How I Mine for Fish?

In the late 2000s, the New Atheist movement was at its height. Smart young people clustered around memetic weapons deployed by "The Four Horsemen" of the movement. They quoted The God Delusion and wrote passionately about the brave new world lying just beyond the the horizon, once we had finally swept away the last remnants of organized religion. That religion, you see, was the source of man's primitive and atavistic conditions. In the new age of reason and tolerance, we would all be heckin good people. Now, had any of these clever youngsters (myself among them) bothered to dig into the arguments, they might have noticed some concerning faults. When faced with a legitimate theologian, the Horsemen had much less exciting debates. These were intellectual bloodsports, after all, and the people demanded a show. What use was a meandering talk about the Cosmological, Ontological, or Teleological Arguments? When these were presented, Hitchens would sidestep, guffaw, and point out that religion was very, very stupid. And the crowds would roar. Removed from the certainty of being Young, Hip, and Aware of the New Thing, it might quite obvious that the Intellectual Rigor of the Horsemen was not, in fact, very rigorous. When confronted with the robust (boring) arguments for religion, they would answer with such daring ripostes as "we've never found heaven in the Hubble Space Telescope", "can God make a burrito so hot He cannot eat it?", or "imagine believing in a flying spaghetti monster." Hardly arguments, at all. What they were, however, were social proof. You, the good and smart person, was laughing at the dumb and bad person, and all of your good and smart friends were laughing along. The Four Horsemen did not kill God. They came upon a dead god, lying facedown in a ditch, and they pronounced themselves His vanquishers. And what god did they find there? That corpse was the husk of Western Inertial Christianity. It was the remains of dead words, quoted by fools and fraudsters. Authentic Christianity was driven out of the West long before the New Atheists took over early YouTube with cartoon skits of "Bible Man." When had it been replaced by Inertial Christianity? I cannot say for certain, but at least as far as the Boomers. I do not speak of doctrine. There are many forms of Christianity with all manner of doctrine, about which far smarter men than I can endlessly argue. We have all those doctrines, still written on their pages. What I am speaking of is animating spirit, of living faith, scaled to the level of state. There are many churches in our lands. I assume that there are many of those churches, in roadside cathedrals or common-room chapels, where the Word still beats. But I am speaking of societies. Where could we last call our civilization "Christian", in such a way that it would recoil at sin, weep for faith, and transmit itself forward not as secular morals but as the Only Way and Truth. What was the last Christianity that would compel princes and nations not just to "be good people", but to organize themselves beyond the letter of secular law. What was the last form of Christianity that would kill and die for belief at the scale of governance? History is replete with examples. If you roll back to Westphalia, you see the need to bind just these forces. The wars of religion were no dead letters. But that's quite some time, and Westphalia solved that problem quite elegantly. So we can look, instead, to the reasons states organize for mortal endeavors. Even into the Twentieth Century, the language of state spoke in Christian terms: who was in, who was out, why we suffered, why we labored. Not just endurance, either. Not just absorbing the ills, but turning upon them with artifice and force. Looking at the documents of those eras, we can say that they at least believed themselves to be Christians, in the real sense of the word. Certainly, modernity's acid must be the inciting incident in decay. The growth of materialist ideology, the flattening of the sacred, and the removal of the transcendent are a drip-drip-drip of erosion upon the faith, far more powerful than any Nietzschean refutation. But where was the flip? When was the last document written, invoking God, where more people rolled their eyes than looked down in reverence? Growing up in Millennial and Gen X spaces, we were thoroughly dead letters. The religious Boomers above us roughly fell into two camps: crazy textual thumpers yelling about heavy metal and Satan, or cultured, erudite, functionally atheistic "believers" who understood that these parables and lessons were but a cast necessary to set a moral bone, not a Truth within themselves. The former were mockable. They quoted words they didn't understand. They lacked temperance and prudence. They often lashed out from fear of their own iniquities, pressed into zealotry, and when pressed in an argument, they'd brandish the Bible and say "it says right here". They would often misquote. Those of my generation who followed this literal crowd rejected the secular world. They learned and adhered doctrinally to the Precise Text. These were the kids who could recite chapter and verse. But their faith was often brittle. When a precisely-memorized contradiction was forced to the surface by a more agile thinker, they would shut down. Faced with the inability to understand the verse they recited, they would collapse into a parody of religiosity (dumb, low status, hateful, etc) or their glass cathedral would shatter, and they'd plunge into hedonic liberation (self-annihilation). The second set were barely Christian at all. The Boomers who believed such may have dressed as Christians. They may have believed themselves to be Christians. They may have even been clergy! (More than once was I informed, with sly and knowing wisdom, that nearly "all" high-functioning theologians were effectively just noble atheists, setting a moral narrative for the less developed.) But remove this by one more generation, and the Inertial trappings of the religion made less sense. If the point of Christianity was "be tolerant" and you had to constantly explain those intolerant passages, wouldn't it make more sense to simply cut away the cast? The bone of secular humanism had set! It was time to be honest and cease the noble lie. Those of my generation who followed this path didn't so much leave the Church as simply Stop Pretending to Be Part of It. One day, each of us simply didn't go to services. What was the point? We had learned the lesson, and the church (lowercase-c) itself was just a gathering place for the elderly, those in need, and the lunatics mentioned above. Good for them, and glad it existed, but not something I needed, certainly! So when the Four Horsemen rode into town, what did they find? A new generation of "thinkers" who had been led out from the Church by the last generation of Shepherds, and a mass of lunatics and yokels just waiting to be defeated in glorious, live-streamed takedowns. If you lived on Midwit Mountain (and most of us always do), this was the show of the age! If the Horsemen had been smarter, had their audience been more discerning, they might have put some thought into what god's corpse they were triumphantly dancing atop. The gods of Inertial and Pop Christianity were scarecrows, but with a little wisdom, more might have realized that the corpse of the god of Secular Humanism (Christian Atheism) was a mere ten yards further down that trench.

