This week’s Ecosophian offering is the monthly open post to field questions and encourage discussion among my readers. All the standard rules apply (no profanity, no sales pitches, no trolling, no rudeness, no paid propagandizing, no long screeds proclaiming the infallible truth of fill in the blank, no endless rehashes of questions I’ve already answered) but since there’s no topic, nothing is off topic — with two exceptions.
First, there’s a dedicated (more or less) open post on my Dreamwidth journal on the ongoing virus panic and related issues, so anything Covid-themed should go there instead.
Second, I’ve had various people try to launch discussions about AIs — that is to say, large language models (LLMs) and the utilities they power — on this and my other forums. The initial statements and their followup comments always end up reading as though they were written by LLMs — that is, long strings of words superficially resembling meaningful sentences but not actually communicating anything. That’s neither useful nor entertaining. Thus I’ve decided to ban further discussion of this latest wet dream of the lumpen-internetariat here.
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Finally, I’m delighted to report that no fewer than nine of my earlier titles will see print next month and are available now for preorder. Five of them are books from the peak oil era, discussing the future of industrial society. Yes, I know the peak oil movement collapsed; that doesn’t mean that the slow, steady depletion of petroleum reserves isn’t drastically reshaping our lives right now. I’ll be revisiting this in a post early next year, once the current sequence of posts is finished. In the meantime, I’m pleased to say that After Progress, The Ecotechnic Future, The Long Descent, The Retro Future, and The Wealth of Nature will all be back in print shortly.
The other four? Those are my four older non-series novels: The Fires of Shalsha, Star’s Reach, Retrotopia, and Journey Star. All four of them are science fiction; The Fires of Shalsha and Journey Star are both classic space opera — well, as close to classic space opera as my eccentric imagination will get — while Star’s Reach is deindustrial cli-fi and Retrotopia is exactly what the title suggests, a quirky utopian novel with a retro theme. (Longtime readers got to see both of these latter two books take shape one blog post at a time.)
All nine of these books are being released by Sphinx Books, so if you’re interested, you can read more about them and preorder them here.
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With that said, have at it!
Since this is open ended, I will remark on something that has bemused me lately, about the notions of God. The accepted one among monotheists seems to be a being of unlimited power and knowledge. I don’t understand why this is so. According to the Bible, God twice created beings in a significant way. He created angels. A great many of these did not work out the way He intended. They rebelled against him. He created humans. They very promptly fell, and also have not generally worked out very well, to the point where, in many accounts, they must receive God’s grace to be saved. So He twice creates beings, and they twice do not work out as desired. (Then He gets very angry at them, rather than, as the Rubaiyat points out, accepting the blame due to Himself for his lack of competence). I realize people are willing to accept all sorts of inconsistencies to sustain their morale, but this seems to be a problem that is too obvious to be overlooked, and yet is.
It’s become an annual tradition for me to write a piece of ghostly flash fiction for Halloween and send it to my family and friends, as well as post it on my website. The latest one is finished and is ready to share. Since it is flash fiction, I’ll share it right here too. It’s intended for all audiences and is free of gore and light on the horror.
THE VOICE IN THE WELL by Justin Patrick Moore
Daniel’s father didn’t want him and his friends to play all the way in the back yard by the concrete covered well. Naturally, it was the place where Daniel and his friends wanted to play the most. So they play there they did, near the capped off old well all the way in the backyard, past the locust trees and the catalpas, in the valley between the streets, far from the world of adults. Daniel remembered it clear as a bell, the first time he heard the voice inside the well. It was a fall day, not too cold, but crisp enough that he felt vibrant and alive. The orange leaves from the trees hadn’t all fallen yet and the grass was still bright green, burning off the last of the summers fuse.
“You need to let me out Jimmy!” the voice said, echoing with reverberant resonance.
Daniel didn’t know who the voice was talking to. He didn’t know anyone named Jimmy.
It sounded old, like a recording on one of those tape cassettes his dad sometimes put onto the dusty boombox when he was working on the car out in the garage, crackling and antique.
“Come on, I didn’t do anything,” it continued, and in desperation, “I didn’t say anything to mom, I promise!”
It wasn’t just Daniel who didn’t know who Jimmy was. His friends Billy and Sam didn’t know who Jimmy was either. There wasn’t a Jimmy on their street or on the street behind them. They didn’t know a Jimmy from their games of kill the man or their games of freeze tag or their games of baseball in the field that brushed up against the expansive woods at the end of Orland Street.
