Counter-Currents
2,349 words
French translation here
The conservative philosopher Russell Kirk wrote:
We must remind ourselves, to begin, that culture arises from the cult: out of the religious bond and the sense of the sacred grow any civilization’s agriculture, its common defense, its orderly towns, its ingenious architecture, its literature, its music, its visual arts, its law, its political structure, its educational apparatus, and its mores. Christopher Dawson, Eric Voegelin, and other historians of this century have made this historical truth clear.
Kirk believed that Western civilization could not survive apart from an active and vigorous Christianity. Like many of the more traditionalist elements of the American Right, Kirk was a convert to Roman Catholicism. However, ultimately Kirk’s traditionalism was pushed aside within American conservatism as the ideological premises of radical individualism, egalitarianism, and free market fundamentalism were taken to their logical conclusion. Furthermore, as American conservatism is essentially one giant corporate lobbying effort, the coherence of an ideology was less important than the interests of donors, and there are few donors who want to fund a kind of Christian traditionalism.
More importantly, Christianity itself is complicit in the “leveling” process. As Alain de Benoist has described in On Being a Pagan,[1] creation in the Christian conception is an alienating process, as consciousness and the divine is held to be outside a fallen world. As Benoist argues, Christianity and monotheism generally pave the way for atheism by desacralizing the world. The result is plagued with a hatred for the world as it is, a world-denying impulse that naturally lends itself to messianic liberalism to make the fallen world fit with the divine order. Eric Voegelin termed this attempt to bring heaven to Earth as the impulse to “immanentize the eschaton.”
And of course, that divine order is, at its heart, egalitarian. Though Christianity properly understood does not demand egalitarianism, racial suicide, or messianic liberalism, the central doctrines of the cult of the cross make this evolution natural. Like acid, Christianity burns through ties of kinship and blood. As Christ states, “He that loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.” The Apostle Paul tells us, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”
While he understandably downplays the Jewish role in cultural breakdown, Paul Gottfried’s Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Toward a Secular Theocracy effectively makes the case that residual Protestantism is part of the ideological justification for “equality,” as the redeemed seek to display their elect status through superior displays of liberal morality.[2] Though God Himself has been deposed for being too inegalitarian, the old Yankee spirit of messianic egalitarianism persists to the present day within secular, post-Protestant America.
Of course, this still leaves the more traditionalist churches such as the Roman Catholic, the Orthodox, and the remnants of traditional Protestantism. Many of these denominations are growing as the moribund institutions of mainline Protestantism continue to wither away. However, the hierarchies, rituals, and doctrines that sustain these denominations owe more to ethnic traditions, political realities, or nods to Primordial Tradition than anything within Christianity itself. As James Russell exhaustively documented in The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity, what we think of as orthodox (small “o”) Christianity in the West is a cultural conglomeration of ostensible Christian belief forced into the world-accepting, hierarchical, and warrior societies of the Germanic West. Even today, the same Christian leader who tours Third World slums bemoaning inequality bears the title of the Roman guardian of the state religion (Pontifex Maximus). The warrior saints like St. Michael and St. George, the character of the High Mass, the cult of Mary, the sacralizing of political power or special objects—all of this owes more to paganism than any kind of authentic Christian belief.
Militant Protestantism would confirm these exact same charges. For hundreds of years, the Christian cross itself was not a sacred symbol to devout Christians, but an offensive reminder of Roman “paganism.” In the 1965 film Cromwell, the eponymous hero interrupts a service to destroy a simple display of a cross and candles, thundering, “Would the king turn the house of God into a Roman temple?” Once Christianity is reduced to what it really is, it loses much of its role as a guardian of Tradition, a steward of the folk, or a positive force in the development of the race.
For any who accept “justification by faith,” salvation or damnation is conferred by an abstract individual choice as to whether or not one accepts Jesus Christ as the savior. Such a creed renders family, kin, and nation irrelevant, and it encourages intellectual stagnation so as not to endanger the soul of the believer. The most Bible-believing Christians, modern evangelical Protestants, are gradually transforming Christianity into its true form, a cult of egalitarian true believers, with the special “Chosen People” serving as the sole exception.
The contradiction at the heart of this process is that Christians remain the most Traditionalist mass constituency in the United States today, generally holding to conservative gender norms, having large families, and insisting on standards of decorum and hierarchy in behavior. Still, this can be explained because Christians are drawing on the cultural norms and standards of residual Westernized, “Germanized” Christianity. Even this is fading with time.
The influential evangelical preacher Rob Bell made headlines with his declaration that “Love Wins,” suggesting that the Biblical ideal of hell needs to be rethought. Younger evangelicals are more likely to focus on issues of “injustice,” poverty, and anti-racism rather than holding the line on issues like homosexual marriage. Even the pro-life cause has been justified by a kind of consistent and radical egalitarianism, rather than support of the traditional patriarchal family as such.
In Men–Art–War, a disillusioned priest says, “Where the Papists had made man a corpse, the Protestants had taken that corpse and made it a skeleton. From dead to deader, you could say.”[3] Christianity is fatally handicapped by its insistence that people rationally believe irrational creeds, and the more they believe them, the more remnants of Tradition, culture, and life present within a denomination are stripped away. Traditional Catholicism (which is to say, a mixture of European paganism and mutilated Christian belief) simply decreed dogmas and told people to believe them. Protestants try to argue people into belief, which is why a modern evangelical sermon resembles nothing so much as a lawyer making a closing argument, using Scripture as his law.
Orthodoxy avoids some of the traps by emphasizing the mystical nature of God and his ultimately unknowable essence while retaining a strong hierarchical structure linked to culture and community in this world. It is not surprising that Orthodoxy has been gaining strength, especially in conservative circles, and that Orthodoxy alone does not seem to be explicitly committed to the extermination of white racial identity. It’s also not surprising that the Culture Distorters have targeted Orthodoxy specifically as an obstacle to progress.
Of course, as a friend put it after watching an Orthodox nationalist rally, “Impressive, but eventually they are going to start reading their Bibles.” By removing the protective shield of an esoteric priesthood around Christian doctrines, the Enlightenment, literacy, technology, and the Protestant revolution made Christian belief widely accessible to the masses. The result is that stripped of superstition and dogma, Christianity is being taken to its logical conclusion. The specific beliefs of Christian denominations are less important than their universalist message of salvation and overall moral and metaphysical outlook.
