America's Civil War: What a LARP!

This "woke" soldier appears to look forward to martial law being implemented in America, so she can shoot anyone who disobeys her orders. 

Of course, when posted on conservative websites, the linked vido provoked a flurry of fiery, virtue-signaling comments in which gun owners claimed they would kill anyone who dares infringe on their freedoms! 

All of this, both sides, whether we speak of the "woke" soldier or her armed conservative opposition, are simply LARPing (Live Action Role-Playing). Everyone wants to be a hero, everyone imagines themselves in the role, pointing their weapon and squeezing the trigger in righteousness while they mow down hecatombs of the degenerate enemy.

Ain't. Gonna. Happen.

There will be no replay of the Civil War, there will be no re-enactment of the American Revolution. The "woke" won't shoot anyone, neither will America's conservative gun owners. Events have already demonstrated, in spades, that neither side has any real interest in doing any of this. Both sides just like to roleplay and virtue-signal. That's all.

You may disagree. So, let's look at the facts. In 1787, America was a very young country by any measure. The average age of Revolutionary War soldiers in the Continental Army was 18 to 19. The life expectancy for the average American white male was 38 years of age. 

 Todd Andrlik goes so far as to characterize the Founding Fathers much more accurately as the “founding teenagers… or twenty somethings.” And he’s quite right to do so...

Things weren't much different 70 years later. By 1860, the year  the Civil War started, The average age of all officers and men in the 23rd Pennsylvania was nineteen. The largest single age group was eighteen, followed by soldiers twenty-one and nineteen. Life expectancy had risen to 39 years of age.  

Unknown numbers of children served in the [Civil War] armies. Edward Black was nine years old when he entered an Indiana regiment. Among the youngest Confederate soldiers was Charles C. Hay, who joined an Alabama regiment at the age of eleven. John Mather Sloan of Texas lost a leg in battle at the age of thirteen.

The most famous of the dozens of young drummer boys was Johnny Clem of Newark, Ohio. He went to war at the age of ten. 

In contrast, the average median age of Americans in 2021 is 38 years old. For white Americans (the cohort most likely to own guns), median age is 44, modal age (the most common age) is 58. Life expectancy for all Americans is now 78. The citizens bragging about their willingness to engage in war on various social media forums are, on average, twice as old as the average soldiers in either the Revolution or the Civil War. The citizens who own guns are nearly three times as old as those soldiers. These old men shoot their mouths a lot more often than they shoot their guns. That isn't going to change.

War is a young man's game. Most armed conflicts in the world today take place where the average age is at least ten or more years younger than the average American. Mexico's drug war takes place in a country where the average age is 29. Average age in Yemen, where civil war rages, is 20. The average age in Afghanistan is 18. Africa's many countries and many small wars are being waged within general populations that average 19 years of age. 

War requires lots of young men with lots of testosterone and limited skin in the social fabric game: no children, no property, no businesses, so no sense of risk. There is no sizeable subpopulation in the United States that fits this description. Even the young people who would otherwise fit in this category would risk their federal welfare benefits if they engaged in serious violence. Old people don't throw Molotov cocktails because they can't run away fast enough. Their walkers get hung up on street debris. Precisely because everyone is invested in the current order - everyone on BOTH sides is - there will be no shooting war. We don't have enough hormone-filled young people to make it work.

Thus, 2021 America sees a lot of barking, but everyone is very careful to refrain from actually biting. 

Consider: Guns are more widely available now than at any time in American history, including the Revolutionary and Civil War. But, a huge percentage of the population actively refuse to buy guns. Those that do own them clearly aren't interested in using them. The most violent segment of the population, the communist Antifa and BLM movements, have pointedly NOT been using guns.

The "trained communists" are LARPing. The people who headed up BLM bought mansions for themselves and their families, not RPGs for their followers. They're just capitalists hiding behind communist slogans to reap wealth. Apart from Ashli Babbitt, cops are not shooting civilians, civilians are not shooting cops. We don't even have four dead in Ohio. We've got one dead in the January 6th Tourists Gone Wild incident.

