Category Archives: Art and Ideas

Christopher Dawson on Hostility to Religion (Comment added)

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“Behind this vague tendency to treat religion as a side issue in modern life, there exists a strong body of opinion that is actively hostile to Christianity and that regards the destruction of positive religion as absolutely necessary to the advance of modern culture.”

—  Christopher Dawson

My Comment:

As I’ve written, I am an agnostic and a skeptic….not so much about God, as about language. Which means, I read Dawson or Voegelin, with as much attention (or inattention) as I read Marx. The latter does not seem any more “scientific” than the former to me. Indeed, the only thing that makes something a religion is the hostility to opposition that adheres to it. [correction: this is an overstatement. It should read “one of the things that make something a religion.”] From that point of view, most of those who believe themselves to be actively hostile to “god” and “religion” are actually devout believers – their temperament is exactly like the rabid fundamentalists they denounce.

I, on the other hand, believe myself to be a Christian agnostic and a Christian skeptic.

How can I subscribe to such a contradiction in terms? [For those unfamiliar with theology, there are many leading theologians who are quite skeptical or even unbelieving in “god”].

For me, it is not a question of lacking faith in God. That is quite a simple-minded kind of contrarianism.

My heresy is a little deeper. I lack faith in language.  I have no faith in words as a fixed repository of meaning.

As for “god” – the conventions and symbols one grows up with can never really be uprooted and it seems wiser and truer to accept them as equally the outgrowth of the mind as logic or empiricism.  If I must confess disbelief in “god,” then I must confess it equally in “man,” “truth,” “justice” or “logic,” “you” or “me.”

What naive empiricists never realize is that what endows facts with their “factuality” is the “mind.” There is no escaping that.

Not do we have to go from naive empiricism to naive idealism, i.e., we don’t have to leap from “just the facts, ma’am” to “Just my opinion.”

Instead, we continually adjust our thoughts and subjective experience to the hard edges of facts so-called, to the limitations of objective experience. We do that through the refinement of our language. We continually reflect the tension of existence in a conditional, fractured, and fluctuating reality through language that expresses the contradiction and paradoxes inherent in our existence as mind-body.

In that spirit, I have no problem with affirming:

Credo in unum Deum, Patrem omnipotentem, factorem caeli et terrae, visibilium omnium et invisibilium…..

The Neurolinguistic Programming of Reality

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“An excellent example of globalist
redefinition of a common term
is the use of the word “state” in place of “country”
. When the media and leaders
refer to a country like Iran as a “state”
this has the same or similar effect as the
British globalists referring to the United States
as “the colonies”, which is off-handed at best.
This type of redefinition of terms is
designed to belittle the conception of a
supposed and/or perceived enemy by making
them appear less important and smaller in perspective
to the aggressors. Most soldiers would be
more willing to attack a “rogue state” than an “enemy
country”. The actual usage of this type of
terminology actually creates a mass perception
that the said country has already been assimilated
into the globalist empire and is simply acting out of
turn and is deserving of punitive damage whether
compensatory or offensive or both.
However, the true modus operandi
of the globalists is essentially Hegelian
in nature. Time and time again as a
species we can observe the workings of “thesis,
antitheses and synthesis”.

An excellent example would be the attacks on
the World Trade Center of 2001.
Thesis: “terrorists are a continual threat
to our liberty”. Antitheses: the
attack on the World Trade Center. Synthesis:
the Patriot Acts and Office of Homeland
Security, also known as: the loss of liberty
in the name of security…….

There are many conclusions to be drawn when
looking at the cycle of empires, but one
stands clearly: ruling is a science, and it
involves coercion whether via induced
suffering, psychological
torture and/or destabilization….”

— Max Mitchell, “Foundations of War:
Terminology of the New World.”

Paul Craig Roberts on the End of Empire (comment added)

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Washington Arrogance Has Fomented a Muslim Revolution
by Paul Craig Roberts

Hat-tip to David Redick for the link

“In a government of law, the existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.”

~ Justice Louis Brandeis

Is Pakistan responsible for the Mumbai attack in India? No.
Is India’s repression of its Muslim minority responsible? No.
Is the United States government responsible? Yes.

The attack on Mumbai required radicalized Muslims. Radicalized Muslims resulted from; (Item numbers inserted by ARTS)

1. the US overthrowing the elected government in Iran and imposed the Shah;
2. from the US stationing troops in Saudi Arabia;
3. from the US invading and attempting to occupy Afghanistan and Iraq,
4. bombing weddings, funerals, and children’s soccer games;
5. from the US violating international and US law by torturing its Muslim victims
6. from the US enlisting Pakistan in its war against the Taliban;
7. from the US violating Pakistan’s sovereignty by conducting military operations on Pakistani territory, killing Pakistani civilians;
8. from the US government supporting a half century of Israeli ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their lands, towns and villages;
9. from the assault of American culture on Muslim values;
10. from the US purchasing the government of Egypt to act as its puppet;
11. from US arrogance that America is the supreme arbiter of morality.

