Bruce Charlton's Notions

We have been hearing recently discussion of the Benedict Option for resisting Secular Leftism -

http://www.jrganymede.com/2015/07/02/the-benedict-option

which derives from Thomist philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre writing in After Virtue (1981), recently popularised by Rod Dreher.

But this is regarded as effete and defeatist by the Secular Right of the Boromirosphere - so named by this blog's commenter Ingemar after the (pre-his-repentance) Tolkien character from Lord of the Rings, and summarised by the phrase:

Hey lads, let's use the One Ring to fight Sauron!

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/the-secular-right-alternative-right.html

The Boromir Strategy correctly diagnoses that we are in a state of warfare with Secular Leftism/ Political Correctness/ Social Justice Warriors which are evil - but fails to recognise that this is essentially a spiritual war, which must be 'fought' with spiritual weapons - and that evil cannot be defeated by evil; and that the weapons of the Good are all Good.

The Boromirosphere is easily recognised by its tone of hatred, gloating Schadenfreude, and foul-mouthed invective. The Boromir strategy is that the opponents of Leftism need to beat Leftism at its own game - fight one-sided feminism and women-preference with one-sided macho posturing and women-oppression, fight antiracism with pro-racism, fight uncontextualised kindness with shock-and-awe cruelty - in sum, to be even-more ruthless, hardline, expedient, and materialistically-focused than The Left.

An example of the Boromir Strategy is the 'No Enemies to the Right' meme; which argues that because the mainstream political Left do not reject vicious Leftist extremists - whatever their methods and motivations; then their opponents should not reject vicious Right Wing extremists - whatever their methods and motivations; because that would be to weaken the movement.

However, all this is understandable given that the Secular Right are... Secular. They do not believe in the reality of God, the unseen world, the spiritual realm - so the only effects they will recognise and advocate are in the exact same material world that is approved and taken-seriously as valid public discourse by the modern mass media.

In sum, the secular Left and Right are two sides serving the same (demonic) masters - exactly like Labour and Conservative, Democrat and Republican, and all the rest of mainstream politics.

Whereas, the simple reality is that we live in a world of divine entities and communications - mostly un-perceived by the five senses - a world in which all Goodness is necessarily effectual, and where apparent defeat of real Goodness can only be temporary.

The motives and methods of Good are identical; Good ends can only be attained by Good means - and all Good means will sooner-or-later lead to Good ends. We need not be concerned by expediency - if we do the right thing then we will be on the side of eternal destiny, and all manner of synchronicities and unforeseen eucatastrophes* will come to our aid.

That is all that ought to concern us in a world created by a God who is Good and is our Heavenly Father. Politics is, after all, very simple - if we truly understand it.

And this attitude is called faith.


Note: Eucatastrophe is a Tolkien coinage meaning good-catastrophe - the 'fortunate' but once-experienced-known-to-be-destined last minute twist in a story to achieve a happy ending in the face of apparently-inevitable defeat by evil.

It is striking that the possession of the One Ring is rejected by even the most good and most powerful characters of The Lord of the Rings.

Why this should be, is explained at The Notion Club Papers blog. 

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The reason is a variation of what I have often termed The Boromir Strategy - or "Hey lads, let's use the One Ring to fight Sauron!".

The Boromir Strategy is the usual form taken by would-be resistance to global totalitarian leftism - which is why so much time and effort is expended in the mass media and blogosphere in "studying the arts of the enemy" in order (supposedly, purportedly) to discover and use the enemy's methods against the enemy...

Yaas...  

In the NCP-blog post I make clear that to do this is already to have joined-with the enemy. 

To claim The Ring is a counter-productive pseudo-attempt to fight the enemy by moving onto the enemy's own ground; or - more precisely - trying to fight the enemy after opening the door and inviting him right inside the castle keep.

The reason the Boromir Strategy is so popular as to be near universal, is that it is a mask of good intentions used to cover the reality of evil motivations.

The argument was deployed in Lord of the Rings to justify Boromir forcibly trying to take the One Ring from Frodo in order to use it himself - for his own purposes, including his greater power and glory. 

The pretence was that this was done only to save Gondor, and to defeat Sauron - but that was not true. 

