|
|
|
What is always with us? By exPF What lasts forever? Well, the mineral composition of the planets has a pretty impressive longevity. The constellations of stars, with their long-forecasted death dates, make an impressive claim on time. The tendency of leftist philosophers to acknowledge the changing nature of the universe with a shrugging admission that everything is immutable, and the search for transcendent order thus useless, is a relatively fixed and unchanging pattern, albeit newly emergent. The knee-jerk leftist shrug of “I see no transcendent order, so there can be no compelling imperative inherent in circumstances” pressages the inevitable return to resigned live-for-the-moment hedonism: you can continue chasing your tails gentlemen. Its all just as meaningless as we set out to prove it to be. Looking to the cosmos is really a step too far considering that our evolutionary environment only knew the heavens as a playground for our ancestors’ anthropomorphizing imaginations (if one assumes, as I do, that a transcendent order has to be rooted in our existence and being, rather than in that of a creator). We may want to touch “forever” and play in the grandest theater accessible to us, but objectivity demands we stick to the facts of human life and ask, rather than what lasts forever (since we ourselves do not last forever): “what is always with us?” No doubt you already guessed it: venereal disease. A persistent itch “downstairs” is the glue that binds humans to eternity. No, no, I actually have something to say this time so lets pretend that joke never happened. When it dawns from time to time on the talking heads of the western establishment that the existence of a social order is necessarily dependent on things deeper than personal whimsy, they allude to things which have lasting value. Since we are interested in being architects of some kind of future social order, lets investigate the principles they allude to. 1. Geography - “As midwesterners, we value fine workmanship.” (said to a Korean midwesterner) 2. Language - “As Francophones, we value french civilization.” (said to a group of Moroccans in the process of setting fire to an overturned car.) 3. Culture - “As we believe in democracy, we want to spread it to the middle east.” (said by a group of Jewish Americans working in a think tank.) 4. Religious - “Since we believe in the unity of all Christians, we wish to strengthen our ties to the churches in China and Nigeria.” (Said by a western preacher to a congregation including nigerian christian immigrants). [- note to Christians - I don’t want to spend the comments thread discussing how this last example is not representative of your religion, this isn’t a central argument of the essay.] The examples I gave above were cherry picked to show how each of these sources of transcendent social order can actually be hijacked and put into the service of a deeper and more permanent source of social order: the genetic, or as Guessedworker poetically put it, the eternal nation. One need but look around oneself to find countless examples - in western countries at least - of how the superficial principles of social order which are “kosher” for us to organize around - are constantly undermined and made self-contradictory if not downright laughable by the emerging assertion of the order which we know to be truly paramount: the genetic. Unlike the limits of a territory defined by a political entity and historical memory, or the language we choose to communicate in, or the cultural customs and usages we put on, or the religious beliefs we affirm in the abstract - ethnic community ties are actually no joke. Well, unless they are. We certainly have founded a final civilizational flourish on the premise that they are a joke. I don’t mean to suggest that the genetic order too can never be made a mockery of or subverted, or shown to be an unnecessary principle or a hindrance. But the triumph over this principle is always very fleeting: one has to look to the short-term to vindicate such a viewpoint, and remain in the short-term. Ultimately the geography, language, culture and religion which one employs cannot be other than a means - a means toward the preservation, furtherance or destruction of an essence which precedes them and to which they must be subservient. I think the evolutionary paradigm exhibited by ‘the selfish gene’ as it applies to the ultimate nature of human activity, cannot be answered. That book indicates how our existence and activities relates to our essence. I even think that most of the above categories retain their power as pre-Watson & Crick principles of social order, on the basis that they piggyback off of the power of genetic community ties and reflect these im Umriss without actually explicitly saying the name of the principle on which they are grounded. The appeals to geography, culture, language and religion are all best made when these things impel us to embrace what is already familial. I’m sure we have all already experienced these appeals being used in situations where they group together laughably disparate elements, thanks to the fact that our societies are now based on categoric ignorance of genetic order. Such as blacks in the English premier league being evidenced as some kind of shared love of sport and thus of English culture. Or the anecdote I once mentioned about a Lebanese immigrant to Canada who asserted that liking Canadian beer and hockey made him as much a Canadian as anyone else. One runs from principle to principle, and out from behind each one pops some sort of monster claiming to be one’s long lost brother. Each month some new politician asserts that he will overcome the alienation which is carving his polity into social islands: and look at the brand new, old idea he has repackaged for you to reconcile you to whoever he wants to join you to. What is always with us? Not a certain landscape, not a language, not a religion - as definitive as these things are, we only touch a part of our nature when we align according to them. As the Narrator said, your ancestors were Christians for hundreds of years, pagans for thousands of years. [ - said to illustrate a principle, I don’t want to debate Xtianity - ]. Well, what characteristic held true for your ancestors over the whole span of evolutionary time? Other people are always with us. And it so happens that for the vast, unfathomable spaces of evolutionary time, those other people who were with us were our close kin and relatives. Our relatives are always with us. They are the true constant, as we know and experienced it, throughout evolutionary time. (As an adjunct of that, an important factor of human religiosity has always been ancestor worship, and human behaviors appear to be evolved to guarantee reproductive success, guaranteeing a future stream of relatives - so humans seem to live surrounded by relatives both spatially and putatively-temporally like a fish lives surrounded by water.) The gene is going to outlive liberalism like the ocean off the Spanish coast reforms upon being scooped up by your hand - liberalism won’t even leave a dent in it: that which is for us, in our human terms, “the eternal”. Neither is this vision of life according to genetic order the grand vision of existence which one might want. But I personally find it comfortingly human. It disappoints the most high-flown of our hopes, confirming the austerity of its realism; yet it is far from wretched, and leaves us an open field for the kind of action which we as humans would all do regardless of what our model of reality dictated. Liberalism has insufficient respect for the gene. It thinks the gene is “blue eyes” and nothing more. In fact it is, on the individual level, the considerations of the selfish gene which regulate and determine the avenues of human striving: it has us chasing women, procuring income streams and scheming about the future ad infinitum (or if you are a member of the proletariat, it has you making fart jokes, eating cheetos and commiserating with those similarly afflicted ad infinitum). On the collective level, it has us nurturing one another, forming families and cliques, banding together against foreigners, and defending territory ad infinitum. Its this flip side of the coin that liberalism has invested its pride in disproving and/or banning. But what if Hamilton’s law turns out to be the basis of all social cooperation, and thus the basis of our social order?
We are uniquely suited to investigate this principle now, as westerners, given the technology that is available to us (cheap air travel) and the philosophy of our philosopher-kings (immigration + liberalism + welfare state); our countries have become a kind of testing lab for principles of ethnic relations. What began as liberal posturing and a social experiment may yet be turned to a true scientific experiment on the basis of human cooperation. Racialist historians sometimes have to chaff at the strange relation to ethnocentrism/kinism which exists in history. On the one hand there are a plethora of sources discussing the problem from a traditionalist perspective; on the other hand it seems that past societies were so “kin-centric” and naturally insular that they massively took for granted and implicitly assumed the existence of a genetic order which we are now in the position to have to spell out explicitly: their world was so “racist”, so kinist, so built on tribalism, that in some sense one feels jealous of their luxury in never having to confess to “the open secret”, which they nevertheless in many cases did. (This isn’t meant to downplay, however, the extensive use of the other four pillars - particularly in times of decay and Empire - to justify subverting the genetic order in the name of a supposedly higher pillar: see Alexander the Great’s traffic in Persian women on the basis of grand old Persian culture and political expediency; the entire Roman legislation dealing with the importation and naturalization of Syrian slaves, justified likewise from political expediency. Surely the ancient world, when in decay, knew how to kick at the genetic pillar of communal life in the name of the other pillars. Empires fail the heroicist critique because they typically intend - as a consequence of their structure - to outlive the nation that founded them. So nations are actually subverted to maintain the empires supposedly founded in their name - but not actually. This is related to the internal dynamics of empires.). Modern scientists cracked the atom, unleashing from it forces which even today keep superpowers at a respectful distance. Much like particle colliders studding our university campuses invite us to study these powerful forces and learn what we can about quantum physics, the breakdown of traditional mores and the availability of mass travel allow us to “crack the ethnic extended family” and examine what forces are released after such a momentous happening. Its right that we should be obsessed with this problem because we are in a unique historical position to experience it in high relief. From our human perspective, what lasts forever? Put another way…. what is always with us? Comments:2
Posted by exPF on Tue, 31 Mar 2009 05:55 | # Good critique, Gorboduc. I was offering my view of the landscape, as a surveyor who has gone to some lengths to familiarize himself with the different materials discussed - i.e. political history, selfish gene theory, biology, modern society, etc. etc. As far as assembling facts from these to prove to you that my view is paramount - I don’t think I can do it in the conclusive terms you would wish. It would actually be truly amazing if I was able to conclusively prove something along these lines when discussing a I didn’t want to discuss Xtianity because it involves discussing so much - and has been undertaken so many times on MR. Unlike you, I dont view biology and paganism as dead ends, and miscegenation as inevitable (which you posted as a what if scenario). This isn’t because I fear a debate on the subject, its just I remember tens of threads where Xtianity has been “done” by different groups of posters who were participating at different epoches of MR’s life. I would similarly handle any references I used to WWII and Hitler, which have seen thousands maybe tens of thousands of comments spent in discussing them. I long for the day when an essay on a topic of this scope does not leave itself open to the above critique. Perhaps another few centuries of history will be enough to clarify the points we are struggling to debate. As to what our ancestors could and could not know from/about the heavens - what do you think? What kind of knowledge is it that they had from/of heaven? I’m a scientist by profession and a realist who doesn’t believe in the divine, so for me the answer is clear. What do modern Bantu tribesman or old american Indians have, as far as knowledge from the heavens? These people also have/had divine traditions. 3
Posted by Guessedworker on Tue, 31 Mar 2009 12:18 | # With apologies to PF ... Gorbudoc, Can we agree that the answer to PF’s question isn’t the Christian God or Yahweh of the OT or whatever because that’s just one of Religious Man’s countless attempts to systematise his own belief in a divine order. Religious people could be magnanimous to their brothers and sisters in the pews and on the Haj and in the shaman’s tent and say “First Cause”. That would be historically inclusive, so to speak, notwithstanding the fact that the oldest surviving religions have no concept of First Cause and are all about self-interest - and often just revenge! But, really, the answer they are all striving to give is “faith”. It all begins and ends with the faith principle. If no living thing had it - as, for example, bacteria and daffodils and fish and I don’t have it - there would be no truck at all with a divine order. There would be only the investigations of reason into the natural world. Now, let me make an important distinction at this point. I am not saying that Man is incapable of ascending to a state of consciousness in which the unity of All is apparent, and I am not saying that that ain’t just the hooey of an auto-induced euphoria. I am saying that if the divine can be interacted with, why can’t we just interact? Why didn’t Yahweh just make us that way? I am saying that he didn’t make John Doe, the sidesman at his local evangelical hang-out, that way. John has never had and will never have such an interaction. If he did ... if all men did, and all living matter, that would be interesting, no? That would tell us something important. But he doesn’t. He just has his faith. Of course, you could counter that by claiming that John has let the divine thingammy down very badly, and is exiled in sin or something. Perhaps his mind is too fuzzy or his will too weak. And he has to live this way or that, or be poor or good to wogs to justify himself in God’s eyes and obtain the aforementioned Unity. After his brain has died. Unless, of course, you’re a Catholic, in which case you will insist that John must have absolution through a priest first. Which is a pity for every non-Catholic. But, then again, Muslims don’t buy that ... Faith, faith, faith, you see. Not experience of the divine. Faith is all there is. So the question, then, becomes this: what explains the constriction of faith to the thinking ape, and the somewhat patchy and highly differentiated appearance of it even in him? (I estimate somewhere around the 60 to 75% mark among European peoples are psychologically capable of sincere worship). Would it most likely be Evolution ... faith as an evolved trait of the human mind offering a fitness gain at some point deep in the evolutionary past? Or would it be the Unknowable who created the All, and is unspeakable angry with John Doe for, oh, something or other? Ideas, Gorbudoc? Let me give you one. Not the John Does but serious students of serious faith-systems pursue one of two long and narrow spiritual paths to the same place. There is the path of Unity with God through the manipulation of the conscious state (ie prayer, contemplation, meditation, zikr, beatification, etc) and there is the path of striving towards Self-Perfectionment. Both, obviously, are goal-oriented pursuits and both require decades of intentional sacrifice, suffering and work. However, one is predicated on the uncovering of Divine Being within the self. It’s always there, supposedly. The other is predicated on the attainment of something which does not yet exist within the self - a special enhancement of it like sainthood. So even here, the same architecture of ontology and teleology that we see in the Western philosophical divide rears its twin heads. Now, this division is plainly intrinsic in and archetypal to the human mind. We are designed/evolved both to experience self and to strive for betterment of it. Therein is the great struggle of our personal and collective life ... Enkidu and Gilgamesh locked in starry combat. Sometimes one of them has the upper hand, sometimes the other. It is unwinnable by either party. At the moment, through the primacy of liberalism, which as you have noted is a rebellious child of Christianity, the teleological principle is on top in the West. The Jewish God of the liberal zeitgeist has declared that he is Very Angry with John Doe, and that the poor fellow is to be cast into outer darkness unless he enters upon the path of divesting the Original Sins of racism, xenophobia, hate, anti-Semitism, sexism and homophobia from his soul. The path to liberal self-perfectionment and the emergence of the New Man has been revealed to us. We see a genocide. It is time for Enkidu to take his turn in command of the combat ... time for the politics of the ontological, of genes and being. 5
Posted by exPF on Tue, 31 Mar 2009 23:03 | # I appreciate you stepping forward GW to say some things which I was feeling but could not articulate. Gorboduc wrote:
Could you give some examples of instances where “the spirit has engendered the material”? Spirit formerly meant “breath” and was used as a synecdoche to represent the whole of human bodily and nervous system function. Breathing was the indicator that one was living, and thus was made to represent the unknowably vast array of background processes which we know the living human body to perform at any given time. This is the latin etymology of spirit. Alternatively spirit could also be a naturalistic metaphor meaning “wind” - the idea that one’s motivations were like gusts of wind, driving one in different directions. This is the hebrew etymology. Typically the word spirit is used to transfer this concept of human nervous system activity - the drivenness, passion, vivacity, attention, alertness, action and motivation which really only can be produced by the functioning human nervous system - to transfer this activity, sans body, to whatever “material” one wants to “engender”. It is the ultimate anthropomorphizing metaphor because For me, except where it is used as a shorthand for describing personality traits and perceived essential features, “spirit” as such is a contradiction in terms. This squares well with the fact that no scientific investigation I know of has been able to show anything of this sort to actually exist. Its for this reason that I ask for some examples. 6
Posted by Desmond Jones on Tue, 31 Mar 2009 23:42 | # It’s not clear whether John Cornwall is anything more than an extended Jewish phenotype. He’s also the author of Hitler’s Pope and felt, at least upon the publication of the book that Eugenio Pacelli and the Vatican were complicit in the Jewish holocaust.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler’s_Pope Interview with Richard Dawkins and John Cornwell
You may be right. It may be a doomed rearguard action. Darwin speaks of absorption when one tribe is more powerful or more moral or numerous than the other. However, it appears clear that it is not liberalism that is the driving force but a Leviathan born of ethnic interests. It’s is not suicide but murder. Moreover, it is not clear that “liberal” Catholics like Cornwall are doing anything more than aiding the process. 7
Posted by Fred Scrooby on Wed, 01 Apr 2009 00:26 | # G, what is your take on forced race-replacement? Is it happening? If so, do you wish it weren’t? Something about you reminds me of Amalek. You’re not he, are you? (Probably not — he never demonstrated any knack for poetry.) He didn’t use to care one way or the other about race-replacement if I remember right. He was pretty annoyed with the Jews but not especially worried about the outcome of things the way one who cares about race-replacement is. He appeared not to doubt things would come right in the end. 8
Posted by Fred Scrooby on Wed, 01 Apr 2009 00:27 | # As for exPF’s essay, it was way over my head. I read it twice and still didn’t understand enough of it to comment much beyond a few minor quibbles, too minor to post. 10
Posted by Fred Scrooby on Wed, 01 Apr 2009 01:13 | # He was far too modest to actually claim it — but he certainly went around strutting it. All joking aside, he was a smart guy and so’s Gorbo, but on second thought I don’t think Gorbo is he. It’s just something about their styles that struck me as similar. Their styles and their unruffledness. (Oops! Is that a word??) 11
Posted by gorboduc on Wed, 01 Apr 2009 01:15 | # Don’t QUITE know what Religious Man is. I have met religious men - the old term for a priest or monk was in many places, a religious - i have met musical or poetic men (and women!) but I couldn’t lump them together as Musical Man or Poetic Man. Politicians don’t seem to fit into a category Political Man. Unless perhaps in german political trteatises. Don’t QUITE understand the DNA stuff either. It seems that MR holds that our genes or DNA constitute our destiny (not QUITE sore that ‘destiny’ has any real meaning either. Let’s try a syllogism.
if not, why not? Try another. i) In the struggle for existence, everyone’s choices, actions and survival prospects are determined by the cleverness of their genetic structures ii) The choices, actions and survival prospects of our enemies are overtrumping ours iii) Therefore their genetic structures are cleverer than ours.
