Why Universities Chose Wokeness, and Why it Won't Work

It has been predicted that half of all American colleges and universities will close in the next ten years, thus fulfilling the ancient prophecy, "Get woke, go broke." But why is wokeness such a problem for universities?

The answer: Griggs v. Duke Power Company, 1971. In that decision, the US Supreme Court found that a particular use of IQ tests in hiring practices caused a disproportionate impact on African American employees. "Disproportionate impact" can make a facially neutral policy illegal under various US civil rights laws.

This ruling was not a blanket ban on IQ testing in employment, but corporations being risk-averse, stopped testing the IQ of prospective employees. Unfortunately, those same companies still needed a proxy for IQ tests. Whether we like it or not, an IQ score does correlate pretty well with how easily an individual can perform a specific job. So, what to do about that proxy? Well, there was one area where IQ tests were considered a useful and necessary screening tool: applications for college. While college in the late 19th and early 20th century was mostly about who your parents were, colleges kept the fig leaf of meritocracy bound firmly about their ivory towers. Since colleges screened applicants for parentage (a proxy for power) and for IQ (a proxy for ability to learn a job), after 1971, businesses began using college degrees as their job screening tool.

The GI Bill was signed in 1944 by FDR. While roughly half of WW II's returning veterans made use of it, the funding rate dropped precipitously from 1955 into the 1960s, because college wasn't really an important item on anyone's radar. However, after 1971's pivotal Griggs decision, businesses made a college degree central. Businesses wanted employees who were hooked into either power and privilege or tour de force intellect, preferably both. The college degree guaranteed that.

This gave universities a virtual monopoly on discriminating on the basis of intelligence. Since that kind of discrimination is really useful in the job market, all a university has to do to be socially crucial is maintain its reputation as a reliable IQ discriminator. If it does that, the actual content of what it teaches is simply not relevant.

Overnight, SCOTUS had unwittingly used Griggs to rig the employment playing field. Vietnam vets were the first group to see which way the wind blew. They became the first generation to inflate their GI Bill life rafts and float into higher paying jobs. The civilian world followed suit. Universities made out like bandits.

Unfortunately for everyone, the Pill was released a decade before Griggs, just in time to start decimating the baby boom. The US total fertility rate (TFR) has been dropping steadily since 1800, with the only significant baby boom taking place after WW II. By 1963, that boom was over. But during the 1970s and early 80s, the bulging Boomer population was still traveling through the anaconda of higher learning. Nobody realized the good times could only roll for about twenty years. It wasn't apparent that the rapidly dropping number of parents would eventually bring it all crashing down.

And that's where "wokeness" comes in. The number of future college students born to American parents has dropped steadily since the 1980s, when the total fertility rate returned to 1930s levels. Since that decade, there haven't been enough backsides to sit in college seats.

Colleges have three ways to handle this declining enrollment: (1) raise tuition (2) import students from other countries and (3) lower standards. The first two have been tried. Tuition is as high as it can afford to be. Every industrialized country in the world has a declining TFR (and a similar problem with their own colleges), so there's a limit to the number of students that can be imported. That just leaves lowered standards.

Enter "woke." Wokeness lower standards while virtue-washing the real reason colleges encourage it - they need every warm body they can get, no matter how stupid that person may be, in order to fund the bloated administration and the perks that grew during the go-go years of the 1970s through the 1990s. In fact, stupid people make better students because they will sign for larger federal loans.

So, the entire wokeness movement, which found its footing at the universities, did so because of the Pill and Griggs. But wokeness is just gasoline on the bonfire of university vanities. The real problem is, no one remembers Griggs.

You see, universities have forgotten that their degrees became valuable to businesses only because Griggs forbad American businesses testing the IQ of prospective employees. Before Griggs, universities were niche high-society clubs. They only became universally critical to economic advancement because SCOTUS unintentionally re-created them as an IQ-testing monopoly. But, as the incoming stream of students disappeared due to contraception and abortion, that IQ testing monopoly had to lower its IQ gatekeeper standards to keep its own income up. Ironically, by embracing wokeness (lowering IQ testing standards) in order to save their bottom line, those same universities are throwing away the only reason a business has to use them. University degrees are now worthless as an IQ proxy.

How are businesses responding to this new state of affairs? They are dispensing with the need for university degrees. Instead, businesses have begun using certifying agencies and certifications (IT certification, management certification, etc.) as a proxy for IQ.

By and large, certifying agencies are a better work-around to Griggs than university degrees. They are more on-point for specific job categories, harder to litigate against, and they now do a better job of screening out stupid people. Which is all that businesses ever wanted to do in the first place. At best, universities are destined to return, to niche high-society clubs.

UPDATE: Yep, my suspicions are confirmed:

But grades may not be the real problem, said Michael Poliakoff, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. He pointed out that only 25 percent of high school students who took the ACT test last year met all four college-readiness benchmarks, which gauge the likelihood that they'll succeed in first-year college courses; 38 percent met none. The composite score was the lowest in more than a decade.

America: Land of Human Smuggling

21st century Americans complain about "coyotes" smuggling people into the United States. Americans are absolutely indignant that some of those smuggled people might be criminals. It's not clear why. Human smuggling is an old American tradition. Indeed, the word "kidnapping" was invented precisely to describe the practice. Indeed, Robert Louis Stevenson's novel Kidnapped was based upon a true story of exactly this British practice.

The earliest known use of the verb kidnap is from A brief historical relation of State affairs from September 1678 to April 1714, by Narcissus Luttrell (1657-1732), annalist and book collector; he wrote that, on 23rd May 1682, there was:

"a tryall at the kings bench barr upon an indictment against Mr. John Wilmore, for spiriting or kidnapping away a young boy under the age of 13 years, called Richard Siviter, and sending him to Jamaica : the jury was a very good one, returned out of the county of Kent : the witnesses against him were some to prove that there was in generall such a trade as kidnapping or spiriting away children, and that he did beleive [sic] there had been above 500 sent away in two years at Christmas last."

