nihilism

[Ben_JS]

Apples fall to the ground.
Do they have self-meaning?

-lifts mic back up-

But then our input’s likely derailment…

-sets mic back down-

[iambiguous]

What is Nihilism?
Curated by TheCollector

1. Nihilism Questioned Figures of Authority

One of the fundamental aspects of Nihilism was its rejection of all forms of authority.

Obviously. After all, from one single individual all the way up to a government, what is an authority but an entity claiming the capacity to know all. An authority on all that is said to be rational and virtuous. That’s why those from Satyr over at Know Thyself to the theocrats in Iran or Afghanistan to Kim Jong Un in North Korea embrace their own rendition of authoritarianism. Not only is there One True Path to enlightenment, but, in fact, there must be because they are already on it!

Not on it yourself?

Go ahead, note how they react to that.

Nihilists questioned what gave one figure the authority to preside over another, and asked why there should be such a hierarchy in place at all.

In the modern world however this gets tricky. Why? Because those who own and operate the most powerful nations around the globe are often not in the least interested in objective morality. They basically preside over an amoral hierarchy. Their main interest is accumulating wealth and power. In fact, it is only when you get down to individual authoritarians like Satyr…those who have utterly no impact on the world around us…will you still find folks committed to a “my way or the highway”, “one of us”/“one of them” moral and political dogma.

They argued no one should be more important than anyone else, because we are all as meaningless as each other. This belief has led to one of the more dangerous strands of Nihilism, prompting people to wage acts of violence and destruction against the police or local governments.

Again, “in theory” this frame of mind is one thing. In practice, however, it can manifest itself in as many different ways as there are nihilists grappling with the human condition in a No God world. Yes, some nihilists will configure politically into anarchists and go after the authorities around them. But others become sociopaths interested in fulfilling only their own selfish gratifications.

And then those like me “fractured and fragmented” to the point that the whole point itself is to accumulate as many fulfilling distractions as possible…“things to do” to keep what you have thought yourself into believing about your own essentially meaningless and purposeless existence at bay.

[iambiguous]

What is Nihilism?
Curated by TheCollector

Nihilism Questioned Religion

Or, to put it another way, for some: nihilism begins with the death of God. However, for the moral nihilists, only in regard to the is/ought world.

To wit…

In the wake of the Enlightenment, and its subsequent discoveries of…reasoning, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche argued that Christianity no longer made sense. He argued that a totalizing system that explained all truths about the world was a fundamentally flawed system, because the world is so complex, nuanced, and unpredictable. In his much talked about essay Der Wille zur Macht (The Will to Power), 1901, Nietzsche wrote, “God is dead.” He was referring to the rise in scientific knowledge and the way it eroded the foundational system of Christian belief that had been a bedrock of European society.

God is dead. What then is the secular equivalent of Sin if not another “totalizing system” revolving around philosophy or ideology or one or another equivalent of God. Of course, the faithful still managed to include God in the “human condition” because, after all, what can science tell us about moral truths or the truly Big Questions. Also, what does science have in the way of immortality? As for the complex, nuanced and unpredictable interactions of mere mortals, all of that is simply subsumed in God’s mysterious ways. He is the part that, in the end, seamlessly intertwines the parts into the whole.

It is worth noting that Nietzsche didn’t see this as a positive thing – on the contrary, he was extremely worried about the impact this would have on civilization. He even predicted that the loss of faith would lead to the greatest crisis in human history. In his essay Twilight of the Idols: or, How to Philosophize with a Hammer, 1888, Nietzsche wrote, “When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet. This morality is by no means self-evident… Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole.”

And, indeed, the rest is history. No God and there are really only two alternatives:

1] invent the secular equivalent of Him: Objectivism, socialism, Communism, fascism, anarchism. And, historically, on and on. Make that the source of all Commandments for mere mortals. Then make life a living hell on Earth for those who refused to toe the line. Then, well, “die like a man”.
2] embrace the amoral commandments of the “show me the money”, “dog eat dog”, “survival of the fittest” global capitalists. Or the “me, myself and I” mentality of the sociopaths.

[Lorikeet (Satyr)]

More words referring to other words…up in the clouds…

Zero connections of words to deeds…to actions…to independently perceptible perceptible phenomena.

Ergo:
Nihilism -
Language disconnecting form reality, and turning inward.
Subjectivity.
But they still need validation, so they find it in other minds, in other texts…
Inter-Subjectivity.
Text referring and deferring to other text.

Then she accuses other of skyhooks and clouds…and seeks a context.
Well, with her definitions and understanding of words, how can there be a real life context, for ‘god,’ let’s say…or ‘morality’, or ‘free-will’?
The way she defines the words makes it impossible, and she likes it that way.
Refusing to define these words, representing concepts, by connecting them to perceptible, independently, verifiable actions, appearances…in the wold.

Exposing her real motive…and her hypocrisy.
She is not interested in determining what is more probable, but to undermine all probabilities…all value-judgements.
She wants uniformity…and this necessitates the undermining of trust in judgements.
Creating the conditions of desperation to allow her ‘compromising’ naïve idealism to work.
She can’t justify her convictions, because they are so naïve and infantile and unreal, so she undermines all convictions.

---

Then she attempts to conceal herself, by claiming that nihilism is skepticism.
A very arbitrary skepticism at that.
Sometimes she demands absolute certainty…any flaw, and void, is enough for her toi dismiss a theory.
Then, at other times, she is more forgiving…no flaw will suffice to abandon a theory.

A hypocrite and a lair.
Bad faith…how can you have any discussion with someone like this?
You can’t…and so everywhere she goes she causes the same reactions…which she then attributed to her perspective’s formidability and its threat, yet she has no clear perspective…all she has are allusions, subversion of all challenging perspectives.
Ask her to define the terms she repeats by connecting them to perceptible actions…and see her reaction.

My definition of nihilism has her as a reference…and those like her.
She is my evidence. She validates my definition of the term ‘nihilism’.
People that use words to cope, to construct a semiotic wall of defence, separating their ego from the world beyond.
All she has are words, referring to text…

[Lorikeet (Satyr)]

Keeping in mind that Heisman was a Jew…shot himself because he wanted to live-up to his clans worship of the nothing.

@Heisman

• Noam Chomsky’s attack on such media manipulators in Manufacturing Consent is comparable to Marx’s attacks on Jewish capitalism. Both Chomsky and Bernays share Jewish descent and an inordinate sensitivity to the interrelationship between propaganda and power. Both demonstrate an inordinate grasp of the political-economic power of the meme — even as they value opposite causes. Jews prominent in the media industry tend to have a leftist bias that implies that race is not important.
Goebbels and other Nazis that took direct control over Germany’s media propagated the message that race is more important than environmental conditioning. Yet if environmental conditioning were not important, then it would make no difference who controls the media or what its message is, since media memes would be powerless to overcome the power of the genes. After all, Jewish media influence provided empirical verification that control over the cultural environment can overpower the influence of genes. The Jewish leftist bias that race does not matter is just as self-contradictory as the Nazi obsession with controlling memes to indoctrinate Germans in belief in the supremacy of the genes. The very obsession with Jewish media influence demonstrates that Nazis and other extreme racialists have somehow been the most radical believers in the power of media and memes to overpower the influence of genes.

