Christianity

[Immanuel Can]

...the use of the pandemic in service to mega-political objectives? Do you have any other thoughts or concerns of any sort?

What you point to here is, beyond any possibility of reasonable doubt exactly what's going on. The WEC has announced (and I have their book right here, on my desk) that they certainly plan to use the pandemic to achieve their political manipulations, if they possibly can.

They say it in their own words. But even the title gives the game away: "Covid-19: The Great Reset." It's all there in black and white, and in Klaus Schwab's broken Ger-English on the internet, for anyone who cares to see.

Not certain, or I missed it, but don't you mean WEF (World Economic Forum)? WEC doesn't seem to apply to anything mentioned here...but maybe I'm wrong.

World Economic Council, or World Economic Forum...It's the same jokers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Reset

[MagsJ]

...the use of the pandemic in service to mega-political objectives? Do you have any other thoughts or concerns of any sort?

What you point to here is, beyond any possibility of reasonable doubt exactly what's going on. The WEC has announced (and I have their book right here, on my desk) that they certainly plan to use the pandemic to achieve their political manipulations, if they possibly can.

They say it in their own words. But even the title gives the game away: "Covid-19: The Great Reset." It's all there in black and white, and in Klaus Schwab's broken Ger-English on the internet, for anyone who cares to see.

..and yet the deniers keep on denying it.

[Harry Baird]

AJ, here's a combined response to various of your missives.

all religions (that I am aware of) and all spiritual paths always recognize that in order to perceive what I have called the higher elements (subtle metaphysical perception and realization) recognize that the addiction to sensuousness, the indulgence in mutable sensation, must be sacrificed so that the higher element can be received and cultivated.

This seems true, and, probably, it's a correct idea. It's a challenging one though.

If you are asking me to define what it is about Christianity and our Christian traditions that seem to me to have the most value, one way to talk about that is to talk about what happens, and what is now happening, when the restraining power of Christian ethics and the guiding/restraining power of the appreciation of the metaphysical principles, even the understanding of them, is abandoned.

OK, but that still doesn't explain what's most valuable in Christianity, because the same problem could occur in other cultures even if their traditions are not as valuable as Christianity.

Moreover, as you're not even a Christian yourself, it's not really clear to what, exactly, you're proposing that we recur. It's not clear whether it would even be a true recurrence or whether it would in fact be a new metaphysical system with only nominal dependency on an abstract borrowing from Christianity which you admit is not even exclusive to Christianity, just best expressed in it.

But the other element here is when these ["the restraining power of Christian ethics and the guiding/restraining power of the appreciation of the metaphysical principles, even the understanding of them"] are deliberately undermined.

Can you speak to who or what is deliberately undermining these, and, most especially, why? How is it that they fail to recognise what you recognise? Are they wicked, or well-intended but mistaken? What are they trying to achieve?

Propaganda and rhetoric that is not grounded in first principles (you who have read Richard Weaver will understand) gains the power to trick the individual, to overpower grounded intellect.

Yes, I've read Richard Weaver, and, as you know, one of my broad critiques of his thinking is that nowhere does he even propose any first principles, let alone justify them - at least as far as Why Ideas Have Consequences goes, which is all I've read of him. The same, in my view, can be said of you. If you disagree, then please outline what first principles are in your view, where you've outlined them in the past (if at all), and how you justify them as such.

Where does this tend? Is it a myth, a paranoia or a developing reality (?) that it tends in the direction of a powerful, tyrannical administrative State where technological means, and perhaps chemical-technological means, are employed as mechanisms of supreme control.

I don't know whether this is myth, paranoia, or developing reality, but it certainly concerns me too.

I would not deny that something, somehow, got set in motion and the Apostles carried it forward.

I understand that perspective, but it seems to me to be more important of an issue than for it to be left at that. It's not just "something" that got set in motion; it's the world's largest religion, and right from the start, adherents were giving their lives up for it. The question as to the true nature of its founder, then, would seem to be of greater significance than that which you seem to afford it - at least, according to my rather dogged and literal mind, of course.

