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Despite their many parallels in practice, we separate ideology from religion as two separate things that appeal to different aspect of man. Ideology is an integrated set of assertions, theories, and goals for achieving a social end, while religion is assumed to be a set of beliefs with a supernatural basis. The ideologue is focused on imposing changes in how we live as humans in a human society, while the believer is someone primarily focused on how the individual reaches the afterlife.
This distinction is entirely due to Christianity, which is a universal set of beliefs that apply to all individuals, even those unaware of it. Christians start with the belief that all people have an individual relationship with God. The point of life is to discover and embrace this relationship so that you can sit at the feet of God in the afterlife. As a result, we think of religion as a world-rejecting phenomenon. It is focused on what comes after this life, not how to improve this life.
This has not always been how religion works. What we used to call paganism was not particularly concerned with the afterlife. The religions of pre-Christian people were often world-affirming and specific to their people. A people had their gods to whom they could appeal for practical things like a good harvest or protection from the bad people on the other side of the valley. Their gods were tied to their identity as a people and their customs that gave meaning to their lives.
Some of the old religion still exists in this age. You cannot become a Druze, for example, even if you learn their religion. You have to be born into their faith in order to be accepted into their religion. Shintoism is not as strict, in terms of outsiders joining the religion, but for all practical purposes it is a Japanese faith. It is impossible to disentangle Shinto belief from Japanese identity. These are what people who study religion call folk religions.
Here is where you see the lines between religion and ideology blur. While Marxism does not possess a god or gods, it is not without its mystery. Marxist historiography is a central tenet of Marxism that must be accepted without proof. Then you have the assertion that this arc of history must bend toward communism. Of course, there is the assumption that all of mankind will eventually progress to the point where they join the rest of humanity in the communist paradise.
The similarities between religion and ideology have been noted many times, but always as a way to underscore the irrationality of the ideologue. The climate change people are compared to a cult, because they carry on as if they are worshipping Mother Earth and fear she is unhappy with mankind. Calling it a religion is a way to dismiss their claims to science and reason. Joe Sobran made the comparison between the Left and religion in his essay about the hive.
There may be another way of using this comparison. For example, the distinction made between universal religions like Christianity and folk religions like Shintoism provide an insight into why one triumphed over the other with some exceptions. Christianity pushed out paganism in Europe because it offered something that paganism either did not offer or did not address as well as the new religion. Similarly, Christianity has been a failure in Japan because it lacks something the native religion possesses.
A simple example is the Gaia worshippers. What is it about this doomsday cult that the believers find appealing? There is a money racket to it, for sure, but this is only possible because millions of people sense that the way we are living in the modern age is leading to some sort of supernatural doom. Is this belief appealing because it offers salvation from this world or is the appeal that it provides them with something to supplement their identity as a group?
If we take that last part a bit further and incorporate Gaia worship into the basket of things we call the Left, the result is a collection of beliefs that define a group of people and give them an elevated sense of status. Proof of their uniqueness is their membership in a group that holds these beliefs. They are on the right side of history because they carry their groceries in grimy canvas sacks and take their young children to drag shows at the local library.
Perhaps the appeal of what we call wokeness lies in the sense of identity it provides to people who live in highly conformist societies. The people who embrace these ideas are uniformly white, educated and upper-middle-class. They live in inorganic sterile suburban developments and work in fields with high levels of enforced conformity, like education, government, and corporate management. The folk nature of the new religion is what helps give their lives meaning.
On the other hand, it is possible that the new religion is the vestigial part of the old world-rejecting religion expressing through social fads. The gender stuff is a clear rejection of biological reality. Gaia worship is the rejection of human progress and civilization itself. The thread that runs through all of these social fads is their destructiveness to Western societies. The new religion of wrecking things appeals to people seeking an escape from this life.
The other appeal is that the destruction of the old order and the coming of the new world orders is full of uncertainty. The weirdness of these beliefs operates as a selection mechanism, filtering out anyone who questions the project. The new religion selects for those seeking the same shelter from the storm, but also those who think that when the storm passes, they will lead the way into the next phase of humanity. There is, after all, a whiff of Calvinism to all of this.
At this point, it is hard to know where the new religion will go or where it will end up on the folk-universal spectrum. What we can know is that new religions are like new ideologies in that they appeal to those unhappy with the present. Communism appealed to disaffected intellectuals and the urban industrial poor. Christianity appealed to provincials in the failing Roman empire. The reason this new religion appeals to the managerial class is they are unhappy with the present.
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Decades ago over on The Daily Reckoning, some long-gone author (Bill Bonner or one of his collaborators perhaps) had a rule-of-thumb that was basically: People (the public) will believe in anything, when the time has come for them to believe it. I’m sure this could be stated in many similar ways. Any number of examples can be found. Here are just a couple of examples. Old: A gold coin standard is mandatory; without it, no check on the unlimited issuance of money exists and the value of same will drop to zero. New: The gold standard is too constricting. We… Read more »
For Christians, the key to the next life lies in this one. Even the pagans had a dim awareness that what was sown in this life bore fruit in the next.
Yes, it is a false dichotomy. Of course, the Christian wants to be saved but his main focus is on this life: how to live, pray, follow the Master, how to react after situations. After all, the Bible has about 1200 pages and no clear description of Heaven. When my university scheduled a meeting to talk about the new LGBT program, I was full of anxiety. How should I act as a Christian? I never thought of Heaven: after all, my salvation does not depend on that. I decided to express my opinion against this program. I knew I was… Read more »
Thank you for saving me the necessity of replying to this post; your reply succinctly does it. I would add only that Christianity was brought to Japan by Francis Xavier in 16th Century, but was declared illegal and persecuted to near extinction under the Shogunate. So instead of a country of Jesus followers we eventually got World War II in the Pacific.
