Posted on 01/05/2014 7:19:21 AM PST by markomalley
Much of the political history of the extended twentieth century is that of massive extinctions of citizenries by their dictatorial governments. Take the engineered mass starvations, torture chambers, firing squads, and gulags of Lenin and Stalin; Nazi gas chambers; Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge killing fields; the genocides of Mao's "Great Leap Forward"; and the tyrannical North Korean Sung dynasty, and one will find that over one hundred million people have been slaughtered.
Systematically murdering millions to create an imagined earthly Eden is clearly irrational. In this sense, leftist ideology has the look of a religious inquisition.
In his introduction to Eric Voegelin's The New Science of Politics (1), Dante Germino neatly captured Voegelin's thesis of the left as an atheistic "religion":
[M[odern Gnosticism has been dedicated to the hubristic attempt to overcome the anxieties and uncertainties of human life by building a terrestrial paradise. However well-intentioned, even the 'moderate proponents of the 'progressive' program bear a heavy responsibility for the disasters of humanity.
Others have alluded to this secular religious characterization of leftist ideology:
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
When Galileo committed the heresy of saying the Earth revolved around the Sun, and showed the world the physical evidence to support it the genie was out of the bottle. No amount of rhetorical venom was going to put it back in. All the condemnations did was drive people away.
You’re still harping about Galileo despite that evolutionary naturalists (Marxist Communists/Hitlers’ Socialists)-—pagans all, btw-— brutally murdered in excess of 200,000,000 men, women, and children?!?
There’s something seriously wrong with your ‘reasoning.’
Thank-you for sharing the video. Words are too small to describe something so immeasurably immense and awesome.
History records mass murders by sociopathic leaders long before Darwin and the Theory of Evolution. Your obsession with laying the blame for every evil that ever existed in the world on it defies reason, to the point of insanity,
History records mass murders by sociopathic leaders long before Darwin and the Theory of Evolution...
Spirited: The most ancient evolutionary cosmogony is the Babylonian Enuma Elish. The celebration of matter/energy is that old. Darwinism is merely a revamped, revised Enuma Elish.
So yes, you’re right about sociopathic leaders existing “before Darwin.” Nimrod was certainly a sociopath. Darwinism unleashed the killing machines—Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Che, progressive eugenicists, etc— in our own age.
Why was "Darwinisn" required for that on our age, when it wasn't necessary at all before that?
When Galileo committed the heresy of saying the Earth revolved around the Sun, and showed the world the physical evidence to support it the genie was out of the bottle. No amount of rhetorical venom was going to put it back in. All the condemnations did was drive people away.
Good point.. Heresy is heresy to some people revelation to others..
Perception is a container for DEMONS or ANGELS..
it’s a matter of taste... set on a table of delights or poison..
Who is the Chief can be a very important choice..
There are so many Ron Popiels out there..
AND RonCo... can be your church...
https://www.ronco.com/aboutus.html
Assuming a premise that you can rationally assign names and personalities to choose from.
Assuming a premise that you can rationally assign names and personalities to choose from.
If you cannot then you yourself become the (chief/chef) by default..
and ultimately Pope.. offering wafers of perception.. as tidbits..
Yes. And you can do that because you started from the premise that you had to choose a chief or chef. These are personal pronouns that designate people. When you start from premise that you're choosing a person then it can be you.
Dear spirited, thank you so very much for this quote from William James! I do believe it may be your only direct quote of him — though it seems the context by which it might be understood is missing. Everything else you cited about James and his work was about what other people have said about him. Including such notorious people as Bertrand "Banned-in-Boston" Russell. Somehow Laplace and Haeckel show up, not to mention the American Realists.... I'm still working through it all....
Sigh. I still do not believe that William James was a gnostic thinker, let alone an unconscious Luciferian. I think he was adapting the techniques of science to the study of psyche, of human consciousness. I haven't read anything by him (yet) that would suggest he saw consciousness as being ultimately "material". Though possibly he might have toyed with the idea that it would be convenient if consciousness could be reduced to such terms, his own empirical evidence, the voluminous "subjective" experience collected in "The Varieties of Religious Experience," does not seem to bear out this presupposition.
It wouldn't be the first time the idea of "science" was applied to a domain of human inquiry that had always been regarded as properly belonging to "philosophy." Plato and Aristotle did this, with episteme politike —political science.