@Heisman

• Judaism began with a belief in the power of nurture to overcome nature, a belief in mind over matter. It is the belief that the sociobiological logic represented by ancient Egypt is not the only way, and that by learning a people can survive otherwise. Gods, such as the sun god, rooted in observable nature, represent extensions of probable beliefs. God, superior to the laws of nature, represents the utmost possibilities of belief. Unity with God could transcend pagan unity with nature.
When one follows God’s laws over man’s (biologically ground) laws, one is literally overriding one’s own biological nature, and hence performing a perfectly “secular” miracle of non-biology transcending biological nature.

@Heisman

• When Jews acquired power after historic powerlessness, the original conditions of Judaism unraveled. To empower the powerless or marginalized is self-empowering while Jews themselves are powerless. But when the Jewish cause becomes victorious, this strategy backfires and Jewish principles deconstruct themselves, inverting the inverters.
For the Zionist state to consistently empower the disempowered Palestinians at their own expense would be political suicide. Being Goliath is a problem when the moral of the story is that David ultimately wins. The internationalism of Christianity laid the common ground for a world that has a place for the nationalism of the Jews. Just as Roman conquerors penetrated the territorial-sociobiological boundaries of the ancient Jewish state, the Jewish-based God memes of Christianity penetrated the ancient Roman world. Christianity began a process of blunting and mollifying the deepest ethical-cultural gulfs between Jew and gentile. The penetration of Jewish genes into the modern gentile West is only a continuation of the anti-kin selective logic that began with Christianity. In other words, Jewish assimilation as individuals in the modernistic West is only a continuation of gentile assimilation to the sociobiological impact of Christianity. Both as individuals and as a Zionist state, Western assimilation of Jewish bodies was founded upon Western assimilation of a Jewish “spirit.”

@Heisman

• In ancient times, writing was the most advanced form of non-biological symbol-information preservation. The written word represented the cutting edge of ancient media technology. In consequence, the Jews, “the people of the book,” were really the people of the media. This media preserved the Jews and the Jews preserved this media. The word propaganda is a variation of the word propagation, i.e. meme propagation. Biblical memes helped propagate Jewish genes and Jewish genes helped propagate Biblical memes. This self-reinforcing, symbiotic relationship is a prime evolutionary origin of the relatively recent radiation of Jews into prominent positions in various fields of modern media.

@Heisman

• “Although I firmly believe,” wrote Albert Einstein, “that the chasm between Jewish theology and Spinozism can never be bridged, I am not less convinced that Spinoza’s contemplation of the world (‘Weltanschauung’) was thoroughly imbued with the principles and sentiments that characterize so many Jewish intellectuals. I feel I would never have come so near to Spinoza had I not myself been of Jewish extraction and grown up in a Jewish milieu.” I find this rather ironic. Spinoza, author of one of the most radical attempts to overcome Jewish particularity in the name of human universalism, could be considered one of the inventors of “modernity.” Yet, somehow, modernity itself is in some way Jewish. Einstein seems to have felt, contra Spinoza himself, that Jewish-influenced “principles and sentiments” somehow drew him closer to Spinoza’s modern universalism.

@Heisman

• Marx is probably the most influential modern example of the famous (and infamous) Jewish proclivity for the left wing socialistic causes. His vision of a communist culmination of human history that resolves the contradictions of the capitalistic world by turning it upside down was nothing less than a nineteenth century updating of the primal archetype of the first revolution: the Mosaic inversion of the Egyptian pyramid-hierarchy. Marxism could thus be interpreted as a “secularization” of a Biblically based, messianic Weltanschauung. The issue behind secularization concerns the origin of “modern” values. If reason, in itself, cannot decide fundamental values then so-called “secular” values cannot be fundamentally rational. The traditional idea of secularization, most strongly associated with Nietzsche, claimed that the modern idea of progress and its egalitarian values were residues of belief in God; Biblical values without Biblical faith. Modern egalitarianism and modern progress, in his view, were secularizations of Biblical values. And at the root of Biblical values was the slave morality that glorified Jewish national political failure.

[Lorikeet (Satyr)]

@Heisman

• Christian love is a radical passive-aggression of the spirit. Whereas genetic insemination requires penetration of biological borders, memetic insemination requires penetration of mental or spiritual borders. Because Jesus’ mind-spirit was the penetration of the mental-spiritual borders that separated Jew and Roman, his spiritual ideas could penetrate and inseminate hitherto “natural” borders. Whereas sexual love leads toward genetic insemination, Christian love leads to memetic insemination. Love is an evolutionary expression of a desire for reproduction and, in this case, the reproduction of the selfish memes of Christian altruism. Jesus overcame the natural determination of being a natural rapist by becoming a supernatural rapist. Christian love is Jesus’ gargantuan spiritual penis raping the boundaries of class and race, Jew and gentile, insider and outsider, and master and slave. Jesus’ penis of the spirit penetrated deep inside until the spiritually violated Roman-ruled world had been loved to death.

@Heisman

• Now, one might say, this “altruism” isn’t really altruistic. That’s right. Altruism as it evolved in biological nature really is not altruistic in the strict sense of true selflessness, and this is what Jesus exposed. On some level, Jesus of Nazareth recognized what Hamilton’s theory of kin selection clarified empirically. Jesus and Darwin could ultimately agree on this point: the “altruism” of the traditional family is fundamentally selfish. For the Roman soldier and for Jesus, the highest call of virtue was a call to war. Jesus combined the warrior ethos of a Roman soldier with the ethical radicalism of Hebrew prophets in a war against the false altruism of kin selective selfishness common to both Jews and Romans. And this meant, in practice, a war against the family: “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law — a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household.” These famous words, “I did not come to bring peace, but a sword” (i.e. Matt. 10:34-39), have been used to legitimate countless violent, bloodthirsty acts of military aggression for people who have called themselves Christians. Jesus does advocate that one sell robe and buy a sword (Luke 22:35-36, 38), but who, exactly, is the enemy here? Jesus was clearly taking up arms, so to speak, but the enemy he fought against was the bonds of the common human family. What we have here is what Crossan calls “an almost savage attack on family values” which “happens very, very often.”

