Hat tip to neopatron Bayou Bomber for passing along this post from his blog chronicling the cleansing of Iowa’s state Capitol.
For those who hadn’t heard, the Iowa state government gave the Satanic Temple permission to vandalize their capitol building with this monstrosity:
Officials and members of the public alike, lulled into moral paralysis by decades of stewing in Modernist propaganda, had suffered this diabolical intrusion since last week.
Until a son of God entered the capitol and cleansed it of the abomination.
The Satanic Temple’s display inside the Iowa State Capitol was destroyed on Thursday, according to police.
A spokesperson for the Iowa State Police told Fox News Digital that Michael Cassidy, 35, was arrested after allegedly tearing down the Iowa Satanic Temple’s Baphomet display.
He was charged with 4th-degree criminal mischief.
In a text message to Fox News Digital, Cassidy confirmed he tore down the satanic display, which was erected last week by The Satanic Temple of Iowa to represent the group’s right to religious freedom.
“It was extremely anti-Christian,” Cassidy told Fox News Digital when asked why he tore the statue down.
That’s what Boomers, Jonesers, and even Gen Xers have missed for years: not that breaking the law to oppose evil is justified; it’s not – but that the only justification you need to lawfully, peacefully stand up to evil is “It’s un-Christian.”
Cassidy at least gets half the equation. The New York Post says he’s 35, which makes him a member of Generation Y.
As frequent readers know, I wrote just the other day about Gen Y’s path to redemption – by handing down the traditions of a world that’s passing away.
I’m old enough to remember a time when diabolical weirdos wouldn’t dare try raising Baphomet shrines on public land. I also remember 90s Conservatives getting stumped by Death Cultists who’d throw the “What about Satanists?” wrench in their paeans to religious freedom.
In that regard, it’s even more impressive that Cassidy has managed to cast off the dead “I disagree with what you say, but I’ll fight to the death for your right to say it,” meme.
Not everybody was impressed, though.
Dunwell’s bio says that before entering politics, he was a pastor.
You’d think he’d be more familiar with Romans 3:8.
And not rather (as we are slandered, and as some affirm that we say) let us do evil, that there may come good? whose damnation is just.
That is not mild language.
Neither did the Israelites react mildly when the Greeks and Romans tried to desecrate the Temple. Someone should ask Dunwell if he condemns that.
He’d probably dodge the question by pointing out that the Second Temple was a sacred site, whereas a state capitol is a civic building. But that’s evasive, since ancient Israel didn’t have separation of church and state. In fact, the high priest served as head of state during the Hasmonean Dynasty.
Would he condemn that?
He might say that religious freedom hadn’t been invented yet, and our society has advanced to tolerate differences of opinion.
But I don’t know. I’m looking around and not seeing a lot of advancement. What I’m seeing is planes crashing, trains derailing, shake machines always on the fritz …
And, oh yeah, Devil worshipers erecting statues in the people’s house.
The question Conservatives should ask Death Cultists, yet they never do, is “How does installing a public shrine to Baphomet serve the good?”
There is no coherent answer. Because it’s an intrinsically grave, evil act.
Dunwell waxes eloquent about 200 Christians coming together over the Satanic shrine outrage.
a) So what?
b) It shouldn’t take a direct frontal attack against God to bring Christians together.
But the only argument you need is the one infallibly revealed by St. Paul above.
That’s the one Michael Cassidy had at heart when he took his admittedly rash but well-meant action.
I can’t condone it, but it was better by objective moral standards than cloaking cowardice in a false version of the Gospel.
You know who would have been justified in destroying that mockery?
God.
Then again, He’d also be justified in preemptively destroying the entire cosmos rather than allowing the least venial sin to offend His all-holy Name. Good thing for us He’s decided to be patient.
It’s mind-boggling that anybody still doesn’t get this by now, but religious freedom was a ceasefire exclusive to Christian denominations whose beliefs 99% overlap.
You can bury the hatchet and agree to disagree with folks you see eye-to-eye with to that extent.
Cassidy is right. The Framers never meant for religious freedom to include LARPing goth psychos.
“But the Catholic Church has cosigned religious freedom!” some Reddit types will reeee.
And that’s a false equivalence because if they’d take the time to read through Magisterial teaching on the matter, they’d see that the Church’s understanding of freedom bears only an accidental resemblance to the total undirected license embraced by Modernists.
For starters, the Church knows that religion is the virtue under justice ordered toward rendering right worship to God.
Since it’s ordained toward the good, religion correctly understood cannot include disordered or false worship like Satanism.
Tl; dr: the Church’s view of religious freedom is that God has the absolute right to receive proper worship, and every human being has the divinely guaranteed right to be Christian – Catholic in particular, but it would be weird if they didn’t get that specific.
And until the world is converted, everyone also has the right not to be coerced into joining the Church.
That’s it.
Still not seeing any mention of Baphomet statues.
Again, not calling for lawbreaking or public disorder; I am pointing out that if Christians can shake off the Modernist conditioning that leaves us prostrate before evil, the sooner Hell World ends.
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Josiah was the last king to tear down the High Places after generations of his ancestors refusing to do so. What happened to Israel when his son put them back up?
The writer of Kings ties the fall of Judah to the sins of King Manasseh.
But, your point stands. The Exile happens
I’m reminded of St. Eulalia
Legend tells us that St. Eulalia (age 12) presented herself to the judge Dacian, and reproached him for his part in destroying souls by compelling them to renounce the true God. Dacian tried to tempt Eulalia with promises of pleasure and fortune that she would be granted due to her noble birth, but she could not be swayed. He then threatened her with instruments of torture, telling her that she would escape the harsh punishments if she just worshipped the pagan gods.
