#I have many ideas about what Nietzsche thought about Christianity too lol

[germiyahu]

One of the funnier things about Jesus is that he's often described as a "radical" and my classics professor literally said "it doesn't make sense for the Romans to execute him if he wasn't covertly calling for an overthrow of the government." I've spent most of my adult life hearing that Jesus was preaching zany dangerous world-upending ideas and he was just too badass and ~actually leftist the whole time~ to be left alive.

However, he was preaching "pray for your enemies, even if they persecute you," "if a Roman strikes you, turn your cheek and offer the other," "if a Roman soldier forces you to carry his equipment, offer to carry it an extra mile," "do not pray in public like those hypocritical Pharisees, pray in private God likes that better," "who are you to judge the Romans' specks in their eyes, you're actually worse if you think about it," "guys Caesar is the legitimate government of the Empire I think you should show the proper respect just pay your taxes," "hey I know I'm being executed but like let's take a moment to consider that the Roman soldiers feel bad about it, forgive them they know not what they do."

This is bootlicking shitlib cuckery if I've ever seen it. Jesus' philosophy for how Judea and its culture was going to survive Hellenization/Romanization was... "Be polite. Don't cause a scene. Keep your head down. Why be a rabble-rouser and make trouble for the rest of us? You're giving us a bad name. Romans are people too!"

He had some cool ideas like "sex workers deserve dignity," but I don't think he's actually the "role model," and "actually really wise Rabbi," that a lot of non Jews try to tell Jews he is (aka, how they should view him even if they don't think he's the son of God). And to be fair, a lot of his ideas were already held by other Pharisees/early Rabbis. Certainly Maimonides et al. would go on to independently come to some similar conclusions re: forgiveness and whatnot.

But Jesus was not a radical. Most scholars agree he was a member of the Hillel school of the Pharisee "political party." He was definitely not a Zealot. The Romans didn't execute him because he was calling for an overthrow of the government. They executed him because he was becoming too popular, and people were calling him Moshiach, which was an implicit threat to Roman supremacy. But Jesus himself was not telling people to firebomb their local valmartus.

I suspect if Jesus had been alive to see the Bar Kochba revolt, he would've "strongly condemned the violent actions of the rebels," even if he "sympathized with their pain." He was actively preaching, if not assimilationism, then meek submission. Martyrdom. If you suffer in silent dignity then your just reward will come. And I'm not claiming he was a race traitor or anything, this was an individual man's response to the ongoing trauma of his homeland being subjugated and exploited. These were his ideas about what to do about it.

But in essence, Jesus was the original Good Jew, and the Romans still murdered him. He spent all of his time as a public figure arguing that they should be accepted and loved and that their oppression of the Jews should be tolerated, and that one day the Romans would simply lose interest in being colonizers and the Jews would be free by being patient and understanding and not rocking the boat too much. And the Romans killed him anyway. Being a Good Jew will never save you.

[nebris]

Do Americans Know How Weird and Extreme Their Collapse is Getting?

Even the Dark Ages Would Laugh at Where We’re Going

Here’s a tiny question. Do Americans know how extreme, bizarre, and weird American collapse is getting? How far off the charts it is? Forget the charts of “normal” — I mean the charts of history. Even the Dark Ages, ancient Rome, and the barbarians might laugh, astonished, at the backwardness of America in 2018. Doubt me? Indulge me — while I prove it.

Consider a tiny but telling and particularly awful example. There’s a GOP candidate in North Carolina, I read today, who proclaims that “God is a white supremacist.”

Now, you might laugh. It’s funny, in an absurd kind of way. But do we call such a belief? What does it take for a mind to think such a thing?

It’s not simple fascism — because fascism, at least the sort we know of in history, tends to reject the church. That’s because, of course, Nietzsche preached a different gospel: that Christian values make people weak, that only the strong survive, and that the job of the strong is to dominate the weak. Fascism is simply an expression of this perverse belief system, this ideology, and in that way, it tends to demonize religion — just as the Nazis did, ruling over a church they despised with an iron fist.

So what is it? Theocracy? Well, it’s not theocracy either — again, at least as we know it. Because in theocratic systems, God is an equalizer. You’re oppressed until you’re pious and faithful, maybe beaten, starve, punished, jailed, as in Iran or Saudi Arabia — but when you are pious, then you’re accepted into the community of believers. In other words, even in hardcore theocracies, God isn’t a racist (LOL) — he might be a vengeful, terrible, angry God, but he’s an equal opportunity abuser. He might call for women and gays and minorities to suffer terribly — but when they renounce their sin, and they’re pure, then they belong to society too. But “God is a white supremacist” is a belief so strange, so bizarre, so fundamentally new in history that it goes even further than that.

