In the late 10th and early 11th century, a form of mysticism evolved that incorporated elements of Islam, Greek philosophy, Gnosticism, bits from other esoteric faiths, which existed in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. The person credited with spreading this new faith was a guy named Muhammad bin Ismail Nashtakin ad-Darazi. He came to Egypt in 1017 and began preaching and attracting converts. He was branded a heretic and executed in 1018 by the sixth Fatimid caliph.
The Caliph, al-Hakim, was not hostile to the new faith, so much as hostile to ad-Darazi, who he thought was suffering from megalomania. His move against ad-Darazi was to put Hamza ibn ‘Ali ibn Ahmad in charge of this new religious sect, which would eventually be known as Druze. Despite not being a member of this new religion, the sixth caliph became a central figure for it. His decision to kill ad-Darazi changed the nature of the religion and allowed it to spread.
This is an interesting bit of serendipity, but it has a connection to our own age in a few important ways. The most obvious, if you are a fan of the period, is al-Hakim is often blamed for starting the crusades. His decision to persecute Christians sent ripples through Europe, eventually leading to the call to recapture the Holy Land. There were other forces at work, but it is generally accepted that al-Hakim played a crucial role in the clash with Christendom.
Eventually two main strains of Islam came to dominate the Arab world, while Christianity dominated Europe. The Levant has remained a place with lots of diversity. The Druze live mostly in Lebanon. The Samaritans are in the Palestinian territories. Maronites, Eastern Orthodox and Melkite Catholics exist in Lebanon. Syriac Christians and Alawites exist in Syria. Of course, various flavors of Judaism dominate in Israel. It is not an accident that instability is the only constant in the Levant.
That is an obvious lesson when examining this part of the world. If one wanted proof of the axiom, Diversity + Proximity = Violence, the Levant has more than enough for any argument. The pathological zeal of Western leaders for inviting the world into Western lands, can only have one end. That is the what we see in Lebanon, a country blessed with a great location, abundant natural resources and natural barriers. Yet, it is a land riven by sectarian violence and the lack of a unifying identity.
There is another lesson from the history of the Levant and that is the cauldrons of diversity tend to create more diversity. The reason this part of the world was popular with schismatics is its diversity attracted these people. Diversity turns the culture into an open are market for every idea imaginable. The openness to new ideas is constantly destabilizing society, open the door for new cracks and crackpots. Diversity rewards diversity, which makes stability impossible.
That is something to keep in mind as Europe works to invite the world. Throw a bunch of people together with a wide range of beliefs and inevitably it spawns a bunch of new combinations. The flow of Muslims into Europe, a land that has abandoned Christianity for various secular passions, is going to spawn new spiritual movements. The recent conversion to Islam of an AfD leader is the sort of thing that is happening with increasing frequency. Islam is now a thing in Europe.
The other aspect to this is the West is now an open country, when it comes to the religion business. Just as Catholicism faced a dying collection of pagan beliefs, Islam is now flowing into a world held together by pointless social fads. The soul of Europe died a long time ago. To be a European today means to be a deracinated stranger in a land that is increasingly unfamiliar to you. That makes Europe fertile ground everyone looking for converts..
That does not mean Europe will be Islamic. Islam always adapts to the local environment. Islam in Asia is Islam with very Asian characteristics. Islam in the Caucasus is a mountain man version of Islam. Biology is the root of everything and that means cultural items like religion flow from it. The Islamification of Europe will inevitably result in something that is very European. The Germans will have their take, the Danes will have theirs and the French will do something French.
It also means all sorts of other permutation that result from mixing Western empiricism, Oriental mysticism and traditional Christianity. The Druze we started with in this post combine Ismailism, Gnosticism, Neoplatonism, Pythagoreanism and Hinduism. It is an esoteric faith that is also an ethnicity. The Druze do not accept converts and they do not allow out-marriage. A person who marries outside the faith is no longer Druze and their children will not be Druze. Imagine something like that happening Bulgaria.