The acceptance of homosexuality and the removal of Christian symbols from the public square should not disguise the fact that the modern world is becoming more Christian. Its universalism, its rejection of “unchosen” loyalties of kin and country, its egalitarianism, its insistence on “human rights,” and its embrace of a non-judgmental Savior make it a harmless spiritual outlet for the modern world, a way for those who can’t fully grasp secular humanism to let off a little steam. Only Christianity’s insistence that Jesus is in fact Lord separates it from being fully assimilated into modernity, and even this is being compromised.
Christianity was the essential religious step in paving the way for decadent modernity and its toxic creeds. In fact, many of the faith’s leading spokespeople defend it for this reason—begging to be allowed to exist because it paved the way for “democracy” and “tolerance.” They are sure to be disappointed—egalitarians will allow no separate peace. Still, as in the past, Christianity will survive because of its role as a safety valve—and it will continue to modify itself to fit with the Zeitgeist.
Of course, most Christians authentically believe in the literal reality of their God—perhaps far more than most “neo-pagans” literally believe in the reality of Wotan or an Earth Goddess. Far from being a strength, this is a weakness. First, the makeup of this “God,” far from being unchanging, smoothly modifies itself to fit modern moral standards. Interracial marriage was once condemned as a grave sin against the Creator. Today, the “God” of most Christians is a fuzzy Martin Luther King Jr. in the sky—indeed, King himself is now a “saint” in the Episcopal Church.
Be it the Monarch of the Catholic Magisterium, the personal Jesus of the evangelical, or the divine social worker of the mainline Protestant, God seems to change His nature to fit what the New York Times demands—though on some issues he may be a few years late. Does anyone doubt that within a few decades most Christians will be celebrating homosexuality in the same way they celebrate interracial marriage today? The only exceptions will be the literalists such as those at Westboro Baptist Church who themselves serve as proof of Christianity’s alienation from reality. Thus the choice for the Christian is either surrender to the culture, or arbitrary allegiance to random Scriptural verses. Yet even the Westboro Baptists hold to a more authentic (and in some ways honorable) form of Christianity by truly believing what their Holy Book tells them, even in defiance of all the world.
Aside from these few marginalized believers and those like them, even the supposedly conservative Christians don’t really believe what they say. A true Catholic has to believe that those outside the Church are sentenced to perdition. It was the importance of this belief that allowed Crusaders and conquistadors to slaughter and forcibly convert the heathens and think they were doing good. No one truly believes this today. Even supposedly conservative Christians see no problem with uniting disparate faiths in order to uphold a vague sense of “values,” rather than insisting on the correctness of their denomination. Bishop Williamson’s denial of the Holocaust was held to be far more sinful by Benedict XVI than the Jews’ denial (and arguably, collective murder) of Jesus Christ as Savior.
People were once willing to die—and more importantly, kill—for their faith because believers thought deeply important things were at stake. After all, if Hell is real and one is in possession of the keys to salvation, then tolerating error is the real cruelty. What do the few moments pain suffered by a burning a heretic matter if it gives the unfortunate dissenter eternal bliss? However, in an age of ecumenicism, tolerance, and political correctness, it’s hard to imagine that religious leaders believe they have a real claim to Truth. Excommunication, condemnation, and the violent rhetoric of damnation seem reserved only for sins newly discovered after 1945, such as “racism.”
Thus, renewing Christian belief is unlikely to “save Western civilization.” If anything, it would facilitate the process of conservatives serving as priests of a dead God, guardians of the “West as a tomb” bereft of vitality and spiritual substance. The literate Christian missionaries of yesteryear may well have been a necessary step in advancing the social and technological development of Europe. However, the spiritual unity of what was once called “Christendom” existed even before the coming of Christ, in the dream of Rome and the unity of the Greeks against the barbarians. Europe as a cultural and racial unit existed before Christ, and we do not need Him to maintain it. What the “positive Christianity” of the past contributed to the West was as much a product of European folk tradition and spirituality as the creed of the Nazarene, and if the latter is distilled down to its purest essence, Europe will not survive. If “Christendom” were reborn, the West would simply repeat its past mistake.
The only kind of “Christendom” that could redeem the West is a Germanic Christianity, which is to say, a pagan Christianity drawing upon European folk traditions. Given our history, why must we continue to cling to this unnatural conglomeration? What we need to do is not continue to shock life into a dead God (and a foreign one at that), but establish a link with Primordial Tradition that can speak to worker and philosopher, scientist and mystic. We can tap into those things that made Christianity the faith of the West and discard those things that have led our people to the brink of extinction. The cathedrals, spiritual lessons, and Crusades of our folk will always be a source of inspiration. But they speak to us because they are an expression of us—not because of the creed they supposedly championed.
Hilaire Belloc famously wrote, “The Faith is Europe, and Europe is the Faith.” He is right, but not in the sense he intended. The Faith was Europe, and the folk traditions that built the Germanized Christianity of our forebears. Today, we must renew that faith, a faith of, for, and about the European folk soul. We must discard the distractions and rediscover the living spiritual practices of our folk and their connection to Primordial Tradition. What Christianity supposedly gave us, we already possessed. What Christianity costs us, we can no longer afford.
Notes
1. Alain de Benoist, On Being a Pagan, ed. Greg Johnson, trans. Jon Graham (Atlanta: Ultra, 2004).
2. Paul Gottfried, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Toward a Secular Theocracy (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002).
3. Mikulas Kolya, Men—Art—War (Lincoln, Nebraska: iUniverse, 2006), p. 66.
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36 comments
The ruling god of the World today is not IHVH, nor Y’shua bar Joseph of Nazareth, but rather Mammon, the demon of unnatural blind lust for money. Classic and medaeval demonographers say Mammon is an androgyne.
Too, Marchese Vilfredo Pareto considers it axiomatic that the democratic republic is the (metaphorical, “as-if”) metamorphic precursor — as larva is to bug or tadpole to frog — of the plutocratic oligarchy.
Great and inspirational article, greetings from a heathen in Sweden!
This is the conundrum: the spiritual foundations necessary to challenge the global hegemony of this debased world order are currently not present. We live in a spiritual void, and lack an overall metaphysical and metapolitical vision that could effectively challenge the liberal/Marxist worldview.
