Majestic piece of writing… And exactly what I’ve been saying, although not as articulately of course, for the last few years. The belief that there is something bigger than us has been intrinsic to the soul of man since he has walked the Earth. Secularism, whilst rejecting shackles of control frameworks placed upon us by religions, allow other more damaging alternatives, namely, the psychopath.
Literally all the world’s problems, historically and currently are caused by one man thinking he has the right to force another down a particular path, and as Jenny says; it is generally men.
Fiona, thank you so much. Yes, it's really crazy how secularism (and it's core tenet, Science) has become a new religion, and there is evidence to suggest that is leading us toward a whole new set of horrors. But that's a pessimistic view! There are many signs of hope -- like you!
One man forcing another down a path; true enough, historically and at present. Thank you for speaking up and generating this conversation.
However, unique to my academic experience across 3 graduate humanities degrees (2012-2022) in the US is that progressive white women are telling me what I must believe and how I and others must value my phenotype. They are all my professors, heterosexual or homosexual, in public research institutions from CA to MA to VA. Same for fellow grad students, white women parroting the social justice lines in their own secular sect of dogma, even orthodoxy, as you note Fiona. My English discipline can no longer be stigmatized as subversive for it is undoubtedly conformist.
In 2020 one female professor sincerely began a class saying “don’t you wish you could force everyone to wear a mask and get vaccinated?”. Another in Fall 2020 forced us to introduce ourselves with our pronouns in class even after I refused. Not wanting to scapegoat my white heterosexual self without qualification as the Enemy in class with he/him/his, I said my pronoun is my first name. They don’t ask anymore. In 2015, a southern CA college admin (white female), stated to staff and faculty, with outstretched arms and a grin, that “social justice is my religion.” At a Cal State, “do not quote dead white men even if they began the discipline.” To not acknowledge white female authoritarians ‘in university’ is to elide the singular role some educated white women take on: social saviors. Motivation?
For they alone are most adjacent to the common denominator of the new platonic binary: the evil white male. And they alone can correct it for they have the Power (as teacher), the bitter cup of Privilege (being white, ergo unearned benefits, but not male), and Positionality (Power and Privilege relative to their students’ historically oppressed identities). A corollary: educated progressive white women whit think they are gods. White women outside of campus culture I know don’t think this way.
It kind of reminds of The Rebel by Camus. Having killed God we humans ended up filling the void with these revolutionary totalitarian systems which have the state making the same claims to the individual that the now dead god allegedly once did. Strangely, the logic is inescapable. I was reflecting the other day on the age old "proof" that "God" does not exist - namely that an all powerful all good being would not allow evil to exist. On the other hand if there is nothing out there, it is all relative and there is no standard by which we might judge any action or occurrence to be evil or good. So really the proponent of this proof is saying is that they actually know what an omniscient omnipotent infinite being would do if an omniscient omnipotent infinite being existed, and since the world isn't that way then this being can't exist. The next logical though unspoken step is that the proponent of the argument must be the equivalent of God, knowing just how the world should be, which is the basic assumption of the argument. Being omniscient as to how the world should be, the only option is to seek omnipotence. Finitude gets in the way, but humans seem intent on getting around that limitation as well.
"The problem of disbelieving in God is not that a man ends up believing nothing. Alas, it is much worse. He ends up believing anything." (G. K. Chesterton)
I’m grateful to have come across this piece and this writer. Grateful is too mild a word. The take is spot on, the writing first class, the attitude so refreshing : clear thinking clearly expressed in plain talk. Thank you. The analysis of the origins of the crack-pot place we are in now is very helpful, having lived through the same times and misunderstandings , but suspicions, as the writer. One’s sanity seems at stake these days, more and more. Thank you again.
You're right about the lack of humility. It brings to mind a quote I picked up a couple of years ago, written in some forum by a perceptive guy who only identified himself as John:
"Can you imagine the staggering hubris it takes to go to a library, look at the thousands of works representing the basic archive of human thought, imagination, and experience, so massive it is unmasterable in a thousand lifetimes, and think: 'Well, they’re all immoral compared to me'?"
If I may emphasize, referencing one of your footnotes, the trans-ing of kids shows how illiberal our liberal policies have become. Gender dysphoria is the only current psychiatric disorder being treated surgically. We are repeating the sins of the past. Should we now be giving diet pills to anorexics (after all, gender dysphoria does fall in the category of body dysmorphic disorders with anorexia)? Maybe lap band surgery? Cutting body parts off teens will no more cure their ills than lobotomies cured schizophrenia decades ago. They just left behind countless brain damaged victims.
