religion – Page 34

Why is it So Fashionable to Defend Islam?

It’s extremely fashionable right now, in some circles, to make a show of defending the virtues of Islam and of Muslims. Strangely, in those very same circles, it’s extremely unfashionable to defend the very same moral values supported and asserted by Islam and Muslims. This essay attempts to make sense of this curious contradiction.

Let’s be clear: Islam is an ideology of hate. Its holy scripture makes it very clear that Allah commands the subjugation of non-Muslims, women and homosexuals. There are numerous admonitions to violence in the Koran, and it is widely accepted – even by Muslims – that Mohammed, the Perfect Man, chopped the heads off 600 Jews on one particular day.

An extremely odd, but common, phenomenon nowadays is of people claiming to be enlightened humanists while defending Islamic ideology. In truth, defending Islam in the name of Enlightenment values is insanity. It doesn’t make any more sense than defending the same fundamentalist Abrahamism that the great thinkers of the Enlightenment valiantly struggled against for 300 years in its guise of Christianity.

This point can’t be overemphasised: the people defending Islam right now are attacking the same people who criticised fundamentalist Christianity for being supremacist, xenophobic, misogynistic and homophobic! In other words, the defenders of Islam are attacking the same people who won us our freedoms from fundamentalist Abrahamism. Freedoms that took hundreds – in some cases, thousands – of years to establish.

So what if the Muslims take over and install a new patriarchy ten times worse than the old one, the gutmenschen cry, like they did in Lebanon and a hundred other places? At least no-one called us racists!

The question has to be asked: why is it suddenly so fashionable to make a big show out of defending such a disgusting ideology, one which would see women stripped of the right to vote and homosexuals thrown from rooftops? This phenomenon can be explained in four major ways: some sensible, some not.

Much of the sentiment behind shrieking “Nazi!” at people who criticise Islam appears to come from a desire to avoid another genocide. The logic appears to be that the white working classes, twisted with the malice and hate natural to people of that station, are only one excuse away from stuffing millions of Muslims into gas chambers. All that’s needed to light a spark to this powderkeg is hate speech from some Islamophobic demogogue.

If anyone is allowed to criticise Islam openly, the reasoning goes, the working class will inevitably chimp out and everyone will get carried away until we’re beating out the brains of Muslim children in the street Lord of the Flies-style. Obviously it’s mostly just middle-class wankers who think like this, but there are a fair number who defend Islam on this reasoning.

Part of it is also pure submission. As this column has pointed out previously, terrorism works, and many cowards have calculated that it’s better not to criticise Islam in case doing so paints a target on the back. The hope of many Westerners is, as the old phrase has it, that “the crocodile will eat them last”. No need to go out like Theo van Gogh, after all.

A third reason is more narcissistic. Some people believe that by accusing someone else of unvirtuous conduct they draw positive attention to themselves, as if by making the accusation they must automatically be innocent of the same. It’s a narcissistic sentiment because it holds that by casting other people down into shame, the accuser brings glory upon themselves.

Leaving aside the obvious application of Haggard’s Law, this virtue signalling is the sign of a true dickhead. It can be observed every time that someone defends Islam by accusing its critic of making their criticism from a place of dumb hate or prejudice, as if Islam could not possibly be criticised on any other basis. It’s no less petty than ripping another person down for not being au fait with any other meaningless fashion.

The major explanation as for why people defend Islam, however, is simply our old favourite, human retardation. Many of these defenders have neither read the Koran nor studied Islamic history in any detail, and they simply aren’t aware of the amount of blood shed by people encouraged by these supposedly holy words. If they are aware, they blithely write it off as “no worse than Christianity”.

Some other retards have observed that most people who hate all other races also hate Muslims, and so, in the manner of retards, have reasoned themselves to the conclusion that anyone who dislikes Muslims must be a racist. Failing to realise that one can distinguish a racist from someone who doesn’t like Islam simply by asking a person their opinion of brown-skinned apostates, these retards tend to reflexively bleat about racism every time they hear a person express any misgiving whatsoever about the religion.

Unfortunately for lovers of peace and reason, it appears that defending Islam is currently fashionable for many reasons, which means it will continue to be defended for a long time yet, which means there will be many more terror attacks on Western soil before we wake up. Sit tight.

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).

Buddhism is Incompatible With Abrahamism, But Fully Compatible With Luciferianism

The apotheosis of Buddha came not through grovelling, sadomasochism and superstitious entreaties, but from lucid, rational and brave introspection

The fashionable talk today is about interfaith dialogue. All of sudden, everyone’s trying to emphasise what the world’s various religious traditions have in common. Some even go as far as to say that all religions worship the same God. Despite the absurdity of most of this fashionable lip-flapping, this essay will argue that, at least, Buddhism is compatible with Luciferianism.

Some say the reason for this interfaith dialogue is that talking leads to fewer misunderstandings, which leads to less violence. Leaving aside the fact that Abrahamism causes 99%+ of the world’s religious violence anyway, the problem with Abrahamism is that the more one learns about it, the less one respects it. Even worse, the more time one spends around its followers, the less one respects it.

