Attack Against Christendom

Persian culture ultimately represents at its core a deeply mystical, poetic, polite, Zoroastrian and Sufi influenced, otherworldly culture, confronted by a western culture that is blunt (at times even rude), more into prose than verse, form over substance, power over virtue, focused on worldly possessions instead of any otherworldly rewards. There is indeed a clash of civilizations, but the political lines drawn do not demarcate its boundaries properly.

In that clash of civilizations, there are those who (in the Zoroastrian tradition) believe in genuine free will, because they do not see victory (for the side of good versus evil, truth versus falsehood) foreordained or inevitable, particularly in any immediate sense. Our individual choice in the battle between good and evil, rather meaningful (as it can affect the duration of this cosmic battle and perhaps even its outcome). The righteousness of a side not necessarily proven by who has might and who has won.

On the other side, there are those who believe might makes right; all the rest lies intended to merely serve might. Even in their religion, everything already foreordained. The winner (the mighty) the one who is right. Our free will a lie. Until we die.

The ethos of the purely monotheistic Abrahamic religions sometimes encouraged these attitudes, even if Zoroastrian influences permeated them all, leaving divisions within their ranks that were not necessarily about each of their sectarian and denominational differences. That fundamental division more in the spirit than in the form.

I was born into the world dominated by what the west has created from these historical and cultural strains, aware of its impermanence, searching for the one Iran has always promised, hoping to see it one day be able to deliver.

 

Pro-Palestinians and Progressive Left should join forces to Defeat the Creepy Corrupt Biden Presidency


"Secular culture is essentially as impossible as atheism because both presuppose the unconditional element and both express ultimate concerns." Implied here is a dialectical view of religion and culture. Religion, in order to achieve realization, must assume form and become culture; in doing so
it is religious in both substance and intention. But culture, even when it is not religious by intention, is religious in substance, for every cultural act contains an unconditional meaning, it depends upon the ground of meaning. Yet when religion becomes culture, it may lose its depth and its sense of relatedness to the unconditional; it may degenerate into an absolute devotion to conditioned cultural realities. On the other hand, culture, even in the act of opposing 'religion,' may rediscover the unconditional threat and support, and it may bring forth new religious creation.”
--James Luther Adams about Tillich in “The Protestant Era,” p. 295​

Creepy Joe Biden lets it side. Biden can't do any legislation because of "Democratic" Senators Manchin and Sinema; Joe can't cancel debilitating student debt and letting it slide; Creepy Joe can't stop war in Ukraine and letting it slide; Joe can't stop the bombing in Gaza letting it slide. Joe can't stop blatant price gouging at the supermarket-- and letting it slide. This is the corrupt Creepy Joe's political gimmick—his entire career is based on letting the fascist work in the backroom while pretending to represent his constituency in Delaware where many American corporations are based because there is almost no business regulations enforce on corporations—that's the ground Biden slithers upon. Vice President Harris is another minority mascot to fool Democrats into thinking she is progressive—she is as non-political as Obama was in office. The mayor of the so-called progressive San Francisco, London Breed, is a sycophant of the Wall Street billionaire Bloomberg.

On November 15, 2023, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in Washington, D.C. beat and arrested pro-Palestinian protestors—this is the way the Democratic Party treats its own party members! Biden shutout presidential candidate Bernie Sanders from the Democratic primaries twice in 2016 and 2020! That's how bad it is.

The pre-2024 American election season now with Biden looks the same as when Reagan won the 1981 election. The incumbent president Jimmy Carter also had Middle Eastern political chaos with Iran holding American hostages; the Arab oil embargo in 1973 caused prices to rise and national gas rationing; the American Federal Reserve under Chairman Paul Volcker jacked up banking interest rates to over 20% causing many businesses to go under. Former CIA Director Bill Casey secretly made a deal with Iran to hold the American hostages until after the 1980 national election. The American media embraced Reagan Neoliberal fascism. The Republicans and NeoCons had war plans to heat up the Cold War to enrich the military industrial complex. Today, under Biden the Federal Reserve has jacked up interest rates; Saudi Arabia is cutting back oil production to increase prices and threatening to sell to Russia and China; the US is trolling for war all over the world such as South America, Russian-Ukraine, China, Africa, and the Middle East again. The US mainstream media is biased to the Republican fascists. Over 560 restrictive new election laws aimed at progressives since 2020 have been passed in American Red states to throw the 2024 election in their favor. Biden is in great danger of losing the 2024 election. The improved American economy he brags about is a result of distorted econometrics caused by the Covid-19 pandemic so is illusory.

