PART II, ARTICLE IX: WOMEN IN COMBAT ARMS TRADES IN CANADA, SECTION II

According to an article in the Ottawa Citizen, the woman captain—Nichola Goddard—was not in an armored regiment, as I had assumed; she was in the artillery, having transferred there from the infantry. If the Ottawa Citizen is correct, I was wrong about her having been armored. This makes no material difference, for my position was, and still is, that women do not belong in any of the trades just mentioned.

After surveying the field of the comments that were fired and not ‘filtered out’ by Facebook (for some of them, says Facebook, were), it looks like the point that my opponents proffered may be reduced to this: Women make great combat soldiers; and they should be allowed to serve in that capacity. And it looks like my point may be reduced to this: Women, as weaker vessels, should not serve in that capacity; and the female captain died unnecessarily as a victim of feminism. 

That women began to serve in combat arms trades in 1989 does not mean that adopting the policy was a good decision; and it does not mean that the practice should continue. As long as what is decided politically is at odds with what God says biblically, there are some of us who will continue to argue for ‘backward’ policies. Whether women should serve in combat roles or not was settled politically in 1989. But the issue was settled biblically in another direction thousands of years ago back in Genesis. It was settled when the LORD God made woman to be ‘an help meet’ (Genesis 2.20) for man—not a warrior by the side of man, and certainly not a captain. The issue was settled even before this; it was settled in eternity in the mind of God.   

Women are nurturers, not warriors; this is a measurable, scientific fact. Compared with men, women have less muscle mass, they are physically weaker, they are more emotional and compassionate, and they are not as inclined to fighting and killing as men are, unless the enemies are unwanted, defenseless infants in the womb. For these reasons, as well as others, women do not box in the ring against men or compete against them in Grand Slam Tennis. For these reasons, warriors have infrequently been women, as history shows. For these reasons, women should not serve in trades that close quarters with the enemy. Women are not predisposed to do physical combat; they are too fainthearted for it. This is why the Bible frequently speaks on this wise: “A sword is upon their horses, and upon their chariots, and upon all the mingled people that are in the midst of her; and they shall become as women” (Jeremiah 50.37.) This is a prophecy of the defeat that the Chaldeans would suffer. And the best way that the Holy Ghost has to state what ‘mighty men’ will become like upon this defeat is to say that they shall become ‘as women.’ That ‘they shall become as women’ means that they will become ‘fainthearted.’ Women are, by nature, fainthearted; they are not constituted to make war. God the Holy Spirit says so. Whoever disagrees with this opinion disagrees with God. It is absurd to advert to exceptions to prove that women are not fainthearted; and only a poorly educated populace would elect politicians who legislate for exceptions, as Canada has done. It is as if no legislator in Canada has ever heard of the maxim: Exceptio probat regulam. (The exception proves the rule.) Education being what it is, maybe they haven’t heard of it. And if they have heard of it, maybe they don’t know what it means. It means that a deviation supposes a norm, and that the norm is therefore the standard. The maxim is common sense. If your Chihuahua happens to chase a bear away one day, you don’t make it a rule to use your Chihuahua to save you from bears. Making the exception the rule could get you killed; putting women for combat soldiers could get whole platoons wiped out. Politicians don’t care much for maxims and lives, though; they care about what they must say and do in order to gain or retain power because it is through power that they become rich. Women are coaxed and coerced into combat arms trades where the standards are not what they should be and where the standards are not, for each and every candidate, enforced. That is a weak and dangerous way to build an army of combat soldiers. Many women who think themselves brave are really fainthearted; and many who think themselves fit are little better than feeble or fat. But the pressure is on to pass women by any means possible, whether they make functional soldiers or not.

PART II, ARTICLE IX: WOMEN IN COMBAT ARMS TRADES IN CANADA, SECTION I

 

Instead of falsely accusing and cussing, which my opponents did in the instance that spawned this article, it is more honorable and helpful to dialogue, consider, and contend. Instead of calling for censorship, which one of these many opponents did, it is better to call forth the accumulation of our learning and to set it down for consideration. Instead of playing the victim, it is better to play the man.    