Like the author, I see no way out of this until our folk once again become infused with a sense of a world mission, and a renewed sense of the sacred ( I don’t mean the ‘mission” of bringing Western values to the benighted masses!) but a truly archaic and virile world view that empowers us, while we once again realize our common ethnos as European peoples. In the near future, coming events will shape this new Weltanschuung. It is ironic that the same Christianity that once united Europe under the banner of Christendom to keep out the Muslim invader now is in the vanguard to colonize Europe and all the white homelands.
“facilitate the process of conservatives serving as priests of a dead God”
One could apply this to the West itself and ask, why is the West worth saving? The vast majority of its people have no desire to preserve themselves or their history. It appears all “Traditionalists” are beating the dead horse of a Lost Cause. Christ does provide the path of Resurrection however. Never underestimate the mythos of Resurrection.
As for “European folk traditions” as surrogate for the Christian faith, I ask where are they? The European West is modernized and consumerist to the point where the average Westerner views “folk traditions” as akin to fairy tales for children. I know of no living, organic folk traditions in existence today.
And as far as the so-called egalitarian passages of the Scriptures are concerned, it remains unclear whether these are truly egalitarian in essence or just given this gloss by Secular humanism. One could argue that a razor-like focus on egalitarianism to the detriment of all else by today’s Christians is far from the essence of Christianity, but instead a gross perversion.
This is one of the best assessments of Christianity’s compatibility or lack thereof with the project of furthering Western Civilization I have ever read. The Christian Traditionalists like those at Gornahoor rightly defend Christianity in as much as it historically embodied primordial Indo-European principles of honorable conduct, social hierarchy, and the integral fusion of spirituality and worldly activity in the form of sacraments, feasts, professional guilds, ascetic warrior orders etc. all of which had more or less direct antecedents in the social fabric of the pre-Christian Roman Empire and the Germanic North, while simultaneously they subtly downplay the spiritually corrupt and decadent tendencies of early Christianity (and their contemporary resurgence) which were so appealing to the “pelasgic” underclass or levantine subversives of the Roman Empire (as Nietzsche, Evola, and Marcus Eli Ravage, among others saw so clearly.)
If they would only *admit* it (which would not constitute any sort of compromise or cession of principle on their), I think they would find much more common ground with those who find “Christianity” qua the actual message of Jesus and apostles to be fundamentally alien to their Indo-European convictions . I think that due to their their understanding of the importance of symbols to the upholding of cultural continuity (and perhaps at least in the case of some Traditionalists raised in the Roman Catholic Church, and for whom it arguably is their “ancestral faith”) Roman Catholicism is understandably defended as the embodiment of spiritual authority in the West.
But to act as if Christianity, from its inception through the Middle Ages (and even allowing for the recognition of a decisive split at the Reformation or whatever other schism where they draw the line between authentic “Christendom” and its subversion, thereby rendering all subsequent developments of the faith invalid) is a coherent, spiritually unified inheritance from Jesus of Nazareth and in line with highest teachings of Primordial Indo-European tradition as found in the Vedas, Eddas and Homer, including even those schools of late pagan thought which are monotheistic or tend in such a direction is such a procrustean misrepresentation of such an order that a critical thinker struggles not see this a deliberate distortion carried out in bad faith, even if this is a “noble lie” motivated by the desire to unite past and present, and the devout traditionalist orthodox Christian with the skeptical apostate.
Great article Gregory. Christianity was an alien religion forcefully imposed upon the Race Soul of our Folk. We must throw off this Jewish virus if we are to survive and pass on our Sacred Genes into the vast future that lies before us.
The “Jewish” virus is mixed with the Egyptian Thoth and before that perhaps India , the Vedas. The Jews are ingenuous and creators of superior spiritual mathematics. That is part of our Western tradition. Get over it.
Christianity should be dumped because it is absurd & has nothing to do with anything authentically “European”.
It was forcibly imposed on much of Europe starting with Greece & Rome.
As the Greek patriot Evaggelos Vallianatos has documented in great detail, Christianity brought death and destruction to the Greeks and destroyed them as a living civilization. Christians like living in denial about this aspect just as Muslims live in denial about how Islam was forcibly imposed on their ancestors.
“The ideal of what Greece was in “ancient” times and the ideal of what it should be in my time clash violently with what Greece is, in fact, in the dawn of the twenty-first century. I love passionately all that is still Greek in Greece. I say this with sorrow, for Christianity radically remade Greece to the point that the real Hellaswas buried for more than a millennium, indeed it is still buried, in the country, which calls itself Hellas or Greece…. The Christians made the whole country a cemetery, which quite unintentionally preserved the aftermath of their plunder and genocide of the Greeks and Hellenic civilization…. The products of Christian culture—the bible, the liturgy, the miracles of Jesus and the saints, the dogmas of sin, paradise and hell, the icons of the religious hierarchy—come from a world that has nothing to do with the Parthenon and the philosophy and piety of the Greeks, who built this greatest masterpiece of Greek and Western culture in order to honor the Greek virgin goddess Athena. (pp. 4-10)…
Dr. Vallianatos comments on the imperial order that brought an end to the Olympics, as follows:
Here was a millennial tradition of athletic competition for arete (courage, virtue, equality before the law, goodness, manliness, nobility and excellence) started by Herakles, son of Zeus and the Greeks’ greatest hero, and Theodosios, thinking like a barbarian, brought it to an end.
The Olympic agon (contest) was much more than a struggle between outstanding men for physical excellence. It was, above all, a Panhellenic honoring of the gods. It was an extraordinary effort to rein in the Hellenes’ passions for war and bring them together from all over the world for the celebration of their common culture. The overwhelming idea behind the Olympic contest was political. The Olympic contest was an effort to build a Panhellenic polis and commonwealth, a united Hellas under democratic governance. The Olympic agon was also building better and nobler human beings. And, yet, the Hellenes’ greatest athletic contest and celebration of national identity were buried…. by a barbarian king who knew no better than listening to the fanaticism of his Christian advisors. (p. 136)
http://thehandstand.net/archive/february-march2008/articles/greeks.htm ”
Christians and the Classics: War against Reason
Evaggelos G. Vallianatos
http://www.vallianatos.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/mq015-03-06-vallianatos_fpp.pdf
Who were the first to attack the Parthenon & why?