I firmly believe that, as one moves to the left or right of moderate, to far left or far right, the ideologies eventually meet back full circle at totalitarian, which is the true opposite of moderate.
The question is this: Where, in fact, is any particular person operating from? A place of ego? Or a place of humility? The answer to this question will explain all. It tells you everything you need to know about a particular person. It defines them and their intent.
I have a question for you. Where in fact do you base your morality or moral system. It cannot come from nothing, for if it did, then every person’s personal morals are as valid as the next persons no matter how vile you may think them to be.
Something else to think about is emotions in relation to morals/morality.
One should ponder emotions as much as they do morals. In my opinion, they are inextricably intertwined.
By the way, I’m nobody. Definitely not higher educated in the “system”.
The first question you ask is spot on. And so much of our current lack of wisdom comes from the inability to distinguish the individual's ego from a universal morality, or truth.
The second question -- about my own morals -- is a fair one but I don't really have a clear answer. I am trying to figure it out myself. I'm not religious, but the 10 commandments and the 7 deadly sins seem to be very workable blueprints, no? And wouldn't it be so hubristic to suggest that, in our modern chaos, we can do better? I can't say much about my own sense of these things other than it seems partly hardwired into me, and partly absorbed through growing up in a culture that was not yet utterly corrupted.
Emotions are important but more often than not, in my experience, they are misleading. If anything, they lead us away from what is right.
And finally, I too am a nobody. And that has freed me from ego somewhat-- or at least I like to think it has. (Though that statement is a bit grandiose, i will admit! 🤣🤣 Forgive me.) And if you were not educated into the system, you are probably smarter than most of us who were.
Your last sentence made me laugh. I think as a whole that is very true. You can’t get an education at any level without being indoctrinated, politically and I find that really sickening. I enjoyed reading your Newsweek piece, “ The left is demonizing populists”. That’s how I bumped into you. I never read Newsweek and I only clicked on the link because it caught my eye at the end of another article I was reading. Happenstance, as they say.
I’m a Baby boomer, soon to be 61 from ‘61! Lol, that only happens once in your lifetime but 69 is the number that pops up in my life consistently. Hopefully I’ll outlive that number.
I consider myself conservative/independent and I am a Christian. Having seen what politics has become (Politicization of every moral issue) and what the resulting political divisiveness has done to society, we need to untangle that web in a hurry. My opinion is that issues become politicized when morally corrupted thinking on an issue can’t stand a moral argument. The issue then becomes a political hostage of twisted thinking and virtue signaling by those that will have their way no matter if it’s wrong. Wrong by whose measure you might ask… and so the conversation goes. The bigger question is, why does a person or persons resort to politicizing an issue when they can’t stand their ground on a moral argument? I present to you, because they are wrong and have no other path to get the result they want and will stop at nothing less than getting exactly the result they are after. So they take it to the politicians who they hope will go against the will of the people and set laws into place to get the outcomes they seek. The problem with that is it is all built on corruption. Corrupted thought, corrupted ideas, and almost always or usually for personal gain. Wealth and power. Biblically, the “Love” of money is the root of all evil.
Money, greed, power, more power, more greed, total corruption and out the door goes all morality. There’s LOT’s more, but this seems not to be the easiest place to have that complete conversation.
You could find a cosmology in certain areas of the internet that can step outside the typical idea of God and break the world into people who are pursuing a Service to Others path and those strictly on a Service to Self Path.
The thing about believing there’s no God or for that matter order in the Universe which is where perverse and easily disproven ideas like Darwinian Evolution end up is that they make a person think that they’re God. So instead of marveling at the wonder of creation and the fact that mantis shrimp have 12 different photo receptors in their eyes or that birds can somehow navigate via quantum entanglement and the earth’s magnetic field. They instead set about to “make things better” in the Yuval Harari sense, mistakenly thinking that transhumanism will be an upgrade.
It’s far past the point of turning back now though, you’ve got millions of people injected with a gene therapy experiment, millions more going to receive more injections this fall. The EU guaranteed to collapse due to energy costs and fuel shortages and generally just abject moral decay. Biden’s nominee to help
Monkeypox being the latest example, cures disease by day, by night wears inverted pentagram black leather and participates in that type of scene which is entropic and insane. Pride, used to be a deadly sin….. Anyway, the earth could use a cleanse and God seems to send things to make that happen. The record is out there for those paying attention in the recently found 18 mile crater under the Greenland ice sheet or the inevitable plague that ended the Roman Empire.
