The Christian Vanguard

In my previous post, I mentioned I lost my friend as a friend. We are no longer friends.  Friends seek the good for one another, and goods and truth are the same things. You cannot have something based on an untruth as a good. The most perfect friendship is united in all the Truth. My friendship with the character we are calling Uriah ended for precisely that reason. I can pinpoint that moment. I remember it well. 

A " frienemy " is he who pretends to be your friend, but is really not. It's a slang compound of "friend" and "enemy". I think some people tend to think of me as such. 

For whatever reason, I've had a lot of dialogue with people who can be generally identified as White Supremacists. They tend to be Catholic Radical Traditionalists, unfortunately, and have this strange fervor for Donald Trump. A part of their philosophy (if it can be dignified by being called such) is that the races, whatever that may mean, should not mix. They justify this by saying it is a preservation of European culture, but of course, European culture, which is Western civilization called Christendom, has no ties to any skin color. These are accidental features. If they mean they prefer people of the same race, that would be fine. In fact, I might even agree with that. I've written before why people tend to marry within their same age group, and I would extend that to class, intelligence, and race. I don't mean we should limit ourselves, but if we have preferences, then we are allowed to act on that.  But what if someone said, "I won't date any non-white...

A few days ago, I wrote about my experiences and confusion about kissing . I called it pointless because there didn't seem to be a final cause to it, but this just means I've emphasized this to the exclusion of the more phenomenal aspects to it. I focused on the final cause and purpose to the body parts and their acts, and thereby reduced the person to mere body parts. I suppose what I forgot was that when we kiss, or at least when I kiss, I kiss you because as you are an object of beauty, I want to be united to you not just as a body, but to you embodied, the distinction being that you are more than a sum of your parts. 

There is a video I just saw on Facebook of a puffer fish trying to attract a mate . He does this in a very entertaining way. Well, its entertaining for me anyways, maybe Mr. Fish wouldn't appreciate me looking down at his efforts. But what he does is, he swims around the bottom of the ocean and makes these designs in the sand, and it's really quite impressive. It's large, generally symmetrical, and actually really beautiful. If Cathedrals could be drawn in the ocean sand, the puffer fish would make the best rounded stained windows. 

I am at that age where I, as a single man, observe his friends getting married and starting families, and begin to wonder, is there something wrong with me? The same week I broke up, like, three of my friends got engaged, including one who was single only three weeks earlier. I was happy for them all, but I didn't feel comfortable seeing all that. Of course, you hear the well-meaning but naive lines such as, "It's okay to be single" or "You shouldn't put your confidence in a partner" or the rage inducing, "God is enough."  These all sort of betray a kind of anti-marriage view, and I've noticed a lot of this philosophy comes from emotionally hurt women and people that were duped by the Sam Harris wave that hit Protestantism a few years ago. I say duped because while everyone was distributing Harris' book,  I Kissed Dating Goodbye, encouraging people to be single forever and follow Harris' model, Harris found himself a wife.

I had often wondered whether the hours long make out sessions with my then girlfriend were occasions to sin . We figured they were, so for that, and a few other reasons, we decided to slow down, a lot. This was interesting for me because I've never kissed a girl like that before, and to go from basically no experience to nearly crashing and burning, it had me thinking: What the heck is kissing? Like, okay, it's when one person presses their lips against someone else, generally on the lips as well, or maybe the cheek, or maybe even the forehead. But like, what does it do?  So, like, sex. We know what sex is, and we can describe it in such a way that refers to the final cause of sex, which is procreation. To refer to sex without final causes is to be a somewhat deficient explanation of what sex is. What then is the point of kissing? I can't figure it out. Why the lips? Why not my index finder? I mean, sure, me poking your face over and over again with my finger is probab...