Spiritual Religions And Political Religions

Enormous confusion surrounds the discussion of religion. The term ‘religion’ seems to encompass some extremely different, even contradictory, attitudes and ideas. This essay argues that a major conceptual division needs to be made: between spiritual religions and political religions.

A spiritual religion is a doctrine that, if followed, will alleviate spiritual suffering. The alleviation of suffering is as close as this world gets to a universal moral good. As such, spiritual religions are seen as something holy. So both spiritual religions and political religions claim to be spiritual religions.

But in the same way that visiting a prostitute and having sex is not really making love, even though it appears similar, political religions are not really spiritual.

A genuine spiritual tradition is not concerned with the will for temporal and material power. A doctrine such as Buddhism teaches its adherents that gratifying such desires will not lead to happiness. And it is correct – once a person has met their basic physical needs, further happiness comes not from physical excess but from meeting social, intellectual and spiritual needs.

A political religion is a doctrine that is primarily concerned with temporal and material power. The authorities of a political religion are not concerned with alleviating suffering – they want power, money, fame, prestige. For them, suffering is a good thing, because it gives them a chance to portray their political enemies as the ones responsible, and themselves as the saviours.

The difference between a political religion and a political non-religion (such as Communism) is that the non-religion doesn’t attempt to cloak itself in the shroud of divine morality. Communism was happy enough teaching that consciousness is extinguished upon the death of the physical body. Political religions, by contrast, admit that consciousness survives the death of the physical body – but there’s a catch.

The catch is always this: your consciousness will reincarnate in a place of suffering in the next world unless you obey the political religion in this world. So the political religions demand that you give them money, time, labour and devotion in this world on the threat of suffering in the next.

The foremost examples of political religions are the Abrahamic cults, in particular Christianity, Islam and Judaism. Each of these has aped the spiritual wisdom of their age to create an ideological monster. Each of these teach that only by submitting to the priesthood can one achieve the cessation of suffering. The priesthood speaks for the divine – a power granted only to them. Therefore, obey or suffer.

The characteristic sign of a political religion is that they cause suffering in order to gain power. Relentless, grinding misery causes people to look to higher authorities for solace, which is why Abrahamism is doing so well in Africa and the Middle East. To this end, political religions usually support the persecution of women, homosexuals, prostitutes and drug users.

Also characteristic of political religions is that they drive out other authorities from cultural space, a kind of memetic brood parasitism.

All political religions decree that no other religion may co-exist with them. The Hebrew Bible states that “He that sacrificeth unto any god, save unto Jehovah only, shall be utterly destroyed” (Exodus 22:20), and the Koran commands follows to destroy non-believers at numerous points (2:191-193), (3:56), (4:74), (4:89), (5:33), (8:12), (8:39), (9:5), (9:73), (9:123), (47:3-4), (47:35), (48:29), (66:9).

Following this imperative, political religions do everything they can to destroy spiritual religions in any territory they control. In much the same way that criminal gangs of narcoterrorists don’t allow outsiders to operate on their turf, neither do criminal gangs of spiritual terrorists. True spiritual religions don’t need to aggress against other religions, because they know that the falsehoods of other doctrines will reveal themselves.

All spiritual religions understand that accumulating earthly power and wealth, gratifying as it may be to the ego, doesn’t provide spiritual solace. As such, true spiritual religions never have a “prosperity gospel” in which it is taught that material wealth is granted by God as a reward for righteousness. Neither do they hearken back to past times of military dominance as golden ages.

Buddhism, for example, doesn’t care if people don’t follow it. Anyone is free to reject the Buddha’s doctrine and indulge in sensory pleasures. But when a person tires of such indulgence, and they feel that it’s time to strike a balance between indulgence and abstinence, then the Buddhists are there to explain their methodology.

Islam, by contrast, cares a lot. Thirteen countries impose the death penalty for apostasy, all of them Muslim ones. This means that children are considered to be Muslim when they are born, and if they don’t like it as adults, they are killed. At the time of writing this essay, almost 1,000 people had been killed in the past 30 days in Islamic terror attacks. All of the killers were following the admonition of their religion to expand its political influence.

The irony, of course, is that all this makes spiritual religions look spiritual, and political religions look material, and this pushes all genuinely spiritual people towards the former, and all genuinely base people towards the latter. This explains why hedonistic self-aggrandisers, when they discover religion in adulthood, tend to discover political ones.

The clash between spiritual and political religions has defined much of the world’s history, and may define much of its future. There are many signs that suggest the Abrahamic cults are slowly uniting under one banner, and, when they do, they will inevitably try to conquer the world or be destroyed in the attempt.