If there’s hope for humanity it’s only in the moral people figuring it out. Natural divisions are forming in the face of inevitable changes. So what do you do? Save your soul and live for something higher or join the hive mind? The psychic tension is palpable now though.
Yes! I agree with everything you say -- and that 'make things better' impulse can actually be driven by innocence (the bad kind), or hubris, or a combination thereof.
Also, a funny aside -- Darwin's theory of evolution is something I notice comes under a lot of criticism that I have found interesting, as has the Enlightenment. Both were things my father revered when I was growing up. This slow turn in perspective is really interesting to me - though my poor old dad would turn in his grave to hear me say that. It is further evidence that we are all undergoing a massive change, and who knows, it might be for the good! 🤣
It’s what follows Darwinian thinking that’s the terrible thing. A complete focus on the materialistic part and nothing on the spirit. Michael Behe wrote a bunch of books deconstructing it and there’s books like Zombie Science from Jonathan Wells. But if you consider that life is designed, then you have to consider the intelligence that did the designing. We’re talking design well beyond anything mentioned in organized religion and my god is it endlessly fascinating. Meanwhile our “modern” world is not working with that design…. Just the amount of EMF is slowly wrecking the human body and it’s only increasing. The way outta this mess is for all people of good will to eventually unite and to do that we all have to just keep learning. It takes a while to unpack, but eventually you’ll realize there’s life after death and best I can figure out the entire universe is just a big school. Some people are more interested in learning than others….. Arthur Firstenberg’s book The Invisible Rainbow goes into the hazards of electricity and EMF.
I know that we could exist on an absolutely pristine and harmonious planet but right now we’re living through the end stages of pathological plan devised by a small group to take over the planet. Some people want to nurture, some want to conquer and destroy so we will see what happens…..
Majestic piece of writing… And exactly what I’ve been saying, although not as articulately of course, for the last few years. The belief that there is something bigger than us has been intrinsic to the soul of man since he has walked the Earth. Secularism, whilst rejecting shackles of control frameworks placed upon us by religions, allow other more damaging alternatives, namely, the psychopath.
Literally all the world’s problems, historically and currently are caused by one man thinking he has the right to force another down a particular path, and as Jenny says; it is generally men.
Bloody good article. More please 🙏
Fiona, thank you so much. Yes, it's really crazy how secularism (and it's core tenet, Science) has become a new religion, and there is evidence to suggest that is leading us toward a whole new set of horrors. But that's a pessimistic view! There are many signs of hope -- like you!
One man forcing another down a path; true enough, historically and at present. Thank you for speaking up and generating this conversation.
However, unique to my academic experience across 3 graduate humanities degrees (2012-2022) in the US is that progressive white women are telling me what I must believe and how I and others must value my phenotype. They are all my professors, heterosexual or homosexual, in public research institutions from CA to MA to VA. Same for fellow grad students, white women parroting the social justice lines in their own secular sect of dogma, even orthodoxy, as you note Fiona. My English discipline can no longer be stigmatized as subversive for it is undoubtedly conformist.
In 2020 one female professor sincerely began a class saying “don’t you wish you could force everyone to wear a mask and get vaccinated?”. Another in Fall 2020 forced us to introduce ourselves with our pronouns in class even after I refused. Not wanting to scapegoat my white heterosexual self without qualification as the Enemy in class with he/him/his, I said my pronoun is my first name. They don’t ask anymore. In 2015, a southern CA college admin (white female), stated to staff and faculty, with outstretched arms and a grin, that “social justice is my religion.” At a Cal State, “do not quote dead white men even if they began the discipline.” To not acknowledge white female authoritarians ‘in university’ is to elide the singular role some educated white women take on: social saviors. Motivation?
For they alone are most adjacent to the common denominator of the new platonic binary: the evil white male. And they alone can correct it for they have the Power (as teacher), the bitter cup of Privilege (being white, ergo unearned benefits, but not male), and Positionality (Power and Privilege relative to their students’ historically oppressed identities). A corollary: educated progressive white women whit think they are gods. White women outside of campus culture I know don’t think this way.
Any resonance with your readers’ experiences?
