Monday, September 28, 2015
Sunday, September 27, 2015
Almost forgot
Today was the Folsom Street Fair.
Haven't been in twenty years. But it reminds me of the some of the adventures of my old leather jacket...
Religious basics
For humans to engage in a religion, they have to believe that it is more than the creation of their own ego. That it reveals Reality in a way that they could not otherwise know.
Rudolf Otto's description of the divine as mysterium tremendum et fascinans is apt. It is mysterious by nature and cannot in principle be comprehended by us. It is overwhelming in its power and scope. And it captures our attention, imagination and awe. Without these elements, it is not really sacred.
Thinking of the liberal rationalism which lies at the heart of post-Enlightenment faiths, such as Unitarian Universalism, I cannot see them as engaging the divine. They are just religious ideologies, having reduced their scope to what they can understand.
On the other hand, when history and culture change and a given religion can no longer make "good-enough" sense of things or provide a way of life that people can actually live --or are any longer willing to live-- its scope is likely to shrink.
I do not think it accidental that a European (and rapidly and increasing an American) civilization which has "emancipated" itself from the religion of its ancestors --Christianity, for the last many centuries-- now finds itself incapable of resisting the savages invading its borders. I think they are linked.
As I have said, the young reactionaries who have awakened to the imminent collapse of their people and blame Christianity's universalism for that fail to note that it was only after Christianity ceased to be the spiritus rector of their people that the sturdily evangelized cells of the Western body metastasized into the cancer of global liberal secular humanism, leaving us defenseless against the New Huns.
It is the emptied churches of the West that the Muslims are turning into mosques.
----
Rudolf Otto's description of the divine as mysterium tremendum et fascinans is apt. It is mysterious by nature and cannot in principle be comprehended by us. It is overwhelming in its power and scope. And it captures our attention, imagination and awe. Without these elements, it is not really sacred.
Thinking of the liberal rationalism which lies at the heart of post-Enlightenment faiths, such as Unitarian Universalism, I cannot see them as engaging the divine. They are just religious ideologies, having reduced their scope to what they can understand.
On the other hand, when history and culture change and a given religion can no longer make "good-enough" sense of things or provide a way of life that people can actually live --or are any longer willing to live-- its scope is likely to shrink.
I do not think it accidental that a European (and rapidly and increasing an American) civilization which has "emancipated" itself from the religion of its ancestors --Christianity, for the last many centuries-- now finds itself incapable of resisting the savages invading its borders. I think they are linked.
As I have said, the young reactionaries who have awakened to the imminent collapse of their people and blame Christianity's universalism for that fail to note that it was only after Christianity ceased to be the spiritus rector of their people that the sturdily evangelized cells of the Western body metastasized into the cancer of global liberal secular humanism, leaving us defenseless against the New Huns.
It is the emptied churches of the West that the Muslims are turning into mosques.
----
Saturday, September 26, 2015
Transitions
Chad Allen. Actually Chad Lazzari. Like Mr B, one of those blondish Italians.
And an out gay man and actor. Although he holds all the standard Borg positions of the LGBT thing, I've always liked him in movies. Especially the Donald Strachey series. His character saves the otherwise predictable LGBT attitudes in those stories. He plays a guy.
Now, alas, he has retired from acting. And has decided to become a psychologist.
I'll miss ya, Chad.
Oh, and by the way, when are your office hours?
--
Breaking the Sabbath
with my heretical musings.
Bought a Macbook Air yesterday. I have finally had it with Microsoft and the PC. Been a user since day one and remained so because of the ease of getting software, the lower cost and the fact that I had learned so many tricks under the hood to fix things when they went south. As they did, all too often.
So far the thing is good, although the smaller screen takes getting used to. Fast, light, and since it has a solid state drive, no heat while it sits on my lap. Still a learning curve, --I will keep both systems in place for a while--but especially since I got a hardly-used "pre-owned" machine at half the retail price, I'm hopeful.
#Cuckservative Fox News commentator Charles Krauthammer, who used to impress me a lot in my merely conservative days, is attacking Ben Carson's sane rejection of a Muslim for president. Do the Liberals go after each other in public as much as the Right does? I don't think so. Pas d'ennemis a gauche.
Calling Carson's idea "poisonous" and out of sync with the Constitution's "ethos," he commits the very common mistake of thinking the this document is a kind of Bible. It ain't. See my 2007 post. Extraordinary thought it be, the men who wrote it never intended it to be anything of that kind. Krauthammer even goes so far as to say that "it doesn’t just set limits to power; it expresses a national ethos. It doesn’t just tell you what you’re not allowed to do; it also suggests what you shouldn’t want to do.”
Are you kidding, Rabbi?
Ultra PC Salon magazine is thrilled, of course. Republicans are great at giving aid and comfort to th e enemy. Salon is shocked that anyone should think about "religious litmus tests." Sure, when there's a Muslim involved. But what about Mormon Romney? Well, that's different...
On FB, pics of my ex and his current BF having dinner with a couple that my ex and I had dinner with years ago. One of them is a Swiss faggot --yes, I know-- who thought it was both chic and ok to do his European contempt of America thing right at the table, in my country, in my face, sibilants and all. That was the last dinner.
And another FB friend is "liking" some sanctimoniously whiny article about how "the Black man in America" is doomed to death or prison. And of course that is "America's" fault. Nothing that ever happens to them is ever their fault, of course. Where she sees a Passion Play, I see parasites.
Finished Thomas Sowell's Conflict of Visions. I am sure that he has his reasons, but he sticks to the lingo of "those who hold the unconstrained vision" and "those who hold the constrained vision" throughout the book. Makes for clunky reading. He does not simply use shorthand such as "the dreamers" and "the realists." Which is how I look at the two visions. An outline here.
Francis The Talking Pope clearly holds the unconstrained vision, which 2000 years of Christian theology says is a lie. And since Vatican II and the Church's sudden creation of this novel fulcrum for all Catholic thinking and acting --"the dignity of the human person"-- that poisonous vision has infected it at all levels. Original Sin anyone? The first of the seven principles which the ultraliberal Unitarian Universalists hold, by the way, is "the inherent worth and dignity of every human person."
Still marching through The Passion of the Western Mind. The tensions, which have sometimes become a dance, now seem quite split. And no one has come up with a way to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. I grit my teeth while he described the post-moderns as having given up belief in grand narratives. Bullshit. Their grand narrative is progressive socialism. Hicks' Explaining Post-Modernism makes that quite clear. Masquerading as "critical theory" open-minded non-dogmatists, they have greated the intellectual gulag of the modern university, where failure to be sufficiently enthusiastic about the naked Emperor gets your goose cooked.
The book does reveal to me, by my reactions along the way, my divided loyalties, making me, too, a modern Westerner.
As I continue to muse about a post-Christian religion for the Whites, I had the thought the other day that the figure of the Devil should be modeled on Saul Alinksy and the anti-Christ on Martin Luther King.
The basic mythic structure would, I think, be the Grail.