The point of this somewhat disjointed post is that Europe is dead. The civilization that was created by the culture born of the Enlightenment carries on, but the culture that is the West is dead. Something will come to replace it and that something will, in whole or part, be carried by the people now attempting to replace the Europeans. The resulting culture that rises next will be some combination of the ingredients being tossed into the cauldron, but it will look nothing like the ingredients.
Europe’s Christian faith was destroyed by WWI and the mindless slaughter in the trenches that left it depopulated. WWII finished the job and now the stately cathedrals are empty husks for tourists and not for worship. Socialism’s cradle to grave mentality replaced the church with the state and now all of the European native populations are breeding way below replacement level thanks to socialism’s crippling taxes, which bleed economies of capital and a total lack of civilizational confidence. The nhilism that replaced Christianity is pure evil. I think Islam is conquering the dying husk of Europe. It’s pitiful that the… Read more »
Unfortunately, Europe can’t produce a Charles Martel anymore. The last generation of men embodying traditional masculine virtues was slaughtered in WWII.
Of course, I’m not counting Eastern Europe into this equation.
Traditional western values, or what’s left of them, remain popular in Eastern Europe, that part of Europe having been immunized by 70 years of Soviet control.
As someone who is half Polish, I have never been more proud of the Poles and other Eastern European tribes who have no intention of going quietly to their graves.
I am anything but an eastern European in ancestry, but I salute the peoples of the old Soviet bloc for their resistance to the imperial edicts of the EU. My one worry is that throughout the eastern half of white Christendom, there is that same unmistakable reluctance to reproduce that we see not only in the vanishing west, but in the great east-Asian peoples as well.
We ice-people just don’t want children anymore, and that spells doom in the long run.
Wisely, as ice people were molded by an environment of resource restraints, unlike the locusts of the warm, fecund south.
Well, ok, not the Han. They just let the bubonic plague send their horseriders fleeing west every dozen generations, while the rest starve.
Perhaps the same pressures that led us to digest lactose- eating something nobody else would- led us to being far-ranging explorers, as well.
If one emerges my hunch will be another King John Sobieski. The Poles have seen this play one too many times and they ain’t buying in this time.
We dont live in the west. We live in an antiwest. It looks like the west, but only because it wears the carcass as a skinsuit.
This may be true if you live close to the East or West coasts, but it’s hardly true of the heartland.
I’m the West, and I’m not dead yet.
In fact I feel better….
But will your children and grandchildren carry on where you leave off ?
My kids are more right wing than I am.
Pretty sure mine will be too, I’d never write off the west, England in particular.
And remember, if we cannot have white victory then at least we can f@#k sh!t up on the way out.
Same here.
My kids aren’t nearly as RW as me, (to be fair, I put the F in Fascism), but my Gen Z grandkids are shaping up nicely. If they didn’t live so far away, I could have one of them groomed up to be a future..um, leader.
Leader is a good word.
Would it be paranoid to expect governments to guide this process of syncretism in a way that benefited them? The Catholics just agreed to let the Chinese Communist Party choose their bishops.
I wonder what mixture our rulers would find most useful to foist on us?
It’s a fair point, this. It’s not paranoid at all. In fact it may be the key to understanding why Islam is free to call the shots in countries like Sweden and the UK. I’m embarrassed to keep bringing up the Romans (just as there is a ‘reductio ad Hitlerum’, there is also a ‘reductio ad Romanum’, or however it goes in Latin). But anyone even casually familiar with the highlights of Roman imperial history know that emperors persecuted the Church until, suddenly, they didn’t. A ‘concordat’ arose between Constantine and the growing Church, disrupted only briefly – and without… Read more »
But…but…but…!!!!
The proggies!!! They’ve done away with the vile, dark nature of man! They’ve destroyed toxic masculinity, acknowledged that we’re all special even though we are all equal and the same…!!!! What you aren’t seeing here, Z, is the rise of New Mankind…
….BEEEEEEEEEEELCH!!!
Sure, I’ll have another beer, thanks…
Europe is not dead. The boomers gave my generation a flickering flame. We will give our children a roaring fire. And we will drive out Islam and if they will not walk back out, we will bash their heads on the rocks.
