By Batiushka for the Saker blog
There always have been and always will be clashes and tensions between different civilisations. In the words of an old Tom Lehrer song, National Brotherhood Week:
The Protestants hate the Catholics,
The Catholics hate the Protestants,
The Muslims hate the Hindus,
The Hindus hate the Muslims,
And everybody hates the Jews.
So sang a Jewish singer, some of whose ancestors, I believe, fled to the USA after the 1905 pogrom in Odessa, a city which for the moment is still in the Ukraine) (1).
This brings us to examining the old saying that: ‘Religion is the cause of all wars’. As a priest, I can in a sense agree with that, as also with Marx’s saying that ‘Religion is the opium of the people’. I can agree with them both because, as a priest, I do not hold with religion and I am not religious. Thank God!
Perhaps I should explain to the confused.
Religion has always been a State manipulation, used in order to control populations. If you have ever visited a Protestant church, you will know this. There, to our astonishment, people have to file in and are directed to sit down in regimented rows in certain seats, and are then told to stand up and sit down, while being bombarded with moralising speeches to make them feel guilty and cough up cash. A clearer case of organised mass manipulation can surely not be found. However, in fairness it must be said that States are capable of doing the same with absolute any ‘religion’.
States use religion to divide and create wars. (So, religion is not the cause of all wars, but it is used as a disguise for the cause of all wars). Why? Because if you openly say, ‘we are going to invade you because we are a different ethnic group and we are extremely greedy and vicious and want to steal and plunder your territory and natural resources’, people may well not follow you. But if, like George Bush, you say ‘God told me to invade Iraq’, or, ‘NATO’s role is to bring freedom and democracy’ (and forget to add, ‘even if it means wiping you off the face of the earth’), you will always find some venal journalists, useful idiots and propagandised zombies to believe you and follow you. In other words, States have always used religion as camouflage to justify their base and basest motives. Hence, religion is indeed the opium of the people.
Why am I, a priest, saying this? Primarily because it is true. But also because I have no interest in religion at all, my only interest is faith. Faith comes from spiritual experience, either you have it, or else you don’t. But it is quite different from State-invented ‘religion’, which is used to manipulate the masses.
Now all civilisations are based on faith, on an original spiritual intuition and experience. It is a historic fact. It does not matter if you are Jewish, Animist, Hindu, Zoroastrian, Buddhist, Confucian, Orthodox Christian, Mayan, Muslim, Shintoist, Catholic, Incan, Aztec, Sikh or, most recently, Protestant, your civilisation, and therefore your culture, depends on your faith. A Civilisation that does not have a spiritual basis, faith, is not a Civilisation, it is an Anti-Civilisation. And of that we shall speak later.
For millennia, civilisations have lived side by side. As we have said, they have from time to time spontaneously clashed and clashed violently about ethnic identity, territory and resources. However, Western Civilisation is quite unique.
Western Civilisation, which has basically existed for a thousand years (meaning that it is quite recent in comparative historical terms) is the only one which claims to be unique and which has consistently implemented its supposed infallibility and resulting intolerance on a systematic and institutionalised basis via organised violence throughout its millennial existence.
Thus, we had the First Crusade (1096-1099), which began by massacring and robbing Jews in the Rhineland and then went on to massacre Orthodox Christians and Muslims, shedding blood, which flowed up to their knees in what they claimed to be the ‘holy’ city of Jerusalem. Should we mention the Inquisition or the Spanish and Portuguese atrocities in what we now call Latin America?
Of course, in fairness, we cannot avoid mentioning the Protestant-Catholic European ‘Wars of Religion’ (sic), in which millions died. The Protestant sects also fought with each other, no doubt in order to prove which was the nastiest-minded and most bigoted. The Protestants, not the Catholics, had witch-hunts, in which they burned to death thousands of poor women, old and young. This was a form of social bullying of those who were in some way different. The Protestants went on to massacre the natives of North America and park the survivors in concentration camps, which they elegantly masked under the name of ‘reservations’ and enslave millions of Africans to work in their labour camps, which they called ‘plantations’. After all, ‘Arbeit macht frei’, ‘Work makes you free’. Though not if you are white, which is why you kindly allow non-whites to work for you.
Much of the witch-hunting goes back to the Protestant hatred and fear of women and so its obsession with sex (‘the only sin’), which it directly inherited from Papacy-imposed obligatory clerical celibacy in eleventh- and twelfth-century Western Europe. Today the old Puritanism of persecuting women has been transformed into the ‘green’ movement. Here, instead of abstention from sexual uncleanness, we now have the equally fanatical abstention from material uncleanness, sexual purity is replaced by environmental purity – ‘green is clean’, the only sin is not recycling. This is just the new Puritanism of such as the clearly clinically depressed and neurotic Greta ‘Funberg’. (What a bundle of laughs she is; it must be the dark Swedish nights). However, the ultimate deviation is the legitimisation of homosexuality: what could be more woman-hating than sodomy?
The great difference between the West and all other civilisations is its unique intolerance because it is convinced that it is infallible. (Papal infallibility may have been dogmatised only in the nineteenth century, but it had already been proclaimed by Hildebrand/Gregory VII in the eleventh century). The West has to impose.
Conversely, President Putin accepts all, as did the USSR, as did the Russian Tsars. Listen again to two parts of his speech on 30 September this year:
‘What, if not racism, is the West’s dogmatic conviction that its civilisation and neoliberal culture is an indisputable model for the entire world to follow? ‘You’re either with us or against us’…. One of the reasons for centuries-old Russophobia, the Western elites’ unconcealed animosity toward Russia, is precisely the fact that we did not allow them to rob us during the age of colonial conquests and we forced the Europeans to trade with us on mutually beneficial terms. This was achieved by creating a strong centralised State in Russia, which grew and got stronger on the basis of the great moral values of Orthodox Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Buddhism, as well as Russian culture and the Russian world that were open to all’.
