Category Archives: Religion

The Third Testament

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Yesterday’s post regarding the future of Christianity inadvertently set off a debate about whether the Bible is fake. Is the collection of books we call the Bible, anything like the texts the original Christians used either in written form or as part of the oral tradition while they were forming up in the first century? Most Christians accept the argument that the Bible is the product of a long process that started after the life of Christ and his disciples, while others insist the Gospels are firsthand accounts.

The flash point in yesterday’s post was the line about the Gospels being written roughly a century after the events they describe. This should not be a controversial assertion as the majority of biblical scholars think the Gospels were likely written between AD 66 and 110 with the usual uncertainty. That is not a century after the life of Christ, so that is a bit of an exaggeration, but that has no impact on the general point. Early Christians were not waving around Bibles, because the Bible did not exist.

That does not mean the Bible is fake, but it does mean the Bible as we know it would be a strange thing to early Christians. They would recognize the stories, as the written texts were no doubt relying on oral sources. Most scholars think the stories about Christ and his disciples were part of the proselytizing of early Christians, used to convince their audience that Jesus was a miraculous figure. The stories also served as examples for early Christians facing their own persecution.

The way to view the Gospels is as part of a marketing campaign for the new religion that also formed the basis of the new religion. After all, Christianity, like any human organization, had to answer the question, “Who are we?” and what followed is what must always follow and that is a collection of rules that define who is inside the group and who is excluded. Fundamental to being a Christian is accepting that Christ is the son of God and the symbol of God’s covenant with mankind.

The Gospels as a sales pitch offend some people, but it should not, as close to half the New Testament is exactly that and no one complains. The Letters of Paul are clearly intended to support and grow the Christian audience. While much of the content was written to address specific theological issues in the early Christian communities, all of them contain encouragement to believers in the face of persecution, urging them to live in a godly manner and to spread the faith.

The point being is that much of what we think of as the Bible was written by men to address the issues faced by early Christians. Like Christianity itself, those early stories evolved in their telling and then further evolved as they were written and rewritten as circumstances warranted. Even the first effort at formalizing these written texts did not stop this process. The mere act of writing them in Latin meant the first Bible was different from the first written Gospels.

Of course, the Bible was written by men and then rewritten and edited by men, which means errors and omissions. Figuring this out is impossible. Why was the Gospel of Saint Thomas left out of the Bible? Probably because it was not anywhere near as popular as the Synoptic Gospels. Maybe early Christian scholars thought there was a whiff of gnostic heresy in those alleged sayings of Jesus. Whatever the reason, it was most likely not a question of authenticity.

Not only were whole texts excluded, but parts of the included texts have been excluded and rewritten since the first efforts to write them down. This story about a hidden chapter of the Bible was floating around recently. The media claims are overdone, but it does reveal that the editing process started soon after the writing process began and went on for centuries. Much of what we think of as the Bible is the result of practical decisions within the limits of the age.

This is the primary argument against literalism and sola scriptura. You cannot accept the Bible as the literal word of God when it was clearly written and heavily edited by men, with all the errors that come with man’s actions. Similarly, it cannot be the sole infallible source of authority for Christian faith and practice when it was compiled by men who were not infallible. Instead, the Bible is to be viewed as a living thing within a living Church that adapts to present reality.

The counter to this argument is that as soon as people start talking about a document as a living thing, they will soon be trying to kill it. This has been the history of the American republic and the Constitution. Everyone who speaks about the “living constitution” is plotting to stab a knife through some part of it. Once people start talking about the Bible as mere inspiration, it is not long before the leaders are embracing sodomy while the congregation is talking about converting to Islam.

Putting aside that debate, the history of the Bible tells us that like the Church itself, the Bible is part of an evolutionary process. Christianity did not spread around the globe and survive to this day, because it was unable to adapt. The Bible itself, with its errors and omissions, survives because of those errors and omissions. The reason people can debate this is because of those imperfections. After all, evolution is driven by defect which turns out to be superior to the standard.

Perhaps that is what lies ahead for the Church. Maybe a third testament, perhaps a collection of yet unwritten texts, adapting the core message of Christ to the modern problems of a technological society, is in the future. No doubt, there will be people who hate it and long debates about what should be in included and excluded, but in the end a timeless message must adapt to the times. It is how we got Mormons. Perhaps for Christians, there is a Joseph Smith waiting to be born.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

Evolutionary Christianity

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Note: Behind the green door I have a post about how the best path to a healthy life is to ignore your health, a post about the bastardization of the college football postseason, and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

One of the most important dates on the Christian calendar is Christmas, the day set aside to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. There is a 1-in-365 chance that Jesus was born on December 25, but no one knows when Jesus was born. The date is of no great significance to the life of Christ. What matters is he was lived and died, and his life and death are the root of the world’s most important religion. To Christians, the life of Jesus is the most important event in human history.

Whether Christianity is still the most important world religion is the most important part of that first paragraph, given the state of Christianity in the world. In Europe, where Christianity evolved and flourished in the Roman empire, Christianity is no longer an important part of the culture. The trappings of Christmas remain, largely for commercial reasons, but otherwise Christianity is just about gone. Islam and managerial liberalism are the most important religions in Europe.

In the United States, Christianity remains under assault by the usual suspects but remains an important part of the culture. Even in the secular regions, the cultural framework of Christianity remains in place. God has been replaced by “the tides of history” and Scripture with the latest slop from progressivism, but these things are just filling the hole left in the Christian framework. In the more normal parts of the country, Christian churches still dot the countryside.

There is no question that Christianity is on the wane in the Western world and that spells trouble for the Church globally. It is tempting to wonder if Christianity has a future at all, but the better question is what will it become in the future? The story of Christianity is survival and evolution. What we think of as Christianity today is nothing like what the early Christians experienced. Even medieval Christians would find modern Christianity to be weird and heretical.