On theological basics, I think I come down on the side of pluralism, but not the "all religions are equally true" version. That makes little sense to me. Something more like Knitter's mutuality model, which sees both truth and falsehood in all religions. This make the claim to universal truth less important. In my current musings, under the metaphor of the light refracted through a spectrum, all religions --well, many-- have their necessary bias in the rainbow. Somewhat like language. We all speak our native tongues, our particular language, but no one speaks Language.
The truth claims of a religion should focus on internal consistency and on avoiding contradictions --not alternative views but contradictions-- to reason or, with caveats, science. After all, with centuries and centuries of debate between theologians and scholars, people's religious allegiances remain.
What makes for change is not correct argument but passionate conviction, cultural shifts, and the contigencies of history. At this point, a religion which tries to present itself as true in the same terms as science is barking up the wrong tree, I think. But how do you avoid that tree without simple consigning yourself to the prison of the subject?
Unless you and everyone else is already there.
Mr B just called from Genoa. I am very lucky to be in love with a happy man.
----
Bought a Macbook Air yesterday. I have finally had it with Microsoft and the PC. Been a user since day one and remained so because of the ease of getting software, the lower cost and the fact that I had learned so many tricks under the hood to fix things when they went south. As they did, all too often.
So far the thing is good, although the smaller screen takes getting used to. Fast, light, and since it has a solid state drive, no heat while it sits on my lap. Still a learning curve, --I will keep both systems in place for a while--but especially since I got a hardly-used "pre-owned" machine at half the retail price, I'm hopeful.
#Cuckservative Fox News commentator Charles Krauthammer, who used to impress me a lot in my merely conservative days, is attacking Ben Carson's sane rejection of a Muslim for president. Do the Liberals go after each other in public as much as the Right does? I don't think so. Pas d'ennemis a gauche.
Calling Carson's idea "poisonous" and out of sync with the Constitution's "ethos," he commits the very common mistake of thinking the this document is a kind of Bible. It ain't. See my 2007 post. Extraordinary thought it be, the men who wrote it never intended it to be anything of that kind. Krauthammer even goes so far as to say that "it doesn’t just set limits to power; it expresses a national ethos. It doesn’t just tell you what you’re not allowed to do; it also suggests what you shouldn’t want to do.”
Are you kidding, Rabbi?
Ultra PC Salon magazine is thrilled, of course. Republicans are great at giving aid and comfort to th e enemy. Salon is shocked that anyone should think about "religious litmus tests." Sure, when there's a Muslim involved. But what about Mormon Romney? Well, that's different...
On FB, pics of my ex and his current BF having dinner with a couple that my ex and I had dinner with years ago. One of them is a Swiss faggot --yes, I know-- who thought it was both chic and ok to do his European contempt of America thing right at the table, in my country, in my face, sibilants and all. That was the last dinner.
And another FB friend is "liking" some sanctimoniously whiny article about how "the Black man in America" is doomed to death or prison. And of course that is "America's" fault. Nothing that ever happens to them is ever their fault, of course. Where she sees a Passion Play, I see parasites.
Finished Thomas Sowell's Conflict of Visions. I am sure that he has his reasons, but he sticks to the lingo of "those who hold the unconstrained vision" and "those who hold the constrained vision" throughout the book. Makes for clunky reading. He does not simply use shorthand such as "the dreamers" and "the realists." Which is how I look at the two visions. An outline here.
Francis The Talking Pope clearly holds the unconstrained vision, which 2000 years of Christian theology says is a lie. And since Vatican II and the Church's sudden creation of this novel fulcrum for all Catholic thinking and acting --"the dignity of the human person"-- that poisonous vision has infected it at all levels. Original Sin anyone? The first of the seven principles which the ultraliberal Unitarian Universalists hold, by the way, is "the inherent worth and dignity of every human person."
Still marching through The Passion of the Western Mind. The tensions, which have sometimes become a dance, now seem quite split. And no one has come up with a way to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. I grit my teeth while he described the post-moderns as having given up belief in grand narratives. Bullshit. Their grand narrative is progressive socialism. Hicks' Explaining Post-Modernism makes that quite clear. Masquerading as "critical theory" open-minded non-dogmatists, they have greated the intellectual gulag of the modern university, where failure to be sufficiently enthusiastic about the naked Emperor gets your goose cooked.
The book does reveal to me, by my reactions along the way, my divided loyalties, making me, too, a modern Westerner.
As I continue to muse about a post-Christian religion for the Whites, I had the thought the other day that the figure of the Devil should be modeled on Saul Alinksy and the anti-Christ on Martin Luther King.
The basic mythic structure would, I think, be the Grail.
On theological basics, I think I come down on the side of pluralism, but not the "all religions are equally true" version. That makes little sense to me. Something more like Knitter's mutuality model, which sees both truth and falsehood in all religions. This make the claim to universal truth less important. In my current musings, under the metaphor of the light refracted through a spectrum, all religions --well, many-- have their necessary bias in the rainbow. Somewhat like language. We all speak our native tongues, our particular language, but no one speaks Language.
The truth claims of a religion should focus on internal consistency and on avoiding contradictions --not alternative views but contradictions-- to reason or, with caveats, science. After all, with centuries and centuries of debate between theologians and scholars, people's religious allegiances remain.
What makes for change is not correct argument but passionate conviction, cultural shifts, and the contigencies of history. At this point, a religion which tries to present itself as true in the same terms as science is barking up the wrong tree, I think. But how do you avoid that tree without simple consigning yourself to the prison of the subject?
Unless you and everyone else is already there.
Mr B just called from Genoa. I am very lucky to be in love with a happy man.
----
Thursday, September 24, 2015
Tuesday, September 22, 2015
Trannies to the rescue
Mr B is in Italy and so he is not able to fulfill his regular duty of making me laugh out loud each morning. I miss that. I laugh a lot less when he is away.
But today, via a FB link from a dear friend who is as liberal as they come --a Unitarian lesbian minister, no less-- comes this hilarity, which produced the usual Mr B effect of out loud laughing.
The prologue: Being trans is an identity that comes with a bill.
The new frontier in LGBT Civil Rights...
The predictable rest of it, in all its glory, is here. Keep laffin, boys and girls and er...
---
But today, via a FB link from a dear friend who is as liberal as they come --a Unitarian lesbian minister, no less-- comes this hilarity, which produced the usual Mr B effect of out loud laughing.
The prologue: Being trans is an identity that comes with a bill.
The new frontier in LGBT Civil Rights...
The predictable rest of it, in all its glory, is here. Keep laffin, boys and girls and er...
---
Sunday, September 20, 2015
Saturday, September 19, 2015
Not bad at all
The interweaving of myth, community and ritual (and although he did not mention it, a code of behavior) is nicely condensed here by a practitioner of Nordic neo-paganism. The 4 C's of religion: creed, community, cult and code.
Christian autopsy
When did western Christendom end?
It was intact in 1500, Europe all Catholic.
The awful Wars of Religion that followed the Reformation did not destroy it wholly, since they were carried out precisely by competing visions of Christendom. Even the execution of Charles I in the mid 1600's was significantly about religion.
One shocking precursor of its demise is the Franco-Ottoman alliance in the 1530's, where a Catholic kingdom allied with the Muslim Turks to fight against the Holy Roman Empire. Talk about "perfidious Albion"...the French who created that phrase certainly got a head start on it.
