In the West, religion and Christianity are closely intertwined. The Establishment Right, for instance, are heavily Christian. Much of the recent history of politics in the West is defined by the need to deal with the power of Christianity in general, and the Catholic Church in particular. To a major extent, the freedom desired by the Second Acceptance is freedom from religious dogma and strictures.
The Establishment Right’s obsession with order, at the expense of everything else, is the ultimate cause of hundreds of millions of deaths from religious terrorism throughout history. The belief that there is only one way to God, and that everyone rejecting that path is evil and God wants them destroyed, is psychopathic. There is no difference between Muslim jihadists, Christians demanding that “every knee shall bow” and Jews trying to subjugate humanity through tikkun olam. All are monsters.
If anything exemplified the excessive order of the First Rejection it is Abrahamism with its absolute refusal to tolerate other religions.
The Western World has not known a destroyer of freedom like Abrahamism. In the ancient European world, all manner of different cults to different gods existed. When the Christians came, they destroyed everything spiritual they could. The Eleusinian Mysteries, which Cicero called the greatest of all of Athens’s gifts to civilisation, were broken up by Christian fanatics over 1,600 years ago.
Atheism, however, is no solution.
Absent purpose, materialism has given us today’s mental health epidemic. The mainstream materialist narrative suggests that happiness comes from consumption. Television advertising shows us happy people buying alcohol, buying travel, buying fashion, buying, buying, buying.
The problem, as Buddha taught long ago, is that desire leads to misery. All the television advertising just implants desire that wouldn’t otherwise exist, thereby creating misery that wouldn’t otherwise exist. Mindless consumption, removed from existential meaning, doesn’t lead to anything close to happiness.
The truth is that people need religion. Materialists deny this, claiming that as long as people have food, shelter and work they will be satisfied. In reality, people have souls and those souls need purpose. Religion provides that. So people need religion to be happy.
For a religion to make someone happy, however, it needs to be true. The drawback of false religions, like the Abrahamic cults, is that people can intuitively sense they’re not true. People can tell, in their hearts, that it doesn’t matter if some rabbi claimed to have died for their sins or not. They can sense that God will judge them for their own karmic debt, not for what someone else may have done. Only the hopelessly degenerate are committed to a belief in no God. So people will always find their way back to religion in some form.
This yearning for religion can be seen everywhere in youth culture. The wokists and SJWs are really just another form of Abrahamist, as has been described at length elsewhere. These people are desperate for the order that true religion provides, and the reason why so many of them are going insane is because they’re not getting it from Marxism. It’s remarkable how similar woke culture, with its hundreds of unwritten rules about what opinions are permissible, is to the Abrahamic cults, which are also totalitarianisms.
A powerful desire for spiritual order can also be seen on the right, most obviously in the TradCath fad. It manifests in a variety of subtler forms also, such as Esoteric Hitlerism, which is everywhere on the non-mainstream Internet. The rising neopagan movement is a kind of European ghar wapsi, as white people seek to rediscover the beliefs and practices of their pre-Christian ancestors.
In the centre are practices such as Elementalism, which takes traditional spiritual practices like psychedelic sacrament use – something both left and right are generally indifferent towards – and blends it with a hierarchical priesthood and an admonition to overcome bestial impulses.
If the entire left-right spectrum exhibits religious or pseudo-religious behaviour, we can conclude that the religious impulse is universal, even if suppressed in some. Thus we can see that the order provided by religion is necessary. The Roman Empire was famous for its piety; heroic figures like Aeneas made a point of pious behaviour. The writings of the Greek Golden Age were replete with references to the gods. So it seems that civilisations wax and wane in correspondence with the strength of their religious belief.
Religion is therefore too precious to be left up to cowboys and clowns, as is the case in today’s West. The obvious solution is for the state to run its own religion, but for there to also be religious freedom, as per ancient Greece and Rome.
This means the state needs to promote a national religion. The precise form of these religions will vary from place to place. In New Zealand, for instance, there would be cults of Woden, Maui and Zealandia, reflecting British heritage, Maori heritage and the modern synthesis, respectively. Northern Europe could adopt elements of the Norse pantheon; Southern Europe could adopt elements of the Greco-Roman pantheon.
This solution has one major drawback: if you allow religious freedom for certain religions, as the Romans discovered, they will use that freedom to destroy the others.
The Theodosian Code records that, as soon as Christians took power in Rome, they worked to annihilate the European religions. Followers of these traditions were increasingly ostracised until the religions themselves were made illegal. Islam, also, has been responsible for the destruction of Buddhist and Hindu communities in countless places. The Mughal invasion of India is probably the single most murderous action in history (if measured by total body count). Neither have the Jews been much better. These three Abrahamic religions are characterised by their unceasing struggle for political power and control at the expense of truth, justice, freedom, peace and basic human decency.
The optimal solution, then, is a state religion plus freedom for all non-political religions. For maximum acceptance, this freedom ought to be extended as broadly as possible; only the Abrahamic religions are truly political enough to be worth of proscription. This could be taken even further, with a declaration that true justice would be the active destruction of the political religions, using all the powers of the state.
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This chapter is from The Alternative Centrist Manifesto, the upcoming masterwork of political philosophy that offers the answers to the political problems of the West.
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