Category Archives: Religion

Life After The Afterlife

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Is it possible for humans to have a transcendent moral code if they no longer believe in an afterlife? Some Christians today argue that it is impossible to have any sort of morality without belief in Christ, but that’s largely a self-serving claim. God’s role in the affairs of man, in the Christian context, is primarily as the ruler of Heaven. Those, who live a moral life, a Christian life, will spend eternity in Heaven at the foot of Christ. The people who live wicked lives, will be condemned to an eternity out of the sight of God.

All of the word’s great religions have an afterlife. The Abrahamic faiths, of course, all share a similar conception of Heaven and Hell, with God ruling the former and Satan ruling the latter. Eastern religions have more esoteric and mystical approaches. Buddhists believe in a cycle of death and rebirth. Through eventual enlightenment, they hope to escape this and achieve Nirvana, an end to suffering. Hindus believe that through knowledge and wisdom, you can achieve a liberation of the soul in the afterlife.

The conception of an afterlife as a reward and an escape from human suffering is relatively new to humanity. The Greeks did not have an afterlife. A Greek lived his life so he would be remembered. Maybe his shade would end up in Hades, but that was not much of a reward. The morality of the Greeks assumed that punishment for angering the gods happened in this life. Sacrifices to the gods were all about getting good fortune now, not after death. The gods played an active role in the affairs of man, only while he lived.

The Egyptians had an afterlife, but it was only for the elite. Given their habit of burying servants with the dead, the afterlife could also include the attendants. Like the great man’s other possessions buried with him, it was assumed he would need some slaves and servants once he entered the afterlife. It does not appear that this conception of an afterlife spawned a corresponding moral code. It was not a reward for a life lived well, but a reward for having been born to the right parents and the right station in life.

It is largely believed that the people who gave mankind the concept of an afterlife, one open to everyone who lived righteously, were the Zoroastrians. They believed those who lived on the side of good spent the after life in the House of Song, which they also called the Abode of Light. The Zoroastrians taught that everyone, who followed a proper code, could live forever and that the soul mattered. Those who sided with evil in this life would be condemned to an eternity of darkness and torment.

The Zoroastrians also gave us the duality of God on one side and Satan on the other. They used different terms. Ahura Mazda is the creator of the world and father of the two spirits, Spenta Mainyu and Angra Mainyu. The former is the “good” spirit, the latter, is the destructive  and evil one. This conflict between good and evil is central to Zoroastrianism and provided the foundation of their moral philosophy. It is also the first known example of a religion basing a moral code on something beyond the here and now.

The Jews picked this up from their time in captivity. The Pentateuch has no reference to Satan, but the Book of Job, written much later, has the familiar Satan figure. In Daniel, Heaven and Hell appear for the first time. Given the history of the Jewish people at this time, it is most likely that they borrowed these concepts from the Zoroastrians. The Satan that Jesus describes is pretty much the Zoroastrian Angra Mainyu. Christian morality is entirely built on the concept of the afterlife and the battle between good and evil.

This is why Nietzsche blamed the Zoroastrians for morality. He and most Europeans scholars of the age were familiar with Zoroastrianism and understood its influence on the Abrahamic religions. Thus Spake Zarathustra is his effort to turn Zoroastrian moral philosophy on its head. Rather than an eternity of good versus evil, he has an re-imagined Zarathustra discover his error and correct the mistake of morality. Nietzsche is a tough read, but the implication is there can be no morality without the supernatural.

The question for our age is can we maintain a moral code when no one believes in God or an afterlife? This is clearly something our betters struggle with, even though they don’t think of it in these terms. The New Religion that Progressives are trying to impose upon us has no explicit god or eternal reward for the faithful. Instead, they are forced to conjure mystical stand-ins like the “tides of history” or appeals to nature. Even their appeals to science are really just appeals to an unnamed and mystical deity.

Right wing Progressives suffer from the same dilemma. It’s not an accident that you never hear conservative pundits make explicit appeals to Christian morals or even Jewish morality. Instead, they argue that Donald Trump is immoral because he vexes the shade of Ronald Reagan or Bill Buckley. They may not come out and call these guys deities, but they certainly treat them as prophets. Put another way, lacking any moral authority they have turned Reagan and Buckley into apostles of a messiah that is never mentioned.

This is, of course, the root of our current cultural troubles. For example, on whose authority was racism made a mortal sin? If it is, what happens when you commit this crime? From whom do you ask forgiveness? If the racist and the anti-racist molder in the same ground together after death, what’s the point of being a devout anti-racist? Perhaps that’s the real reason Progs are digging up Confederate soldiers. They lack an afterlife beyond the graveyard, so that will be their heaven and only the righteous will be buried.

Now, it does not follow that we are condemned to an age of might makes right. The Greeks got along fine without worrying about the afterlife. They did have a set of gods, who had to be mollified. Otherwise, bad things would happen to man in this life. Given the shape of our nature cults and the fanaticism of our secular elites, it is clear that we have not evolved past the point of needing a transcendent morality. That suggests some new deity will replace the Christian god and we get a new conception of the afterlife.