Let other civilisations have other values. But if we find homosexuality unnatural and abnormal, leave us alone. Those are our values. We let you do what you woke want in your countries, therefore stop imposing it on us. The Ukraine, apart from the recently Hapsburgised and Polonised far west, is not part of the Western world. Stop treating it as if it were part of your world. If Catholic countries like Poland and Slovakia want to join you in your promotion of sodomy, we won’t stop them. If Catholic countries like Hungary don’t agree with you, then let them join us. We have nothing against traditional Catholics. We don’t meddle – unlike you.
This unique intolerance of Western ‘Civilisation’ – if that is what it is – reminds us of a poem written before the new great fall of the West in 1914, by an American poet, perhaps the greatest American poet, Robert Frost. In ‘Mending Wall’ (2) there comes that famous line: ‘Good fences make good neighbours’.
The fact is that a fault line runs through Europe. That fault line took more or less definitive shape in the eleventh century. It is a thousand years old. It is the fault line that separates the Catholic world (and therefore also the Protestant world – the two things are the two sides of the same coin) from the Orthodox Christian world. It separates Finland, most of the Baltics, most of Poland, the far west corner of the Ukraine, most of Slovakia, perhaps Hungary and certainly Croatia from the rest of Eurasia. Beyond the east and south of that line lies the rest of the world, the Non-Western world, whose faiths, despite their diversity, in many ways have far more in common with one another than with the LGBT Anti-Civilisation of the Western world. Now the New England poet, Robert Frost, goes on to write in his poem:
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out.
Well, in answer to Robert Frost, once all of the Ukraine is liberated, you will be fenced off, so as to remain good neighbours, you will be walled out behind your Woke Anti-Civilisation. As we said above, a Civilisation that does not have a spiritual basis, faith, is not a Civilisation, it is an Anti-Civilisation, and that is what ‘Western Civilisation’ has step by step become. You can keep it. We take not the slightest pleasure in seeing its degeneration, we are shocked and distressed by it and feel compassion for all its victims. Stop the Empire’s War on Russia, says the Saker, but we would say: Stop the Empire’s War on the World.
Notes:
1. We should perhaps mention here that no pogroms ever took place in Russia, but only in what is now Lithuania, Poland, Moldova and the western Ukraine. (Before 1942 Odessa was essentially a Jewish city). The pogroms were imports from the neighbouring West, where violent pogroms also took place in the nineteenth century, especially in German-speaking countries. The total number of victims over some twenty years in what were basically race riots between poor people and rich Jews (with plenty of poor people of all nationalities getting caught inbetween), sometimes started by Jews, sometimes by the other side, totalled about the same number as the Germans murdered on one average day during the Second World War. Overall, more Non-Jews died than Jews during the pogrom race riots in the Russian Empire. Of course, this is never mentioned in the West. Why? Perhaps because it was the West, and not Russia, which produced Jew-murdering Nazism? And why were there so many Jews living in the Russian Empire in any case? Because they had been expelled in the Middle Ages from racist Western Europe. Just a point of fact.
2. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44266/mending-wall
Just for interest the quote from Bob Dylan is actually from Tom Lehrer “National Brotherhood Week”.
“we will be fencing you off, so as to remain good neighbours”
Puhleeze, Batiushka, don’t go down that road. Remember that the first line of Robert Frost’s famous poem, “Building a Wall”, begins with a doubt about what his “good neighbour” was up to:
“There’s something about us doesn’t like a wall”.
Also remember that the world’s champion wall builders are very fond of quoting those dubious words: “Good walls make good neighbours”.
Lastly, since you are a priest and quote Russian-American-Jewish singer “Bob Dylan’s line, “Everybody hates the Jews”, you are aware of the real problem: It was easy to take the Jews out of a physical Walled Ghetto — they have left by the million — but for Jews to come out from their self-imposed mental Ghetto (aka “God’s Chosen People”) has not been so easy. Neither will it be for Russians if they begin to rebuild a wall around themselves. A physical fence is quickly removed; not so “the mind-forged manacles of man”.
“There’s something about us doesn’t like a wall?” It’s like so much else in life, isn’t it? It’s Contextual.
If my neighbour is a trustworthy, kindly person, who leaves me and my things alone, but has an attitude of friendly reciprocity to me, and we treat each other with respect and kindness, no indeed, we neither of us want or feel the need for, a wall.
However, should my neighbour be the opposite of this, and have the habit of entering my property and stealing, and lying about me to my neighbours, and doing damage to my property then I most certainly DO want – and feel I need – a Wall. A darn great big one at that.
A darned astute observation. I’ve lived in two different types of suburbs, 17 years in one, then 12 years in another. The one suburb had very few fences and you would see neighbors out and talk to them. The other has a good fifty percent of homes with tall fences and you hardly see anyone out except for lawn work maybe.
Sadly, society has evolved that you don’t need fences at all because if you notice, people are swallowed up by their homes. They come home from work, disappear inside, and you don’t see them out hardly at all.
I contend that the difference over a period of 30 years is the development and progress of electronic entertainment and means of communication. Nothing has to be done in person anymore. People don’t play badminton, croquet, volleyball, jarts outside in their backyards. Walkers, all ages, mostly wear earbuds I notice, and don’t stop to engage in conversation.
The breakdown in society in the west is this isolationism likely caused by wealth allowing easier access to all forms of electronic entertainment. If you have no cohesion by individual contact promoted through like values, then different narratives can be promoted. To me, that’s one of the real value of religious organizations; genuinely promoting “good” values, morals, a sense of community and developing integrity.
