Curt Doolittle

Theme: Religion

  • Michael Phillip On Monarchic Survival

    [W]ith the exception of the (restored) Spanish and (created) Belgium monarchies–all the surviving monarchies of Europe are either Protestant (UK, Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden) or tiny (Luxembourg, Liechenstein, Monaco), with Catholic (Italy, Portugal, France, Austria) and Orthodox (Russia, Greece) national monarchies having a much higher failure rate than Protestant ones (Germany), suggests that being able to engage in (and keep) broad social bargains is a survival trait in a monarchy. (Being overthrown by Soviet occupation or Soviet-supported post-Nazi insurrection–Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Albania–can be discounted.) The Protestant “naked before God” all-in-this-together outlook, including different time perspectives, being an advantage over the Catholic & Orthodox absolution-available, hierarchy-rules approach.

  • Michael Phillip On Monarchic Survival

    [W]ith the exception of the (restored) Spanish and (created) Belgium monarchies–all the surviving monarchies of Europe are either Protestant (UK, Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden) or tiny (Luxembourg, Liechenstein, Monaco), with Catholic (Italy, Portugal, France, Austria) and Orthodox (Russia, Greece) national monarchies having a much higher failure rate than Protestant ones (Germany), suggests that being able to engage in (and keep) broad social bargains is a survival trait in a monarchy. (Being overthrown by Soviet occupation or Soviet-supported post-Nazi insurrection–Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Albania–can be discounted.) The Protestant “naked before God” all-in-this-together outlook, including different time perspectives, being an advantage over the Catholic & Orthodox absolution-available, hierarchy-rules approach.

  • Religion is still the most effective resistance movement ever created. It sets t

    Religion is still the most effective resistance movement ever created. It sets the terms by which the population will agree to be governed. No way around it. Now, we could just as easily create truth and rule of law as a religious movement. But that would take some doing.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-23 03:55:00 UTC

  • TOLERANCE FOR FEMININE NEED FOR MAGIC Is the female need to believe in various k

    TOLERANCE FOR FEMININE NEED FOR MAGIC

    Is the female need to believe in various kinds of magic, superstition, new-age pseudoscience, and religion the men’s equivalent of need for hunting, sports and action movies? That it’s a necessary vent for the uncontrollable and irrational impulses that they cannot separate into ?

    I have enough problems with the SINGULARITY of my mind – it could literally kill me if I didn’t constantly work to control it – and nearly has. We call this category of thinking a ‘horizontal’ problem. But a woman has a similar problem in that they have an equally vertical problem: a zillion ‘windows popping up’ that they simply cannot stop, and giving them an order relieves them of the work of categorizing them rationally.

    I am terribly sympathetic actually. Most men have very ‘quiet’ minds compared to women. Something which many women cannot seem to imagine – how ‘quiet’ our minds are by comparison. They ask “What are you thinking?” and we respond “Nothing”, because in fact, we are thinking of nothing. We evolved to watch the horizon for prey – quietly. Patiently. That is very different from wondering about what children are doing – constantly.

    So I’ve become tolerant of silly chick talk. That they cannot tell that they are aware of breathing patterns in the bus, or patterns of gestures, changes in air pressure, and that they perceive this as magic – to them it is.

    We have similar mental blindness. I always am amazed how ‘dumb’ women are about politics until I remind myself that me and my fellow brothers evolved to keep other males away, to kill other males, and to take their women – and that women by contrast have a slave mind: they will acclimate to whoever is in control since their genes can continue regardless of which males are in charge.

    The left suppressed Darwin more than the right. For good reason. Leftists are weaker and less attractive – less desirable. But they have numbers. Otherwise ‘desirable’ would have no meaning.

    So I have become (recently) much more ‘accepting’ of silly chick talk as nothing more than the equivalent of men talking about sports or politics – it’s a vent.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-16 02:45:00 UTC

  • TRADING THE MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX FOR THE CATHEDRAL COMPLEX Great. We trad

    TRADING THE MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX FOR THE CATHEDRAL COMPLEX

    Great. We traded the paranoid military industrial complex, for the faith based evangelical cathedral complex and its equivalent of acolytes in the state department.