If not, why not? Look, I agree that the situation for the cultures and peoples of the West is desparate. (NB I don’t say Western Man, as I’m referring to real people, not to bloodless abstractions! For God’s sake, it’ll be Bespectacled Man or Underpants Man or Chipping Sodbury Man next - well why not , anthropologists used to rave about Beaker Man) And the point I’m trying to make is that all this guff about DNA and genes is the most Godalmighty gigantic RED HERRING or the most damnably distracting MARE’S NEST. Classic Conspiracy Theory, when it got down to discussing cultural or philosophical matters, used to refer to Darwin, Marx and Freud as the three thinkers who’d unshipped the rudders of European civilisation, [personally I’d add the insane moralist (NB NOT “philosopher”) Nietzsche into the mix]. If Dawkins is correct in deriving from his Darwinian positions the belief that Supposing Dawkins and Darwin are impostors and their whole bundle of evolutionary theories is worthless? If you want to restore a real value-system to humankind, if you want to have a set of ideals worth defending, then why not examine the theistic alternative? It’s really only the Christian viewpoint that confers true dignity on mankind. So that’s it: ditch Dawkins and drown Darwin otherwise you may find yourselves bleating without cease Belloc’s satirical lines: Otherwise, I don’t suppose it’ll be long before the good folks here start on about the Theory of Surplus Value or the Oedipus Complex. 12
Posted by gorboduc on Wed, 01 Apr 2009 01:37 | # PS Cornwell’s position on Holohoax not at issue here. It’s just his convenient assembling between two covers of a few proofs that Dawkins isn’t really capable of grappling intellectually with the issues he claims to confront, and is woefully ill-informed about them, that makes me mention him. Oh, and exPF, we’re rather at the mercy of etymology and philology here; I’ve come across people who talk about The Holy Ghost as if He were some kind of spook, and Evelyn Waugh (preface to ‘Helena’) was amused by the story of an anti-Church journalist who took the phrase “The Invention of the Holy Cross” to mean that the story of the Crucifixion was dreamed up as a fiction, rather than that the actual wood of the Cross was found (Lat. ‘invenio’) by St. Helena. Amalek: who he? IQ mention not boasting, just inserted to show that such things are totally irrelevant here. One of greatest men of 19th century, St John Vianney, Cure d’Ars, had - as the savants would see it - a very low IQ. He found it difficult to get ordained, had trouble with his liturgical latin, and never learned to spell his native French properly. Man of unparalled spiritual insight (that word again!), reader of souls, incredibly privileged by God,grievously molested on the physical plane, not just the spiritual one, by Devil on account of his sheer virtue. Read about him! (‘Jean’ in french) 13
Posted by Captainchaos on Wed, 01 Apr 2009 01:51 | # Gorboduc, I’m sure the examination of Christianity to uncover its utility, or not, for the genetic continuity of European derived peoples can’t help but rankle a man of your refined religious sensibilities, but please do indulge us. So now, I’ll ask the question straight, can Christianity, in your opinion, be of service to us in that? Should it? “For God’s sake, it’ll be Bespectacled Man or Underpants Man or Chipping Sodbury Man next - well why not , anthropologists used to rave about Beaker Man)” So you reject essentialism? That’s rich. How do you square that one with your faith? Do you think the White race is a social construct? 15
Posted by danielj on Wed, 01 Apr 2009 02:04 | # Do you think the White race is a social construct? To a certain degree it is. We’ve went over the taxonomy issue before. Similarity is in the eye of the beholder. 16
Posted by Fred Scrooby on Wed, 01 Apr 2009 02:21 | # You’re wrong about that, Daniel. That’s the Jewish word-game. So, it makes as much sense to call all short people one race and all tall another, as it does to call all white men one race and all Negroes another, and all Chinamen a third? That’s Jared Diamond’s “argument,” Daniel. When did you convert to Judaïsm? I must’ve missed it. 17
Posted by Fred Scrooby on Wed, 01 Apr 2009 02:22 | # The Jews all spout that, all of them to a man. 18
Posted by exPF on Wed, 01 Apr 2009 03:32 | # Gorboduc My reference to etymologies of the word “spirit” was meant to reveal the non-scientific, pre-scientific metaphorical nature of the concept of “the spirit”. The etymologies you answered back with were apparently selected to represent the possibility of misunderstanding things as a result of semantics and literalism. This doesn’t constitute any kind of evidence in favor of “the spirit”. If I am to take you at your word of viewing the world as a manifestation of the spirit (“the examples you are looking for are, literally, all around you”), then I have to say you’re view of the world appears to be pre-scientific and in line with shamanistic religions the world over. The difference would apparently be that you believe in the uniquely “correct” spiritual pantheon, and the Bantu shaman does not - but until evidence is brought forth, this is for me a non-starter. When GW discusses “Religious man” - he is alluding to the fact that non-scientific explanations for real world phenomena all appear equally arbitrary, except to those who profess them. Christianity is telling us that a clique of hellenistic Jews discovered the Truth; Bantu shamans would tell us that their apprenticeship under older shamans makes them uniquely qualified to augur the spirits of the various demons that cause events and actions in this world. I understand that it offends Christian sensibilities that I put these things together, but an explanation of causation not based on real-world evidence is an arbitrary explanation, and arbitrary explanations all strike me as being created equal. Man in his religious aspect is relatively uniform - priests of various cultures, and even the various religions, share similarities in psychology and behavior. Poetical man - i.e. man as poet - also shares many tendencies, so that the lives of the poets tend to contain similar elements. These categories certainly have some descriptive value - even if they cannot be said to predict and contain within themselves the whole spectrum of variation which they putatively should. It is in fact, absurd that you make such a demand of a conceptual category placed over wide swathes of human beings: the complexity of many thousands of human organisms doesn’t allow that degree of “hard truth” where all extant variation is contained within a category, at any level beyond the most concrete (i.e. we all breathe oxygen). If you want to make any kind of assertions about human society it is necessary to acquit oneself of the need for complete certainty and perfect conceptual rigor.
Perhaps a stylistic point, but your use of it to feign a superior connection to the people mentioned prompts me to explore it further. Do you really find “the cultures and peoples of the West” that much better a term than “Western man”, or imagine that using one phrase indicates one is speaking of real people, and using the other indicates one referring to a bloodless abstraction? If I prefer to use the term Western man, will you infer from that that my connection to the people under discussion is inferior to yours, or that in transferring them into the world of ideation I somehow rob them of essential qualities and overgeneralize them?
Its the crudeness of the above quote and the crudeness of your syllogism that force me to ask: have you read Dawkins? Are you familiar with molecular biology and evolutionary biology, and the inroads into understanding human nature and the myriad particulars of human existence which these sciences have gifted us with? Its possible to spend a lifetime studying DNA and its complexities, and only ever know a piece of it. I spent 4 years studying genetics at university. The complexity of our genetic code is literally beyond the ability of our most developed minds to presently fathom - and yet, to the old fashioned sort of person with only a passing acquaintence of the material - its “just genes”. Oh, “just” our genes. A theory of the world based on “just genes” would be a theory based on the most expansive, ever-evolving replicator structures the world has ever seen. Only those who never had the opportunity to learn about the genetic code speak of genes as if speaking of genes were reductionist, or as if reducing things to genetics would somehow simplify and one-dimensionalize our existence. Look at the genetic code - there is your “universe” (i.e. the ability to perceive the universe, encoded in sense organs and brain). Its this nigh-incomprehensible complexity that you are referring to when you say “all this guff about DNA”.
Are you familiar with the psychology of gifted children? Gifted children ‘suffer’ from something called asynchronous development, which means their minds reach realizations about the world (pattern recognize) faster, by a matter of years, than those of average children. It could mean, for example, that by the age of 5 they are already thinking like the typical 12 year old. By the age of 12, they are thinking as a typical 17 year old. By 20, they are already shouldering the burdensome considerations of a typical 30 year old. The result of this is alienation from one’s peer group, a feeling of being an outsider, which leaves marks on the person that never go away. It can mean a painful youth and very painful adolescence - in one report I read, many gifted adolescents report only having adults as friends during their teen years! Imagine that - only having adults as friends! I mention this just to show that IQ is far from irrelevant. I too believe that hard work, mental toughness and good breeding will bridge small gaps, but if you’re talking about wide IQ disparaties - such as the one you must feel even when dealing with “highly gifted” people - the assertion that those things don’t matter is a flat out joke. To say that IQ doesn’t play a role in ideological, historical and psychological debates is ridiculous. I have to wonder after reading this, if you are who you say you are, because the only traits of genius I can recognize in your postings are the superior scoff which seems to be the calling card of self-satisfied intellectuals, and the occasional deftly-wielded verbal jab. What area are you gifted in? Are you drunk when you post on this board?
19
Posted by Fred Scrooby on Wed, 01 Apr 2009 03:47 | # So everything with fins is a fish — fishes, whales, 1960 Cadillacs, German V-2 rockets, and F-18 jet fighters. Did I get that right, Daniel? And everything with wings is a bird — F-18 jet fighters, bats, beetles, flying fish, ultra-lights, and sparrows. So F-18 jet fighers are birds and fishes at the same time. That puts them in the same family as flying fish. Yeah let’s re-do the whole taxonomy. Then everything that’s red is a red-headed woodpecker: and apple, a fire engine, the setting sun, a boiled lobster, a gummi bear, and a glass of tomato juice. Hey I’m catching on! Hey, Jared Diamond thinks so, so there’s gotta be something to it! 20
Posted by SM on Wed, 01 Apr 2009 08:40 | # >Gord: attempting to escape their destiny by fighting a valiant but doomed rearguard action. “Nobody retreats like the Germans”. [‘elastic defense’—rear guard ambushes] It buys time for Geheimwaffe (secret weapons projects). That balances out the lions to hyenas ratio… ...A lion can best 10 hyeanas. If the hyeans have 11, they win. Now since, democracy, jesus, industrialism, capitalism etc—civilization in general—excels in breeding for that eleventh hyeana, the lions are gonna need a bigger tooth. Ergo Gehiemwaffe project. (Aeronautics and gene tech etc) Hence buying time through… “elastic defense”. Ya dig? And yes bio “determinism” is why the white male is in this mess. Simply he is a sap by nature. Specifically he had altruist tendencencies which were polished up [at the expense of other traits] and bred for. This made him vulnerable to liberal hooey. (The christer horde certainly has demonstrated its vulnerablity). (PS you’re a dope—you and your immense creationist horde. And it’s genetic. ...And if you’re not stopped, we’re doomed.) 21
Posted by SM on Wed, 01 Apr 2009 09:36 | # Posted by gorboduc on April 01, 2009, 12:15 AM | # Your whole post above, starting with “Don’t QUITE know…” Sheer lunacy. Standouts:
“Suddenly got wise” Imbicil. You don’t understand Natural Selection or naturalism at all and therefore mischaracterize it with strawmen, that I guess work out in the stycks of that `god forsaken hell hole once called america, but it doesn’t work with even the mildly lucid (eg a female). (Note my peoples are from North carolina, W Virginia and some Pennsyvannia—and they are head-in-hole dunces: blame everything on blacks and yet vote for the democrats for over 60 years every 2 and 4 years. When you point out the oddness of that they dismiss you with a downward hand wave and say “I like to live my—It’s a beautiful day—I don’t want to think about this”.)
Wouldn’t change a thing. (BTW, FYI to all, as far as I can tell dawkins is a feminist—like most modern “conservatives” [see my paragraph here below].) Reality doesn’t come for books. I don’t recite what I got from some books. I understand what I do cause what I do understand is obvious. You are congenitally predisposed to not get it and to not want to get it. Along with chivalry, that is Western Mans’ fatal flaw.
“humankind” is imbibed liberalism. Conservative: they go kicking and screaming BUT THEY DO GO (to where liberals—fault of their loins—drag them); then once there, they kick and scream to defend that new place which their delusion sees as some cosmic pattern and absolute and truth[tm]. Eliminating the stupid and religious (who are similar) will be the end of the modern military (comprised entirely of hellotized conservatives as above, youthfully displaying for sex deterministically—oblivious to this [sheer animalism])—and therefore the end of the liberal status quo. “We do not need all these males” ====== Respect my diversity? (That would work in any ‘snappy refutations’ thread too.) ========
LOL. Seriously.
And the God Fearing US/Brit nutters fought against the Third Reich which was going to right the ship (and keep the true epiphannies). So there you go. How’s that working out for ya?... Jesus saves? =========
Well known. One of Dawkins’ better observations. “indifference” Why don’t you see it yourself?
`Cause I want to live and thrive. I don’t want to be “ugly ducklinged” out of my own home pond. (Also I don’t want the inherent—though adaptive, as part of that grand indifference—character flaws of my females to get away with “it”; also the human condition regarding reproduction in general—and all it entails (mostly pain—catalystic as ever—on one plane or another)—needs to be solved—for the good of everybody.) Period. 22
Posted by danielj on Wed, 01 Apr 2009 10:48 | # So, it makes as much sense to call all short people one race and all tall another, as it does to call all white men one race and all Negroes another, and all Chinamen a third? I didn’t say that. You’re putting words in my mouth and that is a Jewish word game. Would you “lump” Nords in with Meds as part of the same “race” Fred? You who doesn’t consider Blacks to be in the same “species” as Whites? Explain to me what the scientific, objective classification of the human race is? (Try to understand I’m not Jewish and I’m on the same side as you. We’re just refining our arguments here.) 23
Posted by danielj on Wed, 01 Apr 2009 10:54 | # <i>Its possible to spend a lifetime studying DNA and its complexities, and only ever know a piece of it.</i Yet scientist claim to have unraveled the mystery of life in their creation of all kinds of fancy phylogenetic trees and claim to understand that evolution over millions of years got us to the present point. I’ve seen metabolic charts and I know they know nothing. 24
Posted by danielj on Wed, 01 Apr 2009 11:01 | # Are Janissaries White? Are children with one Black grandparent White? Are the Portuguese White? Where we “draw the line” for the White race is a social construct. 25
Posted by danielj on Wed, 01 Apr 2009 11:05 | # Where we “draw the line” for the White race is a social construct. Or a function of in-group biology informed, consciously or unconsciously, of Salterian principles if you prefer. 26
Posted by Dasein on Wed, 01 Apr 2009 11:42 | #
Rather than being indignant, you should address Gorbo’s syllogisms. They deserve honest replies.
This feels like a straw man. Do Christians follow their religion in order to be able to explain real-world phenomena? Believing in a moral foundation is something different. A question for non-Christians: do you believe that it is good to sacrifice oneself for the group? I suspect that many here recognize truth in the essential message of Christianity (altruism), but resent its present-day manifestations and its ‘Jewish’ origin (which could perhaps be better described as anti-Jewish).
