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Tag: Christian problem (CP)

Categories
Axiology Film

Iceberg

by Gaedhal

I watched the 2014 film, Still Alice, yesterday.

One of the things that I liked about it was its treatment of the stages of grief. The denial stage is well treated. Alec Baldwin just openly denies that Alice has Alzheimer’s. Alice is quick, almost immediate, to acknowledge verbally that she has Alzheimer’s, but she still lives in denial. She still believes that she can go running, go on holiday, lecture Linguistics at college etc. And also, we kinda get a subtle hint from a neurologist who looks uncannily like Lawrence Krauss that Alice was late in seeking a diagnosis. It was only really when Alice could no longer disguise her memory problems that she sought a diagnosis.

Alice has familial early-onset Alzheimer’s. This is caused by a mutation in the genome.

I remember, in the grand old days of yore, I used to install television satellite dishes with my father. The set-top box, for to decode and unencrypt the digital television signal had a forward error correction rate. The set top box had an algorithm that could correct some errors received from the Satellite. Do not ask me about the engineering wizardry behind this. To me, digital satellite television is a technology sufficiently advanced to be indistinguishable from magic.

However, where is the forward error correction in our genome? Unintelligent design strikes again. This is why, in my view, Paley’s watchmaker argument fails in our day. In Paley’s day, technology was still, very much, in a crude and primitive state. However, in our day, the process of technological manufacturing is so refined that the organs—organum in Latin means: ‘tool’ or ‘instrument’—produced by nature are wholly deficient when compared to the tools, and instruments produced by humans. We humans can contrive forward error correction, whereas biology and nature, thus far, cannot.

And this, incidentally, is why I am pro-abortion.

One of Alice’s children has the gene for early-onset Alzheimers. She swiftly conceives twins by IVF. The embryos in the petri dish are screened for the familial-Alzheimer’s disease, and the embryos containing this gene are destroyed, and only the healthy embryos are implanted. In essence, a woman’s uterus does the same thing: it screens sperm and embryos for nasty genetic material, and if it discovers any such nasty genetic material, then it either kills the sperm, or it kills the embryo or foetus. Thus, naturally, a woman’s uterus has its own contraception and abortion mechanisms. Contraception and abortion is merely the augmentation of a natural process. And if you believe in God, then God ultimately designed these contraceptive and abortifacient faculties that a woman contains in her uterus.

Evolution explains this. Evolution wants a woman to give birth to offspring that will reach adulthood, such that they too will either give birth to or sire offspring. Evolution does not want a woman to either accept defective sperm or to incubate defective embryos. Thus, evolutionarily speaking, the contraceptive and abortifacient faculties that a woman already possesses makes sense. And if you want to defy Ockham’s razor and add a god to the mix, then go ahead. If you do so, then contraception and abortion become divine.

Anyhow, another pro-death position that I hold is euthanasia. There is a scene where Alice tries to commit suicide by ingesting an overdose of Rohypnol. I, of course, was cheering her on, because Alzheimer’s is a fate worse than death. At this point of the film, she was only ½ Alice, by my reckoning. Unfortunately, Consuela from Family Guy, her nurse and housekeeper, gives her a jump-scare, knocking the tablets out of her hand, dooming her to become a human vegetable.

If I ever get diagnosed with dementia, I will book a trip to Switzerland and ingest some Pentobarbital at a Dignitas facility. However, such a service, ideally, ought to be available in Ireland. Evangelical Protestantism prevents euthanasia from being a reality in the North—although it is becoming a reality on the British mainland—and the vestiges of a Catholic theocracy prevent euthanasia from becoming a reality in the South. Again, why I am an antitheist. On the Island of Ireland, Roman Catholicism and Calvinism—the two biggest brands of Christianity, on this island—still have way, way, way too much power. There are no good secular arguments against euthanasia, just as there are no good secular arguments against abortion. Which is why the atheist British mainland is far in advance of Ireland, North and South on these issues.

My grandmother was not still my grandmother after about a year and a half of dementia. However, she lived on as a human potted plant—a mockery of her former form—for about two years after. I was glad, for her sake, when she died. In the words of Saint Thomas More, in his Utopia she outlived herself. Annie Bessant quotes the Utopia in her essay in favour of euthanasia.

 

______ 卐 ______
 

Editor’s 2 ¢

Since I studied the fraudulent profession called psychiatry in-depth, I realised, in reviewing its 19th-century origins, that psychiatrists were simply pathologizing behaviour such as suicide, a ‘sin’ considered lèse majesté divine, dogmatically declaring it to be a disease of unknown biomedical aetiology (and the same with the other diagnostic categories ‘of unknown aetiology’!).

Like me, Benjamin Power has spotted a tremendous error in the racial right, for example, in the comments sections where hundreds of commenters opine in The Unz Review. None of them seem to notice the pseudo-scientificity of psychiatry. Neochristianity, as we understand it on this site, means that the axiological tail of Christian morality persists, foolishly, in today’s secular world. What Gaedhal mentions above is only one example.

I would add that the negrolatry (BLM, mixed couples, etc.) that so afflicts today’s mad West is another example of Christian morality exponentially exacerbated in the secular world (from this site’s seminal essay, ‘The Red Giant’, a Swede noted that secularism exacerbates Christian morality big time).

White nationalists shouldn’t ignore us. They should realise that rather than our paradigm (CQ) competing with theirs (JQ), our POV expands the latter as with the iceberg metaphor. They only see the iceberg’s tip but we know that the Jewish Problem is supported by the huge mass of Christian ethics that lies underneath. Dr Robert Morgan agrees with us in the post from a couple of days ago.

