The great British biologist J.B.S Haldane said that fanaticism was one of mankind’s greatest inventions. By “fanaticism” he meant the burning desire to save mankind from some imagined evil. The fanatic is not just trying to help his fellow man. He feels as if it is his purpose, his reason to exists. Therefore, he will die in his effort to reach his goal, as to give up on his quest or accept defeat would be no different than denying the reason for his existence. To die trying fulfills his purpose.
Haldane credited this to monotheism. If there is one god, then no people could be favored by one god over another. All men were the creation of one god and therefore of equal importance. This leads to the great battle to decide who has the correct understanding of God’s desire for mankind. The only way to know this is to do whatever is necessary in order to bring your understanding of god’s will into being. Fanaticism therefore was the great molder of human history for the last 5,000 years.
Of course, Haldane was a fanatic himself. He was a foaming at the mouth atheist, as they tend to be, so blaming the belief in God, especially Christianity, was a natural instinct for him. A central tenet of atheism is that if man drops the superstition about invisible men in the sky, they will stop trying to impose their beliefs on one another and thus a new post-God era can begin. Mankind will be driven by reason and the underlying facts of natural reality. Logic will be the religion of man.
This is nonsense, of course, but Haldane was not wrong about fanaticism. It is a great mover of history. Where he got things wrong was in thinking monotheism was the root of human desire to save mankind. Instead it was egalitarianism, the idea that all men are naturally equal and therefore naturally worthy. This did not require the belief in one god, as we see today with our humanistic fanatics. The modern intellectual is as indifferent to God as he is committed to belief that all men are equal.
An example of this comes from the legacy site National Review. This piece argues that the coronavirus is the great leveler. Mother nature is reminding the world that all men are equal in her eyes. Because, in theory, rich people can get the virus and die, it proves the fundamental equality of mankind. Time will tell on that score, but most likely the smart and rich will do better in this than the poor and stupid. That’s because Mother Nature does not distribute her gifts equally.
Of course, if this virus turns out to be the scourge of the poor or the great killer of the stupid, the egalitarians will have an answer for that as well. As the author of the piece says, it will be due to the rich and smart taking precautions to insulate themselves from the virus. For the egalitarian fanatic, there is always some behavioral reason to explain why one group does better than another. The equality of man is the beginning and the end, the alpha and omega, of their thinking.
A great driver of history is the belief that if only everyone would do things the way they should do them, then the human condition can be overcome. It is not the only driver, for sure, as not everyone has bought into egalitarianism. In fact, egalitarianism was, for the longest time, an exclusive belief. The tribe, nation or people knew they were equal before god, but those other people, well, not so much. Conquering them and taking their stuff was fine, as it was good for your people.
In recent years, this thirst for universal equality has turned into a weird cargo cult, where simply making people appear equal will cause universal equality to spring forth. You see a bit of that in the National Review post. The author seems to be hoping the virus is a great plague that hits the elites as hard as everyone. In the midst of the suffering, so the thinking goes, everyone will suddenly embrace the equality of man. Only a fanatic can believe that he not so subtly hopes for a plague.
In fact, disaster, man-made or natural, is proof that egalitarianism is rooted in our biology, or at least in the biology of some. The great destruction of man’s creation, the bodies stacked upon one another, a scene seen in every age by every generation, has not purged this instinct from our being. There’s no reasoning with a fanatic and there is not reasoning with an egalitarian. They are immune to reality. They see only that which confirms their belief that all men are created equal.
It is why, by the way, Africa is getting a good leaving alone in the pandemic chatter. They were all revved up a month ago to display their sorrow for the poor Africans, who would surely suffer the worst from this virus. This has not happened, so the egalitarians are busy editing on-line maps to remove the whole continent from our vision. Any discussion of why some groups have done better or worse is prohibited, even by the human bio-diversity crowd. Egalitarianism is powerful magic.
It is a good reminder that whatever comes out of the other side of this pandemic, the egalitarian will still be with us. No amount of reality can dissuade him. If he can see a man in a sundress as just another one of the gals, not even the complete failure of the system built on the dream of equality will dissuade him. He will be right back at it, picking through the rubble for signs that all men are equal. Egalitarianism is man’s greatest invention, a doomsday device we cannot disarm.
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The viewpoint about eglitarianism in this writing, is a good example of black and white thinking.
It is not so important how the globalist door is kicked down.
What is important is who walks through it.
The memes in an election year ought to come in around 6th grade level. Metaphysics can wait until the odd years.
Nobody not already convinced one way or the other has time for or cares about liberalism.
The Haldanes were an interesting clan. A few examples:
“as the biologist J. B. S. Haldane once famously observed: “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose.”
Jack Haldane was the genius son of the brilliant scientist John Scott Haldane. “At the age of three, he was overheard demanding peevishly of his father : ‘But is it oxyhaemoglobin or carboxyhaemoglobin ?’ “. He went on to become the world’s expert on depression chambers for submariners and divers. [YMMV – the three-year-old part sounds like sheep-sh*t to me]
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything
From age eight he [Jack] worked with his father in their home laboratory where he experienced his first self-experimentation, the method he would later be famous for. He and his father became their own “human guinea pigs”, such as in their investigation on the effects of poison gases. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._B._S._Haldane
Skin in the game.
JBS also claimed descent from Robert the Bruce – what True Scotsman doesn’t?
Antiglobalism may well stake the hearts of those vampires reigning over us.
Once you infect someone with the virus of antiglobalism, noticing the usual suspects is often only a problematic detail.
At this point, antiglobalism is de facto prowhite, and a far easier pitch to make than muh facts and logic.
All of the more countersemitic factions have decided that now is the time to engage in rhetorical fratricide. Not the sort of behavior one would expect from people resisting demographic replacement.
The cringe takes of folks just now showing up are actually something I warm my hands over.
Article of the day:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/06/science/tiger-cats-coronavirus.html
It had a “dry cough.” So many underlying issues with this. Was the tiger practicing social distancing? How the hell did it get it? It really ices the cake on this whole spectacle. It’s great to know that zoo animals have access to such great health care. Maybe they can bring the thing onto that hospital ship.
Sorry, no time, thanks to opening my fat gob, but re contradictions and examining my premise:
My starting premise is that the premise of One or None is erroneous, which leads us to another false box: that the God created us.
No. No. That’s entirely backwards.
Now for another contradiction:
The believers are right, yet also wrong.
There’s More- but they have no idea how it works. Because of that backwards First Premise.
Stop the Presses! Woody Harrelson believes that 5G causes Coronavirus. I guess we’re going to have to rip down all those new 5G towers to flatten the curve. After all, if we can save “even one life” from the virus, isn’t it worth ripping down a trillion dollars worth of new infrastructure?
In some bizarre way I see a Jeffrey Epstein tie to this virus madness. The Epstein suicide was perceived by a huge swath of people, regardless of politics, to be a hit job by the wealthiest .001% on a guy in a prison cell who had the goods on them. While this can’t be dismissed outright, a critical thinker would say that there’s a higher likelihood that a degenerate pervert, who lived most of his life in pleasure palaces, couldn’t take prison for even one day, and through an incompetent bureaucracy, was indeed able to off himself. The cameras likely hardly ever worked, as it was government equipment, just like if you have to use a drinking fountain in a public building that trickles into the drain without streaming. Fast forward to today, a huge swath of public being alarmed by a failed bureaucracy on a flu, goes into a panic. We’re told not to question Fauci because he’s been in charge of the NIH since 1984! The tenure alone is supposed to speak to competence, when the opposite is true. Anyone who parks himself in a job like that since The A Team was on TV, as a lord of official nationwide health (as the opioid epidemic raged under his watch) suddenly gets a hold of sweet power, and his sleepy, incompetent agency swings into action like a bunch of Barney Fifes handling a gun. This is something that should have given us pause. Instead we inhaled his BS, and now the suicides alone from ruined business owners will crush that virus stats. The country is almost completely devoid of critical thinking skills.
Okay, the cameras hardly ever worked because incompetence. Okay, the guards were incompetently absent. Okay, the whatsis bone in Epstein’s throat was broken consistent with homicidal strangulation because he was an incompetent suicider. Okay, Epstein’s jailhouse companion swears Epstein was not depressed, but the companion was incompetently empathetic. How many coincidental incompetencies would it take to make you go “hmm”?
Bravo.
To an agnostic, listening to atheists try to prove a negative proposition is just as amusing as listening to fundamentalists try to explain dinosaur fossils.
And, science did answer all my Questions, including the meaning of life, that’s why I’m a very religious atheist.
Because the religious have no idea, they don’t even know what they’re reading.
I was compelled to know.
And they had no answers. None.
They couldn’t give a straight answer to one frelking thing.
Darn tootin’ I was miffed.
Not at the attempt or decency, but at the sheer gall. Go ahead, make my day- answer one.
Just one.
Haldane is subject to honest critcism, as thezman has actually pointed out, for being the pot that calls the kettle black — not necessarily for being wrong about what he posited, in and of itself. There clearly is at least some overlap between fanaticism arising from monotheistic and fanaticism arising from egalitarianism.
Specifically in our current American context, all too many of our intellectuals who have gone unhinged crazy fanatic were born into, raised in, and are steeped in the monotheistic tradition and philosophical world view, in particular the protestant sects that fall within what thezman has referred to as yankee puritanism. This is every bit as true as those (almost all these days) who are too “sophisticated” for believe in God; I would say it’s especially true of this type in that they are the most like the actual 17th century New England puritan fanatics, in actual words and deeds, and strikingly so.
I am aware of this, I know this, simply because I have known and had to deal with too many individuals of this type throughout my life. And make no mistake about it; this includes National Review types and others of the so-called “right” every bit as much as the coo-coo for co-co puffs D-party lunatics of the “resistance” (and everything in between as well). They get tiring and tedious. All of them. They did a long time ago, and this is why I immediately see this whenever it manifests, which now is all the time, all day every day. And yes the ones preaching and pontificating on the bad cold that is going around really do want it to be a plague. Fortunately, they’re in for a big disappointment, at least this time.
And so we’re left with some combination of monotheism gone off the rails with egalitarianism gone off the rails. I really don’t know how large the overlap is and how much of it is of necessity and so always present. I simply know from too much life experience that the overlap is very real, and specifically identifiable, even though my knowledge is (by definition) anecdotal. It is very real, and now they all get to apply their very real craft to a bad cold, and one that has somehow erupted/been fanned into a literally psychotic and hysterical panic on a global scale. It is said that “may you live in interesting times” is a curse. Now I understand why.
Please tell me if fanaticism is an innate trait, or is learned behavior. And no guessing!
Does not egalitarianism and universalism share the same need? Dostoevsky made this declaration about universalism–“Mankind as a whole has always striven to organize a universal state. There have been many great nations with great histories, but the more highly they were developed the more unhappy they were, for they felt more acutely than other people the craving for world-wide union. Even the great conquerors, Timors and Ghenghis-Khans, whirled like hurricanes over the face of the earth trying to subdue its people, and they too were but unconscious expressions of the same craving for universal unity.”
So Universalism is inborn. The tribe over the hill should be the same as ours because the dissimilar is a threat. Equality however has it’s virtues and does not become a pathogen until it is as one with democracy.
OT NEWSFLASH: British PM Boris Johnson moved to intensive care after his condition deteriorates.
Boris Johnson contemplates his political survival in a non-NHS, private hospital under lock and key, as his career will be vaporized once the costs of lockdown are apparent.
This tiresome “One God or No God” crap is exactly what Juri was talking about when he mentioned “Communism and Capitalism”.
J-created words, Orwellian Newspeak.
We’re so busy arguing the definition of the dialectic that we can’t see what is actually happening.
Our very speech prevents us from forming a different concept.
daughter is at MEP today
I think the central tenent of atheism is to hijack every gol-dang thread so they can talk about the gol-dang flying spaghetti monster. Similar disease afflicts vegetarians, dunno why.
Junger is an interesting case. I read his “Tribe” book, which suffered, iirc, from the Rusty Reno problem of being able perceptively to identify and catalogue a problem and then recommend absurd non-solutions to it. In that case, when discussing the suicide of veterans, he identifies the lack of tribe for these men as a cause and recommends creating fake tribes for them.
There is a kind of conservative mentality that wants to unravel half the sweater.
“Similar disease afflicts vegetarians, dunno why.”
In case that wasn’t rhetorical, I suspect deep underlying insecurity about their own choices. The constant talking about it and belittling others who do not share their position is really to reassure themselves, not to convince others. In the same vein, I know some deeply religious persons (for whom I have great personal respect even though I personally have zero religiosity), and none of them go about asking “Do you believe in God [or whatever]?” They are secure in their faith. And good for them.
I don’t go around asking people “Do you believe in gravity?” FFS. As to being personally without religious impulse, I suspect it’s like colorblindness or tone-deafness on my part, given how incredibly prevalent religiosity is.