Up to 75 percent of all the individuals who came off the transatlantic ships in the 17th century were indentured servants, but the European servants did not always come willingly:

Boys and girls of the poorer classes were hustled on board ships and virtually sold into slavery for a term of years. Kidnaping or ‘spiriting’ became a fine art under Charles II. Slums and alleys were raked for material to stock the plantations… About 1670 no fewer than ten thousand persons were ‘spirited’ away from England in one year. One kidnaper testified in 1671 that he had sent five hundred persons a year to the colonies for twelve years and another testified that he had sent 840 in one year.

Without Indentures: Index to White Slave Children in Colonial Court Records [Maryland and Virginia] by Richard Hayes Phillips, lists more than 5,000 children who were kidnapped from England, Ireland, Scotland and New England and sold into slavery in Maryland and Virginia from 1660 to 1720. These kidnappings were the result of the 1601 Act for the Relief of the Poor, also known as the Elizabethan Poor Law, which stipulated that children who were orphaned or whose parents were unable to support them could be taken in by parish officials and apprenticed to local tradespeople.  This law was amended in 1609, 1662 and again in 1697 and 1722, giving officials progressively more power to deal with children who were beggars or vagrants. These children were not indentured and the courts assigned their time of servitude. 

Government kidnapping of children was not an unusual event. By 1600, Queen Elizabeth had granted entertainers the right to kidnap children in order to use them as performers in the theater. Once the children were taken, the parents had little recourse. But the shenanigans did not stop with kidnapping children for transport to the colonies. In 1718, Britain passed the Transportation Act, which allowed convicts to be sold as indentured servants in the colonies. Britain shipped  approximately 60,000 convicts, dubbed "the King's passengers." Roughly ninety percent stayed in Maryland and Virginia. Between 1718 and 1775, up to one quarter of the British immigrants to America were convicts sold into servitude by the British government. According to the vicar of Wendover, transportation served the purpose of ‘draining the Nation of its offensive Rubbish’. Benjamin Franklin compared the practice to the emptying of a chamber pot on a colonial dinner table. But, the practice was  so popular in England that Daniel Defoe wrote Moll Flanders in order to support the government practice.

On both the Atlantic passage and during their servitude, European convicts were treated worse than slaves as they brought less cash, were less physically fit, and had criminal records. They were typically bought by poorer farmers who could not afford slaves. 

The French populated its Louisiana territories in much the same way the English populated their colonies. Charles Law shipped convicts and kidnapped children to the Gulf coast en masse. Being Catholic, the French actually took the time to perform mass marriages of the kidnapped children, to assure family formation and increased population once the newlywed kidnap victims arrived in their new location. Unfortunately for their plan, more than half the women and nearly a quarter of the men typically died during transport. 

So, prior to the Revolution, roughly 30 percent of American immigrants were convicts who were sentenced to be transported to the colonies and sold as indentured servants. Thousands more were kidnapped children either assigned by the courts to servitude for the crime of being an orphan, or spirited away by professional kidnappers who made their living off human trafficking. When someone tells you they can trace their lineage back to the earliest American settlers, the chances are quite good their ancestor was a convict or a kidnap victim.

Welcome to American history.

What's Wrong With Human Composting?

Human composting has become a subject of popular discussion, and I see a lot of religiously-minded people acting upset about it. For the life of me, I cannot figure out what the problem is supposed to be. How is this different from burying people in a blanket or wooden coffin, which is what Christians have done for literally thousands of years?

Embalming only really became a thing after the Civil War, it isn't required in any state in the union, and a lot of faiths (e.g., Judaism and Islam) completely forbid embalming. Actually, Christianity is weird for allowing it. Embalming poisons the soil. The embalmers are required to wear full hazmat suits, including respirator, when they do it. Embalming fluid used to contain arsenic, and 19th-century cemeteries are almost all toxic waste sites as a result, leaching arsenic into the ground water.

"Human composting" is pretty much how family cemeteries stay small. Individual family members are serially buried in the same 18 square feet of dirt over the centuries. Monasteries would commonly bury monks one on top of another, and most of their remains would decompose in the ground seamlessly over the centuries so each plot could be re-used.

What is being described in the article is not much different than how human beings have been buried for almost all of human history. What is the big deal? 

Genesis says Adam was formed from the clay, the word "adam" means "red" and is related to the Hebrew "adamah" which means land or soil. St. Paul talks of men as clay vessels (2 Cor 4:7). The Anglican Book of Common Prayer implicitly endorses composting: "we therefore commit this body to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life."

The Catholic liturgy does the same. On Ash Wednesday, the priest inscribes the cross on your forehead with the words, "Remember, man, thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return." 

The Origins of Hannukah

Ironically, Hanukkah is found in Christian Scripture in 1st and 2nd Maccabees, but is not found in Jewish Scripture at all. Why? Well, these two books (there is actually also a 3 and 4 Maccabees, which some Christian groups consider part of Scripture, but which the Catholic Church does not) were originally written in Greek by the Diaspora Jewish community, they were never translated back into Hebrew. Because Christians preaching the Gospel among Diaspora Jews were using several Greek-language based books like Maccabees to great effect in conversion, the Jews who were opposed to Christianity ultimately ruled that any book not originally written in Hebrew was NOT part of Scripture and should not be considered sacred.

Unfortunately, this ruling meant the Hanukkah celebration was no longer a Scriptural event. This wasn't a huge loss, as it had never been a great holy day. But Christianity spread through Europe and North Africa, and the celebration of Christmas began to become a thing starting around 350 AD.

While it was considered a minor liturgical holiday for the first millennium of Christianity, by the medieval period, Christmas was a major cultural holiday for Christians. The early industrial period turned industrial nations into a surplus-goods society, in which Christmas came to be a way to showcase the cornucopia of goods Christian Europe was producing. Gift-giving entered the picture in a major way. Every culture (Asian, African, etc.) wanted to share in that new outpouring of Christian European wealth.

It was therefore no coincidence that by the early industrial period, Jews were converting to Christianity wholesale and retail. Indeed, some scholars point out that, if not for WW II, Jewish assimilation was on track to wipe out Jewish culture in Europe by the end of the 20th century. To slow the assimilation, one of the rabbinic tools was the elevation of Hanukkah to a major cultural event in order to combat the influence of Christmas. It's still a very minor liturgical event, but the cultural significance now pretty much swamps the religious significance. Hanukkah is now a way for Jews in a Christian society to celebrate Christmas without feeling guilty.

