Secular Ethics is Metaphysically Unsound

Jun. 30th, 2020 09:56 pm
causticus: trees (Default)
I'm of the mind that it's becoming clear that so-called "Secular ethics" has no coherent metaphysical foundation. At the end of the day, it just ends up being each proponent of secular ethics attributing their own particular views/opinions on what constitutes proper secular ethics to "human reason"...which is really silly, because anyone can claim their opinions are based on reason (well, because reasons). In effect, what we end up with is an anarchy of competing "human reason"(s). Which begs the obvious question: "by which objective standard do we employ to determine if this or that value/view/doctrine is based on reason?" Ayn Rand and Karl Marx both attributed their respective hot takes on reality to "human reason." And anyone with half an IQ point would probably know that they would agree on very little, if anything at all.

The final result of this almost three century game-of-sophistries is an eminently-arrogant and dizzingly-anarchic clash of mere human opinions whereby there are no universal values but rather a Nietzschean battle of competing wills. The Postmodernists were quite right on this. Secular Liberalism as some sort of universal value system is a complete farce, and anyone with an ounce of philosophical literacy coupled with intellectual honesty should be able to reach that conclusion rather quickly. Without religious scriptures or philosophical treaties based on some conception of Natural Law, all we really have to work with in terms of determining right from wrong is something along the lines of, "This is the truth because I say so!! And I have an army behind me to force everyone to bend the knee to thing thing I claim to be the truth."

The secular morality project has a whole whoppin' 250 or so odd years behind it. (vs. many millennia of stable, religion-based cultures and civilizations). Chronological pissing contests aside, for most of this period a bulk of the western populations were still firmly Christian. Anyone adhering purely to secular ethics would have been a very tiny minority of educated intellectuals. Up until the most recent time period, these intellectuals still would have been paying some degree of lip service to Christian morality and Christian-Western cultural heritage in general. In retrospect, this whole project of trying to power a morality engine using a fuel input of secular rationalist doctrines, ended up being little more than a long protest movement against Abrahamic theocracy (IMO, Abrahamism is another affront to Natural Law, but that's a whole different topic for a different time, lol)

The long and short: A culture cannot sustain itself on an anarchy of values and principles. Let's hope some day we can get something more nuanced and philosophically-competent than Biblical religiosity.

Long live Natural Law, or Dharma, or whatever else you might want to call it!
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7 More Reasons Why I will Never Be a Christian

Jan. 20th, 2019 11:00 am
causticus: trees (Default)
1. This first point is a succinct reiteration of some other points I had made on the first list. Namely, that institutionalized (i.e. mainstream) Christianity has always been a sectarian affair with a rigid believer/nonbeliever binary Christian clergy have used over the many centuries to divine all of humanity into opposing "with us" vs. "against us" camps. Under this system there is zero middle ground, nor are people allowed to have any freedom of conscience; more specifically, freedom to form their own beliefs and opinions on metaphysical subject matter. Mainstream Christianity is supremely sectarian, and for me, compulsory belief and religious tribalism together is the ultimate deal-breaker. Full stop.

2. In my opinion and from the perspective of the great Western esoteric tradition, any attempt to claim a godform or archetype as a literal, real, historical person in anything resembling a matter-of-fact way (like the Gospel drama/myth does), is supremely vulgar act and a profaning of the great mysteries. Such an endeavor is what charlatans and mind-control cultists do in an opportunistic attempt to gain as many unthinking followers as possible. As I stated on my first list, I do not believe Jesus of Nazareth to have been a real historical person.

3. I do however believe that Jesus was created out of thin air by the New Testament compilers and editors (whomever they may have been), but that in the realm of ideas, Jesus is a very real entity. As an idea, Jesus Christ is composite godform; effectively a of mashup of Dionysus, Apollo, Mithras, Horus and very likely some Eastern inputs like Krishna and the Buddha. As a whole, Jesus Christ is a solar godform. On his name itself, Jesus Christ may in fact have been concocted out of an attempt to create a "Dionysus-Krishna" compound name, as we know "Ies" was the Phoenician name for Dionysus/Bacchus and adding the Greco-Roman os/us masculine proper noun suffix to the name would render "Iesus"..in other words, Jesus. The creations of composite gods for political purposes was nothing new at the time. Not long before Christianity came to be, the Macedonian rulers of Egypt combined the worship of Osiris and Apis into the compound god Serapis. They constituted this new cult for the Egyptian masses they ruled over at the time.

