Posted on 11/07/2015 12:54:57 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
In short, the Left has moved away from Marx’s neo-pagan dialectical materialism (revamped and revised Greek Atomism positing only the existence of physical animated ‘thinking’ matter) toward embrace of Westernized Hindu Advaita (mystical pantheism) which posits the opposite of the former. Now all that exists is Mind (divine energy). In this view, earth is a sacred World Soul (Gaia), the cosmos is the Quantum Void, Singularity, Omega, or Brahman for example, and certain chosen men are gods in process of spiritual evolution.
I’m actually a little proud of myself for understanding what you wrote here.
I wonder who those chosen few are supposed to be...
In the modern mystical pantheist worldview identified by Musser as Post-Modern Liberal Fascism, it is not the personal Triune God who has created everything that exists ex nihilo. No, it is each pagan man-god who creates his own world and meaning in every living moment out of his own consciousness. In other words, since the substance of God is distributed throughout all of the cosmos (dialectical aspect of dialectical materialism; mystical pantheist conception of World Soul or Mind), including the unconscious mind of man, then by means of self-induced trance states, brain-altering drugs, transcendental meditation and other Magic Ways, man can tap into the god-force or energy within, thereby becoming a little god who controls psychic matter because he controls mind. The physical world then, is an illusion because reality is inside the divine mind of the god-man.
This way of thinking is captured by Orwell in his book, “Nineteen Eighty-Four†in which negation of the physical world is an integral part of the social and political philosophy of Big Brother and his despotic Party. At one stage in the book, Winston stumbles upon the shocking realization that,
“…in the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later; the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy.†(Orwell, “The New Spirituality and its Hallmarks, Alan Morrison, SCP Journal, Vol. 30:4-31:1, 2007, p. 19)
When the Thought Police agent O’Brien tortures Winston for “wrong thought†he states,
“We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull. You will learn by degrees, Winston. There is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility, levitation---anything. I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wish to….You must get rid of these nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of Nature. We make the laws of Nature.â€
For an inside look at modern (mystical pantheist) globalism and its' perpetrators, read "Technocracy Rising." With meticulous detail and an abundance of original research, Patrick M. Wood uses Technocracy Rising to connect the dots of modern globalization in a way that has never been seen before so that the reader can clearly understand the globalization plan, its perpetrators and its intended endgame. http://www.technocracyrising.com/
He has it all wrong about environmentalism, which at its root is not at all an ideology, but a series of situational conveniences for the benefit of its corporate sponsors. From their perspective, it’s simply, “more for me” and that means less of you.
All you’ve really grasped is the ideological facade of an academic claque of useful idiots of no real consequence.
Environmentalism is a tool not unlike Lysenkoism.
“...Term “Lysenkoism” is also used metaphorically to describe the manipulation or distortion of the scientific process as a way to reach a predetermined conclusion as dictated by an ideological bias, often related to social or political objectives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
Considering that I've written three books on the topic, I would suggest you not instruct me. You don't know what you are talking about. Yes, it's a tool, but it's all about money, simply because manipulating public opinion is cheaper than buying the assets.
Thank you. I’d forgotten all about good ole’ Lysenko the great grand daddy of all the pseudo-sciences being foisted on the peoples of the world in order to gain a one world government.
Gnoticism teaches that human spirit was God, was cast to earth as a million points of light and is now trapped in the evil material. Only through the sufficient knowledge, can we return to be God. The process of being removed from God is called “alienation”, a theme that should be familiar to students of Marx, even as he put a secular interpretation on it. Humanity could return to God when it achieved the perfect socialist condition. The foundational ideas of Gnosticism go back to the time of Plato.
“The more we come to know about the gnosis of antiquity, the more it becomes certain that modern movements of thought, such as progressivism, positivism, Hegelianism, and Marxism, are variants of gnosticism.”
— Eric Voegelin, Science Politics and Gnosticism, Two Essays, 1968.
Here is a succinct explanation of this process from British philosopher R.T. Allen:
“To understand [alienation] we have to go back behind Hegel, the immediate source of Marx’s ideas, to Hegel’s own ultimate source: viz. Gnosticism. For alienation is the central theme of Gnosticism, along with the saving knowledge of how we became alienated, and from what, and of how we can escape from it. That theme is summarized in the Valentinian formula:
‘What liberates is the knowledge of who we were, what we became; where we were, whereinto we came; what birth is and what rebirth.’