For example, early Christians would be puzzled by the reliance on Scripture by many modern Protestant sects. The Gospels were not written until roughly a century after the life of Christ and his disciples. The first “Bible” was assembled by St. Jerome around A.D. 400 and included 27 books of the New Testament. In 382 A.D., the Council of Rome finished the process of determining the 73 books of the Bible. There were probably millions of Christians before there was a single Bible.

Then you have the fact that the Christianity that emerged from the Levant and began to spread around the Roman Empire ran into both Roman paganisms, but also the much more potent paganism of the Germanic barbarians. Many of the things we associate with Christianity were borrowed from these pagans. James C. Russell argues in his book, The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity, that the culture and religion of Germanic pagans shaped Christianity.

Of course, there are “Bible believing Christians” who reject these claims, but these people are practicing a form of Christianity that could not exist if not for the evolution of the Church into the late Middle Ages. It was the revolution within Christianity that gave us Protestantism and to some degree its secular partner liberalism. The dynamic between the two is a hot topic today in dissident circles. There would be no “Bible believing Christians” without this evolutionary process.

This evolution of Christianity also helps explain why it survived at all. A handful of radical Jews changed the course of human history, by creating something that has motivated men to die for their belief in it. In 303, the Roman emperor Diocletian issued a series of edicts rescinding Christians’ legal rights, setting off a decade of persecutions, just as the early Christian were beginning to codify their faith. Despite this, the Church not only survived, but became much stronger.

There is a good argument to be made that the success of Christianity was due to its struggle in the face of persecution. Early Christians had to be smart, courageous, and resourceful to maintain their religion. This selected for the sorts of people who were willing to take on the enormous challenge of maintaining, spreading, and developing a fundamentally new moral and cosmological outlook. The early Christians had to be to the far right of the bell curve.

Another way to think of it is that Christianity was a new mind virus that quickly evolved to spread among its new host. It then had to evolve even faster once it broke out of its original population. When efforts to eradicate it came, it once again evolved rapidly to adapt to the changes in its host population. Like the common cold or the flu, there are lots of variant of the original Christian virus now. In the end, they all promise the same thing for those infected.

Still another evolutionary way of thinking about how Christianity survived and thrived is that it is a mutation in human thought. Until Christianity, monotheism was limited to Jews and Zoroastrians. Universalism did not exist. These two mutations combined in Christianity and spread through the life, struggle, and death of early Christians until it became a dominant trait. The irony here is that some Christians dispute evolution, but they would not be here if evolution were not real.

The point of all this is not to rustle the sensibilities of those Christians who think the reason for the Church is it is the will and word of God. The point is that Christianity exists at all because it has adapted and survived far worse that the commercialization of Christmas and the “happy holidays” nonsense. Christianity is facing a new challenge in the West, one to which it will have to adapt, while maintaining the thing that has allowed it to survive, which is the hope and courage it provides the believer.

The reason the West is in crisis is the new religion, that which the managerial class struggles to understand, even while they are preaching it, is not able to provide an answer to the questions Christianity has always been able to answer. Those questions are “Who says?” and “Why should I listen?” Men will live and die in defense of the answers to those questions. Whatever Christianity becomes on the surface, it will thrive because it answers the most important of man’s questions.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

Promethean Thoughts

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A popular argument in certain circles is that Christianity is to blame for the decline of the West, because it is blamed for various ills in the West. Individualism is often blamed on Christianity, because within most Christian sects, the individual has a unique relationship with God that is not dependent upon his relationship to his society, ethnic group or tribe. Another complaint is that Christianity demands openness, which invites in the sorts of elements antithetical to social solidarity.

There are many variations on this general theme and all of them have some kernel of truth to them. It is the heart of the rather silly argument behind the “woke right” nonsense promoted by crackpots like James Lindsay. He has created a new political scale where one end is any form of exclusivity, which he calls “woke” and the other end is complete openness, which he calls “classical liberalism.”  It is mostly nonsense, but it does illustrate the anti-Christian claims about liberalism.

Professional Christians do themselves no good in this regard by embracing and celebrating nation wrecking ideas like open borders, diversity, the worship of nonwhites and an obsession with Israel. Most low-church ministers sound like the tourism minister from Israel fused with the HR manager at a major corporation. Of course, the more traditional churches are in deep with open borders, often getting government contracts from people who would like to stamp out Christianity.

In the final reckoning, the Christian churches and their entrepreneurial advocates will have much to answer for over their role in the crisis of the West. The question is whether this is the logical result of Christianity, or is it a novelty that grew from the spread of liberalism, particularly the American form of it. After all, 18th century Christians were not in favor of open borders, and they certainly did not think the worship of Israel was their reason to exist.

For those looking to absolve Christianity, that is the starting point. From the conversion of Europe into the 16th century, Christianity fit neatly into and was an integral part of the feudal order that ruled Europe. The Church provided a moral framework for the secular rules, but also provided a moral authority for them. The Church was the ultimate answer to the question, “who says?” whenever it was not obvious that the king was the person with final authority in his domain.

It is only when people started to question the set of reciprocal obligations and duties that defined the European political order that we see changes in the relationship between Christians and the prevailing social order. The Protestant revolution was as much a result of the weakening political order as it was disputes over the traditions and practices of Christians. In other words, the changes in the political order can be blamed for the revolution within Christianity.

Further context is the fact that the Church was a different thing in the later Middle Ages than what it was at the end of the Roman Empire. The Christianity that evolved to flourish and survive within Rome, had to further evolve after Rome. It continued to evolve to flourish within the new feudal order that defined Europe. Once the feudal order began to collapse, the Church evolved to adapt, often with localized versions to meet localized political changes.

