European is a pretty nebulous concept. There is a place called Europe where people broadly sharing genetic patterns live. It’s a useful construct for understanding things in some contexts, not so much in others. No Roman would have thought of the Germans, for example, as anything like them in terms of race, culture, etc. Caesar felt free to conduct a campaign of genocide against the Gauls because he viewed them much like colonial powers viewed the Indians. “European” is an identity that emerged over centuries and is impossibly to disaggregate from “Christendom.”
There is not “a continuous tradition” of European paganism. Continuous implies ongoing. It’s long gone and has been long gone since the Middle Age at the latest. At best, one could argue that it could be resurrected, but here you arrive at the point I was making. Will Isis worship be a part of your European pagan revival? How about Cybele, the Neolithic Magna Mater? Do we edit all the material from the Enuma Elish from the Theogony? This isn’t a theoretical consideration; neopagans have to argue these exact points because of their similar misconceived essentialism. There is exactly one European religion with a continuous tradition still practiced there, and it’s not Odinism. If you say, “but Christianity came from Asia,” well, so did the Aryans.
To your second point, no one in Roman antiquity would have attached any significance to the fact that, of the three continents they knew of, the Germanic tribes shared Europe with them. They were as hostile and predatory as any boat people today, and just as alien. Fortunately, Christian missionaries were able to smooth away the rough edges and build upon their positive traits, such that Europe was reconstructed with those barbarians playing a major role. The Roman Empire was revived in the West, eventually, under Christian rulers, controlling far more of Europe, and the world, than the old pagan Empire did.
Regarding your third point, yes, the Church could certainly do more. Clement of Alexandria thought the Church was neglecting everything education; no one would listen to him, so he started his own school as part of a program of catechesis. Francis of Assisi thought the Church was neglecting the poor, so he went out and lived among them, and started an order dedicated to that purpose. The mistake so many young men make is to think of the Church as a service provider like Door Dash and lament that it’s neglecting an untapped market. The Church isn’t the buildings and the priests, it’s the whole body of believers. If no one in the Church is doing what you think it ought to be doing, that may, perhaps, be a sign that you are the one meant to do it.
People keep making the same basic errors in interpretation because of the Dunning Kruger effect. They’re good at statistics or computer science but, knowing nothing about the Bible, imagine it must be an order of magnitude simpler. Then when their superficial and reductive readings are challenged, they blame the text for being obscure. It isn’t. It was written in a particular time and place, meaning that some parts will be more challenging to interpret, but was meant for all times and people. The key to unraveling that paradox is to realize that scripture can only really be understood within a living holy tradition. Scripture in that sense is as intellectually demanding as the mind inquiring into it can bear, and its exegesis is in no way intended for a mass audience. Neoliberalism is largely based on the notion that the exact sciences can serve as an organizing basis for society. Missionaries are men with a special charisma for communicating the truths of the faith in terms comprehensible to a particular people. The based young right are wide open for one so gifted.
'No Roman would have thought of the Germans, for example, as anything like them in terms of race, culture, etc.'
Isn't the whole point of The Germania to point Romans back towards what they had been and had lost?
'Caesar felt free to conduct a campaign of genocide against the Gauls because he viewed them much like colonial powers viewed the Indians.'
His was the final movement in the symphony of Roman revenge--the Gauls had terrorised the Latins (and Etruscans) in Italy for at least a century before they were exitirpated or expelled from or assimilated in Italy beyond the Appenines--as well as an expression of his sheer will to power, in the higher and lower senses of the phrase. I don't think a perception of Gaulish savagery were uppermost in Roman reckoning, just as a perception of Indian savagery was not the main motivation of the colonial wars in Appalachia and the American West.
'European is a pretty nebulous concept. There is a place called Europe where people broadly sharing genetic patterns live. It’s a useful construct for understanding things in some contexts, not so much in others.'
OK sure there's this silly idea of 'pan-European paganism', by which all wipipo are somehow ancestral Odinists or whatever. But saying Europe is '[only] a useful construct...where people share [no more than] genetic patterns' is a bit reductive. It reminds me of undergrad history tutors who would say things like 'feudalism is not a *useful* way to describe social relations in 16th century England'. I always used to think, 'Useful be damned. Is it accurate or not?' (they were probably largely right in their objection to describing England then as feudal, but why not just say inaccurate? "Not Useful" wtf?).
A similar objection applies here: Is there such a thing as Europe beyond geography and genes? Is it more than just a contingent 'construct'? Is there in fact, and has there always been for as far back as we can tell, a Europe of the spirit? In spite of massive spiritual differences among Europeans (which should be preserved as far as possible) I would say yes.
So many of these arguments posed by the anti-Christian camp remind me of a class I took in college on Political Theory in Antiquity, which ended up being one of the most formative classes I ever took. Not just because it was the place I was introduced to the great works of philosophy by Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine (which was his favorite), Thomas Aquinas, so on and so forth, but the Professor himself was remarkable. He was from Quebec and a lapsed Catholic who told me, during a private discussion, "The saddest thing on earth is a man who lost his faith and desperately wants to find it again." Obviously, he was fighting his own demons, but for being a self-professed lapsed Catholic and agnostic, he was always defending Christianity on basic, logical arguments that helped spark a renewed interest in religion myself. Every time anyone has a question about Christianity, he had an answer that was simply irrefutable because he was so well read on the topic.
I remember distinctly this one kid tried to "epically own" him on the question of the Trinity, and he just sat down, put his hands in his head, and said something to the effect of, "There are more books written on that topic than you could ever read in a life time. Every question you have has been answered by men smarter than me. If you want to argue about this, please read some of them, and then we can have this discussion." So much of Christianity's most vociferous critics fail to grasp even the basic concepts of it, so much so that debate with them is often pointless because they don't know what they don't know. Pretty much any question they might have has already been discussed extensively since the foundation of the religion and written about by men much more intelligent than any of us. And I'm not claiming to be a great Christian scholar or theologian, but his words always struck me as profound. You can't really argue against Christianity if you only have a surface level understanding of it, no more than you can argue or debate against anything without at least a working knowledge of it.
I hope that man found the peace he seemed to be longing for.
I always found it interesting that each generation seems to reinvent the classic Christian heresies, but aren't familiar enough with Christianity to figure out the classic names.
Pelagianism, for instance, is practically orthodoxy in liberal "Christianity" these days.
@Yakubian Ape I’m definitely sympathetic with your professor’s response and it sounds like he was pretty gracious about it. It strikes me that there is something of a parallel between that response and the one we hear about from the Ctrl-Left (though it is usually internally-directed), particularly on the anti-racist side, about ‘emotional labor’. Obviously, there are differences too (in person vs. in an online forum; admission of something like ignorance vs. implicit and inherent understanding; academic vs. ideological), but there is a parallel.
I see where you’re coming from, but in his defense, a lot of these kids asking these questions were very obviously posing them as a kind of “gotcha” thing so that they could show how enlightened they were and how they were so much smarter than the great luminaries who wrote the texts we were studying, and, in a class where you have an hour and a half to get through the material, you can’t really waste time having a back and forth about an incredibly dense, nuanced, and multifacted conversation like the nature of the Trinity. But I do see what you’re saying.
A professor of mine once related a story from his graduate studies day. His theology professor challenged his students to invent a new heresy, and after multiple failed attempts, they thought they had one that dealt with the Holy Spirit.
They brought it in for review, and the professor turned around, grabbed a book, opened it and pointed to a page that essentially described the heresy they ‘invented’, but it was talking about something from the 4th or 5th century.
This has been my experience debating Christianity as well. Almost every time their issue is something taken out of context, distorted or just made up. I usually end it like your professor and ask them to just please read an introductory book on Christianity.
1) What Kulak is reacting to, I think, is American Christianity as it actually manifests ... And I don't just mean the mainline churches, although I definitely mean them too. Most priests I've met - with rare exceptions - have been extremely effeminate. Most churches I've been to have been mostly old women. Again, I'm sure there are exceptions ... but they're few and far between.
2) Ancestral religions are definitely a thing. The religion of the Greeks of the Hellenic era may have differed from that of the Homeric era, but there was continuity, indeed all the way back to the original Aryans (some of whose religious beliefs and practices we can, in fact, reconstruct). Christianity was an imposition, in many cases at sword point, in other cases through deception as when missionaries straight up lied to the Germans about Christ being a warrior king, which pretends to be sui generis, wholly the product of Jews. Now there are good reasons to believe there is more continuity with European paganism than Christians like to admit ... but many if not most Christians bitterly resist suggestions of continuity. Which, personally, does not help to endear them to me, as it rankles that they expect me to hold Jewish history as more religiously significant than my own; that indeed many expect me to believe that my own people's history, prior to contact with Judea, was demonic. That is not so Christians but it's a lot of them, and for me at least, it produces an instinctive counter-reaction.
3) Young guys are absolutely correct to be filled with white hot rage at the conditions they've been dumped into. If the church isn't going to help with that, then what good is it to them? You say they're erring to treat it instrumentally, but if it's useless to them then, like ... You see the problem, right? These kids have been told "fuck you, it isn't about you, men are over" their whole lives. If the church was like, "actually men are great, here look, we're going to do all these things to address the gaping holes in the lives of young men", they would convert in droves. I see no one doing that.
4) Among those shit conditions is, in fact, the flooding of our countries with foreigners. That is an urgent problem. Is Christianity a solution to that? You might argue that this is a category error, which, sure ... But the next question is, is Christianity contributing to that? And the undeniable fact is that Christian charities are extremely active in facilitating migration. So, that's a problem, and insofar as that is a problem it is not helping to endear the church to young men.
