On traction, and a farewell to a political friend

Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 08 February 2008 10:37.

Having passed up the opportunity to acquire an education at the proper time and, anyway, never having been very willing to submit to the tyranny of other men’s minds, I’ve been glad of the theoretical minimalism that inhabits Conservatism.  It is a visceral politics, and might even be a politics of Nature, or as close to it as any politics addressing a complex society is likely to get.  It is certainly a politics of practical men only too inclined to draw a veil across the philosophical obscura of this, our Postmodern Age.

For example, just the other day I happened across a short passage authored in 1999 by the post-Marxist agony aunt Chantal Mouffe.  She was agonising over the crisis in liberalism.  Liberal intellectuals, you should know, are an anxious lot.  They have been tearing their rational hair out over crises in the Enlightenment Project for well over a century (you would think that would tell them something, but no).

Mouffe, while not a neon-light left intellectual like Michael Walzer, Slavo Zizek or Chomsky, has about her the quality of a weather-vane.  She points not so much to her own body of thought as to the theoretical horizon.  Theoretically, Pomo is the undoing of Everything, even rationalism, in the belief that Something must succeed it.  Well, in 1999 Mouffe sensed that it already had, but saw signs of danger everywhere.  “New antagonisms have emerged,” she wrote, “not only in advanced societies but in the Eastern bloc and in the Third World.”

This was certainly true.  Neither the British Multicultural nor French Integrationist models were uniting the rainbow peeps that were the “new West”.  Russia was about to plunge into an ice-pool of seriously anti-liberal New Kremlinism.  And in the Dar al Islam, a dangerously aggressive and expansionist Wahabbism was rising.

The Project, which in its broadest terms is the bringing together of humanity (otherwise known as peeps) in freedom and justice, was heading nowhere but into the history file.  The future would hold no reverential memories of the ironic Fathers of the present.  There would be no la-la land of liberal values.  And probably, caught dancing too soon in the charnel house, the Jewish value of nihilism, Enlightenment’s one enduring gift, would stand naked and shivering, awaiting the inevitable, messy denouement.

There was still time for Mouffe to hope, however.  An amphetamine progressive, she wrote of “The critique of essentialism – a point of convergence of the most important trends in contemporary theory: post-structuralism, philosophy of language after the later Wittgenstein, post-Heideggarian hermeneutics.”  This “anti-essentialist theoretical stand” was, for her, the essence of a “new vision for the Left conceived in terms of a radical and plural democracy.”

Of course.  Whether or not any “new vision for the Left” can or will ever materialise, Mouff is betting her shirt – and ours - on the staple method of all social constructionists and their Foucaultian and sometimes Gramscian sons and daughters: denial of essence.

It works like this.  We cannot know such a thing as “African”, for example, or “female”.  The apparently recognisable and describable essential qualities of both, or of a new-born baby, say, are only constructs of cultural meanings and practices.  OK, there may be extanct biological forms, and these forms may be solid realities in themselves.  But our ascription of meanings to them is wholly social and historical, and altogether more slippery, ambiguous and negotiable than we think.

And worse is to come.  If the essence of things is only a social construct, our attempt to describe it in words produces a postmodern double-bind.  For language defies any possibility of penetrating to objective reality or ultimate truth.  It is self-referential, relying on words to describe words.  Language never improves upon proximity.  Therefore, the entirety of what we understand ourselves to be as people and what we understand of the world beyond ourselves is hopelessly compromised.

So round we swirl in the Pomo trap until its truly essential dichotomy hoves into view.  The same regimen of denial which nullifies the meanings we ascribe to “African” also nullifies the positive values and meanings that progressives ascribe to, well, “radical and plural democracy”.  It is only the ideals of the Pomo folk that pressage a progressive response to the vacuum rather than a conservative one.  In Pomo itself, there is no preferential basis for progressivism over conservatism.  Or, indeed, postmodernism over modernism.  Or post-structuralism over its deconstructionist, structuralist, economic Marxist and classical liberal antecedents.  There is no centre to hold (no doubt because the Pomo “text” itself has no bleeding essence!).  When Pomo folks assert that they alone are the gatekeepers of what is and what is not epistemological they are being wholly dishonest.

Pomo, then, is a gas for mischievous intellectuals.  But it is too ontologically empty to qualify as philosophy, and too nebulous, indeed slippery and ambiguous, for ideology.  If there is a common thread running through it at all, it is precisely this anti-essentialism that interests Mouffe.  Abolish essence, it says, and you abolish the knowable: the certainties you draw from life and Nature.  Your sources of cultural power are neutralised, and rendered simply into places you may seek psychological source-material for a willed construction of the self.

All this really produces, of course, is willed self-deception.  That first, notably wordless rush of adrenaline when an unknowable “African” shoulders our Pomo person into a dark alleyway, or a “female” cooly returns his gaze, belies all his linguistic contortions, and consigns his “texts”, his hermeneurotica, to a non-essentiality of their own.  Life and love roar away in the world beyond the window, and will not be denied.

At all this the lumpen Conservative can only smile wryly and wonder at his eternally wrong-headed liberal foe.  Probably, he will decide that this strange, discontented creature loathes his or herself.  Then he will grow serious, and remember the anomie and the sheer, tragic waste that flows out of that loathing.  And then ... he will think about something else.  That’s the way it’s been going on for about three hundred years, and still liberalism ploughs its stony furrow, pulling him and the rest of us behind.

But how, exactly?  Political philosophy is the sport of a tiny scholastic minority, and a sport largely incomprehensible to ninety per cent of the population.  Critical Theory raises that to 95%, and the ironies of Pomo raise it again.

Nevertheless, we live in, or at the end of, the Postmodern Age.  So how did a weird intellectual conceit that scarcely anyone outside the ironic elite understands convince anybody of anything?  Take the Pomo position on the condition of language - Foucault’s mega-generalisation that “language is oppression”, for example.  How did that get boosted to the station of social teaching?

Well, we know really.  Here is a critical Wendy McElroy, writing in 2000 at LRC:-

Foucault’s speciality was the interpretation and meaning of language and, for decades, radical feminism has stressed language as a source of the oppression of women.  Sometimes language is considered to be the source.  Thus, they refuse to be called “Madam Chairman” and insist upon the wholesale replacement of the generic “he” with the ungainly “he/she.”  The word “man” is replaced with “human being” or “person.”  History becomes herstory.  Words are deemed to be so powerful that syllables are acts in and of themselves.  For example, pornography becomes an act of oppression and violence against women, and radical feminists call it “rape.”

How about another little Foucault incendiary device, then: “science is a language of power”?

Here’s an abstract from a 2006 paper by Diane Judd:-

More recent postmodern critics of science have taken their cue from Foucault’s work, and have argued that science is, among other things, a hegemonic form of Eurocentric male domination.

... The goals of this paper are to explore the adoption and/or rejection of western science in certain developing countries, and to outline what certain postmodern critics of science have said about the role of western science on a cultural level.  Themes such as imperialism, universalism, and cultural particularism will be particularly emphasized.

“Texts” on the influence of Foucault are only a google away.  Here health and illness, here religion, here education.

Here is Chantal Mouffe again, making it perfectly plain what it’s all about, “Our objective is to establish a dialogue between these theoretical developments and left-wing politics.”

For “left-wing politics” read a continuum of water-carriers – lower-order academics like Mouffe herself, journals and publications,  liberal-left think-tanks, NGOs, public intellectuals and opinion-formers, advocacy groups, and party strategists – each of whom re-process and apply high intellectual output within their own sphere of interest.  So theory is transported into culture.  It does not matter that much whether it’s good theory or good culture.  The mechanism needs raw theory to keep running and substantiate its existence thereby, and it takes what it can get.  Even Pomo.

Anyhow, this is what a political traction engine looks like.  The perilous condition of European Man, for example, his maladaptive existence, his anomie and self-estrangement, his ethno-masochism, his powerlessness, are all proofs that it works only too well.

In total contrast, traction is a concept almost foreign to Conservatism.  Its more genuine thinkers – Roger Scruton, Thomas Fleming for example - have no need to drag society through an ideological hedge backwards.  They wish others to cease doing so.  Historically, they are reactionaries.  They offer resistance to decline, in the manner of Greta Garbo meeting Dr Frankenstein.  But since there is, as I said at the beginning, no real theory of the right, they can’t make any positive play against the aggressions of the left.

At the political level the goals of the right, especially in America, amount to no more than a variation on the Enlightenment Project of universal emancipation and civilisation.  Real Conservative goals are too normative for party politics in the Postmodern Age.  Part of the problem, no doubt, is fear of the left.  But the very Anglospheric distrust of intellectuals also plays its part.  The anti-essentialist terms of the opposing argument are not easy to understand.  But the price for not understanding them is not understanding that a Conservative defence of the West must be essentialist, with all that implies for race, gender and sexuality.  For without essence, there is nothing to conserve.

Over the last two or three months I’ve been re-examining my own Conservatism (which was never of the party political kind, of course - I defined it in the past as acting from and for what is good in us).  Well, the hour is growing late and the night already dark.  I am forced to the conclusion that the politics I have espoused since the mid-1970s are too static and supine, and too anti-intellectual to effect the kind of change that is needed now.  It cannot transform.

Chantal Mouffe was right about the crisis in liberalism.  After Post-structuralism there will be only banality.  The Project has nothing more to give.  There will be an opportunity to argue for survival.  Few as we are in number today, for our side to stand any chance of success we have to equip ourselves with a theoretically-robust and revolutionary politic, something that can speak loudly to our people of freedom and justice.  It must also be amenable to new modes of traction, for which the Interactive Age of communication on which we are embarking may serve.
 
As for the instinctual Conservative in my soul, I believe that Conservatism will describe the politics of a white society of the future matured by time and human wisdom.  But it will not lead us to that high estate now, and on those strategic terms I renounce it.

I’m now beginning the search for a more active philosophical agent, and don’t yet know where that will take me.  I hope it won’t make too dull a read for MR.



Comments:


99001

Posted by onlooker on Wed, 13 Feb 2008 14:14 | #

“Ah, Onlooker, Silver is discussing the failure of the Church. But as in the past the Heathen, is again the place for addressing the failures of the Church.”—torgrim

Yes, torgrim, I know what Silver was discussing. Silver has it right when he said: “The real problem is the church and the debilitating make-work of theological scribblers.  If these people restricted themselves to saving souls, making people at peace with their place in the world, and preaching morality to shiftless ne’er-do-wells we’d all be much better off.”

The problem with the Church today, is it has been invaded by heretics. Heretics who alter the main message of Christ by slipping in the propaganda of secular-modern-liberalism and racial-universalism - ie Cardinal Mahoney, et al.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

To GW,

Thanks for taking the time to explain what you meant. What you say makes a great deal of sense. You have been blessed with a brilliant mind.