Well - Boromir realized this, and he repented (and confessed); and did his best to atone for the damage he had done. 

And... what Boromir did in the story, anybody can do in "real life". 

 

Assertions of spiritual war against the truth of Christianity and the Heavenly resurrection that Jesus offers; will inevitably be regarded as sick, paranoid, persecutory delusions by the dominant, mainstream, secular-materialist majority. That, or regarded as dishonest manipulation, insanity, or sheer foolishness.

Since the spiritual realm is denied reality in all power-full public discourse, since Christianity is seen as Nothing But a socio-political phenomenon - then any damage to Christianity from the totalitarian Global Establishment will only be regarded by the mainstream as collateral damage, accidental to some other prime purpose...

But if spiritual war is real, and if The Enemy is indeed behind the successful 2020 international coup and current-escalating systematic subversion of social cohesion (e.g. Project Fear, Project Resentment, Project Despair) -- then Christianity will be the true (albeit deniable) focus of all major political change. 


By this analysis; the Main Thing about the past few months has been the closure of the Christian churches, the cessation of their core activities. This has been a devastating blow against actual Christians.

This strategy has been most effective against the Catholic churches that were historically the most interwoven with 'the State'; churches which are built around the priesthood, ritual, symbolism and specific consecrated buildings (churches, cathedrals, monasteries, temples etc); since it is the material side which is easiest to suppress.

But even if you are a low church Protestant or unaffiliated Christian; you should bear in mind that the three largest international denominations are Episcopal (i.e. administered by Bishops): The Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Anglican. So, if not an actual majority, still a very large proportion of the world's serious Christians have-been and are severely affected by the recent suppression.

And even the most low church/ home church Protestants are severely affected by the rules against gathering, and the physical separation of all (middling, respectable) people; because of course, there are many exemptions. No Christians are to be exempted, in the end. It's just that the Powers of Evil have to start somewhere; and the converged Establishment leaderships of Episcopal churches make them an easier target.

There it is pretty much a case of Job Done. The Christian churches are here-and-now at the lowest ebb in their history. Next, the Powers of Evil will move on to suppressing the other social manifestations of Christianity: meeting, Bibles, prayer, teaching, theology. Wedges will be inserted; divisions made and widened; Christian set-against Christian... 


In a nutshell, if you agree with me that serious Christians are to be found spread across many denominations (including, I assert, many of those regarded as 'heretical' or 'cultish' or in some way unsound by the mainstream - distinctions which I believe mainly served the corrupt, now utterly discredited, church leaderships); then serious Christians should not let Them drive a spiritual wedge between Us.

At the spiritual level, it really is Us against Them: Us being all serious Christians of all kinds; Them being Satan, the demons, the Global Establishment who serve them, and the mass Godless majority who obey them, and believe whatever they are being told today...

(Some souls have been sold, the majority surrendered.)


And the war is spiritual.

We must therefore discern Good from evil (because the mass majority as well as leadership are on the wrong side). But, on the one hand, Christians should Not discern on the basis of those Political Categories by which They are dividing Us (class, sex, race, sexuality)...

While, on the other hand, we should not be manipulated into supporting evil by the fact that our discernment is spiritual rather than political.


The refusal of serious Christians to be spiritually divided from brothers and sisters in Christ on the basis of spiritual categories means opposing any political agenda based on these categories.

Do not get drawn into the Boromir Strategy!

You cannot use the One Ring to fight the Dark Lord, who made it. You cannot use political categories such as aristocracy, patriarchy, nationalism or race/ism to fight the Left; because ultimately all primary politics is of-the-Left: on the side of the Dark Lords. 


Again: all those who discern primarily by Political categories, are on the side of the Enemy - even when they favour those categories that are (apparently) against the Leftist Establishment.

The primary battle of the spiritual war is to assert the primacy of the spiritual.

It is somewhat dismaying to see Christians embarking, again and again, decade after decade, on delusory projects of "re-taking culture", including the established churches - and instead ending-up fundamentally (and whether they realize it or not) assimilated-to ("converged-with") mainstream (left-totalitarian) ideology.

This is often associated with the Boromir Strategy: "Hey lads, let's use the One Ring to fight Sauron!" - either deliberately ("It's time we learned from the success of the Left"), or else by unconsciously and incrementally becoming more like the Left in order to infiltrate the structures of power and (so the original intention is) seize control. 

