The Orthosphere and Zippy Catholic seem curiously optimistic about the future of the Roman Catholic Church.
Seems to me that anyone who is genuinely Roman Catholic should be making spiritual and organizational preparations for excommunication.
Here are some entertaining bits from the Pope’s interview with La Republica, which came to my attention when it was parodied as “The Third Vatican Councilâ€. I at first mistook the parody for the real thing, since Pope Francis is hard to parody.
“Proselytism is solemn nonsense, it makes no sense. We need to get to know each other, listen to each other and improve our knowledge of the world around us. Sometimes after a meeting I want to arrange another one because new ideas are born and I discover new needs. This is important: to get to know people, listen, expand the circle of ideas. The world is crisscrossed by roads that come closer together and move apart, but the important thing is that they lead towards the Good.â€
Your Holiness, is there is a single vision of the Good? And who decides what it is?
“Each of us has a vision of good and of evil. We have to encourage people to move towards what they think is Good.â€
Which was fairly parodied as “all religions are trueâ€, which is the progressive position that all religions rightly understood, are true, because all religions, rightly understood, are progressivism.
In the same interview Pope Francis also said
“The Son of God became incarnate in order to instill the feeling of brotherhood in the souls of men.â€
Which replaces Christ the redeemer with Jesus the community organizer. In the parody, they have the Third Vatican Council removing the sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and whateverphobic parts of the New Testament, which is not entirely fair, but is true in the sense that demoting Jesus to community organizer is a result of being holier than Jesus. So the parody, which has him revising the bible, is truer than the actual truth.
I literally laughed out loud when Zippy Catholic moderated you for being uncivil when you were in fact the most civil person in the comments. Keep up the good work.
Zippy’s never been able to understand arguments other than his own. He quite similar to most Christians of this age. Loopy ideas not testing by argument or evidence, dismissal of other ideas because of who the arguments come from, unconscious acceptations of the progressive faith and consumed by by small maters that have no bearing on the direction and the speed of the ship.
Indeed.
No shit.
Pope Francis does not seem to have noticed that communism does not work, and that giving effect to communism invariably involves murdering very large numbers of people. He theoretically believes in the divinity of Christ, but treats it as metaphor for the superiority of official victim groups over official oppressor groups, which superiority gives those enforcing social justice the need and the right to assign people to oppressor groups, and kill them. Christ was divine – and so was Martin Trayvon.
Latin America was and is very leftist. The partial counterrevolution that occurred in some places doesn’t I think show that it was less leftist, but that the only option left to those opposed to leftism was extreme violence. This pretty much removed the threat of terroristic leftism but didn’t really change the social environment. Francis is a product of this environment.
I’ve been recently following a video series on precolumbian South American civilization from the Teaching Company. The fact that leftism is so successful in South America can probably be traced back to its precolumbian substrate. To my knowledge, South America is the only place in which civilization began BEFORE any kind of known social stratification emerged. Ziggurats and large settlements were being built in the Norte Chico valley and in Chavin de Huantar. Interestingly, there is no evidence of those early egalitarian cultures of having practiced warfare. Those early Amerinds were apparently very strange people.
Only much later, with the advent of cultures such as Salinar, did the ancient Peruvians start building walled settlements and fortresses, as well as socially stratified neighborhoods. Then they also stopped building those ziggurats around the same time.
Still, I bet enough of this early egalitarianism carried on in some form and to some extent, even after the Incas were conquered. Maybe as predisposition towards socialism somehow ingrained in the genes of Amerinds as well as their their Mestizo descendants?
At any rate, Mr. Bergoglio is not an Amerind, but he was probably influenced by elements of Amerind culture.
Just as churches in Peru have depictions of Inti the Sun God where there should be depictions of the bearded God of Christianity, it seems the Pope isn’t actually worshiping the European Christian God. I don’t know about Montezuma, but it looks like Viracocha and Inti are having their revenge by means of their follower, Mr. Bergoglio.
“I remember that she also gave me the statement from the American Communists in defense of the Rosenbergs, who had been sentenced to death. The woman I’m talking about was later arrested, tortured and killed by the dictatorship then ruling in Argentina.”
Hmm. Maybe he’s Signalling?
Pontifex Indexus Venti will quite point right when the wind blows that way, he’s already done so.
pwned.
Catholics get stuck in logic and doctrine traps when popes like Francis come along. It makes someone like Martin Luther easier to understand.
They’re stuck in logic and doctrine traps because they perceive that hierarchy, order, and tradition are very important to a well functioning synthetic tribe. They can’t bring themselves to the idea that the lynch pin of the order and hierarchy has to removed in order to prevent the current pope from destroying the church. Thus they lie to themselves and play logic games.