Alternatively, the recent efforts to fashion a civic religion will founder as it lacks the necessary moral authority to induce voluntary compliance. The Christianity that flowered in the middle ages may be on the ropes, but something new will surely spring from its ruins. Perhaps the flood of Islam into the West is part of that process. That’s not to say that the West will embrace Islam, but that the soul abhors a vacuum. Maybe we are on the edge of a great religious experiment, like that which birthed Zoroastrianism.

Free Speech In The Custodial State

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A point I’m fond of making is that without freedom of association, you cannot have any other liberties. You can have the appearance of choice, like when you stand in the breakfast cereal aisle at the grocery store, but you can never have real choices. The state not only puts you in that supermarket, they put you in the aisle, along with a bunch of other people. In order to prevent a riot from breaking out, the state must supervise your speech, your actions and make sure you focus on picking from the options on the shelves.

Whether or not our rulers know this is debatable. A feature of post-modernism is that the people in charge forget everything learned by prior generations regarding the human condition and human society. People used to know the link between free association and other liberties. It is why the state regulated public airwaves. Because it required effort to avoid speech broadcast over the air, that speech had to fit community standards. Speech that took effort to consume, like pay services, were free from state censorship.

Anyway, the Left is in something close to a full panic over the oral arguments in Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. The reason for this is the way Judge Gorsuch questioned the attorney for the homosexuals. He correctly pointed out that the “remedy” for the alleged discrimination, is to force the baker to say things in public that he would never say and that he finds offensive. Gorsuch did not say this, but this is how Chinese communists punished heretics in the Cultural Revolution.

Colorado Civil Rights Commission

Put another way, the “remedy” for those not wanting to associate, in this case do business with, another group of people, is to frog march them into the public square and force them to say things they think are false and possibly evil. Of course, it is the only remedy, short of genocide, that is possible in a society without freedom of association. Once the state can force you to be around other people, people you may not like, they have no choice but to supervise your speech, your thoughts and your every move. You are a slave.

That is the reality of the custodial state. The people in charge see themselves as your caretakers, like a baby sitter or care giver. In reality though, you are their slave, because like a slave, you no longer control your body. They control where it is and what it is permitted to do. In this particular case. the state is trying to force this baker to perform his services for the homosexuals. The efforts to punish him are no different from a slave master flogging a runaway slave. It’s to send a message to the rest of the slaves.

The homosexual Slate writer senses this reality, but he cannot bare to face it because it means questioning the One True Faith. Even worse for him is that homosexuals have created an identity, a sense of worth, based on this notion they are a protected class, given special liberties. A white man can be run out of his job by Antifa loons and no one from the local Civil Rights Commission is coming to his aid. Homosexual terrorists can stalk the nation’s Christian bakers and they get the full support of the state.

What makes this case frightening to the Left is that there is no way for the court to rule in favor of the baker, that does not undermine the foundation of the modern special rights movement. Let’s say they carve out a religious “exception” to the laws providing homosexuals with special status. The court is, in effect, saying that religion ranks higher than sexual proclivity. The gays move down a peg. What happens when the court has to choose between Jews and Nazis? Or Muslims and Jews? It quickly becomes untenable.

This is also why the Court will have no choice but to rule against the baker. The three lesbians and Breyer, of course, are predictable votes against liberty, but Kennedy and Roberts have proven to be reliable defenders of the Progressive movement. Kennedy authored the ridiculous gay marriage ruling, after all. Roberts is smart enough to see how ruling for the baker will unravel the Progressive project, so he will probably come up with some tortured logic to justify the state compelling forced confessions from heretics.

This is the other consequence of eliminating freedom of association. The cost of restoring it always appears too high. Most Southerners before the Civil War understood that slavery was untenable, but the cost of ending it was worse. That’s what’s facing the guardians of our custodial state. They know the regime cooked up to address blacks in the 1960’s can only lead to tyranny, but unraveling it offers near term costs that seem more frightening than whatever comes at some later date. Things will just have to run their course.

It will not end well.

 

The Church Of Cuck

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Back in the salad days of Buckley Conservatism, it was largely understood that the butch wing of the coalition was the so-called religious right. These were the people willing and able to muster big crowds for pro-life marches and organize grassroots support for local candidates. The free market types and foreign policy hawks lived on campus and in the bureaucracy. As a result, they were always nice and polite, apologizing to the Left behind closed doors, over their alliance with those disgusting dirt people in the Bible Belt.

That was a long time ago in a different country. Official Conservatism no longer has a religious right and they no longer care about social issues. National Review, the flagship publication of “movement conservatives” is edited by a homosexual activist who champions the gay agenda on the site. Occasionally, someone from this crowd will make some noises about social issues, but it is mostly nostalgia. Like Boomers listening to the oldies station, Gentry Conservatives will talk about abortion to be reminded of better days.

It’s not just a matter of the Official Right dropping social issues and social conservatives from their thing. It’s more that the religious right has become infected by the same parasites as the rest of the old Reagan coalition. In the 1980’s, Christian organizations decided to fully join the political system and as a result they became political organizations themselves. This opened them up to infiltration by the same sorts of people who animate the diseased corpse that is the academy. The religious right is now full of cucks.

