DFCS agent Ron Wilkins said that the abuse, which was both physical and psychological, was some of the strangest and most severe he has seen in years. “Homeschoolers are obviously more prone to abuse than others, which is why you have to keep a close eye on them. But what was happening here really defies explanation,” Wilkins said. “Nobody, and certainly no child, should ever have to endure something like this.”

The Garners allegedly had placed small, hard, uncomfortable seats in a small room of the house that was allegedly sectioned off for “learning.” The children were forced to sit in the tiny chairs for hours upon end, sometimes up to eight hours, were not allowed to get up or move around, and were only permitted to use the bathroom certain times of the day. They were not allowed outside except for a small thirty-minute window, similar to what is done in American penitentiaries. Wilkins claims that this was not the worst of it, however. “These children were subjected not only to unthinkable physical torture, but were treated like animals. When certain periods of the day ended, a loud bell was rung to prod them to move on to the next subject, or to go to a different room. It was just ghastly.”

Though this kind of torture lasted for seven to eight hours of the day, it wasn’t even the end. Even after children were permitted to leave their small seats, they were required to perform endless rote problems for many more hours, sometimes as late as 8 or 9 pm each night. “These are children we’re talking about,” said Wilkins, “We as adults are not subjected to this level of mental exhaustion – what parent would do this to a pre-teen child?”

The Garners did not speak to the police nor have they released any statement as of this morning. Marvin Gladstone, the Garners’ attorney, claims that the arrest was unwarranted. “My clients did not do anything wrong. Once the evidence is brought to light, they will be exonerated.” He stated that his clients were merely trying to take their task of homeschooling seriously and that no abuse was intended whatsoever.

DFCS, however, disagrees. They claim that the treatment of their two children, having gone on for so many years with such consistency, shows an organised and calculated attempt to brainwash their children and to destroy any sense of identity in them. DFCS child psychologist Renee Nesbitt agrees. “You can’t claim that you love your children, and then subject them to this level of bizarre abuse for years on end. The small wooden chairs, the constant ringing of a harsh fire-alarm like bell, the prohibition on speaking, moving, and going outside – it’s despicable,” Nesbitt said. “You might as well send them to a concentration camp.” Nesbitt plans on testifying against the Garners in their upcoming hearing. Nesbitt also claims that she has evidence that the children were routinely drugged with stimulants and anti-depressants in order to allow them to cope with the extremely restrictive and controlling treatment. Though she remains somewhat hopeful, Nesbitt concluded by saying she is unsure if the children will ever be able to recover fully given the breadth and intensity of the abuse.

The Garner children are currently staying with relatives until a long term solution can be found.

So I set up an account with a company, which I will here call the ABCDE (American Bureaucratic Council of Documentation for Engineers) and went through the process of having them vet my background. One of the things I had to do was to send them a copy of my college transcripts. They include in their package a document that has to be signed, sealed, and embossed by the registrar stating that the transcripts are official. So I printed the form, and went down to Georgia Tech, ordered a set of transcripts, had them fill out the ABCDE form and then had them mail it to the ABCDE. Below is what transpired between me and them.

Finally, just like the name of the firm I used, all personal names have been changed as well.

*              *              *

From: Emily Gilmour

To: Dave Hodges

Sent:Wed, February 9, 201110:28:49 AM

Subject: ABCDE Records Program

ABCDE received the transcript from the Georgia Tech, but they are stamped “ISSUED TO STUDENT”.  Please contact the university and request that official transcripts are issued to and sent directly to ABCDE.

Thank you,

Emily Gilmour

Records Coordinator

*              *              *

From: Dave Hodges

Sent:Wednesday, February 09, 201110:51 AM

To: Emily Gilmour

Subject: Re: ABCDE Records Program

Dear Ms Gilmour:

I confess to being somewhat confused. The transcripts are not any less official because they say “ISSUED TO STUDENT”. I thought that the ABCDE form – signed and stamped by the registrar – was supposed to handle the official nature of the transcripts.

The transcripts were issued and sent directly to the ABCDE. I did not ever see them, intercept them, or even hold them. I paid for them to print them and drove all the way out there to hand them the ABCDE form so that they could stamp them. I fail to see how having the words, “ISSUED TO STUDENT” somehow nullifies their official nature, as the registrar was required to indicate on the form.

But whatever. I realise that bureaucracies rarely employ common sense during the course of their activities, so I won’t waste any of your time. Bottom line: do I need to have them fill out and stamp the same ABCDE form again with another set of transcripts that doesn’t have the offending words on them or can I have them just send you a new set of transcripts?

Kindest regards,

Dave Hodges

*              *              *

From: Emily Gilmour

To: Dave Hodges

Sent:Wed, February 9, 201112:20:44 PM

Subject: RE: ABCDE Records Program

Per our application instructions, official transcripts must be sent directly to ABCDE from the university.  You will need to request that the university issue official transcripts to ABCDE and for the university mail them to our office.

Thank you,

Emily Gilmour

Records Coordinator

*              *              *

From: Dave Hodges

Sent:Wednesday, February 09, 20111:43 PM

To: Emily Gilmour

Subject: Re: ABCDE Records Program

Dear Ms Gilmour:

Let me say this again: the transcripts were sent directly to ABCDE from the Georgia Institute of Technology. In what way are the transcripts not official? Did you or did you not receive the ABCDE form, signed and sealed by the registrar? In what kind of envelope did the transcripts arrive at the ABCDE records office? Was it sent from a residence or was it sent from Georgia Tech?

Please show me some form of evidence that application instructions have not been followed. You have presented me no reason to think otherwise.

Warmest regards,

Dave Hodges

*              *              *

From: Emily Gilmour

To: Dave Hodges

Sent:Wed, February 9, 20112:10:21 PM

Subject: RE: ABCDE Records Program

The transcripts are specifically marked “ISSUED TO : David J. Hodge   -  PICK UP”.   The transcripts cannot be issued to the student, the transcripts must be issued to ABCDE.

*              *              *

From: Dave Hodges

Sent:Wednesday, February 09, 20112:29 PM

To: Emily Gilmour

Subject: Re: ABCDE Records Program

Dear Ms Gilmour:

You stated that the requirement was that they be sent directly to the ABCDE by the university. That requirement was fulfilled. They are official and the registrar himself sent a signed and sealed statement to that effect. They say that they are issued to me because I was the one who ordered them. Those things are not free, and I had to drive all the way out there with the ABCDE form to show them what they needed to fill out.

