Observe her protest is written on her in English – she is not protesting for the Russian or Ukrainian audience, but for the western audience. This a western propaganda offensive against the last major Church to stick with Christianity.
I am not a Christian, but Christianity is no threat to me, whereas total domination by progressives of all cultural institutions is a threat to me.
Repeating what I said earlier: Progressives have done to Christianity what Christians did to pagans. Christians would convert the elite by some mixture of economic pressure, evangelical persuasion, and, sometimes, the threat or actuality of state violence. The elite ran the pagan religious institutions, and continued to run them. When ordinary lower class pagans showed for the customary pagan festivals, they found that the festival had been Christianized. They continue to do pretty much what they used to do, but now it was Christian, and not only no longer pagan, but gradually came to demonize pagan gods.
Analogously, today a father takes his family to church on Christmas, and instead of hearing what he was expecting, hears that salvation comes from voting for higher taxes and welfare, and that exercising authority over his wife and children is sinful.
And if the Russian Orthodox Church does not get with the program, their stuff is going to continue to be vandalized and desecrated. That this is western state pressure (the left is the state, and the state is the left, the left is the state at prayer) is apparent from the fact that the Orthodox Church in America has gone over to progressivism. The transition from Christianity to progressivism runs on state, rather than Church, boundaries, and the pressure to convert to progressivism is everywhere expressed in English.
“I am not a Christian, but Christianity is no threat to me…”
But it is a threat – at least potentially.
If Christians are correct about the nature of reality, and you are wrong; then this is the greatest existential threat there could possibly be.
And in practical terms, if Christianity is currently not a threat to you, then this is only because because (real) Christianity is politically small and weak.
A strong Christianity would affect almost every waking moment – as Eastern Orthodoxy did in Byzantium and Russia, up to 1917 (or as it does for the Amish, Hutterites, or devout Mormons, in the US even now).
So maybe you only feel un-threatened by Christianity because you think it is false (presumably having thought this through more deeply than Pascal), and because you know it is weak?
Theocratic England, from the restoration to the early nineteenth century, did not create any problems for unbelievers, for people of different brands of Christianity, or for non Christians. Progressivism does create problems for non progressives, by taxing, by denying access to land, and by intervening inside families to destroy them.
‘presumably having thought this through more deeply than Pascal’
Pascal had the benefit of mystical insight to guide his philosophy.
Without his mysticism, his intellectual calculations would have been much less useful.
November 23, 1654. It was on that evening that he had a “definite conversion,” the result of a mystical vision that lasted two hours and which he called a “night of fire.” In this powerful event, known as the “Memorial,” Pascal experienced “Fire. The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, The God of Jacob. Not of the philosophers and intellectuals.… The God of Jesus Christ.”
http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/catholic_stories/cs0011.html
Mr. Charlton,
Why exactly, as a Christian, are you trying to convince non-Christians who are against the persecution of Christianity that Christianity is a threat to them, especially since, in this world, it is not, and should not be? I generally respect your opinions, but I cannot follow you here.
Exactly. Mr. Charlton’s approach is not really the way to win friends and influence people.
Perhaps he is calling non-Christians who defend Christianity useful idiots?
This a western propaganda offensive against the last major Church to stick with Christianity.
Oh, yes. To relate a short personal tidbit: I can remember as a child, picking a Russian name for one of my pets. My grandfather was stupefied (if not exactly horrified), saying, “Gee, you know, time was not that long ago when you would *never* use a Russian name for *any*thing.” The fact that Russia has become the world’s good guy (in certain ways – at least in the sense that she retains a sense of self-identity and transcendent meaning besides egalitarion diversi-leftism) – and the American Cathedral HATES this – is one of the most interesting realities of our day.
And if the Russian Orthodox Church does not get with the program, their stuff is going to continue to be vandalized and desecrated. That this is state pressure is apparent from the fact that the Orthodox Church in America has gone over to progressivism. The transition from Christianity to progressivism runs on state, rather than Church, boundaries, and the pressure to convert to progressivism is everywhere expressed in English.
I’m not sure I’m following you on this paragraph. Which state is applying pressure to the Orthodox Church? Surely not Russia, as far as I understand? And, there’s also the fact that the Russian Orthodox Church has already endured pretty much the worst persecution a state can bring to bear, and come out thriving.
Western state pressure: western left = western state. Have edited the post to clarify
Notoriously, Christianity can handle persecution pretty well. It is persecution coupled to the offer of decent jobs in the diversocracy and foreign aid business that tends to destroy it.
