religion – Page 33

The Philosophy of Materialism is The Memetic Cancer of Our Age

The brain generates consciousness and therefore the death of the physical body means the extinction of all awareness – so buy buy buy!

Materialism – what is it good for? To give it its due, it’s a very useful paradigm to adopt if one wants to conduct an experiment in any of the physical sciences. The monkey who first realised that fire could be started from the friction of a hard wood on a soft one derived an enormous advantage over the monkeys who were still doing dances to try to please the lightning gods.

More recently, materialist science such as physics and chemistry led to Anglo-American dominance of the sea trade routes, as the adoption of first coal, then oil, then uranium allowed these powers to keep a naval force in operation that was orders of magnitude more powerful than what was possible under sail. Mastery of these sciences also allowed these same powers a decisive military advantage in terms of weaponry.

All well and good – but what is materialism bad for? Many, many, many things. Unfortunately, materialism has strengthened beyond being a mere scientific approach. It’s not even a worldview anymore. In our blind 21st century, materialism must be accorded the status of a legitimate religion. This has had profound effects on the political, scientific and intellectual discourse of all nations.

Like any dominant religion, the presuppositions of materialism can no longer be questioned in polite society. It’s possible to talk about “the” biological basis of consciousness as if it were already an established fact that consciousness has a biological basis. Asking how it is that it’s known that consciousness has a biological basis elicits, in materialist circles, a similar response to going into a church and demanding the priest prove his contention that the Bible is the Word of God.

It’s just not the done thing.

And so it’s possible for one of the world’s most prominent intellectuals, Sam Harris, to discuss consciousness with a supposed expert on the subject for over an hour without either of them questioning the dogma of the “biological basis of consciousness”. That the brain generates consciousness and not the other way around is assumed from the beginning, and all subsequent data has to be shoehorned into this framework or discarded.

Ironically, the podcast mentions that consciousness had hitherto been the purview of philosophers, in a passage exclaiming how good it was that other disciplines are now considering it. The reason why this had been the case is now obvious – because physicists, chemists and neurobiologists are incapable of the logical reasoning necessary to truly consider the question. This logical failure leads to errors like assuming right off the bat that the brain generates consciousness, the type of error that philosophers generally don’t make.

Listening to a supposed expert in neuroscience ramble on about the biological substrates of consciousness is every bit as depressing as listening to some old priest ramble on about whether or not we’re allowed to drink wine on Sundays. Both charades are dependent on one gimmick: take for granted the biological basis of consciousness and we can explain everything (says the neuroscientist), take for granted the eternal truth of the Bible and we can explain everything (says the theologian).

The worst part of it is that – just like Abrahamism, Nazism, Communism and Marxism – materialism has also rotted the minds of the people who have come to believe in it. Like a cancer, it has given rise to a number of bad things, all of them ultimately caused by the belief of materialist individuals that the death of their brain inevitably means the extinguishing of their consciousness.

Materialists are generally indifferent to the condition of the world after they die. Let’s just rape it now is their motto. After all, if their consciousness is extinguished upon the death of the brain, there is no logical reason to act in a manner custodial to the life that comes after you. There won’t be any way it affects you, so why bother?

Materialists are also easily manipulated by death anxiety. People who know that the consciousness survives the death of the physical body can laugh in the face of death, because they know that death will not occasion a traumatically significant change from the state of existence that pertained before death.

This latter point is why materialist cultures like the British fight wars all over the world while non-materialist ones such as the Indians do not. A Brit can easily be terrified into doing what you tell him because of the fear of invasion or economic disaster or God’s judgment or some other catastrophe; the Indian will just laugh.

For Western culture to survive, we have to cast off the spiritual sickness that we inherited even as we assumed scientific and military dominance. We have to move past materialism and the ludicrous contortions of reasoning that it forces people to undergo.

Psychedelic drugs and meditation are the cures for the memetic cancer that has been growing in the West for a few centuries.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis).

VJMP Reads: The Interregnum: Rethinking New Zealand IX

This reading carries on from here.

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.

Are Muslims Bigots, According to the Left?

The acid test for not being a bigot has, for decades, been one’s attitude to homosexuality – but most Muslims fail here

Throughout the Australia same-sex marriage referendum there was a constant refrain: Don’t be a stupid, vicious, hateful bigot, and make sure you vote Yes. Only through sheer bigotry could a person vote No. Only by way of an unprincipled, mindless, unforgivable hate of gay people could a person possibly be inspired to vote against love.

The entire Yes campaign was driven by a fear of far-right extremism. The spectre of white supremacism was even raised. Apparently skinheads and Nazis were ready to storm the streets to give marginalised homosexuals a kicking, cheered on by the same rich old white Christian people who have oppressed everyone else going back to the dawn of time.

But all of this “Love trumps hate”-style rhetoric backfired when it turned out that there were very strong correlations, measured at the electoral level, between being Muslim and voting against same-sex marriage. Notably, the West Sydney electorates with the largest numbers of Muslims were the same electorates to record the highest proportion of No votes.

