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Thread: Christophobia

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    A humble prophet Dresta's Avatar
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    Default Christophobia

    I read an essay by Kenneth Minogue a week or so ago, and recent postings on here have increasingly impressed on me the accuracy of his appraisal. Read it all if you have time, but i will quote the more important parts for those who don't:

    http://www.newcriterion.com/articles...-the-West-1355

    What is remarkable is how perceptive it is considering it was written in 2003; much of what he says is far more true of today than of then. He asks why this visceral and blind hatred of Christianity when the religion is clearly a waning force in the Western world? Why the need to trample all over your opponents after they've already been vanquished?

    [QUOTE]My concern is with another shift in recent sentiment, less dramatic but in my view no less significant. It is the rising hatred of Christianity among Western peoples, which I shall call

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    A humble prophet Dresta's Avatar
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    And this is the crux of the matter, out of which has emerged the modern Olympianist worldview, so well epitomised by the current political status quo of nearly all Western European nations (and of course: in Obama). But it emerged largely as a result of our contact with other cultures:

    Let me suggest that educated Europeans are today united in terms of a project we characterize as the perfecting of the human condition by the power of reason. Devotion to this perfection leads us to scan the news each day in search of signs of the times: we focus on the fate of rights and how they are violated round the world, at the poverty which signals the imperfection of inequality, at peace processes leading us forward and violence and bigotry dragging us backward. The aim is to foster the happiness of mankind, and we are buoyed up when the signs are good and cast down when they are bad. We seek, if we respond to this new form of devotion, to harness human power to control human folly, inspired by our past successes in triumphing over the vagaries of nature. There are many internal disagreements over what this perfection might mean, though currently there is a large measure of agreement that the central problem is war and other forms of human conflict. All of this can be subsumed under the famous slogan that mankind must take its destiny into its own hands.

    We can, I think, distinguish three stages, or more exactly variants, in the development of this project. The first is the entirely familiar idea of progress. Nineteenth-century Europeans in contact with technologically incapable people not only brought them the benefits of Christian salvation but also clean water, railways, and industry. The whole package was understood as a god- like increase in human power controlling human circumstance. This was profoundly disruptive in other cultures because they had long been accustomed to a different idea of the balance between what could be changed and what must be endured. Here from the West came a set of aliens teaching that nasty things that had long seemed inevitable could be remedied. But the actual situation of these interesting aliens was that they were missionaries not only to other cultures, but also to the mass of people in their own culture as well. Technologists, administrators, and intellectuals had to become, as Ernest Gellner has called them, “the Westernizers of the West.” The great figures of the movement to improve the lives of the heathen often happened to be Christian missionaries like Schweitzer and Mother Teresa, but in Europe itself, and in America and other Western parts, they were rulers and social reformers.

    Christians might be believers in progress, but progressives were likely to find Christianity an optional extra, if not an actual impediment to the advance of reason. Christians were therefore often suspicious of progress. “To become a popular religion,” wrote W. R. Inge, “it is only necessary for a superstition to enslave a philosophy. The Superstition of Progress had the singular good fortune to enslave at least three philosophies—those of Hegel, of Comte, and of Darwin.” Beyond European civilization the demand was indeed for philosophies of one kind or another, not for religions, which many of them already had in abundance. Gunpowder, clean water, and vaccines were the thing, not routes to salvation. For most of the beneficiaries of Western enlightenment abroad, Christianity was for understandable reasons increasingly understood as an optional extra. The crucial thing was that scientists seemed to have a method of coming to agreement about what was true and what worked, whereas Christians and exponents of other religions seemed locked into endless irresolvable disputes. Hence the initial response of Indians, Chinese, and others was likely to be admiration for the technical skills of Europeans, and contempt for their beliefs and manners.

