The Catholic church a thousand years ago said that witches do not exist, that people who believe that they are witches are delusional, and that since witches and witchcraft does not exist, you cannot prosecute someone as a witch, hold witch trials, burn people at the stake as witches, because it is impossible to commit a crime that does not exist.
Then, Martin Luther nailed his feces to the door of a church and decided to create a perversion of Christianity based on ignorance and the inversion of Christ's actual teachings, and in so doing brought belief in witches into the world. Protestants burned witches out of the same love of ignorance that fuels ISIS (and to steal the land and other property from unpopular people through trumped up charges).
Showing posts with label Christianity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Christianity. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 4, 2019
Sunday, April 21, 2019
The Last Months of Jesus?
Just watched "The Last Days of Jesus" on PBS, a piece of tabloid propaganda by radical Jewish biblical conspiracy theorist Simcha Jacobovici, who sets out in every single thing he creates to "prove" that literally everything about Judaism is true and literally everything about Christianity is fake. He is willing to spin total yarns to "prove" even the most outlandish things to say some Jewish story absolutely happened exactly as it is written, and will go to the same lengths in the opposite direction to paint Jesus as a scheming political opportunist who had children, founded a dynasty in France, died, and rotted in a tomb. It is co-produced by biblical conspiracy theorist James Tabor, who has worked with Jacobovici and naytheist James Cameron before in the past on fantastical tales of biblical revisionism.
The story, like most of the yarns he spins, appears convincing if you don't think about it, but when you apply even the slightest bit of scrutiny it falls apart.
Just one example dismantles the entire central thesis of the program - that Jesus was colluding with Herod Antipas, Pontius Pilate, and Praetoria Prefect Sejanus, in an attempted coup against Tiberius to put Sejanus on the throne of Rome and Herod on the throne of Judea, and to remove Caiaphas from the position as head priest with Jesus taking his place (I kid ye not, that conspiracy theory the central thesis of the program). Allegedly it makes no sense for Jesus to be arrested, tried, and executed in a couple days. That never, ever happened, we are told. It had to take place over six months, because news has to travel across the Mediterranean that Sejaus was executed for treason, which caused Pilate and Antipas to waiver in their scheme. Ten minutes later we are told that Sejanus is arrested, tried for treason, and executed in a single day, as if they hadn't just went to great lengths to explain that these single day show trials never happened and could never happen and that the Gospel accounts had to be wrong.
It also says that the Gospel writers never mentioned Sejanus because "it was extremely dangerous at the time to do so", despite the fact that we know Sejanus existed because at least six contemporaries of the Gospel writers wrote about him. The more likely explanation as to why the Gospel writers don't mention him is because they had no idea who he was because why would they?
The film also includes bull face lies that Jesus was a follower of John the Baptist (he was not), that he took over John the Baptist's movement when John was executed (clearly he did not), that Jesus had no reason to dislike the Pharisees because they all believed in the same things (which they did not), that John the Baptist sprinkled water on people's heads instead of immersing them in water, that first century Jews believed there would be two messiahs* - one a political ruler and one the chief priest.
The film also lies about the Last Supper and even the purpose behind Christianity. They say Jesus wanted us to remember his death, and that this was the foundation of Christianity, when, in truth, it is his resurrection and conquest of death that is the central point of the religion. If Jesus died and rotted in a tomb Christianity would be meaningless and Jesus, who said he would rise again and rise us to eternal life as well, would be a liar. The resurrection IS Christianity. It is the singular event that proves Jesus is who he says he is and that he can free us from sin and death.
*I should point out that the word “messiah” has two different meanings within Judaism, and the producers of this film are suggesting otherwise. The “normal” messiah was any high priest or king who was anointed with holy oil, and even included the gentile Cyrus the Great, who ordered the reconstruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. The Messiah as we know it today, who will appear at the End of Days, descend from the line of David, free the Jews, and preside over the millennial reign was one man who would quite literally appear a the End of Days. There were not going to be two men ruling at the same time, one a priest and one a king, there was just one final liberator of the Jewish people. The confusion arises among people who don't know that the one word can be used in two different ways in two different contexts. The producers of this program are deliberately misleading the public (James Tabor has even written a book offering a different misrepresentation, where Jesus is the king and John the Baptist is the priest!).
The story, like most of the yarns he spins, appears convincing if you don't think about it, but when you apply even the slightest bit of scrutiny it falls apart.
Just one example dismantles the entire central thesis of the program - that Jesus was colluding with Herod Antipas, Pontius Pilate, and Praetoria Prefect Sejanus, in an attempted coup against Tiberius to put Sejanus on the throne of Rome and Herod on the throne of Judea, and to remove Caiaphas from the position as head priest with Jesus taking his place (I kid ye not, that conspiracy theory the central thesis of the program). Allegedly it makes no sense for Jesus to be arrested, tried, and executed in a couple days. That never, ever happened, we are told. It had to take place over six months, because news has to travel across the Mediterranean that Sejaus was executed for treason, which caused Pilate and Antipas to waiver in their scheme. Ten minutes later we are told that Sejanus is arrested, tried for treason, and executed in a single day, as if they hadn't just went to great lengths to explain that these single day show trials never happened and could never happen and that the Gospel accounts had to be wrong.
It also says that the Gospel writers never mentioned Sejanus because "it was extremely dangerous at the time to do so", despite the fact that we know Sejanus existed because at least six contemporaries of the Gospel writers wrote about him. The more likely explanation as to why the Gospel writers don't mention him is because they had no idea who he was because why would they?
The film also includes bull face lies that Jesus was a follower of John the Baptist (he was not), that he took over John the Baptist's movement when John was executed (clearly he did not), that Jesus had no reason to dislike the Pharisees because they all believed in the same things (which they did not), that John the Baptist sprinkled water on people's heads instead of immersing them in water, that first century Jews believed there would be two messiahs* - one a political ruler and one the chief priest.
The film also lies about the Last Supper and even the purpose behind Christianity. They say Jesus wanted us to remember his death, and that this was the foundation of Christianity, when, in truth, it is his resurrection and conquest of death that is the central point of the religion. If Jesus died and rotted in a tomb Christianity would be meaningless and Jesus, who said he would rise again and rise us to eternal life as well, would be a liar. The resurrection IS Christianity. It is the singular event that proves Jesus is who he says he is and that he can free us from sin and death.
*I should point out that the word “messiah” has two different meanings within Judaism, and the producers of this film are suggesting otherwise. The “normal” messiah was any high priest or king who was anointed with holy oil, and even included the gentile Cyrus the Great, who ordered the reconstruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. The Messiah as we know it today, who will appear at the End of Days, descend from the line of David, free the Jews, and preside over the millennial reign was one man who would quite literally appear a the End of Days. There were not going to be two men ruling at the same time, one a priest and one a king, there was just one final liberator of the Jewish people. The confusion arises among people who don't know that the one word can be used in two different ways in two different contexts. The producers of this program are deliberately misleading the public (James Tabor has even written a book offering a different misrepresentation, where Jesus is the king and John the Baptist is the priest!).
Sunday, December 2, 2018
Hitler versus Christianity
I've already mentioned that Adolf Hitler was not a Christian. Nor was he an atheist. In fact, he tried to eradicate both Christianity and atheism.
Monday, September 17, 2018
Hitler's Religion
Hitler was not a Christian, as the naytheist community would like to portray him. Nor was he an atheist, as many Christians claim. Nor was he an occultist, though most high level Nazis were. No, Hitler believed in the God of Spinoza, who was a Jew.
Sunday, July 15, 2018
Forgiving Hitler
Forgiveness is the central teaching of Jesus Christ. It is the very heart of the Gospel, and sets Christianity apart from all other religions. Other religions are about rituals or self-perfection. Christianity certainly forces us to look at ourselves and our own flaws, and to improve ourselves, but it does so through forgiving others. We transcend the ego not by reciting a mantra or sitting in silence, but by acting in the world.
Still, people have conflicting problems with forgiveness. There are those people who reject God because they think everyone should be forgiven for everything and Hell should not exist, and there are people on the other end of the spectrum who reject God because of God's forgiveness, believing Hell should be a prison for which all the people they despise are locked away forever. It's just like this pillow which some people dislike for being too firm and other people dislike for not being firm enough.
jezuzfreek777 takes some time to talk about God's limitless love for us and his limitless forgiveness. It is a very good, short video that I highly recommend.
Still, people have conflicting problems with forgiveness. There are those people who reject God because they think everyone should be forgiven for everything and Hell should not exist, and there are people on the other end of the spectrum who reject God because of God's forgiveness, believing Hell should be a prison for which all the people they despise are locked away forever. It's just like this pillow which some people dislike for being too firm and other people dislike for not being firm enough.
jezuzfreek777 takes some time to talk about God's limitless love for us and his limitless forgiveness. It is a very good, short video that I highly recommend.
Tuesday, May 29, 2018
Jesse Duplantis: "Jesus Wants You To Buy Me A Jet"
Jesse Duplantis is a preacher of the "prosperity gospel", which is pretty much the opposite of what Jesus taught. Remember what Jesus actually said:
● "These things I have told you, that in me you might have peace. In the world you will have to suffer, but cheer up, I have overcome the world."
(John 16:33)
● "Sell all that you have and distribute it to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come and follow me." Hearing this the rich young man was deeply troubled and he left. Jesus saw this and said "How hard is it for the rich to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God."
(Luke 18:22-25)
The prosperity gospel states that if you pray a whole lot or something then God will give you money and Rolexs and $54 million jets. Mysteriously it only seems to work for the preachers, not the people who attend their seminars, which look more like pep talks than church.
In contrast, Jesus and the Apostles all lived difficult lives, survived through charity, and died violent deaths. The Apostle Paul speaks time and again how he's basically a poor nomad who is constantly being chased out of towns, beaten, starved, and exposed to the elements. He certainly didn't own a jet, or it's first century equivalent, like Caligula had two giant yachts because he didn't want to have orgies with the commoners crossing the Mediterranean. The early church in Jerusalem was sustained by everyone selling their possessions.