Yes, it’s somewhat misleading to say that Christianity failed in Japan. While it certainly failed to totally dominate the Japanese socioreligious landscape for various reasons, there is also a long-established Christian community in Japan with an impressive history of resilience in the face of persecution.
It is a tiny community.
In fact, one could argue that Christianity was deliberately exterminated in Japan because it was far TOO successful, and the newly-created Shogunate could not brook any kind of challenge to its authority after unifying the country. Japan had several daimyos who had converted to Christianity (particularly in the south) and thousands upon thousands of commoners who openly practiced the faith.
The Shogunate basically did the same thing to Buddhism, though less violently: by the time the Meiji Restoration came around, every Buddhist temple in the country was little more than an administrative center for the civil authority.
“The rats won’t give up that cheese called ‘The West’
until they’ve devoured it to the very last crumb” – Jean Raspail, The Camp of the Saints
“Because it’s wreckable!” – Gordon Gekko, Wall Street
“Some men just want to watch the world burn.” – Alfred Pennyworth, The Dark Knight
VDare has some copies of Camp of the Saints going for $250 right now. I wish I could have a copy in my library, but at that price, I can’t do it.
I recall reading it around 1980 probably because Dad’s “newsletters” mentioned it. Probably borrowed it from a public library !!! Perhaps that can be “forgiven” since this was in a rural county of Virginia where the last vestiges of the Confederacy hadn’t yet been purged. Library probably had shelves of Mein Kampf available too. 😀
The title appears to available from “allternative” sources. I cannot speak for whether it’s the genuine article.
https://www.jrbooksonline.com/PDFs/Camp_of_the_Saints_2col%20.pdf
satisfying the text requirement
What is interesting is the evolving morality around p3d0s and the like. The film by the star of Person of Interest about rescuing kids from that stuff generated a ton of hate in the media, with the remarkable assertions that it was morally wrong to be against these p3d0s as that was anti-Alphabet+ people. Again, sacred Alphabet+ people have a right (to White) kids for whatever purpose, because their sacred gayness allows this. Its pretty remarkable. And its a clash of the fury/hatred of ordinary White people by the elite and their gofers, against the fundamental genetic interests of said… Read more »
If they arrest Gavin, it damn sure won’t be for pushing alphabet people in the schools
Agreed, but there’s already been stories about financial improprieties. Non reporting of expenses to the Newsoms etc. Siebel Newsom “produced” a documentary sold at pricey $$ to schools, the proceeds going to the Foundation that has as its chief officers the Newsoms. Who operate a winery.
I assume this was the shot across the bow. Dr. Jill is not going to leave the White House.
It would be nice if you were right. Unfortunately, you’ve never been right about anything.
So once again we see that when people lose their Christian faith, they don’t become faith-less; they seek to replace it with something else, usually something rather malignant.
Web: “No one dare say that international finance would be backing up a war to destroy Monarchies, thus creating a need to replace them with democracy, which we all know is influenced by Dollars, instead of heritage and culture.” “WW1 was waged for two reason and two reasons only: 1) to destroy the monarchies of Europe; and 2) destroy the Ottoman Empire so that Palestine would become under the protectorate of the British empire, which was then handed over to the Rothschilds via the Balfour Declaration (the deal struck to bring the US into the war).” So how did the… Read more »
Commandments against idolatry are overlooked as low key, but it might be what humans do the most unwittingly.
Celebrity worship is idolatry. Superhero collections are idolatry. These atheist geeks have shelves of graven image statues of superman and star wars that would put a pagan shrine to shame.
Worship of technology and social media and selfies is an obvious one.
Of course people make idols over their bodies, obsessing how they look. Or make idols of others bodies into paraphilias.
All people will worship, whether they know it or not
Idolatry! Seeking a Face, a someone you can relateto, to picture in your mind as you would speaking to a grandpa, or an old beloved, or a friend. Heaven forbid! How natural! No, you may not form a clear vision of who you are. Terrible! You might then form a sense of self, of roots, of loyalty and a People- And that must never be allowed. Submit! Submit, to the foreign Master who rules you! This is why he cannot have a face. That he might be anything, promise anything, threaten anything. That you might not point and say, “Look!… Read more »
True, but you forgot the Trekkies, the most malignant group of weirdos…..
Don’t forget Dr. Who.
Plus it’s British.
Coming back because I forgot to thank Fakeemail for illustrating my contention that of the Bible is political, political messaging. Political messaging is fine, good, when applied to the proper scale of “member of a family, community, tribe”; the difficulty is sorting out what works for sheik and shtetl from messages handed down from a ruling class. Messaging, how? Through memes. The didn’t have cartoons, so they painted a picture with stories. A picture with a point, like Aesop did. (Islamic storytelling never gets to a “point”. There is no If-Then-Thus; only and endless run-on of a thousand and one… Read more »
Worshipping the constitution is a form of idolatry too.
“Commandments against idolatry are overlooked as low key”
Because it’s otherwise much too easy to become caught up in endless Puritan spiralling against perceived “idolatry.”
Man plants seed in a moist fertile place; after a time, life emerges. A European looks across an Alpine valley, lake or sea shore, gazes upon mother and child, do these not stir the soul? We have a sense of time, we want to perpetuate these wonderful vistas and physicalities forward into futures as far as they can be perpetuated. We want to drink good water, eat and enjoy healthy food. We want unspoiled lands. We want to go on in to the future, just as long gone ancestors went on into us. Reverence for nature and perceiving one’s self… Read more »
I’ve been doing a lot of reading and documentary watching about ancient civilizations as of late. A common thread of any ancient civilization documentary or essay since the 1990s is to incorporate climate change as having a huge impact on history. A recent documentary that I watched about Egyptian pyramids emphasized that one pyramid in particular was once surrounded by water, and was made to look like an island floating in the middle of a lake. The area where they pyramid is located has since become more dry, but of course that environmental condition has been true for at least… Read more »
‘Climate change’ is the vehicle they are driving to establish a one-world government hegemony.