This isn’t a unique strategy. After conquest Islam spread among Christian subjects in much the same way.
[…] Jim (NSFW): "Progressives have done to Christianity what Christians did to pagans." Like […]
Greetings,
Not sure what the point of your article is. You seem to be saying there’s a similarity between Christianity and Progressivism but in what way, and how do they differ?
Could I say that one way they differ is that Christianity has a doctrine? An actual set of rules one can read, understand, and break?
Where is progressivism’s bible? Where are their rules and what are they? I don’t mean the usual crap about equality and justice and caring and so forth. Where are the rules? Where are the 10 commnandments and the parables, like, render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto to God what is God’s?
I don’t mean blaming whitey or men or Christians for making black people and women and queers feel bad about themselves. What is progressivism trying to build after they destroy the West? Multiculturalism? Even they don’t believe in that. Obama himself sends his kids to Sidwell Friends for $30,000 a year. That’s multiculturalism?
I regret the passing of Christianity.
Progressivism has a lengthy and minutely detailed official line, to which everyone must conform in excruciating detail, which is regularly catechized in its places of holy worship (schools and universities) and is catechized in excruciating, elaborate, and painful detail it is most holy places of high worship (Harvard and the London School of Economics) but whereas Christianity pretends its line is unchanging, and to some considerable extent its line really is unchanging, being written in the unchanging New Testament, progressivism’s line undergoes frequent official change – hence the widespread ridicule from non leftists over the recent change on Gay Marriage. Also a key point of the line is that the line does not exist.
You can see the rules implictly on television shows, since everyone on television shows, except bad guys and idiots, conforms to the rules.
Two years ago, Obama’s position was the same as that of Chick-fil-A, yet now that position is unthinkably and shockingly right wing. Similarly, there is no one in the Tea Party who is openly such an extreme right winger as to propose a return to the policies of 2004. But, as the Chick-fil-A incident demonstrates, though the line undergoes frequent, rapid, and drastic change, there nonetheless is an official line.
Their rules are so lengthy and detailed that one can only give a small sample: for example families must be egalitarian. It is impermissible for the husband to exercise authority. And so, every television show everywhere depicts families where the husband and father does not exercise authority, does not rule, or is an incompetent boob, or both. Yet you will observe in real life, if the husband and father does not exercise authority, is not the boss, the marriage breaks up, which fact no one is allowed to notice, and which fact, should it come to official attention, will result in official punishment.
The rules are also incoherent and self contradictory, plus they are officially nonexistent.
Recall that in “Animal Farm”, their equivalent of the bible underwent such frequent and rapid change, that they ultimately hid it, but the current version always gets catechized starting in kindergarten. Similarly with the Soviet official line. It was so frequently changed that it became officially unofficial. Whenever Hitler was deemed a good guy, every socialist everywhere in the world would firmly say that there was no official line, but Hitler or Pol Pot were good guys, and they had always believed them to be good guys. Whenever Hitler was deemed a bad guy, every socialist everywhere in the world would firmly say that there was no official line, but Hitler or Pol Pot were bad guys, and they had always believed them to be bad guys. Similarly with Pol Pot.
Destroying western civilization is not a plan or a goal, but rather an unintended side effect of policies pursued for short term reasons.
They have a vague confidence that when all power is in their hands, everything will be wonderful, but have no blue print. The greenies (the only ones with a long term plan) plan to reduce the world population to “sustainable” levels (a few hundred thousand or so). The multicults believe that all the good loot descends from space, and the evil whites somehow collared it all, and the government should give everyone a well paid job in the government and a nice house. Feminists want to be men, but also want themselves to be deemed hot, and believe that the government should enable them to be men, but also enable them to remain hot and sexy at the age of forty five and the weight of three hundred pounds.
Nothing here about population issues:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_politics
So not even the greens have a plan.
I think they do have a plan, but their plan is apt to horrify people, so they are disinclined to plainly state it.
But they might also be disinclined to plainly think it.
This is pretty much their plan:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXg_StRpO5w
Every once in a while they let inner thoughts run free.
You should make this be a separate post (starting from “Could I say”). It’s way too good to leave hidden in the comments.
Thanks for your reply. I mostly agree. However, I believe referring to the progressive establishment as a “cathedral” is a mistake. (You didn’t use that term but a number of people do, and I see another commenter below using this very misleading appellation.)
