Gain of function research

> You need doctrine and organization, ie a church.

Christianity lives as a mustard seed. Purge existing religious institutions of demon worshipers, apply water and fertilizer, and we will shortly thereafter have doctrine and organization.

This assumes that Caesar comes first and Woke is eliminated second. If Woke dies of Caesar, but Caesar does not apply water and fertilizer to existing religious institutions, then we will need to follow the Pauline strategy of first creating doctrine and organization underground.

> Supposedly we would try not to use the universities as churches again, seeing how that worked out the first time.

Worked well for centuries. You know my philosophy – never rewrite software from scratch unless you really have to.

It failed due to Socinian entryism, not anything wrong with the basic design. The solution to entryism is well known. The Inquisition. Again, why rewrite from scratch?

We will need a rewrite from scratch on the judicial, prosecutorial, and enforcement system, because the existing system has degenerated too far, and we will be attempting to revive software based on bits slate covered in beeswax, and install it in a system more like that of the Judge Dredd comics, where enforcers have an AI connection to a central database.

It may well turn out to be necessary, but I have seen them turn on a dime many times before, I think they can turn again.

> Christianity lives as a mustard seed. Purge existing religious institutions of demon worshipers, apply water and fertilizer, and we will shortly thereafter have doctrine and organization.

> Certainly the churches have irreconcilable theological and organizational differences between each other

All the mainstream Churches are dead or dying, having converted from Christianity to woke, and long cut off from their roots in the universities. Assuming that Caesar applies water and fertilizer, then the universities will convert to newly high status Christianity. When the universities convert back to Christianity, so will they, and they will converge to high status doctrine of the universities. Then we will make the Catholics appoint an American Pope, as the Chinese made them appoint a Chinese Pope, and converge the whole lot back into communion with Orthodoxy.

When Christianity was the state religion, it was the Christianity of the King, and the rest converged or did not matter.

I suppose the Mormons and the Jehovah’s witnesses and such will still be around and not in communion, but they will discover their religion is not very different from Christianity, as they are now discovering it is not very different from Woke and Duluth. The mainstream Churches are vanishing. If instead of being coverged to Woke and Duluth, they are converged into American Orthodoxy, they will instead vanish into communion with Orthodoxy.

When Tsar conquered non Orthodox country X, he would appoint a King of X, and a new high priest of the Church of X, who would apply a minor spray paint touch up job to the Church of X, and pretty soon the state Church of X was known as the X Orthodox Church, whose independence from the Russian Orthodox Church the high priest of X Orthodoxy would fiercely defend.

Worked then, will work now. Worked for Orthodoxy, worked for Woke. Christians have been at this for a long time. Worked for the Romans too, until their state religion died of natural causes. When they conquered someone, they would tell that the Gods that they were ignorantly worshiping in a low status uncivilized way were actually the Roman Gods, and they should worship them in a high status civilized way.

Similarly the Aztecs converged the worship of Quetzalcoatl into demon worship, and the Roman Catholics converged it into Christianity. It is not altogether absurd to believe that the mortal incarnation of Quetzalcoatl was an early white Christian sailor who made a one way trip to the Americas, though after this many reconvergences, it scarcely matters.

> Problem is, there is no Church of America.

Every State of America had its own state Church. In the war of Northern Aggression, these were all converged at bayonet point to the state Church of New England, whose Vatican has been Harvard from long before the American Revolution.

I propose a do-over. Pooch recommends a different headquarters. Should that be needed, Virginia, where a shadow of the state Church of Virginia is currently breathing its last.

We are reactionaries. We are planning a restoration.

Christians have been at this for a very long time. Now it is demon worshipers. Worked for Christians, is working for demon worshipers. Will work for Christians again.

America had State Churches, openly and officially called such. After the War of Northern Aggression, it had one State Church, still nominally Christian, still officially Christian, but officially unofficial. It still has one State Church, officially unofficial. Trouble is that that Church now worships demons.