Categories
Axiology Might is right (book)

Might is right, 15

Leo Tolstoy, undoubtedly the ablest modern expounder of primitive Christliness, in a much-translated volume entitled Work While Ye Have Light writes: ‘Our Faith tells us that bliss is to be found, not in resistance, but in submission; not in riches, but in giving everything away; we have not quite succeeded in casting off every habit of violence and property.’

To the most inept understanding, could any proposition be placed in a clearer light? Is it not as simple as ‘rolling off a log,’ that the individual attempting to become a true and honest Christian must become like unto a tame sheep?

What a sublime Ideal! How heroic! The bliss of a sheep! How superlatively delightful! How divinely glorious! And a Jew as the Good Shepherd, who leadeth his lambs ‘to green pastures, and quiet resting places, the pleasant waters by.’ For two thousand years, or so, His fleecy flocks have been fattening themselves up with commendable diligence—for the shearing-shed and the butchers-block.

Let any nation throw away all ‘habits of violence,’ and before long it must cease to exist as a nation. It will be laid under tribute—it will become a province, a satrapy. It will be taxed and looted in a thousand different ways. Let any man abandon all property, also all overt resistance to aggression and behold, the first sun will scarcely have sunk in the west before he is a bondservant, a tributary, a beggar, or—a corpse.

Property is necessary to the complete and free development of personality, and therefore human animals should somehow obtain a full and fair proportion thereof at any cost—or perish in the attempt; for he who cannot possess himself of property is much better buried out of sight. Our cities are honeycombed with treasure caverns, heaped up with gold, title deeds, silver, and instruments of credit: our valleys and our mountains are bubbling with wealth untold; and yet, poor miserable ‘servants of Christ’ pass idly by. Men, they call themselves! I call them—castrates.

If Tolstoy’s obsequious principles are derived from the Sermon on the Mount, then who can deny but that the Sermon on the Mount is a sermon unto decay and slavery? If they are derived from the Golden Rule and if the Golden Rule is the word of God, then can it be doubted that the word of God is the word of Fraud. There is far too much of this ghastly ‘goodness’ in the nation, far and away too much. It is time men who can think began to emancipate themselves, and consider the fact that: Morals, laws and decalogues were made by liars, thieves and rogues.

Liberty is honestly definable, as a state of complete bodily and mental self-mastership (which included the possession of property; also defensive weapons) and thorough-going Independence from all official coercion or restraint. Liberty in the conventional sense is a miserable Lie.

To be independent is synonymous with proprietorship. To be property-less, and unarmed, is the condition of actual dependence and servitude. Unarmed citizens are always enslaved citizens, always. Liberty without Property is a myth, a nursery tale, believable only by babbling babies and ‘fools in the forest’—fools in the city also. ‘Liberty regulated by Law’ is, in practice, tyranny of the darkest and foulest description; because so impersonal. There are numerous worthy, reasonable, and practical methods whereby individual tyrants may be removed; but a tyranny ‘regulated by Law’ is only removable by one method—the sword in the hands of men who are not afraid to use it, or to have it used against them: that is to say—the Sword in the hands of the Strongest.

During the whole course of human history, there is not upon record, one authentic instance wherein a subjugated people has ever regained property-holding Liberty, without first butchering its tyrants (or its tyrants’ armed slaves in battle) thereafter confiscating to its use, the lands and realized property that previously had been in the possession of its defeated foes and masters.

This statement is made with cool deliberation and aforethought. Let it be disproved by any one creditable example to the contrary, and the Author is prepared to forfeit 50,000 ounces of pure gold and enough ‘dimes and dollars’ to erect in Chicago, a bronze statue of ‘Our Blest Redeemer’ (crown of thorns and all) 100 cubits higher than the Masonic Temple. This offer is strictly bonafide and shall remain open till 1906, so that philosophers, editors, statesmen, divines (and other accomplished liars) may have enough time to blind themselves, wading through National Archives, and the putrid rubbish heaps that men call Public Libraries.

Categories
Axiology Racial right

Morgan’s

responses on The Unz Review

Eagle Eye: “Even back then, scientific authors were required to recite these politically-correct shibboleths to be allowed to publish at all.”

I wouldn’t say so. Phillipe Rushton and Arthur Jensen were able to publish their heretical ideas on the hereditary nature of racial differences in intelligence “back then”, along with other racial characteristics. In fact, plenty of others, too, were questioning the standard line: Hans Eysenck, Chris Brand, William Shockley, James Watson, Richard Lynn, Herrnstein & Murray (in 1994’s The Bell Curve), etc.

The biggest stumbling block was that in our Christianity-derived culture, all “souls” are supposed to have been created equal, and rightly or wrongly, most people appear to think a “soul” has something to do with mental abilities. To proclaim otherwise is looked at as a kind of blasphemy, so people are reluctant to agree, and they self-censor any doubts. I think it likely that Cavalli-Sforza actually believes what he’s saying in the quote above, although I don’t myself believe it.

Spencer J. Quinn: “In the past 15 years, geneticists have been struggling with the idea of early human ‘introgression’ with archaic hominid populations. Through introgression, members of two disparate populations mate and produce hybrid individuals, which then mate with members of either parent population.”