    The smart thing to do seemed to be to copy Western technology and throw the rest away. Like most versions of smart cherry picking, this one turned out not to work. The baffling thing was that in often mysterious ways, the generation of railways, medical surgery, military science, and so on seemed to be inseparable from Western institutions and ideas.
    Foreigners are always detestable, and superior foreigners even more so. The horrible possibility loomed that in order to cut themselves in on this Western power, non-Europeans might have actually to become Europeans themselves. Even outsiders as culturally close to Europe as the Russians developed strong countercurrents to Western influence, as with the Slavophiles. The same was true in Eastern Europe. Even Germany before the First World War conceived of itself as a spiritually superior nation quite different from the shallow technology of the French and the British.
    Part of what we see in the Middle East today is a reaction to this ^^^^.

    What I am treating as the “stages” of the Enlightenment Project are not, indeed, successive. There is a good deal of overlap. The Marxist version of progress was communism, and the term may stand for all forms of collectivism which took off from the view that bourgeois individualism had merely been one phase in the emergence of modernity, and one that was imminently to be superseded by higher communal forms of association. In its beginnings, communism counted itself as the real inheritor of progress. Whereas the enlightened looked to reason, communists looked to revolution as the way of blasting a path through reaction to the promised land of technology and equality, or soviets plus electricity. The Marxist version of human perfectionism had an irresistible appeal during most of the twentieth century, partly because it offered the promise not only of catching up with the West, but also of skipping a stage and jumping to the head of the progressive convoy.

    The great drama of twentieth-century history was the failure of this promise. Far from solving human conflict, the revolution of humanitarian fraternity served merely to increase it. Far from forging ahead into the modern world, the countries that followed this path lost much of their moral or social capital and ended up with an obsolete rusting industry built over a pile of corpses. It became clear that perfecting the human condition was a bit more complicated than it had seemed.

    The failure of Communism was consecrated in the fall of the Soviet Union. The remarkable thing is that, as in most cases when prophecy fails, the faith never faltered. Indeed, an alternative version had long been maturing, though cast into the shadows for a time by enthusiasm for the quick fix of revolution. It had, however, been maturing for at least a century and already had a notable repertoire of institutions available. We may call it Olympianism, because it is the project of an intellectual elite that believes that it enjoys superior enlightenment and that its business is to spread this benefit to those living on the lower slopes of human achievement. And just as Communism had been a political project passing itself off as the ultimate in scientific understanding, so Olympianism burrowed like a parasite into the most powerful institution of the emerging knowledge economy—the universities.

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    A humble prophet Dresta's Avatar
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    Default Re: Christophobia

    On Olympianism (striking how similar this is to the now-dominant liberal ideology):

    We may define Olympianism as a vision of human betterment to be achieved on a global scale by forging the peoples of the world into a single community based on the universal enjoyment of appropriate human rights. Olympianism is the cast of mind dedicated to this end, which is believed to correspond to the triumph of reason and community over superstition and hatred. It is a politico-moral package in which the modern distinction between morals and politics disappears into the aspiration for a shared mode of life in which the communal transcends individual life. To be a moral agent is in these terms to affirm a faith in a multicultural humanity whose social and economic conditions will be free from the causes of current misery. Olympianism is thus a complex long-term vision, and contemporary Western Olympians partake of different fragments of it.

    To be an Olympian is to be entangled in a complex dialectic involving elitism and egalitarianism. The foundational elitism of the Olympian lies in self-ascribed rationality, generally picked up on an academic campus. Egalitarianism involves a formal adherence to democracy as a rejection of all forms of traditional authority, but with no commitment to taking any serious notice of what the people actually think. Olympians instruct mortals, they do not obey them. Ideally, Olympianism spreads by rational persuasion, as prejudice gives way to enlightenment. Equally ideally, democracy is the only tolerable mode of social coordination, but until the majority of people have become enlightened, it must be constrained within a framework of rights, to which Olympian legislation is constantly adding. Without these constraints, progress would be in danger from reactionary populism appealing to prejudice. The overriding passion of the Olympian is thus to educate the ignorant and everything is treated in educational terms. Laws for example are enacted not only to shape the conduct of the people, but also to send messages to them. A belief in the power of role models, public relations campaigns, and above all fierce restrictions on raising sensitive questions devant le peuple are all part of pedagogic Olympianism.