By ‘genetic code’ I assume you mean more than the translation of proteins via codons, which isn’t terribly complex. Dawkins’ choice of book titles does more to trivialize genetics than Gorbo. I don’t think he needs to understand which codons code for alanine or how genes are regulated in order to criticize reduction to material agents. But perhaps materialists should provide a description of matter which isn’t an abstraction. Then we can say that they are being ‘scientifically objective’. Spirit could also be an emergent property of ‘matter’. The order (information, patterns) in the universe are its manifestations. I agree with your general point though. Our genes are the foundation for our being. But it’s the product that counts and which cannot be reduced to any formula. 27
Posted by SM on Wed, 01 Apr 2009 12:23 | # Firstly: “Objective” is tough. Relativism is always lurking. _BUT_… these are OUR relative designations and therefore valid in and of themselves! These classifications will modify over time as “paradigm shifts”. We want them to only shift according to OUR standards and observations. We must fight to keep alien—“Marxist”—paradigm shifts out. (Last time we fought, you jebus dolts fought for our enemies. Everything has sucked ever since. You all—christers—complain about the modern world we live in but you are obvlious to the fact you have done it yourselves. You have done it to us all. (There will be a reckoning…) Others that don’t like our relative designations ansd classifications can go to death camps where they can grapple with the error that was their attempts to replace our relative constructs WITH THEIRS. Secondly: Genetic cladistics (biochemical dissection) is replacing taxonomy (study of skeleton similarities and subtle differences to classify into groups). From memory… [All this is online at reputable places. Your curiousness is a beginning! And your question is a good place to start actually.] ‘super’ and ‘sub’ affixes affect these headings… KINGDOM ——- ===== Namely… ~temperarature (or energy aquisition) created gender Note that reproduction is the most fascinating subject but least explored. Much parallelism; eg proto dimorphic sex (one-celled specialist-breeding between multiple species in symbiosis with each other!) formed in “pond scum” but modern vetebrate dim sex comes from totally different and much later branch. ...And tons of self denial and self censorship, going back to the earliest modern scientists, for reasons related to my exchange with exPF under thread [‘more than a pretty face’]. Simply: nobody wants to be denouced as low status for studying the 800lb gorilla which dare not hear its name. ===== Simply the phenom where a 30million year old dolphin (from coast-living proto-dog-thang) looks like >400million year old shark (from early fish). This paralellism creates problems for taxonomists, since they look at morphological shapes (creature’s parts) to classify: The seen similarities might be symptom of similar niches rather than family relationship. Genetic cladistics seeks to cure that classification problem. ————— (Hint—use NATURAL SELECTION theory… 1) Different variations are born to a litter (they look, act and feel-inside different because of their different chemical compositions); 2) only a small portion live; 3) the niche they live in decides life and death. Niches change over time ...like so many slow moving storm fronts in the sky. The fundamental motor of the Universe is “cause and effect”—billard balls on a table… richoceting, bank shot after bank shot forever. That ever continuing domino effect motion creates the varying niches and varying pups o’the litters. —————— (And don’t forget, junior… v “SATAN! SATAN! SATAN!”) 28
Posted by SM on Wed, 01 Apr 2009 12:36 | # Corrections KINGDOM
29
Posted by Fred Scrooby on Wed, 01 Apr 2009 12:38 | # Daniel, you can deny race. But only if you deny every other category in the universe. If you admit the principles that allow you to categorize other things such as trees, buildings, stars, rocks, insects, worms, cars, computers, rivers, clouds, snakes, owls, and dogs you have to admit there are races. To deny race on the objections you’re advancing, truly the nincompoop’s objections and the dupe-of-the-Jews’ objections, and to be consistent about it — that is, to deny all other categorizations since you’ve just invalidated the criteria by which you categorize — is to make the whole universe incoherent. The Jews want to have it their own way: they want to deny the existence of that which bothers them, namely in this instance Euros, and affirm the existence of that which suits them, namely Jews. Obviously that’s not even worth responding to, but the spectacle of grown Jewish men, Jewish college professors, with pretensions of being taken seriously, going around spouting this pure nonsense, speaks volumes about the sheer brazenness, dishonesty, narcissism, and solipsistic world view of the Jewish mind: “Nothing exists but Jews.” I’m not replying to your idiotic question on the definition of race. Look “race” up in MR.com’s Wiki if you need help. 30
Posted by Fred Scrooby on Wed, 01 Apr 2009 12:43 | # Also I’m not into the north-south thing so don’t BORE ME TO FRICKING DEATH with that. 31
Posted by danielj on Wed, 01 Apr 2009 20:01 | # Ok Fred. Lemme know if you ever take your finger off the trigger. I asked you to give me the “scientific” and “objective” method of classifying and you didn’t. What you did do was accuse me of denying race exists, which I certainly would never do. I asked you if a Janissary or a person from the WESTERN MOST country in Europe was White and you accused me of starting a conversation about the biological divide between Northern and Southern Euros. I believe 100% in classifying things, similarity and difference, and race but we differ about whether or not it is “scientifically objective.” I ask you now how much Jewish ancestry you have and if a person with exactly that much African ancestry would be disqualified from in-group status? 32
Posted by Captainchaos on Wed, 01 Apr 2009 23:09 | # SM: “Others that don’t like our relative designations ansd classifications can go to death camps where they can grapple with the error that was their attempts to replace our relative constructs WITH THEIRS.” There’s one that shouldn’t have made the final cut. “(Note my peoples are from North carolina, W Virginia and some Pennsyvannia—and they are head-in-hole dunces:” And Jack Daniel’s is made in Tennessee. Coincidence? 33
Posted by Fred Scrooby on Wed, 01 Apr 2009 23:26 | #
I gathered that. I pointed you to the MajorityRights.com Wiki article on race, here: http://wiki.majorityrights.com/race . It should answer your idiotic, and I mean truly moronic, questions. Why did I jump on you? Because you and I had this same exchange a few weeks ago, very briefly. You’re denying race. Do not bore the fricking daylights out of me by playing word games about how you’re “not denying race, only trying to discuss how things are classified objectively and scientifically.” Look it up, I don’t have time for asinine crap. I don’t come here to discuss your free-association speculative crap and I have strictly no patience for Christian race-deniers. If you Christians are going to deny race all you’re doing is suggesting Christianity is a false religion. Any religion that denies race is a false religion, just as any religion that denies two plus two is a false religion.
Neither of my parents was Jewish and I have some Jewish ancestry at the grandparent level. My father was Catholic. I was not raised Jewish. I am a form of Catholic Sedevacantist but I also enormously respect Bishop Richard Williamson (who is not a Sedevacantist) and I reject Catholic Sedevacantists who deny race’s importance. I am currently searching for an acceptable form of Catholicism. The closest I’ve seen to something acceptable is Bishop Williamson. Any Catholicism that denies race or minimises its significance is excrement. Ditto any Protestantism.
I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t deal in “in-group status,” whatever that is. I oppose the current forced-race-replacement régime. That’s the only reason I come here. 34
Posted by danielj on Thu, 02 Apr 2009 01:20 | # I don’t know what you’re talking about. Is a person with an amount of Black ancestry equal to the amount of your Jewish ancestry White? Simple question. It should answer your idiotic, and I mean truly moronic, questions. Why did I jump on you? Because you and I had this same exchange a few weeks ago, very briefly. You didn’t answer me then and you have yet to now. Hey, if you don’t get what I’m asking just ask. Otherwise, it is like my grandmother used to say, fuck you. You’re denying race. No I’m not. No I’m not. No I’m not. I’m asking you to be clearer about it. When you can’t be clear about something, you turn into a rambling Jew baiter. If I don’t agree with you about something it must be because I’m under the perfidious influence of Jews. I don’t come here to discuss your free-association speculative crap and I have strictly no patience for Christian race-deniers. If that is how you perceive me then ignore me or write snarky little comments about me. I have plenty of patience for most, even people incapable of adding a little sophistication and nuance to the debate. If you Christians are going to deny race all you’re doing is suggesting Christianity is a false religion. What? Like Boolean logic false? What the fuck are you talking about? My father was Catholic. I was not raised Jewish. You can’t be “raised” Jewish, it is either in you or it isn’t. Do you think Jew is a religion? I’ll read your MR link and get back to you. 35
Posted by danielj on Thu, 02 Apr 2009 01:26 | # You all—christers—complain about the modern world we live in but you are obvlious to the fact you have done it yourselves. You have done it to us all. (There will be a reckoning…) What I love about MR is the pleasant and respectful way in which we disagree with and engage each other despite being on opposite sides of an ideological chasm. 36
Posted by Fred Scrooby on Thu, 02 Apr 2009 01:28 | # “I’ll read your MR link and get back to you.” Please don’t get back to me: your comment above is one hundred percent bullshit and so will your next one be. You’re a feeblemind and a race-denier. 37
Posted by danielj on Thu, 02 Apr 2009 01:33 | # I’m a feeblemind? I challenge your feeblemind to any battle of wits of your choosing. Or, if you prefer, to Jame’s challenge to the death in the forest. What the hell has come over you? Why are you talking like a fool? 38
Posted by danielj on Thu, 02 Apr 2009 01:35 | # Whatever you do, don’t answer my questions. Good night Fred. I hope you learn how to relax a little. 39
Posted by Storage Device on Thu, 02 Apr 2009 12:28 | #
It’s Monitor.
Btw, for polished up altruistic tendencies, SM, look no further than Kevin Macdonald, who really ought to know better: http://www.vdare.com/misc/090330_weissberg.htm After Weissberg pollutes Vdare with all kinds of filth and smears Macdonald with every (probably true) “anti-semitic canard”, Macdonald congratulates the man on hooking a white girl! (After, of course, blowing down Weissberg’s gorboduc/Monitor level straw men). 40
Posted by Fred Scrooby on Thu, 02 Apr 2009 12:48 | # In “Gorboduc” The Monitor certainly has done a good job of disguising himself. I never would have guessed it. When you think about it, it does fit though. The Monitor, of course, was a Christian race-replacement advocate, so Gorbo is too, which is why he didn’t respond to my direct question on that subject. Christian race-replacement advocates are a form of societal cancerous tumor. They’re vile, really and truly slimy, filthy, nauseating. I guess that other guy was The Monitor too, that guy who said he was Belgian and his name began with a “de,” who once posted a log entry as a guest blogger. He had the same makes-your-skin-crawl pro-race-replacement disgustingness as The Monitor and Rocket. 41
Posted by Fred Scrooby on Thu, 02 Apr 2009 12:50 | # Change that to, “He had the same makes-your-skin-crawl pro-race-replacement Christian disgustingness as The Monitor and Rocket.” That’s what I meant. 42
Posted by Captainchaos on Thu, 02 Apr 2009 15:35 | # I refuse to accept any bin, actually a chamber pot, into which Gorboduc and SM should both be placed. SM wishes to ignite the process of altruistic self-immolation and thereby destroy our race (because any decent man would fight to the bone to stop those crude barbarisms he peddles as ‘necessary’ ‘solutions’). He is a troll, and if he is Jewish it would not surprise me. Gorboduc wants to go to bat for his race, but an interpretation of his faith which has gained perhaps inextirpable presence in his mind, due to his faith gene, prevents him from rethinking his take on his faith so as to be affirming of the continued existence of European Man. One last try, Gorboduc, come out as a man of courage with a willingness to engage the question of the utility of Christianity for the life of your people. You see, if the West is lost there will be no venue for Christianity in the West, said venue having been lost. If there is something in Christianity that can prevent that, why not offer it here? Why not be willing to talk about it on those terms? What really do you have to lose, besides your stiff-necked, misplaced pride? I can at least tell you that I am genuinely interested in finding a Christianity that can do just that. It is not necessary for me to adopt your framing of the nature of reality (i.e., God is the animating force behind it) to have this conversation on the much more mundane level of utility. SM, find the nearest toilet and flush yourself down it. 43
Posted by Fred Scrooby on Thu, 02 Apr 2009 15:41 | #
That’s a pretty good line, I’ll have to remember that to use it on some of these characters. 44
Posted by White Western Man on Thu, 02 Apr 2009 16:37 | # What is always with us? At our most basic and primal level, our race is always with us. Various empires rise and fall, religions wax and wane, political systems are overthrown or dissolve, and ideas/beliefs regarding language, art, food, architecture, clothing, technology, and other cultural forms vary widely…but throughout this cultural inconstancy, mutability, and flux race is always with us. 45
Posted by Christianity = Death Cult on Thu, 02 Apr 2009 17:42 | #
What a laughably stupid statement. Christianity is just a Near Eastern death-cult a la “Jesus died for your sins”...central symbol is of rabble rousing Jew named Jesus dying and dead on the cross…Christians are obsessed with death, they hate the world, and they looks forward to a supposedly ‘glorious’ afterlife. Christianity doesn’t care about the dignity of life and our glorious world and our survival, but actually hates our bountiful and beautiful world because of its “Satanic” temptations and as stated looks forward to death and the supposed afterlife where it is said that all will be perfect in a very multicultural Heaven with Jesus the Jew. Christianity is hostile to the world and is thus hostile to the interests of humanity on Earth, especially Whites who were the primary adopters of it. Early Christians were the first one-world ‘universal love’ multiculturalists and liberals, and Christianity has slowly worn down the natural ethnocentric defenses of Whites with its ‘one love’ universalist/multicultural ideology. Christianity - a ‘religion’ for slaves, idiots, downtrodden Jews, and other inferiors who have lost the will to live. 46
Posted by Captainchaos on Thu, 02 Apr 2009 18:57 | # Christianity = Death Cult: “What a laughably stupid statement.” But is it? “Christianity is just a Near Eastern death-cult a la “Jesus died for your sins”...” And gun powder came to us through the Chinese, so what? Is it of no use, no betterment to us? Because he loved you enough to endure the squalor of material existence, as contrasted with the perfect existence potentially awaiting us in the next life, and to endure pain unto death as the price paid for your worldly wickedness; so that you may enjoy a realm of eternal perfection, if only you love him as he loved you. “...central symbol is of rabble rousing Jew named Jesus dying and dead on the cross…” No, a flesh and blood man, God come to flesh, who endured said for love of you; and you may have all that is his, perfect, bliss, if you love him in return. “...Christians are obsessed with death, they hate the world, and they looks forward to a supposedly ‘glorious’ afterlife.” No, they love what is good in this world, and have hope that their faith in love will be rewarded. “Christianity doesn’t care about the dignity of life and our glorious world and our survival,” What is good in this life are but a pale representation of the glories to come. A love of the good so profound it can settle for nothing less than the realization of the object of its adoration, perfection. “...a very multicultural Heaven with Jesus the Jew.” A Heaven where only those good enough to have faith in love will be admitted, and the gift awaiting them will be fellowship with the perfected. “Christianity is hostile to the world and is thus hostile to the interests of humanity on Earth, especially Whites who were the primary adopters of it.” Hostile only insofar as the world is corrupted, not hostile to the good in this world. And what is good in this world is the fellowship that flows from kinship, Christianity is not hostile to the good in this world, therefore it is not hostile to what the good is grounded in, in this world, in this case kinship. The loving and humble understand this, true Christians understand this, the usurpers and destroyers of love’s worldly groundings are of the Devil. “Early Christians were the first one-world ‘universal love’ multiculturalists and liberals, and Christianity has slowly worn down the natural ethnocentric defenses of Whites with its ‘one love’ universalist/multicultural ideology.” The Devil wishes to deceive us, to lead us away from love’s perfect glories which only await us in Heaven, by providing us with a counterfeit of the real thing. Only through Christ will every man be made perfect, that he is worthy of the perfect blessing of being loved by every perfected man. What a cruel trickster Satan is. “Christianity - a ‘religion’ for slaves, idiots, downtrodden Jews, and other inferiors who have lost the will to live.” And of those who lack malice. _________________________________________________________ Pssst, Christers. You getting the picture? Hey, Gorboduc, pull your head out of your ass. 47
Posted by danielj on Thu, 02 Apr 2009 20:46 | # The Monitor, of course, was a Christian race-replacement advocate, so Gorbo is too, which is why he didn’t respond to my direct question on that subject. Christian race-replacement advocates are a form of societal cancerous tumor. I thought the Monitor started out like Diamed? 48