The official transcripts were sent by the university directly to the ABCDE. What difference does it make whose name is on the front if you know that they’re official transcripts?

My first question still was not answered though: Do you need another ABCDE form signed and stamped by the registrar or is all you need the transcripts with ABCDE written in nice pretty letters somewhere on it?

Another is being mailed now, but I need to know if I need to give them another form.

Hugs and kisses,

Dave Hodges

*              *              *

From: Maude Johannsen

To: Dave Hodges

Cc: Emily Gilmour; Gertrude Hoffmann

Sent:Wed, February 9, 20113:14:35 PM

Subject: RE: ABCDE Records Program

Dear Mr. Hodges:

Please contact your university to request transcripts to be forwarded directly to our office from your university. The transcript release form is not required, however, I am attaching the form to this email if you would like to use it. My department receives numerous transcripts from Georgia Technological University [What is that? –DH]. All transcripts received directly from this institution are listed as being issued to ABCDE.  Please direct any further inquiries regarding your application to my attention.

I expect my department to provide excellent customer service throughout this process, but I expect for all parties to conduct themselves in a professional manner which includes using the appropriate language.

Please let me know if I can be of further assistance.

Maude Johannsen

Manager of Records

*              *              *

From: Dave Hodges

Sent:Wednesday, February 09, 20112:29 PM

To: Maude Johannsen

Cc: Emily Gilmour; Gertrude Hoffmann

Subject: Re: ABCDE Records Program

Dear Ms Johannsen:

The university was contacted and they agreed to re-send a copy of the official transcripts with a different arrangement of letters on the front label, though the content of the transcripts (the only thing that actually matters) will be completely unchanged. I wanted to think of a cheaper and more efficient way to ameliorate the problem but I could only think of three things in the span of ten seconds that would take no time and cost no money and accomplish the same thing. To be on the safe side, I also forwarded them a copy of the ABCDE form and asked if they could fill it out again and staple it to the new set of transcripts.

Your department has not ceased to provide excellent customer service, but my bafflement over the inefficiency of bureaucracies has increased by a small margin. Of course, this is to be expected, so do not think that it reflects poorly on you or your staff in any way – it is simply an essential trait of the type of company for which you work: enormous quantities of information, a surplus of paperwork, an excess of procedures and rules, and an absolute dearth of common sense. This is not to imply that you or your staff are lacking in common sense. It is to imply that bureaucracies by their very nature prevent and punish the use of common sense in lieu of following exact procedure, no matter how expensive or utterly useless said procedure may actually be.

I am not aware of any inappropriate language used on either side, but if you can point me to the words that give particular offence, I will happily retract them.

Affectionately,

Dave Hodges

*              *              *

From: Maude Johannsen

To: Dave Hodges

Cc: Emily Gilmour ; Gertrude Hoffmann

Sent: Thu,February 10, 201110:00:09 AM

Subject: RE: ABCDE Records Program

Dear Mr. Hodge:

Signing a professional email as “Hugs & Kisses” is inappropriate and offensive to my staff. I would assume in your profession you do not address all emails in that manner. Please let me know if I can be of further assistance.

Regards,

Maude Johannsen

Manager of Records

*              *              *

From: Dave Hodges

To: Maude Johannsen

Sent: Thu,February 10, 201110:43:11 AM

Subject: Re: ABCDE Records Program

Dear Ms Johannsen:

I apologise for the lighthearted attempt at humour amidst a string of very frustrating communication snafus. I was under the mistaken notion that after receiving several robotic replies that failed to address any of my questions coherently, that perhaps the one responding to me was not even human but was rather some sort of mailer daemon programme written by undergraduate computer science majors. Therefore, the phrase should not have been taken as some form of suggestive advance nor was it intended to be received with an air of impropriety.

Nevertheless, since I believe that even bureaucrats might also have feelings and sensibilities like everyone else, I do apologise and retract the words as they clearly were misunderstood. At no point was anything inappropriate intended by the phrase, “Hugs and kisses.” Please forgive the imprudent use thereof on my part. Since all correspondence was requested to be sent to you directly, please forward this apology to Ms Gilmour and express to her on my behalf my sincere regret for the offence given to her. As you correctly noted, I do not use that phrase with all emails in my profession. In fact, now that I have had a chance to reflect on my actions, I now realise that the phrase presupposes at least a small amount of familiarity and congeniality, and is therefore completely inappropriate when corresponding with a company that epitomises depersonalisation.

I am very grateful for the service your department provides to engineers and surveyors, and if my application is approved, I will know then that the hundreds of dollars and hours I have funneled into this process over the last several years will not have been wasted. Finally, I would correct your misspelling of my name, but since it was probably not intentional, nor was intended to give offence, I will not make an issue of it.

Sincerely,

Applicant No. 57122

Last year, my family and I ventured north to Brooklyn to spend some much needed time with my wife’s family. Originally, we had intended to stay but for a few days and then return. Seeing that the time spent was so short, and the travel time disproportionately long, I decided that I would return on a bus ride and my wife and children could stay for a much longer visit. Since I was not equipped for a long ride back to the south, I asked my father-in-law for some reading material to keep me occupied on the way back. He happily obliged and gave me a stack of three or four books to keep me company. Of these books was a plain, black paperback with the riveting title, The Collapse of Complex Societies. I know, it may not have New York Times bestseller written all over it, but if you know me, you know that such is some of my favourite reading material. I happily jumped into the book, not knowing what awaited me.

The book was quite engaging from the very beginning. The author, Dr Joseph Tainter, begins by defining collapse and highlights several key traits: less social stratification, less economic specialisation, less information processing, less centralised control, less communication and trading, and division into smaller political units. One thing that Dr Tainter notes is that complexity exists on a continuum. It is not as though civilisations go from primitive and leap immediately into giant bureaucracies. Rather, complexity increases slowly over time as new methods are implemented to increase productivity, ease of travel and communication, or make resources more readily available.

The next thing he does is to describe several dozen collapses that have occurred throughout history and then offers many of the various theories to explain collapse and offer an assessment of each one. The theories include resource depletion, natural catastrophe, foreign invaders, mystical explanations, and finally economic problems. He methodically explains the strengths and weaknesses of each theory and offers his own insight as to why each one comes up short in explaining what has been observed as a universal occurrence. One of his more powerful arguments is that complex societies are noted for their abilities to deal with natural catastrophes and foreign invaders; thus, a society collapsing because of one of these things explains nothing but is rather something that must be explained. Rome spent many generations effectively toppling foreign empires and resisting invaders – it is not an explanation for the Roman collapse that armies invaded Rome. That foreign armies were able to conquer the greatest standing army of the known world is something that demands an explanation.