“Disparate populations”? LOL That palaver is a kind of cleaned-up way to put it. What it really means is that two different SPECIES crossed and produced a fertile hybrid, which of course boggles the mind of every good American, who has been told for years that the proof that niggers are the same species as whites is that a nigger/white cross can produce fertile offspring. But it’s been known for a long time that animals as taxonomically separated as sheep and goats (not even in the same genus, let alone same species) can interbreed and produce fertile offspring. Oxford biologist John Baker, in his book Race, says:

These and many similar experiments were performed by others, but Buffon himself supervised experiments on the crossing of sheep with he-goats. The fact that this intergeneric cross is sometimes successful, and that the hybrids are not infertile, appears to be established. It was accepted as true by Broca, who mentions that the French have a special name, chabin, for the hybrid. Several examples of the successful outcome of this cross are quoted by Alfred Russel Wallace in his famous work Darwinism. The information he quotes suggests that the hybridity is paragenesic. The cross appears to be what Broca called ‘unilateral’, since there is evidence that the ram does not produce progeny with the she-goat.
– John Baker, Race, p. 94

America’s (and the West’s) culture of equality demands, however, that niggers be ranked as the same species as whites, even at the cost of the falsification of reality and the betrayal of scientific truth. This new information about nigger genetics, which underscores how different they really are from whites, may someday help reality break through the complex network of lies that has been constructed to obscure it, but in all frankness, I wouldn’t expect that to happen for many years, if ever. America and the entire West have bet so heavily on racial equality that both would rather immolate themselves on its pyre than admit that the whole thing has always been a lie — a lie inspired and kept in force by the most grievous Christian ignorance and misconceptions about the nature of the world.

Gregory Hood: “American Empire must serve white interests, because the core American identity is white identity. … White identity remains forbidden in public life while non-white identity is celebrated. ”

Huh?

White identity is the “core” American identity, but it’s somehow “forbidden” in public life? LOL What kind of “core” identity is that?! And how can American Empire serve it, if it’s forbidden?

The truth is, the average white American doesn’t identify as white at all, and that’s why white nationalism never gets anywhere. If forced to, a white American might reluctantly check that box on a form, but he’s not proud of it. His culture has taught him that thinking of his race as being important would be racist! Unpatriotic! Hitlerian! Anti-Christian! Almost blasphemy!

Until that changes, the downward spiral will only continue.

Rich: “The Whites I know are proud of their heritage and are angered by the anti-White, anti-Christian actions and rhetoric of leftist Americans. They vote White, they seek out White neighbors and associates. They are the largest segment of American society by numbers. It’s why republicans win elections.”

If the average white man were proud of his race, then “racist” wouldn’t be the toxic label it is. By their reaction, you can tell that whites think that that is about the worst thing you can call them. LOL Even Jeffrey Dahmer took pains to let folks know he wasn’t a racist. A serial killer, a cannibal, and a homosexual, sure, but NOT a racist!

Christianity, with its emphasis on the idea that it’s the “soul” and not the body that’s the thing that’s really important about a man, is responsible for a lot of this. Race is a property of the body, not the “soul”. A typical white Christian would rather his daughter marry a nigger who’s a Christian than a white man who’s not. It’s hard to see how that’s a sign of racial pride.

As for voting Republican, Trump explicitly condemns racism, and especially white racism, as he carefully said after the Charlottesville fiasco. He’s not a racist who values the white race above all others. He favors a race-blind meritocracy. Anyone who voted for Trump expecting him to make America white again is going to be sorely disappointed.

John Johnson: “I don’t think that is an accurate term as liberal religious beliefs are not derived from Christianity nor do they require belief in Christ or God.”

Not derived from Christianity? That’s just historically inaccurate. John Locke, often called the father of liberalism, was a Christian theologian who based his arguments about human rights on his reading of the Bible. The case for these so-called human rights is a cultural legacy of Christianity, and only Christianity. Liberals didn’t invent human rights ex nihilo.

John Johnson: “The most closely held liberal religious belief is related to evolution and not Abrahamic religion.”

This is just another way of saying that human equality is one thing there are fanatics about, and I agree. But a faith in human equality, human rights, and a supposed “brotherhood of man” reeks of Christianity, and is obviously derived from it. The genius of Christianity as a belief system is that this ethical perspective can persist without any “belief in Christ or God”, as you put it. Thus, there are even atheistic versions of Christianity, such as Marxism.

Above in #230, I made a racist revision of John Lennon’s song “Imagine”. But as historian Tom Holland observed in his book Dominion, the original version is Christian through and through.

Categories
Israel / Palestine Racial right

Bibi’s dream

fulfilled by silly Xtians

As to why I said yesterday that the Christian Question is more relevant than the JQ—something the American racial right doesn’t want to see—see a minute of Judge Napolitano’s interview with Matt Hoh today, starting here.

Categories
Theology

“god”

and the problem of Evil

by Gaedhal

That nasty article that I linked to yesterday—which, unfortunately, is behind a paywall—confirms something that Sam Harris used to say:

‘Religion allows people to believe, in the billions, that which, if believed alone, would render one a lunatic.’

Forsooth, yea, and verily! Let us institute an International festival in honour of a mythical peasant preacher’s Jewishness. An insane idea. However, because it is in accord with the Zeitgeist of the world’s biggest religion, it is an idea that is taken seriously.

Let us call foreskin amputation—and especially the pain caused thereby—a “beautiful” thing. This is what the sicko, Margaret Hebblethwaite wrote yesterday.

There is a video of Christopher Hitchens and he was smoking a cigarette, and saying that Catholic lunatics such as John Paul 2, mother theresa—and I have no doubt that he would include Frankenpope and Hebblethwaite in this list were he still alive—are the ‘real enemy’.

And it brings us back to what John Loftus writes in Horrendous Suffering. Ironically, Christianity—it ideally should be called: ‘Judeochristianity’ as Christianity is merely a denomination of Judaism—has added, greatly to horrendous suffering.

Here we have Hebblethwaite, the Catholic, adding to the horrendous suffering of this world by advocating for this vampiric rite of child-abuse.

Ironically, the history of religion, and the horrendous harm caused by religion, is in and of itself an argument against the existence of god.

