Category: Axiology
Excerpted from the 18th article of William Pierce’s “Who We Are: a Series of Articles on the History of the White Race”:
Christian ethics—the slave morality preached in the Roman catacombs—was like a time bomb ticking away in Europe—a Trojan horse brought inside the fortress, waiting for its season. That season came, and the damage was done. Today Christianity is one of the most active forces working from within to destroy the White race.
From the Christian churches came the notion of “the White man’s burden,” along with the missionaries who saw in every African cannibal or Chinese coolie a soul to be saved, of equal value in the eyes of Jehovah to any White soul. It is entirely a Christian impulse—at least, on the part of the average American voter, if not the government—which sends American food and medical supplies to keep alive swarming millions of Asiatics, Africans, and Latins every time they have a famine, so that they can continue to outbreed Whites.
The otherworldly emphasis on individual salvation, on an individual relationship between Creator and creature which relegates the relationship between individual and race, tribe, and community to insignificance; the inversion of natural values inherent in the exalting of the botched, the unclean, and the poor in spirit in the Sermon on the Mount, the injunction to “resist not evil” — all are prescriptions for racial suicide. Indeed, had a fiendishly clever enemy set out to concoct a set of doctrines intended to lead the White race to its destruction, he could hardly have done better.
The “White guilt” syndrome exploited so assiduously by America’s non-White minorities is a product of Christian teachings, as is the perverse reverence for “God’s chosen people” which has paralyzed so many Christians’ wills to resist Jewish depredations.
Moses Replaces Hermann
Not the least of the damage done by the Christianization of Europe was the gradual replacement of White tradition, legend, and imagery by that of the Jews. Instead of specifically Celtic or German or Slavic heroes, the Church’s saints, many of them Levantines, were held up to the young for emulation; instead of the feats of Hermann or Vercingetorix, children were taught of the doings of Moses and David.
Europeans’ artistic inspiration was turned away from the depiction of their own rich heritage and used to glorify that of an alien race; Semitic proverbs and figures of speech took precedence over those of Indo-European provenance; Europeans even abandoned the names of their ancestors and began giving Jewish names to their children: Samuel and Sarah, John and Joan, Michael and Mary, Daniel and Deborah.
Despite all these long-term consequences of Christianity, however, the immediate symptoms of the infection which the conquering Germans picked up from the defeated Romans were hardly noticeable. White morals and manners, motivations and behavior remained much as they had been, for they were rooted in the genes—but now they had a new rationale.
Today’s Christian Patriots
And it is only fair to note that even today a fairly substantial minority of White men and women who still think of themselves as Christians have not allowed their sounder instincts to be corrupted by doctrines suited to a following of mongrelized slaves. They ignore the Jewish origins of Christianity and justify their instinctive dislike and distrust of Jews with the fact that the Jews, in demanding that Jesus be killed, became a race forever accursed (“His blood be on us and on our children”).
They interpret the divine injunction of brotherhood as applying only to Whites. Like the Franks of the Middle Ages, they believe what suits them and conveniently forget or invent their own interpretation for the rest. Were they the Christian mainstream today, the religion would not be the racial menace that it is.
Unfortunately, however, they are not: virtually none are actively affiliated with any of the larger, established Christian churches.
♣
Pierce’s book continues for other eight chapters.
I am convinced that the white race won’t be saved
unless whites—agnostics and atheists included—
give up Christian axiology (see: here).
Greg Johnson on the Holocaust:
1. White Nationalists need to deal with the Holocaust just as we need to deal with the Jewish Question in general.
It is futile to focus on White advocacy alone and ignore the Jews. Quite simply, the Jews will not return the favor. You might not pick Jews as the enemy, but they will pick you. You might wish to see Jews as Whites, but Jews see themselves as a distinct people. Thus they see any nationalism but their own as a threat.