Really, physical walls are only necessary for security because we already have invisible walls created by technology that allow promotion of different values.
That’s the sad reality here.
The Jew Tom Lehrer never explained or wondered why everybody seems to hate the Jews.
Looking at Israel´s treatment of the Palestinian people, Jews never seems to ransack their own soul.
Maybe they have no soul, because it was traumatized out of them as a child via circumcision, incest or pedophilia?
As a priest without a religion but with faith (like some have faith in the US Dollar), the writer preaches the words of Jews and Karl Marx.
I’m shure that this Vicar has never been inside a Protestant Church, or has missed entirely what is going on inside such a church. Maybe the Vicar used his theological studies to smoke a lot of weed while listening to Bob Dylan, and reading Karl Marx instead of studying the Bible.
Yes, Protestants are taught Moral behavior, and some of us feel guilty and are repenting our sins by compensating or seeking forgiveness by those who we have harmed or transgressed.
Not by paying the Church for indulgence of our sins.
The Vikings in Nordic Nations (Today primarily Protestant) were the first society to recognize female inheritance equal to men. In the 6th and 7th Century we sailed down the Russian and East European Rivers and met the Orthodox Christian religion in Byzantium, almost a century before the Catholic Christianity was forced upon us. However in the 16th Century, we reformed our churches to Protestant Christianity.
I have never heard of pure Protestant Nations fighting each other over religious matters.
And the Catholics Church created both the witch-hunts, and the inquisition, not the Protestant Church.
The Catholic Freemasons massacred the natives of North America and send the survivors into reservations.
However, Jewish merchants enslave millions of Africans and sold them to Southern plantation owners.
“Arbeit macht frei” was invented by the 3rd Reich of the Holy Roman Empire, which was promoted by the Pope and the Catholic Church.
Today, Puritanism has been transformed into the ‘green’ movement by the same Empire which launched the sexual puritanism. Instead of sexual abstention, the West now has an obsession with environmental purity and sexual deviations. However, the ultimate sin of the Catholic Church is its widespread use of pedophilia.
What we see today, is more moral gymnastics, once again created by the Papal Institution, and executed by the 4th Reich of the Holy Roman Empire.
PS, I don’t blame the Catholic Christians, only the Papal Institution and its offspring of corrupt Agents.
Those first lines are from Tom Lehrer’s song “National Brotherhood Week”, not Bob Dylan.
Five centuries before Dylan, Kabir was already singing :
(…)
Hindus, Muslims,
both deluded, always fighting.
Yogis, sheikhs, wandering Jains,
all of them lost
in greed.
(…)
In “Kabir poetry by Linda Hess, Upaya, July 6-8, 2018”
https://www.upaya.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Kabir-Handout-LindaHess-Upaya-2018.pdf
Not sure if Batiushka even reads the comments here, but I have deep respect for Batiushka. Two major insights presented here. Life is all about spirituality (commitment to God instead of man made religion) and society is all about culture (civilization = culture based). The collective West seems to abandon these, but it seems to me God has a good reason for this. Not only to wake up the world, but also on a deeper level. As a species we need the things the West brought forward and this could only happen in the West or by the West. I hope Batiushka could shine a light on that. Much love from me from The Netherlands.
I do agree. Having been a somewhat lukewarm “Christian”, attending the High Church of the Church of England, for a large part of my younger years, events sent me thinking and exploring down many paths.
It’s been along time now since I first knew I had to firmly reject saying I was “Church of England, Christian”, having explored the history and psychology or organised Religion to some depth, and come to the conclusion that they were all pretty much institutions of political power, designed to control. I see no need for priests to be anything other than teachers and advisors for those who seek them out for that purpose. We need to spend much of lives learning to establish a personal relationship with the Power that Is, not just go through motions ordered by others.
I see now a new report claiming that Christianity is now a minority religion in England. Soon it will be mostly Islamic, like the rest of Europa.
But Celts will still be Druids I think, finding that Power some call “God” in the woods and streams, the mountains and valleys of our world; and good lives lived.
Yes, I do read all comments.
First of all, my apologies to everyone. You are quite right, it is another Jewish-American singer, Tom Lehrer, not Bob Dylan.
The Russians are not building a wall around themselves. The West is, placing itself in isolation. The Western walling itself out or fencing itself off is providential. The West is sick and has placed itself in quarantine. Once it has walled itself off completely, no more arms can reach the Kiev regime. That is why the wall is needed. On the other hand, nobody said that the wall has to be so high that communication becomes impossible.
In reply to Niccos, all I can say that God can make good out of bad. That is Providence. The Western Cancel Russia is in fact suicidal. It means Cancel the West.
I think it’s good to be dead honest about facts and see things for what they are. At the same time it’s not good to be angry about stuff for a long time and eventually we all have to push forward and build further upon our true values.
I see so many articles in the non-West media just doing the above. They present a good historic overview, telling facts no matter how harsh those are and letting us know what’s going on. But also it’s mostly coming from some anger, frustration, emotions. Understandable sure, but there must be a time to come out of that.
I miss the connection between what’s going on and what the West in a strange way contributes to push our species further. In about a few hundred years it all will make sense, because it’s a deep spiritual lesson we all have to learn here. We all.
Hello.
I discovered Saker Blog at the beginning of the war in Ukraine when russian sites were banned and i began looking for alternatives.
I registered just today and this is my first comment.
Very interesting article. I wonder where my country Greece would fit ino all the above, our situation i think is a bit unique.
You have to go back to your roots. Ancient Greece has never been part of what is called now Western Eurooe, let alone the West.