@Heisman

• The English word “virtue” is derived from the Roman word virtus, meaning manliness or strength. Virtus derived from vir, meaning “man.” Virilis, an ancestor of the English word “virile,” is also derived from the Roman word for man. From this Roman conception of virtue, was Jesus less than a man or more than a man? Did the spectacle of Jesus dying on a Roman cross exemplify virtus; manliness; strength; masterliness; forcefulness?
Consistent with his valuation of turning the cheek, it would seem that Jesus exemplified utterly shamelessness and a total lack of the manly honor of the Romans. Yet the fame of his humiliation on the cross did, in a sense, exemplify a perverse variety of virtus, for Jesus’ feminine, compassionate ethics have mastered and conquered the old pagan virtues of the gentiles. Jesus’ spiritual penis has penetrated, disseminated, and impregnated the West with his “virtuous” seed. And it is from that seed that “modernity” has sprouted. Jesus combined the highest Roman virtue of dying honorably in battle with highest Jewish virtue of martyrdom and strength in persecution. This combination formed a psychic bridge between pagan and Jew, i.e. between ideal cruelty in war and ideal compassion in peace. This is one way in which Christianity became the evolutionary missing link between the more masculine ethos of the ancient pagan West and the more feminine ethos of the modern West. The original Enlightenment notion of revolution reflects a quasi-creationist view of change that makes the sudden rupture between the moral assumptions of the ancient and modern world almost inexplicable. However, if we take a more gradualistic view of social change wherein modern egalitarianism evolved from what preceded it, then the origins of modern political assumptions become more explicable. The final moral-political rupture from the ancients became possible, in part, because Christianity acted as an incubator of modern values.

@Heisman

• Nietzsche believed that he had unmasked Christianity and wrought the death of God. Auschwitz was where God was formally exterminated. Auschwitz was the culmination of the Nazi revolution’s overthrow of the tyranny of God, Christ, and its secular moral mutations. It was the justice of revenge and reparations for Christianity. Just as Germans had entered history, they were subdued by Christian civilization. The Nazis realized that this Jew, Jesus, was teaching them how to be weak. Judeo-Christianity had vilified the proud and war-like nature as evil. This is what the Nazis waged war against.

@Heisman

• What, then, did the Nazis attempt to do? The Nazis attempted to invert the inverters; to radically uproot the radical uprooters; to deracinate the race that deracinates the races; to deny the value of the race that denies the value of race; to arrogate an infinite valuation of death upon their infinite valuation of life; to meet their unqualified will to live with an unqualified will to kill. It was because Jews spawned an ethic of kindness and humanity that Jews were singled out for the ultimate cruelty and inhumanity. Nazis made the highest law the killing of the highest moral law “Thou shall not kill”. The Nazis willed the rebirth of biological evolution through the revaluation of the value of death.

@Heisman

• Where else could typical Jewish aspirations be fulfilled, after all, than within the parvenu idealism of America? The entire substance of the “If I were a rich man…”American dream, the whole rags to riches yarn, betrays the admission that it was the Jews — and not the Christians — who were right about the value of moneymaking all along. American valuation of “the rule of law” is comparable to the Pharisaic laws that Jesus revolted against. The capitalism of Americanism is a defense of Pharisaic mammon worship against Jesus.
The American Empire is neither a new pagan Rome nor a Christian Kingdom of God. The American Empire is more like the rise of the Pharisees. The hypocrisy of the Pharisees, the ancestors of mainstream diaspora Judaism, is the typical bourgeois hypocrisy that is the American norm. America, moreover, resisted the great continental European attacks on bourgeois man, especially by Rousseau, Marx, and Nietzsche.

@Heisman

• The “radical newness of the idea of monotheism,” explained German Egyptologist Jan Assmann, cannot be comprehended without a grasp of the polytheism it opposed. Auschwitz and “the atrocities of the twentieth century”, he concluded, “did not stem from but rather were directed against monotheism.” Nazism was the greatest modern revolt against monotheism. Hitler and his followers attempted to resurrect hereditary notions of aristocracy that had been discredited among the Western democracies.
Nazi hatred for Jews was inseparable from hatred of the Jewish roots of Christianity which had vanquished primeval pagan spiritualism under the name of a Jew named Jesus. Overcoming old conceptions of human rights that had been cultivated under Christian-cultural influence, neo-pagan valuation of the aesthetics of the body was one path within a confluence of revaluations that led to Nazi belief in a master race. The Nazi elite aimed to breed a new elite that would embody their ideal vision of blond haired, blue eyed, Germanic superiority in a way that the actual Nazi elite could not.
Just as Caesar aspired to be an emperor-god, Nazi neo-paganism aspired to breed a new race of gods. The values of polytheism, as represented by the Greeks, the Romans, and early pagan Germanic peoples, possessed a basic consonance with naturalistic cultivation of the body. The civic religion of the ancient Greek Spartans, for example, was consonant with rigorous cultivation of the physical prowess expressed in war and certain proto-eugenic practices, such as leaving malformed infants to their death.

@Heisman

• As I have discussed in The Seditious Genius of the Spiritual Penis of Jesus, Christian altruism is the opposite of kin selective altruism and the most potent Christian memes spread through subversion of kin selective behaviors. The Anglo-Saxons who became Puritans were vulnerable to Christian meme propagation because the Norman Conquest weakened the dynamics of their kin selective altruism. The kin selective insanity of the premise of “the individual” originated with the goodness of Christian altruism. The infinite soul of an individual Christian is the pivotal origin of the modern sense of rightness of individual rights. The genetic decline of the West, the worldwide decline in the frequency of genes of West European populations, is an ultimate consequence of Christianity’s subversion of kin selective altruism and a decisive sociobiological foundation of the modern idea of progress.

@Heisman

• One of the reasons that kin selection is inherently controversial in Western liberal democracies is because of the latent cultural influence of Christianity. A scientific understanding of Christianity in light of kin selection helps demonstrate how “Christian family values” work in diametrical opposition to kin selection. For some reason, the values distinctive to the Bible (as opposed to paganism) point in a direction opposite of the values that a sociobiologist would consider genetically adaptive. This helps to explain the “faith” underlying American egalitarianism.

[Lorikeet (Satyr)]

@Marx

• What are the mundane principles of Judaism? Practical necessity and the pursuit of one’s own advantage. What is its earthly god? Money. The Jew has emancipated himself in a typical Jewish fashion not only in that he has taken control of the power of money, but also in that through him, money has become a world power and the practical Jewish spirit have become the spirit of the Christian people. The Jews have emancipated themselves insofar as the Christians have become Jews. The god of the Jews has become secularized and has become the god of the earth. The exchange is the true god of the Jews.

@Nietzsche

• The Christian conception of God is one of the most corrupt conceptions of God arrived at on earth; perhaps it even represents the low water mark in the descending development of the God type. God degenerated to the contradiction of life, instead of being its transfiguration and eternal Yes! In God a declaration of hostility towards life, nature, will to life! God the formula for every calumny of “this world,” for every lie about “the next world”!