The logical problem of evil says that an Omni god would never have to resort to any sort of evil so as to accomplish his will. If God needs to resort to the allowance of evil, then he is either not all good, or not all powerful. Evil exists. QED. Quod erat demonstrandum: God does not exist. The logical problem of evil is a deductive argument for the non-existence of god. If the premises are true: an omni God would not need evil to accomplish his goals; evil exists; then the conclusion necessarily follows: God does not exist.

Despite Apologists showboating and saying that the logical problem of evil is dead, I think that it is sound. Even if an omni god did need to allow evil to accomplish his creative purposes, then he could always choose not to create. This, according to Doug is the true problem of evil. If God is a perfect and complete world unto himself, then why create a world at all, that He would know, with certainty, would bring about evil. In my view, such a god, faced with either creating a world with evil in it, or choosing not to create a world at all, would simply choose not to create.

However, the evidential problem of evil is an inductive argument. We collect data relating to horrendous suffering, of which there is a superabundance on this Hell-planet, and then we ask ourselves the question, which hypothesis best explains the data: the God hypothesis or the non-god hypothesis. And, in my view, to sincerely and honestly grapple with the problem of horrendous suffering as laid out in Horrendous Suffering by John Loftus is to arrive at the non-God hypothesis as the best explanation for the presence of so much horrendous suffering in our world.

‘James Sterba resurrected the logical problem of evil. It’s impossible that a theistic god exists. Look him up.’ —John Loftus

Yeah, apologists like to pretend that the logical problem of evil is no longer taken seriously in academic philosophy. This is just simply another lie of the apologetics’ profession.

In William Lane Craig’s debate with Christopher Hitchens, he reverses the burden of proof on the logical problem of evil: it was up to Christopher to prove that a god, whom he does not believe in, does not have morally sufficient reasons to permit evil. This is why I take the view of Venaloid, Carrier and Prophet of Zod in saying that William Lane Craig is a conman. A PhD philosopher should be able to wrap his brain around the logical problem of evil. In my view, the hypothesis that Craig is a conman is much more likely than the hypothesis that Craig is incompetent.

But even if a classically theistic god had morally sufficient reasons to allow evil, that same god, by virtue of his omnipotence, could achieve those same ends without allowing evil. The classically theistic god’s omnibenevolence would here kick in: I have two approaches available to me to achieve some end or goal. One approach allows for evil—which I supposedly hate—and another approach does not allow for evil. Well, my omnibenevolence kicks in and necessitates that I choose the approach that does not allow for the existence of evil to achieve my ends. However, evil exists. Thus, a classically theistic god does not exit. If gods there be, then that god is lacking in some omni property. That god is probably less than omniscient, or omnipotent, or omnibenevolent. QED. A deductive proof of the non-existence of a classically theistic god.

However, lest we drift into some sort of atheistic Thomism, or scholasticism, where we simply sit on our philosophical armchairs and a-priori reason all day, we also have the inductive argument against the existence of god from our gathering data as regards instances of horrendous suffering, in our world.

I am sure that William Lane Craig understands all of this very well… Indeed, better than I do. I only have a high-school/secondary-school education. Craig has two PhDs. However, Craig is a dishonest conman.

And thunderf00t—before Elon broke his brain—points this out: Craig isn’t really an academic philosopher, at all. He got two PhDs so as to employ them as props. In academic philosophy, he is a nobody.

Craig, in his own way, is as crazy and as dishonest as Ken Ham. Ken Ham similarly hires PhDs so as to deny evident reality.

Similarly with Wes Huff. Davis points out in that reality rules video, I linked in a previous email, that even though Huff is essentially a thesis and a viva voce away from a PhD, nevertheless, he spends all of his extracurricular time on apologetics, and not, you know, publishing in academic journals. Huff is the new apologetics superstar. However, it is the same modus operandi as Craig’s and Ham’s. Get a PhD. Use it as a prop so as to lie for Jaysus.

Categories
Bible New Testament

SBL

by Gaedhal

Thanks for responding! [Gaedhal refers to Richard C. Miller’s email]

I think that you once described the field of biblical studies as the last holdover of the dark-ages. The New Testament is obviously Hellenistic Graeco-Roman mythology. However, instead of the SBL [Society of Biblical Literature] studying it as such, it erects barriers to studying it as such. I think that you shared recently that members of the guild tried to censor some of your writings, or the writings of some PhD students that you have influenced. You and your students were simply studying and critiquing “the New Testament”—or as you like to call it: ‘earliest Christian writings’—and the guild tried to censor all of you for “going too far in this direction”.

Biblical studies is still, as Avalos points out, an apologetic enterprise. The teleological ‘end’ of biblical studies is to convince the world at large that religion in general, and Christianity in particular, is a force for good in the world. However, to suggest that Christianity is essentially no different to other Greco-Roman mystery/missing-body cults, is to puncture this entire apologetic empire. And Big Bible is Big Business. I think that the guild has been treating you so rottenly of late that you have suspended your Facebook page.

It is as you said on Mythvision: Christianity is a ladelful of the stew that is Greco-Roman Hellenic mythology. Big Bible takes this ladelful of stew and studies it in splendid isolation from the larger stew of Greco-roman Hellenic mythology that Christianity was drawn from.

You mention that travelogue from Corinth, written in Greek—the language of the New Testament!—and written at about the same time that Paul was writing to the Church at Corinth… and how practically no SBL school instructs its students to read this ancient travelogue.