It kind of reminds of The Rebel by Camus. Having killed God we humans ended up filling the void with these revolutionary totalitarian systems which have the state making the same claims to the individual that the now dead god allegedly once did. Strangely, the logic is inescapable. I was reflecting the other day on the age old "proof" that "God" does not exist - namely that an all powerful all good being would not allow evil to exist. On the other hand if there is nothing out there, it is all relative and there is no standard by which we might judge any action or occurrence to be evil or good. So really the proponent of this proof is saying is that they actually know what an omniscient omnipotent infinite being would do if an omniscient omnipotent infinite being existed, and since the world isn't that way then this being can't exist. The next logical though unspoken step is that the proponent of the argument must be the equivalent of God, knowing just how the world should be, which is the basic assumption of the argument. Being omniscient as to how the world should be, the only option is to seek omnipotence. Finitude gets in the way, but humans seem intent on getting around that limitation as well.
Which is kind of an argument for God, no? And I say that as an atheist, or maybe I'm agnostic now.
https://jjhayes.bandcamp.com/track/baltimore-where-chris-toll-walked-2
"The problem of disbelieving in God is not that a man ends up believing nothing. Alas, it is much worse. He ends up believing anything." (G. K. Chesterton)
I’m grateful to have come across this piece and this writer. Grateful is too mild a word. The take is spot on, the writing first class, the attitude so refreshing : clear thinking clearly expressed in plain talk. Thank you. The analysis of the origins of the crack-pot place we are in now is very helpful, having lived through the same times and misunderstandings , but suspicions, as the writer. One’s sanity seems at stake these days, more and more. Thank you again.
Lawrence, thank you so much for your lovely words. You have no idea how appreciated they are.
You're right about the lack of humility. It brings to mind a quote I picked up a couple of years ago, written in some forum by a perceptive guy who only identified himself as John:
"Can you imagine the staggering hubris it takes to go to a library, look at the thousands of works representing the basic archive of human thought, imagination, and experience, so massive it is unmasterable in a thousand lifetimes, and think: 'Well, they’re all immoral compared to me'?"
If I may emphasize, referencing one of your footnotes, the trans-ing of kids shows how illiberal our liberal policies have become. Gender dysphoria is the only current psychiatric disorder being treated surgically. We are repeating the sins of the past. Should we now be giving diet pills to anorexics (after all, gender dysphoria does fall in the category of body dysmorphic disorders with anorexia)? Maybe lap band surgery? Cutting body parts off teens will no more cure their ills than lobotomies cured schizophrenia decades ago. They just left behind countless brain damaged victims.
I firmly believe that, as one moves to the left or right of moderate, to far left or far right, the ideologies eventually meet back full circle at totalitarian, which is the true opposite of moderate.
The question is this: Where, in fact, is any particular person operating from? A place of ego? Or a place of humility? The answer to this question will explain all. It tells you everything you need to know about a particular person. It defines them and their intent.
I have a question for you. Where in fact do you base your morality or moral system. It cannot come from nothing, for if it did, then every person’s personal morals are as valid as the next persons no matter how vile you may think them to be.
Something else to think about is emotions in relation to morals/morality.
One should ponder emotions as much as they do morals. In my opinion, they are inextricably intertwined.
By the way, I’m nobody. Definitely not higher educated in the “system”.
The first question you ask is spot on. And so much of our current lack of wisdom comes from the inability to distinguish the individual's ego from a universal morality, or truth.
The second question -- about my own morals -- is a fair one but I don't really have a clear answer. I am trying to figure it out myself. I'm not religious, but the 10 commandments and the 7 deadly sins seem to be very workable blueprints, no? And wouldn't it be so hubristic to suggest that, in our modern chaos, we can do better? I can't say much about my own sense of these things other than it seems partly hardwired into me, and partly absorbed through growing up in a culture that was not yet utterly corrupted.
Emotions are important but more often than not, in my experience, they are misleading. If anything, they lead us away from what is right.
And finally, I too am a nobody. And that has freed me from ego somewhat-- or at least I like to think it has. (Though that statement is a bit grandiose, i will admit! 🤣🤣 Forgive me.) And if you were not educated into the system, you are probably smarter than most of us who were.
Your last sentence made me laugh. I think as a whole that is very true. You can’t get an education at any level without being indoctrinated, politically and I find that really sickening. I enjoyed reading your Newsweek piece, “ The left is demonizing populists”. That’s how I bumped into you. I never read Newsweek and I only clicked on the link because it caught my eye at the end of another article I was reading. Happenstance, as they say.