It was the Christians, the Christian Emperor Zeno in 484 pillaged the chryselephantine (gold and ivory) statue of Athena created by Pheidias. In the sixth century, the Christians were responsible for unfathomable sacrilege with their conversion of the temple of Athena to a church.
The same thing that the Taliban did to the Bamiyan Buddhas in modern times.
As to the absurd claim of Christianity making us “moral”, only a delusional Christian can believe that the utter nonsense you find in the Bible is comparable to writings as profound as those of Plato, Aristotle etc., all of whom would have rejected Christian barbarism had they been alive when it spread. The Greeks & Romans needed no Christianity to build their civilization.
Monotheism in general seems to engender religious fanaticism, the very first monotheist in history was the Pharaoh Akhenaten and he was a fanatic.
Westerners today like to lay claim to classical Greece & Rome & “Judeo-Christianity” at the same time which is used by the “chosen” to subvert. Look at this Jewess Ilana Mercer & the Shabbos goy Geert Wilders (or is he a crypto?) as an example:
Geert Wilders’ position is eminently consistent. His conclusion: “We come from Rome, Athens and Jerusalem. That makes our civilization special, and certainly worth preserving”.
http://www.vdare.com/articles/paleos-must-defend-the-west-and-that-means-israel-too
By contrast here is what the honest Christian & fanatic Tertullian quipped in the 2nd century:
“What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”
He correctly recognized that these were irreconcilable.
As for today, Japan seems to be doing fine with its Shinto polytheism+Buddhism and needs no Christianity to make it “moral”. They don’t worship some dead Jew as their “savior” & believe the absurd story of a supposedly universal God who only saw it fit to appear to some obscure desert tribe with no writing or literature and enter into a covenant with them. He apparently didn’t find it fit to appear in the advanced civilizations of India, China, Persia, Rome, Greece etc. I was in Japan & then South Korea, the contrast could not be clearer. In Japan I had a pleasant visit where as in SK I had some evangelical Christian screaming at passers by about how they are all going to hell without Jesus. The two peoples are of closely related stock and have comparable IQ’s but what is the difference, in one they have rejected Christianity where as in the other a sizable section has swallowed the poison pill and now behave like mentally ill people. Just go google “crazy Korean Christians” to see what I am talking about.
But was has Jerusalem got to do with Europe?
I’m a little cautious here on Christianity, on one hand it’s perfectly true that the whole business was forced upon the Roman Empire by lynch mobs and self-serving despots in the beginning and replaced wisdom with childish nonsense that enshrines the Jews, but on the other hand, regardless of where it came from, it took on the character of Europe -like moss growing over a rock- and for 1500 years was a central part of our culture… the very thing that we’re defending.
Martin Luther, for example, was very much able to use Christianity to reject materialism and jewry, so to were Christian monks able to use Christianity to call the people to arms to fight off invasion… I agree, Greece and Rome did it all better, but the point is that Christianity isn’t entirely useless, there are salvageable elements there. But the funny thing is that while Christians have in the last few decades been some of the loudest voices praising multiculturalism and praising the jews, in the many centuries beforehand they were also some of the loudest voices in condemnation of all the ills that are so amplified today and they were on the side of the common man when they condemned the jews… although one might say that they condemned them only when they were able to, and not for loansharking or white slavery, but rather for eating fish on sunday, or some such nonsense. Martin Luther is probably the best known exception to this trend among the clergy.
More importantly though if we begin to ‘speak out’ against Christianity then what difference is there between us and any other cultural marxist? We should be mindful of this, and mindful of how an appearance of “virulent anti-religiosity” is going to translate in the mind of a well-to-do person, who calls himself christian, who might otherwise agree with everything we say but refuses to read past the first sentence because he sees us attacking him as much an atheistic jew.
I think, as I’ve said a few times before, it’s best to sidestep the technical details of “what’s wrong with christianity” because frankly most people are well aware of what’s wrong with it courtesy of cultural marxism and the jewish media.
We need emphasis on how European culture shaped Christianity and provided things that sustained Europe, not emphasis on how a Christian is the worst thing in the world to be.
“Does anyone doubt that within a few decades most Christians will be celebrating homosexuality in the same way they celebrate interracial marriage today?”
In Sweden, this already happened in 1998 with the “art” exhibition “Ecce Homo” (pun intended), which displayed Jesus as a rather hardcore homosexual. The exhibition toured the Swedish churches – even the Uppsala Cathedral.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecce_Homo_%28exhibition%29
You can see a few of the pictures here:
http://sverigesradio.se/diverse/appdata/isidor/images/news_images/1602/2519408_520_292.jpg
http://sverigesradio.se/diverse/appdata/isidor/images/news_images/2946/845069_180_226.jpg
http://gfx.dagbladet.no/pub/artikkel/5/50/508/508782/oh280lson_1187078943.jpg
http://gfx.dagbladet.no/pub/artikkel/5/50/508/508782/ecc858ehomo_1187078844.jpg
“Bishop Williamson’s denial of the Holocaust was held to be far more sinful by Benedict XVI than the Jews’ denial (and arguably, collective murder) of Jesus Christ as Savior.”
Good point!
Mr. Hood gives us a powerful argument for abandoning Christianity, but I think two important facts are neglected:
1) Most people (maybe not you but the majority of people) have a need for spirituality, of a type that satisfies their needs for being connected to something greater, provides them with hope and psychological comfort. This is a need as real as that for companionship and love, something hardwired into humans. Christianity has lasted and continues to thrive because it accomplishes this function and provides enormous value to its adherents.
2) Paganism is not a real alternative that people can accept. There are no substantial living traditions or scriptures that make it believable, acceptable or workable for most people.
The form of Christianity being propagated in many churches today is, as Mr. Hood describes, part of the suicide cult of the West. However, Christianity has been an important force in the rise of the West and battling Jewish influence for over a millenium until the twentieth century. The current state of affairs is not the “logical conclusion” of this religion, any more than our current government is the “logical conclusion” of the institutions the American founders built. All of those structures have been subverted by aliens. Without those aliens in the picture, it is likely that all of those institutions would be in a form similar to where they were a century ago, which was adaptive for the most part.