4. As we can see, the creators of the NT narrative were syncretists and they borrowed from every religious tradition they could get their hands on at the time in order to create their new chimera-savior god. Why should I or any independently-thinking person worship a fake god with a fake historical narrative attached to its legacy?

5. The clear answer is: I should not. And I'm under zero obligation to, since Christian institutions have lost so much power over the past several centuries that not a single Church anywhere in the Western world still has the power to force their dogma and demand for sectarian affiliation upon the general public. Why would I voluntarily throw my lot in with a crappy religion that I'm under no obligation whatsoever to affiliate with?

6. Having said all of this, now I can move on to some positive remarks regarding the archetypal aspects of the Jesus godform. But first I must say that in this day and age, we all have choice. As an archetype or ideal form, Jesus is a symbol of light, love, healing, altruism, spiritual rebirth, spiritual illumination and spiritual community-building. And on an ever higher metaphysical level, he personifies "the Logos" which is essentially the active, create and radiant aspect of creation. In essence, the Logos is the masculine aspect of Natural Law. In the Mazdean and Vedic systems, this is the fiery Asha and Rta, respectively. My point in bringing all this up to to put fort the idea that we can use any number of similar godforms to serve as a vessel for this holy and luminous archetype. Why not allow the people to choose between other solar/savior/healer figures like Apollo, Mithras, Dionysus, Krishna, Balder, ect.? Different people can choose a different godform based on their own personality type, aesthetic preferences, or really whatever one resonates with them the most. And event the sacraments, art and ritualism of traditional Christianity has been recycled into whatever new cults arise. Let's face facts: the ritualism of Christianity was stolen for earlier systems anyway. So why not just repossess these elements?

7. Finally, I do recognize that many good people will wish to retain worship of Jesus, which of course is all fine and good. Jesus worship can be cleaned up and purged of its historical blemishes. But at the same time there will be many who don't want to bother with what they see as centuries of blood-soaked baggage and spiritually-enslaving dogma. For the latter group, they can simply adopt another solar godform.
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10 Reasons why Abrahamism is Adharmic (against Natural Law)

Jan. 14th, 2019 02:23 pm
causticus: trees (Default)
I adopted this list from "The Dharma Manifesto", which is a book by the American Vedic guru and scholar, Sri Dharma Pravartaka Acharya. I expanded on each of the 10 points:

1. All three Abrahamic religions have a shared acceptance of the teachings of the Old Testament (Hebrew) prophets. In addition to that, Christians have Jesus, and Muslims have Mohammad. The prophetic narrative places the historical Hebrew/Jewish people (whether they were a real nation or merely a literary contrivance of the post-exile priesthood) at the very center of both earthly and cosmic affairs. This narrative promotes the supremacy of Hebrew mythology and legal tradition over that of all other historical cultures.

2. Anthropomorphic Monotheism: The supreme god of Abrahamism is seen in very human terms, including his exhibition of such very human emotions as anger, jealously, prejudice and jealously. According to various Natural Way traditions, God is vastly beyond (to put it lightly) anything resembling human characteristics or attributes, and the association of God with such base things should be seen by any genuine seeker as being both supremely perverted and abominable. In a higher metaphysical sense, the vulgar anthropomorphization of the Godhead could be seen as the ultimate blasphemy.

3. Abrahamism, and its atheistic offshoot known as Marxism, promotes a profound sense of religious and ideological exclusivity, creating two strictly delineated camps of “believers” in opposition to everyone else. All of these religions and ideologies aim, in one way or another, at achieving some form of world domination. This renders all mobile and expansionist Abrahamic religions as globalist ideologies in both form and function. The largest of these religions have tirelessly worked over the centuries to subvert, undermine and destroy countless local cultures and their Natural Way traditions. By design, totalizing/monolithic religions will always undermine tribal, national and familial bonds, in favor of some abstract, globalized collective entity.