Or the fit. Its possible, even quite likely, that physical fitness (both bodybuilding and aerobic) may be more a determinant of survivability than either being wealthy or intelligent (in the absence of being smart enough to do life-long fitness). Its likely that obesity and just being generally out of shape is the single biggest risk factor for COVID-19?
What are the egalitarians going to do about that? Is there really anything they could do about it, other than shout and scream like they do about everything else?
a person’s level of fitness directly correlates with their expected mortality. even just having a strong grip indicates improved mortality rates.
Precisely. What do the egalitarians have to say about that?
ask Harrison Bergeron 🙂
SoCal MLK Appreciation Weekend H8’ers – site is up for beta, registration only. I’ll post the URL here publicly after we test-drive for awhile.
Dissidents will get more of what we tolerate. Let the delusional operate on their own dime and their own time. We are better served by insulating ourselves from their psychosis. No is a perfectly acceptable answer. God luck keeping these parasites off of us. They cannot exist without us. Go Galt if you can. That idea is more common sense than objectivist thinking.
“There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. We can roll the image, make it flutter. We can change the focus to a soft blur, or sharpen it to crystal clarity. For the next hour, sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear. We repeat: There is nothing wrong with your television set. You are about to participate in a great adventure. You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to… The Outer Limits.“
If you (the individual) think it’s impossible to know everything, you have faith. If you think it’s possible, you lack faith. What you do with that is up to you.
Even though I think he is a closet Papist 🙂 Zman correct faults the atheist (indeed, the comment can apply more broadly…) who says that if everyone could drop their silly faith in the supernatural, they would learn to think rationally. The goal is correct up to a point, but I critique it thusly: The hidden (wrong) assumption in the atheist imagines is that people think in two distinct ways: either they are mindless believers in the invisible guy in the sky OR they are cold-blooded rationalists that would do Spock proud. This is (probably) fallacy of the false dichotomy. The dream of Randian idealists for a perfect world ruled by clear thinking and scientific achievement (this idealism, the 1950s dream of progress, was artfully showcased in the words of Donald Fagen’s 1982 album “The Nightfly”) is the faith that all human irrationality would vanish; Their envisioned utopia is only a trace less ludicrous and out of reach than the competing phantasmagoric heavens of normal religions.
In one sense the argument is correct, that you have the choice to think rationally or not-rationally. But the separation is not all-or-nothing. There is an infinite gradation (mixing) of those two things. For example, consider intuition or instinct.
Furthermore, the “non-rational” area is very large, and contains certainly more than religious belief. Counter-example: hmmm….here’s a poor attempt. I can be atheist (disbelieve there is a god) but still believe that my cats are super-intelligent beings who secretly spy on me and report back to their home planet…
Atheism gets a bad rap. If you think about it, its main fault is a dogmatic assertion that at bottom is just as unprovable as the contrary assertion of the Theist. What IS apparent is the danger that dogma can cause, fanaticism at the extreme leads to Martyr. If someone is willing to die for his faith, that is his choice. I object when he damages others in the process. Finally, just because you’re officially Atheist, doesn’t mean that you can’t be a de-facto religion and cause the deaths of millions. Soviet communism is a good example, probably not the only one. And, according to my “Cliff notes” knowledge of history, there were a lot of willing volunteers who went to their deaths, so genuine faith or successful indoctrination by the power?
IMO “its main fault” is that I have yet to meet an athiest that isn’t annoying as fuck – that doesn’t send me texts with anti-Christian memes once they find out I am a churchgoer …. that doesn’t blurt out stupid, smug shit like, “you believe in gawd, dude?!?” ….
… I could go on.
Yeah, and here’s the important thing. Atheists don’t have no songs. Well, except for “Imagine”.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xmwAD7nHqaY
“Imagine” that…
“Atheists don’t have no songs. Well, except for ‘Imagine'”.
For which they should be banished from polite society, if not tortured.
For the most part, ecumenical monotheism is a function of Christianity. Therefore, it has been with us a little over 2,000 years rather than 5,000. And this fact destroys Haldane’s argument inasmuch as there was a great deal of human misery before the advent of Jesus Christ.
what really invalidates the theory Haldane pulled out of his cat’s ass, is the fact that people can become fanatical about anything, not specifically religion. And they can change targets of obsession too. if you couple a charismatic leader, that evokes the fanatic tendency, with a large group of followers, you are going to be able to overwhelm any group lacking that condition. Like the Neanderthals…
Exactly. That’s another way of saying what I was saying. Ecumenical monotheism didn’t exist before Christ, but to say fanaticism didn’t is preposterous. And, at any rate, fanaticism is hardly a prerequisite for human suffering anyway.
Zoroastrianism? Honest question.
Re: fanatacism, “Do or do not. There is no try.” Newsflash: the Jedi failed. The poz prevailed over the force. I guess there weren’t enough midichlorians to go around…
Funny enough I was watching something the other day hypothesizing that Star Wars was an allegory on the Jewish revolt in 69AD and the destruction of the Roman empire written from the Jewish Perspective.
Strange how these things make it into our culture?
Hmmm. Is there hollywierd entertainment that isn’t written from “the perspective” of the stated? Passion of the Christ, mayhaps?
And look what they did to Mel,
C.mon man! <- my Biden imitation
Lucas took bits and pieces from multiple sources; The Hidden Fortress and The Hero with 1000 Faces in particular. He has also explicitly said it was a vietnam allegory, with the Rebel Alliance representing the Vietcong.
Personally, I have always thought Star Wars was a dumbed-down Dune; a simplified, cannabis induced plagiarism. Think about it: Desert planet, Galactic Empire, chosen savior of the universe, Force replaces Spice, which probably seemed too…ah, mercantile.
yah, he took from Dune too. Imperial Troopers are analogs of Sardaukar.
Not at all. It is (((They))) who control the media and this includes the movie industry. Their influence extends across the Galaxy 😀
Our one hope lies in our secret weapon that renders them powerless:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYX4iGOjR50
Garlic?
Egalitarian atheism is an oxymoron. Egalitarianism requires the negation of all nature and all history. It is superstition carried to the extreme.
I just wished there was a way to get rulers who would dish out penalties for this voodoo.
When the liberal puritan whites declare us sane white men racist for opposing say Chinese immigration and the black nut job leader agrees with the white nut job liberal then it sure would be nice if our leader would say
Ok we import Chinese then. And move the entire Chinese population right in the middle of black town.
Maybe they don’t take up the whitey nut job ideas quite so easily next time.
Or when the Indians say we won’t give you the life saving drug you need?
(Search Bloomberg News for the article)
Send Pajeet and his job grabbing buddies back to live in India.
We gotta get to the point where we dish our punishment for this nonsense.
The conspiracy-theorist is another stripe of fanatic. Once a man takes a draft of the conspiracy brew, no amount of reason or evidence can reach him. Even dialogue is futile.
Religion, like energy is never destroyed, it merely changes form. What the True Believer really fears is that the world is chaotic and random and that nobody is in control. So they seek assurance that there is a plan, there is order. If God is not up there pulling the strings, then it must be the illuminati. Someone MUST be pulling them.
Many people find it hard to live with randomness and uncertainty. They must have answers. There must be a plan. This cannot be all there is.
King Tut – In the past I would have agreed with you. My husband still trots out the old “Never attribute to malice” line (this covid panic and the plethora of evidence that it has been deliberately exacerbated has him a lot more skeptical of everything than before). While I can agree there are some who feel a deep need to have everything being due to order or string pullers, I think that leaves a lot of folks out. I was the original conspiracy skeptic going back to grade school, and my experience with the State Dept. only reinforced the sense that “these people are too stupid to have organized ‘x’ hoax.” But the last decade or so, with all the info that has come out, I am far more open to believing all sorts of things were hoaxes or deliberate and there have been (((certain))) string pullers behind a ton of historical events. I still believe the moon landing happened, but at this point, given another decade, who knows?
There is no scientific evidence supporting the theory we were created randomly, so it is quite natural we do not believe in randomness without meaning.
I can’t for the life of me understand why they are still called “conspiracy theories.” All these efforts to undermine our country and turn us into a gynocracy controlled by the corporations look like they’re pretty out in the open to me.
I think Haldane’s bit was that the beetles shall inherit the Earth.
I cannot “Imagine” that.
Beetles
https://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=2490
I still maintain that the final cause of our present madness is increased social neuroticism, which I define as fear of potential or hypothetical threats rather those evident or imminent. A virus is tailor-made (heh) to exploit neuroses. In a different age, it would have been “evil spirits”.
Neurotics have always been with us, but we have not always given them such attention or influence. Only in the last century, cohencident with the tenure of the 19th Amendment, has our public policy given credence to what we would have once dismissed as literal hysteria.
It’s Woody Allen’s world. We are all just living in it.
Women’s suffrage was our biggest single misstep and a huge reason why it’s likely impossible to reform Western democracies under their existing systems. Once you hand someone power, they don’t give it back unless you make it worth their while.
The ancients rarely left women socially powerless. They had their own spheres of influence, expertise and power, but like our physical nature, those roles were dimorphic, not a partnership of alleged equals, certainly not a “competition.”
We’ll need to hold out some carrots as well as sticks for wahmens to buy into Our Thing in the necessary numbers to keep us strong, offering them distinct roles where they can exercise bio-culturally appropriate authority in things like child-rearing and some aspects of education, for example.
I used to believe that men’s historical leadership role was due to physical strength, and became obsolete when strength became a commodity, and intelligence became the new strength. Now I wonder, though, if all those millennia in power gave men a biological leadership advantage that women (on average) do not possess.
Women are biologically programmed to be neurotic so as to be hep to threats to their young and keep them alive. Perhaps fifty thousand years of not raising children might begin to chip away at that. Until then, you men need to take control back and keep it.
Woody Allen, neuroticism, gynocracy… you’re onto it.
“Haldane credited this to monotheism. If there is one god, then no people could be favored by one god over another.”
This is not how it works, jews and our ruling class believe that only their God is real and has favored the Tribe effectively making them the ruling elite of this world
“Chosen” is the One Weird Trick that the Tribe uses to hack Christians and it still works very well. That’s a big reason why I’m skeptical of Christianity-first political dissidents. It takes a mighty re-working of the scriptures to un-Choose the Chosen, usually requiring an egaliatarian revolutionary Christ that strikes too many as the Commie version ala Liberation Theology.
TradChristians are on the horns of a dilemma unless and until they take upon themselves the responsibility of reinterpreting scripture and rejecting the dogma that’s Browning what’s left of the Church and ultimately killing it.
Exile, my recent listening and readings of the scripture (this being Lent season), I have been doing so in light of perhaps Christianity being “owned” by the Old Testament people. That Christianity was perhaps not so much a “breaking away” or “seeing a new light” as instead a “capture”, which meshes nicely with your comment. Give those renegades some rope to hang themselves with…or maybe some nails, pieces of wood and a crown of thorns.
Not to say that Christianity has not done a lot of good over the centuries for our kind and ours, but there is this weird “elder statesman” or “parental” vibe when rabbis mix with Christians at certain events. It all seems of a piece, and for me, once seen, cannot be unseen.
Dutch, one example was “The God Squad,” consisting of Rabbi Marc Gellman and Monsignor Tom Hartman.
One of my college profs, a liberal Protestant minister, proudly referred to himself as an “Ecumaniac.” He was the only Protestant in the Religious Studies department.
Dutch, if I were the guy tasked with “de-Judaifying” Christianity today, I’d start by demonizing the Old Testament – nothing new there, it’s an old approach. Make it clear that Christ was a clean break and Jews killed him for it. As for the universalist rhetoric, we simply de-emphasize it and push it into the realm of far-future theological speculation (e.g. await the Second Coming for that) and/or be Talmudic with the definition of “mankind.” Lots of ways to skin that goat.
It’s been done before and it can be again, but Christians have to take the first steps on that.
InB4 someone says “but Scripture clearly says…”
Leviticus isn’t equivocal about sodomites and Timothy isn’t equivocal about headship and wahmens but modern Christianity is still cucked on both.
Check out this nugget of Xrl Talmudry re: “headship”
https://www.cbeinternational.org/resources/article/priscilla-papers/historian-looks-1-timothy-211-14
There are Christian’s out there whom are non Catholic trads but aware that the Jews of today are not the chosen people.
There just aren’t very many of us.
The Scofield Bible project and dispensationalism has so infected protestant Christianity including guys like Pence and Pompeo that it basically is like they take a vaccine that prevents them from seeing any Jewish elite as dangerous.
The chosen people mantra is a powerful force in modern Christianity.
Not sure it’s easily defeated?
It’s being chipped away at but it’s still very powerful.
OTH, most evangelicals I know believe Jews are going to hell.