Statistics showed us that Muslims hate gay people and don’t consider them worthy of equal rights. It’s as simple as that. After all, in Muslim countries they often hate them so much they kill them, so there’s no surprise whatsoever that in a multicultural Australia that grants religious freedom to Islam, some Australians will use that freedom to hate gay people.

This raises an obvious question: are Muslims bigots?

After all, we have just spent months being told that people who were against same-sex marriage were bigots, and that the bigotry of homophobia has to be exterminated from modern Australia at any cost.

Over and over, we are told that bigots have no place in modern society, that all political views considered bigotry will have to be relinquished, that if a person doesn’t relinquish a bigoted opinion they are evil, and can be considered identical to Hitler in kind if not in degree.

Moreover, any person holding a bigoted viewpoint is automatically so evil that it’s legitimate to abuse them, to shun them, to lie about them, and to altogether treat them as if they are subhuman for having committed an unforgivable moral failure out of no motivation but pure malice.

So what do we make of the fact that, as per the definition of bigot that the Left has been using up until now, Muslims are extremely bigoted?

The obvious response is to say that gay people knew that already. Muslims are, after all, Abrahamists, and Abrahamism has a scriptural command to murder homosexuals in the Book of Leviticus of the Hebrew Bible, the same place that most Christian anti-gay hate arises from.

The less obvious response is to be quietly grateful that the Muslims of West Sydney are not ten times greater in number, because that might have shifted the balance of the referendum to 49-51 against.

These West Sydney suburbs are, ironically, Leftist strongholds, so the hate that the Left is always accusing the working class of – of being exclusive, discriminatory, bigoted, cruel and malicious – is present in greatest concentrations within their own territories!

VJMP Reads: Anders Breivik’s Manifesto XVI

This reading carries on from here.

In this section (pages 1294-1413), Breivik describes what he predicts will happen when a European civil war kicks off, sometime around 2070 A.D. Chillingly, he is clear about his belief that democracy has already failed. He points out that if Europe is to remain a democracy then it is already lost, because demography has already gone so far as to shift the power into Muslim hands.

After all, if Muslims become a numerical majority anywhere then it is no longer a matter of fighting – they will be able to simply vote any aspect of Islamic culture into law. It is a curious fact of the modern public discourse that few commentators are willing to speak about what will happen if current demographic trends continue, even though the historical example of Lebanon has been clearly described by many, not just Breivik.

A particularly odd paranoid streak, common in European nationalists, comes through in this section when Breivik lists the crimes of the American Empire. This list is not as exhaustive as his list of the crimes of Islam, but it emphasises a point that is not easy for people in the New World to understand: namely, that the idea of “The West” is a New World concept and European nationalists are quite happy thinking of Europe by itself as a self-sufficient system.

Interestingly, here Breivik puts a precise monetary value on his willingness to get rid of Muslims. He states that, when the inevitable deportations begin, every Muslim will be offered 1kg of solid gold to voluntarily go away. $15 billion Euros to get rid of a population of 1 million is a fine exchange in his mind.

The plans for a cultural conservative revolution here are comprehensive. Breivik writes about the need to reform education so that children are taught that Islam is a hate ideology on par with Nazism. Re-educated is the preferred method for dealing with Marxists, unless of course they are “Category A, B or C traitors”.

Again underlining Breivik’s inability to understand irony, he writes “Crusading is not just a right, but a duty according to Canon Law,” which is precisely the mentality that he is accusing Islam of and which he uses to justify his action. Much like the jihadists he excoriates, Breivik claims that “in the context” of the Islamic invasion of Europe, any action could be considered self-defence, echoing Osama Bin Laden’s justification for the 9/11 bombings.

This section then takes a rather bizarre turn, with a series of cut-and-pastes on religious themes such as the ability of the Christian cross to act as a unifying symbol for all Europeans, how the Lord demands that his followers be warriors, and a fire and brimstone laden spiel about the hell that awaits atheists after death.

Here Breivik mentions explicitly that he considers himself a warrior of Christ and that if he is killed in action he expects to get into the Christian heaven as a martyr.

This section finishes with a c.50 page “interview” with himself, in which Breivik responds to anticipated criticism. Here he again expresses his disdain for Nazism, calling it a “hate ideology” and saying that he could expect the Nazis to turn on conservatives like him as soon as the Marxists were dealt with.

Breivik makes a very compelling argument here. The Marxists claim to oppose Nazism on the grounds that declaring a person to be subhuman and then treating them as such is grossly immoral, yet anyone who doesn’t agree with the Marxist doctrine on every point, no matter how evidently ludicrous and self-defeating, is themselves treated as subhuman. Already the Austrian Government is putting elderly ladies in prison for the utterly preposterous non-crime of “Holocaust denial”.

It’s hard not to appreciate the accuracy of this criticism of the Left’s behaviour.