Now, 2018, Jesse Duplantis, the serpent, who has already been granted three jets by his gullible audience, "believes" for a brand new jet. He "burned them up for the Lord Jesus Christ", whatever that means. It's clear it doesn't mean the planes have ceased functioning, because he's still flying around in all three. Well now he needs a new one. And not just any jet, a $54 Dassault Falcon 7X, which Jesus specifically told him to get by name. This jet can go anywhere in the world without needing to refuel, because fuel is so expensive (more expensive than a new jet), especially when you own a "fuel farm", which I guess works like a dairy farm only with milking dinosaurs to get oil instead of cows.
From the Google cache of the Washington Times (fuck your ad blocker ban):
"You can't get there from here!" This is the era of fucking Youtube. Astronauts can livestream from space, you don't need a jet to reach an audience physically. I think Jesus would appreciate that, the ability to reach people all over the world instantly.
Kenneth Copeland even says "We're in show business." That's why they need private jets. They're not in the business of saving souls, they're in "show business," which is worse than hooking when it comes to degeneracy.
As if that's not bad enough these Sadducees need to get up in airplanes and stand up and wave their arms to talk to God. God lives way up on the Moon and he can't hear you if you're stuck on the ground. You need to get up in a private jet, in a $50,000 suit with a $20,000 watch, and shout really loud because God is really old so he's hard of hearing.
To top it off they say that airplanes are "tubes filled with demons." Well, if you really are a man of God then exorcise the demons. That's one of the powers the Holy Spirit should have given you if you are legit. No, commercial airlines are not filled with demons, they're filled with regular people who watch your show and pay for your extravagant lifestyle.
No, those airplanes are not filled with demons, these fake preachers are. These are serpents from Hell taking advantage of the poor, the sick, and the despondent. And if there is a God and a Hell these two will burn in the lake of fire.
● "These things I have told you, that in me you might have peace. In the world you will have to suffer, but cheer up, I have overcome the world."
(John 16:33)
● "Sell all that you have and distribute it to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come and follow me." Hearing this the rich young man was deeply troubled and he left. Jesus saw this and said "How hard is it for the rich to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God."
(Luke 18:22-25)
The prosperity gospel states that if you pray a whole lot or something then God will give you money and Rolexs and $54 million jets. Mysteriously it only seems to work for the preachers, not the people who attend their seminars, which look more like pep talks than church.
In contrast, Jesus and the Apostles all lived difficult lives, survived through charity, and died violent deaths. The Apostle Paul speaks time and again how he's basically a poor nomad who is constantly being chased out of towns, beaten, starved, and exposed to the elements. He certainly didn't own a jet, or it's first century equivalent, like Caligula had two giant yachts because he didn't want to have orgies with the commoners crossing the Mediterranean. The early church in Jerusalem was sustained by everyone selling their possessions.
Now, 2018, Jesse Duplantis, the serpent, who has already been granted three jets by his gullible audience, "believes" for a brand new jet. He "burned them up for the Lord Jesus Christ", whatever that means. It's clear it doesn't mean the planes have ceased functioning, because he's still flying around in all three. Well now he needs a new one. And not just any jet, a $54 Dassault Falcon 7X, which Jesus specifically told him to get by name. This jet can go anywhere in the world without needing to refuel, because fuel is so expensive (more expensive than a new jet), especially when you own a "fuel farm", which I guess works like a dairy farm only with milking dinosaurs to get oil instead of cows.
From the Google cache of the Washington Times (fuck your ad blocker ban):
Televangelists Kenneth Copeland and Jesse Duplantis defended their use of private jets as a luxury means of travel, arguing that commercial planes are full of “a bunch of demons” that will bog down their busy schedules with prayer requests.
In a Dec. 29 segment of Mr. Copeland’s “Believer’s Voice of Victory” television program, Mr. Duplantis recalled a story where he was on a plane and had to unbuckle his seat belt to speak to God, The Blaze reported.
“You couldn’t have done that over an airline,” added Mr. Copeland. “Stand up and say, ‘What did you say, Lord?’”
“No, sir, no way,” Mr. Duplantis agreed.
"You can't get there from here!" This is the era of fucking Youtube. Astronauts can livestream from space, you don't need a jet to reach an audience physically. I think Jesus would appreciate that, the ability to reach people all over the world instantly.
Kenneth Copeland even says "We're in show business." That's why they need private jets. They're not in the business of saving souls, they're in "show business," which is worse than hooking when it comes to degeneracy.
As if that's not bad enough these Sadducees need to get up in airplanes and stand up and wave their arms to talk to God. God lives way up on the Moon and he can't hear you if you're stuck on the ground. You need to get up in a private jet, in a $50,000 suit with a $20,000 watch, and shout really loud because God is really old so he's hard of hearing.
To top it off they say that airplanes are "tubes filled with demons." Well, if you really are a man of God then exorcise the demons. That's one of the powers the Holy Spirit should have given you if you are legit. No, commercial airlines are not filled with demons, they're filled with regular people who watch your show and pay for your extravagant lifestyle.
No, those airplanes are not filled with demons, these fake preachers are. These are serpents from Hell taking advantage of the poor, the sick, and the despondent. And if there is a God and a Hell these two will burn in the lake of fire.
Sunday, March 25, 2018
Healing the Centurion's Servant
Jesus heals the servant of a Roman Centurion with but a command, from the 1977 mini-series Jesus of Nazareth.
Wednesday, February 21, 2018
Billy Graham In Memoriam
Billy Graham died today, 9 months short of his 100th birthday. He was one of the most influential preachers in history, reaching out to the largest audience – estimated to be 2.2 billion people – of any one person ever. He is responsible for an estimated 3.2 million conversions to Christianity. While not a universalist, Graham believed that there were well-meaning people of all faiths who did have Christ in their hearts and were saved even if they had never heard of Jesus or the Gospel.
Graham said, "Someday, you will read or hear that Billy Graham is dead. Don't you believe a word of it. I shall be more alive than I am now. I will just have changed my address. I will have gone into the presence of God."
Graham said, "Someday, you will read or hear that Billy Graham is dead. Don't you believe a word of it. I shall be more alive than I am now. I will just have changed my address. I will have gone into the presence of God."
Thursday, January 4, 2018
Why Does the Bible Mention Unicorns?
Sunday, December 10, 2017
God and the Bogey Man
Most people don't understand God. The idea of God within the minds of most people is some super version of the ego (not Freud's super-ego, just the regular ego super-sized). They project their own values onto God, judging reality based on their own preferences. Since reality does not conform to their own preferences, and morality is egocentric, that means God must be an asshole for causing reality to deviate from egocentric morality. If God was good then God would be like Superman.
Super God would automatically intervene in every instance where reality deviates from the preferences of the individual. Super God is the ultimate incarnation of the nanny state. Super God negates all free will because free will implies a freedom to harm others, and if God conformed to individual preferences of egocentric morality then we couldn't have something like that, could we? That's why the robots need to imprison us, because humans are too irresponsible to take care of themselves.
This mistaken view of God as Superman, or Super God, can lead to one of two conclusions for people: atheism, in the form of the problem of evil, or misotheism, the hatred of God.
I've spoken about the problem of evil, or as I call it the non-problem of evil, because I just don't see what the problem is. The real problem is lack of wisdom and maturity (and perhaps imagination) on the part of the person assuming the problem.
We can see a good example of how the idea of God as Superman leads to atheism in Michael Drosnin's book The Bible Code. Michael Drosnin is speaking with an Israeli mathematician who originally discovered the code Eliyahu Rips. Assuming the code exists, Rips believes that the author is God, while Drosnin does not. Rips is an Orthodox Jew and believes in the God of the Torah. Drosnin is an atheist because he believes in Super God.
"For me, it was not that simple. I had proof there was a code, but not proof there was a God. If the Bible code came from an all-powerful God, he would not need to tell us the future. He could change it himself. The code seemed, instead, to be from someone good, but not all-powerful, who wanted to warn us of a terrible danger so we could prevent it ourselves." (P. 87)
That's a pretty powerful theological assumption underpinning Drosnin's desire to write God out of the picture.
For Michael Drosnin one could just as easily call the problem of evil "the problem of laziness." "If God exists then he could do things for me, so why should I have to? Since I have to do these things, therefore God doesn't exist." Michael Drosnin basically says the exact same thing "If the Bible code came from an all-powerful God, he would not need to tell us the future. He could change it himself." You can almost hear the author whinging: "But I don't wanna change the future, why can't God do it for me? Because he's stinky, that's why! I have to change the future myself, so God doesn't exist, aliens did it!"
So, who is the encoder? You might as well ask, "If the teacher already knows the answer why do I have to answer the question? It must be because the teacher doesn't exist." Why do we have to do things instead of having God do everything for us? Why do we have to do things instead of having almighty government do everything for us? For our own protection why don't we let the robots sequester us away where nothing bad can ever happen to us?
If Michael Drosnin cannot get around his childish fantasy of Super God doing everything, thus freeing Michael Drosnin of all thought and responsibility, what hope does he have of accepting God as the author of the code (assuming the code exists)?
The solution to the problem of evil is called theodicy. People have been writing theodicy for thousands of years, beginning perhaps with the Book of Job. God in Job gives us a sort of non-answer, basically saying Who are we to demand answers from God? Where we there when God created the world? Can we comprehend things from God's perspective from our vantage point here on Earth in these finite bodies?
This makes sense on one level, because just as a dog cannot comprehend why a human might do seemingly cruel things, like a vet performing an operation or something, from the wiser perspective of the human the operation makes perfect sense. The human has the dog's best interests in mind when performing the operation that will cause pain and discomfort because it corrects some life-threatening problem that the dog was facing. The little pain the human induces is better than the alternative, which is much greater suffering and death. We might not understand the purpose of suffering, from our limited, finite perspectives, but an omniscient God does, and sees that it is for the best.
That might make sense on one level, but it doesn't really like a satisfying answer, because we could basically say the same thing about anything. Why does anything exist instead of nothing? Why the sky blue? Why is gravity the weakest of the fundamental forces? Literally any question can be answered with "That's for God to know and don't ask questions, mortal." Philosophy vanishes at that point (and leaves me with nothing to do). That's why theodicy evolved beyond the Book of Job, not because the answer is distasteful, but because it's boring.
