fulfilled by silly Xtians
As to why I said yesterday that the Christian Question is more relevant than the JQ—something the American racial right doesn’t want to see—see a minute of Judge Napolitano’s interview with Matt Hoh today, starting here.
without a kingdom
The following words of a YouTuber reminded me of some things… (my translation from Spanish to English):
Being intelligent is a problem. Not because intelligence itself is negative, but because the world is not designed for those who see beyond it. From an early age you were told that intelligence would open doors, that it would make you stand out, that it would set you free. This is a lie. Intelligence doesn’t set you free, it isolates you. It doesn’t make you fit in, it separates you. It doesn’t give you an advantage, it makes you a target. If you’re here, you’ve already lived it. Overthinking is a self-imposed punishment.
This reminded me that, although I’m a 14-word priest, white nationalists—sympathisers of Christianity in general—ignore me because I realised that the CQ is more relevant than the JQ. The vlogger continues:
As your mind expands, you find superficial conversations unbearable, other people’s stupidity becomes background noise, and pervasive mediocrity feels like a weight you have to carry every day. And the worst thing is that you can’t say anything. If you do, you are arrogant. If you try to explain what you see, you are trolling. If your existence exposes the incompetence of others, you are the problem. Nietzsche understood this better than anyone. Society is not a community of individuals seeking truth; it is a control mechanism based on slave morality, a code designed to glorify obedience and punish independence.
Are you smarter than the rest? Congratulations, now you will be called arrogant. Do you think differently? Now you are conceited. Do you see what others ignore? Now you are a threat. If you talk too much, they isolate you. If you keep quiet, you end up drowning in your own mind. It’s a dead end.
That’s why so many end up faking it. They reduce their speech, disguise their thoughts, and hide their ideas behind common phrases so as not to make anyone uncomfortable. They learn to be mediocre to survive among mediocre people. And if they don’t, they are devoured.
Intelligence not only isolates you, it makes you the enemy. Because the one who sees beyond is a problem for those who have built their lives with their eyes closed. People don’t want the truth. They want confirmation of their beliefs, they want validation of their illusions, they want security in their cage. You are the crack in their walls, the reminder that they could have been something more.
Plato described this thousands of years ago in his Myth of the Cave. Imagine a group of people chained in a cave, seeing shadows on the wall, believing that this is the only reality. One day, one of them breaks free and sees the outside world. He discovers the truth. And when he returns to tell the others, what do they do? They reject him, they attack him, and they want to kill him. Because the problem is not that people don’t understand. It’s that they don’t want to understand [e.g., understand the Christian question—Editor]. It is easier to live in the dark than to accept that you have wasted your whole life looking at shadows.
The intelligent is a problem because his existence exposes the self-deception of others. If you have tried to share what you know, you have seen it with your own eyes. People don’t want depth, they want entertainment. They don’t want critical thinking, they want distraction. They are not interested in knowing reality; they want you to play along, to go with the flow, to not force them to think too hard. If you confront them with the truth, they crucify you.
That is why intelligence is an exile. No matter how hard you try, you will always be too much for the world and not enough to change it. You don’t fit into society because society is not made for those who think for themselves. It is made for stability, for conformity, for the balance of mediocrity. Those who see beyond that are ignored or destroyed. Most of history’s geniuses ended in ruin, in madness, in isolation. Not because they were incapable, but because their minds operated at a level where the rest could not follow. Socrates was condemned to death for asking uncomfortable questions. Galileo was persecuted for challenging the establishment. Nietzsche died alone and despised.
So the question is not whether intelligence is a burden. The question is what you’re going to do with it. You have two ways: pretend you’re not smarter than everyone else, reduce yourself, hide what you know, and numb your mind with banalities so you don’t feel alone. Or accept it. But accepting intelligence is not comfortable. It is to understand that you will be isolated, that you will be an outsider, and that you will never fit in. Intelligence is a condemnation if you let it be.
But it can be a tool if you learn to use it. You don’t need approval. You don’t need validation. You don’t need to fit in. You just need to know that most people will never understand you. And that it doesn’t matter. Because the world is not made for lone wolves. It’s made for herds. Intelligence doesn’t just make the weak uncomfortable. It makes those who rule uncomfortable. Because power is not maintained by force, it is maintained by ignorance. The world is not made for lone wolves, but a pack of wolves rule the flock. The difference is that the wolf of power is not a lone genius; he is a predator who learned to play by the rules of the pack. The one who is intelligent but does not understand how power works is just a sage without a kingdom.