5) Really kinda sick of hearing how Christianity was why Europe conquered the world. The Roman republic got as far as was technologically possible without Christianity. The church absolutely did not unify Europe, ever. Best you can maybe argue is that the Christian worldview facilitated scientific inquiry, which enabled the technological edge that in turn enabled the age of exploration and empires. Even then frankly I think that all had more to do with European genetics. I haven't seen Christianity produce an Enlightenment in Africa.
6) if not misinterpreting your scripture requires reading 800 volumes of exegesis ... I dunno maybe the problem is that your scripture is too easy to misinterpret. Like, I'm constantly seeing Christian apologists writing long pieces explaining why Apparently Cucked Thing akshually means Really Based Thing, and they might even be correct, but the ease with which scripture can be misinterpreted seems like a huge problem.
7) Yes, he needs an editor, and someone needs to tell him this lol
1) Little about the piece gives me the impression that he has an enormous range of experience with Christian churches. Going by this essay he mainly seems to be relying on childhood impressions. There are thriving Christian communities all over the US (to be fair, I can’t speak specifically to the situation in Canada).
2) You’re hardly being comprehensive in your notions of ancestors. You mention the Aryans, but your ancestors also include the people they conquered, and their spiritual traditions. The religion of the Aryans, whatever it was, became something different everywhere it set up shop. The religious practices of the Greeks included a huge Semitic adstrate reflected in the pantheon; Norse myth includes Shamanic practices from Uralic peoples; Hinduism is Hinduism, etc. Every generation practiced something ever more different from what their ancestors would have recognized. It’s wholly arbitrary to return to some point and say- this is what my ancestors did.
I honestly don’t understand the point about continuity. My specialty as a historian is Late Antiquity and I’ve written extensively about the interrelationship between the older religious and philosophical doctrines and Christianity. Christian Bishops were generally educated in the pagan classics, they debated using Greek philosophical vocabulary, they adopted and adapted the religious iconography of their day. I didn’t think any of that, in and of itself, was the least bit controversial. The argument I generally hear is that Christianity represented an inversion of pagan values, but they apparently also secretly didn’t invert them; which is it?
3) I don’t see any sign that that rage is (for the most part) being directed into anything except rationalization. Too many young men want what liberalism has to offer but don’t want to pay its toll. They are mad because they’re unable to get the things they want. Christianity is about wanting better things.
4) There are a lot of groups doing a lot of bad things regarding immigration, too many of them ostensively Christian, but most of their funding comes from secular governments and they serve as a cover for an agenda that has nothing to do with the Church. See Russell Moore. It’s pretty bad and it should end.
5) Europeans have had the same basic genetics since antiquity.
Genetics and no Christianity = repeated waves of barbarian invasions.
Genetics and Christianity = Invasions stop and the west does the invading.
Genetics and no Christianity again = repeated waves of barbarian invasions.
I’m no scientists, but if I were looking for a variable…
6) If I were to hold forth on astronomy, and state as fact that the moon was made of styrofoam and hung from the heavens by a string, and you directed me to read some basic literature, you would hardly accept the response that if astronomy is that easy to get wrong it must be untrue. Christianity is an education, and while you don’t need to read 800 volumes (I was exaggerating for comedic effect) you should at least be familiar with basic works if you’re going to dismiss the whole thing as trash.
Regarding ancestral religions, we live in a deracinated society. People are looking for connection to the past, for deep roots. The old gods are about as deep as it gets, religiously. Your arguments about spiritual admixture seem a lot like the arguments that Europeans don't really exist, because there are differences, they interbred, etc. Yet they do. Similarly, European paganism has a continuous tradition dating back to the bronze age.
Invasions: which are we talking about here? The Germanic tribes were Europeans invading Europeans. The Huns didn't succeed. Muslims successfully conquered Christian North Africa, which they still hold, and Iberia, which they held for seven centuries. The only reason the Mongols didn't roll over Christian Europe was that their Khan died. Meanwhile, the Roman empire was the only time that Europe was united for any long period, and this was not Christians; Alexander conquered the known world, and he was also not a Christian.
You're correct that the anger of young men is mostly not being productively channeled. Can the church channel it? Maybe. I'm not seeing them do that. I am seeing them getting lectured about how they're deficient and shouldn't want what they want ... Which is exactly what the wider society does. Point being, maybe if the church actually tried to help them, fill the some of the many empty places in their lives, the church might stop dying.
When you have a large number of sensitive young men who are less than satisfied with the church, refuting whatever historical or theological misconceptions they have isn't actually going to win them over. They need to be offered something, and I don't mean bible study groups. Right now no one is offering them shit - and for the record this is also true of the pagans, who are not large or influential enough to do anything meaningful. But if you keep seeing the same unsympathetic misconceptions, it might be time for introspection: why are the kids either disinterested or hostile? What is the church doing wrong? What could it do better?
Regarding the ease of misinterpretation, I wasn't saying Christianity is untrue because its hard to grasp. The point is a bit more subtle. If people keep making the same basic errors due to misreading scripture, such that correcting those errors requires tomes of exegesis, this implies that scripture is badly written. Comparisons to the exact sciences don't really wash - the latter are intellectually demanding by their very nature, and not really intended for mass understanding ... nor, crucially, are they intended as an organizing basis for society. That said when scientists find that they're misunderstood, they generally try to find easier ways of communicating fundamental principles.
John, you should turn this string of comments into an article, for it is too good a point to just leave it here unseen. If by chance you don't want to get in bad graces with the christian mob, and rather not do it, it would be understandable.
In response to your point of misinterpretation, would it be a fair evaluation to assume that Achilles is an effeminate because he has a hissy fit over not receiving his sex slave at the beginning of the Iliad, or would it be better to look at this with the cultural context that Pagan nations of that time period had the right of sexual conquest over the women they captured and Agamemnon was slighting him?
Plenty of people think that David and Johnathan were gay despite their God obliterating Sodom and Gomorrah, why wouldn't the same ignorant assume Achilles having a hissy fit?
Just skimmed though this. You have the temerity to tell us that we should not be filled with rage at what migrants are doing to our countries, and should spend our time praying instead, while supporting African charities.
And you then have the presumption to call yourself a man of the right?
"That said when scientists find that they're misunderstood, they generally try to find easier ways of communicating fundamental principles."
John, please.
We don't bother at that. If the slobs don't get it, we are not going out of our way to rewrite the paper. We will leave it up to Attenborough or Tysen or some other media face for the condescending quips. The best most scientists will do is conduct a passive-aggressive flame war in the back of a journal.
I think perhaps what you're assuming is that the Pagans here have some sort of magisterial mentality where foreign elements of belief destroy the integrity of the belief system.
I don't think they are thinking in those terms. I don't think they even agree with Evola in the maintenance of ritual. I think they may actually somehow may desire the cultural expression over the religion itself.
In an abstract sense that’s true, but most of the pagans I encounter advocate for it on the grounds that it’s the natural religion for Europeans/ white people and reject Christianity because it’s foreign and Jewish. My point is that “ancestral” religion has just as many foreign aspects. Evola’s ideas about race were interesting and nuanced and though a pagan, he didn’t think in terms of crude biological reductionism.
Yeah, as I was writing that comment that tension in their view entered my mind. They may say something like "Well, the European spirit can discern for itself the parts that fit themselves", but then one could simply point out the tone in the room in European countries. How does one distinguish Jewish subversion from genuine development?
Ever notice how the Bible is like a Rorschach test? In many ways it's like a mirror to men's souls, their beliefs and morality. Just because you can find fault in the instrumentalised and personalised faith of how some have come to interpret the Bible doesn't mean that you have reject faith entirely. One of the basic mistakes people make is to judge the worth of a particular philosophy or technology on the basis of how it's being applied in the real world today. On a personal note, this was true for me- I spent more than twenty years in an intellectual wilderness with a persistent belief that there must be something fundamentally wrong with our Western systems of knowledge. In my arrogance I believed that I could start from scratch and acquire a new base of knowledge through observation as a means to critique the current paradigm.
I made two mistakes. 1) The problem with the world is not the state of knowledge- it's a matter of the way said knowledge is being applied. In pursuit of very specific goals, elites in the West have been employing instrumental, rather than epistemic, rationality. 2) The answer was not a new tree of knowledge, but a more intimate and familiar knowledge of the tree of knowledge which already exists. To give an example of how this works- some versions of Christianity once argued that the Bible claimed that all Black men and women were inferior- the Children of Ham.
The answer to those who exercise Christianity for fraudulent purposes is to know the material better, not to reject Christianity itself (although of course you are free to choose to believe or not believe, as is your right).
Anywhere, here's a stab at a counter-argument to Christian pro-mass migration arguments. First, we have two sources of poverty in the West. The poverty of those within our societies, the poor who seek to come to our shores, and the poverty caused by the fundamental devaluation of labour value through unlimited labour supply. Of these two problems, not only is the latter is the greater, but solving poverty for one group necessarily impoverishes the latter.
The Christian counterpoint to what's happening in the West, in two-part. First, Jesus didn't force the rich man to give up his wealth- he merely told him what would be spiritually in his best interests. Second, the rich men and women of our civilisation aren't giving away their own wealth or opportunities- they are giving away the wealth and opportunities of those considerably less fortunate than themselves, through their perverse luxury beliefs.
Second, as well as two sources of poverty, there are two types- material and spiritual. Theodore Dalrymple has written at length on this topic. He's seen the poverty of the developing world. It's materially poor but optimistic- boundlessly enthusiastic in its desire to improve circumstances. Then there is the poverty of the Developed world. Materially, it's only relative poverty- but it is a far worse poverty, and far more insoluble. It's the poverty of despair and hopelessness which comes from treading water carrying a heavy weight. And everything our ruling classes is doing with regard to mass migration is only making the situation worse.