[Harry Baird]

The Church of No One Truth (NOT): A Cautionary Tale

A Play of Three Acts of Three Scenes Each

<< Act two, scene two | Act three, scene one >>

Act two, scene three

Characters:

Bjorn aGus

Quirky, of the Henryish variety.

Setting:

Outside (then inside) a residential home.

(Bjorn aGus knocks on the door and waits. Eventually, the door opens cautiously.)

Quirky: Hey, man, you're not here to, like, aggress against me or steal my property, are you?

Bjorn aGus: You don't recognise me?

Quirky: Oh! Nevermind, it's just the light. It throws shadows, y'know? Makes it hard to see who's in front of me.

Bjorn aGus: You going to invite me in then?

Quirky: 'Course, 'course.

(Quirky opens the door and Bjorn aGus enters.)

Quirky: Here, come into the lounge room. Take a seat. Cuppa?

Bjorn aGus: Don't mind if I do. You stock chamomile? I find it soothing on the stomach.

Quirky: "I'd run a mile for chamomile". 'Course I stock it. Got a pot full already.

Bjorn aGus: I'm more of a cyclist than a jogger, but I'm otherwise in thorough agreement.

Quirky: Let me pour you a cuppa, then I'll rejoin you. (Stepping out into the kitchen.)

Bjorn aGus: (Calling out into the kitchen) So, you're probably wondering why I'm here.

Quirky: (Calling back) Figured it was just a courtesy call. Right?

Bjorn aGus: (Calling out again) Well, not exactly. I've a pea in my pod.

(Quirky returns from the kitchen with a mug of tea, which he hands to Bjorn aGus, who takes it.)

Quirky: Huh. Like under the pile of mattresses of the fabled princess?

Bjorn aGus: Kinda. It's like... what is the princess leaving unsaid?

Quirky: (Going a little silent before quietly offering:) Oh. Somebody's blabbed. Look, man, I value my safety, and that of my family. What happened in the land of One Truth denial stays in the land of One Truth denial.

Bjorn aGus: Damn. That's just what Aeon said. Everybody's clamming up on me.

Quirky: I've said too much already. Please... please, take your chamomile tea and just... just go. You can keep the mug. Don't come back.

Bjorn aGus: Man, I'm running out of sources. What have I gotta do for some righteous truth-telling? C'mon, don't hold out on me.

Quirky: It's best you go. Really. Please. For both of our safety.

(Bjorn aGus sighs, and then walks out the door.)

<< Act two, scene two | Act three, scene one >>

[Alexis Jacobi]

The past shows unvaryingly that when a people’s freedom disappears, it goes not with a bang, but in silence amid the comfort of being cared for. That is the dire peril in the present trend toward statism. If freedom is not found accompanied by a willingness to resist, and to reject favors, rather than to give up what is intangible but precarious, it will not long be found at all.

—Richard Weaver, 1962

[Alexis Jacobi]

"Something is rotten in the state of Denmark."

[(Idiomatic): Something is not right, seriously amiss, especially when leading to suspicion of motive.]

The goings-on of government agents.

Ron Utz has a ‘coherent’ theory/speculation that the virus was engineered by Americans as a bio-weapon against China and Iran.

Quoting him:

As most are surely aware, for more than two years I have been pointing to the strong perhaps even overwhelming evidence that the Covid outbreak that devastated our own country and the world was very likely the result of an exceptionally reckless American biowarfare attack against China (and Iran).

Under my analysis, the million American deaths and massive social disruption we have suffered would constitute the most disastrous blowback of any military operation in the history of the world, and if it became widely accepted, the domestic political consequences would be monumental.

My suggestion of a central American role in the creation of this global epidemic has been excluded not only from the mainstream media but from virtually all of the alternative media as well, presumably because the possibility is simply too horrific to contemplate. However, this situation may now be starting to change.

What I find interesting here is the degree to which the purported truth is so devastating to 'conventional arguments' about the origin of the virus and to conventional explanations. I do not make any claims or assertions here -- I don't have any idea about the origin of the virus. The argument that Unz presents turns all other 'interpretations' on their heads and, I would suggest, is emblematic of profound chaos within the entire project of interpretation of our world.

To use the term 'our world' here means the world that is mediated to us through media-systems.