When they were slapping together the undergirdings of what was to become the Christian Church in the second and third centuries, there was a movement to weave the core teachings of Christ into the Greek Mystery religions instead of the mythology of the shitty little tribe that was stealing and claiming the cultures of actual extant groups who had had coherent cultures for the past couple of millennia.
It beggars belief that supposedly sane people believe the crap about, say, wandering around for forty years in a desert about the size of a Walmart parking lot.
” un-Choose the Chosen”
General question, not just for Exlie.
Is this why the whole “Ashkenazi are really Khazars” thing? So people can continue to venerate the biblical Israelites while hating modern-day Jews? If so, makes little sense to me. So far as I can tell, the biblical Israelites were not at all pleasant people. Certainly not anyone you’d want to move into your neighborhood.
Mike I’ve seen a few variations on that play. “The Rebbe” likes to make the “biblical Temple Jews v. post-Temple Talmud Rabbinical Jews” distinction. Many if not most “based” Christian anti-Semites I’ve seen do something like that or the Kazar shuffle to separate “good” from “bad” Jews. As far as I can tell, it’s all pretty thinly-sourced at best.
There’s a real-world distinction we’ve often noted here between Ashkepaths, Mizrahi and Sephardim, as well as ultra-orthodox, but it’s an internal Jewish thing. Poke your under-size nose into that dispute and they’ll lock shields and rain down oy-gevalt on you.
We don’t need any of the Twelve Tribes in our nations and if any are lost, let them stay that way. Aliyah means goodbye and good riddance.
Exile, Jesus is the new covenant, and the Jews by and large rejected Him. The Greeks and Romans (and later Germanics) assumed the mantle by accepting Him. The OT is of historical interest but null and void. Problem solved!
There has always been a lot of “egalitarianism for thee, but not for me” going around…
Decades ago it started as equality of Opportunity. As a kid we were taught we should observe equal access to jobs and housing-Rumford Fair Housing. Yet we also saw no one wanted the fat kid on the baseball team for good reason and later we wondered why we didn’t have freedom of association, why did the neighbors have to rent to that loser and then live next to me. Equal Opportunity morphed rapidly into Equal Outcome and egalitarianism was born. It was a trope devised by my commie parents’ people to shapshift into the new state religion and quickly brought along the weirdos, freaks, lonely wound-up drunk-cat crap wine wahmyn into the religious fold and gave them zealotry. It worked.
It’s latest incarnation is men in women’s restrooms.
If there is anywhere in the world where the herd needs culling, it is Africa. In our desire to ease suffering, we have used our advanced agricultural techniques to end starvation in Africa and caused a population explosion that the Africans cannot possibly support without a lot of outside help. In our desire to end suffering we just ensured a much larger amount of suffering without indefinite ongoing support.
The kvetching and oy veying about the suffering should we ever stop feeding the Africans will be deafening.
The Green Revolution was a catastrophe. Population growth is pretty much stagnant everywhere except Africa and the Middle East, and without the Green Revolution the combined population of these two would probably have remained in the low couple hundred millions instead of the current billions.
It’s easy to criticize the Green Revolution in hindsight, though, since it was undertaken at a time when some hunger and malnutrition was still present in the first world.
Throughout history, whenever a people outgrew their territory, they migrated into neighboring territory for lebensraum. The Green Revolution, combined with the disorder fomented by the “intelligence community” and NGOs in Africa and west Asia, fueled the current population migrations and will render Europe extinct in a generation or two.
Let’s not be too hard on previous generations. Remember this was in the mid-20th century, arguably the pinnacle of Western culture, if not necessarily technology: this was at least for the USA and allies, the recent triumph of the West in WWII, the clear superiority of the Western way, strong in economy and might, etc. There was so much optimism that sober people thought, for example, that other races could be made the equals of the White. Look at all the efforts in Africa to do so in their colonies. Much of this had faded by mid-century, but social movements (civil rights) bloomed in 50s and 60s. Equal opportunity, more, but equal outcomes … very few.
Persisting into the Kissinger administration and its daft idea that it could control China once it midwived it into the 20th century.
Don’t forget the crime against what was left of American manufacturing that Bush junior committed letting them into the WTO.
The tribe had the idea that the Chinese were going to allow them into their society once they got done bleeding us dry. The Chinese have utterly rejected them.
“The Chinese have utterly rejected them.”
Which is why my tinfoil hat says that IF our current unpleasantness is not solely due to Chinese sloppiness (which is probably is) then it is not a coincidence that China is broken* over this, and Iran seems to have been hit especially hard. Who benefits most from these?
*yes, broken. Like a guy stabbed in the middle of a fight, China is still flailing about, but only because the brain hasn’t yet realized how badly the body’s been hurt.
You think the West has triumphed in WWII???
That’s an interesting philosophical question now, innit? If big man Obongo subdues his opponents and thus gets first choice of the bushmeat and pombe*, who is the real winner? The lordly Obongo, or his tapeworm? Hmmmm.
*pombe – millet beer, as consumed in large swathes of SS Africa. The Wiki page on pombe has a photo of an African man in presumably traditional garb drinking his pombe through a straw. Fine, but for some reason Wiki selected a photo that features a little blonde girl (wearing a string of pearls, yet) in it.
The thing that brought that home for me was the quote to the effect that Africa was a continent with 100m people that can’t feed itself and after all the aid from the west is now a continent of 1.5 billion that can’t feed itself.
If you look at the population projections even earlier this century it was essentially flat from the 12th century until colonialism and then accelerated away due to foreign aid intenvention after that era ended.
I dearly wish we could divest ourselves of the responsibility to feed and clothe our African wards but, since they will never grow up, I wager that our burden will not be lifted any time soon.
It looked for a while as if the white man’s burden was going to be assumed by the yellow man but I doubt they feel any sense of obligation in this regard. What’s Mandarin for “are there no workhouses?”.
As long as the Ghost of Colonialism Past continues to rattle its chains around our salons, Tiny Tunde will get a turkey to eat at Kwanzaa.
“It looked for a while as if the white man’s burden was going to be assumed by the yellow man but I doubt they feel any sense of obligation in this regard.”
It’s why the sudden resurgence of reparations and Antisemitism bullshit in the US,
It’s dawning on the parasites that the Hispanics in the US don’t give a shit about the Blacks and Jews and globally nor do the Han Chinese.
Gotta milk honkey while he’s still around.
Agreed.
Trust me, so far as the Chinese are concerned about MENA, sub-Saharan Africa, and Xinjiang, it’s “Sha Hui-ze, sha hou-ze” (=kill the Muslims, kill the monkeys*). And while there is some respect for Jews being “a scholarly people of great antiquity” (because the Chinese view themselves as a scholarly people of great antiquity), Holocaustianity leaves the Chinaman profoundly unmoved.
*The phrase is alliterative in both Mandarin and English. Bilingual skald-ery!
What burden? Set them free!
Here is the McHungus Theory of Fanaticism. The human brain responds to intensity, far more so than sustained elevated rates of feeling. In fact, under latter conditions, the ability to sense intense feelings is chemically dialed back. Hence diminishing returns for addicts. Now look at lab monkeys hitting the bar that (sometimes) dispenses cocaine into their brains 10k, 30k (somewhere in there) between hits. If given unlimited cocaine, they stop drinking water and eating.
A fanatic is a junkie, always chasing that initial ecstatic moment (that made them a fanatic). Hence the increased violence as time goes on, and purity purges. the fanatic gets off on killing and isn’t fussy on who they do. In fact, killing your colleagues is probably more of a transgressive thrill than killing ‘others’. Especially after you have already killed a bunch of ‘others’.
Alternatively, not ecstasy but pain. Chasing the relief from pain the first hit gave, or pain not dealt with festering. Pain shrinks consciousness. Fanatics are wretched souls.
Unfortunately that weird cargo cult of universal equality is now firmly entrenched as our ruling principle. And since it means a denial of racial differences, when blacks under-perform relative to whites, it means whites will exhaust wealth and energy in a hopeless and never-ending effort to bring blacks up to par with whites. It also means the continuing promotion of intermarriage and the continuing dispossession of whites from our home. It never ends, pandemic or not.
Since the leftists made their #1 man, a guy that put into the public record, ““It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is”…. perhaps they can find room to open the term “men” to definition.
As in, “all men are created equal” ….
Getting egalitarianism classified as a mental disorder, and starting to pack people off to mental hospitals for it, would be the ultimate counter-Semitic move.
Careful what you wish for. Religious belief was considered a mental illness in Soviet Union (good that they respected citizen’s rights and all…) 😀 and has come close to being defined so here in Der West but only when it’s a “disorder” of course.
A significant chunk of atheists are at least as fanatical and intractable as a snake-handlin’, King James Bible totin’ Kentucky Primitive Baptist. They are somewhere in the same category as runners and vegans with assuming everyone wants to know they are atheists and why. Spoiler: we don’t care.
Runners…? Seriously? Cyclists, I get because I am one and they can be douches, but…runners? Legit curious – what do they do that’s so obnoxious?
Sean, are “26.2” and “13.1” stickers common in Japan?
I don’t have any (non-mandatory) stickers on my car, but I’ve been very tempted to get one that says “2.62” — note the decimal place location.
That said, in the annals of athletic douchebaggery, surely CrossFitters rank above runners. And cyclists. (I was going to say that roadie douchebaggery > off-road douchebaggery, but thinking back on my road and my dirt days, the total shitheadedness was conserved across branches of cycling, it just took different forms. And don’t get me started on the ‘cross purists….)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyil4IGAvVs
Here is Oregon there are only classes of people allowed to ride bikes. One is hobos and people who’ve lost their licence for repeated DUIs. You can usually tell these people by their lack of a helmet. The other is people showing just how devout they are in the climate change religion. If you work with these people they will make sure to let you know about just how much world-saving they do everyday weaving in and out of traffic. Some of them help you out if you’re a little slow by wearing their ultra-tight cycling clothes to work and carrying their helmets around just so you don’t miss the world-saving.
There are also militant cycling groups who are sort of 2 wheeled antifa. They hold rallies where they deliberately block traffic and just generally act like entitled shits. These people will have you asking “where are the Hell’s Angels when you need them?”
In Soviet block during communism although the church and Christian religion were suppressed/marginalized they were not prosecuted to the point of being burned for their heresy
On the other hand no other dogma was tolerated In Christian domains
(Not even other Christian sects)
Look what happened to Huguenots in France as an example of fanaticism par excellence
Heresy? From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Orthodox_Church
“The sixth sector of the OGPU, led by Yevgeny Tuchkov, began aggressively arresting and executing bishops, priests, and devout worshippers, such as Metropolitan Veniamin in Petrograd in 1922 for refusing to accede to the demand to hand in church valuables (including sacred relics). In the time between 1927 and 1940, the number of Orthodox Churches in the Russian Republic fell from 29,584 to less than 500. Between 1917 and 1935, 130,000 Orthodox priests were arrested. Of these, 95,000 were put to death. Many thousands of victims of persecution became recognized in a special canon of saints known as the “new martyrs and confessors of Russia”.”
And we can add the French revolution to that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dechristianisation_of_France_during_the_French_Revolution
“By the end of the decade, approximately thirty thousand priests had been forced to leave France, and several hundred who did not leave were executed.[26] Most French parishes were left without the services of a priest and deprived of the sacraments. Any non-juring priest faced the guillotine or deportation to French Guiana.[1] By Easter 1794, few of France’s forty thousand churches remained open; many had been closed, sold, destroyed, or converted to other use
And how did Christians fare in Mao’s atheistic China? And remember, quantity has a quality of its own.
Not true. Monasteries were closed, many churches were demolished and many priests jailed or to sent to prison camps or forced labor. Only later have the commies realized that keeping a pacified church around helps with pacifying a segment of the populace too.
“In fact, disaster, man-made or natural, is proof that egalitarianism is rooted in our biology, or at least in the biology of some.”
In “Righteous Mind,” Haidt discusses this in the context of how & why our rational faculties developed – as tools of persuasion and rhetoric to spur group action and organization, not to “find truth.”
The Dunbar-size bands of early man were hierarchical law-of-the-jungle pecking orders, with the baddest dudes usually on top. However, there were times when competing sub-groups would arise to overthrow Chief Grug the Feckless, Overly-Cruel or Luckless. The “betas” of the current order would organize and beer-hall Chief Grug or pillow him using this new rational faculty.
In this scenario, the first and best thinkers were dissidents – very plausible and also pleasing to our vanity – consider me convinced.
This rebel impulse, unchecked, leads to the hair-on-fire version of egalitarianism we see today that gets you kicked off Twitter for dead-naming an Otherkin.
Fast forward 10k years or so. I’ll again recommend VDH’s “Who Killed Homer” – in the early chapters VDH explores the development of the Greek mind-set and worldview and Aristotle’s praise of the “middle ones” as the anchors of the polis. In VDH’s mind and mine, the Greeks best blended monarchy, aristocracy and democratic egalitarianism. Then Rome happened – another post there.