When the voice spoke again it had the quality of something heard in a dream, and they accepted it as a dream, as a voice heard so deep in play that not one of them questioned its reality, and on subsequent days they continued to play the new game of George Down in the Well. That was the name of the kid who did the talking, George, and he was pushed their by his older brother Jimmy after George told his mom what he heard when Jimmy was out behind the garage smoking unfiltered cigarettes he’d stolen from their grandpa. His brother was making a plan as he smoked behind the garage with his friend Gary. He was planning on sneaking into the school at night to pull a prank on the history teacher Mr. Fink. That was the real reason George had been thrown in the well, because when he told his mom about the conversation he overheard between Jimmy and Gary, their mom had sent Gary back home for the night, ending the spend the night, ending the plan to sneak out after everyone went to bed, ending the plan to go in through the window of the chemistry class they had left cracked barely open at the end of seventh bell on Friday. They’d climb up onto the dumpster, push it open and let themselves inside, take the snake out of the terrarium in the biology class and put it inside Mr. Fink’s desk. That would be payback for the week of detention Mr. Fink had given them for talking smarmy talk about Nancy, to Nancy. That would show Mr. Fink.
But now Jimmy had another revenge on his hands. Or so the voice from the well whispered. George told them how Jimmy had waited until everyone was good and asleep, just like he’d been planning before his little brother narced on him. The old sweaty sock was in his mouth before he could scream and his brother straddled him, sat on top of him like a lump of coal, wrapped him up in a blanket so he couldn’t move his arms, and forced him out of bed and down to the back of yard, past the trees to the old well. The family only kept a heavy iron grate over it at the time. That was when Gary stepped out of the shadows. With a few grunts they pulled the grate off and pushed the little loser into the well.
It wasn’t a far drop. Unless you considered one hundred feet to be a far drop. Jimmy didn’t know nothing, and he sure didn’t know how deep a well was. George’s screams were muffled by the sock in mouth, as he fell deep into the well those many, many autumns ago.
That was the story the kids made up when they played all the way down in the valley between the streets, past the locust trees and catalpas, in the very back of the yard where his father didn’t want him to play.
The following year Daniel couldn’t stand not knowing who George really was anymore, because he still heard the voice in the well whenever he went into the back yard. He broke down and asked his dad, “Who are George and Jimmy?” It was Labor Day weekend and they had gone out for one last swirl cone of ice cream at the whippy dip before it closed up shop for the season.
“George and Jimmy who?” he asked back, though he knew.
“There’s a voice in the well from a kid named George always talking about his brother Jimmy.”
“I told you not to go down there,” his dad said, pulling the brim of his baseball cap down further over his brow to keep the end of summer sun out of his face. Flies and sweat bees buzzed around the garbage can that smelled of chocolate dairy and unfinished foot long chili dogs next to the picnic table.
“Why not? It’s been capped.”
“Old concrete isn’t always safe. In fact, I should fill that whole thing in.”
“But who are they?”
His father could have said it was all in his imagination, but he didn’t.
“That well seems to hold old memories and just won’t let them go. Jimmy was a guy my dad went to high school with, until they hauled him off to jail, for what he did to his brother George. He pushed him down that well. Things didn’t go so good for Jimmy on the inside. After a few months in the slammer he found himself on the wrong side of a shiv. His parents sold the house not long after the incident, and it sat abandoned for many years. Nobody wanted it. People used to tell stories about this place all the time, when I was a kid. After I married your mom, houses weren’t cheap, in fact, just the opposite, so when I saw this one for sale as a fixer upper, I bought it up. We wanted to start a family and it was the only place we could afford. There’d always been ghost stories about the well, but I never expected you to hear them straight from George’s mouth.”
The next weekend Daniel’s dad bought what must have been a ton of concrete and invited some friends over and they spent the day filling up the old well altogether. His dad knew a man who was a kind of priest, but not a priest, a person who knew things, secret things. He came and said a blessing on the well and planted a hawthorn tree right next to it. The voice in the well grew quiet for the most part after that, except on early fall days when the wind grows cold but the green grass is still shining, bright and alive.
