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Oh. Wisconsin in the fall! I might have to gather some time and resources and make the journey. Also, very much enjoyed the conversation with the always lively John Heers. We're coming down the final stretch toward Pascha. I hope you have a fruitful Holy Week! Thank you for all the writing and speaking you have done over the last 2 years.

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Paul-Greatly appreciate all of your inspired work. I have shared many of your substack pieces with my dozen book club friends and I selected and will present The Wake at next months club gathering. Should make for a great discussion. Thanks for all that you do. It is resonating with many and I suspect very few are tiring of you speaking of religion or spirituality. Your essays are substack gems.

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Around 500 hundred years ago the western civilisation burned alive around 50,000 Human beings. In the name of religion/ Christianity. They burned them alive with the Bible in hand. They accused them of witchcraft making potions/poison and being different. But they didn’t burn them all. They have been planning there revenge. The humans you call the Machine have control through knowledge. They have the code to the book that made men burn women! The bible is the book of Fractunation. You put people in trance using Fractunation then implant commands or false memory while under trance. They have the money. They are the power. There having there revenge. Look deep inside your Soul good Sir and understand that you are a God as I am and every other Human on this planet is connected to us and all our beautiful Lights in side us make the Divine Light. We burned ourselves with bible in hand once before.

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I admit it has taken 40 odd years to get my head around. But the last couple of years have left me with no confusion just grieve.

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If there is anything that I can help you with what I said I would be glad to Paul.

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John Heers through WAWTAR is shaping the way I want to have conversations, especially around Orthodoxy.

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founding

Hi, Paul. Looking forward to whatever comes next on this project! Your work has been extremely impactful, in a positive way, on my life in these past couple of years. Just as a word of caution as you explore creation and evolution: be very careful about falling into a false dichotomy. Be sure to distinguish between the actual science of evolutionary biology and the philosophies it is often used in support of/the philosophical milieu in which it was developed. The former is in zero conflict with Orthodox Christianity while the latter truly is. Having watched the video, John Heers utterly confused the two. His objections were to a metaphysical materialism and to reductionism. Those are not necessary components of any science. Almost everyone, Christian or not, who goes on about the supposed conflict between any science, with evolution being a favorite, has a failure of understanding, be it in understanding the relevant Scriptures, the philosophical questions, Christian theology and how it relates to the natural world, or in understanding the science. The science of evolutionary biology is as well supported as anything can be in science; the Christian understanding of the world is not dependent upon any particular scientific understanding of the world, but it does have a lot to say about what that science can or cannot, does or does not mean. Rejecting reductionistic materialism does not entail the falseness of the absolute glut of paleontological and genetic evidence in favor of evolutionary biology nor the successful predictions both in the lab and in the wild of the theoretical framework. Medical applications abound, which is more evidence (and please distinguish between this and the medical institutions you are rightly leery of). Hell, we have even witnessed speciation, the evolution of one species into another, in the lab and we've captured it on video; it happened exactly as evolutionary biology would predict. While we do not have a full scientific understanding of our natural history, so our current scientific understanding is not the pinnacle, it is well supported enough that it is not likely to be overturned, but will likely be understood in a broader context, much as Newtonian physics wasn't overturned, but came to be seen as a special case of a more general understanding, be that from the quantum or general relativistic frameworks. Indeed, this expansion is currently being debated; look up the Expanded Evolutionary Synthesis if interested. What you will not find in this debate is that evolution via natural selection is false, only that it is only one among many drivers. Further, virtually everyone who has studied this science in depth sees it as accurate within its domain, regardless of theological commitments. So the vast majority of Christians who study this for a living see it as neither false, nor in conflict with their faith. Indeed, the only people who see it as a false science already had a prejudice in favor of its falseness. We Americans are peculiarly interested in this question in a way other Christians simply aren't. This goes for American Orthodox as well. And we American Christians are the ones most likely to see a conflict, and those outside of the United States that do, do so often because of American influence.

The relationship between science and Christianity is something I've thought a lot about. While I'm not an expert in any science nor really any subject, I do have some scientific education (just a Bachelors of Science in Physics) and I spend most of my free time reading theology and related topics. I was raised a non-denominational Evangelical Protestant and a Young Earth Creationist, have since become Anglican, and am contemplating conversion to Orthodoxy. As my faith has become more traditional and my worldview more enchanted, I have come to have less problems with well supported science.