Why Colleges Are Dying

Many people complain that college standards are dropping. They don't seem to understand that colleges really don't have a choice. 

Total fertility rate in America has been dropping steadily since 1800. The only uptick in the last two centuries was the post-WW II Boomer generation. That ended in 1963. Ever since, TFR has continued it's inexorable trend down. This means the number of students who can enter any particular college, or all colleges combined, also necessarily trends down each year. 

So, colleges MUST dumb down standards because the number of students coming in drops every year. Colleges push abortion and contraception, then are shocked to find their students don't raise kids or send them to college in turn. As a result, to keep enrollment numbers up, standards MUST drop.

But why are colleges pushing abortion and contraception? Well, eugenics has long been a darling of the Progressive movement. In addition, women are taking over both the degree programs and the administration. The kind of women who want a career are typically the kind of women who don't want children.  But even sterile women value relationships over truth. Institutions reflect the values of the people who run them. 

So, as women take over universities, universities stop being truth-seeking organizations and start being extended touchy-feely therapy sessions for sterile psychotic women who invite in every stray dog so the psychotic women can continue their extended, paid coffee klatsch sessions.

Women don't build stuff. 

Men do. 

Kick men out, and stuff don't get built.

Dealing with the Frozen Embryonic Child

 So, the Catholic Church says it is immoral to allow these embryos to grow in the womb of a woman who is not their mother. After thirty years, their mothers and fathers may not even be alive.

If we tried to baptize them in their embryonic state, we would instantly kill them.

So, we've got unbaptized babies that are not allowed to grow up, a Peter Pan situation in real life. Is it REALLY moral to leave them in a frozen state for 30 years? REALLY? 

Yes, it was immoral to create them this way. But not giving these children a way forward to grow and become what they were meant to be... and remember, God allowed the fertilization to work, He ensouled these children because these embryos are EMBRYOS, not just fertilized eggs ... how is THAT moral?  

The Economics of Children

 "Family life is no longer a core aspiration of every person but becomes a “luxury"..." That is most assuredly not what is happening.

People are just making the best economic investments they can with the time they have. In a low-tech, agricultural society, children are a high value commodity item because workers are high-value commodities. You need workers to get the work done. Agricultural societies are marked by high levels of child labor.

For most of human existence, 5 through 15 year old children worked in the farms and fields. When industry and mining was invented 5-15 year old children worked those in the factories and the coal mines. Children were effectively indentured servants with a ten-year to fifteen-year return. But as the tasks children could do became automated, their economic value disappeared. Children could no longer earn a wage for the family. 

In a high-tech, post-industrial society, labor-saving machinery... wait for it... saves labor. As fewer people are needed to get work done, the value of the worker drops. The value of having children drops. It's not that children are a luxury, it's that children are no longer economically valuable. They don't start returning ROI at age 5, as they used to do.

Today, it takes 20 or even 30 years to start seeing return on investment, and the return no longer goes to the family that raised them but to the family they are themselves forming. So, each set of prospective parents sees that they will take a substantial loss on raising children and they... don't. 

If children were actually a luxury good, then rich people would have MORE children than poor people do. But that isn't what is happening. Malthus thought children were a luxury good. His original prediction was that rich people would have more children than the poor did. That turned out to be completely wrong. It is fascinating that people invoke Malthus without bothering to have read his theories. 

Now, it may observed that those in poverty tend to have more children than the rich. This is a direct result of the welfare state. Because welfare increases payments as a function of marital status and number of children, the welfare state has re-created the pre-industrial ROI children once provided, but it does so only for a particular segment of society instead of society as a whole.

The article linked above notes that Muslim and ultra-orthodox Jews still have large numbers of children, but this is largely due to the economic circumstances they find themselves in. Muslim-predominate countries tend to ether be primarily agricultural or derive their income from oil revenues. Both are essentially pre-industrial. Ultra-orthodox Jews are paid by donors (and sometimes even paid by the Israeli government) to study the Torah. That is, they get the equivalent of government welfare payments for sustenance, as even the author of the article admits in passing:

These ultraorthodox Jews have been enthusiastic clients of Israel’s pro-natalist policies and rely on the support handed out to large families by the state as an economic basis for their traditional lifestyles and their continued study of the Jewish scriptures. 

Thus, the article's conclusions about Marx are completely off-base. Insofar as capitalism contains within its demographics the seeds of its own demise, the facts demonstrate Marx was completely clueless. Anyone reading through Marxist writings would search in vain for a reference to the demographics we currently face. Marx had absolutely no idea capitalism would struggle with demography. Asserting that Karl Marx was somehow correct about capitalism is absurd. Marx was simply another Malthus. He was a blowhard, an intellectual who didn't ever really understand how the world works. Failed academics are his tribe, which is why today's failed academics love him so and try endlessly to prop him up as a visionary. Failure calls to failure across the deep, and find consolation in each other. 

Computer-generated Art Does Not Exist

When a computer "does" anything, it is "doing" that action in the same way that a shovel is "shovelling" dirt or a hammer is hammering a nail. Somebody, somewhere, is manipulating the machine to do that.

So, when we say a computer has "tunnel-vision" or "limited understanding", we are wrong. The programmers who created the task list for the computer, the PROGRAMMERS have tunnel-vision, for a variety of technical reasons (e.g., they have limited resources with which to manipulate the machine).

We have a tendency to anthropomorphize an inanimate object, attributing the skills of the programmer to the computer in a way we would never do with a shovel or a hammer. We must always remember that a computer runs a program in the same way a hammer beats down a nail - it does so mindlessly. A computer is a series of electrical junctions working in synch, that's it. Although the music may be beautiful, the player piano does not play music. Although the result may be brilliant, the computer does not think.

Computer-generated "x" is a misnomer. It is always "programmer-generated art" or "programmer-generated writing". The programmers have created a situation in which other people (users) may collaborate with the programmers and their tools (via user-input) to produce a result.

So AI-art is really just anonymously collaborated art. AI-writing is the same. The programmers create interactive parameters, the users provide inputs, and the programmers' rule-based "world" uses that input to create an output.

