THIS month, Ukrainians will observe the 80th anniversary of the Holodomor, the famine and destruction imposed by the Communists on the independent farmers of the Soviet Ukraine. The famine and the many simultaneous deportations of farmers resulted in an estimated 10 million deaths in a once flourishing agricultural region that was known as the breadbasket of Europe. According to a website run by the Connecticut Holodomor Awareness Committee:

In Soviet Ukraine, of course, the Holodomor was kept out of official discourse until the late 1980’s, shortly before Ukraine won its independence in 1991. With the fall of the Soviet Union, previously inaccessible archives, as well as the long suppressed oral testimony of Holodomor survivors living in Ukraine, have yielded massive evidence offering incontrovertible proof of Ukraine’s tragic famine genocide of the 1930’s.

On November 28th 2006, the Verkhovna Rada (Parliament of Ukraine) passed a decree defining the Holodomor as a deliberate Act of Genocide. Although the Russian government continues to call Ukraine’s depiction of the famine a “one-sided falsification of history,” it is recognized as genocide by approximately two dozen nations, and is now the focus of considerable international research and documentation.

Here is one’s survivor’s story.

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SPENCER WARREN writes:

There are a number of moving stories and live links at the BBC website of the commemoration of the 95th anniversary of the Great War armistice. All of Britain stops to observe two minutes of silence at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. This and their practice of wearing poppies were abandoned long ago in our country.

The images brought tears to my eyes. This is perhaps the most traditional public ritual still practiced.

On my visits long ago to Harrow and Winchester School, as on public memorials in Britain, I noted how the World War II dead were an appendage to the far greater number of dead from the First World War, or the Great War.

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VIRTUALLY every week another outrageous murder is committed by American policemen who kill at the slightest provocation, as in the case of Jonathan Ferrell. This week, 19-year-old Tyler Comstock was shot dead when he fled in a pickup truck to the campus of Iowa State University after a family dispute.

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WHEN discussing matters of faith with Catholics, Protestants often attest to their superior devotion to and understanding of the Bible. It is unquestionable that the average Protestant spends more time reading, studying and memorizing the Bible than the average Catholic. Unfortunately, this reading is selective and Protestants of various sects routinely deny things that are said in the Bible. Thus the true Catholic, though he reads the Bible less, possesses a superior understanding of the Bible. This is because he is not only guided by what the Bible actually says, he is guided by the deposit of faith and more than 2,000 years of authoritative interpretation of the Bible. The Bible refutes major beliefs held by Bible-reading Protestants:

The Bible teaches that man is not justified by faith alone.

The Bible teaches Mary’s Immaculate Conception, Perpetual Virginity and Assumption into Heaven; and the importance of venerating Mary.

The Bible teaches the existence of Purgatory.

The Bible teaches that Jesus made Peter the first pope.

The Bible teaches that Jesus is truly present in the Eucharist.

The Bible teaches confession to a priest.

The Bible teaches veneration of saints.

The Bible teaches infant baptism.

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  TYPHOON HAIYAN, in the Philippines, is one of the strongest storms ever recorded to hit landfall. It is creating sustained winds of up to 195 miles per hour. 

SAM writes:

I wanted to comment on your post “Are All Religions ‘True?'” because it is something I have been thinking about a lot recently. I regularly interact with white liberals of the “spiritual, but not religious” variety and they all tend to think that the major religions are interchangeable and equal.

Not only is this view incoherent, it displays a breathtaking hubris which masquerades as humility. It is incoherent because it violates logic at the most rudimentary level: it maintains that contradictory propositions can be true simultaneously. The liberal refuses to face up to fact that either Jesus is God incarnate or he isn’t; either Muhammad is God’s prophet or he isn’t; either the soul will face divine judgment after death or it won’t; either the extirpation of all desire is highest goal of spiritual enlightenment or it isn’t. The liberal refuses to face this because, once these stark alternatives are seriously acknowledged, one is put into the uncomfortable position of having to make an existential choice where the possibility of error is real and the consequences of error are of the utmost gravity. (more…)

WHENEVER I read of Westerners converting to Islam, I am not particularly surprised. These conversions are the result of proximity to Muslims, but also, I believe, of the fact that Muslims hold to one very important truth that is stubbornly rejected by many Western believers. Muslims believe, or at least act as if they believe, that only one religion is true. In this, they are absolutely correct. Either one religion is true — and all other religions are false — or no religion is true. Muslims believe the former proposition.