You cannot dominate an awakened society. You cannot control thinking people. That is why, from birth, we are programmed to accept the balance of mediocrity. Ignorance is glorified, difference is punished, and genius is ridiculed. We are taught to repress our ideas, not to make too much noise, not to stand out too much. It is a systematic domestication. Foucault put it bluntly: power does not need to enslave you physically if it gets you to accept your enslavement yourself. No dictatorship is needed if the herd believes that the rules are for its own good. There is no need for explicit punishment if they make the punishment social exclusion. If you think too much, you will be an outcast. If you challenge the establishment, you’re in trouble. If you decide not to play along, you will be silenced. History bears this out. The world’s greatest thinkers were not rewarded for their genius; they were persecuted for it. The wolves who control the flock have no interest in having more wolves who might question them. If a wolf does not follow the rules of power, he is eliminated or ridiculed into a harmless buffoon.
Look around you. Look at what is glorified. Disposable culture, empty entertainment, quick and simplified thinking. It is not coincidental. It is intentional. Mediocrity is the best weapon of power. Because a sleeping mind does not rebel. Because someone distracted is easier to control. Because it is easier to entertain than to educate. The problem is that most intelligent people do not understand that they are at war. They still believe that truth alone is enough. That if they explain logically what is wrong, they will be listened to. They will not. It is not about logic. It is about power. Camus described it accurately: the man who thinks too much is confronted with the absurd. But society does not want to face the truth. It prefers the comfort of the known. That’s why the intelligent end up isolated, exhausted, and without the strength to keep fighting.
The rest I do not translate because the author doesn’t seem to understand the examples he himself gave: Socrates, Galileo and Nietzsche. In their time they had no chance to become ‘strategists’ or ‘foxes’ as the author says, as they lived against their time (remember Nietzsche’s tragic life).
and the problem of Evil
by Gaedhal
That nasty article that I linked to yesterday—which, unfortunately, is behind a paywall—confirms something that Sam Harris used to say:
‘Religion allows people to believe, in the billions, that which, if believed alone, would render one a lunatic.’
Forsooth, yea, and verily! Let us institute an International festival in honour of a mythical peasant preacher’s Jewishness. An insane idea. However, because it is in accord with the Zeitgeist of the world’s biggest religion, it is an idea that is taken seriously.
Let us call foreskin amputation—and especially the pain caused thereby—a “beautiful” thing. This is what the sicko, Margaret Hebblethwaite wrote yesterday.
There is a video of Christopher Hitchens and he was smoking a cigarette, and saying that Catholic lunatics such as John Paul 2, mother theresa—and I have no doubt that he would include Frankenpope and Hebblethwaite in this list were he still alive—are the ‘real enemy’.
And it brings us back to what John Loftus writes in Horrendous Suffering. Ironically, Christianity—it ideally should be called: ‘Judeochristianity’ as Christianity is merely a denomination of Judaism—has added, greatly to horrendous suffering.
Here we have Hebblethwaite, the Catholic, adding to the horrendous suffering of this world by advocating for this vampiric rite of child-abuse.
Ironically, the history of religion, and the horrendous harm caused by religion, is in and of itself an argument against the existence of god.
The logical problem of evil says that an Omni god would never have to resort to any sort of evil so as to accomplish his will. If God needs to resort to the allowance of evil, then he is either not all good, or not all powerful. Evil exists. QED. Quod erat demonstrandum: God does not exist. The logical problem of evil is a deductive argument for the non-existence of god. If the premises are true: an omni God would not need evil to accomplish his goals; evil exists; then the conclusion necessarily follows: God does not exist.
Despite Apologists showboating and saying that the logical problem of evil is dead, I think that it is sound. Even if an omni god did need to allow evil to accomplish his creative purposes, then he could always choose not to create. This, according to Doug is the true problem of evil. If God is a perfect and complete world unto himself, then why create a world at all, that He would know, with certainty, would bring about evil. In my view, such a god, faced with either creating a world with evil in it, or choosing not to create a world at all, would simply choose not to create.
However, the evidential problem of evil is an inductive argument. We collect data relating to horrendous suffering, of which there is a superabundance on this Hell-planet, and then we ask ourselves the question, which hypothesis best explains the data: the God hypothesis or the non-god hypothesis. And, in my view, to sincerely and honestly grapple with the problem of horrendous suffering as laid out in Horrendous Suffering by John Loftus is to arrive at the non-God hypothesis as the best explanation for the presence of so much horrendous suffering in our world.
‘James Sterba resurrected the logical problem of evil. It’s impossible that a theistic god exists. Look him up.’ —John Loftus
Yeah, apologists like to pretend that the logical problem of evil is no longer taken seriously in academic philosophy. This is just simply another lie of the apologetics’ profession.
In William Lane Craig’s debate with Christopher Hitchens, he reverses the burden of proof on the logical problem of evil: it was up to Christopher to prove that a god, whom he does not believe in, does not have morally sufficient reasons to permit evil. This is why I take the view of Venaloid, Carrier and Prophet of Zod in saying that William Lane Craig is a conman. A PhD philosopher should be able to wrap his brain around the logical problem of evil. In my view, the hypothesis that Craig is a conman is much more likely than the hypothesis that Craig is incompetent.