All the Gnostic texts, though they differ in details, declare that we are strangers, aliens, sparks of Light or Spirit trapped in evil matter. They recount the cosmic process whereby the circles of the world have been created, by ignorant or evil creators and not by the Light, and whereby we have become entrapped in the midmost or deepest dungeon. Finally they impart the knowledge needed to escape back to the one Light whence we have come and which is our real home.
This is the pattern of thought that Hegel took over. But, rejecting all other-worldliness, he sought to reconcile men to this world, of nature and society, from which they had become estranged. We are the vehicles of a self-creating Geist which, in order to become and to know
itself, has gone out into what is most alien to itself—the merely physical world of Newtonian science—and is progressively coming thence to its full self-realization and self-knowledge in and through human life and history. With this knowledge, given by Hegel’s own philosophy, man’s alienation from the world is in principle, overcome although Geist has not yet fully realized itself in the world.
Marx took from Hegel two basic themes of Gnosticism, which Hegel had secularized, and re-interpreted them in his own way: viz. the cosmic drama of a fall into alienation from nature and one’s fellow men, and the saving knowledge, Marxism, which explains this and the way out of alienation back to an unalienated existence. But in one central respect Marx did not fully learn the lesson that Hegel had to teach him about modifying ancient Gnosticism.
The Gnostic texts state that we are sparks of Light or fragments of Spirit (pneuma), and imply that we are distinct from each other and from the Light or Spirit only because of our fall or seduction into the circles of the world. As we fell through each circle, we were clothed with an outer covering. The return to the Light will be a reversal of that process, so that, as we pass back through each circle we shall strip off each coating. Consequently, but this is never stated, as far as I know, at the end of that process each spark or fragment will cease to be distinct and will merge back into the One Light or Spirit. Hence the End will be the same as the Beginning.”
From Flew, Marx and Gnosticism, by R.T. Allen,
Philosophy Vol 68, No 263, (Jan, 1993), pp. 94-98
The full article is available on Jstore and others behind a paywall.
(”Flew” is Antony Flew, 1923-2010, a British philosopher)
see also:
Karl Marx: Communist as Religious Eschatologist by Murray N. Rothbard
http://mises.org/daily/3769
or
http://mises.org/library/karl-marx-communist-religious-eschatologist
Early Secular Communism by Murray N. Rothbard
http://mises.org/library/early-secular-communism
And you feel the need to belittle what I’ve grasped because???
This is very helpful and explains a lot. Who are the leading contemporary philosophers?
How much do the useful idiots know? When I think of the moonbats in my own family, they seem to have blind faith in the particular dogmas (environmentalism, evil capitalism) without any coherent ideology.
Their "faith" is just a fancy form of urban legend. It functions at hyper speed in social media. You can see this tendency in Ben Carson by the way random, not well thought out fecal nuggets fall out of his mouth.
bump for later
I’m so behind on my reading, but this will just have to wait. Thanks for the post.
I'm not "belittling" it; I'm saying that the philosophy doesn't follow the money. You may have done a lot of work, but it's by no means at root in my opinion, having written three books and several major articles on the topic. Consider this example.