The English Alaphabet became the tools needed to achieve everlasting life, the English language became the clues to use the tools to achieve everlasting life.
Neither was ever intended to be used to control the population, but the gods knew humans being natural sinners would instead use the language to control first, and then procede with the everlasting search.
This is why the English language is the most dangerous language of all the languages, b/c of all the potential both good and bad.
Buddhist practice, as I experience it, is Not based on faith.
Or is most based on faith of all. We sit in meditation, enjoying our zazen, without hope of any material gain or any attainment. What could be more an expression of faith?
The Buddha taught to base faith on direct experience
From Kalama Sutta:
‘Come Kalamas. Do not go upon what has been acquired by repeated hearing; nor upon tradition; nor upon rumor; nor upon what is in a scripture; nor upon surmise; nor upon an axiom; nor upon specious reasoning; nor upon a bias towards a notion that has been pondered over; nor upon another’s seeming ability; nor upon the consideration, “The monk is our teacher.” Kalamas, when you yourselves know: “These things are good; these things are not blamable; these things are praised by the wise; undertaken and observed, these things lead to benefit and happiness,” enter on and abide in them.’
Thank you for your contribution Fionnbarra.
According to Tibeto-Mongolian Buddhism full enlightenment can be achieved by faith alone.
Buddhism is about as monolithic as Christianity. I was brought up in Jodo Shinshu, which was definitely faith-based, but not insistently so. The mantra “Namu Amida Butsu” was translated as “I place my faith in Amida Buddha.” My father, who got us involved in this, had developed quite an allergy to “faith” as expressed by Protestant America in the 1950s, so our Buddhist minister (this was Salt Lake City) coached him and us on Zen, much more of an ascetic practice, emphasizing abandonment of desires, than the layman-oriented “Let’s walk the middle road, and if we just have faith we’re saved” Jodo Shinshu, which has the largest number of followers among the sects in Japan. During the warring era, a lively mountain ascetic sect arose in Japan based on the elite class’s Shingon (Orthodox Esoteric Buddhism), combined with Japan’s gallimaufry of local animistic faiths and traditions, collectively known as Shinto. That combination was powerful enough that secular leaders found it necessary to repress it repeatedly, and it was outlawed entirely in the early Meiji period, with adherents declaring themselves either Buddhist or Shinto and abandoning the practices of the other. Jodo Shinshu was also perceived as a threat, due to its popularity, and split into east and west sects.
Thank you Patricia for sharing this interesting story.
In my teenage years I heard Alan Watts speak of the Mahayana and the “Namu Amida Butsu” mantra many times.
Of late, I have become closer to Yogacara Buddhist Theory.
The claim that the Western civilisation is “the only one which claims to be unique and which has consistently implemented its supposed infallibility and resulting intolerance on a systematic and institutionalised basis via organised violence …” is pretty dubious – the early Jewish civilisation claimed to be God’s chosen people and under God’s orders to wipe out all the nearby nations (see in the Bible, Deuteronomy chap 7 first 6 verses).
Neither is the assertion that religion is the root cause watertight in all cases. The systematic violence and destruction visited on multiple peoples by the ‘indispensable’ and ‘exceptional’ Americans in modern times is rooted in greed and lust for power and not religious belief.
What a beautiful article Batiushka. You are hitting the heart of the western existence question in which I live.
I was born “Catholic” where the pope in infaillible and was properly brainwashed in the ideology of guilt. We are born guilty of sin and therefore we should repent and live like worms (except for those who cultivate them). I had to lift myself up “by the lace of my shoes” to escape this living hell. Nothing has changed today except the increased pace of the attack and the incredibly primitive nature of the narrative in a more receptive audience.
Your observations help us understand some of the essential differences between this artificial “non-civilization” world and the truly civilized universe. Developing clear and simple views like those you offer helps create the conditions to built a mental island of peace in the middle of this mess.
Please continue to share your enlightened views on the matters that we all consider critical. I will certainly continue to follow you very carefully and use your bits of wisdom to reinforce my perceptions.
Accepting of all. In the true Spirit. Unfortunately some humans are just spiteful, beyond redemption……. perhaps?
I’m half Mick half Prod, raised Catholic, in a Church of Ireland household. On my Dad’s side so Orange, my Great Grandfather started the first Orange Lodge in Edinburgh, on my Ma’s, so Green, many in the family stayed in the Long Kesh Lodge.
In an Irish sense, I’m Fenien…..accepting of all. Hmmm, one exception, may God forgive my transgression…..I hate Imperial Colonizers….they deserve no quarter!
I was fortunate to be released from my religious shackles by an English teacher. He gave the class a book to read, Siddharth Gautama. My path to, not enlightenment, but more of a paradigm shift mentally to seek, or look beyond.
I still follow a Buddhist path in the simplest of forms, purity of thought, words and actions. Anyone thinking 10 commandments are difficult to follow, try being a ‘simple’ Buddhist for a day.
A thought provoking article today Batiushka hopefully inspiring others to look beyond their shackles ….or as the Prophet Bob Marley would say “emancipate yourself from mental slavery.”
Cheers M
I look forward to reading your comments, Sean the Leprechaun 🍀. I see your last sentence; emancipation from the chains that bind us. Step by step, breath by breath….simple is best, for many.
Batiushka, glad to see you fixed the Bob Dylan issue. He is my favorite poet / songwriter. I have read your commentaries for some time now, and always appreciate your insights.
Wars are about resources, not religion. Religion is used by the establishment to manipulate the masses into acts of evil.
I live in the USA (I was born here). My faith is spiritual in nature, and is informed by scripture. I do not attend “church” in an organized fashion because most (not all) of the “churches” in America have been led astray by Satan.
