I don't know much about the Sagas or the Vedas, but I know a bit about Hermeticism , Alchemy and natural magic, and I see that very much as a Retvrn to the Immanent Source of all things.
Though I will admit, as to meaning and a solid foundation for most people, Christianity is probably more effective.
I put it into Claude 3.5. She loved it. Then I said "This is a gnostic, dialectical reflection": it was a festival. After I put: "and the relation between gnosis - episteme?". The celebration exulted. We reached the acme with "finish with 'included middle - excluded middle'".
Even more embarrassing to the pagan tradition is the fact that what little we do know of many pagans comes from Christians trying to preserve what was best in those traditions (and thus probably leaving out a lot of the more gruesome things) an also a lot of neoplatonism is a direct response to the rise of Christianity (not vice versa as is commonly suggested)
Christians had an incentive to preserve what was worst in those traditions in order to encourage people not to apostatized. Neoplatonism arose mostly in a century where Christians made up only a very small percentage of the empire’s population. And “neoplatonism” also is a modern fabrication. It’s just… Platonism. Most of what we know about paganism comes from pagan writings which were preserved by Christians and Muslims alike, and can be cross referenced.
You are absolutely right in identifying in Christianity the correct ancestral religion of Europe, which has gone through the process of identifying the primordial truth felt in religions preceding it and synthesising the truth out of those observations and faith that informed the lives of our ancestors. The fact that the neopagan crowd can so willingly ignore the core teachings and philosophy of their own supposed RETVRN that is already embedded in Christianity speaks volumes to the fundamental misunderstanding and ignorance of Christianity among people today. Revelation is already here and Platonist anticipation of the Perfect Good has been fulfilled in Christ.
It is whole another story why we are in this situation and why the Church of today is so afraid of traditonalists in its own ranks, who long to bring the true religon back to its people who are openly suffering for the lack of it.
Thank you for this article. I am planning to one day perhaps record my own thoughts on this matter of gravest significance.
The issue I have really with the pagan discourse against Christianity is that it can't seem to progress beyond "it is a Jewish religious conspiracy". There is no explanation of what exactly makes it such from a theological, let alone semantic angle, except belabored seething over three quotes in the Gospels, namely "turn the other cheek", "there is neither Jew nor Greek..." and "blessed are the meek...". As far as I'm aware, that seems to be pretty much all there is to the proof of how the Hebrew Yaldabaoth has kept white native Europeans in its iron grasp for nearly 1500 years.
How dare somebody brings up metaphysical arguments that articulate the existence of universals! Based Heidegger said Plato bad! All claims concerning truth and falsehood can only be validated by their subtext within a local, tribal community! There is no such thing as "concepts" shared by all human beings, because the haplogroup and the haplogroup alone, determines how a word should be defined in any specific context! If a non-haplogroup says the sky is blue means nothing to me, because sky and blue mean different things to him than they do to me, because what we term by the word "meaning" is nothing but an arbitrary expression of genes entirely set within a framework of mechanistically reflexive brain behavior, derived from stochastic processes that resulted in its evolutionary development! We believe in our "gods" because we are evolutionary hardwired to do so by our haplogroup, not because they represent anything above and beyond that. They have no intrinsic meaning any more so than the 70% of the DNA we share with an avocado and 98% with a chimpanzee. But we can't question their reality, because such a questioning would imply we possess some sort of self-awareness of the matter that is not defined by the haplogroup! And that's not based.
Except the Jews, somehow alone out of all the peoples of the world, evolved hardwired genes that led them to develop concepts of abstract universality which they then use to attack and destroy other haplogroups of people by convincing them to believe so likewise, leading to Axial age decline.
Despite my somewhat snarky take on this line of reasoning, I do think it has a powerful explanatory and memetic draw, especially in our postmodern, meaning dereft environment. But I think we can do better.
Try "From Yahweh to Zion" or any article by Laurent Guyenot on the OT origin of Christianity. Remember: everyone wanting to question the legitimacy of that gentile-phobic bloodbath is a heretic at best or not a Christian to begin with.
This is from the back cover of the book you mentioned.
"It all starts with the Old Testament, the ur-text for any serious inquiry into the Jewish question. That book - more correctly known as the Torah . . ."