And January 6th was a nothing-burger. There aren't any violent insurrections. When the radical underground was active in the late '60s and early '70s, it's members murdered police officers and blew up an average of a building a day for years. Yet, despite America's average age being 28 in 1970, and despite the incredible level of armed provocation inflicted by 1960's provocateurs, there was no armed revolution. 

Today's BLM and Antifa are absurd children by comparison. 2021 has no armed equivalent of even the 1960's Weather Underground, much less the militia of the American Revolution or the Civil War. No one is blowing up buildings on a daily basis, no troops are being deployed to put down any civil insurrections, because there aren't any civil insurrections. It isn't just the conservatives who won't use their guns. The communist LARPs aren't carrying guns either. They use firecrackers and rocks. It is easier to find information on making bombs now than it has been in the entire recorded history of the human race, but these jokers can't even make and use the level of explosives the Weather Underground routinely used in the 1960s and 70s.

The Tourists Gone Wild Jan 6 holiday featured exactly zero guns on the part of the tourists, and in the months that have passed since the event, none of America's conservative gun owners have banded together to break their unarmed comrades out of federal prisons. This despite the fact that we KNOW these jailed Jan 6 tourists are being treated worse than the average prisoner.

As for America's gun owners being a feisty force that needs to be reckoned with, that is manifestly untrue. China Joe and his 'ho are in the White House, no armed citizens even tried to stop them. The National Guard troops who were showcased for six months as their Potemkin guard had neither bullets nor firing pins in their weapons. It was just a bunch of National Guard troops LARPing for the cameras and the tourists. 

The government doesn't fear armed Americans. Why should they? Name me an American who COULD lead an armed rebellion. There isn't one. Nobody wants the job. If anyone did want the job, no one else would follow him.

All the guns are paperweights. No one is going to use them. Not one of us will. We don't want our homes razed, we don't want to get shot or go to jail, so none of us will do this. If anyone does, the rest of us will repudiate him as a home-grown terrorist. The NRA will denounce him. No one will lift a finger. The guns we all own are useless. 

We will not see American cities carpet-bombed by B-52s, there will be no drone strikes by US drones on US soil against US citizens, there will be no martial law, there will be no civil insurrection. The populations on both sides of this dog's breakfast are simply too biologically old to do anything so stupid.

All Americans with guns will quietly do what the soldiers tell us to do, while bow and scrape and say "thank you for your service." Any gun owner who does anything else will be disowned by the rest of America's gun owners. If you do anything else, you will be called another Ted Kaczyinski by the NRA. EVERYONE will consider you a home-grown terrorist.

So, no, none of the civilians in America are going to start shooting soldiers, cops or politicians in the face. You just aren't. You LARP like you will, but when it comes right down to brass tacks, you won't. If America's gun owners sat idly by while the Office of the President was stolen - and they did - then they aren't going to do anything in the future either. That's just how it is.

Similarly, wannabe communist LARPs engage in a lot of arson... and.... that's it. They just burn down poor black neighborhoods, i.e., people who can't fight back. Communist BLM may loot corporate stores, but they are careful not to burn them down. If the stores get burned down, the stores won't be restocked, so no one burns them down. Everyone's in it for the loot, no one wants to kill the goose that lays the loot. In 2021, the Maoists act like power comes out of the barrel of a bottle rocket, not a gun. No one wants a shooting war.

Armed conservatives will never live out their action-hero dreams, but neither will America's communists. That's why this woke soldier is so hilarious. There won't be any martial law and she'll never get to live her LARP dream either. No one in this country is interested in that level of violence. So it won't happen.

China Joe and the Communists ALREADY defeated the most heavily armed civilian population in the world. How do you think China Joe and his 'ho got into the White House? They got in by intimidating the most heavily armed civilian population in the world into sitting still and accepting it. 