Posted by gorboduc on Fri, 03 Apr 2009 00:43 | # Hi, Scrooby & Co., I can’t be in several places at once, and I didn’t reply to your question as I have had an enforced absence from the PC. Well really, if the abusive way you and Captain Chaos and ExPF disport yourselves on the web is typical of Pure Nordic Man I think I shall have to seek for better-bred company. Actually, my belief is that there aren’t quite as many of you as might appear to be the case. I’m willing to lay a fiver that the irascible Captain is also GW. Despite the Captain’s occasional Americanisms, there’s a certain idiomatic and thematic parallelism, despite the contrived disguise. What do others think? (CUE - SCURRILOUS ABUSE) And are there other identifications to be made? The good Captain is perhaps trying to get over a Catholic education. I think he now needs to get over the influence of Prussianism. SM (11.23): Your long list made it look as if another “poem” was on the way: thank God it wasn’t. Stop casting yourself as a victim of Christian intrigue and manipulation: if we’ve REALLY done all this to you, then lament your poor genetic endowment, resent the better-equipped Christians, and settle down to write a misery memoir, “ENSLAVED BY THE WEAK” And thanks for the lesson in cladistics:I can’t IMAGINE how you know such a lot! If my syllogisms are weak, show where the disconnectedness occurs. A syllogism is either accurate or it is not. And who was the pretentious fellow who gave me a little lesson in what a synedoche is? Am I drunk when I post? No, I’m absolutely tee-total. The odd mis-spelling is due to a lack of digital virtuosity: errors of organisation are due to poor eyesight. Is anyone who disagrees with you drunk? Do I know anything about gifted children? yes, many years ago I was one. And talking of gifted children, there seem to be a few about here at present. But they seem to be a mite spoiled and petulant. I hate to think of what happens to gifted children that can’t grow up. Think about this, dears: if Christianity is true, the Jews will be extremely angry at it, and will attempt to discredit it, probably by foul means rather than by fair. Christianity, the only true counter to Talmudic judaism, comes in for a fair amount of stick on this site….I do not attempt to exhibit a syllogism here, only to proffer a possible connectedness ... but you DO seem to be singing from the same hymn-sheet here… You guys shouldn’t let drunks, slaves and imbeciles rile you so much! I suppose you think of yourselves as Gullivers, held down by the sheer weight of Lilliputian Christians , individually intellectually negligible, of course, but dangerous when acting in combination. I’m flattered to have so much power attributed to me by SM, especially as I’m an “imbicil”. Danielj and Dasein are good guys. Somehow their contributions are more dignified than a lot of the toilet-mouth ranting that seems to express this site’s official view-points. I wish WESTERN MAN could evolve some better manners! The late lamented Lenny Bruce comes to mind - your lavatorial abuse of people you wish to put down possibly reflects his cultural influence. And I like the derisive point about Bantu shamans someone made earlier, especially asd one or two members of the New Right have apparently been seen at Uk functions with little wooden amulets or totems round their necks… depends how much you want to utilise an invented primitivism I suppose: perhaps one of your garmen-making chums could corner the market in cross-gartered leggings? 49
Posted by Captainchaos on Fri, 03 Apr 2009 09:55 | # Gorboduc, that is just a bunch of self-justifying, self-righteous blather from you. Was it even worth the effort to type? So what is it? If White people do not experience a Christian revival then you don’t give a damn if our race survives? 50
Posted by gorboduc on Fri, 03 Apr 2009 22:43 | # Dear Cap’n, It’s not that THE RACE survives, or how long it survives: it’s what it survives AS, and what it DOES that are important. At present I can’t tell if you value refinement or barbarism more. The sheer aggression of a lot of your postings make me think it’s the latter. Your expressed worry about survival makes you sound a bit like a worried late Victorian with an interest in spiritualism “I just want to know that I will survive!”. I see the New Right is most emphatically NOT interested in conserving anything from our past, and is quite uninterested in tradition, except in newly-invented pagan ones. What it’s most keen to preserve is only a set of dubiously supported “scientific” notions and theories from the mid-19th. century. Look, if you believe the “it’s all in the genes” position, and you think that your genes are programmed for survival, then what are you worrying about? And if they’re NOT programmed for survival, I hope you don’t turn the whites that are left into helpless gibbering idiots when you and your “scientific” chums try a bit of genetic engineering. I think that it was the rather condescending pat on the head that you recently administered to me somewhere else on this site, words to the effect of “Well done, now you’re getting angry!” uttered in the style of a games master at a goodish school in the 60’s, that actually annoyed me a bit: nothing that any of you hostile folk has said to me has annoyed me at all, but I am somewhat disappointed to find that intelligent opposition is here treated at best with a rather snooty and lofty condescension and at worst with a torrent of abuse. Seems that the NEW RIGHT has its share of Guardianista types too! But then if you actually ADMIRE Anger, there’s not much more I need to say to you or to your allies/ aliases. Do you value Greed and Lust, and all the others? And as for some other comment someone made about cancer, well, that’s in the genes too. 51
Posted by Captainchaos on Fri, 03 Apr 2009 23:14 | # Gorboduc, I’m not Guessedworker. Though you pay me a high compliment by insinuating that I am. Christianity provides comfort to many good people and I can never be convinced that is not a good thing. I’ll respond at more length later. As for my “aggression”: chalk it up to the prime of life. 52
Posted by Desmond Jones on Fri, 03 Apr 2009 23:22 | #
How do you aspire to great things if you don’t survive? How do you win the lottery if you don’t buy a ticket? If the barbarian Arminius succumbed to the refinement of Rome in the persona of Germanicus then how might there have been Germanic aspirations? How might that eradicated people aspire to the greatness of Bach? 53
Posted by Al Ross on Fri, 03 Apr 2009 23:53 | # The Germanic “barbarians” (who were, Tacitus reminds us, just as civilised and intelligent as Romans but chose not to live under a heavily centralised government) and the patrician oligarchy which built the Roman Empire constituted both sides of the same racially Nordic coin. It is axiomatic that, when we assess our own Aryan group, we take, as examples, the very best of us, e.g., Bach, but when we make assay of our racial enemies’ qualities we use the worst specimens available. This represents only a slight variation on the truism that every race regards itself as superior and if Whites are perceived to act in such a manner then we are simply indulging in a tautology. 54
Posted by Fred Scrooby on Sat, 04 Apr 2009 00:03 | #
According to what we mean by the race “surviving,” if it “survives” it survives as itself, by definition. What else is it going to survive as? Eskimos? Assuming it survives, what it survives “AS” is what it was before: itself. “Survives” in this context means “doesn’t change into something else”; “stays the same, the same race: not mulattoized, not Chineseified, not Hinduized, not Arabized, not Mexicanized. It’s itself, unchanged.” See how The Monitor returns always to the same mentally diseased position: hoping to make others agree that race is as nothing compared to Catholicism (or Christianity if he’s not Catholic). But he’s come to the wrong blog for that: the truth is it is rather Catholicism and it is rather Christianity that are as nothing if they dismiss race. If they dismiss race they show themselves in the very same instant to be false religions. It’s that simple. A religion dismisses race? Its adherents, all fo them, would do well to immediately walk away from it and find a real religion somewhere else. This person signing as The Monitor aka Gorboduc is worse than a spiritual nullity because mind cancer has eaten up all his wits, turning them into mental putrefaction. He has the Ebola virus of the mind. 55
Posted by exPF on Sat, 04 Apr 2009 01:20 | # Responding to Gorboduc’s response to Captain Chaos:
This viewpoint could be called “cultural supremacism”, or “culturo-centrism” for lack of a better word. Basically the idea that the existence of our peoples is a lesser priority than the maintenace of high culture. The person who feels this way, does not view the existence of our race as a good in itself. The existence of our race is, according to this viewpoint, clearly only good insofar as it supports the generation of Bachs and Beethovens. If we stop producing Bachs and Beethovens, we might as well no longer exist. (I am using the names Bach and Beethoven here to represent the whole of white higher culture, but that extends beyond music to things like computer science, math and literature). The first thing I want to say about this viewpoint is that it is, typically, alien to our race. This does not represent the way that people typically relate to their families or extended families. The existence of my family is a good in itself, regardless of whether they become high achievers and join the elite, or become indigent. One outcome is more desirable than the other, but in neither case would I alledge my indifference to their existence as people - which is in fact what is being implied in the above argument. The lack of racial loyalty implicit in this argument should be plain for everyone to see. The truly problematic point in this argument is that whites really are no longer in a position to maintain a level of high culture in comparison to their past accomplishments. The problems posed by mass immigration and the welfare state are such that they demand of us a reorientation of our culture on a much more fundamental level - we have to go back to the consideration of first things. This may generate further cultural flourishes in the long-term, but in the medium-term white culture will clearly be preoccupied with simple housekeeping issues - i.e. how do we keep from dying and being killed in the new de facto anti-white diaspora where we all now (more or less) exist? How do we maintain a basal level of acceptable culture in the midst of negrification? German culture could produce Bach and Beethoven because it had its basic issues resolved - it had hard borders and an established cultural tradition - in contrast to the time of the great migrations (Völkerwanderung), where there were no great german composers, as Desmond Jones noted. Liberalism has brought upon us another Völkerwanderung, and with that, focused us to concentrate efforts on the bedrock strata of cultural life - i.e. survival and housekeeping - which will assuredly prevent us in the medium-term from contributing to world high culture. Whites concentrating on composing symphonies in 2009, will certainly only be doing so far removed from the troubles which will concern a majority of their racial brethren.
I value refinement and barbarism and won’t set them in opposition because they both clearly evolve in environments where they are suitable strategies.
Besides their supposed similarity to a late Victorian person’s feelings, what is illegitimate about these worries? The quote clearly implies the worry is either
To say that the New Right is uninterested in tradition, when in fact I think they are the group demonstrating the most historical knowledge, the most historical sympathy (for past iterations of our people and their cultures) and the most interest in the roots of european peoples - is an exaggeration that damages it’s authors credibility. The New Right clearly is interested in preserving our culture in heritage - especially insofar as this is seen to be an epiphenoma of the existence of the white race (credit: Wintermute). The New Right does not intend to shackle the white man to past iterations of his culture - but regards the white nations as organisms whose existence has value in itself, over and above that of the cultural clothes which they may wear and discard over various epoches. In this way the thinking endorsed by the New Right and MR/WN thinkers tends to diverge from the cultural supremacism voiced in gorboduc’s comments.
Well, what if his “worrying”, which is a smear word for organizing and strategy, were to be a facet of his biology’s survival response? What if this, what we are attempting on MR, is our genetic survival response to the threat we are faced with? MR is also an expression of our genes. Learning about and discussing the problems we are faced with and sharing solutions - it seems quite adaptive, that which we are engaged in here. Genes being “programmed for survival” does not mean that genes just automatically result in the survival of the organism they belong to. This programming must first be translated into action through exertion and effort - i.e. that which is being exhibited on MR. The wildebeest is genetically programmed to evade capture by lions - this doesn’t mean it doesn’t have to do anything to escape from them.
The universe being blind and pitiless is just applying anthropomorphic qualities to the universe. In case someone is in the dark about what “anthropomorphicizing” means, it means attributing human qualities to non-human objects. The universe isn’t literally ‘blind’ - there is no question here of whether the universe possesses sight or not. The universe is only said to be blind and pitiless in order to contrast it with previous anthropomorphizations of it - the belief for example that a just God ruled over and watched everything. That would make a capacity to view things and judge the justice of human actions - qualities possessed by human beings - into qualities possessed by the universe and/or God. Dawkins used anthropomorphizing shorthand in order to counter a tradition, millenia old, of giving the universe human qualities, such as imagining that there is some big old man behind it, watching and judging us.
Let’s be clear about what “the universe” is, sans living organisms. It is a collection of various elements - allow me to quote a paper I just found on the internet: “The composition of the solar system was established by astrophysical processes, starting with the light elements, such as H, He and Li, produced in the Big Bang, approximately 20 Ga ago. The heavier elements were produced over time by processes involving the evolution and destruction of massive stars (primarily stars greater than solar masses), and processes in novae, both of which enriched the galactic annulus containing the sun by the time the solar system was formed [86,19]. The formation of the solar system is best dated at 4.559 + 0.004 Ga ago, The formation of the solar system occurred by collapse of a dense molecular cloud core The pre-biotic universe consists of these elements, held in relation to one another by the variety of forces which physicists work to understand and which I found a quick description of here. These chunks of elements, In order to understand the basis for what is commonly accepted by humans to be “right” and “wrong”, it is necessary to look at humans and what we are. Our structure, our origins, our essence, puts us in a certain evolutionary framework and dictates to us a whole string of requirements. Even though we cannot find a cosmic justification for our very human concepts of right and wrong - unless we posit a huge, all-powerful human being (being honest, that is what god is construed to be) who controls the entire universe - even though our justification isn’t cosmic, we can find justifications for action which are based in our essence, and the framework we inhabit as a result of our essence. These are “human” i.e. non-absolute notions of right and wrong, which derive meaning from their results in the real world and hence, the attitudes that humans tend to develop about them. Having sex with your sister and then drowning her is a double “wrong” in human terms - and the reason behind this relates to our genetics. Pairing with close relatives can result in deleterious mutations becoming homozygous and hence, degradation of the breeding stock (even if it doesn’t result in outright death or disease, it can be stunting). Thus there is a genetic explanation for anti-incest taboos. Drowning a close relative is against one’s genetic interests, because it takes copies of one’s own genes out of existence. The primary function of human beings and the genes they convey is that of being a replicator - i.e. even though we create tremendous art, are hilarious in conversation, and look great in swimwear - the only thing that truly matters from a long-term perspective is the contribution we make to future genetic stock. This is because just to exist across vast spans of time, it isn’t enough just to be clever and write good prose, one has to actually reproduce. Which is actually a quite problematic and difficult endeavor. I don’t have time to explain the replicator nature of genes and human beings in any more depth - if you want a better explanation, see The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. Returning to the point at hand - we don’t have a cosmic good or bad, we have a human good or bad, dedicated by the nature of our essences i.e. that which we, in fact, are. The universe does not dictate to us what we should view as good or bad. No one in fact looks to the universe to dictate good or bad. We have a sense already built-in that getting money, getting attractive women, getting good food, procuring the means of survival and propagation, and securing a future for our children, are all “right”. Whether the current moralists in the west, or even those of past centuries, recognized the “rightness” of these things, this rightness is manifestly in evidence as all human beings are in fact doing this. Those who look to moralists are also not consulting “the universe” about good and bad - they are referring to the authority of other human beings who, it is presumed, have divine revelations. So nobody is actually looking to “the universe” to give them directives about how to live - even Christians believe that a select circle of hellenistic Jews can be used as a source of divine knowledge about good and bad, my point is that even they are looking to other humans to tell them about cosmic right and wrong. If anybody were to take the admonishing to find one’s ideas of right and wrong from “the Universe”, it would follow from that that the person to ask about right and wrong would be a physicist - so in your next moral quandry, if you truly care what “the universe” thinks, why not call up your local university’s physics department and ask them how the relation of forces and matter dictates that you should behave in your life. This is absurd, but it is no less absurd than the supposition that the “meaninglessness” of the universe in terms of human behavior demands that we abdicate the human notions of good and bad, and the meaning thus derived, because all of it cannot be supported by a universe which supposedly “cares” about who one chooses to have sexual liaisons with. For those who couldn’t be bothered to read all that: science indicates that “The Universe” does not care who or how many people you have sex with.