    Military epistemology is at least factual, even if military psychology is necessarily paranoid.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-12 03:30:00 UTC

  • FOODS AND THE CATHEDRAL: PSEUDOSCIENCE AS RELIGION Their business plan is to ope

    http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/02/23/whole-foods-america-s-temple-of-pseudoscience.htmlWHOLE FOODS AND THE CATHEDRAL: PSEUDOSCIENCE AS RELIGION

    Their business plan is to open near colleges, where acolytes of the cathedral gather in great numbers.

    (It’s actually fascinating.)

    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-12 02:14:00 UTC

  • I mean, moving up the Maslowian pyramid of needs just means that today’s priests

    I mean, moving up the Maslowian pyramid of needs just means that today’s priests don’t hand-wave over illness and despair, but hand-wave over your ‘potential’ and ‘career’, and sell you democratic socialist security and rational and technological saviors.

    Sigh.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-11 12:35:00 UTC

  • STARVE THE CATHEDRAL The Cathedral is, without question, a religion – so we must

    STARVE THE CATHEDRAL

    The Cathedral is, without question, a religion – so we must separate church and state. Right? Easy. Imagine what happens to universities if they must be paid out of future earnings by graduates, just as income taxes are paid out of future earnings by graduates?

    Starve the beast.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-07 07:27:00 UTC

  • OPPOSING VIEW – THE FORCED CHRISTIANIZATION of Rome was the GREATEST CRIME AGAIN

    http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2014/12/what-made-christians-different-in-roman.html?m=1AN OPPOSING VIEW – THE FORCED CHRISTIANIZATION of Rome was the GREATEST CRIME AGAINST MAN IN HISTORY.

    Christianity was practiced by perhaps five percent of the population until Justinian determined that by closing are stoic schools and imposing eastern tyrannical mysticism via the state he could exert eastern dominance levels of dominance over the empire.

    The forced christianization of Rome is perhaps the greatest crime in human history. It is hardly something to be respected, appreciated or cherished, any more than stuffing people into ovens is to be cherished.

    We only now understand by contrasting stoicism with Buddhism that we had invented not only science, reason, logic, mathematics and with Archimedes made possible an industrial revolution, but also we had invented the most important religion ever constructed by man.

    There is nothing to celebrate other than our the miracle of our achievements in spite of this terrible crime against the west and perhaps all mankind – and our eventual escape from this horror.

    As Hayek said, the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries will be remembered as a new age of mysticism conducted in pseudoscientific rather than mythological terms.

    Democratic secular humanism justified by Keynesian Forcible redistribution, American Anglo neo Puritanism, and cosmopolitan pseudoscience are little more than a restatement of Christian authoritarianism – for the same purpose: to conquer and control.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-06 09:41:00 UTC

  • WHY WE NEED RELIGIONS Humans will and must develop a ‘religion’ because without

    WHY WE NEED RELIGIONS

    Humans will and must develop a ‘religion’ because without some set of narratives most questions on a daily basis from the most mundane to the most complex are undecidable. Pedagogical requirements force us to resort to narratives during youth in order to construct relations from experiential rather than abstract lessons – we cannot wait to teach morality until reason forms, and not enough ofus are capable of reason: which is why we must have character, rule, and outcome ethics. Because each is more demanding than the prior method. The only question is the externalities produced by that religion and whether that religion is closer to a reflection of heroic history or farther from heroic history. The monotheisms are pretty awful, but democratic statist secular humanism is far worse.

    SO

    1) Many decisions are undecidable without some means of decision making: breaking ties.

    2) Even if they are decidable it is often necessary to force tie-breaking decisions such that they produce positive externalities. In fact, almost all social benefits are obtained by the choice between otherwise indifferent actions.

    3) We must train the young to intuit such tie-breaking decisions, not reason them.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-11-26 00:23:00 UTC