shrine

For the past 25 centuries, religions have been gilding their beliefs to mesmerise the crowds. It is thus quite weird to note that a clever writer like Paul Kingsnorth has turned to Christianity to "seemingly escape the future as planned by the CIA".

It’s like giving up on an evolving conspiracy theory to join an older one that has been a lie since day one, while using titbits of historical events. 

Yet the present events in which we are all supposedly affected by, only interfere with a very small proportion of people, despite the droning news about this catastrophe or that deconstruction of society. 

Rod Dreher is excited once again, blushing like a young girl on her first prom ball:

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Yesterday I [Rod Dreher] wrote about Paul Kingsnorth’s great new Substack, to which I devoutly hope you will subscribe. Reader N.S. Lyons responds:

"In your post on Paul Kingsnorth yesterday you quoted this great paragraph from his essay:"

“The churning of the surface waters of our societies – the fights, the divisions, the polarising ‘issues’ dangled before us like carrots to squabble over – these are all symptoms of deep shifts beneath. Add it all together – the coming-apart of (supposedly) liberal nations, the ongoing global eradication of rooted cultures and so much of the wild and non-human world, the rise of a techno-feudal new order, the replacement of older values with those of the globalised consumer machine – and what you get, I think, is a revolution.”

Well, it seems he has some unusual company in his pessimism, because the day after he published his essay, the National Intelligence Council (NIC) released Global Trends 2040, the latest in a series of special documents published every four years by the NIC’s Strategic Futures Group to assess “the key trends and uncertainties that will shape the strategic environment for the United States during the next two decades.”

It is a remarkable document. No one seems to have paid much attention to it yet, but I think that should change.

While the analysts who wrote it are unable to describe what is happening inside the United States itself (in practice these reports are mostly produced by the CIA, given that outward facing strategic intelligence is their specialty, and the Agency is essentially forbidden from engaging on domestic matters), their prediction of where the world is headed as a whole is both shockingly dire and fascinating in its candid acknowledgement of the havoc that a combination of technological revolution and the ideological revolution of “identity politics” is unleashing on us all.

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Etc, etc… N.S. Lyons tells us on his website, in his articles, The Upheaval — Introducing the revolutions upending our world:

We are living through an era of epochal change. At few times in history have so many currents of civilizational transformation coalesced and crashed into us at once, and at such speed. To say that we are being unmoored by massive technological, economic, environmental, geopolitical, and socio-cultural shifts would be to insufficiently limit our description of what is occurring. Vast new ideational, epistemological, and arguably even theological frameworks for how to understand and interact with reality have emerged and are now spreading across the world. 

Overwhelmed, and with no contemporary experience with which to easily contextualize and comprehend what is happening, our natural tendency is to ignore it, to dismiss, excuse, and normalize. Today is much like yesterday, this week much like last week. The economy continues to grow. Besides, we think, change is normal; political games and cultural fads come and go, life will remain much the same. But in our bones many of us can feel the rumbling of the earthquake, and intuit the terrible truth: we are experiencing a tectonic upheaval, a rending, uprooting, cataclysmic shift from one era of history to another. And in such times there will, inevitably, be blood.

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So what is this all about. No matter what, there will be diversity in human decisive actions despite this or that organisation trying to get the upper hand. N. S. Lyons sees this a little bit in his trying to make "sense of life amid the madness of the post-modern age”. Not only this, there has been much blood here and there over the centuries of human madness, and possibly less for the last 70 years...

One of the main problem is rather than try to find a modern solution to modern problems plaguing the few modern thinkers (as most people go with the flow of habits, beliefs and rituals — including barbecueing on Sundays) is to go back to the old deceit of religious beliefs. And I find this sad with a writer like Paul Kingsnorth, who seems to have written all he could and then gave up to find refuge in religious delusion.

I really don’t care what he does or not, but I care that he could influence other genuine truth-seekers, those in search of the relative truth in a weirdo universe, in which god has no place but through fabricated ignorance. So, Paul Kingsnorth has found god in the Romanian Orthodox Church, a discovery that makes Rod Dreher dribble with sweetened saliva and give him eyes the size of flying saucers. 

The Churches of all kinds have used various techniques to entice people to believe in crap. Gilding beliefs is one of them. Other techniques are the institution of precise rituals, in which the repeat of mantras become enticing like a trance. The Muslims use the same techniques, with corporal punishment added. The harsh reality of natural survival and of human bunfights should not be enough to push us, decent thinking dudes, into these religious delusive mode. it’s giving up on reality, even if reality does not make sense. The religious delusion is even far more senseless than a non-sensical reality. The religious delusion is a gilded lie. A magnificent porkie…

Yes, Paul Kingsnorth got involved in the free West Papua movement. But even before PK was born, Gus and his mates were involved in exposing the “transmigration” of Indonesians to West Papua. West Papua had been given up by the Western nations as a peace offering to Indonesia for having defeated the “commies” to the tune of several million deaths of their own people. It was believed that Indonesia would treat West Papua as a protectorate like Australia did with New Guinea for a while, until gaining independence, but Indonesia had other ideas… By the mid, 1980s, the shit hit the fan with East Timor, now Timor Leste. Our glorious government fought to prevent Indonesia taking Timor Leste over, and eventually it became independent. Behind the scene one could smell the Howard government working at preventing the Indonesians from taking over the oil and gas field of the Timor Sea and trying to place its dirty mittens on it, while technically these resources belonged to the new nation, Timor Leste. This is where grubby Downer got his pants pulled down later on, when the government was exposed for having bugged the offices of the Timor Leste new government. This case is still going on, with Witness K and his lawyer. We can only hope that the new Attorney General of Australia, Ms Cash, will drop the case as a good will gesture. One can hope.

But overall, giving up on understanding the trials and tribulations of the EVOLUTION of humanity, as tormented and unpredictable as it is, in favour of the old gilded loony faith, is a cop out. the rituals and the stories of the bible are RIDICULOUS, should one look at these with a proper critical eye. One wonders why such a "clever man" as Paul Kingsnorth fell into the trap of delusion. I guess he got tired of having to fight the good fight for reality, as relative and weird as it is, yet is as natural as the wild.

Gus Leonisky

Rabid atheist

Picture at top; the Shrine of St Taurin, Evreux, Normandy (from one of Gus' old books)...

More to come...

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