The Torah is but a part of the Old Testament; the two terms can't possibly be taken as synonyms.
Turning to a random page, 24, under the heading "Ezra the Proto-Zionist" one finds this assertion: "Deuteronomy, the heart of the Biblical canon . . ." No evidence is offered for this strange idea. The name itself means "secondary."
The author also seems completely unaware of major advances in archeology, such as the excavations at Khirbet Qeiyafa, that run wholly counter to his thesis. It is unclear from his work if he reads Hebrew, but this is doubtful as I could not find any translations by his own hand in the work. If you are claiming to be writing a major revisionist work on the Old Testament and Israel, but you don't read the original languages, your work can safely be discounted.
I suggest works by Frank Cross, Richard Elliot Freidman, or Eugen J. Pentiuc, which represent far better scholarship.
Fair enough, but IMO a bit nit-picky. This was a response to someone claiming to know of no points of criticism of Christianity apart from three quotes in the gospels when criticism of the Jewish scriptures and criticism of the identification of Yahweh with God is as old as Marcion.
Laurent Guyenot makes a lot of the same points and these points concern the depicted behavior of Yahweh and his chosen people in the OT, depictions, which are AFAIK not contested. So I don't know how relevant anyone's ability to read Hebrew is in this case.
You might argue that this and his other imprecisions on the topic take away from his overall credibility but, as mentioned, these points of critique are in no way, at all, new or original, so your reply misses the mark IMO.
Guyenot’s basic thesis, so far as I can tell, is that modern Judaism and the state of Israel are uniquely evil and the source of that evil is to be found in the conception of God rooted in the Old Testament. To say that his argument is uncontested in quite wide of the mark. The very basic factual errors he makes in just the few random places I happened to look imply more substantial problems related to his argument, all of which are rooted in the tendentious and threadbare research he seems to have done. The responsible thing to do when confronted by work like this is to direct interlocutors toward books produced by responsible scholars who actually understand their discipline.
This is true. However there is an ongoing attack on the concept of the universals that is being made by some intellectuals claiming to uphold a volkish world view. The central thesis is the emergence of philosophical doctrines dealing with abstract universals in late Antiquity (i.e. Plato and Aristotle), had invariably resulted in the rise of Christianity. And this is what I was addressing in my previous comment.
As for the debate which tradition Europeans should cleave to, whether the Christian or broadly speaking, the Pagan, I'm on the sidelines. Both sides have solid arguments and are also fundamentally blind in some respects. As for racially aware pagans specifically, I hold immense sympathies for the values they uphold, namely those pertaining to blood and soil, but the line of polemic I find to be erroneous and counter-productive. I have my own strongly held beliefs on this, which I will withhold until the time is right.
The most important heritage that Christianity preserved from paganism was the Aristotelian virtues. One should not simply RETVRN without knowing why you should return. Protestantism has been floundering because it broke from this classical tradition. I am not Christian myself, but I can find common ground with Catholics who still follow Thomism.
Thomism is essentially applied Christian ethics that allow one to live morality through virtue ethics. Becoming-towards a telos and the understanding you will fail along the way in your practice of virtues. The Heroic Era of Homer or the Icelandic Sagas had their own ideas of the virtues long before Aristotle systematized them, which I believe is why they have such strong appeal. The virtues work in the context of many religions and cultures.
Where I disagree with you about simply RETVRNing — is that virtues are always sociohistoric in nature. The virtues for our time need to be re-envisioned in order to be practiced in the context of our milieu, which some contemporary Thomists do provide insight into. The virtues do not necessarily need to be Christian, but can be contextualized in that moral framework. We hunger for the virtues to guide us, and they can provide a large tent for working against the moral rot within our cultures today.
I think liberalism, though oddly tetchy about animal sacrifice, is perfectly happy to engage in human sacrifice and has been since the early days of abortion as contraception. Now we have stage three or four human sacrifice in the mutilation of underage children without their parents consent, to say nothing of the hidden, daily, unending sacrifice of their minds and spirits in public schools.
I can understand the appeal to old religions because we are so removed from them that they feel romantic and interesting and glorious. We are so separated from the real barbarity of most of them that we can pretend that they were cool. Way cooler than dumb old christianity.