Anyhoot, William James, and his brother Henry — arguably a very great American literary artist — were Massachusetts men; Boston Brahmins; the fruit of Harvard University at the height of its glory. We Bostonians tend to hold them in high regard. Yet this Bostonian humbly recognizes that, although the United States of America has produced magnificent achievements in economics and science, historically it has not ranked high in accomplishments in the arts or philosophy as compared with other countries....
I gather you conclude that James had reduced all mental processes to "atomic units," following Democritus, the original atomic theorist. And this proves he is a monist.
But what do you suppose motivated Democritus in his (primitive) search for the ultimate nature of Reality? That he started out wanting to prove the godlessness of the Cosmos? Jeepers, I just think that would be a stretch. Maybe the guy was just trying to understand the world all around him, in which he understood himself to be personally embroiled, in the best way he could possibly conceive of. His original insights are still enormously valuable within certain domains of inquiry, and continue to inform modern science to this day.
Of course, it is modern science itself which is now trying to tell us that "atomism" and "mechanism" are inadequate as explanations of the Universe. Both of the great scientific revolutions of the Twentieth Century — Einstein's Relativity, and the Quantum Theory of both the Copenhagen and the Schrödinger Interpretations — occurred after William James' death, in 1910. What would James have known of the state of science proper around the turn of the Twentieth Century?
He might possibly have heard about Max Planck's quantum; he might possibly have heard about Einstein's photon. As a "scientist," James was probably alert to such new developments.
But those "developments" are still not fully digested today — scientifically, epistemologically, ontologically, or socioculturally.
The above excerpt from James brings to mind a dispute between Einstein and Niels Bohr, regarding the epistemological fallout of the quantum theory. On the basis of the criticality of the observer in quantum theory, Einstein twitted his great friend that he, Bohr, would deny the very existence of the moon, unless he could see it with his own eyes. Bohr retorted that the moon would still be there; but he could not claim any direct knowledge of this fact if he didn't see it for himself, and so would be unable to say anything at all about it.
Anyhoot, there are no atoms as such either in relativity or quantum theory. And I strongly doubt there are "atoms" in William James' analysis of psyche.
Dear sister in Christ, I regard the above as open questions. We must always stay open to the Lord. For we humans are not the measure of Him, nor of His Creation, let alone His Judgment.
Thank you ever so much for your engaging correspondence, dear spirited!
Why was “Darwinisn” required for that on our age, when it wasn’t necessary at all before that?
Spirited: Perhaps you haven’t realized it, but what you are asking is: “why was “Darwinism” required for men to do evil—to commit mass murder, etc.-— freely when it wasn’t necessary before?
Answer: At the time of Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Hitler and progressive eugenicists here in America, evil-minded men did at least feel the need for an excuse-—a sanction to commit evil, in other words. That was then. Today’s evil-minded individuals no longer feel the need for an excuse. And that really ought to concern you.
What concerns me is this idea that history, traditions, everything that came before can be dismissed and discarded because "things are different now".
“But what do you suppose motivated Democritus in his (primitive) search for the ultimate nature of Reality? That he started out wanting to prove the godlessness of the Cosmos? Jeepers, I just think that would be a stretch.”
Spirited: Roman and Greek nature philosophers received their notions regarding the structure of the universe from Egypt. Egypt in turn received its’ own ideas from ancient Sumeria (Babylonia). The Enuma Elish, Babylonia’s evolutionary cosmogony bespeaking a one-substance consisting of primordial waters (matter) out of which the gods created themselves is the seed-bed from which grew all such cosmogonies-—even India’s Brahman originated in the Enuma Elish....as did Darwin’s conception.
Church Father Athanasius relates that the worship of matter/energy began with pre-flood people. And now in our own time it has displaced God.
What concerns me is this idea that history, traditions, everything that came before can be dismissed and discarded because “things are different now”.
Spirited: After more than fifty years of having it pounded into their heads by progressive conditioners that “right and wrong” do not exist, man is the conscious product of evolution, the Founders were homophobic white males, America is an oppressive, imperialistic society, ad nauseum, it stands to reason that postmodern Americans detest America’s history and traditions and worship “change.”
And you just happen to have exactly the change they need.