I am more and more astonished by the ignoring of the inconvenient truth that petroleum fuels are the irreplaceable power sources for the large vehicles, equipment, and machines that undergird bulk transportation, flying, mining, industrial processes, timber production, agriculture, earth moving and others, the foundations of our the “modern, developed civilization”. The focus has been on electrifying personal transport which is not so foundational. I have a friend who is a truck driver driving mammoth vehicles up and down California. According to him battery versions of that type of truck has proved impractical. Besides the issue of finding the resources to make the batteries and new vehicles and machines and where the enormous amount of new renewably sourced electricity come from to charge up the batteries. And all this new stuff would have to be created using petroleum fuels as part of the transition! So far fracking has kept the whole show going (68% of petroleum and 78% of natural gas in the USA), but eventually sometime over the next 30 years the guano will hit the fan despite the continuing strenuous efforts exploiting marginal sources of fossil fuels. Apparently Elon Musk is now looking to hydrogen as the new power source in fuel cells. Don’t get me going on this folly of a hope
Two random indicators of the mood in Germany that caught my eye:
1) A band called “Weimar” has made a (probably short) appearance as number one of the German album charts (it must be more than 20 years ago that I had any interest for the “charts”). They started without any big money, big publisher, big advertising behind them, though I heard that’s changing. What’s interesting is that on the album there’s a song called “Hexenjagd” (witch hunt). It’s narrated from the perspective of somebody who witnessed the original witch hunts (verse 1), the SED regime in Eastern Germany (verse 2) and the Corona-debacle (verse 3). In each refrain, the narrator is asked the inevitable “why didn’t you say or do anything” and he replies “because I didn’t know anything” / “I had only good intentions” / “I did nothing wrong”, etc. There are two things about this: 1) They openly criticize the C19 policies and the lunacy of the people. 2) The more important point: It would have been very easy and on spot to make a similar verse about the Nazi-era … which they didn’t do. Since they are -like so many- accused of being “right wing”, I think this probably is a deliberate provocation which both strengthens and weakens the song at the same time. Or they are weaker than they pretend to be and didn’t dare to make the comparison. This “hole” in the song makes it feel very strange, however. I guess that such a piece (which imo isn’t particularly good, anyway) makes it to top 1 with no effort is one more sign that below the surface something is boiling and not in a small way. If anybody wants to listen to the song, it can be found by searching for “weimar hexenjagd” on a well known streaming platform.
2) A rare German perspective on the happenings on the other side of the pond: The large, conservative leaning German mainstream weekly “Die Welt” had this as a headliner on it’s website:
“The exposure of Kamala Harris by the paria Donald Trump: She poses on the cover of the “Vogue”, the other one is frying french fries at McDonald’s: While an unleashed Donald Trump is revealing himself as a disciple of Andy Warhol, Kamala Harris is repeating the tragedy of Hillary Clinton as a farce. A didactic play of left arrogance.” (paywalled)
https://www.welt.de/kultur/plus254113402/US-Wahlkampf-Die-Entlarvung-der-Kamala-Harris-durch-den-Paria-Donald-Trump.html
People are increasingly behaving in strange ways. Money-issues are an important trigger of strange behaviour (which is not at all surprising given the economic destruction Germany is currently experiencing), but I guess there’s more going on.
Cheers,
Nachtgurke
Hi JMG,
What is your view regarding the current state of people’s mental health. I heard discussing often the issues with youth’s mental health in the UK. The situation seems to similar across the Western world.
Thank you
Wer here
JMG and everybody I want to clarify something here, I might had been harsh in the latest comment but I and many people in my area had developed a knee jerk reaction to somethings said on the internet about mu faith. My los=cal church is under the name of saint francais and we do not damage our enviroment here for the aformentioned reason.
But over the many years I had seen the most angry and insane thing being said about thoose of us living here ( perpetrated by an certain groups of childless blue haired people) that we are racist, fascist (and if you were not vaccinated enough certain people would result to attacks and name calling). A lot of young people of a ceratain political stripe had been spreading lies and falsehoods (which they had apparently heard on the social media and mainstream media) so I immediately responded with an unconcious reasponse to an percieved attack
How many time i had been called isms when some people heard that I am an religious person and the insane and crazy claims that were said about religious people in my country (claims that young people that go to the church and don’t want to be vaccinated are Hitler and “Putin’s agent” – excuse me????).
