Familiar with Wolfgang Hoffmann? No he's not the bass player for the latest trendy alternative music band. He's the featured character in the introduction to Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, a book about the ways ordinary Germans fully enabled the Holocaust's atrocities. I'd peeked a bit inside the book to examine the extent of complicity among the Roman Catholic middling leadership and laity, and while there was quite a bit, there was just as much among the vibrantly institutionalized Protestant church as well.

The Hoffmann incident is just as telling as anything throughout the book, and it is easy to see why Goldhagen used it to set up his premise.

Hoffmann was a Nazi officer administrating the turgid proceedings of "The Final Solution", and when asked by his superiors to sign a declaration promising that he would not, essentially, make lampshades from the skins of his victims, he vehemently objected.

Paraphrased: "I'm a reputable, honorable member of our civilized society," he protested, "it is beneath my stature to do such a thing. I would do the right thing anyway. That they think I would do such a barbaric thing by forcing me to swear against it is an affront!"

The glaringly obvious irony is that his entire workday was spent methodically exterminating human beings.

The even more frightening truth escapes most, however.

This is what good, wholesome human beings do.

They do human sacrifice.

They do it everywhere, not just in the abhorrent confines of the Nazi death camps. They do it in the nicest, sweetest hamlets in the most advanced industrialized nations — in America too. Any place where people proudly boast "That's not me, I'm not capable of such an act."

 

Interestingly I just happened catch a new series on pay-cable television, American Gods. I know nothing about it except what I read in the newspaper reviews, its premise: a slough of bored gods go about getting people to commit violent acts upon one another — as expressions of human sacrifice.

Wow, what a prime-time soap opera that must be!

I've always wondered, why does God demand sacrifice? What is the whole reasoning behind it? Why can't the ultra-progressive mantra of Let's just all get along no matter what and stop with this fairy tale God business be the way things should be?

I'm no expert theologian, but I think much of it has to do with the fact that, yes, unfortunately for those Pollyannas out there, each man and woman is pretty much an asshole. Hey, I may be a bit misanthropic, okay, I confess, but I'm not the only one saying it. Jesus said it too. "Why do you call me good? No one is good except God."

Even the tremendously high-minded and giant-hearted individual cannot get around the fact that everyone around them has an intractable dispensation to shit on others in some ways. I mean, I watch the humanist's demeanor change in a big way when boldly challenged with the very idea that man is a sinner and God is the only one with The Antidote. They seem to be insanely intolerant of that, and indeed, would not mind doing away with that person.

In His abounding love, however, God made a way for the doing-away part and it turns out to be pretty good for us assholes, really. First He allowed for animal sacrifices to clearly demonstrate that our sins do need atonement — that's a pretty good deal to me, if we were put on the altar we'd be in big trouble. Those sacrifices were insufficient themselves, but they did show us that God was actually merciful and forgiving.

This was all merely a foreshadowing of the sacrifice, the one God Himself took through Jesus, essentially allowing Himself to be the "doing-away-with", being the sacrifice in place of us. The whole sacrifice thing from God is all about His love, and those who genuinely follow Christ sacrifice themselves daily in their love for another.

 

Those who refuse to accept this truth must, however, engage in human sacrifice by the System. The first of these was Cain's — try to brashly show God that sacrificing another human would earn His favor. The modern Americanist version has been flourishing for some time and is powered by that overarching humanist idea that "There is no way I can do anything really bad."

The class of individual afforded the greatest protections by the reigning hegemony is now the institutionally qualified victim.

It is an obsession now to find ways to be qualified. Traditionally those who do need the charitable largesse of someone are the child, the sick, the disabled, and the elderly. Each have different strata of legitimate disadvantage, such as the classification of physical or mental disability.

What about this newest classification of disadvantage:

The irresponsible?

Does your destructive character flaw mean others must enable your behavior? And how expansive is that flaw so that a great deal of rigorous rent-gorging becomes quite lucrative?

Caesar has always been the predominant rent-processor. His capacity to distribute rental favors to those who'll augment his potency has started reaching proportions that are making codependent society quite entrenched. "I must look good," Caesar's minions proclaim in their souls, "by protecting people from the consequences of their poor choices."

The trick is the humanist in a powerful position must declare there are no poor choices — except, again quite ironically, the ones made by those critiquing that activity! This means there are certainly poor choices as much as there are wise ones. Yet the only way one may know the wise from the foolish is by

The Standard.

This is why atheism is so dangerous.

There are definitely fine, polite, nice, considerate atheists, but the issue is not that someone does a number of really good things — I'm sure Mr. Hoffmann was one of the most upstanding individuals in his community and put dinner on the table for his family every single night.

The issue is acknowledging the firm grounding for wisdom and justice. Scratch an atheist you will find a hearty concession of meaninglessness about morals and ethics and the commensurate inability to stay true to his or her own standards — ultimately they will not be good after all. Keep pushing an atheist and at some point they will break.