It was during their exile in Babylon that apostate Jews developed their own magic way: Kabalah. After the dispersion some Jewish initiates of the magic way went East, into India, etc., while others went West (I know about the slander of those who say they are Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan. Rev. 2:9)
Albert Pike – the most influential Freemason that has lived – has this to say about the Kabalah in his Morals and Dogma:
"The Kabalah is the key to the occult sciences; and the Gnostics were born of the Kabalists. (Morals and Dogma, p. 626)
The Jewish Encyclopedia affirms that the Babylonian Mystery Religion is the mother of Kabalah, Gnosticism and other occult pagan traditions:
"....especially does Gnosticism testify to the antiquity of the Cabala. Of Chaldean origin... Gnosticism was Jewish in character long before it became Christian... Gnosticism – that is, the cabalistic 'Hokmah' (wisdom) – seems to have been the first attempt on the part of the Jewish sages to give the empirical mystic lore, with the help of Platonic and Pythagorean or Stoic ideas, a speculative turn; hence the danger of heresy...of which the systems of Philo, an adept in Cabala...show many pitfalls...Jewish gnosticism unquestionably antedates Christianity, for Biblical exegesis had already reached an age of five hundred years by the first century C.E. Judaism had been in close contact with Babylonian-Persian ideas for at least that length of time, and for nearly as long a period with Hellenistic ideas. Magic, also, which,...was a not unimportant part of the doctrines and manifestations of gnosticism, largely occupied Jewish thinkers. There is, in general, no circle of ideas to which elements of gnosticism have been traced, and with which the Jews were not acquainted." (Cabala, Jewish Encyclopedia)
The famous scientist, engineer, religious writer, mystic, and practitioner of the magic way, Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) claimed to have been instructed by beings on other planets as well as by angels during his astral plane travels. Swedenborg has influenced a long line of scientists, philosophers, modern science fiction writers and movie producers as well as Joseph Smith.
According to Pike, Swedenborg described Masonry as a search after Light:
"That search leads us directly back, as you see, to the Kabbalah. In that ancient and little understood medley of absurdity and philosophy, the Initiate will find the source of many doctrines; and may in time come to understand the Hermetic philosophers, the Alchemists, all the Anti-papal Thinkers of the Middle Age, and Emanuel Swedenborg. (Morals and Dogma, p. 741)
The Babylonian Kabalah holds to the neoplatonic conception that the manifest universe (One Substance, Divine Mens) of which material creation is a part, arose as a series of emanations or evolutions from the godhead or divine Cosmic Spirit or Mind.
In his Dictionary of Mysticism and the Occult, Nevill Drury writes that the Hermetic Kabbalah's Tree of Life consists of ten spheres,
"...or sephiroth, through which – according to mystical tradition – the creation of the world came about. The sephiroth are aligned in three columns headed by the supernals and together symbolize the process by which the Infinite Light...becomes manifest in the universe." (A Short Guide to Occult Symbols: The Tree of Life, Carl Teichrib)
The sephiroth also have a role resembling that of the "...charkas [sic] in yoga."
The sephiroth symbolize the consubstantiality or oneness of the initiate's intellect with the Divine Substance or Mind (i.e., ancient Egyptian Nu, Chaos, Brahman, Omega Point, Singularity) as well as Masonry's seething evolutionary energies of Lucifer (Mind of the Universe) while chakras refer to psychic centers that lie along the spine of the etheric body that awaken by way of kundalini serpent power yoga.
For the initiate, the deeper meaning of the Hermetic Kabbalah is the Tree of Life 'above' as well as the inward path 'below' (ancient Egyptian Hermeticism) in which the adept who has mastered the seething energies of Lucifer discovers and experiences the "inner light" (also called the divine spark and inner Christ).
In “The Making of the New Spirituality: the Eclipse of the Western Religious Tradition,†James Herrick writes that modern physicists now claim to have irrefutable scientific proof for the foundational premises of mystical pantheist spirituality. (p. 169)
The ultimate discovery of quantum physics is trumpeted as scientific proof of the basic correctness of mystical pantheist theology---matter, collectively speaking, is the divine one substance (i.e., World Soul, Brahman, Omega, Mind).
The physicists (Zohar and Marshall) call their divine one substance the quantum vacuum. Their quantum vacuum is strikingly similar to some Hindu and Buddhist accounts of the origins of everything that exists as emanations from the One Substance and/or the Void. Nor do Zohar and Marshall deny the similarity:
“The vacuum spoken of by quantum physicists, like the Buddhist concept of Sunyata, or the Void, to which it is so similar, is replete with potentiality.†(ibid)
From Babylon to our own age, the Void (Light, Mind) has been viewed as the ultimate ground of being and true mystical religious experience. As the beginning and ending of all reality, the Void or vacuum is “the vast sea of all else that is.†Moreover, humans are uncreated excited aspects or modes of the Void:
“…the vacuum has the same physical structure as human consciousness.†As this is the case, then the soul of the Void and soul of the human are one and the same substance.
This means that 'god' is within the human mind. Reality is therefore within human consciousness because man is an aspect of the divine substance.