The Greeks had a means of dealing with disgruntled egalitarians with riot in mind – exile or colonization (mass exile with a smile and stipend).
Today’s riotous minds have no such institutionally-recognized option. But the political wilderness still beckons. A lot more people will be hearing the call of that wild now that civilization’s mask of competence, much less public spirit, has slipped.
Contra Ben Franklin, America was only briefly a Republic, and we didn’t keep it. Functional, balanced egalitarians, those willing to respect hierarchy, but not feckless corruption and exploitation, are looking to the West for new pastures. Corinth is lost and decadent and our new Syracuse beckons.
A lot of priors are on display here lately, damning the “deadbeats” for wanting That Bag. We righteously-riotous proles should consider it our colonial stipend.
So, as a righteously-riotous prole, with Pauline and Miseian sensibilities, am I to consider a paycheck protection SBA loan for my business (4 employees) to be my colonial stipend?
It’s not a stipend when you have to pay it back – with interest, no less. What’s the rate on those loans?
Depends on whether you can show your vaccine passport and that of all your employees comrade.
I checked with 2 banks and they have no information.
The SBA has a simple 2 page form the upshot of which suggests that as long as the applicant has not defaulted on an SBA loan and none of the owners of the company are felons, a loan will be made.
Egalitarianism is man’s greatest invention, a doomsday device we cannot disarm.
— Excellent, makes me wish I was in to putting bumper stickers on my car!
There is one impetus for every religion, the regulation of sexual activity. All other aspects of any one religion are simply complications. The hereafter and immortality? Muslims, for instance, include an eternity of group sex for the true believer.
Just as the state isn’t satisfied to steal wealth, insisting on outlining the legitimate parameters of all behavior, so it is with religion. Allowing the priesthood and its defenders to have the choice of nubile females is their foremost perogative. They also determine the rest of the social and economic relationships. The atheists reject this supernatural structure and currently replace it with some egalitarian form of government, democracy in particular, which is also a religion, designed to regulate our behavior in a manner more suited to the perceived advancements of science, although there really is no possible science where human behavior is involved.
Z you might want to read “Dominion” by honest yet professed atheist Tom Holland. Summary; Christianity and it’s radical idea that we all are made in the image and likeness of God – and hence are not meat to be sold at market, or summed into quant spreadsheets, etc – this is Christianity. Admittedly shorn of that pesky Sky God to hold us to account, but (Post Christ) Christianity nonetheless. There are reasons beyond spite the gays for instance relentlessly pursue the Church for its blessing. His case is comprehensive and persuasive.
Your quarrel here begins with Pope Hildebrand, your quarrel begins with Canossa.
End Holland
Me. >>Its really that like software that has lost the sysadmin still executing the script.
As far as our elites they’re proving daily that the insane are incompetent.
They’re also evil, child sociopaths.
Our elites are Quimby from Lolita.
They gotta go, and don’t blame NR or anyone who wants to avoid the tumbrels.
As far as the leveling virus; you’re right so far – this is leveling economically not just the commons but the healthy.
(Its also culling Chinatowns, for instance Elmhurst in Queens. But don’t say it aloud).
Diversity as cult is headed for late term abortion moral status. Rare, dangerous, despised, but barely legal.
^Yes I know that’s not happening right now. But it’s happening.^
“This is not real, this is not really happening…
You bet your life it is, you bet your life it is…”
— Tori Amos, “Cornflake Girl”
I never imagined seeing Torrid Anus quoted on this site.
Your atheist zealot is, of course, way out there where the buses don’t run. And you are a step behind as are the folks at the NRO.
In the beginning there was God. We lived and died at His whims and word – if you won a battle, it was because God favoured you. If you lost, it was because He was punishing you. If you had a plague, it was because you had sinned. There was God’s Truth and nothing else.
That put is in trouble with guys like Galileo and Capernicus who kicked off The Age Of Reason. The problem with that was that men are not rational animals. They are rationalizing animals and the idea that you could be scientifically proven wrong or your enemies being proved right with a simple methodology that only required dispassionate objectivity and logic – was insufferable.
In the 60’s, spoiled boomer brats begat the idea of Relative Truth. You can have your Truth, the blacks theirs, the homos theirs, the wahmen theirs and so on. In a nutshell, that is basically what “Intersectionality” is. Of course that is utter rot; truth is the same here as it is in Africa or Europe or in Antarctica.
Unfortunately, the guy in the article IS correct. Our own illustrious leader and trust fund baby – Turdo La Doo – his wife has it and he was definitely exposed to it so they put him in a bubble and made him a finger puppet in the self-isolation morality play. In Europe, the Black Death hit all the classes pretty much the same. I think this is why we are seeing so much panic in our leaders. The idea that they are biologically the same as dirt people is not sitting well with them.
As for the egalitarians, they may survive and still be with us… or not. When things get tough and we need everything we have just to survive, stupid people will be liabilities we can no longer afford and you can bet they will be dealt with harshly if things go really badly.
If by God you mean Christian God (which I assume you do) before him were these things called Greece and Rome which incidentally happen to the pinnacles of our civilization
The problem of The age of Reason is that great majority of men and the totality of women are neither reasonable nor rational
It was Maistre who developed this idea most eloquently
Pope, King and Executioner that was his holy trinity, the best humanity could hope for
Heavily influenced by the carnage of French revolution, he failed to see the absence of the wholly trinity in Greece and Rome both despite their shortcomings,advanced civilizations which surpassed the one which followed them for 1000 years in Europe under the full jurisdiction of above said 3 entities
I think you’ll find that most atheists have never even read a bible, much less studied it. I can understand and forgive those that struggle with classical Christian mythology because to be honest, I do too. Most militant atheists that I have seen are rebelling against the hypocrisy, the grift, and the carpet baggers that use and abuse the faith to their own ends. It amuses me that those exact same grifters and psychotic carpet baggers today pose as scientists. They’re essentially doing to science what their ancestors did to the church – undermining it and discrediting it.
I look at these guys putting on airs of sophistication and quoting from historic atheists and I just laugh. A critique of the bible demands that you read it and study it for at least a couple years just to get grounded in it. A proper study can consume a life time. Biblical archeology could consume another life time.
For me personally, I spent most of my life as an atheist or at least an agnostic and I lived among and grew up among amoral shitlibs and leftwing lunatics. I know how they think and reason, and how the stupidity chambers they set up work. It wasn’t until I was exiled from the Hive after too many red pills that I discovered my Maker, right under my nose in plain sight. Zealotry is a condition of man, not of God. The bible specifically forbids it too. That was one of the many revolutionary ideas the faith introduced and why it eventually replaced polytheism that that the Greeks and Romans had been practicing. I would further argue that Rome didn’t reach its pinnacle until the 15th century Renaissance. I’m sure it will strike most people as purely coincidental that now Europe has abandoned God, they are heading into a steep decline that could very well destroy them and their civilization. I am okay with that.
Real Christianity is not about controlling others – it’s about controlling yourself. That’s why your present civilization initially rose while others fell. I’d suggest that you might seek a change in reading material before relying on the words of atheists that have personal axes to grind with people that, living or dead…. may or may not represent the faith.
John Smith, I didn’t find faith until I was tested, either. I wonder if that isn’t the whole point of modernity, with its baubles and conveniences— to keep people from being tested, because once you find faith, all of this looks ridiculous.
Idk, maybe that’s a teenage thought Mr. STEM didn’t have until his 30s
Are you really so sure of the canard that everything stopped for 1000 years until the Renaissance? That the Greeks and Romans were advanced societies but the Catholic Church came along and burnt the books, etc?
You realize there were several Reformations and Renaissance’s starting in 11th century at the latest?
That there was no “science” as we know it under the Greeks and Romans? That the entire methodology evolved from philosophy to natural theology to naturalism starting about the 12th century and took centuries to evolve?
Not to mention to call the Royal Academy “Protestant” is to miss that they were Anglican Catholics?
I don’t know how to tell you all this but the academe of old was well…
In person Blogging for the well heeled – except when they functioned as; Think Tanks for Kings and Emperors.
The Greeks had philosophy – yes.
Darlings we call them Think Tanks now. Those philosophers were engaged in a struggle for Power.
Socrates was the movement leader of a planned Aristocratic Revolution to overthrow Democracy, Plato the Military Commander. The plot was foiled and Socrates killed, ending it.
The Romans had engineering and roads, aqueducts, buildings.
Yes; they certainly did; we’d call them variously Halliburton or the US Army Corps of Engineers- Rome in short was a military Empire. That’s Rome’s I Love Fucking Science.
Rome loved War, and loot.
Science built the roads, the siege fortifications. That’s Classical “Science”.
Galileo was using the telescope to scout enemy fortifications and had an idea. The Catholic Church far from suppressing science subjected Galileo to…peer review.
Galileo and Copernicus didn’t screw up anything, anymore than Vincent Cerf and the other Internet Pioneers screwed up networks. Cerf and others were rejected by Ma Bell (I guess they’ll be the Catholic Church someday and Cerf et al Galileo) as Ma Bell wanted not packet switching but circuit switching for the network.
Packet switching won because of the virtues of Vincent Galileo Cerf…
Or perhaps Packet switching won because Cerf was at DARPANET and the Pentagon wanted to talk thru a nuclear war.
The first packet switched networks were a band of heroic bloggers who… oh wait, actually it was an X.25 network for launching Americas missiles.
In the 90s Al Gore heroically declined to regulate the Internet, allowing an explosion of human knowledge demanding ever better streaming technologies and more bandwidth, faster servers…oh wait; that was porn.
By the way circuit switching came back after a fashion, its called Ethernet Fabric, TRILL or whatever.
Maybe someday when Christianity is finally fuxing dead the Church will be objectively evaluated and measured.
But not until the atheists are done destroying all the social, civilizational and financial capital of the last 2800 years (I’m going back to Homer).
The Church far from suppressing the classics made them a staple of the Churches primary and secondary education; The Trivium and Quadrivium.
Here’s your fucking Dark Ages:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrivium
Yes, clearly suppressing the Classics.
Sarc.
However this pandemic shakes out, the egalitarians aren’t going away. And they will continue to preach equality for all, except for Whitey, who will continue to be demonized and demoralized, maybe more than ever.
I’ve always been partial to this quote from TS Eliot which touches upon the same theme:
“Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm; but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.”
Yes, the elites were scared, which ramped this way up. But also this was the “academic’s” and government “expert’s” time to shine. They never get to do much meaningful in the world but play with their models and theories. This was their time to think well of themselves. And their preoccupation with their own self image–not the accuracy and utility of their models–is what is not allowing them to admit their fallibility and correct the predictions to something more accurate, and thus useful.
This is something our side does not appreciate very well. Pol Pot really believed he was helping his people. He died with a clear conscience. I doubt very many revolutionaries blinked their last blink wondering if what they did was right. Fanatics are defined by their fanaticism. To question the cause is to question their very existence.
It seems to me that is why Globohomo has so few defectors in the upper ranks.
No matter the destruction visited upon the west they generally believe that for your own good you must be cleansed and if it means grinding you, your familly, your culture and your history into the ground, they are prepared to make that sacrifice for you.
I also wonder if this is also not some short circuit in the erotic zone of the brain as beyond a certain point the virtue signalling seems to have a distinct public orgiastic aspect to it. Maybe its some for of genetic defect in the sexual pleasure circuits aligned into the areas dealing with moral behaviour.
Rand and her fanatics are giving Marx a run for his money
Tristan, the present system has a lot of nested, mutually-supporting and/or redundant feedback loops, silver or lead – rewards & punishments.
Multiple whistle-blowers from Faceberg’s Inner Party have already let the catwoman-suit out of the bag regarding Big Tech’s exploitation of our pleasure-tingle-wiring.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/09/facebook-sean-parker-vulnerability-brain-psychology
https://www.foxnews.com/tech/former-facebook-exec-wont-let-own-kids-use-social-media-says-its-destroying-how-society-works
Working in that area I am well aware that nearly all social media is (designed?) oriented towards gamification and reward dependency (I know this even as I am typing this on here). The large companies spend a ton on this stuff.
I was sort of thinking that as this sort of fanatic behavior always seems to have been with us (far back to the Essenes and before and showing up in waves though history) maybe its a genetic trait that becomes dominant in a population, rises up causes a mass conflict and then those people are killed off and it takes time to get enough numbers again.
The erotic aspect I was thinking as it sort of looks similar and is such a strong drive that short circuited into the moral areas would be almost an irresistible force.
There’s a lot of interesting genuine psychology to examine in whether asceticism and celibacy in particular is really “channeled” or “re-directed” into fanaticism. So much of the existing research is agenda-driven (Wilhelm Reich-style “free-love = utopia” as well simply for Zuck’s shekels).
I’d love to see more research done in good faith, particularly in the de-programming/recovery aspect – getting guys & gals who are socially, sexually and psychologically dysfunctional due to porn or “online addiction” back on track, for instance.