The next portion of his work delves into a discussion of the law of diminishing returns as it applies to complex societies. This law is universal and immutable; there is simply no avoiding it. Case in point: if you wish to clean all the rubbish out if your garage, it might take you five minutes to get half of it out. It would take you a half an hour to get three-fourths of it out. And if you wish to clean it and organise it from top to bottom, it may well take five to six hours. This applies to farming an acre of land, removing impurities from metals, extracting energy from a barrel of oil, and everything else in the known world.

And it certainly applies to complex societies and the various problems they have to solve to maintain their complexity. In my last entry I wrote the following regarding the additional energy that we expend in order to have luxuries like cooler homes in the summer:

We now have electricity to light up our homes, power our refrigerators, and keep our homes cool in the summer. But we have to pay electric bills. To pay electric bills requires money, so we work at someplace. But we no longer own land, so now we must pay a man for a place to exist. So we work even more at that place. And the job we found is fifty kilometres away, so now we have to have an automobile, and must maintain it, fuel it, insure it, and pay obligatory taxes on it. So we work some more. Still, we have to communicate with the people with whom we now work, so we purchase an internet connection at home so that we can stay in contact with everybody efficiently. And that costs money, of course, so we work more. But then we have to eat. How could we forget about eating? Why, it is practically an afterthought nowadays. After all this work, we forgot that we still have to eat. And we are no longer in our own yards growing our own food – indeed we are rarely even home at all – so we have to pay somebody else to get our food for us. And so we work some more.

And all of this extra work says nothing of the expenditures that the energy company racks up in order to provide us with electricity. They must design and build a power plant, move coal from the ground to the power plant, have an enormous infrastructure of towers and power lines, engineers to design them, a team of people to maintain them, and must make sure that the energy they produce at any given power plant is sufficient for the network of customers for whom they are providing this service. And at each level, the sheer number of people and man-hours involved is simply staggering. Being an engineer myself, I can tell you that there is nothing in this task that is of little importance. And when you require scores of engineers, those engineers have to be managed, and generally have to work in a common location, requiring even more resources than have been mentioned thus far. And all of this is for cool houses in the summer (or refrigeration in general) and swift means to do laundry and cook food.

Like any system which is subject to the law of diminishing marginal returns, there comes a point where it does not make economic sense to press any farther. Take taxation, for instance. A government may increase taxes in order to finance its own diminishing returns. But as taxes become more oppressive and more unwelcome on the populace, people will begin evading them altogether. And when that happens, the state then has to hire people to enforce the new tax laws. At some point, it becomes economically unfeasible to pursue any higher tax rate and at that point, regression is the only economic option.

But when I hear of upcoming collapse, I do not see it as a bad thing. Interestingly enough, neither does Dr Tainter. He admits that collapse is not always bad, but is sometimes the most economically sensible thing to do. When you cease to get returns on something, then that line of progress should be abandoned. In ancient societies, this resulted in large empires dissolving into smaller city-states with smaller governing bodies that could work well within the confines of the newer, smaller systems.

The problem nowadays is that civilisations are so complex, that collapse could be catastrophic since so few people actually know how to produce things that are actually needed to sustain life. I have long since lamented that so many people are experts in market research but could not grow a single tomato plant or butcher a chicken. In our case, collapse might be devastating for everybody who was not involved in primary caloric production.

Which brings me to the same point I have been heralding for some time: people who are aware of how stretched thin our current system is would do well to learn how to become primary calorie producers, not secondary and tertiary calorie consumers. My family and I are now pursuing our second attempt to garden. Having learnt from last year’s mistakes, we are hopeful that we will be able to bring in more than we did last year. In some years, we hope to be raising livestock as well. I also plan on learning to hunt this year. I would that more families did the same.

Though collapse is inevitable with our current trajectory, this can be a very good thing, especially for those of us who are weary of the state demanding so much of our livelihood. Income taxes, property taxes, social security numbers, driver’s licenses, &c. have become nuisances for many of us who do not depend on the government dole for survival. For those who depend on it, well, that is another thing entirely. [Tainter concludes that collapse is going to happen again, but since there is no portion of the world undiscovered any more, that collapse cannot happen without its being a simultaneous global collapse. Local collapse, he argues, is impossible since if one regime fails, a local stable regime will immediately pick up where the failed one left off. With this conclusion I cannot agree or disagree but I do think he makes a valid point and it is hard to counter.]

One thing that struck me soundly about Dr Tainter’s work is that he clearly places some of the blame for the Roman collapse on the debasement of currency. Now this statement in itself does not strike me at all odd; in fact, I agree with it as it seems indisputable fact. What struck me was that he, a mainstream archaeologist, basically asserts that the modern monetary policy we have in the West, is a prime vehicle for collapse. Monetary realists have been saying this for a century, but every time somebody has the gall to admit this in a mainstream news source, they are looked at as kooks and tin-foil hat wearers.

Nero was the first of the Roman emperors to begin the trend of currency debasement and his successors found it all too effective. Instead of paying for the costs of the regime up front, why not borrow a line of credit as it were from future generations to finance current expenditures? This could only go on for so long though, before the populace lost all confidence in the half-silver, half-iron denarius that was being paid by the Roman government to its employees. Inflation had accelerated to biblical proportions before the entire system collapsed as the Roman state could no longer afford its bread-and-circus budgets. But this was not a bad thing for everybody. Indeed, as Tainter notes, many of the peasant farmers welcomed the barbarian invaders with open arms as the barbarians were far more efficient since they were not burdened by the grotesque Roman bureaucracy that had sapped the populace for the last three centuries of all its wealth.

So I find myself with a slightly more optimistic outlook for now. I doubt that collapse will come so soon as to disrupt my immediate goals for my family. I hope I have enough time to learn to farm, grow livestock, extract some needed power from the sun and wind, &c. before the giant American empire finally comes falling to the ground. I am hopeful that if the intelligent people of this country can learn the same, one by one, we can remove our families from the grid and learn self-sufficiency. This will actually cause the collapse to happen more quickly though, as the ones paying into the system will decrease whilst those receiving from the system will increase.