As a (non-English-speaking) European I feel obliged to react to your post. First I want to say that your view of how things could evolve is very possible if nothing disrupts the flow of history. But as a European I have the feeling that we are not going for a gentle flow of history, but for a rough ride with all possible options open. The migrant invasion of 2015 has been a game changer. It is a catastrofe that also woke up a lot of people. The nationalist-populist movements have gained enormous strength and their influence is growing. It already… Read more »
George Friedman the futurist has made a fine living by demonstrating that at any point in recent history, the future envisioned as a linear extrapolation of the present and its seemingly obvious trends has been wrong. Often it has been spectacularly wrong. As a recent example, prophesying “The End of History” in the early 1990s looks pretty dumb right now, not even 20 years later. But what else do you have to work with than the present modified by current trends_? So, it is quite possible that Europe becomes a Moslem-dominated theme park. But that’s likely wrong too. What’s right_?… Read more »
Good point. “inevitability” is easy to see when you are reading history books. But after all, maybe under slightly different conditions Harold Godwinson would have defeated the Normans at Hastings – then what? A whole history of western civilization belonging to another universe. Maybe Napoleon wins at Waterloo (and Wellington himself admitted later that was a ‘close-run thing’). That said, we live in an age when raw demographics seem to be the prime driver of what is to come. Europe has decided to die; no Wellington, no Charles Martel, no Winston Churchill shows his face. I grew up in that… Read more »
The change of history what if’s that interest me more than any other is the Germans winning the Great War, or it never having been fought. It is becoming increasingly difficult to imagine how even Adolf winning the second Great War would leave us in a condition as enervated as we find ourselves in now.
A few years ago Rod Dreher and his band of followers were wondering aloud about whether the influx of Islam could “save” the West from the lack of meaning, sexual license, etc. For people who care most about putting the sexual revolution back in the bottle I guess it almost makes sense. But I think people who looked at it this way were probably thinking of well-known Muslim celebrities (Hakeem Olajuwan, e.g.) who seem like regular people who just fast for Ramadan, avoid intoxicants and pray often. All the other issues of diversity+proximity, culture clash, etc. were not considered.
The safe bet is that we won’t like it, whatever it is. Years ago read Mango’s excellent biography of Ataturk. One thing that stood out about his experiences in MENA right after graduating from the Ottoman military academy was the sheer effort the Turks expended constantly peeling these various ethno-religious groups off one another to keep some modicum of peace in the Levant. And of course these were largely the same miscreants (with a few name changes) that we have today. You can see why Kemal Mustafa had such a zeal to secularize the Turkish government.
Little backstory – My Grandpa, a Christian from Lebanon, came (LEGALLY!) to America in the 1880s. Married a Nebraska farm girl, learned to read, write and speak English, became a citizen, started a little business, paid his taxes and raised a family. He was so fully assimilated into the US culture that he became a Mason for crying out loud. Anyway, he always referred to the Holy Land as “God’s Monkey House” and never regretted getting the hell out. He died in the 1950s and it would be interesting to get his reaction on what became of his birthplace. So… Read more »
“Imagine being called to prayer to worship Allah at Notre Dame in Paris.”
It already happened in Constantinople. I visited the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. It’s more of a museum now, but the Turks proved their point. It’s not going back to being Christian anytime in the foreseeable future.
Of course, if Westerners had the will, with modern military hardware,we could reclaim Istanbul very quickly.
But we no longer have the will for conquest, or for much of anything other than surrender at this point.
The Russians have their sights on Constantinople, and they have the will to reclaim it. They aren’t playing games in Syria for the hell of it. Putin really has no interest in reassembling the Soviet empire in Central Europe- he wants to resume the Imperial Russian game of expanding South and reclaiming the old Byzantine land that the Turk occupied a thousand years ago. Z might be right, the West might be lost, at least the old version of a Christian people that lasted from around 1095 to 1945. Central Europe, the old Intermarium bloc is going to be the… Read more »
Putin can’t even reclaim Dagestan, much less Turkey.