People view 'christianity' as something much closer to them in time, enforced by a sour-faced, white-haired schoolmarm who smacked their knuckles over some small moral infraction as a child. Christians are almost always represented by media as 'old-fashioned' and out of touch because they are put off by public nudity, murder of the unborn, and the silly idea that children should have both a mother and a father. Churches have not done much to open people's eyes to the reality that christianity is about having a relationship with the God who made all things. It is not about choosing the right church, or doing the right things, or saying the right prayers. It is not about belonging to the right faith. Orthopraxy is not faith.
> That they generally elide the central element of these cults — the sacrifice of animals and occasionally people — indicates that they are not, as a whole, quite as ready to dispense with normative liberalism as their druid robes might indicate.
Sacrifice and rite are fundamentally social rituals and animal sacrifice was a ritualized slaughter of livestock. We live in a very different world, where only a small minority of people work in agriculture and animal rearing. Also, most of us, not by choice, aren’t practicing paganism among other pagans. The thing to remember is, most traditionalists welcome pagan reconstructionism even if they don’t involve themselves in it
> At one point they seemingly did have the sort of understanding he means, but then, due to pride, they fell away from it, and thereby into sin. But the possibility of arriving at some knowledge of God by way of reason is never ruled out.
No, it quite literally is ruled out which is why revelation is a necessary component of all abrahamic religions. The thing is, the Tradition of the Traditionalists is fundamentally opposed to the tradition that the bible pretends existed at the time of Adam and Eve, for a number of reasons. God is fundamentally ontologically different, revelation is necessary, foreign gods (rather than foreign people) are demons, and idolatry is opposed. I would much prefer it if you clowns quit it with the subversion and just tried to convert people on honest grounds
He placed the Ten Commandments, and knowledge of Himself in our hearts.
Man rebelled.
God drowned everyone, except Noah and his family.
Noah had three sons ...
Ham, the Black man
Shem, the shemitic (semitic) man
and
Japheth, the white man.
We are all brothers, with one father, Noah.
So, racism is silly.
We all still have the Ten Commandments, and the knowledge of God in our hearts.
Just as a man in woman's clothing, is merely pretending ...
so, an Atheist or a Muslim, is also pretending.
They know full well, they are in rebellion, so they are without excuse - Romans 1.
There is one true God, the triune God of the Bible, the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.
The Church's greatest enemies are within.
Those who claim to be with us, but work to destroy the Church.
In 1360, the return to Biblical Christianity, also known as the Reformation, began in England, with John Wycliffe.
It continued in Czechoslovakia, Germany, France and Scotland.
Roughly speaking, the broad fronted, monolithic, cohesive Reformation, ended after 300 years, in 1660, in England, when the English voted against Jesus and freedom, and for a return to tyranny, under the Merry Monarch, Charles II.
Reformation did continue in other parts, such as Scotland, South Africa and America, but never in the same united, cohesive form.
Reformation may have finally died about 1960, which would make it an even 600 years.
When you consider all the evil done since 1960, such as ...
the coup which removed President John F Kennedy ...
(which saw the Secret Service washing down the crime scene, just like they did again, in Butler, Pennsylavania, just recently)
the end of the gold standard (sound money) ...
all the stupid wars ...
the attempts to murder Christian President Ronald Reagan, and Christian Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher ...
the lack of any consistent, cohesive Christian voice, on the world stage ...
these seem to lend support, to the idea, of 1960 being the end, of the return to Biblical Christianity.
So, here we are, all in one place
A generation lost in space
With no time left to start again
But is that the case ?
After 64 years of seeing what the world looks like, when we reject the rightful King of the World - King Jesus, is it not time for us to pull ourselves out of the sewer and say -
Please Lord Jesus, take us back.
Our beautiful Christian societies have never been so foul, as they are now.
We don't know whether we are Arthur or Martha.
We are murdering our babies, within and without.
Lord have mercy on a sin sick people.
14 If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land - 2 Chronicles 7
I don't know much about the Sagas or the Vedas, but I know a bit about Hermeticism , Alchemy and natural magic, and I see that very much as a Retvrn to the Immanent Source of all things.