It would be more accurate to use a term like “entertainment software” rather than “cathedral” when referring to the modern liberal establishment. This is because there is no center or body of work that builds on received wisdom or eternal truths. Progressivism (or whatever they call it these days) is a through-the-looking-glass world. Its mind-bending by the father of lies.
People who use the term “cathedral” engage in a kind of magical thinking very similar to modern liberalism. There is no cause and effect in this attempt to associate puritanism and christianity with liberalism. Modern liberalism is more likely a form of gnosticism which was and is a heresy. Gnosticsm may be seen in the Old Testament as the Israelites golden idol worship or Sodom and Gomorah. Or in other pre- and post-Christian sects such as the Adamites or others referring to a Demiurge. But gnostic groups have always held widely differing beliefs.
Progressivism is a Christian heresy, just as Christianity is Jewish heresy.
They started to depart from Christianity when they became the anti slavery movement. The New Testament implies that Christians should eventually get around to freeing their slaves, though not in any swift or urgent fashion, but it clearly rejects freeing other people’s slaves. You can, perhaps turn a blind eye when someone else’s slave runs away, but freeing slaves with fire and steel rather than persuasion and example is clearly unchristian. And they just went downhill from there.
But they continued to think of themselves as a Christian religious movement until shortly after World War II, as indeed the true voice of Christianity, rightly understood.
Modern liberalism is all sorts of things, continually mutating, changing its ideology with ever increasing speed. But if you trace it back in time, and ask what went wrong, back when things started going wrong, it was fairly orthodox Christianity. They proceeded to pursue various noble causes, such as anti racism, anti slavery, anti colonialism, and female emancipation, by the application of state power to reform people with fire and steel. And, in the course of pursuing all these worthy causes, a remarkably amount of state power and other people’s money somehow wound up sticking to them.
Disagree. I was raised in the 50s as a mainstream protestant Christian. I can tell you it wasn’t liberal. In any way.
I have traced it back. Christianity was corrupted from outside. We are seeing it further corrupted today with gay marriage.
Rousseau’s views concerning church and state, which helped move the West to what is commonly referred to as liberalism, were outside Christianity. In fact, were revolutionary. As revolutionary as de Sade’s belief in the underlying cruelty of nature and need for unrestrained self autonomy. These two somewhat contradictory ideas changed the West because a large number of men acted upon them. One on a personal level, the other political.
On the one hand, unrestrained autonomy creates a culture of permanent rebellion against traditional values; on the other, the General Will of the State arbitrates virtue. In either case, the individual becomes a permanent child. Both are antithetical to traditional Christian doctrines concerning autonomy and free will.
Quite so: By the fifties, progressives had entirely abandoned their pretense or self perception of being Christians, but had not yet taken over the Churches.
Before the 1950s progressivism claimed to be a branch of Christianity, and probably believed itself to be. Back in the nineteenth century, plausibly was a branch of Christianity, though in retrospect undergoing obvious and rapid change that would eventually make it clearly non Christian.
French leftism died, as Soviet communism died. French leftism went from Monarchy, to terror, then back to Monarchy. And that was the end of it. It died without substantial influence on modernity.
The French Revolution would be an obscure footnote in the history books, were it not that the anglosphere left likes to dress itself in foreign clothes to facilitate the rule of foreign nations.
The french left originated in Gallicanism, became atheistic in the same way and for the same reasons that progressives became atheistic two centuries later, and dead ended in Napoleon the first. The modern French left is a creation of, and in substantial part a muppet of, the Anglosphere left, manufactured after Napoleon was defeated. Today’s left has no organizational or institutional continuity with Rousseau’s left. The modern French progressive is influenced by Rousseau’s ideas, and likes to dress himself in Rousseau’s ideas to make himself look less like a US State Department tool ruling over Europe through NGOs with their headquarters in New York and branch offices in Brussels, but his organization and institution is organizationally and institutionally descended from English Puritans.
Similarly if US proconsuls get their way with Russia, Riot Pussy will have its history rewritten so that they are the second coming of Soviet Communism, rather than the US state sponsored left that they so obviously are. Soviet leftism died in Stalin, French leftism in Napoleon or the Thermidorean reaction. And now they lie mouldering in their graves. Rousseau influences the modern left about as much as Lenin influences Pussy Riot.
Just FYI – this was a memorial cross over the site of former NKVD prison where many people were executed in 1930s during purges. Moronic does not even start describing the act.