And then China Joe got beat by a bunch of goatherders. Which means the goatherders are more powerful than the most heavily armed civilian population in the world. The goatherders got US weapons because the goat herders actually USE the weapons. Americans don't use their weapons. We just LARP about how we'll use them Real Soon Now (tm). But we won't, and both sides know we won't. 

Now, when confronted with these facts, there are essentially four ways to respond:

1. "Kellmeyer is right. Gun owners are LARPing just like mask proponents."
2. "Kellmeyer is wrong because he got the history wrong (historical reasons listed)"
3. "Kellmeyer got the history correct, but the (non-)use of guns isn't the issue, the real social issue is actually (issue listed)."
4. "The history is irrelevant, Kellmeyer is trying to goad us into using our guns, so we must be sure not to use them."  

I have pointed these facts out on several forums now, and have been accused of (4), i.e., being an FBI plant, trying to foment an armed uprising. That reaction demonstrates my point in spades. American gun owners are simply not going to use their weapons. They can't do it. They consider the idea impossible in every realistic sense, they just fantasize about it, knowing full well they will never actually carry out the fantasy. Their communist counterparts do the same. 

Conclusion: The LARPing will continue until morale improves.

Traditionis custodes

 The Pope, and quite frankly, large swaths of the Church, have finally had enough of the schismatic attitudes generated by the Latin Mass. The disciples of the TLM have spent the last few decades channeling their inner schismatics, imitating the madness of Marcel Lefebvre, and they got the response that justice required.

To be completely clear, I was a member of an FSSP TLM parish for five years, attending every Sunday. When I began there, I had high hopes that I would encounter a group of Catholics who were better-educated, better-formed, just better at being Catholic, than the great mass of Catholics at the Novus Ordo Mass. It is easy to find my blog posts from that period extolling the virtues of the Latin Mass and its community. 

But, over the course of those five years, I slowly realized there was a level of hatred and anger within the community that could only be described as demonic. When priests spout denigrations of an ecumenical council, the Pope and the post-conciliar Church in pseudo-anonymous podcasts or, worse, from the ambo during Mass, there are serious problems with the movement that forms such priests. When the people attending to those podcasts or assisting at those Masses cheer the priests on, there is schism.

I have personally watched my brother-in-law, a good man and a good priest, driven to theological insanity by the TLM. I have seen him drag several members of his family, including his own mother, into the madness. It was and is a train-wreck, it turned him and his family into a theological train-wreck. 

Marcel Lefebvre was a schismatic and a heretic, the movement he founded shared his spirituality of schism, heresy, madness. The FSSP attempt to reform the TLM movement failed. Lay members of TLM communities, whether FSSP or SSPX, continue to revere Lefebvre as a visionary instead of condemning him as the nutcase that he unquestionably was. With shocking conformity, TLM members continued to ape Martin Luther's insistence that the Church would soon reverse itself and see the "wisdom" of the schism he fomented. 

Blessed Pope Pius IX famously proclaimed, "I am Tradition!" Pope Francis occupies the chair that is tradition. Denigrating Pope Francis, as so many TLM communities take delight in doing, logically and ineluctably leads to sedevacantism, which is itself simply an assertion that the gates of Hell prevailed against Christ. Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict both gave the TLM communities decades to correct themselves, decades to demonstrate their love of Christ and His Church by showing fraternal charity towards the council and the post-conciliar Church. But the TLM'rs let both of these Popes down.

Instead, it squandered every opportunity, choosing to pour out venom on anyone who did not share their particular theological idiosyncracies. No group within the Church can lay claim to the entire spirituality of the Church. Franciscans cannot engage in combat with Dominicans about whose spirituality is "better". That's not a Catholic attitude. Lefebvre's attachment to the TLM drove him to schism and heresy. The people who followed him demonstrated they could not escape that error. They insisted that their way alone was superior, that the whole Church must reform to their understanding of Catholicism or be dragged down to the depths of hell. They set themselves up as Pope and denigrated the Pope for not following their vision.