There’s some smoke but how much fire, and what are the devilish details?
tristan;
Re globohomo defection: There’s also the kompromat to keep them in line. What *did* happen to all of Epstein’s safe’s contents_?
And, no, he didn’t kill himself over the loss. Other stuff_? Possibly, IDK.
Yes. This. Even after the imaginary sex crimes convictions of the 1980’s and ’90’s were overturned (especially after the coerced children recanted their own earlier testimonies), the leaders and purveyors of the manias (e.g. police investigator Robert Perez in Wenatchee, Washington) said “they’d do it all again” when offered chances to recent.
Z-“ To question the cause is to question their very existence.“
Which means?
Its like the Taliban; don’t look at them, they’ll kill you.
Which means; better be prepared to do just that, or run away.
Zman said, “Fanatics are defined by their fanaticism. To question the cause is to question their very existence.” I wonder if this would have application to black people who fervently believe that all their problems are caused by white people and as a result intensely hate white people, feeling it’s with justification.
Something MOST people do not understand about Judaism or Christianity is that the Creator NEVER required/requires blind obedience. I cannot remember the exact book, chapter and verse but the Jews were commanded to test whether or not what a prophet predicted came to pass. If it did then the prophet’s message was from the Creator. If not then the prophet spoke presumptively and was a false prophet. In the New Testament, Christians were command to look carefully at what was told them by someone claiming to have a revelation from the Creator to see if it was consistent with what they had already received. One of the 12 Apostles, name of Thomas, refused to believe that the Christ had risen from the dead. When Christ appeared among them that evening rather than rebuke Thomas for not believing, He showed him the nail scars on his hands and offered to show where the Roman soldier’s spear had pierced His side. The Christ’s answer to a lack of faith was EVIDENCE,not a rebuke. The greatest commandment was to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.”
My residual paleo conservatism / libertarianism kicks into high alert whenever somebody from government wants to help me. They can help me by leaving me alone.
I don’t understand the desire to expose yourself to narratives like that found in the National Review. It’s like smearing feces in your eyes. Why on Earth would anyone do such a thing? If you really want to be altruistic in service to others, then by all means, please counsel them that smearing feces in your eyes is a very bad thing that often leads to serious disease, and of course, blurry vision.
He’s taking one for the team.
National Review still has significant influence with Congressional and establishment Republicans. In the 2012 Presidential cycle, several candidates met with their editorial board in person, I think the number was smaller in 2016, but a few of them did then as well. They are fading, I think rather quickly now. It wouldn’t surprise me if they were no longer publishing by Election Day 2024.
I read that at first as “. In the 2012 Presidential cycle, several candidates met with their editorial board in prison”
The weird thing is it did not seem that jarring until I was further on in the sentence.
I suspect they survive with funding from deep pockets within Conservative, Inc., which needs an intellectual support structure for libertarianism.
Probably still getting CIA money.
Sorry, this post is not as coherent as usual. Be that as it may, Haladane (and Zman) are going to have to work a lot smarter to displace Hoffer’s model of fanaticism. In fact, I find it very suspicious that Hoffer’s name was left out of this post.
Zman, what are your thoughts on “The True Believer”? Which Archetype are you?
I’ve addressed this so many times at this point, I hardly feel it is worth it. Hoffer made many great observations about belief. To think he is the final word on the topic is a form of fanaticism I do not share.
Well I am sorry to have bothered you then. I have read *all* of your posts, and remember seeing commenters mention Hoffer, but don’t remember you saying much in response.
If you put “Hoffer” in the search box, you’ll see lots of posts going back years. Your failure to commit all of these to memory is unacceptable!
I am like Johnny Mnemonic; I have to dump old memories to make room for new 🙂 Thanks for the search tip, I am re-reading the many Hoffer referencing posts 🙂
I think he made a good rough sketch of fanaticism. Like all models it obviously gets some things wrong. All theories about reality do.
“Remember that all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful” by George Box & Norman R. Draper, Empirical Model-Building and Response Surfaces
Seems we are currently testing that statement.
There’s also a huge difference between *casual* models which attempt to imprecisely model some real process, and probabilistic models which don’t even bother trying. The second kind are far more suspect than the first.
What i like about TB is Hoffer lays out a comprehensive analysis of charismatic movements — and how all the different types (archetypes) of personality fit into the overall framework. The fanatic is only one component, and is only useful in the initial phase of the movement. It’s the founder of the movement that defines its nature, and the fanatics follow on after him.
A number of prominent thinkers have pointed out the danger of people who want to “help” you, because they will arrogate to themselves infinite power in their self-righteousness.
But I’ve always thought that they had the psychological causality backwards: namely, that the desire for infinite power comes first, and that the infinite number of crusades they cook up are essentially rationalizations after the fact.
Of course egalitarianism is the ultimate crusade to the power-hungry, as it will require infinite power to “correct” the infinite “violations” of inequality in nature.
Indeed. Any attempt to make things more equal on principle is going to end with a far less equal society.
And a far poorer one…
I had in mind some great quotes that I can’t track down by other guys, but Daniels/Dalrymple has a pretty sharp one:
“Committing evil for goodness’ sake satisfies the inner sadist and the inner moralist at the same time.”
Damn, but that’s good.
Goes a long way to explain Barbara Lerner Spectre and her ilk. (Not all spectres are like that)
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victim may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
~ C. S. Lewis
Yeah, that’s one I was looking for, LOL.
Christianity of course as the original “leftist” ideology is the one which established the idea of “equality” as well as of ” making world better place” perversely tying to the notion of “original sin” and eternal culpability
In its essence christian cult is the first universalistic, or in today language the globalist ideology
Neither in Greece nor in Rome any of these ideas existed
Inhabitants of these domains saw themselves as far above the rest (rightly so). The idea of making the world “better” place would be laughed at as were the first Christians arriving in Rome
They were highly amused by these jews preaching the love of the enemy and turning the other cheek
Roman burned down Carthage instead of trying to convert it
First thing Christians did in the new world was to convert the savages to their dogma
No thinking man would dispute the idea that fanaticism stems from monotheistic religions
Look at Greece and its history of dissent, of different philosophy that existed in relatively short period of historic time and compare that to the fanatic zealots of Christianity and their reign from roughly from 500 to 1500 AD
That period that ends with reformation and renaissance was literally a swamp where no new idea in art or science was born
1000 years of absolute christian domination aka dark ages was the age of fanaticism par excellence which western civilization had not known neither before nor after
“Look at Greece and its history of dissent, of different philosophy that existed in relatively short period of historic time and compare that to the fanatic zealots of Christianity and their reign from roughly from 500 to 1500 AD”
I quess Aquinas, Scotus, Bacon, etc. never existed.
Bacon was born in 1526 The other 2 are christian theologians
Roger Bacon.
And just because they were theologians does not mean they were bereft of Philosophy.
I’d strongly recommend Copleston’s History of Philosophy to show the wealth of debate that happened throughout history, even in the ahistorially named ‘dark ages’.
Sure I had spent some considerable time studying one of the major philosophical disputes of the time, namely
“How many angels can dance on the head of a pin”
“How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” (alternatively “How many angels can stand on the point of a pin?”[1]) is a reductio ad absurdum challenge to medieval scholasticism in general, and its angelology in particular, as represented by figures such as Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas.[2]
Fanatic, I’m largely with you on the things you said above, but the “how many angels” issue wasn’t about is it 5, 15 or 33 angels for a given pin. It was really a debate about finite versus transfinite.
My theologically-naive interpretation is that it was trying to address whether there is necessarily a physical aspect to the divine. But I could be FOS on that.
lol 7 minuses so far for a most simple factual statement
(I thought he meant Francis Bacon)
Number of dislikes grows faster than corona virus cases in NYC
If you do not agree you can respond with your arguments or simply ignore it
Likes and dislikes that is a typical female behavior
No, they don’t. Only progress exists.
And Progressivism has always been at war with Eurasia.
Progressivism has nothing to do with Christianity, and Marxism nothing to do with Judaism.
Keep up Comrades! Or else.
Do you know nothing of history?
There is no history.
There is only Progress.
Of course The Dark Ages were Dark.
Catholics were illiterate flat earthers.
We can only read because of Islam.
Progress like Zeus sprang from the head of Darwin.
Before 1945 all was Darkness.
White people give off evil rays that make others do bad things.
There is no God.
There is only science.
Science tells us men are women, and the law tells women they are men.
We are all one world.
COVID will kill 6 million.
Exactly, not one more or less.
Our models are correct. That they are a fraction of a week ago is due to Goldstein and his wreckers.
Work harder Boxer, or collect unemployment because America CARES.
^The above sums the Atheist package^.
How many atheists can dance on a bed of nails? Denying the many posted Bed of Procrustes is the package I sum above?
Angels on pins was a better world than us dancing through the rubble of the old atheists. However we may say in truth – we never were likely To see and could never prove our Kingdom of Heaven – but we can look around and see your world is you reigning in Hell.
Congratulations. You’ve won.
This is your hour.
Saw the wall st. journal is reporting 6.6 mil jobless claims. CNN reported recently coronavirus death rate .66%. Lots of 6s.
https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/whats-news/jobless-claims-surge-to-record-66-million/bb109e6c-b707-40dd-b003-f6ea8837cecc
https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/30/health/coronavirus-lower-death-rate/index.html
Philosophical pluralism hardly obviates fanaticism. Plato had all of Democritus’ works destroyed. And I think I hardly need mention 20th-century Marxists.
Hmm.. I am not sure the British experience with the Thugees in India, or the human sacrifice cult of the druids that the Romans took such pains to stamp out, or the mass human sacrifice of the various South American cultures really agree with that statement. But I suppose it depends on what you mean by fanatic?
Or, the Dark Ages were going to be dark regardless of who dominated life after the collapse of Rome. And, without that collapse and the subsequent dark age no enlightenment would have been left space to birth, and born in Chistianity it was. Not in an Islamic one, or Confucian, Hindu or Buddist, or Atheist. As a non-Christian I don’t feel the need to answer why that is, but facts are stubborn things. Even an Atheist must acknowledge Christianity did not stop the Enlightenment. What the Atheist cannot manage is to acknowledge is that he has ended the Enlightenment.
lol at the idea that the Greeks were unstained by fanaticism. You could try reading, literally, anything at all from them.
Socrates would like a word.
Tocqueville–“It is doubtful whether Socrates and his school had very definite opinions upon what was to happen to man in the afterlife, but the one belief of which they were convinced, namely, that the soul has nothing in common with the body and would survive it, has been enough to give to Platonic philosophy this sort of sublime impetus which is its distinctive feature.
On reading Plato, we see that many writers before and during his lifetime anticipated the doctrine of materialism These writers have not survived to our day or have only partially survived. The same is true for almost allother centuries; most great literary reputations have been linked to spirituality.
Whenever among the opinions of a democratic nation you come across some of those evil theories which promote the belief that everything perishes with the body, you may consider men with such views as natural enemies of the people. If their system could be of some use to man, it would be in giving him a modest opinion of himself. But they do not demonstrate such a truth and when they think they have done enough to prove that they are brutish, they seem as proud as if they had demonstrated that they were gods.
I doubt whether man can ever support at the same time complete religious independence and entire political freedom and am drawn to the thought that if a man is without faith, he must serve someone and if he is free, he must believe.”
Balkan;
You are right about one thing, namely that Christianity is radically egalitarian. But you seem confused about how this works and what it means: To you. Personally.
The true equality in Christianity is that all men (& women) are equally born into human sin and depravity and therefore are equally in need of God’s saving grace, which is equally available to all through accepting Jesus’ atoning sacrifice on the cross. And only through accepting it. We all equally can bring nothing to ‘the unfair exchange.’ But *anyone* can accept it by bringing an open hand, open heart and ‘bending the knee.’
This is The Christian Gospel. The rest is validation, context, explication and interpretation.
Being Easter Week, it is an excellent time to be contemplating this radical equality and avoid wasting mental effort on unimportant second order questions.
Most people, myself most definitely included, get stuck on the ‘bending the knee’ part and invent all sorts of reasons and intellectual schemes to avoid doing so, largely due to the sin of pride. Perversely, the higher the IQ, the more ingenious the intellectual scheme can be. Don’t be that guy.
I’m no fanatic but I do believe that all men should receive equal treatment before the law. Jefferson was no fanatic when he wrote “that All men are created equal”. I believe that the equality Jefferson wrote about was that all should be treated equally by officers of the law. When Jefferson wrote those words, It was much harder to bring an accusation against a rich man (or his progeny) or a titled man than it was a “commoner”. ZMan, are you saying that that sort of preferential treatment, codified by the law, is right and proper? Are you saying that there SHOULD be one law for peed-ons such as ourselves and another for elites?
