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American civil war Egalitarianism Red terror

Another Morgan comment

Dfordoom: ‘Christians like the idea that they’re fighting a rival religion because it gives them hope’.

Sure. Also, treating ‘Wokeism’ as though it is opposition allows them to disguise the fact that it’s just a secular form of Christian ethics. The last thing they want is to be blamed for all of the destruction the secular forms of their religion has caused. If they admitted that Bolshevism sprang from Christian theological thought (Spengler), they’d have to take responsibility for all the genocides perpetrated by the various forms of communism. They’d also have to take responsibility for the first American Civil War, which Christian abolitionists played a key role in starting and prosecuting, and the idea of human equality, which led white Christian America, after the War, to grant citizenship and the vote to negroes. The idea of ‘white guilt’, which is central to ‘Wokeism’, can trace its ancestry to the Christian idea of original sin. If you’re born white, then you’re born guilty.

Categories
Alexis de Tocqueville Egalitarianism Jesus

Western Christian Civilisation – terminal stage

Destruction by Thomas Cole ~ 1835-1836

I have said that white nationalism has developed a myopic diagnosis of white decline: the Jewish question. I have also complained that American white nationalists have not published Who We Are by Pierce, and sell it as a bestseller, to expand such myopic diagnosis into a more accurate worldview. He who introduces the history of the white race encounters patterns that cannot be seen in most nationalist websites.

One of the most conspicuous elements of this pattern is the history of Christianity. And I do not mean only the destruction of the classical world by Christian fanatics in the 4th and 5th centuries. I refer to the Zeitgeist born in the West after such destruction.

In today’s world of florid psychosis, it seems that the fashion to empower transgender people has nothing to do with the Christian Zeitgeist. But this is precisely where the nationalist perspective appears to me as myopic. A few months ago I wrote ‘On Empowering Birds Feeding on Corpses’, where I try to explain that the most psychotic aspects of today’s egalitarianism can be traced back to a 14th-century Franciscan movement that wanted to carry the message of Jesus, in all its purity, to medieval Italy.

The Church of Rome was not tolerant with the egalitarian faction that took the gospel to the letter, and ended up chasing the Fraticelli as heretics. (For an entertaining narrative of that historical drama read The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco: a novel as didactic about the 14th century as Julian by Gore Vidal depicts the 4th century.)

Nobody could have predicted in the Middle Ages that the latent Fraticelli ideals were going to have their historical opportunity once the power of the Church was removed. But that was exactly what happened, centuries later, with the French Revolution.

As the readers of this site already know, the egalitarian ideals of the Enlightenment, implemented by force during and after the French Revolution, were inspired precisely by the gospel message. It may seem incredible to say, but even the most anti-clerical Jacobins subscribed the commandments preached by the fictional character called ‘Jesus’, created by the Jewish and Judaizing Hellenic authors of the New Testament. (*)

If we compare what the West is currently suffering with cancer, we can say that the first cancer cells arose since, in the 2nd century, a faction of Judaism, which Julian would call ‘the Galileans’, began to infiltrate the Gentile world in the outer provinces of the Roman Empire. The infection came to power with Constantine and the Roman emperors who followed him, despite Julian’s best efforts in his brief reign.

The noble spirit of the Aryan managed to tame, in the Middle Ages, the most ethno-suicidal aspects of this Levantine cult that was even imposed on the northern barbarians by force. But it was not until the Reformation and Counter-Reformation when they murdered, again, the revived pagan spirit of the Renaissance when the holy book of the Jews began to be taken seriously, especially in the Protestant world.

Nothing could be more suicidal than worshiping the sacred book of the Jews, insofar as both the Old Testament and the Talmud are sworn enemies of the Gentiles, especially the white man because He represents the best of the Gentile world. But the worst of all happened when this virus mutated from its religious phase to its secular phase.

The Western world of today is nothing but an ideological heir to the ideals of the Enlightenment. The so-called enlightened philosophers did not greet Reason, to use the language of the time, and much less the French revolutionaries. Those who truly began to greet Reason since the twilight of the Greco-Roman world were the eugenicists that we have been advertising in my most recent translations of Evropa Soberana. Only they broke away from the Christian dogma that ‘All men are equal before the eyes of God’, or the neo-Christian or secular version of the gospel, that ‘All men are equal before the law’.

The crux is that ‘All men are equal before the law’ has mutated, since the 1960s, as All men and women are ontologically equal: the final or end-stage cancer that currently kills the West.

As the Cassandra named Alexis de Tocqueville foresaw, the virus of equality always demands more equality. It is like a meme that multiplies itself to the absurd. And the absurd has come today not only with the demand that we must consider transgender people our equals, but trans children as well. But per Tocqueville’s observation this last metastasis won’t end with trans children! There are already Western countries that have legalised zoophilia and, in some of them, there are proposals to legalise pedophilia and even necrophilia…

Through this final metastasis, this runaway egalitarianism, the West is already sentenced and it will die. There’s no question about it. Or to say it more precisely, Western Christian Civilisation, which is in its terminal stage, will die soon as a conservative Swede predicted.

But the point is that everything had its origin in the radical message of Jesus: a message that seemed sublime to me at sixteen but that, at sixty, I see it as Semitic poison for the white man. As I said in ‘On Empowering Birds Feeding on Corpses’, the season of the horse of Troy of which Pierce wrote, that is to say the complete inversion of Aryan values into Gospel-inspired values, has finally arrived.

____________

(*) Whoever believes that Jesus was not a literary creation, but a man of flesh and blood, would do well to familiarise himself with the work of Richard Carrier.

Categories
Arthur Schopenhauer Destruction of Greco-Roman world Egalitarianism Eugenics Madison Grant

Great personalities defend eugenics, 3

by Evropa Soberana

 
Christian domination

In the Middle Ages, through persecution resulting in actual death, life imprisonment and banishment, the free thinking, progressive and intellectual elements were persistently eliminated over large areas, leaving the perpetuation of the race to be carried on by the brutal, the servile and the stupid. It is now impossible to say to what extent the Roman Church by these methods has impaired the brain capacity of Europe. (Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race).

The coming of Christianity plunged classical philosophy into centuries of near-oblivion and clashed with the established and ancient European belief in the inequality of men. Spreading first among the slaves and lowest classes of the Roman empire, Christianity came to teach that all men were equal in the eyes of a universal Creator God, an idea that was totally alien to older European thought which had recognized a hierarchy of competence among men and even among the gods.

Opposing the traditions of classical philosophy and scientific enquiry, Christianity introduced the concept of a single, omnipotent “God of History” who controlled all the phenomena of the universe with men and women being creations of that God. Since all men and women were the ‘children of God’, all were equal before their Divine Maker! Faith in the church’s interpretation of supposedly prophetic revelations became more important than scientific or philosophical enquiry; and to question the church’s view of reality came to be perceived as sinful. (Eugenicist Roger Pearson, ‘The Concept of Heredity in the History of Western Culture’, Part I).

Primitive Christianity represented an atrocious trauma for the West and the European collective unconscious. It swept away the teachings of the classics and only very slowly could Europe recover, step by step, re-conquering and gathering the scattered pieces of wisdom that had been hers and that suffered destruction at the hands of fanatic parasites, poisoned by the desert dogma virus.

The Church had a foreign and anti-European concept of God, taken directly from the Bible. When the early Judeo-Christians taught that God had incarnated in a Jew who died at the hands of the strong (the Romans) for the ‘salvation’ of the weak and sinful—the slaves, the sick, the criminals, the prostitutes, the excrement of the Roman streets and throughout the Empire—, they were laying the groundwork for an atrocious trauma from which European man has never recovered.

In fact, under more modern forms (‘solidarity’, ‘humanitarianism’, ‘equality’, cowardice, sedentary lifestyle, herd mentality, servility, pacifism, conformism) almost all modern Westerners drag variations of such Christian ballast. In the above image, the crucified Christ by Velázquez, the talent of a great Spanish painter was wasted with a strange anorexic, passive and masochistic Jewish idol, instead of some triumphant pagan god.

European populations, especially Celts, Germans, Balts and Slavs—who had always been instinctively governed by eugenic principles—were suddenly engulfed in a misunderstood humanism, which had fermented in the crowded and dirty cities of the Eastern Mediterranean. Christianity frustrated any eugenic, biological and pro-natural possibility for centuries and centuries, so we should not be surprised at the shortage of eugenic testimonies in that era.

In Christendom heretical groups such as the Cathars, the Templars, the alchemists, the old Masons, the Rosicrucians, certain religious orders (orders that accumulated knowledge, such as the Franciscans, Benedictines, Cistercians) and, of course, the Renaissance, could have meant a great change for Europe and a flip-flop for the Church had it not been thwarted by Protestantism, the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation and the Thirty Years War (1618-1638).

This war meant the end of the paganising alternative, the fall of the Holy Empire and the death of a third of the total German population, inaugurating a repulsive period of plagues, famines, religious hysteria, internal wars and witch hunts that devastated the Germanic European layers of better biological quality (Huguenots, Quakers) until Christian authority started to lose strength and credibility in favour of even more dangerous dogmas: the ‘Enlightened’ dogmas.

