Christianity has always had a drive to conquer other people wit the goal of converting them. My understanding is that the meeker denominations like Protestantism paved the way for Christianity to be excavated and eventually eradicated as it is today in the US (I personally think Christianity is completely dead as a public influence in this country). But human beings are attracted to strong ideologies - it's why the big religions have grown so much; they get little influence and then they get more. Wokeism is filing the void left by the eradication of Christianity. It's also gaining followers because it appears to be so big. People will follow it as long as it appears to be a dominant ideology. Some will be hardcore, others just dabblers, same as in religion. But the follower base will grow because there are very real incentives - socially and professionally - for professing to the Woke ideology. This is another major reason Christianity and Islam grew: incentives.
What do you think of Spengler’s argument that ethno-cultures form versions of Christianity according to their world-outlook (rendering Christ, in his eyes, essentially meaningless/incidental)? I.e., his “Magian” Greek/Middle-Eastern Christianity is different from Western Christianity, is different from the currently developing Russian version. I would say Spengler encapsulates Moldbug’s thought, as MM doesn’t have much of in the way of historical explanation past the Protestant Revolution ~1500.
I really like your concept of “the little German” that attempts to rationalize everything religious, but Spengler would say that’s an influence particular to Germanized “Faustian” culture rather than anything inherent to humanity. It’s actually been hard for me to finish Decline of the West because I want to believe so badly (and kind of do already) but his historical explanations are very persuasive.
On the other hand, despite how hard it is for me to ditch a relativist, historicized conception of the world, your work has put into perspective for me that human history really isn’t that long. Only six or seven major civilizations (prehistory doesn’t matter, or didn’t happen), and Christ’s message seems to come perfectly in the middle of them. Your work on the pagan vs. Christian conceptions of sacrifice elucidates this.
I’d also love a future response to 0HP’s three-part series on the need for Christian-Nietzschean synthesis. Like you, I think no mere man’s message can take priority over His, and hearing calls for religious reform from a self-professed nonbeliever rang somewhat flat, but I can’t deny that I already see how modern people, myself included, implicitly justify our actions on a self-inventing Nietzschean basis.
But feel free to refute me forcefully, as I’ve sinned in my quest for knowledge, and probably lost some of my soul in the process.
> I’d also love a future response to 0HP’s three-part series on the need for Christian-Nietzschean synthesis.
Amen brother. A smart guy remarked that 0HP‘s strength is analysis, not synthesis. His attempt at a vision doesn’t have the vitalism or poetry of BAP, and so doesn’t really touch me. That does not mean he is wrong, just that he might be a better observer than a preacher. Thus I‘m really interested in what Randy has to say, no one quite moves me like he does.
Re: race influence i agree more than I don't, but my current view is it's an obstacle to be overcome (!), not a good or praiseworthy situation. I justify this conceptualisation by the smallness of the gate and the narrowness of the way. Ultimately I think the whole thing comes down to languages and translation, which incidentally is why I plan to learn ancient Greek. I don't have a good clean answer, everything I say is a work in progress. I think the apostles being given the gift of tongues is extremely important.
I haven't finished zhps trilogy, but I hope that we shall one day be in agreement.
Much strength and luck on Ancient Greek! I’ve been considering learning as well when I have free time. Great resource to learn Koine as well I’m sure (or vice versa).
I read the Bible when I was little, but never on my own terms. What translation/resource can you suggest?
I think a lot of people lose faith by when someone points out how difficult it is to really look at Jesus and compare. A lot of people end up leaving, just doing it to themselves. It's depressing, it's a total rejection of the idea that being a civil religion is good, it removes the edifice of "we are a socially beneficial religion" (collective, passive, meaningless) to "I AM FUCKING UP" (personal, active, True) and it's a highly depressing. Literally comparing yourself to perfect execution and having to not distract yourself. What on Earth is the point of this guilt?
Well, as long as you point it at yourself, it's fine, because occasionally you do a Good Thing and Get Better, because you're pointing it at yourself. I was putting off a task at work out of fear, and a new guy said "You should do it" and I said "thanks, I will look into it" and he said "Or just do it." I did it, and I feel like a million bucks. I have denounced the devil for 8 hours. Thanks, new guy! My ego isn't inflated, I needed help, but I got it done, and tomorrow it'll be a little easier. Maybe you even get Faith and aren't sad anymore.
