Merry Christmas, everyone! May the Lord's peace and blessings be upon you and your family. The Didactic Mind podcast returns for Christmas with reflections upon what the day means, and why it is so important. I talk about the reasons why this day matters, how its significance translates into our everyday lives, and where the Christmas tradition of gift-giving comes from. I also talk about how things have changed, particularly in terms of trust in institutions, since the time of Christ, and how His life and times serve as both a template and a warning for our own. I finish off by discussing the great Arian Heresy, and how St. Nicholas straight-up JAP-SLAPPED A HERETIC in the face at the Council of Nicaea, and why this matters for our present day.

Links & Further Reading * The Great Heresies by Hillair Belloc * Pastor John Macarthur's sermon about the policemen of the Roman Empire; * The truly awesome story of how St. Nicholas of Myra punched out Arius the heretic;

Protect Yourself From Big Tech As I keep telling everyone with sense enough to listen, you MUST take steps to protect yourself from the Big Tech companies. Start here with this post. Here are the specific steps that you can take:

• Make sure that your web traffic is safe and protected from prying eyes using a VPN – click here to get a massive 80% OFF on a 24-month subscription with Surfshark, the best-value VPN client out there today;
• The best SSD drive that you can get right now, with blazing fast speeds and near-native storage capabilities, is probably the SanDisk Extreme 1TB Portable SSD with NVMe technology – I bought this myself to keep a moving backup of all of my files, it’s the size of a credit card, and it’s absolutely superb;

Build Your Platform * Get yourself a proper domain for your site or business with Namecheap; * Put your site onto a shared hosting service using A2Hosting for the fastest, most secure, and stable hosting platform around – along with unlimited email accounts of unlimited size; * Create beautiful websites with amazing, feature-rich content using Divi from Elegant Themes;

Stand for Western Civilisation * Buy yourself a proper Bible; * Get your Castalia Library books here; * Buy yourself a proper knife for personal defence; * Groom yourself properly with tips and advice from Superb Shaving;