But it is the Pope who leads and directs, not Lefebvre, not the TLM community. It is the Pope who is Tradition. The Pope leads the Church and forms her. If the Pope says a spiritual practice is not conducive to spiritual growth, then we surrender that practice to his ruling. Popes have suppressed liturgical traditions before. Most famously, Pope Pius V suppressed numerous liturgical traditions immediately following Trent. Now, following Vatican II, the Pope has suppressed an additional liturgy. It is his right to do so, not ours, nor have we any right to murmur against the decision.

"Traditionalists" like to insist that monarchy is the best form of government. Well, TLM'rs, you live in a monarchy. The king has decreed. Suck it up, buttercup, and walk the talk. Quit imitating the followers of Korah and Luther. You have been given another opportunity to embrace the Catholic Faith, to follow Tradition, to thank the Pope for his wisdom. Take advantage of it. 

Why the Church is Losing Relevance

The Church is dying because it doesn't have a coherent answer to industrialization. Due to technology, NO ONE alive today suffers as much as EVERYONE did prior to 1800. We are ALL richer, we all live longer, we all suffer from fewer diseases, which have shorter durations.

Some diseases are entirely wiped out. There is no more smallpox, no rinderpest in cattle, almost no polio (only 1 case of wild polio virus (WPV) in Afghanistan, and 1 in Pakistan this year so far, map for last 12 months here). Guinea Worm is just about eradicated, inroads are being made against at least one dozen other endemic diseases.

The entire world used to live in abject poverty, now less than 10% of the world does. Natural disasters kill and injure only one-tenth as many people today as were killed or injured just 20 years ago.

We have the corporal works of mercy and the spiritual works of mercy, two sets, to deal with every kind of suffering there is. The spiritual works still apply, but the corporal works are increasingly irrelevant.

We are on the verge of totally wiping out famine. Same with concerns about potable water - I've seen at least four major pieces of tech in the last year (see here, here, here and here), that will literally dissolve that problem. We have so much clothing that we can't give it away. Shelter is next on the list of solutions, there aren't nearly as many sick and imprisoned to visit as there were, and we're cremating the dead. 

Literally half of the work of the Church is either already irrelevant or on the verge of being rendered irrelevant. Christ may have come to share our sufferings, but we don't share in that suffering nearly as much anymore. It's harder to identify with the crucified Christ now than it ever has been in history. 

For most of human history, mankind has been agricultural or hunter-gatherer. The man who wanted meat for supper had to kill the animal himself, watch the blood run out on the ground, see the suffering and death throes of the animal as it breathed its last. He would then skin, eviscerate, dismember and roast that recently living flesh. Everyone did this every week, week-in, week-out, for their whole life. 

They saw their friends and family members suffer and die in accidents, from illness, on deathbeds that were as common as the dirt the corpses were buried in.  But almost no one lives this way anymore. These experiences are almost entirely unknown to a plurality or perhaps even a majority of the global population. We preach Christ, and Him crucified, but most people simply have no way of connecting with that level of suffering because suffering, violence and death are no longer something we encounter every day.

Christianity was wildly successful in a subsistence-level, agricultural society, arguably better than any other philosophical or theological system the world has ever seen. As Julian the Apostate observed, the Church used the corporal works as a way to demonstrate charitable intent, and used the salving corporal works as a segue-way to the salvific spiritual works. But what happens when the corporal works of mercy are no longer necessary or relevant? 

For the last two centuries, the Church has tried and failed to adapt its message to a surplus-goods, industrial, high-technology society. So far, it has not developed  a compelling message for a world that is not suffering constant corporal want. Indeed, you would look in vain for a Church document that recognizes, in a detailed way, any of the successes listed above. 

The Pope and other Christian leaders continue to preach the necessary message that the poor must be cared for, without acknowledging that the number of poor has been steadily disappearing. Leaders speak of famine without acknowledging how uncommon it is. While we certainly still have poor to care for today, what happens in that near future when we... don't? What is the message then? The goalposts can only move so far before the message becomes a parody of itself. 

