Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 05 May 2022 08:07 | #

It would seem that Frank has chosen to make his reply at at TCW.  The thread runs as follows:

johnathanrackham  guessedworker • 17 hours ago
Speak in plain English, not sociology speak. I know it makes you sound as though you have a clue. But really it is just verbiage and pretentious. Not impressive to those of us who have gone that route many moons ago.
We do not “In non-trivial ways [we] live inside the Judaic mind”. That is plain nonsense that ignores the evolution of thought and of theology. Truly spare us, I did enough of your nonsense at Berkeley, but without the fascist slant.

guessedworker  johnathanrackham • 14 hours ago
John, raise your game. Don’t just issue simple, empty claims. What evolution of Christian thought, exactly, has made “the soul” other than of the Eternal and thus of the risen Christ? How is it not turned towards the Judaic deity, with its most true relation to the Judaic deity? How is the way of Christ not that of universal love, even of one’s enemy?

If you know that these things are true and unchanging ... Christian intellectualism has not disavowed or changed them ... why are you arguing that Christianity’s very core is of the European mind?

I know you don’t like it, but insomuch as these ideas have entered into the very foundations of Western culture we do indeed inhabit a mind-world not of our own making.

Frank Wright  guessedworker • 13 hours ago
Christ is the foundation of western culture. Jurisprudence, art, literature, European thought. It’s a banal observation to point out that the Enlightenment resulted in the secular eschatology of the workers’ paradise, the dream of emancipation through Reason, and other attempts to make of man a God, to replace the one they discarded.

I don’t believe that Man can overcome himself by his own means. I don’t think humanity the correct location for faith. I’m (not a very good) Thomist, I like John Gray’s ideas, I think Liberalism and the American Empire are dissolving before our eyes, and I think what comes next is Bonapartism.

I think the problem which creates all our social ills is the mass SCALE nature of globalised society. It is anti-culture, anti-life and destroys everything that is not itself through addiction and propagandised fetishisation of consumption.

Marketing reaches its erotic apex in the transgender trend - it being the apotheosis of consumer desire - to remake yourself through purchase power, and into a masturbatory fantasy to boot. This is the pinnacle of the promise of Liberal consumerism, and it was inevitable.

Human scale architecture, in society and its structures as in the buildings we inhabit and the business we conduct is a critical feature of a future life worth living. We must move away from a system of perpetual growth and frenzied overconsumption which eventually uses us, and everything valuable in our lives, as fuel.

guessedworker  Frank Wright • 7 hours ago
You are making religious claims, Frank, which are emotional in expression and do not transmit to that third (perhaps) of Europeans like myself who simply do not possess, and have never possessed, the genetic possibility of faith emotion. Faith is a limited quantity among men and does not rise and fall with changing times. In the distant past my ancestors went to evensong and made the necessary noises. They did not speak as you do, in these florid emotional terms.

What this means is that deity is a proxy for a certain brain state, not a force in itself; and while that brain state is met emotionally by the faith-equipped its raw human content is met by the godless others with no less profundity. Deity is not a pre-requisite for either of the two primary esoteric religious goals, ie, union with the All and self perfectionment. It is merely an evolutionary reflex of the higher emotions.

We can nonetheless have a sensible exchange on, for example, Judaism’s influence on our life-in-common through its first century reinterpretation as the Christ cult (I think there are very considerable influences, and they are negative). But we won’t be able to make any headway if one side only emotes.

I agree that liberalism is the replacement of God the Creator with Man the Self-Author. But the failings of liberalism are the failings of Christianity. Like God and Jesus, the liberal individual is a work of the imagination; the former resting on faith (where it exists) and the latter on a fatal misinterpretation of freedom as choice. As Christianity effectively killed our natural and naturalistic faith-form, so liberalism has killed, or certainly attempted to kill, our natural resort to self and kind. But, Christianity has died and liberalism is itself dying now, as we are enter a period of grand competing visions of the global future of human being. In other words, the old tendency for us to be fed lies and artifice survives and multiplies, while geopolitical power and financial hegemony are the only true realities for the owners of those visions: the Chinese Communist Party, the Washington elites, Davos, Jewry.

Our way in the ensuing storm of words and gestures is as yet almost wholly unconsidered. I do not even know who there is that might consider it. Certainly no one allied in any way to conventional thinking. We require a revolutionary idea about human truth, and that, I do believe, can only come from nationalism; and I don’t mean National Socialism and don’t mean the civic Bonapartist version either.

Moonsphere  guessedworker • 13 hours ago
What would a non-Christian Western culture, a world “of our own making” actually look like, I wonder. If the events of the Bible had taken place on European soil - would that have made Christianity more palatable to you as a cultural impulse? Would you have been a believer, a follower - simply through national instincts/devotion?

guessedworker  Moonsphere • 11 hours ago
“The events of the Bible” are the events of one people’s striving to impose itself on its environment, which it still strives to do. For us, it’s different.
The imposition of the Christ cult on the world of the northern European tribes was highly efficient and comprehensive, and so destructive of what went before that we have nothing left but the vaguest traces ... a few objects, fewer vestiges of myth, that’s all. However, we do have the sublime European genius, and we do know the function of religious practise per se. We know it has an exoteric and esoteric form. What we do not know is how the sublime genius which has created almost everything of the modern world, would create its way out of the age of Reason, which is an age of nihilism and technological over-reach. As his final statement, Heidegger said only Alethea, the goddess of Truth in Man, can still save us. The answer to your question could be in that.

Personally, I cannot be a believer because I do not possess expressed genes for faith.

