Romantic Christianity versus Christianity Proper

To my recent post about Finding the True Way to Life, Bruce Charlton commented:

@Kristor – I find your post and comments both surprising and confusing! Your post concedes pretty much all the ground to Romantic Christianity; so that you seem to be advocating the same attitude to churches.

Your comment of July 25, 2022 at 4:49 AM suggests that any particular actual or manifest church (including the RCC) is ultimately ‘merely’ (secondarily) helpful or harmful – but never should be regarded as primary or decisive – precisely the Romantic Christian attitude.

And that the individual person’s intuitive knowledge of the mystical/spiritual/immaterial ‘church’ is all that *really* matters at the bottom line (albeit, I cannot distinguish this concept of ‘church’ from knowledge of deity – of God the Father/Jesus Christ/the Holy Ghost).

Most remarkably, you apparently regard the actual, worldly functioning of the Roman Catholic Church to be a matter of ultimate indifference to you! I.e., whether or not the RCC locks its churches; if it ceases to offer the mass, marriage, funerals; and if most of its bishops and priests focus their teachings on defending and endorsing … whatever policies the global totalitarian Establishment are currently pushing – you say:

I am not too troubled by all of this outward and merely formal ecclesial subjection to the tyrannical civil authority.

I suppose the crux is that you regard this as ‘merely’ formal submission. Yet when formal *and informal* RCC discourse overwhelmingly endorses – and indeed instructs – not just submission, but enthusiastic and active participation, over many years and increasingly … Well, I believe you are in error.

Altogether, I don’t [see] you are putting forward a coherent argument here – which may simply mean that you are in a transitional phase.

Indeed I hope so; because I find your casual, dismissive attitude to the RCC enthusiastic-self-shut-down of 2020 (etc.) to be abhorrent!

Like Archbishop Viganò; I regard 2020 as probably the worst disaster in the history of Christianity, an existential catastrophe, the significance of which can hardly be exaggerated.

These are all important points, and it is important that I respond to them cogently, and forthrightly. The first thing that I would say in response is that this latest travesty of the craven responses of the various church hierarchs to the mandates of the civil authorities in respect to the supposed crisis of covid is not our first rodeo of that sort. Things were much, much worse with the Church during the Black Death, a real pandemic:

On the Reason & Purpose & Intent of the Orthosphere

It is obvious that we can’t go back. We must go forward. The project of the Orthosphere is to limn a cult, a culture, and a society that can work properly for humans after modernism – including the modernist “Church” – has crashed, by dint of exploration of the traditional societies that worked.

Creating a new Christianity that is not the old time religion can’t work. That has already been tried. We are now living in the midst of the results of that experiment. So, one thing we can be pretty sure of is that a properly flourishing Western civilization will have to be founded upon and ordered by – and, in the last analysis, governed by – traditional, orthodox Christianity. Thus one of the main subsidiary projects of the Orthosphere is the explanation of and apology for orthodox Christian doctrine. To the extent that moderns find Christianity incredible or repugnant, it is usually because they misunderstand Christianity. One of our jobs is to do what we can to dispel their confusion.

The Quintessence of the Reasoned Response of the Left to Dobbs

The egregor of the Left is in full control of this gal. I tell you, she’ll go down in history. This photo could be right up there with the shot of the Marines raising the flag on Mount Suribachi. Look at it closely, blow it up if you dare. You will never be able to unsee it; the quivering glossy ululating uvula of existential protest!

Man, I tell you, this is who we are, as Americans. It is the core of our democratic society.

Moloch Will Want His Regular Meals: Cave!

The recent decisions of the Supreme Court cheat Moloch of his accustomed cheap comestibles. He’ll have to make do with less. But, as with all natural systems under the orbit of the moon, this is a case of pushing the envelope in one way only to see it bulge out in another. Moloch will be served, adequately, or there’ll be hell to pay, and no pitch hot.

There will be deaths. Not of children in the womb, but of others. Moloch must be fed, by his slaves. Now that he’ll be denied the food of babies from so many “trigger” states, he’ll need to be fed in some other way. His vassals will try to figure out how  to immolate some high profile victims, to sate his hunger and avert his wrath. I suspect they’ll offer up some from among their own company.

It can’t work. It can’t suffice. His wrath shall inevitably consume all his worshippers. There are not victims enough to sate his lust. His servants then are doomed.

Reject him! Serve the Lord of Life! Only thereby might you prevent your own ingestion, and dissolution, in the insatiable maw of Moloch.