This usually begins with some local and small scale goal; like getting control of a magazine or journal, reforming a college or a school, placing "our people" in local government, or electing a single national politician. The idea is that this then serves as a base and bridgehead for the next step, and the next... and eventually the whole System will be re-orientated in a Christian direction...

There are two things to be said: firstly, people have been saying this and trying it for more than fifty years, and therefore by any realistic and this-worldly appraisal it has an effectively zero chance of working. 

Therefore, by all reasonably probabilities, the needful investment of time, energy and resources Will Fail to achieve the strategic and cultural objectives (although, in the short term and on a small scale, the attempt may make a living for a smaller group of people - which is perhaps why the strategy keeps getting revived). 

So there are large opportunity costs; because if you are prioritizing one thing, you are not prioritizing another thing*; and personal resources expended on pursuing futile (or selfish) ventures are unavailable for potentially valid and successful projects.   

(*There can only be one priority: therefore choose it well!)

The second and more important thing to be said is from an inferred spiritual perspective. 

All talk about re-taking the culture is essentially to do with the material and physical realm, and is framed in terms of a communal activity. 

Now, many Christians have assimilated and committed to the idea that Christianity is essentially a group, communal activity; that must be pursued via an intermediary and material, this-worldly social system (i.e. their favoured church or denomination) - so they are self-painted into an ever-shrinking corner from which they can only imagine (or will only entertain the possibility) of the same-old form of Boromir Strategic escape: no matter how often this has failed, no matter how counter-productive is the attempt in practice. 

My own understanding is almost the opposite; which is that Life is trying to teach us that retaking culture, taking-over The System, or any version of the Boromir Startegy... is not what we should be attempting; because we are spiritual Beings with a direct-line to God and direct guidance from the Holy Ghost. 

And this decision has been made easy for us, by the repeatedly proved fact that church-centred, institution-centred, collective strategies will not work, anyway - so it ought to be facile for us to abandon them.  

Of course; if one is indeed painted-into a this-worldly corner, then this sounds like a counsel of despair! 

But if we are instead prepared to learn from the divine teachings of this-world; we can be completely hope-full that pursuing the strategy which God has laid-out for us, will be far more successful (when success is defined correctly - i.e. spiritually) than the same old useless delusions. 

Indeed, we can be utterly confident that - in the long-term and where-it-matters - we certainly will be successful; so we ought to feel joy, not despair. 

In other words, the reaction of despair is a product of self-blinding and a delusion; but joy is a consequence of that hope which derives from faith in God the creator, our Heavenly Father+, and we His children. 

+This argument works equally well; whether one believes that God is our Heavenly Father only; or, as I believe, our Heavenly Parents.

If Romantic Christians want to oppose totalitarianism, there is a temptation to 'organise', to create an oppositional 'army' (an 'army of liberation'); but - even if it were possible, which it is not - that would essentially be the Boromir Strategy - Hey lads, let's use the One Ring to fight Sauron!

Because the core problem is The System, and organisation involves creating a Sub-System with The System - using System features such as money, laws, media etc - then attempting to use this Sub-System to destroy The System.

It never works because it can't work.


This was brought to mind on this day when UK people are having an election for MEPs, i.e. members of the European Parliament - and there is a chance to register a vote in favour of Brexit. A Brexit 'party' (a Sub-System of The System) has been created, plus a couple of other Brexit possibilities. So this is a protest election, therefore a chance for each individual vote to be 'make a difference', perhaps?

But to make a political party, to support a party, to join an election, to vote is to participate in The System; is to become complicit - and to become a part of the controlled-opposition (spiritually to join oneself with Emmanuel Goldstein, who is The System's manufactured-fake enemy). To vote is the Boromir Strategy...


If not, then what? If I suggest that organising, voting, participating-in The System is actually making-things-worse - then what should people do instead?

('Instead', since whatever we have-been doing is clearly ineffective.)

Instead, we should beach of us become really and truly self-motivated self-evaluators, agents who thinf for our-selves, from our freedom - who believe not what we are told but what we know from personal experience understood by direct intuition, who think not as we are told but as what arises from-with; be individuals whose behaviours can neither be predicted nor manipulated en-masse.