Fifty plus yrs ago I lived in Istanbul after college and worked on an archeological dig–a 9thc. Byzantine church, being restored as a mosque, per local regulation, as if these weren’t already abundant there and by my observation, pretty much unused. Visited Hagia Sofia numerous times with an American scholar who was conducting research there. Yes, it is a museum, but . . . as long as the four minarets stand guard, quite literally, it will never be a church again. Minarets = conquest. Also, a problem the Russians would have in any conquest of the old Byzantium is that… Read more »
An energetic Christendom could probably retake Istanbul with a few high-level phone calls. Justinian would be bouncing around in a padded room, if he saw what passes for ‘the Church Militant’ today.
But none of this is the fault of our enemies. We (westerners, that is) decided to be the fractured rabble that we are, while Islam grows, while the hordes of Africa multiply, while our ‘leaders’ morph into class enemies.
In one of his short stories, Jorge Luis Borges said – through one of his characters – that “the gentleman only believes in lost causes”.
I’m down with that.
Of course its the fault of our enemies. We need a real program!m of counter semitism.
Something that never gets discussed is just how successful Lebanese Christians have been in the new world. Pretty close to the ideal immigrant group.
Live in a mid size midwestern city. Maronite Lebanese Christians have really done well here. Wednesday lunch at St. Raymond’s (Maronite, Lebanese traditional food) is a civic institution
The marriage of Marxist feminism and Islam will indeed be interesting.
Never the twain shall meet. Over at American Digest, there is a piece by Michael Chrichton on speculation, which features this quote by Mark Twain: “There are two times in a man’s life when he should not speculate: when he can’t afford it and when he can.” All this premature handwringing over the death of the West, while entertaining, is defeatist and possibly counterproductive. As Chrichton says, nobody knows what the future holds, and as Al and Pimpkin mentioned, nothing is inevitable. A relatively small (in view of the sweep of history) change of course could alter the whole direction.
There are many scenarios in which Caucasians of NW European origin re-emerge as the most successful force driving civilization forward. One is that our growing social decadence eventually leads to biological decay, leads to pandemic illness and population collapse, leads to starting over. The most robust among us are the first to bounce back.
People are basically meat antennae. European caucosoids have internalized a signal that we were too successful and if we don’t “handicap” ourselves we will take over the whole planet and turn it into a dystopian version of the industrial revolution for all eternity. Feminism and minority rights are just ideological hangars-on. It appears to have happened multiple times on planet Earth. White people have been punishing ourselves for being too successful and now we’ve got the hangover. Self-flagellation is a spiritual thing because humans are so into holiness spirals. Mix that with the Christian power of not caring about the… Read more »
And Twain, like many men, was describing his own flaws in giving that advice. Speculated himself into bankruptcy.
The Druze — funny you bring them up, because I had a strange (?) thought about them recently. You give the standard version of their origin, ad-Darazi and all that. Well, their Syrian section also traditionally used to live in the Jabal ad-Durooz (Druze Mountain) mountainous area in the extreme south of the country — which, incidentally, official Syrian maps have rechristened Jabal al-Arab. Now, that same Durooz area on maps of biblical times appears, with its name Grecized, as Trakhonitis. T-R-KH vs. D-R-Z: Quite some similarity there, isn’t it? Certainly enough to make etymologists happy. So I’ve begun to… Read more »
It could be. There’s an argument that Mohamed was entirely made up by the Arabs who defeated Persian and adopted their religion.
“If one wanted proof of the axiom, Diversity + Proximity = Violence, The Levant has more than enough for any argument. ” The other thing to keep in mind about Levantine diversity is that a lot of it is from government meddling which is something quite relevant to us now; you mention the Druze but the reason that the Baha’i and Circassians are there at all is because they were resettled there. The Ottomans weren’t shy about bringing in a population if they thought there was some profit in it. “That’s the same we see in Lebanon, a country blessed… Read more »
Nature abhors a vacuum.
