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?

Nelson Orgy

update:
beyond-the-rainbow

They should name prisons after this man.  Mandela !  Never mind this overblown humbug  notion of the Greatest figure since the Crucified,  his is a stunning testament to apartheid's tolerance of one of it's dissident prisoners, proof that one prison at least appeared to turned out a reformed character - Robin Island could be the model of all maximum penitentiaries.
Well,  he is rightly credited with his post-penal zen, yet he still should be a penitentiary poster-boy, an icon of hope and tenacity.

Was he innocent when tried ?  Well, clearly not as innocent as when he emerged, penitent, blissful and with seemingly serene sagacity from his incarceration.  His majesty was further crystallised by maintaining a royal silence over the carrion calls for criticism of the ongoing and blatantly heinous antics of his ruling ANC comrades in the subsequent two decades after his release until his demise, reaching its zenith in the Marikana massacre in August 2012, not to mention the forgotten episode of the Shell House massacre in March, 1994 which he claims to have authorised*. 

Nelson is the opium of terrorism who gives terrorism transformative powers.   He is both Spartacus and Fawkes.  Yet he is, in reality, merely the vacuum which these archetypes are projected onto.  Terrorism's soft metamorphosis made possible by the sublimation of prison stoicism.

The orgiastic self-serving maypole festivities of the great and the good for this chameleon's pre-funeral are an outrage to anyone with any remaining human sensibilities.
This isn't merely bad culture,  this is it's successor, civilisation gone putrid with a decadent will.

Is terrorism now circumstantially justifiable ?  Will Guy Fawkes be celebrated with statue outside of parliament alongside of that other, actual, regicide,  Oliver Cromwell ?

                                                    

"I don't think Mandela was a corrupt politician, he did after all spend 27 years in jail for his principles, maybe some of the others are, maybe not".

-Maybe some of the others ? that's an understatement you can only make if you're blithely ignorant.  Mandela was not in an ignorant position and yet he said nothing, for the sake of not tarnishing his Mahatma-like living legend.   I also doubt he would of, for the sake of principles, chosen to spend anytime in prison.  That was imposed on him. (Sure, he would of been willing to spend a short spell which would give dues after, as a freedom-hero triumph (which is what happened, although 27 years was almost certainly longer than he bargained for).  Don't make it sound like a sacrifice he was willing to make.  His was a gamble on a successful revolution backed by the Soviets. A gamble he lost.

You must remember the context of 1961 - most of Africa had achieved dependence around then; he was merely jockeying for a post-colonial position.  If he'd won over the Boers in a coup then, he probably wouldn't have a halo hovering over his head now. 

*In June 1995, ANC and then President Nelson Mandela claimed that he had given the order to defend Shell House, even if it should require killing people.^[5] In 1995 Willem Ratte laid a charge of murder against president Nelson Mandela at the Police headquarters in Pretoria^[6] for the Shell House Massacre.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_House_massacre

http://www.info.gov.za/speeches/1994/230994029.htm

Marikana massacre:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/16/anc-absent-marikana-massacre-memorial

the lost prison manuscript:

http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9116391/the-mandela-files/