> America has historically been a Protestant country and every old type American Protestant would have found the cobwebby foreign ritualistic side of Orthodoxy distasteful, for the same reason they found Catholicism distasteful. If our “Protestants” acquiesce to an absorption into Orthodoxy it would have to be either because Orthodoxy itself absorbs a good amount of Protestantism (seems unlikely to me),

Every national Orthodoxy has its own unique and distinct national flavor. American Orthodoxy will be as American as Greek Orthodoxy is Greek and Russian Orthodoxy is Russian. Take a look at the Mexican take on Roman Catholicism. Utterly different from the Roman. The deal the conquistadors gave them is that if they cut out the human sacrifices and stuff, they could worship Christ pretty much the way they had been worshiping their demons.

> The Cathedral exists, of course, but it’s not Christian. There is no one Christian Church of America that can be integrated into Orthodoxy

Once the North conquered the South, then there was one Christian Church of America, albeit already holier than Jesus, and not long thereafter, openly non Christian. All the mainstream protestant Churches were one Church. They pretended to be many Churches, because they were pretending to observe the First amendment, as they still pretend.

Equally easily, there can one be again.

It has been done before, many times. It will be done again, many times. However, because a key Dark Enlightenment principle is rectification of names, this time we will cut the hypocrisy and call it the American Church, and after a while, American Orthodox.

Back in the 1940s and 1950s, when the universities were still pretending to be Christian, it was completely obvious that all the mainstream American protestant Churches were one Church. Once the universities went openly non Christian, it fell apart into dying fragments.

American orthodoxy will be as American as apple pie, just as Russian Orthodoxy is very Russian

Two drops of holy oil from mount Athos over Phil Robertson, Dean of Harvard. It will then be Orthodox enough for the Russians if we undo the holiness spiraling of the Brownists and company, which we have to do anyway. The saner Protestant objections to Orthodoxy were not terribly serious, it was primarily a matter of which Kings the Tsar was aligned with.

Protestantism truthfully claimed that Roman Catholicism had abandoned its roots (indulgences, the degeneracy of the monasteries and nunneries, the whole list)

The basic Protestant issue with the Orthodox is that a whole lot of protestants went Donatist, notably the Brownists and their ever more heretical descendants, such as the Puritans, but neither Luther nor the Church of England went Donatist. And ever since the sack of Rome, when Roman Catholicism catches heat for its Donatism, it is revealed that since the sack of Rome, its Donatism is only skin deep.

Puritan descended Christianity is dead as stone. Of the existing Christian denominations, only the Anabaptists are so solidly Donatist as to pose a problem with them being orthodox, and they do not matter. The ideological descendants of the rest of the Donatists today worship demons.

The New and Old Testaments are in Greek, not latin.

Rome was Latin and Constantinople was Greek, yet both were orthodox until Rome excommunicated the hierarchy of Constantinople.

They did not split over Latin and greek. Rome split from Orthodoxy over Kingdoms, not liturgies, a fact mentioned rather often by Protestants.

(One of our commenters with Jews on the brain is likely to say the Old Testament is Hebrew. No it is not. The surviving fragments of the original Hebrew books are fragmentary, corrupted by too many copyist errors, and the actually existent Hebrew Canon is back translated from the Septuagint.)

> Do you deny this?

I most certainly do deny it. Greek and Greek literature is not what Orthodoxy is, and latin is not what western Christianity is.

Two drops of holy oil on the head of Phil Robertson, Dean of Harvard, and his Christianity, plus his state sponsored control of academia, will make him Orthodox enough for the Russians. None of the issues you point to are what Russian Orthodoxy is.

That the things you list are not what Russian Christianity is, and they are not what Western Christianity is.

They never have been, never will be.

The things you list are only skin deep, and Orthodoxy has a long history of looking past those things. There is no reason they should matter to any genuine Christian, and in practice they do not matter. Christianity is supratribal, but Christians are not required to be tribeless. Tribelessness is a Harvard demand, not a Christian demand.

Only the anabaptists have genuine theological difference with Orthodoxy. Christians do not demand that other Christians join their national tribe. That is what Paul meant by “Neither Jew nor Greek”. He did not mean globobomo. Paul said, in no uncertain terms, that differences in Christian rituals and practices reflecting differences in nationality were fine, and no one should make a fuss about them.

And, for the most part, Christians have not.

Those questions are not what Christianity is, not what Christians have ever thought Christianity is, not what Christians care about, not what Christians have ever cared about.