2. It is futile for White Nationalists to ignore the Holocaust, for the Holocaust is one of the principal tools by which Jews seek to stigmatize White ethnic pride and self-assertion. As soon as a White person expresses the barest inkling of nationalism or racial consciousness, he will be asked “What about the Holocaust? You’re not defending genocide, are you?”
The Holocaust is specifically a weapon of moral intimidation. It is routinely put forward as the worst thing that has ever happened, the world’s supreme evil. Anybody who would defend it, or anything connected to it, is therefore evil by association. The Holocaust is evoked to cast uppity Whites into the world’s deepest moral pit, from which they will have to extricate themselves before they can say another word. And that word had better be an apology. To borrow a turn of phrase from Jonathan Bowden, the Holocaust is a moral “cloud” over the heads of Whites.
So how can White Nationalists dispel that cloud? We need an answer to the Holocaust question. As a New Rightist, the short answer is simply this: the New Right stands for ethnonationalism for all peoples—what Frank Salter terms “universal nationalism.” We believe that this idea can become hegemonic through the transformation of culture and consciousness. We believe that it can be achieved by peaceful territorial divisions and population transfers. Thus we retain the values, aims, and intellectual framework of the Old Right. Where we differ is that we reject Old Right party politics, totalitarianism, imperialism, and genocide.
The idea of ethnonationalism is true and good, regardless of the real and imagined crimes, mistakes, and misfortunes of the Old Right. Thus we feel no need to “deny,” minimize, or revise the Holocaust, just as the New Left felt no need to tie its projects to “Gulag revisionism.”
The above are only the first paragraphs of a long article at The Occidental Observer. I would recommend reading it all: a sound answer to, say, Carolyn Yeager’s stance on the Holocaust.
However, I must take issue with Johnson’s “We believe that it can be achieved by peaceful territorial divisions and population transfers.” Besides the fact that lots of Jews were very probably murdered in the Second World War the following is what, like the ostriches, most nationalists are still unwilling to see:
1. The dollar will crash soon
2. With all probability the crash will cause high-rocketing unemployment, riots, looting and eventually famine in some places
3. Unlike New Orleans after Katrina, the tension won’t be solved soon after the crash. On the contrary: racial tension in the most ethnically “enriched” cities will escalate throughout the US
4. To boot, in due time the racial clash will converge with a peak oil crisis that, by the end of the century, has a chance of killing the surplus of worldwide population created as a result of quixotic Christian ethics (“Billions Will Die—We Will Win!”)
The reason I believe that most nationalists’ reactionary, non-revolutionary stance hides the head in the sand is because in the coming tribulation very few will care about “totalitarianism, imperialism or genocide” as the bourgeoisie of today care. With all probability, during the convergence of catastrophes nationalists will be ruthless survivors committed to the 14 words and no more to Christian ethics. As I put it elsewhere, “the future is for the bloodthirsty, not for the Alt Righters.”
Granted: Johnson’s piece is otherwise excellent, a must-read for conservative nationalists who are still struggling with guilt and anti-white sentiments inculcated by the tribe. But unlike Johnson and the other ostriches I agree with Mark that the situation for our people is so dire that, with the help of Mother Nature, only a scorched-Earth policy has any chance of success. This is why these days I am reproducing, and will continue to reproduce, the articles of William Pierce: the only intellectual who has dared to write openly and unabashedly about exterminationist pro-whitism—exterminationism with or without the help of Nature.
Even those nationalists who very strongly disagree with us on moral grounds ought to open their minds. They have closed minds because they still have to live for decades in a city plagued with non-white swarms and almost no whites (as I have). You must open your minds about the coming collapse of the dollar and the subsequent peak-oil crisis. Please take your heads off the sand! After all, any of this could potentially unleash a racial crisis of truly biblical proportions even considered as an independent factor. I believe Guillaume Faye will be proven right: the convergence of catastrophes will mark “the metamorphic rebirth of Europe or its disappearance and transformation into a cosmopolitan and sterile Luna Park.”
