by Stephanie Janiczek
Clash Daily Guest Contributor
It’s mind boggling what people are doing and tolerating these days. Sometimes I feel as if I am watching the world on a giant LED TV screen and am not a part of the goings on. I am merely just a member of the horrified audience. The anything goes attitude from sexual mores and other behaviors is like a step back in time to pagan Rome and it is not good.
How many people realize that the licentious way people are behaving is not evolution of society but a step backward? Not many, that is assured. For two thousand years in Western Civilization a code of behavior and ethics was laid down that is based on Judeo-Christian values. These dominated thought, culture, philosophy and secular law. These were not laws or ethics to censor humanity, rather than they release humanity from the thousands of years of materialism and degradation. In the greater context of human history, the Judeo-Christian ethic is a radical departure from everything humanity ever knew.
We look at our ancestors with curiosity. We are astounded by the ambitions of Caesar, and the cunning of Augustus. We take joy in the fierceness of the Vikings and the heroism of the Spartans. We are intrigued by the manipulation of humanity by the gods in the Iliad. The gods were small. What I mean is they were human. The notion that the ways of the Lord are so high above that of man that He cannot be understood is a radical notion. The pagan gods were not so much gods as they were super-heroes. The line between heroes like Achilles and god were thin. The idea that each human life meant something was nonexistent.
In the HBO series Rome, they are not always correct on the history, but they are very good at giving us a taste of Roman culture. Human life meant little or nothing. From the execution of the Gallic leader, Vercingetorix and the tossing of his body afterwards in a garbage dump, to the killing of a murderess and the dumping of her body in the Tiber there was no sense of worth or justice. Murders occur casually. The gods are cajoled, they are bargained with, and they are tempted. The unbridled sexuality and the anything-goes greed and avarice is potent and corrupting. The human spirit, the thing that sets us all apart from each other and everything else is missing.
When the Apostle Paul arrived in Rome, preaching the Word of the Lord, slaves, women and the lowly were drawn to his message of true equality. When he said all are the same in Christ Jesus he meant God see’s us all as equals. This simple fact radicalized Western Culture. It served to draw humanity together, and yet gave individuals the sense that each of us are worth something. From the garbage heaps of Rome, and the Sewers where the first Christians hid, the foundations of natural law and order were laid. Our world as we know it now is not as secular as some would like and it is not as godly as others would like. We are again at a crossroads.
Judeo-Christianity did many things that actually freed humanity from paganism’s materialistic slavery. Judeo-Christian values proscribed homosexuality. They proscribed promiscuity. They elevated the family beginning with a man and his wife as the basic ideal unit from where society would come from. Greece, by its elevation of homo-eroticism, is the direct opposite. The wives were sequestered, men were the ideal. Pedophilia and Homosexual relationships were the general rule. The family only existed for procreation. There was no foundation of morality or equality. The idea that Athens, the foundation of western thought, and philosophy was a bastion of liberty is laughable. The fact is that a family-based life, with a marriage between a man and a woman as the Judeo-Christian ethic states, is the hardest fought battle that society has seen.
When one goes out and see’s children allowed to talk back to their mothers, husbands not opening doors for their wives, filthy words being used against women by young men because they don’t know any better, we have a problem and the problem is the family has been devalued. Judeo-Christianity fought the sensual, materialistic paganism of Greece and Rome and won. Now that same paganism is rearing its ugly head yet again.
Let us look at our neo-pagans now. They are the cultural left. They are the atheist set, the leftists who have aimed to take down the family unit. When Nancy Pelosi talks about her Catholicism, it is like Nero talking about how he enjoyed Paul’s letters. She is a neo-pagan. She reviles the ethics of her faith and the morality she knows is true for materialism. One could almost see her worshiping Gaia, waiting for the bull’s blood to be poured on her.
Abortion is a neo-pagan issue. At no time in the history of the Judeo-Christian ethic has it ever been considered morally right to kill a baby. The argument of the left goes from convenience, to health, to the age of the mother. None of their opinions on the subject, when weighed against the Judeo-Christian ethic, holds water. It goes back to the family. The child is the greatest gift bestowed to a woman and her husband. There can be no greater moment in a human’s life than the birth of a baby. When a baby in utero is referred to in the Latin as fetus all humanity is stripped from it. The value of the tiny human means nothing. Satisfying material wishes and needs is the neo-pagan rule of life.
The radical notion that God, whose presence is everywhere, sees us all as the same is unique in the world. Even now this notion is unique. The less we hold to the ethics and laws we were given on Sinai and on the Mount of Olives and in the upper room after the Resurrection the less equality there is.
Look at Chicago if one wants to see an example of neo-pagan slavery. Families made dependent on a government that cannot do for them what they could do for themselves if they valued themselves.
The ultimate difference between the new neo-paganism and Judeo-Christian values is this: one is slavery of the spirit and soul and the other is the freeing of both. If a man believes he is a slave, he will act like a slave. The slave mentality in all its form is rampant on the left. The moment a man knows he is valued, worthy and an equal is the moment he is free. God does that. When we forget Him or put our trust in government, in men, in fictions our self-worth, our wholeness is gone. God fills that void and in this darkening time, when people are struggling spiritually, there are voids in man that ache to be filled with the knowledge that they do matter.
Image: National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City; author: Wolfgang Sauber; Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license
Stephanie Janiczek is a former Capitol Hill Staff Assistant, Schedule C Appointee and Leadership Institute alum. Military Wife, Hunter, Horse enthusiast, dog owner, writer and feminist kryptonite.