Even so, let the economic chips fall where they may; and may the American empire of bread and circuses become yet another study in the collapse of complex societies.

If we burn our wings
Flying too close to the sun
If the moment of glory
Is over before it’s begun
If the dream is won
Though everything is lost
We will pay the price
But we will not count the cost

In our case, we have certainly paid the price, yet we did not count the cost. Or if we did, it was too late. And what have we lost?

Some might argue that we have lost nothing, and only gained. This rapid spike in industry and technology came as a result of capitalism in the West. Along with capitalism came two new virtues: endless production and the accumulation of wealth. All of these new discoveries were supposed to give us more time, so that we would be working less and enjoying creation all the more. But has that actually happened?

Let us compare what we have now to what was possessed a thousand years ago. In the middle ages, a serf was the absolute lowest a person could be on the social and economic totem pole. He was tantamount to a slave. Many people are surprised to learn how much time was he obligated to spend in service to his lord. The answer? Three days a week. The other four were for him and his family. The lord saw to it that the land was kept safe (that is what the knights were for) and that the manor was run civilly and according to common law. The food raised by the peasants was used by all. Each group had its own peculiar function on the manor and each person lived in a symbiotic relationship with others.

Capitalism changed just about all of that. We now have all the luxuries of having most of the peasant’s work done automatically, and yet we work more and more. And most of us have to travel long distances to get to work instead of working in our own gardens. The net result is that we are driving two hours a day to get to a place that was in one time a day’s journey away, and spending two-thirds of our waking hours there. When we return home, we scarcely have time to eat dinner and see the family, when then we must retire for an early rise the next day. And instead of each member of the manor working for the benefit of others, the symbiotic relationship described above has been replaced by a cutthroat approach to economics: competition is seen as the great saviour of mankind, second only to the Almighty Market.

And what, if I may ask, are we working for exactly?

In short, we are working to perpetuate an entire system that exists solely for its own sake. We now have electricity to light up our homes, power our refrigerators, and keep our homes cool in the summer. But we have to pay electric bills. To pay electric bills requires money, so we work at someplace. But we no longer own land, so now we must pay a man for a place to exist. So we work even more at that place. And the job we found is fifty kilometres away, so now we have to have an automobile, and must maintain it, fuel it, insure it, and pay obligatory taxes on it. So we work some more. Still, we have to communicate with the people with whom we now work, so we purchase an internet connection at home so that we can stay in contact with everybody efficiently. And that costs money, of course, so we work more. But then we have to eat. How could we forget about eating? Why, it is practically an afterthought nowadays. After all this work, we forgot that we still have to eat. And we are no longer in our own yards growing our own food – indeed we are rarely even home at all – so we have to pay somebody else to get our food for us.

And so we work some more.

Now we find ourselves working outside of home (and travelling to and from home) fifty or more hours per week to maintain something that would not even be necessary if only we could return to our land, farm it for ourselves, and be left alone. It would be work we would be doing as families, together, for the common good of each other. To be sure, we would have plenty of work with the task of feeding ourselves, but it would be work worth doing.

Indeed, feeding oneself is so central to our existence as human creatures. Part of the survival of man, both as an individual and as a collective, has been his ability to feed himself. Surviving long winters, battling woolly mammoths, learning to grow grain, gather berries, and catch fish is just part of what our ancestors had to do in order for us to be here to-day. So much of the day was spent catching and preparing food. Why? Because food spoils. They did not have either refrigerators or preservatives in those days, so most food had to be caught or gathered fresh.

To be human required a knowledge of food and how to find it and prepare it. It required a respect of the land on which you lived. It required many things that the modern environmentalist movement would recognise as good but for which they will never actually do anything to actualise.

But I want to up the ante here a little bit. Food and eating are not merely physical issues. We do not eat merely to fill a void in our stomach, nor merely to fuel ourselves. We eat socially. We eat to celebrate a good occasion or as an opportunity to get to know somebody. We have entire mating rituals which begin with a fabulously prepared dinner.

We eat spiritually as well. Many of the world’s religions have the consumption of food as some sort of Sacrament. In the pages of the Christian Scriptures we find God talking about eating constantly. Sometimes, there are commands that people eat a certain way, sometimes that they fast, and other times that they feast. God shewed His compassion on the Israelites by showering them with a day’s supply of bread every morning. Jesus Himself claimed to be the Bread from Heaven and instituted the most glorious Eucharist. In the Apocalypse, Christ further claims to stand at the door and knock; His stated motive is none other than to enter into the house and eat with you. If eating is so central to our lives, physically and spiritually, what do you suppose happens to our humanity when eating is taken away from its original context?

Allow me to elaborate here. All of these spiritual analogies to food cease to have the same impact when we are removed from our first callings as people. Penitential seasons and feasting seasons lose a great deal of meaning without the inevitable relationships with the land and livestock that come from living on a farm. Being removed from food production takes away the process of fattening a cow in anticipation for the Paschal feast, or a goose for the Nativity. Conversely, one misses the impact of penances such as relying only on vegetables and water during Lent or fasting during the Ember Days at the change of seasons. There is a whole spiritual dimension to food which is lost when it becomes the output of a factory instead of the result of a man’s gruelling efforts against earth and element.

Most people in our society have nothing to do with the food they consume. Less money is spent on food as well as less time compared to times past. Food, instead of being the focus of so much of what we do in life, has become an afterthought. Something you can pick up in your car. On your way home from work. Maybe you can even eat it whilst talking on your cell phone.

Food has gone from being a central aspect of the human condition to being a necessary evil at worst, or an annoyance at best, in our quest for mammon and electrical toys. Why do families not eat together like they used to? Oftentimes it is because they are glued to the television, a video game system, the internet, or some other hideous diversion. All this extra time we were supposed to have, and how have we spent it? Making better food? Getting to know our children better? No – by finding new and inventive ways of distracting ourselves.

Humans do not need a whole lot for survival above the basics: food, water, shelter, companionship. The mechanised society has given us monstrous foodlike products, fluoridated water, and shelter that we have to pay to use – and all of these are given at the expense of true brotherly companionship which we lose through the endless pursuit of mammon.

Let us review the supposed benefits of technology:

1) Makes life easier.
2) Less work to do so that we can spend more time with leisure.
3) Higher standard of living.
4) Helps us reconnect with friends that are far away.