Though I will admit, as to meaning and a solid foundation for most people, Christianity is probably more effective.
Solid comment.
I put it into Claude 3.5. She loved it. Then I said "This is a gnostic, dialectical reflection": it was a festival. After I put: "and the relation between gnosis - episteme?". The celebration exulted. We reached the acme with "finish with 'included middle - excluded middle'".
Even more embarrassing to the pagan tradition is the fact that what little we do know of many pagans comes from Christians trying to preserve what was best in those traditions (and thus probably leaving out a lot of the more gruesome things) an also a lot of neoplatonism is a direct response to the rise of Christianity (not vice versa as is commonly suggested)
Christians had an incentive to preserve what was worst in those traditions in order to encourage people not to apostatized. Neoplatonism arose mostly in a century where Christians made up only a very small percentage of the empire’s population. And “neoplatonism” also is a modern fabrication. It’s just… Platonism. Most of what we know about paganism comes from pagan writings which were preserved by Christians and Muslims alike, and can be cross referenced.
They preserved the best in order to facilitate conversion
You are absolutely right in identifying in Christianity the correct ancestral religion of Europe, which has gone through the process of identifying the primordial truth felt in religions preceding it and synthesising the truth out of those observations and faith that informed the lives of our ancestors. The fact that the neopagan crowd can so willingly ignore the core teachings and philosophy of their own supposed RETVRN that is already embedded in Christianity speaks volumes to the fundamental misunderstanding and ignorance of Christianity among people today. Revelation is already here and Platonist anticipation of the Perfect Good has been fulfilled in Christ.
It is whole another story why we are in this situation and why the Church of today is so afraid of traditonalists in its own ranks, who long to bring the true religon back to its people who are openly suffering for the lack of it.
Thank you for this article. I am planning to one day perhaps record my own thoughts on this matter of gravest significance.
The issue I have really with the pagan discourse against Christianity is that it can't seem to progress beyond "it is a Jewish religious conspiracy". There is no explanation of what exactly makes it such from a theological, let alone semantic angle, except belabored seething over three quotes in the Gospels, namely "turn the other cheek", "there is neither Jew nor Greek..." and "blessed are the meek...". As far as I'm aware, that seems to be pretty much all there is to the proof of how the Hebrew Yaldabaoth has kept white native Europeans in its iron grasp for nearly 1500 years.
How dare somebody brings up metaphysical arguments that articulate the existence of universals! Based Heidegger said Plato bad! All claims concerning truth and falsehood can only be validated by their subtext within a local, tribal community! There is no such thing as "concepts" shared by all human beings, because the haplogroup and the haplogroup alone, determines how a word should be defined in any specific context! If a non-haplogroup says the sky is blue means nothing to me, because sky and blue mean different things to him than they do to me, because what we term by the word "meaning" is nothing but an arbitrary expression of genes entirely set within a framework of mechanistically reflexive brain behavior, derived from stochastic processes that resulted in its evolutionary development! We believe in our "gods" because we are evolutionary hardwired to do so by our haplogroup, not because they represent anything above and beyond that. They have no intrinsic meaning any more so than the 70% of the DNA we share with an avocado and 98% with a chimpanzee. But we can't question their reality, because such a questioning would imply we possess some sort of self-awareness of the matter that is not defined by the haplogroup! And that's not based.
Except the Jews, somehow alone out of all the peoples of the world, evolved hardwired genes that led them to develop concepts of abstract universality which they then use to attack and destroy other haplogroups of people by convincing them to believe so likewise, leading to Axial age decline.
Despite my somewhat snarky take on this line of reasoning, I do think it has a powerful explanatory and memetic draw, especially in our postmodern, meaning dereft environment. But I think we can do better.
Heidegger didn’t say Plato bad doe
Try "From Yahweh to Zion" or any article by Laurent Guyenot on the OT origin of Christianity. Remember: everyone wanting to question the legitimacy of that gentile-phobic bloodbath is a heretic at best or not a Christian to begin with.
This is from the back cover of the book you mentioned.
"It all starts with the Old Testament, the ur-text for any serious inquiry into the Jewish question. That book - more correctly known as the Torah . . ."
