religion – Page 35

The Left Are the New Christians – For Better or Worse

The essence of Jesus Christ, as he appears to the modern Left, can be summed up in the word ‘nice’

In the West, most of us associate Christianity with the political right. It’s the right – especially in America – that makes the most overt appeals to the Bible and to Jesus. But if one looks past these appeals to the Christian religion, it seems that the political left is more interested in virtue signalling in general. Have they become the new Christians?

People profess Christian beliefs in order to virtue signal. The idea is that Jesus Christ was the perfect man and without blame, and therefore the more Christ-like a person appears to be the more perfect they are.

The problem with this mentality is that a people’s perception of what Jesus was like – and therefore, their conception of what entails moral perfection – is an artifact of the time and place they live in. Even worse, the popular perception of what Jesus was like is usually fabricated wholesale to suit the needs of the ruling classes.

It has now become fashionable to associate Jesus with socialism. Pope Francis, when not covering up for the numerous child abusers within his institution, makes a concerted effort to link his church with progressive attitudes to refugees, homosexuals and climate change. These are all trendy, left-wing issues that promote globalist solutions – which is what Francis really wants.

The idea is to recast Jesus as the “Lord of Nice,” and since it would be really nice to open your borders to anyone who wanted to wander in and claim welfare for the next 50 years, it’s presumed to be the sort of thing Jesus would have done. Jesus wouldn’t let refugees into his actual home, of course, or even his neighbourhood, because of the imperative to keep house prices up, and he definitely wouldn’t have opened the doors of his church to them, but he surely would have at least dumped them in poor neighbourhoods and offered to pay some tax to go towards their upkeep.

When Jesus was cast as the Lord of morally upstanding and wholesome, then it was the right wing that virtue signalled about how much they were like this. Now, the Baby Boomers that comprise the right don’t care about anything other than money, and Generation X don’t even care about that, so it’s left to the Millennials to virtue signal about how much they are like Christ.

In much the same way that the Biblical Christ taught people to give up concerns for pleasure in this material life, so does 21st-Century Jesus teach that we give up concern for maintaining basic law and order in our societies and protecting our women from rape and our vulnerable youth from physical abuse.

These are mere physical, material concerns, and will naturally dissipate. So it doesn’t matter if Muslims and Africans flood into the country in their millions and rape and destroy everything in sight – the fools simply don’t understand that the real pleasures are in the afterlife!

Of course, this is the reason why the Romans threw Christians to the lions in the Colosseum – the presence of any Abrahamic cult will inevitably cause the society that hosts it to rot from within unless action is taken. The left do not realise that they are controlled by whoever controls their perception of what Jesus Christ was like – and these people tend to be the major moneyed interests who control the mass media.

In other words, their sworn enemies.

The purity spiral of the neo-Christian Left has led to them breathlessly supporting the importation of rapists and religious fanatics into the West, in the hope that this masochistic niceness will be seen and appreciated as Christ-like and rewarded. In this sense, they are much like the original Christians who were too concerned with moral posturing to do anything about the hordes of Germanic invaders that ended up destroying the Roman Empire.

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).

The Four Kinds of Warfare

When a person hears the word ‘warfare’, it usually conjures up images of fire and explosions, bombs, tanks, blood, death, bayonets and bullets. This is what most people mean by ‘warfare’. As this essay will examine, there are four different elementalist perspectives that we can take towards the subject of war, depending on the realm of reality that we are in.

The element of iron corresponds to the kind of warfare that we are used to. In the natural world, iron represents the strength that came to dominate over the clay. It is the strength of muscle, claws and fangs, and later bone clubs and spears, and then swords, axes and knives and then firearms.

When we talk about warfare we’re usually talking about warfare on this level. Here the goal of the warfare is to reduce one’s opponent to chaos by destroying the coherence of (and therefore the order in) their physical body. The element of iron is especially useful here because it can be hammered into a tool that can pierce or slice through an opponent’s body of clay.

Much of modern warfare in this sense is really a logistical challenge that seeks to optimise how quickly iron can be moved from one part of the battlefield to another. Hence, bullets move as fast as possible and tanks move as fast as cars despite weighing several tons. The apogee of this process might be the aircraft carrier, many of which can carry dozens of strike fighter jets plus other armaments.

The element of silver corresponds to economic warfare. This means that it is a warfare of primarily unseen things: debt and interest rates being the foremost of them. In the same way that a man with an iron instrument can reap a field of wheat, a man with a silver instrument (such as a bank charter) can reap a field of men.

The nature of this economic warfare is silvery like the gossamer of a spider’s web. Its power does not come from crushing and slicing, like the iron, but from dazzling and entangling. It has been used ever since Babylon and bases itself on things that people with ordinary intellects have trouble understanding, like fractional reserve banking.

So people with low levels of financial literacy find themselves bedazzled by the promise of, for example, an instant loan no-questions-asked-right-now, and this leads to them becoming entangled in scams like payday loans that they take out to blow on something like a holiday, and then getting bled for a small amount every week forever to service the interest.

The element of clay corresponds to demographic and biological warfare. This does not mean biological in the sense of nerve agents and genetically engineered viruses, but in the sense that the most powerful weapons of any group of people over the long term are the wombs of their women.

Most refuse to acknowledge it, but Europe is in the process of being conquered by an r-selected, equatorial enemy that primarily wages war by reproducing at a high rate and ensuring that the children produced are brainwashed into willingly serving as soldiers for the furtherance of the meme complex. This is warfare of clay because it’s the same way that plants and insects outcompete each other: by spitting out as many offspring as possible.

It has been said that “demography is destiny”, and this is clearly true if one looks back over history and notes how high birth rates inevitably lead to the surviving offspring seeking out new territories (and usually killing the existing occupants of them). The British Empire was also founded on high birth rates and it has been the same for every previous empire in history.

The element of gold corresponds to spiritual warfare. This is the hardest perspective to understand, and it is the perspective that is the most valuable.

The reason why it is the most valuable is the battlefield in question here is the human will, absent which, no force can triumph in any of the other three areas of warfare, no matter how vigorous, strong or smart.

It isn’t a simple matter to describe how warfare is conducted on this level, but it’s enough to say that the spiritual birthright of every human being is to understand that their core essence is pure consciousness, and that this consciousness is immortal, invulnerable and eternal and is the same as God.

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.

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.