Monday, March 18, 2024

Reality is Not What it Used to Be

Where do we go from there? -- in reference to the previous post, which took the telovator to the top floor and concluded that

In everything that is true -- that exists -- there "has to be at least a vestige of the Son's correspondence to the Father."

This explains why we are at once swimming in an ocean of truth and drowning in a sea of lies. 

At any rate, supposing we have pierced the veil of the toppermost -- or it us, rather -- there's nowhere to go but back down into the world. 

Indeed, we are always between immanence and transcendence, bearing in mind that Betweenness as such is a primordial category -- that something is always and forever going on Between the Father and Son, AKA conformity to the True. This between -- what Voegelin calls the metaxy -- represents

human existence as "between" lower and upper poles; man and the divine, imperfection and perfection, ignorance and knowledge, and so on. Equivalent to the symbol of "participation of being" (Webb).

This latter -- participation of being -- "Refers to sharing the qualities of the supreme exemplar," or "a condition between higher and lower degrees of reality." In the Judeo-Christian tradition it is reflected in the principle of our theomorphism, and can be symbolized as follows:

O

(⇅)

Ø

That's us in the middle. To dwell at the bottom equates to empiricism, to flee to the top idealism. But neither approach on its own is justifiable. It reminds us of a book called The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization, which describes the seesaw argument that has been going on for over two millennia. 

The two men disagreed on the fundamental purpose of the philosophy. For Plato, the image of the cave summed up man’s destined path, emerging from the darkness of material existence to the light of a higher and more spiritual truth []. Aristotle thought otherwise. Instead of rising above mundane reality, he insisted, the philosopher’s job is to explain how the real world works, and how we can find our place in it []. 

But an integral view of the cosmos requires both, since they are not dualistic but complementary. Perhaps I should reread it, but at the moment I'm reading a book called The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution.

And here we are. But how did we get here? That is the question the book attempts to answer. The short answer is through really, really bad philosophy, involving a great deal of amnesia, in particular, a systematic forgetting of what man knows about man. But I'm only up to p. 64.

At any rate, the book does bring us back down from the beautiful clouds of metaphysics to the cloudy muck of history.

So, how did we get here -- to a place that sees and raises Descartes, and says I think I am a woman, therefore I am a woman. What must the world be like in order for such a nonsensical statement to make sense? It actually requires centuries of work. Termites can't destroy a house in a day. 

Long story short,

Because men have forgotten God, they have also forgotten man; that's why all this has has happened.... Yet any proposed Christian solution to the crisis of modernity will fail if it does not address the core issues of the Great Forgetting (Trueman).

Long story shorter,

The modern man is the man who forgets what man knows about man.

Each day modern man knows the world better and knows man less.

If man is the sole end of man, an inane reciprocity is born from that principle, like the mutual reflection of two empty mirrors.

"Human" is the adjective used to excuse any infamy.

The human has the insignificance of a swarm of insects when it is merely human.

The cause of the modern sickness is the conviction that man can cure himself.

Man speaks of the relativity of truth because he calls his innumerable errors truths.

Nor is there a "Christian solution" per se, since ours is a chronic but treatable condition.

We only know how to solve problems that do not matter.

Christianity does not solve "problems"; it merely obliges us to live them at a higher level.

Little problems like death, loss, evil, human nature, and the nature of reality. 

Trueman actually begins with the problem of I am a woman trapped in a man's body, a sentence which "carries with it a world of metaphysical assumptions."

Now, every mentally ill person has a problem. As does every healthy person. What is life but problems?

The problem of the fellow somehow unhappiting the wrong body

cannot be understood until it is set in the context of a much broader transformation in how society understands the nature of human selfhood.

Get your anthropology wrong and everything else follows. Am I wrong?

No, but Nietzsche, Marx, and other fiending fathers of postmodernity are: they argue

that the history of society is a history of power and oppression and that even notions such as human nature are constructs designed to reinforce and perpetuate this subjugation.