If you're a good religious person, you're thinking "I am fucking up" a lot of the time, and banking on "but Jesus loves me and I try to make it up to him sometimes". I think that's ok. I think it's ok to be fucked, and knowing it and trying to fix it. That's making up the distance. That's the point of "God is fully divine and fully human" - it's to say "yes this shit is fucking difficult but guess what, it's on the map, go find it."
What's so new about the Woke and Cool Stuff is that you aren't fixing yourself to get closer to the divine, you are doing it for Any Other Reason provided by some Smart Guy. And this is IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH. Not just because it's inherently based on someone not as good as Christ Himself, who you can immediately spot 100 flaws in, but because you can realistically go to the Smart Guy and say, "Hey it's me and you buddy, and Harvey Bungus over here is fucking up. He's not pursuing Any Other Reason!" The fact that it's gotten easier to reach the authority means that, where you were once terrified of action, you are now playing word games (Define "Any Other Reason") to steal God's throne. You get to tell someone else to be perfect, while still completely on your bullshit. And inevitably this puts you as the King of Hell.
The woke stuff is weird, not because it claims the oppressors have sinned, but because it denies the equity of sin, and instead posits that there's someone out there who can balance out all the sin according to categories. That we're close to having all the sin tallied up, and here's how it falls. The fundamentally duplicitous nature of "According to our metrics of Sin, we need more transgenders in STEM" has nothing to do with transgenders or STEM. Assigning the Smart Guy to be Sin Calculator is the overriding objective. The Smart Guy's current occupation is coming up with clickbait verdicts, like "What if breathing was morally wrong" or "Barring Asian and white kids from math classes makes the world better, actually." The appeal of this clickbait is not "Yeah, fuck algebra", but rather "I can definitely convince that fucking idiot Smart Guy to consider my neighbor's sins, he's got my vote!"
Nobody has the balls to pull that move on Christ. To be like "Hey Jesus, look at this fucking guy! What a fuckup! Look at his untallied sins!" Nobody buddies up to Jesus with a condemnation of his neighbor.
Think about how good a comedy sketch it would be to have the office schmoozer try buddying up to Jesus by pointing out his neighbor's sins. We're living in that sketch, it's just that living in a comedy is Hell.
I thought this was going to go off on a tangent about those pigs who make a mess of anyplace they work and then bitch, moan and complain when one tries to keep it cleaner .
I dunno about you but I like my Coffee _clean_ .
Anyways, the rest of it is still interesting as those who make a point about being "! CHRISTIAN !" first and foremost are always the most dishonest and so on and never anything remotely resembling the left or progressive .
Excellent as always. All of the post-Christian Christianities, usually argued as "we don't believe this stuff, really, but its for social good/rational/jungian archetypes/what have you", is a cowardly attempt to sidestep the leap-of-faith problem. Basically, "we can become knights of faith without having to give up rational certainty", which in itself is a contradiction, which Kierkegaard proved two hundred years ago. Likewise why you can't have a Nietzschean Christian synthesis or any other ridiculous thing like that, for there Christ is lost, and without Christ there can be no Christianity. We cannot sidestep Christ.
I'm a Christian and I disagree with this analysis.
Wokeness can be usefully understood as a Christian heresy (remembering that all models are wrong, but some are useful.)
This by itself does not provide a complete analysis; there has been a sort of hybrid cross-pollination of various main ideological strains: Communism, Liberalism (pursuit of science, paired with complete emancipation from all traditions, rules, responsibilities, and hierarchies), but Christianity is a big part of the problem — or at least, a corruption of Christianity.
Even during the times of the apostles, Paul wrote many letters to various churches about how they were being corrupted and failing to properly live out the commands he had evangelized to him. So there is long long precedent of heresies, where churches begin with something closely resembling Christianity and then drift, or mutate, into something quite apart.
The inverse hierarchy of Wokeness/Bioleninism follows a Christian logic of shaming the arrogant strong and praising the weak/gentle/meek/less fortunate.
Also the geographical progression of this movement can be traced back to various sects of Christianity, which as Moldbug likes to say, originated in San Francisco, and in Massachusetts before then.
The problems today trace back to Enlightenment thinking, which was a compromise and a sort of consensus amnesia to pretend not to notice religious differences, in order to end 300 years of Holy Wars and civil wars, which culminated in the Thirty Years War which killed off something like half of Germany and a quarter of Europe from the fighting between Protestants and Catholics, then subsequent famine and disease.