Now, let us evaluate each one. We now get up early and stay up late, and most of our time is spent away from our families. We actually work many more hours than we would have before and rarely have any time for leisure. In some aspects we certainly do have a higher standard of living, but unfortunately for many, it is at the expense of debt and usury, not actual ownership. And yes, we are able to connect with friends that are far away, but this comes at a great expense to the loss of those who are closest to us – our families. Yes, I do like to be able to send an email to my friend from first grade. I would happily give up that privilege if I could be with my children for the entire day.

So has it really been all worth it? Hard to say, honestly. How many of us would so quickly abandon the monstrosity of a system we have built and return to the land? As much as I would like to do so, I am completely unprepared. I know nothing of farming and the tools required to live off the land. I would need a good apprenticeship at Polyface Farm before I could ever hope to have any sort of success. And to embark on such an adventure, I would have to have a year’s expenses already saved up. And I would only be able to use the knowledge I had gained if I owned land. Which I do not. So that brings me straight back to the self-feeding hive which I have already granted that I want nothing to do with. But in order to survive, I must plug myself back in. Indeed, in order to remove myself from it one day, I have to stay in it for long enough to acquire the necessary raw materials to begin on my own apart from it.

So that is where I stand now: looking to a time in the future where I can happily cut myself off from the insanity of the modern way of life, and return to the land as it was intended to be used. I realise that this is not for everybody. But I have seen through the façade and have no desire to be a part of it any more.

It is the vanity of vanities; striving after wind. We made comfort our end, and wonder why we lost our souls.

Nowadays, many questions get thrown around and it is important to recognise the intent behind the question. Does the asker only want information? Does he have a hidden agenda? Why is the information important to the asker? What does the question reveal about the asker himself? This last question is the one I particularly want to deal with, because so many times people decide to answer questions that really should not be answered – and if they should not be answered, they should not have been asked either.

You see, many times questions show a person’s true colours. I once heard somebody ask, “How many Palestinian civilians have been killed in the Israel/Palestine conflict?” Now, this may appear to be an innocent question: something that one might be able to look up on Wikipedia, for instance. But just because said information might be available on the internet does not mean that we should answer this question. Why? Because the person asking this question was not concerned with how many accidental deaths have occurred due to the IDF’s endless battles against terrorism. What the person was doing was using an “innocent question” as a vehicle for criticism of Israel, which is basically just hatred. This is unacceptable.

First of all, to ask such a question assumes from the very beginning that Palestinians are not terrorists who have been firing rockets into Israel for the last forty years. Notice the subtle placement of “civilians” right after Palestinians. Also notice how the asker paired up Israel, an established democratic nation who has every right to exist, with Palestine, which does not even exist. Clearly, the question shows the asker to be what he is: a hate-filled anti-Semite. And once we can decipher what is really happening with the question, we realise that the question should not be answered, nor should it even be asked. As such, it is our responsibility – instead of dignifying the question with an answer – to call out the person for what he is.

To answer the question, and all of its absurd assumptions, is to play in the hands of people who are fuelled by hate. To pretend that the question is in any wise innocent is to accept the anti-Semitic beliefs of the asker. The only proper response is to state loudly and clearly that the asker is an anti-Semite. Shout it from the rooftops for all to hear so that that will be known firstly that you will not accept the asker’s reprehensible beliefs, nor will you participate in his hate. Questions about Israel foreign policy almost always boil down to anti-Semitism. If you see a person who is critical of Jewish people, and tries to cover up his criticism by asking a question, you can rest assured that anti-Semitism lies behind the question. Indeed, anti-Semitism is at the bottom of their heart as well. Criticism of Israel cannot be tolerated. It’s hate, and everybody knows it.

But that is just one example. Questions like this are quite common in this day and age. For instance, when people say, “Where was Obama born?” They are not asking for information on the location of his hospital delivery. Far from it. They are asserting – in a loud and clear way – that they are racists. And since they won’t come out and say it, we have to take it upon ourselves to do so. Contrary to popular belief, this sort of name-calling is the only way to deal with this as it gets right to the heart of the matter. You must refuse to be taken aside with red herrings and such. You must be willing, hard as it may be, to stand firmly, point your finger, and identify who that person really is. Because what that person is, is what the question is all about. And you have to be the one to take the mask off and reveal what’s underneath.

Another example can be found in people who ask questions about current events and tragedies. Frequently, they will disguise their intents by pretending to be about the “truth” but looking closely at their questions you can see very quickly that these people are actually completely crazy. When the FBI released the tapes of the Oklahoma City bombing, news reports declared that four or five minutes had been erased from all the tapes just before the bombing occurred. No sooner had this story about such a horrific tragedy been released that loonies started coming out of the woodwork, asking, “Why were all the tapes edited in exactly the same way?” Questions like this are a dead giveaway that the person is a conspiracy theorist. Even to give any sort of response to these idiotic questions is to accept the ridiculous assumptions that lie behind the question.

But these people, not cowed by the fact that they are exploiting a horrible tragedy, will not stop at anything to push their hate, their racism, or their love of planting seeds of doubt in the American people. As if 9/11 wasn’t enough of a tragedy, these senseless cowards continue to ask questions in the name of “truth”. But we can see right through them, and it’s high time that somebody called them out for what they are. Asking questions about the official story of 9-11 is basically an attack on the brave men and women who risked their lives to pull people out of the rubble. Calling for another investigation into the events that led up to that harrowing day is an attack on the 9-11 Commission, who devoted so many hours to get to the bottom of it all. Asking why WTC7 fell down is an attack on America itself and all the ideals she stands for.

When you hear questions like this, do the right thing. Pretend the questions never got asked, point your finger at the asker, and call that person a name. It will do wonders to dish out a dose normalcy to this nation of haters and crazies.

What is not widely known is how exactly I became interested in studying the things that would cause me to question my previously unfailing devotion to Jean Chauvin. Before the Federal Vision controversy ever got started, there was a young man in a small Protestant mission in west Tennessee who had an insatiable love for the Bible and the Church. The pastor of that mission claimed to have the same love, but found himself hotly disagreeing with the young man on more than one occasion. But instead of having open and honest dialogue about the issues that separated the two, the pastor always cut the conversations short, accused the young man of impertinence, and demanded that the young man change his reading habits.

Probably one of the more frustrating aspects of this whole conflict was that, by all accounts, the young man had read more and knew more than the pastor did. But rather than do any reading himself, the pastor merely insisted he was right but could never make a compelling case of his own. The young man had been reading James Jordan, Douglas Wilson, and Peter Leithart. His voracious reading was starting to cause problems in the little mission, and the pastor phoned home for some help.