The existence of God was taken as given only until maybe the seventeenth century. People suffered deeply, but they didn't question the existence of God. They had a more mature view of God. The idea of Super God hadn't been invented yet. People pursued theodicy as philosophy, as love of wisdom, as a mystical practice, not in order to answer David Hume or Michael Drosnin. Philosophers wanted to get into the mind of God. "This is why you suffer, now what are you going to do about it?" That was the original purpose of theodicy. It's a more mature view than sitting in an armchair and trying to defend the idea that God is not Super God, because you're actually doing something with your life. You're actually progressing toward a goal, not just resting in a sense of smug self-assurance.
Jesus said "In the world you will have to suffer." John 16:33 is what I call the heart of the Gospels. "These things I have told you, that in me you might have peace. In the world you will have to suffer, but cheer up, I have overcome the world." It can't get any more simple than that. Suffering is an intrinsic part of life in this world. The Apostles not only believed that, they also believed God exists and that Jesus is God.
These weren't stupid people. Ancient people were not stupid. In a lot of ways they were smarter than people living today, because ancient people had to live side-by-side with death and privation on a daily basis. Knowing how to use a smart phone or the names of all 57 genders won't save you if the apocalypse happens and an EMP destroys all electronics, but knowing how to plant crops and make fire will. The Apostles could be transported to the modern world and in a relatively short amount of time (especially the ones who spoke Greek like Matthew and Paul, although Paul came later) they could use their skills to find jobs and survive.
On the contrary, if you were transported back to the first century you would almost certainly die of exposure or be killed by bandits in a week. Machines and other people do most of the living for you. You just need to show up at your job inserting tab A into slot B, if you have one, or maybe just sit on your ass and collect welfare and all your needs are met for you. The world has become so integrated that people have become specialised to a degree even people living two generations ago could not fathom. It's led to boredom, laziness, and a lack of wisdom and morality. Furthermore, it led to the creation of the idea of Super God.
Buddha too said in the first Noble Truth that life is full of suffering. He also said that suffering comes from desire (pride in the Christian tradition*), that there is an end to suffering, as Jesus alluded to, and we even have his solution to escaping suffering: the eightfold path. In Christianity we had hints of this path mentioned in the Gospel of Thomas and in the monastic practices of the Desert Fathers, but those teachings were lost for a millennium due to the meddling of Athanasius of Alexandria.
*As a side note, nowhere in Buddhism, not even its most advanced teachings found in Tibet, explains the origin of suffering as far as I can tell. Christianity does mention the origin of suffering, and, unlike the new age spiritualist teachings, Christianity makes recourse to known human psychology rather than assuming the potential motives of omnipotent, omniscient, eternal, indestructible beings. Suffering, in Christianity, arose out of pride, which is a specific desire, the desire to be special. God loves us all equally, but Lucifer wanted special love, thinking himself better than the rest of creation. Since God refused him special love he decided to poison creation by introducing pride into the hearts of humans and angels, leading to the war in Heaven and the fall of man.
C. S. Lewis had a brilliant thing to say about the non-problem of evil. He noted that the problem is based around a contradiction. If the world was as bad, even half as bad, as people who use the problem of evil believe, then there's no way the idea of a good God could have ever arisen. If the world was so filled with evil and suffering that it could prove God does not exist then no one would have ever thought up the idea of God in the first place. The only way the idea of God could exist is if the world is nowhere near as bad as the problem of evil people believe it to be.
As if the idea of Super God leading to atheism wasn't bad enough (at least there are rational atheists, and atheistic arguments aside from the problem of evil, which is a very poor argument), what's even worse is the idea of Super God leading to misotheism. Misotheism is absolute laziness. It is absolute narcissistic infantile histrionic personality disorder. And I mean that in the technical sense. People who hate God have highly unstable and exaggerated emotions, are attention-seeking, have excessive pride, an unshakable belief in one's own rightness, and at the same time an unshakable belief that their own problems are absolutely unique in the history of the world and that no one has ever suffered to anywhere near as great a degree that they have, are unwilling to accept personal responsibility and have a need to blame others for one's own mistakes, are often hypochondriacs, and often perceives relationships as more intimate than they actually are.
Hating God or being angry with God is a form of idolatry. It is replacing God with a Bogey Man of your own ego. The idea of Super God leading to atheism makes sense, because Super God doesn't exist. Self-evidently, because otherwise there would be no problem of evil. The problem of evil exists because God isn't Super God. Super God doesn't go around solving other people's problems. Not believing in something that self-evidently doesn't exist is rational. It's poor theology, but it's still rational thinking. Misotheism, on the other hand, is completely irrational. Misotheism is seeing that Super God doesn't exist and then turning around and creating an evil counterpart to Super God. Misotheism is turning God into the Bogey Man. [The evil counterpart to Super God – the Bogey Man – is technically an extreme version of dystheism, the idea that God is not entirely good. In its extreme form dystheism supposes an entirely evil deity. The hatred of God – misotheism – naturally supposes that this extreme form of dystheism is true.]
The Bogey Man is a fictional entity whose purpose is to terrorise mainly children, because, let's face it, a lot of adults are assholes. Super God as the Bogey Man is a fictional entity for histrionic people to project their anger onto for being inadequate, because histrionic people are assholes.
Super God as the Bogey Man (who I will hereafter refer to simply as the Bogey Man) would not only be less good and moral than regular God, the Bogey Man would be evil. The Bogey Man would be the antithesis of God.
The Bogey Man must suspend free will in order to intervene in all situations. People want Super God to intervene to stop criminals from committing crimes, for example. People don't ask for Super God to prevent criminals from thinking about committing crimes, but for Super God to intervene only in the act of preventing crimes. Since Super God (the Bogey Man) is also believed to be the cause of all things then that means the Bogey Man must have placed the thought to cause the crime into the mind of the criminal and then is supposed to intervene in stopping the criminal from committing the crime. The criminal is just a puppet in the Bogey Man's hands. The criminal's mind is shackled to a body that it has no control over. The Bogey Man is making the criminal commit the crime and then prevents the crime as it is happening. The Bogey Man chooses to make some people sinners, destined for Hell just to have people to send to Hell.
If the Bogey Man exists then nothing you do has any meaning, because the Bogey Man is pulling all the strings. The Bogey Man controls all your actions, causes all of your suffering (even suffering caused by your own choices, because you have no free will, which conveniently relieves you of any responsibility), and then hands out punishment or reward on fiat.
The existence of the Bogey Man is even worse than that. Not only are you being made to suffer in life and rewarded or punished at random, you don't even control your own body. At the very least your mind is locked into a body that you have no control over (in some extreme cases even your mind is controlled by the Bogey Man, freeing histrionic misotheists from responsibility even for their own thoughts). That's absolutely terrifying. At best you are a prisoner of a body you do not control. At worst even your anger itself is caused by the Bogey Man.
If the Bogey man exists not only is your life meaningless, your life is nothing but entertainment for an omnipotent sadist. That's even worse than Descartes' evil demon, who can only trick you. With Descartes' evil demon you can still realise that the world is an illusion and come to know the true God through reason. The Bogey Man directly controls you, absolutely. While it is possible to outsmart the evil demon the Bogey Man is totally unbeatable.
Super God as the Bogey Man must be evil. That's why belief that Super God actually exists leads to misotheism.
Why someone would believe in the Bogey Man I've already explained. People who believe in the Bogey Man have to believe in the Bogey Man. Not because the Bogey Man forces them to believe, but because the Bogey Man frees them from responsibility and makes their problems out to be totally unique in the history of the universe.
Of course God is not Super God, or the Bogey Man. Belief in Super God or the Bogey Man is stupid and childish. The same God who gave us reason did not intend for us to forgo its use. That line of thinking will lead us eventually to Blaise Pascal, Rene Descartes, and into using our reason and contemplation to reach a better understanding of the mind of God and the origin of and solution to suffering.
Super God would automatically intervene in every instance where reality deviates from the preferences of the individual. Super God is the ultimate incarnation of the nanny state. Super God negates all free will because free will implies a freedom to harm others, and if God conformed to individual preferences of egocentric morality then we couldn't have something like that, could we? That's why the robots need to imprison us, because humans are too irresponsible to take care of themselves.
This mistaken view of God as Superman, or Super God, can lead to one of two conclusions for people: atheism, in the form of the problem of evil, or misotheism, the hatred of God.
I've spoken about the problem of evil, or as I call it the non-problem of evil, because I just don't see what the problem is. The real problem is lack of wisdom and maturity (and perhaps imagination) on the part of the person assuming the problem.
We can see a good example of how the idea of God as Superman leads to atheism in Michael Drosnin's book The Bible Code. Michael Drosnin is speaking with an Israeli mathematician who originally discovered the code Eliyahu Rips. Assuming the code exists, Rips believes that the author is God, while Drosnin does not. Rips is an Orthodox Jew and believes in the God of the Torah. Drosnin is an atheist because he believes in Super God.
"For me, it was not that simple. I had proof there was a code, but not proof there was a God. If the Bible code came from an all-powerful God, he would not need to tell us the future. He could change it himself. The code seemed, instead, to be from someone good, but not all-powerful, who wanted to warn us of a terrible danger so we could prevent it ourselves." (P. 87)
That's a pretty powerful theological assumption underpinning Drosnin's desire to write God out of the picture.
For Michael Drosnin one could just as easily call the problem of evil "the problem of laziness." "If God exists then he could do things for me, so why should I have to? Since I have to do these things, therefore God doesn't exist." Michael Drosnin basically says the exact same thing "If the Bible code came from an all-powerful God, he would not need to tell us the future. He could change it himself." You can almost hear the author whinging: "But I don't wanna change the future, why can't God do it for me? Because he's stinky, that's why! I have to change the future myself, so God doesn't exist, aliens did it!"
So, who is the encoder? You might as well ask, "If the teacher already knows the answer why do I have to answer the question? It must be because the teacher doesn't exist." Why do we have to do things instead of having God do everything for us? Why do we have to do things instead of having almighty government do everything for us? For our own protection why don't we let the robots sequester us away where nothing bad can ever happen to us?
If Michael Drosnin cannot get around his childish fantasy of Super God doing everything, thus freeing Michael Drosnin of all thought and responsibility, what hope does he have of accepting God as the author of the code (assuming the code exists)?
The solution to the problem of evil is called theodicy. People have been writing theodicy for thousands of years, beginning perhaps with the Book of Job. God in Job gives us a sort of non-answer, basically saying Who are we to demand answers from God? Where we there when God created the world? Can we comprehend things from God's perspective from our vantage point here on Earth in these finite bodies?