As near as I can tell, combat arms trades in the Canadian army are three in number: infantry, armored, and artillery. A friend of mine on Facebook commented in the affirmative on a page that celebrated Canada’s first infantry-woman, Heather R. Erxleben. She was admitted into 3 PPCLI, an infantry battalion, in 1989, and resigned from the military three years later after serving her first term. The page that celebrated her was on a site called ‘Canadian Army.’ The celebration was in honor of ‘Women’s History Month.’ A dispute erupted after I stated that I would always be against women being allowed to serve as infantrymen. I soon made the dispute about the consequence of women being in combat arms trades, for the consequence, women dying in combat, is one reason why we should be against it. This is why I brought up Captain Nichola Goddard, who died in the war in Afghanistan in 2006 from ‘a chance ricochet of shrapnel’ (Ottawa Citizen) to the back of her head. I will summarize the dispute; then I will submit a commentary on the subject in question. 

So the milestone being celebrated was the admission of a woman into a Canadian infantry unit in 1989. The comments were profuse, festive, and effusive. I could not see one solitary dissenting comment. This was so disappointing to me that I dissented, and laid my comment down alongside the others. My innocent comment was: “I will always be against it.” Then a pile-on against me began; eleven persons took part in it. The comment thread this produced reminded me somewhat of the script for 12 Angry Men, minus the orderliness, and with the addition of profanity. My performance was almost like that of Henry Fonda, maybe, because while I was reasonable and measured, my opponents were, by turns, unreasonable, ignorant, fanatical, and censorious. The new town square called ‘social media’ is volatile. When just one ingredient does not integrate with the aggregate, the amalgam explodes. As heated as this Facebook feud got, it was not as nuclear as what I had already faced, many times before, especially on YouTube and Amazon threads. After about fifty comments were burning up the page, I decided to exit the minefield before the administrators obeyed the call from someone called Jennifer to nuke me from it. If someone called ‘Jennifer’ accuses someone called ‘Mark’ of spouting ‘hate speech’ in Zuckerberg’s politically correct zoo, the battle is about to be ended by a dirty bomb from the cockpit of an immoderate moderator. So I stopped, gathered up the littered comments, offloaded them on my desktop, and began contemplating writing this article. Being accustomed to social media volatility, and being the kind of person who sticks the truth in there until all the bloodied victims drag themselves distressingly away, yet there are times when I mercifully allow my adversaries to experience the sudden absence of my opinionated presence. This, to everyone’s relief, was such a time as that. Before I quit thrusting, piercing, parrying, and goring; in other words, before I decided to stop ‘winning and winning’ (President Trump), I was called a troll, a birdbrain, an idiot, and a string of unmentionable expletives. Admittedly, and for my part, I went so far as to call one of the disputants an ‘ignorant moron’; and I told another two to ‘shut up.’ If this does not show my conduct to have been as pure as ‘snow in Salmon,’ yet my comments were a pretty clean molehill beside the dunghill of expletives on the other side.

PART II, ARTICLE VIII: NUMEROLOGY MADNESS, SECTION VI

Augustine of Hippo, the champion defender against the Pelagian heresy, wrote one of the most important books of all time, which book, The City of God, remains the most necessary theological tome by a Church Father. How much space is given to numerology in this momentous, massive work? Almost no space is given to the subject; I know this because I have just finished reading The City of God for the second time. So, for example, after saying almost nothing on the number seven, he begins to wrap up: “Much more might be said about the perfection of the number seven, but this book is already too long, and I fear lest I should seem to catch at an opportunity of airing my little smattering of science more childishly than profitably. I must speak, therefore, in moderation and with dignity, lest, in too keenly following ‘number,’ I be accused of forgetting ‘weight’ and ‘measure’” (Augustine, The City of God, 11.31.) He saw that it was his duty to focus on the weight and measure of doctrine. Some study of numbers is good; but the exposition of words is better. Gematria, however, is good for nothing except counting.