This started the RPCUS’ investigation into what would later be called “The Federal Vision”. After a brief (and I mean very brief) “investigation” into the movement, a list of resolutions was released condemning the teachings of the speakers at the 2002 Auburn Avenue Pastors’ Conference. When I saw this list of resolutions, it got me thinking about what I really believed. After much reading on both sides of the controversy, I was suddenly made aware of a whole litany of people and events that I never knew about, primarily because they existed or occurred prior to 1517. When I was opened up to a whole new world, about which I knew nothing prior, I was forced to do some serious reading and studying. And as you might imagine, this same thing led the young man at the Protestant mission to do the same. His search for something to satisfy his thirst for knowledge continued elsewhere. And when he found a deeper well in the Catholic Church, his story was hailed as proof of the errors of the Federal Vision.

His story became my story. The young man was Jay Dyer, who inadvertently became the cause for my conversion. Without his experience, I would not have ever been exposed to anything beyond my little sect in north Georgia. For this reason, should I make it to heaven, I will be indebted to him for all eternity.

Recently, after a long bout of studying and soul-searching, he now has left the Roman Church to seek communion with the œcumenical patriarchate of Constantinople. Whilst I am saddened to lose a Catholic friend, I refuse to condemn him or his motives. I remember all too vividly condemning a friend of mine for even looking into the Catholic Church some years back. How foolish it is to condemn without first hearing the whole story.

To-day, Jay remains a very large influence on me. When he left the Roman Church, I saw the criticisms flying. I saw the accusations of bad motives and instability. None of these will I give. Jay has, over the last year, exposed me to more than I could have ever expected to learn from all the traditionalist Catholics in the world. He has opened my eyes to the theology of the East, and more importantly, has shown me why it is such a critical issue for the Church to-day.

For years, I had been content with the arguments of Boëthius and St. Thomas de Aquin for absolute divine simplicity, but when I was presented with the Eastern view, I not only saw the differences between the two views, but also why the Cappadocian Fathers were so insistent upon the distinctions they were making. Since Jay recently announced his decision, discussions have been popping up literally all over the place, and I would like to make a few observations.

Firstly, I remain and am likely to remain a Roman Catholic until my death. But I also recognise that both the eastern and the western patriarchs are pushing for unity. Unity cannot happen and will not happen until the West takes the necessary steps to understand Eastern Theology.

Secondly, traditionalist Roman Catholics who base their entire theology on Ss. Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas without consulting Ss. Athanasius, Maximus, Basil, and Gregory are not really qualified to enter into this discussion. Without doing the requisite reading, you simply cannot claim to have dealt with the force of the Eastern arguments.

Thirdly, though Thomistic philosophy is normative in the West, neither St. Thomas nor his beliefs are infallible. I appreciate heavily the contributions made by St. Thomas to Christian philosophy, but I am not of the deluded opinion that he was above error in his philosophies or works.

Fourthly, if you don’t even know the terminology in which the entire debate is framed, I really do not think that you are competent to have an opinion – pro or con – on the issue. Whilst I would not claim that I understand the issues completely, I understand enough to know that for me to rely exclusively on a few of the Scholastic philosophers is absurd if I am going to engage the Eastern arguments.

Finally, I will always count Jay as the best of friends, regardless of whether he stays with the oriental churches or if he returns to the Roman Church one day. In the numerous battles in which we are currently engaged in this country alone, I count him as an invaluable soldier to have by my side. So whilst I cannot follow him in his decision to leave the Catholic Church, I cannot and will not question his motives or attribute to him anything other than a desire to know and experience God more fully.

Rabbi Moshe Grenkewitz of the B’nith Shabbat School in Tel Aviv stated in a public address to a group of visiting students that the Resurrection of Jesus Christ was “merely a mythical tale meant to convey a moral lesson” and that it has succeeded in popularity only due to the “excessive and fanatical proselytism” of Christianity’s followers.

At a press conference in Malta, speaking for the Catholic cardinalate, Cardinal Antonio Colombo stated, “These words are offensive to Christians everywhere, who have always viewed the Resurrection as a pivotal part of her long history. Such statements by the rabbi are certain to harm Jewish-Catholic relations and hearken back to the ancient persecutions of the Church.” He later stated that such remarks could be seen as an attempt to revive ancient sentiments against Christians and lead to such horrific events as experienced under Diocletian, or even Nero.

Rabbi Grenkewitz dismissed the Cardinal’s words as “nonsense” and expressed both disgust and amazement over the whole issue. “Jews have never believed the Resurrection. That’s what makes us Jews,” the rabbi stated in an interview on an Israeli news programme. He said that to think that just because Jews don’t believe what the Church teaches does not mean that they want to persecute Christians. “Since when do Catholics tell Jews what to believe anyway?” asked the rabbi, “We don’t tell them what to believe.”

The Cardinal, anticipating the rabbi’s comments, claimed that this was not over mere belief but a matter of recorded history. Resurrection denial has carried very stiff penalties in times past, especially in Spain, France, and Germany. The Cardinal closed his statements with grief, stating that the rabbi’s statements set back Jewish-Christian dialogues by almost two millennia.

RIGHT: Cardinal Colombo, representing the Catholic Cardinalate, addresses European reporters in Malta regarding the recent Vatican decision late Friday afternoon.

For instance, it angers me to no end to come home from work only to find that they have destroyed a bunch of their toys and littered the remains all over the house. It drives me absolutely crazy to come home and see the horrible things that they have done to the house – especially when I just want to sit down and take a load off.

My short temper has long been a topic of discussion betwixt my wife and me, and I have known that it is a grave weakness and that if I do not attempt to curb it soon, my children will end up with some very serious problems down the road. Frequently I find myself in my morning prayer time resolving to be good to the children, begging for all the graces of God to come to my aid, crying out to Jesus for help and asking Mary to pray for me. Likewise, every time I enter the confessional I end up having to tell the priest what a rotten father I have been to my children. And over and over again, despite all the best advice in the world, all my prayers, and all my attempts, I still have seen myself as a failure.