The Enlightenment was basically a peace treaty to put forward all these vaguely plausible ideas "let's all just get along and stop killing each other. I won't ask how you baptize, you won't look too closely at my priest selection and education."
Separation of church and state comes from this European armistice.
But humans are religious animals; the God-Shaped Hole persisted in the hearts of man, and formally prohibiting religion simply created an ideological vacuum. Political correctness, Wokeness, Liberalism rushed in to fill that void. But in a very much inherited Cargo Cult fashion, the new religion was a Girardin mimetic imitation of the old religion which everybody was forbidden to formally practice, but they all kinda remembered. So what evolved was this syncretic, creole ideology which was sort of a haphazardly improvised mixture of available rituals and theological justifications. All formal religions were banned, so this hybrid ideology evolved under selection pressures which optimized infiltration of the bureaucracy, judicial system, and schools.
These initial selection pressures are the reason why Wokeness is so dysfunctional, contradictory, and literally retarded.
Normal religions feature some kind of sin, followed by atonement and forgiveness.
In modern Intersectional Wokeness, everyone is automatically guilty from birth, life is a crime against the environment, you are only valid when you are a more miserable victim than your peers, and there is no forgiveness — if you get exiled and debanked for raycism, or Fedpoasting, or MeToo, or some kind of wrongthink, you are a Bad Person now, and forever, and you need to cry in front of a social media mob but there will be no forgiveness and everyone still hates you... and yes, you can no longer work in white-collar industry.
Functional religions either feature some kind of original apostle Lawgiver, or they are constrained by an ecumenical council.
Instead, Wokeness is a fanatical death cult because it evolved in an emergent process — it was born of evasion, hiding from identification, escaping Separation between Church and State.
This section is the part I was disagreeing with, but it's very intellectual so maybe I misunderstood it:
"The supposed tracing of the Christian heritage of the woke left™ is always through nominal "Christianity" - but never back to Christ himself. Specific protestant offshoots usually. It is explicitly everything surrounding, everything after -“Christian metaphysics, Christian morality, etc - that supposedly have lead to the new “religious madness”. It’s never that Christ has informed this later development, it’s never fully traced all the way, only to the Christians. There is no Christology in this analysis. I j’accuse that this is not an accident, and the crucial mistake.
These nominally Christian traditions and so on, are explicitly post-Christian, in which, on a psychological level it operates in a sense of "insofar as Christ is true, real, genuine, etc, he is so by accident" - Christ is arbitrary, not purposeful, not a deliberate act of will by God/act of God. Because this is the only way most people are capable of approaching the subject, today. “I can entertain the idea maybe that they got something right, by accident”. The premise that certain parts of the christian heritage are good or useful, because it happens to fit a "deeper" or “more real” pattern: of Jungian archetypes, or perennialism, or Nietzschean truths, etc. A Christianity without Christ, without Christ as the central focal point, or the deepest truth.
I think it is unreasonable to call such a thing Christianity. At the very least, it’s confusing and unclear language, to call something by the name of something that is at best accidental to it."
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which on the outside appear beautiful, but inside they are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness. So you, too, outwardly appear righteous to men, but inwardly you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.”
The more things change the more they stay the same.
The things the Lord says and commands, divorced from His grace, are HARD. Impossible to do perfectly, in fact. It’s why sinful man keeps trying to make up his own rules all the time, egged on by the malevolent forces of evil pride and lies. Woke-ism and the rapid decline of the modern church in the west are just the most current iteration of all that uselessness. I would say the contagion of this feels like it’s spread even more than in times past. But maybe that’s what everyone who can see behind the facade to what’s really going on always thinks.
I hope and pray that I live to see the course correction that will surely come, hard as that may be. In fact, the measure of how awful so many things are right now is probably the best indicator that mighty works are in motion. “But Thou, oh Lord, how long?”
Thank you to my generous supporters, I feel like im always begging and never saying thank you.
Christianity has always had a drive to conquer other people wit the goal of converting them. My understanding is that the meeker denominations like Protestantism paved the way for Christianity to be excavated and eventually eradicated as it is today in the US (I personally think Christianity is completely dead as a public influence in this country). But human beings are attracted to strong ideologies - it's why the big religions have grown so much; they get little influence and then they get more. Wokeism is filing the void left by the eradication of Christianity. It's also gaining followers because it appears to be so big. People will follow it as long as it appears to be a dominant ideology. Some will be hardcore, others just dabblers, same as in religion. But the follower base will grow because there are very real incentives - socially and professionally - for professing to the Woke ideology. This is another major reason Christianity and Islam grew: incentives.