As it was in the days of Noah when men declared their own godhood so it will be again.
That wasn't its purpose. In posting that to you, it was to demonstrate that I've gone deeply into these issues. If you want the money trail, try this example.
It was during their exile in Babylon that apostate Jews developed their own magic way: Kabalah. After the dispersion some Jewish initiates of the magic way went East, into India, etc., while others went West (I know about the slander of those who say they are Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan. Rev. 2:9)
For the foundations of that, look to Sanhedrin 98a. There you will find the Sabbateans.
Albert Pike – the most influential Freemason that has lived – has this to say about the Kabalah in his Morals and Dogma:
Albert Pike is a bit player by comparison. The Freemasons are being used, as are the Jesuits and Muslims by the way.
As it was in the days of Noah when men declared their own godhood so it will be again.
That He cleansed. Almost no one understands that the flood is THE Shabbat of the fourth commandment.
I went through all that mystic stuff when I first confronted Henry Lamb's Rise of the Global Green Religion in 1996, from Alice Bailey to Robert Muller. It's a way of organizing people but the goals are all about power.
Eric Voegelin and Cyril O’Reagan.
Murray Rothbard writes about Gnosticism in several articles but he does not recognize it by that name. He calls it “reabsorption” religion.
IMO, this is all satanic projection. Clearly Satan cannot grant humans salvation. But throughout history, humans have followed this broad meme in a vain attempt to build a Utopia outside of God’s laws. So, my operating theory is that this is really Satan using human proxies to prove God wrong, that he (Satan) can really create a society that can function apart from God’s laws and should that be successful, Satan can demand that God return Satan and his demons to “their rightful place in the heavens.”
Humanity is expendable to Satan. It does not matter how man humans he must consume in these attempts to create a working godless Utopia. In the end, it is Satan who expects to be restored to his previous position as angel.
This is the Gnostic vision run out to a conclusion that consistent with the Scriptures.
The Development of Keynes’s Economics: From Marshall to Millennialism
by Joseph T Salerno [1]
...
Keynes’s social philosophy, the rudiments of which can already be found in The Economic Consequences of the Peace and which was expounded in widely scattered articles, book reviews, and speeches throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, can be classified as “millennialist.” Although there are numerous variants of social millennialism
or chiliasm, including those based on Christian theology and Hegelian philosophy (Rothbard 1990) [3], what is common to all is the view that social evolution is teleological and, from a specific starting point, progresses along a necessary and definite course to a pre-ordained end. All millennialist theories are therefore presented as theories of historical stages in which human history is foretold as coming to a close in a paradisiacal final stage or millennium.
The teleological aspect of social millennialism has been well-described
by Ludwig von Mises ([I9361 1951, p. 287) [2]:
The teleological view describes the course of [social] evolution in all
its windings and deviations. Thus it is typically a theory of stages. It
shows us the successive stages of civilization until one is reached
which must necessarily be the last, because no other follows it. When
this point has been reached it is impossible to foresee how history is
to proceed.
As a consequence of their teleological orientation, millennialist
theories are inherently esoteric, gnostic, and antirationalist, involving
the explicit or implicit assumption that the theorist or prophet alone
possesses gnosis or direct intuition of the truths of social evolution....
[1] https://mises.org/library/development-keyness-economics-marshall-millennialism
https://mises.org/system/tdf/rae6_1_1_2.pdf?file=1&type=document
[2] Mises: Socialism, An Economic and Sociological Analysis
https://mises.org/sites/default/files/Socialism%20An%20Economic%20and%20Sociological%20Analysis_3.pdf
(Links may have changed due to reorg of material at mises.org)
Marx’s vision ofcommunism
10.1 Millennial communism
The key to the intricate and massive system of thought created by Karl Marx (1818-83) is at bottom a simple one: Karl Marx was a communist. A seemingly banal or trite statement set alongside Marxism’s myriad of jargon ridden concepts in philosophy, economics, history, culture et al. Yet Marx’s devotion to communism was his crucial point, far more central than the dialectic, the class struggle, the theory of surplus value, and all the rest. Communism was the goal, the great end, the desideratum, the ultimate end that would make the sufferings of mankind throughout history worthwhile. History is the history of suffering, of class struggle, of the exploitation of man by man. In the same way as the return of the Messiah, in Christian theology, would put an end to history and establish a new Heaven and a new Earth, so the establishment of communism would put an end to human history. And just as for post-millennial Christians, man, led by God’s prophets and saints, would establish a Kingdom of God on Earth (and, for premillennials, Jesus would have many human assistants in establishing such a Kingdom), so for Marx and other schools of communists, mankind, led by a vanguard of secular saints, would establish a secularized kingdom of heaven on earth.
