Singular "they" is listed in the second edition of Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1965), is that still too "modern" for you?
1965? Are you serious? Oh my, you
are. Historical myopia is so fashionable nowadays...
1965 was the point at which the sick modern mentality was taking a triumphal victory lap,
long after it had already destroyed the world. Modernity
per se started with the era immediately preceding the French Revolution, and metastasized as a cultural cancer in the Nineteenth Century. And by the way, fifty-five years (!) only seems like a long time to mental children. I have the same criticism for the self-styled “conservatives” with whom you no doubt sometimes quibble—the ones who consider the Beatles (or Elvis, or jazz) to be the pure and wholesome music of the “good old days” (!), unlike that awful degenerate noise of the MTV generation and later.
Anyway, save your Gospel preaching for yourself. Those who think in terms of essentials know that modern liberals and indeed, outright Marxists are substantially indistinguishable from primitive Christians of the Second Century; and the mutually hypocritical flamewars between modern liberals and fundamentalist Christians have all the acrimony of a schism between two sects of the same faith. That one side has nominally discarded Jesus whilst keeping the same essential worldview, and that one side is Puritanical whereas the other is hedonistic, are distinctions without difference. I am far from the first to observe this. (
N.b. also that some second-century Christian sects practiced hedonism, and also androgyny and homosexuality; the sect which beat them in popularity swept them under the rug with the rhetorical trick of declaring them “heretics” and “gnostics”, and thus “
not true Christians”.)
(I am also not the first to observe that the classical, so-called “pagan” religions were essentially masculine, whereas Christian morality is effeminate. In the West, the Roman Catholic Church partly avoided this problem for awhile—by partly ignoring the Bible. Protestants are strictly correct when they accuse Renaissance-era Catholicism of dabbling in “paganism”. The Catholicism of the Dark Age was much more Biblical, as is modern Catholicism.)
If you really want to find a society of which I approve, then you need to look back to classical antiquity. Of course, I am not waltzing around in a toga, or pretending to turn back the clock by several millennia. I study the past, for to build the future—a future that is actually better, instead of a rehash of the same old tripe that you liberals have been pushing for the past nineteen centuries.
Anyway, welcome to the future.
$CURRENT_YEAR?
To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.
Welcome to A.D.
2020 120.
Wherefore if any man is in Christ, he is a new creature: the old things are passed away; behold, they are become new.
But we all, with unveiled face beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same image from glory to glory, even as from the Lord the Spirit.
A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another; even as I have loved you, that ye also love one another.
(...etc...)Same substance. Different form. I also observe that people who preach your message online have the same evangelical fanaticism as any Christian fundamentalist robot, and are equally annoying. (The Bible-thumpers also do not take it well, when I tell them to go to hell with their liberalism.)
- The desire for a transformation of the self is not new. It takes various forms. Excepting a very few cases (such as have always existed at the margins), the overwhelming majority of people seeking a now-fashionable transformation of “gender” are essentially indistinguishable from those seeking other transformations of the soul. (Remember that psyche means soul, < ψυχή.) Both there and here, the physical fact of the body is devalued as unimportant, outmoded, obsolete. (Physical (adj.) < substantive feminine φυσική, nominalization of the feminine form of the adjective derived from neutral φῠσῐς, ‘nature’.)
- Argument from novelty is much more fallacious than argument from tradition, insofar as untested hypotheses are much more unreliable than the accrued wisdom of collective human experience. (Not that tradition is a reliable guide: It is less unreliable.)
- The ridiculous notions that history “progresses” through “advancement”, that humans inevitably advance from a worse condition to a better one, and that all the past can be suddenly declared obsolete are all very old fallacies.
Also:
Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.
Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.
Judge not, that ye be not judged.
Versus:destroy within yourself every particle of the sick modern mindset
For I am a free spirit.
44. Need I say expressly after all this that they will be free, very free spirits, these philosophers of the future—as certainly also they will not be merely free spirits, but something more, higher, greater, and fundamentally different, which does not wish to be misunderstood and mistaken? But while I say this, I feel under obligation almost as much to them as to ourselves (we free spirits who are their heralds and forerunners), to sweep away from ourselves altogether a stupid old prejudice and misunderstanding, which, like a fog, has too long made the conception of “free spirit” obscure.
In every country of Europe, and the same in America, there is at present [in 1886] something which makes an abuse of this name a very narrow, prepossessed, enchained class of spirits, who desire almost the opposite of what our intentions and instincts prompt—not to mention that in respect to the new philosophers who are appearing, they must still more be closed windows and bolted doors.
Briefly and regrettably, they belong to the levellers, these wrongly named “free spirits”—as glib-tongued and scribe-fingered slaves of the democratic taste and its “modern ideas”: all of them men without solitude, without personal solitude, blunt honest fellows to whom neither courage nor honourable conduct ought to be denied, only, they are not free, and are ludicrously superficial, especially in their innate partiality for seeing the cause of almost all human misery and failure in the old forms in which society has hitherto existed—a notion which happily inverts the truth entirely! What they would fain attain with all their strength, is the universal, green-meadow happiness of the herd, together with security, safety, comfort, and alleviation of life for every one, their two most frequently chanted songs and doctrines are called “Equality of Rights” and “Sympathy with All Sufferers”...
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