Gematria is an unchristian subculture of superstition, notwithstanding the fact that some Christians are taken up with it. It is no more Christian than Edgar Cayce, Nostradamus, the Immaculate Conception of Mary, and the miracles at Lourdes. Christians who are excited about numerology as a means to convince people that the Bible is the word of God are either misinformed or uninformed. If ignorance is the mother of superstition, credulity must be its father. If it is better to obey God than to perform a miracle, is it not also better to seek a word of God to obey than to divine its numerological value? It is what the word of God says, not the numerological value of its words, that Jesus recommends. Novel marvels and modern miracles, much less numbers, are of little value compared to what the Bible says. What did Jesus say about hardcore unbelievers that numerologists think one more wonder would convert? “If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead” (Luke 16.31.) We shouldn’t want to know the numerical value of any of the words in that sentence, or of what all of the words in the verse together amount to, or whether any of the words or their letters add up to a value that may be divided into a mysterious or positive number. We should want to know what the message in the verse can teach us. It teaches us that even the sight of a miracle will not persuade hardened sinners to turn from their sins and believe in the Lord in order to avoid the judgment to come and be admitted into God’s kingdom. If sinners will not believe on account of a miracle, will they believe on account of numerology? Might the people who believe that numerology will persuade sinners of something spiritual be as lost as the sinners they are attempting to persuade? Are they not like the adulterous generation in Jesus’ day? “An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given to it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas” (Matthew 12.39.) To say the least, it is no mark of true religion to be seeking after a sign when this verse unreservedly directs the focus, through Jonah’s type of death, on the saving death of Jesus Christ instead. The number 666 is ‘the number of a man,’ says the Bible (Revelation 13.18.) If numerology is to be assigned a value, I submit the number 666 for consideration, for it is the work of man, not the revelation of God.

PART II, ARTICLE VIII: NUMEROLOGY MADNESS, SECTION V

It is easy to come up with something mysterious and exciting once we accept that each letter of the alphabet has a numerical value and that we may apply numerical values, with the concepts that they are chosen to represent, to ideas, events, or individuals in the Bible. So, for example, I could concoct something like this. ‘Belial,’ a synonym for the devil, is supposed to add up to 78. And Psalm 78 contains ‘dark sayings’? Could this not mean that Satan authored Psalm 78? According to the rules of numerology, which are as malleable as a rubber band, this is precisely what it could mean. By the use of numerology, a person can make whatever is in the Bible mean anything that he wants it to mean. Numerology draws its practitioners and dabblers away from the meanings of words, and gets them wonderfully lost in a world of numbers and connections that are disassociated from the real value of God’s Revelation. Indeed, my friend, the maker of the PowerPoint presentation that I have just commented on, is a good example of being a victim of this through princes of Gematria like Bullinger and Panin. Principes—plus exemplo quam peccato nocent. (Princes do more mischief by the example they set than by the crimes they commit, Cicero.) Obsession with this kind of thing erodes common sense and makes the mind vulnerable to nonsense. After over thirty years since converting to the Christian faith, this friend of mine is still hypnotized by what the apostle calls ‘old wives’ fables.’ Each one that he tells me about is as strange as the last one, and every single one is unverifiable. After many, many years, he still talks about the Ark of the Covenant that some people believe has been found underneath the earth where Jesus was crucified. So the theory is that the blood of Jesus dripped down the cross and then into the earth and onto the ark as if to fulfill, in a biological, scientific, physical, palpable way, the Old Testament sacrificial system. What if it’s true? What if the death of Christ happened just like that? Would the fact change anyone spiritually? Would his precious blood have magical powers? Would everyone hearing the news believe unto salvation? My friend must think something along those lines would happen. Or it may be that some people like sensational stories more than sound doctrines, and for no other reason than to speculate about what the stories could mean. It gives them something thrilling to talk about with other folktale enthusiasts. Adam Clarke, the commentator, defines old wives’ fables as ‘miracles without rhyme or reason.’ Matthew Poole, another commentator, calls them ‘impertinent discourses which tend nothing to promote either faith or holiness…discourses having no bottom in the word of God.’ They are to be ‘refused,’ says the apostle; that is to say, declined, deprecated, and shunned. “But refuse profane and old wives’ fables, and exercise thyself rather unto godliness” (1 Timothy 4.7.) Old wives’ fables like numerology and the story about the ark under the cross are too silly to entertain, even if it means that the teller of them is so insulted by our refusal that he shuns us in return. It takes just a little meditation to show how silly they are. Considering for a second the one about the blood of Jesus and the ark: Would the cross not soak up the blood before it could reach the earth? And the fact is that the earth soaks up blood even more than it soaks up water, blood being thicker than water, which makes it hard to imagine how blood could drip down through many feet of earth to reach the ark. Maybe the earthquake that happened when the Lord died opened up the earth at the right spot to receive his blood and just perfectly so that the cross did not sink? But no one saw the ark down below? No one wanted to go and get it? And why wasn’t the event recorded by one of the evangelists? The story of Jesus’ blood dripping down upon the ark raises almost as many questions as there are numbers for numerologists to play with. But it is the sort of unsubstantiated story that excites persons who are not satisfied with what the Bible tells us. Does it not border on blasphemy to speculate about the sacred blood in this way? Is Jesus’ blood not precious? Is it not what saves? If it is precious and saving, why countenance fabulous stories about it? Should we not balk at Jesus’ soul-saving blood being imagined outside the context of what the Bible tells us about it? Tales about sacred subjects, and numbers with secret powers—these are twin evils that may be summed up as old wives’ fables. What a disgrace that such things have taken the place of the simple, systematic reading of the Bible. And how disgraceful that to refute this kind of garbage in order to try to straighten a friend out that even something as holy as the blood of Christ has to be explained more scientifically than metaphysically! Sometimes I wonder if we sin by going more than the proverbial ‘extra mile’ with someone.