The good news is I have a full beard now, so if it is going to be Islam, I’m in good shape.
It’s funny, but have had the conversation with several liberal Jews that goes like this…”as Protestant, the worst case scenario for me is I repeat Allahu-somethingorother three times, grow a beard and we’re cool, bros. You and all your issue get exterminated. You might show a little more enthusiasm for getting ahead of this shit”. In one case had the additional admonition that agitating for refugees to resettle in our small village might not be such a bright idea.
I’ll alert the boys at the Daily Stormer that their idea of White Sharia is back on the table.
I made a snide remark 4-5 yrs ago that in the future, white ppl in the West would all be Islamic converts, at the rate we were accepting the Islamification that was underway.
I had no idea how accurate that statement would prove to be…
But Dyson seems quite profitable. As have Bissell, Hoover, Eureka…
Let me add … Islam tried to advance in Europe before, when it was mostly Pagan in the West, and ruled by largely illiterate mostly Pagan rulers from Barbarian tribes. Outside of Spain it did poorly. Islam require absolute submission and a tribal mindset. For those peoples already tribal and ruled by Big Men and with absolute slaves, that was pretty adaptive. But Europeans are not that way — hierarchy is there but so is independence, as well as jealous guarding of privileges and power by lower orders particularly as Rome collapsed and power moved to local counts and castellans… Read more »
It is not dead. But it appears so when covered with snow and hoarfrost in the midwinter. We shall see when spring comes.
I agree that the old culture is dead, and a new culture is/has taken its place. Europe is a hinterland now; a place you go for a picaresque vacation. The US, China, and maybe one or two others are creating the future, now. Everyone else is just along for the ride.
My daughter just returned from ten days in London, Edinburgh, and Paris, places she’d been some years before. The English and Scotts are unfriendly but polite. The French are not polite. Not her being a tourist especially, or American. They are simply pissed in general. It may have something to do with having no say in their own lands, a feeling I am increasingly familiar with.
The French have seemed pissed for a long time, that’s nothing new at all. They are also very culturally Catholic. They rallied a boatload of people against homosexual marriage, although naturally that did not get much play in the media. And, of course, they lost. At least they didn’t totally roll over like Ireland.
http://m.en.rfi.fr/france/20141005-thousands-demonstrate-france-defend-traditional-family-values
And some of the clergy are speaking out on the subject of demographics.
https://www.christiantoday.com/article/controversial-french-archbishop-warns-of-great-replacement-by-muslims/110709.htm
Don’t count them out yet. At some point, they may get really pissed off.
Here is a good, if somewhat depressing, website for keeping up with developments in France.
http://galliawatch.blogspot.com/#!
Half of all priests ordained in France today are Traditionalists — that is, celebrate the Latin Mass. Don’t count France out by a long shot.
When the counterrevolution really begins, it will start in France
The French excel at the useless gesture…however if others pick up where they start, not so useless.
Two enduring influences of the dying Roman Empire upon its western provinces were the spread of Christianity, and the spread of vulgar Latin. Centuries of post-Roman confusion gave rise to distinctive national churches and languages, especially the latter, differentiated from the base by the particular genetic and geographic characteristics of the nations, plus the welter of historic circumstances that mix peoples in different and unique ways. A thousand years from now, it could well be that a blend of western science, ‘vulgar’ English, Mohammedan evangelism and the population explosion out of Africa will yield a suite of new national cultures,… Read more »
I think there will be a reconquest of sorts in the future. The migration wave will end some day, and we will be left with a culture that includes the indigenous population, a group of hybrids, and the group of african and arab settlers. Islam itself will decline too. Its contact with Europe will infect it with European nihilism and feminism and after a wave of explosive growth, it will begin to dwindle. I think the hybrids will eventually indigenise and begin to identify with the native culture, in the same way mestizos in mexico identify with the aztecs. These… Read more »
We certainly have the vulgarity down pat.
