Brexit Planet Dust

What has surfaced and come to fore is the old, 1930's idea 

of the "menace of the masses" (Wells, Blooomsbury).

Disregard of the 'mob' and distrust of democracy.

The liberals and city sub-elites have revealed their secret: that they hate

the 'unwashed', and in the name of progress 

look forward, in ocean-liner fashion, to a future

dripping with thrusting art-deco lines, the way of Mussolini.
These middling men pretend that they

are on everyones side, but they're on their own.

Its a way for politicians to defer responsibilities to a 'central

thing' which on its top level is closed to the gurning populations of Europe.

Same reason they need to bring in refugees, so that 

they 'have to make decisions' under duress,

decisions they don't have to be accountable for, because they've

got the bottomless excuse of 'the poor'.  This also

provides a great excuse for the non-termination of austerity

or any other measure for that matter.  The same excuses war

provides.   They also have it from previous form, that people shall

accept austerity/rationing given the 'right reasons' (WW2 Britain)
and that protestations are merely proof of their subservience (Machiavelli).

The chaos afforded by terrorism is merely more grist for

their mill.  In other words, it is against their interests for

terror to ever cease.  It was not shocking to hear that the regulations

being discussed at the moment the British referendum results

came in is if domestic robots would have the rights of persons in the future.

                (Modern Heretic, John Dunn)

Unto Whited Sepulchres

Again, one hears the accusation that this democratic outcome is ungodly for race relations and is, in itself, an encourager of violence and persecutions.   

Did the EU also invent racial harmony  ?   Like the infamous English ball-match hooligans, those already with a racialist bent are using this, as they do said ball games, to vent their unresolved frustrations on 'the others'.  Here in Hackney we have 're-whitewash gentrification', where black persons feel, rightly so, that they are being bleached out by a banker-funded clique of sacharrine whiteys who just don't jive with the existing ska-dancehall culture.  Some of these yuppies had Stay placards in their windows, but all the leftists honks who laid the mat out for them in the first place had RemaIN vulgarising their (mostly Victorian) fenestration (a mix of bien pesant politik and fears their property purchases would become devalued or bad investments - there was not a single Leave poster anywhere).  The yuppies drive the shop rents up so everything finally becomes clinically clean, cold & corporate friendly, like Canary wharf and most of the west end.  No quirks, no eccentrics, no brick-a-brack, no rastas, no unsteriles.

The terrible thing about not allowing poor persons is that there is no stability, no congeal, no ferment.  Everything is green, raw and cold.  If you don't keep dumb, fresh, clean, tidy & sharp, you will be eventually bought out, robbed by taxes, or evicted.   Unless, that is, you hold on thru 'til the next nosedive to ghetto junk status.

Not as hard as it seems.. Hard come, easy go. 

Culture is a long process, like a fine time-tuned eco-system.  But the clean up is known as 'Civilisation' .   The last stage before evisceration, extinction and collapse.   Also known as 'the bleach'.

"Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!  for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness." - Matthew 23:27

Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet review

by David Crane

On 31 October 1517, as every child once knew, an obscure German monk nailed his 95 theses to the door of Wittenberg’s castle church and so began the Reformation. It would seem that there is no firm evidence that this ever actually happened as myth would have it, but whether Martin Luther nailed his theses to the door or glued them or merely posted them to Germany’s leading churchmen, the Christian world would never be the same again.
Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet is an exploration of a man’s interior life and development and not, as Lyndal Roper insists, either a general history of the Reformation or even of the Lutheran revolution in Wittenberg. She is only too aware of the reductive dangers of shrinking great historical events and theological arguments to the emotional and psychological struggles of an individual. And yet if any man, as her compelling and above all deeply honest biography shows, can shoulder this kind of emphasis — any man, moreover, whose theology seems so direct an emanation of character — it is the charismatic, bruising, paradoxical and appalling Augustinian monk turned renegade, Martin Luther.
Luther — Luder — was born in Eisleben in northern Germany in 1483, and grew up under the shadow of the Counts of Mansfeld’s castles in the small mining town of the same name. In later life he would always insist on his impeccable peasant origins, but his father was a mining inspector and prominent smelting master and it was in a smoky, slagheap-filled town on the edge of the civilised world that the young Martin grew up.
The wider context of the adult Luther’s rebellion — the growing anti-clericalism of the late 14th century, the extravagance and exactions of the Renaissance papacy, absenteeism, the shameful ignorance of so many clergy, the scandal of indulgences, the simmering hostility between Rome and Germany — is familiar enough territory, but for Roper it is impossible to understand Luther without understanding this Mansfeld world from which he came. There is a natural tendency in Reformation studies to concentrate on the independent imperial cities of the south, but the ugly, precarious and divided world that helped shape Luther’s passionate, authoritarian, unforgiving, coarsely physical nature was closer to a 15th-century German Deadwood than it was to the humanist culture and civic traditions of Nuremberg.
Even though Luther remained loyal to his childhood home, there can have been little about it that gave him a very elevated sense of man’s goodness, and nothing that can have inoculated him against the less lovely aspects of St Augustine’s theology when he defied his father to become an Augustinian monk. It might seem odd in retrospect that a man who spent so much of his time railing against monasticism should have joined so austere an order, and yet for whatever reason — and Roper is right to give no pat answer — there was a streak of guilt and self-loathing in Luther that found some perverse balm in the ascetic disciplines and baleful theology of the Observant Augustinians.

In Augustine’s teaching of the utter depravity of man and a strict reading of Paul we have all the ingredients needed for Protestantism; but it is hard not to feel that the Reformation took the direction it did because of Luther’s personality. It was perfectly possible in the early 16th century to square a moderate Augustinian theology with Catholic orthodoxy, but moderation was never part of Luther’s character, and thesis by thesis, crisis by crisis, prayer by prayer, revelation by revelation — it was in the privy tower, on the cloaca, he famously claimed, that the idea of justification by faith alone ‘struck him like a thunderbolt’ — the reformer and the theologian in him came into alignment to produce the Catholic church’s most implacable enemy.
It was this combination of doctrine and character that gave Luther’s assault on the papacy its momentum and destructive power. There was nothing in his attacks on relics or indulgences that was not common enough currency across Europe at the time; but if man could be saved by faith alone and all good works were intrinsically sinful, then the whole penitential edifice of the medieval church — the sale of indulgences, the intercession to Mary and the saints, the cult of relics, the authority of the Pope, the distinct existence of a priestly caste to mediate between man and God — were all so much rubble.
Given Luther’s temperament, the story was never likely to end there, and perhaps the saddest thing about this book is just how much space it necessarily devotes to his battles with other reformers. There was at least a grim logic to his break with Rome; but could anyone but Luther have found sufficient ground for disagreement with allies, friends and disciples as various as Erasmus, Karlstadt, Bucer and Zwingli to have endangered the very existence of the Reformation in the way he did?
While there were genuine theological differences with his fellow reformers, particularly over the doctrine of the real presence, the harsher truth seems to be that like Alexander Pope’s Atticus he could ‘bear, like the Turk, no brother near the throne’. He talked of conscience when what he meant was his conscience. He preached the transparent truth of scripture and again what he meant was Luther’s interpretation of scripture. Intellectual independence, however sincere, however marginal, was disloyalty; disagreement was betrayal.
And his polemical skills, his un-rivalled gifts for fighting dirty, his genius — aided and abetted by the ghastly Lucas Cranach — for exploiting the possibilities of the printing press meant that these battles would be fought with an acrimony and violence that would poison denominational debate for another 400 years. Nor was that Luther’s only grim legacy. ‘The Jews,’ he could write, ‘kiss, eat, drink and worship’ the Devil’s excrement. ‘He stuffs and squirts them so full that it overflows and swims out of every place, pure Devil’s filth, yes it tastes so good to their hearts, and they guzzle it like sows.’
This was, as Roper insists, no mere relic of Catholic anti-Semitism, but integral to Protestant identity and a Protestant sense of election — and in that lies the problem of writing about Luther. She leaves no room to doubt his towering stature in Reformation history, but only hagiography could leave it at that. In her introduction she says that she is not out to produce a consistent Luther; and she is as good as her word. His life and character were a mass of contradictions, and she ducks none of them. Her Luther is at once the theologian who gave Germany its vernacular Bible and the man whose philosophy of political deference would have dark implications for those living under Nazi rule. Her Luther is the child of Mansfeld who proclaimed the priesthood of all believers, and yet seemed incapable of embracing the social and civic implications of Protestantism.
He was also the charismatic preacher who proclaimed the liberating power of the gospel and turned on the peasants who took him at his word; the hollow-eyed, celibate ascetic in search of martyrdom who died, fat and married, in his bed; a kind of inverted antinomian, whose conviction of man’s utter sinfulness gave him so curiously relaxed an attitude to human sexuality; the godfather of modern secularism who struggled with the Devil, the university teacher for whom reason was a ‘whore’, the Saxon provincial who changed the world…
Not, as Lyndal Roper mildly notes, an easy hero.

