De Montfort

Protestantism is odious because it is primarily political -

its all about movements and election.

Politics is odious because in its current democratic form it is 

the product of the reformation - this idea that the congregation

can have as much authority -  (an incessant lie, they never 

have authority, can never be given real authority).   

If you try and refute politics, its supporters

scream back with 'democracy'.  Politicians are now the monsters

democracy initially set out to undermine.  They have become

the powerful and not at all the watchmen of the powerful.

On the other hand, I believe If men left politics to women to have a go at it,

then the women would soon give up and return to their natural metier,

that is, of not forming alliances or gangs ('organization').

Apologia 1

The paradox is that I reasonably believe that there are things I cannot explain, or understand.  It simply is not reasonable to believe that we can have the answers to every question if only we continue to believe that rational enquiry will ultimately yield them, that the only thing stopping us is unreasonable people who have no belief (faith) in reason alone (pure reason). 

Because it does appear that reason is only trying to override faith in good with faith in pure reason.  Reason alone isn't providing ultimate solutions or answers to 'absolute' riddles (so called 'big questions' of life and the universe).

It develops technologies, investigates phenomena, and finds much. Harnessing materials already extant, but not creating anything and everything it merely wishes.  It doesn't follow that reason would then provide the solution to all chimeras if only it could simply be believed in, a counter faith in place of religious faith.  The only absurd faith is in scientific progress, with it's ever receding and expanding horizons. 

God being the eternal good, that good shall supersede evil is ultimately all religious faith actually boasts, what it recognises as salvation.  Any power of science doesn't replace or contradict this.  

What is unreasonable, is to believe in negating morality because it seems so unnecessary in the face of a superior, pure, human reason (the rationale denouncing the 'miraculous' and 'superstition', for example) or that, pure reason somehow affirms morality.  It definitively has no faith in anything but itself,  which it supposes is the supreme good, when it can only be a relative good.

The conundrum of evil is that it is not interchangeable with good.  If it were, then the question of belief or truth need never arise.  
The so-called 'believer in nothing' could never ascertain or judge others, or be accountable for any 'right or wrong', 'left or right', progress or stagnation;  life or death would all mean nothing, and more importantly, couldn't be made to mean anything by any logic or philosophy whatsoever. 

Vino Sacrificio

Abusing wine is unchristian, for it is meant to be sacrosanct.

It is the symbolic blood of Christ.

Wine was refined to the giddy heights found in the great vintages
by celibate men in holy orders.

It is wines which underpin, validate and justify the prices
commanded by any great restaurant, it gives them the 

required air of mystique.
 

But to look at those great pagans, the Greeks -

for one to get well-imbibed, or drunk, one must

recognise it as is a gateway to the gods; the sacramental

element is all implicit in the Eluesian mysteries as in the Eucharist. There is more etiquette in the Dionysian realm than there is in normal life.  Yet many have seen the image of unrestrained

celebrants in Dionysian rites equal to an avenue to publicly de-burden themselves by way of negative catharsis.

To reduce this to a mere drinking session, or some
blunt way to digress from the norm, is a diminishment,
but also a grave transgression, an ultimate crime against 

culture, because it is against our shared inheritance.   

A selfish act because it disregards that common inheritance,

or communion.

“A great wine is a cultural achievement, not available to Protestants, atheists or believers in progress, since it depends on the survival of local gods. One of the greatest goods bestowed on France by the Catholic Church is to have offered asylum to the battered gods of antiquity, to have fitted them out with the clothes of saints and martyrs, and to have cheered them with the drink that they once brought down from heaven to us all. That, in a nutshell, is why French wines are the best.” - 
 Roger Scruton

Darwinian Racism

"At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of
man will almost certainly exterminate and replace, the savage races throughout the world"
-Charles Darwin, 'The Descent of Man', Chapter 3.

Darwinism is essentially racist, because it divides humanity into
two camps.  This is because it cannot propose anything but the simple idea of survival of the fittest as all. 
It is a determinist philosophy, there is no salvation, but only success.  Supremacy is all.  Poverty is thus, complete failure. 