Nothing more, nothing less.
This is not hard. The collection of “woke” beliefs can be explained in three words: single, childless women. The CDS’s latest study on fertility (January, 2023) reveals that 48% of women of childbearing age (15-44) in the US are childless. I saw another recent study that predicted over 50% of women in the US will be single and childless by 2030. These “woke” movements are populated overwhelmingly by single, childless women. Typically, they are credentialed and with decent jobs in HR departments or government, but dumber than a bag of rocks. Having failed to exercise their biological imperative to become… Read more »
“single, childless women” do not have the power to commandeer our culture.
Who organized and promoted the “single, childless women?”
I’m not white knighting for these women. I find them intolerable, but they are an effect, not a cause.
If you remove these women, those who controlled those women will remain with the same malevalent intent.
LIS is correct . they have been played by our opinion leaders and are paying a terrible price for it. the elite agenda is undeniably de-populationist . “All those old folks are owed a fortune in soc sec and pension . it would be a shame if anything happened to them and the folks at the top didn’t have to pay them ” .
Yes, but they wouldn’t get for with their new religion…Women with kids, or even just a husband in many cases, have skin in the game…
The tribe could not have sold their destructive narratives so effortlessly if it wasn’t for white women especially the childless university graduate ones.
Two big red pills for me were seeing how if only men had voted, Trump would have won every state. If only women had voted, Hillary would have won nearly every state.
The second was the demographics of the wall support. Single white women were the most opposed to the wall with around 90 percent opposing it.
The tribe comes up with the narratives. Women are the enforcers and vanguard.
“Most will just lament the most recent development but remain blind to what caused it as with the feminists who resist the transgender movement which is just a natural progression of their own ideology. They will be unable to see they have brought this about themselves. The leftists, the globalists, the feminists, the internationalists (no borders!), the materialists, the atheists and a whole host of other spiritual deviants will wring their hands and say this is not what we meant when it is the direct result of their thoughts and writings and words and actions.” –William Wildblood http://meetingthemasters.blogspot.com/2023/07/feminist-hypocrisy.html “And Yet,… Read more »
Ah, yes, behold the power of ressentiment in the Nietzschean sense, a power almost tectonic in its ability to grind great, God-given things to nothingness. And to those in the grip of this demonic possession, the very ability to comprehend the beauty of that which they are led to destroy is extirpated first of all, leading inevitably to their insensibility toward the evils that they then perpetrate.
I guess my last sentence is a restatement of the ancient wisdom, “Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad”.
Don’t forget the apartment full of cats, the box of wine in the fridge and the second-hand Prius in the reserved space (the Teslas were just too expensive, and where would I charge it?)
Excellent observation. The theory was that, with child bearing now a distant option, women could become what they are supposed to be and live a rich, full life destroying the patriarchy. In practice, it has led to vast herds of desperately embittered woke females with too much time on their hands.
I really hate it when people who are basically atheists possessing only the most superficial and curated understanding of religion, then presume to sit in judgment over it, pronouncing on what it is and was, and who believes what and why. They imagine their position at the cusp of a failing modern age gives them a bird’s eye view of the subject, when they are really just ignorantly scoffing at sounds they’ve lost the ability to hear. The only question that should be put about a religion is whether it’s true or not. Any material or even “spiritual” benefits accruing… Read more »
It is a beautiful analysis and timeless to boot.
Seventy years ago, in a Soviet-satellite country, wokeness (in arts) was called socialistic realism. I remember everybody in my school complaining that the assigned books were unreadable because they were untrue.
I think we understood that the regime would not mind if their writers were more talented or we were more receptive. Why don’t they drop the absurd plots and stop annoying us?
I don’t think we understood that the silly medium contained a clearheaded message: this is your life now, forever.
I still grapple with the deceptive (in my opinion) use of the term “real.” Unless I’m mistaken, the term dates to Plato and his Forms. What I’d call the abstract, interior world of ideals is what Platonism, in fact, terms the “real.” In contrast was that “rabble of the senses,” the body’s sense organs that tried to inform the brain of the “apparent” world. I’m not sure if the above is an example of what Neitzsche (and perhaps others) call inversion of values. But it certainly would qualify, seems to me. Let’s see: make up any old shit you want,… Read more »
Late comment. I call it Plato’s Mistake; it is the same mistake the religious make. Plato assumed that there was a perfect form from which the earthly descended. No. The opposite is true. We can sense that there is a World Beyond the physical- BUT, the reality is, it descends from us. From the real Real, the reality of organic physical form. This is the best Creation can do. The Mistake comes from imagining One Beginning; no, the physical constants were built up, piece-by-piece, particle-by-particle, through unknown cycles of Creation. That is what I call the Bones. The organic nodes-… Read more »
“Perhaps the appeal of what we call wokeness lies in the sense of identity it provides to people who live in highly conformist societies.”
This exactly.
Modern society has stripped people of any identity, killed God and made even the affluent pretty miserable. They need a reason to suffer. Jesus and Buddha have been ignored. So creating heaven on earth is there goal. They think Woke is the path.
I think it’s easier to multiply loaves and fishes than it is to civilize Barbarians, but that’s what make a horse race.
https://twitter.com/DrBrittaniJ/status/1678040234850656259
This is why it’s dumb to say we should just get rid of gender studies and things will be better. If it was just gender studies it might be a manageable problem. This is someone who “majored in something useful”.
I had always assumed that blacks in this level of society are like Sidney Poitier. But it seems you have professional class blacks that are almost as bad as ghetto blacks, just bad in a different way.
I had always assumed that blacks in this level of society are like Sidney Poitier.
A friend who taught me right from wrong
And weak from strong
That’s a lot to learn
Yeah I did too.
