Category Archives: Religion and Philosophy

Rush Limbaugh: Don’t Trust ‘Deep State’ Health Experts About Covid! Reply

by • Health and Medicine, Religion and Philosophy

Contra Kyle, Rush is not wrong to say that we should question medical and scientific authorities. Historically, there are plenty of examples of the medical and scientific establishment being not only wrong but complicit in systems of tyrannical political authority (e.g., eugenics, Lysenkoism, the “racial hygiene” policies of the Third Reich, Chinese organ harvesting). See Foucault’s work in this area or Thomas Szasz’s critique of the “therapeutic state.” Where Rush goes wrong is with the selectively of the authorities that he criticizes.

Submit to Freedom: Bronze Age Mindset Reply

by • Left and Right, Religion and Philosophy

Submit! to Geoffrey Miller & Justin Murphy talking about the book ‘Bronze Age Mindset’ by Bronze Age Pervert. It’s a wide-ranging conversation that sparked a lot of new ideas for us. Topics include freedom, power, sex, space, submission, domination, hierarchy, religion, glory, Mannerbund, Indo-Europeans, evolutionary psychology, social media, recklessness, mind hacks, the Blank Slate, Nietzsche, Darwin, Moldbug, Palahniuk, Achilles, Elon Musk, Kanye West, Dwayne Johnson, Nassim Taleb, nerds, manic geniuses, bugmen, American Mind, Claremont Institute, and the Intellectual Dark Phalanx.

The Life and Thought of Friedrich Nietzsche Reply

by • Left and Right, Religion and Philosophy, Uncategorized • Tags:

A good documentary on Nietzsche. The primary weakness that is demonstrated by most anarchists and leftists is their failure to confront Nietzsche’s critique of modern liberal-humanism generally and leftism specifically as forms of secularized theocratic neo-Abrahamism, which is why we find so much zeal among leftists for rooting out heretics and the morally impure while destroying relics of the “pagan” past.

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Let’s Not Wake Up Like This Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Left and Right, Race and Ethnicity, Religion and Philosophy • Tags:

On November 2nd, 2019 at http://www.free-flo.org , Seth Andrews gave this presentation as an encouragement to get the facts, understand ideological opponents, and not lose ourselves in the deafening white noise of online outrage. It’s a speech given in good faith, with the hope that it will also be received in good faith.

Marxism and Christianity: Analogous or Incompatible? Reply

by • Religion and Philosophy • Tags: , ,

By Troy Southgate

News from Nowhere

A NUMBER of political commentators have attempted to make a comparison between Marxism and Christianity, emphasising – and with some justification – that not only does each adhere to the linear mode of history, but that they also contain a series of composite elements which follow a rather similar pattern. Indeed, on the face of it there does seem to be a large degree of truth in this assertion and if we examine some of the key tenets it is clear to see why Marxism has always been regarded by its Christian counterparts as a dangerous rival:

(a) the Garden of Eden may be said to accord with the state one finds in Primitive Communism;

(b) the Fall of Man can be compared to the economic disparity one finds in the Division of Labour;

(c) Christ’s persecution can be interpreted as a symbol of the conflict one finds in class society;

(d) the Crucifixion is akin to a situation of revolutionary upheaval;

(e) The Kingdom of God, or Heaven, is analogous to the full realisation of a Communist utopia.

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The Intellectual Legacy of Carl Schmitt 1

by • Religion and Philosophy • Tags:

                                                by Keith Preston

Part One: p. 1

Early Life and Intellectual Development

The Turmoil of Weimar and the State of the Exception

Part Two: p. 6

The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy and The Concept of the Political

Part Three: p. 11

The Destruction of the Weimar Republic and the Rise of the Nazis

Part Four: p. 15

The Nazi Era, The Postwar Period, and Schmitt’s Contemporary Relevance

Part One: Early Life and Intellectual Development

Among the many fascinating figures that emerged from the intellectual culture of the Weimar Republic that existed in Germany between the two world wars, perhaps none are quite as significant or unique as Carl Schmitt. An eminent jurist and law professor during the Weimar era, Schmitt was arguably the greatest political theorist of the twentieth century. He is also among the most widely misinterpreted or misunderstood. The misconceptions regarding Schmitt are essentially traceable to two issues. The first of these is obvious enough: Schmitt’s collaboration with the Nazi regime during the early years of the Third Reich. However, the other reason why Schmitt’s ideas are so frequently misrepresented or even reviled in contemporary liberal intellectual circles may ultimately be the most important. Schmitt’s works in political and legal theory provide what is by far the most penetrating critique of the ideological and moral presumptions of modern liberal democracy and its institutional workings.