@Nietzsche

• …Let us face facts: the people have triumphed – or the slaves, the mob, the herd, whatever you wish to call them – and if the Jews brought it about, then no nation ever had a more universal mission on earth. The lords are a thing of the past, and the ethics of the common man is completely triumphant. I don’t deny that this triumph might be looked upon as a kind of blood poisoning, since it has resulted in a mingling of the races, but there can be no doubt that the intoxication has succeeded. The ‘redemption’ of the human race (from the lords, that is) is well under way; everything is rapidly becoming Judaized, or Christianized, or mob-ized – the word makes no difference…
[size=80][The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals][/size]

@Nietzsche

• Christianity as a denaturalization of herd-animal morality: accompanied by absolute misunderstanding and self-deception. Democratization is a more natural form of it, one less mendacious.
Datum: the oppressed, the lowly, the great masses of slaves and semi-slaves desire power.
First step: they make themselves free-they ransom themselves, in imagination at first, they recognize one another, they prevail.
Second step: they enter into battle, they demand recognition, equal rights, “justice.”
Third step: they demand privileges (they draw the representatives of power over to their side).
Fourth step: they demand exclusive power, and they get it –
In Christianity, three elements must be distinguished: (a) the oppressed of all kinds, (b) the mediocre of all kinds, (c) the discontented and sick of all kinds.
With the first element Christianity fights against the political nobility and its ideal; with the second clement, against the exceptional and privileged (spiritually, physically –) of all kinds; with the third element, against the natural instinct of the healthy and happy.
When a victory is won, the second element steps into the fore-ground;
This mediocre nature at last grows so conscious of itself (acquires courage for itself –) that it arrogates even political power to itself – Democracy is Christianity made natural:
[size=80][WTP, 215][/size]

@Plato

• As regards Plato, I am of the opinion that he owes to the Jews the theism that periodically comes over him. This is why Numenius (according to Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, I, c.22, Eusebius, praeparatio evangelica, xiii,12, and Siodas under ‘Numenius’) called him Moses graecizans: Τι γαρ εστι Πλάτων, η Μωσης αττικαζων; and he reproaches him with having stolen (αποσυλησας) his doctrines of God and the creation from the Mosaic writings, Clement often repeats that Plato knew and made use of Moses, e.g., Stromata, I, 25; v, 14, 90 etc.; Paedagogus, ii, 10, and iii, 11; also in the Cohortation ad gentes, c.6, where after in the previous chapter monkishly scolding and ridiculing all the Greek philosophers for not having ben Jews, he exclusively praises Plato and breaks out into pure exultation that, as he (Plato) learned his geometry from the Egyptians, his astronomy from the Babylonians, magic from the Thracians, and a great deal from the Assyrians, so he learned theism from the Jews: Οίδα σου τους διδασκάλους καν αποκρύπτειν εθελης….δόξαν την του θεού παρ’ αυτών ωφελησαι των Εβραίων. A touching scene of recognition. But in what follows I see unusual confirmation of the matter. According to Plutarch (Marius), and better according to Lactantinus (i, 3, 19), Plato thanked nature for his having been born a human being and not an animal, a man and not a woman, a Greek and not a barbarian. Now in Isaac Euchel’s Gebete der Juden, from the Hebrew second edition, 1799, p. 7, there is a morning prayer in which the Jews thank and praise God that they were born Jews and not heathens, free men and not slaves, men and not women.

[Lorikeet (Satyr)]

@Sloterdijk

• Anyone looking for the secret of how Judaism was able to survive for over three millennia should begin here. It is nothing other than the high degree of memoactive fitness inherent in this religion because of its primary myth: it combines the joy at having escaped with the memory of that most terrible of nights. Numerous secondary forms of rehearsal sup-port these first influences, especially ones centred around scriptural study. The proud painfulness of circumcision may have had a similar effect. Whoever lives under the myth of the exodus shares a stable stigma that distresses, elevates, obliges, bonds and excludes. Its eminent duplicability enables its carriers to pass on their passion and wander through the ages as living transporters of spiritual content.

@Sloterdijk

• The second complicating precondition of the monotheistic establishment of biblical Israel stems from its experiences in exile during the sixth century BC. There is a wide-ranging consensus among scholars that Jewish theology entered its critical phase in the time of Babylonian captivity (586–538 BC), when it developed the characteristics that can still be recognized today. Following earlier zealotic preludes and rigorist episodes, these were the years of monotheistic decision. This escalation was triggered by the semantic clinch between the God of the Israelites and the imperial Gods of Babylon. The earlier Yahweh monolatry now brought forth a speculative superstructure that developed into a monotheism that was both theoretically and politically advanced. The point of these radicalizations is not difficult to identify. It lies in the emergence of a political concept of God with meta-political overtones that testifies to the resolve to grant the God of the enslaved people – weeping at the waters of Babylon – absolute superiority, albeit one concealed and for the meantime only capable of being asserted symbolically, over the gods of the despotic empire. This turning point constitutes one of the most significant moments in the intellectual history of the later West. It marks the first separation of spirit and power, previously a diffuse unity, into polar opposites. While the rulers in power, like all happy tyrants before them, paid unwavering tribute to worldly success and accumulated reports of victories like holy trophies, the spirit of the defeated withdrew to a sanctuary in which it dreamt of justice and dictated the conditions for its imminent satisfaction. In this context, the concept of truth took on a futuristic tinge and opened itself up for reversal fantasies of a partly therapeutic, partly retributionist nature. Post-Babylonian theology discovered the counterfactual and utopian mode of thinking. Truth and reality parted ways, presenting the option of propagating values at odds with reality in the name of truth, which was henceforth treated as the sharpest weapon of the weak; these values were doomed to failure on the stage of real events, yet they could not, and did not want to, stop anticipating their hour of triumph.
[size=80][God’s Zeal: The Battle of the Three Monotheisms][/size]

@Sloterdijk

• With the advent of Islam, the third exclusive monotheism appeared on the scene. Its establishment was defined by the fact that it viewed itself emphatically as the latest and most perfect manifestation of the Abrahamic one god complex.
Islam took its late arrival as its most precious spiritual chance, as it claimed the advantage of seeing and correcting the errors, both alleged and real, of the two preceding monotheisms. This is why Muslim clerics refer to the founder of their religion as the “seal of the prophet”. The idea of correction in the process of monotheistic revelations is constitutive for Islam, as it permits it to make a virtue out of necessity by converting the deficit of non-originality into the advantage of a later clarification. Just as the Christian message before it could only come about through a partial abrogation, a corrective revocation of Jewish teachings (literary critics would add: through a severe misreading), the Islamic revelation presupposes the partial abrogation of the two older versions of monotheism. (Here this misreading of its two predecessors is taken to a spectacular level; yet it is precisely the success of Islam that shows that the adepts of this new holy book had more important things to do than draw on the sources of existing cults in a philologically correct fashion.) Consequently the religion of the Qur’an, like that of the New Testament, was substantially characterized by a position of theological contrast; its first front stood in the tradition of the Jewish and Christian zealots who waged war against the gods and idols of their polytheistic surroundings, while the second opposed the Jews and Christians directly. The former were accused of being frivolous and hypocritical, as they did not even take their own prophets seriously, while the latter were presented with the charge of falsely declaring the prophet Jesus “the Son of God” in their deludedness, whereas all true knowledge of God, according to Islam, begins with the realization that the Highest is alone for all eternity and has no child. The pathos of the Islamic thesis of God’s solitary position is based primarily on the polemic against the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, which was regarded with suspicion as a form of tritheism.
[size=85][God’s Zeal: The Battle of the Three Monotheisms][/size]