Europe, a Prophecy

In choosing the 'leave' box, I am acting out of principle.  Because I have very little

understanding or will to read the endless files to gain the knowledge which would 

fructify into understanding.

The futures unknown baby.  Besides being a theme in this ridiculous ballot

(strange for a government to promise this democratic thing, then to have serious

remorse about the possible outcome).  As usual their confidence was 

in democracy being a bread and circus affair.

Voting out, and away, because its been a constant theme of mine:

rejecting lofty claims of enlightenment culture.  Because the middle ages 

weren't as barbaric as made out, torture gained new ground with the birth of the 'early modern' age, 

the Tudors, who also invented espionage.  From that proceeding to revolutions and ending in technological war, the icing on the cake being Hiroshima.

The argument for plurality being 'choose corporate' - 

Its logic follows that one must choose the big and 

standardized, the proven.  Everything must look the same anywhere.  

Sterilise the petri dish.  Its safer, especially when you're old

and can't abide anything.  This is a carrion call

of the death instinct,  thanatos.   

William Blake saw the enlightenment for what it was:

a dulling of perception in favour of the metric reduction of measuring

things and proclaiming promethean God like wisdom.  

He foresaw what was happening in America and

France quite early on as not turning out good.  

The french revolution leading immediately to Napoleon and the

attempt to subjugate all Europe (and Russia) to another Roman styled Empire.

America, the giant federation which would lead to the catastrophe of 

the American civil war, the largest conflict of the 19th Century, in the land

of the free.  

This EU is merely the latest incarnation of the pagan Reich concept.

The now old neo-classical idea that Economics, law and democracy,

after Athens and the Roman Republic, rather than the medieval, 'backward' superstitions

of pre-reformation Gothic christianity, will triumph over all irreconcilable differences and

give us a golden age of arcadian bliss.

If only we could live like people in a Poussin painting.  

We'd first have to rid ourselves of cars, planes, and death as well. 

Blake lllustration:

(Blake loved this image, the frontispiece to 'Europe, a Prophecy', and made several copies.

The old man is Urizen, in Blake’s mythology the embodiment of reason and law and a repressive, 

satanic force trying to bring uniformity to mankind. 

(In 'America a Prophecy', Urizen is the evil god who rules during the Enlightenment.) 

Here he is seen kneeling in a flaming discus surrounded by dark cloud, hand held 

over a compass, apparently measuring the black void.)

Messianic Jubilaeum

Religion is used for ruin and hate and war.  

But it isn't a two-step, black & white argument.

It is not a simple division of religion on one side, and secular humanism/atheism

on the other.

In the middle is non-puritanical religion.  If you look at messianic, apocalyptic sects

they are usually puritan whether they be protestant or Islamic.

The atheist position is simply one of non-religion, a belief 

in human goodness (but also a morally ambiguous position) 

but without willing to paying any dues for it, or

respecting the historic culture whence those values truly originated. 

Thereby taking a position merely of observer, of not taking sides,

unwilling to stand for or against anything, and hence

open to the rule by a Cromwellian Commonwealth or a

Wahhabist Caliphate simply because they refuse to defend

anything, because believing nothing means standing for 

the position of nothing.  This has been the position of Jews

since the Babylonian yoke.