So well my coment wasn;t entirely an rant I just don’t want to hear about those crazy things anymore.
Stay safe Wer
Good morning JMG!
Recently I came across a prominent author whose influence has a strong presence today and was curious if you had come across his work. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who wikipedia tells me was a Jesuit priest, scientist, paleontologist, theologian, philosopher, and teacher. Quite the resume! The general story with him is that he wrote books prior to his death which had him excommunicated from the church and after his death in the 1950s his works began to be widely published and became very influential in the Catholic church and among scientists.
His most prominent works are “The Future of Man” and “The Phenomenon of Man”, which I have yet to read but is waiting for me at the library, though I did watch a video about the contents. It reminded me of parts of this article, https://www.ecosophia.net/against-enchantment-i-ken-wilber/ where a “Great Chain of Being” is mentioned. Pierre coined the future event called “The Omega Point” in which the entirety of the universe spirals towards a final point of unification, he described a noosphere, ‘a planetary sphere of reason which represents the highest stage of biospheric development, that of humankind’s rational activities’ (like the internet and social media), and lastly he argued that evolution occurs in a directional goal-driven way essentially making the case that now (in the 1920’s) man is able to be an active participant in the evolutionary process.
In part thanks to your writings I can see how these grand ideas are very appealing. But, what I was quite surprised about is his lasting influence. https://teilharddechardin.org/about/our-mission/. For example, Peter Hotez cites him as an inspiration https://x.com/PeterHotez/status/1831515647588642968. His works appear relevant to the 1960’s second Vatican council reforms and in influencing the transhumanist movements. Another place his work was extremely prominent was in a 1963 CIBA foundation symposium where individuals who remained highly prominent and influential in shaping scientific research were represented.
My sense is that Pierre Teilhard de Chardin has been a foundational influence in the fields of biophysics (molecular biology) and information technology. I struggle to think of a specific question for you but am curious of any parallels you may be aware of where ostensibly useful fields are underpinned by such…lofty concepts? My hope is that with the repeated failures and overpromising in the fields of biology and technology that they may spell the end of these myths but who knows.
JMG,
In some earlier comments I speculated on some of the reasons for the apparent collapse in the effectiveness and sanity of the Kamala Campaign. I won’t rehash those again but now another good reason for the bumbling of the Harris/Walz ticket has emerged. It appears that Kamala’s campaign manager and assorted upper toadies are effectively DEI hires. There is not enough information out there yet to determine their actual competence, but what we do know is that none of the upper echelon of the Harris campaign ever worked outside of the non profit advocacy sphere. As such they are totally out of touch with working Americans , and it shows.
#1 Michael Maratsos
The question you raise is a classic of Judeo-Christian theology. Even in the Old Testament, people wondered why life is so painful and incoherent. Good people have to suffer, bad people do well (not always, of course). Your question as to why an almighty God creates flawed beings at all is along similar lines.
According to the Book of Job, the answer to the question of God’s arbitrariness is that it is not possible for man to understand his plans with his limited intellect.
Maybe it wasn’t his plan to create perfect beings in the first place. I have also had thoughts that the monotheistic God is simply a metaphor for cosmic principles, such as karma, transience etc.. Hence his unique selling point as the only God.
Note 1; from the news,
“A new international airport will soon open in Greenland’s capital Nuuk, allowing larger aircraft to land for the first time – paving the way for direct flights from the US and Europe.
It’s the first of three airport projects that officials hope will boost the local economy, by making the Arctic territory more accessible than ever before.”
No longboat trips from Iceland? Darn.
Note 2, an attack of realism.
“Meta senior research Yann LeCun (also a professor at New York University) told the Wall Street Journal that worries about AI threatening humanity are “complete B.S.”
When a departing OpenAI researcher in May talked up the need to learn how to control ultra-intelligent AI, LeCun pounced. “It seems to me that before ‘urgently figuring out how to control AI systems much smarter than us’ we need to have the beginning of a hint of a design for a system smarter than a house cat,” he replied on X. He likes the cat metaphor. Felines, after all, have a mental model of the physical world, persistent memory, some reasoning ability and a capacity for planning, he says. None of these qualities are present in today’s “frontier” AIs, including those made by Meta itself.”