This is a beautiful piece of writing.
Moldbug is the boss and Christianity is showing up to work and getting blamed for someone else's mess. Sharp.
I will add that I found the digging and energy over desiring to name the thing and it's ideological pedigree perfectly a waste of time:
https://silentsod.substack.com/p/spiritual-enslavement
What do you think of Spengler’s argument that ethno-cultures form versions of Christianity according to their world-outlook (rendering Christ, in his eyes, essentially meaningless/incidental)? I.e., his “Magian” Greek/Middle-Eastern Christianity is different from Western Christianity, is different from the currently developing Russian version. I would say Spengler encapsulates Moldbug’s thought, as MM doesn’t have much of in the way of historical explanation past the Protestant Revolution ~1500.
I really like your concept of “the little German” that attempts to rationalize everything religious, but Spengler would say that’s an influence particular to Germanized “Faustian” culture rather than anything inherent to humanity. It’s actually been hard for me to finish Decline of the West because I want to believe so badly (and kind of do already) but his historical explanations are very persuasive.
On the other hand, despite how hard it is for me to ditch a relativist, historicized conception of the world, your work has put into perspective for me that human history really isn’t that long. Only six or seven major civilizations (prehistory doesn’t matter, or didn’t happen), and Christ’s message seems to come perfectly in the middle of them. Your work on the pagan vs. Christian conceptions of sacrifice elucidates this.
I’d also love a future response to 0HP’s three-part series on the need for Christian-Nietzschean synthesis. Like you, I think no mere man’s message can take priority over His, and hearing calls for religious reform from a self-professed nonbeliever rang somewhat flat, but I can’t deny that I already see how modern people, myself included, implicitly justify our actions on a self-inventing Nietzschean basis.
But feel free to refute me forcefully, as I’ve sinned in my quest for knowledge, and probably lost some of my soul in the process.
> I’d also love a future response to 0HP’s three-part series on the need for Christian-Nietzschean synthesis.
Amen brother. A smart guy remarked that 0HP‘s strength is analysis, not synthesis. His attempt at a vision doesn’t have the vitalism or poetry of BAP, and so doesn’t really touch me. That does not mean he is wrong, just that he might be a better observer than a preacher. Thus I‘m really interested in what Randy has to say, no one quite moves me like he does.
Mr. Report is all about that splagchnizomai response
Re: race influence i agree more than I don't, but my current view is it's an obstacle to be overcome (!), not a good or praiseworthy situation. I justify this conceptualisation by the smallness of the gate and the narrowness of the way. Ultimately I think the whole thing comes down to languages and translation, which incidentally is why I plan to learn ancient Greek. I don't have a good clean answer, everything I say is a work in progress. I think the apostles being given the gift of tongues is extremely important.
I haven't finished zhps trilogy, but I hope that we shall one day be in agreement.
Much strength and luck on Ancient Greek! I’ve been considering learning as well when I have free time. Great resource to learn Koine as well I’m sure (or vice versa).
I read the Bible when I was little, but never on my own terms. What translation/resource can you suggest?
If the King James Version is good enough for the orthodox priests to recommend for English speakers, it's good enough for me
(I'm English speakers)
Randy it's crazy how hard your posts go, thanks.
I think a lot of people lose faith by when someone points out how difficult it is to really look at Jesus and compare. A lot of people end up leaving, just doing it to themselves. It's depressing, it's a total rejection of the idea that being a civil religion is good, it removes the edifice of "we are a socially beneficial religion" (collective, passive, meaningless) to "I AM FUCKING UP" (personal, active, True) and it's a highly depressing. Literally comparing yourself to perfect execution and having to not distract yourself. What on Earth is the point of this guilt?
Well, as long as you point it at yourself, it's fine, because occasionally you do a Good Thing and Get Better, because you're pointing it at yourself. I was putting off a task at work out of fear, and a new guy said "You should do it" and I said "thanks, I will look into it" and he said "Or just do it." I did it, and I feel like a million bucks. I have denounced the devil for 8 hours. Thanks, new guy! My ego isn't inflated, I needed help, but I got it done, and tomorrow it'll be a little easier. Maybe you even get Faith and aren't sad anymore.