Biden is going to lose the 2024 election. American Pro-Palestinians supporters, and American Muslims should join political forces with the American progressive left to push Biden out of the primary elections just as he did with Bernie Sanders. Creepy Joe needs to pay a political price for what he did to American progressives. But what would be the unifying platform for this new coalition? I suggest considering the religious socialism of Paul Tillich would establish common grounds for such a Christian, Muslim, and Pro-Palestinian political forces. I have already referenced Tillich in a number of posts, but for a complete exposition of religious socialism the last two chapters of his book, “The Protestant Era,” (1948 )(pdf.). These two chapters are more informative and up to date than even the modern internet today! I see nothing in Tillich's theology and socialism with would conflict with Islamic beliefs. In fact, the reader will be shocked how much some Christians and Muslims have in common, and how complementary Tillich's views are of other religious traditions.

“The principal opposition to the divine unity is not a satanic principle of mere negation; it is rather a demonic power that perverts the creative power into a mixture of form-creating and form-destroying energy in history. A demon is something less than God which pretends to be God. The demonic operates not only in the individual's willful yielding to the temptation to give rein to the libido of sensuality, of power, and of knowledge. It operates even more powerfully in human institutions. Here Tillich, like Augustine, transforms the primitive Christian conception of
the demonic so as to make it applicable to social movements.”
--James Luther Adams about Tillich in “The Protestant Era,” p. 304​

Tillich will blow your mind! Christians and Palestinian Muslims have a shared faith in the Divine, shared symbols, and a common enemy—Christian fascism.

America's true God is money!

Next to the last chapter in “The Protestant Era” is titled, “Chapter XVIII: Spiritual Problems of Postwar Reconstruction,” from page 261-69 (only nine pages). A good summary of Tillich's political-religious views, the very last chapter titled, “Tillich's Concept of the Protestant Era” from pages 273-316 (only forty-three pages) is written by a famous Christian theologian named James Luther Adams and gives a complete, but clear exposition of Tillich's political philosophy.

The famous contemporary American journalist and minister, Chris Hedges, was a student of Adams and is influenced by his philosophical theology according to Wiki.

Chris Hedges "The Genocide in Gaza"
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Here is a short video of an interview by Katie Halper with Norman Finkelstein on how we lose our humanity while discussing the on-going genocide in Gaza:

“I don't know how many of you have read Rousseau's* Second Discourse on Inequality (1755). It happens to be very good and one of the things he says in the second discourse is men would be monsters were it not for the natural feeling of pity. It's pity that humanizes people. And then he takes the next step and says the more educated you become, the more you develop that rational faculty which enables you to find excuses why not to do anything when others are suffering. And he says if a person is being murdered outside a philosopher's window he says, 'The philosopher puts his hands to his ears and says to himself, Perish if you will, I am safe.' That's what education does to you. It enables you to suppress and rationalize your natural sense of pity-- not to act out of it.

And then he has a great line. He says, whenever there's a conflict in the street...you know, two kids beating the daylights out of each other, or two gangs beating the daylights out of each other. He says, quote, 'The Prudent man, the educated man--he walks away.' He says, 'It's always
the market woman,' or as we would now say, the fish market woman, 'who intervenes to break it up.' She's reacting to her pity. And that's the whole world. The whole world finds all sorts of excuses to walk away.” 1:21 minutes

*Jean-Jacques Rousseau (June 28, 1712 – July 2, 1778 ) Swiss-born philosopher, writer, and political theorist.

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"My message is simply that the government does not have the right to lie. If a government has a right to lie, it has a right to murder. And I can assure you any government which is able to get away with a lie will get away with murder because the name of the situation you have when a government is allowed to lie, to lie with equanimity, is fascism."
--A speech given by the New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison in 1968 (or early 1969) to the Southern California Broadcaster Association at
the Century Plaza Hotel hosted by the Los Angeles Free Press (video @ 6 minutes).