[Lorikeet (Satyr)]

@Spengler

• Islam, therefore, is to be regarded as the Puritanism of the whole group of Early Magian religions, emerging as a religion only formally new, and in the domain of the Southern Church and Talmudic Judaism. It is this deeper significance, and not merely the force of its warlike onslaught, that gives the key to its fabulous successes.

@Spengler

• A culture is born in a moment when a great soul awakens out of the proto-spirituality of ever-childish humanity, and detaches itself, a form from the formless, a bounded and mortal thing from the boundless and enduring. It blooms on the soul of an exact definable landscape, to which plant-wise it remains bound. It dies when the soul has actualized the full sum of its possibilities in the shape of peoples, languages, dogmas, arts, states, sciences, and reverts into a proto-soul. But its living existence, that sequence of great epochs which define and display that stages of fulfillment, in an inner passionate struggle to maintain the Idea against powers of chaos without and the unconscious muttering deep down within. It is not only the artist who struggles against the resistance of the material and the stifling of the idea within him. Every Culture stands in a deeply symbolic, almost in a mystical, relation to the Extended, the space, in which and through which it strives to actualize itself. The aim once attained – the idea, the entire content of inner possibilities fulfilled and made externally actual – the Culture suddenly hardens, it mortifies, its blood congeals, its force breaks down, and it becomes Civilization, the thing which we feel and understand in the words Egypticism, Byszantinism, Mandarinism. As such it may, like a worn-out giant of the primeval forest, thrust decaying branches towards the sky for hundreds or thousands of years, as we see in china, in India, in the Islamic world. It was thus that the Classical Civilization rose gigantic, in the Imperial age, with a false semblance of youth and strength and fullness, and robbed the young Arabian Culture of the east of light and air.

@Vidal

• I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. I see no good in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam — good people, yes, but any religion based on a single… well, frenzied and virulent god, is not as useful to the human race as, say, Confucianism, which is not a religion but an ethical and educational system that has worked pretty well for twenty-five hundred years. So you see I am ecumenical in my dislike for the Book. But like it or not, the Book is there; and because of it people die; and the world is in danger.

[Lorikeet (Satyr)]

@Voegelin

• The constancies and equivalences adumbrated work havoc with such settled topical blocks as myth and philosophy, natural reason and revelation, philosophy and religion, or the Orient with its cyclical time and Christianity with its linear history. And what is modem about the modem mind, one may ask, if Hegel, Comte, or Marx, in order to create an image of history that will support their ideological imperialism, still use the same techniques for distorting the reality of history as their Sumerian predecessors

@Voegelin

• The aim of parousiastic Gnosticism is to destroy the order of being, which is experienced as defective and unjust, and through man’s creative power to replace it with a perfect and just order. Now, however the order of being may be understood—as a world dominated by cosmic-divine powers in the civilizations of the Near and Far East, or as the creation of a world-transcendent God in Judaeo-Christian symbolism, or as an essential order of being in philosophical contemplation—it remains something that is given, that is not under man’s control. In order, therefore, that the attempt to create a new world may seem to make sense, the givenness of the order of being must be obliterated; the order of being must be interpreted, rather, as essentially under man’s control. And taking control of being further requires that the transcendent origin of being be obliterated: it requires the decapitation of being—the murder of God.
The murder of God is committed speculatively by explaining divine being as the work of man.

@Voegelin

• The death of the spirit is the price of progress. Nietzsche revealed this mystery of the Western apocalypse when he announced that God was dead and that He had been murdered. This Gnostic murder is constantly committed by the men who sacrificed God to civilization. The more fervently all human energies are thrown into the great enterprise of salvation through world–immanent action, the farther the human beings who engage in this enterprise move away from the life of the spirit. And since the life the spirit is the source of order in man and society, the very success of a Gnostic civilization is the cause of its decline.
A civilization can, indeed, advance and decline at the same time—but not forever. There is a limit toward which this ambiguous process moves; the limit is reached when an activist sect which represents the Gnostic truth organizes the civilization into an empire under its rule. Totalitarianism, defined as the existential rule of Gnostic activists, is the end form of progressive civilization.

[Lorikeet (Satyr)]

@Unknown

• Deaths in the Bible. God – 2,270,365 not including the victims of Noah’s flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, or the many plagues, famines, fiery serpents, etc. because no specific numbers were given. Satan – 10.

People of the book, by the book, for the book.

[Lorikeet (Satyr)]

@Boman

• Nature and history are correlative terms, like being and motion, space and time. Existence can be experienced as both. Nature is then existence construed as something that exists, while history is existence construed as development and continuous happening. Nature is the content of space, and history is the content of time.

@Boman

• The Greeks have given the world the science of history; the Israelites gave the world historical religion. In contrast to all their neighbours, both peoples knew what history is; this is no consequence of their mental giftedness, for there is another reason.

@Boman

• The classical culture, elaborated by Plato, Aristotle and the stoics, is a western and intellectual version of a universal type of ahistorical spirituality.

@Boman

• For us, actions are oriented objectively, impersonally, and spatially; the Hebrews think subjectively, personally, and temporally.

@Boman

• We Europeans with our customary spatial mode of thinking frequently think of temporal rhythms by means of the obvious image of a circle or cycle; the reason for this is the circular movement of the sun which from time immemorial has been used for temporal orientation, since the image of the circular movement of the sun was transferred to the corresponding time. The Hebrews, however, orient themselves temporally not towards the circular movement of the sun, but toward the regular change of the moon’s phases, toward the rhythmic alternation of light and darkness, warmth and cold, as already indicated.

@Boman

• As the Greeks did and as we do, the Israelites determined these times with the aid of the sun, moon, and the stars [Gen. 1.14], but in a totally different way. The distinction is expressed even in the different designations for sun, moon, and stars; the Greeks called them heavenly bodies, and Plato knows that they are spherical. The Greeks therefor, first consider the form of the heavenly bodies; they observe where they are in the heavens and in that way they (and the other Indo-Europeans) determine time. The most important time determination is the sun; Christmas (25th December) and St. John’s day (Midsummer Day, 24th June), which are defined by means of the sun’s provision in the sky, are ancient Indo-Germanic festivals. These were unknown in Israel; there the holy seasons were denied with the aid of the quite variable and movable moon. The Hebrews call the heavenly bodies, lamps, me’oroth [Gen. 1.14 ff.] or lights [Ps. 136.7] both names refer to functions. Lamps and lights help us to see; they illuminate and warm.