Church, State and culture --both popular and elite--remained heavily interlaced, even indistinguishable, until the 1700's, although Descartes and Newton published in the 1600's.
A watershed is 1789, I think, the French Revolution and its Napoleonic aftermath. There were revivals after that, but the trajectory ever since was downward. They were loading the gun in the century prior, shot the fatal bullet in 1789 and then the patient finally died several decades later.
I think it was pretty much dead by the mid-19th century, although people could still speak sentimentally of Christendom when they meant Whites (or in Churchill's case, non-Nazi Whites).
The majority of western Europeans --in the home continent and elsewhere-- remained Christian in some sense long after that, but both the intelligentia and the States were operating on a quite different set of assumptions. While Christendom existed, the Church --in its various forms-- was a power that was in some sense required to legitimate the State, even if its actual role was as chaplain, as in Anglican England or Orthodox Russia. But its power has been merely sentimental since the 19th century.
The Liberalism which is now completely hegemonic in the West is the toxic grandchild of Christendom, more proximately the evil love/hate-spawn of the Enlightenment and the Romanticism which reacted against it.
Christendom was destroyed partly by its own internal conflicts but partly by the inherentinstability dynamism of a Western world created on the antagonistic energies of, to put it oversimply, Athens and Jerusalem.
Interesting to read the relationship of faith and reason, visionaries and skeptics, throughout Western history using Samuel Huntington's typology:
It was intact in 1500, Europe all Catholic.
The awful Wars of Religion that followed the Reformation did not destroy it wholly, since they were carried out precisely by competing visions of Christendom. Even the execution of Charles I in the mid 1600's was significantly about religion.
One shocking precursor of its demise is the Franco-Ottoman alliance in the 1530's, where a Catholic kingdom allied with the Muslim Turks to fight against the Holy Roman Empire. Talk about "perfidious Albion"...the French who created that phrase certainly got a head start on it.
Church, State and culture --both popular and elite--remained heavily interlaced, even indistinguishable, until the 1700's, although Descartes and Newton published in the 1600's.
A watershed is 1789, I think, the French Revolution and its Napoleonic aftermath. There were revivals after that, but the trajectory ever since was downward. They were loading the gun in the century prior, shot the fatal bullet in 1789 and then the patient finally died several decades later.
I think it was pretty much dead by the mid-19th century, although people could still speak sentimentally of Christendom when they meant Whites (or in Churchill's case, non-Nazi Whites).
The majority of western Europeans --in the home continent and elsewhere-- remained Christian in some sense long after that, but both the intelligentia and the States were operating on a quite different set of assumptions. While Christendom existed, the Church --in its various forms-- was a power that was in some sense required to legitimate the State, even if its actual role was as chaplain, as in Anglican England or Orthodox Russia. But its power has been merely sentimental since the 19th century.
The Liberalism which is now completely hegemonic in the West is the toxic grandchild of Christendom, more proximately the evil love/hate-spawn of the Enlightenment and the Romanticism which reacted against it.
Christendom was destroyed partly by its own internal conflicts but partly by the inherent
Interesting to read the relationship of faith and reason, visionaries and skeptics, throughout Western history using Samuel Huntington's typology:
"must learn to distinguish among our true friends who will be with us and we with them through thick and thin; opportunistic allies with whom we have some but not all interests in common; strategic partner-competitors with whom we have a mixed relationship; antagonists who are rivals but with whom negotiation is possible; and unrelenting enemies who will try to destroy us unless we destroy them first."----
Friday, September 18, 2015
The Unbearable Whiteness of UnSeeing
Some of the elements that make
Whites
The Most Foolish People On The Planet (c)
The Most Foolish People On The Planet (c)
Idealism: a tendency to fall in love with ungrounded and untethered visions of how things ought to be even, or especially, when the likelihood of them ever being that way is small to nil.
Superstitious moral hubris: falsely believing that they embody the ideals they fall for and that this special morality will both ensure the success of their projects and protect them from any adverse consequences of their selflessness.
Sentimentality: collapsing all sense of context and prudence and being emotionally blinded by images or instances which display unreal examples of innocence and/or victimization.
Fratricide: a painful tendency to murderously attack each other, despite the larger or longer term consequences.
This list is hardly exhaustive.
Any other suggestions?
---
Suicidal lemmings for Jesus
I don't know how the upcoming Synod on the Family in Rome will turn out, but everything to do with it indicates to me what a destructive clown the Holy Father is.
Like the feckless Anglicans (and all the other mainline Prots), he seems to focus on pleasing The Cultured Despisers of Religion. And if history and experience show anything, it is that every capitulation to them only increases their despite.
Homosexuals are, in the US, less than 3% of the population. And damned few of us are committed Christian church-goers. LGBT culture is flamboyantly (of course) and contemptuously anti-Christian. And yet the US Episcopal church picked a gay man to be a bishop, knowing the internal fractures that would follow. Why? To signal to The Cultured Despisers of Religion --quite a few of whom are Anglican clergy, apparently-- that they would Do The Right Thing No Matter The Consequences. How brave. How beneath contempt. How White.
It is certainly a sign of my residual Catholicism that it would never have occured to me in a thousand years to make a pro-gay move that would create schism. And the Anglicans have fatally wounded themselves just to please a tiny group of people who despise them..
Which brings us back to Francis The Talking Pope. Who knows? Maybe the Synod will pull it out of the fire and maintain Catholic doctrine on marriage despite the damage His Narcissism has wrought. But this Evita Peron in clerical drag seems bent on trying to curry favor with the least committed at the price of severely demoralizing the most committed. For just one example, while letting the post-Christian eco-feminist nuns of the LCWR off the hook entirely, he has put a traditionalist Franciscan order under virtual house arrest. WTF?
Part of me is amused that part of me cares about this. After all, my current feeling is that Christianity has betrayed two groups that are important to me: men and Whites. So why should I care what they do about divorced people and communion?
---
Like the feckless Anglicans (and all the other mainline Prots), he seems to focus on pleasing The Cultured Despisers of Religion. And if history and experience show anything, it is that every capitulation to them only increases their despite.
Homosexuals are, in the US, less than 3% of the population. And damned few of us are committed Christian church-goers. LGBT culture is flamboyantly (of course) and contemptuously anti-Christian. And yet the US Episcopal church picked a gay man to be a bishop, knowing the internal fractures that would follow. Why? To signal to The Cultured Despisers of Religion --quite a few of whom are Anglican clergy, apparently-- that they would Do The Right Thing No Matter The Consequences. How brave. How beneath contempt. How White.
It is certainly a sign of my residual Catholicism that it would never have occured to me in a thousand years to make a pro-gay move that would create schism. And the Anglicans have fatally wounded themselves just to please a tiny group of people who despise them..
Which brings us back to Francis The Talking Pope. Who knows? Maybe the Synod will pull it out of the fire and maintain Catholic doctrine on marriage despite the damage His Narcissism has wrought. But this Evita Peron in clerical drag seems bent on trying to curry favor with the least committed at the price of severely demoralizing the most committed. For just one example, while letting the post-Christian eco-feminist nuns of the LCWR off the hook entirely, he has put a traditionalist Franciscan order under virtual house arrest. WTF?