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Reflections on His Goofiness: William Gillis on Positive and Negative Liberty 5

by • Anarchism/Anti-State, Religion and Philosophy

Goofy Gillis has a lengthy interview podcast interview available. Listen here.

Here’s my general take on the content of this interview.

He’s not unintelligent, and much of what he is saying is not “wrong” per se. But I know enough about him to know that his idea of “freedom” amounts to the de facto compulsory universalization of the PC/SJW/Antifa/call-out culture paradigm, although perhaps enforced by extra-legal vigilante violence rather than a conventional state.

His ideology seems to be “Total positive freedom to make unlimited choices resulting in absolute diversity, except for people who might do something I don’t like, such as being ‘reactionary.'” That’s consistent with the nonsense I’ve seen in his Twitter feed.

Technology or no technology, progress or no progress, the evidence from all relevant fields shows that humans are naturally tribal in a social context, and individual values are rooted in their psychological and genetic proclivities. Where there is “freedom,” there is “diversity.” But diversity often includes the existence of polar opposites.

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A History of Decentralization 5

by • Anarchism/Anti-State, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Environment, Law/Justice, Left and Right, Men and Women, Race and Ethnicity, Religion and Philosophy, Science and Technology, Secession, Strategy

aragon.black
Jun 11, 2019
14 minute read (full)

First let’s decentralize history…

This month’s thematic has been a real challenge for us and raised many questions in our minds. Why? The history of decentralization is complex and non-linear. But most of all, it is difficult to be considered from an objective point of view, stripped of the predominance of the state.

Talking about decentralization leads obviously to discuss about centralization; to find the ghosts of history, to cross-reference the victories and failures of social-political movements; to discover some contemporary alternatives to the generalized centralization of our lives. Unless we consider that a technology is neutral, in the end, we cannot talk about decentralization without talking about governance, suffrage, politics or apoliticism, autonomy, organization… and the dominant model of centralization: the nation-state. Still, if a very vast literature and documentation concerns rise of states, it must be stated that the one granted to the opposite, i. e. the absence of a state, is almost non-existent. More…

The Dr. Strange of the American Revolution Reply

by • Health and Medicine, Religion and Philosophy, Science and Technology, Uncategorized

nautil.us
Brian Gallagher

“I ascribe the Success of our Revolution to a Galaxy,” Benjamin Rush wrote to John Adams, in 1812. He wasn’t invoking the astrological. It was commonplace then to associate a bright assembly of people with the starry band in the night sky that Chaucer called “the Milky Wey.” Yet Rush crossed out “a Galaxy” and wrote in, perhaps for the sake of specificity, “an Illustrious band of Statesmen—philosophers—patriots & heroes.” Historian Jill Lepore has written that, in the “comic-book version of history that serves as our national heritage, where the Founding Fathers are like the Hanna-Barbera Super Friends, Paine is Aquaman to Washington’s Superman and Jefferson’s Batman.” And Rush? I posed this question to Stephen Fried, author of the recent book, Rush: Revolution, Madness & the Visionary Doctor Who Became a Founding Father. Fried replied, “Dr. Strange.” More…

Why we disagree about human nature Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Race and Ethnicity, Religion and Philosophy

Elizabeth Hannon & Tim Lewens (Eds) Why we disagree about human nature.Oxford University Press, 2018. 206 pp. £30 hbk.

JULY 1, 2019

By Simon Jarrett

If one day a disturbingly precocious child were to ask what part you had played in the nature/ nurture war, what would you reply? Were you with the massed intellectual ranks who, since the philosopher David Hull’s ground-breaking 1986 classic ‘On Human Nature,’ have denied that there is any such thing as a common nature for all humans? Or did you join Stephen Pinker’s 2003 counter-revolution, when The Blank Slate sought to reclaim the ground for the Enlightenment, and the idea that there is something essentially the same about all humans across time, space and culture?

If you are not quite sure where you stand, or perhaps too sure where you stand, then this pleasingly eclectic collection of ten essays on human nature, and whether we can meaningfully talk about such a thing, will be of great help. Its contributors, who come from psychology, philosophy of science, social and biological anthropology, evolutionary theory, and the study of animal cognition, include human nature advocates, deniers, and sceptics. We could perhaps call the sceptics ‘so-whaters’ – they agree there may be something we can attach the label ‘human nature’ to, but query whether it really matters, or carries any explanatory weight. These people would take our (hopefully apocryphal) infant prodigy aside and say, ‘well there are some conceptual complexities here that make it quite difficult to give you a straightforward answer.’ More…

Video Games That Made People Question Their Beliefs Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Religion and Philosophy, Uncategorized