The question, then, is this: how far back in history do we have to travel to find a God who’s a racial supremacist? Who damns people purely for the color of their skin, their ethnicity, their “race”? Well, we’d have to go back past the colonial era — because even in, for example, South America and Africa and Asia, God could save everyone — religion was a colonial instrument (and I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense, just a historical one) — not just whites or Aryans or whomever. Sure, you might never be an archbishop — but the church would happily accept you into a congregation.

What about the Dark Ages? In fact, we’d have to go back past the medieval era, too — because even then, the same logic applies. God was angrier, and more menacing, demanding inquisitions and tests of faith — but nobody was beyond redemption. Even the medieval church had black saints!

Do you see how bizarre, extreme, and gruesome all this is getting? We’re already in the Dark Ages — but what America’s producing today is even more unenlightened than the actual literal textbook Dark Ages. How funny. How strange. How sad.

Let us continue, until we reach an answer. Let’s go all the way back to antiquity. What about Greeks and Romans? They weren’t monotheists — but were their Gods racial supremacists? Did Athena and Artemis damn black people and Asians, just for the color of their skin? Of course not. The most obvious classical example is Anthony and Cleopatra — neither of whom “converted” in any modern sense, but Cleopatra obviously wasn’t white, and Anthony obviously wasn’t Egyptian. In fact, by this time, Rome was a mixture of all kinds of people — and its Gods rejected no one.

So now we’ve gone back — all the way back in human history to the very dawn of civilization. And we haven’t found one example of a statement as weird, grotesque, and bizarre as “God is a white supremacist!!” That doesn’t mean that religions didn’t do terrible things, or even racist things — of course they did. But that is not the same as a racist God. But nowhere do we find such a belief. Even the ancients, it appears, aspired to higher moral and ethical values than racist Gods. Even they’d find such a thing fantastic, foolish, and laughable, probably.

(You might have thought by now — “it’s barbarism!” Ah, but it would be too easy to call this barbarism. Barbarians, the poor things, aren’t even this uncivilized. Their gods are violent and wrathful, but like the Vandals or the Visigoths or the Vikings, they weren’t racists, really, nor were they fascists, just warrior Gods, and besides, many “barbarians”, like indigenous Americans, had peaceful naturalist deities, probably far more civilized than their colonizers.)

What is such a thing, then? It’s entirely new in human history, more or less. Now, it’s dangerous to say that something is “new”. History’s a cycle, not a line. So when might we have found beliefs like this? Probably in times of great crisis. Imagine a series of failed harvests, season after season. The priests stand atop a great pyramid, and cry, “it is their fault! The Gods demand their blood!” And so the human sacrifices begin. A scenario like that is what would produce a racist God — but for the same reason, when the harvest returns, Gods, who must be impartial beings probably have the darkness of those days scrubbed from them, and go back to being Gods of mercy and justice and so on.

So if “God is a white supremacist!” is new — at least in the sense that it’s the kind of gruesome thing we only see in periods of genuine collapse — what do we call it? It’s not fascism, as we’ve already discussed, nor is it theocracy. It’s more like a bizarre, strange, toxic cocktail of the two — which are already toxic cocktails of their own, fascism of liberalism and conservatism, theocracy of state and church. So it’s a finely distilled poison, which we might call theofascism.

And that is what America is really inventing now. Once upon a time, it invented great and amazing things. Moonshots, chemotherapies, highways. Yet, even at those times, it was also inventing terrible things, too, which, mostly, it brushed under the rug — Jim Crow laws, segregation, and so forth. Now, though, the balance has changed. America isn’t inventing great things anymore (no, Facebook doesn’t count. Are you kidding?) It seems instead to be inventing new ways to destroy, ruin, and shatter things. What things? Democracy. Reason. Civilization. Truth, justice, equality. It is creating poisonous cocktails, so dangerous, so bitter, so toxic, that they are off the charts of history. Things like theofascism — which is just one ideology of ruin.

