Why I hate Christianity

“What a certificate of mental poverty it was for Christianity that it destroyed the libraries of the ancient world!”

Makes sense though, literacy has not been kind to it.

Had pagan religions been allowed to exist, surely there would be entire nations today that wouldn’t subscribe to this secularized form of Judeo-Christian values that is killing us.

Yeah but isn’t that still part of the larger problem we’re facing? Can you imagine Christianity without the centralization and technical ability of Rome? The same Rome that, as you and Pierce noted, acted plenty ghoulishly towards the Germans before anyone had heard of the Nazarene.

You refer to The One Ring as wealth, but I fear it may be worse. Wealth as such may be like invisibility; sheltering the wearer from the natural world and the common rabble of enemies, but putting you on the same plane as the wraiths and slowly causing you to disappear into their world. Nonetheless the ring’s essence wasn’t invisibility, and it didn’t need to be worn to corrupt.

A rural gentry can retain a noble character in spite of their estate. An industrial proletariat doesn’t need wealth to become soulless and orcish, they can be near-starving, but they need to be a part of an industrial city.

I believe we’ve been in a struggle with technology itself since the advent of agriculture, a struggle made all the more significant by our technical power. We live inside a technological system which is adaptive, which moves towards its own stability and expansion without the conscious support of its vessels, and which will psychologically grind up anyone who isn’t prepared to assert their own will against it. It’s the ring that we must carry to the end of time.

It was Kaczynski’s grim essay that first destroyed my liberalism, and I suppose it’ll never leave the back of my mind:

The leftist of the oversocialized type tries to get off his psychological leash and assert his autonomy by rebelling. But usually he is not strong enough to rebel against the most basic values of society. Generally speaking, the goals of today’s leftists are NOT in conflict with the accepted morality. On the contrary, the left takes an accepted moral principle, adopts it as its own, and then accuses mainstream society of violating that principle. Examples: racial equality, equality of the sexes, helping poor people, peace as opposed to war, nonviolence generally, freedom of expression, kindness to animals. More fundamentally, the duty of the individual to serve society and the duty of society to take care of the individual. All these have been deeply rooted values of our society or at least of its middle and upper classes for a long time. These values are explicitly or implicitly expressed or presupposed in most of the material presented to us by the mainstream communications media and the educational system. Leftists, especially those of the oversocialized type, usually do not rebel against these principles but justify their hostility to society by claiming (with some degree of truth) that society is not living up to these principles. (…)

The system does not and cannot exist to satisfy human needs. Instead, it is human behavior that has to be modified to fit the needs of the system. This has nothing to do with the political or social ideology that may pretend to guide the technological system. It is the fault of technology, because the system is guided not by ideology but by technical necessity. Of course the system does satisfy many human needs, but generally speaking it does this only to the extent that it is to the advantage of the system to do it. It is the needs of the system that are paramount, not those of the human being. For example, the system provides people with food because the system couldn’t function if everyone starved; it attends to people’s psychological needs whenever it can CONVENIENTLY do so, because it couldn’t function if too many people became depressed or rebellious. But the system, for good, solid, practical reasons, must exert constant pressure on people to mold their behavior to the needs of the system.

Too much waste accumulating? The government, the media, the educational system, environmentalists, everyone inundates us with a mass of propaganda about recycling. Need more technical personnel? A chorus of voices exhorts kids to study science. No one stops to ask whether it is inhumane to force adolescents to spend the bulk of their time studying subjects most of them hate. When skilled workers are put out of a job by technical advances and have to undergo “retraining,” no one asks whether it is humiliating for them to be pushed around in this way. It is simply taken for granted that everyone must bow to technical necessity. and for good reason: If human needs were put before technical necessity there would be economic problems, unemployment, shortages or worse. The concept of “mental health” in our society is defined largely by the extent to which an individual behaves in accord with the needs of the system and does so without showing signs of stress.

I’m not as pessimistic as Kaczynski is. I believe that we can – through an act of will – reassert ourselves, and take ourselves back from Sauron. Carry the ring, as we are fated. Technology will always remain a titan sleeping just below us though. I guess my nonchalance towards Christianity’s domination comes from this outlook; Roman centralization and urbanization necessarily led to he destruction of the pagan mindset.