If you want to speak of a crisis in the Church, that is the crisis. 

The Unbearable Lightness of EVs

From Green Energy Reality Check: It's Not as Clean as You Think | Manhattan Institute (manhattan-institute.org):

 A lithium EV battery weighs about 1,000 pounds.(a) While there are dozens of variations, such a battery typically contains about 25 pounds of lithium, 30 pounds of cobalt, 60 pounds of nickel, 110 pounds of graphite, 90 pounds of copper,(b) about 400 pounds of steel, aluminum, and various plastic components.(c)

• Lithium brines typically contain less than 0.1% lithium, so that entails some 25,000 pounds of brines to get the 25 pounds of pure lithium.
• Cobalt ore grades average about 0.1%, thus nearly 30,000 pounds of ore.(e)
• Nickel ore grades average about 1%, thus about 6,000 pounds of ore.(f)
• Graphite ore is typically 10%, thus about 1,000 pounds per battery.(g)
• Copper at about 0.6% in the ore, thus about 25,000 pounds of ore per battery.(h)

 In total then, acquiring just these five elements to produce the 1,000-pound EV battery requires mining about 90,000 pounds of ore.

From Will the U.S. Mine for Rare Earth and Exotic Minerals? - American Thinker

• The U.S. has only one operating rare-earth mine – Mountain Pass – which lost over two years of production due to a 2016 bankruptcy. Mountain Pass sends their mined ore to China for processing due to high environmental compliance costs – including regulatory minefields and a byzantine quandary of local, state, and federal rules.

From Sustainable shipping: solutions for the future of shipping (solarimpulse.com)"

• Shipping materials will account for around 17% of global CO2 emissions in 2050.

It's almost like 'Environmentalism' was funded by the Chinese to encourage Western companies to ship production to China. Huh.... how odd....  So, how many strip mines does it take to make one Tesla? 

Define "Free Market"

For years, I have heard liberatarians, conservatives and liberals, people of every stripe, make various statements about "the free market." But none of them define what it is. Some of them seem to think various conditions make a market "un-free", but no one can seem to agree on what those conditions are, nor do any of the conditions they specify seem to make any sense.

For example, how is it NOT a "free market" when the government gets involved in the market? The government is just one more market player that can be duped, played, cajoled into taking or providing capital, just like any other market player. Every player in the market is free to do whatever they want to do. Every action has consequences - as long as you are willing to accept the possible consequences, then what's stopping your action? 

What people seem to want is not a "free market", but an "equitable market", where everyone has a good outcome. That's impossible. It cannot be done. As long as people vary in their abilities, there will be some people who are 3 or 4 standard deviations better at dealing with current market conditions than anyone else is. As those people apply their skills, they will inevitably create a monopoly in their industry simply because they are so much better at that industry than anyone else is. 

When the monopoly exists, players who are not as good at playing be current rules will try to change the rules, and they will use as their justification the idea that "the market is not free." If they successfully change the rules - shock! - the new rules favor their style of play instead of that of the old market leader. Then they become the monopolists and a new set of players try to change the rules to benefit themselves at the cost of the current leader. 

And that's the point. EVERY market is a free market. The USSR, Communist China, the US, corporate monopoly, oligarchy, mob rule, war, peace, chaos, quiet, pick-your-favorite environment, whoever is currently on top in that environment got there because they figured out how to turn the existing system to their advantage. Anyone is free to figure that out - it's just harder for some groups in some circumstances  to figure that out than it is for those same groups in other circumstances. Some circumstances favor one set of skills, some circumstances favor another set of skills. We go 'round and 'round in our perpetually, universally free market as everyone tries to game the rule set to their own advantage. 

But the economy is absolutely man-made, completely free, and all the actors in it can take whatever risks they want to amass whatever advantages they can. To say that one rule set is "free" while another rule set is "unfree" is simply to say that you personally find the first rule set advantageous while you don't find the second set advantageous. In that sense, "free market" is a phrase that has no meaning.

