Some of my sayings about religion and some other stuff

This is a good tl;dr of the blog if you're pressed for time or just aren't that interested. Have fun.

• The flashpoint of all rebellion against God is to do with where spirit meets matter, in three areas, who Jesus is, what the Eucharist is, and sex.
• The universe is hierarchical.
• A king is a father to his country in a way no politician can be.
• Respect the integrity of rites. A rite is not a costume. It's not like a coat you can put on and take off. It's more than a style of worship services. It's a package deal, a complete school of Christian thought and living.
• Thou shalt not mix rites.
• That said, home devotion can be anything you want, even a free-for-all, but I think the experts recommend following a rite.
• You can really know only two rites well and live in only one.
• Catholic ghetto is Christian community that liberals don't like.
• The rosary is an okay prayer aid, by and for the Latin Church, originally a substitute for the psalms and hours/office for the illiterate, that can work for some people. Don't introduce or promote it in the Eastern rites. They have their own practices.
• If somebody claims his prayer rule has magic powers, run.
• If a priest you meet starts trying to prove his "lines of succession," run.
• "The Pope has overstepped and is unbiblical!" said the Anglican bishop, harkening to the "Reformation," as she was about to officiate at a same-sex wedding.
• Catholic liberals are provincial and un-ecumenical.
• The English language has a Christian tradition: Anglican English, the English of the old Book of Common Prayer and King James Bible.
• The only English most Catholics care about is the only English they have a generations-old tradition of praying in, the prayers of the rosary, so the missal and the most liberal parish revert to "Our Father, who art in heaven," etc.
• Latin is international, precise, unchanging in meaning — a plus of a dead language, a gateway to the classical world, and pretty, Italian's mother.
• Catholic traditionalism is not about Latin. It's more about being against religious liberty and ecumenism.
• Is integralism the true seamless garment?
• Want to learn a Slavic language? Learn lots of vocabulary first because there are few words in common with English.
• Slavic grammar is like other European languages once you have the vocab down.
• Learning the Cyrillic alphabet is just an adjustment.
• Inflections, cases as well as conjugations, your changing word endings telling your story so word order's almost irrelevant, is an elegant way to set up a language.
• The glory of Byzantium (really the Eastern Roman Empire; 1800s historians renamed it), of Orthodoxy, was the whole Roman Empire became Catholic. The tragedy of it was it mistook the empire for the church. The Pope was no longer in the empire, so he was no longer considered in the church.
• Western Rite Orthodoxy is a byzantinized joke (but it doesn't have to be).
• What needs to be done with the Orthodox is to rewrite Catholicism all in Orthodox terms. That needs experts.
• Catholicism and Orthodox share a rite and the first seven great church councils.
• All of Orthodox doctrine, the first seven great church councils, is true.
• Orthodox doctrine is Catholicism in first-millennium Greek form.
• Eastern churches in Western countries lose their people to assimilation by the third generation.
• Catholicism is not the cult of the Pope's person.
• With the Vincentian canon, what has been believed always, everywhere, and by all, you pretty much get Catholicism.
• Modernity wants to turn us all into lonely, horny cogs and consumers, only skilled enough to do our jobs.
• Reboot society. If people can't marry and have kids at 19 in your society, something's wrong with it.
• There is no such thing as American conservatism, just quaint liberalism.
• The recent revival of the traditional Latin Mass in the official Catholic Church was a bait-and-switch. The ordinariates are probably on the hit list too.
• Many good Catholics' mainstay since the late 1960s has been the earliest, quietest Sunday Novus Ordo Mass. No attempt at music; no funny business. By the book. Better still with the accurate English from Benedict XVI.
• The "Reformation" drove the mother country from the church literally by force. The English are still sad and confused by that even though they no longer remember why.
• The Anglicans denying church infallibility in their Articles XIX and XXI gave away their ending.
• The English Reformed churches including the Anglicans lost their shit at the "Enlightenment."
• The disgruntled Anglican convert pond is fished out.
• A great lost hope of the '60s is that the high churches almost got back together. Maybe the divisions were just misunderstandings as is believed about the Assyrians and Miaphysites now.
• Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Unitarians, and Oneness Pentecostals are not Christians.
• Justification by faith vs. by works is a non-issue. (The Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation agree.)
• If you're as Christ-centered as the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod and ACNA, you're doing Christianity right.
• Liberalism, secular humanism, etc. is a close copy of Christianity, a daughter religion of it that uses Christian ethics. It sees itself as Christianity's fulfillment. It is a religion but it doesn't need churches.
• If it's not doctrine, it's on the table.
• Strict decorum in the sanctuary; come as you are for the laity.
• Traditional laity have a lot of freedom. Mill in and out of the church at will. Follow the service in a book. Wander from shrine to shrine lighting candles and saying your own devotional prayers. Fall asleep. Some things are more edifying than others.
• If it wouldn't disrupt a traditional Latin Mass or an Orthodox service, it's welcome.
• Traditional worship often becomes a form of a dialogue between the priest and the clerk.
• I'm more conservative than the Novus Ordo and more liberal than the SSPX.