Jim Garrison on the JFK Assassination and Fascism - Intro w/ James DiEugenio
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"If a government has a right to lie, it has a right to murder."
-New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison in 1968 (or early 1969)​

This is what happens when fascism and religion connect--both Christianity and Judaism are vulnerable, if not already victim.

German Theologian Paul Tillich cautioned that the church is to be the vigilant guardian that weakens fascism's power by revealing its structures of self-sustaining dynamically generating creative evil--the demonic.

” But real demonry—if this word is to have any special content---occurs only in connection with a positive, sustaining, creative-destructive power...This is true also of the last great demonry of the present, nationalism.... National things receive sacral untouchability and ritual dignity. But just there demonization begins. With the creative-supporting forces, destructive ones combine: the lie with which the self-righteousness of one nation distorts the true picture of its own and foreign reality; the violation, which makes other nations an object whose own essence and independent might is despised and downtrodden; the murder, which in the name of the g-d pledged to the nation is consecrated to holy war" (Paul Tillich, The Interpretation of History)."

Miroslav Filipović: A Franciscan Priest who Turned into BESTIAL Ustaša Child Killer at JASENOVAC
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The Quantum Mechanics of Hope
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The title is a phrase taken from Ernst Bloch's book "Atheism In Christianity," to counter the belief that a spiritual life is escapist. Bloch instead thinks the spiritual life is a teleological hope for a utopian world.

“...for Bloch a sort of quantum mechanics of hope is at work in religion in that it exists and moves as both particle and wave....
The figure of Christ as such is thus a particle of hope...the Christ-impulse...is the wave.”
--Peter Thompson, Introduction of Atheism In Christianity (2009), Verso ed., by Ernst Bloch, p. XXIII.​

I am impressed by this video lecture from the Harvard Divinity School by Professor Matthew Ichihashi Potts who is a "Plummer Professor." What is a "plummer?" I had to look up the term "Plummer" that means, "Plummer Professorship is an esteemed academic position that bridges the gap between different disciplines." That is interesting. One could erroneously assume that professors reaching into other disciplines would result in inferior scholarship--but that's not true! In fact, it is the fallacy of composition. The end result could be superior in methodology and logic than in any single discipline.


Here is the video summary of "Religion in Times of Earth Crisis: Apocalyptic Grief: Reckoning with Loss, Wrestling with Hope."

"This is the fourth event in the six-part Religion in Times of Earth Crisis Series.

Speaker: Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church
Moderator: Diane L. Moore, Associate Dean of Religion and Public Life

"Human-caused climate change already contributes to manifold global disasters. As the planet inevitably continues to warm, these disasters will be routine and unrelenting. Addressing the reality of loss must become a basic spiritual task of our climate present and future, along with summoning the resolve to respond to all our losses. In this session, Matthew Ichihashi Potts considered the apocalyptic roots of the Christian tradition in order to diagnose how Christianity has contributed to the present crisis and suggest possibilities for a different way forward. Through particular attention to grief and hope as religious categories and with specific reference to various moments and movements from within the Christian tradition, Potts reflected upon the spiritual crisis at the heart of climate catastrophe and suggests the potential for a religious response.

Matthew Ichihashi Potts, MDiv '08, PhD '13, was appointed the Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church and the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals in 2021. Potts has served on the faculty at Harvard Divinity School since 2013 and has focused his teaching on sacramental and moral theology, ministry and pastoral theology, religion and literature, and preaching. He is the author of two books, Cormac McCarthy and the Signs of Sacrament: Literature, Theology, and the Moral of Stories (Bloomsbury, 2015) and Forgiveness: An Alternative Account (Yale University Press, 2022). He sits on the editorial board of the journal Literature and Theology. He is also co-host of the podcast Harry Potter and the Sacred Text. Potts served as both an officer in the United States Navy and as a college administrator before being ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church."

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The Algebra of Genocide with Chris Hedges & Hatem Bazian


“I would not vote for Joe Biden if you put a gun to my head, and I've had a gun to my head....You know they have to pay, they have to pay for this. I don't want Trump, but I didn't support the genocide. I didn't do this, they did it, and it won't stop...we have the numbers to make them pay.”
--(video @1:10:22 min.)​

I agree with Chris Hedges! That corrupt S.O.B. (and a crypto-fascist Zionist) needs to pay for all the damage he has done to the American people in his long depraved unscrupulous demonic political career. And Hedges is correct about Bernie Sanders who has absolutely NO POWER!