We should behave like cats; and cats cannot be herded.


Thirty-plus years ago - government Health Service policy broke ineffectually over the barrier of General Practitioners - Family Physicians - because each was an independent agent, and spiritually each was stubbornly independent (for better and for worse - but independent).

I worked in the NHS bureaucracy for a couple of years, and the government officials often complained that that trying to control General Practice by changing policies and rules was like herding cats - their exact words - in other words it could not be done, because GPs were not predictable in their behaviour; under the same policy, each was likely to go off in his own direction, without regard for the group.

It did not much matter what you did to one GP, because most of the others regarded themselves as living in a different world. In practice, The System either had specifically to control each GP as ?50,000 separate units; or else there would not be much control.

That was then, this is now> Now there is a massive system of detailed (patient by patient) online surveillance and monitoring, a single imposed-contract for all, and the work and payments is broken up into multiple separate (monitored) units; and GPs are increasingly organised in increasingly-large groups. The GP is de facto (when not in practice) an employee of The System.

British GPs are no longer cats but instead sheep - or, increasingly, archetypal-movie-lemmings; who were, in reality, being herded off cliffs by unseen Disney technicians...

(An exact analogy for Western Man with respect to the Global Establishment.)


And what applies to GPs in microcosm applies to Western Man. This is what it is to live under a totalitarian system - no longer to be an agent, not to have one's own unique motivation, to be monitored and manipulated in large, impersonal units, by bureaucratic systems of rules, incentives and punishments. 

We need to become cats, cease being lemmings.

In the spirit of Vaclav Havel's 'poster test' (complete essay here); I had an illustrative experience about a decade ago trying to book a room for informal weekly meetings.

What Havel showed is that the totalitarianism of our society can be seen many times a day in multiple apparently trivial experiences. However, these experiences are seldom identified; I think because (unlike the Czech society under communism) modern Western societies have been extensively corrupted, and are complicit in their own oppression.


Inspired by The Inklings; I wanted to book a room for evening weekly conversation meetings of a floating, flexible population of some half a dozen people - from my friends and colleagues, and their friends and colleagues. The idea was that we might read and discuss work in progress or half-baked ideas; and follow the conversation wherever it might lead; broken up by cups of tea and coffee...


I found a suitable space in the rooms attached to a nearby nonconformist protestant church, and was asked to meet with the person whose role it was to rent out these rooms (the person was a somewhat motherly elderly woman - a fairly typical nonconformist; she was probably an unpaid volunteer).

I was rather surprised to be asked to meet with someone; but I guessed that it was a screening process, to make sure the rooms would not be let to anyone who might abuse them, or leave them in a bad state. Since I am a 'respectable' person, who has lived locally for decades, and the participants were people such as doctors, professors, Anglican priests... I didn't anticipate any problems.


But there was more to it than that. Before being allowed to rent the room, I was asked exactly who would be attending, and what we would be discussing.

I was stunned by this - but managed to respond that I had no clue, we would simply be having a conversation; I asked for clarification. Then it became clear that the church did not want to be associated with certain types of ideas, being discussed on its premises. These were not defined, were left vague and rather menacing; but it was pretty clear that the concern was with 'right wing' ideas.

So, the implicit situation was, that I was not going to be allowed to rent a room to have conversations, unless the representative of the church could be assured that (vaguely) 'right wing' ideas would be off the agenda.

By this point I had decided not to pursue the matter - but the excessively large amount of money asked for rental gave me an easy excuse to get out of the situation.


My interpretation of this situation is that this is a good example of how totalitarian power works, and the everyday, micro-level.

First: everything nowadays is run by committees - and committees are intrinsically left wing and atheist; because personal responsibility is eliminated, hence there is 'no morality' in committee decisions - which is another way of saying that they are always and intrinsically immoral; which is another way of stating the plain fact that Committees Are Evil.

All committees are evil, and this is how it works...

My understanding is that the church committees (and their representatives) are plugged-into the the church bureaucracies, local and national government bureaucracies (including the bureaucracies that inspect and grant permissions to churches, the national Lottery bureaucracies - which often subsidise/ bribe churches; and the bureaucracies that award prizes, medals and titles).