Now, the output may be completely unexpected and beautiful from the viewpoint of everyone involved. That's very neat if it is. But insofar as it is beautiful or useful, that's a result of the people involved. The computer contributed only speed and technical accuracy.

And this is why "computer-generated art" *SHOULD* win art competitions. It truly is the product of talented human minds, all working together. The individual people could never have achieved the result, but the team of people - who do not know each other and may never meet - HAVE achieved the result. In that sense, "computer-generated art" is not substantially different than the entirety of human culture throughout history. Every human artist today builds upon the work of countless previous generations of artists, most of whom they do not even know, and none of whom they have met. But instead of collaborating across generational time, computers allow the artists to collaborate across physical space. The anonymity hasn't changed, the individual contributions haven't changed. The tools have changed a bit, but that's it. Whether the tool be a quill pen, a paintbrush, a camera or a computer, the art is still created by the people using the tools they have at their disposal.

Guns don't kill people, people kill people. Pens, cameras, pianos, computers don't create art, people create art. "Computer-generated art" is a human achievement, not a computer's achievement.

Fascism: A Leftist Fantasy

Sir Oswald Mosley, A Story:

After the War, he sought to return to political life, but found little support, including when he stood for Parliament on separate occasions. In his last political race in 1966, to represent a district in London, he received 4.6% of the vote. He was an early supporter of a strong centralized European government. He saw it an opportunity for his corporate state: economic direction by “experts”, concentration of decision-making, a hedge against democracy—much as the European Union has become. He died in 1980. 

What to make of all this?

Much has been written of Mosley, a good deal centered on the theme of “lost promise”. It is said that Mosley would have been prime minister if only he had not been impatient in 1931 and resigned from the Labour Government; if only he had waited his turn; if only he had not succumbed to the attractions of fascism. “Mosley created the British Union of Fascists (emphasis added) as a vehicle for his economic vision of Britain as a Keynesian economic state”, writes Rubin. “After a period of initial popularity, his movement eventually became a haven for lunatic anti-Semites and fringe members of society. As Mosley became lost within the monster he created, frequent public violence at his group’s rallies made him a national pariah.”

All true to an extent. Yet, the early Mosley of the left and the Mosley of [the British Union of Fascists] have much in common, the core weaknesses in their policies the same. Both believed in government by “experts” and administrators, and replacing the pluralism of the market and entrepreneurial economy with a corporatist directorate. Both held a distrust of democracy, despite their professed populism. These beliefs continue to be are present in globalization debates—though today they are held mainly by the proponents of globalization, rather than its critics....

Mosley himself said in 1968, “I am not, and never have been, a man of the right. My position was on the Left and is now in the centre of politics.”

Fascism is the union of government with private industry in such a way that government directs and controls private industry. Government was seen as a coalition of experts, industry a coalition of businesses willing to be directed by experts. That was Mussolini's definition, that was FDR's execution of Mussolini's definition. Fascism always has been a Leftist fantasy. 

What OT Prophecies Did Jesus NOT Fulfill?

Catholics always talk about the OT prophecies that Jesus fulfilled, but Jews tend to emphasize the prophecies Jesus did not fulfill. From the Jewish perspective, if an individual fails to fulfill even one of these conditions, then he cannot be the Messiah. What objections do they raise? Here are a selection:

Old Testament Silence on the Second Coming

Nowhere in the Old Testament is there a hint of the Messiah's Second Coming. As the Jews point out: 

"Where did you get this idea of a ‘Second Coming’? Was it because Jesus did not succeed the first time that he needs another try? The Bible doesn’t say anything about the Messiah coming twice.”

Christians counter that Jesus will fulfill all Old Testament in the Second Coming. Jewish sources show that the Messiah will fulfill the prophecies outright; in the OT Scripture no concept of a second coming exists.

According to Jewish commentary, the Messiah will become the greatest prophet in history, second only to Moses (Targum – Isaiah 11:2; Maimonides – Teshuva 9:2). Prophecy can only exist in Israel when the land is inhabited by a majority of world Jewry, a situation which has not existed since 300 BC. During the time of Ezra, when the majority of Jews remained in Babylon, prophecy ended upon the death of the last prophets – Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi.

Jesus appeared on the scene approximately 350 years after Jewish prophecy had ended, and thus could not be a prophet. 

So, why do Christians insist on the Second Coming? First, because Jesus insisted on it. The Gospels show Him speaking of His return again and again. And second, because the OT prophecies listed below are obviously not yet fulfilled. For instance, while the Gospels do not show Jesus Himself saying He would usher in a period of everlasting peace, his disciples taught that He would do that.

Unfulfilled Prophecies: Universal Peace

In Isaiah 11:1-9, we see prophecies about the coming Messiah, some of which were fulfilled in Yeshua, but some have not been fulfilled yet. We don’t yet see any of these things happening: 

• The wolf will live with the lamb,
      the leopard will lie down with the goat,
  the calf and the lion and the yearling[a] together;
      and a little child will lead them.
  7 The cow will feed with the bear,
      their young will lie down together,
      and the lion will eat straw like the ox.
  8 The infant will play near the cobra’s den,
      and the young child will put its hand into the viper’s nest.
  9 They will neither harm nor destroy
      on all my holy mountain,
  for the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord
      as the waters cover the sea.

The verses in Micah 4:1-3 are also clear prophecies about the coming Messiah, and they tell of a universal peace that has not yet manifested. Yet the Messiah was supposed to end all hatred, oppression, suffering and disease. As it says: "Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall man learn war anymore." (Isaiah 2:4) The argument then is: if Jesus was the Messiah, why isn’t there world peace? Many Jewish People who are still waiting expectantly for the Messiah are expecting a Messiah who will bring world peace.

Unfulfilled Prophecies: Restoration of Israel and Temple

The Messiah is supposed to build the Third Temple (Ezekiel 37:26-28).

I will make a covenant of peace with them; it will be an everlasting covenant. I will establish them and increase their numbers, and I will put my sanctuary among them forever. 27 My dwelling place will be with them; I will be their God, and they will be my people. 28 Then the nations will know that I the Lord make Israel holy, when my sanctuary is among them forever.’