Let this entire shitty fascist imperialist cluster **** of a nation collapse—a nation that assassinated its own president so to enrich itself with global Cold War murder. Americans are still stumbling around like the fools they are. The current psychopathic president is a mass-murder, his anticipated opponent has already murdered 1.2 million Americans, but you wouldn't know it in the Fox News media gulag.

It's too late for Biden--feed him alive to MAGA! I would enjoy witnessing his political mutilation and dismemberment. Instead of focusing on the domestic fascist insurgence in America, he was globe-trotting around Europe like a viceroy planting the seeds of war in Ukraine and that military base we named, “Israel” which should have never existed.

Biden is so worried about Israel reclaiming its homeland from some 2,400 centuries ago but is purposely absent-minded of the land stolen from the Cherokee, Creek (aka, Muscogee), Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole American Indians tribes not even two-hundred years ago when 6,000 to 17,300 Native American were murdered in an ethnic cleansing of Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee by the Indian Removal Act of 1830. The Cherokees (my ancestors) were the last to leave Georgia in 1938 where gold was discovered. And when the survivors of the five tribes settled in the unproductive wasteland of Oklahoma, oil was discovered, which the settlers stole from the Indians yet again! **** YOU FASCISTS!

It's the same shitty act in Gaza today, but by different butt holes.
Zionist Israeli fascism is an exact doppelgänger of American jingoistic chauvinism.​

Hedges reflects on the self-immolation of Aaron Bushnell:

“In his essay, 'Critique of Violence' (1921) Walter Benjamin examines acts of violence undertaken by individuals who confront radical evil. Any act that defies radical evil breaks the law in the name of justice. It affirms the sovereignty and dignity of the individual. It condemns the coercive violence of the state. It entails a willingness to die. Benjamin called these extreme acts of resistance 'divine violence.' 'Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope,' Benjamin writes.” --Chris Hedges quoting Walter Benjamin (Video @ 47:10 min.).

 

True.......

a State Religion founded on the writings and teachings of Protestant Reformer Martin Luther would be off to a bad start.......

but.......

it may be helpful to remember how radical the Roman Catholicism of the time of Martin Luther really was?????


Here is an article by Protestant Reformer Martin Luther from 1543 :

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/martin-luther-quot-the-jews-and-their-lies-quot#google_vignette

 

Stop romanticizing native Americans. They raped, slaughtered, enslaved, and drove one another out of their places forever before the Europeans arrived. At least the Europeans had the good sense to raise the standard of equality in freedom. That is something the natives never would have achieved. The problem was a clash of cultures.

And there is no genocide in Gaza. Israel is there routing out Hamas because of what Hamas did to Israeli citizens in Israel on Oct. 7th of 2023. Hamas has had six months to free the Israeli hostages and surrender. But they haven't. So it is all on Hamas, as well as on Iran who is behind Hamas. I don't see Iran being around for long. Israel though is there to stay. So it is best to make peace with that fact.

 

Thank you immensely for these comments Injeun........ You are so correct that essentially every national group on earth has engaged in taking slaves.... and murdering innocent civilians at some point in time or another. Well said!

But... even Adolf Hitler is said to have stated in 1945 that if he had had two divisions of the First Nations Tribes of North America he could have sent his armies home and ruled Europe using terrorism......
......
He also is said to have said that he could have won WWII if he had had two divisions of Canadians..... Hitler faced the Newfoundlanders in WWI and was impressed by their courage.

An interesting aspect of WWII is how the Gurkha soldiers were amazingly helpful in winning the war.........
......

Did Gurkha soldiers from Nepal save the lives of thousands of Canadians?

 

The Pattern:
As in Palestine today, the problem is not with the indigenous people...it's something else.


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"If rich people with private property have been stuffed through excessive greed and if they want in their contents too obstinately, they give rise to countless and incurable illnesses and through their vices these rich people can bring about the ruin of the body as a whole." This was not written 20 years ago, or 10 years ago, and it was not written by Thomas Piketty, and it was not written by any other Marxist critic of capitalism, and it was not written by any economist or by any scholar. This quote was written in 1158 by John of Salisbury in his famous book Policraticus (The Statesman's Book).