Then one day my wife read to me the story of a child who drowned in a swimming pool when the mother had looked away for just a short time. He was two years old, and had permanent brain damage after the incident. His personality was gone, and he would be an invalid for as long as he lived. My heart sunk into my chest. I didn’t even know these people, but it didn’t matter. I could not even bear to think of something that serious happening to one of my own children. Then I considered the fact that things like this happen in God’s timing, and ultimately He is the one who is really in control. Furthermore, God’s timing for everything is a mystery – we don’t know when our own hour will come and how long we will be here in this life. I certainly don’t know how long my children will be here with me. God may chose to take them to-morrow for all I know. This may seriously be the last day that I have with them.

As these thoughts first swirled around in my head, I have to admit – rather painfully – that they had little to no effect on me or my attitude.

The next day was January 1st, which is a Holy Day of Obligation for Catholics: the Feast of the Circumcision of our Lord. I had been up late the night before, and I really didn’t want to go to church that day. But I did anyway, and I took my three-year-old son along with me and left my wife and four daughters (who were mostly sick) at home. I was tired and I didn’t want to be there and my son kept doing really annoying things at very inopportune times. He would take the hymnals out, drop them on the floor, take off and put on his coat over and over again, and stuff like that. I was not in the mood at all and my fuse was running short.

The sermon was about allowing small, venial sins to go on unchecked whilst without our notice we suddenly found ourselves tolerating the serious mortal sins. I asked myself as honestly as I could, “Is this what I am doing?” I brushed the thought away and turned my attention again to my son, who was trying to stand up in the pew and look at the woman sitting behind me. When the sermon ended, I selfishly wondered how much longer it would be before the Mass was over.

Soon the Consecration came, which is the holiest, most solemn portion of the Mass. The entire congregation was silent as usual. The priest silently said the words of consecration, “This is my Body,” elevated the host and the bells were rung thrice.

I shivered as I realised that now Jesus’ presence was made manifest. Jesus, His precious Flesh and Blood, were there present with us in the sanctuary. Of course, this happens at every Mass, but this time it impacted me more than I can describe. I suddenly was overwhelmed with the fact that God, who loved His children so much, deigned to take upon Himself human nature – even to the point of death on a cross – all so that we might be saved. How much would our Father do to make sure that we could be with Him always and ever in eternity? He paid the ultimate price. Here I was, annoyed at my own son just for being a child. And I do not even know how long I will have with him.

Just as the bells were finished ringing and everybody had their heads bowed in adoration, I began to cry. And I looked over at my son – who was already looking at me – and I gave him a smile. Probably the first smile he had seen from me that day. And as he smiled back, he touched my face with his little hand. I hugged him and kissed him right in the middle of the service. I didn’t care if anybody thought it was awkward or strange. For the first time, I thought about what the Father’s love for us is, and what a failure I had been to my own children.

It has been four days since then, and I haven’t had to raise my voice even once to my children. I smile at my children, because I am glad to see them. When I see the messes they make, I can be happy that they are healthy enough to play with toys and I can use the time cleaning up their messes to reflect on the Passion of our Lord and the suffering He endured for our sake. When they fight with one another, I can be a peacemaker as opposed to the household law enforcement. When they are frustrated, I can be their comfort instead of their antagonist. Will I fail again as a father? Of course I will, but now I will never hear the words of the Consecration again without calling to mind the greatness of the Incarnation and Passion of our Lord and what it means for fathers everywhere: what it means to suffer and sacrifice so that your loved ones may be with you forever.

In many of my various discussions regarding the Roman Catholic Church, I end up arguing points with folks from all backgrounds, including everybody from the not-so-distant “Orthodox” to fundamentalist Baptist and everybody in between. Few of these people still hold to the original doctrines espoused by the so-called Reformers, but some do, and talking with them is always interesting. In one of my recent discussions, I came across a nice fellow who believed (along with the rest of the RPCNA) that the Pope is Antichrist, and more specifically, the man of sin represented in St. Paul’s second epistle to the Christians in Thessalonica. He posed a challenge for me, to wit: that I prove from Holy Writ alone that the Pope – or, the succession of Popes – is not the “man of sin” spoken of therein. This alone, he explained, was his reason for rejecting the Catholic Church. The following post is based on my response to his challenge.

It must be said from the outset that I cannot prove to anybody that the Pope, or that all the collective bishops of Rome are not the singular “man of sin” mentioned in the Scriptures. The reason for this is the same reason that nobody can prove to me that he is (or they are), based on the Scriptures alone. One can offer his private opinion and I can offer mine, but at the end of the day, each man retains the prerogative of whom or what he will believe in terms of an interpretative scheme and why. Since I have no control over that, whether or not I have proven anything, always resides with the listener and with him alone. I might reverse the challenge and make my opponent “prove” that the Church that Jesus established was actually the many thousands of Protestant sects which would appear many hundreds of years later; at the end of the day, I would be the sole judge of whether or not he had proven this satisfactorily.

Secondly, proving that a singular Pope (the text does say “man” and not “men”) is the man of sin is not enough to disprove the claims of the Catholic Church since the Pope’s being Antichrist is certainly within the realm possibility. But more to the point, proving that the Pope is Antichrist is not enough, in itself, to demonstrate the claims of Protestantism. There are so many heretical sects (ones that even all mainstream Protestants would consider heretical) that are also in stark opposition to the Roman Catholic Church. The claim that the Pope is Antichrist could be accepted by Coptic Christians, Eastern Orthodox, Mohammedans, Mormons, Children of God, Swedenborgians, as well as many rural fringe charismatic sects.

Thirdly, there is a constant refrain that I hear regarding a great singular apostasy which is prophesied by St. Paul, and this apostasy is always accepted – prima facie – to be the corruption of the Roman Church. Yet history records hundreds of apostasies, all of which most Christians would also consider apostasies, to wit: Marcionism, Nestorianism, chiliasm, Donatism, Montanism, Eutychianism, &c. Demonstrating that an apostasy in fact took place does not prove de facto that “the apostasy” was that of the Roman Catholic Church. And the truth is that neither does it prove that Protestantism is the true religion. One must keep in mind that there are hundreds of current Restorationist Christian sects, all of which claim the exact same thing: that a great apostasy occurred within the Church, from which apostasy the Church would not recover for many centuries.