Peoples’ spirituality is part of their reality. It may be unfathomable to a non-believer, but God is as real to most Christians as the sun – an accepted and unquestioned fact of life. Over half of all fraternal organizations are religion-based, and Christians are living much healthier and adaptive lives than non-Christians; having more children, living more virtuous lives, less plugged into the popular culture, etc.
I agree with the title of the article, that Christianity will not save the West in its current form. However, the solution is not de-Christianization, but re-infusing this religion with adaptive beliefs that have been abandoned, such as the belief in Europeans as a chosen people, an abhorrence of race-mixing, etc.
Religion is an essential part of a people’s survival. The West is not going to be saved by rational, even-minded atheists. It is going to be saved by fanatics with fervent beliefs that are willing to make real sacrifices.
2) Paganism is not a real alternative that people can accept. There are no substantial living traditions or scriptures that make it believable, acceptable or workable for most people.
but surely the desire of the Nation replaces and exceeds christianity? Or all modern literalist religion for that matter:
Ones actions should comport with the success of ones own People, by making them stronger, you make Yourself stronger.
That is the practical lesson to take from jewish ethnic networking isn’t it?
This is basically the mindset that the Hellenes and Romans had as well, with a mans City as his Nation. What we’d recognize as formal religion in that scenario, from the warped monotheistic perspective, would be a minor part of daily life for… Spartans or Athenians, for example, (Rome is actually little different) because the primary focus of reverence be focused upon ones own excellence within the Nation.
The religion, then, is the success of the Nation. It’s a more practical outlook anyway.
We have “scriptures,” or I should say, we have knowledge passed down in literature. Many of the myths of the North are simple codes, deciphered when you understand the character and place names. Maria Kvilhaug, though somewhat feminist, mostly in her reaction against Christianity, has done the work and explains the inter-relations in her book, The Seed of Yggdrasil. While the intro is badly edited and repetitive, the rest is phenomenal. In it she explores ideas of transcendence, ascension, transformation, spiritual reality, the dead who achieve Paradise, the nature of the soul, shamanic traditions, views of the god/goddess, creation, the so-called “end” known as Ragnorok, and much more. Also journals like The journal for Contemporary Heathen Thought and Northern Traditions explore much of these things from a more scholastic side than you will find in some of the “heathen” organisations. Many of these people are able to discern a primordial tradition.
Christianity began with allegations that spirits were real, and could be controlled to some extent.
Jesus spent a lot of time driving evil spirits out of possessed people and working miracles. His followers worked miracles in his name – or at least, they believed that they did.
If you want a new religion, you had better have new miracles. I doubt that anyone at counter-currents is about to multiply loaves and fishes; ergo, I doubt that counter-currents has any grounds to start a new religion – or to revive any old ones.
If there are no spirits that can be seen, much less controlled, there is no point calling your system a “religion.”
If all you want is collective behavior, a new sense of tribalism, a better approach to ethics – none of those things require religion. If your concern is with the physical survival of your race, you don’t need to bring the issues of gods and afterlife experiences into it.
If there are no spirits that can be seen, much less controlled, there is no point calling your system a “religion.”
But religion was never really about that, it’s always been ‘parables’ wrapped up in stories- take the Greek myths for example, modern man might look at it and take it literally, based on his understanding of religion, and entirely miss the metaphors and analogies in the Greek stories; Odysseus escaping the blinded giant by clinging the belly of a sheep, perfect metaphor for masking oneself into a ‘herd’ to avoid detection. When you take a literalist view of it, one misses that event entirely and thinks that “the Greeks believed in Cyclops”.
I find it very difficult to believe the literalist idea that Socrates or Aristotle or any man or woman in the Ancient World seriously looked up at the sky during a storm and thought that a god was hurling bolts of lightning at them, and then they went home and designed complex feats of engineering and algebraic formulas and so on.
I think rather that modern man has this cretinous, and entirely wrong, view of religion because he’s had literalism drummed into his head for, well, perhaps since the later days of Rome when ‘early christians’ (popularly assumed at the time to be Jewish Cultists) whipped up the underclass into lynch mobs and started killing the philosophers.
But anyway, it’s just semantics, if people are comfortable calling a thing a ‘religion’, then does it really matter?
If you want a new religion, you had better have new miracles. I doubt that anyone at counter-currents is about to multiply loaves and fishes; ergo, I doubt that counter-currents has any grounds to start a new religion – or to revive any old ones.
True enough Bert and as we are having our summer fund raiser this would be a good opportunity for the true believers to do some multiplying.
However valid the arguments made here and also by various other writers who critique Christianity, it is unrealistic to imagine that Christianity would collapse and be replaced by Paganism at any point in the near future. Pagans and Christians who hold similar values – particularly racial and ethnic identity and European culture – need to reconcile themselves (which is not an impossible thought, as Mircea Eliade shows) and aim towards jointly creating a better social and political order. It would be naïve to think that religious infighting could do anything but hinder the Right from achieving its goals. No doubt each side will continue to critique the other, which is only natural, but which religious position gains dominance needs to be determined largely through passive persuasion and will certainly occur over a long period of time. The Pagans, in particular, need to content themselves with the fact that the conversion of the people to Paganism will occur slowly (assuming it will be successfully performed), and will have to accept as allies Christians with similar values and attitudes.
I don’t know for sure what the “essence” or “logical conclusion” of Christianity is, or if there is such a thing at all, but historical fact is, that our European ancestors that created this spectacular civilisation did not think at all about Christianity as Mr. Hood does or as he thinks they did. I find it absurd to assume that the intense and passionate dedication and identification Europeans had for the struggles and concepts of Christianity was a mere accident of history or simple ignorance on their part. One cannot say that they had accepted this half-heartedly, on the contrary. If all that was so “alien” to their soul, as some think, how could that have happened?
Christianity and the metaphysical concepts derived from it (such as the tension between God and the “World”, body and soul, sin and grace etc) created conflict, trouble, tension, unrest in the European soul, and sometimes I think, that is exactly why it became so attractive and came to dominate Europe. Europeans needed something that challenged them in such a profound way. The “Faustian” soul needed it. It would have been bored to death with forever Walhalla. It also fed their seemingly innate desire for universalism, for big pictures, for infinity, for the absolute. It gave them something to chew on in a way no pagan religion would have ever been able to. Their souls needed extremes of heaven and hell, darkness and light, of glory and self-denial, of moral virtue and sin, of worldliness and asceticism.