You expressed a concern and received a sincere response from me. From your reaction you make it clear that your concern was feigned right from the start. Your will was turned to evil and your phony concern the excuse for the commission thereof.
As was pointed out in a prior post, while earlier evil-doers used Darwinism as an excuse for evil-doing, today’s evil-minded are beyond the need for excuses. They mainly resort to traps such as feigned concern.
Spirited: Guenon does not describe James as a Luciferian but as an unconscious Satanist. This is an important distinction. The first position speaks of knowing submission to Lucifer while the second speaks of the unwitting submission by those who like James, no longer believe in the Christian view of total-reality, thus are blind to the unseen powers under whose influence they’ve fallen.
Guenon’s own view of reality is based in perennial philosophy and rather than explain his meaning from within that worldview I’ll explain it from within our own total view of reality.
Both evolutionary materialism (i.e.,Secular Humanism/ Atomism) and evolutionary Eastern pantheism (and occult New Age) posit a one-sided view of reality rather than Christianity’s total view of reality encompassing both physical matter and spirit.
Atomism’s one-sided view holds that void and physical matter in motion (the ‘sensory’ or empirical dimension) encompasses all of reality while Eastern pantheism’s one-sided view holds that void (psychic energy/ the unseen) is spirit (mind) and since this is reality then the physical world is Maya, or illusion.
These two one-dimensional cosmogonies have a materialist philosophy that Christians share. The principal doctrine of Christianity is that the living, personal One God in three Persons became flesh (i.e., physical matter) in Jesus Christ God incarnate. Jesus Christ is a Person and the ultimate aim of Christianity is not just the salvation of immortal souls (the unseen) but the resurrection of the material body (the seen) in incorruptibility.
Christian reality consists of two interconnected, interfacing halves, hence this earth (the seen/empirical/material dimension) is really a theater and men live out their lives on its stage being observed by other men (the seen) and by the living, personal God and Angels (the unseen).
Men cannot see God and very rarely do they see Angels but they can see and hear us. God tests our hearts, knows our secrets, motives, and thoughts (Psa. 17:3; 44:21; 139: 1-4) and both righteous Angels and malevolent fallen Angels and demons are all around us, watching, listening, helping if righteous, if not then leading men astray, inflating and enflaming passions, blinding and corrupting minds, teaching one-dimensional views of reality and other persuasive thoughts into the minds of men.
With this in mind we can understand why Guenon described James as an unconscious Satanist: James radical empiricism posits a one-sided view of reality that blinds him to the actual though unseen presence and influence of hostile beings.
It is also with this in mind that we can understand why God holds all 'teachers'---be they priests, ideologues, philosophers, prophets, scientists such as Dawkins and Sagan, etc.---to higher levels of accountability.
I assure you I have enough experience to know that any proposition that starts starts with the premise that history is irrelevant is going to come to no good.
"Urged on by some of his friends and collaborators, Guénon agreed to establish a new Masonic lodge in France founded upon his 'Traditional' ideals, purified of what he saw as the inauthentic accretions which so bedeviled other lodges he had encountered during his early years in Paris. This lodge was called La Grande Triade ('The Great Triad'), a name inspired by the title of one of Guénon's books. ... [T]his lodge, belonging to the Grande Loge de France, remains active today.... René Guénon died on January 7, 1951; it is reported that his final word was 'Allah' ('God')."Admittedly, this is from Wikipedia; so if you take it with a grain of salt, I'll understand.
The entry denotes Guénon's primary "school" affiliation as "Advaita-Vedanta, Sufism, Nondualism, and Platonism"; and his Main Interests: as "Metaphysics, Esoterism, Initiation, Symbolism, Mythology, Gnosis, Religious texts, Freemasonry, Mathematics, History, Society, Social criticism, Comparative religion." In the category "Notable Ideas," we are referred to his "Critique of modernity from the perspective of ancient wisdom traditions; refounding of western esotericism based on the still living eastern ones."
As I was reading through, I was stunned to realize how very much Guénon seems to resemble my former "guru," Benjamin Creme of the Maitrieya/Arcane School/Hierarchy of Masters/One World Religion/Esoteric flummary business from which I made my own personal escape in 1985. (Thanks be to God!)
I could never vet this guy as a credible authoritative source on the life and work of William James.
Sorry. Maybe it's just me....
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