Russia, and all other nations, would be wise to walk away from the “west”. The West is filthy, and God will give it a cleansing in God’s way in God’s time. This cleansing has already started. The demise of The Evil Empire (thanks be to God), and the preponderance of out-of-their-minds individuals (dare I say possessed?) in this pseudo society are signs of the reckoning that is already upon us.
Many thanks to you and The Saker for reaching out to people with information that has not been tainted by the corporate media.
Romans 12:17-19
17 Recompense to no man evil for evil. Provide things honest in the sight of all men.
18 If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men.
19 Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.
I disagree with the author as to religion is being the cause of conflict or war for it is man’s heart that is evil ( Genesis 6:5 and 8:21 ). Man ate of the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the garden ( Genesis 2:9 ) before religion was known. However, man’s heart is evil and he will continue to do evil unless he is regenerate.
@ Skip59
Christians going to war to kill members of their own religion is the history of the 20th Century and so your comment is quite correct. The Christmas Truce of 1914 must have really angered a great many politicians if not bankers who could never in a million years have allowed Christians to actually follow their Lord’s Commandments! Reminds me of the American Civil War where at Westpoint there was a visible division between brothers who were just day earlier in chapel together breaking bread and having communion and now were facing each other on the battlefield killing each other for someones else political gains!
How are they all going to justify their free will? {sic?} at the judgment seat of Christ?
“Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; 20 you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies. 1 Corinthians 6: 20
The universe made humans the way we are. Suffering, and fear of more suffering, rules us all. Sex salts the wounds and drives more strife. All of existence is cause and effect. Free will is an illusion since all of our thoughts and decisions are the result of previous conditions and events.
“All nature is but art, unknown to thee;
All chance, direction, which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good:
And, spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite,
One truth is clear, whatever is, is right.”
‘Tis but by parts we follow good or ill;
For, vice or virtue, self directs it still;
Virtuous and vicious every one must be,
Few in th’ extreme, but all in the degree,
The rogue and fool by fits is fair and wise;
And even the best, by fits, what they despise.
Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,
As, to be hated, needs but to be seen;
Yet seen too oft, familiar with its face,
.. first we endure, then pity, then embrace.
But where th’ extreme of vice, twas ne’er agreed:
(Ask where’s the north? at York, ’tis on the Tweed)
No creature owns it in the first degree,
But thinks his neighbour farther gone than he;
Ev’n those who dwell beneath its very zone,
Or never feel the rage, or never own;
What happier natures shrink at with afright,
The hard inhabitant contends is right.
For forms of government let fools contest;
Whate’er is best administered is best:
For modes of faith let graceless zealots fight;
His can’t be wrong whose life is in the right:
In faith and hope the world will disagree,
But all mankind’s concern is charity:
That reason, passion, answer one great aim;
That true self-love and social are the same;
That virtue surely makes our bliss below;
And all our knowledge is, ourselves to know. ”
Alexander Pope, my only Pope.
It is all a package deal. If the universe was not exactly as it is, we would not exist, we would have no lives at all.
It is Shakespeare’s “All the world’s a stage”, we are merely players in a play that the universe writes and moves on to the next scene.
@ Jimmy Walker
Well said i must say. Excellent points. Free will to some extant has always bothered me. No parent would ever say to ones child in warning not to walk on thin ice as you may fall into the lake and drown but hey you are your own person with your own free will so do as you like? Even in the Garden of Eden its wasn’t a choice of their free will to make but rather a simple straight forward Do Not Eat that!!!
Puzzling?
Thank you.
Even within the illusion, there is not entirely free will. I have “free will” to jump off a cliff? I might be crazy and do it. At best, “free will” is a choice based on limited info and physical choices.
@ Jimmy Walter
At best, “free will” is a choice based on limited info and physical choices.
The poor and the rich? How about that if you get my drift? If your rich, super rich having need of nothing then you have all the free will do as you please which brings up something extremely important Isaiah 48:10:
See, I have refined you, though not as silver;
I have tested you in the furnace of affliction.
For my own sake, for my own sake, I do this.
How can I let myself be defamed?
I will not yield my glory to another.
and with that are the words “delight yourself in the Lord and in his laws” the scriptures teach, and why people don’t is something that God always looks to get to the bottom of.
The verses the come before are the real gems right to the first verse!!!!
Free Will?
O how i love the Book of Job so much truth there in with perhaps this verse being the most succinct:
“Beware of turning to evil which you seem to prefer to affliction.”
That a hell exists is going to serve a great many people extremely well i must say.
And with that lol i remember a game show on TV Truth or Consequences lol!!!
Cheers Jimmy Walter
I wonder if many saw this piece by the Syrian British journalist Richard Medhurst. It’s quite amusing, but very very encouraging to see.
The world is slowly slowly turning against the Israeli Zionists, from the grass roots up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9tNGngNAHY
I find it difficult to apart the different sub-groups within the main groups. I see in each main group ‘normal’ people, extreme people and everything in between. Also I see people sort of hiding in main groups, like if they belong to such main groups but realy have another agenda. Religions as main groups aren’t homogeneous, they contain normal people, extremists and manipulators. Too many normal people don’t see it and in my opinion follow something they shouldn’t. They give power to the extremists and manipulators.
Nicely put. I offer a pair of considerations:
Consider that the witch hunts, “The Protestants, not the Catholics, had witch-hunts, in which they burned to death thousands of poor women, old and young. This was a form of social bullying of those who were in some way different“, were mostly against the wise women, the witches, midwives, and nurses who took care of women and men, and were a threat to the authority of the clergy. They were in charge of birth and death, abortions, contraception, and healing, and it is easy to see how they were a threat.