Part of me is amused that part of me cares about this. After all, my current feeling is that Christianity has betrayed two groups that are important to me: men and Whites. So why should I care what they do about divorced people and communion?
---
Thursday, September 17, 2015
Anuddah dis n dat
Ann Coulter rustled yet another Sacred Minority Victim Group with a Tweet. Refuses to repent of her imaginary crime. The sky is falling and she is The Worstest Human Evah.
So many people are zombies and don't know it.
September is a wonderful month in San Francisco.
Utopianism, located in this world or in the next, easily leads to nihilism.
The Beginning of All Things and The End of All Things can only be spoken of meaningfully in mythological terms. That having been said, I think it's pretty safe to assume that Jesus is not literally coming back.
The more problems you try to fix, the more problems you create. Life can be managed, not solved.
As I play with the outlines of a future Euro religion that UpLifts* Christianity into a new framework, I am more impressed with the genius of Apostolic Christianity --Orthodox and Catholic-- in its capacity to UpLift Judaism into a Greco-Roman framework that Jews could never have imagined. And still find abominable.
This recent invasion of Europa from the south reminds me of the Gothic War. Rome never recovered.
So many people are zombies and don't know it.
September is a wonderful month in San Francisco.
Utopianism, located in this world or in the next, easily leads to nihilism.
The Beginning of All Things and The End of All Things can only be spoken of meaningfully in mythological terms. That having been said, I think it's pretty safe to assume that Jesus is not literally coming back.
The more problems you try to fix, the more problems you create. Life can be managed, not solved.
As I play with the outlines of a future Euro religion that UpLifts* Christianity into a new framework, I am more impressed with the genius of Apostolic Christianity --Orthodox and Catholic-- in its capacity to UpLift Judaism into a Greco-Roman framework that Jews could never have imagined. And still find abominable.
*My translation of Hegel's Aufheben, subsumes by a combination of cancellation and preservation.One of my sad and embarrassing realizations in old age is that my life-long philoSemitism is not returned.
This recent invasion of Europa from the south reminds me of the Gothic War. Rome never recovered.
Wednesday, September 16, 2015
Repeats
Watching my favorite episode of Psych, I am reminded of how tiresome self-obsessed Negroes can be.
---
---
UnProgress---
It's been interesting to see myself try to imagine a Western post-Christian religion. Of course, it is merely a thought experiment, but rather than being vaguely agnostic about so many of the issues that used to engage me, I get to debate them in my own head. And I fear that I may be more romantic and less classical than I hoped!
While using the Hegelian dialectic and his tactic of Aufhebung/UpLift on this project, I took for thesis the ancestral religions and cultures of ancient Europeans and for antithesis the Christendom which replaced it, musing on what a synthesis of these two might look like.
While limping my way home from the office today (sprained ligaments in my knee), it dawned on me that the antithesis was Christianity, the early Christianity that came from west Asian Hellenistic Judaism, and that the synthesis was Christendom: which UpLifted so much of Greco-Roman classical and Germanic and Slavic barbarian culture under the banner of the Christian Church. It can be argued that while the Latins and Greeks, the Germans and the Slavs (and Celts, etc) were Christianianized, the Christian religion, once in their hands, was Romanized, Hellenized, Germanicized and Slavicized. It would indeed be odd were that not so.
Christendom began more or less from 380 --Emperor Theodosius' edict making Christ the sole god of the Roman Empire-- and died sometime IMHO between 1789 (French Revolution) and 1918 (the end of the First Great European Civil War), a reign of about 1500 years. Preceding Christendom was another period of similar length, about 1200 years, the Ancient Classical World, from the founding of Rome in 753BC and the 8th century BC appearance of the Greek polis until our 4th century.
None of these dates are exact, nor is the dyad of aeons or epochs I have described. But if it is more true to say that Christendom, now dead, was the synthesis of Christ and the Ancients...that it has already been done...where to go from here?
The Christian faith, dying in the West, is alive and growing in the Third World, along with Islam.
If Whites are so irreversibly poisoned by Liberalism that we cannot defeat the demographic jihad and reconquista being wrought on us, then all this is moot. We will, like the ancient Romans, cease to exist.
----
While using the Hegelian dialectic and his tactic of Aufhebung/UpLift on this project, I took for thesis the ancestral religions and cultures of ancient Europeans and for antithesis the Christendom which replaced it, musing on what a synthesis of these two might look like.
While limping my way home from the office today (sprained ligaments in my knee), it dawned on me that the antithesis was Christianity, the early Christianity that came from west Asian Hellenistic Judaism, and that the synthesis was Christendom: which UpLifted so much of Greco-Roman classical and Germanic and Slavic barbarian culture under the banner of the Christian Church. It can be argued that while the Latins and Greeks, the Germans and the Slavs (and Celts, etc) were Christianianized, the Christian religion, once in their hands, was Romanized, Hellenized, Germanicized and Slavicized. It would indeed be odd were that not so.
Christendom began more or less from 380 --Emperor Theodosius' edict making Christ the sole god of the Roman Empire-- and died sometime IMHO between 1789 (French Revolution) and 1918 (the end of the First Great European Civil War), a reign of about 1500 years. Preceding Christendom was another period of similar length, about 1200 years, the Ancient Classical World, from the founding of Rome in 753BC and the 8th century BC appearance of the Greek polis until our 4th century.
None of these dates are exact, nor is the dyad of aeons or epochs I have described. But if it is more true to say that Christendom, now dead, was the synthesis of Christ and the Ancients...that it has already been done...where to go from here?
The Christian faith, dying in the West, is alive and growing in the Third World, along with Islam.
If Whites are so irreversibly poisoned by Liberalism that we cannot defeat the demographic jihad and reconquista being wrought on us, then all this is moot. We will, like the ancient Romans, cease to exist.
----
Sunday, September 13, 2015
Rebels with a cause
Watching a Hollywood movie, From Hell (2001). I've seen it several times, a Jack The Ripper mystery.
Since it's based on a graphic novel by an anarchist, its cartoon approach to class, gender, religion, etc is not surprising. The bad guys are rich, White, upper class, Christian (Mason) males and the victims are women, foreigners, Jews, etc.
One of the ironic moments is when the Bad Guy aristocratic head of the police assumes that the killer will likely be a foreigner, an Indian or a Jew, we know that we are supposed to be disgusted by his bigotry. Blah blah blah. Zzzzzzz. The usual embedded propaganda.
But when it is a product marketed by 20th Century Fox, a huge global Hollywood corporation and makes a $35 million profit, it is hardly a cri de coeur from the streets. What industry is more akin to the so-called "unregulated capitalism" bugbear than Hollywood and TV?
A film like this is, in fact, along with every other TV or movie product from these people, propaganda against one oligarchy in favor of another. Its own.
---
Since it's based on a graphic novel by an anarchist, its cartoon approach to class, gender, religion, etc is not surprising. The bad guys are rich, White, upper class, Christian (Mason) males and the victims are women, foreigners, Jews, etc.