The same framing can be applied to America. In the New World, the old religion was free to evolve and do so under unique circumstances. The Calvinism of the Old World arrived in New England, along with Anglicanism and Presbyterianism. Soon, every Christian sect of the Old World was setting up shop in the New World, quickly evolving and splintering into new versions to meet new conditions. America was a great experiment for more than just self-government.

What we call progressivism has its roots in this Christian experiment. A century ago, progressive literature was riddled with references to Scripture. The reason for that is it had its roots in Christian movements like abolitionism, social reform movements and the Social Gospel movement. The argument against slavery that animated the Civil War were not economic or political in nature. The abolitionists were acting upon their sense of moral justice informed by their Christin faith.

The way to understand America since Gettysburg is to think of it as a religious crusade masquerading as a country. The covenantal form of nationalism that still turns up in our politics has roots in the founding the country. Northern nationalism in the Civil War, for example, was linked to America’s alleged destiny to free the world. It was not enough to celebrate self-determination. America had a duty to help all people free themselves from domination and that started with the South.

This is the error people make when trying to blame liberalism for the current crisis or blame Christianity for the liberalism. American liberalism of the type the Framers embraced was replaced by a variant that borrowed the modes of thought from Protestant Christianity but eventually left out God and Scripture. The hole of authority has been filled with vague concepts like the “tides of history” and other expression that can be replaced with “the side of the angels.”

This creates a dilemma. It is clear that Christianity in the Old World evolved to meet the challenges of the changing political order, driven by the spread of Old World liberalism, but it is also clear that the new forms of Christianity informed that liberalism, and in the case of America, created a fusion of the two. That new ideological and theological cause, dressed in the garb of reason and pragmatism, then dominated the West, at the point of gun, until we have reached this point.

In the end, blaming liberalism or Christianity is a fool’s errand. The root cause probably goes much further back. For example, universalism is only possible in a cosmology that has just one God. In a world of many gods, there are many sources of moral authority, so therefore no one can claim a single moral order. Then you have the curse of reason that was given to us by the Greeks. If there is one God and one morally correct way of living, then our reason should be able to discover it.

The good news for the Christians is that the religion has shown an ability to adapt that no other faith has managed. Judaism has survived for longer, but only as a folk religion serving a tiny minority. Christianity has survived as a majority religion, through the ups and downs of Western civilization. Despite its current condition, it will most likely adapt and once again give cause to the flourishing of Western people. The same fate probably does not await liberalism or progressivism.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

Democratic Theocracy

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Iran has been in the news lately and one of the interesting things about the coverage is Western media rarely talks about the president of Iran. In fact, almost all Iran stories skip the president entirely. This is highly unusual as Western media is conditioned to personify countries that are out of favor. The bad country becomes the ruler of that country and that ruler is always some form of Hitler. The closest they get with Iran is using a picture of the supreme leader in the copy.

One reason for this is Iran is a complicated place and Western media struggles with anything more complicated than the good guys versus bad guys narrative. Despite what most think, Iranian politics has factions and parties, with the winners being picked by the voters at fairly normal elections. Those factions and parties argue about all the usual things, including foreign policy. The current president ran on a platform of improving relations with the rest of the world.

The funny thing about Iran is that it has avoided what has happened with all prior revolutionary societies. They did not have rounds of purges or a great terror in which a strongman consolidated power. There is no cult of personality in the way most communist societies evolved. They are not dogmatically attached to a narrow set of economic policies. Instead, Iran has evolved into the world’s first explicitly democratic theocracy based in its form of Islam.

At the top of Iranian society is the Supreme Leader. He is appointed by the Assembly of Experts, who are elected to their positions. The Guardian Council approves all candidates for elected office, including those nominated to the Assembly of Experts, so the gatekeepers of politics are the religious authorities. The result is a political system that can debate and argue over public policy, but within the broad religious framing of the Islamic authorities.

This is why the West often talks about Iran as if it is a medieval society. In medieval Europe, the Church set the boundaries for secular government. The King had to be in good standing with the Church, but the Church needed to be in good standing with the king as he provided security. From the perspective of “secular” societies in the West, the Iranians have recreated a throne and altar society, something the West abandoned in favor of reason and democracy.

The interesting thing about the criticism is it comes with some envy. The managerial class of the West, especially in America, would probably prefer the explicit relationship between the moral and the practical. In Iran, if Islam forbids it, it is simply forbidden and that is the end of it. In America, banning the discussion of crime stats is forbidden for an extensive list of contradictory reasons sprinkled with magical thinking about the reality of the human condition.

This may be why Iran avoided the cycle of violence and authoritarianism that we expect to see with revolutionary societies. From the start, the morality of the revolution had been resolved. The main task was to first remove the prior regime and the Western influences that emanated from it. Once the old regime was gone, there was no void where the old morality existed, so there was no battle for who would decide how to fill the void and with what to fill it.

This may explain some of the convulsions of the West. Christianity and the carryover from it provided the moral center of the progressive ideology. That slowly gave way to opposition to communism in the Cold War. Once the great struggle had been won, there was no longer a moral purpose to the progressive ideology. What flowed into it was whatever was kicking around the institutions. Fringe lunacies suddenly had a clear path to the center of the progressive moral universe.

Once again, we see that Marx was right about politics. At the highest level, it is about the battle over moral questions. Once the moral questions are answered, there is no need for this sort of politics. Instead, politics is reduced to debates about how to address the mundane practical issues of governance. For thirty years Iran has only had to worry about defending itself from the West, while for the last thirty years the West has been searching for a new god to replace the old one.

What you see in Iran is something the West cannot reconcile and that is the limit of reason, which is the moral. The ideology of the West rests on the assumption that all moral questions have a reasonable answer, so all moral limits that cannot hold up to reason must be invalid. Iran does not struggle with this dilemma, because the moral limits are beyond question and they are right there in the Koran, as interpreted by the religious authorities.