This week, while campaigning in an Alabama church — as a Bible-believing Christian, I’ll note that this story is already off to a questionable start — Judge Roy Moore, the state’s embattled Republican Senate candidate, faced down a rather spirited heckler. “The entire time, all the girls are lying?” the man shouted, right before he was escorted out of the event. “Why would they lie?” If you’ve been following our very depressing national news cycle, you know the story: Moore, age 70, has faced multiple accusations of sexual misconduct dating back four decades, two of them involving underage girls, including one alleged assault of a fourteen-year-old. No charges have been filed, and that’s unlikely to change; the statute of limitations on any potential crimes stemming from the allegations appears to have long ago expired. Moore, for his part, argues that his accusers are part of a coordinated hit job orchestrated by Washington-establishment insiders. “They don’t want to hear about God,” he declared this week. “And they don’t want to hear about the Constitution of the United States and its foundational principles in God.”

We’ll get back to the Constitution — and Moore’s understanding of it — in a moment. But for now, let’s hear what the pastor of the church said, his doughy chin raised high, once the heckler had been neatly dispatched: “I would remind everyone,” he sniffed, “that this is a worship service.”

The opening two paragraphs reads like something you would find in Mother Jones or The Nation. It is the sort of framing that the Cult of Modern Liberalism has used against Christians for generations.

I’ll get this out the way: If you’re in Alabama and you want to vote for Roy Moore, vote for Roy Moore. But let’s at least try to keep things real: If you vote for Moore, you’re doing it because he’s not a Democrat, rather than because he’s some holy soldier on a special mission for God.

I would be willing to wager that the first draft of this was something like, “If you’re voting for Roy Moore, you’re doing it because he is not a Democrat. Just don’t call yourself a Christian.” That was the tone of the piece and the underlying message. To come right out and say it would require something resembling courage and that’s a mortal sin in the land of the cuck. After all, the merchant wing of the movement is going to be peddling Jesus themed wine and cheese baskets as part of the next fundraiser.

The fact is, there can be no interpretation of the events in Alabama that would lead a committed Christian to support the Democrat over Moore. Moore is staunchly opposed to abortion. The Democrat is willing to install Planned Parenthood approved abattoirs in the nation’s grammar schools. Even the most isolated  “Bible-believing Christian” can understand the difference between a venal sin and a mortal sin. Moore’s sins, whatever they were, are trivial, compared to supporting wholesale baby murder.

In fairness to “Bible-believing Christians”, the authoress of the NR piece is just some bubble-head hired to write down what she is told. Still, many of the people now claiming the mantle of leadership in the religious right are more concerned with their relationship to Washington than their relationship with Jesus. That’s because party politics is always about compromise. If you choose to get in bed with one party or the other, you are going to get up with their fleas, or worse. That’s what happened to the religious right and the GOP.

The Southern Baptist Convention being overrun by howling lunatics is the most recent example. A generation ago, the sorts of people hooting about white supremacy would have burst into flames if they walked into a Baptist church. Today, they feel perfectly comfortable walking the halls of their well appointed offices of the SBC. It’s because the people in charge now feel more at home with Progressive loons than they do with the people in the pews of their own churches. These churches are run by cucks now.

It goes back to the old line from Robert Conquest. “Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.” In the case of American churches, they stopped being explicitly Christian. Once they diluted their purpose by getting into politics, they were made vulnerable to infiltration by Progressives, who naturally seek to corrupt the organic institutions of a society. Once the religious right went exclusive with Northern conservatives, they were open to infiltration by Northern Liberals.

Suicide Cult

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I have a friend who was a reverend in the Episcopal Church. He is technically still in the church, but he has decided to find another vocation. The main reason is that most of the people running the church are women, along with a high number of homosexuals. The result is the people running the church care more about social justice and their genitals than anything else. Like most of the mainline Protestants churches, the Episcopal Church has become a circus of degeneracy and general lunacy. As a result their pews are empty.

That said, you can learn a lot about the direction of the Cult of Modern Liberalism by watching the mainline Protestant churches. They are so desperate for attention, they tend to give the game away by going overboard in the latest Progressive fads. Their internal war on heterosexual white men has been going on a long time now, long before the rest of the Progs decided to make war on the honkyman. This story out of Virginia shows the true nature of the statue toppling stuff and its ultimate goal.

Leaders at the church that George Washington attended decided that a plaque honoring the first president of the United States must be removed.

Christ Church in Alexandria, Virginia will take down a memorial marking the pew where Washington sat with his family, saying it is not acceptable to all worshipers.

“The plaques in our sanctuary make some in our presence feel unsafe or unwelcome,” leaders said, a reference to the fact that Washington was a slaveholder.

“Some visitors and guests who worship with us choose not to return because they receive an unintended message from the prominent presence of the plaques.”

“Many in our congregation feel a strong need for the church to stand clearly on the side of ‘all are welcome- no exceptions,'” they concluded.

A memorial to Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee will also come down.

These churches are big on the “all are welcome” stuff. They hang banners outside their empty churches with this slogan, usually decorated with rainbows. My suggestion is the alt-right toughs should take pics of themselves dressed as Hitler, posing in front of these stupid signs. That would make for a hilarious social media campaign. The fact is, the only people welcome in these hell holes are Progressive nutters and sexual deviants. As is always the case with The Cult, the opposite of what they say is usually the truth.