Thank you for your post European guy. Have been visiting Scandinavia on a semi-regular basis since 2000. Was quite shocking on my last visit to see the hordes of migrants standing on street corners and hanging out in the shopping malls. Since I am a tourist and not working it’s easy to see these parasites hanging out in the daytime doing absolutely nothing. My friends over there don’t see this . Perhaps their busy working and don’t realize just how extensive The Invasion has become. Hopefully Europe can save itself. Would be happy to come over and help but first… Read more »
Indeed. There’d be a lot of us Ameriburgers willing to go fight to save West. But we have to be free to bring our arms.
“the culture born of the Enlightenment carries on”
But the Enlightenment was replaced by the Romantic Movement in the early 19th Century. Much of the art, philosophy and politics of the 19th and 20th Centuries is explicitly Romantic. Nazism and Fascism, for example.
The Romantics repudiated cold science and reason in favor of intuition and feeling: Beethoven vs. Bach.
And the cold rationalism of dialectical materialism didn’t work out, either.
Bob; Excellent point. As you say, European Romanticism, unrestrained from any higher, external standard of morality, particularly (but not only) German Romanticism, has done incalculable damage to Western Civilization. Of course, The Enlightenment had removing of those higher, external standards of human conduct as one of its main objectives. So The Enlightenment can hardly be let off the hook. Serious question, is European Romanticism even over_? ‘Post-Modernism’ is clearly a rejection of The Enlightenment, but is it really a rejection of Romanticism and it’s reliance on emotion, feelings and intuition_? I’d say that it’s pretty easy to link philosophical Romanticism… Read more »
In the context of religion and culture, Europe is now a cauldron competing forces and entities, each attempting to survive and thrive. Adaption to the extant environment is a key component (hence the different flavors), but root attributes and successful traits also play a major role. My guess is the patriarchy is severely underappreciated for it’s stabilizing role in society and also as a mechanism for conveying hard-earned wisdom from generation-to-generation. It is not religious dictum that is Islam’s strength, but perhaps it’s adherence to patriarchy.
The patriarchy is encoded and enforced in the religious dictums of Islam. If only the West had a great patriarchal religion that had been around a couple thousand years, if only Western people could adhere to and practice such a religion…
The Greeks kept their women in closets spinning yarn. Patriarchy didn’t help them.
Patriarchy doesn’t have to be authoritarian and abusive. It can be more about division of labor, separate family contribution spaces, efficient decision-making, and avoidance of needless conflict; all of which strength the family unit. No religion or culture does this perfectly, but some variant can be found in many successful and robust societies.
Hell, I might join the goat fuckers if I get to mow down a few thousand panty waisted liberals with an AK.
The Levant is not messed up because its the Levant and therefore diverse, its messed up because it was fought over for its favorable geographic position by empires starting with the Egyptians versus the Sumerians around 1500 BC. Want to invade Egypt? The only real route is through the Levant, which is the route the Hyksos took around 1600 or so. Want to invade Turkey and Europe from Sumeria or Iran? The only reasonable way is through the Levant, where you can find water year round, reasonable mountain passes, and a way into Turkey and thus Europe with reasonable mountain… Read more »
The Levant is indeed the “four corners” of human history.
Whiskey; Yes indeed, Palestine and the Levant have been the choke point geography connecting Africa, SW Asia and Europe throughout known human history. When I was in Israel some years back an Israeli was lamenting that G_d had given The Tribe some of the toughest territory in the world. As best I could, I pointed out that if one read (only) The Torah (first five books of the Christian Bible) it was pretty clear that, from the very start, *The Children of Israel* were supposed to be ‘a shining city on the hill’. So where better to do this_? His… Read more »
I don’t remember what Yogi Berra said about the future but whatever it is, I agree with it.
depressing
The sugar in today’s Levantine Petri dish:
The oil, of course.
Russian military in Syria
Israeli-Saudi-Hillary cooperation in ISIS
Saudi/Iranian faceoff in Hezbollah Lebanon and Houthi Yemen
They’re fighting for the huge Cyprus-to-Palestine offshore oil beds. (Levant)
And for access to the Suez, the maritime route for Qatari LNG and Iraqi offshore oil. (Yemen)
Plus, of course, Pipelinestan and the Belt
Of course I missed it.
