Category Archives: Language

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Pulp Fiction, the Trinity, the Samurai Trilogy, and the Old City Hall Tavern – or What I did over Winter Break

Introduction

Some time ago when The Orthosphere was novel, Kristor, in addressing the issue of how I might best contribute to the enterprise, suggested to me in private correspondence that not every posting needed to be a fully worked out, objectively couched essay.  Shorter, more personal or subjective postings might serve justifiably – postings that reported, say, moments of intellectual clarification, attempts to live in a context of liberal soft tyranny, important formulations discovered in reading, objects of longstanding connoisseurship, or the like.  A posting might even be modestly autobiographical or self-explanatory.  What follows is an amalgam of all that.

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PC is Jizya

In the comments of Dr. Bertonneau’s most recent portion of his valuable series on TS Eliot, I wondered idly why the Powers decided that we ought to use “Muslim” in place of the traditional “Moslem.” There followed some interesting offline conversations with Ilion and another regular commenter at the Orthosphere, which led to the discovery of some unexpected connections to apparently unrelated issues.

Really, should we ever be surprised at such discoveries? In a coherent world, how could anything fail to be connected to everything else, whether trivially or not? What is thought but an exploration of that network of connections?

This post then is mostly a recapitulation of the exploration I undertook with Ilion and my other correspondent. My thanks to them both.

What did the exploration unfold? “Language is an instrument of power, whether we want to think of it that way or not. E.g., I doubt you would say that the move from AD and BC to CE and BCE was innocent of political implication.” Ergo: Politically correct speech is a type of jizya, the head tax Muslims imposed on infidels under their power: Christians, Jews, &c.

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Liberalism is a Religion, For That Gives it its Satanic Power

In my post “A Church of Liberalism,” commenter “The Man Who Was…” objects strenuously to my identification of liberalism as a religion. He maintains his position despite my pointing out that liberalism answers all the deep questions of life, that it demands worship and devotion, and so on. He thinks it grossly improper to call liberalism a religion.

The dispute comes down to the question of what the word “religion” means, and whether one believes it proper to use the word “religion,” as I have, to refer to something that fulfills most of the traditional aspects of religion without being a religion in the full and literal sense. Obviously liberalism is not a formally constituted “religion” in the textbook sense. But it has enough similarities with religion that I did not think anyone would object to my use of the word.

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What love isn’t

Nothing quite grates on me more than getting lectured by ignorant atheists about what my religion actually commands of me. I complained once, I think, several weeks ago about an offensive and frankly indecent image of a group of Christians (their exact affiliation was unclear) who, at a gay pride parade, showed up to wave apologetic signs, wearing shirts emblazoned with the logo “I’m Sorry.” The obscene display so melted the hearts of the perverts on parade that one of them sauntered over, dressed in nothing but a pair of whitey-tighteys – in public — to embrace one of the sign-wavers. Their embrace was photographed and widely circulated as evidence of Christian love in action. You can see that sentiment on display at this site, where I first read of this monstrous offense against decency, and where, in the comments, an assortment of lefties and atheists who obviously don’t buy their own bullshit command us to embrace sodomy en masse in the name of “love” or… I dunno, be hypocrites or whatever the fashionable judgment of the day is. (Thankfully, this attitude doesn’t go unchallenged).

Well, no. Nope. The thing displayed in that photograph, whatever it is, isn’t love. It’s scandal. It’s the opposite of love. It destroys love; it destroys grace; and it destroys souls.

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