Not really, mutations have to occur for cells to become cancerous. Typically these mutations are caused by carcinogens - and most carcinogens that humans are exposed to are from industrial sources, i.e. created by recent advances in human industry. Its a result of the proliferation of the chemical industry and the ubiquitousness of industrial chemical products which contribute to the rise in cancer rates. 56
Posted by Templar on Sat, 04 Apr 2009 02:25 | #
Giving “the universe” anthropomorphic qualities and perceiving there to be an intelligence at work behind it, would seem to be two rather different propositions.
Being honest, why do you construe God to be an all-powerful human being?
I’m afraid that’s incorrect. From a long-term perspective, nothing truly matters. Biological organisms have an obvious intended purpose of replicating themselves, but this replication has no ultimate purpose. It is merely activity for its own sake, and ultimately pointless and futile.
Which is to say that the white race cannot be defended on the basis of art, or law, or anything else not immediately related to reproduction.
No, they generally look to the perceived powers responsible for the existence of the universe.
“Everyone’s doing it” is not a sound basis for a moral law, PF. Acquiring resources, mates and offspring may be desirable and advantageous from an evolutionary perspective but that does not necessarily make them morally “right” of themselves, in fact, to adopt a materialist, purely evolutionary perspective is to divorce oneself from moral notions such as “right” and “wrong” all together.
Which is seen to confer a necessary, greater-than-human authority upon them. Nobody is looking to other humans to give them directives about how to live life because humans are frail and fallible beings, and so even the most devoutly militant of atheists need to convince themselves that they follow the dictates of something greater than themselves in their lives, hence the appeals to deified “Reason”, “Science” and “Evolution”. 57
Posted by Templar on Sat, 04 Apr 2009 02:57 | # Aw, who am I kidding? This is pointless. Neither of us is going to convince the other of anything. 58
Posted by Al Ross on Sat, 04 Apr 2009 03:24 | # If Templar gets down on his knees, closes his eyes, places his hands together in the Buddhist gesture of respect and jabbers at the stratosphere, as he doubtless does with Yahweh - impressing regularity, perhaps his interlocutor will experience a Damascene conversion. Oh ye of little faith. 59
Posted by exPF on Sat, 04 Apr 2009 06:01 | # Templar, I respect Xtianity in dedicated racialists. Meaning, I don’t need to see Xtianity “disproved” in the harshest terms - it has some plausibility and I think has a claim on possibly being true. Therefore I only tend to ‘get into it’ with people who use Xtianity to somehow downplay race or prove it to be of no importance. The likelihood that you can convince me of Xtianity is small, so perhaps debate isn’t a valuable use of our time. But I will answer the points you bring up.
Insofar as intelligence isn’t exclusive to humans, yes, it isn’t strictly anthropomorphicizing. It would be
The idea of god which comes up again and again - so often and so widespread throughout history that it cannot be said (to my knowledge) to really have originated anywhere specifically, is very similar. Whether its Hindu gods, Christian God, Bantu spirits - they all are patterned after living beings here on earth. They are patterned after intelligent metazoans, intelligent multi-celled organisms. Gods have arms, legs; they think, they strive, they argue, they even sometimes copulate; the Christian God deliberates, weighs in judgement. Gods have personalities. The Nordic gods even had physical features characteristic of the nordic races: Thor was red-haired, Baltur was blonde-haired and blue-eyed. In the cases of Satyrs and such, the characteristics of animals were given to gods. All of these features are taken from the physical world we have knowledge of: it strikes me as suspect that the divine world would so nearly mirror our own world. We metazoans all share characteristics. We move, eat; we’re made of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and some other elements. Our evolution is explained by the evolution of RNA molecules and DNA molecules and the bodies they code for. But why should Gods have the same bodies as us, or reflect our own traits so similarly? Why should Jehovah be so interested in the people of Israel? He sounds to me like a big Jew in the sky. Thor and Baldur and Odin very obviously represent to me the characteristics of Nordic men writ large - I recognize my own character in the description of Odin’s mischievous, slightly grim character. These gods were clearly patterned after men - why semitic religiosity tended to a monotheistic god, I cannot say. It is too convenient for pre-scientific man to find a grandiose version of himself controlling the universe - it makes me think his divine knowledge was taken from corrupt sources. I think the men who originated God-stories had no direct knowledge of god, they had deep feelings, occasionally psychotic and dietary imbalances leading to ‘visions’, and out of these they spun their stories. This conclusion does seem to be corroborated by the fact that the divine world looks so much like ours.
Wow, that’s an interesting point you bring up. When you speak of “purpose” and “perspective”, please dont forget that both of these things imply a conscious agent. Rocks don’t have purposes, as far as we know they can’t “do” anything. “Acting” as such is the prerogative of life forms, purposeful acting as we know it is the prerogative of highly evolved metazoan life forms (assuming a conscious, i.e. not hard-wired, purpose). Our universe is basically a bunch of rocks. Judging by the eternal quiescence of the heavens - so many billions of stars, basically doing nothin’ much for countless millenia - they don’t have a purpose. I think its fair to say that nothing matters - to them. Of course, its not like I wait around for a rock to behave like a metazoan and then after many years conclude it won’t do anything - I know that the absence of evolved behaviors and intelligence precludes it from “doing” anything. You say the replication of life forms has no “ultimate purpose” - but in order to have a purpose we need a conscious agent providing the “ultimate perspective” on which this “ultimate purpose” would have to be based. So who is that agent? Clearly, the elephant in the room is that this ultimate perspective was supposed to be supplied by God. Well, I think the “ultimate purpose” only can exist if God exists - i.e someone is either playing puppetmaster with the whole of creation, in which case they presumably have some reason for doing so (i.e. a purpose), or there is no puppetmaster - and thus there is no “ultimate purpose”. To say that replication is “ultimately” pointless and futile is an interesting assertion. What that means to me is the realization that there is no ‘higher artisan’ ensuring that this whole process results in some higher end - the process is continuing simply as a result of its own volition, not because it satisfies any higher (i.e. divine) requirements. The use of the words ‘futile’ and ‘pointless’ describe how life must appear to an ultimate perspective, given the fact that the agent wielding the ultimate perspective could not actually control everything like a putative God would be able to. This reflects exactly the role of men, who can attempt to view the world from an ultimate perspective - or to imagine that they do - yet who are helpless to ‘wield the world’ in the way of a putative God. When human men view the entirety of time and space in their minds (or attempt to), and especially if they are accustomed to the idea that all of this is being wielded by a god, realizing the lack of the ultimate purpose, hence the inability to satisfy the requirements of this ultimate perspective, will make the entirety of existence appear “pointless” from that higher perspective. Which indeed it may be, since this higher perspective is really a feat of human imagination anyway, and not the first rarified human thought process that despite a tantalizing promise turned out to be a dead end in practical terms. I think anything that looks on the whole of creation and declares it ‘pointless’ is a perversity. Yet this is the inevitable after-pangs of withdrawal from a religious worldview, I suppose. To have a religious worldview is to be assured of ultimate purpose. Here is an interesting thought experiment: imagine there were two gods- the puppetmaster God and his brother, Jack. The puppetmaster god controls all of creation, while Jack just looks on. It turns out, although we short-termists cannot see it yet, that the puppetmaster god does have a purpose for creation, and he is busy working this purpose in his mysterious ways. All of creation is humming away splendidly - humans reproduce gladly because they know, after all the generations pass, it will not have been “futile”, there will have been a “point” (beyond that of earthly success). And Jack the brother to the puppetmaster god, watches over the countless millenia, as his brother brings creation to a crescendo of meaningfulness, encapsulates its essence in some kind of commemorative plate, and then destroys it in a burst of joy and culmination: Jack looks on to the entire process, considers his brother’s purpose in doing all of this, and thinks: is there no higher purpose than my brother’s? Who is wielding my brother in the name of a higher purpose? If he is just doing it for the satisfation of his own volitions, isn’t it ultimately (i.e. considered from the level above the puppetmaster god) “pointless”? The point is, at some level, someone must be operating just for pure old fun’s sake, whether it is us or God. At some point, the higher intelligence is just doing what it wants. And the question then becomes: does that serve any higher purpose than fulfilling the desire of that agent? If not, from all “more ultimate” perspectives, at least those viewed with the pre-expectation of purpose and higher symmetry or aesthetic value, it is “pointless”.
The white race can be defended on any grounds whatsoever - even on no grounds at all. “Because I wanna” is a valid defense of the white race as far as I’m concerned, though it lacks persuasive power. I strive to combat those “arguments defending the white race” which have internal inconsistencies which will give way under the pressure of argument to conclusions supportive of race-replacement. For example, when I first discovered this board, cultural supremacists would make their “loyalty” to the white race conditional on the probability that we continue to maintain high culture - classical music, art, Latin; some of these people were Mediterraneans who thought that my race (Nordic) had to bow to theirs as cultural benefactors. For others, Christianity was actually more important than the white race (Gorboduc may have been present in those days under a diff name), which they often scoffed at, probably because they themselves were racially conflicted. Still others would disparage modern white culture as if whites who fell under the influence of modernity were somehow no longer our brethren.
I dunno. Its moral to have children, right? Its moral to give them the best you can, right? It seems to me that trying to get money and women is highly moral, in the sense that it
I would tend to put right and wrong in context by saying “strategically right” or “strategically wrong” - this makes clear my intention of success in this world.
I understand that the humans in question supposedly have divine knowledge. But there is no way to really understand what divine knowledge is, who has it and does not have it, is there high quality and low quailty divine knowledge, etc. etc. So, besides the fact that they claim to have divine knowledge, how can one know if this is merely a claim? I understand that science has a massive air of snobbery about it, with which it really pays no respect to religion. The snobbery is in fact huge, especially Dawkins (and myself, I do it too). But to be fair, look at what science has done for us. You and I are complete strangers, yet united by interests, we discuss deepest things across a cable - science did that. We’ve had science for a few hundred years, look at how its changed things. We had ‘divine knowledge’ for thousands of years, and never once did the divine god show us how to build a computer. Why not, since that clearly is within the capacity of a putatively divine being? Why does this divine knowledge never actually produce any cool stuff? 60
Posted by gorboduc on Sat, 04 Apr 2009 10:33 | # Sorry, chaps, you’ve lost me. “Because I wanna” says it all. Who is speaking? a badly-brought-up child, a drivelling rock star? Why use this low idiom?. Don’t you want to preserve civilised discourse? I may have used “guys’n'gals” in a reference toi Harry’s Place but that’s a satirical reference to the “hip” demotic speech-styles over-frequently employed there! I love the way you folks brandish “scientific papers” as ifvery title was a guarantee of the accuracy of their contents: just like an old-time preacher-man brandishing the Bible. I’ve commented elsewhere on MR about the touching faith or fideism generally reposed in anything described as “scientific”. Oh, and all that sorry stuff about Odin! So when I read the Scandinavian myths I’m really reading about YOU? For shame! How many legs has your horse/cat/dog got? This reminds me of a conversation that I once had with a rather silly girl: SG (interrupting) No, I mean, who did you identify with? You’ve got to identify with someone in a book if you’re going to enjoy it! Self: Sorry, I didn’t “identify” with anyone. I thought the story was- SG: So you DIDN’T really like it? Pshaw. Why aren’t you Loki? Study classical myth, and think of Narcissus!
Don’t know where all this ‘divine knowlege’ comes in. God has that; we don’t, although in the old Christian world there was a science called ‘theology’ - by some divinity. The Bible and the Fathers are full of disclaimers of such knowedge: you will know St Paul’s “per speculum in aenigmitate”. The level at which you wish to preserve our culture is apparently displayed by the sycophantic way in which the dreary and sub-literate rubbish dished up as “poetry” by Norman was presented. A pungent, and concise and accurate comment was posted recently: “faggot shit”. I’m most interested by your pious respect for science based on its abiity to “change things”. Mere change for the sake of novelty is not sought by intelligent people. You don’t say whether you think the change has been for the better or the worse. Merely to point to “change” as a proof of “science” is to invite contemptuous ridicule. You had better bend that mighty cranium of yours to a couple of scientific problems, which, if not solved, MAY mean that the white race won’t survive: what has happened to our song-birds, and what has happened to the bees? 61
Posted by gorboduc on Sat, 04 Apr 2009 11:01 | # Also, ExPF, you were wrong when you said your ‘thought-experiment’ was ‘interesting’. It was not. No experiment begins with “suppose…”, but with “observe”.
I am reminded of another thought experiment, hilariously carried out, purely internally, and to his own very great satisfaction, by a VERY GREAT SCIENTIST INDEED, who did NOT observe the phenomenon himself, and who yet drew immense (some might say, presumptuous,) conclusions and it is as follows: In North America the black bear was seen by Hearne swimming for hours with widely open mouth, thus catching, like a whale, insects in the water. Even in so extreme a case as this, if the supply of insects were constant, and if better adapted competitors did not already exist in the country, I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more and more aquatic in their structures and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale. ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! It’s beyond satire, isn’t it? But I love your little self image a yourself as a “grim” character. Perhaps you should fix up ANOTHER pseudonym, BALROG. I tremble. 62
Posted by John on Sat, 04 Apr 2009 11:49 | #
You allude to something unique to the monotheistic Middle Eastern goat-herder religions and most deleterious, pernicious and insidious: the idea that one should worship God. 63
Posted by SM on Sat, 04 Apr 2009 12:16 | #
How is that satire? (The above might not lead to what he said (whale like) because of a million and one other selection events occurring between that bear and his lineage’s supposed future whale-shape but that would still all be the natural selection equation.) =================== Prick… the zeus/ deus /dio guy who morphed through migrant hijacking[jews] into the Yhawhe/ Jehovah guy. So abusive and apathetic that our only solaces is his non existence—“ourselves alone”. The more primitive the gods, the less power they have over a nature they didn’t create. They are simply dead and promoted ancestors who, we imagine, protect us a little (like parents do). Can’t blame them. But cosmic creator entities are to blame. And as far as your needing a point to carry on and fight back (with your point being the jebus ‘god’)... What makes you think that this all powerful cosmic-enigma god isn’t working for the “other side”?... At any rate the techno snowball and a philosophical ontological understanding (eg natural selection) are not the same things. We can destroy ourselves—or a part of ourselves—with the crazy train techno snowball but the facts of nature we have observed can still BE RIGHT too. If we are to protect ourselves from the crazytrain snowball And at the same time accept what we now know to be true too, maybe we need to shale off atavistic (obsolete vestigial) christian sentiment, see a little means and end justification and throw down in un jesus-like, undemocratic ways, Third Reich style. 64
Posted by Dasein on Sat, 04 Apr 2009 12:23 | #
The New Right’s attitude to traditional Christianity has always troubled me. Some commentators claim that de Benoist’s respect for tradition derives from an appreciation of his mother’s roots in agricultural society. Does that not include Catholicism? I don’t know why that bit gets tossed out. Apparently de Benoist read On the Genealogy of Morals when he was 13. His precociousness is impressive, but it might have been better if he had an idea of what was being deconstructed beforehand. As I’ve grown older (though I still don’t have gray hair), I’ve become more interested in Nietzsche’s writings. It’s a good challenge and an antidote to wishful thinking, but its effectiveness is proportional to the strength of that which he’s attacking. That is the paradox.
What is an ‘element’? Elements from the periodic table are an aggregation of more elemental particles. What are the properties of the fundamental units of matter? Until we know this (which we won’t), materialists should be more humble. This description also starts late in the process. At around 1 millisecond, quarks and antiquarks began to form in an asymmetric ratio (for every ~1 billion quark-antiquarks pairs there was an extra quark). Whence came these quarks and antiquarks? Whence came their predecessors? What set them in motion? Religion cannot be discounted by presuming science will ever have all the answers.
Let’s try some syllogisms (for the paranoid, I am not Gorbo!): 1. The universe has humans 2. Humans have interests 3. The universe has interests — 1. Humans were formed by processes in the universe 2. Humans have interests 3. Processes in the universe give rise to interests
There is choice involved. My choice of wife reflects how I want my children to be. There is nothing pointless or futile in human choice. To marry someone outside your race is to spit on the decisions made by thousands of generations of your ancestors.