If Christianity is what you say it is, present arguments and evidence for the claim, as I argue from Jesus, Paul, from the creeds, and from events in the history of Christianity that Christianity is what I say it is.

In every post you presuppose your thesis, and presuppose that I agree with it, that Christians have always agreed with it, that everyone has always agreed with it.

You briefly acknowledged that I disagreed, and then went right back to presupposing that I agree.

You seldom actually state your thesis outright, simply assuming that everyone knows it is true, and you have never presented any argument or evidence for your thesis.

State your thesis outright, and make an argument for it. Present evidence as if there was widespread disagreement and your thesis was controversial and disputed.

I said that if tomorrow we made Phil Robertson Dean of Harvard, he purged Harvard, then a few years later two drops of holy oil on his head would make him Orthodox enough for the Russians.

Well?

Would it not? If not, why not?

Anselm’s atonement theory was big difference between Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy and I would argue, albeit not everyone would accept this theory, that it was integral to Roman Catholic Donatist heresy, but the Roman Catholic Church quietly abandoned that theory without anyone making a big deal about it, though it may well still theoretically part of Roman Catholic dogma, and the Protestants never accepted it in the first place. In so far as Roman Catholic theology depends on specifically latin Church fathers, that theology was quietly abandoned in the reformation and counter reformation, which is an implicit admission that it was heretical. The only western heresy still Christian and still going strong is anabaptism, and how many anabaptists are there?

> and the individual moral/aesthetic/philosophical subtleties escape your coarse eye completely

And yet you have never discussed any of these subtleties, whereas I have been discussing anabaptism, Anselm’s atonement theory, optimism and despair, passivism and action, pacifism and war.

Any differences between strands of Christianity, you have very vaguely alluded to, and I in response have have discussed them explicitly and at length.

And none of them amount to a can of beans.

You just assume that they are mighty, and that everyone knows and agrees they are mighty, the very foundation and definition of Christianity. No they are not. You alluded to Anselm as a latin father, an influential theologian whose influence Orthodoxy does not share: Well, guess what, since the sack of Rome, the reformation and the counter reformation, no one is influenced by him any more. The defining founders of Christianity are not Anselm and company. They are to be found in the Old and New Testaments.

History of Christianity in a nutshell:

The bible is full of contradictions, many of them entirely intentional. Paul deliberately contradicts himself all the time, and all the big heresies are some Church running hog wild with one phrase from Paul about some thing, and then flatly ignoring everything else he says about that thing. Thus faith versus works.

The biggest today, and the biggest for a very long time is marriage, running hog wild with his commendation of self restraint, and ignoring everything he has to say about marriage.

So, we need the Church fathers. But there are a whole pile of Church fathers, and they all say different things. And some of those things are kind of stupid, and are generally today quietly ignored as an embarrassment, a notorious example being the pole sitters.

And some of them, like numerous Roman Catholic church fathers following the split, were made saints for coming with numerous radical new doctrines that were helpful to popes in their struggle with Kings for power and gold. Rome, would, off the cuff, say all sorts of things, and then some theologian would come up with a justification that just happened to make it good and true.

After Rome split from Orthodoxy, it rapidly began to develop all sorts of new doctrines, doctrines that had a curiously close relationship to Popes getting more money and more power. Rome split over Kingdoms, not liturgies.

And then Gutenberg printed the bible. Everyone reading the bible for himself had two results, one very good, one very bad. First everyone noticed that Roman Catholicism had become grossly heretical. Secondly everyone saw no end of contradictions, and was apt to grab one end of the contradiction and run with it, while ignoring the other end of the contradiction.

So, to sort out that lot, we have to look to history. By their fruits you will know them. Well, the fruits of Anselm and a whole lot of the post great Schism latin fathers were rivers of blood, and the Roman Catholic Church in the counter reformation walked back from the worst of them. The sack of Rome inspired the Roman Catholic Church to beat a retreat on a pile of this stuff.

After a bit, this pile of Roman Catholic heresy became too much, and we had the reformation and Protestantism. Which led to the sack of Rome and the counter reformation, the counter reformation being Rome quietly retreating from the pile of self serving heresies it had accumulated from the latin fathers.