In other words, forgetting human nature isn't a bug, it's a featured mind parasite. It's like saying There's no such thing as a woman, and I am one. But if everything is an oppressive social construct, so too is the construct of transgenderism. Indeed, often enough to only escape from this oppressive construct is suicide.

The product of power and oppression is the Sacred Victim, who are collectively "the real heroes of the narrative." You get more of what you reward, hence all the victim-heroes. At the same time the real heroes, from Washington to Churchill, are the oppressors.

Tell us something we don't know.

Okay, Trueman discusses the terms mimesis and poiesis, which "refer to two different ways of thinking about the world." The former is much like a realist philosophy in which truth is the conformity of intellect to being: it

regards the world as having a given order and a given meaning and thus sees human beings as required to discover that meaning and conform themselves to it.

Such a commonsense view of the world is precisely what makes you an oppressive and power-mad White European Heteronormative Christian Nationalist tyrant. Conversely, poiesis   

sees the world as so much raw material out of which meaning and purpose can be created by the individual.

Genesis 3 All Over Again? 

Sure sounds like it. Back in the real world,

the authority of the created order was obvious and unavoidable. The world was what it was, and the individual needed to conform to it.

Now, I'm all for questioning authority. But the authority of reality? And its author? That seems more than a bit soph-defeating. Nevertheless, "Today's world is not the objectively authoritative place" it used to be. Nowadays, 

Modern man treats the universe like a lunatic treats an idiot.

That's enough for today.

Sunday, March 17, 2024

A Tweenage Correspondence Course in Reality

Or maybe three-ality.

Let's get back to basics: "truth is a relationship of correspondence between two quite different sorts of things," on the one hand, the intellect, on the other, intelligible reality. 

But note that in reality there are always three, since relationship itself is equally primordial. That's our claim, anyway. 

For example, try saying anything without a relationship between words and things or words and other words. Can't be done. 

For me, a Christian metaphysic vaults this mysterious third to the toppermost of the poppermost. Looked at this way, we aren't just related to reality, but relationship as such is a part of the reality to which we are conformed.

I know, tricksy. But denying it is also a kind of trick, only the bad kind that results in a host of metaphysical mischief.

Who is the third who walks always beside you? / When I count, there are only you and I together / But when I look ahead up the white road / There is always another one walking beside you (Eliot) 

Who is it? You know poets. They never come right out and say it. Although in the footnotes there is a counter-claim by the idealist philosopher F.H. Bradley which sketches out in precise terms what we do not believe: that

my experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside; and... every sphere is opaque to the others which surround it.... the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul.

If Professor Bad Example is correct, then there is no shared relationship, nor any "third" walking beside us. In fact, no real us at all, just two more or less contiguous but closed circles. 

But for us the Us is as equally real as the I and the Is , i.e., Intellect-Being-Relation. Are you with me? Or just an adjacent circle enclosed in absurcularity -- a nul de slack? 

Yada yada, truth is always a "three-way affair," is it not? Which is how we can at once know truth and share it with others. 

Having said that, many people are indeed closed circles, i.e., the existential closure alluded to in yesterday's post. In reality, a person qua person is a truth-bearing being, but how? By virtue of what principle?

I'll just quote Marshall and add my own comments as necessary:

if Jesus Christ is the truth, then truth is borne, not only chiefly by sentences or beliefs, but by a person.... in the end, truth is a person. 

That's the claim. Aphoristically speaking, that

The truth is objective but not impersonal.

Truth is a person.

The life of the intelligence is a dialogue between the personalism of spirit and the impersonalism of reason.

A person is a be-tween. 

A betweenager? And a trialogue? Sounds about right, Petey. But let us dig a little deeper into this whole. 

Look! Down there: "a single concept of truth applicable to all true sentences and beliefs."

Wait -- it's alive! Don't act so surprised:

If God were not a person, He would have died some time ago.

"In the correspondence of person to person by which the Trinity makes us Christ's icons one may hear an echo of the ancient idea that truth is a correspondence of mind to reality."

Listen! For God is the guest of silence.

we cannot be bearers of Christ's image without sharing in his correspondence to the Father, and so bearing, like him if imperfectly, the imprint of the Father himself....