In a way they might be right. Once Sulla broke with tradition and used the legions to save the republic it was only a mater of time until someone else used the legions to conquer it. In the same way if they remove a pope there’s an excellent chance that pope removal might become common and destroy the church anyways.
If the church is to be saved by removing the pope then a new structure must be designed to replace the existing structure with all new traditions that preserve the best of the old with new ones geared to prevent another Francis.
When you explain it like that, it is obvious that they are right.
They are also screwed, barring a miracle. I suppose they expect a miracle.
I, on the other hand, think the state church needs to be subordinated to the needs of the state. The early Christian Church undermined Rome in various ways, among them that it was alarmingly sympathetic to barbarian immigration.
Charles the Hammer put the Church in order, and, starting with Charles the Hammer, we see manly Bishops with armor and big hammers stained with the blood and brains of Saracens. The dangerously pacific and passive propensities of Christianity were rationalized away, while its sound positions on sex and reproduction were given more force though the authority granted by Charles the Hammer. His grandson, Charles the Great, put the somewhat ad hoc measures of his grandfather on a permanent institutionalized basis with Holy Roman Emperor and Pope, himself as the first Holy Roman emperor.
When the holy Roman Emperors weakened, the Church started to have problems, and has had big problems ever since. Needed a strong emperor, to keep the strong Church from corruption.
A world of a single superstate sucks, for lack of competition between states. In a world of many states, if all stagnate but one, the one with scientific and technological progress will rule, fixing the problem.
If many nation states, need many national churches, a Church of England, a Church of White Americans, with a theoretically equal church of black Americans (equal as in “separate but equal”), and so on an so forth.
“And they that passed by, blasphemed him, wagging their heads, and saying: Vah, thou that destroyest the temple of God, and in three days dost rebuild it: save thy own self: if thou be the Son of God, come down from the cross. In like manner also the chief priests, with the scribes and ancients, mocking, said: He saved others; himself he cannot save. If he be the king of Israel, let him now come down from the cross, and we will believe him.”
I don’t know if the early Church was “sympathetic to barbarian immigration” but I do know that without such immigration we wouldn’t have had Charles the Hammer and the subsequent Middle Ages.
Perhaps an infusion of barbarism was just what the late Romans needed.
The mistakes of the early church is not a widely discussed topic among christens. It’s not surprising that you wouldn’t know about it.
Quite possibly nothing less drastic could have saved them from themselves, but they suffered a lengthy dark age. I would hope to skip the centuries of darkness this time around.
“Perhaps an infusion of barbarism was just what the late Romans needed.”
Something on the order 70-90% of coastal roman population(most people lived on the coast) were killed or carried off as salves in centuries after the fall of Rome. England has almost no roman DNA left despite Romans having lived there for 400+ years before the fall.
I’m often told by christens that more Christianity is the way to save the west. If more Christianity means that me, my family and everyone I know is slaughtered or sold off by barbarians that Christians invited in then the Christian version of “saving” seems to be rather less than useful. I’m not a fan of death cults.
One of the biggest lessons the Christian church learned during the fall of the west is the church must be loyal to the local people first and to the larger Christian community second.
Red:
OK, in what ways did the early Church show itself to be “alarmingly sympathetic to barbarian immigration”? It seems implausible given that the barbarians in question were either heathens or heretics. Was the policy of settling barbarian tribes in Roman territory an ideologically driven protocol-leftist ‘openness to the other’ or simply a necessity dictated by military weakness? If the latter, it seems tendentious to blame that weakness on Christianity — the Empire had been significantly affected by military and institutional dislocation before Constantine. The glory days of classical Rome were already gone. (It’s also worth remembering that the Christian Eastern Empire survived the fall of its Western neighbour by almost a millennium — not a bad run.)
Jim:
Some things are just beyond the power of men to save or direct. Reality is messy that way and no civilisation lasts forever. Rather than blame the Christian Church for causing the Dark Ages, we should praise her for providing an institutional and cultural matrix robust enough to pull the West through the tradition and lift it to the heights of medieval civilisation. (And even the Dark Ages weren’t unrelievedly dark. The Carolingian Renaissance, the flowering of Anglo-Saxon civilisation, the rise of a unified Christian Anglo-Scandinavian empire …)
See Unqualified Reservations on Prudentius.
Moldbug carefully avoids mentioning, but expects his readers to know, that Prudentius wrote this stuff in 406AD, and that the Roman Empire in the West fell in 410AD.