Look, this woman is most likely an AA graduate from med school. Why would one think that she has an superior intellect to match her (given) status. Her post seems to reinforce my bias. She is mentally still a ghetto Black without her own accomplishments—and she probably senses it—hence she display’s an MD behind her name in a non-medical forum/discussion. I’ve seen bunches of these people, both White and minority! Hell, when I was a graduate student, the ribbing one got when claiming the title “Doctor” upon graduating was humbling to see and strongly reinforced by the faculty of my… Read more »
Tony Scalia could be a jerk at times but in one of the last oral arguments he participated in, he said this: “One of — one of the briefs pointed out that most of the black scientists in this country don’t come from schools like the University of Texas. They come from lesser schools where they do not feel that they’re being pushed ahead in classes that are too fast for them.” I’m not sure if the same thing applies to black doctors, but if she hadn’t gone to the University of Michigan medical school (where my mom’s dad went… Read more »
TBF, there is such a thing as “the talented twentieth.”
Not in this case, granted . . . .
Never heard of it—“twentieth”. Look up “talented tenth”. That is the proportion W.E.B. Du Bois singled out as well as any number of the early civil rights folk in the late 19th and early 20th century.
There is little indication that a population with an average IQ of 85 could possibly have a “talented twentieth” as we’d now understand it since only 14% of Blacks would be expected to exceed the White mean average IQ of 100–and 100 is no great deal.
I’d love to hear Britanni honestly articulate why she moved to a rich white suburb and how awful it is there.
Should be a hoot.
Some kind of perceived social status has to be the answer because there is no material gain from the religion, in fact the opposite. Although many of them already have plenty of money for at least a generation. It’s weird how it spread so quickly too. Even 15 years ago most of the “woke” people today were just race blind liberals. Why did it spread so fast? What changed that made simply being a regular liberal not nearly enough for them? Why didn’t this happen earlier, when the lower and middle classes had a lifestyle more similar to the wealthy?… Read more »
Humans seem to have an instinct to form ingroups and outgroups in any situation, even when the humans are similar. In the past, in otherwise homogeneous societies, whites fought over religion and class. I guess that part of the hatred that white leftists have for other whites is a new expression of the old class conflict. One of the many reasons that I am so interested in the failed Austrian painter is that he had explicit policies to try to encourage brotherhood between the different classes. How much can the seemingly innate instinct to form ingroups and outgroups within a… Read more »
“I guess that part of the hatred that white leftists have for other whites is a new expression of the old class conflict.”
Absent “racism” – which we once had both baked into the pie and sprinkled on top – we have classism.
Voila…
Best I can do is competition on technical merit.
It’s a White Male thing.
And the women get to vote INFORMALLY. With their fertility as the winning prize.
You could say that the “green” industrialists making millions off government subsidies for inefficient power sources are the corollary to televangelists. There is some money in it, even if it’s not exactly prosperity gospel. I think you understate their need to signal their separateness from the dirts. They need to signal it every day in every way. Material affluence, the display of which is discouraged so as to not offend Gaia, isn’t a reliable marker, or always an obvious one. Out and about in their daily world, nobody really knows how affluent the average person they cross paths with is.… Read more »
My guess as to why they went nuts in the last 15 years is Obama. In 2008 they put all of their hopes and dreams in him, thinking he was going to bring about paradise. Around 2013, they figured out paradise wasn’t going to happen. Rather than do some self-reflection, they thought some evil people must have prevented their sacred Obama from doing it. Who opposed him? Racist whites.
These soulless gods aren’t as omnipotent as they believe themselves to be. The guy who runs Boderhawk shared an experience he had in a small college town in Switzerland a few years ago. He heard noises in the street below late one night and looked out the window of his apartment. He saw two vibrant, scholarly refugees brawling. One of them threw the other through a glass store window. The local police arrived and sent the less injured guy back up to his apartment. There was glass and blood on the street in front of the store. The next morning,… Read more »
Melissa: Harkens back to the classic “If a tree falls in a forest . . . ” My husband’s colleague, who took his family to Europe for a train trip, insisted there was no unrest in France that HE saw, therefore it did not exist. He literally called the reports “fake news.” I’ll bet you 90+% of ‘murricans never even heard of anything happening in France. It’s easy to get a false impression from the generally better-informed commenters here that more people are aware of reality. Even if a few average Whites realize crime is increasing in their area or… Read more »
3g4me: Unfortunately, you are correct.
There is a large percentage of the population who lack complex thought.
There is also a tremendous effort by the ruling class to conceal the truth.
Hrrrrmmmmm. I am a recent convert to Christianity and can’t speak with any authority but…I think I might take exception to your statement that “it’s all about getting into the afterlife…” In my outhouse studies, the Bible is actually very vague about details of the afterlife. Also, you can’t up your chances merely by being charitable and virtue signalling. You are literally called upon to be a better human being. It is very much more about the “here and now” and how people need to think in order to get along. But whadda I know? I can speak with some… Read more »
You are correct on the minimal points about the afterlife in the Bible. Heck, even Hell is three different words, none of which signal afterlife (e.g. Gehenna). However, if we understand Christianity as the Catholic Church or other main denominations, then we have to acknowledge that they do spend a great deal of time perverting the messages in the Bible, one of which is the afterlife.
Filthie: Assimilating one’s enemies? That’s your summation of Jesus’ teachings and Christian theology? Seriously?
Speaking strictly clinically and dispassionately about the net result – yes. Many Dissidents struggle with faith and spiritualism and I am merely trying to speak to them on their terms.
I struggle with my own faith too, sometimes. Years of hive mind conditioning makes it incredibly difficult sometimes.
On second thought I may have managed to trip over my own dink and and gone tumbling down the stairs with this. Obviously real Christianity is far more involved than “worrying about the afterlife” and I gently chided our esteemed blog host for it.
Then I made the same mistake myself. Christianity is far more complicated and involved than “assimilation of your enemies”.