In other words there is a dense web of regulatory, permissory, and reputational bureaucracy surrounding each and every publicly operating institution. Any of these could trigger an investigative avalanche in response to a few accusatory words from... well, anybody.

All institutions live in fear of mass media bureaucracies; which can initiate and orchestrate and sustain mass hatred against anybody at any time. And the national bureaucracies are linked to the European Union (and its laws, regulations, and potential funding), the United Nations and beyond.

Functionally, all public bureaucracies are parts of a single system. What is the characteristic of this system? They are evil, but in what way? We can (and should!) observe that (whatever individuals may believe and think) all component bureaucracies are in basic, ideological agreement about social priorities and threats - and this includes even such low level outfits as volunteers working for local nonconformist churches.


These are the facts; but the implications are so far-reaching as to be unacceptable to almost everybody.  Because if all bureaucracy is evil, then all institutions that engage with the social realm are compelled to become a part of the bureaucratic system, and therefore complicit in evil.

If I had gone ahead and booked the room, then my loose gathering of conversationalists would necessarily have become a public institution, a part of the global totalitarian system; existing only by the grace and favour of this system - which could be withdrawn at any time.

So - here and now, already-existing - all existing and possible public institutions are intrinsically corrupt, since they are part of the primary manifestation of evil in the world. If you are pinning your hope on Any institution. 

The only way to avoid this is Not to be a part of the institutional world. Don't rent rooms! All publicly recognised groups are institutions and all institutions are One.


The only exemptions are groups of family and friends whose cohesion is from Love and have no 'official' or organised reality.

And this is precisely why the family and (that rare thing) real friendship are under constant and vicious attack from The System; who constantly try to infiltrate legal concepts into these affectional relations (under excuses such as rights of children, payment for housework, protection against forms of abuse, limitation of freedoms etc) - and to make these primary and definitional.

Things are coming to a point; and the old individual-group compromises which served Christianity (more-or-less well) for two thousand years, are already impossible - and this will get worse. The world of true knowledge gets ever further divided from the pervasive lies of public discourse.

We are already confronted with multiple, daily situations in which our inner, intuitive knowledge is contradicted by institutional authority - and most people, most of the time (including Christians) are coping by denial of this reality; which is simply to side with The System: i.e. the primary manifestation of evil in the world.


Note added: The usual response to something like this is - But what should we do? Where, implicitly, the 'do' implies some 'effective' This-World sociopolitical action. 

And with the (usually unconscious) assumption that 'we' already know how things ought-to be, and the only live question is how best to achieve this (within existing constraints of resources and time, given the supposed-probabilities of success and risks of failure... and so on). 

The whole thing rapidly becomes absorbed into the question (seldom understood as such, however) of how to activate one part of The System (that we like) and set it against some other part of The System that we don't like - because (we recognise) only The System has the power to compel and punish its errors and evils... 

But the lesson we ought to be learning is that this only strengthens The System. It is just office politics, bureaucratic infighting. It is the 'Boromir Strategy' (as advocated by the Secular Right 'Boromirosphere' - "Hey lads, let's use the One Ring to fight Sauron!" - https://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2016/07/the-boromir-strategy-as-advocated-by.html).

We need to see that this is precisely the triumph of bureaucratic totalitarianism. And then realise that the solution of rejecting totalitarianism in toto in a world where totalitarianism is Everywhere and doing Everything... which is something so radical as to be almost unthinkable - yet that is what we must think (or else fail the test). 

You didn't want to make things perfect. You just hated things the way they are.

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I regard things as very bad indeed. I recognise that this view is not generally accepted - most people would say that things are bad but not much worse than usual. But I regard that attitude as the final straw in clinching just how bad things really are.

What sets us apart from earlier societies is moral inversion; that the bad things are openly promoted as good by politicians, government agencies, the legal and educational systems and in the mass media.

Naturally this confuses people - since in the past people have usually been bad despite official exhortations to do good. In earlier times the officials were usually hypocrites, but paid lavish lip service to the importance of being and doing good - now they urge and reward and coerce people to do be bad, and attack good - while reversing the labels.