Put another way, what Iran has in excess is the answer to the two most important questions for any society and they are “who says?” and “why not?” The answer to both questions is well known to everyone in Iranian society and therefore the questions never need to be asked. In the West, there are no answers to those questions, so the closest we get to an answer is the jungle of rules against discussing anything that challenges the sensibilities of the managerial class.

What we see with the contrast between Iran and the West, particularly America, is a contrast in two forms of democratic theocracy. Iran starts with the issue of morality as a settled matter and implements democracy as a means to sort practical ends. In the West, democracy is a moral end in itself, but the result is endless debates over what will be temporarily viewed as timeless truths. Iran is the mirror of American in terms of the relationship between the moral and the political.

There are other reasons why Iran is what it is, not the least of which is that it is full of Iranians who can date their society back to the ancients. Islam also has a vastly different view of the natural world than what evolved out of Christianity. Even so, the fact that Iran has survived as a democratic theocracy provides a clue for how American progressivism could survive as well. Otherwise, it shakes itself to pieces searching for something to fill the void that lies at the center of it.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

Jesus Hates Immigration

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Note: Behind the green door I have a post about the demographic collapse playing out in the workforce, a post about how the Tenet Media case looks like a political op and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Would Jesus hate the cat memes that have spread across the internet in response to the Haitian problem in Springfield Ohio? Some people think so. Progressive cranks have responded to this by claiming it is your Christian duty to welcome these people into your homes. Granted, these people are not sincere but people who claim to be Christians of some sort often agree with them. They claim Scripture requires the faithful to treat everyone equally, as God’s children.

This is the official position of the Catholic Church. The Pope is a big fan of open borders and mass immigration. It is not just for theological reasons. One argument is that the migrants from the global south are Catholics or could become Catholic. Protestant churches make similar claims. Immigration is seen by main stream churches as a solution to their empty pews. Some claim that the Haitian migrants have revitalized the churches in the Springfield Ohio area.

Of course, the people making these claims can find in Scripture what they need to support their position as the morally correct one. Ephesians says, “you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people.” Leviticus says, “You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself”. Hebrews says you must show hospitality to strangers and modern Hebrews say you should never notice this.

The most popular and probably the most effective argument from faith used in favor of open borders is that all men are created in God’s image. Since we are all God’s children, we have the same duty to cat-eating Haitians as we do to the Irish guy who drives the UPS truck and helps coach the local football team. Since immigration is an issue because it is the movement of nonwhites into white areas, it is a racial issue, and the Christian is prohibited from seeing race.

The obvious counter to this is that Jesus was fine with slavery, so he surely would not oppose the deportation of illegal aliens. This never registers with the Bible-quoting immigration enthusiast because much of what makes up modern Christianity in the West is cherry picking verses from Scripture that just so happen to support the secular morality of this age. For the most part, what passes for Christianity in the West is just a loyal servant at the foot of neo-liberalism.

That still leaves the question as to whether Jesus would be on the side of the people important pet-eating Haitians into your town or on the side of the people making AI-generated memes of Trump defending the house cats. The logic of Christianity says that Jesus would be pumping out those cat memes. He would not be making overtly racial claims about Haitians, most likely, but what we understand about Christian faith tells us he would be opposed to mass migration.

The place to start is where Christianity starts. The “open borders Christians” are correct when they say these Haitians are God’s children, no different from the fifth-generation Irish guy or the guy who traces his line to the Mayflower. Fundamental to the Christian faith is that we are God’s creation and humans are made in God’s image. Our ability to understand God at all rests on the assumption that he possesses all the qualities we possess as human beings.

From this we can draw one obvious conclusion. We have reason and free will, thus God intended for us to use our reason and free will. God does not make mistakes, at least this is true for the New Testament God. The God of the Hebrew Bible is not as confident, so maybe he was still prone to error. Regardless, God gave us, and only us, free will and reason, so it must have been on purpose and for a reason. The only possible reason is to use them.

The other thing that we know, if we are all God’s creation, is that all men are God’s property for the same reason man can have property. God owns himself, so God owns that which he has created. He gave man dominion over the earth and all of the living creatures on it, but he did not grant ownership. God may be an absentee landlord, as many have asserted, but he is still the landlord, which means he still owns what he created, including mankind.

This is the basis of Christian ethics. What we ought and ought not do is based on the idea that we are all God’s property. Theft is wrong because when you steal the labor of another man, you are harming God’s property. On the other hand, punishing someone for theft, is acting on God’s behalf to right the wrong done to God. It is why we think hunting for food is perfectly acceptable. Man needs to eat, and God gave us domain over the animals. Hunting for sport, however, is complicated.

The logic of Christianity tells us that Jesus would be appalled by what is happening in towns like Springfield Ohio. Rounding up Haitians and dumping them into unsuspecting towns around North America does nothing to reduce the damage done to God’s most precious property, mankind. In fact, it increases the damage. Worse yet, this damage is done for the benefit of the money changers responsible for it. What we see happening with immigration is a deliberate offense to the Christian God.

This is even more obvious when we remember that we have reason and free for the sole purpose of using it. If we wanted to help Haiti, there are ways we could improve the conditions on the island without harming cat owners in Ohio. We could take over the island, set up a local dictator tasked with distributing food and medicine. We could round up the Haitians and send them to Africa, where they have the minimum infrastructure needed to maintain an African population.

The point of all this is that Christian ethics is about reducing the damage to God’s property, which is primarily mankind, but also that which mankind has been granted dominion, the earth, and its inhabitants. Mankind has reason and free will in order to figure out the best way to act in order to minimize the damage to God’s property, so we are free to debate the issue. We must be free to debate the issue. Cherry picking lines from Scripture to shut down debate is therefore immoral.