We have to be extremely careful when we ‘simplify things’. It’s currently a huge problem in Dissident thought, but they are not the only ones doing it.
I wonder sometimes. One could get that idea by taking the Great Commission at face value, for instance.
Filthie: I recommend Yuri Slezkine’s “The Jewish Century.” (I was tipped off to it here or a similar place.) Of course it’s written from a European Jew perspective, but I found it quite credible. In particular, it’ll provide very detailed answers to several questions you pose above. How much is true and how much is skillful storytelling, you must decide for yourself. While the book doesn’t deal much in Bronze Age legends, consider some of the Jew’s own folklore. Stripped of its supernatural trappings, there still remains more than a grain of truth in such grand narratives as Joseph’s successful… Read more »
Or in Joseph’s. He bankrupted Egypt with his taxes on grain and cattle, based on a fever dream, while providing a rich cut to his own to colonize the Egyptian bureaucracy.
(“Joseph” is an archetype, like Pajeet, Bubba, and Felontavius.)
Part of the reason Christian belief did not spread far in Japan was its main group of believers was nuked at Nagasaki.
That their ancestors might be suffering in hell for not being Christian didn’t appeal to the Japanese
I always thought it ironic: Nagasaki, target #2, always had a (small) Christian community – rare in Japan.
But really: Christianity in Japan was aggressively trampled down by Toyotomi Hideyoshi et.al., in the16th century.
(The Catholic Church seemed either incapable or unwilling to do syncretism with folk religions in either Japan or China – see Matteo Ricci – as they had centuries earlier done with Norse, Celtic, Latin, and Slavic folk religions.)
Anyway, check out Martin Scorsese’s SILENCE (2016?)
Believe it not, the sexual mutilation of children for some religious end hasantecedents in Christianity. Google the “Skoptsy” (just don’t use Google Images.) They believed that lust was so devilish that the only way to rid the world of it was to rid the sites of the body of these vestiges—mastectomies for females and castration for males (sound familiar?) They even claimed to be in the Word with their acts: “And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not… Read more »
“She was a cute – young lady”
Fixed it for you.
The people doing this shit will rot in hell.
joey jünger: “…antecedents in Christianity…” Mother Ann Lee convinced myriad young Whites of the 18th Century to forgo sexual intercourse and thereby die childless. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Lee Her influence on the culture was so profound that, a quarter of a millennium later, she still has one or two living disciples in Sabbathday Lake, Maine. She must have been personally responsible for preventing the births of hundreds of thousands [possibly even millions?] of White Christian children. [Note that there are 35 million descendants of the Mayflower alone…] Margaret Sanger had a similar effect upon the species, although her wrath tended to be directed… Read more »
Genital mutilation? Gee, I wonder who thought of that as a religious practice?
The Covidian religion was a little more different than the Earth worshipers. It offered more redemptive capacity. With the eco religion even when you adhere to the strict theology humanity is still considered a cancer that needs to be eviscerated to make Mother Earth clean again. In the Covidian one as long as you wore the mask, even alone in your car, boosted every five minutes, cleaned your UPS packages (I know people who did this, sadly) turned around three times to spray Lysol in house, etc., you were redeemed from the virus. Even if you died from it you… Read more »
That last sentence is quite a striking analogy (one I hadn’t thought of). I would not be surprised if the next covid’ish’ plague to assail humanity will in fact require the equivalent of lambs blood to be sprinkled on the lintels of the doors to each house – lest the government death angel pays a visit.
This new religion, as Z terms it, is coterminous with Leftism. It is Leftism. And, inasmuch as Leftism has always been the ideology of those unhappy with the status quo, it has needs be destructive. Whenever Leftism ceases annihilating, it ceases to exist. And we can’t have that now, can we?
“This new religion, as Z terms it, is coterminous with Leftism. It is Leftism. And, inasmuch as Leftism has always been the ideology of those unhappy with the status quo, it has needs be destructive.” The problem, though, is that these people are NOT unhappy with the status quo the way that traditional working-class/peasant leftists were. To the contrary, adherents of the new religion are the overclass — they have a lot of money, education, status, power, nice homes, secure jobs, sexual license, etc. Let me tell you I was in both Chapel Hill, NC and West Virginia last week,… Read more »
Beginning with the French Revolution, Leftists have been unhappy with society for any number of reasons. But in the present, their primary gravamen is that groups of people are not equal, dammit, and they should be! The fact that negroes, despite intensive and expensive remediation for 60-plus years, still lag far behind whites by virtually every index, drives them mad. The fact that perverts are held in lower esteem by society and are far more prone to suicide than normal people, pushes their buttons. The fact that we still live by hierarchical dyads such as criminal/lawful, insane/sane, lazy/productive, offends against… Read more »
“To the contrary, adherents of the new religion are the overclass — they have a lot of money, education, status, power, nice homes, secure jobs, sexual license, etc.” Perhaps they’re unhappy its falling apart then and has been for the past 20 years? Feminism and all the isms we dislike have been ascendant since the end of WW2. It like a recent video i watched that showed the total percentage of the G7’s economic output since the early 90’s and the BRICS. Slowly they gain on you and then they pass you all at once. You’ve been losing your culture… Read more »
Skillful use of “level” as a verb in two senses. But wait, there’s more!
(1) make something (in social sense people’s opportunities or outcomes) to be equal or similar;
(2) to aim (a weapon);
(3) [similar] to direct a criticism or accusation;
(4) [most ominously] to demolish [a building, a town, a city, etc.]
The World-Improver (Egalitarian, Liberal, Reformer, etc.) has made ample use of all four senses of that verb, dating to the dawn of civilization and perhaps even earlier.
“Ashes and diamonds, foe and friend, we were all equal, in the end.” — Roger Waters/Pink Floyd
“In a state of nature–or so they suppose–we are all the same.”
Lambs laying down with lions, eh?