One of the ironic moments is when the Bad Guy aristocratic head of the police assumes that the killer will likely be a foreigner, an Indian or a Jew, we know that we are supposed to be disgusted by his bigotry. Blah blah blah. Zzzzzzz. The usual embedded propaganda.
But when it is a product marketed by 20th Century Fox, a huge global Hollywood corporation and makes a $35 million profit, it is hardly a cri de coeur from the streets. What industry is more akin to the so-called "unregulated capitalism" bugbear than Hollywood and TV?
A film like this is, in fact, along with every other TV or movie product from these people, propaganda against one oligarchy in favor of another. Its own.
---
Islam
for all its flaws, know the right thing to do to these harpies.
Westerners, both Christian and post-Christian, just put up with it.
The Muslim reaction is the healthy one.
---
Saturday, September 12, 2015
Western self-destructiveness
Listening through Tarnas' over-written but still interesting and informative history of the Western mind --White and Male-- I am getting one of his central themes: that each modern lurch toward freedom from tradition and the past eventually winds up undercutting itself. He is certainly no traditionalist, but the pattern is pretty clear. Each new "advance" contains within it the seeds of its own destruction.
One of the themes is the increasing skepticism of philosophy about the human mind's capacity to know reality. Yet, as an inveterate theist, I cannot help noticing that there seems to be, in modern thought, an assumption that only divine knowledge is true knowledge, that only perfectly objective knowing deserves the title of knowing. Seems to me like a game rigged for failure, issuing in cynicism because the goal was obviously flawed from the beginning. The theme seems to be that since we can't know perfectly, we can't know at all.
We start with Plato and wind up with Nietzsche and the PoMo's. What a decline.
---
One of the themes is the increasing skepticism of philosophy about the human mind's capacity to know reality. Yet, as an inveterate theist, I cannot help noticing that there seems to be, in modern thought, an assumption that only divine knowledge is true knowledge, that only perfectly objective knowing deserves the title of knowing. Seems to me like a game rigged for failure, issuing in cynicism because the goal was obviously flawed from the beginning. The theme seems to be that since we can't know perfectly, we can't know at all.
---
Thursday, September 10, 2015
European Ebonics
One of the typical observations of euro nationalists concerns what is called the "high time preference" of certain third world populations, including those which reside within the Eurosphere.
This typically means a preference for immediate gratification over a future reward or obligation.
But when it comes to moral gratification, it seems that the white population is much more like the third world when it comes to instantaneous feel goods versus the long-term effects.
The grotesque embrace of the so-called migrants into Europe, celebrated with choirs and clapping hands and, as one pundit-put it, cascades of emotional incontinence, shows that these people are grooving on their own high-mindedness and remaining utterly and completely unconscious of the horrors that will follow there ecstatic moment of ethical exhibitionism.
And lest anyone think that I am excluding Americans from this disgusting performance, believe me, I am not.
Pacifism is evil
I have always listed pacifism as one of the seven evils which constitute liberalism.
The passive and castrated attitude of the Europeans in the face of the current invasion of Muslims and Africans shows why this is true.
By choosing pacifism in the face of invasion they also choose all the evils which will befall them and their women and their children because of their high mind cowardice.
In the end, every wall and every boundary and every frontier must be built on blood. Otherwise, it is simply a thin veil or curtain, an invitation to violation.
The sad state of our own country also reveals this truth.
There are far worse things than a little blood shed at the beginning.
Slouching Toward Brussels
Returning to Europe in 1975 (?) with my first boyfriend, a very acute observer, we were both struck by how insubstantial the mother continent felt, that it would be ripe for some truly powerful and passionate phenomenon to wipe it all away. Back then we thought it might be some kind of resurgent fascism.
If only!
Never could have imagined that the Mohammedan jihad which Christian Europe resisted and defeated over and over again from Charles Martel to the Siege of Vienna, would be the rough beast, its hour come at last, slouching toward our ancient homeland. Having liberated itself from its old Faith and its repressions and hierarchies and dogmas, it divested itself of its native immune system, its mot powerful weapons of resistance to an alien Faith which brooks no opposition and remains as self-confident as it ever was, against which the castrated victim-appeasing Liberalism of the EU has no defence.
(BTW, Islam embodies everything liberalism hates about historic Christianity and then some, yet they invented "Islamophobia" to protect it from critique.)
We are all supposed to open our homes up to these savages over the picture of one dead baby, but the thousands of White English girls pimped and raped in Rotherham for decades by Muslims is something polite people do not bring up.
And in the meantime, to accomodate itself, the Church allowed itself to be infected with the glib foolishness of post-War humanism, so that now it is worse than useless, in fact, a traitorous accomplice to its most undying foe.
Incredible. The Most Foolish People On The Planet (c).
---
If only!
Never could have imagined that the Mohammedan jihad which Christian Europe resisted and defeated over and over again from Charles Martel to the Siege of Vienna, would be the rough beast, its hour come at last, slouching toward our ancient homeland. Having liberated itself from its old Faith and its repressions and hierarchies and dogmas, it divested itself of its native immune system, its mot powerful weapons of resistance to an alien Faith which brooks no opposition and remains as self-confident as it ever was, against which the castrated victim-appeasing Liberalism of the EU has no defence.
(BTW, Islam embodies everything liberalism hates about historic Christianity and then some, yet they invented "Islamophobia" to protect it from critique.)
We are all supposed to open our homes up to these savages over the picture of one dead baby, but the thousands of White English girls pimped and raped in Rotherham for decades by Muslims is something polite people do not bring up.
And in the meantime, to accomodate itself, the Church allowed itself to be infected with the glib foolishness of post-War humanism, so that now it is worse than useless, in fact, a traitorous accomplice to its most undying foe.
Incredible. The Most Foolish People On The Planet (c).
---
Wednesday, September 09, 2015
The quest in the West
While the news describes the continuing invasion of Europe by the Third World Others and the surprising appeal of The Donald's attack on our own version of it, I am wandering through the culture and religion of The West.
The Arthurian and Grail legends are of great interest because they exhibit such a cross-fertilization of Christian and ancestral worlds. Part of their difficulty is also part of their strength, that there is no single canonical version. As with much mythic material, you can recognize the outline but the local and temporal variations abound.
The wounded Fisher King whose land is dying and who needs to be healed...not a bad image for the soul of the European male.
Playing with how to UpLift the Christian materials. By UpLift I mean what the German verb auf/heben means in a Hegelian context: to retrieve into a new context something prior, while preserving it and also transforming it. Naturally I am drawn to the archetypal approach, which somewhat matches the ancient Christian tradition of reading the Bible not just literally --according to the primary meaning, be it history, poetry, etc.-- but also symbolically. For my purposes, the historical meanings are not primary but the symbolic ones are.
A big part of the religious problem for Westerners is that scientific evidence is now the coin of the realm for what is true. Religion which tries to assert its beliefs as being as true as scientific data run the risk of aping a way of thinking which is incompatible with religion. But given the long history of Christian assertions of truth, backing off from that usually leads to the ghetto of poetry.