Firstly I said “The early church”, not “Christianity”. I am a huge fan of restoration Anglicanism, and I am pretty keen on the Christianity that conquered the Incas and the Aztecs.
Secondly After 1000AD, no empire just a half abandoned city, From 400AD to 1000AD, more accurately described as a series of empires where the emperor eventually decided to locate his palace at Constantinople. They did not go all the way dark, the way Rome did, but the lights were pretty close to going out.
(Sorry, that should read “proto-leftist”)
(And “through the transition”.)
Jim:
One poet is hardly “the early Church”. The link at the end of MM’s piece gives a more nuanced view.
That said, one cannot deny there are times when manly Bishops with armor and big hammers stained with the blood and brains of Saracens are what’s required.
“One poet is hardly “the early Churchâ€. The link at the end of MM’s piece gives a more nuanced view.”
I’ll quote from that link:
In 417 AD, the theologian Orosius observed: “the barbarians [in Spain], having forsworn their swords, have turned to the plow, and now nurture the surviving Romans as allies and friends.†(cited in Mathisen, 2006, p. 33).
This type of quote is repeated by many christens during the period that they encouraged the empire to let them in. Once past the frontier Rome had no defenses to stop such large groups. Yes Christians are not wholly responsible for it, but they made a disastrous call that helped bring down the empire and got a lot of christens and Romans killed for their naivety.
Not that nuanced: It concludes:
” Was the policy of settling barbarian tribes in Roman territory an ideologically driven protocol-leftist ‘openness to the other’ or simply a necessity dictated by military weakness?”
Christians viewed the goths as new people to convert and because some had already converted they’d never be a danger to Christians and might actually be useful if non Christians Romans gained powered again. Typical universalist thinking.
This isn’t the only mistake the church made. While they did very good things like restoring the sanctity of marriage and brought unity to the empire they did very bad things like banning infanticide and rigorously enforcing it. This caused a massive growth in the worthless non working population which in turn caused massive taxes increases on the working to keep them fed. Which lead to the productive to cease being productive and refusing to have kids.
When the eastern empire reconquered the west a century or so after the fall they found a populace so stupid and worthless that they just let the territory go 20 years later. With the populace as it was there was no economic gain from holding it. It’s the people that truly makes a place valuable and in the western empire only the worthless had survived Christianity’s experiments with banning infanticide and insistence on saving everyone.
We’d see a similar result in America if we outlawed abortion. If we didn’t have abortion under class blacks would be 30-40% of the population today instead of 9-10%.
To it’s credit the Catholic church learned it’s lesson. Infanticide was officially illegal but they spent no time enforcing it. If a women left her child to die in the woods, they ignored it.
Red:
You got a source on that? All I’ve read on the Gothic war doesn’t say that. Not to mention that the eastern empire was Christian too and so ostensibly subject to the same problem.
Sorry I don’t have a single source. It’s mostly memory from a bunch of histories and an inference about the results. It’s not rigorous and it might be wrong. I’d love to have someone with more knowledge about the fall of the empire critique it.
1. The west had a serous depopulation population problem until christens ended infanticide in the west.
2. The Greek east still had relatively solid family life but the west, Roman family formation was dead due to women’s rights and lots of infanticide/birth control. This caused declining IQ among the elites and not enough men to man the legions.
3. With the banning of infanticide the primarily group of people producing the next generation were sluts and whores. We’re talking an all of sudden torrent of births from the least capable of society. It produced enough children to fill the legions but it would be like replacing American white population with a 60% black one all in the space of 30-40 years.
4. Stupid people requires a certain amount of smart people around to keep their harm to a minimum. You can’t increase elite demographics nearly as quickly as you can with common people.
5. Despite the extra population, the people drawn from this pool proved useless at war which forced the Romans to rely on barbarians for defense. There’s also signs of rapid economic decline and massive over taxation during this period. Before the end the Romans switched to using the populace as part time farmers/part time militia similar to the feudalism practiced in the east but the peasants couldn’t properly feed themselves let alone protect the border. Where as feudalism worked great in the east, in the west it was a disaster. Think of blacks trying to farm for themselves right after the end of slavery in America.
6. When the east re-conquered west there wasn’t enough economic activity to make it worth their while. How do lands and people go from pretty productive to utterly worthless in 150 years? I’d say the demographics of the populace had changed for the worse.
7. During the middle ages the church stopped actively trying to prevent infanticide which indicates that their previous ban hadn’t worked out so well.