@Boman

• The deepest level of meaning in the term ‘word’ is thus nothing which has to do with the function of speaking – neither dynamic spokenness, as was the case in the entire Orient, nor the articulateness of utterance – but the meaning, the ordered and reasonable content. The term was generally used ‘only with regard to the principle functions of the reasonable man’.

@Boman

• ’Word’ and ‘deed’ are thus not two different meanings of dabhar, but the ‘deed’ is the consequence of the basic meaning inhering in dabhar.

@Boman

• The oldest portion of the Wisdom literature [Prov. 22.17-24.22] is an almost literal rendering of the Wisdom collection of King, Amen-em-ope, but every reference to the Egyptian gods and every motif which may not be reconciled with Jahvistic religion is either altered or expunged. Thus, for example, the divine retribution for human deeds in the after-life is changed into a retribution in this life. It is thereby established that the Israelite theologians and Wisdom teachers were able, even in the most ancient times, to pick up foreign material, consciously to rework it, and to insert it, materially adapted, into their own religion.

@Boman

• It is thus proven beyond doubt that the Assyrians and Babylonians conceived of the divine word under the image of a physical-cosmic power.
In Egypt, the power of creating and of sustaining everything was traced back of the divine world.

@Boman

• Even for Philo, the greatest mind of the Jewish Diaspora, Plato was the great teacher, and his attempt, resting on inner conviction, to unite Platonism and Judaism shows that even Jews saw and felt the spiritual kinship of Platonic and biblical ideas.

@Boman

• A comparison with Plato’s philosophy is worthwhile, because the religious spirit inhering in it is most closely associated with the biblical spirit, and the ideas that come to expression through it are best able to be compared with the biblical ideas.

@Boman

• Only when dynamic thinking is considered the ideal does Greek thinking appear static; once it is recognized that Greek thinking is fully the peer of Israelite thinking, an attempt must be made to give positive expressions to the antithesis from the Greek side as well. From that viewpoint Greek mental activity appears harmonious, prudent, moderate, and peaceful; to the person to whom the Greek kind of thinking occurs plainly as ideal, Hebrew thinking and its manner of expression appear exaggerated, immoderate, discordant, and in bad taste.

@Boman

• …thinking of the Greeks is spatial and that of the Hebrews is temporal.

@Boman

• It is quite correct and meritorious that Nygren regards the Platonic understanding of love, Eros, as the only possible basis for a comparison with the biblical-Hebraic idea of love, Agape. Platonism represents the acme of Greek intellectual life, as Nygren also thinks, and because it is religious in nature, it is quite comparable with Israelite thinking which is religious through and through.

@Boman

• …for the Hebrew the most important of his senses for the experience of truth was his hearing (as well as various kinds of feeling), but for the Greek it had to be his sight; or perhaps inversely, because Greeks were organized in a predominately visual way and the Hebrew in a predominately auditory way, each people’s conception of truth was formed in increasingly different ways.

@Boman

• From this it follows that Hebrew thinking became psychological, since psychology is concerned with us ourselves and our inner states and images. Moreover, it was of equal necessity that Greek thinking should bear the stamp of logic, since logical validity is constructed externally (objectively), independently of our psychical conditions, and for the most part it also permits of demonstration by way of diagrams, at any rate so far as the Greeks evolved it.

@Boman

• The Greeks have given the world the science of history; the Israelites gave the world historical religion. In contrast to all their neighbours, both peoples knew what history is; this is no consequence of their mental giftedness, for there is another reason.

@Boman

• In Greek antiquity the discovery of new material was the business of the poet only to a limited degree; even Shakespeare used without hesitation already existent material in his dramas. Nor did the originality of the Israelite thinker lie in stylistic reworking of material. Even in this field the Hebrews were apparently devoid of ambition; so far as the form was materially useful they allowed the words and expressions of the authors to remain undisturbed. If those words and expressions came into conflict with Israelite religion, morality, or a kind of thinking, the material was partly reworked, partly expunged, partly expanded and partly reshaped. In the clarity with which this was seen and in the rigour with which it was carried out lies one of the most essential accomplishments of Israelite thinkers and writers.

@Boman

• Perhaps we can between understand the formal difference in the thinking of the two peoples if we try to answer the question: what do they mean by truth? For the Greeks truth, negatively expressed, is that which is unveiled (αληθής=a-privation+λήθης=’hidden’; cf. λανθάνω), therefore, that which is revealed, clear, evident, or that which is to be seen clearly. The positive expression for ‘true’ is connected in Indo-European languages with the notion of being:
The primitive German form *santha from IE *sont, present participle of the root *es-‘be’ (Greek εων, ων – ‘being’ Form *esont, cf. Sanskrit sant- ‘being (adj.), good, true’), AS sith; in the Nordic languages the root is well attested: sann – ‘true’; the German word for ‘true’ {wahr} is one which made its way from the south and replaced in Anglo-Saxon the older soth.

@Boman

• The corresponding Hebrew concept of truth is expressed by means of derivatives of the verb ‘aman’ – ‘to be steady, faithful’; ‘amen – ‘verily, surely’; ‘omen – ‘faithfulness’; ‘umnam’ – ‘really’; ‘emeth – ‘constancy, trustworthiness, certainty, fidelity to reported facts, truth’; cf. ‘omenah – ‘pillar, door, post’. In short, the Hebrews really do not ask what is true in the objective sense but what is subjectively certain, what is faithful in the existential sense; therefore, it is not what is in agreement with impersonal objective being that interests them, but what is in agreement with the facts that are meaningful for them. This shows that Hebrew thought is directed toward events, living, and history in which the question of truth is of another sort than in natural science. In such matters the true is the completely certain, sure, steady, faithful.

@Boman

• Greek thinking is clear logical knowing; Israelite thinking is deep psychological understanding.

[Lorikeet (Satyr)]

@de Benoist

• Instead of pushing man to exceed himself, the monotheism of the Bible consumes his vitality. He must ‘impoverish and annihilate himself to give consistency to God. The deity becomes a kind of haemorrhaging of human nature. And God manipulates the transfusion of all man’s creative energies.

@de Benoist

• Judeo-Christian monotheism developed a negative anthropology because it is a negative religion. An anti-religion.