    Olympianism is the characteristic belief system of today’s secularist, and it has itself many of the features of a religion. For one thing, the fusion of political conviction and moral superiority into a single package resembles the way in which religions (outside liberal states) constitute comprehensive ways of life supplying all that is necessary (in the eyes of believers) for salvation. Again, the religions with which we are familiar are monotheistic and refer everything to a single center. In traditional religions, this is usually God; with Olympianism, it is society, understood ultimately as including the whole of humanity. And Olympianism, like many religions, is keen to proselytize. Its characteristic mode of missionary activity is journalism and the media.

    If Olympianism has the character of a religion, as I am suggesting, there would be no mystery about its hostility to Christianity. Real religions (by contrast with test-tube religions such as ecumenism) don’t much like each other; they are, after all, competitors. Olympianism, however, is in the interesting position of being a kind of religion which does not recognize itself as such, and indeed claims a cognitive superiority to religion in general. But there is a deeper reason why the spread of Olympianism may be measured by the degree of Christophobia. It is that Olympianism is an imperial project which can only be hindered by the association between Christianity and the West.

    In reality, of course, you can’t give up your identity, because you are what you are. It’s a fantasy. You can, however, toss away the scraps of your past that seem to be an impediment to your present ambitions, as some Olympians have done in apologizing for the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Conquest of the Americas, slavery, and anything else apologizing for which might curry favor with one part of the “Third World” or another. Above all, however, Olympianism seeks to repudiate its own religious basis. The last thing a missionary rationalism needs is a noisy minority reminding outsiders that the project of world justice as currently advanced is a spin-off from Western civilization. Worse, Christianity as a reminder of this fact is exactly the thing likely to provoke irrational resistance to the message. The basis of much of the visceral hatred of Christianity today is that it contradicts the ambition to present the West as the source of pure reason and compassion. Very similar Olympian passions may well account for the rising hatred of Israel, construed as a vehicle of religious dogmatism standing in the way of the West’s accommodation with the whole Islamic world.

    The Olympian project now takes the form of advancing world government by judicializing political conflicts, and its central instrument is in expanding treaty commitment to human rights and in creating international criminal law. The setback (for Olympians) of Colonel Gaddaffi’s Libya becoming the Chair of the U.N. Committee on Human Rights suggests that there is a certain unreality in these international organizations, but Olympians think in the long term. They have, after all, been working on the project since Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations. Failure in the 1930s was redeemed after 1945 by the creation of the United Nations, which accorded international bureaucracies some power over most of the important political problems. Politicians can often be persuaded to sign uplifting treaties even at the cost of creating problems for their own constitutions. An imagined place in history is a powerful inducement to a politician. The treaties signed soon come to be understood by lawyers and journalists, always keen to expand their power, as another step forward in the process of making a better world.
    Note how Gaddafi is no longer with us?
    Last edited by Dresta; 01-24-2016 at 09:10 AM.

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    Default Re: Christophobia

    Its tendency towards centralization and (imperialistic) world governance:

    Progress, Communism, and Olympianism: these are three versions of the grand Western project. The first rumbles along in the background of our thought, the second is obviously a complete failure, but Olympianism is not only alive but a positively vibrant force in the way we think now. Above all, it determines the Western moral posture towards the rest of the world. It affirms democracy as an ideal, but carefully manipulates attitudes in a nervous attempt to control opinions hostile to Olympianism, such as beliefs in capital or corporal punishment, racial, and other forms of prejudice, national self-assertion—and indeed, religion.