4. Sectarianism: The belief that there is only one true faith, and that any other form of religious expression external to the one truth faith is necessarily wrong. This belief has long been the wellspring of countless acts of religious fanaticism and the aggressive erasing of any and all history and tradition that contradicts the sectarian ideology being promoted.

5. And thus the acceptance of terrorism, violence, mob action, and aggressive missionary tactics to spread their religion. In other words, religion is spread “by any means necessary”; real harm and destructive consequences be damned.

6. A common sense of being at war to the death with the Dharmic (“pagan”), Gnostic and Perennialist world that preceded Abrahamic ascendancy. Again, there is the inherent tendency of Abrahamic ideology, in addition to its Marxist offshoots, to ruthlessly memory-hole anything that contradicts or questions the ideology in question. Those aspects of earlier traditions which don't overtly conflict with the ideology, are incorporated and re-contextualized as being a product of (as opposed to pre-exisiting) the ideology being promoted.

7. The centrality of unidirectional prayer to commune with their god, with systemic meditation practice playing either little or no part in the practice of their respective religions. Abrahamic ideology asserts a “one size fits all” spiritual regimen which ignores real differences in human personality type, the innate aptitudes of different individuals and other predispositions, in addition to glossing over the differing cultural and ethnic characteristics of various human populations. Every human group everywhere on the planet gets monolithically stamped with the same exact religious and spiritual mandate.

8. A rigid belief in the existence of angels, the devil, demonic spirits, and the like. Non-human spiritual beings or entities from other traditions usually get demonized or anathematized unless they are re-branded as angelic or sanitly figures. This inflexible cosmic dualism allows for no middle ground or nuance in the realm of various psychic and spiritual phenomena. Every form of intelligence in the universe is presented as being unequivocally good or evil.

9. All three teach bodily resurrection, the Final Judgment, the creation of the soul at the time of conception or birth (as opposed to the soul's pre-existence), the binding effects of sin, and so forth. These positions, when presented as literal dogma, contradict the teachings of the world's great Natural Way traditions. For example, Hindusim, Buddhism, Gnosticism and various Pagan/Native traditions have teachings of things like soul preexistence, soul transmigration and karma, in one form or another.

10. The importance of a holy day of the week set aside for prayer and rest, and the imposition of non-local and ideology-based holidays and festivals onto converted peoples. In all traditions preceding Abrahamic ascendancy, nearly all religious holidays and festivals were based on the changing of the seasons and natural cycles in general. The first stage in alienating various peoples from nature started with the redirection of religious festivities away from nature and instead toward the celebration of book-based events and other ideological features.
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The Brick-and-Mortar University is Obsolete

Jan. 3rd, 2019 02:15 pm
causticus: trees (Default)
Yes, that's right. With (near) ubiquitous high-speed internet, every college lecture imaginable is at every internet user's fingertips; not only college lectures, but the very best of college lectures from the very best professors. For the most part, the professors and instructors we find at the vast majority of brick-and-mortar university campuses are little more than second, third and fourth hand repeaters of knowledge someone way before them and much smarter than them discovered. Why get your info through them when you can go straight to the source at just the click of a button? Much less, why pay all kinds of insane money to this middleman class of aforementioned repeaters?

The incumbent higher-ed model is a dead man walking. Sooner or later (hopefully the former) the student debt ponzi bubble is going to burst bigtime and there's going to be a lot of useless academics and administrators out on their asses. Yet there will still be the need for education and competency certification (i.e. credentialing). Displaced instructors may find a new calling as test proctors and evaluators. For all fields of study that aren't hands-on technical disciplines, students will be able to entirely learn at their own pace through books and youtube videos at. At this point their only need for a middleman will be for someone to test their knowledge regarding the discipline in question. Instructors will become more like trainers and coaches than distinguished intellectual pulpit-occupiers. If Natural Law is to properly reassert itself then knowledge-acquisition/transmission as an organized activity will once again take on a Guild-like structure. Students will be Apprentices, junior instructors and thesis-writers will be Journeymen/Associates, and professors of course will be Masters (as we can see, the existing concept of a "Masters Degree" is somewhat of a misnomer).