@de Benoist

• Expelled from the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve become “the first pagans of history.” Translation: they have become accomplished individuals, human beings in the full sense of the word. This humanization goes hand in hand with a true individuation. It is only after he has sinned that Adam is personally challenged by God [Genesis 3:9]. The generic history of humanity begins with the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Civilization is also now able to start. Work appears. Human intelligence gives birth to syntactic language. These facts are regarded negatively in the Bible. According to the theology schools, original sin may be interpreted in rather dramatic fashion; the fact remains that if Adam and Eve had obeyed God, history would never have begun and humanity never would have been.

@de Benoist

• In regard, however, the debate between polytheism and monotheism there is not the “old opposition between the intellectual and the tangible,” contrary to what Michel Le Bris writes. It is not a question of choosing the tangible overt the intellectual, no more than it is of choosing nature over history or culture. Nor is it a question of invoking any kind of “feminine” security or womb of the earth-mother against the father of the “celestial” worlds beyond.
The paganism I am speaking of is situated in an entirely different problematic. It is not the choice opposite to Judeo-Christian choice. It rejects this choice. In such a way that it brings to light the opposition between a system that posits in principle the inseparability – which does not mean the identity– the Judeo-Christian system – which posits their severability in principle (considered by Le Bris as a “major catastrophe of thought”) to build itself upon a duality.

@de Benoist

• When it comes to specifying the values particular to paganism, people generally listed features such as these: an eminently aristocratic conception of the human individual; an ethics founded on honour (“shame” rather than “sin”); an heroic attitude towards life’s challenges; the exaltation and sacrilization of the world, beauty, the body, strength, health; the rejection of “worlds beyond”; the inseparability of morality and aesthetics; and so on. From this perspective, the highest value is undoubtedly not a form of “justice” whose purpose is essentially interpreted as flattening the social order in the name of equality, but everything that can allow a man to surpass himself.
For paganism, it is pure absurdity to consider the results of the workings of life’s basic framework as unjust. In the pagan ethic of honour, the classic antithesis noble vs. base, courageous vs. cowardly, honourable vs. dishonourable, beautiful vs. deformed, sick vs. healthy, and so forth replace the antithesis operative in a morality based on the concept of sin: good vs. evil, humble vs. vainglorious, submissive vs. proud, weak vs. arrogant, modest vs. boastful, and so on.
However, while all this appears to be accurate, the fundamental feature, in my opinion, is something else entirely. It lies in the denial of dualism.

@de Benoist

• Christian theologians in the past never skimped on details when describing the horrors of hell. When it came to the nature of the joys reserved for the chosen after the Last Judgment, they were always more discreet. Karl Marx, as well, was always more prolix when it came to stigmatizing the evils of capitalism than in describing the specific aspects of the “classless society.”
To get any idea of just what “Messianic Times” will consist of, one is reduced to conjectures. Such a “moment” can only be described in opposition to the reality of the world we know. It is clear that from the biblical perspective the advent of the end of time is connected to the coming of a more fundamentally equalitarian society, one that is more homogeneous and more peaceful. As history rests on conflict, there will no longer be any conflicts – therefore no more diversity that is susceptible to “degenerating” into confrontations. Mastery will no longer have any reason to exist: all forms of “alienation” will disappear.
The world will be transfigured into the world’s opposite. The great cities devastated by Yahweh will remain deserted “for generation upon generation” [Isaiah 13:19-20]; they will be like Babylon: “The Lord’s wrath will make it uninhabitable; it will become a site of total solitude” [Jeremiah 50:13].
As every people will lack any distinguishing features, they will no longer display any will to power. Peace – the peace of the cemetery – will reign forevermore, “no longer will any learn the art of war” [Michah 4:3].
Any possibility of being “similar to God” will have been annihilated. The powerful will have been “humbled” – all would have renounced any search for power. The first will have become the last. The master will adopt the manner and behaviour of the slave. “The wolf will live with the lamb and the panther will sleep with the goat. The calf, the lion cub, the fatling will walk together” [Isaiah 11:6]. The wild beasts will feed on salad and man himself will become an herbivore. Thanks to the Messiah, the “taint of the serpent” will be erased.
There will no longer be day or night, sorrow or joy, “nor merit or sin.” There will no longer be anything.

@de Benoist

• Christian morality is burdened by resentment. The believer accepts his own debasement in exchange for the hope that others may also be debased. He adheres to a morality that supresses diversity in the name of “equality,” that belittles in the name of “justice,” that curdles in the name of “love.” Such morality is a system to dissipate energy, chip away at health, and destroy potency. It culminates, when all is said and done, with fusion and confusion, with entropy and death. It reveals itself, once identified, to be pure negation – like the death instinct. (Here Eros is merely the mask of Thanatos.)

@de Benoist

• The biblical approach goes from the universal to the particular; it deduces what we can know of the particular from what we should know of the absolute. In Greek thought, on the contrary, although the universal also plays an important role, the approach is the opposite. The conceptualization of the universal is based on the abstraction and successive generalization of a plurality of concrete particulars. In the Bible what is first provided are totalities, categories, and classes, for which individual things or people are only manifestations…
Biblical thought is an all-encompassing, totalizing thought that proceeds from the general to the particular based on deduction from the revealed absolute and not by induction based on lived experience. In this system, the particular is not at all the basis from which the general concept is inferred; it is the projection of the idea of generality.
Individuals and things are then themselves only projections, “realizations” of universal essence and ideas. Whereas in the discourse of paganism the particular can attain the universal by virtue of its very particularity – Goethe is universal by first being German; Cervantes is universal by being primarily Spanish – in the discourse of the Bible, it is the universal that provides statutory basis for every particular. In the first case, the general defines itself through the particular; in the second, it is the particular that is defined by the general.

@de Benoist

• The balance of force by law under the strict control of political sovereignty is the characteristic of every organic society, and it is only the disappearance of one or the other that will lead either to despotism or anarchy.
In Antiquity, the refusal of tyranny, resistance to a power gone mad, to an order that has become no more than established disorder, is symbolized by Antigone rising up against Creon – by Antigone, who, with the choir was seen by all Greece as being in the right (contrary to what Levy, against all the evidence, declares). The affirmation of the primacy of politics is therefore a far cry from the legitimization of despotism; in fact it is the exact opposite. Instead, it is clearly its negation that appears to denote a disturbing mental disposition, a subjectivity that is so pathological that it is spontaneously compelled to transform every object into an “idol,” a subjectivity so materialist that it can only escape its own tendencies by submitting to the absolute decrees of a Completely Other, a subjectivity, which through its protest against hierarchies, is in fact aiming at their reversal.
Dare we say it: the interpretation of all power as an evil, every recourse to force as “unjust,” does not only arise out of propaganda that may or may not be effective, it also reveals a profound inability to grasp these notions in any other way. It reveals, in a word, what our preachers of “justice” and universal peace would do with the power if the opportunity arose for them to claim it.