More important, cherry-picking lines from Scripture so that you can claim a sense of compliance with the will of God, at the expense of God’s property, as in the damage done by immigration, violates the foundational logic of Christianity. If Jesus were here today, he would not only flip over the tables in the offices of the people responsible for unchecked immigration, but he would also whip the people waving around their Bibles in support of it. Jesus would hate them.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

Faith & Reason

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Note: Behind the green door I have a post about bringing back penal colonies and exile to deal with crime, a post about how the fight with Old Scratch continues among the people we call the left and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Was Jesus rational? If you are a modern Christian, this is a question that probably sounds intentionally offensive or unintentionally ignorant. It suggests the person asking the question thinks Jesus was insane. Calling Jesus a crazy person therefore could sound deliberately provocative. On the other hand, someone asking the question could simply be ignorant. Only someone unfamiliar with Scripture or Christian theology could suggest that God’s only son was a lunatic.

This is not a question that would have offended early Christians, however, because they had a different relationship with faith and reason. The gods of the ancient world were not the defenders of logic and reason. Often, the gods were the greatest offenders of logic and reason, using tricks and magic to bring down the hero, even though the hero was acting rationally. After all, the tragic hero is often the man who does the rational things but is brought low despite his reason.

The ancients did not look at reason like modern man. They had to solve problems like all humans, but they did not worship reason like a god. In fact, reason was often viewed as a hinderance to understanding the gods. Understanding the gods and their relationship to man started with the understanding that the gods operated outside of the rationality of mankind. They had their rules, man had his rules, and the story of man was the interplay between these two worlds.

Of course, there was that sense that the fate of men and the individual man was controlled by things beyond human comprehension. It was not just the capricious gods who tripped up men, but that sense that there was something else going on to determine the outcome of life, something that was well outside the domain of man, a thing called fate. Just as the tragic hero was undone by fate, the hero was the man who recognized and submitted to his fate.

For most of human history, the key to making any sense of life was in accepting the mystery of the natural world and man’s place in it. That acceptance never meant understanding it, much less conquering it. The natural world was not a thing to be conquered or even challenged. It was a thing to be accepted. Therefore, for the early Christians, the irrationality of Jesus and his life would have made far more sense to them than the far more rational version of this age.

The phrase, “Athens and Jerusalem”, which turns up in certain parts of American conservatism has its roots in this question about the rationality of Jesus. The second century Christian writer Tertullian famously asked, “what has Athens to do with Jerusalem” in response to those trying to make sense of faith. The absurdities within the story of Jesus are what gives power to faith, because the truly faithful believe the message despite the absurdities.

As an aside, “Athens and Jerusalem” was reintroduced to us by Strauss, who used it for a series of lectures and essays. No one knows what he meant by it as the main project of his students is to make themselves and their mentor as incomprehensible as possible on the assumption that “Straussian” is code for incoherent. Others have picked up the phrase as a way of weaving their ancestors into your family tree, thus making Western civilization the fruit of the Greeks and the Jews.

It is debatable as to whether Strauss clipped this phase from Tertullian in order to open the gates to ideas outside of Christianity. In the hands of lesser minds, it has led to idiotic concepts like “Judeo-Christian.” Tertullian would have happily lit the fire underneath the heretics promoting such an idea. Like the other Christian writers of his age, he was hostile to the Jews and wrote polemics against them. For their part, the Jews have never forgiven him for it.

That aside, there is little doubt that Christianity, as it spread throughout Europe, became a vehicle to introduce Greek thought to Europe. Not only did the Church preserve and reproduce ancient works, including the Greeks, it began to absorb the rationality that Tertullian would have found difficult in the organization of the Church and its relationship with the secular authorities that evolved in the Middle Ages. The irrationality of faith planted the seeds of the rational rejection of faith.

Therein lies the problem for the modern Christian. He has grown up in a world that worships reason to the exclusion of mystery. The point of human thought is to locate every mystery and strip from it all of its irrationality, so that it is reduced to a mechanism explained by mathematics. Reason is the hunter who poses with his kill for a picture he can use on his internet profile, because the beauty he sees in the image is him posing next to the kill, not the bit of nature he harvested.

The Christian who bristles at the “absurdity” the question posed at the beginning is a Christian forced to explain faith by the rules of reason. It is a hopeless project, which is why the churches have emptied out across the West. If the churches are to fill up again or new churches are to be founded, the modern Christian must confront the fact that the god of this age is rationality. That god must be overcome in order to be restored to his proper place alongside the mystery of life.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

The Faith Of Our Betters

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Western elites are in a competition with one another to see who can be the most creative in violating the old rules of the liberal order. Every week seems to bring a new outrage from a Western government. The reason it seems like they are looking to outrage rather than work from an understood ideological foundation is that they do not fully understand their new ideological foundation. It is an evolving paradigm, as they used to say, to which they are forced to adapt.

A good example is this rather weird story out of the UK. A company was taken to court because they paid warehouse workers more than their retail workers. The warehouse staff was predominantly male while the retail staff was predominantly female, thus creating a situation in which men are earning more than women. The company pointed out that this is normal and there was no evidence that women were discriminated against in hiring or evaluations. They lost the case anyway.

Something called an employment tribunal agreed that “the difference in pay rates between the jobs was not down to direct discrimination, including the conscious or subconscious influence of gender on pay decisions, but was caused by efforts to reduce cost and enhance profit. Even so, it ruled that the “business need was not sufficiently great as to overcome the discriminatory effect of lower basic pay.” In other words, it just looked bad so it must be bad.

This is like saying that a man was not directly or indirectly responsible for the death of someone he did not like, but the man’s death just looked bad, so the fellow who did not like him will be convicted of murder. In the new normal, you can be guilty of violating a rule or law, even if you did not actually violate the rule or law, simply because the rule or law is not getting the intended result. You could literally end up in a British jail because the judge thinks it looks bad for you to remain free.