As has been pointed out elsewhere, Abraham was probably the world’s first true psychopath. The cult he started developed into the greatest collective evil the world has ever known. This evil reflects Abraham’s sadistic desire for total control and dominance, something shared with all his followers. Indeed, Abraham could be said to be the father of political religion.

On the Mithraic ladder, Abrahamism is equivalent to the lead, the basest possible frequency. The spiritual religions, on the other hand, are equivalent to the gold. They are akin to divine radiance beaming down on us. Thus, although political and spiritual religions may appear very similar on the surface, it’s necessary to draw a sharp distinction between them. Ultimately, they reveal their true interests by their actions.

If you enjoyed reading this essay/article, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2020 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis). A compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019, the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 and the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 are also available.

If you would like to support our work in other ways, please consider subscribing to our SubscribeStar fund. Even better, buy any one of our books!

How A Person From A Gang Family Would Deal With The Gang Problem

I come from a very rough family. At various points in my life, I have been the son of a gang member, the nephew of a gang member, the brother of a gang member and the cousin of a gang member. Both of my brothers have spent time in prison, both of my mother’s brothers have spent time in prison, and I had been struck in the head or face by four different adults by the time I was five years old. Despite all this, I managed to get a research degree in psychology. This is how I would deal with the gang problem.

Any effective program of behavioural modification has to have two elements: reinforcement of desired behaviours and punishment of undesired behaviours. This is popularly known as “the carrot and the stick approach”. Solving our gang problem requires such an approach.

My proposal for the carrot is universal basic income.

People in the upper and middle classes have great difficulty imagining what life is like in the bottom 5%. Only very rarely do they have the life experience to understand how being raised in an environment of abuse and fear causes a person’s brain to develop differently to normal. As such, they have great difficulty understanding why some people can’t hold down a full-time job.

Being raised in an abusive environment causes the brain to develop in a way that is highly optimised for war, and poorly optimised for peace. One consequence is that mild levels of stress can push a person so damaged into homicide mode. If a person’s brain is wired to react with instant and overwhelming aggression to threatening stimuli, they are very unlikely to be able to deal with the daily challenges of the workplace.

The solution to such mental problems isn’t being stuffed full of sedatives and told to get the fuck back to work, as per standard mental healthcare practice in New Zealand. The only effective treatment for the damaged person is to allow them to rest until they grow out of their condition. This requires time, and that’s where a universal basic income can play a role.

A small but guaranteed income would not only help practically by removing an enormous amount of financial stress, it would help morally by removing resentment. Many young people from difficult family environments deeply resent the fact that work is demanded of them before they’ve had a chance to develop a fully functioning brain. A UBI would take away one of the major reasons for people born into disadvantaged families to rage against the system.

My proposal for the stick is crating.

Psychopaths consider all kindness to be weakness. All. As such, lenient sentencing and political engagement merely encourages them to commit more crimes. Not all gang members are psychopaths, but the gang environment provides an excellent environment for them to hide. With the exception of entering Parliament, joining a gang is the optimal path for a psychopath who wants opportunities to abuse people and get away with it.

The key to solving the gang problem lies in accurately being able to distinguish psychopaths from non-psychopaths. The single biggest flaw of the entire “Justice” system is that it makes no effort to distinguish between sadists and psychotics. As such, the former are penalised too lightly and the latter too harshly.

The non-psychopaths should be treated with patience. If someone is from a gang environment and isn’t a psychopath, despite having ample motive to become one, they must possess some measure of spiritual gold. They must possess the capacity to say ‘No’ to evil. People like this need to be cherished. Mental illness is not a reason to punish someone, as it’s often a good thing, because it’s often an alternative to psychopathy.

The psychopaths should be crated. The first step here is to introduce a new category of crime: those committed with malicious indifference to human suffering. A typical example of such crimes are coward punches like the recent ones in Auckland. Most murders and rapes will naturally fall into this category.

The second step is to subject every convicted criminal to a full psychological examination, with the goal of determining whether they have irreparable brain damage making them sadistic.

Modern psychological science can make such a distinction. The amygdalas of such people are less likely to activate in response to observing human suffering, making them callous, and their pre-frontal cortexes contain less grey matter, making them impulsive. Such unusual brain structures reveal that those people are dangerous.

If a person is found to have irreparable brain damage of the kind characteristic of psychopaths, and is later found guilty of a crime committed with malicious indifference to human suffering, then, upon being found guilty, they are immediately nailed into a crate instead of being taken back to the cells. This crate is then loaded into a helicopter, flown 20 kilometers out over the ocean, and jettisoned from a great height.

This carrot-and-stick approach will succeed because of the twofold benefits it offers.