Granting to creatures a participated likeness in the incarnated Son's correspondence to the Father seems to be the final goal of the act by which the Trinity brings it about that we have true beliefs. 

In other words, conformity as such -- which is always a relation -- is grounded in the conformity of Son to Father?

If correspondence to the Father is itself identity-constituting and non-contingent for the Son, then "truth" belongs... to God's own identity, in the form of the Word's perfect correspondence to the Father whose total reality he expresses. The Son would then correspond to the Father -- would be "the truth of the Father."

The Truth of truth -- of even the possibility of truth? Sounds like it: this "identity-constituting relation to the Father would thus be basic to the truth of all possible true beliefs." Turns out that "Everything corresponds to the Father in some fashion, however remote." 

In everything that is true -- that exists -- there "has to be at least a vestige of the Son's correspondence to the Father."

Short & sweet.

All truth goes from flesh to flesh.

But

Write concisely in order to finish before you become boring.

Saturday, March 16, 2024

What Can We Not Doubt?

To review, we are discussing what it means to say that Christianity is true, which, of course, presupposes that we can know what truth is. 

Conveniently, -- at least for those of us in the trailer Thomist park -- Christianity both implies and relies upon a realist metaphysic in which truth = the conformity, agreement, or correspondence of the intellect to reality: "truth is that which is."

This is how any and all truth is "justified," precisely. Supposing you think the rope is a snake, or Biden isn't one, then your belief is unjustified. Yes, man is prone to illusion, but illusion presupposes an underlying reality.

Indeed, even argument per se presupposes a reality we can know. This much is inarguable. In reality, everyone is a realist and can only pretend to be otherwise.  

But nor is this an atomistic universe, so one truth will cohere with others, both horizontally and vertically. Reality is more like a holofractal organism of internally related parts than a machine with only exterior relations. 

Indeed, this is why it is possible for (merely) biological organisms to exist. Otherwise it is impossible to account for the appearance of internal relations in a purely exterior universe. 

So, Christianity is not restricted to purely "Christian" beliefs, but rather, rests upon epistemological and ontological assumptions capable of justifying "beliefs in general -- for any possible claim which wants to count as true."

To merely say that knowledge of truth is possible is to have said a great deal. Indeed, if the opposite is the case, what is there to say? Could there ever be a "community of the unreal" in which everyone exists in their own private Idaho, with no relationship to the real? In which every man is tenured? 

Yes and no. But I don't want to get into progressive politics just yet. There will be plenty of time for insultainment.

We have a right to true beliefs because prior to this we have a belief in truth, ultimately because truth itself has rights. There can be no right to be wrong, because falsehood is unjustifiable, precisely. We have a relationship of dependency on the truth that is prior to our knowing it. 

If truth is dependent upon us, that's just the metaphysical nonstarter known as rationalism, whereby we are enclosed in our own psychic preconceptions projected outward.

Of course, people tend to be more or less entangled in their own projections which are taken as real, but that's just mental illness or ideology (but I repeat myself). Part of the "maturational process" involves the ability to distinguish these from reality, AKA reality testing. 

Come to think of it, ideology can be regarded as a sublimated form of mental illness. It exists on a spectrum from the relatively mature to the sadistically primitive, but a defense mechanism is nevertheless a defense mechanism, ultimately against reality. 

Voegelin has much to say about such ideological deformations and epistemic pathologies rooted in what he calls closed existence,

in which there are internal impediments to a free flow of truth into consciousness and to the pull of the transcendental.

He also refers to the eclipse, which is a

perverse closure of consciousness against reality; a state that may become habitual and unconscious, but never entirely free from the pressure of reality and the anxiety produced by the attempt to evade it.

This is why ideological activists are always so paranoid and persecuted. We don't need them but they need us, and desperately, as receptacles for their projections. 

If the leftist is not persecuting, he feels persecuted.