And there's the rub. Our more postmodern Christians have misconstrued which part of the Bible the West is living in today. They want to minister to the poor, which is not a bad thing, provided it's not furnished with the meagre wealth and dearth of opportunities already experienced by the blue collar class throughout the West. No, we are living in the time of Pharaoh and they are his unwitting taskmasters. The Pharaohs of the West have asked the slaves to make bricks without straw, and they are abetting them.
Finally, the fatal Coup De Grace. What will happen to the children of the migrants being mass imported to the West? Nothing good, if the experiences of Sweden or several other Western European countries is anything to go by (Netherlands, France, Germany). If anything the spiritual poverty which they seem to be experiencing is far worse than the material poverty they might have expected growing up in the country of origin of their parents. All the evidence points to the fact that far from experiencing a batter life, many children of migrants whose parents aren't highly skilled, seem to have a worse lot in life than the already benighted and exploited blue collar class in the West, or people growing up in their parents former homelands.
The Catholic Church sold indulgences. In the Church of England rectorages are funded by private benefactors, and it's not unusual for whichever family paid for it to have their own private balcony, where they can lord it over the commoners.
Even the Bible itself has been corrupted by money. 'The meek shall inherit the Earth' was originally 'the poor will inherit the Earth'. The wording was changed to suit the Roman aristocracy, according to a Divinities professor from Oxford or Cambridge.
'The problem with the world is not the state of knowledge- it's a matter of the way said knowledge is being applied. In pursuit of very specific goals, elites in the West have been employing instrumental, rather than epistemic, rationality.'
I think it’s unlikely, as it’s mostly just a matter of sacred values. Christians prize their universalist faith more than the health and welfare of any particular race or people or nation, and they either can never be convinced that those two can ever be at odds or are so committed to fighting the “long defeat” that they simply acquiesce to the anti social forces tearing us apart.
It’s precisely because I am an adult that I’m concerned about this. I don’t want the “beautiful losers” as Francis called them to steer and dominate the conversation about how to actually revive our moribund society.
I have children, I don’t want them to live in a ruin.
Christian Europeans successfully defended Europe from the Huns, Mongols, and Moors.
The Celts, Gauls, Greeks, and Germanics were more or less conquered by the Romans and brought into the fold. I’m just having trouble seeing how being a pagan somehow means more cultural and political stability.
Don't know about others, mais French-Catholicisme kicks ass; we have the best potlucks, we pray together, provide social-aid to one another, help find jobs for our young, all while celebrating French nationalisme, Jesus and dogs and have been in Quebec pushing hard for the Latin-Masse.
In northern Ontario, it used to be entirely French-masse everywhere and it rocked. I've also heard good things about the Gaelic Masse (I really want to check it out in a few years).
That said, Kulak's arguments make no sense to me. I'm a former pagan, former atheist and all I ever felt was misery, and have since returned to Holy Mother Church. I've since fallen in love, returned to reading the Bible, have reconnected with relatives, have published a book, met with success online. What can my prior deeds as a pagan or atheist compare with these? What can say Gaul or Eire speak of in terms of successes or accomplishments to rival the grand deeds of France, of Ireland or of Scotland? Each of them Christian nations, kingdoms that overcame such trials and tribulations that people still speak in awe of them.
If one doesn't like Christianity fine, no hard feelings but methinks a little respect is due for the ancestors, for the accomplishments of those of whom Celaeno spoke of so eloquently. I think this 'vitalist' or 'neo-pagan' vs Christianity nonsense should end if we want to triumph over the enemies at the gates. Divided we WILL fall, united we will stand.
That said, I suppose my viewpoint is; Christianity is strong, vibrant and has died many times and come back each time, and it is infinitely preferable with its emphasis on kindness, chevalerie, pity and love to any of the alternatives which have little use for these concepts.
Merci, it is these very deeds and many others that have inspired me to write about their history on my substack, and to imprint some of it into my fiction that I publish also here. None can quite rival the glory of our ancestors or the deeds Christianity moved them to advance and press forward.
Kulak is Canadian. I suspect his experience with Christianity comes from the Anglican church.
For the most part, Anglican church today does match his caricature of Christianity. Ditto for closely related churches like the Methodists. The decline in these denominations began in earnest when I was a child. I witnessed the Episcopal church dumbing itself down in order to be "relevant."
As a Catholic, let me observe that we take a lot of abuse over that whole “Inquisition” thing but if you’d just have let us take care of these puling heretics at the beginning we wouldn’t have some of these problems now.
Catholics function as nothing more than a refugee importing NGO in the United States. This is far more offensive and detrimental to my country than anything Protestants can do.
Not Jews, if that’s what you’re insinuating. They have their own NGOs but are far less relevant than the Catholics, less funded, less impactful, etc. This isn’t even necessarily a defense of them, as their position in America’s elite is quite evidently a resounding net-negative. I’m just not going to be dishonest and narrow-minded, and blame them for something which has the effect of absolving other guilty conspirators.
Correction: "[Too many] Catholic [bishops] function as nothing more than a refugee importing NGO in the United States." As a Catholic, I find it offensive, inhumane and detrimental to my country.
I was raised in a "Mixed" household of several denominations. I was in and out of Anglican, Lutheran, Presbyterian, United, Episcopal...
Every one of them in unison turned into the caricature at the same time the Catholic schools started hosting queer-Straight alliances.
This was EVERY denomination except for the Amish and Mennonites.
I attended my sister's Baptist church recently... Entirely fat white women, old former alcoholics, and east indian men the closeted priest was trying to match-make with the white girls.
So sodomy or miscegenation... choose your own adventure.
I'll allow a benevolent and loving God might possibly be out there somewhere, but he is certainly not in Canada.
Something I think youre both missing is that you can both be more or less right. As far as I have seen, Canada is a wasteland possibly worse than anywhere else I’ve been, not by attendance (Switzerland was worse), but by just watered down crap that is more or less what you describe, if not worse. Kulach, I encourage you to try, and I am sure you have already a lot by the sounds of it, to find some actual serious Christians somewhere. Perhaps get with librarian about where to go and you can make a challenge out of it.
On another note, the Catholics in Canada turned bad faster and earlier than anywhere else I’m aware of in the West, which the Librarian should look into. Essentially all of their bishops got together and made a statement that they were all in schism and JP2 didnt have the balls to do anything about it, right around the time Pierre Trudeau marked the end of Canada as a real country.
The West needs a new high church protestant denomination. (There are still ultra low church denominations which stick to the Bible and aren't woke. But the emotionalism and horribly repetitive hymns drive away the Vulcans.)
Israeli is a modern secular term. I think what you meant was Israelite. Now, for me God is universal, His Kingdom is in Heaven not of this world. But I’ll stop there, because these debates between Christians and Pagans go nowhere.
Reading Kulak's piece, I got this impression too, based on other Anglicans that I've known. Maybe if he'd been raised around hothouse tent revivals and wildcat snake-handler cults, he'd have a different impression.
But, for the record, the minister at my childhood church was based as all get out. Too much so. When I was training to be an acolyte, he went on a bit of a rant to my mother about how Jews were conspiring to destroy Christianity. He would have gotten along great with Vox Day.
And my Methodist childhood friends were still worried about hell.
The initial decline was just dumbing down the language in the Prayer Book. The complete collapse came later.
Presumably there are places aside from the deep south where churches and queer-outreach centers are different institutions... but it's alien to my experience.
I live in the Deep South, so that is my radius of personal experience. The queer outreach centers are mainline Protestant churches in the nearby large metro area. They are dying of spiritual AIDS. But even there, one can find congregations that actually practice the faith in some traditional form or another.
When people online speak of ‘based’ Christianity they can mean a lot of things. If one means a church backing a political program centered on race and nationalism, such a thing doesn’t really exist on anything but a niche level, mainly because, as I noted, the Church isn’t a political organization. If by based one means a Church committed to upholding the doctrines of the faith against all pressure to conform to the world, depending on one’s ideas about what constitutes a church, there are a number of Evangelical Protestant groups that cleave to their version, as well as traditionalist Catholics. The Orthodox Church, apart from Fordham and some things out of the Phanar, is wholly committed to Apostolic Christianity. As far as politics goes, traditionalists who feel they can engage with the system tend to go TradCath (JD Vance) while those with a more counter-system mindset go OrthoBro; those are generalizations, but it is a pattern. Read the link if you want more information.
I'm a Canadian Catholic, and a while ago I read about how this local Anglican Church was built according to the wishes of a member of a well-known local family. I was curious about this, so I figured I would check out their website to see if they had anything more about that history, but it didn't have anything on the church's history at all. It did have information on anti-racism and all that kind of stuff though. If that represents the typical Anglican experience then I can understand his frustration.
I’ve been a youth leader in the Swedish church for two years now, and the “John Lennon Jesus” is actually a perfect depiction of what they taught us here, and bonus points to Kulak for accuracy; our priest is a lesbian. But, these are nice people, very caring, they are merely the kind of super adapted and sociable person western civilization was built on. The high trust man who is completely in line with the dictates of his society. No wonder they are globohomo liberals.
I initially wanted to be catechized (confirmed?) because I had recently gained a profound interest in Christianity, actually from listening to orthodox chants on YouTube, I think everyone knows which video I mean haha. I felt I had to participate in this tradition of my ancestors. Naturally the choice was the Swedish church, it’s the church of my people and the Lutheran faith and confession has always been appealing to me. (I am Swedish).