Gita Jackson
Kotaku

When Scott Udall first played Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance shortly after it came out in 2005, he was in a vulnerable spot. Udall, who grew up Mormon in Salt Lake City, Utah, was very religious, and his family were all politically active Republicans. His parents had gone through a messy divorce, and he’d lost contact with his father’s side of the family. He found solace in Path of Radiance’s world, and when the sequel, Radiant Dawn, came out two years later, he was excited to revisit the characters. He didn’t realize when he started playing that Radiant Dawn would become a catalyst that shook him from his previously held convictions. More…

Smash All Dogmas: Overcoming the Addiction to Ideology 7

by • Anarchism/Anti-State, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Left and Right, Religion and Philosophy

By Keith Preston

Originally published in Tribes Magazine

Perhaps one of the most curious features of modernity is the way in which ideologies have replaced religions as a principal source of contentiousness. During the era of the nineteenth century, when the intellectual revolution of the Enlightenment was being institutionalized, a few perceptive thinkers recognized that the “death of God” did not mean the death of dogma. In 1844, Max Stirner noted that “our atheists are pious people,” an acknowledgment that humanism and liberalism had replaced Christianity as the religion of the intellectual elite. Similarly, Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Parable of the Madman” was rooted in the recognition of the consequences of the loss of faith, its metaphysical underpinnings, and its derivative traditions.

“What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?” (Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 1882)

The era of the twentieth century revealed that the Age of Faith gave way not to an Age of Reason, as Voltaire or Thomas Paine would have hoped for, but to an Age of Ideology. What were the great conflicts of the twentieth century, whether the two world wars or the Cold War, but wars of ideology that paralleled or exceeded the great wars of religion that had taken place during previous centuries?

Many different ideologies abound in the same manner that many different religious sects can be identified. Ideologies are typically grouped into the categories of Left and Right. The Left is thought to favor equality, progress, and universality, and leftists include liberals, progressives, socialists, social democrats, communists, left-libertarians, and left-anarchists. The Right is thought to favor hierarchy, tradition, and the particular, and rightists include conservatives, reactionaries, traditionalists, monarchists, right-libertarians, fascists, and national socialists. There are also a range of ideologies that defy the left/right model such as nationalism, populism, environmentalism, regionalism, feminism, and third positionism.

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Trans-Tribalism or: Why Traditionalists Should Stop Worrying and Embrace the Queer Revolution 8

by • Anarchism/Anti-State, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Left and Right, Religion and Philosophy, Sexuality and the State • Tags:

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

I like conservatives. Not all conservatives. Not the bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb Iran kind or the endangered white male victim kind. But the Traditionalist kind. The Old Right, Paleolibertarian, fuck-you-mind-your-own-damn-business kind. I like people like Bill Kaufman, Wendell Berry, Ron Paul and H.L. Mencken. I admire the prose and courage of Yukio Mishima. I appreciate the insight of Martin Heidegger. I think Oswald Spengler’s ideas are at least as prophetic as those of Gramsci and Marx. I even think Alain de Benoist has a few good ideas (and about 67 bad ones). Justin Raimondo used to be one of my favorite writers before he mysteriously vanished up Donald Trump’s orange asshole. And I consider antifa-hate-thing Troy Southgate to be a personal friend of mine.

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The Last Temptation of the Evangelical Right 2

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Electoralism/Democratism, Left and Right, Religion and Philosophy

I generally hold to the obviously heterodox view that, contextually speaking, Donald Trump is the most liberal president the USA has ever had (though Barack Obama was more liberal on some social issues like the environment and transgender rights, and Jimmy Carter was more liberal on some foreign policy issues like international human rights). It is therefore interesting that his biggest supporters would be some of the furthest right sectors of US society, such as the religious right and the racialist right. Imagine Hugh Hefner or Larry Flynt running for president in the 1960s, 1970s, or 1980s with followers of George Wallace, Jerry Falwell, or Pat Robertson as their biggest backers., and you have a rough analogy to the present situation. This article by a neocon evangelical and former member of the Bush administration explains why. During the George W. Bush era, I said that Dubya did not govern any further to the right than LBJ, and Trump is much further to the left.

By Michael Gerson

The Atlantic

ne of the most extraordinary things about our current politics—really, one of the most extraordinary developments of recent political history—is the loyal adherence of religious conservatives to Donald Trump. The president won four-fifths of the votes of white evangelical Christians. This was a higher level of support than either Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush, an outspoken evangelical himself, ever received.

