MENE MENE TEKEL UPHARSIN

Geoff B suggested this needed to be posted here at Millennial Star. I’m happy to oblige. These are my thoughts, your mileage may vary, of course.

For many years, I’ve followed a rather eclectic group of men and women who spend a lot of time thinking deeply about various issues, and then writing their thoughts about those topics. I don’t always agree with everything they say, but I deeply appreciate knowing what they have to tell us, and I recognize that many of them really do know what they are talking about because they have spent years or decades thinking about the issues and studying them in great detail. I have been enriched by their thoughts and writings, and over the last decade, my viewpoints on a lot of things have changed drastically, primarily due to their influence in opening my eyes to some festering issues that have laid just under the rock of our social structures.

One writer that I have followed consistently is Rod Dreher. Mr. Dreher is formerly a journalist, currently an author, blogger and pundit. He has written several books, the most prominent of which are Live Not By Lies and The Benedict Option. Both are must-reads if you care at all about living a religiously informed life in the West or in the United States. He has a world wide following, particularly in Europe and the United States. But he has readers in Africa, Asia, all over the place. He is religious, and his faith informs his study and his viewpoint. However, he doesn’t push his religion on his readers, but he is very transparent about his beliefs. For many years he was a faithful Catholic; he broke from the Catholic Church nearly twenty years because of the international pedophile priest scandal. He fled to the Orthodox faith, and that is his spiritual home.

I don’t agree with every jot and tittle of what Mr. Dreher writes about. We don’t view politics, for example, through the same lens. He was, and is, extremely hard on Donald Trump whereas I am far less critical. But whatever. His value to me is his profoundly deep insights into religion, into our cultural insanity in our contemporary society and politics, and his quite trenchant commentary on a host of issues that we grapple with in the now third decade of the 21st Century.

Without stepping the reader into all the details, Dreher has been keeping his finger on the pulse of our rotting corpse culture for many years now. He was clear-eyed from the very beginning about what Obergefell was going to do to religious freedom in the United States. He saw the growing intolerance in our social and secular institutions towards Christians before most anyone knew that it was becoming a problem. He saw the handwriting on the wall long before many other people saw these issues. His is a voice that needs greater dissemination.

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Many readers have heard of eugenics, a set of beliefs that involves improving human beings through scientific experimentation and the exclusion of certain “undesirable” groups. Eugenics were used by the Nazi regime in the 1930s and 1940s to justify forced sterilization, medical experimentation and ultimately the extermination of millions of human beings in an attempt to improve the German race.

What many people don’t know is that 100 years ago Progressives were almost all eugenicists. Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson — Progressive heroes — both promoted eugenics. The scientific “consensus” of the early 20th century was that eugenics were needed to create better human beings and a better society.

Princeton University scholar Thomas C. Leonard documents this in his 2016 book Illiberal Reformers; Race, Eugenics & American Economics in the Progressive Era. “In 1928, 376 college courses were dedicated to the subject of eugenics,” he wrote.

The result in the United States? More than 60,000 people were forcibly sterilized. Eugenics were used to justify segregation and Jim Crow laws because the thought process was that African-Americans were genetically inferior. But eugenics was not just aimed at African-Americans, of course. The “inferior” people included “degenerate Anglo-Saxon hill clans, immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and Asia, backward peoples in the territories of the new American empire, African Americans, the feebleminded, [and] the epileptic” among many others, Leonard writes. More than 30 US states passed laws in favor of forced sterilization.

It is important to understand that the eugenics movement was considered “settled science.” Darwin and subsequent biologists had conclusively proven that natural selection would help create the best human beings, and the role of the government was to promote policies to help natural selection along. The science of the day proved that it would be harmful to the general society for inferior people to be part of the gene pool. For the good of all, the less desirable must be forced out, and it was government’s role to protect the common good.

And here we arrive at a crucial lesson we should have learned from the horrors of the eugenics movement: individual rights are always more important than societal rights. The U.S. Constitution concentrates on individual rights and limits governmental authority to infringe on these rights. And it is also true that traditional Judeo-Christian values have promoted the idea that individuals, as sons and daughters of God, have natural rights that supersede societal rights.

Eugenics was evil in every way. It was racist, it was classist, it was illiberal, it was murderous and it was used to justify societal tyranny instead of individual rights.

And that is exactly what COVID-19 hysterics are promoting today.

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My blog post on Come Follow Me

Discusses Zion’s Camp and how it applies to us today.

https://joelsmonastery.blogspot.com/2021/09/come-follow-me-d-102-105.html