This makes sense on one level, because just as a dog cannot comprehend why a human might do seemingly cruel things, like a vet performing an operation or something, from the wiser perspective of the human the operation makes perfect sense. The human has the dog's best interests in mind when performing the operation that will cause pain and discomfort because it corrects some life-threatening problem that the dog was facing. The little pain the human induces is better than the alternative, which is much greater suffering and death. We might not understand the purpose of suffering, from our limited, finite perspectives, but an omniscient God does, and sees that it is for the best.
That might make sense on one level, but it doesn't really like a satisfying answer, because we could basically say the same thing about anything. Why does anything exist instead of nothing? Why the sky blue? Why is gravity the weakest of the fundamental forces? Literally any question can be answered with "That's for God to know and don't ask questions, mortal." Philosophy vanishes at that point (and leaves me with nothing to do). That's why theodicy evolved beyond the Book of Job, not because the answer is distasteful, but because it's boring.
The existence of God was taken as given only until maybe the seventeenth century. People suffered deeply, but they didn't question the existence of God. They had a more mature view of God. The idea of Super God hadn't been invented yet. People pursued theodicy as philosophy, as love of wisdom, as a mystical practice, not in order to answer David Hume or Michael Drosnin. Philosophers wanted to get into the mind of God. "This is why you suffer, now what are you going to do about it?" That was the original purpose of theodicy. It's a more mature view than sitting in an armchair and trying to defend the idea that God is not Super God, because you're actually doing something with your life. You're actually progressing toward a goal, not just resting in a sense of smug self-assurance.
Jesus said "In the world you will have to suffer." John 16:33 is what I call the heart of the Gospels. "These things I have told you, that in me you might have peace. In the world you will have to suffer, but cheer up, I have overcome the world." It can't get any more simple than that. Suffering is an intrinsic part of life in this world. The Apostles not only believed that, they also believed God exists and that Jesus is God.
These weren't stupid people. Ancient people were not stupid. In a lot of ways they were smarter than people living today, because ancient people had to live side-by-side with death and privation on a daily basis. Knowing how to use a smart phone or the names of all 57 genders won't save you if the apocalypse happens and an EMP destroys all electronics, but knowing how to plant crops and make fire will. The Apostles could be transported to the modern world and in a relatively short amount of time (especially the ones who spoke Greek like Matthew and Paul, although Paul came later) they could use their skills to find jobs and survive.
On the contrary, if you were transported back to the first century you would almost certainly die of exposure or be killed by bandits in a week. Machines and other people do most of the living for you. You just need to show up at your job inserting tab A into slot B, if you have one, or maybe just sit on your ass and collect welfare and all your needs are met for you. The world has become so integrated that people have become specialised to a degree even people living two generations ago could not fathom. It's led to boredom, laziness, and a lack of wisdom and morality. Furthermore, it led to the creation of the idea of Super God.
Buddha too said in the first Noble Truth that life is full of suffering. He also said that suffering comes from desire (pride in the Christian tradition*), that there is an end to suffering, as Jesus alluded to, and we even have his solution to escaping suffering: the eightfold path. In Christianity we had hints of this path mentioned in the Gospel of Thomas and in the monastic practices of the Desert Fathers, but those teachings were lost for a millennium due to the meddling of Athanasius of Alexandria.
*As a side note, nowhere in Buddhism, not even its most advanced teachings found in Tibet, explains the origin of suffering as far as I can tell. Christianity does mention the origin of suffering, and, unlike the new age spiritualist teachings, Christianity makes recourse to known human psychology rather than assuming the potential motives of omnipotent, omniscient, eternal, indestructible beings. Suffering, in Christianity, arose out of pride, which is a specific desire, the desire to be special. God loves us all equally, but Lucifer wanted special love, thinking himself better than the rest of creation. Since God refused him special love he decided to poison creation by introducing pride into the hearts of humans and angels, leading to the war in Heaven and the fall of man.
C. S. Lewis had a brilliant thing to say about the non-problem of evil. He noted that the problem is based around a contradiction. If the world was as bad, even half as bad, as people who use the problem of evil believe, then there's no way the idea of a good God could have ever arisen. If the world was so filled with evil and suffering that it could prove God does not exist then no one would have ever thought up the idea of God in the first place. The only way the idea of God could exist is if the world is nowhere near as bad as the problem of evil people believe it to be.
As if the idea of Super God leading to atheism wasn't bad enough (at least there are rational atheists, and atheistic arguments aside from the problem of evil, which is a very poor argument), what's even worse is the idea of Super God leading to misotheism. Misotheism is absolute laziness. It is absolute narcissistic infantile histrionic personality disorder. And I mean that in the technical sense. People who hate God have highly unstable and exaggerated emotions, are attention-seeking, have excessive pride, an unshakable belief in one's own rightness, and at the same time an unshakable belief that their own problems are absolutely unique in the history of the world and that no one has ever suffered to anywhere near as great a degree that they have, are unwilling to accept personal responsibility and have a need to blame others for one's own mistakes, are often hypochondriacs, and often perceives relationships as more intimate than they actually are.
Hating God or being angry with God is a form of idolatry. It is replacing God with a Bogey Man of your own ego. The idea of Super God leading to atheism makes sense, because Super God doesn't exist. Self-evidently, because otherwise there would be no problem of evil. The problem of evil exists because God isn't Super God. Super God doesn't go around solving other people's problems. Not believing in something that self-evidently doesn't exist is rational. It's poor theology, but it's still rational thinking. Misotheism, on the other hand, is completely irrational. Misotheism is seeing that Super God doesn't exist and then turning around and creating an evil counterpart to Super God. Misotheism is turning God into the Bogey Man. [The evil counterpart to Super God – the Bogey Man – is technically an extreme version of dystheism, the idea that God is not entirely good. In its extreme form dystheism supposes an entirely evil deity. The hatred of God – misotheism – naturally supposes that this extreme form of dystheism is true.]
The Bogey Man is a fictional entity whose purpose is to terrorise mainly children, because, let's face it, a lot of adults are assholes. Super God as the Bogey Man is a fictional entity for histrionic people to project their anger onto for being inadequate, because histrionic people are assholes.
Super God as the Bogey Man (who I will hereafter refer to simply as the Bogey Man) would not only be less good and moral than regular God, the Bogey Man would be evil. The Bogey Man would be the antithesis of God.
The Bogey Man must suspend free will in order to intervene in all situations. People want Super God to intervene to stop criminals from committing crimes, for example. People don't ask for Super God to prevent criminals from thinking about committing crimes, but for Super God to intervene only in the act of preventing crimes. Since Super God (the Bogey Man) is also believed to be the cause of all things then that means the Bogey Man must have placed the thought to cause the crime into the mind of the criminal and then is supposed to intervene in stopping the criminal from committing the crime. The criminal is just a puppet in the Bogey Man's hands. The criminal's mind is shackled to a body that it has no control over. The Bogey Man is making the criminal commit the crime and then prevents the crime as it is happening. The Bogey Man chooses to make some people sinners, destined for Hell just to have people to send to Hell.
If the Bogey Man exists then nothing you do has any meaning, because the Bogey Man is pulling all the strings. The Bogey Man controls all your actions, causes all of your suffering (even suffering caused by your own choices, because you have no free will, which conveniently relieves you of any responsibility), and then hands out punishment or reward on fiat.
The existence of the Bogey Man is even worse than that. Not only are you being made to suffer in life and rewarded or punished at random, you don't even control your own body. At the very least your mind is locked into a body that you have no control over (in some extreme cases even your mind is controlled by the Bogey Man, freeing histrionic misotheists from responsibility even for their own thoughts). That's absolutely terrifying. At best you are a prisoner of a body you do not control. At worst even your anger itself is caused by the Bogey Man.
If the Bogey man exists not only is your life meaningless, your life is nothing but entertainment for an omnipotent sadist. That's even worse than Descartes' evil demon, who can only trick you. With Descartes' evil demon you can still realise that the world is an illusion and come to know the true God through reason. The Bogey Man directly controls you, absolutely. While it is possible to outsmart the evil demon the Bogey Man is totally unbeatable.
Super God as the Bogey Man must be evil. That's why belief that Super God actually exists leads to misotheism.
Why someone would believe in the Bogey Man I've already explained. People who believe in the Bogey Man have to believe in the Bogey Man. Not because the Bogey Man forces them to believe, but because the Bogey Man frees them from responsibility and makes their problems out to be totally unique in the history of the universe.
Of course God is not Super God, or the Bogey Man. Belief in Super God or the Bogey Man is stupid and childish. The same God who gave us reason did not intend for us to forgo its use. That line of thinking will lead us eventually to Blaise Pascal, Rene Descartes, and into using our reason and contemplation to reach a better understanding of the mind of God and the origin of and solution to suffering.
Sunday, December 3, 2017
The Last Judgment
Continuing on the same theme of the non-problem of evil and theodicy, here is a homily expressing the traditional Catholic answer to the existence of suffering. The Last Judgment, leading to reward or punishment in the world to come provides justice for a life that seems unjust.
Thursday, November 30, 2017
Giving Thanks versus Anger with God
Hating God or being angry with God is a form of idolatry. It is replacing God with a Bogey Man of your own ego. The idea of Super God leading to atheism makes sense, because Super God doesn't exist. Self-evidently, because otherwise there would be no problem of evil. The problem of evil exists because God isn't Super God. Super God doesn't go around solving other people's problems. Not believing in something that self-evidently doesn't exist is rational. It's poor theology, but it's still rational thinking. Misotheism, on the other hand, is completely irrational. Misotheism is seeing that Super God doesn't exist and then turning around and creating an evil counterpart to Super God. Misotheism is turning God into the Bogey Man.
Monday, October 23, 2017
The Sign and the Shroud: Part One: The Hypothesis
I'm reading the book "The Sign" by Thomas de Wesselow, and man this guy is a teenage edgelord douchebag, isn't he? He has to attack Christians and Christianity on every single page. I dare him to make a book mocking Islam.
I have a tendency to skip ahead, to read the author's conclusion first so I know what I'm getting into. Just like I don't like to pay to see a movie until after it's released and people on the Internet reveal the ending, because I'm not going to pay to see a movie with an ending I hate.