For those familiar with American discrimination law, this may sound like disparate impact, which is a legal term that refers to practices that unintentionally discriminate against people of protected groups in areas like employment and housing. This doctrine was imported to the UK for the same insane reasons it exists in America. It is the only way around objective reality while maintaining the radical delusions of universal human equality and the blank slate.

The logic of disparate impact works like this. Since there are no immutable differences between people or groups of people, any differences between groups of people must be due to some form of discrimination. Logically, there can be no other reason if universal equality is true. Therefore, if there are group differences that negatively impact nonwhites, then it must be from discrimination by whites. Discrimination is the ghost in the machine that explains what we see every day.

That is not what appears to be going on with this UK case. The tribunal clearly stated that the company policy is neutral, as far as intent and application. Apparently, there are female warehouse workers who make what male warehouse workers make and male retail workers who make the same as female retail workers. It is just that females prefer retail while males prefer warehouse work. This bit of biological reality is so disturbing to the court they ruled it must be eradicated.

It is a good example of two things we see with the new religion we see with the managerial classes in the West. One is there is a strong whiff of world rejecting Gnosticism about it. It is never clear if they are trying to recreate the human condition to their liking or they simply reject the human condition along with the objective reality in which mankind resides. Perhaps Justice William O. Douglas’ use of the terms “emanations” and “penumbras” was a clue.

The other thing you see is how the power of narrative warps their sense of reality to the point where it is often at odds with reality. This is something we keep seeing in things like the Ukraine war and now the Harris campaign. The narrative provides an a model of reality that is untethered from physical reality, so they must always be altering their mental model of reality. Alternatively, they seek to force reality to comply with the demands of their alternative reality.

It is not hard to imagine the judges in that UK case thinking, “We know how things should be, so even though they are not that way, and we cannot find evidence of Old Scratch in this, we will just set everything right and all is good.” There is no thought of the secondary and tertiary consequences to their ruling. If the company automates it retail area to address the problems created by this ruling, they will be back in court to explain why they are not living the court’s model of reality.

All the loose talk about creating a new religion misses the fact that we have a new religion, the religion of the managerial class. This new religion has roots deep in the Western tradition. Not only does it contain the egalitarianism and universalism of Christianity, but it also has the mysticism from the ancients. At the heart is the suspicion that reality is a figment of our imagination, so if we reimagine reality then we can have a reality that frees us from the human condition.

In the end, this weird new religion is a luxury good. The parade of lunacy we see is only possible because the masses have food and entertainments. Each new bit of lunacy chips away at it but until it reaches a critical state, the cost of these religious fantasies is spread around the respective economy. The great enabler of managerial lunacy is the ability to socialize the cost of it. At some point, the cost becomes unbearable, and the new religion goes into the dustbin of history with its adherents.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

Starting A New Religion

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There are three things true about the modern West and all three of them are connected to the issue of religion. One is the obvious fact that the religion of the West, Christianity, is in steep decline. The second is that the West itself is in a steep cultural decline, which may be the result of the decline of Christianity, or it could be another symptom of a deeper issue behind both of those problems. Then there is the ongoing invasion and subjugation of European people in their own lands.

Objectively, occidental people look more like Native Americans right now, in terms of the things we can measure, than their ancestors of the last century. Low birth rates, declining life spans, rampant discrimination against people of European heritage, drug and alcohol abuse. Like the Indians on the reservation, European people now live at the pleasure of an alien ruling elite. As we are seeing in the UK, European people no longer have their ancient rights in their own lands.

What needs to happen to arrest this process is for occidental people to fight back against the gathering darkness. For that to happen, people need to be inspired to sacrifice for something and the best way to get people to sacrifice is through the mechanism of religion. A healthy people have a religion that reflects what they love and celebrate about themselves. This is what provides the motivation to sacrifice present happiness for the future happiness of their people.

The trouble with this line of thought is that the religion of the West, Christianity in its various forms, is in total collapse. That means creating a new religion, but new religions do not have a great track record. Not only that, the secular religion of the West, liberalism, is drenched in Christian priors. If you want to start a new religion, you not only have to contend with the old religion, but that which has slowly displaced it in the name of secularism and openness.

On the other hand, you could take a page from the last successful new religion, Mormonism, and create a spinoff of sorts. It is debatable as to whether Mormonism is a Christian denomination. Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints consider themselves Christians. They share many Christian beliefs, such as the divinity, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In the end it does not matter much as they managed to make it work and continue to thrive.

In other words, the Mormons rebooted Christianity in a new religion that served the needs of a growing number of people who did not see what they wanted or needed in the existing Christian denominations. Another way of putting it is a group of religious entrepreneurs saw an untapped market and created a product that fit the needs of this underserved market for religion. They set about creating a new religion, using many of the familiar parts of the existing religion.

The first task of Joseph Smith and his early converts was to create a new moral authority for his new religion. In order to avoid the trap of current interpretation of Scripture, Smith said he was visited by an angel who led him to the “golden plates” which would form the basis of a new religious text and the foundation of the religion we call Mormonism. The Book of Mormon is not another Gospel or considered Scripture, but it sits alongside Scripture for the believers.

The important thing about this additive process is that Smith was recentering the moral authority of Christians between the God of the Old Testament and the God of Jesus and the New Testament. The Hebrew God is masculine, cruel, and often terrifying, while the God of Jesus is infinitely merciful and benevolent. God of the Old Testament is a warrior who loves the smell of burning flesh. The God of the New Testament is a loving mother who always forgives you, no matter what.

By the 19th century the Christian God was becoming something of an alien weirdo, especially to men. How could a man trust a God who cannot savor the thrill of dominating his opponent or who cannot enjoy sin? What is the point of worshipping a God who will forgive you if you fail to worship him? Men sacrifice their goods and their person, not because of trust, but because of fear, a fear of the consequences of doing otherwise, either from their fellows or from their God.