This means that people have been aware of the problematic inherent in capitalism a thousand years ago, that's 1,000 years ago. We have been living with this problematic 1,000 years, and we have not been able to solve it as the recent economic crisis has shown, 2007, and 2010. Something is seriously wrong, something is seriously sick, and we have been failing for at least 10 centuries--for at least 10 centuries to cope with it."
--Cultural studies in business: Re-orienting Cross-Cultural Studies in Business: A European analysis" by Prof. Sam Vaknin @ 0.51 minutes.

Chief Red Cloud of the Oglala Sioux (1822-1909):
"You must begin anew and put away the wisdom of your fathers. You must lay up food and forget the hungry.
When your house is built, your storeroom filled, then look around for a neighbor whom you can take
advantage of and seize all he has."
--Andrist, Ralph K. 'The Long Death,' Macmillan,- 1964, p. 134,
found in 'God is Red,' Vine Deloria, 2003, p. 204
​

 

Christian Nationalists by the millions....and all of the same quality.​

"Logan, the Mingo chief, appealed to the Virginians for justice at the peace council following the back country war of 1774; 'I appeal to any white man to say if he ever entered Logan's cabin hungry and he gave him not meat; if he ever came cold and naked and he clothed him not.'1 Such hospitality characterized the tribal religious communities precisely because they were communities limited to specific groups, identifiable to the world in which they lived and responsible for maintaining a minimum standard of hospitality and integrity."
--found in 'God is Red,' Vine Deloria, 2003, p. 218

1 footnote: "I Have Spoken: American history through the voices of the Indians," (1991), complied by Virginia Irving Armstrong, Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, p. 28

 

The Moravian missionary, Christian Frederic Post, volunteered to carry a British message of peace to the hostile, pro-French Shawnee and Delaware during the French and Indian War. He talked with them at their village of Kushkushkee the last of August 1758, and they replied on September 1. SHINGIS, Delaware chief, was one of the spokesmen:

 

False Flags and False Religion

“...there are three people who for whom God has special care: widows, orphans, and foreigners. The foreigners are the illegal aliens in your land today because those are the three people who have nobody to protect them. So, if God doesn't protect them, they're in real trouble. And it's kind of odd here, we are three thousand years later and we're still arguing about the three same three darn questions.”
--Bernard Brandon Scott, Ph.D Professor Emeritus Phillips Theological Seminary, @ 1:06:48​

American Heretics: The Politics of the Gospel (Christian Nationalism Documentary)

​

What does Christianity actually stand for other than national war machines? Theologian Dr. Vine Deloria writes, “The track record of individual Christians and Christian nations is not so spectacular as to warrant anyone seriously considering becoming a Christian. From pope to pauper, Protestant to Catholic, Constantinople to the United States, the record is filled with atrocities, misunderstandings, persecutions, genocides, and oppressions so numerous as to bring fear into the hearts and minds of non-Christian peoples (''God is Red,” Vine Deloria, 1973, New York, Grosset & Dunlap p. 194).” And Deloria didn't mention the sad role of German Christianity merging with the Nazi movement as the fascists united German Nationalism with the German Christian Church. At the end of WWII many of the non-fascist German clergy had been sent to Nazi labor, or death camps with some clergymen actually crucified.

The historical track record of Christianity shows it eventually embraces the false values of the nation it is a member whatever the status quo might be such as racism, false consumer individuality, materialism as false spirituality, and economic competition as false community. Neo-liberal metaphysics replaces the garden dwelling Adam and Eve with a deal seeking truck and barter Smithian economic Man. Television, radio, and mass media are the modern false idols of Christian nationalism: “...the problem with the Christian conception of human behavior is that it apparently depends on the cultural context in which it exists to determine what standard of behavior the will shall follow. With only a preliminary examination of some of the positions understood as Christian over the years, one could conclude that Christianity attempts to dominate cultures and does so initially but eventually falls victim to cultural values (''God is Red,” Vine Deloria, 1973, p. 196).”

The right-wing nationalism known as Zionism is nearly indistinguishable from the nationalism that has enveloped American Christian Fundamentalism since the Cold War era to the present day. The doctrines of Christian nationalism today are to get rich and defend your country against the non-white pagan foreigners! Even during the era of American chattel slavery, the Christian church split into pro and anti-slavery sects followed with deadly race riots by white Christians post-Civil War: “...As the cultural values change, the doctrines also change; it becomes impossible to determine exactly how a Christian does behave (ibid., p. 198 ).”