This guy writes a near 500 page book about the Shroud of Turin and the resurrection, so naturally I figure about 200 of those pages are filler and another 200 are details, so if I skim just 100 pages I'll get all the relevant details. It saves a lot of time reading multiple books. Here's his conclusions, that could have been shortened to a 20 page paper, not a 500 page book:
*The Shroud of Turin is the authentic burial shroud of Jesus. We can accurately trace its provenance back to AD 600, well before anyone had the technology or the know-how to make a forgery, so that means it's highly probable that the shroud is authentic.
*The Shroud was created by a Maillard reaction (the way bread browns when you bake it) caused by the unusually rapid decomposition of Jesus' body. We know this because the only other possible explanation is a miracle, and fuck off miracles, we're all atheists now.
*The image on the Shroud is the resurrection, even though you can't see it in normal light, and you don't notice that there's a face unless you're standing at least ten feet away from it, and the huge smoking gun of the still rotting body inside the tomb! All the "appearances" of Jesus after the "resurrection" were public displays of the Shroud.
*First century Jews had a different understanding of life after death and resurrection than we do today. They didn't believe in such childish notions, they were atheists too. They knew dead is dead, but seeing that image gave them courage to go to spread the Gospel and to face without fear the most horrific deaths anyone has had to suffer in human history.
That's his hypothesis. And except for the first part, the part actually based on history, it's total horseshit.
And if we remove the childish invective and the second half of the book that's a retelling of the New Testament with the Shroud inserted into the place of Jesus, we can trim this down to a nice scientific paper and submit it for peer review. But it's not. He has to go on and on and on for 470 more pages (the pictures are all beautiful, but as the citation page in the front of the book attests, none of them are the author's own work).
I tried to read the first page and it took about 30 minutes because every other sentence I had to stop to write a refutation, not of the author's opinions on religion, he can believe what he wants, but the blatant historical lies he tells. On the very first page, in one sentence, he tells two blatant lies about early Christianity:
*The author states that Constantine made Christianity the state religion of Rome in 325. That's false. Theodosius made Christianity the state religion of Rome in 380, 43 years after Constantine had died. Theodosius also never made it state policy to destroy pagan temples, although he didn't stop anyone who did destroy them.
*The author states that a Christian mob burnt down the Library of Alexandria because it was pagan, condemning the West to centuries of ignorance. That's not even false, that's a lie. The Library of Alexandria burnt down centuries before the reign of Theodosius (or Constantine, who the author conflates with Theodosius), possibly by Julius Caesar in 48 BC. Under the reign of Theodosius the Serapeum of Alexandria, a temple that had a collection of books, as temples often do, was burnt down by a political mob, that just so happened to be composed mostly of Christians, for political reasons. Alexandria was a hotbed of mob violence. Two political factions were going at it, the losing side sought refuge in the Serapeum, and the winning side burnt it down because it was a convenient way to eliminate their rivals.
This man has a PhD in art history, mind you. One would think (hope) that such a degree would require passing at least one actual history course. Anyone who has taken an introductory course in the late Roman Empire or early modern Europe knows these statements are false, so the only way a PhD history scholar could get these facts wrong is by deliberately telling lies.
Two pages later the author has to take yet another shot at Christianity and all other forms of belief other than atheistic materialism:
Here's an accurate artistic depiction of the author:
The author, a couple paragraphs later, talks about how the works of Celsus and Porphyry were destroyed in great book burnings by evil Christians who did things for the evulz.
No. Pretend to be the historian your degree says you are. Books are made of paper, papyrus, parchment, and other perishable materials. 99% of everything that has ever been written has rotted away to dust and is lost. Some roving mob of evil Christians didn't have to go around burning books, those books are lost all on their own because of the ravages of time. We don't have any first hand accounts of the life of Alexander the Great, only third hand commentaries by people living 400 years later, not because someone was trying to erase him from history, but because books rot. If you want a book to survive it has to consistently be a best seller (or its pre-modern equivalent) for millennia. The only way books survive is because enough people thought they were interesting or significant enough to make copies, and then generations later people made copies of the copies, and that's why we have the works of Aristotle and Homer and the Gospels, because enough people thought they were interesting or important enough to preserve. Most books were not copied down because most books are crap to begin with. If, in 1,000 years, Thomas de Edgelord's masterpiece has been lost to history it's not because evil Christians burnt all his books, it's because his books are just crap and no one saw it necessary to print new copies. It's as simple as that. There's no need to resort to malice as an explanation when laziness will suffice.
De Wesslow's treatment of the Shroud from an artistic point of view is tremendous. He points out why the image on the Shroud is inartistic. No artist would have made an image like the image on the Shroud, putting the blood on the cloth first and then putting the image on top, using multiple different perspectives on the front and the back, depicting anatomy the way it would have been totally unknown by medieval and Renaissance artists, creating an image so faint that no one can see it up close in normal lighting and that only takes on its true greatness in photographic negative. The Shroud betrays itself as anything other than an artistic work. Pointing out why the Shroud cannot be a forgery de Wesslow's work is very good. The problem comes when he tries to mischaracterise Christianity. It's just like Richard Dawkins. Dawkins might be a brilliant biologist, but he's a piss-poor philosopher who does nothing but rehash arguments that have been refuted millennia ago.
I've written about this before when talking about the religious views of ancient people. Ancient people were not stupid. Ancient people were not stupid. Did the Greeks really believe the gods were people who sat on Mount Olympos doing all the crazy stuff in the myths? Probably very few did, but most were smart enough to see the truth of the stories. They were written as a way to get a point across about very complicated subjects in way that was easy to assimilate and remember. The gods are so obviously anthropomorphized versions of abstract qualities. Aries is unchecked rage and Athena is the rational mind that takes over in warfare, the two primary ways in which people fight. These are psychological qualities that are represented as people as a form of shorthand.
Ancient people knew a dead body is dead. They knew that better than we do, isolated as we are from the reality of death. First century Jews would not see a stain on a cloth and believe that the rotting dead body right next to that stain had miraculously risen and was immortal, and believe it so strongly that they were willing to be crucified, beheaded, tortured, burnt alive. No one is so stupid to believe in a risen Christ when they can see the rotting corpse just because they found a stain on a cloth.
And the author arrives at this conclusion by cherry picking the Gospels, which he will decry as unhistorical in one breath and then a sentence later quote mine for his retelling of history. Which is it? Are the Gospels unreliable or are they the very corner stone of his thesis? Both can't be true. De Wesslow spends two thirds of the book rewriting the Gospels in contortionist fashion to insert the Shroud in the place of the risen Christ, because we're all atheists now, we know miracles are fake.
Coming soon: Part Two: The Science
I have a tendency to skip ahead, to read the author's conclusion first so I know what I'm getting into. Just like I don't like to pay to see a movie until after it's released and people on the Internet reveal the ending, because I'm not going to pay to see a movie with an ending I hate.
This guy writes a near 500 page book about the Shroud of Turin and the resurrection, so naturally I figure about 200 of those pages are filler and another 200 are details, so if I skim just 100 pages I'll get all the relevant details. It saves a lot of time reading multiple books. Here's his conclusions, that could have been shortened to a 20 page paper, not a 500 page book:
*The Shroud of Turin is the authentic burial shroud of Jesus. We can accurately trace its provenance back to AD 600, well before anyone had the technology or the know-how to make a forgery, so that means it's highly probable that the shroud is authentic.
*The Shroud was created by a Maillard reaction (the way bread browns when you bake it) caused by the unusually rapid decomposition of Jesus' body. We know this because the only other possible explanation is a miracle, and fuck off miracles, we're all atheists now.
*The image on the Shroud is the resurrection, even though you can't see it in normal light, and you don't notice that there's a face unless you're standing at least ten feet away from it, and the huge smoking gun of the still rotting body inside the tomb! All the "appearances" of Jesus after the "resurrection" were public displays of the Shroud.
*First century Jews had a different understanding of life after death and resurrection than we do today. They didn't believe in such childish notions, they were atheists too. They knew dead is dead, but seeing that image gave them courage to go to spread the Gospel and to face without fear the most horrific deaths anyone has had to suffer in human history.
That's his hypothesis. And except for the first part, the part actually based on history, it's total horseshit.
And if we remove the childish invective and the second half of the book that's a retelling of the New Testament with the Shroud inserted into the place of Jesus, we can trim this down to a nice scientific paper and submit it for peer review. But it's not. He has to go on and on and on for 470 more pages (the pictures are all beautiful, but as the citation page in the front of the book attests, none of them are the author's own work).
I tried to read the first page and it took about 30 minutes because every other sentence I had to stop to write a refutation, not of the author's opinions on religion, he can believe what he wants, but the blatant historical lies he tells. On the very first page, in one sentence, he tells two blatant lies about early Christianity:
*The author states that Constantine made Christianity the state religion of Rome in 325. That's false. Theodosius made Christianity the state religion of Rome in 380, 43 years after Constantine had died. Theodosius also never made it state policy to destroy pagan temples, although he didn't stop anyone who did destroy them.
*The author states that a Christian mob burnt down the Library of Alexandria because it was pagan, condemning the West to centuries of ignorance. That's not even false, that's a lie. The Library of Alexandria burnt down centuries before the reign of Theodosius (or Constantine, who the author conflates with Theodosius), possibly by Julius Caesar in 48 BC. Under the reign of Theodosius the Serapeum of Alexandria, a temple that had a collection of books, as temples often do, was burnt down by a political mob, that just so happened to be composed mostly of Christians, for political reasons. Alexandria was a hotbed of mob violence. Two political factions were going at it, the losing side sought refuge in the Serapeum, and the winning side burnt it down because it was a convenient way to eliminate their rivals.
This man has a PhD in art history, mind you. One would think (hope) that such a degree would require passing at least one actual history course. Anyone who has taken an introductory course in the late Roman Empire or early modern Europe knows these statements are false, so the only way a PhD history scholar could get these facts wrong is by deliberately telling lies.