The choice by Western media to canonize Pussy Riot given the general vulgarity of their acts (poorly conceived vandalism and uncouth behaviour) and the relative triviality of their punishment (2 years in jail) comes across similarly to the woman vandalizing the memorial cross. Namely, it feels like a giant middle finger to dissidents in Russia who had half a genuine clue to rub together in their heads, who thereby worried powerful gangsters in the state apparatus, and who therefore were dealt with in ways that might be argued as genuine repression. However, their half a clue was developed independently of any coordinated effort by the Cathedral, so they do not receive a massive media blitz, whereas Pussy Riot gets multiple consecutive days of front page coverage even in MUNICIPAL newspapers in the West.
That a newspaper in my area supposedly dealing with MUNICIPAL affairs saw fit to put Pussy Riot on its FRONT PAGE for MULTIPLE consecutive days is probably the most convincing sign that the selection of Pussy Riot is some kind of public opinion blitz meant to shape Western opinion of Russia. Again, that they chose the most crass and thoughtless ‘movement’ they could find (or manufacture) feels like a massive insult to more thoughtful political dissidents in Russia, especially the ones who suffered far worse than 2 years jail time. More importantly, it proves conclusively that the media’s intentions on this matter are fundamentally insincere.
You have to admit, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova looks pretty good on the front page of your newspaper. And the other two at least make it less obvious that the goal is to put Tolokonnikova on the front page.
Much interesting background material to this story at the Nourishing Obscurity blog, with first-hand experience of Russia
http://nourishingobscurity.com/2012/08/20/the-boiling-frog-principle/#comments
Jim, I was there in the 60s. Radicals and leftists weren’t reading Cotton Mather or Jonathan Edwards. They were reading Rousseau, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Hesse, and many other Europeans and those Americans influenced by them. SDS were not a bunch of puritans. They hated the West and its Christian and classical traditions.
I’ve lived in France. French writers, journalists and artists and so forth loathe America. They took their marching orders from Moscow and never from puritans or Christians.
In the USA, American intellectuals were influenced by Europeans from the Declaration of Independence onwards through socialists, dadaists, nihilists, and surrealists. Whittaker Chambers carefully and thoroughly bears witness in detail to the cultural and politcal underpinning of American Leftism and oikophobia.
Since the pajeet opened this thread I looked at it out of curiousity…
Interesting someone else said the New Left read Rosseau, this supports BAP’s theory of leftism which I also mostly agree with. That progressive leftism in the modern sense really started with Rosseau, Puritan leftism is older but Puritan leftism evolved into the Unitarians who are only one faction of the left.
Rosseau was the main source of the evil…
“Today’s left has no organizational or institutional continuity with Rousseau’s left.”
But, does it have any “organizational or institutional continuity” with puritanism?
You can’t have it both ways. Of course, Rousseau didn’t found the communist party. But he and other purveyors of the Enlightenment established underlying ideas which helped Marx write the Manifesto. One such idea, among many, was “alienation.” Rousseau was the first to use this term, or at any rate introduce it in wide circulation. Rousseau also wrote, “Vices belong less to man, than to man badly governed.” His ideas on the General Will directly led to communist and eventually the New Left’s and SDS’s “participatory democracry.” He popularized the concept of the “noble savage” which has led to the unending romanticism of non-Europeans.
If you want to establish “organizational or institutional” connections between puritanism and the modern left you and your associates need to build a reasonable cause and effect outline. I don’t see it.
The New Left was in large part a Leninist conspiracy, and the Marxists do not have organizational continuity with the Puritans. But those guys were aiming at Soviet conquest of the west, and failed. To the extent that the New Left did succeed and now rules us, it did have organizational continuity.
To the extent that the New Left argued class war, it did not have continuity with the Puritans. To the extent that it was feminist, anti racist, and anti colonialist, it did have continuity with the Puritans, who were feminist, anti racist, and anti colonialist from the days of Cromwell. The restoration enabled British colonialism to get restarted, resuming piracy, slave raiding, trade, and settlement of foreign lands where Sir Walter Raleigh left off.
For example the University occupations were an inside job. The administration wanted to be occupied, and behind the scenes drew up the list of demands to be made upon it, much as the Environmental Protection Agency arranges for people to sue the Environmental Protection Agency demanding that it have more power and confiscate more wealth. And the University Administration did have continuity with the Puritans, through the explicitly Christian left of couple of decades earlier. Most of the “demandsâ€, such as victim studies, resentment studies, and affirmative action, were stuff that they had long been doing, or long been seeking. The University authorities had been actively favoring women and blacks for nearly a century, and the rot in the curriculum goes back all the way to the late nineteenth century. The students were “demanding†stuff the university authorities had long been seeking to impose, but had been having trouble getting away with.