Therefore, the Christian age (and that includes the centuries of secularisation, scepticism, enlightenment, technical and scientific advance etc) is infinitely more complex and interesting than the preceding Pagan ages, whose heritage it never lost, but extended and expanded. Even the Renaissance is far from being a mere revival of antiquity – it is born out of tension, conflict, contradiction, amalgamation and an expanded consciousness. Much of Michelangelo for example would be far less exciting, if it was either merely/purely Pagan or merely/purely Christian. Compared to the art of the ancient Greeks, Renaissance art tells us, that something fundamental had changed and happened in the meantime.
And if the acceptance of that religion was a “mistake” and the beginning of the European people’s “decadence”, ah well, then the result was probably the greatest and most productive “decadence” there ever was on this planet. It is in fact hard to imagine that things could start again and get any better than that. It would probably require a sort of mutation of the mind, something entirely new that surpasses either antique paganism and Christianity. What made “us” historically is the synthesis of Christianity and Paganism. That is the leitmotif. We cannot discard one from the other, and sort out what we regard as the “truer” parts (there wont be any consensus about that anyway) and then imagine we are “really ourselves” again now or “Pagans”. We cannot go “back” in any way. If anything, a new synthesis or progress would have to be the next step.
I also think it can hardly be assumed that the metaphysics the Christian Europeans accepted and believed in had no relation whatsoever to their artistic, political and philosophical creations. The Holy Roman Emperors differed quite a lot from the old Roman Emperors, and that was a result of metaphysics. The concept of a Pope and a Church and of the State-Church-duality is unique and also the result of a metaphysic that simply didn’t exist in pagan times. A cathedral or a baroque church or a medieval monastery is a theological concept and statement made in stone. I find it stRiki-Eikingly banal to say these things expressed “us” and nothing else. They would have never been erected if people had believed that and not have thought of God. Even medieval knighthood or romance would be impossible without metaphysics closely linked to Christian theology and values.
That is even more true for sacred art, in painting, sculpture, music: all these passions, crucifixions, madonnas, final judgements etc. , made by some of the greatest artists that ever lived, who were fully emerged and captivated by these ideas, images and beliefs – if it is just the “white race” you see, you see nothing at all. You are missing a huge part of the story, and of who this race was and how it perceived the world, Man and God. One cannot separate form and content like that, as if saying “Oh this Rembrandt or Bosch painting is pretty but I really despise the story and theology behind it, a pity they weren’t allowed to paint Wotan and the Valkyries, how much better and more authentically European that would have been…how alienated from his roots Rembrandt was that Jesus and the Old Testament fascinated him so much.” It is absurd to even think of it.
Alain de Benoist would probably critisize the crusades as an unpleasant outcome of monotheism. It was also him who said that the perceived “truth” of a religion has nothing whatsoever to do with its local origins. The notion of a “foreign” and therefore false god is basically non-religious. Thoughts like these only occur, when actual belief is in decline, and so it happened since the enlightenment. The restlessness stayed. Today, there is no real religious belief in Europe anymore. Churches are empty, priests are disbelievers, monasteries and contemplation are a thing of the past, saints and mystics, theologians and poets are no more. What is left of Christianity is mostly a secular travesty.
I will spare any words about what is called “Christian” in the USA. Admittedly this is a disaster. If I would be American I would probably too become a militant Antichrist myself, but rather an honest Atheist than a “Pagan”. I do not think it is possible to be a “Pagan” in a religious sense today. Even the Benoist brand is a mere philosophical creed, which is something different. Now I want to see a guy who actually believes in Wotan and doesn’t give me some Jungian archetype blabla or heroic rhetorics. But that is what it is about. A mere mythology, as beautiful as it might be, isn’t enough.
I can’t help myself, but I do find all this talk about “forebears” and the mystique of the “folk” and it’s “traditions” nonsensical on so many levels. It is “politische Romantik” and a delusional myth,and it lacks historical substance. I also don’t see why my “forebears” who shat in the woods should be of more relevance to me than those who believed in the Christian salvation. I’d also rather believe in the foremost importance of great men and the Genius than in any quasi-deification of the “folk soul. Admittedly (seemingly by the grace of nature) the European peoples had a huge share of these men, but I can’t see the white Race doing anything particular useful today. All this is indeed no more but a “faith”, but a secular and a “forced” one that won’t save anyone either. A faith or a God doesn’t just come because you think you need him or according to what you would find suitable. Things just don’t work that way. Heidegger said so too, in his famous 1966 interview.
OT but Telegraph’s obituary for Venner
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/10214897/Dominique-Venner.html
The weight of the evidence is really against keeping Christianity around. Traditional Christians that have big families (and promote sex-roles according to tradition) are a plus, yes. However, I was always impressed with Savitri Devi’s argument in “Gold in the Furnace” where she described our decline as a three stage process. First came Christianity – the belief that all people were equal in the Lord’s eyes. Then came democracy, that all should be equal in terms of political power. Finally, we come to communism, that we should all be equal economically. Communism is just going by different names now.
Review Christ’s parable of the talents. No Traditional Christian ever believed all people were equally gifted – even if they were loved equally by God. Each man is a unique creation. And God didn’t incarnate for all men but for each man. It’s only when the Transcendental was jettisoned and replaced by social gospel did these problems begin. The individuality was forgotten in favor of the universal love and this was buttressed by Christ’s record of deep concern for the poor.
As Bishop Sheen said of Communist Christianity, They put the cart before the horse. Because early Christians and later monks loved God, they loved each other and had little concern with material goods. So the Communist thinks he can get them to love each other by taking away their possessions.
J. Laurence criticizing Christianity does not make you a “cultural marxist”.
Nietzsche had nothing but contempt for the morbid cult & he was no cultural marxist.
Most of those “great” things Christians like to attribute to their cult are the products of pagans or innate genius of nations.
Even the so called “renaissance” had a huge pagan component with crypto pagans advocating a full blown revolution and overthrow of Christian tyranny to those who incorporated many pagan themes into their art.