I have a very short fuse when it comes to obvious cynical con-artists such as Wes Huff. It amazes me that Kipp Davis could call this guy a “budding scholar”. But this is the problem of Old Atheism. The likes of Kipp Davis and Bart Ehrman want to be thought well of by the likes of Huff and Licona for reasons which totally escape me. With Avalos it was not so: he wanted to burn the guild to the ground, and, indeed, you yourself have criticised him for not divorcing himself completely from SBL…

[In another communication Gaedhal informed us:]

This could be why the SBL guild is treating Richard C. Miller so badly. If Christianity is but Hellenistic Greco-Roman mythology—and it is!—then it is bad for Jews if this be found out. If Yahweh be as fictitious as Zeus, and if Jesus is as mythical as Hercules, then the Jews go from being “the Chosen People” and “a great monotheistic Faith” to simply being a gang of religious swindlers and hucksters who have been duping and swindling the Goyim with their religious bullshit for about 3,000 years.

And we cannot have that! (indeed, David Skrbina writes of this in his Jesus Hoax).

Categories
Christendom

Alain

The translation of Alain de Benoist’s important essay on Christianity is now available in PDF (here), and I have just included it in the reading list for the featured article, ‘The Wall’.

Categories
Ancient Rome Axiology

Christianity:

The communism of antiquity, 7th and last

by Alain de Benoist

Editor’s note: I didn’t invent the term ‘neo-Christianity’.
Remember that this essay was published in French
almost… half a century ago!:

 

______ 卐 ______

 

In his essay on The End of the Ancient World (op. cit.), Saint Mazarin rightly recalls that, until recently, the culture of the Late Empire has always seemed to us ‘qualitatively inferior to that of the great civilisations that preceded it’. But today, he says, this is no longer the case: ‘All the voices of the “decadent” Roman world, between the 3rd and 6th centuries, have become accessible to us’. Conversely, ‘we can say that decadentism, expressionism and other modern categories of literary or artistic criticism are so many ways of understanding the world of the Late Empire… The kinship between our age and that world is a fact on which everyone can agree’. And he finally asks: ‘To what extent can we extend this revaluation of the poetry and art of the Late Empire to manifestations of social and political order?’

Curiously, Mazarino, for whom we probably live in the best of all possible worlds, draws from this observation the moral that the idea of decadence is illusory. At no point does he think that if the Late Empire seems more worthy of appreciation to our contemporaries, it is because they find stigmata familiar to them in it. After all, the current period refers like no other to the image of the tenebrae that Erasmus spoke of, and it is this similarity that has put us in a position to appreciate what previous generations, in better health, could not see.

Indeed, studying the conditions in which the Roman Empire died is not only of historical and abstract interest. The kinship between the two conjunctures, the parallel often drawn between those conditions and those that prevail today, makes it profoundly relevant. Moreover, many admit, with Louis Rougier, that ‘revolutionary ideology, socialism, the dictatorship of the proletariat, derive from the pauperism of the prophets of Israel. In the criticism of the abuses of the old regime by the orators of the Revolution, in the prosecution of the capitalist regime by the communists of our days, the echo of the furious diatribes of Amos and Hosea against the course of a world in which the insolence of the rich oppresses and flays the poor resounds; as do the harsh invectives of Jewish and Christian apocalyptic literature against imperial Rome’ (op. cit.).

Celsus would not find it challenging to identify even today ‘a new race of men, born yesterday, without a country or traditions…, united against all institutions… and glory in common execration.’ Once again, in the Western world, the fanatici, sometimes living ‘in community,’ truly stateless, hostile to all ordered structures, to all science, hierarchy and borders, to all selection, separate themselves from the world and denounce the ‘Babylon’ of modern times. Just as the first Christian communities proclaimed the abolition of all natural categories for the exclusive benefit of the ecclesia of believers, today, a neo-Christianity [Editor’s emphasis] is spreading, which announces the imminent advent of a new Parousia, of an egalitarian world unified by the overcoming of ‘old quarrels,’ the socialisation of Love and the flight forward in the delay of the ‘social.’ On December 30, 1973, Brother Roger Schutz, Prior of Taizé, declared: ‘Above all, there must be Love, because it is Love that gives us unity.’

Ancient Christianity rejected the world. The Church of classical times distinguished the order above from that of here below. Neo-Christianity boldly transferring its secular hopes from heaven to ‘here below’, secularises its theodicy. It no longer celebrates the solemn marriage of converts with the mystical Bridegroom but the marriage of Christ and humanity through the intercession of the universal Spirit of socialism. It too rejects the world, but only the present one, affirming that it can be ‘changed,’ that another must succeed it, and that the messianic union of the ‘disadvantaged’ can, through its intelligent intervention, fulfil on earth the old dream of the biblical prophets: to stop history and make injustices, inequalities and tensions disappear.

‘Today more than ever, the Greek Spirit, transformed into a scientific spirit, and the messianic spirit transformed into a revolutionary spirit, are irreconcilably opposed. The existence of cold-blooded sectarians and fanatics to whom subjective participation in a body of revealed truths, in gnosis, gives, in their own eyes, rights over everything and everyone, the right to do everything and to allow themselves everything, persists in posing a question of life or death to a society that is on the verge, not of a war of religion, but of something close to that historical plague: the war of civilisation’ (Jules Monnerot, Sociology of the Revolution, Fayard, 1969).

Certain critics repeat against European civilisation and culture the words of Orosius and Tertullian against Rome: today’s setbacks are the punishment for its past faults. It pays for its ‘pride’, wealth, power, and conquests. The barbarians who come to plunder it will make it atone for the sufferings of the Third World, the impotent ambition and the humiliation of the poorly endowed. On its ruins, the Jerusalem of the new times will be built. Then, we will see the disappearance of ‘the veil of mourning that veiled all peoples, the shroud that covered all nations’ (Isaiah XXV, 7). We are once again faced with the same moralising interpretation of history. But neither history nor the world is governed by morality.

