Per the downfall of the West.
There are a few lines about Christianity that have been floating around on the X timeline in recent years:
-Christianity worships meekness and so no wonder more aggressive religions are dominating
-Jesus Christ is actually a revival of some ancient pagan savior figure, look at the numerology
-Christianity was the prevailing orthodoxy of the West as it was subverted, therefore it must be confronted with something antithetical to its values for it to get a grip
I’ll give my response to each of these points.
1) Meekness:
Teehee oh fiddlesticks hopefully no one bullies us!
I remember going to Kiwanis as a kid a number of times and thinking to myself at the time, “Everyone is so nice.” It was disorienting to me. I didn’t have the words at the time. There was a disconnect between the usual testiness and aggravation parents showed their kids in the home and the cookies and ice cream pie way they were at Kiwanis.
I remember going to many LDS functions as a teenager and it was even more intense. I remember a girl I liked having a bad weekend because her father slapped her across the face on a Friday and on the Sunday everything was love-bombing pumpkin pie while she was still smarting from the trespass. You were just supposed to pile in the van with all your other LDS siblings and go off to happy camp all day. I was so confused by this.
I remember going to Wednesday night Youth Ministry at the Catholic Church and group discussion time had a little bit of venting about your home life. Our youth minister Mike would listen to a bit of it and talk to people’s parents. That was the extent of it. I don’t know that this was systemic. Seemed more like it was a Mike thing, who is still the youth ministries director at my hometown church. What a kind man.
Some Christian churches have gone totally off the deep end. I don’t understand why. I haven’t dug into the doctrinal differences that would lead to these extremely goofy logic fractals where you somehow can have Stormtroopers dancing Gangham Style under a lights show. Many millions of Americans across the Bible Belt rock out to Jesus in these mega churches. I don’t understand it. I’ve attended a number of services at churches like these and it just bewilders me. Feels like I’m experiencing the madness of whoever is in charge of the show.
2) Ancient Pagan Numerology Stuff
“Jesus was a rehashing of this guy, mon. 9/11 was an Inside Job!”
When someone tries to rope me in on, “Jesus was an inside job!” my eyes glaze over in boredom. This seems to me the kind of stuff massively underemployed, intelligent but anti-social people get into. There’s all kinds of goofy Internet rabbit hole stuff people get into essentially because America has no manufacturing base and women are in the workplace. Used to be you could work a job, buy a muscle car with a summer’s wages, buy a house with four years’ wages, and Boomer it up. Now you have to finance trips to the restaurant and become an expert dietician so you don’t face unexpected medical bills. There has to be a middle ground.
I tend to be able to spot spergy people from a mile away.
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Back to spergy people.
The unabomber wrote about leftists being “over-socialized” and this resonated with a lot of people. There’s nothing wrong with tremendous amounts of socialization. That was, in fact, the world before WWI. People born in the 1880’s were the last people to receive lots of natural socialization – meaning socialization within a free context. The “over-socialization” of leftists must be considered within the context of broad spread institutional capture by the Left, which happened throughout the entirety of the 20th Century. Leftist socialization should be differentiated from free association.
People who’ve had too much input from the Internet have a kind of wimpiness about them that I don’t like. It’s not only that but I think that heaps of verbal abuse tends to drive people toward the Internet, which gives them easy acceptance. I believe in balance in all things: have good people in your life, get information from good online sources (anything the Australian or Euro governments would shid and piss about), work out on the regular, work full-time if you’re a man, mother full-time if you’re a mom, cut dramatic people out of your life, practice self-reflection, starve the Leviathan. This will give you a good balance. The love and consideration of a virtuous person is worth much more, in input terms, than dopamine rush info rabbit holes on the Internet. Spergy people, who have been verbally abused or just big league neglected growing up, tend to not have this balance in their lives. And so they try to pull others into their impotent cul-de-sacs of irrelevance and emotional privation. I’d rather put on some Billy Joel.
Me when I get good sleep.
3) Spook the SHIT out of Christians so they change
This one is a bit more niche but the spirit of it is out there.
This supposition that Christianity is this abomination because it oversaw the downfall of the West is one of those non self-knowledge answers that sounds cool. Why did the West decline? Everyone has their answer. Some people say it’s because of the Reformation. Some people say it’s because of outside religions. Some people say it’s because of socialism. Nobody wants to talk about the lot of children in this world.
You can’t borrow hundreds of trillions in unfunded liabilities from the future and say you care about children or future generations in the same breath.
You also can’t institutionalize public schooling and claim to care about children. The more you cede your children to forces outside of the home, the more screwed up they will become and the whackier their politics will become.
People have all these whacky politics these days. Nobody is bread and butter. Nobody is a well-fed hoss.
Who needs trouble when you’re a big old chonker?
Can’t be an overly neurotic power seeker if you’re a big hoss. Big legs, big butt, big heart.
Somehow it’s Christians’ fault that they were confronted with a playbook they hadn’t really dealt with in 400-500 years that was suddenly sprung on them because of advancements in mass transit?
That doesn’t make sense to me.
I think when someone says you have to spook the shit out of Christians, they’re just telling you they’re used to verbally assailing their kids, if they have any, for long periods of time. Or they’d do this if they somehow were able to join the gene pool. Same for people who say the West “deserves a time out”.
The one thing I’ll say is that Christianity posits that all humans are “ensouled”.
I just don’t think this is biologically true. I remember the hubbub a few years ago when some aid worker went to some distant tropical hellhole and came back swearing that the people there just literally did not have prefrontal cortex function. They had no conception of the future and so didn’t plan for it.
Christianity went through this period of time of colonial expansion where Christians thought they could bring people over to the Way, the Truth, and the Light. I think it failed utterly miserably and not only that, managed to stoke up a bunch of vengeance because of course uncivilized and backwards people would irrationally strike back at the hand that fed them for 200 years. Don’t feed the wildlife!
I don’t think all humans are ensouled. I think IQ disparities matter. This is not codified into Christianity in any meaningful sense. If you had basic brain scans of the amount of damage people accumulated from their cruddy parents along with some measurement of frontal lobe function, you could exclude brain-damaged people from society with ease. This would lead to a Renaissance that would outstrip Florence and the Medicis a thousand-fold. I wrote about such a society in an unreleased novel from ~2019.
Some of my adult life has now been spent in or near Salt Lake City watching it turn slowly into a Third World shithole because LDS believe every 3rd worlder with a pulse gets to have their own planet in the afterlife. Now you have Pacific-Islander gangs run amuck, whole city blocks of literal Muslims with baby strollers, and half the valley is Mexican. Hey, but a small minority of them sometimes attend their neighborhood ward. Worth it!
I’ll leave further commentary for another day. I appreciate you being here with me.