed rail was going to get built. That wasn’t the purpose of this project, at least as far as the contractors were concerned. Rail, trains? Who cares. The billing was the goal. Suck money out of the project, do nothing. Build nothing.

For myself, I guess I got two weeks in...Fresno. Oh I did go day-hiking at Sequoia National Park on my weekend there. So that was cool.

Now seven years later this utter waste of money might be finally over. The Federal Railroad Administration rescinded four billion dollars scheduled to be transferred to the project, with no intention to send a single dime more. The accompanying report was damning, citing failure after failure to keep deadlines, lack of planning (including not planning to move utilities, oh wait, that’s what I was there to do—ten years after the project started), decades-long environmental reviews, no trains ordered, no rail built, and on and on. A complete failure with no end in sight. Yanking Fed money, that is, tax payer money, is the right thing to do.

Maybe California can successfully sue the Feds to get their free money, but I don’t see how that would hold up in court. Can they float a bond or something at the state level? Beats me. A private investor? I’d be shocked if anyone would want to touch it; besides Cali hates private investment, the whole idea of this project was to show how awesome big government can be; look we gave you a train!

Was there ever an intention to make a high-speed rail? Let’s look at the stakeholders.

• The voters. I think they wanted a train. They voted for the initial bond for the project. I’ve never driven between LA and SF but by the map it looks awful. Flying is a terrible experience. I’ve taken overnight trips on Amtrak and it’s a hell of a lot better than flying or driving if you get a roomette. Full size bunk beds, you can walk around, there’s a dining car with full meals and a snack car, an observation car, etc. Way better than flying or driving. An HSR between LA and SF isn’t a bad idea.

• The contractors. Absolutely not, they didn’t want a HSR built. Did they want a HSR in the processing of being built? Absolutely. Cost overruns forever, baby. But a completed project can’t be billed.

• The state legislature. I won’t reiterate everything in Chris Bray’s entire Substack but the legislature is a collection of lizard people in clown suits. I don’t think they even know much about high-speed rail but it’s something Europe has, Europe is better than America so super fast choo choos means free health care or something like that. Besides they think it means jobs for their districts, even though most of the jobs are going to big construction companies that are importing the workers and private land is being bought out cheaply or eminent domain’d out of the hands of citizens but FREE EUROPEAN HEALTHCARE CAFES DRUG DECRIMINALIZATION FAST CHOO CHOO GOOD. What are you, a MAGA? Fascist.

• The governor. I don’t think he knows what he wants. Not out of stupidity but because he’s not mentally human in any sense. I think he does want a HSR so he can emulate China and be Premier Mandarin Gavin of the People’s Republic of California. But he also wants a perpetual money machine for his constituents of environmental NGOs and labor unions. Especially if he can use Federal money and not California money. Tax payers in other states? Screw ‘em. That’s what they get for not living in California. Finishing the HSR would mean the money machine stops but he really wants the HSR but...he wants both things at the same time so he says whatever Magic Crystal Mind Control Command tells him to say at any given moment. Especially if he thinks it makes him sound presidential.

There’s a lot of crowing that the Federal funding cancellation means the end of this boondoggle but my gut feeling is that we haven’t seen the end of it. What would happen to all that land? Would the original owners get it back for cost or free? No track has been laid but there’s been some bridge work and such done. Does that get demolished?

I bet the project goes on hiatus and waits for the next Democrat president who will give them back the four billion, with interest and additions. It will be a reward for delivering the Oval Office to whoever that may be, and to deliberately spite all the critics and Republicans and anyone with common sense. No, this isn’t over. Though it would be nice if it was.

And it still won’t be completed, ever.

That is, in a culture made disenchanted by human secularism and scientific rationalism, our way back to meaningful lives is seeing and accepting the supra-natural realm that we have rejected for centuries. That rejection has made us vulnerable to many damaging ideas such as moral relativism. In fact, these supposedly secular inventions create spiritual vulnerabilities to demonic influence.

As Dreher says, “the world is not what you think it is.”

It’s an intriguing thesis. Before when I was still a secular leftist I would have scoffed at the idea, and probably made a crack about religious nuts and the D&D scare of the 1980s.

Now as a Christian, and an orthodox one at that, I feel the truth in what Dreher says here. I’ve had minor supernatural experiences, so far good ones, and many people at my church have had deeply profound supernatural experiences. So I get it. My mind is certainly open.

I’m struggling with determining how re-enchanted the world is, as I do think that 99% of the time the universe is pretty plain and predictable. I work in STEM so it has to be, otherwise my job would be incredibly difficult:

Me: This design is done.

Boss: Do it again.

Me: Why?

Boss: God changed the atomic weight of aluminum again.

Me: Arrrghhhhh!!!

“Living In Wonder” is a book I recommend to anyone open-minded enough for a thesis that is the exact opposite of everything we’re taught to believe these days in this modern highly-advanced civilization we have here in the West. It’ll make you think, or reconsider something unusual you experienced and perhaps dismissed.

But the whole time I was reading it, it reminded me of another book. One from nigh thirty years ago. Not for its similarity, but for being the complete opposite; “The Demon-Haunted World” by Carl Sagan.