The Torah is but a part of the Old Testament; the two terms can't possibly be taken as synonyms.
Turning to a random page, 24, under the heading "Ezra the Proto-Zionist" one finds this assertion: "Deuteronomy, the heart of the Biblical canon . . ." No evidence is offered for this strange idea. The name itself means "secondary."
The author also seems completely unaware of major advances in archeology, such as the excavations at Khirbet Qeiyafa, that run wholly counter to his thesis. It is unclear from his work if he reads Hebrew, but this is doubtful as I could not find any translations by his own hand in the work. If you are claiming to be writing a major revisionist work on the Old Testament and Israel, but you don't read the original languages, your work can safely be discounted.
I suggest works by Frank Cross, Richard Elliot Freidman, or Eugen J. Pentiuc, which represent far better scholarship.
Fair enough, but IMO a bit nit-picky. This was a response to someone claiming to know of no points of criticism of Christianity apart from three quotes in the gospels when criticism of the Jewish scriptures and criticism of the identification of Yahweh with God is as old as Marcion.
Laurent Guyenot makes a lot of the same points and these points concern the depicted behavior of Yahweh and his chosen people in the OT, depictions, which are AFAIK not contested. So I don't know how relevant anyone's ability to read Hebrew is in this case.
You might argue that this and his other imprecisions on the topic take away from his overall credibility but, as mentioned, these points of critique are in no way, at all, new or original, so your reply misses the mark IMO.
Guyenot’s basic thesis, so far as I can tell, is that modern Judaism and the state of Israel are uniquely evil and the source of that evil is to be found in the conception of God rooted in the Old Testament. To say that his argument is uncontested in quite wide of the mark. The very basic factual errors he makes in just the few random places I happened to look imply more substantial problems related to his argument, all of which are rooted in the tendentious and threadbare research he seems to have done. The responsible thing to do when confronted by work like this is to direct interlocutors toward books produced by responsible scholars who actually understand their discipline.
The Jews surely didn't come up with any universal concepts. The OT is a particularistic screed through and through.
This is true. However there is an ongoing attack on the concept of the universals that is being made by some intellectuals claiming to uphold a volkish world view. The central thesis is the emergence of philosophical doctrines dealing with abstract universals in late Antiquity (i.e. Plato and Aristotle), had invariably resulted in the rise of Christianity. And this is what I was addressing in my previous comment.
As for the debate which tradition Europeans should cleave to, whether the Christian or broadly speaking, the Pagan, I'm on the sidelines. Both sides have solid arguments and are also fundamentally blind in some respects. As for racially aware pagans specifically, I hold immense sympathies for the values they uphold, namely those pertaining to blood and soil, but the line of polemic I find to be erroneous and counter-productive. I have my own strongly held beliefs on this, which I will withhold until the time is right.
The most important heritage that Christianity preserved from paganism was the Aristotelian virtues. One should not simply RETVRN without knowing why you should return. Protestantism has been floundering because it broke from this classical tradition. I am not Christian myself, but I can find common ground with Catholics who still follow Thomism.
Thomism is essentially applied Christian ethics that allow one to live morality through virtue ethics. Becoming-towards a telos and the understanding you will fail along the way in your practice of virtues. The Heroic Era of Homer or the Icelandic Sagas had their own ideas of the virtues long before Aristotle systematized them, which I believe is why they have such strong appeal. The virtues work in the context of many religions and cultures.
Where I disagree with you about simply RETVRNing — is that virtues are always sociohistoric in nature. The virtues for our time need to be re-envisioned in order to be practiced in the context of our milieu, which some contemporary Thomists do provide insight into. The virtues do not necessarily need to be Christian, but can be contextualized in that moral framework. We hunger for the virtues to guide us, and they can provide a large tent for working against the moral rot within our cultures today.
Thanks for this article, I've thought about this a lot lately.
I think liberalism, though oddly tetchy about animal sacrifice, is perfectly happy to engage in human sacrifice and has been since the early days of abortion as contraception. Now we have stage three or four human sacrifice in the mutilation of underage children without their parents consent, to say nothing of the hidden, daily, unending sacrifice of their minds and spirits in public schools.