On the face of it, there are several major ways that Buddhism appears utterly incompatible with Abrahamism. On the other hand, although Buddhism could never find peaceful co-existence with Abrahamism, it could find it with Luciferianism.

The major tenet of Buddhism is that one acts in a way that minimises the suffering of other sentient beings. The principle behind this is compassion, in that the suffering of those other beings is an important thing that ought to be taken into consideration. A related teaching is the interdependence of all things, which cultivates an appreciation of the effects that one’s actions have on the well-being of other creatures.

There are no such concepts in Abrahamism. Working to reduce suffering is incidental to following the directives of God – if homosexuals are to be put to death then so be it. God says so. It matters not whether this action reduces or increases the suffering in the world. Likewise, women have to be put in their place, and non-believers persecuted. Compassion doesn’t come into it; all that matters is submission.

Luciferianism doesn’t really have set instructions for what to do about the suffering of other conscious beings. Cruelty, however, is seen as petty, small-minded, even bestial. The Abrahamic insistence on male infant genital mutilation appalls the Luciferian, who tends to see it as a gross violation of power with superstitious origins.

This attitude of submission (and of forcing submission) is another way in which Buddhism is not compatible with Abrahamism. For example, Buddha said:

“Don’t blindly believe what I say. Don’t believe me because others convince you of my words. Don’t believe anything you see, read, or hear from others, whether of authority, religious teachers or texts. Don’t rely on logic alone, nor speculation. Don’t infer or be deceived by appearances. Find out for yourself what is true and virtuous.”

This is an extremely Luciferian attitude. Here, Buddha appears to be saying explicitly not to worship him, not to see him as something higher. A Luciferian would understand that one cannot take another person for an authority on how we all got here or what we’re doing, while a Buddhist might contend that the nature of God is irrelevant.

By contrast, Abrahamism preaches submission to dogma. Questioning the priest is not the done thing, because he speaks with the authority of God. Whereas a Buddhist teacher will sit at the front of a class and take questions, which are answered honestly, the Abrahamist preaches from a raised pulpit, and takes no questions. Questions imply free-thinking, which is a sin because it correlates negatively with submission.

Buddhism doesn’t demand that anyone bow down to anyone else. There is no self-appointed “God’s Representative on Earth”. A Buddhist would not give any credence to anyone claiming to speak for God, for any reason – the Pope has no more spiritual authority than a schizophrenic street prophet. The shiny silver that high priests are bedecked with will not convince a Buddhist that they know what they’re talking about.

What matters to the Luciferian, like the Buddhist, is a methodology by which truth might be discerned. Abrahamism is not a methodology – it is a dogma. Where the Luciferian and the Buddhist might meet on equal terms to discuss strategies and tactics of mutual interest, the Abrahamist presumes to dictate the truth, and the right to enforce submission to this truth with violence.

It seems like Buddhism appeals to the same sort of people as Luciferianism. It may be that both traditions arose to meet the challenges of their time and place: Buddhism with immense physical poverty, and Luciferianism with suffocating environments of spiritual lies, misdirections and untruths.

Buddhism deals with the lies of the senses and the mind, and Luciferianism with the lies of the Abrahamists. They are both master moralities, in contrast to the slave philosophies of the desert.

VJMP Reads: Julius Evola’s Ride the Tiger IV

This reading continues on from here.

The tenth essay in Ride The Tiger is called ‘Invulnerability – Apollo and Dionysus’. Here Evola further describes his conception of an aristocrat of the soul as someone who feels very deeply and who is very moved by things. The modern man (the man of clay, essentially), only feels very shallow emotions, and quickly moves from one such shallow impression to the next.

In this essay, Evola touches on the truly aristocratic topic of deliberately exposing oneself to great trials and tribulations, for the sake of learning one’s true nature. Alchemists will recognise this mentality as the one necessary to burn away everything but the gold so as to learn to distinguish Spirit from Nature. The purifying fire is that which burns away body and mind and leaves one with one’s true nature – it is necessary because it burns away everything shallow, leaving only actions which arise from the depths.

A person who has done this may find themselves gifted with a “transcendent confidence” that is characteristic of the aristocrat of the soul. This is important because in purifying oneself down to the gold one also strips away all of the conditioned belief in life’s meaning. To proceed past this stage, the alchemist must find within themselves the will to assert a meaning to life independent of any outside source. Then one is invulnerable.

To open oneself without falling apart is not easy in an age of dissolution. Here Evola takes care to point out that it’s very easy to fall at the second hurdle. Just because mainstream religion is bullshit doesn’t mean that we should abandon it for wild paganism and barbarianism. There is more.

The eleventh essay is called ‘Acting Without Desire – The Causal Law’. Once a person discovers their true nature, they should also learn the ability to act without desire. This entails taking the correct action at any given time instead of becoming distracted by profit or loss, or by what other people might think of you. Doing what needs to be done.

This needs to be qualified, however. There are naturalistic desires, that arise from the biology of the human animal. These are generally to be avoided. There are also, however, heroic desires, that arise from something greater than the merely physical, from something transcendent. These may be acted upon.