The world is mute: it gravitates in silence. In his essay on The Jewish Question, Marx stated that only communism could ‘fulfil in a profane way the human foundation of Christianity’, thus pointing out the ‘revolutionary inadequacies’ of Christian doctrine (‘religion of the slaves, but not a revolution of the slaves’) and the affinities between the two prophetic systems, the spiritual and the terrestrial. Roger Garaudy clarifies these words by recalling that Christianity was ‘an element that disintegrated Roman power’. He adds:

The hostility to the imperial cult, the refusal to participate in it, and even more so the prohibition of Christians from serving militarily in the Empire at a time when recruitment was becoming increasingly difficult and when the number of Christians was increasing daily, a prohibition which persisted until the 4th century, had a clear revolutionary meaning. Moreover, there is in the character of Christ, magnified by the collective imagination of the first Christians, and heir of numerous messiahs similar to the Essene ‘Lord of Justice’, an undeniable revolutionary aspect (Marxisme du XXe siecle, La Palatine, 1966).

Engels, who reminds us that ‘like all great revolutionary movements, Christianity was the work of the popular masses,’ also noted the kinship between the two doctrines: the same messianic certainty, the same eschatological hope, the same conception of truth (well perceived by O. Tillich).

In early Christianity, he sees ‘a completely new phase of religious evolution, destined to become one of the most revolutionary elements in the history of the human spirit’ (Contribution a l’histoire du christianisme primitif, in Marx and Engels, Sur la religion, selection of texts, Ed. Sociales, 1960). And in his eyes, Christianity is the non-plus ultra of religion, the ‘consummation’ (in the sense of Aufhebung) of all the religions that preceded it. Having become the ‘first possible universal religion’ (Engels, Bruno Bauer and Early Christianity) it is also, by the force of things, the last: every end marks a caesura, which implies another beginning. After Christianity, assuming that there is an ‘after,’ there can only come its overcoming.

Joseph de Maistre said: ‘The Gospel outside the Church is a poison,’ and Father Daniélou: ‘If we separate the Gospel from the Church, it loses its temper.’ These words have their whole meaning today, when the Church, the new catoblepas[1], seems to want to abolish its history and return to its origins. Throughout the two millennia, structures of order were established within the Church which, while adapting to the European mentality, allowed it to put into form and reason the dangerous evangelical message; the ‘poison’ having been softened, the faithful had become Mithridatic.

Today, neo-Christianity wants to put these two millennia in parentheses to return to the sources of a genuinely universal religion and give a more significant impact to its message. So, if it is true that we are living through the ‘end’ of the Church (not, indeed, of the Gospel), this end takes the form of a return to a beginning. The Gospel (pastoral ministry) increasingly separates itself from the Church (dogmatics). But this is simply a repetition: the tendency is to bring Catholics back to the ‘revolutionary’ conditions in and through which early Christianity was created. Hence, the interest of this historical overview which, while showing us what happened, tells us at the same time what awaits us.
 
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[1] The animal of which Pliny the Elder speaks, slow and stupid in appearance and which killed with its gaze (Translator’s note).

Categories
Ancient Rome Miscegenation

Christianity:

The communism of antiquity, 6

by Alain de Benoist

 

This certainty that the Empire needed to collapse for the Kingdom to come explains the mixed feelings of the early Christians towards the barbarians. Undoubtedly, at first, they felt as threatened as the Romans.

Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, distinguished between external enemies (hostes extranei) and internal enemies (hostes domestici). For him, it was the Goths that Ezekiel was referring to when he spoke of the people of Magog. But, in the second stage, these barbarians, who were soon to be evangelised, became auxiliaries of divine justice. Christians could not admit that their fate was linked to that of a ‘Babylon of impudence’. That is why the Carmen de Providentia or the Commonitorium of Orentius are scarcely interested in other than the ‘enemies within.’ In the 3rd century, in his Carmen apologeticum, a Christian author, Comodian, speaks of the Germans (more precisely of the Goths) as ‘executors of God´s designs.’ In the following century, Orosius, in turn, affirms that the barbarian invasions are ‘God´s judgement’ that come ‘in punishment for the faults of the Romans’ (poenaliter accidisse). It is the equivalent of the ‘plagues’ Moses used to blame the Pharaoh.

On 24 August 410, Alaric, king of the Visigoths, after besieging Rome for several weeks, entered the city by night through the Porta Salaria. It was a converse patrician, Proba Faltonia, of the Anician family, who, after sending her slaves to occupy the gate, had it surrendered to the enemy. The Visigoths were Christians, and the spiritual and ideological solidarity bore fruit. The Anicians, of whom Amianus Marcellinus (XVI, 8) says that they were reputed to be insatiable, were known as fanatics of the Catholic party. The sack of Rome that followed was described by Christian authors with kindly strokes. Alaric’s ‘clemency’ was praised. Georges Sorel asked: ‘Were the vanquished guilty?’ St Augustine says of the Visigothic leader, he was God’s envoy and the avenger of Christianity. Oretius says that only one senator died and that it was his fault (‘he had not made himself known’), and that it was enough for Christians to make the sign of the cross be respected, and so on. ‘Such daring lies, says Augustin Thierry, were later admitted as indisputable facts’ (Alaric).

Around 442, Quodvulteus, bishop of Carthage, claimed that the ravages of the Vandals were pure justice. In one of his sermons, he tried to console a faithful member who had complained about the devastation: ‘Yes, you tell me that the barbarian has taken everything from you… I see, I understand, I meditate: you, who lived in the sea, have been devoured by a bigger fish. Wait a little: an even bigger fish will come and devour the one who devours, despoil the one who despoils, take the one who takes… This plague that we are suffering today will not last forever: in truth, it is in the hands of the Almighty’. Finally, at the end of the 5th century, Salvianus of Marseilles affirms that ‘the Romans have suffered their sorrows by the just judgement of God’.