Two pages later the author has to take yet another shot at Christianity and all other forms of belief other than atheistic materialism:
"The traditional notion of a flesh-and-blood resurrection remained unquestioned in Christendom for more than a millennium and a half. In retrospect, it is rather astonishing that such an improbable dogma could have dominated the minds of so many for such a long time. It stands as testimony to the imperialistic power of the Church and its sustained stranglehold on intellectual endeavor, a grip that only began to loosen during the period of the Renaissance and the Reformation. Even then, it was another 200 years before religious skeptics began to challenge the very basis of Christian faith, reviving voices that had been silenced since antiquity." (pages 5-6)
Here's an accurate artistic depiction of the author:
The author, a couple paragraphs later, talks about how the works of Celsus and Porphyry were destroyed in great book burnings by evil Christians who did things for the evulz.
No. Pretend to be the historian your degree says you are. Books are made of paper, papyrus, parchment, and other perishable materials. 99% of everything that has ever been written has rotted away to dust and is lost. Some roving mob of evil Christians didn't have to go around burning books, those books are lost all on their own because of the ravages of time. We don't have any first hand accounts of the life of Alexander the Great, only third hand commentaries by people living 400 years later, not because someone was trying to erase him from history, but because books rot. If you want a book to survive it has to consistently be a best seller (or its pre-modern equivalent) for millennia. The only way books survive is because enough people thought they were interesting or significant enough to make copies, and then generations later people made copies of the copies, and that's why we have the works of Aristotle and Homer and the Gospels, because enough people thought they were interesting or important enough to preserve. Most books were not copied down because most books are crap to begin with. If, in 1,000 years, Thomas de Edgelord's masterpiece has been lost to history it's not because evil Christians burnt all his books, it's because his books are just crap and no one saw it necessary to print new copies. It's as simple as that. There's no need to resort to malice as an explanation when laziness will suffice.
De Wesslow's treatment of the Shroud from an artistic point of view is tremendous. He points out why the image on the Shroud is inartistic. No artist would have made an image like the image on the Shroud, putting the blood on the cloth first and then putting the image on top, using multiple different perspectives on the front and the back, depicting anatomy the way it would have been totally unknown by medieval and Renaissance artists, creating an image so faint that no one can see it up close in normal lighting and that only takes on its true greatness in photographic negative. The Shroud betrays itself as anything other than an artistic work. Pointing out why the Shroud cannot be a forgery de Wesslow's work is very good. The problem comes when he tries to mischaracterise Christianity. It's just like Richard Dawkins. Dawkins might be a brilliant biologist, but he's a piss-poor philosopher who does nothing but rehash arguments that have been refuted millennia ago.
I've written about this before when talking about the religious views of ancient people. Ancient people were not stupid. Ancient people were not stupid. Did the Greeks really believe the gods were people who sat on Mount Olympos doing all the crazy stuff in the myths? Probably very few did, but most were smart enough to see the truth of the stories. They were written as a way to get a point across about very complicated subjects in way that was easy to assimilate and remember. The gods are so obviously anthropomorphized versions of abstract qualities. Aries is unchecked rage and Athena is the rational mind that takes over in warfare, the two primary ways in which people fight. These are psychological qualities that are represented as people as a form of shorthand.
Ancient people knew a dead body is dead. They knew that better than we do, isolated as we are from the reality of death. First century Jews would not see a stain on a cloth and believe that the rotting dead body right next to that stain had miraculously risen and was immortal, and believe it so strongly that they were willing to be crucified, beheaded, tortured, burnt alive. No one is so stupid to believe in a risen Christ when they can see the rotting corpse just because they found a stain on a cloth.
And the author arrives at this conclusion by cherry picking the Gospels, which he will decry as unhistorical in one breath and then a sentence later quote mine for his retelling of history. Which is it? Are the Gospels unreliable or are they the very corner stone of his thesis? Both can't be true. De Wesslow spends two thirds of the book rewriting the Gospels in contortionist fashion to insert the Shroud in the place of the risen Christ, because we're all atheists now, we know miracles are fake.
Coming soon: Part Two: The Science
Wednesday, September 27, 2017
The Life of Jesus: The Three Kings
Ye may remember from The Life of Jesus how astronomer Michael Molnar was able to determine that Jesus was born on 17 April 6 BC using ancient Roman coins depicting the star pattern at the time. A conjunction of all the planets, especially Jupiter and the Sun in the constellation Aries, prompted the wise men from the Bible to go looking for the infant Jesus. Molnar, along with Egyptologist Bob Brier, reason that the wise men, or magi, were Parthian astrologers, and their skulls may have been discovered by Constantine's mother Helena and they may be kept in the Cologne Cathedral.
Wednesday, August 23, 2017
Ken Wilber: Only Religion Can Save The World
Ken Wilber explains why only religion provides the structures and tools necessary for both growing up and waking up. Nothing else can create a cohesive community that gives meaning to our lives, or provide the means of escaping suffering and discovering our true identity.
Wednesday, July 26, 2017
Pascal Rewagered and the God of Smart People
Blaise Pascal
formulated his famous "wager" in his notes and never
published them in his lifetime. The wager says basically that we
cannot know whether God exists or not, so we should act as if God
does exist because the promised reward for living a moral life is
infinitely beneficial and the punishment for living an immoral life
is infinitely harmful. If God does exist and we live a moral life
then we get infinite reward. If God does not exist and we live a
moral life we sacrifice nothing because life would be equally
meaningless no matter how one chooses to live.
As Clavius states in the movie Risen what his greatest fear is: "Being
wrong, and wagering eternity on it."
The main objections most people have to
Pascal's wager never seemed to cut it for me.
The first objection, which Pascal
himself simply laughed at as a word game, is that there are multiple
religions with different gods and to follow one religion faithfully
would mean violating the tenants of other religions, all of which
have infinite consequences. This objection is false, and obviously
so, because there really are only two religions with infinite
consequences – Christianity and Islam – and the two are mirror
opposites of one another. And if you need help figuring out which is which then you're hopeless and shouldn't be pursuing philosophy.
The second objection argues that God
would never accept someone who is persuaded by the wager because such
a person is being moral for selfish reasons. This objection, too, has
been transformed into a joke by the anti-Christians, because the only people opposing Pascal very rarely talk about other
religions, which always seemed suspicious to me, as if their primary
objective was just anti-Christian. They are not atheists because none of them seem to oppose the infusion of paganism into modern society, like all the days of the week and the months being named after pagan deities (and yes, there are many thousands of people who profess belief in Odin and nature spirits and all of that, so the argument that these are dead religions falls flat). And very few of them ever dare criticise Islam, and most actively praise it. Let's face it, if the money said "In Thor We Trust" or "In Allah We Trust" none of these so-called atheists would complain. Their only problem is with Christianity because it gives them the out to be edgelords.
Atheists seem to be saying that God, or
at least the Christian God, would endow humans with the faculties of reason and intelligence and then demand that we never use them. The God of the objectors wants humans to be stupid, based on the false notion that faith means "belief without evidence", when, in actuality, faith in the Biblical context means something closer to trust, and is arrived at through reason and evidence.
Stupid people, overwhelmingly it seems, are not moral. Certainly not more moral than smart people. Stupid people kill albinos because they believe albinos practice sorcery. Stupid people kill others for sorcery, full stop. Stupid people have sex with their cousins and produce inbred children who are even stupider. Stupid people cut open the heads of bald men believing treasure to be inside. Stupid people are less moral because stupid people have lesser ability to defer gratification, which makes them more violent, and stupid people are also less empathetic, meaning less able to take on the perspectives of others. This means that the God of the Anti-Pascalites wants humans to be immoral. If God wants people to be immoral then God is not God but is instead the Devil. The Anti-Pascalites are confusing the Devil for God and are crafting an erroneous argument out of their own confusion.
But God is not the Devil, and God wants people to be moral, because God is moral. If God wants people to be moral then God wants people to be smart. Smart people come to trust God through reason and evidence, and can apply that reason to see that it is better to be moral and believe in God than to be immoral and disbelieve in God. An intelligent person can appreciate Pascal's wager, because morality within a Western context is inextricably linked to Christianity.
This isn't to say that God exists. Pascal was not arguing for the existence of God with his wager, although he did present arguments for the existence of God in the same unpublished book. Pascal was merely saying that it is better to act as if God exists, meaning that it is better to act morally than to not act morally, because the consequences otherwise are too horrific to contemplate.
And we've seen those consequences. We've seen the hundreds of millions dead as a result of societies that have tried to kill God. The consequences go above and beyond survival after death, they impact the world of the here and now. The only thing that can replace God is the absolutist state, and the problem with the absolutist state is that it does not recognise any authority outside of itself. The absolutist state has no room for forgiveness, where as God's mercy is very great indeed. We've seen this with the gulags and the killing fields, and more recently with cultural Marxism and how the left has begun to eat its own. In the great oppression olympics, the left has sought to crucify its own members who are not extreme enough. There is only one place behaviour like this ends, and that's a mass grave.
Whether we want to think of the metaphysical implications or not, the pragmatic implications of cultural Christianity more than justify the continuation and strengthening of Christian culture within Western society.
Atheist Richard Dawkins identifies as culturally Christian.
formulated his famous "wager" in his notes and never
published them in his lifetime. The wager says basically that we
cannot know whether God exists or not, so we should act as if God
does exist because the promised reward for living a moral life is
infinitely beneficial and the punishment for living an immoral life
is infinitely harmful. If God does exist and we live a moral life
then we get infinite reward. If God does not exist and we live a
moral life we sacrifice nothing because life would be equally
meaningless no matter how one chooses to live.
As Clavius states in the movie Risen what his greatest fear is: "Being
wrong, and wagering eternity on it."
The main objections most people have to
Pascal's wager never seemed to cut it for me.
The first objection, which Pascal
himself simply laughed at as a word game, is that there are multiple
religions with different gods and to follow one religion faithfully
would mean violating the tenants of other religions, all of which
have infinite consequences. This objection is false, and obviously
so, because there really are only two religions with infinite
consequences – Christianity and Islam – and the two are mirror
opposites of one another. And if you need help figuring out which is which then you're hopeless and shouldn't be pursuing philosophy.