@de Benoist

• The sickly types aspire to form a herd. Quantity compensates them – at least they think it does – for what they lack in quality. If several suffer together they believe their suffering is reduced. Those who boast Judeo-Christian values sometimes attribute to the “powerful” the feelings they would have or be tempted to have if they were there in their place. They do not see the true power is an end in itself and does not aim, on condition it is tranquil, at any utility – that the “will to will denies any end in itself and only tolerates an objective as a means in order to best itself deliberately in the game and organize a space for this game.” In paganism happiness is never the antagonist of power, But nor is it an antagonist of equity. By condemning the exaltation of weakness, paganism is not in any way aiming at justifying the crushing of the weak by the strong, nor forming the “ideological alibi” of any sort of established disorder. To the contrary, it claims to contribute to the formation of the spiritual framework that allows every individual, whatever his rank, assuming only that he has the will, to cultivate what inside strengthens and does not undo him.
Paganism does not reproach Christianity for defending the weak who are unjustly oppressed. It reproaches it for exalting them in their weakness and viewing it as the sign of their election and their title to glory; it reproaches Christianity for not helping them to become strong.
So it is not a question of opposing the strong versus the weak – today, in any event, it is paganism that is weak and Judeo-Christian monotheism that is strong – but purely and simply of opposing a system of remaining weak with a system of becoming strong. It is also a question of making a world that is not a vale of tears, not a theater of shadows, nor a stage where a man with erratic happiness acts out his salvation, but that natural field of self-expansion for a man capable of asserting his autonomy and establishing himself as his own project.

@de Benoist

• We can hence better understand that contemporary decadence is not the effect of its distance from the Christian religion, but its profanation in the strict sense of the word, i.e., its generalized diffusion in profane forms – its generalized infection. And it is in this sense that one can say, without cultivating paradox, that the world has never been as Judeo-Christian as it is today.
The moral God is dead, but the values he has bequeathed are more present than ever, even though their impotence is a generally noted fact, and even though they constitute merely a décor of the impasse in which our contemporaries crash into time and time again like a fly on a windowpane.
God is dead, but the modern world continues to claim him as its authority, precisely because it cannot and does not want to rid itself of his carcass. All Western “humanism,” according to Levinas’ phrase, is passing through a “secularization of Judeo-Christianity” – not is it by chance that we are witnessing the resurgence today of a fundamental criticism of Heidegger accompanied with the adulation of a Judeo-Christian monotheism in which nobody believes anymore but which everyone claims.

[iambiguous]

What is Nihilism?
Curated by TheCollector

Nihilists Believed Nothing Matters

If there was no God, no heaven and hell, and no real authority, Nihilism argued that nothing had any meaning, and there was no higher purpose or calling in life.

A higher purpose. A higher calling. What on Earth does that mean? Well, for many it means God and religion. Ultimately everything that we do is judged by God. So that way we can think ourselves into believing that we wouldn’t do what we do except that in choosing not to do it we risk the wrath of God. The Good Book becomes the higher meaning, the higher calling.

Religion in particular precisely because it does encompass both sides of the grave. Sure, there are secular One True Paths left and right. And down here while on them you can anchor yourself to that meaning and calling. But, come on, what’s the handful of decades encompassing the cradle to the grave next to all of eternity?

So don’t expect the Gods to go away anytime soon.

It’s a pretty depressing attitude, defined by pessimism and skepticism. And at times this attitude has led to wanton acts of violence and extremism.

It’s certainly the key component sustaining any number of sociopaths among us.

Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard was deeply religious, and he argued that we could still believe in the “paradoxical infinite”, or blind faith, even if Nihilism threatened to destroy it. Meanwhile, Nietzsche believed we should accept the fear and uncertainty of the unknown, in order to pass through it and find a new higher calling.

Tell me this isn’t rooted existentially in dasein. Different lives, different experiences, different relationships, different information and knowledge all derived from particular worlds. Just as it all comes together for you and I in regard to nihilism. Some [most] of us cling to one or another God or No God objectivist font, some [far fewer] begin to fracture and fragment.

And then, one way or the other, one by one, nihilist or not, we all tumble over into the abyss that is oblivion.

Unless of course that’s wrong.

[Lorikeet (Satyr)]

More walls of words, responded to with more words…
Still no reference to anything outside her head.

All the words are ‘esoteric’…words in dictionaries referring to words in texts…
Of course she sees no meaning…she made it so.

[Lorikeet (Satyr)]

All is corrupted by nihilism…even science.
It has now presupposes what it can never find, for if it did the world would be annihilated by by its existence.

[Lorikeet (Satyr)]

Listen to the description of postmodernism…
Who does it remind you of?

She parrots it…
From Abrahamism, to Marxism, and now she is encamped in Postmodernism.
An ideologue…a mindless minion…

The core ideas are what connects them all.
Subversion; Messianism; Linguistic; Ideological; Subjectivity; Rejection of Objectivity unless it can prove itself to be absolute; words used to disconnect a judgement form the relationships in the world; justified as skepticism; denial of identity; denial of morality; rejection of reason and rationality…

She didn’t progress she upgraded her delusions.

From divine sparks trapped in pots, spirits encased in bodies…to a raceless, sexless proletariat being exploited by an internationalist cabal that has no ethnicity, no nationality, no racial nor gender identity, of capitalists, to sexless identities forced - edumacated, cultured - to be gendered, trapped in the “wrong body.”

Satyr’s Words

[Lorikeet (Satyr)]

Karen is a postmodern parrot.
She has no clue…she’s following the dogma…
Subvert, undermine…

[Lorikeet (Satyr)]

@Lorikeet

Listen to the description of postmodernism…
Who does it remind you of?

She parrots it…
From Abrahamism, to Marxism, and now she is encamped in Postmodernism.
An ideologue…a mindless minion…

The core ideas are what connects them all.
Subversion; Messianism; Linguistic; Ideological; Subjectivity; Rejection of Objectivity unless it can prove itself to be absolute; words used to disconnect a judgement form the relationships in the world; justified as skepticism; denial of identity; denial of morality; rejection of reason and rationality…

She didn’t progress she upgraded her delusions.

From divine sparks trapped in pots, spirits encased in bodies…to a raceless, sexless proletariat being exploited by an internationalist cabal that has no ethnicity, no nationality, no racial nor gender identity, of capitalists, to sexless identities forced - edumacated, cultured - to be gendered, trapped in the “wrong body.”

Satyr’s Words

[Lorikeet (Satyr)]

If you listen to this…
postmodernism…
It’s, as if, the speaker were describing Karen…even though he was born and raised differently…he knows of a behavioural pattern that is more general…describing multitudes of mostly white old females…
‘Karen’ the term, itself, is a reference to a particular kind of American, mature woman…but now feminized men as well are Karens…and Blacks…
It’s an American phenomenon - sheltering, a sense of entitlement…nagging, cynical…demanding…unable to comprehend or respond to reason…emotional…annoying…loud…in your face…