Not to speak out of turn, Mr. Mullins, but I would suggest you read Zippy on this question of “equality before the law.” Thoroughly. Start here, if you like:
https://zippycatholic.wordpress.com/?s=equality+before+the+law
“that All men are created equal”, a phrase I was in love with for most of my life (tons of things are gradually coming up for revision), was war propaganda. Then it became dogma, ie religion of a kind.
“ZMan, are you saying that that sort of preferential treatment, codified by the law, is right and proper? Are you saying that there SHOULD be one law for peed-ons such as ourselves and another for elites?”
You already know the answer to this, and it isn’t the first time you’ve posted something confrontational like this with a blatantly obvious piece of bait sitting on a hook.
Are you familiar with Vox Day’s gamma sperg theory? He isn’t wrong, even if he assigns it to everyone who disagrees with him. But there are some times when it is 100% accurate. I’m sensing this being one of those times. You have to talk right to the host to get that dopamine hit that you are a Smart Boy(tm), right? (especially if he responds)
If you aren’t familiar with this phenomenon simply go search his site and you will learn a hard, but necessary, lesson about why you phrase comments the way you do and the deep seated underlining psychology about why you’ve likely been like this your whole life. You may even be able to escape it with some very thorough introspection and gut level honesty.
“underlining” <- my favorite part of the comment
Is the grammar enforcer gamma sperg really the hill you want to die on Karl? Do you pick out Z’s errors as well?(I think you do actually) Nothing like jumping directly into the line of fire proving my point yet again. You are a Smart Boy™ (along w/ OP, we get it!)
https://i.imgur.com/D8nJ7d2.jpg
how am i to blame for you providing everyone a good laugh? I would bet hard money you are wearing a t-shirt with vox’s picture on it. A suspiciously stained T-shirt…
And you Nazi’s know what awaits , don’t you?
https://img1.etsystatic.com/073/0/10958733/il_fullxfull.806180345_qa86.jpg
Amusing, but really a typical spell checker error that often goes unnoticed. Whatever is going on here with my iPad spell checker and the blog, I get at least half a dozen such in any posting and need to go back to or react after reread. Indeed, I didn’t even know what you were referring to and had to reread Apex’s comment closely. I corrected it in my mind and noticed nothing.
i figured it was a spelling completion error, but the vainglorious pomposity of the comment was more than i could resist 😛
Predator, you know exactly jack SHIT about me aside from the fact that I am bold enough to use my own name instead of cravenly hiding behind a nom-de-net like so many brave net warriors here. I asked the host a question because I had a question about something HEwrote. I don’t do deep seated underlying psychology or other such nit noy bullshit! I ask simple direct questions couched in simple direct language precisely as I was taught in Air Force Effective Writing back around 1975 or so.
For the record, I respect the ZMan FAR TOO MUCH to believe that he needs the assistance of double-digit-IQ bozos to answer a simple question. I stated the context of my query clearly – i.e.
I am well aware that a rich man has a greater likelihood of obtaining a favorable (to him) outcome in a court of law. My question was whether the ZMan believes that such differences ought rightly to be codified in American law. Whether the law fekking OUGHT TO BE cognizant of a person’s social or economic status when said person appears before the bar of justice.
Now will you nitwits kindly STFU and let the ZMan answer an honest question?
Oh, and for the record, I read ZippyCatholic’s little piece. Obviously, no two people standing before a judge are going to be entirely equal. One of them – ostensibly -is in the right while the other is not. My question revolves around whether one’s socio-political-economic standing SHOULD/OUGHT TO have any bearing on who is right. I thought courts WERE SUPPOSED TO decide things upon the basis of objective FACT and not which side of town one of the litigants grew up/lives in. Geez Louise! Can’t we at least be civil here? Or do we all have to march in lockstep? Is one not allowed to ask questions of the all-wise guru?
I believe men are created equally before the law, and have the same worth in the eyes of God. That is different from saying they have the ability to contribute to society equally.
Thank you. I share that belief and it seemed to me that the ZMan was saying the exact opposite so I stupidly asked for clarification. I suppose around here one is not allowed to question the ZMan.
Yeah, Rachel Jeantel is the epitome of “equal before the law.” Ohnoes, you’ll reply, that’s not what you mean. But it is what you will get with your blanket statement. No, we are not equal in any way nor should we be ‘equal’ before some presumed law. What you’re looking for is perfect fairness which is found nowhere in nature. You’re presuming some jury made up of some racial and/or IQ level mixture can rationally and fairly and impartially determine justice. Democracy and equality – both are massive lives and massive failures.
While many atheists do indeed subscribe to the new PC religion of egalitarianism, it doesn’t have to be that way.
Many of us who reject iron-age myths, look instead to science, as the best means of understanding who we are as human beings, and how we came to be that way.
And science reveals egalitarianism to be every bit as fallacious as religion.
.
Bill, unfortunately it takes humans to perform science. And the current priesthood that rules over what passes for reality today is not interested in data that contradicts their baseline premise of egalitarianism.
Or as they say, “feelings don’t cate about your facts” when they march you out of the temple naked and unemployed.
Science reveals what we don’t know. 10 questions arise in answering 1.
Science reveals the scientist far more often than it reveals it’s subject, unfortunately, and increasingly. Belief in science is a religious cult disquised as a belief in science. Like the cult of Darwin, they grasp their prayer beads and cast incantations at unbelievers, especially the scientific ones. Science advances against scientist–as the man said–one death at a time.
James, the last sentence in your post reminds of one of my favorite books back in my first go around in academia, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.” Highly recommended for those who haven’t read it.
https://www.amazon.com/Structure-Scientific-Revolutions-50th-Anniversary/dp/0226458121
I agree with your last sentence, but science will never provide insight on who we are as human beings. We are ghosts in machines. Science can rudimentarily explain the physics of the machine. Understanding the ghost can only come through faith.
The material can’t grasp the immaterial.
he will die in his effort to reach his goal
It seems like more and more in the modern world he’s willing to transfer the glorious honor of dying to you.
Quite. That is why he has changed that line from “Battle Hymn” originally declaring “let us die to make men free,” to “let us live to make men free.”
Yep, and one of the reasons I no longer attend services.
And one entire verse has been omitted for years…
“I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel. As you deal with My contemners, so with you my Grace shall deal. Let the hero born of woman crush the serpent with his heel”
Speaking of which, now that you mention it:
https://orthosphere.wordpress.com/2013/09/30/humanitarian-humbug-and-hostility/
I wasn’t aware of that one being omitted (but my lack of awareness means little). But for years I wasn’t even aware there was a 6th verse:
He is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave,
He is Wisdom to the mighty, He is Succour to the brave,
So the world shall be His footstool, and the soul of Time His slave,
No doubt that unspeakable S-word. Well, unspeakable unless it’s used to beat us over the head with our collective guilt.
It should be noted that the egalitarianism of modern Christianity is not historical. It was well understood there would be a hierarchy, even in Heaven(see Dante), and while the rich were called to give to the poor, nowhere did it say everyone had rights to equal amounts of goods, or that people should treat outsiders equally (see Jesus and the Samaritan woman and his comment about dogs). This makes sense, as Jesus was not stupid, and neither was the Church about the ramifications of such thinking.
Read Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason, who was essentially the Hitchens of his time, and one will realize that it’s the same rhetoric, and just as wrong as it is today. The French gave an excellent exhibit A. The idea that there is a singular, universal reason that everyone could assent to is one of the core poisons of the enlightenment that needs to be eradicated. While there were several enlightenment philosophers that had incredible insight(Kant, Hume, etc), it doesn’t take long to start to see glaring holes in their personal worldviews.
The oft quoted excerpt from Paul from Galatians, now used to kill all dissent, was to emphasize the openness of salvation for all. Now it’s a catch-all for sanctimonious busybodies to wreck Christianity and putting their new, egalitarian religion in its place.
The devil knowing the Bible inside and out indeed.
Paine the Hitchens of his time! I love it! 🙂 May I put in a plug for Deism? This is the belief in a God that created and sustains everything but does not intervene in the affairs of Man in any way. This was an evolution in the Enlightenment’s changing thought of religion. For all practical purposes it was equal to atheism. This is “God the Utterly Indifferent” from (IIRC) Heinlein’s “Stranger in a Strange Land”.
Africa is probably unscathed due to demographics: only a tiny fraction of that continent’s population lives past 60:
https://blogs.worldbank.org/sites/default/files/africacan/images/africacan-7-facts-about-population-in-sub-saharan-africa-625_2.jpg
The poor and stupid will certainly be hit a lot harder in the US. (See Detroit, New York, Milwaukee, New Orleans.) solipsistic and narcissistic as they are, US coloreds are already trying to attribute their “disproportionate impact” to the usual “root causes” of racism, redlining, obesity, and so on.
Little thought is given to the fact that perhaps this group is suffering disproportionately because it has never really understood the germ theory of disease. While white people largely avoid large gatherings, the vibrant are still beating up innocents in groups, then returning home to grandma (because of course mom and dad are MIA) and inadvertently exposing her to the China virus. Then they’re shocked when all the fat, sickly grandmas start dying!
https://www.inquirer.com/crime/philadelphia-police-mail-carrier-assault-septa-platform-20200404.html
weather is saving them. same in south america
Continents of History vs. Continents of Nature. There is a reason those Peacock Bass grow so big in Amazonia. …
Well in typical egalitarian fashion, the cure will render millions of people poor and displaced, where they can intersect with all kinds of death vectors. That should help flatten the disparate impact curve.
The war on poverty has really ceded ground in this war on virus. So much so that the cure for the virus is more poverty.
Ignoring reality at all costs plays well with the single-mindedness of fanaticism. It also allows the solutions of the egalitarian fixers to sow the seeds of the next problem.
The equality they solve for always results in more people miserable and likely to suffer and die.
Indeed it is a doomsday device, which is why I favor the ‘death cult’ label when referencing the progs.
They seem intent on ushering in the great leveler of death. While not all deaths are equal, all men become equal in death. And thats close enough for them!
Always in the background but overlooked is the myriad ways the civilized-developed-White (ok, Euro- and Asian-) world supports the very existence, and more so the material comforts of the real dirt people. If the brains that runs all the machinery disappears, whether due to a disease, politics or simple attrition, the machinery will run for a little while but eventually fail slowly or quickly and spectacularly. Look to any post-colonial African country or black-majority city in the USA and judge for yourself. In science fiction it is usually the savage, most animal-like people who survive. When the latest cycle completes we will learn the benefit we brought our Neolithic brothers turned out to be mostly temporary, and primarily vastly increased their numbers far beyond their learning. What an unhappy day it will be for the billions of Primitives in the 21st century, wondering where the magic has gone but sure it will return if only the proper rituals are performed, just like the 1940s Cargo Cult savages were, wondering when the magic planes and ships would return with their candy and other wondrous treats.
Unfortunately, unlike the Melanesian savages, or the post colonial countries, millions of these people are now next door to you and if things break down they will not be wondering where the bounties went as they know where they started from.
AAs are more social than most…they dread social isolation much more than whites or Asians, who are perfectly happy on their phones or computers (or books) as opposed to cook-outs.
To put it simply, I think the disease’s trajectory can be determined by two factors: the latitude of the people and the socialness of the people. If you’re high-latitude and highly social you’re hit the hardest. Ergo, Jews in NYC, blacks in Chicago, and Chinese in Seattle had better take more precautions. Japanese in Indonesia, not so much.
I suspect testing in Africa doesn’t quite measure up to US standards…
US standards are shite too. But I get your point.
I would wager getting tested for a slightly nasty cold in Africa is the least of your worries disease wise.
Based on first hand experience (knowing a family that has it), being overweight and diabetic makes this incredibly bad for you. Also if you’re old on top of that.
Obesity and diabetes runs rampant through the black American community. Not so much in Africa I imagine. And then if the rumors are true about Malaria medicines helping out, that would also help explain things in Africa. Though a lot remains a mystery still. Maybe weather? But then how do you explain New Orleans etc?
“Africa is probably unscathed due to demographics”
No brain, no pain.
At its most lethal using government stats this virus is just under 3% lethal. With the myriad of other things that will kill you in Africa the high fertility rate and sketchy data from there , we’d never notice.
From what I can gather this diseases does have significantly higher effects in the US and UK at least on Asians , Middle Eastern peoples Blacks and Older Whites.
What is scary though is not only do we have a global depression do to histrionic overreaction to this virus , food exports have basically stopped and at the same time giant city sized locust plagues are all over East Africa , the Middle East and to a lesser degree South Asia.
That is global chaos in action.
The US is a little better off if we can figure out how to get our institutions and logistics working correctly but we are not immune.
Mexico for example depends quiet a bit on remittances and not only are those going to suffer but so is tourism and oil. That nation is dubiously stable at best and many of the legs of its economy are going to get sawed off.