If you have any doubts about any of this, take a look at the roster of clergy running this church. The rector has two last names, suggesting she is keeping her options open. A good rule of thumb is that a woman with two last names is a nut. That’s probably why she hired a tranny as a youth counselor. Her second in command is a former actress, a profession known to attract the stable and virtuous. Two more women fill out the priestly class of this old church. It’s not hard to see why they are waging jihad on George.

That’s the thing with these churches. They are run by social justice warriors who see the church as a vehicle to inflict Progressive morality on their congregations. You can be sure that no one in the church gave a damn about George Washington. These hens spend all day clucking about what they read in the New York Times or heard on NPR. They came up with the idea of evicting the father of the country, because they wanted attention. It is virtue signalling, but their idea of virtue originates outside the Episcopal Church.

Of course, this was always the end point of the Rebel Flag burning and statue toppling. It is the thing everyone knew all along. It may have started as a tantrum by Cloud People aimed at the Dirt People, but it was going to end as a orgy of self-abnegation. These people hate their own kind. They hate their ancestors. The reason is, they hate themselves and the way to erase themselves is to erase their past. Progressives dream of the day when they no longer exist and any memory of them is gone too.

God speed Christ Church.

No Tomorrows

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All human societies have some form of belief system, usually based in the supernatural or in unexplained mysteries. People who study these things think that belief is one of the earliest modern human traits. Language and religion, the formalization of belief, most likely evolved together. That certainly makes sense. Religion has always been a handy store of knowledge and language is the way in which it can be transported from one generation to the next. From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense for both to coexist.

That is speculative, but what is not speculative is that all known people have had something we would consider to be a faith system. Primitive people have primitive belief systems, usually based in natural phenomenon like the seasons and elements. American Indians have a whole collection of deities based in nature. More complex societies create more complex myths, legends and belief structures. The Greeks and Romans had very complex systems. Christianity, obviously, is a rich and complex belief system.

We in the modern West tend to think we have moved past this stuff. The educated classes, while not willing to say they are atheists, scoff at the religious. The most you will get from the upper classes is the line about being spiritual, but not religious. The truth is, Western elites are believers like all people in all times, maybe more so. It’s just that their beliefs are informal and ad hoc. The people toting canvas sacks to the market are doing so because our better say nature demands it of us.

Belief systems describe a people. The ancient Egyptians had a highly complex belief system like many ancient people. Their religion, however, was unique in that it was entirely focused on the afterlife. They did not make sacrifices and pray for the here and now. They built monuments, complex burial systems and temples in order to prepare the living for the after life. There is a good argument that this focus on the after life is what allowed the Egyptians to keep their culture going for 3,000 years.

On the other hand, the Greeks were not very concerned about the after life. Their focus was on the here and now. The gods interfered in the lives of men, so it made sense to focus devotion on swaying the gods to act on your behalf or against the interests of your enemies. The Greeks did have the concept of an afterlife, but it was not the focus of their belief system. Immortality for man was possible by having sons, who would carry his name, or dying for his polis, which would live on and remember his name.

The Greeks may have been more concerned with the present, when it came time to worshipping the gods, but they had a nice long run, roughly 1000 years. It was not as if they were hedonists, living only in the moment. Even so, this focus on the now had some odd results. For instance, we know just about every Egyptian ruler and his deeds. We even have some of their corpses. The Dorian Greeks, on the other hand, burned their kings, as well as any record of them. We know nothing about them as a result.

This brings up an important point about our present age. The cult of Gaia, for example, is long on rhetoric about the future, but its focus is on present virtue. The greens are not trying preserve the environment for future generations. They are hoping their efforts snuff out future generations. The same is true of anti-racism and multiculturalism. These are all about the present. Calling them suicide cults is useful rhetoric, but in fact our virtuous rulers don’t think past tomorrow. it’s all about grace today.

This is particularly true with regards to migration. Nationalists like to cook up complex theories as to why our rulers are wedded to the idea of mass immigration. Some say it is cheap labor. Other say it is cheap votes. Still others see it as spite. All of those things are true, but the real motivation is virtue. Instead of a public ceremony where they sacrifice a bull or consecrate a church, inviting in the poor and downtrodden is the big public act of virtue. The consequences are down the road. The grace is today.

It’s not just vanity. We are the first people to have no conception of an afterlife. Even the Greeks believed in the after life and they believed there was judgement of souls. They may not have made that the focus of their faith, but they still believed there was something beyond this life. This spiritual hopelessness of Western elites may be why the Cloud People couch everything in terms of personal fulfillment and self-actualization. It is a way of crossing the River Styx without actually believing in it.

 

The nuttiness of modern elite culture may simply be a neurosis arising from the conflict between the natural, bone deep desire of man to be remembered, colliding with the lack of any reason to be remembered. Even the humblest of men will carve his name into a tree or scratch his name on his prison wall. “I was here” is the primal scream. Today, that impulse has no cultural vessel into which it can flow. The lonely barren spinster yells “I was here” and the only thing that happens is the cat stirs and then goes back to sleep.

Maybe this is it for us. Maybe there is no tomorrow for the West.