It was apparent as soon as I stepped inside the door that this was not traditional Christianity, this was not the stern faith of my fathers. It’s very female in nature, women are the majority. You may never say anything exclusionary, there is TOTAL EGALITARIANISM. But I stayed, I felt despite my constant self censorship I needed some form of irl outlet for my “deeper” thoughts and perhaps a gateway to socializing despite my atomization. I’ve lately been growing tired of this though, these meetings are mostly girl talks about trivialities and some sparse discussions on personal faith…
My point is that Kulak is correct in his assessment of “John Lennon Jesus” as the deity of “christianity”, however to say that this heretical variant is in the majority world wide would be ridiculous. It is perhaps the most popular denomination in most European Protestant countries, but not in the world. This would not fly in the Congo or Peru. It is blindingly obvious to anyone familiar with a true Christian faith, even in its most basic doctrinal assertions, that this faith is disingenuous and phony. The fact that these churches reject or question the Bible as inherently true, the divinity of Jesus and or the resurrection, THE CONCEPT OF SIN or traditional marriage, these truly most BASIC forms of Christian faith, tells us so clearly, they are not honest. The amount of lying and deception against yourself you have to go through to be a liberal Christian is insane. I believe if Kulak did attain his views of Christianity through childhood experiences of church (Anglican church as it seems, which is very similar to the Swedish church on these issues) these initial reactions are very legitimate. However, I believe that if he had then not immediately been discouraged and wholly rejected the faith, he might have found something deeper within Christ than the trivial “love” these people teach. I hope you’re doing well librarian. I always appreciate your posts. Interesting to see this one in particular as I reacted similarly when I first read Kulaks post. God bless.
The key is to depart from Protestantism as quickly as possible and become either Catholic or (if you really can’t deal with Francis) Orthodox. There is a reason Peter was the leader of the apostles.
Do these guys even understand how Wotan would be worshipped in the modern day? Their entire priest class was destroyed. The entire culture it's based upon was destroyed a millennia ago, and we will never know many of the nuances of the folk tales the ancient Germanics would understand implicitly. Read The Poetic Edda and recognize how many names and events are lost to the wind, with only conjecture and educated guessing left to explain these massive gaps in their mythological worldview.
It's like if the Orthodox and Catholic priesthood vanished, and someone picked up The Bible with no other context centuries later. A religion that loses its cultural transmission ceases to exist.
Exactly. Save for the Greeks and Romans, most of the Celtic and Germanic/Nordic peoples didn't even have writing to record their beliefs and practices. Not all but much of what we know from say the Nordics for example comes from Christian sources. Ironic.
Ironic that Christians attempt to use this as evidence that the religion is lost "oh Christians destroyed it all and rewrote it!"
We have the ability to investigate crimes decades old. We are not retarded browns. The knowledge isn't completely lost, moreover it exists within our very spirits.
That’s not really ironic. What’s ironic is that “retarded browns” (your phrase) are the only people on earth who actually do have a living pagan tradition. If you want a control group for where that leads, you can head to India (or Toronto, apparently).
This is above all a very *patient* critique. I read his piece and couldn't be bothered even getting started on what he got wrong.
'Your ancestral racial religion, such as it is, is Christianity.'
This is true, and there is no way to escape its morality other than the experience of total civilisational collapse--and who wishes for that? Until then Christianity remains at the root of civilised life, in the only way that we can understand it. If and when the war of all against all begins (and I hope it never does), you will see the real 'pagans' emerge, with a *real* pitiless pagan morality--and I doubt somehow that they will be worshippers of Odin or Apollo.
Naturally a huge praise-wave is coming your way; the above is but a small part of its froth.
EDIT: Kulak is often a highly original thinker; his piece on Tacitus, the Valkyries and NW Euro women is...something else.
Its kinda sad how obsessed atheists are with something they claim not to believe in. Every day its another article whining about God and Christians. Its so obvious that its predominantly inexperienced, uneducated children writing these screeds that its fookin boring already.
The counter arguments I’ve seen so far have been hostile and snippy, dancing around the issue in a way that indicates a crisis of faith. People are running back to traditional religion as we watch society collapse around us, but the increasing spiritual emptiness of those institutions has never been successfully resolved. Unless the connection with the divine is reestablished all this renewed interest will just be a flash in the pan before something more deserving replaces it.
If your faith is so weak that you can’t stand someone else having a different opinion then you have a lot more in common with modern leftists than you think
I think the core of this problem is that, in not understanding the purpouse of religion(which, to be fair, very few people do) and by not really being willing to give up pluralism (that is to say, practically speaking, an aversion to dogma as such), they remain within modernism itself. And that of course leads them to the only religiosity modernism permits, that being Schleiermachers pursuit of spiritual experience, aka Theological Liberalism in it's full sense. Which is to say, they themselves have more in common when it comes to theology/philosophy with as you say, the Lolcow sects than with actual Christians.
But those Churches got subverted by leftists because of Mosca's Law - *motivated* minorities rule. Which is to say, that sort of religion clearly can't generate the animating force neccesarry to create that minority, nevermind protect itself or forumulate a political formula. But seeking precisely that is the point of this discussion on the political right.
I really should get around to writing an essay on this.
I'm not sure that lady deserves all the attention she gets. Being an enthusiastic grammar quisling, I tend to scorn aberran't apostrophe's and similar prolefeed. I might be a snob, but most likely I'm already getting enough of it on Xitter.
Anyway... I'm not particularly religious but one Christian maxim I wholeheartedly agree with is «by their fruits you shall know them»; and organized Neo-Paganism brought us Azov Batallion. No, thanks.
Kulak’s post is a hallucinatory fever-dream full of resentment at something which exists only in his mind. If you’re going to criticize Christianity for something, at least get the facts right.
This is basic persuasive writing 101. Sadly, on the internet, we see the truth in the axiom that facts and logic have little-to-no power to persuade most people as opposed to emotion. Kulak gets that which is why his posts do numbers.
There are failings among Christian denominations and individual Christians, most prominent being failure to accurately teach the true faith—this is why dogma is important and “every man is a priest/all you need is a Bible and your own personal interpretation, bro” was recognized by the actual church as the heresy it was—but to blame Christianity of all things—the thing which was and is rejected by nearly all decision-makers the past two centuries (including many Founders!) is as laughable as blaming Zoroastrianism.
For me, the fact that Christianity triggers people across the left-right spectrum is evidence that it's true. Either that or Jesus had otherworldly powers of trolling.
Christianity, absent the interior life, is indeed neutered. In each generation, the Church wanders away from its source, which is Jesus Christ acting in the souls of believers, and must be called back to it. But that interior life requires surrendering to the folly of the Cross, which is exactly what the gentiles, like Kulak, find abhorrent.
The whole Christian project is to do something so stupid according to the wisdom of the world that it can't possibly work, and then by seeking the kingdom of God and His righteousness, all these things really are given unto you.
I've never read a full article from Kulak yet somehow I thought he was a she; shows how much investigation I did, I suppose. What's the deal with the profile pic, then? Is it some meme I'm woefully unaware of?
Does this represent the resurgence of the "vitalist" vs Christian battle I've heard so much about?
Forgive me, I'm not one of the cool kids 'round here - I don't know all the ins and outs; I just read Kulak and thought "Well, okay" and opened something else. I'm a busy man, you know (there is a world outside Substack, I remember, sometimes unfortunately).
'Does this represent the resurgence of the "vitalist" vs Christian battle I've heard so much about?'
Yes but it never really goes away. Crypto-establishment 'traditional christian' ghouls attack (ATTAQ!) BAP and others--mainly BAP--and 'pagans' respond with some variation on Kulak's arguments. Sometimes it's the other way around.
Obviously The Librarian and other right-wing Christian substackers are not crypto-establishment ghouls--many are genuine and in my opinion many get *almost* everything right--but things go back and forth in much the same way between substack Christians and pagans.
European is a pretty nebulous concept. There is a place called Europe where people broadly sharing genetic patterns live. It’s a useful construct for understanding things in some contexts, not so much in others. No Roman would have thought of the Germans, for example, as anything like them in terms of race, culture, etc. Caesar felt free to conduct a campaign of genocide against the Gauls because he viewed them much like colonial powers viewed the Indians. “European” is an identity that emerged over centuries and is impossibly to disaggregate from “Christendom.”
There is not “a continuous tradition” of European paganism. Continuous implies ongoing. It’s long gone and has been long gone since the Middle Age at the latest. At best, one could argue that it could be resurrected, but here you arrive at the point I was making. Will Isis worship be a part of your European pagan revival? How about Cybele, the Neolithic Magna Mater? Do we edit all the material from the Enuma Elish from the Theogony? This isn’t a theoretical consideration; neopagans have to argue these exact points because of their similar misconceived essentialism. There is exactly one European religion with a continuous tradition still practiced there, and it’s not Odinism. If you say, “but Christianity came from Asia,” well, so did the Aryans.
To your second point, no one in Roman antiquity would have attached any significance to the fact that, of the three continents they knew of, the Germanic tribes shared Europe with them. They were as hostile and predatory as any boat people today, and just as alien. Fortunately, Christian missionaries were able to smooth away the rough edges and build upon their positive traits, such that Europe was reconstructed with those barbarians playing a major role. The Roman Empire was revived in the West, eventually, under Christian rulers, controlling far more of Europe, and the world, than the old pagan Empire did.
Regarding your third point, yes, the Church could certainly do more. Clement of Alexandria thought the Church was neglecting everything education; no one would listen to him, so he started his own school as part of a program of catechesis. Francis of Assisi thought the Church was neglecting the poor, so he went out and lived among them, and started an order dedicated to that purpose. The mistake so many young men make is to think of the Church as a service provider like Door Dash and lament that it’s neglecting an untapped market. The Church isn’t the buildings and the priests, it’s the whole body of believers. If no one in the Church is doing what you think it ought to be doing, that may, perhaps, be a sign that you are the one meant to do it.
People keep making the same basic errors in interpretation because of the Dunning Kruger effect. They’re good at statistics or computer science but, knowing nothing about the Bible, imagine it must be an order of magnitude simpler. Then when their superficial and reductive readings are challenged, they blame the text for being obscure. It isn’t. It was written in a particular time and place, meaning that some parts will be more challenging to interpret, but was meant for all times and people. The key to unraveling that paradox is to realize that scripture can only really be understood within a living holy tradition. Scripture in that sense is as intellectually demanding as the mind inquiring into it can bear, and its exegesis is in no way intended for a mass audience. Neoliberalism is largely based on the notion that the exact sciences can serve as an organizing basis for society. Missionaries are men with a special charisma for communicating the truths of the faith in terms comprehensible to a particular people. The based young right are wide open for one so gifted.
