/christian/ - Christian Discussion and Fellowship

The modern pagan attitude is typified in Nietzsche. For the inseparable accretions of ressentiment and philosophical thought contaminate the entirety of the Nietzschean corpus. His final fragments are blistered with unrestrained animus, dreadfully bitter and yet sustain an addictive virulence. In his own words:

>Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, §1052 (March-June 1888)

The two types: Dionysus and the Crucified. – To determine: whether the typical religious man is a form of decadence (the great innovators are one and all morbid and epileptic); but are we not here omitting one type of religious man, the pagan? Is the pagan cult not a form of thanksgiving and affirmation of life? Must its highest representative not be an apology for and deification of life? The type of a well-constituted and ecstatically overflowing spirit! The type of a spirit that takes into itself and redeems the contradictions and questionable aspects of existence! It is here that I set the Dionysus of the Greeks: the religious affirmation of life, life whole and not denied or in part; (typical – that the sexual act arouses profundity, mystery, reverence). Dionysus versus the “Crucified”: there you have the antithesis. It is not a difference in regard to their martyrdom – it is a difference in the meaning of it. Life itself, its eternal fruitfulness and recurrence, creates torment, destruction, the will to annihilation. In the other case, suffering – the “Crucified as the innocent one” – counts as an objection to this life, as a formula for its condemnation. – One will see that the problem is that of the meaning of suffering: whether a Christian meaning or tragic meaning. In the former case, it is supposed to be the path to a holy existence; in the latter case, being is counted as holy enough to justify even a monstrous amount of suffering. The tragic man affirms even the harshest suffering: he is sufficiently strong, rich and capable of deifying to do so. The Christian denies even the happiest lot on earth: he is sufficiently weak, poor, disinherited to suffer from life in whatever form he meets it. The god on the cross is a curse on life, a signpost to seek redemption from life; Dionysus cut to pieces is a promise of life: it will be eternally reborn and return again from destruction.

In Nietzsche, we find a recognition of the irreconcilable opposition between the perspective of the victimisers’ mythology and the Biblical perspective of the victims – and the consequent ramifications for all future ethics and politics. The passion and intensity of Nietzsche’s polemic betrays his ressentiment par excellence. Perhaps blunted by the silence brought by Christian society, Nietzsche considered ressentiment the primary form of the desire for violence, and both the fruit and the germ of Christianity; everything in Nietzsche is under the influence of Christianity.

As the Bible relates:

>Genesis 4:15-22

And the Lord said to him: No, it shall not be so: but whosoever shall kill Cain, shall be punished sevenfold. And the Lord set a mark upon Cain, that whosoever found him should not kill him. And Cain went out from the face of the Lord, and dwelt as a fugitive on the earth, at the east side of Eden. And Cain knew his wife, and she conceived, and brought forth Henoch: and he built a city, and called the name thereof by the name of his son Henoch. And Henoch begot Irad, and Irad begot Maviael, and Maviael begot Mathusael, and Mathusael begot Lamech: Who took two wives: the name of the one was Ada, and the name of the other Sella. And Ada brought forth Jabel: who was the father of such as dwell in tents, and of herdsmen.

And his brother's name was Jubal; he was the father of them that play upon the harp and the organs. Sella also brought forth Tubalcain, who was a hammerer and artificer in every work of brass and iron. And the sister of Tubalcain was Noema.

The legacy of Cain lies in his role as both fratricide and founder. Consequent to Abel’s murder, the law against reciprocal violence is established. And where Cain builds the first city, his descendants give that city husbandry, music and technology. Modern anthropology, ignorant or unwilling of cultural interpretation, ends at observing the same elements in the story of Cain and Abel as in the mythologies of Dionysus and Romulus. All of these are statements on collective murders, and so require a name. As Jesus said:

>John 8:43-44.

Why is my language not clear to you? Because you are unable to hear what I say. You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of all lies.

That name is Satan, and these myths are thus expressions of the false accusations, collective murders and victim deification that founded pre-Christian culture, and that the Gospels recognise, reproach and reject. The Paraclete, the Holy Spirit, is therefore the advocate of all martyrs as witnesses to the truth of the Gospels. The dreadful sword of Christ, l’ordre de la charité, spells the doom of all those Satantic societies by revealing their social order lies on the convergence of collective violence upon a scapegoat. And it was this inevitable destruction of Satan, by the Christian interpretation of collective violence and its universal declaration of guilt that must invariably, argued Nietzsche, prevent any continued order or fraternity between men.

Ressentiment is the element of violence that survives the impact of Christianity. For ressentiment flourishes wherever violence is diminished and Christianity has only partly succeeded in its aims to eliminate violence in all its forms.

The ressentiment, only made possible by Christianity and its diminution of Satanic violence, expressed by Jungian efforts to Biblicise mythology, by Heideggerian efforts to mythologise the Gospels, and by the idealisations of primitive cultures have only contributed to the vague and eclectic religiosity of our time. Faced with the dreadful turbulence of Christianity, both Jung and Heidegger grasped at the vestigial elements of the old sacred. Except for their vocabulary, they are wholly within the realms of nineteenth-century historicism.