The second objection argues that God
would never accept someone who is persuaded by the wager because such
a person is being moral for selfish reasons. This objection, too, has
been transformed into a joke by the anti-Christians, because the only people opposing Pascal very rarely talk about other
religions, which always seemed suspicious to me, as if their primary
objective was just anti-Christian. They are not atheists because none of them seem to oppose the infusion of paganism into modern society, like all the days of the week and the months being named after pagan deities (and yes, there are many thousands of people who profess belief in Odin and nature spirits and all of that, so the argument that these are dead religions falls flat). And very few of them ever dare criticise Islam, and most actively praise it. Let's face it, if the money said "In Thor We Trust" or "In Allah We Trust" none of these so-called atheists would complain. Their only problem is with Christianity because it gives them the out to be edgelords.
Atheists seem to be saying that God, or
at least the Christian God, would endow humans with the faculties of reason and intelligence and then demand that we never use them. The God of the objectors wants humans to be stupid, based on the false notion that faith means "belief without evidence", when, in actuality, faith in the Biblical context means something closer to trust, and is arrived at through reason and evidence.
Stupid people, overwhelmingly it seems, are not moral. Certainly not more moral than smart people. Stupid people kill albinos because they believe albinos practice sorcery. Stupid people kill others for sorcery, full stop. Stupid people have sex with their cousins and produce inbred children who are even stupider. Stupid people cut open the heads of bald men believing treasure to be inside. Stupid people are less moral because stupid people have lesser ability to defer gratification, which makes them more violent, and stupid people are also less empathetic, meaning less able to take on the perspectives of others. This means that the God of the Anti-Pascalites wants humans to be immoral. If God wants people to be immoral then God is not God but is instead the Devil. The Anti-Pascalites are confusing the Devil for God and are crafting an erroneous argument out of their own confusion.
But God is not the Devil, and God wants people to be moral, because God is moral. If God wants people to be moral then God wants people to be smart. Smart people come to trust God through reason and evidence, and can apply that reason to see that it is better to be moral and believe in God than to be immoral and disbelieve in God. An intelligent person can appreciate Pascal's wager, because morality within a Western context is inextricably linked to Christianity.
This isn't to say that God exists. Pascal was not arguing for the existence of God with his wager, although he did present arguments for the existence of God in the same unpublished book. Pascal was merely saying that it is better to act as if God exists, meaning that it is better to act morally than to not act morally, because the consequences otherwise are too horrific to contemplate.
And we've seen those consequences. We've seen the hundreds of millions dead as a result of societies that have tried to kill God. The consequences go above and beyond survival after death, they impact the world of the here and now. The only thing that can replace God is the absolutist state, and the problem with the absolutist state is that it does not recognise any authority outside of itself. The absolutist state has no room for forgiveness, where as God's mercy is very great indeed. We've seen this with the gulags and the killing fields, and more recently with cultural Marxism and how the left has begun to eat its own. In the great oppression olympics, the left has sought to crucify its own members who are not extreme enough. There is only one place behaviour like this ends, and that's a mass grave.
Whether we want to think of the metaphysical implications or not, the pragmatic implications of cultural Christianity more than justify the continuation and strengthening of Christian culture within Western society.
Atheist Richard Dawkins identifies as culturally Christian.
Saturday, May 20, 2017
Jesus' Crucifixion in Roman Sources
Many Roman historians, pagan and Jewish, mentioned Jesus, identified as a teacher and wonder worker (thaumaturge), in their histories. They say he was crucified by the Roman Prefect Pontius Pilate.
Sunday, May 7, 2017
The Miracle of the Holy Fire
Every year on the eve of Pascha, the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem enters the Edicule in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, and sometimes within minutes a blue light appears that ignites a bundle of 33 candles. The flame from these candles is passed around, all over the world, to the faithful. 2017 marks the first time in history that the holy fire has made its way to America.
The fire does not burn, as seen by the hundreds of pilgrims whose hair, skin, and clothes are unaffected by bathing in the fire. It also does not emanate from any known source. The Israeli army checks the Church beforehand for any source of ignition. There are no matches, torches, lamps, lighters, or flints. Magnifying lenses will not work inside the stone tomb in the center of a darkened church. Furthermore, the candles of some pilgrims are said to spontaneously ignite before being touched by fire.
Dr. Steve Turley explains the miracle of the holy fire in two videos below.
The fire does not burn, as seen by the hundreds of pilgrims whose hair, skin, and clothes are unaffected by bathing in the fire. It also does not emanate from any known source. The Israeli army checks the Church beforehand for any source of ignition. There are no matches, torches, lamps, lighters, or flints. Magnifying lenses will not work inside the stone tomb in the center of a darkened church. Furthermore, the candles of some pilgrims are said to spontaneously ignite before being touched by fire.
Dr. Steve Turley explains the miracle of the holy fire in two videos below.
Sunday, April 2, 2017
Do We Want Eternal Life?
Eternal life is feared and rejected by some because it is thought to be nothing more than a continuation of this life of struggle. Some (including Bob Couttie) suggest that a life of infinite duration would become boring or monotonous. My old teacher once pointed out that such an idea is preposterous. With infinite time on one's hands one could accomplish an infinite number of tasks. As he said, he would read an infinite number of books and then write an infinite number of books, and still have infinite time to do infinitely more things. Some, like poor old Bob again, suggest that a life of infinite duration would lead to infinite procrastination. Since we always have infinite time in which to accomplish some task we would see no hurry and so put off doing it forever.
It is suggested in this homily by Fr. Matthias that many people reject Christianity out of fear or revulsion to the idea of this life everlasting.
However, these people are all mistaken. Eternal life is not merely a continuation of this life indefinitely into the future. Eternity is not an infinite duration of time, eternity sits outside of time completely. Eternal life is life without time.
A timeless condition is attested to in the near death experience and in people who have experienced nirvikalpa samadhi. It is your true nature, your original face, the face you had before your parents were born. It is the state we will all experience following the resurrection.
Thursday, February 23, 2017
The Necessity of a Russo-American Alliance
Americans harbor fantastical racism toward Russians. The easy answer might be to say it is a hold over from the Cold War, but the hatred runs far deeper than that.
It is true that Americans hated Russians during the Cold War, and Russians thought it was because of communism. However, after the Soviet Union collapsed, Americans still hated Russians. Americans hate Russians not because of communism, but because Russians are Russians.
The trouble goes back all the way to the beginning of the Russian state. Russia was always the other, never quite Europe, but not Asia. After four centuries of harassment and repression at the hands of the Turks, the powerful Russian empire stood poised to obliterate the Ottoman empire and deal the Turks reprisal for enslaving half of Europe. The great powers should have cheered Russia on and provided aid and moral support. Instead France and Britain, enemies for a thousand years, joined forces and helped the Turks defeat the Russians in the Crimean War.
Britain and France saw in the Ottoman empire a puppet, where as in Russia they saw a rival. Vast beyond all imagining, with a bottomless supply of resources and manpower, Russia could swallow up the world if given half a chance. It's better to stick to the devil you know than these sub-human sons of Vikings.
America, as heir to the West, inherited hatred of Russia along with British common law and the English language.
Russia is an upstart. They are not an Ancien Régime like Britain or France or even Germany, who, through intermarriage, managed to take control of all the ruling houses of Europe without firing a shot. We can always pretend Germany, or the Holy Roman Empire, is successor to Rome, even though no such entity existed until 1871.
The Russians, on the other hand, they just appeared in the sixteenth century. They are also Orthodox Christians, not good Protestants like the British or Germans. Even the French Catholics with their Vatican voodoo are better than the crazy beards and fur caps of the mad Russian monks.
And Russians were not true full-blooded Europeans, they were Slavic untermensch. They weren't animals like Africans or Asians, they were more sophisticated, more sinister. They were like Neanderthals, animals that masqueraded as men. But the veneer of civilisation was never thick enough to convince the inbred cliques of Western Europe that Slavs were fully human like themselves.
That hatred, along with the insatiable bloodlust of the military-industrial-intelligence-media complex, is fueling a Cold War 2 and threatening to tear apart any detente that President Trump hopes to build with Russia.
The Cold War was fueled by the bottomless desire for money and influence. Where once Uncle Joe Stalin had provided the bulk of the effort to stop the Nazis, with Roosevelt and Churchill happily smoking away with the Supreme Soviet, the end of the war had posed an existential threat to the nascent deep state. Without arms contracts the endless supply of money would dry up. With no enemy to spy on the intelligence apparatchiks would have to take jobs selling carpets or working in a delicatessen. No, they needed to concoct a new war so the party would never stop, and they fell back on the easiest target: Russia.
The military-industrial-intelligence complex, of both super powers, had to get rid of Kennedy and Khrushchev because they faced off eye to eye and found common ground and then turned inward to repair their broken countries. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the missiles were removed from Cuba and Turkey and almost 20 years of hostilities between the USA and USSR began to cool, Kennedy tried to restrain the power of the CIA and the private Federal Reserve, and Khrushchev tried to take resources away from the KGB and the arms manufacturers to improve the welfare of the Soviet citizens. Naturally they had to be removed and two war hawks, LBJ and Brezhnev, put in power.
Militarism, not communism, destroyed the USSR, and it very nearly destroyed the USA. USA just had a head start in terms of money it could lose, having avoided a disastrous civil war and destruction of 20% of its industry in WWII. If both countries started off on an even playing field both would have collapsed around the same time.
Of course the USSR couldn't compete. 3 million dead in WWI, another 4-5 million wounded. Loss of most of Russia's agricultural land. 6 years of civil war, another 3 million dead, at least. 7 million dead in famines in 1921-22, another 5-10 million dead in famine in 1932-33. At least 20-26 million dead in WWII, plus the destruction of at least 20% of all Soviet industry and agricultural land.
The Cold War was like a heavyweight champion fighting against some guy with both legs and an arm tied behind his back, and still, despite all that, in a single lifetime, people in the Soviet Union started basically as slaves living off the land making nothing to ending up making half of what people in America were making in 1991.
Imagine what could have happened if Kennedy and Khrushchev were allowed to make peace instead of being eliminated and having pointless war continue.
Imagine now what a glorious future we can live in if Trump and Putin are able to bring our two nations together. One unified force to eliminate Islamic terrorism, one unified force to chart a path to Mars and the outer moons. American technical know-how combined with the ironclad faith of the Russian Orthodox Church can restore Western civilisation to the glory it once was before materialism, atheism, cultural relativism, and moral nihilism began to eat away at the very heart of the greatest civilisation in human history.