'No Roman would have thought of the Germans, for example, as anything like them in terms of race, culture, etc.'
Isn't the whole point of The Germania to point Romans back towards what they had been and had lost?
'Caesar felt free to conduct a campaign of genocide against the Gauls because he viewed them much like colonial powers viewed the Indians.'
His was the final movement in the symphony of Roman revenge--the Gauls had terrorised the Latins (and Etruscans) in Italy for at least a century before they were exitirpated or expelled from or assimilated in Italy beyond the Appenines--as well as an expression of his sheer will to power, in the higher and lower senses of the phrase. I don't think a perception of Gaulish savagery were uppermost in Roman reckoning, just as a perception of Indian savagery was not the main motivation of the colonial wars in Appalachia and the American West.
'European is a pretty nebulous concept. There is a place called Europe where people broadly sharing genetic patterns live. It’s a useful construct for understanding things in some contexts, not so much in others.'
OK sure there's this silly idea of 'pan-European paganism', by which all wipipo are somehow ancestral Odinists or whatever. But saying Europe is '[only] a useful construct...where people share [no more than] genetic patterns' is a bit reductive. It reminds me of undergrad history tutors who would say things like 'feudalism is not a *useful* way to describe social relations in 16th century England'. I always used to think, 'Useful be damned. Is it accurate or not?' (they were probably largely right in their objection to describing England then as feudal, but why not just say inaccurate? "Not Useful" wtf?).
A similar objection applies here: Is there such a thing as Europe beyond geography and genes? Is it more than just a contingent 'construct'? Is there in fact, and has there always been for as far back as we can tell, a Europe of the spirit? In spite of massive spiritual differences among Europeans (which should be preserved as far as possible) I would say yes.
lol
So many of these arguments posed by the anti-Christian camp remind me of a class I took in college on Political Theory in Antiquity, which ended up being one of the most formative classes I ever took. Not just because it was the place I was introduced to the great works of philosophy by Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine (which was his favorite), Thomas Aquinas, so on and so forth, but the Professor himself was remarkable. He was from Quebec and a lapsed Catholic who told me, during a private discussion, "The saddest thing on earth is a man who lost his faith and desperately wants to find it again." Obviously, he was fighting his own demons, but for being a self-professed lapsed Catholic and agnostic, he was always defending Christianity on basic, logical arguments that helped spark a renewed interest in religion myself. Every time anyone has a question about Christianity, he had an answer that was simply irrefutable because he was so well read on the topic.
I remember distinctly this one kid tried to "epically own" him on the question of the Trinity, and he just sat down, put his hands in his head, and said something to the effect of, "There are more books written on that topic than you could ever read in a life time. Every question you have has been answered by men smarter than me. If you want to argue about this, please read some of them, and then we can have this discussion." So much of Christianity's most vociferous critics fail to grasp even the basic concepts of it, so much so that debate with them is often pointless because they don't know what they don't know. Pretty much any question they might have has already been discussed extensively since the foundation of the religion and written about by men much more intelligent than any of us. And I'm not claiming to be a great Christian scholar or theologian, but his words always struck me as profound. You can't really argue against Christianity if you only have a surface level understanding of it, no more than you can argue or debate against anything without at least a working knowledge of it.
I hope that man found the peace he seemed to be longing for.
I always found it interesting that each generation seems to reinvent the classic Christian heresies, but aren't familiar enough with Christianity to figure out the classic names.
Pelagianism, for instance, is practically orthodoxy in liberal "Christianity" these days.
I grew un a cult that taught what amounts to a dozen heresies all at once. It was pretty cringe.
Heh. I grew up LDS; that's got at least a dozen heresies, and probably more.
I grew up a Jehovah's witness.
There was something in the water in the 19th century I guess
Bless you friend.
I also grew up in a cult - Protestantism
A lot of the more novel teachings in the Protestant traditions also appear or become more prominent in the 19th century. It was an odd time
@Yakubian Ape I’m definitely sympathetic with your professor’s response and it sounds like he was pretty gracious about it. It strikes me that there is something of a parallel between that response and the one we hear about from the Ctrl-Left (though it is usually internally-directed), particularly on the anti-racist side, about ‘emotional labor’. Obviously, there are differences too (in person vs. in an online forum; admission of something like ignorance vs. implicit and inherent understanding; academic vs. ideological), but there is a parallel.
I see where you’re coming from, but in his defense, a lot of these kids asking these questions were very obviously posing them as a kind of “gotcha” thing so that they could show how enlightened they were and how they were so much smarter than the great luminaries who wrote the texts we were studying, and, in a class where you have an hour and a half to get through the material, you can’t really waste time having a back and forth about an incredibly dense, nuanced, and multifacted conversation like the nature of the Trinity. But I do see what you’re saying.
Oh, 100%. Another very relevant distinction.
A professor of mine once related a story from his graduate studies day. His theology professor challenged his students to invent a new heresy, and after multiple failed attempts, they thought they had one that dealt with the Holy Spirit.
They brought it in for review, and the professor turned around, grabbed a book, opened it and pointed to a page that essentially described the heresy they ‘invented’, but it was talking about something from the 4th or 5th century.
This has been my experience debating Christianity as well. Almost every time their issue is something taken out of context, distorted or just made up. I usually end it like your professor and ask them to just please read an introductory book on Christianity.
A few thoughts.
1) What Kulak is reacting to, I think, is American Christianity as it actually manifests ... And I don't just mean the mainline churches, although I definitely mean them too. Most priests I've met - with rare exceptions - have been extremely effeminate. Most churches I've been to have been mostly old women. Again, I'm sure there are exceptions ... but they're few and far between.
2) Ancestral religions are definitely a thing. The religion of the Greeks of the Hellenic era may have differed from that of the Homeric era, but there was continuity, indeed all the way back to the original Aryans (some of whose religious beliefs and practices we can, in fact, reconstruct). Christianity was an imposition, in many cases at sword point, in other cases through deception as when missionaries straight up lied to the Germans about Christ being a warrior king, which pretends to be sui generis, wholly the product of Jews. Now there are good reasons to believe there is more continuity with European paganism than Christians like to admit ... but many if not most Christians bitterly resist suggestions of continuity. Which, personally, does not help to endear them to me, as it rankles that they expect me to hold Jewish history as more religiously significant than my own; that indeed many expect me to believe that my own people's history, prior to contact with Judea, was demonic. That is not so Christians but it's a lot of them, and for me at least, it produces an instinctive counter-reaction.
3) Young guys are absolutely correct to be filled with white hot rage at the conditions they've been dumped into. If the church isn't going to help with that, then what good is it to them? You say they're erring to treat it instrumentally, but if it's useless to them then, like ... You see the problem, right? These kids have been told "fuck you, it isn't about you, men are over" their whole lives. If the church was like, "actually men are great, here look, we're going to do all these things to address the gaping holes in the lives of young men", they would convert in droves. I see no one doing that.
4) Among those shit conditions is, in fact, the flooding of our countries with foreigners. That is an urgent problem. Is Christianity a solution to that? You might argue that this is a category error, which, sure ... But the next question is, is Christianity contributing to that? And the undeniable fact is that Christian charities are extremely active in facilitating migration. So, that's a problem, and insofar as that is a problem it is not helping to endear the church to young men.
5) Really kinda sick of hearing how Christianity was why Europe conquered the world. The Roman republic got as far as was technologically possible without Christianity. The church absolutely did not unify Europe, ever. Best you can maybe argue is that the Christian worldview facilitated scientific inquiry, which enabled the technological edge that in turn enabled the age of exploration and empires. Even then frankly I think that all had more to do with European genetics. I haven't seen Christianity produce an Enlightenment in Africa.
6) if not misinterpreting your scripture requires reading 800 volumes of exegesis ... I dunno maybe the problem is that your scripture is too easy to misinterpret. Like, I'm constantly seeing Christian apologists writing long pieces explaining why Apparently Cucked Thing akshually means Really Based Thing, and they might even be correct, but the ease with which scripture can be misinterpreted seems like a huge problem.
7) Yes, he needs an editor, and someone needs to tell him this lol
1) Little about the piece gives me the impression that he has an enormous range of experience with Christian churches. Going by this essay he mainly seems to be relying on childhood impressions. There are thriving Christian communities all over the US (to be fair, I can’t speak specifically to the situation in Canada).
2) You’re hardly being comprehensive in your notions of ancestors. You mention the Aryans, but your ancestors also include the people they conquered, and their spiritual traditions. The religion of the Aryans, whatever it was, became something different everywhere it set up shop. The religious practices of the Greeks included a huge Semitic adstrate reflected in the pantheon; Norse myth includes Shamanic practices from Uralic peoples; Hinduism is Hinduism, etc. Every generation practiced something ever more different from what their ancestors would have recognized. It’s wholly arbitrary to return to some point and say- this is what my ancestors did.
I honestly don’t understand the point about continuity. My specialty as a historian is Late Antiquity and I’ve written extensively about the interrelationship between the older religious and philosophical doctrines and Christianity. Christian Bishops were generally educated in the pagan classics, they debated using Greek philosophical vocabulary, they adopted and adapted the religious iconography of their day. I didn’t think any of that, in and of itself, was the least bit controversial. The argument I generally hear is that Christianity represented an inversion of pagan values, but they apparently also secretly didn’t invert them; which is it?