In messianic religious movements, the millennium is invariably established by a mighty, violent upheaval, an Armageddon, a great apocalyptic war between good and evil. After this titanic conflict, a millennium, a new age, of peace and harmony, a reign of justice, would be established upon the earth. Marx emphatically rejected those utopians who aimed to arrive at communism through a gradual and evolutionary process, through a steady advancement of the good. No, Marx harked back to the apocalyptics, the postmillennial coercive German and Dutch Anabaptists of the sixteenth century, to the millennial sects during the English Civil War, and to the various groups of pre-millennial Christians who foresaw a bloody Armageddon at the Last Days, before the millennium could be established. Indeed, since the immediatist post-mils refused to wait for gradual goodness and sainthood to permeate among men, they joined the pre-mils in believing that only a violent apocalyptic final struggle between good and evil, between saints and sinners, could establish the millennium. Violent, worldwide revolution, in Marx’s version made by the oppressed proletariat, would be the instrument of the advent of his millennium, communism.
In fact, Marx, like the pre-mils (or ‘millenarians’) went further to hold that the reign of evil on earth would reach a peak just before the apocalypse. For Marx as for the millenarians, writes Ernest Tuveson,
“The evil of the world must proceed to its height before, in one great complete root-and-branch upheaval, it would be swept away...”
...
10.5 Marx’s character and his path to communism
Karl Marx, as the world knows, was born in Trier, a venerable city in
Rhineland Prussia, in 1818, son of a distinguished jurist, and grandson of a
rabbi. Indeed, both of Marx’s parents were descended from rabbis
...
In a companion essay, ‘Reflections of a Young Man on the
Choice of a Profession’, Marx expressed a worry about his own ‘demon of ambition’, of the great temptation he felt to ‘inveigh against the Deity and curse mankind’ .
Going first to the University of Bonn and then off to the prestigious new
University of Berlin to study law, Marx soon converted to militant atheism,
shifted his major to philosophy, and joined a Doktorklub of young (or Left)
Hegelians, of which he soon became a leader and general secretary.
The shift to atheism quickly gave Marx’s demon of ambition full rein.
Particularly revelatory of Marx’s adult as well as youthful character are
volumes of poems, most of them lost until a few were recovered in recent
years. Historians, when they discuss these poems, tend to dismiss them as
inchoate romantic yearnings, but they are too congruent with the adult Marx’s
social and revolutionary doctrines to be casually dismissed. Surely, here
seems to be a case where a unified (early plus late) Marx is vividly revealed.
Thus in his poem ‘Feelings’, dedicated to his childhood sweetheart and later
wife Jenny von Westphalen, Marx expressed both his megalomania and his
enormous thirst for destruction:
Heaven I would comprehend
I would draw the world to me;
Living, hating, I intend
That my star shine brilliantly ...
and
...Worlds I would destroy forever,
Since I can create no world;
Since my call they notice never...
Here is a classical expression of Satan’s supposed reason for hating, and
rebelling against, God.
In another poem, Marx writes of his triumph after he shall have destroyed
God’s created world:
Then I will be able to walk triumphantly,
Like a god, through the ruins of their kingdom.
Every word of mine is fire and action.
My breast is equal to that of the Creator.
And in his poem, ‘Invocation of One in Despair’, Marx writes:
I shall build my throne high overhead
Cold, tremendous shall its summit be.
For its bulwark - superstitious dread
For its marshal - blackest agony.
The Satan theme is most explicitly set forth in Marx’s ‘The Fiddler’,
dedicated to his father:
See this sword?
the prince of darkness
Sold it to me.