In and by the content of his own mind. For example, where would they be without "white privilege" or "Christian nationalism" or "the patriarchy" to project into? They would have to be with themselves, which would by intolerable. Imagine a Joy Reid or Keith Olbermann having to tolerate their own heads!

The world is the projection of God.

You have a point, Petey, but there is a difference between pathological -- AKA "forced" -- projection, and what is called by the wise "diffusion of the Good." Really, it's the difference between love and hate, life and death, boundless creativity and leaden predictability.

Yada yada,

Eventually the practice of justifying beliefs will have to appeal to beliefs which we... and our interlocutors hold true, but for which no reasons are given.

In other words, Gödel, for there will always be at least one truth for which our system cannot account: "beliefs terminate arguments when no reasons need to be offered for them." 

*Ironically*, it would be illogical to maintain that one's first principle can be reduced to logic. Rather, our First Principle simply is. Just don't pick one that cannot justify any entailments from it, for example, a-theism, or relativism, materialism, or subjectivism, each a form of cosmic irrationalism. 

It is not reasonable to pretend to enclose man in reason, for truth always transcends it. Which reminds me of a crack by Schuon to the effect that things aren't true because logical but logical because true -- or that no purely logical operation can furnish the premises on which it operates.

Radical doubt is impossible, for there must be at least one thing that is not or cannot be doubted: "rational conversation and argument do not require, but rather preclude, holding all of our beliefs (including our criteria of truth) open to doubt at the same time." 

What is the one Undoubtable Principle? We'll get into it in the next post, but the guy who said the following is my kind of guy:

Anyone who does not love the truth, has not yet known it (Gregory the Great Guy).

Friday, March 15, 2024

The Metaphysics of Jesus

In our opinion, one should not be a Christian for any other reason than its truth. Or at least Christianity should be truer than any alternative -- meaning that it should simultaneously explain more than any other metaphysic on offer, without unexplaining anything important. 

So, this book looked appealing: Trinity and Truth by Bruce Marshall. Like most books, it fell into my hands via holy happenstance:

This book is about the problem of truth: what truth is, and how we can tell whether what we have said is true. Marshall approaches this problem from the standpoint of Christian theology, and especially that of the doctrine of the Trinity. The book offers a full-scale theological account of what truth is and whether Christians have adequate grounds for regarding their beliefs as true. 

It's a bit pedantic, and spends far too much time refuting self-refuting philosophical nonstarters, but makes some solid points along the way. 

As we know, Jesus startles us with a number of startling truth claims, the most startling being that he is the truth. This is a startling claim. But because Christian doctrine is the water in which our civilization swims -- or at least the unpolluted spring from which it sprung -- perhaps we have lost our capacity to be startled by it. In other words, insufficient (!?!). 

Our approach will be much like Leon Kass' The Beginning of Wisdom, which treats the claims of Genesis as any other philosophical text. Thus, we ought to be able to do the same with the New Testament, which, after all, is regarded by Christians as the fulfillment of the Old. 

So when Jesus says he came here in order to straighten us out and "bear witness to the truth," we ought to take this epistemological claim literally and see where it leads. 

After all, every uncorrupted -- or at least intellectually honest -- human wants to know the truth, and in my view, we are entitled to the truth. Otherwise, why go to the trouble of creating an epistemophilic being with no possibility of satisfying this unrestricted desire to know?

Assumes facts not in evidence: that we are created. 

That's not true, because we have spent many posts discussing the Principle of Creation. It's your lucky day, because I won't rehash that material today. Suffice it to say

Either God or chance: all other terms are disguises for one or the other. 

Or, between O and Ø, and Ø just left the building. 

Of course, this leaves open the question of "what O is like," and Jesus claims to tell us what O is like, precisely. He could be wrong, but when he says "I am the truth," it's a literal statement. It's up to us to assess the claim. If we are so inclined.

For example, "Truth is not simply personal; for John truth is a person" (emphasis mine). But

Even this is too weak: truth is not just any person, but this human being in particular: Jesus of Nazareth, and among human beings only he. Knowing what truth is and deciding about truth... finally depends on becoming adequately acquainted with this person.... this human being is divine truth itself.