Take for example the case of the Catholic Christian Zionist Bruce Edwards Ivins who was investigated for mailing false flag letters contaminated with anthrax after the 9/11 terrorist attacks to the offices of U.S. Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy, as well as to the offices of ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, the New York Post, and the National Enquirer. Five U.S. post office workers died from several anthrax laden letters traced back through DNA of the highly refined anthrax to Ivins who was a highly trained bio-defense researcher at Fort Detrick, Maryland. Ivins once wrote in a letter to the editors of the News-Post, “By blood and faith, Jews are God's chosen, and have no need for 'dialogue' with any gentile."[75] Ivins' goal was to fan the flames of anger against the Middle-East with a false flag terrorist biological attack in hope America would go to war against Zionist Israel's enemies. This incident reveals a strange kind of religious nihilism born of religious elitism, religious bigotry, and racism. Once a national media story, the Ivins anthrax case is an embarrassment for the United States because it involves a trusted ally, Israel, and since has not been widely publicized by the mainstream media.

The documentary on American Christian Nationalism video posted above focuses on how easily churches can be co-opted by right-wing political factions and their spokesmen like the Rev. Oral Roberts, and Rev. Jerry Falwell subsidized by wealthy totalitarian backers of various political factions: “.... Individuals thus follow that version of the religion that appears to be the most comforting to them. Shopping for prestige churches as an individual climbs the social, political, or economic ladder is not unheard of. In its practical sense, Christianity is a religion almost wholly determined by the culture in which it finds itself. It brings to that culture some of its ideas, including a comforting sense of history. But in practical terms it quickly bends to whatever forces are most dominant in that culture, as individual Christians are forced to follow a course that they would imagine to be most religious in a cultural context strange to the world of Roman dominated Palestine (ibid., p. 198 ).”

 

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A statue of the late Rev. Billy Graham was just unveiled in the U.S. Capitol. In 2018 North Carolina's Governor Roy
Cooper, who's a Democrat by the way, said, "We got to take down one of our two statues because the one of the statues
in there was a former Governor named big Charles Aycock and he was an avowed white supremacist.' Roy Cooper said, 'I
don't like that this guy is representing our state. I know it makes a lot of people in our legislature and citizens uncomfortable, but why don't we remove that that guy who has outlived his welcome, right?" So, they wanted to take it down to make room for a second statue, but they--and they actually did this-- in 2015 they said they're going to replace it with a statue of Billy Graham.

Three great Christians: war criminals Richard Nixon, White Supremist Billy Graham, and convicted felon Spiro Agnew

A statue of disgraced evangelist Billy Graham was unveiled in the U.S. Capitol
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I found the videos on "Unsolicited advice" by a British philosopher in Britain named "Joe" are of excellent quality. A recent video on religion is a good example titled,
“Pretend to be Religious” | Schopenhauer on God
Joe comments on a fictional dialogue written by the philosopher Schopenhauer titled "Religion: a dialogue, and other essays by Schopenhauer, Arthur, 1788-1860; Saunders, T. Bailey (Thomas Bailey), 1860-1928." (pdf.)
Phialethes (The Greek word φιλαλήθης means "a lover of truth.") and Demopheles are the two main characters in Schopenhauer's dialogue on religion.

The last section of the video "Allegorical Truth" is particularly interesting, and I have written essays on this topic rejecting fundamentalist biblical literalism.

Joe remarks at 24:21 minutes:
"Let's say for the sake of arguments that everything Demopheles says is 100% correct. Religious belief actually is a huge help for a lot of people. Existentially it can be immensely valuable for moral virtue and social cohesion and it also communicates deep truths that people would otherwise be barred from discovering. Does this mean that atheists, like me, should say things that we truly believe are false to serve the greater good, but however you answer this question Schopenhauer's
dialogue is well worth a read. It seems that many atheists today are asking the question. So, if God doesn't exist now what? And this is a fantastic essay to get your intellectual juices flowing and who knows maybe it will convince you to say that you believe in God even if you don't."