I've spoken on this topic at length. The emptiness that has taken root in the West is the driving force behind Islamic terrorism. Lack of religion in the West, lack of value and meaning to life, is creating a vacuum, both spiritual and physical. Westerners are refusing to breed, so to solve the problem of a rapidly declining population, Angela Merkin, like a reverse Hitler, is flooding Europe with Islamic third-worlders. With no strong Christianity within Europe, there is nothing to stop those migrants from forming rape gangs and burning Sweden to the ground. Merkin is committing genocide against the German people.
The only thing that can keep the West from falling to pieces is strong Christian faith and a desire to breed, providing both the spiritual and physical bulwark against the endless hordes of Islamic migrants who believe women are property, rape is acceptable, homosexuals should be murdered, and all knowledge should be burned except for a single, all-encompassing book that can be interpreted six ways till Sunday by every back alley cleric and self-proclaimed Caliph.
And the only place where Christianity still reigns in Europe is Mother Russia.
We've watched as secular states in the Middle East and north Africa have been decapitated: Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan (the pro-Soviet government the United States destroyed by creating Al Qaeda). Egypt was nearly destroyed, and by every indication it appears that Erdogan of Turkey is an Islamist. The United States has its sights on Syria and Iran, two of Russia's allies. They should be our allies too, in the war against radical Islam. You see, even though the people there are overwhelmingly Muslim, they are ruled by rational actors who fully embrace technology and the twentieth century. Iran provided the US with support in eliminating the Taliban after 9/11. That's not because they are pro-America, Tehran just didn't want radical Islamists at their doorstep. There is also a horrendous heroin problem in Iran, fueled by the vast fields of opium poppies that grow from one horizon to the other in Afghanistan. Just as Britain and America sided with Stalin in World War Two, Iran sided with America against the Taliban because they shared a common enemy.
The United States went to war in Afghanistan out of revenge. Iran did so because they don't want mad, seventh century barbarians right next door poisoning and murdering their people.
Secular dictatorships in the Middle East are necessary to keep radical Islam from spreading, just as strong adherence to Christianity is necessary in Europe for the same reason. There were no refugees when Gaddafi was in power. He provided his people with free housing, food, water, and jobs, all paid for by the ocean of oil Libya sits atop, and he provided security by eliminating any Islamist barbarian who tried to stir up discord. The same is true with Assad in Syria.
If you sow the wind you will reap the whirlwind. If the United States works with Russia, Syria, and Iran to defeat radical Islam, everyone's lives will improve. There will be no need for anyone to migrate to Europe because Syria and Iraq themselves will be safe once again. Everyone wins except the arms manufacturers and the intelligence agencies.
That is why it is imperative that Trump is able to defeat the chickenhawks in Washington. That is why US troops need to be pulled out of Poland and the Baltic states, why the people of Crimea be permitted to stay in Russia where they voted to be. If the West is to survive, if world peace is truly to be realised, there must be an alliance between the US and Russia. If not then the West is destined to be reduced to dust in the wind.
It is true that Americans hated Russians during the Cold War, and Russians thought it was because of communism. However, after the Soviet Union collapsed, Americans still hated Russians. Americans hate Russians not because of communism, but because Russians are Russians.
The trouble goes back all the way to the beginning of the Russian state. Russia was always the other, never quite Europe, but not Asia. After four centuries of harassment and repression at the hands of the Turks, the powerful Russian empire stood poised to obliterate the Ottoman empire and deal the Turks reprisal for enslaving half of Europe. The great powers should have cheered Russia on and provided aid and moral support. Instead France and Britain, enemies for a thousand years, joined forces and helped the Turks defeat the Russians in the Crimean War.
Britain and France saw in the Ottoman empire a puppet, where as in Russia they saw a rival. Vast beyond all imagining, with a bottomless supply of resources and manpower, Russia could swallow up the world if given half a chance. It's better to stick to the devil you know than these sub-human sons of Vikings.
America, as heir to the West, inherited hatred of Russia along with British common law and the English language.
Russia is an upstart. They are not an Ancien Régime like Britain or France or even Germany, who, through intermarriage, managed to take control of all the ruling houses of Europe without firing a shot. We can always pretend Germany, or the Holy Roman Empire, is successor to Rome, even though no such entity existed until 1871.
The Russians, on the other hand, they just appeared in the sixteenth century. They are also Orthodox Christians, not good Protestants like the British or Germans. Even the French Catholics with their Vatican voodoo are better than the crazy beards and fur caps of the mad Russian monks.
And Russians were not true full-blooded Europeans, they were Slavic untermensch. They weren't animals like Africans or Asians, they were more sophisticated, more sinister. They were like Neanderthals, animals that masqueraded as men. But the veneer of civilisation was never thick enough to convince the inbred cliques of Western Europe that Slavs were fully human like themselves.
That hatred, along with the insatiable bloodlust of the military-industrial-intelligence-media complex, is fueling a Cold War 2 and threatening to tear apart any detente that President Trump hopes to build with Russia.
The Cold War was fueled by the bottomless desire for money and influence. Where once Uncle Joe Stalin had provided the bulk of the effort to stop the Nazis, with Roosevelt and Churchill happily smoking away with the Supreme Soviet, the end of the war had posed an existential threat to the nascent deep state. Without arms contracts the endless supply of money would dry up. With no enemy to spy on the intelligence apparatchiks would have to take jobs selling carpets or working in a delicatessen. No, they needed to concoct a new war so the party would never stop, and they fell back on the easiest target: Russia.
The military-industrial-intelligence complex, of both super powers, had to get rid of Kennedy and Khrushchev because they faced off eye to eye and found common ground and then turned inward to repair their broken countries. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the missiles were removed from Cuba and Turkey and almost 20 years of hostilities between the USA and USSR began to cool, Kennedy tried to restrain the power of the CIA and the private Federal Reserve, and Khrushchev tried to take resources away from the KGB and the arms manufacturers to improve the welfare of the Soviet citizens. Naturally they had to be removed and two war hawks, LBJ and Brezhnev, put in power.
Militarism, not communism, destroyed the USSR, and it very nearly destroyed the USA. USA just had a head start in terms of money it could lose, having avoided a disastrous civil war and destruction of 20% of its industry in WWII. If both countries started off on an even playing field both would have collapsed around the same time.
Of course the USSR couldn't compete. 3 million dead in WWI, another 4-5 million wounded. Loss of most of Russia's agricultural land. 6 years of civil war, another 3 million dead, at least. 7 million dead in famines in 1921-22, another 5-10 million dead in famine in 1932-33. At least 20-26 million dead in WWII, plus the destruction of at least 20% of all Soviet industry and agricultural land.
The Cold War was like a heavyweight champion fighting against some guy with both legs and an arm tied behind his back, and still, despite all that, in a single lifetime, people in the Soviet Union started basically as slaves living off the land making nothing to ending up making half of what people in America were making in 1991.
Imagine what could have happened if Kennedy and Khrushchev were allowed to make peace instead of being eliminated and having pointless war continue.
Imagine now what a glorious future we can live in if Trump and Putin are able to bring our two nations together. One unified force to eliminate Islamic terrorism, one unified force to chart a path to Mars and the outer moons. American technical know-how combined with the ironclad faith of the Russian Orthodox Church can restore Western civilisation to the glory it once was before materialism, atheism, cultural relativism, and moral nihilism began to eat away at the very heart of the greatest civilisation in human history.
I've spoken on this topic at length. The emptiness that has taken root in the West is the driving force behind Islamic terrorism. Lack of religion in the West, lack of value and meaning to life, is creating a vacuum, both spiritual and physical. Westerners are refusing to breed, so to solve the problem of a rapidly declining population, Angela Merkin, like a reverse Hitler, is flooding Europe with Islamic third-worlders. With no strong Christianity within Europe, there is nothing to stop those migrants from forming rape gangs and burning Sweden to the ground. Merkin is committing genocide against the German people.
The only thing that can keep the West from falling to pieces is strong Christian faith and a desire to breed, providing both the spiritual and physical bulwark against the endless hordes of Islamic migrants who believe women are property, rape is acceptable, homosexuals should be murdered, and all knowledge should be burned except for a single, all-encompassing book that can be interpreted six ways till Sunday by every back alley cleric and self-proclaimed Caliph.
And the only place where Christianity still reigns in Europe is Mother Russia.
We've watched as secular states in the Middle East and north Africa have been decapitated: Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan (the pro-Soviet government the United States destroyed by creating Al Qaeda). Egypt was nearly destroyed, and by every indication it appears that Erdogan of Turkey is an Islamist. The United States has its sights on Syria and Iran, two of Russia's allies. They should be our allies too, in the war against radical Islam. You see, even though the people there are overwhelmingly Muslim, they are ruled by rational actors who fully embrace technology and the twentieth century. Iran provided the US with support in eliminating the Taliban after 9/11. That's not because they are pro-America, Tehran just didn't want radical Islamists at their doorstep. There is also a horrendous heroin problem in Iran, fueled by the vast fields of opium poppies that grow from one horizon to the other in Afghanistan. Just as Britain and America sided with Stalin in World War Two, Iran sided with America against the Taliban because they shared a common enemy.
The United States went to war in Afghanistan out of revenge. Iran did so because they don't want mad, seventh century barbarians right next door poisoning and murdering their people.
Secular dictatorships in the Middle East are necessary to keep radical Islam from spreading, just as strong adherence to Christianity is necessary in Europe for the same reason. There were no refugees when Gaddafi was in power. He provided his people with free housing, food, water, and jobs, all paid for by the ocean of oil Libya sits atop, and he provided security by eliminating any Islamist barbarian who tried to stir up discord. The same is true with Assad in Syria.
If you sow the wind you will reap the whirlwind. If the United States works with Russia, Syria, and Iran to defeat radical Islam, everyone's lives will improve. There will be no need for anyone to migrate to Europe because Syria and Iraq themselves will be safe once again. Everyone wins except the arms manufacturers and the intelligence agencies.
That is why it is imperative that Trump is able to defeat the chickenhawks in Washington. That is why US troops need to be pulled out of Poland and the Baltic states, why the people of Crimea be permitted to stay in Russia where they voted to be. If the West is to survive, if world peace is truly to be realised, there must be an alliance between the US and Russia. If not then the West is destined to be reduced to dust in the wind.
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