Payback is a Bitter Pill

China Joe Biden is a Chinese Communist Party shill, there's no question of that. The question is, has he opened the southern border in order to allow China to smuggle fentanyl into the States? Lots of people are now pointing out that this is at least a side effect, if not an intended outcome, of Biden's border policies. 

Now, I am not opposed to open borders because: 

1. our country was founded as an open borders country, 
2. Aquinas was fine with open borders, 
3. the Holy Father is fine with open borders,

But, even if none of that were true, the fact that China is importing a powerfully addicting illegal drug into the United States is unsurprising. If this were a movie, we would expect this to be the end of the reel, wherein after the protagonist suffers endless outrages, he wreaks havoc upon his tormentors. Given what we did to China, and in deference to America's favorite Hollywood ending, China owes us at least that courtesy. Sit back, grasshopper, and I will tell you the tale:

China had much to sell the West, but the West produced virtually nothing China needed or wanted. As British and American citizens consumed tea in great quantity but failed to produce anything the Chinese wanted, the threatening imbalance of trade between East and West became acute.

Both British and American companies solved the problem by illegally importing opium into the Chinese mainland. Chinese officials had long outlawed the drug because they recognized it as a poison. By the late 1700's, however, Britain had control of India’s poppy fields and her navy made it possible to smuggle tons of the stuff across the Chinese border and into Chinese harbors. American businessmen, having no access to Indian poppies, dealt themselves into the illegal drug trade by encouraging Turkish farmers to plant poppies so they, too, could grab part of the drug business.

China responded by confiscating and destroying the huge opium stocks in British warehouses on Chinese soil. Britain went to war to recover the cost of the lost opium, not once, but twice (1839-1842 and 1856-1860). The resulting British victories not only opened Chinese ports to the Western importation of opium, it also gave American citizen Warren Delano, FDR’s grandfather, the enormous wealth which FDR would use to such excellent effect in his own presidential election campaigns. In short, it is not too incorrect to say that FDR's presidency was made possible in part via drugged Chinese slaves.

That's correct: Franklin Delano Roosevelt's grandfather imported opium into China despite the fact that China had outlawed opium. This illegal opium trade led directly to the Opium Wars that destroyed China as the centuries-long Asian superpower. It led directly to the burning of the Old Summer Palace, which still angers the Chinese, and to the subjugation of China for centuries by the West. The grandson of one of the major Chinese drug runners became the President that lorded it over them during WW II. 

China never forgot that.

Now, China seems to be returning the favor.

And we are left to whine that payback is a bitter pill. 

Should the Alamo Be Legitimized?

What I can't understand about Republicans and conservatives is, why you insist on making heroes out of a bunch of Democrat Protestant pro-slavery asshats?

That's what the Alamo was about - it was about a bunch of Democrats, a bunch of illegal alien immigrants - fighting to keep slavery alive in Texas. Why? Because that's what Democrats always do, and that's what they were doing at the Alamo, that's what they were doing in the entire fight for Texas independence. They were fighting for the right to be Democrat slaveholders, and everyone at the time knew it.

The prime cause, and the real objects of this war [the Texas Revolution], are not distinctly understood by a large portion of the honest, disinterested, and well-meaning citizens of the United States…. They have been induced to believe that the inhabitants of Texas were engaged in a legitimate contest for the maintenance of the sacred principles of Liberty, and the natural, inalienable Rights of Man: --whereas, the motives of its instigators, and their chief incentives to action, have been, from the commencement, of a directly opposite character and tendency…to wrest the large and valuable territory of Texas from the Mexican Republic, in order to re-establish the SYSTEM OF SLAVERY; to open a vast and profitable SLAVE-MARKET therein; and, ultimately, to annex it to the United States…. The Slaveholding Interest is now paramount in the Executive branch of our national government…. Benjamin Lundy, 1836

 John Quincy Adams testified in the House of Representatives (Dec 1835) that Lundy was absolutely correct:

And this is the nation with which, at the instigation of your Executive Government, you are now rushing into war into a war of conquest; commenced by aggression on your part and for the re-establishment of slavery, where it has been abolished, throughout the Mexican Republic. For your war will be with Mexico---with a Republic of twenty four States, and a population of eight or nine millions of souls.... 

