Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Mon Nov 21, 2022 3:28 pm

Not a "whimper," chum. I'm not asking for...nor expecting...your sympathy. I know I won't get it. I don't expect it. I expect exactly what I get. Jesus Christ Himself told us it would be so.
"If they hated Me," He said,
"they will hate you [disciples] also."
But what He also said is this: that God's mercy is doled out in the proportions you give it to others yourself. You'll want to be mindful of that, in your own interests, I'm certain.
What is impossible for you to understand, given your pious investments, is that I laugh at the whole display that you act out here. You are a terrible actor and your melodrama results in bathos and false-pathos.
What you fail to see, and it is a substantial failing on your part, is that in a significant degree what people resist in you is that which I have named Hebrew idea-imperialism. You cannot actually see this
mechanism accurately. You do not, therefore, understand significant aspects of the necessity of rebelling against these imposed structures. Your pious commitments and your arrogating assertions (these two things function in perverse unison) link you into a power-dynamic that had to, simply had to, be shorn away from.
None of this can you understand even glimmeringly.
However, and with that said, when 'the common people' who never were very well educated in real categories of intellection are ripped away from the ethical restraining system that functioned (er-hum)
tyrannically in them and around them, when this was ripped away these types, these irresponsible types, who never really had structures of inner restrain established in them, were seduced by all sorts of different forces & powers. Sensuality and the glories of unrestrained in-n-out of course and then everything else available in a Garden of Earthly Delights, but there is another element: business today prefers a person to be incapable of mounting any resistance at all to the machinations of the consumer-inducement marketing.
A strong, upstanding Christian ethic functioned, as all sound religious ethical ststems do, as a sort of protection against such conglomerations of interest as is modern capital enterprise. So business (an ideology of marketing, of PR and advertising propaganda) benefits from the undermining of cultural Christianity. The poor atomized dolt, incapable of real intellection and real, genuine self-imposed restraint, becomes a *victim* of forces and powers that surround us today. They all *seek to have their way with us*.
The vulgar, debased average person of today, the end-result of entire causal processes that *create* such an individual, suffers in the present dispensation because he cannot *locate himself* within a genuine personal and also cultural power. His function is to be the victim and to be guided and controlled by immensely powerful force. And far less can he locate himself within metaphysical categories. To see them and appreciate them requires a training he cannot access.
Now, along comes hyper-pious Immanuel Can with his terrible threat and his terrible promises. "Save yourselves!" he shouts "or you will burn in hell!" This amounts to a social and a socially-conventional threat to get with the program of those sorts who run the churches and define the religious modalities to those who appear in their congregations. So your own Evangelical Christianity is a servant, a perverse servant, to far greater political, social, cultural and economic -- indeed global -- enterprises.
All of this you fail to see. No part of this do you ever talk about nor have you ever talked about it.
You do, indeed, locate yourself within conventional social Evangelical Christianity. One notices this when you begin to complain about the 'Democrats' all all the naughty things they are up to. These are
not at all immaterial to the problem that we face today, or to the current that we are in and which moves us all along inexorably. But conventional Evangelical Christian doctrine -- its modes, its focus, its political dimension -- are deeply entrenched with extremely unsavory machinations. Not the least being, as I have pointed out many times, is Evangelical Christianity's blind support for *Israel* due to the metaphysical assertion that one must *bless the Jews* to receive god's blessing!
Now, you talk about 'salvation' but have never made any sufficient case for even what you are talking about. "Salvation from the consequences of sin" you have said. I completely reject the basis of this assertion. I have to do so to get out from under the control that you seek to assert through it. But this does not mean that I must not or should not or will not take charge of my life. I have actually worked through it, psychologically and if you will emotionally. I can tell you about this, and I have told you about it,
but you cannot hear. Why can't you hear? Because you are gripped by and locked into specific descriptions of metaphysical truths and leashed to the edifice of Evangelicalism.
But salvation, for us today, cannot mean what you believe that it does mean. So your *preaching* simply has no reach -- except among a certain class of people disposed to it or prepared for it. For example in the Third World where you have carried on your missionary work. But the sociological aspect of the success you have there (Christianity is expanding tremendously in the global south) is an element that you cannot consider from a removed perspective. But this is, of course, another story . . .
I'm not asking for...nor expecting...your sympathy. I know I won't get it. I don't expect it. I expect exactly what I get.
Christianity today, and certainly Judaism before it, establish an opposition to the world that evokes oppression and condemnation. This comes about because by definition Christianity, and Judaism, declare all other modalities of spirituality to be evil and demonic. Inside of Christianity and inside of Judaism are the root causes of the reactions that are received. Once you have seen that it is impossible to unsee it.
Begin to see some of these things
you pitiable oppressed child. Quit the ultra-pious rehearsals. Understand that your theatrical rehearsal simply does not move the audience.