Luther, Cromwell, and Osama Bin Laden's Islamic puritans have 

 in common the justification of the immanent fulfillment of messianic 

apocalyptic prophecy.  They believe they are

undoing the sin of man by annihilating what they deem 

abominations, which involve division rather than 

any unity, for they unite only in opposing something.  

They can only stand against, they can never stand for anything.

They give no choice, unite with them or be at war with them.

So compulsion(tyranny), or war can only ensue.

Nothing is adapted, accepted, incorporated, or added,

the only thing that can happen is that culture, variety, people,

and customs are taken away.  The Catholic culture, for all its 

faults, was often not guilty of this.  Rather than simply carrying out a 

genocide policy as the protestants did in North America and Australia,

enduring examples of synthesis can be seen everywhere Catholicism 

went (Mexico, England, South America) 

It built on existing traditions and grew its own tradition as a result.

Islam did this up to a point.  This is because initially it absorbed and synthesized 

the Judaic Patriarchs and Christian desert-father knowledge, wisdom and traditions and 

Greek science, geometry and philosophy.  

But once it had gained a large cultural ascendancy in its vast expansions 

after the prophets death, it soon began to stultify and turn to theories of doctrinal purity

which eroded its initial revitalizing potency.  The minority Shiite represent

the remnant of the earlier, more tolerant, tradition, while 

the majority, puritan, Sunnis have today seized the narrative.  

Of course Catholicism and Shia have also been guilty of 

episodes of doctrinal and dogmatic purity resulting in intolerance,

divisions, bloodshed, hatred and show 'trials'.  But these instances

are also a result of reaction to the division in their faith, they have the same effect

from the same cause, but are not ultimately bound by any orthodoxy to

propagate these divisions and contradictions.  False doctrines fail and

they are noted for their intolerance - of organic cultures, of women,

of hysterical bans on imagery, saints, statuary and ultimately Nature, or

mother earth.  Shrines and relics, as much as they are derided as

wishful thinking, superstitions or idolatry, fill the need for ritual expression and

calendrical marking of the liturgical year, that is, they follow nature and

the seasons.

The puritans were the the self-proclaimed antithesis of the current orthodoxy.  

Christian puritans frame themselves as Christ against

a corrupt priesthood.  However, the Judaism that Christ 

upended against were far more like Puritans themselves than

the Vatican Papacy.  The route post-captivity Judaism

had taken was a law-obsessed priesthood, centered on 

temple culture rather than pastoral, nature-based.

Neo-pagans are really neo-puritans,

who have a romanticised notion of the purity of nature more 

than any actual respect for it. 

Christ fits into this as the incarnate human-God, following 

other saviours such as Mithras, Demeter (and countless others) 

because he accepts and reveres the ground of nature- this is my blood

and body - why he is the Way through it.  He never assumes 

like an Olympian God that he is free from it, commanding 

from above, and separate from earth, nature or us.  He promotes the idea

that we are sons of both this world (earth) and the Almighty (the 'father').

Much of this was adjusted by theologians, which led to the reformation led by Augustinian monk turned rogue theologian, Martin Luther, and continued by other beneficiaries of monastic educations, notably Zwingli & Calvin, and continued by 'philosophers' such as John Locke.

But the reformation was only possible because

of the printing press, not because people were freed from tradition

by some grass-roots, collective enlightenment.   This 'enlightenment' came from

the technology of Gutenberg, which was hardly collective and certainly not

a noble or spiritual human development.  The technology of Gutenberg is 

now being superseded in our time by the internet (non-print), showing that,

far from miraculous, Gutenberg's black-letter movable type was a chimera, different, but not unlike the half-animal faun-like idols of the pagans that Moses railed against.   

This idolatry of script/font/typeface/calligraphy can be seen  by the continued sacredotal insistence today of Arabic Abjad script (العَرَبِيَّة‎), and the  Hebrew alpeh-bet(אָלֶף־בֵּית עִבְרִי).  The representative of this biblioatry in the west, the inheritor of the German black-letter ("gothic") typeface

and the secular, modernist puritan hegemony,  of the Swiss "Helvetica" typeface.    

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.