What has always confused me about atheists, is they cannot, or refuse to deal with the fundamental question of how space and matter can into existence. Darwinism is fine theoretically. It’s basic premise is that life as we know it evolved from primitive organic molecules. Great! This may very well be true; but, how did those molecules get there in the first place? If they evolved from non-organic molecules, then how did the non-organic molecules get there…? Until those questions can be answered, the only logical conclusion a rational person can come to is that the universe was created by an intelligent designer.

Best wishes to you, Guessedworker, and God bless,

onlooker


99002

Posted by Rusty Mason on Wed, 13 Feb 2008 14:18 | #

Silver’s post echos my question a bit: now that we have the faith gene, how do you propose to handle it?  It is completely illogical and unreasonable to think that more than a handful of the brightest of our people will be swayed from the current religions (Christianity and liberalism, mostly) by a call to logic and reason alone.

Those who call for the destruction of one belief system are hardly doing their followers any service by not offering a better, more complete and more attractive alternative.  In this regard, Lindsay Wheeler’s Christianity, Wintermute’s Hellenismos, and Stephen McNallen’s theodish Asatru are far superior to anything offered by many of the leaders on this blog.  These three men are offering to smart (but flawed) men and women real alternatives, systems which have been tried and proven successful for long periods of time, and are backed by fairly solid reasoning (at least well enough for most people).  Pure logic and reason are fine, but people need much more.  They need an ethical system to lean on, they need spirits to animate them.  Besides, they can and will reason themselves into anything; into destructive beliefs just as easily as constructive ones.

Our job, as I see it, is to lead them to reason and logic—to Truth—, happiness and productivity, through faith, faith that is also as true as we can determine (this is what Christianity, in its best forms, should be for).  It’s part logic, part marketing, part mysticism, and part common sense.


99003

Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 13 Feb 2008 16:43 | #

silver: “you seem to be critiquing man for what he was before he even became man.”

The OT, of course, places the Fall at the very beginning of Man’s time on Earth.

why do you balk at interjecting God at this point?

I do not need superhuman intervention to theorise the condition of Man.  Nature can do it, and explain the existence of the superhuman too.

Can’t He be a way back to stillness?

For the individual, religious worship is a path to beauty, not to consciousness.

doesn’t He lessen the amount of will required to do so?

Recently, there was a short series of programmes on British TV about three journeys made by Peter Owen-Jones.  He is vicar of Firle, a village close to my home town.  At a retreat in China he was told, “If you are walking along the road and you see the Buddha coming towards you, slay him.”

Doesn’t that preserve essence

Well first, Pomos use the term more broadly, in the sense of any meaning inhabiting anything.  But it is our wont to concentrate upon human essence, and that’s fair enough.  Essence is preserved no matter what Yahweh gets up to, or us.  It’s all the accretions of a life lived unconsciously that are perishable through the act of stillness (and developments thereof).


99004

Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 13 Feb 2008 16:57 | #

You’re welcome, onlooker.

On the molecules, the imperfection of our knowledge does not necessitate a Supreme Being.  Rather, it necessitates caution, humility and patience.


99005

Posted by Don on Wed, 13 Feb 2008 19:41 | #

Gessedworker said on Tuesday, “Christian universalism lies at the noumenal root of our difficulties.”

He’s so right. A mind that absently applies universalism to all peoples, all regions, all religions, all philosophies, and all nationalities, is trapped by a meme that imprisons us. From a meme point of view, this is the archway stone that bars us from finding real freedom to live our lives in our own communities with our friends and families.


99006

Posted by Desmond Jones on Wed, 13 Feb 2008 20:58 | #

His post-natus unconscious accretion of external influences, manifesting as Personality.

For instance?

In consequence, external influences enter us unseen and unmediated, and accrete in the disorderly psychological superstructure which we call Self, but which is anything but.

For example? What are those apparently unmitigated influences that are growing or expanding one’s personality? Where’s the teleology? Where’s the purpose and design, GW?


99007

Posted by Friedrich Braun on Wed, 13 Feb 2008 21:48 | #

Where did god come from, silver? Who designed the designer? *yawn* This is about as fascinating and relevant as watching paint dry.


99008

Posted by Rusty Mason on Wed, 13 Feb 2008 22:34 | #

Theology and cosmology are important to a well-functioning society.  A group’s common understanding about First Causes, including the how and the why, are a fundamental part of its culture, society, and law.


99009

Posted by Prozium on Wed, 13 Feb 2008 22:39 | #

Those who call for the destruction of one belief system are hardly doing their followers any service by not offering a better, more complete and more attractive alternative.  In this regard, Lindsay Wheeler’s Christianity, Wintermute’s Hellenismos, and Stephen McNallen’s theodish Asatru are far superior to anything offered by many of the leaders on this blog.

That’s because a new and improved mysticism really isn’t necessary to function in the modern world. A proper understanding of reality and how it works will suffice.


99010

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Wed, 13 Feb 2008 23:35 | #

“A proper understanding of reality and how it works will suffice.”  (—Prozium)

“A proper understanding of reality and how it works” encompasses a sense of the transcendent.

Prozium I told you when you were Daedalus and possibly Scimitar as well, you’re wasting your time with this stuff (so are Friedrich, Al Ross, and the other big atheists).  You’ve a first-rate mind — all of you have.  Use them for debating other topics.  I guarantee you, this is the biggest time-waster possible for your talents.  You’re talking like a child where this stuff is concerned.  You have no idea what you are talking about. 

When a baby is sick and it isn’t known if it will live the atheist will pray.  He may blurt it out clumsily but the meaning of his words and the one to whom they are addressed will be unmistakable.


99011

Posted by Desmond Jones on Wed, 13 Feb 2008 23:38 | #

Christian universalism is not Christianity. MacDonald argues that Christianity is part of what made the West unique.

Western culture was built by people who differ genetically from those who have built the other civilizations and cultures of the world.  In the following I will argue that Western cultures have a unique cultural profile compared to other traditional civilizations:

  1. The Catholic Church and Christianity.
  2. A tendency toward monogamy.
  3. A tendency toward simple family structure based on the nuclear family.
  4. A greater tendency for marriage to be companionate and based on mutual affection of the partners.
  5. A de-emphasis on extended kinship relationships and its correlative, a relative lack of ethnocentrism.
  6. A tendency toward individualism and all of its implications: individual rights against the state, representative government, moral universalism, and science.

In the case of monogamy, a battle carried to the European elite by the Catholic Church, KMac asserts:

Monogamy is a very central aspect of Western uniqueness with some important effects.  Monogamy may well be a necessary condition for the unique European “low-pressure” demographic profile.20 This demographic profile results from late marriage and celibacy of large percentages of females during times of economic scarcity.  The connection with monogamy is that monogamous marriage results in a situation where the poor of both sexes are unable to mate, whereas in polygynous systems an excess of poor females merely lowers the price of concubines for wealthy males.  For example, at the end of the 17th century approximately 23% of both sexes remained unmarried between ages 40-44.  But, as a result of altered economic opportunities, this percentage dropped at the beginning of the 18th century to 9%, and there was a corresponding decline in age of marriage.  Like monogamy, this pattern was unique among the stratified societies of Eurasia.21

In turn, the low-pressure demographic profile appears to have had economic consequences.  Not only was the marriage rate the main damper on population growth, but this response, especially in England, had a tendency to lag well behind favorable economic changes so that there was a tendency for capital accumulation during good times rather than a constant pressure of population on food supply:

  The fact that the rolling adjustment between economic and demographic fluctuations took place in such a leisurely fashion, tending to produce large if gradual swings in real wages, represented an opportunity to break clear from the low-level income trap which is sometimes supposed to have inhibited all pre-industrial nations.  A long period of rising real wages, by changing the structure of demand, will tend to give a disproportionately strong boost to demand for commodities other than the basic necessities of life, and so to sectors of the economy whose growth is especially important if an industrial revolution is to occur.22

There is therefore some reason to suppose that monogamy, by resulting in a low-pressure demographic profile, was a necessary condition for industrialization.

And again, KMac emphasizes the exclusiveness of the Puritans enhanced their reproductive fitness.

The Puritans, like the Amish and Hutterites, sought to build their own society and exclude outsiders rather than dominate non-Puritans. But the very success of the Puritan enterprise?its size, its wealth, and its control over a large area of land comprising the Massachusetts Bay Company?made it the target of the British colonialists seeking to control their possessions and a goal for immigrants seeking economic advantage. The Amish and Hutterites, on the other hand, because of their very low economic and political profile, would never have excited the sort of attempts at control which the British exercised on the Massachusetts Bay (Company. But in the absence of control over their own territory, the group strategy quickly unraveled. The Puritans lost the abilities to govern their territory, control the behavior of its inhabitants, and control immigration. And in the absence of these prerogatives, the Puritans gradually ceased being a well-defined group strategy. These trends were well in place by the end of the 17th century, less than 75 years after the origins of the colony. . . . Without control of a specific territory, the Puritans succumbed to their own individualistic tendencies and those of the surrounding culture.

One wonders what might have happened if the British colonial authorities had allowed the colony complete sovereignty and if it had ultimately become a nation-state. Such a state, based on a clearly articulated exclusivist group strategy, might have been extremely successful. Composed of a highly intelligent, educated, and industrious citizenry, and with a proneness to high fertility and strong controls promoting high-investment parenting, it might have become a world power. One can imagine that as the 19th century wore on. Puritan intellectuals would have begun to see themselves as an ethnic-racial group and that Darwinism would have replaced Christianity as the ideological basis of the state, at least among the well-educated. The demise of Puritanism is likely a major event in the history of European peoples.


99012

Posted by onlooker on Wed, 13 Feb 2008 23:45 | #

“Where did god come from, silver? Who designed the designer? *yawn* This is about as fascinating and relevant as watching paint dry.”

On the contrary, this subject is very fascinating; it highlights the central point in fact that humans—on their own—are intellectually incapable of understanding, or explaining, their origin.


99013

Posted by Desmond Jones on Wed, 13 Feb 2008 23:56 | #

When a baby is sick and it isn’t known if it will live the atheist will pray.  He may blurt it out clumsily but the meaning of his words and the one to whom they are addressed will be unmistakable.

The atheist also calls an ambulance. For they know hope does not reside in their prayer, but in the science of medicine.


99014

Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 14 Feb 2008 00:00 | #

Desmond,

I’m not sure what you are driving at, or whether you fully understand the thrust of these ideas.