Among the former the most prominent example is Gemistos Plethon who advocated a full blown repudiation of Christianity and unification of Greece under the old Hellenic religion to resist the Turkish threat. According to Ficino he was the main inspiration behind the founding of the “Platonic Academy” in Florence that was to play a crucial role in the “renaissance”. He was labelled a “second Plato” by those who knew him, here is one eulogy:
“I have learned that our common father and master has shed every earthly element and departed to heaven, to the place of purity, joining the mystical chorus of Iacchus with the Olympian gods. I too rejoice to have studied with such a man, the wisest that Greece has produced since Plato. So if one were accept the doctrines of the Pythagoreans and Plato about the infinite ascent and descent of souls, I should not hesitate even to add that the soul of Plato, having to obey the irrefragable decrees of Adrasteia and to discharge the obligatory cycle, had come down to earth and assumed the frame and life of Gemistos.”
– Source: P. G. Woodhouse monograph on Plethon
You don’t need Christianity to build Notre Dame, the Greeks & Romans had already shown they were capable of creating beautiful architecture and many other things when Christians didn’t even exist.
Millions of Bantus are also now Christians, why don’t Christians enlighten us why we haven’t seen any comparable achievements there if accepting Jesus is all that matters.
Martin Luther wrote that tract because he was frustrated by Jewish refusal to convert. The Christian problem with Jews is one of religion not race, the two sometimes came to be conflated because many so called converts continued to practice Judaism in secret or amassed wealth at the expense of the masses due to various reasons such as usury, high IQ’s etc. Moreover contemporary Lutherans by and large won’t touch Luthers rantings against the Jews with a barge pole.
The reason that the universal aspects of Christianity didn’t fully flower until modern times was that it was only in modern times that there has been a great deal of mass migration due to improved communication and transport. If Christians of Roman times could have baptized millions of Bantus and imported them into the Roman empire they surely would have done so. Indeed the Christians assisted the barbarians smash what remained of Rome and Greece.:
Zosimos is wrong that Alaric abandoned Attica untouched. Another Greek
writer, Eunapios (circa 346–414), a philosopher and a former hierophant or
chief priest of the mysteries at Eleusis, an eyewitness to the works of Alaric,
reports that the Gothic barbarian, with the guidance of Christian monks,
smashed Eleusis, a sacred polis by the sea, about twenty kilometers northwest of Athens. The year 396 was the time, says Eunapios, “when Alaric
with his barbarians invaded Greece by the pass of Thermopylae. He did so
as easily as though he were crossing an open stadium or a plain fit for cavalry. The impiety of men dressed in black clothes made that possible. There
were no longer any laws that protected the chief priest of the Eleusinian mysteries. The black-robed men threw the gateway of Greece open to Alaric and,
together, marched unhindered to destroy Eleusis.”
http://www.vallianatos.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/mq015-03-06-vallianatos_fpp.pdf
Today with a fully globalized world the universal aspects of Christianity are bearing their fruits. Just look at the support the Catholic churches extend to illegal Hispanics.
This is all besides the point, I find the whole cult absurd and repugnant. First off if this so called “God” didn’t find it fit to appear to appear to any of my ancestors for a covenant or for that matter to anyone in the civilized world then I have no time for him. If he found some illiterate desert savages in the middle of nowhere fit to be his “chosen people” then he can have them.
To quote Hegel:
<<>>
Some have commented on the impracticability of going back to paganism. I agree but even more impracticable is to insist that Europeans go back to the childish nonsense of Christianity at a time when church attendance is at its lowest in Europe and most Europeans don’t have time for the Jesus fable.
You are welcome go back to Church & sing hymns with your Bantu brothers in Christ but I have better things to do with my time.
To quote Hegel:
In order to worship the God of the Bible, somewhere in history a drastic uprooting process had to have taken place. The old pagan gods had to be forsworn and the ways of one’s oldest ancestors abandoned. This was as true of Moslems and Christians as it was of Jews. Here again, Catholicism sometime mitigated the harshness of the process by identifying local deities with Christian saints. Not surprisingly the young Hegel, although Lutheran by tradition, expressed his bitterness at this alienation from his own archaic religious inheritance:
Every nation has its own imagery, its gods, angels, devils or saints who will live on in the nation’s traditions . . .
Christianity has emptied Valhalla, felled the sacred groves, extirpated the national imagery as a shameful superstition, as a devilish poison, and given us instead the imagery of a nation whose climate, laws, culture, and interests are strange to us an whose history has no connection whatever with our own. A David or a Solomon lives in our popular imagination, but our country’s own heroes slumber in learned history books . . . . Thus we are without any religious imagery which is homegrown or linked with our history . . . all that we have is the remains of an imagery of our own, lurking amid the common people under the name of superstition.
Hegel concluded his complaint by asking: “Is Judaea, then, the Teutons’ fatherland?”
The young Hegel understood the profoundly destablizing character of the uprooting involved in the conversion of the Germans to biblical religion. He also appears to have grasped that biblical religion is inherently uprooting, at least in the first generation. Biblical religion effectively begins when God commands Abram, “Get thee out of thine own country, and from thy kinsmen, and from thy father’s house, and go unto a land that I will show you” (Gen. 12:1) It is instructive to recall the young Hegel’s bitter condemnation of Abraham’s voluntary uprooting:
Abram, born in Chaldea, had in youth already left a fatherland in his father’s company. Now, in the plains of Mesopotamia, he tore himself free altogether from his family as well, in order to be a wholly self-subsistent, independent man, to be an overlord himself. He did this without having been injured or disowned, without the grief which after a wrong or an outrage signifies love’s enduring need, when love, injured indeed but not lost, goes in quest of a new fatherland in order to flourish and enjoy itself there. The first act which made Abraham the progenitor of a nation is a disseverance which snaps the bonds of communal life and love. The entirety of the relationships in which he had hitherto lived with men and nature, these beautiful relationships of his youth (Joshua 24:2), he spurned.
As noted, Abraham’s departure from his native land entailed unconditional rejection of the gods of that land; and all Jews, Christians, and Moslems are the heirs of their spiritual forefather’s primal uprooting.
http://www.amerika.org/globalism/religion-and-the-case-of-capitalism-richard-l-rubenstein/
“I find it absurd to assume that the intense and passionate dedication and identification Europeans had for the struggles and concepts of Christianity was a mere accident of history or simple ignorance on their part. One cannot say that they had accepted this half-heartedly, on the contrary. If all that was so “alien” to their soul, as some think, how could that have happened?”
