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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   30656 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

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I wonder if Q-anon causes difficulties for the Nicene Creed. The right wing spaces that I monitor, mostly patriots.win, mock posts trailing things that are "about to happen". News that prosecutions are coming gets mocked with a sarcastic chorus of "two more weeks" or "trust the plan".

Meanwhile the Nicene Creed tells us

He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead

I've four guesses

  1. That looks to my eyes like the kind of "trust the plan" pitch that currently excites contempt, and this will be an obstacle to Christian revival.
  2. Q-anon is profane. The Nicene Creed is sacred. The profane cannot contaminate the sacred. There is no obstacle to Christian revival.
  3. Going to Methodist church as a child (England, 1965‐1970) the second coming did register at all. Later, when I learned that some branches of American Christianity centered on the second coming, I initially thought: I know about that. It features in the book Father and Son; it is a weird, Plymouth Brethren thing. It has been quietly dropped, and doubts about it will not be an obstacle to Christian revival
  4. The second coming is an important part of traditional Christianity. If people in 2025 find "about to happen, trust the plan" gives them the ick, then that will be an obstacle to Christian revival.

My guesses contradict each other. I'm really confused :-(

Trust the plan snark is directed at human plans. God is on a different level. If it discredits the eschatalogical Christians that will probably impact the popularity of Christianity I agree - because threats are a good way to bully the ignorant into line - but it can only be good for Christianity on the whole - and the world, since it reduces the number of people doing things like trying to breed special cows to bring about the end times.

I need you to tell me that’s not a real thing

Yes it is.

The mainstream Christian view is that trying to predict the end times with more specificity than the Bible tells us is for nut jobs.

The Reader’s Digest condensed version: The Old Testament ritual for purifying Jewish priests to serve in the temple requires the ashes of a spotless red heifer. Rabbinical tradition adds a bunch of criteria to the biblical law (as rabbinical tradition is wont to do) such that qualifying cows are absurdly rare.

Some Jews who want to restore the temple would like to breed qualifying cattle. A few eccentric dispensationalist Christians, who believe that the rebuilding of the Jewish temple is part of the unfolding of biblical prophecy, want to help them. This isn’t a common thing, but it has geopolitical relevance, as rebuilding the Jewish temple would require tearing down the Al Aqsa mosque.

If the temple is going to be rebuilt, the site would need to be consecrated with the sacrifice of a red heifer. It has to be a heifer that has no other colored hairs at all. That is very rare. Ranchers in Texas are working with ultra-orthodox groups in Israel to breed a line of such cows to have it ready in case the Dome of the Rock suddenly....goes away.

Now I want to reread The Yiddish Policemen's Union.

>He doesn't know about the red heifer

Boy, do I have some ancient lore for you.

Very much the 2nd. My take as an Orthodox Christian is that fomenting fears and guesses about the apocalypse is strictly sinful, and mostly a Protestant thing. Christ Himself says:

“But of that day and hour knoweth no one, not even the angels of heaven, neither the Son, but the Father only.“

I’m not sure how sinful it is, but most of the people who talk about it seem a bit off. Like they don’t really seem to care about anything else.

I have a half-formed thought about this. There are certain simple ideas whose implications are so profound and perspective-shifting that they essentially colonize a person's entire mind. I stress that these are simple ideas -- Christianity and classical liberalism are profound sets of ideas, but they are too complex for the average person to immediately filter everything in their lives through them. Simpler ideas are different, though -- it's easy to filter everything you experience or hear about through simple ideas like "the invisible oppression of the white man/Jew/etc is keeping good people down" or "the end times are nigh" or "the NAP is all that matters" or "the scientific method is the only valid source of knowledge" or "all social problems is rooted in class struggle" whatever.

I think that fixation on a single idea like this is actually a very mild form of mental illness, even the generally "respectable" ideas I included above (harcore libertarianism, communism, scientism). People get stuck on an idea and it becomes their entire, 1-dimensional universe. G.K.Chesteron has a great passage on this:

The madman's explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory. Or, to speak more strictly, the insane explanation, if not conclusive, is at least unanswerable; this may be observed specially in the two or three commonest kinds of madness. If a man says (for instance) that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny that they are conspirators; which is exactly what conspirators would do. His explanation covers the facts as much as yours. Or if a man says that he is the rightful King of England, it is no complete answer to say that the existing authorities call him mad; for if he were King of England that might be the wisest thing for the existing authorities to do. Or if a man says that he is Jesus Christ, it is no answer to tell him that the world denies his divinity; for the world denied Christ's.

The entire chapter is worth reading.

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