3) I don’t see any sign that that rage is (for the most part) being directed into anything except rationalization. Too many young men want what liberalism has to offer but don’t want to pay its toll. They are mad because they’re unable to get the things they want. Christianity is about wanting better things.
4) There are a lot of groups doing a lot of bad things regarding immigration, too many of them ostensively Christian, but most of their funding comes from secular governments and they serve as a cover for an agenda that has nothing to do with the Church. See Russell Moore. It’s pretty bad and it should end.
5) Europeans have had the same basic genetics since antiquity.
Genetics and no Christianity = repeated waves of barbarian invasions.
Genetics and Christianity = Invasions stop and the west does the invading.
Genetics and no Christianity again = repeated waves of barbarian invasions.
I’m no scientists, but if I were looking for a variable…
6) If I were to hold forth on astronomy, and state as fact that the moon was made of styrofoam and hung from the heavens by a string, and you directed me to read some basic literature, you would hardly accept the response that if astronomy is that easy to get wrong it must be untrue. Christianity is an education, and while you don’t need to read 800 volumes (I was exaggerating for comedic effect) you should at least be familiar with basic works if you’re going to dismiss the whole thing as trash.
7) My rates are reasonable.
Regarding ancestral religions, we live in a deracinated society. People are looking for connection to the past, for deep roots. The old gods are about as deep as it gets, religiously. Your arguments about spiritual admixture seem a lot like the arguments that Europeans don't really exist, because there are differences, they interbred, etc. Yet they do. Similarly, European paganism has a continuous tradition dating back to the bronze age.
Invasions: which are we talking about here? The Germanic tribes were Europeans invading Europeans. The Huns didn't succeed. Muslims successfully conquered Christian North Africa, which they still hold, and Iberia, which they held for seven centuries. The only reason the Mongols didn't roll over Christian Europe was that their Khan died. Meanwhile, the Roman empire was the only time that Europe was united for any long period, and this was not Christians; Alexander conquered the known world, and he was also not a Christian.
You're correct that the anger of young men is mostly not being productively channeled. Can the church channel it? Maybe. I'm not seeing them do that. I am seeing them getting lectured about how they're deficient and shouldn't want what they want ... Which is exactly what the wider society does. Point being, maybe if the church actually tried to help them, fill the some of the many empty places in their lives, the church might stop dying.
When you have a large number of sensitive young men who are less than satisfied with the church, refuting whatever historical or theological misconceptions they have isn't actually going to win them over. They need to be offered something, and I don't mean bible study groups. Right now no one is offering them shit - and for the record this is also true of the pagans, who are not large or influential enough to do anything meaningful. But if you keep seeing the same unsympathetic misconceptions, it might be time for introspection: why are the kids either disinterested or hostile? What is the church doing wrong? What could it do better?
Regarding the ease of misinterpretation, I wasn't saying Christianity is untrue because its hard to grasp. The point is a bit more subtle. If people keep making the same basic errors due to misreading scripture, such that correcting those errors requires tomes of exegesis, this implies that scripture is badly written. Comparisons to the exact sciences don't really wash - the latter are intellectually demanding by their very nature, and not really intended for mass understanding ... nor, crucially, are they intended as an organizing basis for society. That said when scientists find that they're misunderstood, they generally try to find easier ways of communicating fundamental principles.
John, you should turn this string of comments into an article, for it is too good a point to just leave it here unseen. If by chance you don't want to get in bad graces with the christian mob, and rather not do it, it would be understandable.
I've said a lot of these things before, actually, in a few essays, e.g. my essays on Caesar, and on Reenchantment.
In response to your point of misinterpretation, would it be a fair evaluation to assume that Achilles is an effeminate because he has a hissy fit over not receiving his sex slave at the beginning of the Iliad, or would it be better to look at this with the cultural context that Pagan nations of that time period had the right of sexual conquest over the women they captured and Agamemnon was slighting him?
Only someone with the soul of a woman would write something that dishonestly bitchy.
Well how about you explain the dishonesty to me?
Plenty of people think that David and Johnathan were gay despite their God obliterating Sodom and Gomorrah, why wouldn't the same ignorant assume Achilles having a hissy fit?
LMAO
https://open.substack.com/pub/renaissancemanphil/p/critiquing-the-dissident-right-a
Just skimmed though this. You have the temerity to tell us that we should not be filled with rage at what migrants are doing to our countries, and should spend our time praying instead, while supporting African charities.
And you then have the presumption to call yourself a man of the right?
Absurd, pathetic, disgusting, and weak.
"That said when scientists find that they're misunderstood, they generally try to find easier ways of communicating fundamental principles."
John, please.
We don't bother at that. If the slobs don't get it, we are not going out of our way to rewrite the paper. We will leave it up to Attenborough or Tysen or some other media face for the condescending quips. The best most scientists will do is conduct a passive-aggressive flame war in the back of a journal.
Sort of like what is going on here.
I guess we must know different scientists. Many of the ones I know - those who teach in particular - try very hard to make themselves understood.
Then there are the textbooks, which have been refined over generations to make difficult concepts easier to grasp.
I think perhaps what you're assuming is that the Pagans here have some sort of magisterial mentality where foreign elements of belief destroy the integrity of the belief system.
I don't think they are thinking in those terms. I don't think they even agree with Evola in the maintenance of ritual. I think they may actually somehow may desire the cultural expression over the religion itself.
In an abstract sense that’s true, but most of the pagans I encounter advocate for it on the grounds that it’s the natural religion for Europeans/ white people and reject Christianity because it’s foreign and Jewish. My point is that “ancestral” religion has just as many foreign aspects. Evola’s ideas about race were interesting and nuanced and though a pagan, he didn’t think in terms of crude biological reductionism.
Yeah, as I was writing that comment that tension in their view entered my mind. They may say something like "Well, the European spirit can discern for itself the parts that fit themselves", but then one could simply point out the tone in the room in European countries. How does one distinguish Jewish subversion from genuine development?
Ever notice how the Bible is like a Rorschach test? In many ways it's like a mirror to men's souls, their beliefs and morality. Just because you can find fault in the instrumentalised and personalised faith of how some have come to interpret the Bible doesn't mean that you have reject faith entirely. One of the basic mistakes people make is to judge the worth of a particular philosophy or technology on the basis of how it's being applied in the real world today. On a personal note, this was true for me- I spent more than twenty years in an intellectual wilderness with a persistent belief that there must be something fundamentally wrong with our Western systems of knowledge. In my arrogance I believed that I could start from scratch and acquire a new base of knowledge through observation as a means to critique the current paradigm.
I made two mistakes. 1) The problem with the world is not the state of knowledge- it's a matter of the way said knowledge is being applied. In pursuit of very specific goals, elites in the West have been employing instrumental, rather than epistemic, rationality. 2) The answer was not a new tree of knowledge, but a more intimate and familiar knowledge of the tree of knowledge which already exists. To give an example of how this works- some versions of Christianity once argued that the Bible claimed that all Black men and women were inferior- the Children of Ham.
The answer to those who exercise Christianity for fraudulent purposes is to know the material better, not to reject Christianity itself (although of course you are free to choose to believe or not believe, as is your right).
Anywhere, here's a stab at a counter-argument to Christian pro-mass migration arguments. First, we have two sources of poverty in the West. The poverty of those within our societies, the poor who seek to come to our shores, and the poverty caused by the fundamental devaluation of labour value through unlimited labour supply. Of these two problems, not only is the latter is the greater, but solving poverty for one group necessarily impoverishes the latter.
The Christian counterpoint to what's happening in the West, in two-part. First, Jesus didn't force the rich man to give up his wealth- he merely told him what would be spiritually in his best interests. Second, the rich men and women of our civilisation aren't giving away their own wealth or opportunities- they are giving away the wealth and opportunities of those considerably less fortunate than themselves, through their perverse luxury beliefs.
Second, as well as two sources of poverty, there are two types- material and spiritual. Theodore Dalrymple has written at length on this topic. He's seen the poverty of the developing world. It's materially poor but optimistic- boundlessly enthusiastic in its desire to improve circumstances. Then there is the poverty of the Developed world. Materially, it's only relative poverty- but it is a far worse poverty, and far more insoluble. It's the poverty of despair and hopelessness which comes from treading water carrying a heavy weight. And everything our ruling classes is doing with regard to mass migration is only making the situation worse.
And there's the rub. Our more postmodern Christians have misconstrued which part of the Bible the West is living in today. They want to minister to the poor, which is not a bad thing, provided it's not furnished with the meagre wealth and dearth of opportunities already experienced by the blue collar class throughout the West. No, we are living in the time of Pharaoh and they are his unwitting taskmasters. The Pharaohs of the West have asked the slaves to make bricks without straw, and they are abetting them.
Finally, the fatal Coup De Grace. What will happen to the children of the migrants being mass imported to the West? Nothing good, if the experiences of Sweden or several other Western European countries is anything to go by (Netherlands, France, Germany). If anything the spiritual poverty which they seem to be experiencing is far worse than the material poverty they might have expected growing up in the country of origin of their parents. All the evidence points to the fact that far from experiencing a batter life, many children of migrants whose parents aren't highly skilled, seem to have a worse lot in life than the already benighted and exploited blue collar class in the West, or people growing up in their parents former homelands.
Is that Christian?
There's a simpler answer, though: In the US, Christianity was bought. With money.
There's a recent book out by Megan Basham, *Shepherds for Sale*, that explains how this happened.
The Catholic Church sold indulgences. In the Church of England rectorages are funded by private benefactors, and it's not unusual for whichever family paid for it to have their own private balcony, where they can lord it over the commoners.
Even the Bible itself has been corrupted by money. 'The meek shall inherit the Earth' was originally 'the poor will inherit the Earth'. The wording was changed to suit the Roman aristocracy, according to a Divinities professor from Oxford or Cambridge.
proofreading note: "laud" doesn't mean what you think it means.