Alt-Jew

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Someone contacted me the other day saying they were starting a site called Alt-Jew and he wanted to know if I knew any right-wing Jews that would be interested. You never know about these things. It could have been a terrorist organization trying to get some names of people they could terrorize. Anyone can register a website. Well, not anyone, thanks to terrorist groups like the SPLC and ADL. Still, you never can be sure about these things. The Reagan Battalion was an elaborate Soros fraud.

Regardless, it provides a reason to write about a subject that gets zero attention. That is the schism among American Jews, one that is looking a little bit like the divide within the white world. There are a growing number of right-wing Jews, who are wondering if liberal Jews are bad for Jews. It’s not just politically, but culturally and racially. They look around at the demographics in America and see greater out-marriage, lower birth rates and the telltale signs of assimilation and secularization.

Anyone who has engaged with Orthodox Jews knows they regard Liberal Jews with a high degree of hostility. They are not as bad as the Hasidim, but they view Reformed Jews as fakers, getting the benefits of being Jewish without the commitment. Their relatively small numbers have made them easy to ignore, but demographics are changing quickly. Orthodox are 10% of American Jews and a full decade younger than the median age of Reformed Jews. They also have many more children per female.

Now, the Orthodox are famously ethnocentric. They also vote for conservative white candidates in elections. When it comes to identity politics, the Orthodox favor it over consensus. They may not be talking about ethno-states and separatism, but their revealed preferences run strongly in that direction. Like the Amish though, their numbers will only grow the old fashioned way. They don’t recruit so they don’t attract a lot of converts. Talk to anyone who has converted and they will tell you it is a long and challenging process.

There’s another division, somewhat related to the Orthodox movement, and that is the Chabad movement. Here’s a Globe story from two years ago and a Forward story from last year for some background. One of the unique things about Chabad is they recruit and do so aggressively. They even recruit gentiles. I’ve had them put the arm on me more than once, even though they know I’m not a Jew. President Trump’s son-in-law and daughter are Chabad. Joel Pollak, the Breitbart big shot, is Chabad. This is not an accident.

As that Globe story makes clear, the Chabad movement is a curious thing. On the one hand, they are Orthodox, which puts them culturally to the right of most people and way to the Right of most Jews. On the other hand, they seem to be following the model of the early Christian church by letting converts ease into the life. Jared Kushner is not growing a beard and wearing all black anytime soon. It’s hard not to think that they are first concerned with growing the movement. They’ll worry about discipline later.

There’s another piece to the puzzle. There are Conservative Jews who make up about 20% of American Jewry. These are the folks you will not only see filtering into the Chabad movement, but also on the fringes of the alt-right. They may or may not consider themselves white, but either way, they are fine with white identity politics. They think multiculturalism is madness. It’s not just madness for Jews, but for everyone. Diversity is a cancer to be avoided. These are folks who would be called Alt-Jew.

The number of Conservative Jews sympathetic to the alt-right is debatable, depending upon how you define the terms. There are quite a few Jews supporting Jared Taylor’s work at American Renaissance. I correspond with maybe half a dozen Conservative Jews who share my politics. They think their numbers are growing as Jews in America come to terms with the failings of liberalism and reformed Judaism. To use a phrase I picked up at AmRen, these are Jews who are religious, if not spiritual.

None of this means that Jews are suddenly going to lift Richard Spencer up and carry him to the throne of the ethno-state. It just means that demographics and shifting politics spare no one. Liberal Jews are old and not particularly fertile. Orthodox Jews are young and extremely fertile. Conservative Jews fall somewhere in between, but probably represent a much more practical alternative for American Jews who wish to remain American and Jewish. In a majority-minority world, everyone is going to have to pick sides.

For a distinct minority, it will also mean a return to strict ethnic solidarity. That means policing stuff like this that only serves to encourage the worst response from other groups in the population. Whether or not that happens or how it plays out is a mystery, but what is certain is that in the future, everyone will be voting their skin. That’s how multiculturalism works. There’s no place for modern liberalism, much less liberal Judaism, in a world of identity politics. Alt-Jew may be the only way forward for Jews in America.

Better Living Through Suicide

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Religions tend to set limits. Those limits come with the force of God or some spiritual force that transcends man. Otherwise, a religion would be nothing more than man-made rules enforced by the strongest. This is why laws in most of the world are rooted in the dominant religion of the region or country. The local religion is a list of restrictions and limitations placed on the believers. Naturally, when it came time to form a government and write laws, they relied upon the laws and rules of their religion.

This may seem rather obvious, but the concept of the limiting principle is easy to take for granted. This is a core feature of most religions and it easiest to understand by considering our laws. Take two people who are not robbing banks. Just as long as both are not robbing banks, neither is more or less of a bank robber than the other. Both are simply not bank robbers. In other words, while there may be degrees of bank robbery, there are no degrees of not bank robbery. Not being one is the limit of that virtue.

This is true of religion, of course. The sinner can be someone breaking a minor rule or someone violating the big rules. Their degree of sinfulness can be established, but their degree of virtue does not exist. If you are not violating the rules of the faith, then that is as good as it gets for you, at least in this life. In other words, there is a limit to virtue. That limit is the rule or prohibition. You are either within the rules or not. Efforts to out-virtue others are usually seen as vanity, unjustified boasting about one’s spiritual state.

