Johnny came home from Sunday school and his mother asked him what the Sunday school teacher taught him that day.
Johnny: Mom, the teacher told us the story of Moses and the Isrаelites. She told us about how Moses was leading the Isrаelites out of captivity in Egypt, when Pharaoh and the Egyptian Army started chasing them trying to take them back into slavery. Suddenly the Isrаelites came up to the Red Sea and couldn’t get across . So Moses sent two brigades back to fight a rear guard action and delay the Egyptians while he had his combat engineers build a pontoon bridge across the Red Sea. When the bridge was finished Moses had his artillery fire smoke shells to blind the Egyptians while the Isrаelite host withdrew across the bridge. But when the Isrаelites got to the other side of the sea and the smoke screen cleared, Moses saw that the Egyptians were still following and crossing the sea over the same bridge. So Moses got on his radio and called for an airstrike. A squadron of F-16s appeared and dropped GPS guided smart bombs blowing up the pontoon bridge and drowning the whole Egyptian Army in the Red Sea.
Johnny’s Mom: Johnny! Are sure that’s what the Sunday school teacher told you?
Johnny: Well no Mom, but if you heard it the way she told it, you never would have believed it.
“A nominally Christian church that does not believe in God or Jesus Christ has no reason to exist. By severing themselves from God's Word, the Bible, and freeing themselves from its strictures, they inevitably decline and die. It is a reliable predictive model. Welcome women into the pulpit in defiance of Scripture and your church will almost instantly go into decline. Once Jesus Christ is evicted from the building, the genuine Christians soon follow.”
- Vox Day
Yeah, stripped of the belief in and worship of a deity, the "metaphysics as they say, what is Christianity? Just being “nice”? Do you need to attend weekly meetings and pay tithes for that?
But some people just can’t wrap their heads around the supernatural aspects of traditional religion, can they? Believing in God is just something they cannot do. It makes no sense to them. Where’s the proof? If you think you have a soul take it out and show it to me. Nowadays more people are willing to say so out loud than in the past. Yet some among them still want something that will make them feel good about themselves without having to believe in God. Certainly without having to follow a bunch of old-fashioned buzz-kill rules of behavior just because some deity that doesn’t exist tells them to in a book that was written two thousand years ago either. Or else they want to take a cafeteria approach to religious doctrine and pick and choose what they want to believe or not believe. All scriptures are open to interpretation, but some people clearly want to put words in Jesus’ mouth and /or disqualify some of his Apostles. Hey I can dig it, many of the things that the scriptures tell us, we moderns just don’t want to accept anymore. The Feminists sure don’t like much of what’s written in the Bible. Anything that doesn’t demonize men and pedestalize women they don’t agree with.
The 18th Century German philosopher Immanuel Kant came to the conclusion that all religious experiences are personnel since religious beliefs cannot be proven or disproven in a court of law or by scientific experiment. So this the doctrine that drives modern western thought: freedom of religion and freedom of conscience. Believe what you want to believe. Religious belief is a personal matter (except in the Muslim world where it is a matter of the state and there is NO freedom of religion). Martin Luther taught we all have a personal relationship with Christ and don’t need a church organization to intercede. But a Christianity that is not based in the Bible is not Christianity. All the orthodox Christian Churches (Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and all the mainstream Protestant Churches) adhere to the beliefs stated in the Nicene Creed about the nature of God. Enforcing correct worship is not a public issue today since we no longer believe that God will collectively punish us for allowing people to pray the wrong way and believe the wrong things. Except in the Dar-el-Islam, the Muslim world.
So if you’re seeking to develop a calm and peaceful mind and free yourself from worry and rumination you would be better served by reading the works of the ancient Stoic philosophers and following their advice. Clearing your mind with Zen mediation does a good job too. If you’re not wiling to believe that Jesus is one of the three personalities within the one God, then most of his teachings will make little sense to you, simply because his principle teaching IS that He is the Son of God and whoever believes in him will have eternal life.
“Lord,” Martha said to Jesus, “if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But I know that even now God will give you whatever you ask.” Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.” “Martha said to Him, "I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day." Jesus said to her, "I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in Me will live even if he dies, and everyone who lives and believes in Me will never die. Do you believe this?" “Yes, Lord,” she replied, “I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, who is to come into the world.”
- John 11:21-27
Which apparently is why secularized Christianity is selling as well as no alcohol beer.
“Happiness comes from understanding one basic principle. Some things are within our control and some things are not. Our opinions, ambitions, desires, and aversions are in our control. We can change the content of our inner character. Our body, wealth, fame, and social status are not in our control. They are external to us and not our concern.”
– Epictetus, Stoic Philosopher, 55-135 A.D.
“How much time he saves who does not look to see what his neighbor says or does or thinks.”
- Marcus Aurelius, “Meditations”
“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”
– Plato
"...the Church of Christ Without Christ. Where the blind can't see, the lame don't walk, and the dead stay that way."
-Brad Dourif as Hazel Motes, "Wise Blood" (1979)
(Wise Blood Trailer)
“Religious people tend to encounter, among those who are not, a cemented certainty that belief in God is a crutch for the weak and the fearful...Now the belief in God may turn out at the last trump to be a mistake. Meantime, let us be quite clear, it is not merely the comfort of the simple—though it is that too, much to its glory—it is a formidable intellectual position with which most of the first-class minds of the human race, century in and century out, have concurred, each in his own way....speaking of crutches—Freud can be a crutch, Marx can be a crutch, rationalism can be a crutch, and atheism can be two canes and a pair of iron braces. We none of us have all the answers, nor are we likely to have. But in the country of the halt, the man who is surest he has no limp may be the worst-crippled.”