But there are many more, if we look closely at American collapse. The idea that we should arm teachers, instead of protect kids from school shootings — militant capitalism. The idea that people should have to crowdfund insulin — techno-Darwinism. The idea that people should never be able to retire — neofeudalism. The idea that freedom is just the weak being exploited by the strong — neo-authoritarianism. Those are four more weird, ruinous, baffling ideologies — and just like theofascism, we’d have to go a long, long way back in human history to make sense of them. All these ideas are so strange, self-destructive, and fatally absurd, that they’re off the charts of history, all the way back to the dawn of civilization.

Do you think the Romans would have let their kids hack each other to bits in the Colosseum? That the Vikings would have let hedge funds buy and sell the lives of their young and old with impunity? Do you think the Victorians would have stopped people from having insulin if they had it? Of course not — they were already pioneering public parks, libraries, and transport. American collapse is off the charts — in the weirdness and totality of its cruelty. So let me ask again: do you think Americans know how weird, extreme, and bizarre American collapse is getting?

Umair July 2018

https://eand.co/do-americans-know-how-weird-and-extreme-their-collapse-is-getting-977f3b6c73b3

[beforethoughts]

Thoughts on religion

I sort of mostly believe in the Bible, but I have my own interpretations of it, I like to think of it as ‘holy’ ancient text or wisdom. Holy in a sense that does not need to be overtly heeded, I mean I think people when they think of religion act really weirdly about it, I feel like being too dogmatic and strict with “religion” sullens the point and inherent meaning and purpose of it. It gets sort of in he way I feel like, it’s not supposed to be a system of power either and religion turns into a power struggle just the same as many other hings too, so I think it’s very important to not let it get like that; but good luck telling most “religious” people this, as they are notoriously dogmatic and close minded.

I question if religion even works anymore, because often it’s misinterpreted for wrong and used for wrong doings (again, the pursuit of power) and many Christians for example are on the far right, which is sort of hypocritical with the teachings of the Bible and Jesus, but yet they often don’t care. I would almost say that religion can be a positive force, but it’s not anymore, or at least right now. I also think that it shouldn’t be so against progress, or at least religion in some ways needs to be effectively brought into the 21st century, because it’s kind of outdated and not enough people really understand it anymore.

I think people again always get lost and stuck on “rules” and “control” and this is a serious problem with humanity, I don’t think it’s a good thing either; again I think it’s actually why religion was created and what it’s specifically about. It’s that (at least Christianity) there is only one God and no one man can take the place of God. Man can try, but they will always fail, and thus man must always take into consideration “God” and accept and try to understand what “God” would want. So basically, living in tune with “God” and what the universe and nature (even the planet) mos wants for itself, and for man; no humanity, because human beings are flawed creatures, and the like. We are meant to live, and experience this world, but the desire for control always reared it’s head and this is why you end up with corruption, and war and all these problems, it’s because someone always want control, and then seeks power to control (because their is no god) etc It’s hard to know or define what God is yes, and it will always be a struggle but it should be taken into consideration.

and also I think False Idol Worship is a serious problem. I think people do this a lot, for example I think Churches and Pastures turn into forms of false idol worship, I think the |State, government media, it all turns into false idol worship. It’s not “God” then, but more forms of power and control. (I worship this person, not what they are saying; their power)

I think questioning things is fine, believing in something and something being popular is okay, the only problem is when something literally is blindly followed, when it becomes just an unquestionable thought, or idea and it becomes a form of “law” and a “system” that’s when problems arise from thought. I take this from Taoism, and Buddhism and i think it’s right in this sense. (though, I don’t think the ego is the problem per-say; I don’t think detaching everything like they preach is good)

Like Nietzsche said “God is dead” and I think more so, it’s because hardly anyone really believes anymore in God. It’s not understood anymore, it’s just that there’s a meaning to life and that maybe we exist for a reason maybe there’s a grand purpose to life, there's a “good” I guess too when people stop believing in god, they stop believing in almost everything. I think atheist is not far removed from nihilism and that everything is based on variables and numbers. I guess then “logical” precedes atheism/nihilism. There’s no hope, life does not have value, free will does not really exist, we re all govern by our DNA, our biology and programmed in this way as well. Everyone is the same, nothings ever spontaneous, a miracle, by chance, there’s no beating odds, there are only odds and variables. The only hope is to control everything, and everything must be controlled; nothing can ever changed, humanity can never be saved. I guess this is what most people believe.(there’ no exceptions the system is alawys right, who cares? keep it going) 

Religion now is almost just a form, an organization that people  go to so that they can unburden their conscious and not feel ‘guilty” i think mos of the time, but then in their regular life they are kind of horrible people, but because they “sin” and go to church, it’s okay they won’t be “damned” (lol)