Johnson and the rest of nationalists who are unwilling to see the storm that is coming are like the tender-hearted women who lie weeping and mourning, awaiting the results of the coming fighting in Jacques-Louis David’s Oath of the Horatii:
We on the other hand are like the three brothers expressing loyalty and solidarity with Rome before battle, wholly supported by the father and willing to sacrifice our lives (and millions, if not billions of other lives) for the good of our people.
Excerpted from the 12th article of William Pierce’s “Who We Are: a Series of Articles on the History of the White Race”:
The attractions of the vast and rich Orient for one Nordic conqueror after another are obvious. What is unfortunate is that none made racial considerations the basis of his program of conquest—and it could have been done.
Alexander, for example, could have laid the foundations for a Nordic empire which could have stood against the rest of the world—including Rome—forever. The Macedonians and the Greeks shared common blood and had similar languages (ancient Macedonian was an altogether different language from modern Macedonian, which has its roots in the sixth century A.D. conquest of Macedonia by Slavic tribes). If, before invading Asia and defeating the Asian armies, Alexander had devoted his energies to forging just these two peoples into a unified population base, casting out all the alien elements which had accumulated in Greece by the latter part of the fourth century B.C.; and if, while conquering Asia, he had carried out a policy of total extermination—then he could have colonized Asia with Nordic settlements from the Indus to the Nile, and they could have multiplied freely and expanded into the empty lands without danger of racial mixing.
But Alexander did not cleanse Greece of its Semitic merchants and moneylenders and its accumulated rabble of half-breeds, and he chose to base his Asiatic empire on the indigenous populations instead of on colonists. And so the Greco-Macedonian world, despite its uninterrupted prosperity and its maintenance of the appearance of might after Alexander’s death, continued its imperceptible downward slide toward oblivion.
A comment by Franklin Ryckaert:
It would be nice if a person with the talent of a Prof. MacDonald would write a trilogy on the problem dealing with:
1) The innate psychological characteristics of Whites (individualism, abstract idealism, universal moralism).
2) The influence of Christianity and its secular outgrowth of Liberalism (inversion of values, altruism as the only form of moralism even to a suicidal degree).
3) The Jewish exploitation of both.
Central to the weakness of Whites is what I call naive inclusivism.
It is naive because it not only believes that all non-white peoples can and want to become like Westerners, but also that including them in Western societies will lead to a Utopia instead of racial suicide.
This naive inclusivism is as old as the European expansion outside Europe itself:
• Alexander the Great wanted to include all peoples of the Middle East in his Hellenistic ideal, even initiating miscegenation with them.
• The Romans included all non-European peoples in their Empire bequeathing Roman citizenship to all who they thought deserved it. They even had one time an Arab emperor (Philippus Arabs).
• When the Western European peoples began to colonize the world, they made the same mistake. The Spaniards and Portuguese miscegenated with the natives of their colonies on a mass scale and later also with their imported African slaves.
• The Dutch miscegenated with the Indonesians and accepted their mixed offspring as “Europeans”.
• The French accepted educated Blacks, the so-called evolués, as their equals. France doesn’t keep statistics about its ethnic and racial minorities because it considers them all as “Frenchmen”.
• Only the British kept aloof from the natives in their colonies and didn’t allow them to immigrate into the white settlement colonies or Britain itself. But that has now radically changed, the British having become the most extreme both in terms of immigration and miscegenation.
We simply cannot ascribe this suicidal behaviour to Jewish machinations, rather it is the age-old inclination of Europeans to include the whole world in a universal ideal. You aptly describe Jewish destructive influence as an “epiphenomenon”; it couldn’t function as it does without the above-described preconditions.
Tanstaafl and Carolyn Yaeger refuse to acknowledge this basic fact, ascribing its recognition to “treason”. Self-criticism hurts, but it is absolutely necessary.
It seems to me that the etiology of Western malaise is more complicated than what the average nationalist has imagined. While reading MacDonald’s first trilogy study on Jewry I thought that the etiology was, at least, threefold.