So, let's get acquainted with this strange person and his startling claims. I don't know about you, but my curiosity has been piqued.

Marshall writes that "Jesus makes the Father known" and that "He is 'the truth' only in virtue of his unique relation to the Father" (emphasis mine). Complicating matters,

Jesus is "the truth," moreover, not only on account of his bond with the one who sent him, but also on account of his bond with another whom he will send: "the Spirit of truth..."

This Spirit, whoever or whatever it is, is also "the truth" Jesus wants to reveal (and who in turn reveals further truth to us). Ultimately, "truth" is "an attribute of the triune God. Indeed, truth is in some deep sense identical with the persons of the Trinity." 

Moreover, all truth, to the extent that it is true, has its origin in this Spirit. We Raccoons not only reject no truth, but happily celebrate and take on board any and all truth, the more the merrier. Come on in! 

Now, not to say that the above formulation is a myth, but is there a way to "demythologize" this language and express it in a more purely metaphysical way? Or at least draw out the metaphysical implications and entailments? What is Jesus actually saying about ultimate reality that is more adequate than all our other ways of speaking of it?

For in the end it indeed comes down to the question of adequation -- that is, to a realist conception of metaphysics whereby truth is the conformity of intellect to being, all other conceivable epistemolgies being number two or lower. 

And Jesus is telling us that this Being is ultimately a relation of three persons -- or, as we like to say, of substance-in-relation (which we borrowed from Norris Clarke but have long since adopted as our own).

Now, this metaphysical conception "must be regarded as epistemologically primary across the board," which is to say, as "the primary criteria of truth." As such, nothing can contradict it; "it must be regarded as the chief test of truth of the rest of what we want to believe."

This means that the very notions of how we decide what is true and of what truth is must be reconfigured in a trinitarian way (emphasis mine).

Is Jesus up to this challenge? Here again, he ought to be able to take on all comers -- not just strawman arguments but the steeliest of steelmen. 

We're just getting started. Maybe a good place to pause.

Thursday, March 14, 2024

A Miracle Cure for the Progressive Disease

After conversing with some "thoroughly modern" people, we see that humanity escaped the "centuries of faith" only to get stuck in those of credulity. --Dávila

Why are we increasingly being ruled by fanatical secular theocrats? 

We should expect that as our society increasingly distances itself from its Christian roots, the Christian sensibility for limited government will wane, and the universal human tendency to unite all authority, spiritual and temporal, in one central office or structure will reassert itself (The Religion of the Day).

We mustn't forget "that it has not been typical for humanity to make a distinction between" the sacred and secular, and that nearly all civilizations "have lodged spiritual, moral, and political authority in the same office" (ibid.). 

We were once the great exception, but now we're back to the rule of giving to Caesar what doesn't belong to him:

Once a Christian vision of the world has been abandoned, it is very difficult to limit the power of temporal governments (ibid.).

Indeed, those of us who recognize such limits and object to caesarodopism are now called "Christian Nationalists," or -- with unsurpassable irony -- "fascists." In such an upside-down world, those of us who want the state to have less authority are called authoritarians.

Must these Gnostics always immanentize the eschaton?  

Given the fact that Progressive religion is this-worldly in its scope, the political arena has increasingly become the staging ground for religious propagation and... a kind of religious warfare (ibid.). 

An endless war of religion. It's the price of Progress.

You will have noticed that one of the characteristics of progressive religion is that it is devoid of wisdom. In the words of our fine Colombian,  

Political wisdom is the art of invigorating society and weakening the State.

Which is why the left specializes in pretending to solve "transitory problems with permanent solutions," and, come to think of it, permanent problems -- i.e., those arising out of human nature -- with political solutions. But there can be no political solution to a spiritual problem.

Thus, for example, corporations are greedy tax cheats. Unlike the Biden crime family.

The only man who should speak of wealth and power is the one who did not extend his hand when they were within reach.

Brandon is not that man, and he has the shell corporations to prove it.

Yes, but he is a devout Catholic! 