;TLDR Population decline followed by rapid lower class population increase lead to a sudden Idiocracy in the west thanks to the Christians. Their heart was in the right place, but the results were horrible.
A source on infanticide.
http://www.christiancadre.org/member_contrib/cp_infanticide.html
Red:
It’s true that some of those quotations might suggest a degree of complacency in the face of barbarian settlement (though none amounts to anything like “encouraging the empire to let them in”), but it’s quite a leap to assume such attitudes were typical of the wider Christian population, let alone an ‘official position’ of the Church. It would be interesting to see what popes and bishops were saying.
In any case, Frost also quotes contemporary pagan authors expressing exactly similar sentiments to Prudentius et al. If Christians would have seen the barbarians as potential converts, so pagans would have seen them as potential subjects of the Roman law and beneficiaries of the Roman peace. Those who complain about Christianity’s ‘universalism’ seem to forget that the pagan imperium rested on universalist assumptions of its own.
Regarding your speculations about the dysgenic effect of Christian opposition to infanticide, I don’t really know enough about the period to say whether any of it’s grounded in fact. However –
But do those figures take account of what the white demographic might be if whites weren’t aborting and contracepting themselves out of existence? I assume blacks had no legal access to abortion in, say, the 1950s, yet I suspect that wouldn’t have been seen as a major demographic threat then because whites weren’t busily committing racial suicide on their own account.
You yourself acknowledge “the west had a serous depopulation population problem” and “Roman family formation was dead due to women’s rights and lots of infanticide/birth control”.
It’s not a bad theory but you need to develop it better. Especially citations in how. the western family was different from the eastern and if whores had a population explosion then.
And calling them like American blacks is an exaggeration.
“But do those figures take account of what the white demographic might be if whites weren’t aborting and contracepting themselves out of existence? I assume blacks had no legal access to abortion in, say, the 1950s, yet I suspect that wouldn’t have been seen as a major demographic threat then because whites weren’t busily committing racial suicide on their own account.”
There’s two different problems going on at the same time:
1. People are becoming dumber because women’s rights kills the birthrate among smarter people. Abortion/Contraceptives barley factors in. Check any civilization in history and your find that women’s rights destroy the upper and middle class birthrate. More whites are middle and upper class thus their rates wouldn’t change much over all, though the quality of whites would decline.
2. The lower classes are fucking like crazy because of welfare and sexual liberation.
So if you ended abortion and conception tomorrow the increase in the underclass would swap the exiting smart people and smarter people would still not be reproducing due to women’s rights.
Underclass black women use abortion like it’s birth control. Underclass white women use actual birth control. To make either illegal would cause a massive surge in the underclass birthrate and destroy our ability to handle them(not that we’re doing that well right now). The black problem would be much worse than the white problem due to superior child production capabilities, lower standards, and the offspring being less civilized.
If the church ever gets her way on the this subject the results will be beyond disastrous unless you prep the population first. You need penalize bastardy in and outside the church. The penalties will have be harsh enough to force women control themselves after the abortion ban is in place.
Christan have it all wrong protesting in front of abortion clinics. They should be at their churches shaming and tossing out their single mothers and they should treat bastards and divorced women like shit.
“In any case, Frost also quotes contemporary pagan authors expressing exactly similar sentiments to Prudentius et al. If Christians would have seen the barbarians as potential converts, so pagans would have seen them as potential subjects of the Roman law and beneficiaries of the Roman peace. Those who complain about Christianity’s ‘universalism’ seem to forget that the pagan imperium rested on universalist assumptions of its own.”
The Christians being as stupid as the pagans isn’t a decent argument that the church was a force for good.
You may have misunderstood the point. It’s not that the roman empire wasn’t going to collapse(it clearly was with or without the Christians) it’s that the Christan church made things worse in some ways. The church that had emerged during the middle ages had learned from those mistakes and created Europe. For that alone it should be honored for all history.
The issue at hand is Christians are repeating the same mistakes the early church made and worse they’re ignoring all the good decisions as well. Creating stable family life was a massive win for the Christian church and the empire. The modern church doesn’t even bother to research while early Christians has such solid families and modern Christian families are largely crap. An early christian could expect support from other Christians in finding work, finding a mate, finding shelter, and finding fellowship. Today’s churches do none of that. Instead the church is full progressive universalist mode helping every who’s far away and largely not Christian while ignoring their local brothers and sisters.
Actually it’s not all that stark. The History of the Catholic Church is our monks. Cluny for instance. The Church [and ahem western civilization] was preserved and cradled in the monasteries. To outsiders our history is the history of the papacy. If this were the case truly we would have been completely fucked by the 8th century during the pornocracy, but monks showed Charlemagne what courage was by preaching unto marytrdom amongst the Saxons [and many others]. One actually converted 30 Pechenegs to Christ.