Unexposed to the priestly whetting of pagan teeth with blood, few recognise the urgency of the Gospels. Bewilderment and condescension follows each mention of the collective murder of God. Per Nietzsche:

>Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §125

“…God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How shall we console ourselves, the most murderous of all murderers? The holiest and mightiest that the world has hitherto possessed, has bled to death under our knife – who will wipe the blood from us? With what water could we cleanse ourselves? What lustrums, what sacred games shall we have to devise? Is not the magnitude of this deed to great for us? Shall we not ourselves have to become Gods, merely to seem worthy of it? There never was a greater event – and on account of it, all who are born after us belong to a higher history than any history hitherto!” - Here the madman was silent and looked again at his hearers; they also were silent and looked at him surprise. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, so that it broke in pieces and was extinguished. “I come too early,” he then said, “I am not yet at the right time. This prodigious event is still on its way, and is travelling – it has not yet reached men’s ears. Lightning and thunder need time, the light of the stars needs time, even after they are done, to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars – and yet they have done it themselves.

>>839560

The expression here is contaminated across several layers, yet still logically distinguishable. At its most obvious, Nietzsche is writing on the modern disappearance of the deification consequent to the collective murder of a real victim. The second level follows, the realisation that the victims of collective murder are the pagan gods. The highest level is the realisation that the Passion of Christ is not the death of the Christian God but the death of all other gods.

Like his fellow idealists, Nietzsche felt that the death of an exhausted religion – the Biblical religion – would allow the birth of some new god, a birth unrooted in the death of the resented Biblical God. Idealists are unable to apprehend the reality, rendered intelligible by Christianity, of collective violence, and see it only as a cure for the fermenting pandemonium – the ressentiment – of their, and our, time. The caustic trickle fills the cup of every “intellectual” nihilist, i.e., the psychologists.

As an interpretative tool, the imitative principle is far more serviceable than the Freudian complex. By eliminating the conscious patricide-incest desire, it does away with the cumbersome necessity of the subsequent repression of the desire. In fact, the imitative principle casts the unconscious aside; it explains the Oedipus myth and does so with an economy and precision lacking in the Freudian approach.

Freud’s thought constantly drifted in the direction of imitation, and was checked, each time, by his necessity for the patricide-incest motif. Lacan, too, failed to intuit the imitative nature of desire, bound by his linguistic obsession to reinforce the “structural” aspects of Freudian analysis.

The interest of Freudian analysis does not lie in its results, in its pretentious accumulation of psychic agencies; nor does it lie in the spectacle of Freudian apprentices clambering up and down the precarious scaffolding of Freudian doctrine with remarkable and futility. Rather, Freudian analysis is itself an obstacle to discerning the nature of the relationship between subject, model and object; to understanding the origins of ressentiment and violence. Yet Freud recognised, in an anti-Freudian moment, the pagan commonality of collective murder in religious rituals (See Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, The Return of Totemism in Childhood).

Despite its enshrinement in the modern canon, the dramatic insights of Nietzsche have been buried under the rhetorical ornaments and milquetoast analyses necessary to avoid the dreadful guilt of collective violence. The idolatry of Freud ceases wherever his gospel turns to the same Satanic theme.

These men exemplify the heights of ressentiment; their writings plaster every theatre and brothel. They know but one thing: to fill their belly and be drunk, to be wounded whilst fighting for their favourite charioteer, to live like goats and pigs. Here the slayers of Christ gather together, here the Cross is driven out, here God is blasphemed, here the Father is ignored, the Son is outraged, here the grace of the Spirit is rejected (John Chrysostom, Adversus Iudaeos, Homily). The response to the God Question is as it was in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: You are free to think as you will, and everything of yours shall remain yours, but from this day on, you are one apart from the many.

>>839561

Few are ready for the answer of Christ:

>Psalm 118:22

The stone which the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.

The habitual reaction, in the wake of any exception to internalised ressentiment, but especially in real violence, is to retroactively apply a host of malignancies upon the vengeful; and, since every community believes every evil that befalls it comes of evil purpose, to erect prohibitions against the behaviour or action of the vengeful.

Yet modern society further prevents the mediation of the desire for violence with each new prohibition. For, possessing no equivalent response to the adolescent rite of passage or funereal liturgy, it cannot pre-empt and resolve the desire for violence; it dissuades dissent only with the reciprocated violence of jurisprudence. Where nineteenth-century nihilism quietly seethed, modern annihilism flares, with pagan intensity, for real violence. Every modern prohibition is therefore to the exciting of further violence, and to the dissolution of the community. For as Jesus said:

>Matthew 12:25-26

Every kingdom divided against itself is laid waste, and no city or house divided against itself will stand. And if Satan casts out Satan, he is divided against himself. How then will his kingdom stand?

>>839562

>>839561

>>839559

>>839560

Great read

Neo-paganism and philosophy is not a faith, they are works. It starts the the Self and ends in the Self by which these are merely rules of good conduct of the Self relating to itself. There is no common ground for discussion between those who understand the binding of Isaac and those who do not.

Most Neo-Pagans are just white nationalists, who think they are "un-Jewing"/un-Semitizing themselves by ridding themselves of Christianity. They think of their lands' own native gods as products of that land - but nothing could be further from the truth. The very same gods they worship have roots in the "cradle of civilization"/Semitic world as well. Saturn and Hermes didn't just randomly pop up in the Mediterranean. It came to them by way of the Hittites, who came by way of Sumer. Thor and Loki didn't just pop up in the middle of Scandinavia. Everyone has a damned Trickster in their culture for a reason.

The difference with Abraham (and later Moses) is he created a breakaway civilization, not tied to his own original land (Sumer), but informed by a God only known by revelation. And with Jesus especially, Christianity have little to do with any semiticisms. It is not a religion of a "land", but the Kingdom of Heaven. If one truly wanted to purify themselves, they would be born from above, as Jesus said [John 3:3].

Bump