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The Church of Jesus Christ Satanist 1

by • Religion and Philosophy

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

Maybe this is evil but I’ve always wanted to start a cult. It just seems like a fun thing to do. The robes, the guns, the girls, the mirrored aviator shades. Death squads, armed compounds, and fireside orgies. There is just something strangely romantic to me about taking over a ghost town in Wyoming, painting all the buildings blood red, and declaring war on the federal government and reality itself. The fact that it’s also a tax exempt way to get laid and loaded doesn’t exactly hurt either. Sure it usually ends badly but to go out in a blaze of glory set by the feds on live television while neck deep in barely legal pussy, oh sweet Jesus, what a way to go! So I figured, after 11 years in Catholic school and another 6 in hermetic self-isolation, why not try my hand at the game. I’m an off-puttingly charismatic and mentally ill gadfly. If Jim Jones, Osho, and Charlie Manson, then why not Comrade Hermit. It’s high time we had ourselves a genderfuck messiah. The idea is very 2019, don’t you think?

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Keith Preston on “Thinkers Against Modernity” Keith Preston 2

by • Left and Right, Religion and Philosophy

My recent interview with Kevin Barrett. This is one of the better interviews I have done. Listen here.

Listen HERE

Keith Preston is a notable anarchist thinker and incisive critic of Secular Humanist Idiocy Tending Towards Political Correctness (SHITT-PC)*…the same hegemonic pseudo-religion Jonathan Revusky calls Anti-Religious Religious Fundamentalism (ARRF).

In this interview we discuss Keith’s recent book Thinkers Against Modernity, a concise and readable synopsis of intellectuals who have influenced the European New Right. Though it leaves out the two most important Traditionalist thinkers—René Guenon and Renée Girard—Thinkers Against Modernity does a terrific job of elucidating complex and difficult ideas, and showing why late 19th and 20th century intellectuals who questioned progressivist materialism (among other post-sacred cows) are now more relevant than ever.

Thinkers Against Modernity is cheaper than a course in 20th century intellectual history—and offers a much higher signal-to-noise ratio than is normally found in the academy. It also has the courage to ask the million dollar question: What will happen when the Western world completes the process it is now undergoing and finishes losing faith in nihilism?

Some of us, following René Guenon, have lost faith in nihilism and turned to traditional religion in general…and the best-preserved one, Islam, in particular. Others have sketched out other possible paths: Belloc and Chesterton’s Catholicism, Nietzche’s superman, Junger’s heroic individualism, or  various forms of political engagement. Keith Preston’s book is a terrific introduction to some of the most significant thinkers who have seen, and struggled with, the failure of modernity.

 

*Don’t blame Keith for that acronym, I just made it up.

Aristocratic Aesthetic Socialism 1

by • Religion and Philosophy • Tags:

By Robert Stark

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By Robert Stark: Originally Published on Alt of Center

The concept of beauty throughout history has been a force for creation, inspiring mankind to reach the pinnacle of civilization. From men accomplishing great things to win over a lover, the beautiful female as a muse for the artist, religions building great temples and cathedrals to attract worshipers, kings and emperors building monuments to demonstrate their greatness, and businesses using aesthetics in architecture and advertisements to attract more consumers.

In today’s society aesthetics serves primarily as a force to manipulate people to keep them striving and conforming to the liberal capitalist system. Advertisements use aesthetics to create a vision of a product to consume; not just the product itself but an overall aesthetically pleasing scene involving beautiful women, luxurious furnishings, great architecture, natural scenery, and music to create the mood.

Aesthetics then become a mechanism to keep people enslaved to the system in hope that they can one day date or marry an attractive woman, buy aesthetically pleasing merchandise, vacation in aesthetically pleasing locals, and live in an aesthetically pleasing community.

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Just Grateful Reply

by • Religion and Philosophy, Uncategorized

“Cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that comes to you, and to give thanks continuously. And because all things have contributed to your advancement, you should include all things in your gratitude.”

―Ralph Waldo Emerson

struggle

“Struggle” statue, Kalemegdan

 

When I was on blackout status at the treatment facility in Las Vegas, thinking I was special and therefore deserved and expected the CAs to keep an eye on my car for me, I was forced to take a loss and didn’t find out about it until it was too late. During that time I wasn’t allowed to receive any visitors for the first 45 days – except for my sponsor – an older recovering alcoholic from Texas who walks with a cane and talks about Death during breakfast; and who was diagnosed with a wicked case of malignant spinal cord tumors some years ago. Surgical strategies were successful at removing the tumors from his spine but the operation left him with permanent disabilities that wiped out any chance of walking again. The old man literally had to shit in a pan for the first 6 months and couldn’t go to sleep without going through an entire process of crawling and “transferring” into bed. After nearly 2 years of assisted shitting solutions, he was able to move one leg just enough to smash around on a cane. He continued gaining movement until he was able to shit in peace again, and then, started showering on his own. Before anyone knew it, he was somehow driving again. Then, the tumors came back. He had to go for a second surgery and although the doctors were successful at removing the tumors from his spine again, the surgery took him back to the start.

All the way back to the pan.

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