St Paul's critique of the Jewish Law as a mode of sacred living is argued partly on the actual effect it had on him: creating a sense of hopelessness that he would ever be able to carry it out sufficiently. What was intended, says he, to be life-giving had instead become toxic in its effects. A similar critique can be made of the Christian Gospel.
On the other hand, for all its problems --inherent and inescapeable in any human phenomenon-- Christianity may have paved the way for modern liberalism, with its corrosive egalitarian and universalist drive, but while Europe was Christian, --dogmatic and narrow-minded, as its Enlightenment critics asserted-- it never gave in to this drive. It was chock full of boundary, self-assertion and hierarchy --to say nothing of a rich and powerful divinity--and had woven itself into the fabric of many European identities. Only when Europe rejected this, did it walk down the path to self-destruction. The path from the triumph of science and reason to the dregs of technologism and post-modern deconstruction is no mystery. Which is why I continue to believe that any race and culture which is to survive must be shaped by sacred myth and ritual, kinship and code. I just don't think that atheism can build a world.
Nowadays, in the Church's struggle to maintain itself as a respectable instutiton in a post-Enlightenment world, it has ironically become infected with the same assumptions that its enemies used against it and has transformed itself from the backbone of the White West into one of the West's traitorous accomplices in destroying what it once built. What Pope before the fecklessly modern Vatican II period would have supported, even mandated as a Christian duty, the invasion of Christendom by streams of Muslims? It beggars belief, but there it is.
As Tarnas notes in his Passion of the Western Mind, the end result of the West's liberation struggle against mysticism and dogma and restrain in tradition was first a celebration of optimistic and heroic freedom but then, as it kept digging, came the nihilistic discovery that we are merely biological entities fighting and fucking our way through our tiny lives on a miniscule planet inside a universe so vast and uncaring that we are less than insignificant. Great job, guys.
There's gotta be a better way forward.
---
The Arthurian and Grail legends are of great interest because they exhibit such a cross-fertilization of Christian and ancestral worlds. Part of their difficulty is also part of their strength, that there is no single canonical version. As with much mythic material, you can recognize the outline but the local and temporal variations abound.
The wounded Fisher King whose land is dying and who needs to be healed...not a bad image for the soul of the European male.
Playing with how to UpLift the Christian materials. By UpLift I mean what the German verb auf/heben means in a Hegelian context: to retrieve into a new context something prior, while preserving it and also transforming it. Naturally I am drawn to the archetypal approach, which somewhat matches the ancient Christian tradition of reading the Bible not just literally --according to the primary meaning, be it history, poetry, etc.-- but also symbolically. For my purposes, the historical meanings are not primary but the symbolic ones are.
A big part of the religious problem for Westerners is that scientific evidence is now the coin of the realm for what is true. Religion which tries to assert its beliefs as being as true as scientific data run the risk of aping a way of thinking which is incompatible with religion. But given the long history of Christian assertions of truth, backing off from that usually leads to the ghetto of poetry.
St Paul's critique of the Jewish Law as a mode of sacred living is argued partly on the actual effect it had on him: creating a sense of hopelessness that he would ever be able to carry it out sufficiently. What was intended, says he, to be life-giving had instead become toxic in its effects. A similar critique can be made of the Christian Gospel.
On the other hand, for all its problems --inherent and inescapeable in any human phenomenon-- Christianity may have paved the way for modern liberalism, with its corrosive egalitarian and universalist drive, but while Europe was Christian, --dogmatic and narrow-minded, as its Enlightenment critics asserted-- it never gave in to this drive. It was chock full of boundary, self-assertion and hierarchy --to say nothing of a rich and powerful divinity--and had woven itself into the fabric of many European identities. Only when Europe rejected this, did it walk down the path to self-destruction. The path from the triumph of science and reason to the dregs of technologism and post-modern deconstruction is no mystery. Which is why I continue to believe that any race and culture which is to survive must be shaped by sacred myth and ritual, kinship and code. I just don't think that atheism can build a world.
Nowadays, in the Church's struggle to maintain itself as a respectable instutiton in a post-Enlightenment world, it has ironically become infected with the same assumptions that its enemies used against it and has transformed itself from the backbone of the White West into one of the West's traitorous accomplices in destroying what it once built. What Pope before the fecklessly modern Vatican II period would have supported, even mandated as a Christian duty, the invasion of Christendom by streams of Muslims? It beggars belief, but there it is.
As Tarnas notes in his Passion of the Western Mind, the end result of the West's liberation struggle against mysticism and dogma and restrain in tradition was first a celebration of optimistic and heroic freedom but then, as it kept digging, came the nihilistic discovery that we are merely biological entities fighting and fucking our way through our tiny lives on a miniscule planet inside a universe so vast and uncaring that we are less than insignificant. Great job, guys.
There's gotta be a better way forward.
---
Sunday, September 06, 2015
Thought comets
flashing through my brain.
-----
I am really lucky. Mr B makes me laugh, often, every day. Really lucky. Blessed, even.
-----
The current youngmale hipster haircut, on some guys, looks pretty sexy. The "disconnected undercut" is what they call it. (Who thought that name up?)
It combines the two extremes of male hair display. On the sides, you have the really close and sharply cut style which implies discipline and no-nonsense military precision. On top, you get the thick and shiny luxuriance which displays youth, excess and conscious sexual signalling. Both, at one time.
Of course, it can get out of hand and look flamboyantly dumb and creepy.
-----
When you're happy, say, in the middle of flagrante delicto or a great meal* having a body is a great thing. When you're engulfed in dark emotions, it just feels like a horrible trap you can't escape.
*I originally typed "or a great male"...Thanks, Dr. Freud.
-----
My damn knee hurts whenever I move it.
-----
September is a great month in SF. Clear cool mornings and warm days.
-----
Gaydom is tediously repetitive and predictable. Especially the constant victim routine. YouTube just suggested a gay short film for me to watch. It's all about the awful things that could have happened during the worst AIDS days. But they didn't. Subjunctive victimhood: condition contrary to fact. But the Sacred Victim routine is ritually repeated. Endlessly. Zzzzz.
----
I need a new pipe. The mouthpiece on my old one broke and I bought an interim in NY but the hole in the bowl is too high up, so it leaves 1/4 of the tobacco unsmoked.
Leaving the pipe store on 4th, a Black guy almost backed into me. I put up my hands to keep him away and as I kept walking, he made some kind of threatening comment about me pushing him. Potential chimpout, but no follow-through. Years ago after exiting a very crowded bus at rush hour in SF, a Negro youf followed me for three block because he said I stepped on his foot and didn't say I was sorry. These people are crazy.
----
I miss the eastern Sierras.
----
Looking forward to Mr B's birthday later this week. I hope he likes my present.
----
-----
I am really lucky. Mr B makes me laugh, often, every day. Really lucky. Blessed, even.
-----
The current youngmale hipster haircut, on some guys, looks pretty sexy. The "disconnected undercut" is what they call it. (Who thought that name up?)
It combines the two extremes of male hair display. On the sides, you have the really close and sharply cut style which implies discipline and no-nonsense military precision. On top, you get the thick and shiny luxuriance which displays youth, excess and conscious sexual signalling. Both, at one time.
See? How can there not be a God?