Correct:

The diffusion of a few drops of Christianity into a leftist mind transforms the idiot into a perfect idiot.

And surely Brandon is the most Perfect Idiot ever to be president. 

In the Christianity of the leftist Christian, one of the two elements sooner or later eliminates the other.

Why is he so angry? Is it just the amphetamines, or is something else going on?

The progressive becomes angry at nothing as much as the stubbornness of the one who refuses to sacrifice the certain to the new.

The stubborn white urbanite projecting his stubbornness and anger into us, so it is we who simmer with White Rural Rage™.

But Our Democracy™!

The leftist screams that freedom perishes when his victims refuse to finance their own murder. 

Lincoln Riley should be grateful for all the Diversity™.

Get on the Right -- which is to say, left -- Side of History™, peasant!

The democrat defends his convictions by declaring whoever challenges him to be out of date.

 "Where genuinely Christian ideas predominate, neo-Gnostic religion loses influence" (ibid.). Conversely,

Where Christianity disappears, greed, envy, and lust invent a thousand ideologies to justify themselves.

Wait. Aren't we MAGA types the Nazis? 

That's not how I remember it: World War II was

an internecine gnostic religious war between German Nazis and Russian communists. Each of these ideologies was attempting to replace a waning Christianity with a new, all-encompassing vision for the society that promised the perfection of the temporal world (ibid.). 

True, the Marxists prevailed, but why pick between them? The modern left combines statism, Jew hatred, identity politics, class envy, and the rule of lawlessness into one perennially attractive and monstrous package. 

Pessimistic? Funny you ask:

With good humor and pessimism it is possible to be neither wrong nor bored.

Even so, I am not without optimism, even if Progressive Man is a hopeless dumpster fire:

Intelligent optimism is never faith in progress, but hope for a miracle.

It's happened before, or we wouldn't be here.

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

In This House We Believe Mind Parasites are Real

This is interesting: progressive religion isn't just a personal mind virus but a collective one that can only burrow into an existing culture that it could never have produced: it

is inherently parasitic like a virus, or to put it more neutrally, it is derivative rather than original. The Gnostic turn of mind will inhabit an already existing religious faith or philosophical system and re-order the structure of its host body even while assuming the host's mythic power (The Religion of the Day). 

And here we are? 

You are correct, sir. But we could also say that Christianity is "viral," for example, in the way it wormed its way into the existing Roman Empire and spread throughout its body. And indeed, Richard Dawkins has called religion as such -- AKA the "God delusion" -- a virus of the mind, so what's the difference?  

Dawkins analyzes the propagation of religious ideas and behaviors as a memetic virus, analogous to how biological and computer viruses spread.

Dawkins also describes religious beliefs as "mind-parasites," and as "gangs [that] will come to constitute a package, which may be sufficiently stable to deserve a collective name such as Roman Catholicism..."

How to tell when one is infected? Well, the "faith sufferer" will, for example, hold convictions

that something is true, or right, or virtuous: a conviction that doesn't seem to owe anything to evidence, but which, nevertheless, the believer feels as totally compelling and convincing.

This is not my experience, rather, the opposite, for all the evidence -- evidence for truth as such -- points to a nonlocal source of Truth. Science, of course, assumes the intelligibility of the world to intelligence, without being able to account for what is otherwise a great mystery with no principle to account for it.

Mystery?

There is a conviction that "mystery" per se is a good thing; the belief that it is not a virtue to solve mysteries but to enjoy them and revel in their insolubility.

Again, not in my experience, for we do not equate mystery with the unknown, rather, with the infinitely knowable. Mystery is an easily verifiable existential and ontological fact. Unless, of course, you are omniscient, like Dawkins.

If the believer is one of the rare exceptions who follows a different religion from his parents [like Bob], the explanation may be cultural transmission from a charismatic individual.

Is that what it is? Granted, I have been influenced by certain individuals, but I would not say it is because of their charisma. Rather, because their explanations seem truer (i.e., conformed to reality) and account for more data than the alternatives. 