>about the notions of God
I guess that’s the top-down way of looking at things. Where you start with one Big Cheese and build a hierarchy that reaches down to the material world. Then there’s the bottom-up approach that the Japanese take, where you start with natural places and natural phenomena and ascribe a deity or spirit behind it. Then maybe you ascribe a deity-of-deities and work your way up.
I dunno which is better, but I’m suspicious of top-down approaches to anything.
@Michael Maratsos.
Yes, beings with a will of their own will sometimes not agree with the will of their maker. Also, Jesus never (nor could have) squared the circle. Would you like to talk about the implications of either? I will feel disappointed if you just wanted to point out that Christians believe things that ain’t so. You do too, as well as me. I don’t know your age, but I bet at some point you have had some retirement account somewhere…
Michael Maratsos,
That’s a property of the religions created in the Age of PIsces. The religions from the Age of Aries and future religions in the Age of Aquarius don’t and won’t have the omnipotent and omniscient god.
@Michael Maratsos
I think this is the result of Christianity’s syncretic origins, incorporating a lot of late Hellenistic ideas, with their insistence on perfection and immutability of the spiritual realm, and Hebrew mythology. Exoteric Judaism doesn’t seem to share the notion of God’s infallibility, having officially endorsed ways to win over Him on a technicality, especially when it comes to activities prohibited during Shabbat. As for Islam, this is anecdotal evidence, but I’ve met a few Muslims who drink alcohol after dark, “when Allah is asleep”, but I don’t think this is endorsed in any shape or form by Islamic clergy, unlike loophole abuse concerning 39 Melachot.
There were attempts to reconcile this split in Christianity’s foundation, known collectively as Gnostic Christianity, but they didn’t fare all that well.
@Michael Maratsos
I think this one of those “that’s a feature, not a bug” sort of issues. Pick any Book/Chapter/Verse of the Bible and there’s a good chance you’ll find evidence suggesting that the One God is…. not all that unified. The Pentateuch makes it pretty obvious that the desert spirit God of the ancient Hebrews, Yehweh, is competing with the Gods of their rivals; the Book of Job makes it clear God is, at the least, cordial with, if not appreciative of, Satan; the New Testament repeatedly refers to God as The Lord of Hosts, i.e., a God of Gods, etc. By the time we get to Medieval Christianity, we have the Holy Trinity, which is a nice attempt to square the circle but… nonetheless divides a One into a Three.
All that to say, I wouldn’t get too hung up on the particulars. Taken as a whole, the One God of the Bible is basically the platonic form of the eternal Borscht Belt Comedian. Not really fair, not all that funny, but… definitely thought provoking!
I’ve been looking into how human physiology works, and I’m starting to think there’s a conspiracy to make Americans fat. First, a lot of the standard advice given for weight loss is insanely counterproductive. One example of this is that given how our physiology works, eating carbs makes people gain weight by suppressing the ability of the body to burn fats and making fat cells absorb both fatty acids and glucose; and eating fat helps a lot by suppressing appetite, so what do they tell people to do? Eat carbs, avoid fats, and try to eat less, which wreaks havoc on the metabolism.
There are also some pretty weird public policy decisions that make no sense, unless in this light. Some of these relate to food, such as the decision to subsidize emulsifiers, but not all. Emulsifies are meant to bind fats with water, and are basically soap. They are good at striping the lining of the gut, preventing the intestines from knowing how much food is in there; and then there are tons of otherwise weird things that fall into place with regards to the processed food industry.
Others are not related to food: one of the most important ways to increase metabolism is aerobic exercise, such as walking or running. The odd decision to make so much of the US unwalkable is thus another example of the odd policy decisions which fall into place in this light.
I’m not at all sure who’s behind it, but it seems like a lot of things which are otherwise quite strange make way too much sense in this light…
Speaking of Christianity… file under, Apocalypse Not:
One of my blind ham radio buddies gave me a call to give me the low down on this radio piece from the BBC World Service program Outlook. My aforementioned friend also had a history as a member of the World Wide Church of God. It was one of the things that bonded us when it came up in conversation. That, and he had been a bonafide phone phreak and knew people like Captain Crunch and Joy Bubbles back in the glory days of whistling around Ma Bell’s system of wires. Anyway, for me this story was interesting because I grew up in this church, and my dad and step-mom are still members of the reformed legacy church that changed all the doctrines I grew up, when they said “we were wrong” basically. They became Grace Communion International. Others, who wanted to stick with the original beliefs, splintered into a bunch of different groups. I have a great aunt who is still a member of one of them.