An aristocratic person, then, thinks not in terms of sin but in terms of error. The concept of sin is impossible because God has long been repudiated; all that remains is adherence to standards that one sets from within as an expression of one’s true nature.

One ought to act with a mind to what is effectively a law of karma, in that actions have consequences, regardless of whether those actions conform to any conception of good or evil. Those consequences are real and should be regarded as such. This is fine because the real man of gold doesn’t just live, but rather manifests himself and his true nature in the world.

This is the end of the second part of the book. The next part is called ‘The Dead End of Existentialism’, and the first essay here is the book’s twelfth: ‘Being and Inauthentic Existence’. This deals with the two types of existentialism (as Evola sees it): the philosophical, academic tradition and the practical tradition exemplified by Jean-Paul Sartre.

Evola dismisses existentialism almost entirely, for the reason that the existentialist philosophers are too much a product of their times, and because they are not themselves interested in the world beyond. The existentialists are very materialistic and this disqualifies existentialism from being a philosophy that an aristocrat might be concerned with.

Despite this, existentialism can be credited with some things. For one, the idea that “existence precedes essence” serves to keep the existentialist in touch with the metaphysical and transcendent. It also helps to highlight the dual nature of the aristocratic soul, which, as described earlier, is much deeper than that of the pleb.

A Technoshamanic Update to the Perennial Philosophy

The perennial philosophy comes and goes, all throughout time and space, being a reflection of the mind of God in the Great Fractal. In every new age it updates itself, taking a form that makes sense to the people of the time, depending on the characteristics of that age. Because technological change has been so rapid over the last 150 years, the perennial philosophy has not been able to keep up. This essay makes an attempt to do so.

The metaphors of the former age were the crucifix, the fish and the crescent, just as they were the pyramid, the bull and the sacrificial brazier in the age before that. The age that we are now entering has its own zeitgeist – perhaps it is time for a technoshamanic update to the perennial philosophy?

The perennial philosophy is informational gold and is more fundamental than language and therefore cannot be described in words. However, we can predict what some of its teachings are going to be, by applying the axiom of “As below, so above” to the modern day.

In its earlier incarnations, through the writings of Hermes Trismegistus and others, the perennial philosophy explained the metaphysical world by analogy to the natural world. “That which is above is from that which is below, and that which is below is from that which is above, working the miracles of one,” reads the Emerald Tablet, “Its father is the Sun and its mother the Moon.”

This remained an extremely effective metaphor, until today. The world of today is so bizarre, so surreal and impossible that distinguishing it from a dreamscape is no longer easy. Moreover, modern people are almost completely out of touch with the natural world – many of us haven’t so much as looked at the Moon in years.

We need a new metaphor for a new age, and virtual reality seems like the obvious replacement.

Following this line of reasoning, one might expect that the creation myths of the new century will be based around the same binary division as always but with a modern twist; in other words not of yang and yin, fire and water or Sun and Moon but of 1 and 0. The hardware is the brain, the software is the mind, and electricity is the Holy Ghost.

Different lives could be seen as nothing more than differing sets of sensory impressions upon consciousness. As long as these impressions could be accurately recorded and reproduced, there’s no reason why they couldn’t be accessible for any conscious person to experience at any time.

My own The Verity Key twisted the ordinary perception of consciousness through a machine that could replace the consciousness of another person with that of the operator of the eponymous device. The idea was to play on the usual belief of the reader that their consciousness was directly connected to their physical body, and could never be separated.

This played with the idea of the Great Fractal, which is conceptualised as an immense algorithm that calculates all of the possible combinations of senses that make up the illusion of the material world. This is a modern way of expressing how all things flow from one, i.e. “all created objects come from one thing, an undifferentiated primal matter”.

In other words, all of the contents of consciousness ultimately flow from consciousness itself, because nothing more than consciousness is needed to create them all – a fact known to all who have managed to purify their consciousness to the level of gold and thereby completed the Philosopher’s Stone.

Other ancient alchemical or hermetic beliefs can likewise be transliterated into a modern context.

The laws of karma can be expressed in terms of frequency, which no-one understood before the days of widespread radio, and which now everyone does. If one can imagine such a thing as a frequency of consciousness, a higher frequency would produce a more harmonious tone and joy among those who heard it, whereas a lower frequency would produce a discordant tone and fear among those who heard it.

A technoshaman might contend that, upon the expiration of one’s physical body, the frequency of consciousness that one had cultivated is the only thing that passes into the next world. They might even go as far as to contend that this frequency will attract those of a like frequency, and therefore that, post-death, one’s frequency dictates which part of the Great Fractal one’s consciousness becomes attuned to and the frequency of those who populate it (until, of course, one dies there as well).

One’s “frequency of consciousness” can here be likened to an analog television or radio signal. The more pleasurable frequencies are not necessarily the first ones discovered, or the most popular ones, and they certainly aren’t the easiest to tune into. In order to tune into higher frequencies one must know where to find them on the dial.

The alchemical quest of transforming lead into gold is a physicalist metaphor for the mystical quest that, in modern language, could be said to be about tuning a low frequency of consciousness into a higher one.