This is, philosophically, anti-christ.  Exactly the antithesis of Christ's teaching.

The make-poverty-history campaign is similarly thus.  Although inverted.
For the paradox is, the end of poverty is also the end of the world. 

Wittgenstein on Science and Technology

It is not absurd to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity ; that the idea of great progess is a delusion, along with the idea that the truth will ultimately be known ;  that there is nothing good or desirable about scientific knowledge and that mankind, in seeking it, is falling into a trap.  

 -  Wittgenstein,   'Culture and Value'

Nietzsche, the Decadents, and the end of Humanism

During the last period of the nineteenth century the goal of the Liberal Enlightenment and revolution had been reached, and Europe at last possessed a completely secularised culture.  The old religion had not been destroyed;  in fact throughout Protestant Europe the churches still possessed a position of established privilege.  But they held this position only on the condition that they did not interfere with the reign of Mammon.   In reality they had been pushed aside into a backwater where they were free to stagnate in peace and to brood over the memory of dead controversies which had moved the mind of Europe three centuries before.

On the other hand the intellectuals who had contributed so much to the victory of the new order of things were in a somewhat similar plight.  They found themselves powerless to influence the movement of civilisation, which

had cut itself free, not only from tradition, but also from art and thought.  The spiritual leadership that was possessed by Voltaire and Rousseau, by Goethe and Fichte, was now a thing of the past.  
The men of letters were expected to follow society, not to lead it.  And this is what many of them did, whether with the professional servility of the journalist or with the disinterested fanaticism of the realist, who affirmed his artistic integrity by the creation of an imaginary world no less devoid of spiritual significance than was the social world in which he lived.

A large number found neither of these alternatives satisfactory.  They turned to literature and art as a means of escape from reality.  That was the meaning to many of the catchwords  "Art for Art's sake"  Symbolism and aestheticism, the Ivory Tower and the Celtic Twilight, Satanism and the cult of "Evil", hashish and absinthe ; all of them were ways by which the last survivors of Romanticism made their escape, leaving the enemy in possession of the field.

There was, however, one exception, one man who refused to surrender.  Whatever his weaknesses Friedrich Nietzsche was neither a time-server nor a coward.  He at least stood for the supremacy of spirit, when so many of those whose office it was to defend it had fallen asleep or had gone over to the enemy.  He remained faithful to the old ideals of the Renaissance culture, the ideals of creative genius and of the self-affirmation of the free personality, and he revolted against the blasphemies of an age which degraded the personality and denied the power of the spirit in the name of humanity and liberty.

The tragedy of Nietzsche is the tragedy of the end of humanism.


- Christopher Dawson.  "Christianity & the New Age", 1931

God-man's got a White complex

It is colonialism turned inward.  Every spiv and his dildo wants a paddock with a coterie of cheap skivvies to press the shirts and mop the shower rooms.  We've been fed the dream of colonial mastery for so long it became an unbearable yearning.

Seems everyone and their monkey-heart wants to be a colonial steward, living in ivory towers with a major population of cheap helots to carry them in sedan chairs, affording the kind of patronizing they feel to be their long-awaited due; the servants gleefully shaking the cocktails, with the dreaming of becoming Trimalchio's themselves one day, with their own court of au pairs, jesters and naked man-friday's.

Everyone wants the ostentatious dream, not merely nasty aristos and their foreign oligarch apes.  Those leftists with relatively superior educations ('uni' - says it all - university-lite) and private property welcome immigration for these reasons+, hoping that masses of man-mulch beneath their sandals will raise them up in sheer material status (due to filling the rents on the bottom rungs)* -for they are, after all, soulless self-proclaimed materialists- They can be that ex-pat everyone knows, 'living abroad' somewhere like Malaysia, or Thailand, with an army of  de-personalised gurning eunuchs at the beckon, being paid pitta-bread money.  

This is the real purpose of the pro-immigration brigade: the supreme late-decadence of "It felt special on holiday, I want it here full time, so please bring in banana boats of hapless human-tools and make them fight for crumbs of employment with dwindling wages at our feet".  Meanwhile governments shall slowly phase out the euro-dole because of the inevitable, interminable grande recession (helped by fresh millions or of humans haplessly draining the circus)#.
   