People here might like it because it is a story of what believing in the end of the world can do to a person. I was born seven years after this end of the world date… but the church still preached imminent end times all through my childhood. Anyway, it’s good radio in the eminent BBC style and those of you who like radio might like this story.
The funny thing to me is, Grace Communion International is still sometimes listed as a cult in Christian books on the subject, because they believe in universal salvation. That, to me, is actually one of their saving graces, though I don’t attend.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3ct5p58
“Jerald Walker grew up in the predominantly white, Worldwide Church of God – a doomsday cult that convinced its followers the world would end in 1972. Raised by blind, African American parents and under the cult’s strict teachings, which preached racial segregation and an imminent apocalypse, Jerald’s life was dominated by fear, isolation, and the belief that his future didn’t exist.
When the promised doomsday never came, Jerald and his family were left grappling with shattered beliefs. As his life unravelled, Jerald fell into addiction and crime, struggling to escape the mental and emotional grip of the cult. But through education, an extraordinary teacher and a passion for writing, he found a path to redemption.”
“Celadon, maybe so, but human beings are religious by nature — deprive them of religion and they’ll create a new one out of whatever materials are available. As the history of Marxism shows in fine detail…” – This was a great point that you made, JMG. I should’ve sharpened mine, some. What I am specifically wondering is that if “X” (ideal Christianity) was designed to end religion (including Christianity), but that it was also foreseen that ersatz imitations of X (or heresies, in the case of Marxism), would be “inevitable”. No “Progress”, just a continual generation and destruction of bad ideas, masquerading as the real thing, that have to be iterated, for whatever reason, if nothing else, out of mimetic desire. “X” (as Jacques Ellul calls it) would then be a “fire” and a “sword”, since it would tend to generate its own copycats through the process of inevitable misunderstanding, corresponding roughly to the esoteric/exoteric distinction. This dynamic has no end goal or progress, nor no absolute way to separate sheep/goats. All one can do is say, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear”. But it is made considerably worse by NOT being aware of it (eg., not knowing about the inevitable corruption of even “Holy Mother Church”), or by pretending to know and specify and control exactly how this plays out. As a conservative, I’d say, absolutely, religion is necessary, all you can do externally is try to enhance it and deepen it and make it more “anastasia” (stable), and avoid “stasis”. Internally, one can long for the Kingdom of God. I’m just wondering if Christians longing to have a “religion” is a little like the Israelites longing to have a “King”: it’s inevitable, but a commentary on how many people inside the Church don’t understand very much.
Hello everybody. I have a question for you all, JMG and kommentariat.
What do you think about alcaline diet? Is it necessary for your health or is it another fashion? Thank you for your answers…
JMG, I’ve read on this Magic Monday’s post that you believe you’re in your last trip around these parts. If so, it’s been an honour to get to know you!
Anyways, changing subject, you really should check this out: https://x.com/BehizyTweets/status/1848837727392772413
@ Michael Maratsos
People need to believe, whatever the inconsistencies in their faith, because believing is in human beings’ DNA. They have makeshift explanations for everything, but they prefer not to dwell on them because they know that it would weaken their faith, and they really need to believe. Even atheists believe in something which they’ll stick to for dear life.
It always amazes me that some people I know, who have studied the Bible very thoroughly, still believe in the goodness of God, in spite of texts such as Numbers, 31:17-18, King James Version:
17. Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him.
18. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Numbers+31%3A17-18&version=KJV
Concerning the genocide of the Canaanites by the Hebrews, believers say that “It wasn’t true, archeology proves that it never happened.” Fine, but if this part of the Bible is a lie, how about the rest? I never got a straight answer, but I guess that true believers are perfectly OK with the idea that the Bible is the word of God, generally speaking, but parts of it are not, being additions made by fallible humans.
My two cents on this: people will believe in something, always. I’ve noticed that Wokism, that awful ideology which is destroying the West (notice how in the US it has almost destroyed academia, the armed forces, freedom of thought, etc) is strongest among people who claim not to believe in the supernatural.