00:00 Atheism and Society
01:35 Schopenhauer: A User's Guide
07:39 An Existential Necessity
14:17 The Moral Lessons of Religion
18:06 Allegorical Truth

Is Atheism Over?
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When the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu, life is over, his ashes should be gathered and flushed down the toilet of the house he was born in.

Chris Hedges: Nero's Guests
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lol a wave of spam posts from a lunatic. No wonder this board is dead.

 

Paul Tillich on Existential Anxiety and Courage​

These are stressful days. They are not that different from the 1960's but I was too young to know the seriousness and consequences of the general social unrest with vigilante attacks on university students and anti-war protesters. The same type of socio-political divisions and breaks are happening once again with the same government propaganda, false narratives, villainization of ordinary citizens, police brutality, suppression of political speech, dyslexic courts, and unending wars. During the 1960s, young people were especially villainized.

The Christian theologian, Paul Tillich, published his book, “The Courage To Be,”(1952)(pdf.) that lays out a formulation of the principles of Christian Existentialism. Tillich suffered PTSD from his time serving as a minister at the Battle of Verdun in WWI resulting in over 300,000 French and Germans dead in ten months of fighting. From this experience Tillich realized Christian theology needed re-interpretation in the modern world.

There is atheistic existentialism (Sartre), and religious existentialism (Kierkegaard). Tillich borrowed from Kierkegaard's existentialist philosophy and inspired much more by Martin Heidegger's famous work “Being and Time,” (1927). Tillich re-translates the phenomenology of “Being and Time” into a Christian existentialism. Heidegger learned the phenomenological method from its modern founder, Edmund Husserl himself. In “Being and Time” Heidegger performs an eidetic reduction on human consciousness (Dasein) and its “being in the world.” With Husserl's methodology Heidegger identifies basic moods of being such as Angst, or dread which is unlike fear since it has no definite object. Another Dasein mood of being is “fallenness” (Verfallenheit).

All of this back history and philosophical influences are behind Tillich's work on anxiety. In the chapter 3 heading “Being, Nonbeing, and Anxiety,” Tillich identifies and distinguishes Dasein's types of existential anxiety:

“Courage does not remove anxiety. Since anxiety is existential, it cannot be removed. But courage takes the anxiety of nonbeing into itself. Courage is self-affirmation "in spite of," namely in spite of nonbeing. He who acts courageously takes, in his self-affirmation, the anxiety of nonbeing upon himself. Both prepositions, "into" and "upon," are metaphoric and point to anxiety as an element within the total structure of self-affirmation, the element which gives self-affirmation the quality of "in spite of" and transforms it into courage. Anxiety turns us toward courage, because the other alternative is despair. Courage resists despair by taking anxiety into itself (Courage to Be; p. 66).”

Here is a summary of Chapter 3 (p. 64-78), Pathological Anxiety, Vitality, and Courage:

The analyses of pathological in relation to existential anxiety have brought out the following principles:

1. Existential anxiety has an ontological character and cannot be removed but must be taken into the courage to be.

2. Pathological anxiety is the consequence of the failure of the self to take the anxiety upon itself.

3. Pathological anxiety leads to self-affirmation on a limited, fixed, and unrealistic basis and to a compulsory defense of this basis.

4. Pathological anxiety, in relation to

A.) the anxiety of fate and death, produces an unrealistic security, in relation to

B.) the anxiety of guilt and condemnation, an unrealistic perfection; in relation to

C.) the anxiety of doubt and meaninglessness, an unrealistic certitude.

5. Pathological anxiety, once established, is an object of medical healing. Existential anxiety is an object of priestly help.

All of this came to mind watching a video by Professor John Vervaeke and author Brendan Graham Dempsey who ask, “How can ancient faith traditions adapt to the complexities of the modern world?”

Reviving Faith with Meta-modern Spirituality and the Future of Christianity
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The New Evangelicals​

I want to add another passage written by Tillich on neurosis during times of radical historical change that overlays and intensifies the fundamental existential anxieties of fate, death, and meaninglessness:

“There is a moment in which the self-affirmation of the average man becomes neurotic: when changes of the reality to which he is adjusted threaten the fragmentary courage with which he has mastered the accustomed objects of fear. If this happens — and it often happens in critical periods of history — the self-affirmation becomes pathological. The dangers connected with the change, the unknown character of the things to come, the darkness of the future make the average man a fanatical defender of the established order. He defends it as compulsively as the neurotic defends the castle of his imaginary world. He loses his comparative openness to reality, he experiences an unknown depth of anxiety. But if he is not able to take this anxiety into his self-affirmation his anxiety turns into neurosis. This is the explanation of the mass neuroses which usually appear at the end of an era.... (The Courage To Be, Tillich, 1952, p. 69-70)(pdf.).”