Therefore, if there is anything salvageable from the Middle Ages it is, undoubtedly, the ‘other’ Middle Ages of castles, knights, troubadours, crusaders and princesses. Three institutions deserve mention: the cavalry, the nobility and the Holy Empire.

When the descriptions of the great characters of the time are read or someone examines the skeleton of a prominent king, there is nothing but awe: Emperor Charlemagne (742-814) measured more than two metres; Roland, his paladin, was also described as a giant; the Norwegian king Harald Hardrada (1015-1066) measured seven feet, that is, approximately 2.10 metres; the redhead Sancho VII the Strong (1194-1234), king of Navarra, measured even more; Jaime I the Conqueror (1208-1276), king of Aragon, was described as a giant, and the same goes for the first Crusade kings of Jerusalem.

All these men were, in addition to heroes of their time, giants of genetics belonging to a practically extinct lineage—but likely to be resurrected by an appropriate selective bio-politics. As the Spanish author Enrique Aynat wrote, ‘The Nobility, like it or not, has natural causes. It was born from the primitive inequality of talents and characters. It has remained a sought and conscious selection, set by an institution. The Indo-European had naturally accepted ,without coercion, the superiority of the Nobility knowing that it had left families that, both physically and morally, represented the summum of the selection’ (Eugenesia, Editor’s translation).

Roger Bacon (1214-1294) and Francis Bacon (1561-1626).

Roger Bacon was an English Franciscan friar greatly ahead of his time. A compulsive scholar, in his work he wrote treatises on grammar, physics, optics, mathematics and philosophy. He was even interested in the manufacture of gunpowder and the situation and size of celestial bodies.

Long before Leonardo Da Vinci, Galileo and the Renaissance, Roger Bacon foresaw the invention of flying devices and steamboats, and in his detailed optical studies he anticipated the possibility of designing artefacts such as microscopes, telescopes and glasses. Along with his revolutionary alchemical experiences, all this was considered suspicious of heresy in his time and he became imprisoned. Roger Bacon died forgotten and fell out of favour.

Three centuries later, natural philosophers like Bruno and Francis Bacon rehabilitated Bacon’s reputation and portrayed him as a scientific pioneer.

Although it seems innocuous, the phrase by Francis Bacon I quote below is inconceivably heretical. It suggests that man is subordinate to Nature and the same principles can be applied to animals.

Naturam non vinces nisi parendo (‘You will not master nature unless you obey it’).
 

______ 卐 ______

 
Note of the Editor: I have redacted the above passages because in the original text there is confusion between Roger Bacon and Francis Bacon. Even today, with their anti-Nordicism and Christian ethics, white nationalists are not obeying Nature. (As to his Christian ethics, see what I said about Greg Johnson this Monday.)
 

______ 卐 ______

 
Sir Thomas More (1478-1535) was a lawyer, statesman, a friend of Erasmus and an English writer known for his Utopia where he disguised his ideas of state leadership under the science-fiction genre.

In Utopia there is a eugenic policy very similar to the Spartan, where the couple should, first of all, look naked to find out what kind of person they married in terms of genetic qualities. Thomas More criticised such an idea to escape the possible religious repression, but what he does is expose it to the public eyes. He would be beheaded for refusing to recognise King Henry VIII as head of the Church in England. For that reason alone the Catholic Church canonised him.

In choosing their wives they use a method that would appear to us very absurd and ridiculous, but it is constantly observed among them, and is accounted perfectly consistent with wisdom. Before marriage some grave matron presents the bride, naked, whether she is a virgin or a widow, to the bridegroom, and after that some grave man presents the bridegroom, naked, to the bride.

We, indeed, both laughed at this, and condemned it as very indecent. But they, on the other hand, wondered at the folly of the men of all other nations, who, if they are but to buy a horse of a small value, are so cautious that they will see every part of him, and take off both his saddle and all his other tackle, that there may be no secret ulcer hid under any of them, and that yet in the choice of a wife, on which depends the happiness or unhappiness of the rest of his life, a man should venture upon trust, and only see about a handsbreadth of the face, all the rest of the body being covered, under which may lie hid what may be contagious as well as loathsome. (Utopia, published in 1516).

William Penn (1644-1718). A member of the Puritan religious society of the Quakers, he emigrated to America for religious persecution in Britain and founded the province, now a state, of Pennsylvania. Many of the political principles he adopted there laid the foundations for the subsequent American Constitution. Penn represented the old Puritan English race, considered as foundational for the United States. He was held in high regard by the later American eugenicists that we will see later.

Men are generally more careful of the breed of their horses and dogs, than of their children (Reflections and Maxims, 1693).

Thomas Malthus (1766-1834), an English economist and demographer, was the first to point out that the world’s population grew faster than resources grew; that overpopulation was a danger, that natural resources were limited and that man was bound to hunger, conflict and epidemics if he did not behave responsibly as to his reproduction, hence the expression ‘Malthusian catastrophe’.

It does not, however, by any means seem impossible that by an attention to breed, a certain degree of improvement, similar to that among animals, might take place among men. Whether intellect could be communicated may be a matter of doubt: but size, strength, beauty, complexion, and perhaps even longevity are in a degree transmissible…

As the human race, however, could not be improved in this way, without condemning all the bad specimens to celibacy, it is not probable that an attention to breed should ever become general; indeed, I know of no well-directed attempts of this kind, except in the ancient family of the Bickerstaffs, who are said to have been very successful in whitening the skins and increasing the height of their race by prudent marriages, particularly by that very judicious cross with Maud, the milk-maid, by which some capital defects in the constitutions of the family were corrected. (‘An Essay on the Principle of Population’, 1798).

Frederick the Great (1712-1786), King of Prussia, an example of strategic-tactical genius, top-notch politician and one of the most brilliant military commanders of all time, colonised the East with German peasants and pushed Prussia into the category of a European superpower. At his death he had laid the foundations of what in the 19th century would become the Second Reich.

It is unpleasant to see the work that is taken under our harsh climate to grow pineapples, bananas and other exotic fruits, while dealing little with human prosperity. At any event, man is more important than all bananas together. He is the plant to cultivate, which deserves all our attention because he represents the pride and glory of our country.

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), politician, inventor, scientist and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. His ideas about freedom, finance, banking and independence opposed him to the great powers of his time. In a letter to a doctor, Franklin observed:

Half the lives you save are not worth saving, as being useless, and almost all the other half ought not to be saved, as being mischievous. Does your conscience never hint to you the impiety of being in constant warfare against the plans of Providence?

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), a German philosopher who was influenced by Plato, Hinduism, Buddhism, Goethe and who in turn influenced Wagner, Nietzsche and Hitler himself. Schopenhauer attached great importance to the will as a universal force, restored dignity to Nature, spoke about the importance of the species, denied the validity of Christianity and made important criticisms of the faulty tenets of Western civilisation; criticisms that led him to defend eugenic policies.

If we now connect the conviction we have gained here of the inheritance of the character from the father and the intellect from the mother with our earlier investigation… we shall be led to the view that a real and thorough improvement of the human race might be attained to not so much from without as from within, thus not so much by instruction and culture as rather upon the path of generation.

Plato had already something of the kind in his mind when in the fifth book of his Republic he set forth his wonderful plan for increasing and improving his class of warriors. If we could castrate all scoundrels, and shut up all stupid geese in monasteries, and give persons of noble character a whole harem, and provide men, and indeed complete men, for all maidens of mind and understanding, a generation would soon arise which would produce a better age than that of Pericles. (The World as Will and Representation, Vol. II).

The English imperial aristocracy. The British ruling class that took England to very high levels of glory during the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries is considered of Germanic heritage, owing its blood mainly to Anglo-Saxons and Normans. Its system of upbringing and selection, as its militaristic orientation, was admired even by Nazis such as Günther, Darré, Hitler, Rosenberg and Savitri Devi who saw in the Anglo-Saxon countryside the repetition of Germanic ideas that continued alive in North America and Australia. Their mentality is summed up in the maxim ‘To breed, to bleed, to lead’.

As examples of the nation that gave birth to eugenics, we see here two members of the British ruling class, so reminiscent of the Roman patricians. Left, Charles George Gordon (1833-1885), famous for victorious campaigns in China and Egypt, and for being killed as governor of Sudan during the Mahdi rebellion. Right, Reginald Dyer (1864-1927), a veteran of endless campaigns in India, Pakistan, Burma and Afghanistan. In his time he was criticised by some (‘bloodthirsty madman who murdered hundreds of innocents’) and praised by others (‘he avoided the killing of whites throughout India’).

Categories
Deranged altruism Egalitarianism Nordicism

On Voldemort the Mudblood

Today I changed the name of one of the most used categories on this site: from ‘deranged altruism’ to ‘out-group altruism’. The latter term better denotes what happened in the Aryan psyche since it was finished being conquered by the Judeo-Christian ethic. (In the pagan world, neither the Greeks nor the Romans nor the Norseman felt obliged to altruism outside their ethnic groups.)