First: the hardware. As MacDonald and many others have pointed out, whites “have some unique characteristics such as individualism, abstract idealism and universal moralism” that are apparently genetic (precisely the characteristics that presently are being exploited by the tribe).
Second: the software. If the above is a problem in the hardware (something like whites being wired the wrong way when dealing with other races), these hardware characteristics were augumented after a Catholic cult, which means “universal” including all ethnic groups in the world, took over the Roman Empire.
Third: the virus. Paradoxically, once Christianity starts to be abandoned by the white people, our universalist-individualist-idealistic frame of mind, taken to its ultimate logic naturally results in liberalism, a “virus” of the mind operating within the white psyche.
If our diagnosis of the West’s darkest hour is correct, then the Jewish Problem is an epiphenomenon of the deranged altruism resulting from the secular fulfillment of universal Christian values. (Proof of it is that Muslims don’t allow the suicidal empowerment of Jews in their nations.) It also means that both our hardware wiring and our Judeo-Christian software must be understood before we can grasp the whys of the psycho-ethical structure that is preventing us from taking elemental action (e.g., disempowering the Jews). For the Christian that I was, and this is purely anecdotal (others may find different venues), the first step to understand the virus was starting to question the historicity of the gospel narratives.
Thus I typed many passages from Helms’ book in honor of Porphyry, the first man to write a prolegomena of what fifteen centuries later started to be called “higher criticism” of the Bible.
Stevieb said…
I agree with all that [Stevieb refers to what I wrote here]. But this is the first time I’ve read your blog, and you come across too arrogant.
Fine—you don’t suffer fools—I get that. But I don’t get this enthusiasm for bashing “monocausalists,” for me they’ll do just fine for now.
Getting out from under the boot of Jewish ideological and political domination is the first step. You’re probably confusing some of the lesser intellects involved in this movement—of whom I would reluctantly include myself—and that can be dangerous, or at least counterproductive, in my opinion.
Having said all that, I’ll read on (no need to post this)…
Chechar said…
No need to post your above comment in this particular page? OK, I will delete it and post it again in a proper thread (if you don’t mind).
For most people “arrogance” is something like what popularly passes as a jerk, but according to my Merriam-Webster’s dictionary arrogance is “a genuine feeling of superiority that shows itself in an overbearing manner or attitude…”
For the record, these are my recent posts about “monocausalism,” a view that now I reject because I doubt we can blame a hundred percent the Jews for the mess in today’s world and place zero percent of blame on ourselves.
But the real crux is that if monocausalists are right, then Alex Linder’s brutal “Let’s exterminate ’em all” makes sense. On the other hand, if Christian universalism is to blame too for our problems, exterminationism is highly problematic not only from the moral viewpoint, but from the strategic viewpoint as well since whites seem to have a loose screw doing big time, Gremlinesque mischiefs on their own.
I agree with you that monocausalists are doing a superb job though. Since Jews cannot be criticized in today’s traitorous culture, it’s good to see that there are people that focus on them and on them alone.
Nonetheless, if there’s something wrong going on in the white psyche sans Jews, if we are really trapped in a device of our own making, the Gremlinesque screw has to be tightened up a bit.
This is why we have to focus on the existing paradigm or Weltanschauung that I call “Secular Christianity” or however you may want to call it (political correctness, ethno-masochism, deranged altruism, genetic communism, cultural Marxism): a set of ideas as rigid and unexamined as anything that a Calvinist could produce.
Nowadays this crystallized psychic structure, that many simply call “liberalism,” is preventing whites from taking the kind of inner action that would allow them to first rebel intellectually, and then revolutionarily.
I may be arrogant, yes, but it’s worth remembering that even Hitler himself, in his intimate table talks of 1941, spoke more against Christian axiology than against Jewish influence.