The heresies of Rome were for the most part sorted out following the sack of Rome. The heresies of the protestants have now been sorted out in a different way. Some heresies rapidly led to more heresies, and eventually to post Christianity. The ideological descendants of those guys these days worship the Gaia and the Covid demon.

That tradition does not spring from Anselm either.

Anselm was heretical. His Christology was part of the claim that the sacrifice of Christ gave the Pope a treasury of spiritual loot that the Pope was entitled to sell off to the highest bidder (indulgences), or use in power politics with Kings.

And the doctrines of Anselm were dumped by protestants in the Reformation, and quietly dumped by the Papacy in the counter reformation as a result of the sack of Rome.

The protestants, for the most part, looked back not just to the Bible, but to the early Christian Church Fathers.

Christian Church Fathers that wrote in Greek, and are the heritage of Orthodoxy, Protestantism, and counter Reformation Roman Catholicism alike.

Yes, but the Papacy is a single point of failure.

You need a leader. Collegiate leadership is weak, ineffective, inefficient, slow, and vulnerable to entryism. But you have to have an effective mechanism for detecting and removing evil or disloyal leaders, or leaders that simply fail to lead.

The early Church had collegiate leadership, but when it found itself with rather too much political power, found it needed leadership capable of more decisive action. And became vulnerable to evil and self interested leadership.

The infallibility of the Church is discredited by a whole pile of official Church doctrine it now has quietly retreated from, and a whole pile of sainted post 1077 Church fathers it would now prefer that everyone forgot.

Catholics have to fix the Papacy, and to fix the Papacy must decide that a consensus of the Bishops can remove one Pope and install another, and have to have a system for monitoring the performance of the Pope. Honest book keeping of Catholic finances would be a mighty good start on the latter.

Well, who should decide on the appointment and removal of the leader?

I recommend the following system: Anyone with apostolic succession can give someone else apostolic succession, and anyone with apostolic succession can vote on leadership, but their votes are weighted in proportion that their priests and deacons have a flock that they can get to regularly show up, perform Christian rituals and say the right things, and a flock that sporadically and infrequently shows up to perform a few key Christian rituals. Hatch, match, and dispatch.

You need an apparatus that monitors what the leader is up to, starting with good book keeping, and if those with apostolic succession find what is being monitored disturbing, then a majority with apostolic succession who have a majority of the flock call for an election, and then if one leader can get a majority in favor, he is the new leader, with a new board that should resemble the old board, with those who called out the problem still members of the board.

And the leader needs a board to keep an eye on what he is up to. Also to check the books.

I am pretty sure that if voting was weighted by actual flock attendance, Latin Mass Catholics would have a Latin Mass Pope, or at least a Pope who actually was red pilled Catholic.

> The gay priests in the Vatican are the Catholic Church, and should a “trad” Pope arise those priests must elect said “trad” Pope.

No they are not.

Those Bishops that have canonical succession and have the flock showing up at their churches are the Catholic church.

Attempting to refute it would plunge me into an endless stream of Motte and Bailey arguments where you ambiguously defend your Motte and your Bailey without quite committing yourself to either one, your Motte being that the Flood, the Tower of Babel, and so forth are legendary retellings based on real and important neolithic events, and your Bailey being that David is mostly quite recent fiction, and the parts of Bible written by King Solomon were not written by King Solomon, who probably did not exist either.

Tell me exactly what I am supposed to refute, nail your colors to that mast, and I will refute it.

That is what makes it a Motte.

That Solomon did not dictate the first part of the book of Solomon, and so on and so forth, is the Bailey.

And by the way, odd coincidence that the fall of Bronze Age civilization in the middle east seems to have involved some mighty big earthquakes at roughly the time that the children of Israel overran them. Did the walls fall when Joshua had the trumpets blown? I don’t know but it does not seem stupid for the children of Israel to think it a miracle.

> My question is: how do you know that those little details point to the Old Testament being about Bronze Age nomadic patriarchal patrilineal shepherds and not Iron Age nomadic patriarchal patrilineal shepherds

Because Abraham gives Kings a hard time, and we know Bronze Age Kings got a hard time from Bronze Age shepherds, and Iron Age kings did not.

Because among those little obscure minor details is that the sailor and ship builder clan of Dan was kin to the shepherd clans, and the thumbprints of the tribe of Dan, who provided many of the ships of the sea peoples, are all over the destruction of Bronze Age civilization from one end of the Mediterranean to the other.