Lately I have been thinking about the transition from Christian ethics—thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself—to secular ethics—altruism towards non-whites—, and I realised that there is no comprehensive treatise on the subject.

For this reason, I reread ‘Egalitarianism’ which I reproduced on this site four years ago. I was so impressed by the lucidity of the author, who in the forums signed as ‘Kurwenal’ that I was about to request a printed copy of his book, Suprahumanism: European Man and the Regeneration of History by Daniel S. Forrest (London: Arktos, 2014. It is unclear if Daniel S. Forrest is just another penname of Kurwenal or his real name.)

Kurwenal had posted very intelligent comments on this site from 2012 to 2015. I have the impression that he is a German who has lived in Spain. Kurwenal is one of the few white nationalists who has read some of the content of Hojas Susurrantes and I even mention him in the second book of my autobiographical trilogy. A big admirer of Richard Wagner, he used the name of one of the characters in Wagner’s operas: Kurwenal.

However, just before clicking on the shipment from Amazon it seemed pertinent to read a review in Counter-Currents. The book-review title is ‘Daniel Forrest’s Suprahumanism’ and was authored by Ted Sallis. You can imagine my surprise to find, in the comments section, the following comment by Forrest/Kurwenal:

From a political perspective, an inclusive approach is preferable: all Europeans of good will both in the mother continent and overseas are to be considered members of the future European ‘polis’, independently of past ‘admixtures’ or present unprepossessing genetic traits.

Joseph Walsh has told me that not only whites seem to suffer from a death wish, but that even the white nationalists themselves suffer from this ailment. The first time he communicated such an idea, I’m not sure if it was in London, it seemed to me implausible and bizarre. Only over the years did I realise that it was sadly true, and Kurwenal’s quote exemplifies it.

Out-group altruists do not seem to have weighed on my scolding to the editor of Counter-Currents about the most abject confusion between some Meds and real whites. See for example these two photos that I reproduced in 2013 where the face of one of the purest whites of Scandinavia is contrasted with one of the swarthiest Italians in Sicily. Kurwenal’s non-Nordicist philosophy, orthodoxy among most alt-right folks, can only end in their extinction.

Although not as swarthy or ugly as the Sicilian referred above, what is most paradoxical is that a mudblood like me is the one who wants to save what remains of the Aryans. In contrast, pure whites, whether nationalists or not, have been, since WW2, in pursuit of their extinction—and precisely because of their eternal guilt complexes dating from the transit of pagan to Christian axiology.

In the Harry Potter saga Lord Voldemort is a mudblood obsessed with purity. Of course, J. K. Rowling used it as a metaphor for her anti-racist ideology. I kind of project myself on Voldemort because it’s precisely the fact that the dark lord himself has lost his pure pedigree what explains his concern that others could lose it too.

Categories
Egalitarianism

Unz commenter, 6

“After WWII, Jewish anti-white propaganda on the radio, TV, in newspapers, and movies, has conditioned whites to be like that… And it only took a few decades, while they were soaking up all this propaganda they were proportionally losing their Christian values. Up until WWI, whites correctly saw themselves as the ubermenschen.” 

This is an historically ignorant narrative; a conspiracy theory that regards whites as easily manipulated fools who are not morally responsible for their own actions.

The fact is, American whites amended their Constitution to make negroes the legal equals of themselves by giving them citizenship and the vote in the 1860s, long before there was TV, radio, or movies, and at a time when the United States was virtually 100% white and Christian. Nor, despite the obviously disastrous results, have they ever made any move to reverse course and repeal those amendments. This is another characteristic behavior of Christians that has a long history: when faith and reality conflict, it is almost always faith that wins out with them, not reality.

U.S. entry into WWII on the Bolshevik (i.e., anti-white) side was yet another instance of its commitment to racial equality. Far from regarding themselves as a master race, much American war propaganda cast derision on the very idea of a master race, let alone that American whites, the majority of whom were themselves of German ancestry, were members of it.

Categories
Americanism Egalitarianism Racial right

USA’s DNA

One of the most offensive things that I find in the Alt Lite (for example, in some videos by Jean-François Gariépy) is that they hold the American flag behind their backs. In a recent colloquium on YouTube with Richard Spencer (here), Spencer said that his country started badly from the first hour; mentioning both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

White nationalism is an impossible chimera between Americanism and Nazism, in which the American animal predominates over the European. This is why it is refreshing that some central figures of the Alt-Right, like Spencer, begin to question the double helix that fertilised the American egg.

One of the axes of the helical structure that formed the United States is the monstrous lie of equality. The quotation ‘All men are created equal’ has been called ‘immortal declaration’, and ‘perhaps the single phrase’ of the American Revolutionary period with the greatest ‘continued importance’. Thomas Jefferson first used the psychotic phrase in the US Declaration of Independence, which he penned in 1776.

But there’s another equally monstrous and psychotic lie, the other helical axis, Christianity. As long as both molecules of nucleic acids or DNA are not shattered in the minds of white nationalists, their movement will not cease to be a chimera that, precisely because it is a fantasy, cannot engage the real world.

Categories
Egalitarianism Friedrich Nietzsche Jesus Miscegenation

Heisman’s suicide note, 10

Friedrich Nietzsche claimed that modern morality and modern democratic, egalitarian ideas are superficial secularizations of Christian values. His masterful philosophical and psychological analysis of Jesus and his movement is the starting point of any significant discussion about Christianity’s relationship to modern values. Christianity, he claimed, was a slave morality, and modern egalitarianism rests upon the underlying victory of value revolution Christianity initiated.
Yet the secularization thesis is not an exclusively elitist insight. As popular historian Thomas Cahill put it in The Gift of the Jews, “There is no way that it could ever have been ‘self-evident that all men are created equal’ without the intervention of the Jews.” No matter which way one looks at it, whether elitist or populist, Jews, including Jesus, have been decisive in molding the evolution of civilization in the West through the inordinate influence of Christianity.
Contra Nietzsche, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, in The God Delusion, takes the diametrically opposite view that “modern” morality does not come from the Bible. One of the greatest failures of Dawkins’ book is that he fails to even mention Nietzsche; he fails to mention the most relevant and potent challenge to his belief that the morality of modernity has nothing to do with the Bible. Among the reasons that Dawkins did not confront Nietzsche, perhaps this is the most obvious: if Nietzsche is right, Dawkins is wrong…
Dawkins believes in an ever-moving Zeitgeist. This spirit of the times is a spirit of progress that moves away from prejudices such as racism, sexism, and homophobia, and towards some form of political equality. This politically leftwards shift, he claims, has no connection with religion; it even marches on despite religion. But if modern egalitarianism does not come from the Bible, then where does it come from? Dawkins explained:

The onus is not on me to answer. For my purpose it is sufficient that they certainly have not come from religion.

That is an explanation? How can religion be ruled out if he has no substantial alternative explanation? While his atheism is a lack of belief in God or gods, he is unable to offer a positive scientific explanation for the modern Western values he has faith in. Dawkins accepted the premise that morality is ‘not necessarily constructed by reason’. But if reason cannot determine fundamental values, then liberalism and the mysterious modern Zeitgeist of progress rest on fundamentally irrational foundations.
Dawkins apparently believes in a spontaneous generation or special creation theory of modern values. In the special creation theory of modern political equality, Christianity has nothing to do with its quick and sudden evolution. “Progress” thus progresses from a spontaneous generation of modern egalitarian values. Dawkins writes almost as if modernity did not evolve out of the Christian world that preceded it…
Jesus turned the ancient world upside down. Either Roman/Jewish war would tear him apart, or Jesus would tear Roman/Jewish war apart by attacking the kin selective nepotism that polarized both Roman and Jew in opposition to Jesus himself. Jesus reversed kin selective values through hatred of the family. Dawkins apparently prefers the Old Testament on this point, and criticized Jesus for his “dodgy family values.” But if Dawkins is going to criticize Jesus’s anti-kin selective values, he should really criticize the values of modernity. What “modern moralist”, Dawkins asked, would follow Abraham? Yet Abraham’s willingness to kill his own son in the name of God is a theological root of Jesus’s hatred of the family. God was not to be confused with pure family values…
To reverse kin selection is to destroy the human family. This is how Jesus attempted to bring the world-rule of the selfish gene to an end. In standing as an individual against kin selective, Jesus acted as the supreme monkeywrench in the gene machine that undergirded modern individualism.
Dawkins hypothesized that indiscriminate altruism in the modern context, along with sex with contraception, are misfirings of former genetic adaptations. Since Dawkins subscribes to some form of the liberal egalitarian Zeitgeist, this means that Dawkins values this misfiring of ancient genetic adaptations. Dawkins thus believes that these forms of genetically maladaptive behavior are good. Why does Dawkins value genetically maladaptive behavior?
Jesus represented a social problem and his innovative ethics represent, in a sense, a kind of solution. Jesus’s ethics are fundamentally selfish in the sense that, in attacking kin selective altruism with an incompatible standard of anti-kin selective altruism, he opened a place for the half-breeds… Christianity, an antidote to genetically adaptive hatred, is probably the deepest source of the implicit modern valuation that the nepotism of kin selection (i.e. Christ killing Nazi racism) is evil.
Jesus was a mutt, but not just any kind of mutt. Jews and Romans were considered political opposite—and often spiritual opposites. Romans considered themselves the alphas of their world, and the Jews the omegas of their world. Jews considered themselves alphas in the eyes of God, and the Romans as the moral omegas of their world. Jesus combined these incompatible alpha/omega conflicts within himself. Jesus could be conceived as both the alpha and the omega his social order. All previous “social” boundaries were broken in his individual being. His very existence implicated the breaking of all social boundaries. All the seeds of modernity, as a break with the ancient world, are latent within the existence of Jesus…
Being a bridge of the gulf between gentile and Jew in life, Jesus was a bridge of the gulf between gentile and Jew in death. Gentile assimilation of Christianity over a thousand medieval years gradually engendered the modern idea of humanity. The assimilation of Jew and gentile in Jesus is what opened assimilation of Jew and gentile in the modern West.
If reason, in itself, cannot determine fundamental values, it becomes clearer that Christianity provided the ethical ends, while modernity bridged the chasm between the real and ideal by providing the technological means to realize those ethical ends. Modernity was bred out of a struggle between the real and the ideal in the form of a struggle for moral superiority…
The path towards self-destruction through moral superiority can be discerned in Matthew 5:38-39:

You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.