-----
When you're happy, say, in the middle of flagrante delicto or a great meal* having a body is a great thing. When you're engulfed in dark emotions, it just feels like a horrible trap you can't escape.
*I originally typed "or a great male"...Thanks, Dr. Freud.
-----
My damn knee hurts whenever I move it.
-----
September is a great month in SF. Clear cool mornings and warm days.
-----
Gaydom is tediously repetitive and predictable. Especially the constant victim routine. YouTube just suggested a gay short film for me to watch. It's all about the awful things that could have happened during the worst AIDS days. But they didn't. Subjunctive victimhood: condition contrary to fact. But the Sacred Victim routine is ritually repeated. Endlessly. Zzzzz.
----
I need a new pipe. The mouthpiece on my old one broke and I bought an interim in NY but the hole in the bowl is too high up, so it leaves 1/4 of the tobacco unsmoked.
Leaving the pipe store on 4th, a Black guy almost backed into me. I put up my hands to keep him away and as I kept walking, he made some kind of threatening comment about me pushing him. Potential chimpout, but no follow-through. Years ago after exiting a very crowded bus at rush hour in SF, a Negro youf followed me for three block because he said I stepped on his foot and didn't say I was sorry. These people are crazy.
----
I miss the eastern Sierras.
----
Looking forward to Mr B's birthday later this week. I hope he likes my present.
----
Western decline, personalized
I'm in my late 60s, my knee went out the other day and I am limping around until I can see the doc next week, I'm sneezing from allergies, which has given me a headache, and I have heartburn after lunch.
Poor me.
____
Poor me.
____
Saturday, September 05, 2015
Christianity and the post-Roman West
 |
| The Lord Christ, Catalonia, early 1100's |
My lastest reading on the fate and fall of the Roman Empire in the West, by specialist historian Adrian Goldsworthy, asserts the this collapse had very little to do with Christianity (pace Gibbon) and far more to do with universal human passions for wealth and power. The parade of failed emperors, coups, and civil wars in the last two centuries after Constantine --himself winner of a civil war-- strongly suggests this. The conversion to Christ failed to stop what had been going on for a long time.
Based on this assumption, I make the claim the while its current state has grown toxic for the West, Christianity as Christendom, was what allowed the emergence of a genuine and commonly held White European civilization.
The combination of racial and religious history which made it possible for such diverse groups as Orthodox Slavs and Protestant Brits and Catholic Spaniards to think of themselves as related even when at war is the work of the Church as Christendom, the Realm of the Christians.
When Christendom was weakened and began to fade, first with the Reformation, then with the Enlightenment and the rise of the secular Euro nation-state, only then did we have the ghastly outcome of our White Civil Wars, beginning with the mid 19th century and nightmarishly culminating in the 20th. Our native populations --of young males especially--were decimated and the colonial peoples we had conquered saw us as beatable.
Although testy neo-pagans claim that "tolerance" is the great virtue of polytheism, they fail to note that such polytheism has very definite limits --as a religion--in its ability to create a sense of common kinship. I would suggest --not argue, because it's a new idea for me and a large one-- that in the wake of Rome's collapse and the incursions of the Barbarians, it was precisely the triumph of modifiedly monotheist and dogmatic Christianity which finally allow the initially hostile (and always competitive and fractious) forces of the old Empire and the great new populations of the incursions finally to mesh together into Europeans. (To give them due credit, the Mohammedans --and Jews, too--as Other helped a lot to coalesce the sense of common spiritual kinship; were Christianity still healthy, they still would.)
I do not dispute --very painfully though it be-- that Christianity in it current Liberally-infected state is inimical to White Men and to the European peoples generally and that it needs to be transcended, but I reject the notion often heard by the "kike on a stick" crowd that Europe was victim for 1500 years to a Semitic captivity.
Christianity may have harbored within it the universalizing seed of our destruction, with its worship of weakness and failure, but it was the hostile Enlightenment --anti-Christian to its core-- which really birth the cancerous Liberalism which is now consuming our people alive. When Christianity was orthodox and self-confident, its celebration of humility was far more than compensated by its sense of itself as the triumphant culmination of all of history. Note the image above.
As I wrote on FB recently, where over 10,000 deluded Icelanders volunteered to take tens of thousands of Syrian "refugees" into their tiny island, when these folks were devout Lutherans they would never have done that. Only after "liberating" themselves from their "dogmatic and restrictive" old Faith have they shown themselves to be so blindly entranced by updated dreams of selfless suicide.
It may have been the very "Semitic captivity" of Christianity which created us as White Westerners and allowed us to thrive and survive.
Till now.
---
Holocaustianity
The Right’s Jewish Problem - Taki's Magazine:
A Jew who dared question the Canonical Version of the history of Europe's Jews in WWII got cast into outer darkness by the very same Hollywood right-wingers who otherwise paint themselves as speakers of Truth to Power. By his self-description, he had unimpeachable pro-Israel credentials, etc. but made the fatal mistake of asking questions about What Must Never Be Questioned.
It's perfectly natural for Jews to make "The Holocaust" their historical centerpiece. What I no longer buy is that it's anyone else's.
Or that it should now buy them any particular moral immunity. It's just a Hebrew version of "the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow." And, frankly, gets all-too-often used for the same corrosive purposes.
"Anti-Semitism," along with "homophobia" and "racism" and "sexism" and "Islamophobia" and all the other isms and phobias, is a shorthand thought-weapon, understandably promoted by any group which feels threatened. Or in most cases nowadays, insufficiently worshipped. In which case, "beatings will continue until morale improves."
But all these essential fraudulent and completely self-serving sleight-of-hand concepts contain an implied but implacable Prime Directive payload inside the exterior viral coating. Not only are you forbidden from disliking them, but in order to avoid the catastrophic charge of any of these Orwellian isms and phobias, you must adopt an unquestioningly uncritical, agreeable, celebratory and, as I said, worshipful attitude toward the groups they protect.
Any group lucky enough to be graced with an ism or phobia of their own becomes a Sacred Victim Group. Thus, worshipful is not an exaggeration, since offending any of them is treated in our secular culture exactly as blasphemy, heresy or witchcraft were treated in pre-modern ones, as violations of holiness and transcendant value. We no longer put people on the literal rack until they confess and repent and we don't physically burn them in the public square anymore, but in our own way, we do exactly the same thing to those perpetrators of CrimeThink who will not burn incense to Caesar...or Shmuel, or Mohammed, or Rosario, or Laquisha or Bruce or Emma Sulkowicz, as she carries her cross longer than Jesus through the valley of the shadow of death, aka, my alma mater Columbia University.
I bought all of these notions, for a long time. But, like a good Gnostic, I took The Red Pill.
Now I know they're all crap.
---
'via Blog this'
A Jew who dared question the Canonical Version of the history of Europe's Jews in WWII got cast into outer darkness by the very same Hollywood right-wingers who otherwise paint themselves as speakers of Truth to Power. By his self-description, he had unimpeachable pro-Israel credentials, etc. but made the fatal mistake of asking questions about What Must Never Be Questioned.
It's perfectly natural for Jews to make "The Holocaust" their historical centerpiece. What I no longer buy is that it's anyone else's.