    The essence of the Olympian moral posture is a kind of humility. Whatever it has, it is keen to share—technology especially. A just world is an offer to be accepted, not a command to be obeyed. The project being to bring everyone into the world community, Olympians will make whatever sacrifices are required. It will not only pick up the expenses, but abandon anything in its own past that might be a sticking point to non-Western peoples. Humility amounts to the offer of accommodation to others on terms that all sides can agree upon, and the great virtue of the humble is that they can recognize, own up to and apologize for their faults.

    Such a moral posture comes naturally to the Olympian because it merely extends to the Third World the precedence accorded to the poor when deciding public policy in the liberal democratic states of the West itself. The old familiar social question—how to deal with the poor—has suddenly turned up in a civilizational context. “The test of a civilization,” Olympians somewhat implausibly say to each other, “is how it treats its poor and vulnerable.” The rhetoric of Western elites is steeped in self-criticism about the inequalities of contemporary Western societies. Ideally, the Western elites would like to see, or at least imagine they would like to see, an order of things which dispenses, or at least seems to dispense, with inequality, indeed with any form of the exercise of power. The aim of the Olympian project in this area is to replace as the basis of order irrational passions such as fear of punishment. They ought to give way to more rational expedients such as understanding and therapy. As in all versions of the Enlightenment, “education” is central, but one needs distancing quotes around the term “education” to make it clear that we are referring to a process that aims to produce people of a certain type: in other words, not education at all, but training. And the basis of this training will be to make people empirically flexible but morally rigid.

    Having developed a welfarist moral and political posture, the Olympian takes easily to expressing the same posture in international affairs. That notably coercive institution the state is now pronounced a survival from the past. The idea of governing has not quite disappeared from politics, but the term “governance” is preferred, not only because it sounds more arcane, but also because it suggests that laws and rules “emerge” out of a society rather than be made by some sovereign body. Rules, laws, edicts, recommendations, and so on turn up in our lives without apparently being touched by human breath; they come from bodies so remote—preferably supranational if not international—that one may take their wisdom for granted. And if there should be muttering about the burdens this concern for the world’s poor might impose, Olympians have taught their democratic populations to think of themselves as generous and compassionate to suffering classes of people. They have large funds available for subsidizing the Third World poor in their endeavors to improve themselves. In any case, Western people are extraordinarily generous about helping those who suffer in remote places.

    One of the central problems of Olympianism has always been with the nation state and its derivative, nationalism. A world of nation states is one of constant potential antipathy. It makes something of a mockery of the term “world community.” Hence it is a basic tenet of Olympianism that the day of the nation state has gone. It is an anachronism. And on this point, events have played into the hands of this project. The homogeneity of these nation states is a condition of democracy, but it also facilitates the wars in which they have engaged. If, however, homogeneity were to be lost as states became multicultural, then they would turn into empires, and their freedom of action would be seriously constrained. Empires can only be ruled, to the extent that they are ruled, from the top. They are ideal soil for oligarchy. Olympianism is very enthusiastic about this new development, which generates multiculturalism. Those who rule a rainbow society will have little trouble with an unruly national will, because no such thing remains possible. The Olympian lawyer and administrator will adjudicate the interests of a heterogeneous population according to some higher set of principles. Indeed, quite a lot of this work can be contracted out to independent agencies of the state, agencies whose judgments lead on to judicial tribunals in cases of conflict. This is part of a process in which the autonomy of civil institutions (of firms to employ whom they want, of schools to teach curricula they choose, and so on) is steadily eroded by centralized standards. Multiculturalism in the name of abstract moral standards has the effect of restricting freedom across the board.

    Like the Libyans in Africa, the Olympians in the West are turning a plural thing like a civilization into a rigid thing like a project. There is a dire purposiveness about the Olympian passion for signing up to treaties and handing power over to international bureaucrats who want to rule the world. Everything down to the details of family life and the modes of education are governed and guided so as to fit into the rising project of a world government. The independence of universities in choosing whom to admit, of firms choosing whom to employ, of citizens to say and think what they like has all been subject to regulation in the name of harmony between nations and peace between religions. The playfulness and creativity of Western societies is under threat. So too is their identity and freedom.