Not expert on this, but iirc Marx was influenced by Hegel. Hegel was an idealist, more or less gave us the modern notion of dialectic. Again iirc. Maybe I absorbed this somewhere, but to my mind, there’s a trinity of ideal, material, spiritual. Take away spirit, because it’s mysterious and more or less operates ex nihilo, and you get a dialectic. Progress is no longer a will, but a process working itself out. It’s not potentially capricious, it has fixed, potentially universal, rules. The question is, is it ideas or stuff in the driver’s seat? Again, Hegel an idealist, but… Read more »
What is it about this doomsday cult that the believers find appealing? – Answer- The human need for suffering and depravation in order to bring enlightenment. A middle or upper class that has always had the conveniences of modern living, hot water, electricity, etc., still needs to overcome sin. Since all the old sins, like getting railed in an orgy or taking drugs are out the window, new sins must be invented. There’s not even need for redemption, although buying carbon offset credits can do that.
“There’s not even need for redemption, although buying carbon offset credits can do that.” Nor especially no need for repentance. Repentance means facing up to ones flaws head on, moving into action and make the change away from. You are then in the process of becoming a different person, by the act of turning away and then turning toward. The insane left does not change. Does not change! It’s sorathic spiteful destruction until dust. Termites always destroying the foundation. Sadly, it’s time to separate. The waamen ain’t changing, Richard Levine ain’t changing, Cookie Toadface Nuland-Kagan ain’t changing, F your kids… Read more »
When humans acquired complex language skill, this enabled verbal programming of their young with ancient wisdom that served to enhance survival, hence evolutionary reinforcement. Religion was an adaptation that successfully enhanced this programming via consistency, repetition, and constructive feedback. All historical religions are a compilation of ancient and local wisdom that evolved in a particular environment. Universalist religions are those which distilled the common denominators of ancient wisdom across many environments into one composite paradigm. In addition, they all include an element of deferred gratification, which evolution seems to find valuable. The important point is that religions can only persist… Read more »
Leftism, or wokeness, or whatever you want to call it, rejects ancient wisdom and creates new “wisdom” on the fly. This protean nature is its strength. It constitutes adaptability over time, and, backed by the military and economic might of the GAE, it conquers space as well.
Yes, the inmates are now running the asylum and they command the obedience of the Jackboots to ensure their security. And all tyrannies are like this because its the only way they can persist, even if temporarily. At the root, these societies largely sustain themselves via exploitation or slavery, which is enabled by application of supreme force. If evolution looked favorably upon this model, slavery would still exist. Eventually the plebs reach a breaking point and rise up. We are not quite there yet, but with the defeat of Ukraine and the rise of BRICS+, that tipping point may come… Read more »
All false religious fail because, no matter how much they wriggle and writhe, there is one thing they can’t avoid: Reality. And Reality is coming at our lovely Woke friends with the speed of a runaway freight train.
One of the strangest aspects of the new religion is how they ascertain the friend/enemy distinction. The zealots seem to be more and more motivated by simply rejecting what their enemies are embracing. You see this in environmentalism when they flock to farming mega-corps when we espouse the virtues of regenerative farming, or in Germany when they re-fire coal plants in order to close down their nuclear power. If there was a 100% clean, infinite energy source, the environmentalists would probably be against it just because the “bad people” are for it. Probably the strangest modern example is he left… Read more »
Well, if you look at how prior religions metastasized, it always snowballed once the religion became a means of displaying higher social status. Social status in our society is largely based on how far removed you are from hillbillies, so wokeism appeals to that by simply believing the opposite of whatever a redneck would believe.
I firmly believe that if the Bad Orange Man started preaching solar power or castration, the wokerati would have no choice but to quickly change their tune.
Conservatives are making a shameful display about the pedo movie, too. The hero is a Homeland Security agent, based on some actual guy. Inside every real-life DHS man’s office computer there are many, many, very long lists of “DVEs,” domestic violent extremists. One list is of every DC tourist in early January 2021, one is of every parent who ever complained about trannies, etc., etc.—and soon a list of everyone who paid to see the movie about him.
The whole “bud lite” thing: simply a twisted (and very immature!) assault on what “they” perceived to be the “fun-juice of bad-folks.”
And silliness orchestrated by a…female who I am sure is, um, shall we say, not particularly maternal.
Christianity offered something… …to Roman slave women. Then Roman women. But what does it offer men? IT OFFERED THE WOMEN who in fairness are a lot better wives and mothers than the pagan Roman women, and still are… Rome had been Christian for over a century when it “fell”. But what was the attraction? Ok – Roman soldiers fsking Christian slave girls and 300 years later the Emperor Constantine popped out.* So sorry- the attraction is less the afterlife than sex, but as these women DO make good wives and mothers the men say “yes Dear” and so… That and… Read more »
> That and again the illiterate Barbarians needed literate clerks aka Clerics to count their money, and over time the flavor of Christianity preferred by the ones writing it down won out. A lot of the reason Christianity won is because the early Christian institutions attracted the Roman elites who grew disillusioned with the Roman bureaucracy. > And yes Christianity IS a woman’s religion, the Men say yes Dear because she’s a good wife and Mother, unfortunately it leeches away masculinity, making it indefensible, this was instantly a point of contention with Roman rulers and Generals, it goes back and… Read more »
Christianization was not uniform. It was a bottom up affair in the core of the Roman empire. In Gaul it was more of a top down process as Roman power waned. In other parts of Europe it was an evolution that resulted in a different religion. Christianity in Scandia, for example, was never the same thing in practice, as it was in Rome.
Clearly, Christianity raised the status of women in the ancient world. Paganism valued women, if at all, only as sexual commodities, and highly perishable ones at that. The nurturing aspect embodied by the Virgin Mary, as well as other women in the New Testament, has a longer shelf life, literally.
Note that I do not view this development as an entirely unalloyed good. Empowered women have their downsides for society.