The limiting principle keeps religions and the law from going crazy and descending into virtue spirals. After all, if one can be more virtuous than the next guy, then the next guy can be even more virtuous. The cycle ends only when everyone is dead. The same is true of the law. Utopian schemes like communism are aimed at constructing the perfect society, but since perfection is impossible, it is a never ending cycle of madness to make society better, which means making people better. It’s why they always end in violence.

This has always been the problem with efforts to create a civic religion. Robespierre and his radical buddies figured this out quickly, which is why they came up with the Cult of the Supreme Being. Of course, their new reason cult got weird in hurry and contributed to the demise of Robespierre. The reason is any effort to invest moral authority in men or their creations turns those men into gods. The madness of the French Revolution was a virtue spiral, as there was no transcendent limit. The radicals could always be more radical.

We see this with the nature movements that have been a feature of the Left for as long as anyone reading this has been alive. The greens always aim for some sort of Edenic outcome. Their goal always lies just a little further. The idea of “good enough” is outside their comprehension. Couple that with their preternatural belief in the sinfulness of man and you end up with a nature cult that borders on being a suicide cult. The end point of every Progressive nature movement is the end of mankind.

The greatest impact individuals can have in fighting climate change is to have one fewer child, according to a new study that identifies the most effective ways people can cut their carbon emissions.

The next best actions are selling your car, avoiding long flights, and eating a vegetarian diet. These reduce emissions many times more than common green activities, such as recycling, using low energy light bulbs or drying washing on a line. However, the high impact actions are rarely mentioned in government advice and school textbooks, researchers found.

Just look at that list. It sounds like a combination of the Shakers and 1970’s new age mysticism. In order to save the planet, according to researchers and experts no less, is to avoid having more humans and make the ones waiting around to die as miserable as possible. The unspoken reason for selling the car and sitting in the dark with your nothing burger is so you can suffer and atone for your sins. In other words, it is not enough to be a green, you have to kill yourself as the ultimate sign of your virtue.

This is not new. The Shakers, obviously, are an example of what happens when a religion cannot imagine a limit to virtue. The Shakers, though, had the decency to mind their own business and not try to inflict themselves on the rest of the world. In the long run, they were a slow-motion suicide cult, but they were willing to let nature take its course. The modern nature cults not only want to rush their demise, they want to take the rest of us with them, or at least make us suffer for their religion.

This is the problem that has haunted the Left in America. There’s no concept of good enough. They are always chanting, “we can do more” or “there is more work to do.” No matter how much damage they do in the holy cause, they are sure that more needs doing, more must be done. It’s why their causes tend to burn out in fits of insanity like we see with the whole transgender thing. The quest for the ultimate victim has led them to celebrate mental illness as a virtue and deny biological reality.

There’s another point here worth mentioning. A reason Progressives lack the concept of the limiting principle is that the modern American Left grew out of the postmillennialism of the 19th and early 20th century. This was an American Protestant movement based on the belief that the time between now and the end times would be one where the Church came to dominate the nations of the earth and usher in an era of peace, prosperity and righteousness, signally the return of Christ. Abolitionism was a product of this movement.

Modern Progressives have abandoned the language of Christianity, but they retain the characteristics and much of the language of their spiritual forebears. Instead of spreading the Word, they spread democracy. Instead of defeating Satan by expanding the kingdom of God on earth, the modern Progressives expands the inclusive Community to defeat the Hate. Saving the earth is, in a way, the restoration of Eden. When the goal is to immanentize the eschaton, it is no wonder they set no limits for themselves.

The Church of Modern Lunacy

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I have a passing interest in the Church of England and its American variation, the Episcopal Church. An old friend is in the church so I get some first hand descriptions of what it is like to be in a dying institution. That’s the only way to describe the Episcopal Church. Attendance declines every year as old members die off and new members never materialize. Go into an Episcopal service and you can’t help but notice that most everyone is a senior. The actuarial tables are the church’s greatest enemy.

Of course, church attendance has always skewed a little older. Young people tend not to be attracted to the faith, even if their parents regularly attend services. As people get older, have families and begin to sink roots, they get more involved in their faith and attend services regularly. That’s the trouble with the mainline Protestant religions. The young are not coming back once they start having families. That means their children are not raised in the faith. As a result, these churches are now in a death spiral.

The story is familiar to anyone who has been paying attention. These churches made the decision to chase the latest social fads in the 70’s and 80’s, hoping to make themselves more appealing to the young. The only thing they did was make themselves less attractive to people interested in being part of a traditional Christian sect. It was not just in the pews, but in the clergy as well. Those feeling the call found that the church in which they were raised was not interested in defending and maintaining the faith.

The result is the clergy slowly radicalized. First came the women and then the feminist women. Soon they invited in the homosexuals and the clergy started looking like the faculty of a liberal arts college. That’s when the pews started to empty out. Why bother going to church, when you can get the same liberal lecture from television? That’s what started the decline in church attendance. Instead of offering a shelter from the storm, they decided to chase an over-served market – radical Progressives.

Talking to my friend, he tells me that there are elements within the Episcopal Church that know what must be done to save the church. The trouble is they are outgunned and out maneuvered by the radicals. That’s the thing. The conservatives make it a priority to serve the church and serve God, while the radicals are always scheming to advance the radical agenda. The conservatives are constantly outmaneuvered because they are not playing the political games. They end up getting marginalized, despite having numbers.