    Globalization is having very odd effects on our thinking, but none is more curious than the Olympian project of turning the West’s cultural plurality into a homogenized rationalism designed for export to, and domination over, the rest of the world. Turning a civilization into a project by putting everything through a kind of rationalist strainer so as to remove every item that might count as prejudice, bigotry, and superstition will leave Europeans meandering without a compass in a wonderland of abstractions. It reminds one of Aesop’s frog, who wanted to be as big as an ox, and blew himself up more and more, his skin becoming thinner and thinner, till he burst.

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    Down with GLOBALISM poido123's Avatar
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    Default Re: Christophobia

    Christians are out of fashion.


    At least that's the way I look at it.


    New fads and thinking have their cycles. Everything in time balances with a counteraction or rebellion.


    Society has regressed with the reduction of religion particularly christianity(I've noticed it in Australia), it was used to keep order, was a major part of school curriculum and used as part of teaching good morals in society.


    where are the morals now in society? just a lot of lost people doing drugs, living a selfish and empty life.

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    Reign of Error BoutPractice's Avatar
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    Default Re: Christophobia

    Interesting read.

    Overall it amounts to little more than a neat essentialist narrative.

    For example I (and I suspect many others) sympathize both with Olympian views AND with Christian views. Promethean ambition and the consciousness of our insignificance aren't incompatible, but mutually reinforcing. We're big and we're small and we know that we're both.

    Humans aren't made for rest, tranquility. The experience of being human is one of tension, contradiction... striving towards ideals, failing, but never abandoning.

    To be human is to not be at home... the point is, you are looking for a home (which in fact is inside of you the whole time), but you don't really want to find it, because this home is death. The best thing that can happen to you is to embark on an epic spiritual journey, so quixotic that you're certain to never find it.
    Last edited by BoutPractice; 01-24-2016 at 10:17 AM.

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    Default Re: Christophobia

    Christianity is cool to hate on only because people associate it with Whites, and it suits the mainstream agenda where its ok to shit on anything pro-White. A white that looks out for his peoples best interest is a racist POS while a black, asian, jew, hispanic that does so is applauded and cheered.

    And I am no Christian either. Nietszche shit on Christianity and it's flaws over 100 years ago and it's no different today. The only good thing about Christianity is it is one of the only remaining family traditions westerners even have today. Ex: Families getting tougher to celebrate a kids confirmation.

    But Christianity is also for cucks. One of many examples of this is that it's mainly Christians that donate to the third world at the expense of their own country, more or less just bringing everything down because no problem ever gets solved just by throwing money at it. The refugee thing right now is another thing that gets support from Christians. Sure it sounds good in theory "Lets help everyone!", but then you realize everyone suffers as a whole rather than progresses together.

    Not to even mention that Christianity is absolutely devoid of all spiritual knowledge. I'm sure the Vatican has some intentionally hidden information, but as for the Christian populance they are just taught to worship some imaginary being, rather than look inwards and realize their own potential. Before Christianity every civilization was polytheistic. The Romans, the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Tibetans, the Vikings. All had many gods which suggests that this is likely more in line with the actual truth of things beyond the physical plane than the Christian concocted slave worship.


    The Greeks believed that man was a rational animal, which implied that being human was a function of being rational. Women and slaves being defective in rationality were also less human. Christianity replaced this with the idea that each person was an immortal soul equally valuable to God and constituted of a set of affections, which had been deranged by the Fall.
    This was one of the bolded passages an explains the cuck mentality of Christianity.

    People need to accept that some people are just better than others. The truth is that all beings are not all equal. I'm not going to pretend some crack addict is the same worth as me.