In Native American tribes of the past, an occasional person would be born of sexual ambiguity. They were called ‘Two Spirit’ people and were tolerated.
However, it seems like in these modern days, Two Spirit people are inordinately frequent. My supposition is these people at a very young age, maybe womb, feel the distress and precarity of modern life and decide to have nothing to do with it. Rather than suicide, they reject breeding and take sexual solace with the same sex. Just a guess, a claim that the LHBTQ+ movement is a symptom of Western decadence, not a cause.
Tedder; your last paragraph…your last statement…I also sense this and have for quite some time. Been discovering, learning about Weitko. All so very interesting.
I suspect it has a lot to do with estrogen-mimic compounds in our plastic polluted environment. In my own observations, there seemed to be a distinct shift in attitudes among girls between those two years older than I and those one year older. The overall balance of the older ones was strongly traditional, very feminine and passive, while that of the younger ones was more assertive. For example, the girls a year older than I demanded and got an end to the requirement that all girls wear skirts to school. When I got to thinking what could have caused that (since feminism was just not a big thing in Utah and no one my age at 12 had heard of it yet), the fridges full of Tupperware and the Tupperware parties really popular among all the housewives came to mind. When I looked into it, it turned out to have become all the rage a few years before I was born. The older generation could not understand the passions we girls were beginning to feel at puberty. They said, “Come on, just can it, sweetie!”
You cannot can biology.
Religion is the OPIATE of the people. Not OPIUM. Opium is the product of opium plants. An ‘opiate’ can be alcohol, pills, television, radio, public meetings. “Days of Lives” is an opiate. Fidel’s three hours speeches could be seen as an opiate.
You, as a writer, are judged on your opening sentences – it colours the rest of the article.
If your Marx quote was misquoted, or mangled in translation, I apologise.
“The Protestants hate the Catholics,
The Catholics hate the Protestants,
The Muslims hate the Hindus,
The Hindus hate the Muslims,
And everybody hates the Jews.”
Mr. Tom Lehrer conveniently leaves out whom the Jews hate. Palestinians, Iranians, Syrians, Muslims, and the Goyim everywhere….
let me summarize… everyone
I’d also argue that the first pogroms/holocaust/genocide were in fact carried out by the Jews:
In February 1921, the workers in Petrograd and the sailors in Kronstadt had had enough. Several strikes broke out in Petrograd on the 22nd of February. The workers no longer wanted communist guards in the factories. The communist leadership had also cut the bread ration by a third (heavy industry workers received 800 grams per day, normal workers 600).
The wages had sunk to a tenth of what they had been before the Bolsheviks grabbed power and the inflation rate was catastrophic. Workers who had sneaked past roadblocks and left town headed for the countryside to find food but were either arrested or simply shot, since the factories were ruled by military discipline. Trotsky had also introduced the American Taylor system (named after the American economist Frederic Winslow Taylor, born in Germantown, 1856, died in 1915) which transformed workers into robots.
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“As the threats against the communist Jews became louder everywhere, the aggressive Jewish leader Mikhail Lashevich called the striking, disappointed workers “bloodsuckers who are trying to practice extortion”.
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On the 6th of March Leon Trotsky was infuriated. At first he wanted to use ****poison gas****, which he had quickly acquired from abroad, against the rebels. Then he said that all those demanding free speech, free press and free trade unions should be shot “like ducks in a pond” or “like dogs”. He ordered the rebels to give up. They refused.
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Most of those captured were mercilessly shot by order of Trotsky. A total of 30 000 people were executed in this terrible bloodbath.
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It has only now been revealed that Trotsky personally led the mass executions of sailors, their families and others involved. (Dagens Nyheter, November 25, 1993.)
The Jewish anarchist Alexander Berkman from the United States of America visited Kronstadt after the storming. He wrote in his diary:
“Kronstadt has fallen. Thousands of corpses of sailors lie in the streets. The execution of the prisoners continues.”
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The Chekists had used every imaginable excuse to kill. In the town of Bryansk, the death penalty was introduced for drunkenness, in Vyatka for “being out-of-doors after 20:00 hours”, in other areas for theft. The prisoners were brought to execution cellars, were made to undress, stood against a wall and shot by a little firing squad armed with pistols.
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In Petrograd, the soviet leader Grigori Zinoviev demanded in a speech that the inhabitants of Russia who could not be won over to the cause of Communism should be ****liquidated****. (Det Basta, No. 2, 1968, p. 136.)
In other words, Russia was occupied by groups of Jewish gangsters, who later also fought against each other. Eventually, about a million Jews died in this way. Professor Israel Shahak stressed in his valuable book “Jewish history, Jewish religion – The Weight of Three Thousand Years” (London, 1994) that fanatical Jews have always tried to follow the instructions according to which they must kill all “traitors” of Jewish blood – those who do not accept their own extreme points of view.
Of course the opposition also believes that if one lives by the sword, one dies by the sword, and they don’t care what religion you are.
Then we have the old “anti-Semite” canard:
Trotsky regarded all patriots as anti-Semites. In April 1919, in the middle of the great terror in Kiev, Trotsky visited the city and ordered that all Russian patriots should be ****exterminated****. They were beaten to death with hammers and their brains ended up on the floor of the shed where this crime was later discovered. (Platonov, “The History of the Russian People in the 20th Century”, part I, Moscow, 1997, p. 611.)
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Trotsky also had Russia’s most prominent poet, Sergei Yesenin, murdered. Official cause of death: suicide. Despite the fact that his head had been crushed so that brain tissue had leaked out, Yesenin had still been able to hang himself, according to the death certificate of the Jewish professor Alexander Gilyarevsky.