Eulalia threw down the idol before her and trampled on the cake she was supposed to sacrifice to it. The judge ordered her to be seized and executed, and her flesh was ripped with iron hooks. The executioners then set fire to her wounds, including her hair, and she was stifled by the flames. Throughout the ordeal, she continued to praise and thank God.
https://angelusnews.com/faith/saint-of-the-day-eulalia/
Appealing to Ephesians against the use of the “sword” is beyond stupid, considering the very passage he quotes ends:
“And take unto you the helmet of salvation, and the SWORD of the Spirit (which is the word of God).”
And of course the words of Christ Himself:
“Do not think that I came to send peace upon earth: I came not to send peace, but the sword.” (Matthew 10: 34)
Not to mention the obvious parallels to the cleansing of the temple that you point out.
The level of Biblical ignorance from most American Christians, including from pastors, is shocking. I’ve heard Christians say that concern for the poor is only a “New Testament” thing, even though violating those commandments is the second most common reason for Israel to get in trouble with God (worshipping foreign deities of course being the most common reason.) Similarly I’ve had Christians tell me that Christians and the Jews who rejected Christ got along just fine until the middle ages. Even a cursory reading of the Bible would reveal how wrong these ideas are.
If you want to go the secular “what would the framers of the constitution think” route, John Locke explicitly said that tolerance of religions should NOT include tolerance of atheists. (The main reason he gave was that oaths mean nothing to an atheist.) The same reasoning would say that we should not tolerate satanists, and we DEFINITELY shouldn’t tolerate satanists who claim that their beliefs are just a LARP when pressed, meaning that lying is at the core of their beliefs.
While I called Satanists LARPers in the post, a lawyer friend gave a point of correction. He worked on RFRA cases, mostly involving the COVID vax. A requirement for filing a RFRA claim is “sincere, closely held belief.” At least some Satanic Temple members signed affidavits pursuant to such filings. Some of those affidavits also cited abortion as a Satanic sacrament, but that’s another topic.
What Satanists seem to be doing with religion is a variant of the serious/clown routine Jon Stewart did with journalism. They’re devout Devil worshipers or atheists having a lark depending on which is convenient.
That’s why we should reject Locke and his entire frame wholesale. The reason to exclude Satanists and atheists from religious toleration is they both give grave offense to God. Anything else is dealing under the enemy’s terms.
Once you know _why_ Locke said what he said, ALL of it becomes illegitimate.
I do. I wrote my Masters on it.
TLDR: Take a status-obsessed child of a downwardly-mobile family, make him useless at anything but Rhetoric, and put him in the hands of a venal and ambitious man who knows how to read people.
That was Locke and his patron, the 1st Earl Shaftsbury. Locke was no paragon of Reason; he was a gaslit cultist, a LaRouchie centuries before Lyndon LaRouche, and exploited accordingly.
Wow. I had no idea. But everything you just laid down makes total sense.
While you are correct, I feel obliged to point out that Locke’s logic here is rooted in his belief that moral laws required Christianity, and (as far as I can recall) thus that it is impossible to deduce any moral laws from purely natural observation or via our inherent powers.
That’s hard to square with Aquinas, who held that positive law should be based on the natural law, not directly on divine law.
Saint Boniface, pray for us!
Nice post. A significant portion of my online time recently has been spent in some manner trying to convince “traditional” Catholics that traditionally, the Church Is Always Right (TM). Misunderstanding what amounts to concessions of the globalist modernist world the Church finds herself in is one of them.
Applied on a small scale, Vatican II means not strong arming my now adult/college age daughter into Mass attendance after years of insistence on it as a family. However we do have a standard of moral behavior we otherwise expect from her. On a society scale, it means practically legislating all of Catholic mortality/teaching without a flinch, just short of “everyone has to go to Mass and be a practicing Catholic”. I don’t see any endless right to even modern freedom of speech in that kind of context. But so many of the radicalized Catholics can’t get over the title in the document. They have a very modernistic reaction to that teaching, rather than the traditional one.
Also as a Gen Xer, 100% agreed that we picked up too much of our baseline mortality/viewpoint from the Boomers, even knowing it was wrong. Gen Xer’s are also much more likely to be dissents than Boomers, but lots of us just also have no other frame either.
Yes, if Vatican II had been a Modernist council, its documents would have come to Modernist conclusions. Instead they just reiterate perennial teachings, as you said, in terms that are more accessible to modern culture.
Boomer “morality” is one of the reasons the church is hurting so bad. Most Western whites, especially conservatives, are feminists now to some extent. There is a website I used to follow called vigilant citizen. Although it had some good information it was so sensationalist that eventually I had to stop following it. Whenever anything even remotely resembling sexual deviancy involving women popped up the authors would start whining about how all these women were led astray. The idea that women could be witches and whores and devil worshipers doesn’t even cross their mind. Coming from the Pacific Northwest I have seen beautiful women with devil tattoos and the mark of the beast. The blind spot of older generations, especially boomers, makes them incapable of seeing the sins of whichever chosen group they support. Be they Jews, blacks, or white women. The last one is probably the worst weakness, as I have met men who were “based” on everything else who fall prey to woman worship, which always becomes worship of the White of Babylon.
That was originally typed to “Whore” of Babylon. Not sure how or why it was changed to “White.”
As has often been observed, change happens one retirement party at a time.