I didn’t comply with what I said in a previous post: that I would ignore further discussion with White Nationalist Christians (WNCs) at The Occidental Observer and refrain myself to offer my views in this blog, because I continued to discuss there a little bit more.
Although the author of the article in question has studied the Bible in formal courses, he and the WNCs of the ongoing debate seem to be ignorant of the devastating results arrived by New Testament scholarship.
In the next entry I will reproduce excerpts from the first chapter of Randel Helm’s Gospel Fictions and, hopefully, in the subsequent entries I will reproduce passages of the rest of Helm’s book.
Presently I don’t have internet connection at home. I am writing this entry in my bedroom and will post it tonight in the nearest internet café that’s still open on this Mexican holiday of May 5th. But before doing it I’d would like to respond here to what a WNC commenter told me in the above-mentioned thread. Without connection I can’t quote him (and I hate to do any serious writing with the browns beside me in the café), but he criticized me by claiming that my Nazi stance was just Judaism in reverse, and that good Christians ought not to be that racist.
Well, I live in Mexico City, a metropolis with more than 20 million people, most of them of brown skin color. And this day I am dismayed to see that the Mexican celebration of 5 of May is now almost official in Obama’s America. Taking into account that you will be a persecuted minority in your own nation, wouldn’t something like the Nuremberg Laws have been good for Americans had you allowed Germany to defeat the Bolsheviks?
The reason that in the next entries I’ll take the trouble of typing excerpts of Helm’s Gospel Fictions is simple: I believe that Christianity must be debunked. I believe that Christian axiology is to blame for the creation of such a depressing sea of Untertmenschen here in the Big City and elsewhere in the Third World.
While WNCs concur with counter-jihadists that non-white immigration into the West is the main symptom of the elites’ treason toward our people, their diagnosis is epidermal. Beneath the skin rash of treason lies a metastasis that has been eating the organs of people of European origin for centuries. That infection has been comprehensibly explained in a long entry reproduced in this blog, “The Red Giant” where a Swede criticized Christianity:
People here at Gates of Vienna focus on the immigration problem. But mass immigration is just the local projection of this much larger and more fundamental problem of which I’m talking of here, that is, the planetary population explosion and our attitudes towards it (which also caused it). It won’t help to address the immigration problem without addressing this global problem. That is, it won’t help to be a lonely, purely Polish, if surrounded by Arabs, Pakistanis and Africans all along the border.
What is happening across the world is the large-scale version of what is happening within our countries. Our relative numbers are diminishing by theirs increasing exponentially, in both cases.
But Christian ethics cannot stand the sight of little brown children dying. They must help them, or they will freak out. They cannot keep their fingers away.
For the very same reason that Christian ethics abhors [abortion and] infanticide, it causes the population explosion in the world. It’s a deeply held doctrine within Christian ethics that every single human life across the planet must be saved if possible. According to Christian ethics it is forbidden and unthinkable to think in terms of not saving every little brown child across the planet [through Western medicine, vaccinations, hygienic advances imported from the West, etc.]. But the consequences of this mindset are catastrophic, not only for us but also for them, as I have already explained. But since people are so programmed according to Christian ethics, what I’m saying does not seem to enter their heads. The thought is too unthinkable to be absorbed. It’s an utter taboo.
At this point it wouldn’t help putting back god and Christ into the equation. Instead we need to leave Christian ethics.
My fellow WNCs:
You better start leaving Christian ethics altogether and let the brown babies, without further help from the First World, start dying like flies as infant mortality rates were so common before the deranged altruists arrived from the Eastern coast. Otherwise the swarm of Neanderthals that I am about to suffer when I step outside my home’s entry door en route to the café will reach, and eventually conquer, the rest of your lands at the north of Río Grande…
Categories
The Christian problem
encompasses the Jewish problem
No subject is so dangerous to address among White nationalists as the Christian religion.
Christianity became a Universalist religion with a special mission to transform the Other into the Same. The seeds of egalitarianism—albeit on the religious, not yet on the secular level—were sown.