Of course, young people seeking to join the clergy are confronted by a politicized bureaucracy full of homosexuals and social justice warriors, who are mainly interested in advancing their own agenda within the church. Like the old commie radicals of yesteryear, the current radicals use struggle sessions and purity tests to boil off those who would challenge their agenda. Imagine you’re a young priest and you are told you now have to celebrate a special mass for the transgendered.

The General Synod of the Church of England has voted to ‘welcome transgender people’ by considering preparing a church service as a way to “mark a person’s gender transition”.
The official church of the United Kingdom voted four to one in favour amongst the Clergy and more than two to one amongst the Laity (members who are not Clergy) at the four-day Synod, the motion reading:

“That this Synod, recognising the need for transgender people to be welcomed and affirmed in their parish church, call on the House of Bishops to consider whether some nationally commended liturgical materials might be prepared to mark a person’s gender transition.”

Vicar of Lancaster Priory Church, Chris Newlands, posed the motion to the Synod, saying he would speak on behalf of transgender people as the church’s Synod has none.

He said: “We need to be aware of the impact that our actions – be them welcome or rejection – have on the members of the trans community.

“I hope that we can make a powerful statement that we believe trans people are cherished and loved by God, who created them.”

The BBC reports that, “Such a service would not be a second baptism, however, as the Church’s teaching is that humans are made in the image of God – transcending gender – and baptism takes place only once.”

Archbishop of York Dr. John Sentamu said there was a need for vicars “to welcome and affirm, in their parish, transgender people”, adding that the “theology has to be done” by the House of Bishops and “can be done very quickly”.

Notice the feminine language. They want to “welcome and affirm” trannies into their churches. I’d like these guys to point to the passage in the Bible that covers men who like to play dress up or people so mentally unbalanced they believe their sex organs are imaginary. Ministering to the mentally ill has a place in a church, but that’s not what they are saying. They want to make mutilating people a sacrament. Imagine being forced to embrace this sort of madness. It is no wonder the sane clergy are leaving.

Of course, it’s also why the pews are empty. It’s another reminder that Progressives must be treated like rage zombies or highly contagious disease carriers. Once you let one into your organization, it will set about bringing in more of its kind. In this case, it was women in the clergy, then feminists, then homosexuals. They have reached the point where few inside the church care at all about the faith. It’s all about the latest Progressive fads and how they can outrage the remaining members of their congregations.

Is the Pope Catholic?

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There’s been a lot of commentary about Pope Francis being a commie, mostly from Official Conservatism, which now holds a puerile understanding of both communism and capitalism. Evangelii Gaudium (The Joy of the Gospel), is a 2013 apostolic exhortation by Pope Francis that criticizes neoliberal global capitalism, among other topics. American “conservatives” took this mild critique to mean the Pope opposes the new religion of Globalism, so he must be a Marxist, because Marxists are bad.

The thing is, Catholicism has always been opposed, to some degree, to capitalism, particularly certain aspects of what we now call capitalism. The most obvious example is the opposition to usury. Every lecture on the evils of antisemitism contains some reference to the Church forbidding usury. Less well known is the Catholic Church’s embrace of localist economics and politics, in opposition to the internationalism of Soviet communism. The point being, the Church has never been a fan of global capitalism.

The criticism of the Pope on economic grounds says more about the bottomless ignorance of modern conservatism than it does the Pope or the Church. For the Church, any church for that matter, economics are downstream from theology. In fact, economic positions should only matter in so far as how they advance the particular theological points of the faith. Catholicism long attachment to the sovereign authority of the people, naturally leads it to embrace national economics over global economics.

That bit is sure to get some spergy responses from Catholics and Christians, but we’ll deal with that in the comments. The point to take away is that it is perfectly plausible for the Pope to be within Catholic doctrine and oppose the current fads in global economics and not be a communist. The fact that secular defenders of globalism are more hive minded than the clerical critics, suggests globalism has become more of an all-consuming religion than Catholicism. It is international fascism. 

Whether or not the Pope is a globalist is unimportant. What matters is whether or not he is a Catholic. Look at the response from Francis when Trump announced that he was withdrawing the US from the Paris climate deal. The Pope had heavily lobbied Trump in person on the mysteries of climate. He gave him a book pushing the apocalyptic claims of the most unhinged climate fanatics. It’s not unfair to say that the Pope bet a big chunk of the Church’s prestige on this, so naturally he was very angry at the result.

Now, the Pope had a joint presser with Trump on his home turf. Trump has been divorced a few times, has children from a variety of women. He is, by his own admission, a serial adulterer. The Church, at its core, opposes the way in which Trump has lived his life. At their meeting in Rome, the Pope could have taken the time to admonish Trump on these basic theological issues. At the minimum, he could have made the most powerful man in the world blush a bit about his lifestyle, even if he was not willing to be Thomas More.

Of course, the Pope is more than a theologian and spiritual leader. He is a politicians so it is understandable if maybe he would avoid the personal. He could have, however, weighed in on the oppression of Christians and Catholics in the US. That health care bill everyone says is a mess has provisions that compel Catholics to act in a way that contradicts their faith. That should be pretty damned high on the Pope’s list of concerns to be broached with the American President.