I am running with the Darwinian grain, but acknowledging one inconvenient fact: that currently I cannot wholly explain from an evolutionary perspective the “honorable maturity” to which man strives.  Of his striving for personal status - a figure for fitness - we know.  But status is not the issue here, quite the reverse.  The maturation of which I speak is a thing of humility.  Further, personal status is not the goal of woman.  Yet woman, too, strives for this same completion, notwithstanding the Muslim belief that she does not have a soul.

Basically, what I am doing here is separating out the essential pursuit - observable in Islam, for example, in certain forms of Sufism - from the rule-following, religious crust.  I am then postulating a distant evolutionary explanation for the recondite place of essence in the life of Homo sapiens.

The religious crust - the worshipping, the ritualising, the evangelising, and so on - I am, as you fully understand, founding on genetic interests.

So that’s the schematic.

On the Nature (the Inate) and Nurture (the Acquired) aspects of my three-part model of man’s psychology there should be little general disagreement between us.  However, I assume that you are unfamiliar with the overlay concepts of absence and presence, and have not considered how Nurture impacts upon a mind marked by the former - that is, the lowly state of consciousness at work as I write these words and you read them.

Understand, I am reaching for a model of Man and mind that is truthful and can be foundational for philosophical purposes.  If I have not set that model forth with much skill, I apologise.  I will try to get better at this thinking game.


99015

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Thu, 14 Feb 2008 00:13 | #

It’s a good thing Pericles isn’t still around.  This thead would give him conniption fits.


99016

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Thu, 14 Feb 2008 00:22 | #

Don’t be dense, Desmond.  I’m talking about after the ambulance has already been called, the baby already seen by the doctors and specialists who’ve already done everything they could, and the grandmother, aunt and uncle are comforting the quietly sobbing mother.  And yes I’m talking from a memory of a scene I saw as a young man, one I’ll never forget till my dying day.


99017

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Thu, 14 Feb 2008 00:26 | #

That baby lived, by the way.  My own sons just went to his wedding in Long Island this past summer.


99018

Posted by onlooker on Thu, 14 Feb 2008 00:36 | #

Mr Scrooby,

Do you recall right after 9-11 the church pews were suddenly filled for a few weeks? All that self righteous smugness disappears quickly when people are in fear of their own safety. When people face the actual reality of their own death, isn’t it ironic how so many people that proclaim they don’t believe in God suddenly call upon God for comfort and reprieve?

Just an observation.


99019

Posted by Prozium on Thu, 14 Feb 2008 00:51 | #

And again, KMac emphasizes the exclusiveness of the Puritans enhanced their reproductive fitness.

Check out the demographics of Massachusetts. C’mon, Desmond. I know this must have you wincing.


99020

Posted by rocket on Thu, 14 Feb 2008 01:44 | #

well well ,  intellegent pro - tribalists that articulate the us verses them skin pigment dialectic . there is only one fly in the oinment : JESUS OF NAZARETH . and suprise surpise , he even ranks higher in power , authority, intellect and authenticity than martin luther king and oswald spengler.

clarification : it goes like this—Jesus verses Christianity . Jesus came to tear the family apart , tribalism , the cult of self , you name it . Christianty sought to put it back together . Christianity-Christendom made the same mistakes that the Jews made in regards to Jesus . they expected a messiah that was gonna kick butt and take names. they wanted a warrior . sound familar ? does not Euroman want that same warrior ? Euroman is so Jewish .

But leave it to GOD to appear on the scene in history with a ‘‘reversal of expectation ‘’ , an explode all of the walls that man has set up with his fellow man . Kierkegaard was right when he said ‘‘one must trample on ethics in order to become a knight of faith ‘’. the tribal mentality prefers another kind of knight . one that chooses conveience over truth and a sword instead of the cross.


99021

Posted by onlooker on Thu, 14 Feb 2008 02:14 | #

well well , intellegent pro - tribalists that articulate the us verses them skin pigment dialectic . there is only one fly in the oinment : JESUS OF NAZARETH . and suprise surpise , he even ranks higher in power , authority, intellect and authenticity than martin luther king and oswald spengler.


Tell that to the Islamofascists, not us.


99022

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Thu, 14 Feb 2008 02:40 | #

Onlooker, yes I do remember it, thanks.  I also remember from my boyhood hearing a man who’d been in combat in WW II say, “There’s no atheist in a foxhole,” a saying I’ve heard many a time since then.

Rocket, Christianity doesn’t require of us that we blind ourselves to race or pretend it doesn’t exist, or mandate our group racial/ethnocultural mass-suicide.  If you think it does, not only are you wrong, you’re a perfect example of a major defect in Christianity itself, to wit, the way it makes it difficult for men to understand precisely they DON’T have to acquiesce in their group’s mass suicide in order to “be good Christians by being extra-nice to non-whites” or whatever the “thinking” is (if you can call it “thinking,” a very big if).  A religion can possess all the truth in the world but if something about it makes it hard for its faithful to access its truth, so hard they keep getting it one-hundred-and-eighty degrees wrong, that religion has a fundamental defect which will sooner or later be its downfall.  Thou shalt not steal is pretty straighforward and doesn’t have this problem:  people don’t get it backwards, but imagine if they did.  You’d have people going around stealing under the mistaken impression Christianity required it of them.  Well, it’s that way with racial/ethnocultural suicide:  Christians all over the place are rushing to acquiesce in it, in the mistaken belief Christianity requires it of them.  Christianity does not mandate group suicide of races any more than it mandated group suicide of the Jim Jones cult members or the Heaven’s Gate loonies but for some reason Christians find that simple truth as hard to grasp as I found certain topics in senior-year math electives in college.  The priests could go a long way to straightening that misunderstanding out but won’t for some reason.  That’ll be their downfall and the downfall of the entire religion if they persist in their immoral negligence. 

Nothing in Christianity favors Rocket’s “[pseudo]Christian universalism” over Salter’s “Universal Nationalism.”  Nothing.  Rocket, you need to check out the blog sites “Spirit Water Blood” and “Cambria Will Not Yield,” and the Kinists generally.  Oh, and one more thing:  don’t try to fob off your weak-minded faux-Christian Jim-Jones-Kool-Aid-guzzling-style racially-suicidal clinical depression masquerading as Christianity here, because the regulars are neither that weak-minded nor that clinically depressed that they’d fall for it for one millisecond. 

Oh and by the way, of you’re so intent on putting into practice the Church’s supposed exhortation to Christian Raceless Universalism (as you see things that is, blinkered fool that you are), go be about it in the Sub-Sahara, Brazil, or ... where was that other place again? ... oh yes, Port Moresby.  Don’t try it here please, Rocket.  We’re Christians but not “Raceless Christian Universalists.”  We’re normal, you see:  it’s not Rocket science (... no pun intended, I’m sure) ....


99023

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Thu, 14 Feb 2008 02:44 | #

Christianity doesn’t see it as being mean to non-whites for whites not to commit racial/ethnocultural group suicide.  Morons like Rocket think it does. 

It doesn’t. 

I don’t know a simpler way to put it, and priests had better start clarifying that.


99024

Posted by Prozium on Thu, 14 Feb 2008 04:48 | #

Jesus came to tear the family apart , tribalism , the cult of self , you name it .

True dat.


99025

Posted by rocket on Thu, 14 Feb 2008 04:53 | #

you can either follow christianity or you can follow the Christ of the new testament . there is no nuetral ground . if you think that following Christ is suicidal then you fail to see the difference between the suicide and the martyr. something that st. Augustine made clear in the ‘‘CITY OF GOD’’ .

i notice that some of you are fond of qouting Chesterton . i like him too . Chesterton said ‘‘the suicide denys all life , the martyr affirms it ‘’. if you seek to defend ‘‘your people ‘’ then answer me this , what makes you any different than the pagan multiculteralists ? as far as i can see it is all social engineering and not the commands of Jesus .

Christ said about his own family ‘’ who are my mother , brother , and sister? those who do the will of GOD ‘’ . Christ commanded us to love our enemys . Christ is not asking you to do anything . Christ commands. since Christ died for everyone , picture in your mind him washing the feet of osama bin laden . if you think that you can do any less , then hide behind your patriotism , which is nothing more than the virtue of the viciuos .

you want a domesticated christianity with no teeth , that cant shake the world ? that is disfigured and powerless . that comprimises . then you will have it . you want to stick by ‘‘your people ‘’ like the other races ? thats fine by me . as a fellow american i will defend your right to do it .  but dont do it in the name of Jesus CHRIST. dont defame that sacred name .

by the way , i have preached the gospel to the islamofascists. they responded just like some of you all did . mmmm.


99026

Posted by Prozium on Thu, 14 Feb 2008 04:55 | #

Rocket, Christianity doesn’t require of us that we blind ourselves to race or pretend it doesn’t exist, or mandate our group racial/ethnocultural mass-suicide.

Christianity doesn’t require anti-racism, but the universalism in the Christian message easily lends itself to that interpretation. The same is true of liberalism. At face value, liberalism doesn’t require you to be an anti-racist. It is possible to be liberal (someone who believes in “freedom,” “equality,” and “tolerance”) while believing in the existence of racial differences. Eventually, the logic of liberalism will work itself out to the point where it starts to corrode racial and ethnic identity, as well as other customs and traditions. It works like cultural acid.


99027

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Thu, 14 Feb 2008 05:22 | #

More “Rocket science” ....

Rocket exemplifies postively THE WORST AND MOST OBNOXIOUS defect of Christianity as it is now taught:  the way it ensnares the weak-minded into taking pride in this truly nauseating faux-“Christian”-self-abnegation spectacle which these specimens always try to boast of.  One way you know it’s faux is Christianity never taught it; another way is these specimens are being “self-abnegating” with something that’s 1) not their personal property, and which 2) they, being totally soulless, don’t care about and wouldn’t even if it were their personal property:  the Euro races.  Notice Rocket, who takes such satisfaction in ostentatiously giving away the Euro race, doesn’t give away his personal savings, his own car, his house, or his other property.  Shouldn’t he be giving that away if he’s so “self-abnegating”???  But no, he’s only willing to give other people’s stuff away, stuff he doesn’t give two squats about.  But when you give away stuff that isn’t even yours and that you don’t give two squats about, is that called “self-abnegation”?  Doesn’t seem like it. 

The European race, which he doesn’t care about anyway, isn’t his personal property to give away.  It’s his posterity’s.  The whole “gesture” is faux from A to Z:  1) it’s not Christian, 2) it’s not his to give away, 3) and even if it were his, he doesn’t care about it so it’s no sacrifice for him whatsoever.  So where’s the “Christian” (it’s not called for by Christianity) and where’s the “self-abnegation” when he’s making no personal sacrifice whatsoever? 