It’s not snobbery, it’s blindness.
Human intelligence did this. 65
Posted by gorboduc on Sat, 04 Apr 2009 13:21 | # Dear Sm, What I meant was, that paragraph, being so asinine, COULN’T be satirised. To attempyt it would be to gild refined gold, to paint the lily. I am well aware of the apparent etymological connections between Jupiter, with his highly irregular other cases, Jovis, Jovem, Jove, and Jehovah. Fr. Formby wrote a book about 1870 to suggest that Numa had studied with Solomon, no less, and that the original religion of Rome, was what you’d call Judaism. Your theological discourse, ahem, lacks coherence. Really I’m going to have to ask for an interpreter. Why do you make so free with words like ‘prick’? What purpose - other than the revelation of your own character - does the choice of such language have? It is remarkably unpersuasive, although it might affect those who are poorly informed and prone to being bullied. Unfortunately the Third Reich was about the worst example you could have chosen. This site contains a recently-posted and very favourable retrospective, apparently from an elderly eye-witness, explaining how very decent the Hitler Youth organisation, even in the late stages of WWII, was in supplying buses every Sunday to take the kids off to their respective churches, and carefully explains how the Reich actually BUILT 2500 new sacred edifices. 66
Posted by gorboduc on Sat, 04 Apr 2009 13:27 | # If anyone missed it, the apparent eye-witness claims about the general niceness and decency of the Third Reich was posted by Friedrich Braun under the cutesy Ainu Mechinime bunny video. And no, I didn’t see the swastikas either. 67
Posted by Fred Scrooby on Sat, 04 Apr 2009 14:30 | #
That’s exactly The Monitor/Gorboduc. Precisely! You’ve defined the creep. And he goes about it in such a cancerous way, too — makes one’s skin crawl the way Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and John Wayne Gacy do. These “Christians” who use Christianity “to somehow downplay race or prove it to be of no importance” are among the dregs, the absolute dregs, of humanity.
Science and whatever has thus far kept the Jews from shutting us down (the Jews with the connivance of the Vatican and Lambeth Palace). Once the Jews figure out how to overcome whatever is thwarting them they’ll instantly terminate our conversation here, “cable” and “science” notwithstanding.
That makes an important fundamental point and is pretty well put. It happens, though, that we possess qualities that are desirable too, and that fact can’t be completely separated from the rest. But exPF’s fundamental point stands and, again, is very important. Central, in fact. 68
Posted by Captainchaos on Sat, 04 Apr 2009 15:44 | # Gorboduc: “It’s not that THE RACE survives, or how long it survives: it’s what it survives AS, and what it DOES that are important. At present I can’t tell if you value refinement or barbarism more. The sheer aggression of a lot of your postings make me think it’s the latter.” Yet what our people do cannot be separated from what we are. I detect in you Monitor, a self-professedly devout Christian, some mighty lack of Charity of the spirit for our people, yours and mine. And too, not sufficient Faith in their goodness I would expect of a Christian man for his kin; and if found wanting, Hope held for the amelioration of what lacks, even delayed to the eleventh hour before doom strikes. Let it be known now, they are good and loved by us, and we believe they ought live. Accordingly, it is our solemn duty and sacred honor to fight for them to the end, come what may; for what is good should never die. In that spirit, I invite you to take up the fight with us as you do what is right by your people and your faith. Pray on it. 69
Posted by danielj on Sat, 04 Apr 2009 15:58 | # G/The Monitor: So what if the Asians that are moving here adopt traditional Reformed and traditional Catholic Christianity in the traditional percentages that the White race adopted them, drive out the Mexicans, out breed the Whites, become an overwhelmingly dominate majority redefining “American” and vote Republican? Will you be happy if your culture survives on in these Mongols? Additionally, for the race to survive at all is a necessary condition for the race to survive in the fashion you wish it to. It is in fact of primary and superior value for the race to survive period then. Full stop. You cannot convert a White brotherhood that doesn’t exist. 70
Posted by danielj on Sat, 04 Apr 2009 15:59 | # dominant majority and redefine American in the process all while voting Republican? 71
Posted by SM on Sat, 04 Apr 2009 16:17 | #
What is ‘gobbledegook’ about it—specifically—you un-deservedly smug mediocre sophist. The dismissal of an argument through spelling and grammar flame is what you see with gooberduck’s tactic. It demonstrates lack of an argument. Your attempt at smug dismissal of those you challenge because “they are incoherent” is made laughably bare by the fact you are too incoherent to properly attribute your insults. Ie do you mean my paragraph below your “Darwinian quote” or the original one within you quotes? [rhetorical]
It is not just “apparent”. Your cult is a made-up fairy tale. Actually it is a plagiary of a made up fairy tale; it achieved power through some kind of slow motion (ie hard to see in history) Marxist-like /democracy-like revolution. The reason the new plagiarized-version worked so well is it unwittingly [since it’s a meme] refined the protectionist demagoguery part of the previous fairy tales and had a dumber, more needful and naive class (the laborer/slaves of Rome and naive Northern Euros) to exploit. (And I don’t like the way you ignored the part of my response to you which was in agreement with your concerns. The part about the Luciferian apple; and the history of your light bringer paradox. [The shadows scare you to blindness.] Your cult is filled with ignoramuses, who we know nothing about other things but also don’t even understand their own cult’s parables and history.) And know this, you smug idiot… Your religion is dead, your god is dead, your masculinity is forfeited, your families are dissolved and next your countries. Have a nice day. 72
Posted by exPF on Sat, 04 Apr 2009 16:34 | # Replying to Dasein’s syllogism:
The first syllogism confuses the idea of the universe containing interests (i.e. the interests of entities within it), with the universe having interests of its own. Thus it hinges on the ambiguity of the word “has”. The universe can contain interested parties (parties with interests), and even conflicting interests, without itself having interests of its own. The universe in fact contains a great many things, without itself being them, or without these things being fundamental characteristics of the universe’s existence. As I think “interests”, like “perspective” is a property of an evolved and conscious or semi-conscious being, the universe cannot possess these things as it is not an evolved, semi-conscious being. The rocks on Jupiter’s moon Io, for example, do not possess a perspective, nor do they possess interests. But the entire universe sans life, as far as we know it, is just more of these rocks in different elemental aggregations. The second syllogism is true. Processes in the universe give rise to interests - even though I think it is a poor formulation because interests are not things that exist as such, rather they are properties of a being. Like perspective, or purpose, you won’t find interests sans being or sans body. So it would make more sense to say that processes in the universe gave rise to evolved semi-conscious beings (higher metazoans) who, as a result of their nature, have “perspectives”, “purposes” and “interests”.
You’ve amended my original statement in a way that makes it more ambiguous and obscures the spectacular productivity of the method of knowledge acquisition which I referred to (science), by lumping it together with all human intelligence generally. 73
Posted by Dasein on Sat, 04 Apr 2009 19:37 | #
It wasn’t my intention for the health of my syllogism to depend on the ambiguity of ‘has’. It is meant in the sense you state- contains. The universe in itself does not necessarily have the same (or any) interests, though if we presume to know some existing interests (our own), by a leap of faith we could believe that the universe shares them.
I don’t want to put interests onto a materialistic Procustean bed. They can be real without being material particles. This is one of the fundamental problems with the materialists’ claim that the universe is meaningless and random. It only makes sense (possibly) in a universe without humans (or life). Just by making the argument, the claim is refuted. Talk about irony.
Sorry, I wasn’t trying to misrepresent what you said. My wish is that scientists (I’m not saying you) would be grateful for more than a methodology. 74
Posted by Templar on Sat, 04 Apr 2009 19:38 | # @Al Ross:
What, you think I’m not praying for you lot every day? @exPF:
Okay, but what’s up with the abbreviation?
I’m not sure I’m trying to convince you of Christianity, so much as attempt to pick apart your Materialism.
That seems rather unfair to pre-scientific method scholars, not to mention overly generous to post-scientific method researchers. The fact is, “science” or no, we still have little idea of the origins of the universe.
We are, after all, only human.
I disagree. “Purpose” in its primary definition is simply an object or end to be attained, so even (anthropomorphically metaphorically) blind, unconscious things such as your stars can be said to have a purpose, even if this purpose is, from a Materialist perspective, no more edifying than burning through their stock of hydrogen.
That is my point.
As Gorboduc pointed out, you seem to be starting from a position of “observe” rather than “suppose”.
This is not a given.
No, this reflects the role of men who, having renounced the idea of God, still desire to find purpose in a now logically purposeless universe.
This inability of yours to speculate on greater-than-human perspectives is a dead end in philosophical terms.
A pointless, Materialist creation is very much a perversity.
It is the honest acknowledgement of the realities of a non-religious world-view.
Why? Your intended point can only function within the context of there being two or more “gods” capable of interfering in each other’s designs.
From the “ultimate perspective”, fulfilling the desire of the agent is the higher purpose. Pointlessness is only a consideration when there is no agent and no intended purpose but only random collision.
How is it valid?
Is it? If you discard a metaphysical perspective positing ultimate consequences for actions, there is no question of anything being “moral”. Having children is not “good” and not having children is not “bad”. They’re merely “different”.
Survival is not moral. It merely *is*.
I would say that it can be evaluated rationally, according to internal consistency. If you are someone seeking a religious faith to believe in, do the teachings of the humans in question seem logically consistent? The fact that the Greek philosophers eventually began to reason their way into a sort of monotheism seems rather instructive, though I’m afraid I’m hardly the most informed of Christians in this regard.
Well, I thank you for your, um, humility?
Engineering did that, I would say.
Yes, perish the thought that we should not have the ability to wipe ourselves off the planet at the touch of a button.
And yet, somehow we got by.
Why? Do we really need “cool stuff” to live spiritually fulfilled lives? @John:
Is it unique, John? Seems rather universal to me, though I will submit that being a perfect, omnipotent being, the “monotheistic goat-herder” God is unique in being worthy of worship, as opposed to the all-too-human winos passing for deities in other locales… 75
Posted by gorboduc on Sat, 04 Apr 2009 19:40 | # SM: sorry about misspellings: no-one is perfect, and at present my eyes aren’t good. You posted a (to me, at least) meaningless “mental experiment” which depended on a whole string of absurd assumptions. A silly game, I thought. Then i bethought me of another “mental experiment” that someone (actually Darwin) dreamed up. If you didn’t see the absurdity of yours, with its ‘presentation plate’ or whatever, you might, I hoped, see the absurdity of Darwin’s, and, proceeding by analogy, see the meaninglessness of yours. And frankly I couldn’t see much agreement with my concerns in the rest of your posting. I didn’t mention any light bringers, so I don’t see why you try and fasten any “light-bringer” paradox on me. Careless speller I may be (and your own contribution is not flawless in the matter of keyboard/grammatical accuracy) but I don’t think I mentioned Lucifer at all. Show us where. The rest of your posting is just meaningless abuse. It tell your readers FAR more about you than it does about me. But i expect they all know by now anyway. The skin-crawling bit is getting a bit boring now, and perhaps your readers have had as much of it as I have. If I’m Monitor, you must be Glenda Slagg with her yowl of “Arnchasickofhim!” Do tell us more about the Jahweh etymology. If it’s not “apparent”, or spurious, it must be real, with interesting implications. I’m glad you’re a learned church historian, even if you deliver your insights in a rather pithy and outspoken way: I’m just starting on this, one of many books dealing with the history of Christianity in Britain, and I should value any particular information you might have on it: The ecclesiasticall historie of Great Britaine deduced by ages, or centenaries from the natiuitie of our Sauiour, vnto the happie conuersion of the Saxons, in the seuenth hundred yeare; whereby is manifestly declared a continuall succession of the true Catholike religion, which at this day is professed & taught in, and by the Roman Church. Written by Richard Broughton. The first tome containing the fower hundred first yeares. To which are annected for the greater benefite of the reader ample indexes ..., At Doway : By the widowe of Marke Wyon, at the signe of the Phoenix, M.DC.XXXIII. [1633] Well, when I first visited here I was a “speck” among you mighty men: now I’m the “dregs.” Too bad that a slave can rile you all so much. - But perhaps it’s just Loki in trickster mode… 76
Posted by Dasein on Sat, 04 Apr 2009 19:46 | #
This has similarities to the Jewish argument for pre-emptive genocide (i.e. gotta replace those Whites before they vote in another Hitler). If you are Christian, you must know that it is never justified to write off your race (Luke 15:11-32). 77
Posted by Captainchaos on Sat, 04 Apr 2009 20:10 | # Re syllogisms: All things that live under bridges are trolls. Some bums live under bridges. Some bums are trolls. Yawn. 78
Posted by danielj on Sat, 04 Apr 2009 20:17 | # Engineering did that, I would say. This is an absolutely crucial distinction. Evolutionary Biologists/Psychologist/Physicists/Whatever/etc. don’t utilize their time to invent useful technology, they just speculate endlessly and “unscientifically” while engineers, some of them conservative Christians, actually make useful things in a scientific manner. We’ve had science for a few hundred years, look at how its changed things. Are you telling me that “Science” came suddenly on the scene, totally replacing religion as the organizing force in society, is the cause of all the technological progress in the last 200 years and that this was only possible because science is opposition to religion? The Greeks knew a whole helluva of a lot without recourse to the scientific method and they were somewhat religious although eventually succumbed to some form of mysticism. 79
Posted by danielj on Sat, 04 Apr 2009 20:20 | #
Your major premise is untruthful. I don’t understand Cap’n? Are you opposed to Traditional Logic? 80
Posted by Captainchaos on Sat, 04 Apr 2009 20:30 | # More: All Jews seek to mislead the goyim for the benefit of Jews. Jesus was a Jew. Jesus sought to mislead the goyim for the benefit of Jews. ___________________________________________________ Can it, Monitor. Working towards the preservation of your faith and your race are not mutually exclusive, or at least need not be. Why not make the latter your task, since you seem to care enough to type about it on a racialist board? Of course there will be many White people who wish to be Christians when our task is brought to fruition; of course sensible men will not try to impede this. Really, just what is your point? Be part of the solution, not part of the problem, as they say. 81
Posted by Captainchaos on Sat, 04 Apr 2009 20:47 | # Daniel J, But how would you go about demonstrating my major premise is untruthful? The answer to that question is my point. My objection to traditional logic is its use for purposes that do not serve life, the life of our people. Otherwise, full-steam ahead. I guess Monitor’s 168 IQ didn’t necessarily include the premise that others have bullshit detectors. Not that his bullshit isn’t well intentioned, which I hope it is. 82
Posted by danielj on Sat, 04 Apr 2009 20:55 | # My objection to traditional logic is its use for purposes that do not serve life, the life of our people. Otherwise, full-steam ahead. I see. Is it really the Monitor? I don’t remember him posting in the same manner as G. I have trouble following all the personalities. Regardless, good on you mate! 83
Posted by danielj on Sat, 04 Apr 2009 20:56 | # Can it, Monitor. Working towards the preservation of your faith and your race are not mutually exclusive, or at least need not be. Again, one cannot preserve the faith of one’s race without preserving one’s race. It is a necessary precondition. 84
Posted by exPF on Sun, 05 Apr 2009 09:30 | # Reply to Templar’s last reply to exPF (me) I’ve broken this down into different numbered points.
you replied:
I reply now: You say we have “little idea of” without saying what gives you a frame of reference to say big or little. Compared to what? What is the expectation? Compared to, say, 200 years ago, we know a very great deal more than they did about the origins of the universe. Someone visiting an astrophysics lab from 1809 would be amazed to see what we have developed. But what is the context of the point I was trying to make? It is this: There is, in this fact, a vindication of science as a method of knowledge acquisition - as being superior to, say, “divine inspiration”, which taught us little or perhaps nothing about the physical facets of the universe. Here, as elsewhere, science is vindicated, non-scientific methods such as philosophic speculation or divine inspiration shown to contribute little or nothing. That was the larger point.