The Messiah will gather all Jews back to the Land of Israel (Isaiah 43:5-6).

Do not be afraid, for I am with you;
    I will bring your children from the east
    and gather you from the west.
6 I will say to the north, ‘Give them up!’
    and to the south, ‘Do not hold them back.’
Bring my sons from afar
    and my daughters from the ends of the earth—

Unfulfilled Prophecies: Torah Observance

Spread universal knowledge of the God of Israel, which will unite humanity as one. As it says: "God will be King over all the world – on that day, God will be One and His Name will be One" (Zechariah 14:9).

The Messiah will lead the Jewish people to full Torah observance. The Torah states that all mitzvot remain binding forever, and anyone coming to change the Torah is immediately identified as a false prophet. (Deut. 13:1-4)

If a prophet, or one who foretells by dreams, appears among you and announces to you a sign or wonder, 2 and if the sign or wonder spoken of takes place, and the prophet says, “Let us follow other gods” (gods you have not known) “and let us worship them,” 3 you must not listen to the words of that prophet or dreamer. The Lord your God is testing you to find out whether you love him with all your heart and with all your soul. 4 It is the Lord your God you must follow, and him you must revere. Keep his commands and obey him; serve him and hold fast to him.

Throughout the Christian "New Testament," Jesus contradicts the Torah and states that its commandments are no longer applicable. For example, John 9:14 records that Jesus made a paste in violation of Shabbat, which caused the Pharisees to say (verse 16), "He does not observe Shabbat!"

Unfulfilled Prophecies: Not a Descendent of David

Many prophetic passages speak of a descendant of King David who will rule Israel during the age of perfection. (Isaiah 11:1-9; Jeremiah 23:5-6, 30:7-10, 33:14-16; Ezekiel 34:11-31, 37:21-28; Hosea 3:4-5)

The Messiah must be descended on his father's side from King David (see Genesis 49:10, Isaiah 11:1, Jeremiah 23:5, 33:17; Ezekiel 34:23-24). According to the Christian claim that Jesus was the product of a virgin birth, he had no father – and thus could not have possibly fulfilled the messianic requirement of being descended on his father's side from King David.

According to Jewish sources, the Messiah will be born of human parents and possess normal physical attributes like other people. He will not be a demi-god, nor will he possess supernatural qualities.

Because no one has ever fulfilled the Bible's description of this future King, Jews still await the coming of the Messiah. All past Messianic claimants, including Jesus of Nazareth, Bar Cochba and Shabbtai Tzvi have been rejected.

Inaccurate Prophecy: Suffering Servant

Christianity claims that Isaiah chapter 53 refers to Jesus, as the “suffering servant.”

Jews read Isaiah 53 as a follow-up on the theme of chapter 52, describing the exile and redemption of the Jewish people. They argue the prophecies are written in the singular form because the Jews (“Israel”) are regarded as one unit. In Isaiah 41:8, Israel is called the "Servant of God." In fact, the Jews claim that Isaiah states no less than 11 times in the chapters prior to 53 that the Servant of God is Israel. Thus, for them, Isaiah 53 describes the sufferings of the nation of Israel. 

Unfulfilled Prophecies: David's Line Failed

Jeremiah 33:17 is, of course, the most problematic of the prophecies. If we take this prophecy at face value, Judaism failed at least a half a millennium before Jesus ever arrives on the scene: 

"For this is what the Lord says: ‘David will never fail to have a man to sit on the throne of Israel, nor will the Levitical priests ever fail to have a man to stand before me continually to offer burnt offerings, to burn grain offerings and to present sacrifices.'" 

The prophecy obviously failed before the Old Testament period ended. The destruction of the Kingdom of Judah by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BC brought an end to the rule of the royal house of David.  Even if we agree that Jesus is of the line of David, there is a half a millennium gap that Jeremiah and Sacred Scripture, the God-breathed Word, got wrong. 

For at least 500 years, five centuries, 25 generations, there was no descendant of David sitting on the throne of Israel, nor any nation of Israel upon whose throne such a descendant could have sat. Not only did the line of David fail, the Temple failed, the Levitical priesthood failed, and the entire nation of Israel failed. It disappeared off the map of history, and arguably never came back. 

From the Babylonian Captivity forward, the majority of Jews have never again lived in the land of Israel. Even today, as of September, 2021, among the global Jewish population, the number of Jews in Israel is close to 6.9 million, while about 8.3 million live outside Israel (including around 6 million in the United States). The current nation that claims the name Israel is established as a primarily secular state, it is not a monarchy. Many ultra-orthodox Jews actually oppose the existence of Israel precisely because it fulfills no Scriptural mandate. They consider the current nation of Israel to be a fake. To them, it is an anti-Messianic abomination. These Jews want Israel to be destroyed.

Just 20 years after Jeremiah makes this prophecy, the first Temple was destroyed. Sure, it got re-built 70 years later, but that's a 70-year interregnum. Then, once it got re-built, the Second Temple got destroyed in 70 AD. The Levitical priests haven't offered burnt animal or burnt grain sacrifice in two millennia.

Worse, the priesthood of liturgical Christians is of the order of Melchizedek, NOT the order of Leviticus. Christians cannot claim the Mass fulfills the prophecy because (a) Christians claim the wrong priesthood, (b) Christians don't make any burnt offerings at all and (c) even if the first two problems could be cleared up, that still doesn't solve the problem of the 70-year interregnum between the first and second Temples.

If prophecy is a point of contention, then neither the Jews nor the Christians have a solid response to the several hundred year interregnum when David's royal line most certainly DID fail. Neither one has a solid response to the failure of the Levitical priesthood. Jeremiah was absolutely, incontrovertibly wrong in at least two different ways.

If you want to say the Word of God is eternal and valid forever, as Pope Benedict claimed, then that's a problem.

Catholic Schizophrenia

The Catholic Church has long had a schizophrenic view of marriage. On one hand, the marriage of Mary and Joseph is the ideal towards which all married couples should strive. On the other hand, the couple didn't have sex, Mary remained perpetually virgin. Many a canonized saintly couple have entered into a Josephite marriage, in which the couple vowed never to have sex. Canon law indicates  sex forms the "firm foundation" of marriage, any married couple who has not had sex can much more easily have their marriage annulled precisely for that lack. Further, marriage exists in part for the procreation of children, yet a Josephite vow vitiates that purpose. 