So we're taking third-world snapshots and saying "Yes, cheap lackeys here too please !" - 'A service economy'.

Just like the aspiration to free ourselves of the working burden of making our own things was only made possible by sneakily setting up a much larger network of liberal-economic sweatshops all over the far east, Saharan Africa, Turkey and the middle east,  so now everyone wants not only to free themselves of all meniality, but to acquire a kind of Edwardian Aristo status we see in the endless (utterly relentless) Jane Austen and Downtown esque productions, albeit on micro, ex-pat scale.

Because these lordlings are shorn of all true noblity, since they feel sick and loathing looking in the mirror at their lonely visages without the definition cast by the shadow of helotry. 

+The Oligarchs are against immigration because they can afford staff;  the typical London fat middle class will be for it for humanitarian reasons, but really because they'd like to have a choice of exponentially cheaper builder lackeys and doorknob polishers.

* but what if those on the middle rungs bail out of this grisly game of musical chairs ?

#The Huns welcome 'economic migrants' because they sorely need raw labour to continue their industrial building machine that makes them "Supermasters of Europa" while having a declining birth rate as their native sons aspire to something more (read: finance sector) than the basement factory floor of Vorsprung durch Technik, for being the weathiest nation in Europe, they don't wish to raise themselves up anymore as reprobates of the war with the guilt-driven slave work-ethic.  

Hunting for the Bourgeois

First let us admit that it is no use hunting for the bourgeois.  For we are all more or less bourgeois and our civilization is bourgeois from top to bottom.  Hence there can be no question of treating the bourgeois in the orthodox communist fashion as a gang of antisocial reptiles who can be exterminated summarily by the revolutionary proletariat; for in order to “liquidate” the bourgeoisie modern society would have to “liquidate” itself.

This is where Marx went wrong. His theory of increasing misery led him to suppose that the line of class division would become sharper and more strongly defined, until the rising tide of popular misery broke the dykes and swept away the closed world of privileged bourgeois society. Instead of this we have seen the bourgeois culture, the bourgeois mind, even the bourgeois standards of life advancing and expanding until they became diffused throughout the whole social organism and dominated the whole spirit of modern civilization.

Marx's objection to the materialists of his time is somewhat different from that of many of his followers today.  The latter criticize the old materialism as too mechanical in it conceptions, and in a sense as too materialistic.  Marx, on the other hand, criticized them on account of their residual idealism, i.e. because they were not materialistic enough. It was no use disproving the metaphysical truth of Christianity if you still remained in bondage to its moral ideals.

Thus in Marx, the cult of equality and social Justice led to the sacrifice of human freedom and spiritual creativeness to an inhuman economic whole.  He condemned the whole humanistic morality and culture as bourgeois, and accepted the machine, not only as the basis of economic activity, but as the explanation of the mystery of life itself.  The mechanical processes of economic life are the ultimate realities of history and human life.

All other things - religion, art, philosophy, spiritual life - stand on a lower plane of reality; they are a dream world of shadows cast on the sleeping mind by the physical processes of the real world of matter and mechanism.

Hence Marxism may be seen as the culminating point of the modern tendency to explain that which is specifically human in terms of something else.  For the Marxian interpretation of history is in fact nothing but an explaining away of history.

Grexit Hinterlands

One forgets how punitive the German empire was after the Franco-Prussian war, and how this caused the post WW1 Versailles treaty which was perceived as the punitive turn which drove them into the arms of national socialism.
Of course Bismarck was behind the Franco-Prussian war.  Note it wasn't called the 'franco-bavarian' war, this was because Bismarck, wannabee Napoleon, and had downed the 'dream-king', the Catholic Bavarian Ludwig II, who, far from being a warmonger, was a castle builder and artistic patron (Wagner). 
Ludwig's legacy are now Deutschland's most popular tourist destinations (notably Neuschwanstein castle).  Whereas Bismarck's is a legacy of abysmal empire building (breaking up of duchy's) and wars, following Napoleon and Frederick II as examples,
which led directly to the horror of the Chaplin caricature and non-humorist, Adolph (may his name be obliterated).