When Jesus say “But I tell you”, he is upping the ante above Judaism’s upping the ante above paganism.
Non-violent resistance is not a modern invention; it was practiced by first-century Jews against Rome. Jesus’s political powerlessness, however, became the limitation that grounded his theological innovations. Jesus’s innovations with Judaism mirrored the origins of Judaism itself in paradigmatic Egyptian slaves. The less powerful one is, the higher one’s ethic may be—at least in principle. Christianity is more evolved than Judaism in that it has even lower or more forgiving standards of what a good human being is than Judaism…
Jesus’s death as a gene propagator, and resurrection as a meme propagator, can be understood as a supernatural defiance of the “natural law” of natural selection. Bodily death was not the final word.
The sanctification of human life in opposition to natural selection was Biblically expressed through the notion of the human soul, and especially mind/body dualism…
Modern liberalism has not been inclined to acknowledge its historical debt to Christianity anymore than Christianity has been historically inclined to acknowledge its Jewish parentage. Yet one cannot fully understand the secularization of Christianity except as a development with roots in the preceding paradigm of Christianity’s separation from Judaism.
When rootless West moderns trace their roots to Christianity, they are led to Christianity’s roots in Judaism (this is surely a formula for rootlessness).
[pages 488-500]

Categories
Ancient Rome Deranged altruism Egalitarianism Individualism Liberalism Miscegenation Napoleon

Heisman’s suicide note, 7

The Christian Collapse into Capitalism

If the Trojan Horse of Christianity successfully injected its moral-behavioral code into a given host, what would the aftermath look like? Theoretically, one would expect that the frequency of kin selective based behaviors would decline. Individuals would be freed or even barred from self-organization on the basis of kinship. It follows that the most thoroughly Christianized nations would be the most susceptible to the breakdown of kin selective altruism over time. In short, if a people succumbed to the holy virus of Christianity, one would expect it to look something like America.
The very survival of liberal democracy through two world wars was made possible by the involvement of an America remarkable for both its ethnic diversity, and its unusually high level of religious commitment among developed nations. America’s ethnic diversity and America’s Christianity are directly related to one another. After all, genetic miscegenation is a practical logical fulfillment of love against the law. Conventional Christianity itself represents the cultural miscegenation of Jewish and gentile moral civilizations (i.e. the gargantuan adoption project known as American immigration is partially an inheritance of Constantine’s adoption of the foreign God of the Jews). Jesus himself was spiritual miscegenation of Jewish and gentile moral civilizations as a fulfillment of love against the law.
The secular West inherited from Christianity a moral or spiritual attitude that associates goodness with the inverse of the logic of kin selection. The entire idea of modern egalitarian progress is a logical continuation of the anti-kin selective logic of Christianity in action. It is a measure of the success of the mutated Christian meme-virus that Westerners do not even need Jesus to further perpetuate the logic of his attack on kin selection.
Yet the specific mechanisms of Christian influence on kin selection require clarification. For argument’s sake, let us say that Christianity tended to attract the most altruistic members of the population. Let us say, furthermore, that the minority of superlative altruists contains, on average, a greater proportion of genes for altruistic behavior than the majority population. If the most highly altruistic inclinations originally evolved through kin selection, and learning the discipline of Christianity tends to divert such altruistic behaviors into channels that are either indifferent or detrimental to genetic adaptation for the highly altruistic minority, then Christianity, over many generations, will tend to decrease the genetic fitness of the population. While this is only one scenario among many, the seditious genius of Christianity (a.k.a. Christian goodness) is that it may attract individuals with the greatest share of genetically based altruism within a population while serving to subvert its original genetic basis.
If everyone followed the superlative example of a chaste Catholic priest, it would lead to the extinction of the human race. Catholic priests that cheat by having children and propagating their genes, however, may perpetuate any possible genetic basis for their hypocrisy. I use the superlative example of a Catholic priest only to illustrate a far more general phenomenon: Christianity can very literally breed “hypocrisy” relative to the honest Christians who restrain themselves. Through this pattern, over a period of generations, Christianity may have literally helped breed the modern bourgeoisie on a both a genetic and cultural level. Generally speaking, Christianity breeds a bourgeoisie simply by chipping away at the advantages of the stronger to the advantage of the weaker, and undoing the correlation of reproductive success and military-political success (i.e. of kings and aristocracy).
Christian memes impacted Christianized genes by making the highest the lowest, the first the last, the alpha the omega and, in general, rewriting the rules of the social game. Christianity literally helped to breed the progressive left by gradually altering the social status of certain human types. It made conventional Darwinian winners moral losers and enshackled the genetically adaptive function of pagan virtues in its moral snares.
Within the hypocrisy industry that Christianity created, those inconsistent with general ideal principles tend to be the ones that survive. To be fully consistent would be as biologically suicidal as dying on the cross. The ethically honest ones tend to be selected out of the population. The cheaters of these ethical principles tend to multiply. In short, the supremacy of Christian ideals tends to breed a bourgeoisie; egoists who follow the moral letter in a practical sense while trampling over ideal spirit. This is why Pharisees survived to become the ancestors of most Jews while Jesus got the cross. This is how Christianity helped to create the modern world.
Machiavelli could be considered the first mature philosophic representative of the twilight zone between the ancient political world and modern liberalism. Machiavelli attributed the decay of duty to fatherland to Christianity. By socializing men in faith in the higher fatherland of God’s Kingdom, his contemporaries betrayed the fatherlands of the Earth. Yet something changed that made Machiavelli’s advice something other than a return to ancient Roman ways. In Machiavelli one can discern a breakdown of a certain kind of altruism; a breakdown of a level of political duty that was taken for granted by the Romans. While Machiavelli criticized the Christian corruption of political duty, he himself exemplifies the consequences of the Christian corruption of kin selective altruism.
In a manuscript dating from 1786, Napoleon Bonaparte wrote:

It is axiomatic that Christianity, even the reformed kind, destroys the unity of the State: (1) because it is capable of weakening as well as of inspiring the trust which the people owe the representatives of the law; (2) because, such as it is constituted, Christianity contains a separate body which not only claims a share of the citizens’ loyalty but is able even to counteract the aims of the government. And, besides, is it not true that the body [the clergy] is independent of the State?… Its kingdom is not of this world. Consequently, it is never civic-minded.