I have no idea what relevance the rest of that has, to my comment. Are you talking to someone else?
Oh, shit. I posted on the wrong line! Thanks for the proofreading :)
'The problem with the world is not the state of knowledge- it's a matter of the way said knowledge is being applied. In pursuit of very specific goals, elites in the West have been employing instrumental, rather than epistemic, rationality.'
YES
Excellent comment
Rough stuff and well said.
At what point are you guys gonna stop crying about where on the doll big bad Christianity touched you?
It's getting old. Get over it.
At what point are you going to say something constructive?
I think it’s unlikely, as it’s mostly just a matter of sacred values. Christians prize their universalist faith more than the health and welfare of any particular race or people or nation, and they either can never be convinced that those two can ever be at odds or are so committed to fighting the “long defeat” that they simply acquiesce to the anti social forces tearing us apart.
You should get out more.
It's as constructive as you deserve. I'm busy.
As usual you have nothing useful or interesting to say.
Sure I do. I don't waste it online.
Man if you have never seen anything constructive from someone, maybe take the hint
boohoo nigga
Maybe when Christianity stops contributing to the wholesale deracination of our body politic?
So… probably never.
Grown adults get over their shit. "Body politic" or whatever doesn't prevent that.
It’s precisely because I am an adult that I’m concerned about this. I don’t want the “beautiful losers” as Francis called them to steer and dominate the conversation about how to actually revive our moribund society.
I have children, I don’t want them to live in a ruin.
Here's the thing. You may not have a choice about what your kids live in.
Considering how irresistible history can be, I suspect we're getting ruins no matter what we do.
So perhaps consider something that brings the good life regardless.
you are going to lose
That’s not an argument. That’s an evasion.
Whatever you say, champ.
Christian Europeans successfully defended Europe from the Huns, Mongols, and Moors.
The Celts, Gauls, Greeks, and Germanics were more or less conquered by the Romans and brought into the fold. I’m just having trouble seeing how being a pagan somehow means more cultural and political stability.
Don't know about others, mais French-Catholicisme kicks ass; we have the best potlucks, we pray together, provide social-aid to one another, help find jobs for our young, all while celebrating French nationalisme, Jesus and dogs and have been in Quebec pushing hard for the Latin-Masse.
In northern Ontario, it used to be entirely French-masse everywhere and it rocked. I've also heard good things about the Gaelic Masse (I really want to check it out in a few years).
That said, Kulak's arguments make no sense to me. I'm a former pagan, former atheist and all I ever felt was misery, and have since returned to Holy Mother Church. I've since fallen in love, returned to reading the Bible, have reconnected with relatives, have published a book, met with success online. What can my prior deeds as a pagan or atheist compare with these? What can say Gaul or Eire speak of in terms of successes or accomplishments to rival the grand deeds of France, of Ireland or of Scotland? Each of them Christian nations, kingdoms that overcame such trials and tribulations that people still speak in awe of them.
If one doesn't like Christianity fine, no hard feelings but methinks a little respect is due for the ancestors, for the accomplishments of those of whom Celaeno spoke of so eloquently. I think this 'vitalist' or 'neo-pagan' vs Christianity nonsense should end if we want to triumph over the enemies at the gates. Divided we WILL fall, united we will stand.
That said, I suppose my viewpoint is; Christianity is strong, vibrant and has died many times and come back each time, and it is infinitely preferable with its emphasis on kindness, chevalerie, pity and love to any of the alternatives which have little use for these concepts.
Well said, Brothers.
Merci, it is these very deeds and many others that have inspired me to write about their history on my substack, and to imprint some of it into my fiction that I publish also here. None can quite rival the glory of our ancestors or the deeds Christianity moved them to advance and press forward.
None, indeed.
Godspeed.
Merci, and to you also.
Kulak is Canadian. I suspect his experience with Christianity comes from the Anglican church.
For the most part, Anglican church today does match his caricature of Christianity. Ditto for closely related churches like the Methodists. The decline in these denominations began in earnest when I was a child. I witnessed the Episcopal church dumbing itself down in order to be "relevant."
As a Catholic, let me observe that we take a lot of abuse over that whole “Inquisition” thing but if you’d just have let us take care of these puling heretics at the beginning we wouldn’t have some of these problems now.
Catholics function as nothing more than a refugee importing NGO in the United States. This is far more offensive and detrimental to my country than anything Protestants can do.
You might want to look at the names of those running the NGOs
Not Jews, if that’s what you’re insinuating. They have their own NGOs but are far less relevant than the Catholics, less funded, less impactful, etc. This isn’t even necessarily a defense of them, as their position in America’s elite is quite evidently a resounding net-negative. I’m just not going to be dishonest and narrow-minded, and blame them for something which has the effect of absolving other guilty conspirators.
Correction: "[Too many] Catholic [bishops] function as nothing more than a refugee importing NGO in the United States." As a Catholic, I find it offensive, inhumane and detrimental to my country.
Who owns these "catholic" NGOs, by-and-large?
Catholics!
Vatican —> Caritas Internationalis —> CCUSA
'Catholics function as nothing more than a refugee importing NGO in the United States.'
Too true
Who’s running “catholic NGOs?”
Oh I’m not the first one. 😉
There’s no point in answering. It’s not Jews. That’s all I’ll say.
Can you make some “Catholic” NGOs?
The inquisition did for heretics what psychiatry does for mental illness. Sometimes more is not the answer.
I was raised in a "Mixed" household of several denominations. I was in and out of Anglican, Lutheran, Presbyterian, United, Episcopal...
Every one of them in unison turned into the caricature at the same time the Catholic schools started hosting queer-Straight alliances.
This was EVERY denomination except for the Amish and Mennonites.
I attended my sister's Baptist church recently... Entirely fat white women, old former alcoholics, and east indian men the closeted priest was trying to match-make with the white girls.
So sodomy or miscegenation... choose your own adventure.
I'll allow a benevolent and loving God might possibly be out there somewhere, but he is certainly not in Canada.
And I'm told in Europe it's worse.
This is the kind of thing I would make up as a teen because I didn't believe anyone would call me on it.
It reads like a made up story. Even if it were true, than it would be on you for framing it in such a fake way.
Something I think youre both missing is that you can both be more or less right. As far as I have seen, Canada is a wasteland possibly worse than anywhere else I’ve been, not by attendance (Switzerland was worse), but by just watered down crap that is more or less what you describe, if not worse. Kulach, I encourage you to try, and I am sure you have already a lot by the sounds of it, to find some actual serious Christians somewhere. Perhaps get with librarian about where to go and you can make a challenge out of it.
On another note, the Catholics in Canada turned bad faster and earlier than anywhere else I’m aware of in the West, which the Librarian should look into. Essentially all of their bishops got together and made a statement that they were all in schism and JP2 didnt have the balls to do anything about it, right around the time Pierre Trudeau marked the end of Canada as a real country.
The West needs a new high church protestant denomination. (There are still ultra low church denominations which stick to the Bible and aren't woke. But the emotionalism and horribly repetitive hymns drive away the Vulcans.)
You guys ignore the crucial points just to harp on "heresies" and dogma.
The church failed us. Your god is Israeli. It's over.
Israeli is a modern secular term. I think what you meant was Israelite. Now, for me God is universal, His Kingdom is in Heaven not of this world. But I’ll stop there, because these debates between Christians and Pagans go nowhere.
Having been raised Anglican, can confirm.
Reading Kulak's piece, I got this impression too, based on other Anglicans that I've known. Maybe if he'd been raised around hothouse tent revivals and wildcat snake-handler cults, he'd have a different impression.
Then again, maybe I would too.
But, for the record, the minister at my childhood church was based as all get out. Too much so. When I was training to be an acolyte, he went on a bit of a rant to my mother about how Jews were conspiring to destroy Christianity. He would have gotten along great with Vox Day.
And my Methodist childhood friends were still worried about hell.
The initial decline was just dumbing down the language in the Prayer Book. The complete collapse came later.
This is a good point. The church he complains about is mocked by all others as liberals.
Yes it is an accurate depiction of low Anglicanism. Can confirm.
The Episcopalian church means well but it's lost.
All churches Ive been to are liberalized. What world do you guys live in? They all support some form of globohomo
I'm also curious as to the map.
Presumably there are places aside from the deep south where churches and queer-outreach centers are different institutions... but it's alien to my experience.
I live in the Deep South, so that is my radius of personal experience. The queer outreach centers are mainline Protestant churches in the nearby large metro area. They are dying of spiritual AIDS. But even there, one can find congregations that actually practice the faith in some traditional form or another.
When people online speak of ‘based’ Christianity they can mean a lot of things. If one means a church backing a political program centered on race and nationalism, such a thing doesn’t really exist on anything but a niche level, mainly because, as I noted, the Church isn’t a political organization. If by based one means a Church committed to upholding the doctrines of the faith against all pressure to conform to the world, depending on one’s ideas about what constitutes a church, there are a number of Evangelical Protestant groups that cleave to their version, as well as traditionalist Catholics. The Orthodox Church, apart from Fordham and some things out of the Phanar, is wholly committed to Apostolic Christianity. As far as politics goes, traditionalists who feel they can engage with the system tend to go TradCath (JD Vance) while those with a more counter-system mindset go OrthoBro; those are generalizations, but it is a pattern. Read the link if you want more information.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/world/orthodox-christianity-surging-in-canada-as-other-denominations-decline-heres-why-5662287
I'm a Canadian Catholic, and a while ago I read about how this local Anglican Church was built according to the wishes of a member of a well-known local family. I was curious about this, so I figured I would check out their website to see if they had anything more about that history, but it didn't have anything on the church's history at all. It did have information on anti-racism and all that kind of stuff though. If that represents the typical Anglican experience then I can understand his frustration.