And:
With Satan I have struck my deal,
He chalks the signs, beats time for me
I play the death march fast and free.
from
Classical Economics, An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, Volume II, by Murray N. Rothbard, page 317, 337-339
Free PDF download at:
http://mises.org/library/austrian-perspective-history-economic-thought
"completely about power and the hegemony of the 'chosen ones' (as they see themselves) over the rest of us, about the imposition of the only correct worldview (their own), about the remodeling of the world."
Klaus further explains that the goal of green environmentalism and climate change is to completely destroy private property rights and the free enterprise system by limiting the "carbon footprint" of individuals and companies, growing the size of government, and ushering in global police state socialism. Klaus told the Washington Times: I understand that global warming is a religion conceived to suppress human freedom.
In an impeccably researched essay, Ascendancy of a Financial Criminal Elite, Prof. James Petras details the rise of a criminal consortium which he describes as the super wealthy of America and Europe:
.....the super-wealthy and their families have as much as $32 trillion (USD) of hidden assets in offshore tax havens, representing up to $280 billion in lost income tax revenue! This study excluded such non-financial assets as real estate, precious metals, jewels, yachts, race horses, luxury vehicles and so on. Of the $32 trillion in hidden assets, $23 trillion is held by the super-rich of North America and Europe." (Globalresearch.ca)
The super wealthy are mainly global corporatists and bankers:
England's leading banks, including Barclay's and a host of others, have been identified as having rigged the LIBOR, or inter-bank lending rate, for years in order to maximize profits. The Bank of New York, JP Morgan, HSBC, Wachovia and Citibank are among scores of banks, which have been charged with laundering drug money and other illicit funds according to investigations from the US Senate Banking Committees. Multi-national corporations receive federal bailout funds and tax exemptions and then, in violation of publicized agreements with the government, relocate plants and jobs in Asia and Mexico.
Yet while the goal is about power it is about so much more, in particular, it is about the answers to the ultimate questions: Where did everything come from? What is man and why does evil exist?
The most important element of Western civilization's worldview is its' radically unique conception of man as person because created in the spiritual image of the One God in three Persons:
"So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them." Genesis 1:27
For fifteen hundred years, Christendom and then later Protestant America, had followed St. Augustine (AD 354-430) in affirming that as all men are the spiritual image-bearers of the transcendent Triune God then it logically follows that each person is a trinity of being — of soul, spirit, and body:
" The essence of the human is not the body, but the soul. It is the soul alone that God made in his own image and the soul that he loves....For the sake of the soul...the Son of God came into the world...." (Incomplete Work on Matthew, Homily 25, Ancient Christian Devotional, Oden and Crosby, p. 153)
In Biblical thought, the body is inert matter organized and vitalized by the soul. A human life is a soul which informs inert matter, thus a body without a soul is no more than a disorganized mass of cells that would quickly deconstruct. (Body, Mind, and Soul, Pastor Louis Pernot, Temple de l'Etoile, Paris, Nov. 28, 2010)
The noblest part of the soul is spirit (the heart), the unique property that distinguishes soul from matter. Spirit is immortal and self-aware. It can will and think and is freely responsible for what it thinks, wills, and does. In Christian thought, a person is a spirit and personality is the total individuality of the spirit. Without spirit there is no person.
The key to individual liberty in the temporal sphere is man's spiritual liberty contrasted against a genetically programmed animal-like orientation. Animals do not have spirits, which are linked to intelligence, imagination, sensitivity, self-consciousness, reflection and the capacity for truth and moral goodness.