When he says that the reason the idea cannot be considered is "presumably because the possibility is simply too horrific to contemplate" I am led to ponder on how it has come about that the sense of possibility to get to the true facts, to actually be able to see and understand 'the world' has been shattered.

My own view is that we have to examine another, defining event to be able, through consideration of it, to understand the degree to which perception is manipulated: the entirety of the 9/11 event. This event presents a picture that defines the millennium. If one pans out from it and sees it as it has been presented, there is little problematic. It all seems clear. One accepts it because, in its way, it is comfortable to do so. The narrative functions. But when one pans in and begins to examine it more closely, then that interpretation is challenged. The more the conventional story is challenged the more it frazzles. The more it frazzles the more uncomfortable and less secure one becomes. How can one live in that state? How can the tension be resolved? And what if it is not resolved?

Curiously, though there is at least one directly perceptible element that would seem to undermine the entire story (the collapse of Building 7), the effort has been made to 'explain' this away. And here is the interesting part: those who want to believe, who need to believe, latch onto a 'false explanation' because it serves the function of holding the (so-called) official narrative together. Those who are inclined, with at least some good reason (i.e. how is it possible that this structure simply collapsed and in a way that directly mirrors controlled demolition), to disbelieve then challenge the platform of certainty but often, though not always, careen off into bizarre and untenable lines of speculation. And then the essential problem comes to the fore: the incapacity to interpret accurately 'our world'.

With Unz's analysis this 'ungrounding' becomes apparent. It is as if anything is actually possible in our present. It fits in of course to a cultivated doubt & suspicion about the real objectives of government and business interests. The discovery of 'the big lies' that operate behind some of the larger social and political events. The essence of this realization? That power-systems will lie and deceive as they need to and will yet spin things in such a way that the fictions they present are in fact true. Yet the sober citizen knows this is not the case.

What interests me perhaps most is what happens when people (the larger mass) become unmoored from the possibility of accurate knowledge and assessment.

[henry quirk]

[henry quirk]

The past shows unvaryingly that when a people’s freedom disappears, it goes not with a bang, but in silence amid the comfort of being cared for. That is the dire peril in the present trend toward statism. If freedom is not found accompanied by a willingness to resist, and to reject favors, rather than to give up what is intangible but precarious, it will not long be found at all.

—Richard Weaver, 1962

[henry quirk]

The goings-on of government agents.

Ron Utz has a ‘coherent’ theory/speculation that the virus was engineered by Americans as a bio-weapon against China and Iran.

Quoting him:

As most are surely aware, for more than two years I have been pointing to the strong perhaps even overwhelming evidence that the Covid outbreak that devastated our own country and the world was very likely the result of an exceptionally reckless American biowarfare attack against China (and Iran).

Under my analysis, the million American deaths and massive social disruption we have suffered would constitute the most disastrous blowback of any military operation in the history of the world, and if it became widely accepted, the domestic political consequences would be monumental.

My suggestion of a central American role in the creation of this global epidemic has been excluded not only from the mainstream media but from virtually all of the alternative media as well, presumably because the possibility is simply too horrific to contemplate. However, this situation may now be starting to change.

What I find interesting...

[Alexis Jacobi]

AJ intoned: All religions (that I am aware of) and all spiritual paths always recognize that in order to perceive what I have called the higher elements (subtle metaphysical perception and realization) recognize that the addiction to sensuousness, the indulgence in mutable sensation, must be sacrificed so that the higher element can be received and cultivated.

This seems true, and, probably, it's a correct idea. It's a challenging one though.

If it is a correct idea, and if it is true, then it is possible that it deals on some First Principles of one sort or another that you could yourself explain, right? You respond intuitively, right? But what principles are involved then? Defining these would be a way to arrive at to those First Principles which make for a sound assertion.

OK, but that still doesn't explain what's most valuable in Christianity, because the same problem could occur in other cultures even if their traditions are not as valuable as Christianity.

You desire that I make a 'convincing case' and present it to you in easily masticated portions. But my assertion is that you need to become a better chewer! What is 'most valuable in Christianity', in my own view, is not one thing or just one element, but an entire set of contributing elements. If I only were to say that early Christianity incorporated into it a wide range of Platonic notions and ideas, which seem to have become the base for all philosophical musing (Plato and Platonism), would that in itself function for you as one sufficient element? But there are dozens of such incorporations. And it is the sum totality of all these contributions that have filtered into and then become, or helped to bring into being, who we are and what *we* have achieved.