There are signs of hope! American Christianity has a great variety of denominations. For example, the Texas House Representative James Dell Talarico district 52 and seminary student gave a powerful critique of Christian Nationalism at James Talarico Is Taking on Christian Nationalism... and Winning.

Below is a video interview of founder of the New Evangelicals, Tim Whitaker:

“Christian Nationalism is a giant threat to our country. A danger to women, to minorities, to the marginalized and to democracy itself. While these white, Christian nationalists believe they’re saving the country from heathenism, what they’re really offering is a theocracy of top down control with themselves at the top. We must see this threat for what it is, and that starts with understanding. Tim Whitaker is the founder of the New Evangelicals, an inclusive, Jesus-centered community that holds space for those marginalized by the evangelical church and advocates for systemic change. Raised deep in the evangelical world – Tim had a crisis of faith watching his church leaders embrace a man who was so antithetical to what he had been taught to believe. He now holds the toxic churches and their leaders accountable, while still offering a home of faith to his fellow Christians.”

Christian Jesus v. Trump Jesus: A Conversation with the New Evangelicals’ Tim Whitaker
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Tillich on the Demonic Personality, Real Demonry, and Political Nationalism​

Theologian Paul Tillich does not believe in ghosts, demons, and angels, but interprets them as symbols. Christian nationalism interprets the New and Old Testament literally and throws the word “demonic” around as if we are living in the ancient biblical times. This is because the Christian fascists cannot not understand the New Testament gospel except by literalizing Hebraic symbolic language that early Christianity adopted. Tillich does not want to de-mythologize Christian scripture, but rather to de-literalize ancient biblical symbols.

"But it is necessary to interpret some structures on which society is built as symbols of demonic powers, and it is necessary, in making these symbols manifest to open the struggle against the demonry of a period...as everything that points to the unconditioned has a symbolic character and can never be grasped actually, empirically. In symbols and only in symbols shall we speak now of the demonries of the present (“The Interpretation of History: Demonries of the Present,” p. 117)(pdf.)."

Tillich gives the definition of the demonic as autonomous self-sustaining dynamic creative evil:

“The depth of the demonic is just this, that the meaningful and meaningless elements in it are inseparably combined. Thereupon rests its inevitability, its surpassing power, in the face of which all moralizing is doomed to impotence. The sinfulness to which the service of Mammon also belongs, is indeed the general presupposition of every demonry. But real demonry—if this word is to have any special content-occurs only in connection with a positive, sustaining, creative-destructive power (“The Interpretation of History: Demonries of the Present,” p. 120)(pdf.)."

Because the personality is the seat of form creative-destructive power, the demonic distorts this human potentiality in the worship of Mammon:

“The demonic comes to fulfillment in personality, and personality is the most prominent object of demonic destruction, for personality is the bearer of form in its totality and unconditioned character (“The Interpretation of History: Demonries of the Present,” p. 86)(pdf.)."

Tillich's concept of the holy and demonic is largely based on the work of the German theologian Rudolf Otto in his book, “The Idea of the Holy.” Paul Tillich understands religious nationalism as the worship of idols that are seen as inherently holy:

“Holiness cannot become actual except through holy “objects.” But holy objects are not holy in and of themselves. They are holy only by negating themselves in pointing to the divine of which they are the mediums. If they establish themselves as holy, they become demonic. They still are 'holy,' but their holiness is antidivine. A nation which looks upon itself as holy is correct in so far as everything can become a vehicle of man’s ultimate concern, but the nation is incorrect in so far as it considers itself to be inherently holy. Innumerable things, all things in a way, have the power of becoming holy in a mediate sense. They can point to something beyond themselves. But, if their holiness comes to be considered inherent, it becomes demonic. This happens continually in the actual life of most religions. The representations of man’s ultimate concern-holy objects-tend to become his ultimate concern. They are transformed into idols. Holiness provokes idolatry (Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. I, p. 216).”