A while back we began a series of posts on "philosophical nonstarters," of which atheism must be chief. I reject atheism on purely intellectual, logical, philosophical, metaphysical, experiential, and even scientific grounds.

What if we flip the script and say that atheism is a dangerous mind parasite? 

Historically, practical atheism has been the shrouded beginning and final result toward which all Progressive religious schemes tend.

As such, it is both the first principle and last end -- the alpha and omega -- of the left. It is one of the primary divisions between conservative liberals and illiberal leftists. 

Dawkins and I agree on the existence of mind parasites, since these are the stock in trade of the coonical pslackologist. I am intimately familiar with their destructive influence, but how does one distinguish these from live-enhancing memes that lead to human flourishing? 

For example, the wiki article cited above references a meta-review of 100 studies showing that religion has "a positive effect on human well-being by 79%."

Which for our purposes is neither here nor there, because a person living in untruth is setting himself up for unpleasant feelings down the line. 

We certainly agree with Dawkins that there is such a thing as bad religion, since that is precisely the subject under discussion, i.e., progressive religion. However, unlike Dawkins, we maintain that man cannot not be religious, even -- indeed, especially -- if that man is a progressive atheist. 

If your neighborhood is like mine, you've seen the signs of the times:

 In my house it's more like this:

We also agree that science is real, but if only science is real, how to account for rights of any kind? 

Being a Christian Nationalist, I believe they are anchored in the plain meaning of the Declaration of Independence -- that they are endowed to us by the Creator. It is the leftist who believes in them "without evidence," principle, or ground. For example, if "black lives matter," it can only be because all lives do, but why? Where did they get that crazy notion?

Obviously they got it from Christianity, but it is like a cut flower that can only wilt when detached from its roots. In this regard it is a bit like a virus, which is a fragment of genetic information looking for a host. The real host is the body from which it has been excised. Call it the Body of Christ, but that is getting ahead of the post.

Back to our book. It echoes what we just said, in that progressive religion "arises out of the soil of Christian belief." For who but a confused and poorly catechized Christian would say "kindness is everything"? Christianity has never been a suicide pact. Pacifism is just one of the shadows or viruses of Christianity. 

In this context, atheism is just one more Christian heresy. It assumes a strictly rational universe that can be understood by the human mind, except they get off the truth train at a provincial bus stop instead of taking it all the way to the top. 

Gödel?

You guessed it, Petey. Nothing could be more illogical than pretending to enclose being in one of the mind's rationalistic models. To the atheist we say: be reasonable! A little perspective, please. But of course, it is "a futile task to look for logical consistency in a Gnostic worldview."

In such an unstable alloy, there will be remaining bits from the host vision that do not square well with new Gnostic ideas.

As to the parasitic nature of progressive religion,

Much of the potency of a given Gnostic belief system comes from what it has borrowed from an existing and internally more coherent way of seeing things. It is doubtful that something called a "pure Gnosticism" could exist for very long on its own.

This being for the same reason that a virus cannot live long without finding a host. Technically a virus isn't even "alive" per se. Which is perhaps why, when I look at the left, I see dead people.

There has never been a successful civilization founded on a Gnostic form of religion, and it is unlikely that there could be, given that many elements of Gnostic belief militate against any stable civilizational development. 

Again, the virus of progressivism can only hijack a living system. I well remember my own infection, which leads to questions of "treatment," "cure," and "inoculation," which I suppose we'll consider in the next post. Bottom line for today: even Marxism was and is

dependent for much of its attractive power on the Judeo-Christian faith that preceded it, and has proved a destructive and incoherent failure wherever it has been put into practice.

It evolved -- or devolved, rather --

in the context of Christianity, and current Gnostic movements are dependent to a great degree on the Christian vision of reality.... [their] existence is unthinkable without the Jewish and Christian religion that preceded it.

In this house we believe in parasitology and epidemiology.

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

The Catechism of the One True Faith of the Left

We've suggested in the past that leftism in all its ghastly forms represents a crystallization -- the institutionalization -- of man's fall. It is the foolish attempt to make right everything that is wrong with man. Let us count the aphorisms, and elaborate them with material from The Religion of the Day:

The radical error -- the deification of man -- does not have its origin in history. Fallen man is the permanent possibility of committing the error.