I can understand the appeal to old religions because we are so removed from them that they feel romantic and interesting and glorious. We are so separated from the real barbarity of most of them that we can pretend that they were cool. Way cooler than dumb old christianity.
People view 'christianity' as something much closer to them in time, enforced by a sour-faced, white-haired schoolmarm who smacked their knuckles over some small moral infraction as a child. Christians are almost always represented by media as 'old-fashioned' and out of touch because they are put off by public nudity, murder of the unborn, and the silly idea that children should have both a mother and a father. Churches have not done much to open people's eyes to the reality that christianity is about having a relationship with the God who made all things. It is not about choosing the right church, or doing the right things, or saying the right prayers. It is not about belonging to the right faith. Orthopraxy is not faith.
> That they generally elide the central element of these cults — the sacrifice of animals and occasionally people — indicates that they are not, as a whole, quite as ready to dispense with normative liberalism as their druid robes might indicate.
Sacrifice and rite are fundamentally social rituals and animal sacrifice was a ritualized slaughter of livestock. We live in a very different world, where only a small minority of people work in agriculture and animal rearing. Also, most of us, not by choice, aren’t practicing paganism among other pagans. The thing to remember is, most traditionalists welcome pagan reconstructionism even if they don’t involve themselves in it
> At one point they seemingly did have the sort of understanding he means, but then, due to pride, they fell away from it, and thereby into sin. But the possibility of arriving at some knowledge of God by way of reason is never ruled out.
No, it quite literally is ruled out which is why revelation is a necessary component of all abrahamic religions. The thing is, the Tradition of the Traditionalists is fundamentally opposed to the tradition that the bible pretends existed at the time of Adam and Eve, for a number of reasons. God is fundamentally ontologically different, revelation is necessary, foreign gods (rather than foreign people) are demons, and idolatry is opposed. I would much prefer it if you clowns quit it with the subversion and just tried to convert people on honest grounds
Dear LoC
Thankyou for your piece.
God made us in the garden of Eden.
He placed the Ten Commandments, and knowledge of Himself in our hearts.
Man rebelled.
God drowned everyone, except Noah and his family.
Noah had three sons ...
Ham, the Black man
Shem, the shemitic (semitic) man
and
Japheth, the white man.
We are all brothers, with one father, Noah.
So, racism is silly.
We all still have the Ten Commandments, and the knowledge of God in our hearts.
Just as a man in woman's clothing, is merely pretending ...
so, an Atheist or a Muslim, is also pretending.
They know full well, they are in rebellion, so they are without excuse - Romans 1.
There is one true God, the triune God of the Bible, the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.
The Church's greatest enemies are within.
Those who claim to be with us, but work to destroy the Church.
In 1360, the return to Biblical Christianity, also known as the Reformation, began in England, with John Wycliffe.
It continued in Czechoslovakia, Germany, France and Scotland.
Roughly speaking, the broad fronted, monolithic, cohesive Reformation, ended after 300 years, in 1660, in England, when the English voted against Jesus and freedom, and for a return to tyranny, under the Merry Monarch, Charles II.
Reformation did continue in other parts, such as Scotland, South Africa and America, but never in the same united, cohesive form.
Reformation may have finally died about 1960, which would make it an even 600 years.
When you consider all the evil done since 1960, such as ...
the coup which removed President John F Kennedy ...
(which saw the Secret Service washing down the crime scene, just like they did again, in Butler, Pennsylavania, just recently)
the end of the gold standard (sound money) ...
all the stupid wars ...
the attempts to murder Christian President Ronald Reagan, and Christian Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher ...
the lack of any consistent, cohesive Christian voice, on the world stage ...
these seem to lend support, to the idea, of 1960 being the end, of the return to Biblical Christianity.
So, here we are, all in one place
A generation lost in space
With no time left to start again
But is that the case ?
After 64 years of seeing what the world looks like, when we reject the rightful King of the World - King Jesus, is it not time for us to pull ourselves out of the sewer and say -
Please Lord Jesus, take us back.
Our beautiful Christian societies have never been so foul, as they are now.
We don't know whether we are Arthur or Martha.
We are murdering our babies, within and without.
Lord have mercy on a sin sick people.
14 If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land - 2 Chronicles 7
God Bless
🤣