Yet, in a letter to the bishop of Como in 1797, Napoleon also concluded that “[t]he morality of the Gospels is the morality of equality and, by that token, the morality best suited to the republican form of government.” On one hand, Christianity promotes a morality of equality. On the other hand, Christianity poses a permanent potential fifth column that is inherently enervating of political authority. Liberalism inherited both characteristics from the fifth column character of Christianity. (Islam, incidentally , is another variation on the Semitic way of empire that is currently exploiting the fifth column ground that Christianity prepared in Europe and is thus poised to take its place.)
Napoleon followed Rousseau in acknowledging the destructive power of modern liberal-individualism upon civic virtue. However, if the origins of modern democratic morality are Biblical, then why is it destructive of altruism? The answer is to be found in the neutralization of kin selective altruism achieved by the Christianization of pagan naturalism. Modern political equality is the cumulative neutralization of the extreme kin selective paradigm of Roman Empire. Neutralization of paganistic kin selective altruism was effected by the radical opposition party of the Christian Kingdom of God. Kinship bonds that classically culminate in the patriarchal duties of alpha altruism were neutralized by the omega altruism of Christianity and the net result is modern political equality.
The early Christians were considered antisocial. They would not make sacrifices to the Roman gods. The early Christians would not do their duty. Christianity proved a dangerously preemptive of Roman virtue because it formally addressed gentiles, not primarily as members of a group, but as individual souls.
Edward Gibbon concluded that Christianity’s valuation of private salvation over the public good contributed to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. This Christian inheritance is immediately recognizable in liberalism’s valuation of the private rights of individual as the foundation of politics. “Rights” counter duties and grant freedom from duties. Freedom has a tangible meaning only if one is as free to be wholly self-absorbed as to dedicate one’s life to others.
There is a common belief or misunderstanding that the opposite of Christian altruism is individual selfishness. This is incorrect. The diametrical opposite of Christian altruism is not individual selfishness. The opposite of Christian omega altruism is the kind of group selfishness represented by Roman alpha altruism.
After all, from the viewpoint of those conquered by Rome, what was the problem? Were the Romans too individualistic? Was that the problem? Was the problem that Romans were too likely to put their individual interests before the interests of the Roman state? No, the problem was exactly the opposite. The problem was that Romans were all too dutiful to their state. Roman virtue was what made Rome: a race of conquerors. The problem was Roman virtue itself.
Christian “virtue” was an attack on Roman virtue. The ultimate target of Christian omega altruism was not individual selfishness. Christian omega altruism targeted Roman alpha altruism. Christianity fought altruism with altruism, and the long-term result of this clash of virtues was the corruption of both forms of altruism and the rise of the middle ground of modern, Western, equal individualism.
Christianity led to capitalism by canceling out, neutralizing, and delegitimizing extreme expressions of kin selective altruism. As omega altruism broke kinship bonds down, the premise of the individual human soul began to build up. As the idea of altruism so radical that it transcended kinship became socially legitimated, the kinship social shackles encumbering individuals became illegitimated. By reversing the evolutionarily normative prioritization between kinship and altruism, Christianity corrupted the kinship foundations of altruism and stimulated the rise of capitalistic individualism.
Torn between the irreconcilable opposites of alpha altruism and omega altruism (that the Crusaders vainly attempted to unite), “the individual” became the logical social solution. In consequence, the West landed in the middle ground of the moral mediocrity of the middle class. The cumulative waste product of this process of secularization is commonly called liberalism. Alpha altruism and omega altruism cancelled one another out, and the cumulative result of this neutralization is political equality.
A classic verification of this theory can be found in a small-scale repetition of the very same process during the social revolutions of the late 1960s. Leftist social movements of that time reaffirmed the egalitarian aspirations of liberal revolution, launching attacks on the social remains of kin selective organizations and its classical, quasi-Roman, patriarchal, warmongering corollaries. The ultimate result of these social movements was another collapse of “we” into “me”. 1960s socialism collapsed into the greed of 1980s individualism. In terms of its underlying sociobiological basis, this baby boomer episode was only a repetition of the original collapse of Christianity into capitalism.

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Ancient Rome Catholic Church Classical sculpture Egalitarianism Enlightenment Individualism Jesus Liberalism Martin Luther New Testament Protestantism St Paul Tacitus

Heisman’s suicide note, 3

Rupture: How Christ hijacked
the moral compass of the West

The English word “virtue” is derived from the Roman word virtus, meaning manliness or strength. Virtus derived from vir, meaning “man”. Virilis, an ancestor of the English word “virile”, is also derived from the Roman word for man.
From this Roman conception of virtue, was Jesus less than a man or more than a man? Did the spectacle of Jesus dying on a Roman cross exemplify virtus; manliness; strength; masterliness; forcefulness? Consistent with his valuation of turning the cheek, it would seem that Jesus exemplified utterly shamelessness and a total lack of the manly honor of the Romans.
Yet the fame of his humiliation on the cross did, in a sense, exemplify a perverse variety of virtus, for Jesus’s feminine, compassionate ethics have mastered and conquered the old pagan virtues of the gentiles. Jesus’s spiritual penis has penetrated, disseminated, and impregnated the West with his “virtuous” seed. And it is from that seed that “modernity” has sprouted.
Jesus combined the highest Roman virtue of dying honorably in battle with highest Jewish virtue of martyrdom and strength in persecution. This combination formed a psychic bridge between pagan and Jew, i.e. between ideal cruelty in war and ideal compassion in peace. This is one way in which Christianity became the evolutionary missing link between the more masculine ethos of the ancient pagan West and the more feminine ethos of the modern West.
The original Enlightenment notion of revolution reflects a quasi-creationist view of change that makes the sudden rupture between the moral assumptions of the ancient and modern world almost inexplicable. However, if we take a more gradualistic view of social change wherein modern egalitarianism evolved from what preceded it, then the origins of modern political assumptions become more explicable. The final moral-political rupture from the ancients became possible, in part, because Christianity acted as an incubator of modern values.
Christian notions of “virtue” were not an outright challenge to pagan Roman virtue by accident; these values were incompatible by design. To even use the Roman term “virtue” to describe Christian morality is an assertion of its victory over Rome. The success of the Christian perversion of the manliness of Roman “virtue” is exemplified by its redefinition as the chastity of a woman.
A general difference between ancient Greco-Roman virtue and modern virtue can be glimpsed through the ancient sculpture, the Dying Gaul. The sculpture portrays a wounded “barbarian”. Whereas moderns would tend to imitate Christ in feeling compassion for the defeated man, its original pagan cultural context suggests a different interpretation: the cruel defeat and conquest of the barbarian as the true, the good, and the beautiful.

The circumstances of the sculpture’s origins confirm the correctness of this interpretation. The Dying Gaul was commissioned by Attalus I of Pergamon in the third century AD to celebrate his triumph over the Celtic Galatians of Anatolia. Attalus was a Greek ally of Rome and the sculpture was only one part of a triumphal monument built at Pergamon. These aristocratic trophies were a glorification of the famous Greco-Roman ability to make their enemies die on the battlefield.
A Christian is supposed to view Christ on the cross as an individual being, rather than as a powerless peasant of the despised Jewish people. If one has faith in Jesus, then one “knows” that to interpret Jesus as the member of a racial-religious group is wrong and we “know” that this interpretation is wrong. How do we “know” this? Because we have inherited the Christianity victory over Rome in that ancient war for interpretation.
Liberalism continues the Christian paradigm by interpreting Homo sapiens as individuals, rather than members of groups such as racial groups. If it is wrong to assume Jesus can be understood on the basis of group membership, then the evolutionary connection between Christianity and modern liberalism becomes clearer. Jesus was a paradigmatic individual exception to group rules, and his example, universalized, profoundly influenced modern liberal emphasis on individual worth in contradistinction to assumptions of group membership.
Love killed honor. The values of honor and shame are appropriate for group moralities where the group is valued over “the individual”. Crucially, such a morality is inconceivable without a sense of group identity. Jesus’s morality became liberated from a specifically Jewish group identity. Once it dominated gentile morality, it also eroded kin and ethnic identity. The Christian war against honor moralities became so successful and traditional [that] its premodern origins were nearly forgotten along with the native pagan moralities it conquered.
Jesus’s values implicated the end of the hereditary world by living the logical consequences of denying the importance of his hereditary origins. This is a central premise underlying the entire modern rupture with the ancient world: breaking the import of hereditary origins in favor of individual valuations of humans. In escaping the consequences of a birth that, in his world, was the most ignoble possible, Jesus initiated the gentile West’s rupture with the ancient world.
The rupture between the ancient and the modern is the rupture between the rule of genes and the rule of memes. The difference between ancient and modern is the difference between the moral worlds of Homer and the Bible. It is the difference between Ulysses and Leopold Bloom.
On Nero’s persecution of the Christians, Tacitus wrote, “even for criminals who deserved extreme and exemplary punishment, there arose a feeling of compassion; for it was not, as it seemed, for the public good, but to glut one man’s cruelty, that they were being destroyed.” The modern morality of compassion begins with Christianity’s moral attack on the unholy Roman Empire. Christianity demoralized the pagan virtues that upheld crucifixion as a reasonable policy for upholding the public good.
If, as Carl Schmitt concluded, the political can be defined with the distinction between friend and enemy, then Jesus’s innovation was to define the political as enemy by loving the enemy, and thus destroying the basis of the distinctly political. The anarchy of love that Christianity spread was designed to make the Roman Empire impossible. The empire of love that Paul spread was subversive by design. It was as subversive as preaching hatred of the patriarchal family that was a miniature model for worldly empire.
Crossan and Reed found that those letters of Paul that are judged historically inauthentic are also the ones that carry the most inegalitarian message. It appears that their purpose was to “insist that Christian families were not at all socially subversive.” These texts “represent a first step in collating Christian and Roman household ethics.” For these historians the issue is “whether that pseudo-Pauline history and theology is in valid continuity with Paul himself or is, as we will argue, an attempt to sanitize a social subversive, to domesticate a dissident apostle, and to make Christianity and Rome safe for one another.”
What could be more ridiculous that the idea that Jesus’s attack on Roman values would not need some “modification” before making themselves at home in Rome? Jesus and Paul were heretics of mainstream or Pharisaic Judaism and rebels against Rome. Since the purity and integrity of the internal logic of Christianity is hostile to purely kin selective values, there is no way whatsoever that Christianity could survive as a mass religion without corrupting Jesus’s pure attitude towards the family. Jesus’s values subvert the kin selective basis of family values.
That subversion was part of the mechanism that swept Christianity into power over the old paganism, but it was impossible that Christianity maintain its hold without a thorough corruption of Jesus’s scandalous attacks on the family. If not this way, then another, but the long-term practical survival of Christianity required some serious spin doctoring against the notion that Jesus’s teachings are a menace to society.
These, then, are the two options: the pure ethics of Jesus must be perverted or obscured as models for the majority of people or Christianity will be considered a menace to society. The very fact that Christianity did succeed in achieving official “legitimacy” means its original subversive message was necessarily subverted. State-sanctioned Christianity is really a joke played upon on a dead man who never resurrected to speak on his own behalf.
Official Christianity was making Jesus safe for aristocracy; falsifying Jesus; subverting Jesus. Rome subverted his subversion. Jesus attempted to subvert them—and they subverted him. (Bastards!) Yet without this partial subversion of subversion, Christianity would never have taken the deep, mass hold that is its foundational strength.
This insight, that pure Christianity must be perverted in all societies that wish to preserve their kin selective family values, is a key to understanding the process of secularization. Secularization is, in part, the unsubverting of the evidence for Jesus’s original social program from its compromised reconciliation with Rome. The first truly major step towards unsubverting Rome’s subversion of Jesus’s message was the Protestant Reformation.
The Roman Catholic hierarchy contains elements of a last stand of the old Roman pagan virtue, a reminder that it had and has not been subdued completely. The Reformation begun by Martin Luther was directed, in part, against this last stand. While Luther partially continued the containment of Jesus by checking the advance of the idea that heaven should be sought on earth, this German also continued the work of the Jewish radical he worshiped in attacking the hierarchy of Rome.
Secularization is the unsubverting of Jesus’s message subverted by Christian practice. Modern liberal moral superiority over actual Christians is produced by unsubverting the subversion of Jesus’s message subverted by institutional Christianity. There is an interior logic to Jesus’s vision based on consistency or lack of hypocrisy. Liberal arguments only draw this out from its compromises with the actual social world. In this role, Protestantism was especially influential in emphasizing individual conscience over kinship-biological imperatives based on the model of the family.
The average secular liberal rejects Biblical stories as mythology without rejecting the compassion-oriented moral inheritance of the Bible as mythology. That people, still, after Nietzsche, tout these old, juvenile enlightenment critiques of Christianity would seem to be another refutation of the belief that a free and liberal society will inevitably lead to a progress in knowledge. The primitive enlightenment critique of Christianity as a superstition used as a form of social control usually fails to account that its “social control” originated as a weapon that helped to bring down the Goliath of Rome.
Still, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, this old enlightenment era castigation of Christianity for not being Christian endures without realization that this is actually the main technical mechanism of the secularization of Christian values. When one asks, what is secularization?, the attempt to criticize Christianity for its role in “oppression”, war, or other “immoral” behaviors stands at the forefront. Liberal moral superiority over actual Christians commonly stems from contrasting Christian ideals and Christian practice. This is what gives leftism in general and liberalism in particular its moral outrage.
Secularization arises as people make sense of Christian ideals in the face of its practice and even speculate as to how it might work in the real world. Enlightenment arguments for the rationalization of ethics occurred in the context of a Christian society in which the dormant premises of the Christian creed were subjected to rational scrutiny. To secularize Christianity is to follow Jesus in accusing God’s faithful believers of a nasty hypocrisy:

Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men’s bones and everything unclean. In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness. (Matt. 23:27-28)

To charge Christians with hypocrisy is to relish in the irony of Jesus’s biting charges of hypocrisy against the Pharisees. Jesus’s attempt to transcend the hypocrisies inherent in Mosaic law’s emphasis on outer behavior was one germinating mechanism that produced Christianity out of Judaism. The same general pattern generated modern liberalism out of Christianity. Just as Jesus criticized the Pharisees for worshipping the formal law rather than the spirit of the law, modern liberals criticize Christians for following religious formalities rather than the spirit of compassionate, liberal egalitarianism. It was precisely Christianity’s emphasis on the spirit that helps explain how the spirit of liberal compassion evolved out of the spirit of Christianity even if the letters of the laws are different.
To recognize hypocrisy is to recognize a contradiction between theory and action. The modern ideology of rights evolved, in part, through a critique of the contradictions of Christian theology and political action. Modern ideology evolved from Christian theology. Christian faith invented Christian hypocrites, and modern political secularism seized upon these contradictions that the Christian hypocrisy industry created. Resolving these moral contradictions through argument with Christians and political authorities is what led to the idea of a single, consistent standard for all human beings: political equality. The rational basis of the secularization process is this movement towards consistency of principle against self-contradiction (hypocrisy).
Modern ideas of political rights emerged out of a dialogue; a discourse; a dialectic in which Christianity framed the arguments of secularists, defining the domain upon which one could claim the moral high ground. The “arguments” of Christian theology circumscribed the moral parameters of acceptable public discourse, and hence, the nature of the counterarguments of “secular” ideology. Secular morality evolved by arguing rationally against the frame of reference provided by the old Christian Trojan Horse and this inevitably shaped the nature of the counter-arguments that followed. Christianity helped define the basic issues of secular humanism by accepting a belief in the moral worth of the meek of the world.
The Roman who conquered Jesus’s Jewish homeland could feel, in perfect conscience, that their conquest should confirm their greatness, not their guilt. Roman religion itself glorified Mars, the god of war. Pagan Roman religion did not automatically contradict the martial spirit—it helped confirm the martial spirit.
Chivalry, the code of honor that tempered and softened the warrior ethos of Christian Europe, is the evolutionary link between pagan virtue and modern virtue. Yet the imperial vigor of the Christian West was made, not by Christian religiosity, but by Christian hypocrisy. Christianity planted in its carriers a pregnant contradiction between Christian slave morality and Christian reality that was just waiting for the exposé of the “age of reason”. Christianity made the old European aristocracies “unjust” by dissolving the prehistoric and pagan assumptions of its existence.
Jesus himself contrasted his teachings with the ways of pagans:

You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. It will not be so among you; but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave; just as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many. (Matt 24:25-28)

To reverse the high political development of kin selection represented by Rome leads towards sociobiological primitivity; to an immature stage where human ontology is closest to a more primitive phylogeny; when humans are closest to our common evolutionary ancestors; when humans are biologically most equal to one another since genes and environment have not yet exacerbated differences.
Christianity reached a state of fruition called “modernity” when a kind of justice was reaped for the ancestral betrayal of a Christian’s pagan forefathers. The pagan values that genuinely supported an ancestral chain of sacrifice for their kin kind and the patriarchal kingdoms of this world were betrayed.
A war of generations broke Christianity from Judaism, and left wing humanism from Christianity. These are only peak points that matured from the gradual kneading of cultural dough; from change guided by visions of the moral high grounds in heaven or on earth. Out of a conflict between generations that Christianity helped leaven, the modern social idea of progress rose.

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Alexander the Great Ancient Greece Ancient Rome Axiology Catholic Church Christendom Deranged altruism Egalitarianism Individualism Kevin MacDonald New Testament Universalism