Published in 1995 at what in hindsight was the peak era of secular humanism and neoliberalism, Sagan’s book was aimed at the “lay person,” assumed to be someone without a Ph.D. and a teaching gig at Cornell University. Basically a refresher on the scientific method for regular readers, Sagan presents techniques of skepticism as a toolkit to help the reader identify and reject badly presented science, pseudoscience and most especially supernatural phenomena.

Most famously Sagan used the analogy of the “invisible dragon.” If someone claims they see a dragon but it’s invisible and it’s existence cannot be proven by any test that can be performed by science, is it real then? Therefore, that which is not observed by science does not exist. Q.E.D.

To be fair, the book includes good guides for debunking obvious flimflammery and quackery and other nouns that end in -y. We live in a world with many unreliable actors and bad science is everywhere. Critical thinking is a great skill set and the scientific method can be applied to many things.

But for Sagan, the material world knowable by science is all there is. Knowledge can expand and the door is always open to what may have once been considered scientifically impossible. But that which is not proven does not exist. Such is the elegance of the scientific method.

Having faith in the unprovable is a poor use of human intellect, the argument goes. Better to have faith in the scientific method and that which is provable. For that which is provable is reliable, and that which is not is fickle, malleable, and prone to misuse.

This is the primary argument of what I call Saganism but I suppose now goes by the name“scientism,” the belief that only science can provide truth, and includes a sub-belief that science can replace ancient human faiths by giving us meaning without God.

After all, we are all star stuff. Right?

The Saganistic expulsion of anything deemed “superstition” raised the ability to wield the scientific method and the knowledge of science to the level of moral judgment. If you could use such tools, and acquire the education concomitant with learning those skills, then you are morally superior to those who are deemed the superstitious. Left unsaid in “The Demon-Haunted World” is the category “the religious.”

Naturally, the most morally superior are those who can attain the high levels of education that make a person more rational and therefore more moral those those who cannot attend Cornell University for financial or academic reasons. But for those who do, their superiority is confirmed. For the price of tuition, of course.

Let’s compare this to the path to spiritual grace as taught by Dreher. In “Living In Wonder,” he gives it for free. You could buy his book ($29.99 hardcover) (when did hardcovers start costing a third of a 100 dollar bill?!!) and read his description of the Jesus Prayer. Or you can search for it online.

Oh fine, I shall give it you right now.

Pray:

Lord Jesus Christ

Son of God

Have mercy upon me

A sinner.

There. Now you have a simple prayer that when repeated with all your heart can lead you to salvation. Let it work on you and you will be drawn to Christ and eternal life. It will pique your interest to pursue more prayers and pray your own. Your life can be transformed. If you stay with it.

All for the low, low price of zero dollars.

This is the gate-keeping of Saganism and secular humanism. Instead of a faith that makes everyone equal in the eyes of God, free to all who approach and ask, the path of rational Saganism requires education, the higher and more expensive the better; access to a wide library, ideally with thick complicated tomes of science and reasoning; and the luxury time to pursue all of the above.

Their salvation is for a few. Religion is for anyone, so religion must go. The irrationality of the religious is a mark upon those in the dark. The rational abilities of the few is a halo of acknowledgment of their superiority.

The moral importance of education replaced Christian good/evil. Knowledge is better than a lack of knowledge, therefore a person who is more educated is more correct than one who is not. That is, a person who is more educated is morally correct; those who are not are morally wrong. Whether they do good things in the traditional sense, or bad things, is irrelevant.

But, Dreher asks, what if you did see that dragon? Now what?

Oh, and the dragon talked to you. It told you to be the better person and forgive the jerk who cut you off on the highway (who, strangely, was a Saganist. True star stuff). So you forgave and forgot about the incident and now you’re happily and safely at home with your family, having let go of your anger.

A Saganist would declare you at best misguided, probably stupid, and possibly schizophrenic. No proof, no dragon.

Dreher says no, those supernatural experiences are quite real. Rare perhaps but they do happen. And they have great meaning both to the person experiencing them and to the meaning of the universe. Instead of a plain mechanical universe where the truth and therefore morality can be determined using the scientific method, enchantment experiences show the truth of supernatural (and hence total) evil and also supernatural good. The universe is not a neutral realm. This is a spiritual battlefield.

You saw the dragon, you did. And it saw you. And your life is better for it.

This is not to say that rationality and science is useless. As mentioned before, I work in a STEM field; science pays the bills. Manipulating matter and energy is useful for providing a good material life to everyone. But it does not give meaning. Nor does it help interpret my thoughts, feelings, or subjective experiences. And those are as real as any atom in the universe.

Nor should everything be attributed to demons. Sometimes a head cold is just that. A bad day at work really was due to your terrible co-workers, no supernatural occurrences necessary. Take the most likely explanation for anything but when that runs out, be prepared to be open to something beyond reality as it has been reduced in description by scientism.

Also, if you do pick up “Living In Wonder,” don’t read the chapter on demon possession before bed. Do you think you’re too old to be scared of the dark? You are not. Trust me.