Many Whites make a fundamental mistake when they portray new civil religions as part of an organized conspiracy of a small number of wicked people. In essence, civil religions are just secular transpositions of the Judeo-Christian monotheist mindset.
—Tom Sunic
______ 卐 ______
What white nationalists call the Jewish Problem can only be fully understood as the consequence of an Aryan problem. The “Aryan problem” is a form of deranged altruism resulting from the secular fulfillment of universal Christian values, a point that most nationalists, especially the monocausalists,* find too hard to digest.
Start here and if you like it see this PDF.
See also:
My two cents:
The biggest struggle of this century is not only the fight against the Jewish Race and their biological weapons of mass destruction. It is the fight against the personal Jew which all of you Christ idiots have.
—Axe of Perun
_________________
* Monocausalism is the orthodox view in many white nationalist circles that Jewish influence in our civilization is the sole cause of white decline. Monocausalists do not believe that there is a Christian problem or that whites, including atheists, agnostics or new agers, are wired the wrong way as a result of the programming of Christian meta-ethics through the last millennia.
The “Christian problem” does not only refer to Christian dogma, but also to the moral grammar of what we are calling “secular Christians,” a group that could even include the anticlerical Jacobins. See the entry “The Red Giant” linked above to clarify this apparently paradoxical issue.
The universalist mindset (“Catholic” means “universal”) that allowed the Jews to take over our media, a process that started right after the French revolutionaries emancipated them, is the primary infection—the Christian/Secular Christian problem. Jewish depredations in our society, a secondary infection; and the current Islamization of Europe, a tertiary infection.
From this point of view the religious malaise that afflicts the West today is, in order of seriousness: (1) Christian ethics, (2) Jewish subversion and (3) the mass migration of Muslims and non-whites in Europe and the US.
A couple of recent articles and threads at Counter-Currents about Pierre Krebs’ Fighting for the Essence reminded me what we are now calling “secular Christianity”:
Tom Sunic said…
This book is important because it advises the reader about how to decipher the causes and consequences of our decadent age. Being himself a disciple of European heavyweights such as Homer, Nietzsche, and Heidegger—to name only a few—Krebs correctly traces the root of the problem of White racial decay and cultural decadence not to liberalism and multiculturalism, but to the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Above all, Krebs focuses on the destructive forms of the monotheistic Judaeo-Christian mindset which prevails among both the so-called Leftist and Right-wing intellectuals and their respective disciples. In fact, by using quotes from and commentaries concerning many important, albeit deliberately ignored European scholars, Krebs demonstrates that all political concepts that we take for granted today are basically modified ideas, myths, legends and impostures that originated in the Middle East and that are now making headway into our secular, godless society.
Krebs aptly dissects the discourse and the mindset of modern Marxists and liberals who, in spite of the fact that they often profess to be atheists or agnostics, nonetheless adhere to the monotheistic conceptualisation of the world that was handed down by the Judaeo-Christian tradition, through its secular and postmodern offshoots. In the same vein, Krebs adroitly warns against those modern political neuroses which appear quite often among many so-called Right-wingers, which causes them to rely too much on blaming all the problems of Whites on outsiders; or, in a grotesque flip side, to embrace outsiders at the expense of one’s own. Both manifestations are wrapped up in the same Judaeo-Christian package. How can a White nationalist, a racialist, or a traditionalist, or whatever he may call himself, and regardless of whether he lives in Europe or America, successfully combat hostile and alien worldviews and adopt different methods of conceptualisation, while at the same time revering these same alien referents and the same paradigms which are, ironically, part and parcel of the same non-European mindset he wishes to reject?
The matrix of the West, as Krebs argues, is no longer territorial or political. It lies in the White man’s experiment with Christianity, which began as merely an obscure Oriental cult—a cult which has absolutely nothing in common with the spiritual homeland of the White man: ancient Greece.