Why Europeans must reject Christianity, 20

by Ferdinand Bardamu

 
The Christian apologetics of Prof. Kevin MacDonald
Sociobiological accounts of Western pathological altruism are based on inferences not supported by the available empirical evidence. For example, if the individualism of European societies is the result of evolutionary adaptation under ecologically adverse conditions, a similar tendency would be found among other ethno-racial groups that evolved in the same environment. However, Eastern Europeans and Northeast Asians evolved in the same North Eurasian and Circumpolar region but remain strongly ethnocentric and collectivist.
Those arguing in favor of a European genetic basis for pathological altruism face another serious problem: for thousands of years of recorded history, there isn’t a single instance of collectively suicidal behavior among Europeans until the Christianization of Rome in the 4th century. Why this is the case requires the following explanation.
Ancient ethical norms diverged considerably from modern ones. Pity was condemned as a vice; mercy was despised as a character flaw. Mercy was viewed as the antithesis of justice because no one deserved help that had not been earned. The rational man was typically expected to be callous towards the sufferings of the less fortunate. His philosophical training in the academies had shown him that mercy was an irrational and impulsive behavior whose proper antidote was self-restraint and stoic calm in the face of adversity. In the Roman world, clementia was reserved exclusively for the vanquished in battle or the guilty defendant at trial. Weaklings and the economically disadvantaged were beneath contempt.
Life in the ancient world was quite brutal by modern Western standards. The punishments meted out to criminals—blinding, burning with coals, branding with hot irons and mutilation—were exceedingly cruel and unusual. Public entertainment was noted for its brutality. Scratching, biting, eye gouging and mauling an opponent’s genitals were accepted as legitimate tactical maneuvers for boxers and wrestlers alike. In the naumachia, armies of convicts and POW’s were forced to fight each other to the death in naval vessels on man-made lakes. Gladiatorial combat remained immensely popular for centuries, until the monk Telemachus tried to separate two gladiators during a match in the Roman coliseum. He was promptly stoned to death by the mob for his efforts. Slavery was considered a non-issue in the ancient world. Aristotle rationalized the institution by dividing men into two classes: those by nature free, and therefore capable of assuming the responsibilities of citizenship, and those who were by nature slaves. A slave was defined as chattel property bereft of the capacity to reason. This meant that he could be sexually exploited, whipped, tortured and killed by his master without fear of legal reprisal.
Racism or, more accurately, “proto-racism” was more widespread and more accepted in the ancient world than in our politically correct modern Western “democracies.” As revealed by in-depth examination of classical literary sources, the Greeks were typically ethnocentric and xenophobic. They were given to frequent generalization, often negative, about rival ethnicities. The Greeks casually and openly discriminated against foreigners based on deeply ingrained proto-racial prejudices. Ethno-racial intermarriage, even among closely related Greek ethnic and tribal groups, was universally despised. It was even regarded as a root cause of physical and mental degeneration. The absence of terms like “racism,” “discrimination” and “prejudice” in the ancient world reveals that proto-racist attitudes were not generally condemned or seen as pathological.
Greek intellectual and biological superiority was determined by their intermediate geographical position between lazy, stupid northern Europeans and effeminate, pleasure-loving Asians. The Greeks were the best of men because they had been exposed to the right climate and occupied the right soil. The Greeks looked down upon foreigners, pejoratively referring to them as “barbarians.” This was an onomatopoeia derived from Hellenic mockery of unintelligible foreign speech. Barbarians were viewed as the natural inferiors of the civilized peoples of the Mediterranean basin. Prejudice was not only directed at foreigners. Significant interethnic rivalry also existed among fellow Greeks, as demonstrated by the history of the Peloponnesian Wars. Greek patriots despised their Roman conquerors, even referring to them contemptuously as barbarians. After the conquest of Macedonia, the Romans embraced the prejudices of their Greek subjects as their own.
How do contemporary sociobiological accounts of Western pathological altruism explain this?
It has been alleged that pathological altruism was always a deeply ingrained European character flaw. The Pythagorean communism of the 5th century BC is frequently mentioned as corroborating evidence, but these practices were reserved for the intellectual elite. Much the same could be said for Stoic cosmopolitanism, which bears no similarity to the deracinated cosmopolitanism of the modern West. In the Greek variant, the intellectual gains world citizenship by living in accord with the cosmic law of universal reason; in the Roman variant, the cosmopolis is identified with the Roman patria.
The Hellenistic empire of Alexander the Great is believed by some to have been established on a morally universalist foundation. These accusations have their basis in the rhetorical amplifications and literary embellishments of chroniclers who wrote long after the exploits of Alexander. The expansion of the Greek sphere of influence in Asia was romanticized by some as implying a new world order based on an imagined brotherhood of man. This is contradicted by the historical record. In actuality, Alexander and his generals promoted a policy of residential segregation along ethno-racial lines in the conquered territories, with Greek colonists on one side and natives on the other. In the Greek view, Hellenized Egyptians, Israelites, Syrians and Babylonians were racial foreigners who had successfully assimilated Greek culture; clearly then, cultural and linguistic Hellenization was not enough to make one “Greek.”
Ancestral lineage was an important component of ancient Greek identity. Herodotus observed that the Greeks saw themselves as a community “of one blood and of one tongue.” Caracalla’s extension of the franchise to Roman provincials in 212 AD was not an act of universalism per se, but occurred after centuries of Romanization. It was done for purposes of taxation and military recruitment. This imperial legislation, known as the Antonine Constitution, did not abolish ethnic distinction among Roman citizens.
The conventional sociobiological explanation of Prof. MacDonald and others is contradicted by the pervasive brutality and ethno-racial collectivism of ancient societies. Given Christianity’s role as an agent of Western decline, no explanation will be fully adequate until this is finally acknowledged and taken into consideration. Prof. MacDonald, in an essay for The Occidental Observer, “Christianity and the Ethnic Suicide of the West”, ignores this major obstacle to his own detriment, arguing that from a Western historical perspective, Christianity was a relatively benign influence. Despite MacDonald’s eminence as an authority on 20th century Jewish intellectual and political movements, his defense of Christianity reveals a superficial understanding of history, contemporary political theory and Christian theology.
Prof. MacDonald whitewashes Christianity throughout, denying that the religion has ever been “a root cause of Western decline.” He observes that Christianity was the religion of the West during the age of European exploration and colonization, but not once does he mention that Christianity was a spent force by the late Middle Ages, having undergone a serious and irreversible decline in power and influence. Prof. MacDonald does not mention that after 1400, Christendom was no longer unified because the legitimacy of medieval ecclesiastical authority had been shattered; first, by the rediscovery of classical science and philosophy, which shook the Christian worldview to its very foundations, and second, by the Protestant Reformation, which reduced the pope to the status of a mere figurehead.
This set the stage for the large-scale dissemination of atheism and agnosticism in the 20th century. Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press, combined with the spread of mass literacy, virtually ensured that the Christian church would never again control European intellectual life. If the late medieval church had retained the same ecclesiastical and political authority it had under Pope Innocent III, European colonization and exploration of the globe would have been virtually inconceivable. For these reasons, it is more historically accurate to situate European territorial expansion within the context of resurgent pagan epistemic values, i.e. empirical rationality, intellectual curiosity and the pursuit of scientific progress for its own sake, during the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution.
It is argued that the decline of the West has co-occurred with the decline of Christianity as an established faith, but this is incorrect. The Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution, as well as exploration and colonization that occurred along with it, were only possible because of the collapse of ecclesiastical authority in the late medieval period. This eroded the Christian stranglehold on the spread of knowledge, replacing blind faith with the pagan epistemic values of classical antiquity. The recent decline of the modern West beginning in the 1960s has co-occurred with the growing influence of a neo-Christian ethic in the public sphere, just as the decline of the ancient world co-occurred with the triumph of Christianity over the forces of paganism.
Prof. MacDonald observes that Christians have not always been consistent moral universalists in practice, but this is a non-sequitur. Marxists have not always been consistently anti-racist or multiculturalist, given Stalin’s rabid anti-Semitism, aggressive policy of national Russification, and deportation of entire ethnic populations to Siberia, but this does not change the fact that anti-racism and multiculturalism are characteristic features of Marxist orthodoxy. Since when have the inconsistent practices of a few individuals ever mitigated or excused the destructive nature of an ideology completely at odds with the biological reality of human nature? Likewise, MacDonald’s non-sequitur does not affect the central importance of spiritual equality in the Christian belief-system. Historically, Christians were divided on whether spiritual equality entailed certain real-world implications or was of purely eschatological significance.
This hopelessly muddled line of argument revolves around a nebulous definition of “traditional” Christianity, a term either alluded to or directly mentioned throughout. If traditional Christianity is supposedly good for Europeans, how can it be universalist and ethnocentric at the same time, as in the case of American abolitionists and slave-owners? Or is traditional Christianity whatever form of Christianity MacDonald finds acceptable? If this is the case, what is the point he is trying to make here? Prof. MacDonald mentions that the patristic writers frequently criticized Jewry for being obsessed with biological descent. This placed them at odds with the multicultural and multiethnic ideology of the Christian religion. But how can the patristic writers, who systematically formulated the official dogmatic orthodoxy of the church, not be representative of “traditional” Christianity? Paradoxically, MacDonald acknowledges the ancient origin of the church’s race-mixing proclivities. If he believes that the patristic writers were corrupted by egalitarian principles at a very early date, he should at least provide evidence of theological subversion.
According to Prof. MacDonald, the secular left, which initiated the cultural revolution of the 1960s, is not Christian in inspiration. This statement is egregiously wrong, revealing a profound ignorance of the philosophies of liberalism and Marxism, especially in terms of their historical development. These belief-systems originated in a Christian theological context. The core ideas of liberalism, human rights and equality, have their genesis in the careful biblical exegesis of 17th and 18th century Christian political theorists. Marxism is deeply rooted in the fertile soil of the Christian tradition, especially in the speculative Protestant rationalism of Hegel. It also draws additional inspiration from the Reformed theological principles of Luther and the communist socio-economic practices of the primitive Christian church.
