Lying about Chesterton

Deacon Jim Russell is trolling the internet claiming that G. K. Chesterton supported lying for a good cause.

He bases this on a Chesterton quotation taken entirely out of context which I addressed three years ago, and the points I made then Deacon Russell continues to ignore now.

In brief ...

The entire point of Chesterton’s quote and of the English tradition since the execution of the Jesuit martyrs is that equivocation is wrong because it is lying about lying; it is a double lie. Equivocation is not wrong because lying is right; equivocation is wrong because lying is wrong, and to play games with words is to lie twice.

Read what Chesterton actually said about lying here.

And please pray for people who get sucked in to the irrationality that rules most of the internet.

Personally, I need a break.

***

And, by the way, something else that Deacon Russell and the "We Like Lying" crowd have ignored for years is the mass of evidence that the Ordinary Magisterium has settled this issue - the vast case against Lying and for Honesty that you can read here.

The Full Story on Bishop Finn

" Let's step outside and settle this thing like men ," she said, and she was a lady. " You're spewing anti-Catholic rhetoric !" he insisted. "How can you criticize a bishop when you're an actor and everyone knows actors are perverts and nitwits ," she screamed. (That last gal had a point). These are all reactions to my post last week about Rod Dreher's article on Bishop Finn's Indictment. And above all, people are charging me with believing the biased media coverage of the scandal. This, at least, is not true. In fact, everything I say in this post will be taken not from a media account of the scandal , but from the independent report on it as commissioned by the diocese , the Graves Report, which you can read on your own here . So let's shove the media aside and see for ourselves what's contained in this internal diocesan report conducted by an independent firm. *** Fr. Shawn Ratigan was a priest of the diocese of Kansas Cit...

What Follows ...

At one point I took all of these posts down, because I felt I had been far too willingly brainwashed into a religious system that was doing more harm than good. But, lately, I decided to republish some of the more interesting posts. What follows is about ten percent of what I posted from 2007 to 2021. They are in an odd chronological order, becuase Blogger is a clunky. Meanwhile, you can find my more sane (and more recent) musings here - https://theateroftheword.substack.com .

Alarms and Violent Decisions

On Monday I returned from nearly two weeks on the road, our Great North Tour, in which we gave 15 performances of 7 scripts in 13 days in 6 states – from Grand Forks, North Dakota, to Holt’s Summit, Missouri. In all of that wonderful chaos God gave me the great blessing of being away from the internet . And two weeks away from the Lying for Jesus issue was very therapeutic. But as therapy ends and Lent begins, I’d like to conclude my thoughts on the firestorm that swept us all up into the single most divisive issue I have encountered in ten years as a Catholic. My Role in This Back in August, James O’Keefe was invited to give what amounted to the keynote address at the American Chesterton Society Conference in Emmitsburg, Maryland. O’Keefe electrified the crowd by telling us that he was inspired by G. K. Chesterton (he did not mention his other role model, quasi-Satanist Saul Alinsky) and that he, James O’Keefe, was willing to live a monk –like existence harassed by leftists and...

Waiting for Godot to Leave

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