Amerika

Conservatives have backed themselves in a corner by giving up on crucial areas just because these disadvantaged some people. In life, everything disadvantages someone; if it provides a better civilization, all benefit however.

One thing that disadvantages people is culture. It inherently creates a hierarchy based on who understands and furthers the culture, and this disadvantages the bourgeois because most of them do nothing but pay taxes, go to jobs, and go shopping.

In fact, if we have to identify most of the modern non-contributors, they will be the people who adamantly state that they give the most. They go to jobs, for themselves; they pay taxes, but will cheat when they can; they buy what they like, which often is the opposite of what they endorse.

People like this hate the intangibles and transcendentals. Intangibles like culture, future history, continuity, logic, and reality bother them; ideals — these motivate us — like goodness, beauty, accuracy, and harmonious order freak them out, too.

They want a world of subsidized anarchy where they can do whatever they wanna do and no one else can tell them what to do. They do not want to think about time beyond their immediate lifespans. They do not want to be obligated to actual ideals.

What they like are what we might call tithe ideals. That is, you sacrifice a portion of what you have in order to get what you want. They are ideological socialists, yes, but in their minds, they will still keep most of their salaries, their boats, cars, and gadgets.

Tithe ideals produce religions. Religions specialize in the exoteric: come in, repeat the dogma, go through a ritual, and you are considered part of the group. For most people, losing Saturday or Sunday morning is not a big deal, and they gain an identity.

Right now, in response to the natural and unavoidable identity politics of diversity, conservatives are attempting to unite us all on the idea of what is basically a theocracy with the bulk of modern government — democracy, civil rights, equality, diversity, socialism — remaining the same.

Never mind that they have essentially adopted Enlightenment™ thought as the core of their religion, forgetting its original transcendental and mystical aspects. Never mind that this replaces culture and ethnicity, allowing them to continue in the socialist model of “any warm body that repeats the dogma.”

The bigger point however is that by using religion as a substitute for civilization, they are harming civilization. There is one way out of modernity, and that is by rejecting the Big Lie at its core (“equality”) and moving on from there. Nothing else will achieve that goal.

In response to such futility, people have been moving away from organized religion for a long time. On paper, we are a highly religious country, but with churches closing every week, we have to ask what that means. Mostly people are both searching for faith with religion, and as usual being lazy and opportunistic.

Take a look at the tumble into individualism that our postmodern religion embraces:

American’s belief in angels (69%) is about on par with belief in heaven and the power of prayer, but bested by belief in God or a higher power (79%). Fewer U.S. adults believe in the devil or Satan (56%), astrology (34%), reincarnation (34%), and that physical things can have spiritual energies, such as plants, rivers or crystals (42%).

“They’re very malleable,” Garrett said of angels. “You can have any one of a number of quite different worldviews in terms of your understanding of how the cosmos is arranged, whether there’s spirit beings, whether there’s life after death, whether there’s a God … and still find a place for angels in that worldview.”

People like gods — angels are a type of demigod degraded to henchmen, basically — into which they can project their own beliefs, fears, and needs. This is what humans do to everything they touch, since they view reality as a competitor for their own egotism and therefore detest it.

This may be an artifact of the pause before the storm. We can see that the system is incompetent, hide-bound, and perilously close to self-destruction. Right now people want malleable gods; when they are burying their friends, family, and neighbors, they will want invariant gods to guide them.

What would conservatism look like if we detached it from Christianity? A workman telling you the pros and cons of any method, then making a recommendation that is at an optimum tradeoff point on the supply-demand curve.

You have heard it a thousand times. “You could get the fancy water heater, which really is not a bad deal at all, but it will last the same time as this other one that is half the cost and does almost all of the same things.” There is a sweet spot, a middle path, an efficiency point on the curve.

What would faith look like if we detached it from Abrahamic religion? It would be more of a nature-worship with a strong sense of the divine as attached to this world, and therefore parallel to it, rendering it comprehensible to us if we strive to understand this world first.

This would be an intuitive faith. All children believe in God or something like a god until we beat it out of them with socializing and self-image in fourth grade. After that, they become good little atheists because atheism has the fewest rules, even if agnosticism is the actual scientific position.

Such a faith would go back to the roots of religion. It would assert that there is a divinity to life, that good and bad are always in balance and so death is always the end, and that those who understand how life works will have more success than those who do not.

My guess is that we will eventually have such a thing in churches. They will stack the Bible with a heap of other ancient texts and say that these are approximations, but what matters is the inner knowing that out there a force of benevolence animates life, even if not actively in our daily affairs.

This can take us away from the primitive nature of organized religion. It essentially co-opts superstition. If something bad happens, Satan did it; if something good happens, God or angels were watching over you. This is the religion of the slot machine, not nature.

Conservatives walk a risky path here. They may be able to win on a Christian libertarian platform, but in doing so they complete the cultural and ethnic erasure that the Left started. Sometimes what looks like a god is in fact a devil.

Tags: angels, faith, religion