And again I ask, what will be your cause in such a war! Aggression, conquest, and the re-establishment of slavery where it has been abolished. In that war, sir, the banner of freedom will be the banners of Mexico; and your banners, 1 blush to speak the word, will be the banners of slavery. 

Every abolitionist of the age said the same thing:

"It is impossible for any honest man to wish success to Texas. All who sympathize with that pseudo republic hate liberty and would dethrone God."

—abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, editor of The Liberator

In early 1836, the largest Texas force in the field, commanded by Colonel James Walker Fannin, was composed of over ninety percent of United States citizens.

Even many of the Northerners in the US saw the danger Catholic freedom posed for the Protestant slave-holders. They saw Santa Ana's insistence on freeing slaves as a direct threat to Southern and Western slave-holding states. The existence of a free Catholic Texas was an incitement to slave revolts throughout the South. The Texans at the Alamo were not freedom fighters, they were slavery fighters, as Democrats always are. When you put a halo around the Alamo, you defend illegal immigration, you defend slavers, you defend the use of violence in the name of, in the support of, illegal immigration and slavery.

When you look at all the details, really study what the American Protestant Democrats at the Alamo and in the larger fight for Texas independence were doing, you soon realize they were the early 19th century version of BLM and Antifa. Why would conservatives defend this nonsense?

Why would anyone from the party of Lincoln want to legitimize Democrat asininity?

Protestants Claim Scripture is Heretical

 There has been a recent kerfluffle over a comment by a pastor, in which Reverend Warnock, a pastor who oversees MLK's church, said:

The meaning of Easter is more transcendent than the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Whether you are Christian or not, through a commitment to helping others we are able to save ourselves.

This comment has been condemned by Protestant commentators as heresy. Well, there's nothing heretical in Warnock's statement unless you're a Protestant, but Protestant theology has always been nonsense.

Take the first sentence, "The meaning of Easter is more transcendent than the resurrection of Jesus Christ." Yes. Exactly right. The resurrection of Jesus is immanent, the meaning of the resurrection is transcendent. That is, the resurrection is a real thing that happened in the flesh, risen flesh that could be touched, it is closer to us than we are to ourselves, it is bound up within who we are, while the meaning of that resurrection is transcendent, it is higher than us, it draws us up beyond ourselves into the heart of the Trinity. Yes. Precisely correct.

Second sentence, "Whether you are a Christian or not," - yes, as Paul says in Romans 2 “They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts sometimes accusing them and at other times even defending them.)" . That is, we all know what the law says, even when we don’t know the law. And, we all prove it by doing what’s in God’s law without even knowing it. And this knowledge and acting on this knowledge will "even defend them" on the Day of Judgement.

And the last part? "Through a commitment to helping others we are able to save ourselves." As Augustine of Hippo says "He who created us without our help will not save us without our consent." (St Augustine, Sermo 169, 13 (PL 38,923)). Paul pointed out that "We are God's co-workers" (1 Cor 3:9). God's work is our salvation, so our co-work is also our salvation. Paul talks about "working out my salvation in fear and trembling". (Phil 2:12) and even goes so far as to say "Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church..." (Col 1:24). That is Paul asserts not only that Jesus' suffering actually LACKS something, he asserts that he, Paul, can make up what is lacking!

Jesus points out that we must do this through good works, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, etc. The people who do this are the people who are gathered together and saved on the last day.

Grace affects the whole person. The mind responds with faith, the body with works, both happen simultaneously. We are NOT saved through faith alone, as the Letter of James points out. Even the demons have faith in the resurrection, but that does not save them.

The good reverend just echoed Scripture and Saint Augustine.

People who object to what he said know neither Scripture nor the power of God.