You replied:
I now say: Yes, thats an easy admission. But the larger point was this: why give “religious man” - i.e. man attaining supposedly divine knowledge through his non-scientific methods such as inspiration and speculation - why give him the benefit of the doubt? Why not assume that his knowledge of things which are physically inaccessible to him (i.e. the higher world or heavens) would be corrupted by his tendency to base assumptions about that world on his experience in this? Why not adopt a policy of distrust towards things that cannot be directly ascertained, or knowledge that cannot be confirmed by one’s own investigation or the investigation of others?
I said:
you replied:
I now say: There are several definitions of purpose, here is one from wikipedia: “Purpose is the cognitive awareness in cause and effect linking for achieving a goal in a given system, whether human or machine.” Another definition: “an anticipated outcome that is intended or that guides your planned actions.” Another definition: “An object to be reached; a target; an aim; a goal; A result that is desired; an intention; The act of intending to do something; resolution; determination.” Do you see the difference between a star burning through its hydrogen stores, or a crayfish dying, and an “aim”? I will try to explain it here. Imagine the star burning through its hydrogen stores - you say its purpose is to burn through those stores. Now imagine an icy comet strikes the star, changing its equilibrium so that part of the star collapses without burning through its hydrogen stores - does collapsing now become that star’s new purpose? By your reasoning, yes: the new purpose of the star is to collapse upon impact with the comet. So the “purpose” of this star is simply to be a star and to “do” whatever happens to it. Essentially, when the star is burning hydrogen, it isn’t “doing” anything - that is what the star is: the star is a combustion reaction. When something happens to the star, its new “purpose” becomes to facilitate whatever is happening to it, i.e. to be completely passive. Neither of these things represent “purpose”, because the star burns by definition and the passivity of the star in its reaction to the comet is also a function of its being (i.e. size, shape and composition). Both burning hydrogen and collapsing upon sufficient impact from other bodies is part of what a star is - that is its being. One cannot say of objects that their purpose i.e. the goal of their activites (definition) is to be themselves, since they are themselves already ipso facto: this does not represent an aim because it is not in any way different from prevailing conditions. Yet inanimate objects are seen to be perpetually “striving” merely to “be themselves” - or, adopting a more parsimonious explanation - they are perpetually just being. My conclusion: Purpose construed as a characteristic of an inanimate object is anthropomorphicizing the object or at least exypnohiparxycizing (intelligent-being-icizing) the object. Only conscious or semi-conscious beings can have purpose.
I wrote:
you replied:
Philosophical speculation on greater-than-human perspectives is, to my mind, a dead end in practical terms. It is useful for only three things: 1) Generating large texts for printing and storage The last one is highly subjective and suspect, even, since it indicates one is “speculating” to the tune of one’s own pleasures - which is mental masturbation. Science is sadistic, demanding submission to its rules and strictures - but in the end, it is real - unlike speculation, which amounts in my mind to playing with words and concepts: although I do appreciate that speculation sometimes values “inner consistency” (mentioned below) as a rule. The larger point being made: science is still a vastly, vastly superior method of knowledge acquisition when compared with speculation on larger-than-human perspectives.
I wrote:
you replied:
I now say: Does that mean anything other than this: that you have developed in accordance with your belief an aesthetic taste for the way the universe or creation should appear to you, and an alternative view lacking an “ultimate purpose” and God’s guiding hand is now disgusting to you? Essentially, you are registering your distaste at the universe given that my viewpoint were true. Yet all this is just the aesthetic taste of a man, right? Or is there a more compelling reason besides I tend actually to a polar opposite view - I find the idea of a grand puppetmaster “a perversity”. If I truly believed in God, I would become very apathetic because I would have the surety that my exertions were not really necessary, because an all-powerful all-knowing diety reigns over everything anyway. Why bother striving for anything or even trying to change anything? If God has existence’s collective back just like the US Gov had Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac’s back - why should I worry about the proper investment of my time and energy in effecting change. If God really controls things, I would be a nihilist, because I would assume that I couldn’t change anything outside of his plan and that therefore his plan would be able to succeed with me putting forth minimal effort.
I wrote:
You replied:
I now say: No, my point actually holds true for any cosmology besides the all-knowing, all-powerful One God. Here is the fundamental point: how did the receivers of divine knowledge (Jesus and the Apostles and later church fathers) actually know the dimensions or hierarchy of our Universe’s cosmology? How did they know that god was all-knowing, all-powerful, that there was only one and none higher? It seems very easy to just use superlatives and the word “all” - but how was this in fact related, and was it other than an assertion? Did somebody “see” heaven? Assume for a second that there was an all-powerful god ruling this universe and, in other dimensions (somehow) there are other universes ruled by other gods. Might not ‘our’ god have lied, and misrepresented the dimensions and/or hierarchy of the cosmology when giving the founders of Christianity “divine knowledge”? Might not “divine knowledge” however it was related or perceived, contain errors - either errors or omission, misinterpretations or outright lies, either from above (i.e. authored by superhuman powers) or below (i.e. lies from the receivers of the “divine wisdom” on earth)? Is it not, in fact, probable, given our inability to check this knowledge and it relating to something completely beyond the bounds of our normal perceptions? In what other circumstance would one ask people to believe in a simple assurance of the veracity of a statement that could be neither confirmed nor even tested? We don’t even know, really, how the receivers of divine wisdom found out about the cosmology - presumably, “angels” told them - so we can’t test the veracity of the information to even see if the message was properly relayed to us. We certainly can’t inquire as to the motivations or veracity of the “angels” - after all, they are presumed to be pristine information sources. If the cosmology was not as it is represented - a thing we can apparently never test - how would we know? Maybe the angels or the supposedly all-powerful God have an interest in keeping us ignorant of the existence of other gods. Whose to say? Is it impossible that gods might want to keep us ill-informed about the cosmology in the same way as politicians rarely let slip any concise information about political situations or motivations? Wouldn’t the benefactor(s) of one cosmological lie have an interest in maintaining ignorance of the cosmological truth? Wouldn’t gods, if they could speak to us, lie to us about their characteristics and relation to one another in the same way - and really, from the same motivations - as politicians do? CONTINUED BELOW 85
Posted by exPF on Sun, 05 Apr 2009 09:34 | # 7. Higher purpose vs. doing it for fun’s sake (i.e. pointlessness) I wrote:
You replied:
The world, existing for itself - men pursuing women because they like them, fish swimming upstream because they have evolved to mate there - is seen here as being “pointless” because it does not conform to a higher purpose in the case that materialism is true. However the desire to give existence a “point” is something unique to humans. It is not observable in other areas of the animal kingdom. Evolutionary biology suggests that existence - i.e. surviving and thriving for a time on the earth - has been reason enough for every animal before us to exert itself. For us it is considered insufficient reason, hence “pointlessness”. I think this is a product of human psychology which tends to be goal-oriented or to utilize “purposes” to achieve ends. Just like we have anthropomorphicized (or exypnohiparxicized) the whole universe by placing a God behind it as causator, it follows that we have to demand that creation is wielded by this god with an end in mind - an end beyond that of it merely existing. I can’t find anything in this particular item besides an aesthetic critique from the religious person’s perspective that the world appears more appealing when one believes in God, because it appears to have a larger significance.
I wrote:
You asked:
I say: It’s valid insofar as it’s a statement of the author’s volition - “I want the white race to survive”.
9. Does morality exist without metaphysical perspective positing ultimate consequences for actions?
you replied:
I say now: Let’s look at the definition for morality: “concern with the distinction between good and evil or right and wrong; right or good conduct” alternatively: “moral - concerned with principles of right and wrong or conforming to standards of behavior and character based on those principles”. The etymology is from moralitas meaning “manner, character, proper behavior”. I live in a non-religious household, where no one believes in Christianity or any kind of God or religious power. Like (I assume) many, many thousands or even millions of people, I grew up in an atheistic household. It would follow from your assertion above that there is no morality, i.e. no fixed idea of right and wrong, which governs/governed my life in these conditions, or those of my kin and family members. Well, this is plainly wrong. Standards for right and wrong conduct (i.e. morality) still obtain in the absence of metaphysical justifications for them. In the case of a shift from a metaphysical explanation of consequences to a real-world explanation of consequences, such as occurs when a household changes from Christianity to atheism, the reference point justifying the conduct shifts. Instead of refraining from doing something because one would be punished by demons, one refrains from doing something because it would hurt a loved one or compromise some strategic interest (i.e. lose money). In many ways the conduct in a Christian household is very similar to that in an atheistic household, but the justifications have changed. One’s behavior becomes more ‘rational’ in a sense after removal from metaphysical reference points, because one deals with real consequences and effects of one’s behavior as motivating factors, instead of ‘ultimate consequences posited by a metaphysical perspective’. The assertion that non-believers have no notion of good or bad choices, merely different ones, is fallacious. What really happens is that good or bad ceases to be a property ascribed to a behavior on the basis of a biblical “I said so”, and becomes instead based on its consequences or possible consequences. “Essentially” good or bad becomes “strategically” good or bad. This gives the individual more freedom in shaping their own moral code - at least in theory, it being not prescribed by a text - and the result is that morality becomes more flexible and pragmatic, as well as suffering the downside resulting from short-term outlooks (inability to see the long-term consequences), experimentation (discovering through one’s own experience the consequences of actions) and moral cooption by foreign cultures (i.e. television). (note: I know that Christians similarly work towards their own understanding of their morality in a similar process, and “customize” their morality with fine tweaks). The main point: morality persists in the absence of the Christian and/or religious worldview.
10. Is survival moral, and to what extent? I said:
you replied:
I say now: Survival is definitely the basis of most, and more likely all, of our morality. The difficulty is that established morality is the digested, age-old group consensus on what aides survival, whereas our concept of survival is much sharper, more objective, and can be wielded in much closer quarters (i.e. the individual scenario, rather than applied en masse as a moral law to scenarios generally). Moral reasoning represents a kind of “gut level strategy” both for the group and the individual - and developed at times when considerations of strategic outcomes were not possible due to the absence of the language necessary to convey these. Consider the universal taboo against incest - it has its basis in the preservation of genetic integrity. But it developed throughout ages in which it was impossible to say: “Look, too much inbreeding can result in deleterious mutations becoming homozygous” - perhaps even in ages where it was impossible to say, “Look, brother sister mating produces abnormal children”, either because the language was genuinely not that far developed in conceptual vocabulary or knowledge didn’t exist about that topic (I can only speculate, of course, but anti-incest mechanisms exist even in lower animals). This “survival admonishment” is so ingrained in us that it is more than a dictum - the famous form of human experimental morality, particularly Jewish experimental morality, which is meant to be written on tablets and promulgated - this is more than a dictum, it is carved into our being. You know the revulsion if you are experiencing something sexual and a picture of a female relative “pops up” - the reaction is very negative. This is clearly deeper in our programming than some neocortex-housed admonishment to love wogs, dating from 100 years ago or less. Other taboos, such as taboos against murder - except in the case of war, in which case there is strong moral justification for serving one’s own tribe and committing murder against another tribe, in which case it is not called murder: I need not show how these taboos are survival-sprung, their advantageousness is already surely apparent. Taboos against adultery are well known, and adaptive for the easing of social strife and the prevention of related menfolk of the same tribe waging war over their own women. Then there is the benefit to stable family formation that comes from fidelity. The “core basics” of civil society and high investment parenting are programmed into the white genome, at least the assertion that we needed Christianity to infuse us with these is disproved The point here is this: morality is derived from ancient survival aides, some of which are now become instinctual (i.e. anti-incest), some of which rely on processing and explicit dictums but still play on deep instincts (i.e. military service, military pride, in-group out-group), and some of which are more recently derived and thus experimental, existing as dictums with shallow emotional resonance (i.e. the Christian experimental dictum “Love thy neighbor as thyself”). Some morality is radically experimental and “destructive” insofar as it is designed to be absorbed by another group different from that which derived it, and to destroy them in the name of benefiting the originators group. This morality, which viewed properly is anti-morality since it aims at the destruction of those who employ it, would contain for example those anti-racist memes which are so experimental as to have arisen within the last 65 years and which, even as one reads the dictum, one feels a revulsion and sense of inner wrongness - the resistance of an inner instinctual moral substrate admonishing one to “protect the ingroup”. Morality is a group of semi-cultural, semi-instinctual/genetic popular understandings which function as admonishments designed to aid in survival. The reason why survival appears separate from morality is because the admonishments of morality are often aimed at group survival rather than individual survival. When we strategize about individual survival we often use more refined tools than our crude, generalized moral feeling and admonishments which come inherited from the perspective of group survival. One way to view Majority Rights’ purpose is that it exists to argue to the strategic-thinking individual, who understands his own morality as his own strategizing (i.e. agnostic or atheist), that collective survival is also important.
I wrote:
you replied:
I say now: Definition of engineering: “the discipline dealing with the art or science of applying scientific knowledge to practical problems.” Alternative definition: “Engineering is the discipline and profession of applying technical and scientific knowledge and utilizing natural laws and physical resources in order to design and implement materials, structures, machines, devices, systems, and processes that safely realize a desired objective and meet specified criteria.” The original point of my “science did that” argument was not to precisely describe the origin of internet communications, but rather to show how profitable science has been in real world terms - giving birth to feats of engineering. This is demonstrative of the fact that science gives us real insights about the universe - we know because we can apply them and they work. The implicit comparison I am trying to make is to divine inspiration and philosophical speculation or religious speculation: what have they given us? Is there any indication from their application that we have arrived at real insights about the universe? Certainly nothing we can compare to the computer. And these technological accomplishments are the least of what I value about science, although I do value them. I value the explanation of world that makes sense and is beautiful - thus giving me a spiritual satisfaction that religious explanations never could offer me.
Thats the end of the reply. 86
Posted by SM on Tue, 07 Apr 2009 00:17 | #
—————— 1) Different variations are born to a litter (they look, act and feel-inside different because of their different chemical compositions); Niches change over time. The fundamental motor of the Universe is “cause and effect”—billard balls on a table… richoceting, bank shot after bank shot forever. That ever continuing domino effect motion creates the varying niches and varying pups o’the litters. Parallelism: The phenom where a 30million year old dolphin (from coast-living proto-dog-thang) looks like >400million year old shark (from early fish). ————- At any rate the techno snowball and a philosophical ontological understanding (eg natural selection) are not the same things. We can destroy ourselves—or a part of ourselves—with the crazy train techno snowball but the facts of nature we have observed can still BE RIGHT too. (We can’t just hide our heads in holes and pretend truth hasn’t been seen.) If we are to protect ourselves from the crazytrain snowball And at the same time accept what we now know to be true too, maybe we need to shale off atavistic (obsolete vestigial) christian sentiment, see a little means and end justification and throw down in un jesus-like, undemocratic ways, Third Reich style. ============ 87
Posted by Templar on Fri, 17 Apr 2009 15:38 | #
We know that it came from something. This is remarkably unchanged from previous centuries.
Your “larger point” misses it. The spiritual and the material are separate spheres of study, and your attempt to impose a false conflict between the two only muddies the issue.
Again, your “larger point” seems to miss the point in general. If people doubted their religious leaders they would leave them to seek others. Far more interesting is the question of why the secular priesthood i.e. scientists, seek to convince their fellow men to trust in their flawed, human judgment unquestioningly.
Do you? Really, it’s a rather silly question.
By your reasoning, yes. By my reasoning, no. The star remains a star, which is a mechanism the purpose of which is the production and radiation of energy through the consumption of hydrogen.
Existence is a dead end in practical terms.
If one is ignorant of all history, perhaps.
“Mental masturbation” is a rather interesting charge, given that “speculating to the tune of one’s own pleasures” can hardly be limited to the theistic side of the debate, as you yourself demonstrate by the admission that the thought of a higher power makes you uncomfortable (not for nothing has Vox Day nicknamed the interactions of the Dawkins-Dennet-Hitchens-Harris quartet a “circle jerk”, I suspect). In fact, that is a central flaw in the claims of the atheist side to be “scientific”; it begins, not from the position that all things are potentially possible, but from the position that all things but one are possible, and this one thing will not be entertained under any circumstances.