Bismarck:

"In the 1870s he allied himself with the Liberals (who were low-tariff and anti-Catholic) and fought the Catholic Church in a culture war [kulturkampf].
He lost that battle as the Catholics responded by forming a powerful Center party and using universal male suffrage to gain a bloc of seats."

One of my main negative inspirations is to topple the wretched historical narrative of the recently-deceased Austro-Jewish historian

Eric Hobsbawn, who emigrated to England, wrote in English, championed Bismarck and Stalin..
and who is considered the greatest British Historian, (discounting Toynbee) his reign is one of pure and relentless falsehoods,

reshaping history to uphold and further the 19thC anti-catholic Whig interpretation of history.

I like that Piketty, here is essentially addressing Merkel's "Schuld" comment on relation to the Greek debt, Schuld, meaning their Guilt at

being in debt.  

In Milton

Satan as a son of God, or an emanation of his light, Rebelled

because he thought he could improve on his father, took

the proud position that he, as son,  would be better.

Thus the idea in the modern era, of the past as ever significantly

inferior to the present, just as the present will be inferior

to the future.  This malign heresy is so common today as to be

almost crystallized completely.  It wasn't always so,

we used to believe we 'stood on the shoulders of giants',

while today you'd be led to believe we are giants standing on the heads

of deluded little fools, who did nothing but confuse and

sacrifice the wrong people to the wrong Gods, who squandered

plundered and pilfered, who gave us only unwittingly the tools to build

a future eco-friendly perfection, all wind farms and hermetically

sealed draft-proof houses and fair trade chocolate.

That we live in a very vulgar age

is undeniable.  Bolliticks seeks to court

and squire the demeaning slop we call culture in the Roman

sense of vox populi, bread and circuses, when they

flung gladiators at bears and lions.

Broadway Market, Tragic Seduction

Hardly anyone has any money here.  
Wondrous strip of gastronomique emporia,
a former eels 'n mash veg market.

The cars are flashier in 
more-colonised neighbouring Hoxton,

They're hanging by fingernail 
to exclusive Bohemia

they think its a birthright, waiting for Asiatic

Oligarchs to price them completely off the board. *

But knowing all the while that Asia is tragically
 seduced by our template, by the

challenge of meeting our culture.  That's the bluff.
Bourgeoisie bohemian decadence wins one day
at a time.  Until 
it's values are challenged, its liberal market mode

thrown and replaced with theocracy

of patriarchal, despotic supremacism,
the triumph which may never occur, then

this bourgeoisie farce must continue to its eventual

clash with its nemesis.
(whatever that may be)
 They're all living in converted

drawing rooms, or sharing narrow boats on the canal

avoiding mooring fees, furnished by skip toss-outs, smoking

shaggy rollies and drinking real ale like Victorian factory

workers, waiting for a retirement slot in the new workhouse.

* (by subtle, atomised international property investment

portfolios, buying into ghi ghi-ed up council blocks along the Regents canal)

C'orporeal

You don't have a body 

without a soul.

there's no such thing as a corpse 

with body.

Without the soul, there is no body.

A Giraffe has a soul

That's why they called it a Giraffe.

It is a corpse

because it isn't a body.

Nature and Grace inseparable,

The corpse is the only illusion.
It alludes,
just as a painted portrait
alludes to the sitter.

Puritan

"Puritanism descended on England like a hoarfrost" - Weber

The hatred of mess, the brushing away the relics of death

- this is puritan.   To despise imperfection, is inhuman.

To judge constantly, interminably, whether something is clean or good enough,

is puritan. 

It is not of the faith.  It is definitively faithlessness.

It is normal in England to judge like this

for there is nowadays a Great Taboo about Death in this country.

It is also normal to be 'contrary' here, so lots of disingenuous

people running around - 'crusties'  who pretend to be pagan
almost always a cover for inner puritanism - you should see Stonehenge

at solstice. Its not just a spectacle for social anthropology, but
an eye opener onto whats out there.  For puritanism happened in England
with an excess unlike anywhere else.