The principal reason for the murder was Yesenin’s new poem, “Land of Crooks” in which he surprisingly describes a Jewish tyrant – Leibman-Chekistov. All his acquaintances recognized Bronstein-Trotsky by the description. Yesenin welcomed the “revolution” at the beginning but soon grew disillusioned with it and managed to perceive the dark forces at work behind the political spectacle.
That was why he wrote his revelatory poem in which he described how American businessmen took power in Russia with the help of political gangsters who became Soviet prospectors speculating in Marxism. He called the new power-mongers parasites and actually said that the Soviet republic was a bluff (this word was romanised!). He also described Trotsky’s burning hatred of the Russian culture.
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Yesenin’s murderer Yakov Blumkin began his career as a ****rabbi in the synagogue in Odessa****. Like many other orthodox extremist Jews, he sought a position in the Cheka after the Bolsheviks came into power. At the same time he was an official member of the Social Revolutionary Party. Trotsky gave him the mission of murdering the German ambassador Count Wilhelm von Mirbach, on the 6th of July 1918, to prevent the Brest-Litovsk peace agreement. The Social Revolutionaries were accused of this murder. Also the Communist Aino Kuusinen related in her memoirs that Blumkin murdered Mirbach.
The US and EU are just pawns being used to eventually create a one world government, that will depend on a universal currency to be created by privately owned central banks. There is an interesting video on this subject entitled “Princes of the Yen” that describes how the banking mafia used booms and busts in Japan to effect structural changes in their economy to gain control.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17IKA-YsqXQ
Harold J. Berman:
I start from the fact that every legal order requires for its vitality the support of a belief system that links law not only with morality but also with fundamental convictions about human nature and human destiny. This is an anthropological truism, not a theological proposition,
In all societies religion and law, in the broad sense of those words, are interdependent and interact with each other. In all societies there are shared beliefs in transcendent values, shared commitments to an ultimate purpose, a shared sense of the holy: certain things are sacred. And in all societies, there are structures and processes of social ordering, established methods of allocating rights and duties, a shared sense of the just: Certain things are lawful.
The political and social philosophies that sprang from the Enlightenment were religions because they ascribed ultimate meaning and sanctity to the individual mind and also, it must be added immediately, to the nation. The age of individualism and rationalism was also the age of nationalism: the individual was a citizen, and public opinion turned out to be not the opinion of mankind but the opinion of Frenchmen, the opinion of Germans, the opinion of Americans.
Liberal democracy was the first great secular religion in Western history the first ideology which became divorced from traditional Christianity and at the same time took over from traditional Christianity both its sense of the sacred and some of its major values.
Idols for destruction by Herbert Schlossberg
Religious Secularity
Of all the misleading interpretations of this complex age, few are more so than the common one that secularism means the replacement of a world view that is religious with one that is not. This completely mistakes the meaning of religion. Max Weber rightly argued that each major aspect of human action is dependent on a distinctive set of religious attitudes. The religious outlook influences the institutions of society in ways that cannot simply be accounted for in material terms. Sociologist Gerhard Lenski’s studies in American society confirm Weber’s hypothesis. The religious character of human ideas and institutions is all-pervasive, even in nontheistic systems like Buddhism, communism, and humanism. All social phenomena, Lenski says, constitute systems of faith, not being based on logical or empirical demonstration, and all seek to respond to the most basic problems of human existence. Thus, all normal adults are religious. “Human existence compels men to act on unproven and unprovable assumptions, and it makes no exceptions.” One of Jacques Ellul’s most important contributions has been to show that modern Western society is awash with religiosity, that the much-vaunted secularization process means the flourishing of anti-Christian religions.
Harold J. Berman:
I start from the fact that every legal order requires for its vitality the support of a belief system that links law not only with morality but also with fundamental convictions about human nature and human destiny. This is an anthropological truism, not a theological proposition,
In all societies religion and law, in the broad sense of those words, are interdependent and interact with each other. In all societies there are shared beliefs in transcendent values, shared commitments to an ultimate purpose, a shared sense of the holy: certain things are sacred. And in all societies, there are structures and processes of social ordering, established methods of allocating rights and duties, a shared sense of the just: Certain things are lawful.
The political and social philosophies that sprang from the Enlightenment were religions because they ascribed ultimate meaning and sanctity to the individual mind and also, it must be added immediately, to the nation. The age of individualism and rationalism was also the age of nationalism: the individual was a citizen, and public opinion turned out to be not the opinion of mankind but the opinion of Frenchmen, the opinion of Germans, the opinion of Americans.
Liberal democracy was the first great secular religion in Western history the first ideology which became divorced from traditional Christianity and at the same time took over from traditional Christianity both its sense of the sacred and some of its major values.
Black Rednecks and White Liberals by Thomas Sowell
Conquest
While European imperialism has been dominant in the past 500 years, in the preceding centuries Europe was itself subjected to foreign conquests. It was invaded from Asia by the Mongols, to whom the Russians paid tribute. It was invaded from the Middle East by the Ottoman Empire, whose armies reached the gates of Vienna in the sixteenth century. Europe was invaded from North Africa and the whole Iberian peninsula was subjugated for centuries by the Moors. There was nothing peculiarly European about either conquering or being conquered—or about changing from one of these roles to the other in the course of history. The year in which the last of the North African conquerors was driven out of Spain—1492—was the same year that marked the beginning of Europeans’ creation of worldwide empires.