I’ve been a youth leader in the Swedish church for two years now, and the “John Lennon Jesus” is actually a perfect depiction of what they taught us here, and bonus points to Kulak for accuracy; our priest is a lesbian. But, these are nice people, very caring, they are merely the kind of super adapted and sociable person western civilization was built on. The high trust man who is completely in line with the dictates of his society. No wonder they are globohomo liberals.
I initially wanted to be catechized (confirmed?) because I had recently gained a profound interest in Christianity, actually from listening to orthodox chants on YouTube, I think everyone knows which video I mean haha. I felt I had to participate in this tradition of my ancestors. Naturally the choice was the Swedish church, it’s the church of my people and the Lutheran faith and confession has always been appealing to me. (I am Swedish).
It was apparent as soon as I stepped inside the door that this was not traditional Christianity, this was not the stern faith of my fathers. It’s very female in nature, women are the majority. You may never say anything exclusionary, there is TOTAL EGALITARIANISM. But I stayed, I felt despite my constant self censorship I needed some form of irl outlet for my “deeper” thoughts and perhaps a gateway to socializing despite my atomization. I’ve lately been growing tired of this though, these meetings are mostly girl talks about trivialities and some sparse discussions on personal faith…
My point is that Kulak is correct in his assessment of “John Lennon Jesus” as the deity of “christianity”, however to say that this heretical variant is in the majority world wide would be ridiculous. It is perhaps the most popular denomination in most European Protestant countries, but not in the world. This would not fly in the Congo or Peru. It is blindingly obvious to anyone familiar with a true Christian faith, even in its most basic doctrinal assertions, that this faith is disingenuous and phony. The fact that these churches reject or question the Bible as inherently true, the divinity of Jesus and or the resurrection, THE CONCEPT OF SIN or traditional marriage, these truly most BASIC forms of Christian faith, tells us so clearly, they are not honest. The amount of lying and deception against yourself you have to go through to be a liberal Christian is insane. I believe if Kulak did attain his views of Christianity through childhood experiences of church (Anglican church as it seems, which is very similar to the Swedish church on these issues) these initial reactions are very legitimate. However, I believe that if he had then not immediately been discouraged and wholly rejected the faith, he might have found something deeper within Christ than the trivial “love” these people teach. I hope you’re doing well librarian. I always appreciate your posts. Interesting to see this one in particular as I reacted similarly when I first read Kulaks post. God bless.
You must look up St Sigfrid and St Bridget of Sweden!
The key is to depart from Protestantism as quickly as possible and become either Catholic or (if you really can’t deal with Francis) Orthodox. There is a reason Peter was the leader of the apostles.
Do these guys even understand how Wotan would be worshipped in the modern day? Their entire priest class was destroyed. The entire culture it's based upon was destroyed a millennia ago, and we will never know many of the nuances of the folk tales the ancient Germanics would understand implicitly. Read The Poetic Edda and recognize how many names and events are lost to the wind, with only conjecture and educated guessing left to explain these massive gaps in their mythological worldview.
It's like if the Orthodox and Catholic priesthood vanished, and someone picked up The Bible with no other context centuries later. A religion that loses its cultural transmission ceases to exist.
Exactly. Save for the Greeks and Romans, most of the Celtic and Germanic/Nordic peoples didn't even have writing to record their beliefs and practices. Not all but much of what we know from say the Nordics for example comes from Christian sources. Ironic.
Ironic, but also sensible. God preserves what would otherwise be lost. And so we try our best to do the same.
Amen.
Ironic that Christians attempt to use this as evidence that the religion is lost "oh Christians destroyed it all and rewrote it!"
We have the ability to investigate crimes decades old. We are not retarded browns. The knowledge isn't completely lost, moreover it exists within our very spirits.
Paganism never got defeated.
That’s not really ironic. What’s ironic is that “retarded browns” (your phrase) are the only people on earth who actually do have a living pagan tradition. If you want a control group for where that leads, you can head to India (or Toronto, apparently).
Pretty sure it was defeated. Sorry. Christianity absorbed the best elements of paganism and discarded the rest.
This is above all a very *patient* critique. I read his piece and couldn't be bothered even getting started on what he got wrong.
'Your ancestral racial religion, such as it is, is Christianity.'
This is true, and there is no way to escape its morality other than the experience of total civilisational collapse--and who wishes for that? Until then Christianity remains at the root of civilised life, in the only way that we can understand it. If and when the war of all against all begins (and I hope it never does), you will see the real 'pagans' emerge, with a *real* pitiless pagan morality--and I doubt somehow that they will be worshippers of Odin or Apollo.
Naturally a huge praise-wave is coming your way; the above is but a small part of its froth.
EDIT: Kulak is often a highly original thinker; his piece on Tacitus, the Valkyries and NW Euro women is...something else.
Its kinda sad how obsessed atheists are with something they claim not to believe in. Every day its another article whining about God and Christians. Its so obvious that its predominantly inexperienced, uneducated children writing these screeds that its fookin boring already.
The counter arguments I’ve seen so far have been hostile and snippy, dancing around the issue in a way that indicates a crisis of faith. People are running back to traditional religion as we watch society collapse around us, but the increasing spiritual emptiness of those institutions has never been successfully resolved. Unless the connection with the divine is reestablished all this renewed interest will just be a flash in the pan before something more deserving replaces it.
I wasn’t being hostile and snippy. I honestly believe an omnipotent creator can cure Exum’s crippling penis addiction.
No, you’re being hostile and snippy, you’re just too much of a pussy to admit it.
He can also cure your autism.
I doubt it considering he can’t even cure you from being a snarky self important pussy.
🤭
nooo :( he is not being a nice big chungus! :((
When you attack someone's worldview, than act surprised when they respond with hostility, you embody the mid century German stereotype of a jew.
If your faith is so weak that you can’t stand someone else having a different opinion then you have a lot more in common with modern leftists than you think
"if you really had strong faith you wouldn't mind that I'm trying to hurt you"
This is retarded.
I think the core of this problem is that, in not understanding the purpouse of religion(which, to be fair, very few people do) and by not really being willing to give up pluralism (that is to say, practically speaking, an aversion to dogma as such), they remain within modernism itself. And that of course leads them to the only religiosity modernism permits, that being Schleiermachers pursuit of spiritual experience, aka Theological Liberalism in it's full sense. Which is to say, they themselves have more in common when it comes to theology/philosophy with as you say, the Lolcow sects than with actual Christians.
But those Churches got subverted by leftists because of Mosca's Law - *motivated* minorities rule. Which is to say, that sort of religion clearly can't generate the animating force neccesarry to create that minority, nevermind protect itself or forumulate a political formula. But seeking precisely that is the point of this discussion on the political right.
I really should get around to writing an essay on this.
I'm not sure that lady deserves all the attention she gets. Being an enthusiastic grammar quisling, I tend to scorn aberran't apostrophe's and similar prolefeed. I might be a snob, but most likely I'm already getting enough of it on Xitter.
Anyway... I'm not particularly religious but one Christian maxim I wholeheartedly agree with is «by their fruits you shall know them»; and organized Neo-Paganism brought us Azov Batallion. No, thanks.
Thanks for reading Kulak so I didn’t have to.
Kulak’s post is a hallucinatory fever-dream full of resentment at something which exists only in his mind. If you’re going to criticize Christianity for something, at least get the facts right.
This is basic persuasive writing 101. Sadly, on the internet, we see the truth in the axiom that facts and logic have little-to-no power to persuade most people as opposed to emotion. Kulak gets that which is why his posts do numbers.
There are failings among Christian denominations and individual Christians, most prominent being failure to accurately teach the true faith—this is why dogma is important and “every man is a priest/all you need is a Bible and your own personal interpretation, bro” was recognized by the actual church as the heresy it was—but to blame Christianity of all things—the thing which was and is rejected by nearly all decision-makers the past two centuries (including many Founders!) is as laughable as blaming Zoroastrianism.
Oh, YEAH! Well Zoroastrianism turned me into a newt!
I got better...
For me, the fact that Christianity triggers people across the left-right spectrum is evidence that it's true. Either that or Jesus had otherworldly powers of trolling.
Christianity, absent the interior life, is indeed neutered. In each generation, the Church wanders away from its source, which is Jesus Christ acting in the souls of believers, and must be called back to it. But that interior life requires surrendering to the folly of the Cross, which is exactly what the gentiles, like Kulak, find abhorrent.
The whole Christian project is to do something so stupid according to the wisdom of the world that it can't possibly work, and then by seeking the kingdom of God and His righteousness, all these things really are given unto you.
I've never read a full article from Kulak yet somehow I thought he was a she; shows how much investigation I did, I suppose. What's the deal with the profile pic, then? Is it some meme I'm woefully unaware of?
Nice article.
'Is it some meme I'm woefully unaware of?'
Yes but don't bother
I think I can imagine!
So did I--an angry, hysterical, teenage girl.
Ouch. (:
Does this represent the resurgence of the "vitalist" vs Christian battle I've heard so much about?
Forgive me, I'm not one of the cool kids 'round here - I don't know all the ins and outs; I just read Kulak and thought "Well, okay" and opened something else. I'm a busy man, you know (there is a world outside Substack, I remember, sometimes unfortunately).
'Does this represent the resurgence of the "vitalist" vs Christian battle I've heard so much about?'
Yes but it never really goes away. Crypto-establishment 'traditional christian' ghouls attack (ATTAQ!) BAP and others--mainly BAP--and 'pagans' respond with some variation on Kulak's arguments. Sometimes it's the other way around.
Obviously The Librarian and other right-wing Christian substackers are not crypto-establishment ghouls--many are genuine and in my opinion many get *almost* everything right--but things go back and forth in much the same way between substack Christians and pagans.
At first I was kinda like, she's hot, but trouble. But after a few articles I was like, she's totally a dude.