Yes, Christianity was the first-wave feminism of its day. I am not disparaging Christianity here…I agree with first-wave feminism.
Women are valued members and saints. I can’t think of another religion that holds women in as high a regard. But it merely elevated women from being chattel; it didn’t reject family and biology like the progressive religions do. That was enough.
There was some practical advantages to conversion. Clovis converted and made sure to be on good terms with the bishops for purely practical reasons. Whether he was ever a genuine believer is debatable. He issued edicts in defense of the Catholic church, but rarely enforced them. He also appointed his people to positions within the church, thus coopting it.
On the other hand, there were German tribes that rejected the Gallo-Roman Christianity in favor of Arianism for cultural reasons, but Arianism provided the rulers with tools that the old gods did not in terms of social organization.
The conversion to Christianity in Anglo-Saxon Briton was generally a practical affair. Sometimes it was done to curry favor.woth Frankish kings, especially if the Anglo-Saxon king was married to a French noble woman.
Other times, the Anglo-Saxon kings realized the advantages of a literate class and the added authority Christianity gave them.
Britain is an interesting case. Pagan to Christian to pagan to Christian.and almost back to pagan.
And now to Islam.
Let’s see the end of France and America before we start mourning for Blighty.
It’s odd to me that so many people assert the conversion of Clovis was insincere. Conversions of rulers are always constrained by prudence, but people seem to think that if he didn’t become a monk or something, then maybe it was merely instrumental. He never went back to worshipping the old gods; not sure what more we would expect. Peter Heather wrote a history of the era and seemed to think it would scandalize the faithful by pointing out Clovis entertained Arianism before deciding on orthodoxy – as if the ruling class in Spain, western France, all of Italy, and… Read more »
Google Mount Athos
“Wives, be submissive to your own husbands as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, just as Christ is the head and Savior of the church, which is His body. But as the church submits to Christ, so also let the wives be to their own husbands in everything.” -Ephesians 5:22-33
What part of that “leeches away masculinity”?
Trinitarianism has many aspects which leech away masculinity. It wants us to… • Reject our own patriarchs for Israel’s, • Submit to a degrading guilt trip which is promoted under the rubric of “original sin”, • Honor Joseph, a probable cuckold • Pretend that Mary was impregnated miraculously by a god, not by Joseph before marriage nor by another man, • Love our enemies indiscriminately, • Believe that the poor in spirit are blessed, • Turn the other cheek, • Take no care for the morrow, • Agree that “God is love” even though it’s obvious that the god, if… Read more »
Oh gawd. Another escaped trailer park intellectual from Jim’s Blog. Expect Bubbles to come along any moment. It makes you wonder where these goofs went to school and who taught them. Christianity has produced the best men the world has ever seen. The best warriors were historically Christian. As were the best architects, the best shipwrights, the best captains and navigators, the best scientists, the best builders – all had their roots in Christianity. Hell’s bells…even blacks can be raised from utter squalor by the faith. The best families and fathers and sons are Christians. Contrary to Jim and his… Read more »
“ Christianity pushed out paganism in Europe because it offered something that paganism either did not offer or did not address…” $Accounting$. The monks were literate and could count money and taxpayers and the Barbarians who weren’t Christian-because the Germans who took over Rome were- needed tax revenue and so literacy, and so Clerics became Clerks. Gaia same thing; The actual corporate polluters who do put heavy metals in the water table realize that all idealists seek money, as Marx with Engels. They rigged the Corporate research grant game so Carbon and CO2 became the poison, this is a much… Read more »
It doesn’t all come down to money. It all comes down to demons.
This is dumb. We see it a lot from people who imagine our ancestors were as shallow and unreflective as we are and cannot imagine people having any concern with serious questions about our place in the universe. So they say, “Accounting!” or, “Literacy!” as if writing and arithmetic require some sort of conversion of a man’s soul and a ruler’s civilization toward Christ.
“Ah! But it was all fake, see? The rulers never believed it, they just pretended to believe so they could get those literate and numerate monks to do their work,” etc.
It’s all so tiresome.
Agreed. Any time I read somebody reducing some movement or phenomenon to materialistic causes, I just roll my eyes. Silly and reductive.
Silly.
AND
Reductive.
“the result is a collection of beliefs that define a group of people and give them an elevated sense of status” This is the conclusion that I’ve come to having lived almost all of my life on the leftist west coast. The major appeal of this belief system is the sense of superiority that it grants the believer and the license to hate those outside of the group. Smugness and condescension flow from this group towards the non-believers. Take my sister, for example. Please… All of their humorists, Colbert, Stewart, drip with scorn for those who don’t believe. Smugness is… Read more »
I tend to agree with you on this one LineInTheSand. I witnessed it first hand in the land of the Smug Index for many years and later in the island borough that is the world’s capital city – even worse there. It seems like it is a gigantic doom loop. It also explains why they make cause with the black grievance mongers. Misery likes company. The system of rootless college to corporation status and power seeking is very destructive of the human soul. Loyalty to the nation was replaced with loyalty to the Degree Stamping Institution. That was a thin… Read more »
Yeah, I’ve lived around these people for 20 years. They’re signaling their membership to a club, a club that they feel gives them the right to look down on other whites. What’s fascinating is how the club is almost exclusively whites. Non-whites are just props, which is why they get so confused and, frankly, a bit upset when Asians and Indians start to join the club. (Blacks are okay but they’re special and no threat.) Lefty whites don’t know what to do with Indians and Asians that start harping on white priviledge. First, the lefty whites lose status in the… Read more »
I disagree. I think white Leftists, in their perversity, revel in being condemned for their whiteness and their alleged priviledge. It gives them a masochistic frisson, and allows them to play the martyr’s role at the same time.
Some, yes.