The first benefit is that a more compassionate approach will neutralise resentment. Most young men who join gangs do so because they learn early in life that society hates them, and they reason that they might as well hate society back. A UBI would take away the most of the financial incentive to join a gang (this incentive is much bigger than most people realise). This will mean fewer gang members.

The second benefit is that, on account of the more compassionate approach, it’s justified to be extremely firm against the intractable criminal elements that remain in the population. People would no longer be forced by economic necessity to join gangs, so those who do can be assumed malicious. The widespread crating of known psychopaths will spread fear among the remainder.

The combination of these two effects would be a drastic reduction in both the number of gang members and the amount of suffering caused by gang activity.

If you would like to support our work in other ways, please consider subscribing to our SubscribeStar fund. Even better, buy any one of our books!

The Ruling Class Is Manufacturing Consent For A War With China

Anyone following the zeitgeist will have noticed a sharp rise in anti-China rhetoric lately. Some will also have noticed that the mainstream media recently switched narrative on the origins of the Covid virus. Until recently, one could get banned from FaceBook for suggesting that the virus was made in a Chinese lab. Now FaceBook encourages the idea. Why? This essay explains.

This BBC article from March is typical of the new rhetoric. The British Government’s main propaganda organ is now openly declaring that China is committing a genocide against their Uighur population in Xinjiang. The American Government has followed the British lead, with the Biden Administration now formally stating that China is guilty of “genocide and crimes against humanity”.

Declaring China to be carrying out a genocide is a major step, because it means that many people will feel morally obliged to do something about it. It will also allow the Establishment to paint the Chinese Government as the moral successor to Nazism, and thereby to play on all the conditioned guilt around the Holocaust.

This sudden concern for the Uighurs seems extremely odd, as the Uighurs aren’t treated any worse than cannabis users are treated in most Western countries. Moreover, not even other Muslims care about the Uighurs, as demonstrated by the fact that Muslim trade delegations to China seldom raise the issue.

The plight of the Uighurs is being exploited for propaganda purposes. There will be a lot more mainstream media propaganda in this vein in coming years. The narrative will be Evil China. We will get daily reminders that China is oppressive and evil – because the Western Establishment is trying to manufacture popular consent for a war against them.

Although many Westerners consider their ruling classes to be omnipotent, the reality is that they still need popular consent for any major move. That popular consent lubricates the gears of the war machine; without it, those gears don’t turn. To that end, the ruling classes instruct their lackeys in the mainstream media to manufacture consent for those major moves in advance.

The next major move they wish to make is to smash China. The ruling class of the West intends to attack China now for the same reason it attacked Germany then: to stay on top of the pile.

Measured by PPP, the Chinese economy has already surpassed the American one. It’s apparent that China’s economic rise will soon give it the capacity to project power over Taiwan. The fear is that China will eventually gain the capacity to project power over Singapore, and thereby over the centre of the world.

Today, the Chinese economy is some 10% larger than the American one. By 2026, according to IMF estimates, the Chinese economy will be some 40% larger. It’s apparent to every Western military planner that, if they want to prevent China from becoming unmanagably powerful, they have to strike now. As Machiavelli wrote in The Prince: wars cannot be avoided, they can only be postponed to the benefit of one or the other party.

The ruling elites of the West have been faced with a stark choice. Either strike now, and put the rising challenger back in its place, or wait, and risk that China becomes too strong to deal with. Given that China has an average IQ of 105, and is not near as wealthy as other populations with similar IQs, logic suggests that they have the potential to become a lot more powerful yet. More logic suggests that, if all that is true, the time to strike is now.

The Western ruling classes followed that same logic to its inevitable conclusion a while ago. They have decided that war is preferable to falling further behind. To that end, they will do everything they can to stoke conflict. This explains the sudden intense increase in anti-China rhetoric from the mainstream media.

The war imperative is why Western powers are sending flotillas to patrol the South China Sea. Everyone understands that the attack on China will be a multinational affair, with America, Japan, Britain, Australia and India all involved at a minimum. The strategy now is to increase the provocation and intimidation, and wait for China to make a mistake.

The great risk is of a false flag attack similar to the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. It’s entirely plausible that the Western ruling class blows up one of its own warships and tells the plebs that the Chinese did it – this was how they successfully manufactured consent for the attack on Vietnam.

If such a thing did happen, the mainstream media would scream 24/7 about the need for revenge against murderous Chinese aggression before it was too late. The narrative would be that anyone unwilling to destroy China is dishonouring the victims of the false flag attack, is endangering the rest of us and is therefore a traitor to the West.

Westerners be warned: if the mainstream media informs us about a sudden and inexplicable act of deadly violence carried out by the Chinese against Western targets, we need to steadfastly remain sceptical. Freethinking people might not be able to stop the herd stampede to war, but we might be able to limit the carnage.