― Herman Wouk, This Is My God: The Jewish Way of Life
“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
– Matthew 11:28-30 (NIV)
Jeremy, thank you for this deep article. I particularly liked your use of Roman quotes. In his book Metaphysics of War, Evola defines the Church as vehicle that swept Roman values into the Middle Ages and carried Germanic values into modern times. Your citations certainly bring that home. Even to a heathen such as I, it is clear that the notion of heroism is only scrubbed from Christianity when it is secularized.
The worst thing the Christians did was to tie the new testament to the old. The old testament is the rantings of a bunch of maniacs that worship the devil and are lead by one or more of his demons. A group of Christians tried to break away from this madness so of course they were all killed.
Catharism.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharism
The Catharist believe that the god of the old testament was not God but a demon. Any reading of the old testament with it's "kill them all" attitude would be a point in favor of Catharism.
Catharist believe the material world is evil. Any one who's stubbed their toe can attest this is true. I won't say matter is unreal but I don't believe it's eternal.
Catharist believe in reincarnation. I used to think reincarnation was stupid til I read a book by Ian Stevenson. Children have been able to remember many things that only a person who died would know. If reincarnation is not true then there's some other super strange effect.
near-death.com/reincarnation/research/ian-stevenson.html
reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1d2v7i/parents_of_reddit_what_is_the_creepiest_thing
The Catharist were murdered by the Jesuits which were expressly created for that purpose and run by Ignatius Loyola a crypto-Jew.
israelect.com/reference/WillieMartin/Ignatius_Loyola.htm
"...In contrast to the Catholic Church, the Cathars had but one sacrament, the Consolamentum, or Consolation. This involved a brief spiritual ceremony to remove all sin from the believer and to induct him or her into the next higher level as a perfect..."
The saying,"Kill them all, the Lord will recognize His own" was invented by Ignatius Loyola involved in the mass murder of the Catharist so opposing people who think this way is a good thing.
JESUS CHRIST, speaking to the Jews in the Gospel of St. John, 8:44 “Ye are of your father the devil, and the lust of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is not truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar and the father of it. – then answered the Jews — ” (which makes it clear that Christ was addressing the Jews.)
As for the warlock demon worshiper Moses and the Isrаelites in Egypt here's what their own books say about them.
"Exodus 12
35And the children of Isrаel did according to the word of Moses; and they borrowed of the Egyptians jewels of silver, and jewels of gold, and raiment: 36And the LORD gave the people favour in the sight of the Egyptians, so that they lent unto them such things as they required. And they spoiled the Egyptians."
So they ripped them off. Cheating people from the beginning of written history.
On a different note Jeremy Bentham's note on the Germans screw up on taking Iraq is doubled here by this author. He says that they should have skipped bombing England altogether and taken Gibraltar. Thereby owning the Med. I didn't think of this and it makes good sense. He says it was Hitlers provincialism that caused it to be over looked. Makes sense as Germany was a land power and probably didn't think the same as a sea power. Anyways I think it worth reading if you want to "what if" WWII.
counter-currents.com/2011/01/drieu-on-the-failure-of-the-third-reich
Let’s give credit where credit is due. Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits (the Society of Jesus), was born in 1491, 262 years after the Cathar Crusade. The guy who should get the credit for having said “Kill them all, let God sort them out “is Arnaud Amalric
Arnaud Amalric was a Cistercian abbot and a papal legate and inquisitor during the Albigensian Crusade or Cathar Crusade (1209–1229). He was in charge of the crusader army that sacked Béziers in 1209. There, according to the Cistercian writer Caesarius of Heisterbach, Arnaud Amalric responded when asked by a Crusader how to distinguish the Cathars from the Catholics, Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius (Kill them all. For the Lord knoweth them that are His.). This is the origin of the modern phrase, "Kill them all and let God sort them out."
Caesarius did not hear this statement first hand, merely writing that Arnaud was reported to have said it (dixisse fertur in the original text). Arnaud himself, in a letter to Pope Innocent III in August 1209 (col.139), wrote: While discussions were still going on with the barons about the release of those in the city who were deemed to be Catholics, the servants and other persons of low rank and unarmed attacked the city without waiting for orders from their leaders. To our amazement, crying "to arms, to arms!", within the space of two or three hours they crossed the ditches and the walls and Béziers was taken. Our men spared no one, irrespective of rank, sex or age, and put to the sword almost 20,000 people. After this great slaughter the whole city was despoiled and burnt...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnaud_Amalric
Hey the common soldier back then was an individual who fought for plunder. The troops wanted their chance to get rich. So sometimes they took the bit in their teeth and just did what they wanted, regardless of what their superior’s wishes might have been. As in this case. But if you’re in command you get the credit or the blame for whatever your troops do or fail to do, even when it’s not your fault. That’s still true today.
So a Demigod shows up, tunnels into the Earth and jailbreaks Hades.
I do not understand why humans would think that had anything to do with them.
Of course, anyone involved with that would keep a low profile.
I screwed that up bad. Problem is I'm not sure how. I went back and read some of my references for that and came up with,"...Saint Dominic met and debated with the Cathars in 1203 during his mission to the Languedoc. He concluded that only preachers who displayed real sanctity, humility and asceticism could win over convinced Cathar believers. The institutional Church as a general rule did not possess these spiritual warrants.[58] His conviction led eventually to the establishment of the Dominican Order in 1216...", the Dominican order is not the Jesuits.
I may have seen it written somewhere and immediately accepted it as true because so many people bitch about the Jesuits that they would fit right in on being the killers of the Cathars.
My apologies for leading myself and other people astray.