When Lord Bertrand Russell, the philosopher, renounced his title of nobility (he was a hereditary earl) out of personal conviction opposed to hereditary aristocracy, he wasn’t able to renounce it for his son, only for himself.  His son Conrad could still inherit the title.  Rocket is giving away something bequesthed not just to him but his posterity forever, the European race, yet he’s giving it away irretrievably, taking it away not only from himself who spits on it, but from all his and our posterity, which he’s not entitled to do:  that’s THEIR inheritance he’s squandering in the supposed spirit of “Christian self-abnegation,” the inheritance of generations to come, and he has no right, Christian or otherwise, to squander it. 

Rocket’s whole schtick is vomit, and the whole Christian priesthood are vomit if they persist in letting phonies like him get away with their disgusting pose, especially if they influence the gullible.


99028

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Thu, 14 Feb 2008 05:37 | #

“Christianity doesn’t require anti-racism, but the universalism in the Christian message easily lends itself to that interpretation.”  (—Prozium)

That’s a major defect in Christianity, analagous to, let’s say, the defect in the system of Roman numerals.  Using Roman numerals, addition was hard, multiplication required brilliance, and it took a mathematician to do long division.  Ordinary people couldn’t manage it.  Certain things were too hard when using Roman numerals, so the system was replaced.  Likewise, in Christianity certain simple truths seem too hard for ordinary people to grasp, such as that we’re not required under Christianity to self-abnegate ourselves to racial extinction.  If that remains too hard for the ordinary rank-and-file to grasp, Christianity is in big trouble.  Again, the Church establishments are falling down on the job in not clarifying this for the faithful and their negligence is a crime.  There’s nothing unchristian about Salterian Universal Nationalism.  Christianity frowns neither on Salterian Universal Nationalism nor on “Christian Universalism,” meaning if the people want the former it’s fine with Christianity, just as it’s fine with it if they want the latter.  BUT THE FORMER IS IN NO WAY WHATSOEVER A SIN.  The Church needs to be setting the record straight on that, but they’re deliberately not doing it.


99029

Posted by VLC on Thu, 14 Feb 2008 06:35 | #

if you christians can save the West and the White race using the Bible and your sermons then I’ll line up to be baptised and I’ll even spend years punishing myself like the monk in the DaVinci Code but being like Thomas I need to see some evidence that you are right. You’re wasting your time trying to convince people here that christianity is the way by arguing with words, you should demonstrate it. Argue with deeds and results. I will support anything that works. 


Prozium: “It looks to me like the Church is a collaborator everywhere.”

in France and in Holland particularly. They behave exactly as Jean Raspail described them in The Camp of the Saints. When the liberation comes we should shave their heads along with those of the women who slept with the invaders


“Christian universalism lies at the noumenal root of our difficulties.”

but you see back in healthier days our christian ancestors were more than christians, their religion wasn’t an obstacle for sane ideas: they could be christians and nationalists, christians and racists, christians and this or christians and that. Even Hitler considered himself a christian. Their religion didn’t really interfere with their earthly decisions outside of the personal sphere, i.e. individual sins. The Western mind was and still is poisoned by self-destructive universalisms of all kinds and this same poison got the West’s religion. Consider religion as a part of the body, its condition reflects the condition of the patient. A symptom more than a cause.


99030

Posted by VLC on Thu, 14 Feb 2008 06:43 | #

Mouff is betting her shirt – and ours - on the staple method of all social constructionists and their Foucaultian and sometimes Gramscian sons and daughters: denial of essence.

Leftists are secular creationists and their irrationality and their hatred will kill us all if we don’t kill it first. Being right isn’t enough to win, we must fight and defeat the crazies. That’s simply what we must do, either that or we die.

I don’t care what the Left or the Right is, I don’t call myself a conservative nor a liberal or whatever else, I don’t think in those terms. If those who call themselves conservatives harm whites intentionally or not then we have to push them aside. If they’re on our side intentionally or not then we leave them alone or help them. I’m a man of the white race and that’s the starting point for the rest - and we are being overtly attacked as men of the white race in the academic world by skunks like Mouff and more subversively by jews in the entertainment business and the media. Once you realize that you realize that the world isn’t a big complicated and murky place that needs intellectuals to explain it to the man on the street. All I had to do to understand the mess we’re in was to stop watching TV, discover American Renaissance and listen to William Pierce’s broadcasts. I didn’t need to read tens of books or even to understand the concept of EGI.

I don’t understand why some of you seem to have the need to hold grand theories or doctrines. Things are simpler than what nutcases of the MultiCult like Mouffette want you to believe


99031

Posted by Desmond Jones on Thu, 14 Feb 2008 07:16 | #

...the lowly state of consciousness at work as I write these words and you read them.

The question is, GW, do we all see green the same way? Or if reverse-engineering Star Trek’s Lieut. Commander Data, was merely dismantling a machine or snuffing out a sentient life? Are there true zombies—beings who act like us but in whom there is no self, actually feeling anything. Is that the deal?


99032

Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 14 Feb 2008 11:34 | #

Desmond,

Absence/presence is not absence<>presence, like blue<>green.  It is not a continuum open to subjective interpretation.  It is dark/light.  Our ordinary consciousness is flawed and dark, irrespective of the intelligence operating within it.  Everyone is a “zombie” if you like, Goethe and Wittgenstein no less than the feted recipients of the Darwin Awards.

Presence is the precondition for the (often fleeting) emergence of “I”, the authentic, the self in being ... essence.  Of course, the ordinary working of the mind always resumes in all its mechanical tedium, and the thief returns.

I stress that anti-essentialism, as the term is employed in Pomo, is not a war on human essence in this fankly sacred sense.  It is a war on the properties we ascribe not just to Homo sapiens, but to absolutely anything - animal, vegetable or mineral.


99033

Posted by onlooker on Thu, 14 Feb 2008 15:04 | #

VLC wrote: “Once you realize that you realize that the world isn’t a big complicated and murky place that needs intellectuals to explain it to the man on the street. All I had to do to understand the mess we’re in was to stop watching TV, discover American Renaissance and listen to William Pierce’s broadcasts. I didn’t need to read tens of books or even to understand the concept of EGI.”

I couldn’t agree more! And for the umpteenth time: It’s not TRADITIONAL Christianity that is plaguing us, it’s MODERN LIBERALISM and RACIAL UNIVERSALISM that are. The masses are brainwashed mainly through the garbage that emanates from the TV set, not from churches. Besides, most leftists, or died-in-the-wool liberals, don’t go to church anyway. Sadly, in post Constitution America, and post Christian Europe, the Church has been replaced by the TV.

Regarding racial universalism, the late great Samuel Francis said it well in his essay titled:

Race and the American Identity

http://www.amren.com/mtnews/archives/2005/02/race_and_the_am.php


99034

Posted by wjg on Thu, 14 Feb 2008 15:11 | #

GW,

Your post and the subsequent discussion is excellent; a challenging and important question and a serious grasping for answers.

Over the past two years I have been in the process of better understanding “God” and “his” place in my life / in our lives.  The quotes are to emphasize the nebulous meaning of the word not that there isn’t a god or gods.  I love being a fly on the wall in these God discussions between passionate atheists and theists.  They speak past each other to such a degree that an edifying conversation is impossible.

I have become so completely disillusioned by the Christianity espoused through all orthodox channels, be they liberal or conservative, that I have rejected it because it is everything I expect of poison and nothing of remedy.  As Revilo Oliver said Christianity has had several reformations (from Luther to Marx), all in an ever harmonious direction towards the gods of this world.  For Rocket to suggest that contemporary “Christianity” is a barrier to the cult of Euro-suicide (personified by his use of the word “Christ”) is absurd.  Contemporary Christianity is what he says his “Christ” is: one of a seemingly infinite variety of institutions who have declared war or denied succor to Euro-man. His (and he is definitely “orthodox” these days) Christianity has been described best as Judeo-xtianity.  It is the pseudo-spiritual element in the trinity of the liberal cult from the esoteric perspective; the other pieces being The Father – Jewry – and The Son – the pc martyr archetype (e.g. MLK).  In this new moral universe Euro-man clearly plays the role of Satan – having destroyed Eden.  But the new heaven is fast approaching as Satan is about to be vanquished eternally.

Of course (pre-marxian) Christians only see the exoteric pieces of this shell game; actually thinking there is a substantive difference between Jonestown and Hymietown (our world) when all that separates them is timeliness (slow vs. quick) and method (miscegenation/faggotry/pacifism/abortion/sterility vs. cyanide).  They are given all the fantasy; all the hope fors; all the maybes; like a literal omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent diety, an eternal (but otherworldly) paradise, and eternal hell for the “others”.  Might these things be literally true?  I don’t know.  It also might be true that those who believe them were themselves tested and found wanting and are headed for the very pit they think was intended for their enemies.  Who knows.  What we do know – albeit imperfectly at points in time - is what our minds and spirits have been created to or evolved to know and that is what is in front of us.  What we also know is that the string pullers in this production get all the measurable gain.  The Christian is only left with the hope that the story of the Rich Man and Lazarus proves true again.

Fred well describes what Christianity should be from the perspective of the interests of Euros.  But Rocket and the atheist Christian critics like Prozium, FB, and AR are right about what Christianity is.  Can it, should it, be reformed to be consistent with and help to propel holistic, progressive (real) life?  I don’t know.  I am not sure whether Christianity is currently in a corrupted state (the view of FS and Kinists) or has just come “home” after a long detour as a semi-acceptable, Euro-friendly weltanschauung (the view of RPO).

Jesus as quoted in the Bible has many words of wisdom as well as many that are a bit perplexing to put it mildly.  All should follow this command of his and I’m paraphrasing: “If a tree does not bear fruit, pull it up by the roots and burn it”.

That wisdom should be heeded if we are to escape our current spiral of descent.  It may well apply to the edifice erected in his wake and in his name.

Bottom line is we need a spirituality that works.  We need myths and stories that bind us as a people(s).  Without these things we can never even try to answer “why?”  Most of these things are beneath a thin layer of dust that only needs to be blown off but some are new to our times and we must be pioneers in their implementation.


99035

Posted by Rusty Mason on Thu, 14 Feb 2008 15:31 | #

Rocket,

You are not really following The Christ, as hard as that might be for you to believe just now; you are regurgitating radical communist (liberal) dogma, built on Christian heresy (errors) of centuries past, and perfected to a sweet poison by a hostile, foreign, parasitic tribe of spiritually-challenged neurotics.  If you were better read in history and philosophy, you would see what even the muslims and the atheistic nihilists on this blog see.