Or that it should now buy them any particular moral immunity. It's just a Hebrew version of "the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow." And, frankly, gets all-too-often used for the same corrosive purposes.
"Anti-Semitism," along with "homophobia" and "racism" and "sexism" and "Islamophobia" and all the other isms and phobias, is a shorthand thought-weapon, understandably promoted by any group which feels threatened. Or in most cases nowadays, insufficiently worshipped. In which case, "beatings will continue until morale improves."
But all these essential fraudulent and completely self-serving sleight-of-hand concepts contain an implied but implacable Prime Directive payload inside the exterior viral coating. Not only are you forbidden from disliking them, but in order to avoid the catastrophic charge of any of these Orwellian isms and phobias, you must adopt an unquestioningly uncritical, agreeable, celebratory and, as I said, worshipful attitude toward the groups they protect.
Any group lucky enough to be graced with an ism or phobia of their own becomes a Sacred Victim Group. Thus, worshipful is not an exaggeration, since offending any of them is treated in our secular culture exactly as blasphemy, heresy or witchcraft were treated in pre-modern ones, as violations of holiness and transcendant value. We no longer put people on the literal rack until they confess and repent and we don't physically burn them in the public square anymore, but in our own way, we do exactly the same thing to those perpetrators of CrimeThink who will not burn incense to Caesar...or Shmuel, or Mohammed, or Rosario, or Laquisha or Bruce or Emma Sulkowicz, as she carries her cross longer than Jesus through the valley of the shadow of death, aka, my alma mater Columbia University.
I bought all of these notions, for a long time. But, like a good Gnostic, I took The Red Pill.
Now I know they're all crap.
---
'via Blog this'
Friday, September 04, 2015
No escape
I took the risk of watching a 2011 Brit series on King Arthur. As I could have predicted, we have castrating feminist women and of course one of Arthur's knights is African. The Sacred Narrative requires this. Always.
All it lacked --so far at least, -- was the obligatory sacrosanct interracial couple.
---
All it lacked --so far at least, -- was the obligatory sacrosanct interracial couple.
---
Thursday, September 03, 2015
Dynamism and SelfDestruction
Whether you use the image of Athens and Jerusalem, Aristotle and Plato, Enlightenment and Romanticism, etc. it's pretty clear that that White West (a tautology) is defined (largely thought not exhaustively) by its dialectic of mystical universalism and scientific rationalism. Is that dynamic or is that destructive?
Looking for a sacred stream that does not simply choose the one side over the other is quite the challenge.
---
Looking for a sacred stream that does not simply choose the one side over the other is quite the challenge.
---
Tuesday, September 01, 2015
This fallen world
Whilst in a store in NY, I spy the outline, from the back, of a tall, broad-shouldered, crop-haired man in a pair of slacks and a light polo shirt.
He turns to speak to one of his staff and I see a Mediterranean nose and jawline, powerful build, age about 25.
I hear him talk: out pops a 17-year old high school girl.
I want to curse God.
---
He turns to speak to one of his staff and I see a Mediterranean nose and jawline, powerful build, age about 25.
I hear him talk: out pops a 17-year old high school girl.
I want to curse God.
---
September morn
I have had some very good times this summer. And one of them, living in SF, is expecting that September will actually be a summer month. And furthermore, as I say pretty well every year, knowing that the coming autumn will be kind and the winter no more than inconvenient a bit...
Going back to religion makes me ponder directly once again the Great Questions: why is the world created and why are there humans?
Self-described tough-minded types who think that they can reduce everything to what they imagine they know by sense experience find all of religion nothing but "pretty lies." I wonder how a religion would look that remained a religion, a commitment to a trans-human sacred, and did away, as far as possible, with "pretty lies." Or is the pretty lie essential to gaining religious commitment from people?
It's a shame I am not a novelist. Weaving the faith of the Sons of Europa into a post-collapse series of novels would be a great way to do it.
Trapped on a long uncomfortable plane flight, I watched the last half hour of Exodus; Gods and Men, the latest version of Moses and Pharaoh, etc. Very idiosyncratic, to say the least. Why Christian Bale should play Moses is a mystery. And Yah apparently reveals himself to CB in the form of a wise little boy of about six. He chats with him while CB is in a cave carving the Commandments on tablets.
The Red Sea scene was interestingly unusual, combining naturalism --interpreting the withdrawal and return of the waters as tsunami behavior-- with pretty exciting CG.
A thought on so-called fundamentalisms. During the aeons of Christendom --from the establishment of Christian Rome to the 19th/20th centuries, a self-confident Christianity interpreted the Old Testament through Christian eyes. It was the New Covenant, which had superceded the Old and was its true owner and interpreter. Within that theo-cultural confidence, the images of the Hebrew scriptures would easily be appropriated into Christian style for the new peoples of Europe.*
With the collapse of Christianity and, along with it, Western White self-confidence and the post-WWII sanctification of Jews, we now have a situation of ethnic fundamentalism, where Moses --whom White Christian audiences once easily saw without qualm in Charleton Heston-- now "ought" to look like what we are told to imagine ancient people like him were supposed to look like. Which, whatever it was, was not like evil White us.
It is against this catastrophic loss of self-confidence that my quixotic ramblings about a new European religon arise.
----
Going back to religion makes me ponder directly once again the Great Questions: why is the world created and why are there humans?
Self-described tough-minded types who think that they can reduce everything to what they imagine they know by sense experience find all of religion nothing but "pretty lies." I wonder how a religion would look that remained a religion, a commitment to a trans-human sacred, and did away, as far as possible, with "pretty lies." Or is the pretty lie essential to gaining religious commitment from people?
It's a shame I am not a novelist. Weaving the faith of the Sons of Europa into a post-collapse series of novels would be a great way to do it.
Trapped on a long uncomfortable plane flight, I watched the last half hour of Exodus; Gods and Men, the latest version of Moses and Pharaoh, etc. Very idiosyncratic, to say the least. Why Christian Bale should play Moses is a mystery. And Yah apparently reveals himself to CB in the form of a wise little boy of about six. He chats with him while CB is in a cave carving the Commandments on tablets.
The Red Sea scene was interestingly unusual, combining naturalism --interpreting the withdrawal and return of the waters as tsunami behavior-- with pretty exciting CG.
A thought on so-called fundamentalisms. During the aeons of Christendom --from the establishment of Christian Rome to the 19th/20th centuries, a self-confident Christianity interpreted the Old Testament through Christian eyes. It was the New Covenant, which had superceded the Old and was its true owner and interpreter. Within that theo-cultural confidence, the images of the Hebrew scriptures would easily be appropriated into Christian style for the new peoples of Europe.*
With the collapse of Christianity and, along with it, Western White self-confidence and the post-WWII sanctification of Jews, we now have a situation of ethnic fundamentalism, where Moses --whom White Christian audiences once easily saw without qualm in Charleton Heston-- now "ought" to look like what we are told to imagine ancient people like him were supposed to look like. Which, whatever it was, was not like evil White us.
It is against this catastrophic loss of self-confidence that my quixotic ramblings about a new European religon arise.
----
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