The ninth essay in The Interregnum is ‘Religion and the Real World’, by Daniel Kleinsman. It lays out its thematic question in the first paragraph: “does a pope’s ‘apostolic exhortation’ have any weight or relevance in the modern world?”
The scene is set by the usual canards of climate change and inequality. Pope Francis’s recent comments about how the world needs to do its bit to help with such issues is discussed.
Unfortunately, Kleinsman comes across as just another tub-thumper with an agenda. The insight that no relationship exists in isolation is credited to Francis as a “pope’s innovation”, when anyone with even a passing familiarity with comparative religion would know that the interdependence of all things is one of the original insights of the Buddha.
Ironically, even in an essay where Kleinsman has his lips firmly attached to the Pope’s anus, Kleinsman reveals the sham at the heart of Catholicism: the Pope credits evolution with bringing about consciousness, and is therefore a materialist who doesn’t actually understand spirituality.
This essay is poorly-written enough to contradict itself at several major points. The common theme of these contradictions is to demand that the whole world come together in harmony but to also dump all the blame for the condition of the world on a very select group of people.
If we’re all one, what’s the point in promoting this antagonistic dichotomy of “tangata whenua” and “tangata tiriti”, the only possible outcome of which is dividing the population into two opposing groups?
And if we’re all part of an interdependent system, aren’t all of us guilty of upholding and facilitating exploitation – even those being exploited by it?
One wistfully recalls the days when the left stood for solidarity between all people, and when the New Zealand left promoted the idea of Kiwitanga as a way of bridging the gaps between Maori and Pakeha. Now, those who speak the language of unity out of one side of their mouths are seeking to divide the country out of the other by talking about “those who are owed” and “those who owe”.
Kleinsman describes the masculine-oriented language used by Francis as “unhelpful”, but does not mention that the same holy book where Francis is getting all his stories from also commands women to shut up and and be quiet (Timothy 2:12 etc.): “…A woman must learn in quietness and full submissiveness. I do not permit a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man; she is to remain quiet. For Adam was formed first…”
On that line of reasoning, when are we getting a female Pope?
These are questions that the religious will never answer. Theirs is not to reason or to honestly inquire; theirs is to lecture, admonish, guilt trip and harangue. In that, they have something very powerful in common with Marxists, which perhaps hints at a possible alliance this century.
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Insofar as Luciferianism is a religion, it holds something to be divine, but what that thing is is not obvious
Whereas the Abrahamist worships his genital-mutilating Big Man in the Sky and the Satanist worships his personification of the adversary, Luciferians don’t seem to make a big thing out of worshipping any Lucifer figure. Nonetheless, Luciferians are entirely capable of comprehending and appreciating the concept of the divine. So what do they worship?
The word ‘Lucifer’ is usually thought of as a proper noun, but its original usage was as a title. More specifically, Lucifer means ‘bringer of light’. It was once the title given to the King of Babylon, and like everything religious, it has an exoteric and an esoteric meaning.
The exoteric meaning ties into the sun worship that is closely related to the religious sentiment in primitive man.
When the Sun starts sinking in the sky after the Summer Solstice the natural reaction for a human bereft of knowledge is fear. It seems like the world is dying as it gets colder and darker and all signs of life diminish. It feels like one has been abandoned by God, and if one is superstitious some of that fear might be mixed with guilt and blame.
So when the Sun returns after the Winter Solstice the natural reaction is one of incredible joy, as if God had shifted attitude from hatred to love. With the Spring comes new life, more light, more warmth, and everywhere there is joy and good cheer (this is, incidentally why Christmas, the major Western festival, is celebrated at the same time as the return of the Sun in the Northern Hemisphere).
Any early ruler opportunistic enough could easily convince the people around them that it was the ruler who was responsible for the return of the Sun, and only by treating that ruler with sufficient respect and obedience would the Sun return. This is the reason why the God-King model was so prevalent. Hence, the King of Babylon was given the title ‘Lucifer’ out of respect for that King being credited with the return of the Sun after the Winter Solstice.
The esoteric meaning is related, but different. In the esoteric sense, Lucifer refers to that impulse within humans that drives them to seek out the light of metaphysical knowledge and then carry it back to the rest of humanity to enlighten them as well. To this end, Lucifer has taken taken many forms in popular culture, the next most famous of which might be Prometheus.
Lucifer is not really a personage in this sense either, because anyone is capable of embodying that impulse at the right time in their lives. In this sense, Lucifer is someone that the individual becomes as they harness their own will to bring light into the world. Lucifer can therefore just as well be manifested by the worshipper as sought out in the external world, as the precise locus of this sentiment is not relevant.
In other words, Luciferianism is a continuation of the same shamanic tradition that led to human mastery of fire, which led to being able to cook food, which led to effectively being able to pre-digest food outside of the body, making us far more efficient, which meant that we had surplus energy that was able to be used for brain development, which led to humans being able to differentiate ourselves meaningfully from the other great apes – a kind of apotheosis of the species.