To add to the confusion, the Church has long allowed men or women to leave behind their spouse and children as long as they are entering a monastery or convent. Several saints did that, which has long puzzled me. For example: 

• Blessed Rafaela Ibarra (1843-1900) married, then founded a religious congregation (Sisters of the Holy Guardian Angels). Twenty-nine years after taking marriage vows she left her husband, with his permission, taking vows of poverty, chastity and obedience and entered the congregation she founded.
• Blessed Bartolo Long took vows of perpetual chastity. However, on the advice of his spiritual director, he entered a Josephite marriage with a rich benefactor in order to prevent gossip about how he used the funds of the rich woman he married. 
• Blessed Benedetta Frassinello, born 1791, married for two years with no children, both spouses take vows of perpetual chastity and live a Josephite marriage.
• Blessed Mary of the Incarnation (Marie Guyart Martin), born 1599, greeted the death of her spouse with the words, the Lord "freed me from the fetters of marriage... as soon as I became free, I felt a great repugnance for marriage..". Does anyone speak of being freed from the fetters of baptism, confirmation, reconciliation, the Eucharist, or anointing of the sick? Do priests revel in being freed from the fetters of Holy Orders? Are we permitted to show a "great repugnance" for any other sacrament? She left her 11-year old son Claude (born April 2, 1619) in order to join the Ursulines in January 21, 1631. As she herself said, "Everyone blamed me for leaving a child not yet twelve years old, especially leaving him without any secure means of support..." Pope John Paul II beatified her.
• Catherine of Genoa and her husband lived a Josephite marriage after he "came to his senses" and renounced a formerly dissolute life. 
• Blessed Seraphina (Sueva of Montefeltro) left her dissolute husband, entered the Poor Clare convent in Pesaro, got dispensation from Pope Callistus II and took solemn vows of perpetual poverty, chastity and obedience and eventually became abbess. Her husband occasionally visited. She's an incorruptible. 
• Blessed Mark of Montegall and Chiara dei Tibaldesch got married in 1451, never consummated their marriage, and both left it one year later. She entered a Poor Clare convent, he entered the Franciscan Friars of Observance.
• Saint Nicholas von Flue and Dorothea Wissling, married 1447. Abandoned his wife and ten children to become a hermit (not a priest, a hermit). His youngest son was 16-weeks old at the time. His spiritual director recommended it. He was canonized by Pope St. Pius XII in 1947.
• Blessed Galeotto Roberto Malatesta, married at 16, left his wife at 18, became a third order Franciscan, died at age 21.
• Blessed Dorothy of Montau was married in a "tortuous" marriage with a "pious" man, had nine children, eight died. Her last, Gertrude, born March 1380 alone survived. When Dorothy's husband died in 1390, she gave her ten-year old daughter to a convent. By May 1393, she was a cloistered recluse. Her canonization said she "persevered in marriage." Can anyone recall living the graces of any other sacrament described as "persevered in sacrament X"? She was beatified by Pope Pius VI in 1967.
• Yet, when Frederick Ozanam died, a cardinal remarked to Pope Pius IX on what a shame it was that a man as holy as Ozanam should have fallen into the trap of marriage. The Pope replied, "Oh, I did not realize that our Lord established six sacraments and one trap."

The Eastern Orthodox are no better. Consider, for instance, the Orthodox saint, Mary of Paris, considered one of the greatest saints of the 20th century. She was married twice, her son Yura being born in Tbilisi in 1920. Her bishop encouraged her to take vows as a nun, something she did only with the assurance that she would not have to live in a monastery, secluded from the world. In 1932, with her husband Daniel Skobtov's permission, an ecclesiastical divorce was granted, and she took monastic vows. That makes her son 11 or 12 years old at the time she took monastic vows, so she's no different than Blessed Mary of the Incarnation.

Taking monastic vows is NOT a sacrament. At most, it is a discipline. It provides no special graces, according to Catholic teaching.

Marriage, conversely, IS a sacrament. It DOES provide sanctifying, divinizing grace, special grace that is crucial (cross-bearing) for salvation itself. So, how does walking away from sacramental grace towards just a basic little discipline make one a saint?

St. Paul says we should be like him, no spouse, but if we MUST marry, then he supposes it is ok to do it. He makes very clear, however, that it is much better for everyone to be celibate, as he is. Conveniently, Paul considers himself the measure of man. 

His teaching in Corinthians certainly doesn't seem consistent. Why is he endorsing a celibate life, which is NOT a sacrament unless you are male and ordained, over married life, which IS a sacrament? Especially given that most of us CANNOT be like him, because we are either female, or we simply are not called to Holy Orders? So... I'm supposed to be a monk or a brother, instead of a priest, because being celibate, and/or monastic vows, is somehow superior to the sanctifying, divinizing, deifying grace of a sacrament? I'm supposed to be a monk instead of allowing the grace of a sacrament make me into a god? And, yes, that's what 2 Peter 1:4, CCC 460 and 1999 say sacraments do. Sacraments make us partakers of the divine nature... sacraments make us gods. Taking perpetual vows of celibacy, yeah, not so much. But apparently, becoming a monk or nun is superior to being married.

How does that even work? 

How can simple celibacy under disciplinary vows be superior to a DIVINIZING SACRAMENT??? From the perspective of saving grace, it makes zero sense. And notice, it isn't sex that makes the sacrament holy. True, once you've had sex, it's a lot tougher to get an annulment, but it isn't strictly necessary to have sex in order to gain the sacramental grace of marriage. Indeed, as you can see above, there are examples of spouses who never had sex at all, and are canonized saints. In fact, the two greatest saints of the Church were married but never had sex. That's an answer to people who say the Church just wants Catholics to have a lot of children so the Church has a lot of disciples. I mean, if that were the case, then deliberately celibate married couples would not be canonized saints.  