In Islam, some Western secularists sense the clear and refreshing air of a certain honesty. They know, without perhaps being able to articulate it, that the ecumenical, “interfaith” movement that has swept the modern West is nonsense. Astute non-believers understandably have contempt for this opiate of the masses. Different religions hold to different propositions, even if they agree on some points. Both sides of a contradiction cannot be true. This is obvious even to a child.

Those who believe that all religions are partly true are sloppy thinkers or dangerous liars. “Interfaith-ism” is far more damaging than atheism. Most people are not inclined to atheism. Most people, indeed all people, are inclined to wanting God on their own terms.

Many so-called Catholics believe, for instance, that other religions are partly true and that Catholicism is fully true. This cannot logically be so. Either Catholicism is the one true faith, and other faiths are entirely false [as religions], or Catholicism is wholly false. The Catholic Church states that salvation can only be attained through the Church. But Lutherans implicitly believe that salvation can only be attained through the Lutheran Church. They just don’t state it openly.

Here is a good analysis from the website Novus Ordo Watch. For non-Catholic readers, simply replace whatever their own religion is with the reference to Catholicism to arrive at the basic philosophical conclusion that only one religion is true or none are true: (more…)

  TEXANNE writes: Unfortunately, this is the same level of thinking one encounters among most adults.

C.S. writes:

I would like to express my great gratitude for your site, The Thinking Housewife, and the educated commentary it provides. It is difficult as a college freshman to find a decent appreciation of the effects of the revolution on society. I applaud you for standing against both the revolutionaries on left and right, and most especially, for avoiding confusion with the so-called ‘Men’s Rights Movement,’ which is, by the rejection of duty, in forfeiture of manliness.

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IT WAS Steve Sailer who once said that homosexuals don’t really want marriage, they want weddings. The homosexual wedding is, aside from being a fun party, the most visible way of normalizing homosexuality. Homosexuals have never shown a tendency to spend their lives with one person; quite the opposite, many homosexuals don’t spend a week or a single night with one person. Two West Point graduates “married” at the West Point Chapel Saturday, another milestone in the implosion of the American military.

Meanwhile, Retired Army Maj. Gen. Patrick Brady, and a few other prominent retired military, told World Net Daily that the homosexualizaton of the military and the push to place women in combat have demoralized service members and seriously compromised their willingness to fight. How could these not be demoralizing forces? Normal male aggression has been criminalized. Liberals make no secret of despising the military. They believe the military is to blame for warfare in the same way they believe guns are to blame for homicide. One of their most effective tactics has been to recruit women and pansies to kill off the male hero. In the end, that’s what the military sexual assault tribunals, which will become ever more Stalinist as the years go by, are about: eradicating the fighting man on an inner level, making him constrain his own aggressive impulses for fear of reprisal. In the end, this has nothing to do with women who want to fight or men who want to marry men.

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AMENDMENT 66, the Colorado education bill that was the darling of the liberal establishment and would have raised an additional billion dollars in taxes for all-day kindergarten and other programs, was defeated yesterday by almost two to one. See the Denver Post’s story here. This is significant given that out-of-state proponents of the bill, including Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg, and the teacher’s union spent millions of dollars promoting the measure, seriously outspending the opposition.

Speaking of education in Colorado, a bill was passed this summer that requires sex education to begin in kindergarten. It takes a lot of money to promote sexual decadence.

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CHIRLANE McCRAY and her husband, the newly-elected mayor, Bill de Blasio, are the perfect first couple for New York. He is white and she is black. That fact alone could not help but make their ratings soar. She’s a former lesbian and he’s from a broken home. Very good on both counts. He considers socialist Latin America his ideal society and she seethes with anger when describing her childhood in a largely white community. It’s all almost too perfect to be true. De Blasio beamed over his mixed-race family as he campaigned and, like Obama, appealed to envy of the rich in portraying New York as a “tale of two cities,” the oppressed and the oppressors. He won in a landslide yesterday.

McCray, who does not take her husband’s name, had this to say in a recent interview about the future of the city:

The city needs to become, in terms of opportunities, more like what it used to be. Now I know, people say, oh, the crime, the blah, blah. You know. That’s — we are never going to go back to those days. We don’t want to go back to those days. That’s not even an issue. What we want is for people to feel like they can raise their families here. That their kids can go to college. They can do better themselves. There is a route into the middle class. We want young people to feel like they can come here.