If you would like to support our work in other ways, please consider subscribing to our SubscribeStar fund. Even better, buy any one of our books!

The Three Worst Historical Crimes Of The New Zealand Government

The New Zealand Government is fairly benign as far as governments go. Despite that, the nature of government is to act as a force that commits crimes against the people it rules. Government officials often calculate that they must do so out of a duty to maintain order. This essay discusses the three worst atrocities the New Zealand Government has ever committed.

The third worst atrocity is waging a War on Drugs against the New Zealand people.

In doing so, the New Zealand Government unmistakably revealed a tyrannical mindset. It declared that the mind of every individual New Zealander belongs to the Government, and this Government has the right to decide what goes in those minds. The Government claimed the right to program those minds to best serve it, and it claimed the right to prevent those minds from deprogramming themselves.

The Sixth Labour Government has upheld this commitment to crushing cognitive liberty. Despite holding an absolute majority of Parliamentary seats, they appear content to keep destroying New Zealanders who use cannabis. A recent case in the Dunedin District Court saw a cannabis grower sentenced to a longer prison term than what other men get for killing people or for raping their own stepdaughter over several years.

Their excuse for doing so is respecting the will of the recent cannabis referendum. But in acceding to the No voters, they respect their awful reasons for voting that way. Dan McGlashan showed that the vast majority of No voters were poorly educated, and these people followed the propaganda and not the science. Many other No voters had stated that they voted the way they did because they hated cannabis users. It’s a crime for the New Zealand Government to respect such malicious sentiments.

The second worst atrocity is forcing mass Third World immigration on the New Zealand people.

After sacrificing themselves by the thousands in World War II, the returned servicemen of New Zealand expected that their Government would take care of them. Instead, the globalist victors of that conflict opened the borders of New Zealand to cheap Third World immigration. Anyone who objected was called a racist and said to be on Hitler’s side.

After seventy years of globalist immigration policy, New Zealand wages have collapsed so far that it’s all but impossible for a simple labourer to own a home to raise a family in. In 1992, it was possible to buy the average New Zealand home with the equivalent of 7,000 hours of labour at the average wage. By 2020, this ratio has become over 21,000 hours of labour to own the average house.

The mass importation of Third World cheap labour constitutes an atrocity for the destructive effect it has had on the ability of the New Zealand working class to lead decent lives. Even worse is the now constant threat of violence, property and sex crimes that New Zealand’s working class have to live with on account of sharing neighbourhood space with Third World imports who hate them.

The single worst atrocity ever committed by the New Zealand Government was the conscription of New Zealand men into military service during World War One.

The War on Drugs may have destroyed thousands of families and pushed many to suicide, and the mass importation of cheap labour may have wrecked communities all over the country and pushed many families into wage and rent slavery, but both evils pale in comparison to forcing unwilling Kiwi men to fight in a war that did not concern them.

Over 32,000 New Zealand men were conscripted into the abattoir of the Great War – some 3% of the national population at the time. Assuming a death rate roughly equal to that of the volunteer soldiers, around 3,000 of these conscripts would have lost their lives. To force men to kill and die in this manner, against their wills, is the worst atrocity the New Zealand Government has ever committed.

The great military strategist Basil Henry Liddell Hart, writing in Why Don’t We Learn From History?, ranked conscription as one of the worst evils of history. Not only did it make war more likely, as he realised in the aftermath of World War One, but it also led to widespread moral degeneration on account of normalising the use of force to compel people to act against their wills.

Many families are still suffering from the effects of World War One today. The Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder incurred from being conscripted into a senseless slaughter, and made to kill other working-class people, was never healed. New Zealand’s appalling rates of child abuse can be directly traced back to the normalisation of cruelty and violence during World Wars One and Two.

At Gallipoli, Passchendaele, El Alamein and Monte Cassino we learned that cruelty and violence was how one exerts one’s will in this world. Unfortunately, we didn’t fully unlearn this lesson and heal. This is why child abuse rates in Sweden and Switzerland, who did not participate in these wars, are a fraction of what they are in New Zealand.

Most of this unhealed trauma was passed down to the Silent and Boomer generations, who then manifested it as anxiety, depression and a relaxed attitude to child abuse. These mental illnesses are less present in Generation X and the Millennials, but they still exist – a testament to the magnitude of the initial damage.

The New Zealand Government has never apologised for any of these crimes, and probably never will, because all of these abuses show the New Zealand people who the boss is. They stand as the three worst historical atrocities ever committed by the New Zealand Government.

If you would like to support our work in other ways, please consider subscribing to our SubscribeStar fund. Even better, buy any one of our books!