Certainly, the Left’s methods of “atoning” by burning and drowning witches doesn’t produce good people. But it is not designed to. It is designed to create Perfect Humans that Obey Absolutely, Perfect Obedient Stormtroopers, is what they wish for. And what they have gotten.

See this.

That’s one reason why the pro Papal or pro Catholic church forces fought against the Protestant reformers, to maintain the purity of the main line and prevent heresies from being born.

However, the Catholic Church wasn’t helping with their corrupt practices, paid indulgences, and other political issues.

“Almighty God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Maker of all things, judge of all men: We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness, which we, from time to time, most grievously have committed, by thought, word and deed, against thy Divine Majesty, provoking most justly thy wrath and indignation against us.

“Have mercy upon us, have mercy upon us, most merciful Father; for thy Son our Lord Jesus Christ’s sake, Forgive us all that is past; and grant that we may ever hereafter serve and please thee in newness of life, io the honour and glory of thy name; Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”

Contrast that majestic, rolling Elizabethan thunder with the 1960s milquetoast revision (see the felt applique banners? hear the amateur guitars?):

“Officiant and People together, all kneeling

“Most merciful God,
we confess that we have sinned against you
in thought, word, and deed,
by what we have done,
and by what we have left undone.
We have not loved you with our whole heart;
we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.
We are truly sorry and we humbly repent.
For the sake of your Son Jesus Christ,
have mercy on us and forgive us;
that we may delight in your will,
and walk in your ways,
to the glory of your Name. Amen.”

The dry rot in mainline Protestant churches is deep, and most are no longer Christian. The minister in the NYC church I sometimes attend gave a perfectly Unitarian sermon last Easter — EASTER! — saying “It doesn’t matter what you believe, because God will redeem all creation in the end.” I was sorely tempted to stand up and say, “So what the hell are we all doing HERE? Let’s go play GOLF.”

My three cents.

Here we sit, on this side of the Pond, scratching our heads about what’s going on in our own country, and we should have the luxury of trying to figure out the Euros?

Merkel has made a second huge mistake. The first was after Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, rejecting modernism

At Fukushima, Japan, a first generation reactor near a geological fault line half the world away was hit by a tsunami – NONE of which applies to Germany, at ALL! – resulting in the herding the eco-worshipping Germans (cf, Wagner and Norse mythology), into rejecting improving modern technology and to go pagan instead! Worshipping the sun and wind, etc.

Why? Well, aren’t we all going top fry from global warming if we don’t?

Instead of rejecting that ridiculously false move, which has doubled electricity cost in Germany, Mad Mutti Merkel has decided to double down!

If german chemical and manufacturing is going to follow low-cost energy from US fracking to the old rust belt of Ohio, then the Germany facing higher cost labor from 5% unemployment can remedy the plunging rate of reproduction AND get labor costs lower by increasing the numbers of low-wage laborers by importing a couple million of them!

At least this is only line of thinking that makes sense to me. Importing those least able to assimilate, and in the nation doing the worst to achieve assimilation, seems wreckless to us in the extreme!

Merely doing it out of their hearts seems too much to accept. Thus, I think it has to do with the synergy of making the German industrial machine more labor market flexible.

Without this consideration, it all makes no sense – now, including this fact, makes some net-net positive sense

It is also tied to the massacre of children at Waco, because the clinton prosecutors like Reno wanted to capture the children and put them in 24/7 interrogation to break them and make them “confess” to child molestation by the Branch Davidians.

The experiments I’m referring to are Leftist psychologists using deep regressive hypnosis to implant false memories. Which is an order, at least, more effective than merely 24/7 interrogation to break a subject and make them say what you want them to say (the reason why the Left thought GitMo was doing this is because the Left specialized in doing that to their prisoners.)

That’s the one I remember, and I probably read it at your blog as well.

Without victory, people have to justify their comrade’s deaths in another fashion, and they cannot easily erase the guilt of allowing their comrades to die, merely by saying that they were fighting for a lost cause.

So Germany would have been hit harder in WWI than Britain or France, but everyone in Europe was hit with a ‘mortal wound’. Then they got the coup de grace in WWII.

In WWII, there was the hidden under story to Iwo Jima’s flag raising. The people who were volunteered to return home and go on fund raising campaigns and parades, weren’t the actual people who first raised the flag. Those individuals suffered fatal casualties. So Clint Eastwood made a story depicting how guilt eats up the survivors when the nation praises them for doing something they know that they weren’t the first to do there. Under FDR the Democrat, expedient methods were often utilized over military discipline or efficiency.

So even if people win a battle or war, there can be some pretty toxic guilt at having survived and been rewarded, in the place of the honorable dead. And if religion and culture doesn’t provide a way to atone for that sin or guilt, people tend to break over time.

That is why the Leftist alliance is mostly made out of broken cultists. It’s easy to break them, but most people just try to reason with them, that’s why it doesn’t work.

Actually, I think the answer is a lot simpler.

Having tried so hard–but so unsuccessfully–to prod, persuade, cajole, force the State of Israel to commit suicide, the progressive, sophisticated and uber-cultured states of Europe have–out of desperation–decided to SHOW Israel HOW to do it.”

I don’t think what you pretend to say seriously, is true, but it is a bulls-eye all the same.

I have read your response, and accept your insight on the matter as problematic, i.e., imprecise, complicated, and therefore greatly given to subjectivity – whether from afar or close and personal. And you’re welcome.