Christian Civilization -- The Central Issue

[Wizard22]

Shut up, you idiot.

Be careful, you're straining both digits of your IQ Hairball with your profound philosophical insights and wisdom here.

The forum can hardly contain it.

[FlashDangerpants]

Perhaps I can tempt you with the philsophisings of Hortence P Gusset who tells us that the "mass religion man" is a phenomenon of the past and we are more or less done with it now.

It definitely sounds more tempting than the prospect of becoming a Catholic.

"Mass consumption man" or "mass social media man" or "mass porn man" are better and more tempting?

Mass porn sounds a bit messy to be honest. It might be difficult to tell what's going on, or where it's going into.

[Alexis Jacobi]

I asserted to AJ and IC a few months ago, that if any 'progress' is to made, the cultural-Right needs to set aside our differences and work together toward a common or universal goal, to counter-attack and push back the cultural-Left. IC failed to heed my warning and suggestion. However, my intentions are clear. If AJ feels my positions are problematic, I don't doubt he'd press me on them.

It has been for me a strange but also a curious conflict. All of my personal background, my university friends and friends growing up, and myself, were of that Left-Progressive orientation. When the Left was actually a Left that could be respected -- pro-family, anti-immigration (illegal immigration), antiwar, pro-free-speech, and opposed to corporate manipulation -- their platforms made sense. But everything has switched around in very strange ways in our present. To the degree that it is hard to sort things out. In fact I do not have it sorted out. Though I am aware that power-games and power-wars are going on all around us.

When I realized what Left-Progressivism in its association with the State was set on, I naturally turned back to those who have been dispossessed in the sense expressed by Wilmot Robinson:

Is it not incredible that the largest American population group, the group with the deepest roots, the most orderly and most technically proficient group, the nuclear population group of American culture and of the American gene pool, should have lost its preeminence to weaker, less established, less numerous, culturally heterogeneous, and often mutually hostile minorities?

With all due allowance for minority dynamism ... this miraculous shift of power could never have taken place without a Majority "split in the ranks" - without the active assistance and participation of Majority members themselves. It has already been pointed out that race consciousness is one of mankind's greatest binding forces. From this it follows that when the racial gravitational pull slackens people tend to spin off from the group nucleus. Some drift aimlessly through life as human isolates. Others look for a substitute nucleus in an intensified religious or political life, or in an expanded class consciousness. Still others, out of idealism, romanticism, inertia, or perversity, attach themselves to another race in an attempt to find the solidarity they miss in their own.

I realized that I had to *change my spots* and realign myself with those I described as 'the original Americans'. This also did involve a decision to consciously choose to favor those of European descent, though it is not natural for me (given my background) to see people on the basis of their race or ethnicity. And in aligning myself with *original Americans* -- those who built the country, and those who have been dispossessed by those notorious choices made when manufacturing was transferred elsewhere -- I also realized that I had to better understand, and also to respect, their religious orientation. That is their Christianity.

Simultaneously I began my own investigations into Christianity and Catholicism and, therein, realized that everything that I felt to be of *original value* (those views and beliefs about what is valuable) came to us through Christianity and that nexus (which does not exclude the nexus of philosophical exposition that can be termed *the Greco-Christian*), and on the basis of these realizations I began an odd process of re-conceiving my own *metaphysical position*. It was when I was reading Shakespeare in combination with Basil Willey who opened up a way to view the metaphysical shifts of the 17th century that I realized that, for example, those *pictures* that I refer to as the imaginal substance of Christianity is not in fact what counts, but rather something that enters in through them.

That is an heretical position in some sense, but given my history (as a product of California Radicalism) there was nothing that could be done about it. Long ago I realized that what was actually of tremendous importance was the *conceptual pathway* to maintain a link and an understanding of that which we mean when we use the term *God*. And the phrase 'ideas have consequences' popped into my head long before I encountered Richard Weaver (who wrote Ideas Have Consequences, a very influential book for those of conservative and also of religious orientation)(though Weaver was a Platonist).

Dubious wrote:

Belief systems are the containers of intuitions which are often inculcated before they are properly examined. It seems to me - and admit I may be wrong - you are attempting to modernize Christianity into a contemporary Western system of values by stripping it of its historic religious connotations hoping to reveal its metaphysical underpinnings, i.e., its denotations into a new advanced system of values more in alignment with modern sensibilities.