Similarly with the smash monogamy movement. The ever rising age of consent, the ever expanding definition of rape, the ever diminishing rights of the accused to defend himself against such charges, the ever diminishing requirements for evidence to prove rape, were part of a continuing movement that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century had been explicitly Christian and explicitly Puritan.
Cromwell’s preachers had big problems with Paul’s command that husbands and wives, having given consent once and forever, always had to make themselves sexually available to each other and do their best to gratify each other, whether they were in the mood or not. The destruction of marriage is a direct continuation of this movement, taken to ever greater extremes. Divorce on demand, requiring moment to moment consent to marriage, is a logical continuation of the invention of “marital rapeâ€, requiring moment to moment consent for sex. Cromwell’s Puritans were already working their way towards “marital rape†Divorce on demand, and rape charges on a woman’s say so, was the result of a slippery slope that they set their feet upon.
Puritans in Cromwell’s times were already worried that Saint Paul’s command that husbands and wives must be sexually available to each other might lead to the husband mistreating the wife by having too much sex with her, and so, in the sixties, more than three centuries later, they finally got their way, an attack on the family that began in the seventeenth century, and continues to escalate.
One of the reasons I keep harping on traditional Christian marriage is that is where the Puritan drift from Christianity to militant atheism began, though things really went of the rails with the anti slavery movement.
“Similary with the smash monogamy movement . . . that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century had been explicitly Christian and explicitly Puritan.”
Can you prove this? You need to cite this movement’s source material. Writers who use traditional Christian dogma or puritanism (uncorrupted by liberalism) for their inspiration to destory marriage. Then, you need to prove they weren’t outliers and cranks but actual influence on other people and events. You haven’t done this.
“One of the reasons I keep harping on traditional Christian marriage is that is where the Puritan drift from Christianity to militant atheism began, . . . ”
You would have to prove up is down and down is up. Isn’t it more likely that modern libertines and atheists were inspired by the people they say inspired them? Rousseau, de Sade, Marx, Darwin, Freud, Marcuse, etc.
You are prohibiting slippery slope arguments. But it was a slippery slope.
No one ever used traditional Christian dogmas on marriage to justify destroying marriage. Rather, the Puritans backed off a little bit from traditional Christian dogmas in order to justify state intervention in the family to protect women and children. And then they backed off a little further to justify more state intervention to more protect women and children. And then they backed off one hell of a lot further to justify one hell of a lot more state intervention.
As soon as the Puritans backed off just the tiniest little bit from Saint Paul’s directive on marriage, backed off just a little bit from traditional Christian marriage dogma, they were in a logically and emotionally inconsistent position. If the husband is “persecuting” the wife by having more sex than the puritan thinks the wife wants, or the puritan thinks the wife should want, then, slippery slope, you wind up with “marital rape”. If “marital rape”, if sex requires continuing consent moment by moment, then marriage requires continuing consent moment by moment, in which case, you have effectively abolished marriage.
They were not, at first, intending to destroy marriage, just preferred that husbands should be considerately non sexual to their wives, as wives were supposedly non sexual to their husbands. But, in the nineteenth century, once the successors of puritanism were once again on the path to power, they competed with each other each to be holier than the other, so their positions became more and more extreme, and this position became more and more extreme, by small and almost imperceptible degrees, until it became “smash monogamy” and militant atheism.
[…] Athelron points out the rarely remarked upon remarkable facility certain protestors have in English and with Western cultural references. If you didn’t know any better, you’d almost think they were protesting for American (and BBC) cameras or something. But you know better. See also. […]
Jim, just reading your archives, these are your own words from 2012 where you admit that Christians demonized the pagan gods. Where do you stand on this today? Considering our recent debate on the old gods and Christianity?
I know you favour the Russian Orthodox Church, and in that you have been consistent.
Not all of them deserved the demonic appellation. And not all of them were given it. Some of them, quite a few of them, reappeared as Saints. Quetzalcoatl being a notable example. The worship of Quetzalcoatl was tolerated provided it was done unto God. But quite a lot of them were given it that did not entirely deserve it.
With the converging of Christianity in Mexico, the old gods walk again. And they are quite obviously demonic. Nearly all of that lot thoroughly deserved the appellation then and now.