Zman insists on proving to me every single day how truly ignorant and certainly stupid I really am
“The West is dead”. I’ve been trying not to think or say that for several years. I can no longer avoid the truth of the matter.
A simple way to put this- Europe’s great Colonies are falling. The first World empire is lost. Whither then, her people? Will there be a next Great Race? I see that Whiskey has answered. The Heartland- from whence we began. The fire rises. There, we will be forged into the brilliant sword, sharp as glass, bright as burnished steel, hard as diamond. Smart in all things, not the narrow autistic focus of the shattered Scribes or their Rapist brothers. Not the oversexed Breeders, the conformist Drones, the drifting Island People, nor the quiet Forest People. No, something Great. Great, and… Read more »
The fever bite of the Fleas eventually weakens hosts, many unto death- but the survivors emerge stronger.
None have strayed far, except one.
We shall once again resurrect the past, that all others forget- such a treasure trove, from these times!
The Explorers, the breakaway race, hardened yet benevolent (for only benevolence lasts), will surge outward, escaping the Nest, ever outward at last.
We are mites who live on the scum that floats on the surface of a liquid world, true- Yet the ants have retained their form, fighting and dying, for 200 million years or more. Should we hop from rock to rock, the rubble of our Oort cloud merges with the Oort of the next star over. Give it a thousand years more- or 10, or a million, mere blips in the stellar cycle- Who is to say that one day, the coded strains of memory locked into the DNA, in the eye cells of a descendent of a reader of… Read more »
I have a (poorly researched) idea that Nietzsche, with his beginning in pre Socratic thinkers, didn’t just kill God, he closed the Socratic era of western thought and took christianity with it.
Tyke; It should go without saying that any actual being that Nietzsche could actually kill (with mere words no less) is no god at all. But if there *is* a transcendent God, then something else is going on and it would be good to not count Him out just yet. IOW, God may well be done with Europe and maybe us too, but that doesn’t mean He’s done with human history. He’s apparently on the move in Russia and Asia, for example. It’s amusing to contemplate a Chinese Christian crusade to recover the Holy Land for Christendom as an example… Read more »
There are more Christians in China than there are people living in the United States.
Doc;
Thanks: My point precisely. I have talked to a number of missionaries to China (some of them Asians themselves) over the years. They report that telling native Chinese that Christianity is *not* a European religion (only) removes a serious stumbling block to them accepting Christ as their personal savior.
Not even close.
I suspect that Nietzsche, when he wasn’t busy trying to hold on to his sanity in the face of syphilitic mental decay, would have told you that God had been dead for some time and that he was merely eulogizing (with great sarcasm — a hammer, perhaps) Him. I was just watching a documentary, The Decent One, based on a recently discovered trove of Himmler’s letters. What struck me throughout the readings, was how lost these souls were. Like Nietzsche, they are always struggling with some burning shame, stomach ache, or blinding headache. The emotional and physical always seem linked… Read more »
Nietzsche lost his mind, IMHO, because of his belief in ‘the eternal return’. It makes sense, and anyone who believes as Nietzsche did would go crazy as well. The depressing element is that he might be right. His great fear was that he’d have to live the same life, over and over, forever: Recurrence to him was Hell. His view was this: The Universe goes through a life cycle, and collapses back to its preliminary conditions; being a Universe, it follows the specific laws of its own genesis and development, and replicates itself – again and again… which means we… Read more »
Professors trotting out the institutionalized Nietzsche for their students to show them what tertiary syphilis looked like is fairly well documented. Of course, they did not have the tests we have today, so their diagnosis may have been incorrect and I could very well be wrong. Given what I know about probability, quantum physics, and infinities, there could very well be an infinite number of me hunting and pecking these words across meta-time as you put it. But upon posting the comment, an infinity of me would go on to live very different lives, while another infinity of me would… Read more »
Christianity was slowly dying among the nobility, intellectual and merchant classes before he was born. These groups all wanted out from under the thumb of the Church to do as they pleased without any moral scold pointing fingers at their degeneracy and worship of mammon. If you wanted to point to when it started – the Reformation followed by the insane and bloody 30 years war. IMO would be a good reference point. Then the rise of state run churches or where the churchman walked hand in hand with the merchant and nobleman. Even after WWI and WWII the faith… Read more »
There’s a strong hunger among the young now for something transcendent to guide them. A lot of younger alt-right guys are drifting into Christianity, but of course they’re taking it on their own terms. Astrology is becoming a big thing too. A SJW tinged reading from an adept on September 6, the day after the Trump administration announced it was rescinding DACA included this: “The full moon in Pisces … may open the floodgates of our feelings. May help us to empathize with others … May we use this full moon to continue to dream up, and actively work toward,… Read more »
Rationality always comes at the end of a cultural cycle. Socrates and his crew we laughing at the commoners belief in the Greek gods, certainly the future would be rational. Then Greece was dominated by a gang that said they were descended from wolves.
