Category: Religion, Myth, and Theology

THE CHRISTIAN CONENT OF THE WEST? MOSTLY A BAD THING

What’s the point of lamenting the fall of christianity? It’s an obscurant, irrelevant argument.

Compare Mithraism vs Aristotelianism/Stoicism/CommonLaw vs Buddhism and it’s predecessor hinduism, vs christianity/islam/judaism and their predecessor Zoroastrianism.

It’s pretty obvious that aristotelianism/stoicism/law are scientific and uniquely western systems of thought.

As far as I can tell, Christianity is an appropriation of Mithraism in order to create a utopian cult-rebellion against rome. It’s fairly obvious as a student of religions to grasp that there is nothing novel in christianity that was not in Mithraism and practiced by countless legionnaires.

It’s pretty obvious that the romans used genocide to wipe out the norther european religion of nature worship (druidism). Although we are slowly reconstructing a bit of at present from fragments.

It’s pretty obvious that the political value of the church was in importing eastern despotism in order to decrease the cost of managing the crumbling and impoverished empire using propaganda.

It’s pretty obvious that the church could not resist the greeks even after forcing closed the schools, and that it took a concerted effort via propaganda (like marxism) to impose propagandism on the west.

It’s pretty obvious that Augustine tried to defend the eastern despotism by using obscurantism to incorporate the greek thought.

It’s pretty obvious that this strategy failed and sent us into a thousand years of ignorance.

It’s pretty obvious that the good produced by the church was accidental: banning cousin marriage and granting property rights to break up the tribes, and then using church crowning of kings as legitimacy, using conniving politics and literacy to both keep the people ignorant and control them.

It’s pretty obvious that the enlightenment was caused by a reassertion of greek thought.

It’s pretty obvious that the marxist era in response to darwin, was a second attempt at creating authoritarian mysticism, this time in the form of pseudoscience.

It’s pretty obvious that the 20th century europeans failed (the operational revolution failed – although I think I can rescue it) to counter the pseudoscientific movement (Marx/Keynes and mainstream economists).

I care about christianity only so far as I care about having a church/temple/school because I understand the value of performing ritual together and invoking the submission-to-the-pack response that most of us feel as revelation.

We cannot go back into mysticism. Albeit we need a new religion to rescue us from neo-puritan-secualr-social-democracy. But that religion must both provide ritual, and return us to truth/science/and reality, which is the unique western tradition, and the origin of our competitive against the other civilizations with whom we compete.

Christianity was a bad implementation of mithraism. And it was a bad thing compared to stoicism and aristotelianism and law. I am not sure precisely what form that new religion must take (although I know parts of it) but it will not by a return to ignorance and mysticism.

Curt Doolittle

THE FUTURE OF ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY: UNNECESSARY

(from elsewhere)

The question is whether or not christian religion can function as a means of restoring western civilization. And my argument (and that of many others) is that it cannot. And for the reasons I stated: (a) that just as justification(rationalism) replaced mysticism, science(criticism) has replaced justification (rationalism), and people will not tolerate a return to primitive monotheistic mysticism. And (b) the forces that led to western success in the ancient and enlightenment world, were independent of the christian mythos – and much older. and (c) we cannot impose religious institutions, yet we can impose academic and legal institutions. (d) given that the differentiating feature of western civilization is truth, truth telling, jury, independent judges, and the common organic law, it is possible to use nothing more than the law to restore traditional values, and education to explain them.

We may need a new civic religion. But the few people who ponder that new religion all suggest that it will be much closer to stoicism, buddhism and nature worship than to christianity. And given that neo-puritanism is a christian heresy, and social democracy a christian heresy, it is certainly not a safe vehicle for the transmission of our civilization.

The germans almost exited christianity at least twice now. Had they done it in the Romantic period we might have had a chance to keep the best of old and new.

We need our churches. We need jesus as a philosopher of the poor. But Justinian imposed christianity by force and shuttered the stoic schools (the western religion), so that they could use eastern despotic central rule in the failing empire. And Caesar murdered all our Druids, to wipe out our culture, so they could impose roman imperialism. And the enlightenment was our first attempt to restoring our people to our original correspondence with nature, rather than with babylonian tyrants deified.

We have need of myth and ritual. We have no need for totalitarianism in our religion.