Seems important.

Man, I hate to break it to you, but there was this crazy political belief system called "Whiggism" that was entirely based on pro-Lucifer fanfiction. The brand isn't very popular anymore, which is why they renamed themselves "liberals". You might have heard of them.

If this election goes badly, remember this poll when "Principled Conservatives" try to argue against the Admin's positions on Immigration (+11), Corruption (+5), Economy (+2) while arguing FOR the Iran War (-2). Stick a pin in the motivated reasoning.

Observe progressive morality in play here: "It is not what you do that matters, but what ideology you hold." She describes a person who supported her, helped her, and struggled alongside her. In any other age or context, you would describe this person as a friend and good woman, as shown by her DEEDS. And yet, the moment this loyal and upstanding person expresses a BELIEF which goes against her own, she plunges in the knife. To the progressive, to be a Saint with the wrong politics is evil, while to be a mass murdering psychopath with the correct politics is to be good. They cannot allow for the Noble Adversary or Loyal Opposition. All morality descends from ideology, and anyone outside of the hivemind swarm must be destroyed. Such an ideology must be handled as the Cathars were handled. It is antihuman and must be driven from this Earth.

Patriots: you have a duty to vote straight ticket Republican tomorrow. Your nation depends on it. Target bad Reps in the primaries. The general is for locking out the lunatics who want to kill us.

Candy bowl nationalism.

I know I'm running against the grain of Current Thing "Sensitive Young Sith Lord Anakin Skywalker", but the structure of the Star Wars universe could very easily become cosmic horror. The force extends from life. It moves through all life. It binds all life. The force is not shown to have a supreme godhead or pantheon. It simply is. Life exists, so does the force. Does the force have a will? Certainly not a personified one. Life exists, so does the force. Which means the force, without will, precedes consciousness. Before morality. The force exists from the point of life. And what is life? A sustaining reaction. A replicating pattern which exists to perpetuate itself. The force then, would grow. And as creatures rise from the primordial soup, they develop in complexity. Hunger, fear, aggression. Procreation. These urges are below the rational, so crude that "emotions" is an inferior term. The irrational animal urges - the passions - are what drives life. And life drives the force. Even in our world, a world without the force, higher animals must grapple with these. Mark territory. Guard mates. Claim kills. Sire offspring. By the time a little race of social tool-users had set in place the cognitive structures needed to consider a question of "should" above the base passions, they were preceded by structures and tribes from the animal kingdoms. But these are not necessary for the force. The force is in all things. The cougar at ambush has the force. The snake eating stolen eggs has the force. The bacterium devouring rotting meat has the force. All life has the force, and it is united simply by the compulsion to live. The force has no morals. It has a compulsion, shared by all life, and those passions have only been bound within a cosmic wink by one tribe of curious tool-users on a single cerulean marble. The stars will blink, and those reasons and restraints will pass with the toolmaker. But somewhere on Rigel, a bacterium will begin to chew on chemical stew. It's complexity will tip into that self-replicating pattern which exists to propagate itself. And there will be the force. --- So tell me, which philosophy within Star Wars most reflects the pressures and passions of that urge which seeks only to grow? The Sith may be a corruption of the force, but the Jedi exist as an anti-force. A containment mechanism set around this cosmic sea of passions and oriented at forever stilling its waters. The force elevates champions. The Jedi exist to serve. The force feeds passions. The Jedi become a stone. The force runs in bloodlines. The Jedi end their lines. This is not that the Jedi are wrong and the Sith are right. But the Sith exist moving along the current of desire, want, and propagation, and the Jedi seek a stillness most perfected after all life is gone. And where then is the force? The only answer which makes the Jedi the correct interpretation is one where the force itself wishes to die. Alternatively, the Sith are closer to the true telos of the force (superior beings clawing ever upward for one more day in the eternal arms race of self-replication), likely now corrupted by the dominating goal to destroy the containment order which restrains them. This doesn't make the Sith good - battling wizard kings are rarely benevolent figures - but it certainly calls into frame the purpose and direction of the Jedi order which restrains them, and might itself be steering into a desired universe of silent stone.

A well regulated noosphere, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear compute, shall not be infringed.

And they say right wing art doesn't exist.

I think they doubt the polling.

Not gonna lie: if real, this is really cool. Good on him.

Halloween Malfoid. Spooky!