A person is uniquely free because he can spiritually transcend matter to access the supernatural dimension as Paul affirms:
"Now the Lord is Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom" (2 Cor. 3:17)
Man is God's spiritual image-bearer, and, said the brilliant French economist, statesman, and author Frederic Bastiat, this is the gift from God which includes the physical, intellectual and moral life:
" He has provided us with a collection of marvelous faculties. And He has put us in the midst of a variety of natural resources. By application of our faculties to these natural resources we convert them into products, and use them. Life, faculties, production — in other words, individuality, liberty, property — this is man (and) these three gifts from God precede all human legislation, and are superior to it. Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place." (How Evil Works, David Kupelian, p. 8)
Vishal Mangalwadi, India's foremost Christian philosopher affirms that the unique concept of man as God's spiritual image-bearer gave birth to the belief in the unique dignity of human beings, and this is,
"...the force that created Western civilization, where citizens do not exist for the state but the state exists for the individuals. Even kings, presidents, prime ministers, and army generals cannot be allowed to trample upon an individual and his or her rights." (Truth and Transformation: A Manifesto for Ailing Nations, pp. 12-13)
Killing God; Dehumanizing Westerners Jesus to Buddha, " ....you took God away from them (and) your espousal of an absence of self is the most unique and fearsome claim you made...You turned from Hinduism because it said there was an essential self, which they called the atman. " (The Lotus and the Cross: Jesus Talks with Buddha, Ravi Zacharias, pp.59, 67)
Following in Buddha's footsteps, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Darwin, Freud, and Nietzsche, among others, took the Triune God away, deconstructed man's soul and lies taught as truth. Eric Voegelin comments:
" ....the order of being (was) obliterated (and reinterpreted) as essentially under man's control. Taking control requires the decapitation of being — the murder of God." (Eric Voegelin, Science, Politics and Gnosticism, p. xv)
In place of man as God's spiritual image-bearer, the New Man is soulless beast-man or bio-machine, qualitatively no different from a rat, pig, or ape.
In no Western thinker has Buddha's nihilist doctrine been more clearly expressed than in Nietzsche's ecstatic utterance, God is dead. God is dead in the hearts of modern Westerners:
" ...and it is as true of the atheists and Satanists who rejoice in the fact, as it is of the unsophisticated multitudes....Man has lost faith in God and in the Divine Truth that once sustained him; the apostasy to worldliness that has characterized the modern age since its beginning becomes, in Nietzsche, conscious of itself and finds words to express itself. God is dead..." (Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age, Eugene Rose, p. 60)
Prior to the turn of the century, the Triune God was already dead in the hearts of America's ruling class progressives, and upon the arrival of Swami Vivekananda at the Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893 they eagerly embraced him. Vedanta Societies were established in America and Europe for the purpose of injecting Vedantic ideas into the bloodstream of the West and America. Among those who helped disseminate Vedanta monism were Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, Somerset Maugham, and Teilhard de Chardin.
The Sixties witnessed a whole series of Indian gurus make their mark on the student generation. Popular culture was introduced to any number of nature- beliefs, from Vedanta monism, Zen Buddhism, pantheism, panentheism, reincarnation and karma to belief in a vague immanent 'force,' World Soul, Gaia (Mother Earth) and Teilhard de Chardin's Omega Point.
It is already the case that for increasing numbers of contemporary believers the death of the Triune God has made it impossible for them to affirm the existence of the human self thus they actively seek the annihilation of their souls through drugs, Tantric sex, yoga, and meditation. As with Buddha and contemporary Hindu gurus some initiates are trying to merge their individual consciousness with the void.
For over two hundred years, nihilist philosophies have been working their way through our culture, embedding themselves, often unconsciously, within our psyches. This means that not only is the way we see ourselves, our Constitution, liberties and America colored by nihilism, but to the degree that our minds have been polluted are we immobilized by apathy, the spiritual emptiness that says in reaction to our twisted, degraded, lawless culture, Why bother?
The foundation stone of modern nihilist philosophies is the claim made by the power elite and their minions of scientific neutrality as a general operating assumption. Two applications of modernist thought evidence this: evolution (anti-creation account/relentless change/relativism), an inverted exegesis that deconstructs and reduces man in the spiritual image of the Trinity to evolved ape, and deconstructionism (destructive criticism/critical theory). Along with evolution, deconstructionism is a form of relativism or nihilism that for more than eighty years has been spilling into and contaminating our moral and culture sustaining institutions from seminaries and Biblical scholarship to academia, law, media, arts, and politics, thence our minds, individually and collectively.
So yes, it is about power. But it's also about why ideas have consequences but more importantly, why evil ideas have evil consequences, which is why 'dehumanized' Westerners and Americans are trapped in an alternative reality, a spiritually empty psychic cage, a matrix consisting of lies invented and maintained by the power elite and their yes-men. This is why most W. Europeans are so apathetic that they'll ultimately submit to the invasion of their homeland rather than fight. And finally, it is why there exists a need for thinkers to unpack, analyze, expose and refute evil ideas and lies.
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