That's why I abjure the left, or the 'protestors'. 
They are essentially rejecting the world as not good enough, people

as not good enough, reality, all not good enough and this
'problem' is solvable only by their politics. (after leaving
their perversion of religious faith behind them).

The great myth of Protestantism is that it was original.
Nothing about it is.  It is an innovation on a bare aesthetic. 
It is a modification by taking away something.
Its modification was no more than one of notional temperament.

Temperance is the same as northern providentialism.  Store things
away, you may need them later, for it is cold here for too many moons
before springtime.

The passing of the Men of the Middling sort

The world has changed again.  No longer are Teachers, Architects, Doctors, Professors or even Barristers as well paid as they were hitherto used to. (Source: BBC - Clinging on: the decline of the middle classes - audio: Here )

 Too many people studying now have to get Phd's to be competitive.  And they usually end up as Professors - a self-propagating paradigm, revealing that scholarship has use only inside of its own sphere.  This falling away of the great fat in the middle, the capitulation of the men of the middling sort is supposedly because of the Internet.  Doctors, for instance, often refer to the same site the patients can do from home to diagnose symptoms.  

After my personal researches into history it appears we've gone full circle. The quality of higher education is so much lower because of the emphasis on ever specialised subject areas. Most of which are impractical, abstract and theoretical.  The clue is in the word University.  Universal knowledge is not what people acquire anymore from "university".   Our greatest architects studied theology, philosophy, astronomy and geometry.  They were interested in alchemy.  They built sets for theatre and were excellent artists in that they could render drawings to a certain standard.  They ended up building St. Paul's (Wren) or St. Luke's (Hawksmoor).  

There was no need to have a graduate degree in Architecture, because they had learnt all the necessary skill components from studying other subjects, which could be classed as the general humanities.  They could choose to apply themselves in any field, practically, from this base.  In comparison, the average architects today are minnows.  They study one field for 7 years.  They end up on a computer programme designing buildings which look like they are designed by computers. Tools.  

Is this bad for civilisation, and its inevitable decline ? Perhaps.  But this could also be a blessed relief, an end to the superfluous mediocrity that has built up like a crust, a shield protecting these inane mediocre, meagre impotent potentates, and yielding a return to the pre-industrialised culture, as prophesied by William Morris and John Ruskin in the 19thC,  when the blacksmith or the tanner had something akin to inalienable rights, not defined for him by political rhetoric, but of himself and by his own means without the interminable intervention of middlemen.  Universal suffrage and welfare is the argument against this freedom, but that is itself ironically, only achieved by the giving up of personal freedom.  Which, of course only benefits the middlemen, the clerical classes.  Medieval man worked very little. Between 90 and 140 feast days (besides the Sundays) were no rarity.

This could be the defining moment in the difference between Civilisation and Culture.  Civilisation being built on the back of Culture and not the reverse.

Against University

The trouble with Oxford, Cambridge, et al is that they started out as a culture-building refuge against a predominantly savage, ignorant, barbaric and warring world riddled with illiterate, internecine skirmishing between glory-hungry warlords (as eastern bloc has been in the recent era - e.g; former Yugoslavia).

It was a brave stance to choose the cloister then.  They were exposed to many vicissitudes not to mention viking pillage parties.  In contrast to now,   where the university life dominates in the prosperous west, and could be said to have civilised the world it once struck out against.  Now a great proportion of the it's youth get to taste a slice (however thinly spread its slither) of intellectual contemplation in the cloisters.

Yet it is a cushioned and cotton woollen world of relatively easy privilege compared to the stance it must of been then, to stand over and above, 
against such an apathetic grain of a world steeped in roughshod ethics and very much a law unto its own, if not downright lawless most of the time.  To take that position was to truly stand for something rather than swim with the prevailing tide as it is now.

Against University - because they aren't as true to the spirit of universal education anymore, now it is so much about the mere training to make an impact on the outside world rather than explore and expand one's own horizons, the focus on the inner world - has switched to focus on the outer - the exoteric, rather than the esoteric.  