All the SWPL is White Supremacist, & So Must Be Stamped Out

We learn from Vice Magazine that interest in and enjoyment of the wilderness is characteristic of white supremacists. We had already learned that grammar, diction, logic, and math are white supremacist. Also science, ergo, and so then knowledge, and a fortiori wisdom; thus any notion of characterological merit, or excellence.

When truth as such is dethroned, nothing can survive. Thanks, you goddamned nominalists!

NB: that is not a curse, but a statement of fact.

A pattern emerges: everything that white people generally and particularly and so noticeably like, respect or enjoy is white supremacist, and must be wiped out.

God Weighs In re Virtue Signalling

The virtue of virtue is humility; for, all the virtues derive from a prior proper recollection of the true order of things, in which God is foremost of all. Overweening pride then – such as we indulge whenever we worry about our selves, or their reputations, or form our acts first in respect thereto – is the vice of vice.

As to the ostention of virtue, then:

Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven. Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.  But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth: That thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly.

Matthew 6:1-4

Humility is social chastity. Humility lies not in a recusal from the assertion of the truth as one sees it, but rather in a refusal to preen.

Also this: alms that cost you nothing are not alms in the first place.

I Kid Thee Not

Folks, they are being totally honest with us now: the masks are intended for the NPC who wants to be known as such. I snapped this photo yesterday in a checkout line.

The Basic Liberal Conceit

The liberal conceit is that no man labors under any natural ontological requirement that he should submit to some authority, and so nor therefore can there be any legitimate authority; ergo, it is wrong, as unjust, to exert or submit to any authority, and eo ipso good to transgress against authority of every sort, and to undermine it.

The propositions in the foregoing can be rearranged ad libitum, without undermining their joint agreement or their moral effect – or their morbid consequences in human lives.

Reality being what it is, that liberal conceit tends in action always to the centralization of all power in a tyrannical … *authority,* against whom no liberal man may – or can – stand.

What is that obdurate reality? It is that, no man being he than whom no greater can be conceived, then every man is less than some other – whether an other man, or an other institution, or an other god. So the liberal who prides himself (the word is chosen advisedly) that he is himself the sole master of his fate is in fact willy nilly the servant or slave of some master far greater than he, whose existence he may not even suspect, but whose dictates he witlessly obeys.

This perhaps accounts for the spooky unanimity of our divers disparate adversaries, who all as one of an evening begin using some new phrase or proposing some new crisis or solution – or demonizing and scapegoating the victim of the hour, subjecting him to the two minute hate that destroys his life. They are of one mind because they serve one mind.

Whether you know it or not, you serve a lord. Better then for you to know who he is, and decide witly whether he is worthy of your fealty.

On the Memetic Success of Modernism

Modernism appears pretty consistently in minds as an amalgam of several philosophical notions: positivism, materialism, physicalism, nominalism, liberalism, moral and aesthetic relativism, and atheism. There may be others. If you come across a man who credits one of them, it is a pretty good bet that he credits all the others, too.

It is interesting that, on any one of those notions, there can be no such thing as moral culpability. Modernism then looks like a retreat from morality, and so from responsibility, on every philosophical front. Implicitly, modernism makes shame and guilt inapposite to reality. Shame and guilt are painful feelings, and it is pleasant to get out from under them, via the conviction that they simply don’t pertain to anything – particularly oneself, or one’s acts. That is why modernism is tempting; this might account for its memetic success.

Modernist Elite Belief is a Reliable Contraindicator

Apart from the obviously incontrovertible stuff like sunrise, whatever the Modern Elite believe is true is almost certainly in fact false. Whatever they think is good is almost certainly in fact bad. This has been true since about a decade after the dawn of the television age.

When this realization first struck me, my first interpretation was to treat it as generational: whatever the Boomers thought was true and good back in 1972 was actually false or bad or both. But then I realized that the Boomers were right about a few things, like organic food, fitness, diversity of seed stock, and traditional buildings and neighbourhoods. And Early Music.

It wasn’t the Boomers. It was the elites, whether of the Boomer generation, or earlier generations, or later. Whatever the elites have ever advocated via the Establishment Propaganda Machine: it’s all been fake. And none of the really absurd stuff they’ve been pushing at us would have been entertained for a moment by almost anyone prior to the television. People had back then too much contact with real reality – as opposed to the artificial stuff the elites broadcast.

The toxic brew seems to consist of modernism and electronic media: crank nominalist insouciance about stubborn truth through an electronic media economy that is desperate to attract eyeballs, and you get all sorts of crazy stuff pumped out of the screens. That suffices to generate fads and fashions at odds with reality: with health, and sanity, and life.