Saying that the Catholic Church began the apostasy is not enough to make the greater case – it must also be demonstrated that whatever sect you happen to hold is the true one. And there are thousands upon thousands of sects, all claiming to be the true restoration of the Church – the same Church which was destroyed or corrupted in the Roman Church. Let me name a few of them: Iglesia Ni Cristo, the Boston Church of Christ, the Church of God of Prophecy, the House of Yahweh, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh-Day Adventists, the Campellites and the Millerites, and Luz del Mundo. All of these sects make the exact same claims as the Reformed Protestant, yet possess completely different doctrinal standards. In the grand scheme of things, what is one more sect amongst so many? For me even to give weight to one particular brand of Restorationist Christianity, I then would have to evaluate every single sect that was ever born of men. Why? Because if the Church fell once, she can fall again, and the brand of Christianity that one accepts now may well undergo its very own apostasy down the road, requiring yet another Reformation, where everything previously thought to be true is shown actually to be false – based on the Bible alone, of course, or which ever books were decided still belong therein.

Specifically, what makes the claim of the Lutherans valid, but not that of the Mohammedans, Mormons, or Millerites? If one can entertain that the entire Church fell and nobody saw it happen, then I can maintain that any other particular sect did fell as well and then we would have to investigate the claims of every single Joe Schmoe who came along with yet a new reading of the Scriptures. And why would we have to do this? Precisely because we would believe in a Church that is capable of teaching error. There would be no pillar or bulwark of the truth – just we, alone in the desert with our Bibles, yet without anybody to tell us how to read them. This is, ultimately, the scenario being presented to me. All Protestants will vehemently deny it, but there really is no way out of this. If a Reformation can come along and undo everything before it – or even ninety per cent – then another Reformation can come along and undo everything that the first one did.

And now, given all the aforementioned caveats, I will attempt to deal with the text at hand. The claim is that St. Paul said that this Man of Sin would sit in the temple of God (i.e. the church). Yet just because the Pope sits in the Church does not automatically make him the culprit here. All Protestants – indeed, all men of Christian persuasion – can be said to “sit in the temple of God” as well.

Next, it is said that “he would claim to be God on earth.” Yet many, many men have made this foolish claim. And not many of these men who have made this claim have been Catholics, let alone the Pope. There is no such teaching of the Catholic Church that the Pope is God on earth. The teaching is that he is the Vicar of Christ, which is hardly the same thing. He in a very real sense fills the same office as the Old Testament prophet who would speak to kings and say, “Thus saith the Lord.” The prophet was not claiming to be God on earth, but he did indeed act as God’s mouthpiece on earth. God uses mouthpieces all the time. Sometimes they are asses, and sometimes they are angels. But they are all God’s mouthpieces without taking away from His ultimate Deity.

Finally, it is claimed that this man of sin – the Pope, as the theory goes – “leads the apostasy, a falling away from the truth within the church.” But there were numerous accounts of these kinds of things, as I said above – why single out the Catholic Church, especially when Protestants by and large accept many of the dogmas that were taught by the Popes and the Catholic Church – even after this apostasy supposedly took place?

The Scriptures tell us specifically what the teaching of Antichrist would be, and no Pope has ever taught what the Scripture says that Antichrist would teach, to wit: that Jesus is not the Christ, denying the Father and the Son (cf. I John II:xxii). If a culprit is to be found for this teaching, there are many people who did this in the early days of the Church, and I have already named a few of them.

The main problem with this theory is that when I ask when it is that the Bishop of Rome became Antichrist, nobody ever has a specific answer, yet St. Paul says that all this rumpus would happen after a specific revolt followed by a singular revelation of a singular man. Very well then, what was this specific revolt? In what year did it occur? Who was the singular man, and whose identity was revealed of which the holy text speaks? I ask this because if these things cannot be identified, I find nothing about the argument even remotely compelling.

Now the first great revolt that happened after St. Paul wrote his letter to the church in Thessalonica was the Jewish-Roman war, a great revolt, after which Nero took power (a.d. 66). He ruthlessly persecuted Christians, had the temple destroyed, and most certainly did see himself as a deity on earth. His megalomania was even observed by the heathen of his day.

And yet even after all of this, there is nothing in the text to indicate that an office, or a succession of popes is the singular “man of sin”. If one wishes to tell me which Pope it was, or which it will be, then by all means let it be known.

However, identifying which Pope it was will only present a whole new set of problems for the argument.

Should one decide that the Pope in a.d. 66 (St. Peter) was Antichrist, then that would not look too appealing, especially since he wrote some of the books of the Bible. If you pick his successor, St. Linus, that does not bode well either, because St. Paul speaks well of St. Linus in his epistle to the Romans.

Suppose it be St. Xystus – and he did reign around the time of the revolt of Bar-Kochba – but actually he did not do anything particularly man-of-sin-like. All we know that he did was to codify certain parts of the Mass. For instance, he did say that all the people have to recite the Sanctus together after the Preface. But that is hardly the behaviour for which we are looking in order to identify Antichrist. Then there is Pope St. Victor (a.d. 180), but he stood up for the deity of Christ Himself, and actually excommunicated a priest for denying it. By St. John’s own criterion, he fails to make the status of Antichrist.

One might go all the way to Pope St. Sylvester (as many often do, supposing that his name was actually Constantine), but Sylvester does not come after a large revolt. In fact, he and Constantine were around when the Edict of Milan was passed, when Christianity was legalised. After that, there is not a great deal to happen revolt-wise for a great season.

And I would be remiss if I did not mention that nearly all Protestants (and especially the Reformed type) accept the Œcumenical Councils at least up through the fifth century as being binding for doctrinal orthodoxy. All this brings us pretty late in the game for this great apostasy to have started.

And yet, in the mean while, hundreds of real, bona fide, historically-recorded apostasies had already occurred, but I am to ignore those. No, not just ignore them, but I am to side with the Catholic Church and accept her rulings at those junctures against those heretics. The Church slowly moves along, condemns Arius and Mani and Donatus – all well and good – but then at some point everything changes. Some huge cataclysmic event happens (but nobody notices) and suddenly the Pope is Antichrist, the Catholic Church is full of errors, and all of this happens to occur whilst evading recorded history and without sparking schism. Or even discussion. It just happened. And then all the events that led up to it and resulted from it were just washed down the Memory Hole.

I am forever curious as to where all the Bible-believing Christians were when this change took place. Did they all just hop right along down the path of perdition behind the great Whore of Babylon?

None of it adds up. Even so, I am willing to hear the various theories on this. I just cannot see how this can make any sense when analysed with any depth whatsoever.

But at the end of the day, the most obvious thing that sticks out is that the Scriptures say “man of sin” and not “men of sin”. The desire to turn the word “man” into the word “men” has a specific name I learnt in my Protestant high school systematic theology class: eisegesis.