The issue about other traditions and other cultures is in what became possible for them to build on the established foundations. I would not devalue them, in fact I think that if I have a method is to abstract concepts in such a way that they can be recognized universally.

Moreover, as you're not even a Christian yourself, it's not really clear to what, exactly, you're proposing that we recur.

What am I then?

I am surprised that you ask this question when I have, even if badly or incompletely, demonstrated or at least alluded to the value in 'higher things'. All that is 'higher' had to pre-exist the moment when they became manifest in our world, is that not a necessary idea? Before man came on the scene all those ideas had to exist, did they not? How did they exist? In what form? How do they enter our world?

So what would you suggest is the thing that must be recurred to?

AJ: But the other element here is when these ["the restraining power of Christian ethics and the guiding/restraining power of the appreciation of the metaphysical principles, even the understanding of them"] are deliberately undermined.

HB: Can you speak to who or what is deliberately undermining these, and, most especially, why? How is it that they fail to recognise what you recognise? Are they wicked, or well-intended but mistaken? What are they trying to achieve?

Your Kids Go to Paulo Freire's Marxist Schools

Again, you want pre-masticated bullet points -- what can be explained to an 8-year old is how you put it -- because you have mastication issues! You.do.not.read.and.study.enough!

If you understood that Richard Weaver (one writer you are familar with) worked with a critical set if ideas you would yourself understand his notion of the degeneration that he exposes.

From the Wiki page:

Weaver attributes the beginning of the Western decline to the adoption of nominalism (or the rejection of the notion of absolute truth) in the late Scholastic period. The chief proponent of this philosophical revolution was William of Ockham.

The consequences of this revolution, Weaver contends, were the gradual erosion of the notions of distinction and hierarchy, and the subsequent enfeebling of the Western mind's capacity to reason. These effects in turn produced all manner of societal ills, decimating Western art, education and morality.

As examples of the most recent and extreme consequences of this revolution, Weaver offers the cruelty of the Hiroshima bombing, the meaninglessness of modern art, America's cynicism and apathy in the face of the just war against Nazism, and the rise of what he terms "The Great Stereopticon".

Again the Wiki page:

Weaver gives the name "The Great Stereopticon" to what he perceives as a rising, emergent construct which serves to manipulate the beliefs and emotions of the populace, and ultimately to separate them from their humanity via "the commodification of truth".

Here, notably, Weaver echoes the sentiments of C. S. Lewis in his book The Abolition of Man (which was written nearly contemporaneously with Ideas Have Consequences), and anticipates the modern critique of consumerism.

Harry writes: Yes, I've read Richard Weaver, and, as you know, one of my broad critiques of his thinking is that nowhere does he even propose any first principles, let alone justify them - at least as far as why Ideas Have Consequences goes, which is all I've read of him. The same, in my view, can be said of you. If you disagree, then please outline what first principles are in your view, where you've outlined them in the past (if at all), and how you justify them as such.

The first principles he works with form the ideas that he communicates. No, I guess that he has not written out a list, so you have that right, but there is a whole series of assertions and predicates that inform his presentation. I guess I would say that those who could manage to read his book would, at least to some degree, have been made familiar with the basic ideas of Platonic philosophy. They were, of course, at one time the stuff of grammar school.

How do you *justify* then any of your most primary assertions?

You are asking me, once again, for a pre-digested list of first principles. But I do not think that the first principles that, say, Weaver works with can be reduced to a list. I suppose they would have to be brought out slowly and revealed through the essay form. And here Weaver becomes for us a paradigm of conservative thought and a set of ideas that can oppose hyper-liberal radicalism (if this is taken as ungrounding from solid principles as well as of identity).

Harry wrote: I understand that perspective, but it seems to me to be more important of an issue than for it to be left at that. It's not just "something" that got set in motion; it's the world's largest religion, and right from the start, adherents were giving their lives up for it. The question as to the true nature of its founder, then, would seem to be of greater significance than that which you seem to afford it - at least, according to my rather dogged and literal mind, of course.