It might have had something to do with losing your head for refusal to accept the nonsense.
Ever think of that part?
Charlemagne had 4,500 Saxons beheaded at Verdun for refusal to convert.
Christianity was accompanied by tremendous violence and coercion everywhere it went. If it had any innate merit it wouldn’t have needed that.
Your “logic” is as good as a medieval Hungarian or Spaniard saying that the imposition of Islam showed that Islam wasn’t alien to their “soul”. After all at one point in time many areas of Southern Spain were Muslim majority with many native Spanish converts and Hungary fell under Ottoman occupation.
Turkey itself was once Greek territory and many Turks have substantial Greek blood. Albania, Kosovo etc were also once Christian countries.
Does this all prove that Islam had some great attraction to these European peoples?
No all it proves is that the one with the military power can impose their religion.
If it comes to a choice between losing your life or abandoning your religion, most people would choose the latter and that’s what most Europeans did. Some such as those 4,500 brave Saxon souls refused to do so and suffered death for their refusal.
“Does anyone doubt most Christians will be celebrating homosexuality in the same way they celebrate interracial marriage within a few decades?”
In Sweden, this already happened in 1998 with the “art” exhibition “Ecce Homo” (pun intended), which displayed Jesus as a rather hardcore homosexual. The exhibition toured the Swedish churches – even the Uppsala Cathedral.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecce_Homo_%28exhibition%29
You can see a few of the pictures here:
http://sverigesradio.se/diverse/appdata/isidor/images/news_images/1602/2519408_520_292.jpg
http://sverigesradio.se/diverse/appdata/isidor/images/news_images/2946/845069_180_226.jpg
http://gfx.dagbladet.no/pub/artikkel/5/50/508/508782/oh280lson_1187078943.jpg
http://gfx.dagbladet.no/pub/artikkel/5/50/508/508782/ecc858ehomo_1187078844.jpg
“Bishop Williamson’s denial of the Holocaust was held to be far more sinful by Benedict XVI than the Jews’ denial (and arguably, collective murder) of Jesus Christ as Savior.”
Good point!
Greg: Thank you for a very thoughtful article. There is something you need to study in great detail before you reach any conclusions about the Christian faith. That is Vatican II. This is what transformed the Christian faith into the toothless tiger it currently is today. The council was called and ran by Marxists, Freemasons, and homosexuals. The Catholic faith was eviscerated at the council. The liturgy, customs, beliefs, and even the doctrines themselves were either altered or changed completely. What passes today for the Catholic faith is a direct result of the council. Please watch this video entitled “What we have lost…” This will show you what occurred. http://youtu.be/TR5XT2Vtn6w
I realize that bashing Christianity is hip, but does anyone ever ponder the example of Codreanu? I’d love to see any so-called White nationalist today directly confront him about his faith as a weakness when literally none here or elsewhere can honestly compare themselves to him. Perhaps we never will again see such a great man.
Jesus said that if a man has two cloaks he should sell one and buy a sword. Russian/Serbian Orthodoxy is still Christianity with teeth. I suspect it is precisely this group that will end up being the dominant force protecting Europa in the years to come. Certainly much more so than “militant Odinists”!
Another M. Kolya, in “Pater…”
“Pusillanimous modern Christians easily lend themselves to a certain trifling revulsion, like discovering something decaying at the back of the refrigerator that should have long ago been discarded. They come in a thousand varieties these days, most not even going by the name Christian. Many, lacking the smallest bit of insight, even profess a supposed distaste for their Jesus-worshipping brethren. Unfortunately, in this era of sloughing, in these decades of evolution where population transfers and media are the winnowers rather than sleet and ice sheets, those who will breed the strength of the future still have connections, familial ties to that most horrible of all creeds, that which has gone by many names but which always shares the same basic article of faith – equality in everything, equality in tigers and lice, equality in treasure and trash.”
“Impressive, but eventually they are going to start reading their Bibles.”
The Church loves all people, including those who are black, white or non-Christians. – [Highest Greek Orthodox] Archbishop commenting on Golden Dawn
http://www.ekathimerini.com/4dcgi/_w_articles_wsite1_1_30/10/2012_468003
Lew, the church is obviously compatible with both ethnonationalism as well as multiracialism. As so often happens, however, the archbishop felt compelled to clarify that the church is not necessarily opposed to non-Greeks as a reaction against GD’s attempts to coopt the church, or to claim that the church’s views are one with GD’s. Most probably the archbishop does not feel any tremendous amount of love for blacks or atheists (and we can be sure he doesn’t fill his life with such people), but if GD are going to insist that his job description requires him to hate blacks then it’s quite understandable that he would go pains to clarify that it doesn’t.
This happens all the time with whites in America. Most whites prefer to live away from large concentrations of blacks, but when WNs insist that their racial views are not essentially different to WNs’ views they feel the need to point out that there is in fact an important difference.
Or maybe he just applied Christian principles and the teachings of the Bible?
As if that’s more likely than the explanation I proffered. Dream on.
There about 2 billion Christians in the world.
In the entire world, can you give one example of a Christian leader, Orthodox, Catholic or Protestant, in any sect, denomination, institution or organization who backs racial/ethnic nationalism based on Christian principles? My only requirement is that the person must lead 5000 Christians or more. No fringe outfits (Christian Identity).
There are about 2 billion Christians in the world. In the entire world, can you give one example of a Christian leader, Orthodox, Catholic or Protestant, in any sect, denomination, institution or organization who backs racial/ethnic nationalism based on Christian principles? My only requirement is that the person must lead 5000 Christians or more. No fringe outfits (Christian Identity).
I just don’t agree with Russell’s thesis in ‘Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity.’ I think he was wrong to claim that the “core” of Christianity was lost. I think German Christianity was an authentic form of Christianity, and it preserved and strengthened Western Civilization for 2,000 years.
I wrote a rather long and detailed review of Russell’s book to defend my view: http://cocmillennial.blogspot.com/2016/11/germanization-of-early-medieval-christianity-review.html
St Augustine wrote that ‘that which is known as the Christian religion existed among the ancients, and never did not exist.’
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