Amerika

On the Right, anger rises over Christianity. Too often, Christians are seen paying lip service to conservative values, and then either going Leftist or adopting a stance of passive resignation, congratulating themselves on their moral sacrifice while letting the disaster gain strength around them.

In the former, Christians confuse the “universality” of Christianity — that there is an order of God which applies to some degree to all individuals — with universalism, or the idea that this order applies identically to all individuals, the same way they misunderstand equality to mean zero hierarchy.

Like the original idea of equality, Christian universality was originally intended to mean that all people are given the same chance to rise above themselves. Unfortunately, there are two glitches: as Baron Evola points out, written religions quickly become universalist because they confuse the exoteric with the esoteric, and people will naturally re-interpret any concept of “same chances” as “same outcomes” because it flatters their egos.

Thus, we find a design flaw in Christianity… the Word is its own enemy because its meaning crumbles under the onslaught of individualistic interpretations. Some say the solution is Catholicism, but this makes the problem worse by providing a centralized area of interpretation which is then gamed like any other political resource. In fact, our current Pope who has more in common with Communism than Christ is proof of this.

The pagans laugh at this, but ignore a problem in their own approach. By not writing anything down, they guaranteed that it would be lost instead of corrupted, but this is more a function of its declining popularity than the method of “graceful failure” designed into it. Christianity won because it had basically the same values and could be spread easily to larger groups.

In fact, it might make sense to view Christianity as a superior spiritual technology. Its simplified nature makes it perfect for groups, and by making people act in unison, it can be a powerful mass motivator. This strength is also its weakness, because when it becomes corrupted, it encourages insanity just as strongly.

However, this problem is not found in Christianity, but in the nature of mass motivation itself. Any sufficiently motivating force will be misinterpreted because individuals interpret rules, words and symbols in the manner most beneficial to the individual, that is, closest to “anarchy with grocery stores.”

Centralization fails for this reason, or at least is only part of the puzzle. Christianity in history represented a bubble, first gaining great strength, and then losing it once the Christian idea — the burden on each individual to get right with God — became hammered into the usual human entropy, or equality.

This leaves us with a troublesome situation. Christianity is not, as Nietzsche alleges, the origin of liberalism, but its victim. It was however complicit in leading to the power of liberalism because of its focus on the individual. At this point, it becomes more of an “alternate reality” into which conservatives slip instead of addressing the world, perhaps a consequence of its dualistic view where the only perfection is found in heaven and Christians should simply wait for that instead of trying to get it right here in life.

Our real problem is the tendency of conservatives to throw up their hands at the world and go back to what they were doing. For over a century, they have been doing this. They rationalize that somehow the situation will work out, or that the Left will fall when its programs fail, or other ways of making an excuse and going back to work so they can pay the taxes that fund the State.

This is why many of us growing up in the 1980s ran from both conservatism and Christianity: the only people we saw who admitted to these beliefs were absolute morons or were moral weaklings who had permitted the situation to come about in the first place. You will not find many Generation Xers inside of a church or Republican convention for this reason. To us, these groups appeared as retards and liars.

One needs only to look at the lyrics to the only real Generation X artform, death metal and black metal, to see the rage at Christianity and conservatism explode. The broken wings of angels and desecration of all purity are popular topics. In the Gen X worldview, Christianity and conservatism were the forces holding us back while the world burned.

In particular, Christians and conservatives indulged in the illusion that everything in the world turns out just fine if all of us work hard at our boring jobs and pay those taxes. Just lie back and enjoy it, in other words. They said this because any actual rebellion would personally inconvenience them, and they were “Me Generation” too!

In our present time, many on the Alt Right think that a return to religion will save the West. This is also an illusion based on personal convenience. The West needs to bootstrap itself by ending the insanity and nurturing sanity, which is a bigger question than religion.

In fact, at first, it is oppositional to religion because people need to understand how nature and the world work before they seek a spiritual meaning, or they will end up in the same dualism that convinced their ancestors to do nothing while insanity took hold.

We need brutal realism. This takes a form that includes religion, but only in parallel with other vital institutions as expressed in the four pillars. Religion is not the cause; realism is the cause, and religion is one of the effects or methods and principles used to achieve the goal, which is a golden age of civilization.

To understand this, we need to go back to the pagan origins of Christianity. In this view, there is no Word, only variant interpretations of an ur-spirit that pervades all existence. This spirit is not oppositional to reality, as it is under dualism, but united with it or patterned in parallel to it, through a doctrine called monism.

This way, we can understand religion in its proper role: as a tool for understanding some aspects of reality, only in parallel with realism. It does not stand on its own. It is not a cause in itself. It is a means to an end, and that end is clarity about reality, both physical and metaphysical.

By doing so, we allow a space for religion — which more important than bringing comfort, brings joy to many — that does not allow it to subvert the rest of our needs and turn us into solipsistic individualists who shrug and go back to work instead of confronting vast social problems head-on.

Tags: christianity, dualism, monism, paganism, snapshots, ur-spirit