If that were the case I would not have a problem admitting to it. But that is not the case. My issue resolves to this: there is either a constant, ever-existing metaphysics that originated with the manifestation of this Universe and Cosmos, and there either is or there is not a supreme divinity that owns all creation and manifestation. What that is, that is to say the existence of it (the being of it), is in my conception a reality that is beyond my conceptual capacity. That is to say that I have no way to express what Existence is and no way really to comprehend it when its opposite is contemplated (no-existence). The better expression of this mystery is expressed in the Vedic language as *Sat-Chit-Ananda*. The more the mystery of existence is meditated on, the more it opens up as a puzzle, and in my own case it is there that whatever *divinity* means becomes apparent.

So if my own *conceptual pathway* has any relevance to the issue that Dawson discusses in the book I quoted from, and if my processes are similar to what others of us who have been *extruded onto the shores of modernity* are going through, then what I am dealing with -- and there are many more than just myself -- the process of reconnection with our own traditions and all of that which has allowed what we are to come to be should then become more clear.

It is a question of making commitments when there is an array of different things to which one can align oneself and associate oneself. If you are a square peg it is going to be a rough journey to fit into a round hole. If you are trying to force yourself to fit you always have to realize that *defects in your manufacture* have to be understood.

Therefore in respect to what Wizard has said in the above-quoted paragraph, I make my commitments with those who seem better aligned with those general metaphysical principles that I have been outlining over the months and years. I have wavered though. For example in my conflicts with Immanuel Can (who is a terrible apologist for Christian values). Then the task become to go further to the root and to discern and try to understand, and if possible to appreciate, what is there at the very core of Traditional Catholicism. Because that is the most orignal nexus of Europe -- and it is to *Europe* that I make my personal commitment.

I did that because of something René Guénon said: that in traditional Catholicism there were still vestiges of what he defines as a universal metaphysics. Timeless, constant, ever-existing. And the answer is that, yes, what I refer to as metaphysically timeless does indeed reside there. But I do have a somewhat Gnostic interpretation: the depiction, the picture, the symbols, are representations of conceptual pathways to hold onto that *concept of the divine* and to exist in and respond from a position of relationship. And relationship is intellectual, conceptual, but also (for want of the better word) emotional and spiritual.

The reason many of you conflict with me (in the sense of the ideas presented) is, in my opinion, because you have been placed by cultural and social powers, and by historical processes, on the outside of a totality which, conceptually, is incomprehensible to you. It has been made incomprehensible on one hand, but you too have contributed to its incomprehensibility. There is no unity even possible in what you (quote-unquote) *think*. Your thinking on these levels is simple rebellion. But not really against the Symbols of Authority -- the Church for example -- but to something far more fundamental. And in this sense the Christian picture of *rebellious children* and even *demonic rebellion* and the associations that people develop with destructive energy and pathways -- well, this can be understood when one comes under the influence of such *confused people*. And confused you are! But I say that without blame.

To *go back to the foundations* is a radical process given the current that flows in our present. There is something agonizing and demanding about it. Because at any point you could stop the authenticity of the process and get stuck in one point or perspective. If you get stuck merely in conventions then I think you will have made a mistake.

In this sense, if I may be so bold as to present it in this way, one has to develop and rely on a *communication* with a living spiritual force. That is how I conceive of the holy spirit. If the question is "Why then do you choose to return to a Christian nexus?!" when there are other traditions and paths? I think it resolves to the issue of essences. That is a complex issue. There is an explanation however.

[Alexis Jacobi]

Perhaps I can tempt you with the philsophisings of Hortence P Gusset who tells us that the "mass religion man" is a phenomenon of the past and we are more or less done with it now.

Sure, that material could be presented for examination. But in the meantime we could also focus on your commitments and perhaps I could refer to your psycho-spiritual romance with the assholes of boys and young men? You did after all present it as an object of your concern.

I recognize that every once in a while you bust out with some knotty paragraphs which are, I gather, *philosophical* in your way of understanding philosophy. But let us examine the sublimation of religion as it takes effect in your case. What would come of that? You shift your psychic commitments to another plane, no?

You have by historical process and personal choice given up on that relationship with a higher order of being I refer to, and down down down you go and finally there you are, sodomizing a rent-boy and celebrating it with what I can only describe as glee. Like Bukowski among shit-stained sheets. Is this what most defines you? I would hate to think that except that I actually believe that it may be true.