The hostility between the secular left and “traditional” Christianity is emphasized to further demonstrate the non-Christian origins of Western pathological altruism. However, his observation is completely irrelevant, as both traditional and secular Christianity are essentially rival denominations within the same Christian religious tradition. The mutual hostility that exists between the two is to be expected. Furthermore, it is foolhardy to maintain that traditional or mainline Christianity has been corrupted by the secular left; given the origins of liberalism and Marxism in Christian theology and biblical exegesis, it is more accurate to say that traditional Christianity has allowed itself to be corrupted by its own moral paradigms after taking them to their logical conclusion. The Christian theological basis of social and biological egalitarianism is merely the rediscovery and application of the original ethical teachings of Jesus and the primitive church.
Prof. MacDonald says the “contemporary zeitgeist of the left is not fundamentally Christian.” He fails to realize that the liberal-leftist ideas behind Third World immigration and state-sanctioned multiculturalism have deep roots in the Christian tradition. There is a common misunderstanding, no doubt propagated by Christian apologists, that one must embrace the supernatural claims of Christian religious dogma to be considered a Christian. This contention is not supported by contemporary scholarship. For example, Unitarians reject traditional Christian orthodoxy but remain well within the Christian fold. Neo-Christianity, like Unitarianism, is a thoroughly demythologized religion, properly defined as the application of New Testament-derived ethical injunctions to the management of contemporary social and economic relations. By this definition, Liberals and Marxists are no less Christian than your typical bible-thumping “holy roller.”
If Christianity is ultimately responsible for the destruction of Western civilization, asks MacDonald, why aren’t Middle Eastern Christians destroying their own societies by aggressively pushing the same universalist and ethno-masochistic agenda? In this case, the comparison is historically flawed. The medieval Islamic conquest of Byzantine North Africa and the Near East virtually guaranteed that Middle Eastern Christianity would follow a socio-historical trajectory differing significantly from the one followed by Latin Christianity. Up until quite recently, Middle Eastern Christians inhabited a medieval world no different from the one Europeans had lived in for centuries before the dawn of the Renaissance. Middle Eastern Christians never experienced any Reformation that allowed them to shake off the tyranny of ecclesiastical authority and wrestle with the real-world implications of spiritual equality.
Furthermore, none of the conditions for a Reformation ever existed in what remained of Middle Eastern Christendom. There was no humanist movement, which meant no dramatic increase in literacy or availability of printed material. There was no rediscovery of the patristic writers or of the ancient biblical manuscripts in the original languages. Access to the original source material would have made it easier for religious dissidents to challenge ecclesiastical authority and refute long-established medieval Christian dogma. In fact, Middle Eastern Christians were dhimmis, a persecuted jizya-paying religious minority in a larger Moslem world hostile to their very survival. Given the precariousness of their legal situation in the Ottoman empire, they had no time for the finer points of biblical exegesis or theological analysis.
Prof. MacDonald states, erroneously, that in Judaism there is no “tradition of universalist ethics or for empathy with suffering non-Jews.” He is obviously not familiar with the teachings of the Old Testament: “The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the LORD your God.” (Leviticus 19:34) Christianity is simply the radical universalization of Hebrew ethical concern for the plight of hapless foreigners living among them; as such, it is firmly embedded within the soil of 1st century Palestinian Judaism. Although Christianity has absorbed Greek philosophical ideas because of its wide dissemination in Europe, it is obviously not a European invention.
At this point, Prof. MacDonald asks: If the “moral universalism / idealism” that is destroying Sweden is due to Christianity, how does one explain “how people can lose every aspect of Christian ideology except the ethics”? To answer this question, let us inquire into the historical genesis of the Christian religion and the identity of its earliest followers.
Christianity originated in the yearning of Palestinian Jewry for social justice while having to patiently endure the tyranny of foreign rulers. Under these harsh conditions, Jewish beliefs in a messiah acquired an unprecedented sense of urgency, eventually assuming militant and apocalyptic overtones. This sense of urgency reached a crescendo in 1st century Palestine; self-proclaimed messiahs amassed armed bands of followers poised and ready to establish the son of David on the throne of Caesar, by force if necessary. This is the environment in which the Jesus myth originated, woven together from different strands of Jewish tradition in an atmosphere of deep-seated yearning for the coming advent of a messiah. This advent symbolized the end of Roman tyranny and the establishment of the kingdom of god on earth.
Christianity’s earliest followers were drawn from the refuse of the empire. Why? Because Christianity was the first mass movement in history to give concrete expression to the inner yearning of the people for freedom from oppression and hunger. What man has not sought to escape the oppression of his masters or the poverty of his surroundings? With the rise of Christianity, like the rise of Jewish Messianic belief, the inchoate yearnings of the mob for deliverance from oppression were replaced with a vision of a new social order that would inaugurate an age of universal justice and freedom. This new vision would lead to the establishment of a worldwide communist economic system that would forever solve world poverty and hunger. In the New Testament was found a blueprint for an ideal society that would inspire generations of social reformers and leftist revolutionaries.
For centuries, it was the only widely accessible document that demanded social justice for the poor and downtrodden and the only document to propose a practical solution to the problem of social inequality: the establishment of a socially egalitarian or communist society on earth. The religion of Christianity tapped into this deep-seated, age-old psychological yearning of the masses and, for the first time in history, gave it a coherent voice. This ensured the survival of ethical Christianity long after the decline of ecclesiastical orthodoxy in the late Middle Ages, allowing it to flourish, virtually unchallenged, in the ostensibly secular milieu of the modern 21st century Western “democracies.”
As a control mechanism, ethical Christianity was remarkably flexible. It could be used to justify any social arrangement, no matter how unjust or brutal. Its promise of “pie in the sky” had a remarkably pacifying effect on the illiterate serfs, who were expected to toil on the lord’s manor for their daily bread. Feudal landowners encouraged Christian religious instruction because it produced an easily controlled and manipulated peasantry. Vassals had it drummed into their heads from the moment of birth that servants must obey their masters. The church promised them life everlasting in paradise if they faithfully observed this requirement until death.
The great rarity of the peasant revolt against serfdom reveals the shrewd pragmatism of those who used religion as a means of safeguarding the public order. Punishment for original sin and the Pauline dualism between body and spirit, among other things, provided European rulers with additional convenient rationalization for the institution of serfdom. In the right hands, the ethical pronouncements of the New Testament could be used as an agent of revolutionary change, capable of stirring up mass revolt and potentially unleashing forces that could tear apart the “vast fabric of feudal subordination.” This was demonstrated by the Peasant Revolt of 1381, ignited by the fanatical communist-inspired sermons of the renegade priest John Ball.
The concept of human rights—Christian ethical injunctions in secularized form—illustrate in concrete fashion why the morality of the New Testament managed to survive long after the decline of Christian dogmatic orthodoxy. Rights dominate the field of political discourse because they are considered by egalitarian ideologues the most effective mechanism available for ensuring (a) the equal treatment of all persons and; (b) equal access to the basic goods deemed necessary for maximal human flourishing.
This practicality and effectiveness must be attributed to the ability of rights to fulfill the secret yearning of the common people, which is to ameliorate, as much as possible, the baneful effects of oppression and want. It achieves this by demolishing the traditional social and political distinctions once maintained between aristocracy and peasantry, placing all individuals on the same level playing field. The concept of rights has allowed the masses to closely realize their age-old utopian aspirations within a liberal egalitarian or socialist context. The concept’s great flexibility means that it can be interpreted to justify almost any entitlement. Even those who openly rejected the notion of rights, such as utilitarian philosopher Bentham, were unable to devise a more satisfactory mechanism that ensured equal treatment of all.
The Marxist tradition, emerging from under different historical circumstances, never fully decoupled Christian ethical teaching from traditional orthodoxy; instead, Marxist philosophical method necessitated an “inverted” Judeo-Christian eschatological and soteriological framework, largely because dialectical materialism is primarily an inversion of Hegel’s speculative Protestant rationalism.
In Hegelian Christianity, knowledge is substituted for faith. This eliminated the “mysteries” of Christian orthodoxy by making rational self-knowledge of god a possibility for all believers. The trinity as absolute mind, and therefore reason incarnate, means that Jesus of Nazareth was a teacher of rational morality, although his ethical system had been corrupted by patristic and medieval expositors. If “the rational is real and the real is rational,” as Hegel said, history is not only the progressive incarnation of god, but god is the historical process itself. The triadic structure of the natural world, including human self-consciousness, proves that the structure of objective reality is determined by the triune godhead of Christianity.
Hegel’s interpretation of Christianity gave Marx the raw material he needed to extract the “rational kernel” of scientific observation from “within the mystical shell” of Hegelian speculative rationalism. This liberated dialectical analysis from Hegel’s idealist mystification, allowing Marx to do what Hegel should have done, before succumbing to Christian theological reflection: construct a normative science, a Realwissenschaft, analyzing the socio-economic developments within capitalism that would unleash the forces of worldwide proletarian revolution.
The secularization of Christianity preserved the religion’s ethical component, while discarding all supernatural elements. This gave us modern liberalism. In contrast, Marx turned Hegel’s Protestant theological system upside down, a process of extraction resulting in the demystification of Hegelian Christianity. In Marxist philosophy, the inversion of dialectic removes the analytical tool—the “rational kernel”—from within its Christian idealist “shell.” This is then applied to the analysis of real-world phenomena within a thorough-going materialist framework, like the internal contradictions of capital accumulation in Marxist crisis theory.
Prof. MacDonald argues for a genetic basis for moral universalism in European populations, a difficult argument to make given the historical evidence indicating a total absence of pathological altruism in the ancient world before Christianization of the Roman empire. He mentions the systematic brainwashing of Europeans and the major role of Jewish political, academic and financial influence in the ethnocide of the West, but again forgets to mention that all these cultural forces rationalize European dispossession using political ideas like universal human rights and equality, the two fundamental pillars of secularized Christianity.
Prof. MacDonald’s attempt to exculpate Christianity of being “a root cause of Western decline” is easily refuted. In the final analysis, Christianity, at least in its organized form, is the single greatest enemy of Western civilization to have ever existed.

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