But even if a classically theistic god had morally sufficient reasons to allow evil, that same god, by virtue of his omnipotence, could achieve those same ends without allowing evil. The classically theistic god’s omnibenevolence would here kick in: I have two approaches available to me to achieve some end or goal. One approach allows for evil—which I supposedly hate—and another approach does not allow for evil. Well, my omnibenevolence kicks in and necessitates that I choose the approach that does not allow for the existence of evil to achieve my ends. However, evil exists. Thus, a classically theistic god does not exit. If gods there be, then that god is lacking in some omni property. That god is probably less than omniscient, or omnipotent, or omnibenevolent. QED. A deductive proof of the non-existence of a classically theistic god.
However, lest we drift into some sort of atheistic Thomism, or scholasticism, where we simply sit on our philosophical armchairs and a-priori reason all day, we also have the inductive argument against the existence of god from our gathering data as regards instances of horrendous suffering, in our world.
I am sure that William Lane Craig understands all of this very well… Indeed, better than I do. I only have a high-school/secondary-school education. Craig has two PhDs. However, Craig is a dishonest conman.
And thunderf00t—before Elon broke his brain—points this out: Craig isn’t really an academic philosopher, at all. He got two PhDs so as to employ them as props. In academic philosophy, he is a nobody.
Craig, in his own way, is as crazy and as dishonest as Ken Ham. Ken Ham similarly hires PhDs so as to deny evident reality.
Similarly with Wes Huff. Davis points out in that reality rules video, I linked in a previous email, that even though Huff is essentially a thesis and a viva voce away from a PhD, nevertheless, he spends all of his extracurricular time on apologetics, and not, you know, publishing in academic journals. Huff is the new apologetics superstar. However, it is the same modus operandi as Craig’s and Ham’s. Get a PhD. Use it as a prop so as to lie for Jaysus.
‘All great movements are popular movements. They are the volcanic eruptions of human passions and emotions, stirred into activity by the ruthless Goddess of Distress or by the torch of the spoken word cast into the midst of the people’.
—Hitler
by Gaedhal
Thanks for responding! [Gaedhal refers to Richard C. Miller’s email]
I think that you once described the field of biblical studies as the last holdover of the dark-ages. The New Testament is obviously Hellenistic Graeco-Roman mythology. However, instead of the SBL [Society of Biblical Literature] studying it as such, it erects barriers to studying it as such. I think that you shared recently that members of the guild tried to censor some of your writings, or the writings of some PhD students that you have influenced. You and your students were simply studying and critiquing “the New Testament”—or as you like to call it: ‘earliest Christian writings’—and the guild tried to censor all of you for “going too far in this direction”.
Biblical studies is still, as Avalos points out, an apologetic enterprise. The teleological ‘end’ of biblical studies is to convince the world at large that religion in general, and Christianity in particular, is a force for good in the world. However, to suggest that Christianity is essentially no different to other Greco-Roman mystery/missing-body cults, is to puncture this entire apologetic empire. And Big Bible is Big Business. I think that the guild has been treating you so rottenly of late that you have suspended your Facebook page.
It is as you said on Mythvision: Christianity is a ladelful of the stew that is Greco-Roman Hellenic mythology. Big Bible takes this ladelful of stew and studies it in splendid isolation from the larger stew of Greco-roman Hellenic mythology that Christianity was drawn from.
You mention that travelogue from Corinth, written in Greek—the language of the New Testament!—and written at about the same time that Paul was writing to the Church at Corinth… and how practically no SBL school instructs its students to read this ancient travelogue.
I have a very short fuse when it comes to obvious cynical con-artists such as Wes Huff. It amazes me that Kipp Davis could call this guy a “budding scholar”. But this is the problem of Old Atheism. The likes of Kipp Davis and Bart Ehrman want to be thought well of by the likes of Huff and Licona for reasons which totally escape me. With Avalos it was not so: he wanted to burn the guild to the ground, and, indeed, you yourself have criticised him for not divorcing himself completely from SBL…
[In another communication Gaedhal informed us:]
This could be why the SBL guild is treating Richard C. Miller so badly. If Christianity is but Hellenistic Greco-Roman mythology—and it is!—then it is bad for Jews if this be found out. If Yahweh be as fictitious as Zeus, and if Jesus is as mythical as Hercules, then the Jews go from being “the Chosen People” and “a great monotheistic Faith” to simply being a gang of religious swindlers and hucksters who have been duping and swindling the Goyim with their religious bullshit for about 3,000 years.
And we cannot have that! (indeed, David Skrbina writes of this in his Jesus Hoax).