In the 2nd century, the City had been invaded by foreign cults. A temple to the Great Mother had been erected on the Palatine Hill, where fanatici officiated. Moral contagion did the rest. ‘Through the gap opened in the barrier that closes the horizon of terrestrial life, they were going to penetrate all sorts of chimaeras and superstitions, drawn from the inexhaustible reservoir of the Oriental imagination.’ (Bouché-Leclercq). These were the bacchanalia, the rites with mysteries, the Isiac cult, the cult of Mithra, and finally, Christianity. The words ‘The last of his family’ were written in the tombs more frequently. Pompey’s line had disappeared in the 2nd century, and also Augustus’ and Maecenas’ lines.

Rome was no longer Rome; all the rivers of the East flowed into the Tiber. It was only much later, in the Renaissance, that Petrarch (1304-1374) observed that the ‘black epoch’ (tenebrae) of Roman history had coincided with the era of Theodosius and Constantine; while in northern Europe, in the early 16th century, Erasmus (c. 1469-1536) claimed, although he called himself a ‘militiaman of Christ’, that the true barbarians of ancient times, the ‘real Goths’, had been the monks and scholastics of the Middle Ages.

Categories
Ancient Rome Bible Christendom

Christianity:

The communism of antiquity, 5

by Alain de Benoist

 
Christian doctrine was a social revolution. It did not affirm for the first time that the soul existed (which would not have made it original), but that everyone had one identical at birth. The men of ancient culture, who were born into a religion because they were born into a fatherland, tended instead to think that by adopting a behaviour characterised by rigour and self-control they might succeed in forging a soul, but that this was a fate reserved undoubtedly for the best. The idea that all men could be gratified with it indifferently and simply by the fact of existing was shocking to them. On the contrary, Christianity maintained that everyone was born with a soul, which was equivalent to saying that men were born equal before God.

On the other hand, in its rejection of the world, Christianity presented itself as the heir of an old biblical tradition of hatred of the powerful, of the systematic exaltation of the ‘humble and the poor’ (anavim ébionim), whose triumph and revenge over wicked and proud civilizations had been announced by prophets and psalmists. In the Book of Enoch, widely disseminated in the first century in Christian circles (cited in the epistles of Jude XV, 4, and of Barnabas: XV), we read: ‘The Son of Man will raise kings and the powerful from their beds and the strong from their seats; he will break their strength… He will overthrow kings from their thrones and their power. He will make the mighty turn their faces away, and cover them with shame…’ (Enoch XLVI, 4-6).

Jeremiah takes pleasure in imagining the future victims in the form of animals for the slaughter: ‘Separate them, O Yahweh, like sheep for the slaughter, and reserve them for the day of slaughter’ (Jeremiah XII, 3). To the women of the powerful, whom he calls ‘cows of Bashan’ (Amos IV, I), Amos predicts: ‘Yahweh has sworn by his holiness: The days will come upon you when you will be lifted with hooks, and your descendants with fishing spears’ (IV, 2). The psalms outline the beginning of the class struggle, and the same spirit will inspire ‘the first groups of Christians and later the monastic orders’ (A. Causse, op. cit.). ‘In the end, there is only one theme in the Psalms,’ says Isidore Loeb, ‘which is the struggle of the poor against the wicked, and his final triumph thanks to the protection of God, who loves the one and hates the other’ (Littérature des pauvres dans la Bible).

The poor are always the victims of injustice. They are called the Humble, the Holy, the Just and the Pious. They are unfortunate, prey to all evils; they are sick, invalid, alone, abandoned, relegated to a valley of tears, they water their bread with tears, etc. But they bear their pain; they even seek it out because they know that such trials are necessary for their salvation, that the more they are humiliated, the more they will triumph, the more they suffer, the more they will one day see others suffer. As for the wicked, they are rich, and their wealth is always culpable.

They are happy, build cities, perform pre-eminent social functions, and command armies, but they will one day be punished in proportion as they dominate. ‘Such is the social ideal of Jewish prophecy,’ says Gerard Walter, ‘a kind of general levelling which will make all class distinctions disappear and lead to the creation of a uniform society from which all privileges of any kind will be banished. This egalitarian sentiment, carried to its ultimate limits, is linked to an irreducible animosity against the rich and the powerful, who will not be admitted into the future kingdom. The ideal humanity of the announced times will include all the just without distinction of creed or nationality’ (Les origines du communisme, Payot, 1931).

The second book of the Sibylline Oracles paints a picture of humankind regenerating in a new Jerusalem under a strictly communist regime: ‘And the land will be common to all; there will be no more walls or frontiers. All will live in common and wealth will be useless. Then there will be no more poor or rich, no tyrants or slaves, no great or small, no kings or lords, but all will be equal’ (Or. Sib. II, 320-326).

Given this, it is easier to understand why Christianity initially seemed to the ancients to be a religion of slaves and heimatlos, a vehicle for a kind of ‘counterculture’ that only achieved success among the dissatisfied, the declassed, the envious and the revolutionaries avant la lettre: slaves, artisans, fullers, carders, shoemakers, single women, etc. Celsus describes the first Christian communities as ‘a mass of ignorant people and gullible women, recruited from the dregs of the people,’ and his adversaries hardly try to disabuse him on this point. Lactantius preaches equality in social conditions: ‘There is no equity where there is no equality’ (Inst. VII, 2). Under Heliogabalus, Calixtus, bishop of Rome, recommends that converts marry slaves.