As Justice Brandeis said, crime is contagious. Government teaches by example, and America’s example is lawlessness. America’s brutal crimes against the Muslim world have invited every Muslim to become a law unto himself – a revolutionary. It is not terror that Washington confronts but revolution……

The change over which Obama will preside will have no American victories. The change will come from

1. America as a failed state,
2. from the dollar dethroned as reserve currency,
3. from America repudiated by its allies and paid puppets,
4. from massive unemployment for which there is no solution,
5. from hyperinflation that produces anarchy.
6. The day might arrive when Washington is faced with revolution at home as well as abroad.

December 5, 2008

My Comment

Roberts’s piece is provocatively stated, so I thought should add this comment.  I think he’s fairly correct to state that the Pakistani and Indian governments are not to blame, fundamentally, for what’s happening. However, to the degree that these governments – like others – tend to take the line of least resistance and  go along with Washington’s agenda, or buy into it, or stand on the sidelines while that agenda is enacted elsewhere, they encourage the misdeeds of the prime culprit. And, to the degree that they are themselves corrupt or lawless,  they don’t help the situation…

(Not following either of the two countries’ internal politics, I can’t do more than make a general statement).

How not to go along, you might ask?

Well, there’s Angela Merkel’s recent condemnation of global central bank interventionism. Why can’t we hear more of that from the global community?

Or has the cat got its tongue on every issue but the issue of Israel-Palestine?

What’s the Point of Dollar Devaluation?

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“If all a country needed to do to achieve manufacturing supremacy and economic dominance was devalue their currency then Georgia and Bosnia would be considered paragons of economic prosperity.”

—   Michael Pento, via 321 gold.

Aha. The folly of naivete. Mr. Pento’s mistake is to think that manufacturing supremacy is what our oligarchs have in mind for the US.  He must be kidding.

The goal is to destroy US economic independence (let alone dominance) and subjugate it to an international cabal centering around….guess who…the oligarchs.

Oscar Wilde on the Confraternity of the Faithless

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“When I think about religion at all, I feel as if I would like to found an order for those who CANNOT believe: the Confraternity of the Faithless, one might call it, where on an altar, on which no taper burned, a priest in whose heart peace had no dwelling, might celebrate with unblessed bread and a chalice empty of wine. Everything to be true must become a religion. And agnosticism should have its ritual no less than faith. It has sown its martyrs and it must reap its saints, and praise God daily for having hidden himself from man. But whether it be faith or agnosticism, it must be nothing external to me. Its symbols must be of my own creating. Only that is spiritual which make its own form. If I may not find its secret within myself, I shall never find it; if I have not got it already, it will never come to me...

— De Profundis, Oscar Wilde

The Tytler Cycle

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“The average age of the world’s greatest democratic nations has been 200 years. Each has been through the following sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith. From faith to great courage. From courage to liberty. From liberty to abundance. From abundance to complacency. From complacency to selfishness. From selfishness to apathy. From apathy to dependency. And from dependency back again into bondage.”

— Alexander Tytler on the cycles of government

[Correction: I’m getting feedback that this quote exists in different versions and may not actually be from Tytler or may be attributed to him while being a pastiche from other individuals partly or wholely. No time to verify now, will be back later on this. My fault. I didn’t think to google it, as I’ve seen it quoted so extensively].

My Comment

Tytler misses a link here. Apathy leads to cowardice and then cowardice to.
dependency. Courage is a primary spiritual virtue – it’s part of effort or action.
You don’t have anything without courage. In religious teaching the opposite of love is never posited as hate, but fear.

Fear is the source of practically every evil that comes upon us. Selfishness stems from fear. Greed stems from fear….

We have become sheep because of fear.

That’s why I’m interested in trauma in childhood. That’s where we first learn fear and learn to hold it in rigid patterns in our bodies and minds. [Thanks to Kevin Duffy for the quote from Tytler]

Update: In response to a comment, I thought I’d add this here:

Most cyclical theories are simplistic in their broad outlines, but they’re useful when you look at them from a meta-theoretical level
By metatheory I mean the overarching narrative in which they are placed – i.e., what does the schematization of the theory say about the way that particular person or age reads history…

There’s Vico –  Age of God, Age of Heroes, Age of Men.
There’s the Greek republic-democracy-tyranny
There are the mahayugas and yugas (great ages) in the Hindu cycles (which are cosmic, not political)

Ravi Batra, who was the first economist to write extensively about a coming great depression (late 1980s), I believe, has a new book out which includes his cycles – he has an age of acquisitors followed by an age of intellectuals (I forget the exact name) and then a golden age..and I think it’s based on the varna (caste) system – which originally was not socially pernicious.

Correction: Robert Prechter predicted a coming great depression early on, as well. I’ll verify the dates….