A messiah should lead you to Truth, not away from it.  “Truth through faith.”  Ever heard that?  That’s what it is supposed to mean, what it used to mean in Christianity’s glory days: find the whole, universal, cosmic Truth through a combination of faith and logic.  One needs knowledge, logic, reasoning, etc., but one also needs faith to complete ones understanding before ones spirit can rest, before peace (heaven) will come. You’ve got the faith part, but your knowledge and reasoning are very weak.  This is not all your fault, we all live a most feckless and idiotic society today, where real knowledge and hard study work is discouraged.

Best,
Rusty


99036

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Thu, 14 Feb 2008 15:58 | #

I made comments à propos of this discussion in another thread, comments I stand by.  They’re here, here, here, here, here, and here.


99037

Posted by Rusty Mason on Thu, 14 Feb 2008 16:08 | #

WJG,

“Bottom line is we need a spirituality that works.  We need myths and stories that bind us as a people(s).  Without these things we can never even try to answer “why?” Most of these things are beneath a thin layer of dust that only needs to be blown off but some are new to our times and we must be pioneers in their implementation.”

Yes, we have these, in the Northern and Celtic gods of old.  The only modern group I’ve found so far that seems to have a real understanding of spirituality, reason, and natural law, as interpreted by European peoples, is the AFA, the Asatru Folk Assembly, headed by Stephen McNallen (http://www.runestone.org).  It is folkish (respects ancestors, heritage, and race), theodish (respects natural law, hierarchy, responsibility, duty, etc.), and is reasonable (not given to ideologies such as universalism, communism, liberalism, socialism, nazism, etc.). 

If you prefer the Southern European beliefs, there is Hellenismos (aka Hellenism or Latinism), a most fascinating way of ordering your life and viewing the world.  You could literally read and study 100 lifetimes and never cover all of the best of what has been thought about it and what has been written by its best thinkers.  It is fascinating to me per se, but also because parts of it could be a model for what Northern European may have been like at one time, and a pointer to what movements like Asatru and Celtic spirituality could be in the future.

Vale,
Rusty


99038

Posted by onlooker on Thu, 14 Feb 2008 17:08 | #

“I don’t understand why some of you seem to have the need to hold grand theories or doctrines.”

Yes, keep it simple.

1- Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

2- If you’re a Europid, do not violate the genetic interest of your own ethnic group.

3- Whatever the neo-cons advise you to do, do the opposite and you’ll be okay.


99039

Posted by wjg on Thu, 14 Feb 2008 18:38 | #

Fred,

Your links to that earlier thread and your posts in this one are all spot on.  Your emphasis on the cowardice, hypocrisy, and treachery of the NWO’s satraps masquerading as Christian theologians is perfect.  They always give away things as does the limousine liberal: things that are neither theirs to give nor things which they care about.

If the Vatican wants to turn itself into the third world’s drain field as opposed to all the historic Euro-lands it still holds shamanistic sway over then its sacrifice could be respected both for its legitimacy and - thankfully - finality.  Of course it serves a different master who will suffer no others and him they serve faithfully, getting a few scraps from the table in return.

Christianity had its age as the defender of the West but whether this age was a distortion of its pedigree or its fulfillment is not clear.  Judging by the conviction of many judeo-xtians - as evidenced by the fairly typical Rocket - winding up a cadre of commissars to implement their people’s suicide is something that Biblical cannon is well suited for.  Other flavors of this fanaticism were revealed during the Hundred Years War, the abolitionist movement, and others.  This does not bode well for its future utility. 

As with the entity still called the United States Christianity has been divested of almost all its former value.  Even if it can be reformed to a race-neutral institution it might be best left alone.


99040

Posted by wjg on Thu, 14 Feb 2008 18:42 | #

Rusty,

Thanks for the info.


99041

Posted by VLC on Thu, 14 Feb 2008 19:47 | #

onlooker:

The masses are brainwashed mainly through the garbage that emanates from the TV set, not from churches.

There are many churches and christian groups promoting international adoption (there’s a christian guy who has a blog I don’t have the link but he blogs about the fat baby nigger he adopted in Africa and how it’s a gift from The Lord and so on) and many non-religious groups do the same (I was driving through a rich neighborhood the other day [about 15 minutes from Montreal] and I saw a fat white woman with a baby nigger too dark to be a mixed one that she must have adopted), you see christians supporting the mexican invasion because the mexicans are said to be christians too and that Jesus said to welcome everyone in your house and you see many non-christian white liberals supporting the mexican invasion too because they believe that opposing it would be to commit the sin of racism.

There’s not a lot of difference between the TV set and the churches, the poison is the same, the lies are the same. In Europe I doubt you could find even a single priest who would openly oppose the destruction of the european race. Recently in France there were Franciscan monks demonstrating in support of illegal aliens (called the ‘sans-papiers’, meaning the paperless or the unauthorized):

http://www.fdesouche.com/?p=1333

The christian religion isn’t a dam or a force, it follows the trends and the moods of our race, because its ranks are filled with white people. You guys need to read the Camp of the Saints.


99042

Posted by Al Ross on Thu, 14 Feb 2008 20:22 | #

Fred, on a personal note regarding atheists under pressure resorting to prayer, I left that straw unclutched when,some years ago, armed home invaders entered my house, assaulted my visiting parents, tied up my wife and me while threatening us (infants included) with death and hurled our maid down the stairs. My father, an elder of the Church of Scotland, didnt mention to me when we discussed the attack whether or not he had called for supernatural assistance.


99043

Posted by rocket on Thu, 14 Feb 2008 20:55 | #

There really is no need for ad hominum here gentleman . first let me tell you who i am not : i am not a liberal . i am not a communist. and i dont own a house . i happen to despise all 3 of those things. i am against the taking of all life. so forget the jim jones analogys . i am against abortion , war , the death penalty , and euthansia . and if you cant tell te difference between the suicide and a martyr then what can i say ?

what i am for and have been doing in the last 3 decades has been to follow my Lord Jesus . Now ,  this is an intellegent board. it was reccommend to me by a very dear freind of mine that shares your views. what i am setting up here is an athithesis to your thesis . i happen to agree with some of the views on this board.  but maybe for different reasons .

i am for building the wall to stop illegals . why ? the preservation of the nation state that st. Paul talks about in Acts 17 to the Athenians as in regards to GOD setting up nations with boundrys . i am against the WTO undermining our sovergnty as a nation . and i think that when it comes right down to it races have a hard enough time getting along with each other . when you mix them there is trouble. but , as we read in Acts 13 , that is what the Apostles did at the first sending out . that is why multiculturism is a false divine substitute for the real thing . only GOD can unite people of other races. and since you all can read , and if you believe in the new testament that is what GOD is seeking to do .

so , here is your choice : choose your own genetics or obey Christ . there are more important things in this world than preserving a race since all men will die anyway . and that important thing is the kingdom of heaven on earth . and if you had any guts and faith and fear of GOD you would do just that.


99044

Posted by onlooker on Thu, 14 Feb 2008 21:03 | #

“The christian religion isn’t a dam or a force, it follows the trends and the moods of our race, because its ranks are filled with white people.”

Exactly, and the trends and moods of our race,including the Christian clergy, are conveyed to the masses via the TV. The anti-white liberals use the power of the TV to mold our minds in the shape the they want to form it into. The modern Church, meaning post WWII, acquiesced to the popular culture rather than maintaining their central message of salvation through Christ. So, yes, the modern Christian churches are filled with, and run by, a bunch of racial universalists. That said, I still maintain it’s a mistake to focus in on Traditional Christianity as a destructive force. We should direct our attention on modern liberalism and racial universalism/egalitarianism. It’s modern liberals that are the enemy, whether they be atheist, agnostic, Christian, or whatever. Furthermore, it’s WHITE liberals that are the most damaging to the white race. Come to think of it, I’m not sure if there’s such a thing as a non-white liberal? Non-whites align themselves with masochistic white liberals only because they recognise it’s to their own ethnic advantage to do so.


Yes, I’m well aware of the perverted heretics that occupy and preach false Christianity in the churches; but (sorry for belaboring the phrase), I’m not going to throw the baby out with the bath water.


99045

Posted by Desmond Jones on Thu, 14 Feb 2008 21:27 | #

This is it. Correct?

The essence of antiessentialism

Comments about the “clash of civilizations” and such like provoke complaints about “essentialism,” the supposed error or sin of attributing a particular fixed character to a group of people. The thought behind such complaints is that something as complex as a civilization or religion or race must be a heterogeneous collection of things that seems to acquire unity and take on a particular character only in relation to other things and to the purposes of the viewer.

That general philosophical view is appealing to many people because it reflects strong skeptical and subjectivist tendencies in modern thought. We can’t know things as they are in themselves, only things as they are to us, which is what we make of them. It also seems to have a practical result: if something is what it is only in relation to its setting and what one makes of it, then one can in effect change the thing by changing its environment and how one reads it. Whatever that thing does is therefore really one’s own doing, and whatever it seems to do habitually must be the reflection of one’s own obsessions. If Islam is aggressive, or the wogs (who begin at Calais) are untrustworthy, then the fault is not wholly—or perhaps at all—in Islam or the wogs. It is we ourselves who construct Islam and the wogs through our classifications, who elicit their conduct through our actions, and who give it the significance it has for us through our interpretations.

It’s hard to know what to do with such a line of thought. There’s no doubt that people often construct the situations they find themselves in. Still, taken as an overall theory the point is useless. For one thing, it always involves a double standard. it can’t be applied generally because doing so would disintegrate all categories and make thought and discussion impossible. If it’s somehow illegitimate for Slovaks to complain about gypsy “thievishness,” because gypsies and their supposed qualities are a creation of Slovak society, then how can it be legitimate for the EU or the gypsies themselves to complain about Slovak “racism”? If the EU shuns the Slovaks because the Slovaks shun the gypsies and drawing lines that exclude is bad, who’s being irrational?

What follows from any of this? Only that it’s silly to think you can quash a line of discussion by saying “essentialism.” One can always complain that a conception like “Islam” or “the black race” is being applied in too simpleminded a way. One should give the particulars, though. If the conceptions have been used for a long time by a wide variety of people on both sides of the lines they draw, there must be something in them that reflects important realities. To say there is something essentially illegitimate about using them in reasoning about public affairs is itself to reason is an overly schematic and thus culpably “essentialist” fashion.

Posted by Jim Kalb at October 18, 2002

Again, it’s a metaphysical construct. It’s not science because it’s not falsifiable. How is it a third rail for evolutionary theory?


99046

Posted by onlooker on Thu, 14 Feb 2008 21:28 | #

Al,

I’m really sorry that horrible incident happened to you, your maid, and your family. What happened is everyone’s nightmare. My sincere condolences to out to you and yours. I hope you all are fully recovered from the truman.

Are the perps in prison now?

Your unfortunate experience serves to outline the question:  Why do bad things happen to good people.