I’ve heard the theory that monotheism gave rise to fanaticism but didn’t know it was Haldane’s. I am no defender of monotheism, I can easily see why it would lead to fanaticism. But I suspect it might be the other way around; ppl did not become fanatics b/c they invented monotheism, they came upon monotheism b/c they wanted to be fanatic about their god. Fanaticism (probably, who really knows this stuff??) comes from an inner void and the need to fill that up. As Hoffer said, if a man’s business is worth minding, he will mind his own business. Fanatics are mentally incomplete, there’s a hole they always need to fill. And that’s what makes them effing impossible to get along with in the long run.
ppl did not become fanatics b/c they invented monotheism, they came upon monotheism b/c they wanted to be fanatic about their god.
Just so: religion is downstream from culture.
I think they have extensive feedback loops between them that make causality (‘which is downstream from which’) very difficult to untangle. Both are upstream from politics though and probably downstream from HBD.
A humanities buddy called religion a “mirror”, which works on many levels that I won’t bother to expound upon.
probably downstream from HBD.
Yes. That’s why the profoundly atheist Sweden resembles Minnesota.
Now that’s an insight I had not been aware of. Thanks.
Profound indeed. Exquisite.
(Exquisite, in regards to the ‘mirror’. Just so.)
Felix;
“That’s why *now* profoundly atheist Sweden resembles *now profoundly soft Marxist* Minnesota”. FIFY (fixed it for you).
But both Sweden and Minnesota *are* profound believers in ‘magic dirt’ else they wouldn’t have let 3rd world moslems take them over. So they both are believers in the supernatural, just a different one than before: One far more destructive to their children (if they have any) than any belief in God could ever be.
But both Sweden and Minnesota *are* profound believers in ‘magic dirt’ else they wouldn’t have let 3rd world moslems take them over.
You’re proving my point. Their cultural mores and values are the same irrespective of whether they believe in god.
And America is built on Magic Dirt theory. Jesus didn’t exactly save you from the Hart-Celler Act, did he? In fact, Christian organisations are the main motors of the immigration-industrial complex.
The abolitionists were mainly religious fanatics.
The “abolitionists” were the New England (((bankers))) calling in their loans on their Mississipi Delta (((owner))) brothers.
Of course, goys did the fighting and dying.
Two birds with one stone.
Grant’s General Orders #11, a brief moment of lucidity notwithstanding.
Magic Dirt Theory didn’t really take root–so to speak–in the US until the mid-60s. As such, it’s a facet of Western New Leftism rather than of America qua America.
Krull the Magnificent, they called him.
Felix. Yes, good insight. Some of these Christian organizations are pretty good wrt to what they do. Franklin Graham’s setup for helping disaster victims puts the Fed’s to shame. However, when he collects my donation for say, hurricane relief, he then uses left over funds to help non-Americans all over the world.
Catholic charities as well, especially with their refugee resettlement, also work against my interests. At this point, my charitable donations extend little farther than local groups in town—where I can visit and see their efforts are not in conflict with my beliefs.
“Religion is downstream from culture,” may be the most un-empirical thing ever said.
A lot of atheists get the cause and effect backwards. They routinely attribute “anti-gay” sentiment to Christianity. Even if you accept atheist thinking the bible was made up by ignorant goat herders, they obviously already didn’t like gays. They ignore atheistic atrocities while attributing every atrocity ever committed by a Christian to the religion.
Atheists like to pretend that they are above all the human pettiness they ascribe to religion and that widespread atheism will lead to a secular utopia and ignore all evidence to the contrary.
Which is why atheists have to go back a thousand years to the Crusades, where 1-3 million died in centuries of conflict, to get an example of religious atrocities. But they ignore Mao and Stalin, who killed between 50-100 million in the 20th century. Both were avowed atheists who banned religion from their countries, and actively persecuted Christians. Even the atheistic Chi-Coms of today, when they are not persecuting the religious, kill Falun Gong people because they want to twirl in the parks.
Which they then try to blame on the Christians. The Crusades were mostly defensive in nature and were a response to Muslim atrocities and expansion into Christian areas.
They absolutely hate Christianity. Hatred of Christians and Christianity is what drives these people, not some love of reason. This is why they are always trying to ascribe all the advances of Christendom to Muslims or foreigners. Erase Christendom and we are living like the Romans did, at best. This reality just eats them up.
I never understood that gap in understanding TBH. I tried to explain to someone the other day that pretty much all of the ME and North Africa was Christian until the Islamic expansion.
Presenting facts was almost like a replay of confronting a vampire with a cross in the old Hammer films.
The atheists were co-opted by those who created Islam. This is a war of smoke and mirrors.
Please stop saying Communists are atheists.
The Bolshevik creators and backers of puppets Stalin and Mao were enforcing their religion, the dictate of their God- to kill and enslave the people of Christ, and all other gods.
The conquest religion of the master race must suppress all other gods, and their peoples.
Not atheist at all.
Atheists don’t care.
The greatest trick of the Devil was not that he didn’t exist, but that he was the Father of the Christ- who fought him!!
Thus, the Constantine state religion was painted with the same bad paint as the Masters.
The force of creation is above the volcano god- above all the gods.
This is the Spirit within that the Christ, and all good men, speak for- and which speaks through them.
Voltaire, no friend of religion, master of sardonic wit, had some wonderful quotes. I don’t have the exact at hand, so consider these paraphrases:
“The Koran is a book whose every page is an insult to common sense.” (Could the same be said for other holy books?)
“The Jews are the only ancient people that had to have a divine prohibition against bestiality in their holy book.”
May be the first para should be
Therefore, you will die in his effort to reach his goal, as to give up on his quest or accept defeat would be no different than denying the reason for his existence.
A central tenet of atheism is that if man drops the superstition about invisible men in the sky, they will stop trying to impose their beliefs on one another and blablabla.
You are making it up as you go along. There is only one tenet of atheism: that Santa isn’t real.
Hehe, let’s not waste tons of comment space on our enjoyable little chat about that. I think atheism is a religion b/c it has ALL the tenets, you think it is not 🙂
Still on the fence with regards to Santa? I mean reindeer exist, right?
The postmodern West’s only religion involves wooden doors, Olympic-sized swimming pools, and symphony orchestras.
😆😆 not exactly
I don’t know about Santa because I’ve never been to the North Pole. However, the universe exists. And that is a very troubling thought.
I’ve been to the North Pole, and in fact have visited Santa’s house up there. Take it from me, he’s real.
The North Pole is in Colorado Springs. It’s open year-round.
Santa is waiting for you!
No, that’s a the fake (lower case) north pole. I’m talking about the real (upper case) North Pole. See here:
https://www.explorefairbanks.com/explore-the-area/local-destinations/north-pole/?gclid=CjwKCAjwpqv0BRABEiwA-TySwU2OCxxcOYObBC81iGQSRIXnVakpe_MuGLnuaL5TdAldZuVZE3MvqBoCRBIQAvD_BwE
no no no
obviously santa claus lives in santa claus, indiana
why wouldn’t you live in the place that is named after you?
it’d be like me not living in davidsburg, pa
Hell is in Michigan. N/W of Ann Arbor.
And yes, it snows there every year.
The Nazi Santa is in Antarctica.
Quantum phenomenology (which is itself a kind of religion) aside, “You can’t get something from nothing” has always been the most convincing argument for the existence of a creator, or at least, some creative force outside of time. Same thing, in my book.
Tarl Cabot – This is exactly how I come out as well. Atheists cannot explain how life came from non-life and order came from disorder. We can split an atom and release massive energy, fly to other planets through a vacuum with no oxygen, and we can beam our image to the other side of the planet in real time. We know every chemical that ever existed on earth. But we can’t create a single-celled organism in a lab. The logical explanation is that something outside our dimension is responsible.
Atheists cannot explain how life came from non-life and order came from disorder.
And so what?
It is flattering that you elevate atheists to arbiters of the ultimate questions, but just because I can’t explain life, the universe, and everything, doesn’t mean your Bronze Age explanation is true.
I don’t care as long as the atheists leave me and mine alone, which they can’t.
Mind you many of them are just anti- religion, one in particular.
Precisely. The simpleton arguments that a creator is the only explanation for something from nothing merely extends the dilemma to the question of the creator’s origin.
I still like the philosophical issue of first cause, it may have other names, but the problem is simply that you can’t define the first cause. Taking the origin of the universe, the Theist would say God created it and He always existed, etc. But this violates the fundamental rule of cause and effect. A perfectly rational question then is “Where did God come from?” The debate will always rage on because we are at a draw: The believers can’t prove their God exists and the unbelievers can’t prove where this stuff came from 🙂
The believers can’t prove their God exists and the unbelievers can’t prove where this stuff came from
That’s not apples to apples. Atheists are not claiming to know where stuff comes from, while Christians are; the onus of evidence is on them.
Given you don’t know where stuff comes from, how can you be so certain it doesn’t come from a purposeful creator? The faith that it comes from somewhere strikes me as less rational than that it comes from a creator.
2020 BC: cuz Magic Sky
2020 AD: cuz Magic Dirt
“That’s not apples to apples. Atheists are not claiming to know where stuff comes from, while Christians are; the onus of evidence is on them.”
Your “Santa” line implies you know where it did not come from, which is the other side of the same coin. I can respect agnostics. But atheists display a condescension from the sidelines, while exhibiting the same certainty they mock.
As for evidence, sometimes in science we prove something that we cannot see exists by the reaction to it. I cannot prove you once had Covid-19, but if you have the antibodies, that is pretty good evidence. I cannot show you God under a microscope. But we have billions of data points of people who strongly believe. It’s not scientific certainty, but science would also not discard that much data.
Any postulate absent of proof is a faith based belief.
Atheism is therefore a faith based belief as it cannot provide a rational and provable explanation for the universe and life that precludes the existence of a God or gods. The onus of evidence is on both sides otherwise it’s a 50-50 push. Nice try at punting though.
To be purely rational, agnosticism is the way to go.
Any postulate absent of proof is a faith based belief.
Atheism is therefore a faith based belief
Hence the Santa-argument: does not believing in Santa constitute a religion?
The onus of evidence is on both sides otherwise it’s a 50-50 push.
Oh, you’re agnostic about Santa, then? It’s 50/50, since you can’t prove he doesn’t exist?
If God were to be infinite at least as Christian theology holds, then God can have no beginning nor end and then time cannot exist for this deity. Nor can God exist within this universe as much as the universe exists within God as infinity would also suppose infinite dimensions.
That’s where I am at to. I am not a Christian, but science sure has trouble trying to get away from God (Prime Mover).
And that Prime Mover is not necessarily a giver of moral law. These are two distinct roles.
Way I see it some kind polytheism makes way more sense than monotheism.
“some creative force outside of time”
The relentless, omnipresent Force of binding, one of the five fundamental forces of Creation: the weak nuclear force.
We can put a Face on it, because that is how we frame our understanding.
But to claim consciousness is a necessary fundamental floor is to be Deepak Chopra.
Does water need guidance to run downhill?
Does water need guidance to run downhill?
It needs gravity to guide it. But what is gravity, why is it, and how does it act on water?
Like all the fundamental forces, the fact that gravity exists and works is obvious, but we have only rough, incomplete mathematical models for how it works. Nobody has ever detected a graviton and in fact there is no complete theory for how gravity works.
We have perfectly good explanations for why water runs downhill.
https://www.theonion.com/evangelical-scientists-refute-gravity-with-new-intellig-1819567984
The Santa argument is gay.
It cuts to the core: do you take wildly improbable fairy-tales on faith?
Or rather, why do you make an exception from basic skepticism and common sense, when it comes to your own, personal Jesus?
I’m a reluctant atheist. I’ll take the Jesus crowd over the atheists any day of the week. Globohomo is entirely atheistic. Equality is atheistic. SJWs are mostly atheistic. Hell, the downfall of the churches is largely down to atheistic SJWs infecting them.
Most of the evil we oppose comes from the atheists. Just take a look at humanism, which comes directly from atheism.
The atheist crowd flat out lies about religion and the religious (Christians). Of course, the atheists are absolute COWARDS at heart, which is why they cannot stand up to the muzzies. They use the courts to mess with Christians, while allowing muzzies to do anything they want. They want to arrest Christian parents for not going along with LGBT stuff in the schools but IMMEDIATELY capitulate to the muzzies when they oppose it.
Secularism is not going to lead to a rational utopia, it is ultimately going to lead to us being crushed by Muslims.
And, of course, the tribe is behind the atheist movements in the West and in America especially. It was them that got religion kicked out of the schools and ushered in the “sexual revolution”
Dissidents need to pick a side. You are either with the normal people or you are with the tribe and the atheists.
The huge number of Soviet citizens who fought and died in WW II were fanatical in support of mother Russia, and most likely atheist. Religion doesn’t have all the true believers. I concede Islam seems to be in the lead in the modern world.