Indeed, my greater appreciation of my ancient faith and a greater appreciation of scientific knowledge (in terms of it being a part of wisdom, not in terms of the Baconian philosophy driving much of it or in terms of its technological applications) have not only gone hand in hand, but have often driven one another.

This isn't the forum for doing so, but if you'd like a conversation from a different perspective on the subject than John Heers', but one that is highly sympathetic to his concerns and to what you've been doing here and elsewhere, I'd be happy to be in correspondence with you, by email or even hand-written letters. Just let me know, but whatever you do and wherever you end up on this or anything else, God bless you and thank you for sharing your sorely needed perspectives!

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Apr 7, 2023·edited Apr 7, 2023

Paul, I’m curious: my subscription period runs from October to October: does the special offer remain valid till Oct 2023, i.e. if I pay the reduced price now, the subscription will simply keep running from Oct for the following year? When I pressed the button it just took me to my profile page, with apparently no further action visible. Many thanks.

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On a completely different (but thematic) track. I came across an article on Thomas Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow. I remember back in college it was a hip read and if you could actually wind your way through (or maybe pretended you did) it was a signal of a great hipster intellectual merit. Nothing against the novel, mind you. I, alas, failed twice to make it very far into it--to my hipster-cred shame!

But according to the article the novel is a premonition of some solid Kingsnorthian themes.

https://compactmag.com/article/pynchon-s-prophecy

Now that hipsterdom has fallen it might be worth giving the novel another shot. Maybe.

Paul- The Abbey has been quite a ride thus far. I am interested in how this phase wraps up...and what comes next. -Jack

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Apr 7, 2023Liked by Paul Kingsnorth

Paul, nice touch with the Percy French painting. Percy was the kind of man that rarely exists in the West today. He was a civil engineer who became a prolific Irish songwriter, poet and artist.

That we struggle mightily to produce men like that today is further condemnation of The Machine.

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I believe the witch hunts were just cleaning up the last of The Templars and Gnostics.

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Apr 7, 2023Liked by Paul Kingsnorth

Thank you Paul for all your revelatory writings, I have learned a great deal. Orthodox in general do not evangelize but the Orthodox story needs to be told more often and in my opinion who better to tell it than one who has been found and brought into the fold. Please continue to share your faith; I believe it’s what you are being called to do. Have a blessed Pascha.

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So glad you're able (hopefully) to get to the midwest. I've been sending links to these essays to many of my Chicago area friends, and they really resonate. Road trip in the fall!

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I see your name being referenced by other writers alot ( Medium Substack and the like ) Must be a good thing right? Usually they will say something like " Kingsnorth wants to flee to the wilds" and something about a new type of Christian worship. Anyway the Lord really blessed me in a strange way today. I am honestly sitting here in almost shock. My needs are not always what I would think are the Lords way but dang He Loves unconditionally is all I can say. Happy Easter to you and your readers. Looking forward to more.

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Apr 7, 2023Liked by Paul Kingsnorth

Happy Easter! Well, you have one more week to go but I’m Catholic, writing on Good Friday, sliding into Easter and the celebration of the Resurrection.

Just finished a sublime Triduum, in Latin, chants in semi-darkness. Yes, the old Latin rite, still alive in a few churches and extremely packed, mostly by people under 50, hungry for the mysterious and the spiritual. It’s fashionable to shout doom and gloom from the rooftops but there is the light. “Et lux in tenebris lucet et tenebrae eam non comprehenderunt” (John 1:5). And the light shineth in the darkness and the darkness did not comprehend it. God is in control. He has always been in control. The deception of the world is to convince people that they’ve been abandoned.

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All rule tends to be or become misrule. A slight variation of "Power tends to corrupt." The rule (Kingdom) of God is the only exception because it is not of this world. Why is there so much corruption in "the church?" Because "the church" as it self-identifies is not an arm of God; it is a self-appointed rule, falsely claiming to be of God. Churches, church leaders, and church hierarchies are sons (and daughters) of Balaam, false prophets as he was. The only difference is that Balaam had an ass that spoke truth.

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