You mean science is exypnohiparxycized?
You’re far too idealistic. Being practiced by imperfect men, scientific disciplines, like religious disciplines, often fall far short of the projected perfect ideal of practice. The difference, of course, is that religions generally attempt to place some check upon the raging drive of the human ego, which scientism generally tends to aggravate.
It does indeed mean something other than that. It means that in a universe where men have been told that no Creator watches over them, and that they are the sole determiners of their reality, the result is a perversity of all good things, as was seen repeatedly demonstrated over the course of the 20th century.
I’m not surprised. Most atheism is rooted in some essentially trivial objection (hence so many become atheists in adolescence, and gradually return to religious faith as they grow older and wiser).
If by that you mean it does not hold true for the cosmology of the all-knowing, all-power One God of Christianity, I would agree.
Being God Himself, I imagine Jesus had a fairly good idea.
Yes, actually. Visions of the Heavenly Kingdom aren’t exactly unheard of in Christian writings.
This is becoming interestingly reminiscent of Richard Dawkins’ speculating at multiple universes to avoid confronting the issue of the titanic statistical unlikelihood of our (observable) universe having come into being through random chance and happenstance.
I can’t find anything in this particular counter-argument besides an aesthetic critique from the non-religious person’s perspective that the world appears more appealing when one believes in God, because a larger significance is too difficult to accept. This would seem to be borne out by your throwing about inanities such as the claim that their must be no ultimate, theistic point to existence because no creatures other than humans display a desire for there to be one, or that the existence of a creative agency must needs imply anthropomorphization (are printing presses anthropomorphized?), and that anthropomorphization of itself disproves the existence of a creative agency. 88
Posted by Templar on Fri, 17 Apr 2009 15:49 | #
How is it valid as far as you’re concerned?
Hardly. It’s entirely possible for atheists to be moral just as it is entirely impossible for there to be a specifically atheist morality any more concrete than individual whim, and so the morals of atheists are generally of a parasitic sort, copying those of the host society (unless they aren’t, in which case widespread killing is usually around the corner).
Laughable. Try and explain “love” as a rational concept.
I say again: There is no morality in a Materialist universe. Only advantageous or disadvantageous circumstances (as we will disallow the possibility of choice as a factor, given such a thing as a mind is inimical to Materialist thought, ironically enough).
I disagree rather sharply with that, for reasons which I’ll explain below.
That’s quite correct. You can only speculate on these alternative explanations, in an amusing contrast to the loudly proclaimed superiority of “scientific” philosophy over religion for its putative basis in demonstrable proof, but the larger point you’re missing is that instinct is only half of the story. I certainly won’t argue your claim that religiously-inspired moral behaviour has certain tangible benefits for the practioner, but to excise the matter of free will from the issue is to deliberately blind oneself and so fall to grasping for straws for answers. Yes, adultery is socially destructive, yes, incest leads to harmful abnormalities, but the mere fact that we all have a certain gut instinct about these things hasn’t stopped people from deciding not to follow their instincts (hence the existence of civil laws and religious prohibitions against such deviance), and while the taboo against having sexual relations with close kin may be generally present in all of us, this has not prevented certain human beings such as those belonging to the historical Incan, Hawaiian, Egyptian and Balinese ruling classes from actively pursuing father-daughter or brother-sister marriages to maintain the purity of royal bloodlines, much as the human instinct to seek God has not prevented certain people from deciding to be atheists, though those latter arguably have a far less reasonable excuse for their behaviour than incestuous Egyptian god-kings.
“Advanced” is of itself a rather hollow claim. Advanced in comparison with whom, exactly? Is the rape and strangulation/stabbing to death of inebriated slave girls as part of the funeral rites of a socially important man “advanced”, and if so in your opinion, why?
Agnosticism/atheism is anti-European. More of a sub-continental thing, really.
That would necessarily entail throwing out your earlier claim that “science” has only existed for a few hundred years. Myself, I’m rather ambivalent to the relative profitability of “science” in real-world terms, particularly when technophiles treat all changes as uniformically positive. On the one hand, I probably wouldn’t have made it out of childhood with the medical knowledge of earlier eras, but on the other, one rather distressing effect of more sophisticated technology is the ever-greater ease of killing large numbers of people, or keeping them constantly submerged in an environment of complete propagandization, or maintaining intrusive, electronic surveillance over them. In this, I can very much sympathize with the Paladin Orlando’s throwing the “strange engine” of King Cymosco into the sea, lest a weapon that kills impersonally, and from afar corrupt the chivalry of Europe, though of course, there remains the problem of not being able to put the genie in the bottle, or to use a more Western metaphor, to return the plagues to Pandora’s box.
A silly claim, in this context. Scientific study can reveal how rain clouds form but it cannot provide moral guidance (and especially not moral authority), which is real insight about the universe which man inhabits.
However impressive a feat of engineering is a computer, it is still only a tool, in the final analysis, and ultimately no more spiritually fulfilling than a hammer or saw, offering of itself no insights about anything in particular, in contrast with, say, Aquinas’s Summa Theologica.
Your claim to spiritual satisfaction would amuse the doctors of the Church of old, who saw and promoted the study of the workings of the natural world as a means of knowing God through His creations. 89
Posted by White Western Man - Re:Gorboduc on Fri, 17 Apr 2009 17:33 | # Myself and others here would like you on the side of White humanity Gorboduc, but you seem a bit too far gone in to Judaeo-Christianity Cloud Cuckoo Land as it seems that you would rather stand with Jesus The Jew And His One World/One Love Multicult Army long before you would stand with your fellow besieged Whites who are currently facing almost complete dispossession if not near-extinction within the next 100-150 years if the tide is not turned back very soon. Meanwhile, Judaeo-Christianity is safely ensconced for at least another few centuries around the world (“One World, Under Christ, with Third World Immigrants For All”), having now been adopted by the Blacks and Browns and Yellows all over Africa, South America, and Asia - so much for Christianity as a ‘White religion,’ as the vaunted ‘eternal faith of Europe and the European peoples.’ YOU EFFETE COWARDS CONTINUE TO ENDLESSLY DEBATE THE POINTLESS VAGARIES OF THE TRINITY WHILE THE WHITE RACE IS BEING SWAMPED AND DISPOSSESSED IN THEIR OWN LANDS. The continuity, territory, and ultimately the very survival of the White race is clearly a much more pressing priority than some Jewish/Near Eastern death-cult that irrationally worships a random loudmouth/rabble-rousing Jew as The Son of God (TM). I’m sorry, but no amount of fervent praying with rosary in hand and/or ‘soulful meditations’ of a bloody and dead Jew on a cross of are going to turn back the non-White hordes now - it’s going to take immense will, strength, rationality, unity, and planning/organization to turn back the non-White tide (not the irrationality and divisiveness of Christianity with its billion-and-one sects), and those qualities are all woefully lacking in your laughably weak and stupidly childish bastard-child-of-Judaism ‘religion’ with its ‘resignation’ and ‘meekness.’ Parts of Europe didn’t even become fully Christianized until the 1300s-1400s for Chrissake, and it is also clear that many of the other European peoples that adopted it earlier never really accepted it, much less wanted it IMPOSED UPON THEM by roving Jewish fanatics/zealots and their lackeys. It is now clear that most Whites have outgrown the tiredness and weakness of Judaeo-Christianity, or never even accepted and/or grew in to it the first place - Whites are growing up and moving on (ever since, you know, a little thing called the Renaissance a few hundred years ago helped to banish the generalized ignorance, serfdom, and stagnation which reigned supreme during the heavily Judaeo-Christian Middle Ages), and it is now clear that many Whites worldwide care nothing for and no longer want to have anything to do with this weak yet insidious Jewish death-cult found in their midst. How do you propose Whites rally behind a JEWISH/NEAR EASTERN ‘RELIGION’ like Judaeo-Christianity? Isn’t that a tad bit odd, Whites rallying behind a non-White ‘religion’ that has been a prime cause of their gradual but steady dispossession? A religion that has sapped the natural ethnocentric vitality and warrior spirit of Whites by encouraging them to be ‘civilized’ and ‘loving’ and ‘accepting’ toward any and all non-Whites that accepted Jesus As Their Lord And Savior (TM) and showed up at their European doorstep looking for a meal, a home, a job, and of course a White woman with which to breed? Only after the Roman Empire officially abandoned vigorous, organized, and ethnocentric pro-White Roman paganism and adopted Judaeo-Christianity which emanated especially strongly from the multicultural (and heavily Jewish quarters) of Rome did the empire really start to deteriorate…are you going to try to deny that fact too? Similar to the spread of Jews/Judaism, and probably because Judaeo-Christianity is of course the bastard-child of Judaism, everywhere that Judaeo-Christianity was imposed has eventually succumbed to the multicultural rot or other Jew-led anti-White movements like race mixing, liberalism, universalism/globalism/internationalism, communism, plutocratic capitalism, feminism, hyperconsumerism, etc. Get a clue. Grow up and become a strong White man instead of remaining a cowering White child eternally shivering in the shadow of a false Jewish God. Stand tall and move forward with your White brethren instead of continuing to regress and fall backwards in to the laughable ridiculousness and utter falsity of Judaeo-Christianity. 90
Posted by GR on Fri, 17 Apr 2009 23:48 | # Grow up and become a strong White man instead of remaining a cowering White child eternally shivering in the shadow of a false Jewish God. You’re making some rash judgements about someone you’ve never met. He’s said nothing to indicate he’s anything like you believe (and need to believe). He has a different approach: that’s all. 91
Posted by Al Ross on Sat, 18 Apr 2009 02:10 | # One is,of course, very much accustomed to reading laughably arrant nonsense in the posts of MR’s ovine, evangelizing Christers, but this atheism/agnosticism as “more of a sub-continental thing, really” rubbish does stand out. In the Indian sub-continent the anti-human disease of religious belief is pandemic and the effort of finding a subcon with sufficient respect for rational, observed reality to embrace the atheistic commonsense so mistakenly attributed to that group by Templar would be akin to that required to persuade Bin Laden to sit shiva. Post a comment:
Next entry: Snappy Refutations, Exercise 3
|
|
Existential IssuesDNA NationsCategoriesContributorsEach author's name links to a list of all articles posted by the writer. LinksEndorsement not implied. Immigration
Islamist Threat
Anti-white Media Networks Audio/Video
Crime
Economics
Education General
Historical Re-Evaluation Controlled Opposition
Nationalist Political Parties
Science Europeans in Africa
Of Note MR Central & News— CENTRAL— An Ancient Race In The Myths Of Time by James Bowery on Wednesday, 21 August 2024 15:26. (View) Slaying The Dragon by James Bowery on Monday, 05 August 2024 15:32. (View) The legacy of Southport by Guessedworker on Friday, 02 August 2024 07:34. (View) Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan … defend or desert by Guessedworker on Sunday, 14 April 2024 10:34. (View) — NEWS — Farage only goes down on one knee. by Guessedworker on Saturday, 29 June 2024 06:55. (View) CommentsThorn commented in entry 'Trout Mask Replica' on Thu, 19 Dec 2024 01:13. (View) Thorn commented in entry 'Trout Mask Replica' on Thu, 19 Dec 2024 01:11. (View) Thorn commented in entry 'Trout Mask Replica' on Sat, 14 Dec 2024 21:35. (View) Manc commented in entry 'Trout Mask Replica' on Sat, 14 Dec 2024 20:51. (View) Thorn commented in entry 'Trout Mask Replica' on Sat, 14 Dec 2024 19:49. (View) Manc commented in entry 'Trout Mask Replica' on Sat, 14 Dec 2024 18:47. (View) Thorn commented in entry 'Trout Mask Replica' on Thu, 12 Dec 2024 23:29. (View) Thorn commented in entry 'News of Daniel' on Thu, 12 Dec 2024 22:01. (View) Manc commented in entry 'News of Daniel' on Thu, 12 Dec 2024 19:52. (View) Manc commented in entry 'Trout Mask Replica' on Thu, 12 Dec 2024 18:17. (View) Thorn commented in entry 'News of Daniel' on Thu, 28 Nov 2024 00:02. (View) Manc commented in entry 'News of Daniel' on Wed, 27 Nov 2024 17:12. (View) Thorn commented in entry 'Trout Mask Replica' on Mon, 25 Nov 2024 02:05. (View) Manc commented in entry 'Trout Mask Replica' on Sun, 24 Nov 2024 19:32. (View) |
Posted by gorboduc on Tue, 31 Mar 2009 02:28 | #
I suppose the basic incoherence of this is well symbolised by the assumption that, it is made explicit in line 9, underlies the whole piece.
This sits very ill with the demands of “objectivity” of line 11.
It calls into question the status of whatever “facts” (same line) are later to be alleged.
They may equally well all turn out to be assumptions, like the pious hope that our existence gives rise to a “transcendent order” lines (9, 10). (I could understand this if it were reversed, that our existence results from a transcendent order, as it is more likely that spirit engenders the material, than that the converse prevail)
It is plain from the text that the author makes one particular statement about his/her personal beliefs. It would be impudent to doubt it, as it is a claim about the interior workings of the author’s psyche, made by its possessor: and it is this.
I think the evolutionary paradigm exhibited by ‘the selfish gene’ as it applies to the ultimate nature of human activity, cannot be answered.
This statement undermines the whole article: the author turns out to be writing about his/her personal beliefs, and is not claiming any sort of status as a scientist or even a reporter of facts. In other words, the whole thing is just a neat little example of that very old-fashioned diversion, the literary causerie. “I like to imagine ...”
However, the game of begging the question may have actually begun a bit earlier: consider the following.
...our evolutionary environment only knew the heavens as a playground for our ancestors’ anthropomorphizing imaginations…
I should like to know what exactly this is intended to mean, and I do not wish to be forced into making a possibly illicit assumption, when a little more craft on the part of the writer would have clarified matters. It may mean that the men of former ages knew nothing about astronomy but had a bit of a knack for seeing the constellations as depictions of mythological personages such as Orion or Andromeda: in which case why are these men referred to as the “Evolutionary environment”?
Or is it some sort of high-falutin’ poetic speech (and having previously noticed the bardic tendencies, lyrical and incantatory, exhibited by some of this site’s favourite contributors I wouldn’t be at all surprised) that’s perhaps explicable to Ruskin’s “pathetic tendency”, the personalising of the inanimate? If this IS what is being said here, then what actually IS the basis for the statement about the restricted knowledge available to earlier ages? I must apologise if I have crassly misread the meaning of this portion.
I’m rather suspicious of the writer’s apparent desire to inhibit Christians from answering the piece on their own terms. Christianity is mentioned at least twice, each time with the proviso that Christians shouldn’t answer back, this is not for them, but there is an inescapable implication that Christianity is somehow associated with the liberalism that subverts our genetic heritage, and there’s the usual genuflection in the direction of the theophobic Dawkins. And every Christian who comes within the orbit of that deeply and deliberately ignorant man’s malign influence should stand up and fight back.
But then if liberalism is taking over the generality of our minds, and inspiring us to scoff cheetos, play soccer with black men or pour Canadian beer for the Lebanese, maybe the fault IS in our genes, or maybe exPf has incompletely understood what our genes are for.
Are all liberals mutants? They seem to be in the ascendant at present, so maybe miscegenation is the next step our genes are impelling us to take, and the contributors to this site are perversely and unrealistically attempting to escape their destiny by fighting a valiant but doomed rearguard action.
A corrective to the dismayingly pessimistic theory of genetic determinism - and surely there are really few things more pessimistic than paganism (which has no real future hope) and its twin, evolutionary biology (which shows more unfavourable than favourable new developments) may be found in John Cornwell’s recent little book “Darwin’s Angel” described by its author as ‘An Angelic Riposte to “The God Delusion”’.