In my own family dechristianization was rapid, as in most of the Western world. I was born in a Catholic family. Few of my relatives were true believers, but all the children was baptized and went to catechism. My first son was baptized and went to catechism. The second one was baptized but we didn’t send him to catechism. The third one wasn’t baptized and didn’t go to catechism. My wife is still a Catholic, but she doesn’t go to church. Both my parents were incinerated, a practice which is absolutely contrary to Catholic usage.
Yet, religion doesn’t die so easily. At the age of 38, after more than two decades of atheism, I turned to Theravada Buddhism, a religion which doesn’t entail believing in an eternal soul. Basically, I am a pantheist who has found moral guidance in Buddhism. My eldest son was close to Buddhism, but he married a Moroccan Muslim woman (not practicing, wears miniskirts, but she fasts during the Ramadan) who made him put his statue of the Buddha out of view. My second son, after two terrible years fighting long Covid, has recently added a Bible to the small number of books he owns.
On the political front, a report on local early voting, which opened in my municipality yesterday. I went right away in the morning and there was already a substantial line of folks waiting for the doors to open at 7:30. It was a wonderful thing to see from a civic engagement standpoint.
My ballot has been cast and I can now get on with my life.
It also occurred to me, too, with the Democrats reforming themselves as the anti-populist party, that the conventional wisdom that high turnout benefits them may be well past its pull-date.
@ Michael Maratsos–
To my mind, the obvious solution is one that Christians have often failed in, which is to not confuse myths with historical events. God, being indeed all good, does not “become angry”; being all knowing doesn’t cause things that “don’t work out as planned.” No more does Pluto, being a God, “rape Persephone,” a goddess; nor does Ceres “mourn” her daughter. Nor, for that matter, did Saturn castrate his own father!
Instead, these are ways of framing the nature of reality in a form comprehensible to the human mind. “These things never happened, but always are.” The Christian story is that God created, in the Garden of Eden, the first man, who is also the first woman– “Male and female in his own image,” “bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh,” and so on– and that that first man “disobeyed God’s will” and “fell from Paradise” by “learning the knowledge of good and evil” and so was clothed in “garments of skin.” After a time, the New Adam and New Eve came into the world: These are Jesus, “son of God,” and Mary, “conceived without sin.” (Why did all that time have to pass? What does that mean?) Her heart was pierced by seven swords; He went willingly (after praying “Thy will be done” in the Garden of Gethsemene) to his death (at the Place of the Skull, where the skull of the First Adam was buried) on the cross (made from the wood of the Tree of Life) . Dying thusly, he descended into Hell and broke its gates; he ascended into Heaven. After a time His Mother, the New Eve, also ascended into Heaven, and was crowned “Queen of Heaven and Earth.” All of these are allegorical statements about the nature of human life and the universe as a whole, not descriptions of historical events.
Taken as history, this is an odd story about a bungling deity who regularly sets his own creations on fire until forever and then subjects his own son to a miserable death. Such a being is hardly wothy of worship. Perhaps, as you suggest, he really should turn the mirror on himself and consider his own errors, possibly with the aid of a trained psychotherapist. The point is precisely that it is not history, but myth. Perhaps a myth that, as many believe, actually happens to have actually happened; perhaps not. It hardly matters. Myth deals in the world of Truth and eternal Being; History, with Facts and endless Becoming. As history, the Christian story tells us very little and not much of any use. As myth, the Christian story reveals eternal truths about the human condition, in which many have found an immense and even endless well of spiritual nourishment.
Here’s the scenario I’m envisioning for the upcoming election (and as Kimberly Steele often says on her blog, I do realize I could be wrong): Trump wins handily enough that only some form of contrived subterfuge is the only way for the globalist political class to deny him his victory, and this class resorts to this very subterfuge without so much as batting the proverbial eyelash. as the blue-state big-city PMC applauds like trained seals. The true-red states, whose geographic base is the region that formed the Confederate States of America in 1861, protest bitterly and denounce Kamala Harris’s swearing in as 100% illegitimate and an affront to constitutional government. The South, of course, doesn’t immediately run a Confederate Battle Flag up the flagpole and declare a new CSA, but the resulting alienation of the true red states will form the basis of what will become a messy and protracted divorce of the long-disparate parts of the American nation. All manner of social, political, and economic chaos will attend these events, and this will spell the eventual end of the United States as a world power. The ordinary people of all the formerly United States will have to get use to a much poorer standard of living.