The old testament record is that the tribe of Dan provided the rearguard against chariots during the retreat from Pharaoh, the Dannites show up in the destruction of the cities of Canaan in the old Testament and the ships supplied by the tribe of Dan show up independent of the Old Testament record moving troops around burning Bronze Age cities from one end of the Mediterranean to the other in numerous Bronze age records. The archaeological record shows a major, possibly the major, ship building facility on an island controlled by Dannite pirates at the Eastern end of the Mediterranean at around the time of collapse of Bronze Age civilization, and around the time that lots of Bronze Age Kings were complaining bitterly of invaders coming in ships to destroy cities in very much the same style, and with a similar policy of destruction and annihilation, rather than pillage, as we see in the archaeological and old Testament record for the land based destruction of the cities of Canaan.

We know from assorted little minor historical details that these were the people that burned Canaan, at the same time as Bronze Age cities were burning everywhere under the impact of a diverse array of hostile foreigners.

The Dannites are minor players in the Old Testament record of the destruction of the cities of Canaan, but they are also minor, sometimes significant players, over the entire record of the destruction of the cities of the entire Mediterranean Bronze Age civilization independent of the Old Testament. Sparta was founded primarily by Dorian invaders, but in part by Dannite invaders. Being sailors and ship builders, rather than shepherds, they show up in the historical record a lot from one end of the Mediterranean to the other.

We know these were derived from Bronze Age shepherds, because we know Bronze Age civilization was burned by Bronze Age people returning to their cultural, religious, and racial patriarchal patrilineal identities.

If these were stories derived from Iron Age shepherds, rather than Bronze Age shepherds, what is the patrilineal, (and thus presumably patriarchal) tribe of Dan, nomadic Bronze Age sailors, pirates and ship builders who supplied a large fraction of the ships of the Bronze age sea peoples, doing in this story?

The cities of Canaan were destroyed as part of the world wide Bronze age destruction of cities by nomadic patriarchal invaders, and local immigrant hostile ethnic communities that were descended from, and had extensive cultural and religious links with, patriarchal patrilineal groups outside the boundaries of Bronze Age civilization. We know those were culturally and racially derived from nomadic patriarchal patrilineal Bronze Age shepherds because we have pretty good idea of the kind of people that formed the armies of armed and organized refugees that destroyed Bronze Age civilization.

Groups of armed and organized patriarchal patrilineal clans returning to their patriarchal patrilineal nomadic ways were all over the burning ruins of Bronze Age civilization, except that we know that Egypt managed to expel them, and Assyria retreated from them deep into its hinterland.

Exodus is a written record of what one such people, who (barely) retained writing, did, and for the rest of them, we have no written record from within, only written records from without, but the archaeological record, and the last writings of the civilizations they destroyed, show everyone else doing similar things.

The historical and archaeological record, and the record of the old testament, shows the tribe of Dan were Bronze age sea nomads. The historical record also shows that Egypt at the time had issues with truculent foreign origin shepherds, and issues with truculent foreigners of diverse alien origins.

The cities of Canaan were destroyed at the same time, in the same way, as the rest of the Bronze Age cities. The invaders sought to destroy them, not loot them, to kill the inhabitants, not enslave them. This policy is a mystery to modern archaeologists, but the Bible implicitly tells us that the Bronze age invaders perceived the cities not as places of trade and learning, but as forts from which came Bronze Age armies to impose tax gatherers, socialism, and hostile demon worshiping religion on people of a different culture and ethnicity. And the Bible tells us of the Egyptians attempting to impose socialism and the cultural norm of infanticide on the children of Israel. This explains the Israelite policy, which policy we can see in the ruins of the Canaanite cities, and in the ruins of almost every Bronze Age city, very few of which were destroyed by Israelites, but all of which were destroyed in the same way at the same time by alien patriarchal patrilineal peoples, albeit the Bible would suggest that in the case of the Israelites, this was more a return to their cultural roots, a return to patriarchy and patrilineality.

It is widely argued by some archaeologists that the aliens were there all along, that immigrant populations ethnically, culturally, and religiously connected to invaders were doing a large part of the fighting that destroyed Bronze Age civilization.