And for everyone else who really doesn't need to take up an intellectual discipline (i.e. the overwhelming mass majority), there shall be a return to trade schools and guild-like organizations. The 800 lb. gorilla in the room regarding the higher-ed system today is that the vast majority of enrolled students shouldn't even be there in the first place. Traditionally, intellectual attainment was an elite activity; well, because most people simply don't have the natural aptitudes to make it in those areas. Precisely because higher-ed degenerated into a money-sucking scam, the whole thing became massively dumbed down in order to accommodate the new horde of mediocre people that comprised its new customer base student body when this gigantic over-expansion really started to get out of control. So when Natural Law does once again reassert itself (gods willing), we're going to see the intellectual end of education shrink back into its proper, natural niche.

Most of academia today is useless fluff and pile of hyper-inflated makework for a professional pharisee class. It will get what's coming to it.
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How the Humanities Became so Thoroughly Infiltrated and Compromised

Dec. 28th, 2018 11:12 am
causticus: trees (Default)
It's quite simple: the branch of academia we call "the humanities" is the most subjective area of studies; it is the area most open to accommodating differing interpretations and even mere opinions. The humanities is the soft side of knowledge and inquiry. It's a fertile ground for both sophists and truth-seekers alike. When philosophical standards are done away with it becomes a fertile ground for ideologues and and radical elements to freely peddle their propaganda to young, impressionable minds.

Unlike in the hard sciences, it's all-too-easy to make unfalsifable truth claims in most of the humanities. Truth in the humanities is ultimately a matter of which philosophers, thinkers, schools of thought, and academia personae are currently in vogue. Truth in this sense is an appeal to authority rather than something that can be empirically tested and quantified.

I've stated before that I don't believe there has been any grand "Cultural Marxist conspiracy" that infiltrated and took over Western academia. I must add a caveat here: radical professors with Marxist sympathies have in fact been all over academia since at least the early 1970s and they have probably colluded with one another to some degree. But I don't believe it's been by any hyper-organized, top-down means. Rather, a potent organizational culture took hold after the massive cultural shifts of the 60s and 70s worked their way through general public's collective psyche. And university administrators were more than complicit in enabling this plague to incubate and spread. Administrators likely enabled this culture to proliferate, because in enabling crypto-Marxist departments like "Women's studies" to exist, they were scoring cheap and easy "diversity" brownie points that made for positive-sounding PR. As with most situations, incompetence and shortsightedness are much more sensible explanations for corruption than shadowy conspiracy theories.

And as we know quite well now, the corruption has infested the Social Sciences as well. Social Science is that murky middle ground between humanities and the natural sciences. Many social science fields rely on subjective metaphysical speculations as the basis for how to frame studies and interpret data within those fields.

The corruption is even trying to creep into STEM now, but I'm confident that will only go so far until it hits a big brick wall known as mathematics. You see, math couldn't give a damn about your feelings. Sophistry and emotional rhetorical cannot fudge numbers. STEM will be fine but it needs to detach itself from the rest of the festering rot academia has become.

In fact, academia itself needs to stew some more in its own poisonous juices until it completely dies. Parallel institutions must rise up in its place. Good riddance to the corrupted academia. The new institutional paradigm must first and foremost devote itself to truth-seeking. And by truth-seeking, I mean an uncompromising devotion to Natural Law. There is Natural Law and their is nihilism; we must choose one; we cannot serve two masters. Natural Law truth-seeking is done when we derive our philosophical and intellectual authority from the towering greats who existed long before the corruption set in. In other words, we should return to the classics and turn a sharply skeptical eye toward Natural Law-rejecting modern modes of inquiry like utilitarianism, positivism and blank-slate assumptions about human nature.

Once again I say, good riddance. The infected near-corpse known as modern academia shall die on its own terms.
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