You see yourself as a member of an intelligentsia -- a bold child of modernity directing your mind to really important, transformative ideas -- but in reality what you are about (if I can base this on what you write) is just a portrayal of your downward trajectory, the crucial end being a rent-boy's butt-end. It is the total perversion of those hierarchies of value I refer to. And in a sense you are en *emblem* of what is going on widely in our cultures.

When what is transcendent and super-sensual cannot any longer be conceived as real, and such authority portrayed as a chimera, there is no real alternative but to be seduced by perverted pleasure in the here-below. Perverted of course in comparison to those higher alternatives when they are held in the mind and highly valued.

You are duck who can quack indeed. And quack you do! It does not matter who you might quote. What comes out of your mouth is completely useless to any sort of genuine personal, cultural, philosophical or spiritual process.

In this sense -- though I recognize I am here firing a blunderbuss -- I align you with your fellow Landsman and brother Harbal. He is a man who cannot even conceive of what I refer to as *higher*. And you are a man with at least some intellectual wherewithal to destroy an alignment with that *higher set*.

You are therefore excellent products for study.

[Harbal]

I align you with your fellow Landsman and brother Harbal. He is a man who cannot even conceive of what I refer to as *higher*. And you are a man with at least some intellectual wherewithal to destroy an alignment with that *higher set*.

You are therefore excellent products for study.

No, I cannot conceive of what you refer to as "higher", but I think that is because you are quite nuts, and I have no particular insight into that sort of thing. Seriously, you are obviously not right in the head.

[FlashDangerpants]

You see yourself as a member of an intelligentsia

That sort of pretension is how people suffer the indignity of ending up like you.

[Alexis Jacobi]

You see yourself as a member of an intelligentsia

That sort of pretension is how people suffer the indignity of ending up like you.

I’ll take it duly under consideration, Flash. Count on it.

[Alexiev]

It has been for me a strange but also a curious conflict. All of my personal background, my university friends and friends growing up, and myself, were of that Left-Progressive orientation. When the Left was actually a Left that could be respected -- pro-family, anti-immigration (illegal immigration), antiwar, pro-free-speech, and opposed to corporate manipulation -- their platforms made sense. But everything has switched around in very strange ways in our present. To the degree that it is hard to sort things out. In fact I do not have it sorted out. Though I am aware that power-games and power-wars are going on all around us.

Are you opposed to illegal immigration? Do you think we should give North America back to the Indians?

[Impenitent]

Do you think we should give North America back to the Indians?

yes

-Imp

[Alexis Jacobi]

It has been for me a strange but also a curious conflict. All of my personal background, my university friends and friends growing up, and myself, were of that Left-Progressive orientation. When the Left was actually a Left that could be respected -- pro-family, anti-immigration (illegal immigration), antiwar, pro-free-speech, and opposed to corporate manipulation -- their platforms made sense. But everything has switched around in very strange ways in our present. To the degree that it is hard to sort things out. In fact I do not have it sorted out. Though I am aware that power-games and power-wars are going on all around us.

Are you opposed to illegal immigration? Do you think we should give North America back to the Indians?

Idiotic argument. Back to the drawing board.

[Alexis Jacobi]

…but I think that is because you are quite nuts, and I have no particular insight into that sort of thing. Seriously, you are obviously not right in the head.

At least … you’re thinking!

[Lorikeet]

Were the settlers invited?
An interesting confusion.

Conquest through exploration, and inverse conquest through immigration.
The conquered have their vengeance.

[Harbal]

…but I think that is because you are quite nuts, and I have no particular insight into that sort of thing. Seriously, you are obviously not right in the head.

At least … you’re thinking!

Intuition guided me to that conclusion more than thought did.

[Alexis Jacobi]

…but I think that is because you are quite nuts, and I have no particular insight into that sort of thing. Seriously, you are obviously not right in the head.

At least … you’re thinking!

Intuition guided me to that conclusion more than thought did.

A lazy flowing river might also. Following an adventurous fly, too. But try to arrive at the same conclusive result with an Aristotelian rigor. But (to quote Wizard) don’t strain the frail double-digits!

[Dubious]

Religion will always be necessary because most of humanity lag behind moral, ethical, and spiritual development.

If we need religion for moral, ethical and spiritual development which at best religion only provided on a very low level, it's time to take holy communion from Trump.