We’ve had Anti-Popes before and weathered them, we had one during Napoleon. We’ve had the Papacy go thru every horror known to primate. We endured. It’s nice to have a John Paul II, but that doesn’t happen often.
We really need a right wing American Pope (Aut Broglio, Aut Nihil). Speaking of Sulla.
We endure through the monasteries and the faithful peasants. Our educational, hospital and true charity institutions don’t hurt us over the long run either. Charity was never an evil word until the 20th century got ahold of it.
Jim the Papacy was in the service of the State until Canossa. Which this man seems determined to reverse. The Orthodox didn’t exactly cover themselves with glory during Communism either. If the State is God’s employer…
“We endure through the monasteries and the faithful peasants.”
That explains the puritan obsession with destroying the monasteries.
Popes having concubines and being succeeded by their sons is not a problem – that is a fine system, better than a having a conclave of Bishops elect the pope. The church was great during the Papal pornocracy. Pope John XI was a fine Pope. The problem today is that the Church is subject to a state hostile to your religion, which intends to convert you all to progressivism. Back in the days when the papacy was unduly influenced by hot chicks, it was unduly influenced by Roman Catholic hot chicks.
They got to be officially declared to be a counter revolutionary organization, which is glorious. They had martyrs. Nearly all of the Greek Orthodox clergy were shot or sent to labor camps. Patriarch Tikhon anathematized communism and the communist government.
Metropolitan Sergius was the Greek Orthodox Phil Robertson.
Where is the Roman Catholic Phil Robertson?
I can’t seem to grasp why Christians once shown the truth immediately shoot the messenger, claim that God will save them, and then burn all the bridges with potential non Christian allies.
Can’t reason people out of something they didn’t reason into.
The psychological pathways of religion are funny.
Not as funny as the psychology of atheist, tribe-switching nerds, spandrell!
Keep up the good work on your articles on fob history no one cares about. We all need a hobby, champ.
Lol. Hit a nerve huh.
As to that last bit, they would rather you be Catholic and a fool than atheist and wise. This extends to trying to deny that non-Christians even can be wise.
Wise?
Yer all going to Hell. They never actually took that off the books.
As to Catholic and a fool..well..you know..we are here 2000 years later.
And BTW you’re typing on this machine because of our hunchbacked monks.
Yer so called Reformation is Divine Chartered Accountancy, and you outsourced the last part to the Jews. {{{— See? Divine Tribalism works.
Gee Jim it could be worse. We could be Anglican. Getting the Communion host from the Transvestite Dwarf yet?
See the ACNA – Anglican Church of North America. Also “Anglican mainstream” No transvestites giving communion there. Not that the ACNA is necessarily a major improvement on Pope Francis, but at least the grosser acts of impiety by the Anglican church have hit a large organized collective response by Anglicans, which has forced substantial conciliatory moves, notably opposition to gay marriage, from the Archbishop.
I can’t blame Catholics for being suspicious of atheists. The atheist track record is a poor one when given power or influence. What I don’t understand is the total lack of concern about heretics living and spreading within the church. The danger from such people is far greater than the danger from a powerless and non influential group of atheists.
Most atheists are not atheists, but advocates of competing religions.
Namely Atheistkult. Who with evangelistic fervor try to convert illogical unenlightened religious Bigots to Reason. That they may serve the Goddess of Reason.
“Each of us has a vision of good and of evil. We have to encourage people to move towards what they think is Good.
Hopefully then, enough people recognize that the Marxism which Bergoglio peddles is evil.
[…] Cthulhu swims only left « Jim’s Blog […]
[…] Cthulhu swims only left « Jim’s Blog […]
[…] “Where is the Roman Catholic Phil Robertson?” Jim Donald asks.  Where indeed?  The most painful thing in all of this is the shame.  If Catholic businessmen or clergy were being threatened with torture or the Gulag and they all betrayed the faith, one could understand while still disapproving.  But we are such cowards that mere social disapproval is enough to make us effectively renounce our Savior.  (And make no mistake:  accepting Leftist sodomy affirmation in defiance of scripture, tradition, and natural law certainly does mean switching teams.  It shows who your true master is.  If you give in on buggery, the Left owns you completely.) […]
[…] on the TNIO post for recognition of that.) Rather than arguing over whether “Cthulhu swims left” AAA proposes amphetaminizing the monster regardless. If a “holocaust of freedom” […]