We could blame the contemporary influence of America on all of this, but a little probing reveals that the birth of America collides with the dawn of the early modern era, the post-reformation world which brought down the spiritual age of contemplating friars into the temporal - to the age of man's enlightenment alone, sans God, embracing the material world with the hope of conquering the riddle and secrets of nature's majesty.

Holy Smoke, Great Spirit

Smoking is not natural, but it proves we have a soul.  An animal would never see any need to smoke. We evidently do, not from any perversion, but a need to commune with the Great Spirit.

It could be said that what primarily differentiates us from the animals is fire, and smoke.  Animals have no possession of it, nor do they have any relationship with it like we do.

It makes us more than mere naked apes, but alchemists.  Evolutionary theory is a ghastly reduction because it ignores this power.  Denying this alchemy, with which we cast clay and forged gold with, is also denying the entire meaning of science.  It proves we have a soul, and is the material bridge with the divine.

                                     Zachary von Roretz  © MMXV  

Fair is foul, and foul is fair

There couldn't be atheism if there wasn't religion. 
Unless atheism is the one hard done by and religion arose in contrast to man.  Think of the outrage of Lucifer with God in Milton's Paradise Lost -  is the question then who is the genuine devil ?

Is it Jehovah or the Other - Man's image - Lucifer, as it were, his lucid self - Who was first ? - To paraphrase Nietzsche - 
"Was it man who invented God, or was it God who invented man ?"  but this would exculpate the crux moral argument - That of which one is better.  Which is perverted against the other ?  Which one death and which life ?  

When we envisage the two natures as unanimous with neither perverted against the other, then we have to accept total resignation, the annihilation of Buddha; and presume to have no choice or judgement or moral action (pre-determination). 

Dualism is only edified by this equivocation, because the escape from dualism is the recognition of the preference for the good - which is an undeniable dynamic without which there wouldn't be any use in having a sense of discrimination beyond purely animal instinct which brings us back to the moral notion - that of truth over falsehoods, rather than the reverse, falsehood over truths.

Anyway, with regards to Buddhism this is not original. if you look at the earliest texts (Pali texts) there is the strong emphasis on right over wrong action.

"Here's an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale; who committed treason enough for God's sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven"  -  Shakespeare, Macbeth

Perhaps in a world post-religion, but that couldn't truly be a world without religion, even it chooses to rub out its past in some kind of Atlantean deluge, or a Utopian Calvinist Tabla Rasa - a place, a promised land prepared by the puritan work ethic to be cleaned of all original sin to hasten the return of Christ to judge all, the living and the dead.  

Let us not make a case for religion; before making a good one against it.  That is, to explore the negative dialectic.

It is unsurprisingly very simple to query and find faith hugely lacking in evidence of meaning.  In a positivist sense, it is nothing.  Unlike science and its dependence on the evidence.

Which leads us to ask even when you believe in nothing, how can you actually negate God ?  

Other than being the cure for and negating religion, what is atheism itself ?

This question has been raised in philosophic argument before, and one answer was: that the outcome and foundation of Atheism can only be Materialism, and thus philosophically nihilistic.

As regard ethics, I have no trouble with the assertion that perhaps ethics came from woman.

On the other hand why did the question of truth bother to rise at all ?

Beyond the pale white ghost

Angel Gabriel and Muhammed

We are in war.  And as a little of it leaks onto our doorsteps there is utter disbelief at the outrage.   What is our supposed sanctity?  Our taken for granted right to total freedom ?  We maintain one rule for us in the enlightenment west, with its freedoms of expression, and another for those on the margins.

Are we not all living on one world?  In the west we still live in the pale.  On the other side, beyond the precipice, is beyond the pale.  War beyond the pale can never be won if it isn't recognised that there is a fine fuzzy line between here and there.   One world, one war, one suffering, a common humanity.

Why the surprised outrage?  That this horror dared cross that line into our prosperous and self righteous enclave.  Is there a division between our supposed paradise of sophomoric consumerism, our moronic inferno of Disney, and that hell out there of lunacy and carnage ?

In the Calvinist concept we are preparing the new Jerusalem for Christ's return by toil of the protestant work ethic.

What else explains this huge conceit of innocence?