99047

Posted by onlooker on Thu, 14 Feb 2008 21:32 | #

“I hope you all are fully recovered from the truman.”

Also, I hope you all are fully recovered from the trauma.


99048

Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 14 Feb 2008 22:17 | #

Al,

I second onlooker’s gesture of sorrow.

Desmond,

“How is it a third rail for evolutionary theory?”

Jim, as usual, does a nice job.  Anti-essentialism is very like anti-racism in its political application.  It is pre-programmed for one given purpose, which is left-revolutionary in character.  Its entire claim to moral worth resides in the prejudice, “hate” etc which it can attach to the white claimant to hegemony.

My point is that regardless of the left’s machinations, Conservatives and traditionalists should be vigorously arguing for the nature of things.  They dont, and that fact both turns them into petty anti-essentialists and tells us everything we need to know them.

That said, arguing for the nature of things necessarily draws from evolutionary theory, n’est-ce pas?

I am still puzzled by your objection.


99049

Posted by Al Ross on Fri, 15 Feb 2008 05:24 | #

Thank you, onlooker and GW, for your sympathetic words. The perps were not caught. An Assistant Commissioner of Police (with whom I sometimes drink) kindly came to my house despite its being outside his area, and he surmised that they were illegal immigrants, so the cops and a posse of immigration officers rousted a squatter settlement and rounded up (sans kid gloves) all foreigners without valid visas and jailed them for a month or so prior to mass deportation.


99050

Posted by Desmond Jones on Fri, 15 Feb 2008 06:56 | #

Ok, GW, however, your initial statement was,

I am a Darwinian with a question about teleology.  The point is that something is outside Western epistemology, and it is situated at the sacred core of every genuine religion (or, in the case of Christianity, once was).  But it has nothing whatsoever to do with faith or worship, which are genetic endowments.  It is not accessible through faith.  It is the question ... the mystery of whether a man might, in some way, become a god, and for us it is unanswerable.

What part does design play here? For an evolutionist the question is not unanswerable. It is a simple no. Moreover, the man god symbolism is not at the centre of every major religion, only Christianity.


99051

Posted by Guessedworker on Fri, 15 Feb 2008 09:18 | #

Subsutite “honourable maturity” for “god”, and the argument is perhaps less offensive to you.  I don’t mind which formulation is used, since the issue is the same.  The issue is: what would be the rightful estate of a life lived in high consciousness of the essential self?

Now, and this might upset you still further, I have to tell you that there is another aspect to the brain which science is yet to seriously address.  I mentioned the path of the ecstatic.  Beatification (in the sense of the coming of visions in the mind) is reportedly either emotional or intellectual in nature.  That is, it can express through the language of imagery or symbology, both of them thoughtless in the conventional sense.  Now, perhaps it’s just a good trip induced by voluntary physical hardship ... a mess-around with serotinin and a few other chemicals in the brain, I don’t know.  Perhaps that’s not all it is.  But the same old existential question and the same three possible answers that I put in a comment earlier still apply.

1) It’s no more meaningful than any experience of brain-manipulating drugs.

2) It’s natural to Man, and would furnish him with a sublime understanding of reality were it not for his fall into an unconscious life.

3) It is the Divine voice.

Forget the exhibitions of the faithful.  We can explain that behaviour.  Beatification and the consciousness of “I” are the real nuts for Darwinian thought to crack.


99052

Posted by rocket on Fri, 15 Feb 2008 16:16 | #

throwing away my Euro interitance ? well , i guess its better than having Euro idolatry . i owe nothing to that which is cultural and fleshly , but all to my Lord and Saviuor Jesus Christ. treason against my ancestors ? nothing short of it will you make you his disciple .

i see the words CHRISTIAN UNIVERSALISM banded about in the pergorative on this site alot . but does any one really understand what it is ? first off the term is redundant . every true follower of Jesus is a universalist. this is never to be confused with the counterfeit politcally correct multicults . they are seeking by their own man made power to substitute that which was wrought in GOD during the age of the Apostles as seen in the book of Acts.

look at Acts 13 . why does Luke chronicle these different races that normally would hate each other and state that ‘‘those who believed where together ‘’? why was the first sending out of the Apostles in Antioch ? because of its heterogeniety . GOD was showing that he could break these differences down FOR HIS GLORY . the multicults of our day dont do it for GOD’S glory but for their own utopianism . and how many on this board are intersted in GOD’S glory ? your too busy worshipping at the alter of your own genepool . your so jewish . they gaurd their genepool and earthly power too.

so , no wonder the reaction to this counterfeit is your kind of segregationalism . so , we have the multicults counterfeiters and the reactionary white fear culture. what do they have in commen? they are both missing the purpose of GOD on earth . which is that GOD did not create man to kill each other , but love each other. that is what Christ taught and lived . and for those who have said that i am not a christian becuase i believe this , either cant read the new testament , or their perception of the human race boils down only to genepool and skin color. pity.

and so the psuedo debate about racial homogeniety verse racial heterogeneity drags on and distracts us from the dignity that GOD wants to give us as being more than psycho-social beings , but rather spirits created in his image.


99053

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Fri, 15 Feb 2008 16:39 | #

Rocket is completely degenerate and a perfect example of the kind of degenerateness Christianity stumbles into when it’s not careful.  It’s nihilism.  We’ve all seen Jewish nihilism.  This is the Christian variety (probably related at some deep level, the two being sister religions).  You wanna know what Nietzsche rightly LOATHED about Christianity?  Read Rocket’s post above:  you’ll be staring a sample of it right in the face.


99054

Posted by torgrim on Fri, 15 Feb 2008 19:02 | #

Al Ross;

My condolences.

How utterly symbolic, of the times we live in.


99055

Posted by Desmond Jones on Fri, 15 Feb 2008 22:43 | #

Beatification and the consciousness of “I” are the real nuts for Darwinian thought to crack.

Sorry, GW, but no sale. People may believe what they want. It’s not upsetting. The point is only that mixing metaphysics with science does not a Darwinian make.


99056

Posted by Guessedworker on Fri, 15 Feb 2008 23:54 | #

Desmond,

These two exercises of a non-ordinary consciousness - meaning, consciousness of self and consciousness of the beatific - are either experientially real or they are delusions.  Their reality ... their existence would lie squarely in the material world.  As actions of the mind they would be phenomena, not noumena.

As such, they are fit subjects for scientific examination.  The objective would be to explicate them in terms of fitness gain, just as the impulse to faith can be explicated.  And although the mechanism for that is not at all understood today, nor is perhaps even imaginable, that does not mean that science should draw back from the challenge.  After all, the vermiform appendix exists despite the absence of any explanation by medical science.


99057

Posted by Desmond Jones on Sat, 16 Feb 2008 06:01 | #

...are either experientially real or they are delusions.

Why? Evolutionary biology is currently unable to explain cogniton or correlate it to fitness therefore it must be a delusion? It’s the same argument Creationists apply to the appendix. Science traditionally proclaimed the appendix vestigial. More recently the old remnant apparently is discovered to be a hot breeding ground for “good” bacteria, which aids in the digestive process. It just goes to show evolution is a believer in teaching old dog’s new tricks. However, because of the Darwinist’s non-explanation for the function of the appendix, Creationists immediately suggest a teleological explanation. It was a curse.

If it can’t be proven real it must be a delusion (which really means it’s a God intervention because who else could create that kind of delusion). It’s analogous to the fossil record or abscence of, presented to undermine evolution. Knowledge of the brain like the geologic record is imperfect. Unless every single minute transitional form is revealed, then it must be God in the mix.

Evolution discounts God whether secular or non-secular. It can’t be bothways.


99058

Posted by Guessedworker on Sat, 16 Feb 2008 09:12 | #

Yes, Desmond.  That’s what I said.  Again, I am puzzled as to why you will yourself to a completely purposeless diametric opposition.

Anyway, I repeat: I am an evolutionist with a question about aspects of the life of Man which manifest in a sense or, perhaps, a process of becoming.  And that question is: given that these extraordinarily elusive and, therefore, scientifically near-ignored phenomena of consciousness have no apparent evolutionary purpose, why do they exist? 

As you say, the only fit answer for a scientist is: today we just do not know, but perhaps tomorrow we shall.

My purpose, then, is not to introduce the Divine into Man’s mentation, but to introduce all of Man into ours.  Even if I can’t explain everything today, my model of Man must accomodate the possibility of a rational understanding of the phenomena associated with spirituality, from the most common to the most rare: the impulse of faith; the model of absence/presence and the emergence of “I” which the latter portends; the life-process of maturation as a “present” being; beatific consciousness.

These are part of the essence of Man, regardless of their seeming godliness.  Lenin wrote them all off as “opium”, but he was a religionist too, in his way.  You and I are not.  We don’t need to disagree on this.


99059

Posted by rocket on Sat, 16 Feb 2008 21:32 | #

Fred , what appears to an unbeliever on the outside while looking at the followers of Jesus as nihilism, is on the inside of the believer is the supernatural life of GOD .

weather it be Tacitus , Celsus ,  Gibbon , or Nietzsche , they were all looking at this from the outside . and since they have nothing eternally to offer , they are the real nihilists.

since 100 per cent of every generation dies , what else is there but the life of GOD ?

the fundamental axiom of all intellect is to go back to the source. in the case of this debate , the source is the text called the new testament . in it you will find inclusion of all , and a sharp rebuke from john the baptist , Jesus , and his Apostles against their own people for being too tribal and excluding the gentiles from salvation .

show me in the text otherwise ,. then we have a debate. until then you are just hurling invectives .


99060

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Sat, 16 Feb 2008 22:20 | #

“then we have a debate”

Right, I can’t wait.


99061

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Sat, 16 Feb 2008 22:29 | #

“since 100 per cent of every generation dies , what else is there but the life of GOD?”  (—Off His Rocket)

Here is your nihilism right here, by the way:  he comes right out and says it in black and white:  “We all die anyway, so what difference does anything make?”  Couldn’t be clearer.  This right here is one of the biggest problems with Christianity:  it exerts an attraction on depressive degenerates who interpret it as offering them a home, and they move right in and proceed to distort it and get everything ass-backwards.


99062

Posted by rocket on Sun, 17 Feb 2008 23:12 | #

Fred , i would not call lving forever with GOD nihilism . look at the root of the word . ...the nihil , nothing , nada. those of us who are found faithful and rise with Christ on the final day run in a parallex to nihilism by definition . also , that ressurrection life begins at the new birth now is we believe . once again i go back to the new testament .

now , i looked at another post and you said that christianity cant have it both ways . it cant be universal and be for preserving white man tribal . i agree with you . there are those who seek to have it both ways .At least you and i know where we stand . by the same token , if you claim to be a christian and you cant substantiate an argument against christian universalism from the new testament, then are you not trying to have it both ways ? my challenge was to use the text. if not then we dont have a debate but rather a subjective projection of how we wish to make the world in our own image. and we remained deadlocked.