PART II, ARTICLE VIII: NUMEROLOGY MADNESS, SECTION VI

To complete the PowerPoint oeuvre, several names for Jesus are chosen to show up the number eight because this number is supposed to signify cheerful things, like resurrection and new beginning. The word ‘Messiah,’ for example, has a numerical value of 656, which is nicely divisible by eight. Only seven or eight names for Jesus are singled out. But there are many other names that Jesus is called. Take for example, ‘Son of God.’ Why is this august title not featured? Is it not because it won’t add up to a number that is divisible by eight? What about ‘Prince of Peace’ or ‘King of Kings’? I cannot find them featured anywhere, no matter where I look, not in the PowerPoint, and not on sites about either Panin or Bullinger. They must not add up to the desired value. If they did, they would have been brought forward for sure. 

I gladly concede that the Bible calls attention to patterns of numbers. It is what we should expect from a Book by God, for his General Revelation accentuates patterns too: elk, moose, caribou; mold, mildew, mushroom; snowstorm, blizzard, ice storm. But where in the Bible are letters of words assigned their numerical value? There is no biblical basis for this kind of dissection. When certain words and letters are selected for analysis because someone (outside the Bible) has assigned value to them, this is not enlightening. It is nothing but selections of words and letters for the purpose of arriving at preconceived conclusions. It is no more spiritual to do this than it is to play cards with a stacked deck. This practice of ‘discovery’ is radically different from the patterns of forties and twelves that may be discovered on the landscape of Scripture. Fabrication is not discovery. The selective crunching of numbers that Panin and Bullinger do, because it involves sacred subjects, is a bad strain of mysticism—mysticism by which the simple are deceived and because of which wise men scoff.

Looking outside the PowerPoint, now, several sources say that ‘sons of God’ adds up to 153. And John 21.11 mentions ‘153’ fishes that were caught on account of a miracle by the Lord. So there must be some connection between the number ‘153’ and the ‘sons of God,’ apparently. What could the connection mean? No one knows for sure. But that is the attraction. There is a mystery here that we don’t know the meaning of, and it must be more important than the meaning of Scripture. This is what’s implied. What about ‘sons of God’ not being perfectly divisible into eights or some other positive number? Isn’t this divisibility supposed to be the measure of goodness or greatness? If we divide ‘sons of God’ into eights, we have 19.125-8s. Well, that does not work toward anything positive or fascinating, does it? Therefore some other scheme is resorted to and the one about the number eight is not mentioned. I don’t see that this association between the ‘sons of God’ and the ‘153’ fishes is made by either Panin or Bullinger; but many triflers have done so, and crackpots like these two men have paved the way for this sort of madness. If people take this connection as a proof of something, they can be made to believe anything, and their belief will be worth nothing. In the PowerPoint, the impression is left that Ivan Panin won a Nobel Prize for his Bible coding. The truth of the matter is that he merely ‘submitted his findings.’