But I’ve seen enough lefty whites bristle as Indians or Asians talking about white privilege.. The Indians and Asians are versed enough in the game to point out that present company is excluded.
privilege
Just to ward of the incoming from Biley.
But herein lies a question–do people become Leftists because it allows them to feel superior, or are arrogant, conceited people naturally drawn to Leftism? What is prime–the personality or the ideology?
It’s almost a display of superiority through inferiority.
Like saying “I’m so comfortable with myself that I’m going to degrade myself to show you how strong I am”.
A kid hitting himself in the nuts to show off how tough he is. That kind of thing. But on a much bigger scale.
Answer:
In a more “energetic age,” they would’ve had the “smug slapped out of them” before it grew tap roots.
Colbert, Stewart, et.al., would have long ago been gibbeted.
“How does that dehydration and sunburn square with your snark, fellahs? Touch of frostbite – what? And how ’bout the kids tormenting you with projectiles? What do you have to say for yourselves now?”
Yep. I call it the Smirkocracy. Their arrogance and smugness is matched only be their astounding ignorance of reality.
Marxism, environmentalism, anti-racism and wokism are all offshoots of liberal-enlightenment philosophy. The only difference is the area of focus. Underlying all of them is the idea that liberated man can build utopia. With marxism it was liberation from markets and economics; with the modern iterations it is liberation from biology. In all cases they are narcissistic hubris. Even environmentalism superficially elevates nature, but at core is the belief that humans are dominating nature in a negative, disastrous way. People that truly worshipped nature would not think that man was capable of destroying the planet. Those morons actually do believe that.… Read more »
Yeah, this is James Lindsay’s view and I’m pretty sympathetic to it. From the Greeks to Inspector Callahan, wise men have been telling us “to know our limitations”. But we never listen.
Your point about secret knowledge is a good one. However, I locate this knowledge in the realm of postmodern philosophy–or theory as they prefer to call it. Any literate, intelligent person who picks up a postmodern text will be utterly baffled by what he encounters. The language, the postmodern liturgy if you will, is utterly bizarre, and from a semantic and grammatical standpoint, simply does not make sense roughly 50 percent of the time. This moeity is incoherent gibberish. But the postmodern initiate doesn’t see it that way. She will claim that there is meaning, and that only those who… Read more »
“Christianity pushed out paganism in Europe because it offered something that paganism either did not offer or did not address as well as the new religion.”
Anything that could be a rival to Catholic Christianity was brutally stomped on and extirpated. Including variants of Christianity that were promptly labeled heresies. Most of the folk religions and practices of pre-Christian Europe got this treatment and it’s a miracle they still managed to survive in odd nooks and crannies. The first victim of Christianity was the high culture of the Greco-Roman world.
I would expect this from someone going by the name you use here.
When all is considered with the history of mankind I am quite content with Christianity’s impact on the world let alone on my own salvation.
Anything that could be a rival to Catholic Christianity was brutally stomped on and extirpated. Including variants of Christianity that were promptly labeled heresies. That narrative is pretty overblown because the Papacy lacked the power to do that before the twelfth century, and even then only in north-western Europe. There was a lot of schismatism between ~300ad and 800ad which the empire fought with vary limited degrees of success. But that was not the heavy repression of later middle ages, and mostly failed. As a side note, christianity splintered from the very beginning – throwing off innumerable offshoots that labeled… Read more »
Sure. Look at the various ecumenical councils, beginning with Nicea. The two major versions that emerged victorious were Catholicism in Europe and the Orthodox Church in Byzantium. Efforts to reconcile the two failed.
Christianity began as a variant of Judaism. The failure to attract enough Jews led to casting the net further to snare Goyim. But to do this Greek philosophical ideas had to be added to the mix. This was an ongoing process that continued right up to Aquinas in the 13th century, with his synthesis of Christian theology and Aristotelianism.
Forgive my corrections, but: During Jesus’s ministry Jews were the prime targets of his message. But even during his ministry, he said he was going to welcome the Gentile, and he did so on several occasions. From the beginning, Christianity was universalist. Not a failing Jewish cult. “Catholicism” (AKA Universalism) was the entire Christian church until the high middle ages. There was no east-west thing until The Crusades (some say the Great Schism of 1054) was the cause of the split between Roman and Byzantine Christianity. And it was over Papal authority, of course, with the help of idiot bands… Read more »
Basically true, Marko. However, eastern Christianity always tended to emphasize the divine component of the triune god as manifested in Christ, while western Christianity played up his human element. But this difference was more de facto than de jure. In other words, it was more practical than doctrinal.
“But even during his ministry, he said he was going to welcome the Gentile” In the Gospels, but we don’t know who wrote them and to what purpose. To give another example, look at the treatment of Pontius Pilate, the Roman procurator of Judaea. He would have been ruling with the mailed fist. But look at the evolution of his depiction in the Gospels, which becomes ever kinder. In the Greek Orthodox and Coptic Churches, he’s a saint. The point is to reach out to and attract the Goyim. Jesus was supposed to have been the Jewish messiah for the… Read more »
It took a long time foe the old religions to become folktales and the Christian “heresies” to be suppressed.
lol. The Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Bourbons, and Vandals were unavailable for comment.
Brutally stomped on, {smh}. Read a book, moron.
The visigoths, ostrogoths a s vandals dismembered the western empire and ruled over the parts they grabbed for centuries.
That’s some kine of stomped on.
They were labeled heresies because they were heresies. Either Arianism was true (the Second and Third Persons of the Trinity were created) or it was false. If false, then a heresy. If true, then holding They were uncreated is the heresy. Both can’t be true.
No different than calling a pro-life Democrat a heretic. He would be a heretic of the current beliefs of the Democrat party.
Whether you call them heresies or not, they are evidence of splintering. And they were hardly crushed at the time.
Donatism and pelagianism, among other heresies, weren’t heretical at their point of origin as catholic doctrine had not gelled in those specific areas.
They were post hoc heresies.