The Christian was no longer a sinner in the hands of an angry God, but a sinner who was clutched to the bosom of a loving God. The former did not care if sin was an inevitable plight of man. You were still going to be punished. The latter did not care if you sinned or that you did so with guilt free enthusiasm. You were welcomed into the Kingdom of Heaven just as long as you accepted Christ. The masculine God was gone from the house of man and the feminized God was in charge.

What Mormonism did was recreate the authority of Christianity as something that could both inspire men and terrify them. It is from this reimagined authority that the new rules of the new religion rest. Modern Mormonism may have been feminized over time, like everything else, but there is no doubting its initial masculine appeal. A God that promises men multiple wives is a God who both loves man and also enjoys, at times, tormenting him with too much of what he desires.

The other thing about this new masculine God and his new followers was that they were exclusive and it was not easy to join this new religion. Anything that is easy to obtain quickly loses its value and this was the curse of Christianity by the 19th century. To be a Christian of any type, maybe multiple types, was no more challenging that buying a new suit or changing fashion styles. Then as now, the mature Christian denominations asked nothing from the believers other than cash.

The early Mormons had to suffer, and to some degree they are still required to suffer, due to their peculiar habits. Smith and his followers were chased around the Midwest by angry mobs who viewed them as dangerous heretics, until an angry mob eventually killed Smith and his brother. Smith was a martyr for his cause, but unlike Christ, he was not a martyr in denial of human reality, but a martyr in service to the people of his new religion, thus an example for all of them.

Regardless of how you feel about Mormonism, it is a great example of how to form a new religion from the rubble of Christianity. Smith was the product of the Second Great Awakening, a period of renewal for Protestant sects that had lost their way and a time for new approaches to the life of Christ. Adventism and Dispensationalism also came from this period of religious revival. The Social Gospel Movement also had roots in the Second Great Awakening.

If any society and people are due for another “great awakening” it is the people of the occident who find themselves on the cusp of oblivion. If you are thinking about starting a new religion or resurrecting an old religion, now is a good time, as there are millions of people unhappy with the current offerings. It might also be a good time to reimagine God as something more terrifying than the benevolent old black guy who is happy to drive around Miss Daisy.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

The New Christianity

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Note: Behind the green door I have a post about the send gamers to labor camps, a post about finance socialism and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Was Jesus a loser? By the standards of the age, the human standards, he was most certainly viewed as a loser, with the exception of his followers. That was the point of crucifying someone in that period. The Roman authorities used the practice as a form of humiliation as well as capital punishment. The point of displaying the condemned as they suffered and died was to let the rest of the population know that the guy on the cross was at the bottom of the social hierarchy.

Modern Christians would take exception to calling Jesus a loser, but early Christians would not have been offended. The humiliation of Jesus was integral to both understanding the life of Christ and the message of Christ. If the Romans or the Jews had executed Christ in the fashion reserved for prominent people, then the life and message of Christ would mean something quite different. The stripping of all human dignity at the end was essential to the life of Christ.

Therein lies the problem for modern Christians. By the standards of this age, Christ is a loser, just as he was two thousand years ago. The message of Christ not only runs counter to the way in which modern people live and are expected to live, but the bad end runs afoul of how modern people expect the life of a hero to end. The modern person expects the hero’s life to end in a great triumph and universal acclaim or at least the acclaim of the major characters in the story.

Of course, the message of Christ does not work too well either. Eschewing material prosperity is just not a thing people do in this age or for a long time. In fact, the point of life for a long time has been to increase your material wealth. All of the heroes of the modern age are those who either got rich for their own sake or got rich for having upheld the modern morality. The way around this for the modern Christian is some form of the prosperity gospel, but that often looks like a grift.

More important, the message of Christ was aimed at the losers. From the start, Christianity was a religion for losers. Its appeal assumed that the audience was composed of people who were losers and would remain losers until they died, which would probably be soon. For them, investing in this life made little sense, so they should invest in the next life. Their time on this plane of existence was best used to prepare for everlasting life in Christ.

It is a powerful message if you are a loser and most people in the late Roman Empire and post-empire Europe were losers. Nasty, brutish, and short is a famous line from Hobbes to describe pre-society man, but it was also a good description of life for most people in the early Christian era. It was true for many people when Hobbes was writing in the 17th century. The typical person was subjected to violence, disease, and the constant fear of running out of food.

A religion that tells the losers that their suffering is part of a transition from this life to everlasting life and bliss is going to find a lot of interest. The folk religions of the age were not so rosy about what comes next. Worse yet, if you were going to get any sort of reward in the next life, it meant living this life heroically. That did not offer much for the peasant farmer or the man tied to the land. It is not hard to see why a religion for losers would spread rapidly through Europe at the time.

This insouciant description of Christianity as a religion for losers is not intended as an insult to Christians or Christianity, but to make a point. The rise of Christianity in the West was due to two things. One is the majority of the population, even the upper classes, lived harsh lives. Therefore, a promise of relief from suffering and everlasting life had a strong appeal. The second factor was the embrace of this life as a means to an end, rather an end in itself.

Fast forward to this age and you see that poor people live lives of luxury relative to just a century ago. The typical poor person in America is obese because he has unlimited cheap food. His home is full of conveniences and entertainments. Even in the most terrifying modern ghettos, violence is a fraction of what people experienced even a few hundred years ago. A religion aimed at people living a life of misery is not going to sell to a population living in luxury.

Compounding the problem is a new religion of sorts has evolved in the West that celebrates material success. The point of life, according to the new religion, is to increase your material wellbeing. The point of the state is to foster those conditions and measure success by society-wide material increase. In every election, the economy is the top issue because in this age, we worship stuff, so the promise of more stuff is a sign of virtue. The point of life is more stuff.