I guess you might reduce it to effects emanating from one man. That would be the faith-based, and therefore the necessary, conclusion.

Many many different ideas and many many different men worked out the sets of ideas that formed the Christianity we are talking about.

adherents were giving their lives up for it

And so do suicide bombers today. Do you think that zealousness is proof of the validity of assertion?

[Alexis Jacobi]

AJ: But the other element here is when these ["the restraining power of Christian ethics and the guiding/restraining power of the appreciation of the metaphysical principles, even the understanding of them"] are deliberately undermined.

Can you speak to who or what is deliberately undermining these, and, most especially, why? How is it that they fail to recognise what you recognise? Are they wicked, or well-intended but mistaken? What are they trying to achieve?

This topic is a very interesting one and an important one. It extends well beyond the undermining of Christian categories. James Lindsay's doing impressive work in this area. In fact he is totally immersed in his project of dismantling and exposing the 'undermining' by focusing on infiltrating Marxists and Marxism.

James Lindsay purports to be one that admires Liberalism generally, and American Liberalism specifically, and his complaint seems to be that radical Marxism insinuated itself into the cultural and ideological fabric, certainly of America, but also (I presume) of the Occident, and has supplanted the (according to him) sound principles through which former American Liberalism operated.

My own view of Lindsay is that he is not able to see, or does not want to see, that the trends that are now extremely visible and manifest today have a deeper origin within the American polity and system. I gather that Lindsay imagines that if we could successfully resist and dismantle the Marxian patterns of ideology that we would then expunge it from our system and, like a body that cures itself through fever, we'd 'return to normal'. And normalcy would be American Liberalism!

But one can, and indeed I'd assert that one would have to, actually define an entire set of solid 'first principles' of a political and social sort (within a strict Conservatism and even a radical Conservatism), as well as a range of metaphysical predicates, as a first step in confronting, countering, and reversing just those very trends that have resulted in liberalism's transformation into hyper-liberal radicalism of a uniquely American sort. And that would mean defining ideological positions that actually turn against many liberal (American) predicates. This is a bridge too far, at this point, for Lindsay and all those working such angles.

They are doing valuable work but they are not carrying forward the critical project into just the radical Conservatism I refer to.

[Immanuel Can]

...the use of the pandemic in service to mega-political objectives? Do you have any other thoughts or concerns of any sort?

What you point to here is, beyond any possibility of reasonable doubt exactly what's going on. The WEC has announced (and I have their book right here, on my desk) that they certainly plan to use the pandemic to achieve their political manipulations, if they possibly can.

They say it in their own words. But even the title gives the game away: "Covid-19: The Great Reset." It's all there in black and white, and in Klaus Schwab's broken Ger-English on the internet, for anyone who cares to see.

..and yet the deniers keep on denying it.

It's amazing, isn't it?

[promethean75]

hypothetical. a sinner who's been thinking about becoming a christian is on his way to a church to become a member. he doesn't know much about religion but he knows and feels that he's done great wrongs in his life, and he needs some kind of consolation... so fuck it, he's gonna be born again.

on the way to the church he's sideswiped by a utility truck and is turned into a casserole.

what does 'god' do? let him in, send him to hell, or give him another run at it?

this guy had never 'accepted jesus as his savior', never prayed, and was sure as shit guilty of at least seven deadly sins if not eight or nine.

but.

he had already begun the inner spiritual conversion by just recognizing his situation, and though he hadn't technically yet become a Christian, or made any purposeful effort to be and do what is christian, he had already accepted Christianity by the time of the accident.

does 'god' do it strictly by the book or does he work with you?

discuss.

[Immanuel Can]

what does 'god' do?

As the Good Book says, "Man looks on the outward appearance, but God looks on the heart."
What that means is that everything depends on what the guy was really thinking.

[Dubious]

does 'god' do it strictly by the book or does he work with you?

At best, that depends on how much penance you're willing to put up with for the rest of your life to be deemed worthy. Besides, god doesn't do consolation for fuck-ups! That's what shrinks are for. Consolation doesn't come free in either case.