So, are Mary, Joseph and all the rest BETTER saints because they got married and lived celibately? It sure seems like that is part of the message, yes. But then what happens to the three goods of marriage, including marriage being a remedy for (sexual) concupiscence? Even more weird, how is it BETTER, through sexual abstinence, to deliberately AVOID bringing into existence immortal human beings who will praise God for all eternity? 

On the one hand, marriage is a divinizing sacrament. On the other hand, we are supposed to imitate all the saints who were "freed from the fetters of marriage" and consequently abandoned their spouses and under-age children so they could join a monastery or convent. A Josephite (i.e., physically barren) marriage is held up as better than a fecund marriage that produces numerous immortal images of God. Ignore those children and grand-children and great-grandchildren, the whole web of generational life of men and women who presumably would join their lower-rung saint-parents in praising God for all eternity. To all those thousands of generations of people, well to them, God, the Giver of Life, gives out lower-quality awards because those people actually... you know... physically participated in living out His image in their own bodies. 

That physical stuff, that's yucky. After all, it's not like God physically created man with His own hands out of dirt or anything... oh... well, it's still yucky. So even though they are divinized by the sacrament, married people are not as meritorious as the celibate people who aren't divinized by the sacrament, because, YAY CELIBACY! Which isn't, by itself, divinizing at all. 

Out of all the sacraments, the Catholic message on marriage is, perhaps, the most schizophrenic.

Does the Catholic Church Teach Pedophilia?

We know Muslims have no real issue with child marriage.

But we know Catholics are supposed to (1) obey the Church and (2) imitate the saints.

OBEY THE CHURCH

Check the 1983 Code of Canon Law.  Canon 1083 currently sets the age of marriage as 16 years of age for boys and 14 years of age for girls. This maintains the ages set in the 1917 Code of Canon Law, Canon 1067. But, the 1917 code was a change from the pre-1917 code, which set the canonical ages of marriage at twelve for both ages (younger marriage was possible if the spouse had entered puberty). And for most of the Church's history, one could be betrothed to marriage by the age of seven, although younger betrothals were not uncommon. 

St. John Chrysostom (a Doctor of the Church) said young men should marry as soon as possible (before they turn 20), to keep them out of the whore houses and theaters.

Now, Catholics typically want their children baptized as infants (as early as possible), given first  Reconciliation and first Eucharist by age 7 (as early as possible), many Catholics want their children to be confirmed as early as possible (also age 7). 

For most of the Church's history, the canonical age for minor orders was seven to twelve. But, the canonical age for major orders was quite different: twenty-two for Subdeaconship, twenty-three for Deaconship, and twenty-five for the Priesthood, but there were exceptions. Pope John XI was perhaps twenty-three or twenty-four, and Pope John XII was not yet twenty-two. Reception into a monastery or convent was generally prohibited before age 15. 

The canonical age for Holy Orders is currently 25. Currently, a religious must be 21 in order to make final vows.

However, the canonical age for Holy Matrimony is 14 for women, 16 for men. So, why is marriage the only sacrament no one wants their children to receive at canonical age? 

Remember, Chesterton said tradition was allowing the dead to have a vote. Well, traditionally, the age of marriage was at minimum around 10 or 12. So, if you are a Chestertonian, you should support marriage at that age, right? 

And, remember, Chesterton was born in 1874. In an era when most people didn't know their exact birth date in the first place, British common law allowed girls to marry at 12 and boys at 14. In 1929, just seven years before Chesterton's death, the minimum age for a girl's marriage was set to 14 years (in India), 16 years (in England) and that for boys was fixed at 18 years.

Chesterton died in 1936. So, for most of Chesterton's life, the legal age of marriage for both the Church and the culture he lived in was 12 for girls, 14 for boys.  Chesterton would have had ZERO problem with a 12-year old woman marrying and consummating the marriage.

IMITATE THE SAINTS

    Betrothed at Age 10    

• In Confessions (Books 2 and 6), St. Augustine said his saintly mother had arranged for him to marry a 10-year-old girl when she became of legal age (i.e., 12). He was 30 years old at the time. He had been having sex since he was at least 16 (marriageable age was 12 for men too). He notes that his mother, St. Monica, could have arranged a marriage for him earlier to give him a legitimate outlet for his sexual urges, but she feared that marriage at that time would hurt his chances for a successful career.

    Married at Age 11

• Saint Frances of Rome, born 1384, married 1396, bore six children, 

    Married at Age 12

• The Blessed Virgin is assumed to have been about 12 to 14 when she got pregnant with Jesus. 
• Saint Godeleva married "very young"
• St. Rita married at age 12, bore two children
• Blessed Michelina of Pesaro, married age 12, bore one son, Pardino.
• Saint Frances of Rome, born 1384, married 1396 at age 12, bore three children.
• Blessed Jadwiga (aka Hedwig, Polish queen), born 1374, married 1386 at age 12, bore seven children
• Saint Hedwig of Silesia, born 1174, married 1186 at age 12. Her husband was between 16 and 21.
• Saint Joan of France, born April 23, 1464, married Sept 8, 1476 at age 12. Her groom was age 14.
• Marianne Frances, daughter of Saint Jane Frances de Chantal (d. 1641), married at the age of 12 to a 16-year old groom with her saintly mother's approval. 
• Blessed Thomas Percy, born 1528, married "at the age of eligibility" (i.e., 12 years old) to Anne Somerset. They had four children.
• Saint Elizabeth of Portugal married 20-year old King Dinis. She bore him a child at age 19.

    Married at Age 13

• Saint Melania the Younger, born 383, married 396 at age 13, bore two children. Her husband was 17.

    Married at Age 14

• Saint Kinga, born 1234, married 1248 at age 14.
• Blessed Mary of Oignies, married at age 14, never consummated.
• Saint Catherine of Vadstena, born 1331, married 1345 at age 14, never consummated.
• Saint Matilda, born 895, married 909 at age 14. Bore four children.
• Saint Bridget of Sweden, born 1303, married 1316, at age 13, consummated marriage 1317 at age 14, bore eight children, including St. Catherine of Sweden.
• Saint Elzear and Blessed Delphina.  Elzear was born 1285, Delphina 1282, married 1299, at ages 14 and 17 respectively.
• Saint Philip Howard, born 1557, married at 14 to Anne Dacre
• St. Elizabeth of Hungary married at age 14 to 21-year old Louis (Ludwig IV) Landgrave of Thuringia, and had her first child at age 15.