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What do I personally regard as the strongest evidence of things being extremely bad, in my country of England?

The high and rising addiction to the mass media, that people will not believe their own experience and knowledge but instead believe the mass media. The grossest example is the ignorance and denial and total lack of interest in truly massive, rapid and multi-faceted demographic transformation.

http://addictedtodistraction.blogspot.co.uk/

The collapse into sub-replacement fertility among the most intelligent, best educated and wealthiest people - the taboo against noticing this, discussing it, doing anything about it. 

That inverted and pathological sexuality are propagandised, and defended by draconian regulations, laws, and managed-mobs. Two landmark examples are the Jimmy Savile affair- where the most widely promoted moral exemplar of recent decades was revealed to be a monster of depravity; and the still unfolding revelations of industrial scale paedophilia in Rotheram, Oxfordshire etc.

Related to the last - that the British establishment does not just tolerate, but vigorously-protects systematic racism, violence, torture, mutilation, slavery and disciplinary-homicide when it occurs among recent migrants and immigrants.

http://thoughtprison-pc.blogspot.co.uk/

The fact that a majority of young, and a large minority of older, people practise and proudly-display escalating levels of permanent self-mutilation in terms of tattoos, piercings and the like.

In the public area of communications, people are dishonest nearly all the time. This applies not just to politicians and bureaucrats, advertising and the mass media; but equally to schools, colleges, science, medicine, law, the police, the military, and of course the mainstream churches. Every statement is hyped, spun, selective, distorted, designed to mislead and seeded with outright lies. The very discourse of our time, thus our capacity for reason, is rotten - and ineffective.

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That is a short list of a few of the things which most strike me and come to mind.

But how can this happen? How can all this be going on with either ineffectual resistance or tacit approval of the mass of the population?

There are many answers, and many factors contributing; but the deepest answer and underpinning reason is the lack of religion in the UK.

At a profound level, the mass of British people deny - correctly - any absolute legitimacy for themselves and their convictions; and therefore collude in an agenda of multi-pronged self-destruction.

People try but cannot convince themselves of the validity of any secular rationale for modern peace, prosperity and comfort - and in this they are absolutely accurate. Our unprecedented material well-being and amusements - based on the inherited gifts of past geniuses - does not justify anything; certainly selfish abundance does not justify the kind of tough, long-termist, explicitly discriminatory policies required to safeguard and sustain a complex civilisation.

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Bad things will go on happening, and will go on getting worse and more urgent, and will continue to be ignored, misinterpreted and forgotten; unless or until there is a mass religious revival - which would almost certainly require the emergence and intervention of some leader of goodness, genius and great good fortune.

Because these deep problems are a consequence of a national state of nihilistic demotivation which is both severe and widespread; religious revival, which should of course be a Christian revival, is the one and only and absolutely necessary basis for doing anything which is net-constructive.

(If we try to solve the major problems without religion, we will surely, one way or another or in many ways, end-up using the (un-repented) 'Boromir Strategy' of using the One Ring to fight Sauron. We will - like the secular Right - try to defeat the evil of Leftism and try to make a better world by fostering hatred, greed and pride - in other words, the weapons of The Enemy.)

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Of course, such pragmatic criteria are not a reason for becoming Christian - the only and sufficient reason to become a Christian is that it is true: objectively true and really real.

(If another, non-Christian religion was the subject of a Great Awakening, then realistically this would simply be a different form of societal demise - a different route to what would amount to the same destination: i.e. the collapse and replacement of Britain by something else.)

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In sum, the more bad things happen with the approval of the ruling elites and the badder they get, the more tempting it is to try and stop these bad things by arguing and organising against them - but that is a counter-productive waste of time.

In sum, as things stand, the United Kingdom does not deserve to survive, knows it does not deserve to survive,and that is why it is allowing and encouraging its own demise.

The answer is that we must deserve to survive; by having a higher goal, and being motivated by serving that higher goal: Christianity.

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The only strategic stance - at the general, socio-political level - which is not fundamentally a waste of time or counter-productive is Christian evangelism; to try and promote, in whatever way we can best think of, a religious revival.

I have not the slightest flicker of optimism that this is actually happening - but it could happen, so there is ample room for hope.

Start here and now and with yourself.

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