PART II, ARTICLE VIII: NUMEROLOGY MADNESS, SECTION V

Further into his PowerPoint effort, my friend pivoted from Panin’s work to Bullinger’s. Several names for Satan are singled out as being mysteriously related to the number thirteen: Dragon, Tempter, Belial, Murderer, Serpent. For example, ‘Serpent’ has a numerical value of 780, which is perfectly divisible by thirteen; ‘Belial’ amounts to 78—again, a number that perfectly divides into thirteens. But what about names like Accuser, Adversary, Devil, Beelzebub, Liar, Prince of this World, God of this World, Prince of the Power of the Air? I am not a numerology expert, for the meaning, not the numerical value, of God’s word is what Christians are encouraged to know. But to show how erroneous this kind of numerology is, I went looking for Dr. Bullinger’s schemes to see what he has to say for Satan’s other names. It turns out that ‘Beelzebub’ adds up to a numerical value of 598. I don’t know if it really does, nor do I care. But if it does, it breaks down into 46-13s, just like he tells us. But note the interesting qualification, which he has in parentheses, just like so: ‘(with article.)’ The word ‘Beelzebub’ all by itself, then, does not do the trick that Mr. Bullinger wants it to do. So he adds an article. The article is the ace up the sleeve. Unlike the magician, he has to show us the ace because a lot of people are able to count. Next, for the ‘Prince of this World,’ he has to haul in as many words as are needed to make it into a numerical phenomenon. So, ‘because the prince of this world is judged’ amounts to a numerical value of 5,577, which amounts to 429-13s, or as Bullinger puts it: 13 squared x 33, or 13 x 13 x 33. Look at all those 13s. Too bad it can’t be 13 x 13 x 13. Regardless, what should we take away from this? Does it mean that Satan is so bad that he must be cursed with the number thirteen? Is the number 13 the origin of evil, maybe? The friend who put this PowerPoint together must have seen that some things are stretched a little far, and so only the names for Satan that are the most convincing of representing the number thirteen were chosen by him for his presentation.

PART II, ARTICLE VIII: NUMEROLOGY MADNESS, SECTION IV

After this we are told that the number thirteen signifies sin and rebellion. Why not grant that it does? Joktan is singled out for special consideration here because he is the thirteenth in the order of Shem’s descendents (Genesis 10) and the Gematria of his name amounts to a figure of 169, or 13 x 13. That he was the thirteenth in order after Shem is debatable. But for the sake of argument, why not grant the wish? According to the PowerPoint, Joktan is supposed to be ‘the ancestor of sinful and rebellious people.’ But how sinful and rebellious? What is the measure? Isn’t every sinner sinful and rebellious? Did the people from Joktan’s line become any more sinful and rebellious than the people from the line of Peleg, Joktan’s brother? Abraham is from the line of Peleg (1 Chronicles 1.) Why was Abraham called out of Ur to begin a new line of people if it wasn’t because the people from whom he came were sinful and rebellious? Joktan is no more deserving of the number thirteen epithet than anyone else in his day. If one were to look into it, a bona fide saint from the Bible would soon be found to have a Gematria that could be cleanly divided into thirteens. I was going to try to find one, whereupon I immediately discovered that there are several Gematria models to choose from: Jewish, English, and Simple, each one with its own way of calculating. So I never minded. These three models give Joktan’s Gematria as 801, 426, and 71, none of which divide crisply into thirteens. On another site, I found that there are four ways of computing letters: according to ‘absolute’ value, ‘ordinal’ value, ‘reduced’ value, and ‘integral reduced’ value. “Each letter represents a different creative force,” it says there, which sounds eerily magical, and which reminds me of what charismatic churchgoers believe: that words, especially when uttered, have a power of their own. It is no wonder, then, that my superstitious ‘full gospel’ friend would be roused by Gematria. Anyway, it appears as though it does not matter what model or value system a person chooses to use, or even if a person chooses to come up with his own. It’s all about causing enthusiasm and discussion through a discovery of something that even the prophets and apostles were too unspiritual to investigate. Not knowing which model and value formula Panin and Bullinger used, and thus, which one my friend used to build his project, I will pose a question instead. Why not single out Judas? Does he not, or should he not, signify sin and rebellion even more than Joktan? Maybe coming up with a figure that would show Judas to be associated with the number thirteen is not so easily done. Could that not be the reason why the obscure Joktan is singled out instead of the infamous Judas? Well, this seems entirely likely. What I found from Dr. Bullinger is that to make Judas into some sort of number thirteen wonder-boy, one has to take, not only his first name, last name, or even his two names together, but this whole phrase: ‘Judas Iscariot, he that should betray him.’ Then you get a numerical value of 4,511, which divides itself neatly into 347-13s. That is not part of the PowerPoint, though. Why not? Because my friend must have recognized that it was too much of a reach. No doubt, like what happened to me, he must have run into farfetched numbering like that during his research. (Not that this whole business is not farfetched.) Maybe he is smarter than his masters in numerology.