It does not make for an interesting blog article, but I think it’s more likely that we are going to see a secularism spreading among the Muslims rather than mass conversions of the native population. Islam is a religion for losers.
I think the catalyst for that is going to be the downfall of mullahs in Teheran. They play the role Moscow played in the old commie days. Without them no more al qaeda or Muslim brotherhood
The Persians are an exogamous culture like the europeans and the don’t have the tribal family values islam normally resonates with. This is an observation that antropologist like Carl Salzman, Charles Lindholm and the israeli prof i arab culture Morderchai Kedar has come with and to the Persians islam has been a totalitarian ideology. Much of the muslim world are highly endogamous and islam has legitimacy because its resonates with these tribal family values. The Pakistani anthropologist and diplomat, Akbar Ahmed has analysed the speeches of Bin Ladan and they are directed against the attack on the family honor western… Read more »
Clannish Muslims that are coming to western Europe are economic migrants not invaders like before. Take away the benefits and they go back. Those who are a bit smarter are going the secular route if they wish to stay long term.
We have similar example – the Puritans. They left England for America rather than fighting to the last man.
The Great Schism here will really take off when northern blacks make a form of Islam their thing. Southron blacks, no. Too deep a Baptist embed. Then Latinos will follow into something softer, but different. More flexible, but united. Whites? Already becoming two seperate nations, with their own languages. The urbans will have the Jewish ruling caste, and proceed accordingly, following a pattern thousands of years old. There is where the post-national structures are found. Jove bless us. Now I want to live not a hundred years, but a thousand. Imagine the epic stories, the sheer history, from What Is… Read more »
After observing blacks in the prison system for a very long time, I’ve noticed that they take to militant Islam like ducks to water. To be quite honest Black Muslims are a state sanctioned prison gang.
Nope, blacks here in the deep South also dig Islam, (once they learn about it), too.
It’s the top prison religion, and prison time is gonna happen to the vast majority of the Southern bros.
TL;DR eat fuck drink, to hell with everything and the next generations? Sucks to be you. I’ll choose fire thank you over goat bothering
Much of Islam’s ideology is a vast improvement over our current post-rational progressive religion. Conversion wouldn’t be so bad if we did not have to accept the Islamic people.
If given a choice between Poz and Caliphate, I choose the Caliphate. Islam is a collective of primitive tribal nonsense, and i would like to drive it into the sea but its cleaner than Poz.
My problem with Mohammedanism is that it is a religion for slaves. At its best it might produce well-behaved, sober people, but it has no soul, it rejects personal autonomy. The choice between it and our current degeneracy is a false choice. Classic western thought – secular or religious – contains everything the lonely soul needs to find anchorage.
I’m a Christian, but give me a choice between fighting next to Sam Harris or Ibn Muhammad O’Mally or whoever – I’ll stand with Harris; he’s not ungrounded, after all: We’re both westerners.
It’s the only belief system extant that explicitly calls for human sacrifice. You are a fool.