The answer Krebs offers to intelligent White readers in America and Europe who are seeking an exit from the modern multicultural straitjacket and the conceptual mendacity of liberalism is simple, although it will require a great deal of courage: the return to our lost pre-Christian European roots. Novus rerum nascitur ordo.
Roger Devlin said…
But Krebs names the heresiarch Pelagius as one of his heroes. In his view, the egalitarian lie is to be blamed not on any perversion of Christianity, but on Christianity itself—or, as he invariably writes, “Judeochristianity.” He cites Nietzsche’s observation that
Christianity, which has sprung from Jewish roots and can only be understood as a plant that has come from that soil, represents the counter-movement to every morality of breeding, race or privilege—it is the anti-Aryan religion par excellence.
From this Krebs infers that
every discourse which calls for a European Renaissance without separating itself from Judeo-Christian civilization, its dogmas and its rituals, is condemned to failure in advance, since it is enclosed within the very matrix of decline.
It is a familiar observation that enlightenment thought amounts to a secularized version of Christian doctrine, a displacement of its eschatology into the realm of politics. Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn is just one example of a Christian conservative who stressed this connection, citing the Latin proverb corruptio optimi pessima: “the corruption of the best is the worst.”
But Krebs the admirer of Pelagius cannot mean this; his explicit positions would force him to deny that the secularization of Christianity is the essential misstep. Instead he must hold that (1) Christianity itself is responsible for the specific way in which it was negated by the Enlightenment, and that (2) Europe has been in a state of decadence since at least the fourth century AD. This bold interpretation of European history may deserve consideration, but the author has hardly made a case for it in the brief manifesto under review.
Greg Johnson said…
In response to Devlin’s remarks, yes, Krebs is committed to the claims that (1) Christianity is responsible for the trajectory of its secularization, and (2) that Western Civilization has been ruled by decadent values since the fourth century, when the Christianization of the Roman Empire received state power from Constantine. Both of these claims are defensible in Nietzschean terms, and Nietzsche is Krebs’ prime source here.
(1) Christianity is responsible for the trajectory of its secularization, because secular liberalism represents a triumph of Christian values over Christianity itself. Nietzsche argues that the Christian valorization of truth as something worth dying for was turned against the supernatural, faith-based elements of the creed. And once the supernatural, “pie in the sky” elements of Christianity are discarded, then nothing stands in the way of the progressive/utopian realization of Christian values in this world, values like the worth of every human life.
(2) These values were dominant in the West beginning with Constantine, but they were never really taken all that seriously. Spengler is right: the values of the New Testament are the Bolshevism of antiquity, and Christianity was as devastating to ancient pagan civilization as the Bolshevism of the 20th century. But once in power, the church readily compromised with pre-Christian values and social forms because of its essentially otherworldly focus. And they condemned as heretics those who demanded that the Church live by the values of the gospels. When the Reformation triumphed, however, and Christians started actually reading the Bible and thinking of ways to live by it in this world, the corrosive power of Christian values became fully liberated to do their work.
Kim Petrusson said…
Quite evidently it is since Europe was quite fine under traditional Christianity, but have crushed down under the gnostic modernity.
Greg Johnson said…
What you dub “gnostic modernity” is merely Christian axioms being taken to their logical real-world conclusions. And “gnostic modernity” is a rather marginal phenomenon considered alongside the modernizing thrust of the Reformation. What you point to as the heyday of European Christianity was merely, from a Christian point of view, the hypocritical compromise of the church with pre-Christian sensibilities and social forms. When the Reformation actually got Christians reading the Bible and trying to take it seriously, decay really got underway.
Johnnie Appleseeds said…
Greg, I think we need a strong philosophical refutation of Xtianity that is not perceived as vitriolically and mean-spirited as that of Nietzsche. I agree with Nietzsche, but his language turns people off.
Greg Johnson said…
Maybe you are right, but if Nietzsche is right, there is no pretty way to describe the ugly psychological processes that gave birth to and sustain slave morality.