Conquest, like slavery, existed on every inhabited continent and involved all the races of mankind as both conquerors and subjugated peoples. Slavery and conquest existed in the Western Hemisphere before the first white man set foot on the shores of the Americas. The Zulus were conquering other African peoples when the British arrived in Southern Africa and conquered them all. Europeans also displaced other conquerors in Asia and among the Polynesians. What was different about European imperialism was how widely scattered its empires were, which was possible only because of revolutions in naval technology and a pre-existing base of wealth available to finance overseas expansion. But, morally, what the Europeans did was the same as what non- Europeans had been doing for thousands of years. This is not a moral justification for either. But it is an argument against the selective localization of evil.
Great article Batiushka! Very much appreciated.
“It does not matter if you are Jewish, Animist, Hindu, Zoroastrian, Buddhist, Confucian, Orthodox Christian, Mayan, Muslim, Shintoist, Catholic, Incan, Aztec, Sikh or, most recently, Protestant, your civilisation, and therefore your culture, depends on your faith. A Civilisation that does not have a spiritual basis, faith, is not a Civilisation, it is an Anti-Civilisation.”
I like to quote people much smarter than me such as yours above. Here is one I love and has always stuck with me.
“Were I to be the founder of a new sect, I would call them Apiarians and, after the example of the bee, advise them to extract the honey of every sect”(Thomas Jefferson)
From my point of view I can’t create a blade of grass on my own, I can’t tell my heart to stop beating on my own, I can control my breathing to an extent but can’t tell it to stop on demand forever and sure as hell don’t seem to be able to stop thoughts from flowing through my mind. To me it’s undeniable there is something more powerful than us. And we are living in it. It’s been a process but no matter what I see anymore all I see is God. Maybe that’s delusional or maybe it’s delusional to think otherwise. Who knows…
Really appreciate how you separate religion from spirituality though. If we could have heard what Jesus actually said while he was in town he himself would probably be against organized religion.
Always nice to read someone who understands. Thank you and God bless.
“When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.” J. Krishnamurti, Freedom from the Known, pp.51-52
‘O Marvel! a garden amidst the flames.
My heart has become capable of every form:
It is a pasture for gazelles and a convent for Christian monks,
and a temple for idols and the pilgrim’s Kaa’ba,
and the tablets of the Torah and the book of the Quran.
I follow the religion of Love: whichever way Love’s camels lead,
that is my religion and my faith.’
(Sheikh al-Akbar Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi)
@ Jimmy Walter
“he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.”
and at one time that understanding caused the people of Babylon to build the Tower of Babel. Interesting isn’t it that they all knew from the least of them to the greatest that there was a God. Faith for them wasn’t just a belief based on conjecture. lol
then after a few generation later we have what idolatry raising its ugly head and with it the deification of men er kings hence the Pharoahs?
“or anything else, you are being violent.”
“The kingdom of Heaven Christ, said, suffers violence and the mighty take it by force.”
Why would he say that? I’d imagine looking back to the story of Jacob which became Israel the violence of him grabbing an angel of the Lord was the epitome of taking heaven by force. It was a good kind of violence not the stuff that we see today with standing armies? Such faith is what God is looking for because He is the great rewarder.
You will find me when you have sought for me with all of your heart. Jeremiah 29:13
If we went after God like we do money wow what things we could accomplish?
But O again idolatry raises its ugly head sic…freemasonry!!!!!!!!!
free will?
You know I’d really like us all to get together for lunch!!! What a great smorgasbord we would all have together and the amazing great conversations wow!!!!???? and I’m really pissed off grrr
After Aleppo and Mariupol, now Artemovsk, the pace of the small (though??) Stalingrad of the US proxies is accelerating with devastating effects on the reputation of the US army. At the same time 100 billion helicopter money monthly accelerate the fall of DC the mad.
The Russians will move forward to secure the 4 oblasts they have just integrated. They will respond to the delivery of long-range artillery by preparing an advance westward by destroying what remains of the Ukrainian power grid. Millions of refugees will flood into Poland and Germany, which will ask Sweden and Finland to show solidarity. The winter will end like this.
In order not to face another proxy war, in the Sahel or North Africa, for example, the Russians will keep the war going until summer 2024. The situation in the EU and the USA will mature for the US election campaign. What will be the credibility of the candidates who want a military victory over Russia? The mess in the USA will get even bigger. For the Russians it will be the perfect timing for an operation Bagration bis.
Whenever I read or hear voices concerning walls, fences, boundaries, limits etc., I reflect on a couple of works that have found their way into my psyche. The first is from the movie, Lonely are the Brave, based on the novel, The Brave Cowboy, written by Edward Abbey (here is the trailer:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDKGx3lOXkQ). The second is the song by Woody Guthrie, This Land is Your Land (here is a link to the lyrics: https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/woodyguthrie/thislandisyourland.html). Both express the spirit of western freedom that seems to have been forgotten: One is free when when you allow your fellow the same. In any case I suggest reading the novel, watching the movie and always sing the song of freedom
In terms of Frost. Perhaps, the Frost notion on walls is more a a metaphor on self. Simply, the better I maintain, the better off my neighbor is and vice versa. A sort or form of mutuality. I don’t know. Just a thought.
I have spent a lot of time in open spaces and every time I see a fence, road or dam I want to puke.
Overnight I thought up a great way to solve a lot of the problems of the US & UKN.
How about Russia round up all the troublemakers in the UKN – western area Azov etc… and ship them to Democrat areas of the US (California, New York, Illinois, Michigan, Colorado, New Mexico, Oregon, Washington State & DC etc…) and let them sort out the political situation there.
The Democrats couldnt complain because they love funding them and keeping them and the war going.
Certainly would assist in fixing the US situation.
This would also solve Poland’s problem and allow them to take over western UKN and recover lost lands there and enable East Prussia to go back to Germany.
Kill 3 birds with one stone.