If you're a good religious person, you're thinking "I am fucking up" a lot of the time, and banking on "but Jesus loves me and I try to make it up to him sometimes". I think that's ok. I think it's ok to be fucked, and knowing it and trying to fix it. That's making up the distance. That's the point of "God is fully divine and fully human" - it's to say "yes this shit is fucking difficult but guess what, it's on the map, go find it."
What's so new about the Woke and Cool Stuff is that you aren't fixing yourself to get closer to the divine, you are doing it for Any Other Reason provided by some Smart Guy. And this is IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH. Not just because it's inherently based on someone not as good as Christ Himself, who you can immediately spot 100 flaws in, but because you can realistically go to the Smart Guy and say, "Hey it's me and you buddy, and Harvey Bungus over here is fucking up. He's not pursuing Any Other Reason!" The fact that it's gotten easier to reach the authority means that, where you were once terrified of action, you are now playing word games (Define "Any Other Reason") to steal God's throne. You get to tell someone else to be perfect, while still completely on your bullshit. And inevitably this puts you as the King of Hell.
The woke stuff is weird, not because it claims the oppressors have sinned, but because it denies the equity of sin, and instead posits that there's someone out there who can balance out all the sin according to categories. That we're close to having all the sin tallied up, and here's how it falls. The fundamentally duplicitous nature of "According to our metrics of Sin, we need more transgenders in STEM" has nothing to do with transgenders or STEM. Assigning the Smart Guy to be Sin Calculator is the overriding objective. The Smart Guy's current occupation is coming up with clickbait verdicts, like "What if breathing was morally wrong" or "Barring Asian and white kids from math classes makes the world better, actually." The appeal of this clickbait is not "Yeah, fuck algebra", but rather "I can definitely convince that fucking idiot Smart Guy to consider my neighbor's sins, he's got my vote!"
Nobody has the balls to pull that move on Christ. To be like "Hey Jesus, look at this fucking guy! What a fuckup! Look at his untallied sins!" Nobody buddies up to Jesus with a condemnation of his neighbor.
Think about how good a comedy sketch it would be to have the office schmoozer try buddying up to Jesus by pointing out his neighbor's sins. We're living in that sketch, it's just that living in a comedy is Hell.
Interesting .
I thought this was going to go off on a tangent about those pigs who make a mess of anyplace they work and then bitch, moan and complain when one tries to keep it cleaner .
I dunno about you but I like my Coffee _clean_ .
Anyways, the rest of it is still interesting as those who make a point about being "! CHRISTIAN !" first and foremost are always the most dishonest and so on and never anything remotely resembling the left or progressive .
Still and all good foor for thought here .
-Nate
Excellent as always. All of the post-Christian Christianities, usually argued as "we don't believe this stuff, really, but its for social good/rational/jungian archetypes/what have you", is a cowardly attempt to sidestep the leap-of-faith problem. Basically, "we can become knights of faith without having to give up rational certainty", which in itself is a contradiction, which Kierkegaard proved two hundred years ago. Likewise why you can't have a Nietzschean Christian synthesis or any other ridiculous thing like that, for there Christ is lost, and without Christ there can be no Christianity. We cannot sidestep Christ.
Anyway this post for some reason made me think of this Chekhov story, its very beautiful and I think you would like it https://americanliterature.com/author/anton-chekhov/short-story/the-student
I'm a Christian and I disagree with this analysis.
Wokeness can be usefully understood as a Christian heresy (remembering that all models are wrong, but some are useful.)
This by itself does not provide a complete analysis; there has been a sort of hybrid cross-pollination of various main ideological strains: Communism, Liberalism (pursuit of science, paired with complete emancipation from all traditions, rules, responsibilities, and hierarchies), but Christianity is a big part of the problem — or at least, a corruption of Christianity.
Even during the times of the apostles, Paul wrote many letters to various churches about how they were being corrupted and failing to properly live out the commands he had evangelized to him. So there is long long precedent of heresies, where churches begin with something closely resembling Christianity and then drift, or mutate, into something quite apart.
The inverse hierarchy of Wokeness/Bioleninism follows a Christian logic of shaming the arrogant strong and praising the weak/gentle/meek/less fortunate.