This impulse is responsible, in the eyes of the Luciferian, for most of what’s good in this world. All medical, scientific, philosophical and technological advancements (and all the human misery alleviated by them) can be attributed to it.
What is that impulse that leads a person to understand how to master fire and its application, and how to distill this mastery into principles simple enough that the mastery can be transmitted to others who might bear a similar impulse, so that they might progress ever further than before?
It’s not easy to describe precisely what this impulse is or from where it might come, but this is what the Luciferian holds in highest regard. This suggests that ‘worship’ is possibly the wrong word to use, because it implies a degree of loss of reason, while the Luciferian venerates something akin to that ability to reason (or, at least, the will to be able to reason and enlighten).
When the Abrahamists subverted the Roman Empire and perverted all truth, one of the first things they did was to destroy all the wisdom inherent in the plentiful Roman mystery cults, which had themselves descended from the Greek mystery cults such as the one around Eleusis.
In the Eleusinian Mysteries, participants drank something called a ‘kykeon’, which was a mix of a variety of intoxicating substances, one of which was believed to have been a strained tea made of psilocybin mushrooms. Consuming this kykeon, only ever done in ritual secrecy, had the effect of propelling the whole congregation into hyperspace. That so many of them did so, and that so many returned from hyperspace and returned to everyday society enlightened is arguably the reason why the Golden Age of Greco-Roman thought took place.
When the Abrahamists destroyed this culture in an effort to enslave the population, they made taboo all the things associated with it. This is the reason why mainstream Abrahamist culture hates women (the Eleusinian Mysteries were open to men and women equally), hates cosmopolitanism (they were open to anyone who spoke Greek, regardless of ethnicity) and hates psychoactive substances (they dispensed their wisdom, at least in part, through the ritual alteration of consciousness).
The Luciferian could not care less if wisdom is to be found in the mind of a woman, or a black man, or as a result of a drug-induced epiphany. Wisdom is wisdom, and it’s enough to venerate the light, and the methodologies that lead to the light, for their own sake.
Some people are making the argument that the legalisation of same-sex marriage was another step on the slippery slope to legalising pedophilia, and that it was a mistake to let gay people get married – perhaps even a mistake that needs to be corrected. This argument is becoming more and more common as pedophiles are starting to argue their position with renewed vigour. However, as this essay will show, not only is this line of reasoning fallacious, it also diverts attention from the true problem.
The argument against same-sex marriage seems to go like this. There is a scale of sexual degeneracy, like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, where the depravities at one level make the depravities at the next level seem not so bad, and this leads to those worse depravities being indulged in, and so on until civilisation has collapsed.
And so, the loss of absolute paternal authority over the family and over unmarried females led to prostitution and whoring, which led to divorce, which led to homosexuality, which is now leading to pedophilia and which will inevitably lead to bestiality and necrophilia.
This is how many religious and/or stupid people have been conditioned to think, but the reality is different.
The sliding scale is not of depravity, but of consent. Once a person has done something to another person without that second person’s consent – and got away with it – they are incentivised to do it again. Many sexual predators get an egoistic thrill from doing things to someone without their consent, and it’s this that constitutes the real psychological slippery slope.
If there is a slippery slope that leads to pedophilia, it begins with impoliteness, which paves to way to rudeness, which escalates to verbal abuse, then physical abuse and then which leads to expressions of utter contempt such as rape, kidnapping and murder.
Legalisation of homosexuality cannot fall on a point along this slope, because homosexuality is consensual (at least, it is not inherently non-consensual, unlike having sex with someone too young to give informed consent).
Essentially, the slippery slope we should be worried about is disregard of the suffering of others. Not the feelings of others – the error of confusing feelings with suffering is what has led to the social fascist culture that we have today. We should be worried about people who disregard the suffering of other sentient beings, and see to it that the freedom of these people to cause suffering is restricted when necessary.
This is not to say that we need to make rudeness illegal. What we need to do is remove the elements of our culture that consider it acceptable to do things to people against their will, such as steal from them, or coerce or trick them out of wealth. This will have to happen on both the personal and collective level.
On the personal level, it might be worth encouraging the kind of philosophical and meditative traditions that have led to personal insight in the past, because this usually leads to peace of mind and a cessation of suffering. Hermeticism and Buddhism are examples of the traditions that lead to an appreciation of honest inquiry.
On the collective level, we need to stop conducting wars against each other. The first one we ought to stop is the War on Drugs. The politicians who have fought this war against their own people for almost a century have done so against the will of people, for the people have always been against it in any place where they have been honestly informed with the truth.
Unfortunately for us, the War on Drugs has normalised things that would have been best left taboo, such as imprisoning someone without that person having harmed another person. This was previously unthinkable in earlier times, when correct jurisprudence demanded that some harm must be demonstrated to have occurred before the court could ever have the right to punish someone.
It has also normalised the people do not have to consent to the laws that they are forced to live under. At school, we are taught that this is totalitarianism and evil, but our own governments do it to us without our consent, and they get away with it.
If pedophilia ever does become legal, it won’t be because homosexuality was legalised. It will be because our culture has made it normal to do things to people against their will, to force and coerce them into obedience.