    Married at Age 15

• Edward Longshanks married at 15 to his 13-year old second cousin, Eleanor of Castile. They had 14 children. 
• Saint Joachima de Mas y de Vedruna, born April 16, 1783, married March 24, 1799 at age 15, mother of nine children.
• Saint Paula of Rome, born 357, married 372 at age 15 to a Roman senator, mother of five children.
• Blessed Virginia Centurione, born 1587, married at age 15 
• Saint Catherine of Genoa, born April 15, 1447, married January 13, 1463 at age 15.
• Blessed Seraphina, born 1434, married 1448 at age 15.
• Blessed Umiliana Cerchi, born 1219, married at age 15.
• Blessed Aleth and Tescelin, married at 15, had seven children (including St. Bernard of Clairvaux)
• Saint Adelaide of Burgundy, to 21-year old Lothair II of Italy.

    Married at Age 16

• Saint Adelaied, born 931, married 947 at age 16, bore five children.
• Saint Humility, born 1226, married 1242, at age 16
• Blessed Galeotto Roberto Malatesta, married at age 16.
• Blessed Louisa of Savoy, born Dec 2, 1462, Married 1479 at age 16.
• Blessed Victoria Rasoamanarivo was born in 1848 and married in 1864, at the age of 16.
• Blessed Mary of the Incarnation, born 1566, married in 1582 at age 16.
• Blessed Dorothy of Montau, born 1347, married 1363 at age 16.
• Blessed Joan Mary de Maille born 1331, married 1347 at age 16.
• Blessed Peter To Rote, aged 22, married 16-year old Paula Ia Varpit, who bore two children.
• Saint Thomas More, aged 27, married 16-year old Jane Colt, who bore four children.

    Married at Age 17

• Saint Elizabeth of Portugal, betrothed at age twelve, married at 17. bore two children.
• Saint Joan de Lestonnac, born 1556, married at age 17.
• Blessed Helena of Bologna, born 1472, married 1489 at age 17.
• Saint Elizabeth of Portugal, born 1271, married 1288 at age 17
• Saint Zdislava, born 1220, married at age 17. Mother of four children.
• Blessed Ida of Boulogne, born 1040, married 1057 at age 17, mother of three

QUESTIONS

So, if you are a faithful Catholic, are you preparing your children to joyfully accept the saving grace of the sacrament of marriage between the ages of 12 and 17? Are you encouraging them to marry before the age of 20, in imitation of the Blessed Virgin and the saints, and following the sage advice of a Doctor of the Church, in accordance with canon law?

Is it possible that the the problem of teen pregnancy is actually a problem involving the failure of Christians to prepare 12, 13, and 14-year-olds to be married between the ages of 14 and 16?

Even if it is not stressed, does the Catholic Church formally teach its adherents to accept marriage during the ages that the secular world would call "child marriage" and "pedophilia"? Is secular society correct about when to receive the sacrament, are the ancient laws, teachings and traditions of the Church wrong? Or is the Church correct and secular society the one that is wrong to prevent men and women in their teens from marrying? 

Does the Church instruct us to no longer imitate the saints? Are we to refuse the advice of the Doctors of the Church? Do we block our sons and daughters from being properly prepared to receive the eternal, life-giving grace of marriage at the age of 12, 13, 14, 15 or 16, when canon law has said, or currently does say, they are permitted to receive it? 

Traditionalists get upset when the Pope or the bishops say divorced spouses might still, under certain circumstances, receive the Eucharist, but they refuse the example and teachings of the saints, and look askance at the canons of the Church when it comes to encouraging teens to enter into marriage. Marriage is a sacrament. Why would you discourage or prevent its reception? 

A Timeline Leading To Middle-Eastern Crusades

The Crusades against Islam (as opposed to the Crusades against the Albigensians or the Crusades in Northern Europe) are commonly agreed to have occurred between 1095 and 1291.

• What happened prior to 1095? Well, Islam began it's expansion around 632. In that year, every piece of land which touched the Mediterranean was Catholic.
• By 647, Islam had begun to conquer North Africa. Crusade was not called.
• In 674, Islamic armies laid its first siege of Constantinople, capitol city of the Roman Eastern Empire. Crusade was not called.
• By 711, literally half of the Catholic Roman Empire had been conquered by Islam, and Islam had crossed the channel to invade Spain. Crusade was not called. For the next 600 years, Islamic armies would conquer most of the Iberian peninsula and fight Christian kings for control. Crusade was not called.
• 782, the Islamic invasion of Asia Minor began. Crusade was not called.
• 827, Arab Islamic armies attack and conquer Sicily. Crusade was not called.
• For the next two centuries, Islamic corsairs would raid all along the Spanish, French, Italian, Neopolitan and Asia Minor coast of Christian Europe, kidnapping and enslaving Christians. Crusade was not called.
• In 846, the Arab Muslims raided Rome. Islamic armies sailed up the Tiber, defiled the Church of St. Peter in Chains and St. Paul Outside the Walls, and attacked Rome itself. The papal response was to raise the wall around Rome, to make it one foot higher. Crusade was not called.
• The churches in Jerusalem were razed or defiled, with the Church of the Holy Sepulcher turned into a horse stable. Crusade was not called.
• Only when Muslims forbad Christian pilgrimage to Jerusalem did the Popes finally declare that they had had just about enough of this, and declare Crusade.

Now, compare that to the modern situation. Can you imagine foreign armies invading the United States from the East, capturing every scrap of territory between the East Coast and the Mississippi river, laying siege to Los Angeles, raiding American cities all along the Gulf Coast, the Mississippi River, the West Coast and the Canadian border, and we don't respond militarily for four centuries?

That we don't respond even after they turn the Lincoln Memorial into a Chinese takeout, and destroy the Washington Monument? That we only respond militarily four hundred years later, when the stop America tourists from being able to visit Washington DC at all?

If you think the Crusades was unreasonable, then you must also have very serious objections to the US response after 9/11. And the reconquista of all that territory between the Mississippi and Washington DC... you would obviously object to American military force being used for that, right?