For this reason, there is no idea more odious to the Christian than that of the fatherland: how can one serve both the land of one’s fathers and the Father who is in heaven? Salvation does not depend on birth, belonging to a city, or the seniority of one’s lineage but exclusively on respect for dogmas. From then on, it is enough to distinguish believers from unbelievers, and all other boundaries must disappear. Paul insists on this: ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither male nor female…’ Hermas, who enjoyed great authority in Rome, condemns the converts to perpetual exile: ‘You servants of God live in a foreign land. Your city is very far from this one’ (Sim. I, I).

Such a disposition of spirit explains the Roman reaction. Celsus, a patriot concerned about the health of the State, who sensed the weakening of the Imperium and the decline of civic feeling that the triumph of Christian egalitarianism could provoke, begins his True Discourse with these words: ‘A new race of men born yesterday, without homeland or traditions, united against all religious and civil institutions, persecuted by justice, accused of infamy by all and who glory in this common execration: that is what Christians are. Factious men who pretend to make a separate ranch and separate themselves from common society.’ And Tacitus, who says that they were detested for their ‘abominations’ (flagitia), accuses them of the crime of ‘hatred of the human race.’ ‘As soon as it was suppressed,’ he says, ‘this execrable superstition was once again breaking out not only in Judea, the cradle of the plague, but in Rome itself, where all the horrors and infamies that exist flow from all sides and are believed…’

The imperial principle is at this time the instrument of a conception of the world carried out as a vast project. Thanks to it, the Pax Romana reigns in an ordered world. Filled with admiration, Horace exclaims: ‘The ox wanders safely through the fields fertile by Ceres and Abundance, while sailors everywhere plogh the peaceful seas.’ In Halicarnassus, a tripartite inscription in honour of Augustus proclaims: ‘Cities flourish amid order, concord and wealth.’ But for the early Christians the pagan State is the work of Satan. The Empire, the supreme symbol of a proud force, is nothing but arrogance worthy of ridicule. The harmonious Roman society is declared without exception guilty, for its resistance to monotheistic demands, traditions and way of life, are so many offences against the laws of heavenly socialism. And as guilty, it must be punished; that is, destroyed. Like a lengthy complaint, the Christian literature of the first two centuries breathes out its rosary of anathemas. With feverish impatience the apostles preach the ‘hour of vengeance,’ ‘so that all things which are written may be fulfilled’ (Luke XXI, 22). As the Fathers of the Church did after them, they announce the imminence of revenge, of the ‘great night’ when everything will be turned upside down. The Epistle of James contains a call to class struggle: ‘Come now, you rich people! Weep and howl for the misery that will come upon you. Your riches are corrupted and your clothes are moth-eaten’ (V,1-2).

James, who has read the Book of Enoch, predicts terrible tortures for the rich and the pagans. He imagines the final judgment as a ‘knock to the throat,’ ‘a kind of immense slaughterhouse to which thousands of the well-off, fat and splendid, and with all their wealth on them, will be dragged. He is joy at seeing them go one by one, returning their ill-gotten gains before feeding with their fat the formidable carnage he glimpses in his dreams’ (Gérard Walter, op. cit.). Above all, he accuses the rich of deicide: ‘You condemned and killed the Just One.’ (V, 6.) This thesis, which makes Jesus the victim, not of a people, but of a class, will soon become popular. Tertullian writes: ‘The time is ripe for Rome to end up in flames. She will receive the reward her works deserve’ (On Prayer, 5).

The Book of Daniel, written between 167 and 165 b.c.e., and the Book of Revelation are the two great sources from which this holy fury draws. St. Hippolytus (c. 170-235), in his Commentary on Daniel, places the end of Rome around the year 500 and attributes it to the rise of democracies: ‘The toes of the statue in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream represent the coming democracies, which will separate from each other like the ten toes of the statue, in which iron will be mixed with clay.’ Around 407, St. Jerome, in another Commentary on Daniel, defines the end of the world as ‘the time when the kingdom of the Romans will be destroyed.’ Other authors repeat these prophecies: Eusebius, Apollinaris and Methodius of Olympus. The revolutionary ardour against Rome, the ‘accursed city,’ ‘new Babylon,’ and ‘great harlot’ knows no bounds. The city is the last avatar of Leviathan and Behemoth.

In all these apocalypses, sibylline mysteries and double-meaning prophecies, in all this mental trepidation, hypersensitive to ‘symbols’ and ‘signs,’ in all this psalm-like literature, we find more imprecations than would have been necessary to warm the spirits, shake the imaginations and even arm still hesitant hands. This explains the accusations that followed the burning of Rome in the year 64.

Deuteronomy ordered the services of God to slaughter unbelieving populations and burn their cities in honour of Yahweh, and Jesus repeated the image: ‘He who does not abide in me will be thrown out like a branch that withers, and is gathered and thrown into the fire and is burned’ (John XV, 6). And indeed, from Rome to the bonfires of the Inquisition, much will burn. Sacred pyromania will be exercised without respite. ‘This idea (that the world of the impious will be destroyed by fire),’ says Bouché-Leclercq, ‘had been received by Christians from Jewish seers, from those prophets and sibilants who invoked lightning as quickly as a torch, iron as quickly as fire on the cities and peoples hostile to Israel. Never has the imagination burned so much as in the prophecies of Isaiah and Ezekiel, the richest collection of anathemas that religious literature has ever produced.’

‘In this opinion of a general fire,’ adds Gibbon, ‘the faith of Christians came to coincide with the Eastern tradition… The Christian, who based his belief not so much on the fallacious arguments of reason as on the authority of tradition and the interpretation of Scripture, awaited the event with terror and confidence, was sure of its ineluctable imminence. As this solemn idea permanently occupied his mind, he regarded all the disasters that befell the Empire as so many infallible symptoms of the agony of the world.