Moonsphere  guessedworker • 3 hours ago
With your particular “expressed genes” - would you have done any better with Odin, Baldur, Woden, etc?

However, I suspect that your remark was tongue-in-cheek anyway. You just haven’t come across a sufficiently convincing argument.

I would recommend the works of Rudolf Steiner as a cure-all.

guessedworker  Moonsphere • an hour ago
Faith as a capacity is genetic. It does not come from a higher being. Man is the higher being, and European Man is not the least of him.

The question of the utility of Christianity contra that of the ancient European faith processes as this: Given that the fitness of faith resides in its transport of men from a state of absence and mechanicity, which denies them their full humanity, towards presence or there-being, is a system of ethnic capture and estrangement, which is designed to advance the millenarian supremacy of a single tribe, likely to be the optimal system for any other tribe? Or would that other tribe’s system likely serve it better?

Steiner was a seeker after “spirituality” in the aftermath of an age of grave concern at the nihilism and materialism of modernity. “Spirituality” was an apparent, ready-to-hand answer to the problem of nihilism and materialism, but of necessity it was still religiously conventional and faith-dependent. In other words it was a turning back, as if the “back” to Christianity’s interpretation of spirituality was the natural and real estate of European Man. Nihilism and materialism are seen thereby as a kind of mass sin, a vast and damaging misnomer, and not a reaction to and rejection of Christian spirituality and a reaching for other satisfactions. How much have we really thought this through free of Christianity’s formal rules of thinking? How much have we really thought through what human truth is? Give me Heidegger - a genuinely fundamental thinker - not Steiner, for heaven’s sake

Moonsphere  • 42 minutes ago
Many people are seekers after truth - but very few are finders of truth. Steiner was one of those few. Can you say that you are truly familiar with his work. Thirty odd books, 6,000 lectures. Hmm, I wonder…

There is a Tarot card - the “Tower of Destruction” which seems to symbolise the state that you have reached. A world view that has been constructed and defended passionately - is the Tower. You have laid it brick by brick - but now the walls have reached above your head - it has imprisoned you.

Compare Construction with Growth - the Oak Tree. Each branch growing organically, but mindful of the balance of the whole. You are, it would seem - the arch Materialist - the simple product of amino acids and proteins.

How does this end? How does the prisoner escape? The Lightning strikes from above - the Tower crumbles and you are left with nothing but your freedom.

guessedworker  Moonsphere • 12 minutes ago
You have completely missed what I said, which is that we have taken down the Christian walls and the walls of “spirituality” with it, and this was done from the middle of the 19th century onward and culminated in the Fin de Siecle and the drift towards war. The reaction, which began intellectually with Nietzsche and extended to some extraordinary characters ... Blavatsky, Steiner, and Gurdjieff, for example ... also explained Fascism and National Socialism. Revolutionary Conservatism likewise. These were all attempts to overcome the death of deity without escaping from that deity’s terms of engagement, and this without commitment to the constant creation and renewal which our Truth vouchsafes. For that reason Heidegger argued that Nietzsche was the very apogee of the nihilism which he sought to conclude; and there could be no escape that way.

I am commending to you the last path of Truth and being, which is Heidegger’s path. It is difficult, and it is the path that religions, by their simple resort to emotional self-confirmation and self-referentialism, ineluctably fail to take.

Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 05 May 2022 09:31 | #

Moonsphere  • an hour ago
I am happy to admit that I have not studied the work of Heidegger.

Perhaps I should. You clearly have done. But are you a good advertisement for following this “last path of Truth”? You seem to be in a kind of despair. But that lack of hope attends all atheo-materialist world-views.

Yes, the world is in peril. We are going through an Apocalypse - a “Trial by Evil”. Does Heidegger equip you for such a thing? Or does it, as seems to be the case - leave you floundering in a morasse of angst-ridden impotency.

guessedworker  Moonsphere • 5 minutes ago • edited
I, too, have very large gaps in my reading. I admire those who have a better historiographical interpretation but I suspect also that intellectualism for intellectualism’s sake is not less enclosing than faith. Generally, I have sought to avoid entanglement in “philosophy club” discourse. But, in any case, if one adheres politically to the life-cause of one’s own people the great preponderance of “philosophers” jump on the opportunity to cancel the challenge to their base values through the simple expedient of denouncing my supposed fascism. An example of which you will find above. It’s a daily event.

I don’t know that it is fair to characterise the understanding that one’s people is dying, and it is not a natural death, as despair. Faith may insulate anyone from the unpleasantness without, but isn’t that a kind of hiding? If we rely on a god to save us in this life we will, of course, be sorely disappointed; and if we rely on a god to save us in another life we will also be sorely disappointed. Faith and gods are not there to save us by grand divine gestures from the harm of the world. Faith and gods are there to turn us from absence and mechanicity towards the optimum circumstance for evolutionarily adaptive choice-making which is being-there in the world (ie, the real) and not in confusion or hell or exile.

That, anyway, is my faithless reading of evolution’s corrective to the bipedal hominid on the savannah, with his thinking faculty developing faster than it can be accommodated by his powers of attention! It think the god-strategy was created then. But it died in liberal modernity. So what do we do now, burdened with faith but still not possessed of there-being?

Posted by Al Ross on Wed, 11 May 2022 01:58 | #

One of the differences between people who gained tertiary education in just about anything and casually shrugged off their lightly - worn learning and the tenacious autodidactic bores who drone on about how philosophy affects Whites’ racial future ( there is none ) is the longevity of memory .