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NADIA BOLZ-WEBER, the author of a bestseller and the “pastrix” of a Lutheran church in Denver, is the subject of a profile in The Washington Post. Here’s a condensed version. After trying to make it as a stand-up comedienne, Bolz-Weber redirected her ambition (times are tough in the stand-up business) and got a theology degree of some kind in a seminary. She became a Lutheran minister, which fortunately involves being on stage and talking a lot about oneself too. Her “passion” and “life-changing fervor” are inspiring even white suburbanites, whom she reluctantly forgives for permitting her little opportunity to demonstrate her inclusiveness and for having committed the mortal sin of being not so cool. Her book is modestly titled: Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner and Saint.

She’s on a plane nearly every week to headline church leadership gatherings because of the way she articulates the place of the religious liberal in America. Next up is Calvary Baptist Church in Washington’s Chinatown, where she will speak to an overflow crowd of more than 600 people Tuesday evening.

Her message: Forget what you’ve been told about the golden rule — God doesn’t love you more if you do good things, or if you believe certain things. God, she argues, offers you grace regardless of who you are or what you do.

Christianity, Bolz-Weber preaches, has nothing to do with rules; it is the process of things constantly dying and then being made new. Those things, she says, might be the alcoholic who emerges into sobriety, some false narrative we have about ourselves, religious institutions that no longer inspire.

This woman must be reading Pope Francis. Not surprisingly, Bolz-Weber does not think fondly of her “fundamentalist” Protestant upbringing and she calls most liberal churches “the Elks Club with the Eucharist.” On that point, she is clever and correct. The Elks Club with the Eucharist leads here to Saturday Night Live with the Eucharist. It’s all part of the pseudo-religious, pseudo-moral atmosphere of modern Protestantism. (more…)

  DANIEL S. writes: Three people in Norway are dead after being stabbed to death by a Sudanese man who hijacked a bus after being ordered deported. The man was later arrested. As far as the murder suspect is concerned, his identity and religious affiliation have not been released. He is reportedly from South Sudan, thus making it possible that he was from either a Christian or animist background, though it is all very possible he was Muslim. Either way, such a man should have never been in Norway. It is furthermore curious as to why this man was allowed to walk around freely after having been ordered deported. Once again a Western nation's policy of multiculturalism and mass Third World immigration results in deadly consequences. (And, once again, such a story will quickly be buried and forgotten.)

THANK GOODNESS, the overblown, increasingly pagan and macabre celebration of Halloween is over for another year. Here is a recent post from the blog Eponymous Flower about an Italian bishop who condemned Halloween. It would be nice if there were more voices against it. Bishop Massimo Camisasca issued a statement that said:

“Halloween is a mixture of heathenism and commercialism that is rejected in both components equally.”

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VOTERS in Colorado are being asked this week to approve a measure that would raise an additional $1 billion for schools, fund all-day kindergarten throughout the state and provide more programs for immigrants who can’t speak English. Given that the voters who stand to pay the most are in the minority, the measure is unlikely to fail. Residents with incomes above $75,000 will pay 5.9 percent in state income taxes, up from 4.6 percent.

As Aristotle said, democracy is a form of organized theft. And to Americans, any amount of thievery is justified to support schools, which are considered magical equalizers. Strangely enough, the inequalities do not disappear, but that does not reduce the widespread faith.

In many parts of the country, it is extremely difficult for a family to survive on one income. Taxes are a big reason why this is so. The state funds all-day kindergarten by defunding homes.

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NEXT YEAR, the order of religious sisters known as the Daughters of Charity will permanently sever their ties with St. Thomas Hospital in Nashville, an institution which they opened more than 100 years ago. At Tradition in Action, Marian T. Horvat describes how the liberalism of Vatican II effaced the religious order and gradually transformed the Catholic hospital, once under the capable management of women who took vows of lifelong poverty and charity, into a modern secular institution run by bureaucrats. Dr. Horvat writes:

The competence, energy and expertise of the nursing Daughters of Charity made them much in demand. But it was something more that won them the love and devotion of the people they served. In their distinctive grey habit with the white cornette, these sisters embodied lives of sacrifice. They received no personal salaries, they renounced the social amenities and feminine vanities of the world – all with the aim of serving Christ and seeing Him in the suffering sick of humanity. Such a noble mission reflected in the demeanor and person of each sister, who became a symbol of the model selfless nurse.

After Vatican II, however, things started to change. No more triangular white cornettes were seen in the hospital halls. The Sisters now were in modified habits or secular dress. Soon, the vocations started to diminish and the School of Nursing closed. (more…)

IN THE recent entry on one couple’s home birthing photos, a nurse says she was appalled by the degree to which the health of the baby was endangered to take pretty pictures of the half-naked mother in a kiddie pool. By the way, this is somewhat impolite to ask, but how does one empty a swimming pool filled with water, blood, and other bodily substances in one’s living room? There were no photos to explain.

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