Timothy Birdnow

I was watching a "Secrets of the Dead" episode on PBS last night, and it got me to thinking about the line between the past and present. The episode I watched was about the Trojan War, and archaeologists have been in much dispute over Homer's account of the Trojan Horse; many do not believe this seemingly simple trick would have worked, or that the Greeks would have believed it would work, and forensic archaeologists have done a great deal of labor to see if it - or other possible scenarios that may have looked like what Homer describecd - would have worked. Many different scenarios were examined by the show, from the horse being a battering ram machine to it being a seige tower, and none of them worked given the parameters under which they had to operate. So a horse it must have been.

And archaeologists have worked out the size and scope of the "gift", explaining that a horse was the symbol of Troy so it would have appeared to the Trojans that the Greeks were saying "well, you wore us out; here is a token to show we are going to let bygones be bygones." It seems incredible that after nine years of battle the Trojans wouldn't look inside the thing before bringing it into the city, but mistakes are often the key to warfare, and sometimes a people are so desperate for peace they will overlook anything.

Does that sound familiar? America ignores repeated attacks by Muslims, calling it workplace violence or lone wolf attacks, desperate to find any way to avoid labeling these things as terrorist acts, acts of war. And we go so far as to make a deal with Iran, our sworn enemy, to allow them to obtain nuclear weapons but only after a certain amount of time as though that matters with these people. We are so desperate for peace will simply refuse to look inside the big wooden pony.

That pony is likely to contain a shiny uranium sphere, one that goes "boom!"

But the point of this short essay is that the narrator spoke of the notorious reverence for guile and deceit held by the Greeks at this time, and how many manuscripts from ancient Greece contained high praise for trickery. The Greeks, for all their virtues, were cheats, dirty tricksters who would lie in wait, ready to betray. During the Roman period the Greeks were despised as liars and cheats, and that was a cultural trait carried forward from this love of trickery.

I found this interesting because Liberalism was born out of the Renaissance, which was a revival of Greco-Roman culture and philosophy. The Enlightenment had two roots - Greek and Roman on the one side and Christian on the other, and a great many marvelous things were born of this. But from the beginning of the Enlightenment there was a strong atheistic strain, a group that wanted to reject the Christian aspect and focus on the purely material. It was that strain that would later work in the French Revolution and would see itself actualized in Rousseau and Voltaire and later in the German philosophers, all of whom promoted an atheistic worldview. The modern Progressive movement is solidly atheistic, even while using Christian doctrine to advance itself.

And the Liberal movement is perhaps the most dishonest and treacherous of any large belief system one could encounter. Rarely will the liberal tell you what his real goal is, and the left fights extraordinarily dirty, with winning at all cost the objective. Ends justify the means with the Left. Now where did we see that?

Oh yes; in Troy. The Trojan Horse was an example of Greek guile, and the Liberal movement was born of a revival of Greek things. Coincidence? I think not.

Religion determines how a People approach the world, and in particular the Judeo-Christian religion put strong ethical and moral standards in place, standards that imperiled the eternal soul of the believer if broken. Enlightenment thinking coupled with Christianity bore much good fruit; the rise of market economics, science, inalienable rights, etc. But it only worked as long as there was a standard of absolute truth. Those we call liberals today, the children of Rousseau, Voltaire, Marx, Nietzche Stalin, Hitler, and Woodrow Wilson eschewed those eternal truths for their own godhead, the right to determine right and wrong based on utilitarian needs. The end result has been a world thrown into utter chaos as each god-man holds absolute power over reality as far as he is concerned. Don't like your sex? Change it! Don't like your race? Spray tan yourself to a new one. Your nation's history? Simply rewrite it. Without Truth there is no stability, for Truth is the bedrock of all things. And those who would use treachery and deceit to get their way have not the love of Truth in them.

Think about that next time you read Homer - or the New York Times.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 07:13 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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