It’s not just a question about the Pope being Catholic, or at least prioritizing Catholic theology over his personal theology. The question is whether the Catholic Church is still Catholic. It used to be that the Church was at the forefront of social issues like abortion and homosexual marriage. Today, it is rare to hear anything from the Church on social issues. Instead, in the US at least, the Church is more concerned with maintaining their refugee rackets and defending Gaia from your lawnmower.

We are in a post-Christian world so perhaps it is inevitable that the Catholic Church would be looking around for a way to remain relevant. Attendance at Christian services continues to drop and the median age of self-identified Christians keeps going up. On the other hand, it is not unreasonable to think that maybe what hurts the Catholic Church is that it has stopped being Catholic. There are a million places to hear sermons on Gaia, diversity and other Progressive fads. The Pope is just another voice in the choir.

On Atheism

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A useful way to think about faith and belief is to imagine a scale where at one end you have fanaticism and at the other end you have extreme skepticism. The Muslim wearing a suicide vest is down at the fanatic end, while H.L. Mencken was down at the other end with the extreme skeptics. Disbelief is not the opposite of belief. Skepticism is the opposite of belief. The believer is willing to accept, without evidence, the truth of some statement, while the skeptic is unwilling to accept statements without proof.

Atheists will argue that atheism is the opposite of religious belief, but that’s what is called a gratuitous assertion. The atheist believes there is no superior being. They have no proof of this as there can be no proof. In that regard, atheism is illogical as it is something that can never be proved. Christianity, in contrast, can be proved. Christ could show up and confirm the tenets of the faith. The same is true of Islam or Judaism. In other words, even though there is no proof now, there could be proof. That’s not possible with atheism.

My general impression has always been that atheists are a) mugging for attention, b) mostly opposed to Christianity in a subversive way and/or c) not well versed in religion or the role of religion. Bill Maher is a famous atheist because it makes him safely edgy. He gets to be controversial without any risk of controversy. A Penn Jillette, on the other hand, is just angry that his mother died and his prayers were not answered the way he wanted them answered. He’s also arguing from a position of ignorance. He’s just not that smart.

It’s why I don’t find atheists or atheism all that interesting. Most of it is just a pose from people who demand the right to say controversial things, but have nothing controversial to say. They are meta-rebels. These are people who talk about being rebellious and subversive, but never dare color outside the lines. Entertainers are fond of this style of edginess as it safely allows them to flatter their audience’s own egotistic need to see themselves as an avant-garde. Every modern TV comic falls into this category.

The other day I saw on twitter that Richard Dawkins went somewhere to insult Christians and was so proud of his efforts he was tweeting about it. Dawkins is more famous for being a public douche bag now, than he is for his book The Selfish Gene. I chalk this up mostly to the madness that results from trying to square the prevailing orthodoxy with the realities of biology. Dawkins wants to be a beloved public intellectual and an honest man of science. Instead he is an obnoxious provocateur and a public nuisance.

Dawkins claims to be a militant atheist, not just an anti-Christian bigot, but it’s hard to find any evidence to support his claims. He’s careful not to say bad things about Muslims, probably because he enjoys having his head attached to his neck. Similarly, he has been very careful not to upset the Jews. Christians, on the other hand, get no breaks and he seems to go out of his way to offend them. This is true of all atheists. Whether it is because Christians are a soft target or just anti-Christian animus is debatable.

The other day, someone asked me about this clip from the Joe Rogan Show that Cernovich was promoting. The point was to solicit an opinion from me on Cernovich. My reply was “I will not be shocked if one day we learn that Sam Harris has been strangling hookers and burying them in the desert.” I’ve never found Harris very interesting, so I never bothered to watch him. In that ten minute clip, I got the impression that Harris has a lot of demons. I was also reminded that atheist are almost always joyless dickheads.

I was also reminded that Vox Day used to give Sam Harris the business. I no longer remember the details, but I think a few of the alt-right people have taken shots at Harris, who in addition to being an atheist, is a hooting Progressive and an anti-Trumper. That’s a feature of atheism that goes unremarked. Most are Progressives and usually the hard thumping variety. They may not believe in God, but they are bubbling over with belief in the One True Faith. This suggests that maybe atheism is just another facet of Progressivism.

The Prog impulse to root around in the private lives of strangers, imposing their values on everyone, comes from public Protestantism. This is the general belief that societies are judged as a whole, so the faithful have a duty to root out sin and lift up sinners. In the same way, atheists seem to think that their sacred duty is to stamp out Christianity, as if it is a sin preventing mankind from reaching the singularity. It is excessive belief, manifesting as a hostility toward the more conventional expressions of belief.

To be clear, I’m not a believer. I’m down on the end of the scale with Mencken. I don’t know if the Christians are right about a God in heaven, but I don’t know they are wrong either. I don’t know. I can’t know. For all I know we could be a science experiment for some extra-dimensional species. That said, if religious faith brings you happiness, I’m happy for you and wish you the best with it, just as long as you don’t make a nuisance of yourself. In other words, indifference is my preferred position on your religiosity.

I do know I’d never want to live in a world ruled by atheists.