Also the geographical progression of this movement can be traced back to various sects of Christianity, which as Moldbug likes to say, originated in San Francisco, and in Massachusetts before then.
The problems today trace back to Enlightenment thinking, which was a compromise and a sort of consensus amnesia to pretend not to notice religious differences, in order to end 300 years of Holy Wars and civil wars, which culminated in the Thirty Years War which killed off something like half of Germany and a quarter of Europe from the fighting between Protestants and Catholics, then subsequent famine and disease.
The Enlightenment was basically a peace treaty to put forward all these vaguely plausible ideas "let's all just get along and stop killing each other. I won't ask how you baptize, you won't look too closely at my priest selection and education."
Separation of church and state comes from this European armistice.
But humans are religious animals; the God-Shaped Hole persisted in the hearts of man, and formally prohibiting religion simply created an ideological vacuum. Political correctness, Wokeness, Liberalism rushed in to fill that void. But in a very much inherited Cargo Cult fashion, the new religion was a Girardin mimetic imitation of the old religion which everybody was forbidden to formally practice, but they all kinda remembered. So what evolved was this syncretic, creole ideology which was sort of a haphazardly improvised mixture of available rituals and theological justifications. All formal religions were banned, so this hybrid ideology evolved under selection pressures which optimized infiltration of the bureaucracy, judicial system, and schools.
These initial selection pressures are the reason why Wokeness is so dysfunctional, contradictory, and literally retarded.
Normal religions feature some kind of sin, followed by atonement and forgiveness.
In modern Intersectional Wokeness, everyone is automatically guilty from birth, life is a crime against the environment, you are only valid when you are a more miserable victim than your peers, and there is no forgiveness — if you get exiled and debanked for raycism, or Fedpoasting, or MeToo, or some kind of wrongthink, you are a Bad Person now, and forever, and you need to cry in front of a social media mob but there will be no forgiveness and everyone still hates you... and yes, you can no longer work in white-collar industry.
Functional religions either feature some kind of original apostle Lawgiver, or they are constrained by an ecumenical council.
Instead, Wokeness is a fanatical death cult because it evolved in an emergent process — it was born of evasion, hiding from identification, escaping Separation between Church and State.
I don't see how we disagree at all
Well first I am retarded
This section is the part I was disagreeing with, but it's very intellectual so maybe I misunderstood it:
"The supposed tracing of the Christian heritage of the woke left™ is always through nominal "Christianity" - but never back to Christ himself. Specific protestant offshoots usually. It is explicitly everything surrounding, everything after -“Christian metaphysics, Christian morality, etc - that supposedly have lead to the new “religious madness”. It’s never that Christ has informed this later development, it’s never fully traced all the way, only to the Christians. There is no Christology in this analysis. I j’accuse that this is not an accident, and the crucial mistake.
These nominally Christian traditions and so on, are explicitly post-Christian, in which, on a psychological level it operates in a sense of "insofar as Christ is true, real, genuine, etc, he is so by accident" - Christ is arbitrary, not purposeful, not a deliberate act of will by God/act of God. Because this is the only way most people are capable of approaching the subject, today. “I can entertain the idea maybe that they got something right, by accident”. The premise that certain parts of the christian heritage are good or useful, because it happens to fit a "deeper" or “more real” pattern: of Jungian archetypes, or perennialism, or Nietzschean truths, etc. A Christianity without Christ, without Christ as the central focal point, or the deepest truth.
I think it is unreasonable to call such a thing Christianity. At the very least, it’s confusing and unclear language, to call something by the name of something that is at best accidental to it."
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which on the outside appear beautiful, but inside they are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness. So you, too, outwardly appear righteous to men, but inwardly you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.”
The more things change the more they stay the same.
The things the Lord says and commands, divorced from His grace, are HARD. Impossible to do perfectly, in fact. It’s why sinful man keeps trying to make up his own rules all the time, egged on by the malevolent forces of evil pride and lies. Woke-ism and the rapid decline of the modern church in the west are just the most current iteration of all that uselessness. I would say the contagion of this feels like it’s spread even more than in times past. But maybe that’s what everyone who can see behind the facade to what’s really going on always thinks.
I hope and pray that I live to see the course correction that will surely come, hard as that may be. In fact, the measure of how awful so many things are right now is probably the best indicator that mighty works are in motion. “But Thou, oh Lord, how long?”