I’m a Baby boomer, soon to be 61 from ‘61! Lol, that only happens once in your lifetime but 69 is the number that pops up in my life consistently. Hopefully I’ll outlive that number.
I consider myself conservative/independent and I am a Christian. Having seen what politics has become (Politicization of every moral issue) and what the resulting political divisiveness has done to society, we need to untangle that web in a hurry. My opinion is that issues become politicized when morally corrupted thinking on an issue can’t stand a moral argument. The issue then becomes a political hostage of twisted thinking and virtue signaling by those that will have their way no matter if it’s wrong. Wrong by whose measure you might ask… and so the conversation goes. The bigger question is, why does a person or persons resort to politicizing an issue when they can’t stand their ground on a moral argument? I present to you, because they are wrong and have no other path to get the result they want and will stop at nothing less than getting exactly the result they are after. So they take it to the politicians who they hope will go against the will of the people and set laws into place to get the outcomes they seek. The problem with that is it is all built on corruption. Corrupted thought, corrupted ideas, and almost always or usually for personal gain. Wealth and power. Biblically, the “Love” of money is the root of all evil.
Money, greed, power, more power, more greed, total corruption and out the door goes all morality. There’s LOT’s more, but this seems not to be the easiest place to have that complete conversation.
You could find a cosmology in certain areas of the internet that can step outside the typical idea of God and break the world into people who are pursuing a Service to Others path and those strictly on a Service to Self Path.
The thing about believing there’s no God or for that matter order in the Universe which is where perverse and easily disproven ideas like Darwinian Evolution end up is that they make a person think that they’re God. So instead of marveling at the wonder of creation and the fact that mantis shrimp have 12 different photo receptors in their eyes or that birds can somehow navigate via quantum entanglement and the earth’s magnetic field. They instead set about to “make things better” in the Yuval Harari sense, mistakenly thinking that transhumanism will be an upgrade.
It’s far past the point of turning back now though, you’ve got millions of people injected with a gene therapy experiment, millions more going to receive more injections this fall. The EU guaranteed to collapse due to energy costs and fuel shortages and generally just abject moral decay. Biden’s nominee to help
Monkeypox being the latest example, cures disease by day, by night wears inverted pentagram black leather and participates in that type of scene which is entropic and insane. Pride, used to be a deadly sin….. Anyway, the earth could use a cleanse and God seems to send things to make that happen. The record is out there for those paying attention in the recently found 18 mile crater under the Greenland ice sheet or the inevitable plague that ended the Roman Empire.
If there’s hope for humanity it’s only in the moral people figuring it out. Natural divisions are forming in the face of inevitable changes. So what do you do? Save your soul and live for something higher or join the hive mind? The psychic tension is palpable now though.
Yes! I agree with everything you say -- and that 'make things better' impulse can actually be driven by innocence (the bad kind), or hubris, or a combination thereof.
Also, a funny aside -- Darwin's theory of evolution is something I notice comes under a lot of criticism that I have found interesting, as has the Enlightenment. Both were things my father revered when I was growing up. This slow turn in perspective is really interesting to me - though my poor old dad would turn in his grave to hear me say that. It is further evidence that we are all undergoing a massive change, and who knows, it might be for the good! 🤣
It’s what follows Darwinian thinking that’s the terrible thing. A complete focus on the materialistic part and nothing on the spirit. Michael Behe wrote a bunch of books deconstructing it and there’s books like Zombie Science from Jonathan Wells. But if you consider that life is designed, then you have to consider the intelligence that did the designing. We’re talking design well beyond anything mentioned in organized religion and my god is it endlessly fascinating. Meanwhile our “modern” world is not working with that design…. Just the amount of EMF is slowly wrecking the human body and it’s only increasing. The way outta this mess is for all people of good will to eventually unite and to do that we all have to just keep learning. It takes a while to unpack, but eventually you’ll realize there’s life after death and best I can figure out the entire universe is just a big school. Some people are more interested in learning than others….. Arthur Firstenberg’s book The Invisible Rainbow goes into the hazards of electricity and EMF.
I know that we could exist on an absolutely pristine and harmonious planet but right now we’re living through the end stages of pathological plan devised by a small group to take over the planet. Some people want to nurture, some want to conquer and destroy so we will see what happens…..