"Neo-Gnostic belief is essentially, not accidentally, an expression of human pride." Thus, "Progressive believers have assumed that they are themselves unfallen and morally superior to their opponents."  

Socialism is the philosophy of the guilt of others.

"It tends to produce an unfortunate but inevitable attitude of moral superiority": original sin for thee, original innocence for me. Or the "innocent envy" of the believers in White Privilege, Heteronormativity, Christian Nationalism, et al. 

The left is made up of individuals who are dissatisfied with what they have and are satisfied with who they are.

"Progressive religion harbors a profound hatred for the world as it currently exists." It "gains much of its attraction by appealing to the sense of alienation that we all experience." Which is why it holds no appeal to the contented. 

The left is a lexicographical tactic more than an ideological strategy.

Always and everywhere an attack on language, AKA the word. For example, it is offensive to call homicidal monsters "illegals." Indeed,

The man guilty of the crime is not the envious murderer but the victim who has aroused his envy.

Man prefers to apologize by offering another person's guilt, rather then his own innocence, as an excuse.

"'Not my fault!'" is the universal Progressive religious mantra." 

"Unlike Christians, they hold that what needs to radically change is emphatically not me."  

"Social justice" is the term we use for claiming anything to which we do not have a right.

No social justice, no civil peace for the restavus. 

To believe in the redemption of man by man is more than an error; it is an idiocy.

"The salvation offered by Progressive religion promises not only escape from evil, but the transformation of our current humanity." 

The cause of the modern sickness is the conviction that man can cure himself.

"A modern neo-Gnostic belief system is a scheme of self-initiated salvation."

Transforming the world: the occupation of a prisoner resigned to his sentence.

"Progressive religion acknowledges the human tragedy of profound alienation from the world, and even from our own being." But

Man matures when he stops believing that politics solves his problems.

Neo-Gnosticism "promises to radically overcome the evil of the world and the alienation and lack of fulfillment experienced by humans." It "accomplishes its salvation through the application of some form of specialized technical knowledge (gnosis) gained by human effort."

Today the individual rebels against inalterable human nature in order to refrain from amending his own correctable nature.

The neo-Gnostic "locates the source of the world's evil not in the individual human heart, but in fundamentally corrupted and therefore oppressive structures of human existence."  

In order to enslave the people the politician needs to convince them that all their problems are "social."

The neo-Gnostic accomplishes its salvation "through escape from or destruction of prevailing structures of oppression." 

"The life and soul of Progressive religious practice involves stoking anger for the fight against those who are inhibiting" the birth of the New Age. "If such enemies are not obviously forthcoming, Progressive believers need to invent them, lest their mythic picture of the world should dissolve.:

When Hitler doesn't exist, the left invents him. Every time. 

In this century, compassion is an ideological weapon.

"It is not so much love for those who suffer, but anger rooted in pride at the fact of suffering" that motivates them. 

In order to corrupt the individual it is enough to teach him to call his personal desires rights and the rights of others abuses. 

 "The names of the two antagonistic groups change, but the underlying structure is similar." 

Social salvation is near when each one admits that he can only save himself. Society is saved when its presumed saviors despair.

Hierarchies are heavenly. In Hell all are equal.

Or have equity, rather. Equity is the flattening of vertical ascent.

The cult of Humanity is celebrated with human sacrifices.

Most conspicuously the sacrament of abortion. "Something must die if the guilty human race is to be purified. This instinct is as old as humanity and can be found in every culture." 

Human nature always takes the progressive by surprise.

This follows from the effort "to bring about a new type of human and to inaugurate an entirely new age of freedom that has overcome the past age of oppression." 

Progressive religion is "founded on a radical departure from reality.... the more completely a given revolution succeeds, the more complete will be its resulting failure." "Due to the impossibility of making good on those promises, the hoped-for paradise never arrives."

Give it four more years.

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