A much bigger problem for Christianity is the fact that the ruling elites of this age have no use for Christianity. In the Middle Ages, not only did the ruling elites have lives of struggle, but they also saw utility in a religion that shifted the focus of their people from their current squalor onto what comes after this life. Marx was not entirely wrong when he wrote, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”

Probably the biggest challenge for Christianity is the modern Christian, who like the modern grammarian, refuses to evolve. The grammarian clings to the rules of grammar as if they are timeless truths. Any thought of ignoring them for the sake of clarity is treated as a crime against humanity. The fact that most of what he clings to is a relative new invention is lost on him, because what matters most to him is wielding the blue pencil like nuns used to wield the ruler.

This is the problem with the modern Christian. He is ossified in a mode of thought that is relatively new. Transport a modern Christin back to medieval England and he would be burned at the stake as a heretic. Plop him down among the early followers of Christ and they would be baffled by his Scriptural dogmatism. The early proselytizers charged with converting the pagans would find the modern Christian to be a rigid and irrational burden on their work.

Christianity, as we understand it, is the result of a long evolutionary process that adapted the life and message of Christ to the audience and times. The inability and unwillingness of modern Christians to evolve and adapt is probably the biggest challenge facing Christianity. Put another way, the problem with modern Christianity is not its opponents, but its most dogmatic defenders. They have made failure their security blanket and refuse to let go of it.

If Christianity is going to survive, it will have to adapt to this age and repurpose itself as a replacement for liberalism, rather than an enabler of it. Christianity gave birth to liberalism, but it does not have to sink under the waterline with it. Instead, it will have to either replace it with a new Christianity or give rise to a secular alternative that cannot just coexist with Christianity but allow it to once again flourish. Otherwise, Christianity will go into the dustbin of history along with Western civilization.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

The Last Atheist

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There was a time when the so-called New Atheists were getting a lot of attention online and in the media. The main reason for the interest was famous people with claims to empiricism, people like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, leading the charge for the New Atheists. Famous people can focus public attention on just about anything and when those famous people have credentials people are conditioned to respect, then those famous people can lead public debate.

The movement ran out of steam for a few reasons. One is Richard Dawkins found out that he could bash Christians as much as he liked, but when he moved onto other religions the priests of the New Religion took exception. In Britain, you cannot mock Islam and nowhere are you allowed to mock Judaism. Although it is unlikely that he ever figured it out, the truth is Christianity in the English-speaking world has come to mean “white” and the New Religion is antiwhite.

Sam Harris, the another famous New Atheist, was largely undone by his own weirdness, which you can see in this old debate. He looks like someone you would see in a documentary about serial killers. Persuasion is as much about how the arguments are presented, as about the facts and reason, and Harris presents as a psychopath who you would not buy a car from much less an argument about God. It turned out that Harris was the best argument against atheism.

The main problem for atheists, of course, is that they do not have an affirmative argument to make in support of their claims. You cannot prove a negative, which means there is no way to prove God does not exist. The best they can do is attack the arguments in favor of the existence of God. This not only makes them sound like jerks, but it can never work for the simple reason that people do not abandon their beliefs when they stop making sense, only when they find a better belief.

The other problem for atheists is that they engage in a form of argument that is inherently dishonest in its form. They start with the assertion that their claim is one of however many valid claims. Therefore, if they disprove the other claims, that means their claim is the right one by default. It is why atheists spend all of their time attacking what they claim are the arguments in favor of God, rather than putting together an argument in favor of their godless universe.

This is the Intelligent Design argument in a nutshell. Since there is no way to prove that God got drunk one night and created the platypus, they spend all of their time “disproving” evolution or asserting that “Darwinism” is a religion. It is entirely possible everyone is wrong, and we live in a simulation and the ID’ers are mistaking what they see for the hand of providence, for what is really just the work of bored child of a race of superbeings in another dimension.

That aside, the biggest problem for atheists, however, is that our moral framework as a civilization rests on the assumption that right and wrong, ought and ought not, are backstopped by something that lies outside the reach of man. This has always meant God, the gods or the shaman who communicates with the spirit world. Often, this supernatural element is bound up in tradition, which is just a handy word for agreed upon ways of acting over a long period of time.

If you rip out God from the equation, then all things are permitted unless you can find a reasonable argument against it. You can see the problem here in this video of Harris being interrogated by a young YouTuber. It quickly becomes clear that the new moral framework Harris proposes makes no sense, not even to Harris. He is reduced to endless equivocation and restatement. Depending upon your perspective it is either sad or amusing to watch him struggle.

Of course, the main problem for Harris in his quest to create a new reason-based morality is that such a thing is not possible. Every human society has a morale code, a list of things you ought and ought not do. These collective beliefs in what is and is not ethical are either based on tradition or in the supernatural. One of the cornerstone beliefs must be that there are bits of this code that are off-limits to questioning, as they are too important to put to a vote.

This is the problem for late-empire America and the West in general. Once the medieval Christian conception of God was removed, the entire moral superstructure of the West began to faulter. Liberalism itself rests on a priori beliefs that are rooted in the Western Christian tradition. The reason liberal democracy looks like despotic anarchy is that the thing it requires to remain rational has been removed. The result is a Hobbesian moral universe that often appears suicidal.

This brings us back to the atheists. The main reason their project has always failed is that you cannot replace a set of beliefs with nothing. People will believe in something similar until a better option is found. Belief in the supernatural solves a problem, which is why humans share this one quality. For Western man, the zenith of belief was late-medieval Christianity. The long arc of the West that has reached the current state is the struggle to replace that belief with nothing.

In a way, the rise and fall of New Atheism gives us an insight into what lies ahead for the Godless world we have created for ourselves in the West. It is the image of the last atheist stammering his way through basic questions which he cannot answer because how we ought and ought not live lies in the thing he seeks to destroy. Ironically, it means the reality of belief will once against reassert itself because reality is the thing that does not go away when you stop believing in it.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.