    It's not about hatred. I absolutely love my cat like no other, but I will admit it is an inferior being to humans who I may or may not like. The greeks, the romans, the pre Christian civilizations all openly acknowledged this. It's not about hurting feelings, it's about facts.

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    Big Booty Hoes!! NumberSix's Avatar
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    Default Re: Christophobia

    Let's stop dancing around the obvious. The left's position is that western culture needs to be destroyed. It's not coincidental that they side with any group that is blatantly anti-western, e.g, Marxist, Islamists, radical feminists, etc...

    The ONLY culture that the left demonizes is western culture. Criticizing any other culture is off limits.

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    Decent playground baller Yoda's Avatar
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    Default Re: Christophobia

    Too long, did not read.

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    Default Re: Christophobia

    Quote Originally Posted by poido123
    Christians are out of fashion.


    At least that's the way I look at it.


    New fads and thinking have their cycles. Everything in time balances with a counteraction or rebellion.


    Society has regressed with the reduction of religion particularly christianity(I've noticed it in Australia), it was used to keep order, was a major part of school curriculum and used as part of teaching good morals in society.


    where are the morals now in society? just a lot of lost people doing drugs, living a selfish and empty life.
    "Sky is falling" BS. The issues we face in 2016 are minor relative to the cataclysms we've rained on each other throughout our history.

    Example: The Paris attacks were billed as the worst massacre in France since WWII. It was a terrible tragedy, but a minor one compared to the 600,000+ military and civilian deaths France suffered during the war. The difference in scale is overwhelming.

    Be grateful you live at a relatively peaceful time in world history.

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    Free Nick Young Terahite's Avatar
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    Default Re: Christophobia

    Quote Originally Posted by ThePhantomCreep
    Be grateful you live at a relatively peaceful time in world history.
    It really isn't though, especially if you're a non-westerner or the defenseless unborn. Just admit you are a fake liberal and all you give a shit about is yourself.

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    Great college starter ThePhantomCreep's Avatar
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    Default Re: Christophobia

    Quote Originally Posted by NumberSix
    Let's stop dancing around the obvious. The left's position is that western culture needs to be destroyed. It's not coincidental that they side with any group that is blatantly anti-western, e.g, Marxist, Islamists, radical feminists, etc...

    The ONLY culture that the left demonizes is western culture. Criticizing any other culture is off limits.
    The irony of your idiotic statement is that conservative regressives hate more aspects of modern Western civilization than liberals, by a huge margin.

    There's a reason so many of your ilk still fly Confederate flags--it's where their loyalty actually lies.

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    Default Re: Christophobia

    Quote Originally Posted by ThePhantomCreep
    The irony of your idiotic statement is that conservative regressives hate more aspects of modern Western civilization than liberals, by a huge margin.

    There's a reason so many of your ilk still fly Confederate flags--it's where their loyalty actually lies.
    I don't doubt that some of those people's loyalty lies with the south more than the United States as a whole. I don't doubt that there are some "conservatives" that would like to go back to segregation. Of course those people exist. But it's people like you who have this ridiculous thinking that there are no bad guys on your side and that the other side is all bad.

    I know what bad guys there are on the right. I get that there are people on the right who think everything is a Jewish conspiracy to destroy the white race. I know there is a fringe. I understand that these wackos exist. You though believe that there are only good intentioned nice people on the left. Believe me, the left has their share of wackos but it's getting to point that's the left's wackos aren't the fringe anymore, they're in the mainstream.

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    Default Re: Christophobia

    Quote Originally Posted by Yoda
    Too long, did not read.


    Too long, read you did not.

    How can you mess up such an easy gimmick? **** you jayda.

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    Down with GLOBALISM poido123's Avatar
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    Default Re: Christophobia

    Quote Originally Posted by KiiiiNG


    Too long, read you did not.

    How can you mess up such an easy gimmick? **** you jayda.


    Hating on Yoda now


    You're an angry b.itch Simon

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