Do you see this scenario as at least one distinct possibility?
About voting for the Green Party: Dr. Jill Stein, she really is a physician, so not a lightweight weirdo, first ran for President on the Green Party ticket in 2012. Ten years earlier, she was Green candidate for Governor of Massachusetts. So, that adds up to 22 years of being a leading figure in the Green Party.
If we learned anything from the Kennedy campaign this year, it was that there is what I think can fairly be called a significant portion of the electorate who do care about clean air, soil and water, environmentalism, and the shocking decline in public health in the USA. Add those issues to a robust peace policy, and I think that faction could win some elections and have some influence. Remember that the Progressive Party at the turn of the 20thC never elected a president, but it did elect Senators and Governors and had a profound influence on public policy.
Dr. Stein and those around her have had 22 years now to make the Green Party into a force to be reckoned with and have not done so. I call that rank incompetence and I have had enough of being asked to vote for well meaning fools.
Michael M, that’s an ingenious way of reformulating part of the classic argument from evil: if there is only one god, he created everything, and he is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, why is the world such a shambles? Nobody’s yet come up with a satisfactory response, though there’s plenty of handwaving on the subject. Me, I’m a polytheist, and a relatively traditional polytheist at that; I believe that there are many gods, that they didn’t create the universe out of nothing, and that they’re powerful, wise, and good, but not omni-anything — and the argument from evil is one reason why I find this view convincing.
Justin, thanks for this.
BeardTree, yep. I got into blogging more than 18 years ago to talk about this very issue — and people were shoveling smoke about hydrogen then, too. Oh, and electric cars. Did you know that both of those were big deals during the energy crisis of the 1970s? They didn’t work then, either. Here’s one of the electric cars that was driving around when I was in high school:
It was just as inefficient and inconvenient as the current batch, though I find its visual awkwardness endearing.
Nachtgurke, hmm! Fascinating. Many thanks for both of these.
Foxhands, our cultures in the industrial West are frankly insane, and so people face a difficult choice — they can be well-adjusted to an insane society, which makes them crazy in one way; they can reject their own culture, which makes them crazy in a different way; or they can find some compromise between the two, which makes them crazy in both ways at the same time. It’s not any easy road to walk.
Wer, fair enough. I wondered if something like that was behind it.
Dabilahro, yes, I read The Phenomenon of Man forty-odd years ago, and found it unconvincing. I know Teilhard’s ideas are quite popular among people who want to believe that progress is leading humanity to some kind of surrogate godhood. You’ll find similar notions in various fields — notice how many people who are passionate about space travel, for example, are still caught up in giddy fantasies of humanity bestriding the stars, outliving the sun, et cetera ad nauseam.
Clay, that makes an impressive amount of sense. It’ll be interesting to see if the Democrats can pull anything out of the dumpster fire they’ve ignited.
Siliconguy, thanks for this. I’m almost tempted to visit Nuuk sometime — I’ve been interested in Greenland since long before I started my tentacle fiction.
Taylor, of course there is. The weight loss industry is a huge profit center these days, and it would go broke if it actually helped people lose weight. I discussed that in this blog post:
https://www.ecosophia.net/a-neglected-factor-in-the-fall-of-civilizations/
Justin, thanks for this. Captain Crunch — good heavens. I haven’t heard anyone mention him for a very long time. No, I was never a phone phreak, but I knew people who were on the fringes of that scene.
Celadon, interesting. That would suggest, of course, that Jesus wasn’t one-third of an omniscient god, or he’d have known what would happen…
Chuaquin, if it works for you, by all means. There are a million diets out there and all of them are good for at least somebody, somewhere.
Bruno, nah, I’ll see you on the inner planes someday. As for the business about Trump battling witches, why, I posted something about that over on Dreamwidth earlier today —
https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/301479.html
David BTL, thanks for this. Early voting here in Rhode Island started last Wednesday; I went in around noon, and it was very sedate, no lines, no wait. If that’s the way it goes in this very blue state, Harris may be in much deeper trouble than she realizes.
Mister N, given that significant elite factions have broken from the consensus and are either sitting this one out or backing Trump — the latest is that the Los Angeles Times has refused to endorse Harris — I’d say this isn’t likely, though of course it’s possible.
Mary, “well meaning fools” may not be the right term. Are you familiar with the concept of controlled opposition?