It perfectly rational, however, for the atheist, progressive, humanist, Caesarian rent-glomming life to be so attractive! Everyone loathes having their not-goodness called out. Instead of confronting this ugliness authentically, they continue to wallow in the elaborate lie about it, put on a smiley face and just try to find smiley faces of fellow travelers.

The World System has so many ways to do that! It is like the high-end mall with fancy shops selling the niftiest denial methods, proficiently managed by those doing the work of Cain: no conception of God except the one he makes in his mind (see the fourth chapter of Genesis for more). The largest department store there is the one selling the best merchandise of all —

The Qualified Victim.

"On sale now! Rich utilization of your own woundedness for a vital part of the rank exploitation! You don't even have to really hurt, as long as it's sincerely believed! Best deals here! Price is practically nothing!..."

It'll only cost you your soul.

Of course that is nothing to the one who's been convinced there is no such thing.

Funny, there is a new practice — actually its been around for a while but because of the dramatically emerging world of social media it has a wild new form — "virtue signaling". This is eagerly pronouncing that you're really good with some politically correct thing so you can get in with the hip crowd somewhere, mostly in cyberspace. It is particularly pronounced in the world of victim qualifying.

"That choice is their choice but I can't say anything about that because I'm tolerant! Furthermore I'm on board with rescuing them so I can appear to everyone that I'm a really good person!"

This has become significantly institutionalized to the extent that if you are not a virtuously signaled member of Caesar's fire brigade, then you must suffer the consequences of ridicule, marginalization, ostracism, demonization, or — is it leading to this? — prosecution to the fullest extent of the law.

 

In my devotional time I am reading through Jeremiah, and he is one of my favorite prophets because there are so many places he so definitively speaks about how people do virtue signaling, really — God, don't do anything to us because we're really pretty good after all.

And he ::gasp!::

Calls them out on it.

I happened to catch something I hadn't seen before, one of those truthful gems that grip you. Right there in the eighth chapter, eighth verse:

"How can you say, 'We are wise, and the law of the Lord is with us'? But behold, the lying pen of the scribes has made it into a lie."

I'd glanced at the commentary remarks about this verse and it mentioned this was the first time scribes had been mentioned in the Bible.

Scribes.

You mean like the ones they have at The New York Times?

Now yes, I did address the Gray Lady in my last home page piece, but I can't help but close this one with another mention, much because of the marvelous metaphor I caught in a graphic novel I'd been enjoying.

I love good graphic novels, but since most are either filthy or vapid or both, it is hard to find good ones. Manifest Destiny was a decent one about a fantastic rendition of the Lewis and Clark expedition.

The fourth installment features a series of episodic flashbacks about a failed expedition sent out three years before Lewis and Clark. The leader is the only survivor, and when he is at his most destitute, Captain Helm has a dream in which he dines on eyeballs. He is so hungry and emaciated this seems to be the choicest meal.

Shortly he is violently overcome by what he has ingested, convulsing and exploding from what it hath wrought.

What a phenomenally great metaphor for today's God rejecter.

He wants to see but he wants to do it without wisdom — without understanding truth, justice, righteousness, morality, ethics — and in turn without real understanding of mercy, graciousness, forgiveness, and freedom from futile attempts to be good without The Standard. Throw in robust industry and compassionate charity, two transcendently Kingdom items that have no place in the System.

The New York Times is undeniably the main purveyor of the perverted version of this economy, the one that shreds the value of so many in a twisted network of human sacrifice events exclusively for the purpose of showcasing their goodness through manipulating the incessant pain of The Qualified Victim.

What's more, engendering the rent-bilging of The Qualified Victim is just today's raging pabulum infusing the entire System modus operandi — destabilize everything, from the child's simple bedroom to the chief executive's palatial office. Make rejection of God and His Kingdom appear very appealing, best accomplished by deftly compelling people to join the everything-must-be-made-good-by-Caesar crusade. No matter how good you think you are, if it isn't by Christ, the program is just more of the devil's soap opera.

Please, this is what the System is designed to do, what it is divinely authorized to do. You may immerse yourself in it as you wish, but enlist in it or rebel against it, it is all the same. You may be feverishly enticed to gorge on the eyeballs so you can have the feeling that you are privileged with some special gnostic awareness, but it is you who are being dined upon.

Look at what the New York Times publishes, please, read it carefully. Go ahead, see it for what it is. I'd recommend you do so by the mind of Christ, for without Him it is a perilous folly. Watch how the ordained scribes handsomely expose the demonic complexion of a necessary evil. They do it extraordinarily well.

Here's the more important question:

 

Who's telling the New York Times scribes what to do?

 

If you are courageous enough to go there, then that profound understanding follows. Then the wisdom. Then perhaps, just over there, near to you but far from the deep politics...

 

The Word.

 

*** 

By this we will have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all. Every priest stands daily ministering and offering time after time the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins; but He, having offered one sacrifice for sins for all time, sat down at the right hand of God, waiting from that time onward until his enemies be made a footstool for his feet. For by one offering He has perfected for all time those who are sanctified.

- Letter to the Hebrews, tenth chapter