False dichotomy. Don’t unreasonably divide things. Would you reject as a dissident right member someone who shared many goals with you, yet was an atheist Jew? Is it ok if his grandfather was Jewish but he’s been Methodist all his life? And it’s much more acceptable that he doesn’t believe in God, as long as he’s not one of those atheists? 😀
I have no idea how many of the soldiers fighting for the SU were atheists, but I am guessing very few. This was only a short time after the Soviets came to power and most of them had a very miserable existence under it up until this time period. Most Soviets did not even have a radio in those days. Most didn’t even have power. They were fighting a pretty brutal occupation of their homes too. I really don’t see the point either way.
It isn’t a dichotomy. We just don’t need rabid atheists trying to further fracture an already heavily fractured people. It is also not a false dichotomy to notice that most of our enemies are atheists. That isn’t saying atheists are therefor our enemies.
I also think there is a distinction between people who happen to be atheistic and people who have an identity as being an atheist. It is mostly the latter who tend to be leftist SJW types. Atheism makes for a really shitty identity. It is just not up to the job in the same way Christianity is.
I am not defending “religion,” I am defending Christianity. I could not care less about Muslims or Jews or their religions. If a secular Jew is on my side, so be it. The vast majority of secular Jews are not on our side and actively oppose us. If the secular Jew wants to go sow discord among his fellows, I’ll be cheering him on.
If only there were more Thomas Sowells to go around, we could all have one of them for a neighbor…. We could launch our own Sowell real estate and help the suburban areas in the country import the Sowell to use a human shield against accusations of failure to be inclusive enough.
The huge number of Soviet citizens who fought and died in WW II were fanatical in support of mother Russia, and most likely atheist.
No way. The average Soviet was an Orthodox Christian who understood it was best to not be too vocal about such things. Orthodox Christianity came out of the closet in former Soviet states as soon as it was safe to do so.
And don’t forget Russian Orthodoxy is played like a fiddle by Putin. Unlike Stalin, he knows he can’t repress such belief, so he uses it like a tool. Just like the monarchs of old.
Ben;
Besides the vicious coercion that was a central feature of the Red Army, there were the atavistic elements of manhood as motivators that the Commies successfully appealed to. Many studies over the years have shown that men in actual combat mainly fight on for their immediate buddies survival first, and then for honor among their family/tribe members, second. Ideology divorced from honor from your primary reference group is way down the list.
Females in the military beak this age-old dynamic up by introducing squad level competition for sex through protection of your particular ‘squeeze of the day’. That’s *why* soft Marxists/Feminists insisted on it just as soon as their ‘paladin’, Bill Clinton assumed power in 1993. They *hated* the military and sought its destruction.
The primitive power they actually used for subversion had nothing to do with the ideology they employed to justify it.
This is basically it. I know that saying “this is war” is passe now because everything is a war. When I make a turkey sandwich I’m fighting “the war on hunger”, etc… Anyway, this struggle against the egalitarians IS war and it’s a big one and it’s global. You might even call it a kind of slow cooker WWIII. Big wars always mean alliances, often of people who don’t share much in common except a hatred of The Enemy. Well, there do need to some common goals but they can be a pretty small set. Let’s also not forget that we can all kill each other later after globohomo is gone too. Nervous chuckle on that one.
Stupid feminists in Europe can form alliances with Arab men who plan to rape them. American Jews don’t much care for blacks but join coalitions with them all the time. Surely dissident atheists can sing a few rounds of Frosty the Snowman to give glory to Santa and his little elf sweatshop up there on the sea ice. I know I will.
Pozy, feminists and Muslims, blacks and Jews as real wartime coalitions will last about a week so those coalitions should be a huge benefit for us. They will slaughter each other.
As far as dissidents some of whom are Christian and some not, in the prior world some were left or right, whatever. I think and hope we can stick together through possible war time and after.
The way I see it there are few basic absolutes and we should be able to agree to disagree on the rest. Our survival is what is crucial.
Lol! Hilarious. If Hitler, Mao, and Pol Pot all ate cornflakes, would you then be posting your hate for the flake and preference for weet bix?
Cornflakes have nothing to do with it right? Like Felix has repeated, being an atheist is someone who does not believe in religion due to a lack of evidence. It DOES NOT MEAN an atheist cannot determine right actions, or broken systems, ignorance, or mass corruption as we see in evidence in America atm.
Nor does it mean an atheist cannot be an upstanding citizen, without being in thrall to victimhood culture and other leftist contagion.
It is basic logic to which many of you strangely struggle with.
Huh? You’re a reluctant atheist, yet you help to produce the evil in the world? If people are the root of all evil as you imply by virtue of being atheist, then aren’t you as well? What are you saying? You can be atheist but not part of team ’cause of all shit’?
You hate gay Santa!
You DENY Gay Santa!
just saw one munching on my wife’s hyacinths
That song-
My dog don’t know Jesus
He just looks for more food in his bowl
wow, what a compelling argument.
Most atheists are Progressives, and Progressivism definitely is a religion, an especially fanatical one because no heaven up in the sky means they have to create heaven down here.
I doubt there’s any god or afterlife, but Progressivism is profoundly retarded, and getting stupider every day. They think a man becomes a woman when he puts on a dress, and they call such nonsense “science”!
And we’re supposed to take these fruitloops seriously when one of their own grievance-stricken misfits manages to wriggle its way into a high level position of power and influence such as (Pennsylvania’s) Secretary of Health. I’m definitely a Believer, and therefore I can say, with literally no reservations, “Why do the heathen rage, and the People imagine a vain thing?” I’m not calling anyone in particular a heathen, but if the shoe fits and all that.
Santa deniers. We should gas them all.
The only “tenet” of atheism is the necessity that evidence must precede persuasion. Otherwise intelligent people generally take this for granted but for the monumental exception given to religious belief. The last 10,000 years have yet to advance any form of religious belief to the status of hypothesis.
I think that comment was aimed toward the vocal atheist crowd that rambles on about sky daddies.
Also I think those people are atheists because they are egalitarians. A supreme being responsible for the existence of everything is the most anti-egalitarian concept ever.
Finally, the question of a god or no god is so fundamental that there are a ton of implications attached to either answer.
I think that comment was aimed toward the vocal atheist crowd that rambles on about sky daddies.
Yes, and I studiously did not comment on his charming characterization of atheists.
But my OP was about Z’s definition of atheism, not whether Santa is real or not. It does not follow from atheism, that mankind will be driven by reason or that people would stop being preachy about their convictions.
Finally, the question of a god or no god is so fundamental that there are a ton of implications attached to either answer.
Only if you’re religious.
Just one of those implications is that atheism either necessitates belief in spontaneous generation which Pasteur disproved back in the 19th century or something fanciful like aliens seeding life on Earth.
Just one of those implications is that atheism either necessitates belief in spontaneous generation
Atheism necessitate nothing except not being superstitious. Whether you believe in the Big Bang or not, is a separate issue.
Those last 2 sentences look a little contradictory?
I’m a very religious atheist.
Is that contradictory?
For me, the great contradiction is that there is One God.
Or that the gods have anything to do with Creation.
Who sez?
Why are they more vested in semantics than exploration?
Denying the existence of a creator leaves you with only those 2 possibilities regardless of whether or not you want to accept one of them.
The fact is that spontaneous generation was disproved and believing in aliens is no better than believing in a god and ultimately only pushes the problem back.
If you want be an atheist and claim to be logical, you ought examine the logical results of your starting premise .
Thanks, replied later- logic is a parlor game. My premise is that your starting premise is wrong. A trick, a trap. I reject it.
Except there is a lot more evidence to suggest aliens exist.
Thank the Alien for 19th century science.
They proved that the world was coming to an end in 1844, too.
Why only one? Because the volcano god says he’ll defeat your god, your People, and you?
Submit! Submit! Seek ye the strongest power, the greatest magicks!
I can’t speak for the existence of God, Felix, but I have been both dead and aware for several minutes. There’s “more than this,” but I have no experience that suggests any particular theology has a handle, much less a monopoly, on any, much less all, of what that “more” is.
I’m not a neurologist, but your experience seems a few nails short of a miracle to me, if you don’t mind me saying so.
I do not dispute the world is probably infinitely larger than we can even imagine (in fact, I hope it is) but just because we can’t unravel the immaculate conception of the universe or all the mysteries of life, doesn’t mean we need to resort to volcano gods.
I’ve beaten the bushes for all the scientific explanations and remain unconvinced. Occam’s Razor says the supernatural explanation is more plausible than the empirical logical positivist denials like “DMT rush.”
I agree 100% that theology is mostly spergery based on idle speculation.
If I’m right, I’ll let you hear about it on the Other Side. If you’re right, neither of us will ever know the answer for sure anyway.
If you’re right, neither of us will ever know the answer for sure anyway.
A variant of Pascal’s Wager: if you’re right, you get to gloat, but if you’re wrong, nothing happens. That’s a no-brainer!
Pascal’s Folly: “just lie, you’ll fool Him”
(Still, ‘fake it til you make it’ does have its merits)
On the contrary, if you act live like a Christian and profess the dogmas, you are demonstrating your faith from your works regardless of how you feel.
If he’s right, there will be no gloating. I suspect such human emotion will no longer exist.
Curious. Usually Occam is an argument against God because you don’t want to make an explanation needlessly complex. The non-theist says “Existence exists, it doesn’t need an explanation.” We rationalists live by cause and effect, it’s just in the case of first cause you aren’t allowed to ask “why?” 🙂
My only disagreement: “we’ll never know”
STRONGLY disagree.
Who sez? The sages?
When David Goldman said, “we’ll never know the Meaning of Life”, he was as wrong as wrong could be.
Exile…..you too, huh!
He’s been in Scandinavia too long.
SoCal again, Felix – the closest I’m likely getting to Scandinavia this year is the PacNW or Alberta, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed.
I’ll tell you about it sometime, Range – same for you.
Millions. Billions sense something.
That’s why I’m a very religious atheist.
I trust the common wisdom.
Above all, I trust the White way of wisdom.
We’re different, something new.
The variety of our kind shows this.
That beard sure seemed real, even passing the pull test.
Actually had to put my device down I was laughing so hard.
Yeah and the only tenant of libertarianism is the NAP, right?
The whole reason all of these atheist fanatic organizations exist is to spread atheism (and use their (((fellows)))) in the courts to crush Christianity) in the hopes of a secular utopia where members of the tribe are full members of the European family.
Nailed it, Tars. Guess who created the American Atheist Society and the Skeptics society, just to paint honest atheists with the same anti-Christian label.
Now THAT was funny.
Before the tedious squabble of second-graders begins- “Is too!…Is not!”-
How ’bout the basics:
What are we looking at
How does it work
Why?- what’s it do (what’s the function)
See the Watchmaker Argument.
Watchmaker is another semantic pissing match. Give me the mechanics.
It is the task of science to determine the material and formal causes of the world and life. It is duty of philosophy to determine the agent and final causes.
“Santa isn’t real.”
Santa IS real. And he is a homosexual negro. I have proof.
https://www.amazon.com/Santas-Husband-Daniel-Kibblesmith/dp/0062748742
Daniel Kibblesmith is the appalling manlet who recently gifted the world with The (New) New Warriors (revamp of a comicbook action team I had never heard of) featuring new heroes Trailblazer, Screentime, B-Negative, and [waaaaait for it], twins Safespace and the non-binary Snowflake.
This video is actually worth viewing, for the mockery potential alone, though it’s rather horrifying.
https://youtu.be/5PCWUCv1rnU
PS for MemeWarVet: “Early Life” is cryptic about Kibblesmith. The appalling manlet is on record joking about that, so it’s a “probably” — but who really knows.
Still can’t believe those characters aren’t a meme. Jewish is as Jewish does + trolling about it = signaling his teammates.
Now let him do the same with King David or Moses. Lets see the old testament revamped in the same manner. Wankers.
Oh, boy, did that video ever get ratioed. It was worth watching jus to hear about how Snowflake is nonbinary (“goes by ‘they/them'”). Daniel Kibblesmith must be the model for Snowflake.
Just saw this now- a quick DuckDuckGo search (NEVER use Google!!) revealed the following quote:
“ I have a Jewish mother and a non-Jewish father, and every year we celebrated Christmas and Santa Claus brought us presents. And every year we also lit a menorah.”
So yeah. Every. Single. F***ing. Time.
I presume that Felix, like myself, rejects both egalitarianism and theism. Those of us that fall into both of these intellectual categories appear to be quite rare throughout the history of Homo sapiens. It has proven to be a constant source of discouragement throughout my life that adherence to one usually precludes the other. The rationality that naturally leads to the conclusion that egalitarianism is empirically false would seem to result in the same conclusion regarding any flavor of theism. Alas, most humans seem biologically predetermined to embrace some form of belief that cannot be derived from evidence. The logical inference from this post is that the Zman, for all his intellectual prowess, is not immune to this perennial human failing.