99063

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Sun, 17 Feb 2008 23:52 | #

“we remain deadlocked.”

Drat, I wish Rocket hadn’t said that.  It’s gonna keep me from sleeping nights.  I feel sure of it.


99064

Posted by onlooker on Mon, 18 Feb 2008 02:31 | #

“now , i looked at another post and you said that christianity cant have it both ways . it cant be universal and be for preserving white man tribal . i agree with you .”

I’m a Christian who is fervently for preserving the white-race. Yes, Christianity IS universal, it is meant for the salvation of ALL ethnic groups. The crucial difference between Christian racial-egalitarians and race-realist Christians, is that race-realist Christians don’t believe we have to willingly submit to forced race replacement in order receive salvation. There is something written in the Catechism called the Doctrine of Self Defence, you know!


99065

Posted by onlooker on Mon, 18 Feb 2008 03:03 | #

“The crucial difference between Christian racial-egalitarians and race-realist Christians, is that race-realist Christians don’t believe we have to willingly submit to forced race replacement in order receive salvation.”

Or to put it another way: Fighting off the barbarians that seek to destroy our gene pool does not preclude us from salvation.


99066

Posted by rocket on Tue, 19 Feb 2008 00:35 | #

Onlooker, GOD is merciful , and so i agree with you that our salvation cannot be lost by fighting . However , that is not GOD’S will .

Jesus , the Apostles , and the church fathers of the patristic age pre-Constantine all spoke out against taking up arms . and they all lived it . as we read Tertullians ‘‘Apology’’ , he equates being in the military with infanticide.

Everything changed when that genuis st. Augustine came up with his ‘‘principle of proportinality just war theory’’ was posited to the Church and adopted into a cathechism of self defense . keeping this in mind , there is as Kierkegaard writes in his 15 page essay called ‘‘the difference between a genuis and an Apostle ‘’ the decisive qualitative difference being one of authority .

the genuis has no divine authority . the Apostle does . Ergo , the Apostolic writings in the new testament trump the brilliant work of Augustine . hence the famous debate between the jansenists and the Jesuits in the 17th century with Pascal caught in the middle .


99067

Posted by onlooker on Wed, 20 Feb 2008 15:20 | #

‘’the difference between a genuis and an Apostle ‘’ the decisive qualitative difference being one of authority . the genuis has no divine authority . the Apostle does .”

Excellent point, rocket.

“he equates being in the military with infanticide.”

Infanticide? I take it you’re professing the assumption: If you’re not a pacifist, you’re not practicing divinely inspired Christianity; ie, false Christianity?

In light of the fact that the world is overflowing with murderous criminals, I don’t agree with the Christian pacifists. I admit I’m not not as learned on the subject as you, but my common sense tells me the ‘legitimate defence’ argument comports with the highest Christian values. I believe the Catholic Church has it right.

From the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

“2263 The legitimate defense of persons and societies is not an exception to the prohibition against the murder of the innocent that constitutes intentional killing. “The act of self-defense can have a double effect: the preservation of one’s own life; and the killing of the aggressor. . . . The one is intended, the other is not.”

2265 Legitimate defense can be not only a right but a grave duty for one who is responsible for the lives of others. The defense of the common good requires that an unjust aggressor be rendered unable to cause harm. For this reason, those who legitimately hold authority also have the right to use arms to repel aggressors against the civil community entrusted to their responsibility.


99068

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Wed, 20 Feb 2008 15:49 | #

Onlooker, the fact that the Vatican isn’t right now setting its best clerks, scholars, and theologians to uncovering and making explicit every single solitary text in Christianity having the effect of acknowledging whether directly or indirectly the right of communities to all reasonable, humane self-defense against racial/ethnocultural attack — and the setting by a nation of its own national immigration policy lies within the realm of the “reasonable” and the “humane” and is therefore permitted under Christianity, and yes the “racial” is fully and completely part of all that wherever the concept applies — can only mean one thing:  the Vatican supports the current Eurospherewide Post-1933-Forced-Race-Replacement-of-Whites-Régime.  The Jews keep blaming the Vatican for, according to them, having either supported or insufficiently opposed the Nazi government’s treatment of Jews.  I blame the Vatican because it blatantly supports and actively colludes with the present forced race-replacement régime.  Has anyone on the planet heard so much as a peep out of the Vatican in regard to the current race-replacement crisis — which has been in the planning stage since at least the 1930s, the implementation stage since the mid-1970s, and going at a full gallop since the mid-1980s — other than telling Catholics explicitly or implicitly they have to swallow it if not outright rejoice in it?  No, no one.


99069

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Wed, 20 Feb 2008 15:54 | #

(Nux Gnomica, don’t read the comment just above — it risks jarring your “liberal sensibilities” and coming across as too long and, to put it frankly, bonkers.  I’ll post another one later on recipes for baking the best-ever chocolate-chip cookies.  You can read that one.)


99070

Posted by onlooker on Wed, 20 Feb 2008 17:20 | #

“I blame the Vatican because it blatantly supports and actively colludes with the present forced race-replacement régime.”

Fred Scrooby, let’s be frank and to the point. We both know it’s not the Religion of Catholicism that caused the problem you describe. It’s the flawed men who’ve occupied and occupy the Vatican that are negligent in their protest.

I’m not denying the Church is aiding and abetting or even advocating for illegal immigrants, BUT, the main reason for race-replacement must laid where it belongs. It’s main players are bussiness working in concert with government. Rapacious businessmen and traitorous politicians. Mexicans are not invading the USA to attend church, are they? No! They come to make money. The government is complicit along with bussiness in this PLANNED, AGREED UPON, illegal invasion. Notwithstanding the white-race hanging in the balance.


99071

Posted by rocket on Thu, 21 Feb 2008 01:17 | #

Both points well made gentlemen . One has to remember that since Vatican 2 , the magisterium and the subsequent Popes have all condemed the taking of any kind of human life . Archbishop B ernidian of Chigago called this ‘‘the seamless garment ‘’. Hence echoing the consistent life ethic of Tertullian .

Pope john paul the 2nd closed the clause on the death penalty that was upheld since Constantine . the present consensus at Rome trumps even past councils , and the brilliance of Augustine’s just war that lead to the legitimate defence doctrine .

pass the those chocolate cookies fred. i will eat them even during lent .


99072

Posted by onlooker on Thu, 21 Feb 2008 01:58 | #

“Pope john paul the 2nd closed the clause on the death penalty that was upheld since Constantine . the present consensus at Rome trumps even past councils , and the brilliance of Augustine’s just war that lead to the legitimate defence doctrine .”

You’re wrong, rocket. Here is what the current up to date Catechism says about the death penalty:

2267 Assuming that the guilty party’s identity and responsibility have been fully determined, the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor.

If, however, non-lethal means are sufficient to defend and protect people’s safety from the aggressor, authority will limit itself to such means, as these are more in keeping with the concrete conditions of the common good and more in conformity to the dignity of the human person.

Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm - without definitely taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself - the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity “are very rare, if not practically nonexistent.“68

http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p3s2c2a5.htm


99073

Posted by rocket on Thu, 21 Feb 2008 23:21 | #

onlooker , before John Paul 2 died he closed the loop hole . now , maybe Benedict re-opened it . if so , that is news to me . or maybe you have an old Catechism . i am a practicing Catholic and i have not heard anything about it .

but , i will check with the Dominicans , who are our parish preists and get back with you .


99074

Posted by onlooker on Fri, 22 Feb 2008 00:11 | #

>>>“before John Paul 2 died he closed the loop hole .”

Pope John Paul II couldn’t have closed the loophole entirely. because their still is a small opening.

“Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm - without definitely taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself - the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity “are very rare, if not practically nonexistent.“68

http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p3s2c2a5.htm

>>> “or maybe you have an old Catechism”

 


No, rocket, it’s the post Vatican II Catechism I’m referencing.

CATECHISM OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
CONTENTS

APOSTOLIC LETTER
LAETAMUR MAGNOPERE
IN WHICH THE LATIN TYPICAL EDITION OF THE
CATECHISM OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
IS APPROVED AND PROMULGATED

APOSTOLIC CONSTITUTION
FIDEI DEPOSITUM
ON THE PUBLICATION OF THE

***CATECHISM OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
PREPARED FOLLOWING THE SECOND VATICAN ECUMENICAL COUNCIL***

Please check out the link:

http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p3s2c2a5.htm

God Bless,

Onlooker


99075

Posted by rocket on Fri, 22 Feb 2008 03:46 | #

in sept 1997 , the Pope changed the words ‘‘in cases of extreme gravity ‘’ and closed the loophole on the death penalty once and for all .

check the new york times april 4 , 2005 story called ‘‘ABOVE ALL ELSE, LIFE’’ written by sister helen prejean . it explains the whole thing . rememember , the bishop of Rome has the rite according to canon law of infallibility to over ride even a council . it is not done very often . but it was done here .

this sealed up the doctrine of the seamless garment , and that life is sacred from womb to tomb .

God bless you too my freind .


99076

Posted by JLH on Fri, 22 Feb 2008 15:00 | #

The problem with the “life is sacred” argument is that too many so-called “God’s creatures” are equipped with both the means and the drive to kill as a requirement of their own survival. Life itself demands the destruction of living beings to further its own ends. In that sense life is anything but sacred. It squanders itself all over the place.


99077

Posted by onlooker on Fri, 22 Feb 2008 15:26 | #

“The problem with the “life is sacred” argument is that too many so-called “God’s creatures” are equipped with both the means and the drive to kill as a requirement of their own survival.”

True enough, but:

A fundemental purpose for practising Christianity is to lift humans above their animal instincts.


99078

Posted by JLH on Fri, 22 Feb 2008 15:39 | #

Yes, and at the cost of leaving us defenseless.


99079

Posted by onlooker on Fri, 22 Feb 2008 15:59 | #

“check the new york times april 4 , 2005 story called ‘’ABOVE ALL ELSE, LIFE’’ written by sister helen prejean . it explains the whole thing .”

Sorry, rocket, but the source you cite is flimsy at best.

My source is from the Holy See.

http://www.vatican.va/phome_en.htm

click on site map. then click on Catechism. then go to:

PART THREE
LIFE IN CHRIST

SECTION TWO
THE TEN COMMANDMENTS

CHAPTER TWO
“YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF”

http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p3s2c2a5.htm

Under the title: Legitimate self defence ... the last paragraph, last sentence, clearly, unambiguously spells out a very narrow exception for justifying capital punishment.

“Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm - without definitely taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself - the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity “are very rare, if not practically nonexistent.“68

P.S. My apologies to Guessedworker and MR for belaboring this point.


99080

Posted by onlooker on Fri, 22 Feb 2008 16:08 | #

“Yes, and at the cost of leaving us defenseless.”

Don’t expect the Church to defend you, you already have the right to defend yourself. That’s why I repeatedly cited the “legitimate defence’ doctrine. Besides, our Governments’ first and foremost duty is to protect it’s citizens. Are they not the guiltiest of all the parties in the race-replacement process?


99081

Posted by JLH on Fri, 22 Feb 2008 16:11 | #

1) The state doesn’t do a very good job of preventing crime, just preventing white people from opposing colored criminals.
2) The colored criminals, far from being rendered harmless, are used by the state as a threat to whites who run afoul of the law in their efforts to defend themselves and preserve their living space against encroachment by hostile race aliens.
3) “redeeming himself”? this gives up the game. From a purely Biblical perspective, I thought unregenerate man is incapable of effecting his own salvation. If God or the Holy Spirit can save a man, He can save one facing execution just as easily as one who isn’t, no?


99082

Posted by onlooker on Fri, 22 Feb 2008 16:37 | #

“1) The state doesn’t do a very good job of preventing crime, just preventing white people from opposing colored criminals.”

Agreed!

“2) The colored criminals, far from being rendered harmless, are used by the state as a threat to whites who run afoul of the law in their efforts to defend themselves and preserve their living space against encroachment by hostile race aliens.”

Blame the white liberals for that!

http://www.niggermania.com/purpose.shtml


“3) “redeeming himself”? this gives up the game. From a purely Biblical perspective, I thought unregenerate man is incapable of effecting his own salvation. If God or the Holy Spirit can save a man, He can save one facing execution just as easily as one who isn’t, no?”

No. Salvation of the soul and saving a man from physical execution are apples and oranges.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig2/stagnaro4.html


99083

Posted by rocket on Sat, 23 Feb 2008 01:27 | #

to JLH—Herbert Spencer ‘s social darwinism runs in a direct parallex to the pure gospel of Jesus Christ.

onlooker—the bishop of rome sits in ‘‘ex cathedra’’ and can alter canon law and councils . also , salvation and execution are not apples and oranges. st. james says that ‘‘judgement will be mercilless to those who have shown no mercy ‘’.

remember the story that Jesus gave of the King who forgave his servant a great debt , and the servant turned right around and would not forgive the slave the small debt he owed ? what happened ? THE KING GOT VERY ANGRY AT HIS SERVANT .

what does this mean ? it means those of us that know that God has forgiven us have no right to not to forgive others. the servant was thrown in to outer darkness. salvation and promoting the death penalty are not apples and oranges. who are we not to forgive ?


99084

Posted by rocket on Sat, 23 Feb 2008 01:45 | #

JLH—‘‘at the cost of being defenseless’’ ? you say . i dont know where you got that. The christian who rises above nature has sufficient defence .

read ‘;‘the sorrow of the Romans ‘’—it documents the gladiator culture and how they were trained and how the early martyrs would use the same verbage at death being trained as they would say by the Paraclete ( holy spirit ) , and saying ‘‘we who are about to die, salute you King Jesus ‘’ .

this is not being defenceless . this is warfare on another level . in fact it was so effective that it began to undermine the moral of the Empire hundreds of years before Alaric and the Visigoths sacked Rome in 410A.D.

what the warrior and the martyr had in commen was COURAGE.  neither was defenceless. weather they died for their tribe or died for Christ they had guts. both are lacking today .


99085

Posted by onlooker on Sat, 23 Feb 2008 04:19 | #

“also , salvation and execution are not apples and oranges. st. james says that ‘’judgement will be mercilless to those who have shown no mercy ‘’. “

To rocket and JLH,

Let me try to untangle this mess.

I cited the last paragraph of the legitimate defence sub section to refute rocket’s contention that capital punishment was completely banned by the Catholic Church.

Take note of the last sentence:-

It states:“Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm - without definitely taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself - the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity “are very rare, if not practically nonexistent.“68

JLH took issue will the term, “redeeming himself.” He goes on to contend: “this gives up the game. From a purely Biblical perspective, I thought unregenerate man is incapable of effecting his own salvation. If God or the Holy Spirit can save a man, He can save one facing execution just as easily as one who isn’t, no?”


Well, JLH, takes the term “redeeming himself” out of context from what we were discussing, and what the Catechism is driving at. This is where the confusion happened. If JLH, or anyone else goes back and reads the entire legitimate defence sub section, you can clearly understand it is preferable NOT to execute the offender so as to allow him or her every chance to repent and come to accept Jesus as his Lord and Savior before they die. If the offender is summarily executed, then we are effectively depriving him or her from their every opportunity/chance to be redeemed.

JHL: “From a purely Biblical perspective, I thought unregenerate man is incapable of effecting his own salvation.”

He is capable if he sincerely repents and accepts Jesus as his Lord and Savior.

JLH:  “If God or the Holy Spirit can save a man, He can save one facing execution just as easily as one who isn’t, no?”

Again, only if the man facing execution sincerely repents and accepts Jesus as his Lord and Savior.

Sorry for the misunderstanding. I hope it’s cleared up?

P.S.

My link to niggermania was not meant to offend, it was meant as a joke.


99086

Posted by Sally on Sat, 23 Feb 2008 04:38 | #

onlooker says, “Well, JLH takes the term “redeeming himself” out of context from what we were discussing…”

Possibly you could make “redeeming” understandable, if you would define “deeming” which surely must be an important concept. After all, isn’t “redeeming” a second act of “deeming”?

Interested readers want to know.


99087

Posted by onlooker on Sat, 23 Feb 2008 14:24 | #

Sally asks: “Possibly you could make “redeeming” understandable, if you would define “deeming” which surely must be an important concept.”

Of course I can make it understandable, Sally. But let’s make a deal. I’ll make “redeeming” understandable and define deeming, if you’ll answer the following question:

How did infinite space and all the matter within it come into existence?

**‘I don’t know,’ and ‘it was always there,’ are unacceptable answers.**


99088

Posted by Robert ap Richard on Sun, 24 Feb 2008 17:40 | #

Anyways ...

“I’m now beginning the search for a more active philosophical agent, and don’t yet know where that will take me.  I hope it won’t make too dull a read for MR.”

Welcome to point, GW; We’ve been hoping you could make it.  We lower-order academics and assorted water-carriers have our pencils and notebooks handy.  Now awaiting further instructions, Sir ...


99089

Posted by rocket on Tue, 26 Feb 2008 03:17 | #

i feel guilty about hijacking GW’s thread.  he is a cool dude . that was not my intent .

onlooker—to make execution contingent upon regeneration reduces divnine love in man to secular humanism . its not christian . Christ is our example , and judgement is mine siath the Lord.

this is more for our sake than the criminals sake . it changes something in us to become more like Christ by erring on the side of mercy .


99090

Posted by onlooker on Tue, 26 Feb 2008 12:05 | #

“to make execution contingent upon regeneration reduces divnine love in man to secular humanism .”

Rocket, if I’m understanding you correctly, I have no disagreement with your statement.

In addition to the Christian argument against capital punishment. I have another, more worldly reason to oppose capital punishment. That being the criminal justice system cannot be trusted to mete out fair and just verdicts. The whole criminal justice system—from top to bottom—is littered with sociopaths, incompetents, and other assorted ‘shreds of human debris.’ Too many innocent people are arbitrary arrested, framed, falsely accused, overcharged, etc., then railroaded through the system.

One can’t help but notice that law enforcement and the court system attracts the extremes. It employs the some of the most virtuous of men/women, and some of the most morally depraved.

[The jailer] “brought them out, and said, Sirs, what must I do to be saved? And they said, Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house” (Acts 16:30-31)


99091

Posted by rocket on Wed, 27 Feb 2008 01:50 | #

onlooker , i have had a prison ministry for over 30 years , and i write death row inmates weekly so this also personal to me .

if you read the national review cover story( a few years back ) by carl cannon called ‘‘the conservative case against capital punishment ‘’  he says the same thing you do about innocent men being put to death .

aslo , one might add—it really does not deter crime . what does deter crime is to spread the good news of Christ and see people re-generated in Him . an ounce of prevention ....


99092

Posted by onlooker on Wed, 27 Feb 2008 14:30 | #

“one might add—it really does not deter crime . what does deter crime is to spread the good news of Christ and see people re-generated in Him . an ounce of prevention ....”

I think that about sums it up, rocket.

All the best to you, and may God help us all

onlooker


99093

Posted by Desmond Jones on Wed, 31 Mar 2010 22:44 | #

Good news for the believers in the theory of the emergent human brain. wink

http://majorityrights.com/index.php/weblog/comments/on_traction_and_a_farewell_to_a_political_friend/#c55430

Colin Blakemore: how the human brain got bigger by accident and not through evolution

Oxford neurobiologist Colin Blakemore tells Robin McKie why he thinks a mutation in the human brain 200,000 years ago suddenly made us a super-intelligent species

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/mar/28/colin-blakemore-how-human-brains-got-bigger


99094

Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 01 Apr 2010 00:46 | #

silver,

you seem to be critiquing man for what he was before he even became man.

If one accepts that consciousness is intentional, and our ordinary waking state is not the only state of consciousness possible for a man, then it does seem that the date (or period, really) for a bifurcation must be set well back.

why do you balk at interjecting God at this point?

If one has no faith, the idea of a god is superfluous.

Can’t he be a way back to stillness?

The object is not to be still.  Anyone can be still at any time simply by employing the power of attention in a certain way.  What flows from that is a certain functional unity of the mind, and what flows from that is the object: however fleeting or imperfect it may be, a consciousness of self which is quite distinct from the former thing that went by that name.

At the very least, doesn’t he lessen the amount of will required to do so?

I imagine (I have to imagine because I would never do it) that praying at the outset in the conventional way would continually destract from the stilling of the mind.  However, if you are interested, the real meaning of “prayer” might become the action of the state of consciousness of self.  Prayer might be what we can do in such a state, so to speak.

Doesn’t that preserve essence but still give the pomos something to play with (you can forget about them ever going cold turkey, imo)?

Essence, meaning all that is not acquired, all that belongs to our being, needs no preservation.  It is.

What pomos and latter-day pomos of this or that church of total confusion say about Man is just noise to me.  They are babbling children with 140 IQs.  The pity is that they have so much political traction for their nonsense.


99095

Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 01 Apr 2010 00:50 | #

Desmond,

So you are living in the house of liberalism now?  Strange friends you keep.

I will stick with the scientific consensus.



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