Theism and Atheism

1. Everyone says god’s cool with what they do, especially when it’s filthy. Hey!, at least we do our torture now in stealth. Since Europe when Christian, there’s been a certain politics of selection (like Christianity itself); just doing what Jesus said doesn’t make for the most spectacular career always. Roman Catholic on a foundation of Roman Republic, I submit: Pagan emperors enforce their law, Christian ones arbitrated their own as God’s. If you think extremism is what Jesus might have preached, you need to get a life.

2. Christianity is always a bit already speculative: “Sucks now, but we’ll hook you up in the end.” Martyrs died happy for it. All defeats were evidence of the heathen need for supressing God. Every man having been formed in image of god, even Nazis used to go to church and pray. The “poor souls” in unbelief used to be included and life was to be turned not toward riches and in power. Christians, at first, could follow the gospel directly free from alternative or choice; but as their faith attained worldly dominance it had to abide by dictates of preserving its own authority—in subverting its original critique of temporal power—it gave way to the ideology its doctrine had purported to usurp.

3. Theology mediates religion and power. But permanence requires dominance. Great and lower beings were put into the respective positions and compromises had to be made with a savage late antiquarian and medieval world. It’s a matter of Christianity vs. Christendom. Theology, however, did give rise to various forms of philosophy, a belief in universal human rights—the edifice constructed atop the enlightenment ideal. Medieval scholasticism led directly to Renaissance humanity, which resulted in the fraying of unified views of Christian doctrine.

4. Scholasticism, of course, derived from Classical continuity of philosophy; essentially an idea that abstractions of truth are readily apprehendable by all prepared to see and accept them as in intelligent structure of design: This came to be considered as universally valid and a heirarchy was elaborated as new entities came to be accepted in subverting their relation to the inherited pantheon. “Men had a picture of the universe in which divine and natural knowledge, divine and natural laws were one.” This supposedly applied to all men, or came to at some point. Politics split divisions, medievalism was succeeded in continual wars and mass migrations, economic upheaval and conservatism. The link between secular and religiou authority was criticized and dismantled, culminating in humanism and Protestant skepticism, which villified abstract and speculative systems (If you had that many Catholics spying on you might have too.); reason became sovereign overall. “The interest of the individual and the state became the criterion of action in this world.” German idealists (go figure) framed all of society as a competition “between individuals and nations” as the inexorable end ancillary to religious doctrine. Nationalism came to fill the gap left by the split between secularism and detached spirituality: A matter of allegiance to nation as self over learning of yourself through god.

5. Modern Europe has craftily avoided addressing the direct antithesis between rationality and still-prevalent religious doctrines until recently. Certain states have balanced religious devotion with that of political liberalism; others have tended to make it a more private, subjective affair. The Americans have actually accepted the equivocation like the former under the guise of the latter’s devotion. Rationalist atheism posed no serious threat until its political ascendency permeated sociological structures and consciousness coming into conflict with production and commerce: Foucault’s noted classical period. Religion addressed basic subjective needs more thoroughly than philosophy until nature and its selection came to dominate as a more absolute and empirical paradigm than theistic speculation; the divorce was, at first, quite very radical. “Science” and ‘objective’ expertise usurped their place as the primary mode of authoritative discourse (but only with reference to describing how nature ‘really is’).

6. “The upheavals which began with the present century—the era of world wars, of nations awakening all over the globe, of stupendous population growth—can only be compared with the decline of antiquity or the middle ages.” These naturally lead to some doubts as to the presence and nature of Almighty. Pedestrian uncreativity, called “consistency”, and being efficient—not just at work, but in every aspect of your life as if personal—are our new standards for God of the Day. “Democracy is being undermined… as a conflict between the different commercial, industrial and agrarian interests of independent groups.” Generally speaking, anyone who’s not a part of making the decisions now tries to usurp their power by refusing to sign your form. In important affairs, the systematic operation of administrative machinery devolves onto the spectacular efforts of a few talented, charismatic individuals (since just being professional enough isn’t good unless they are able to persuade convincingly by charm): You can see how this made things prone to fascism in the century previous.

7. In some, perhaps every, way the contemporary tensions resulting from these historical progressions are represented as products of their development in time.—in matters of religion, perhaps as the Platonic example of that fact.

8. It’s my belief that the fracturing of Christian unity and challenge (which is not essential, but a fact since the mid-19th Century) of scientific rationality—which is the definition of non-humane objectivity discoverable by subjective interpretations of verified fact—has led to an over-emphasis on the concept of love to atone for this radical split.—But the materialist conceptions of science and theoretical speculation in the previous century had so destabilized any notion of certainty with reference to a nature of the subject (which Foucault did all the work to subvert, and not one single bit of it once in any way ever directly) that—generally speaking in sociological terms—the actual act of loving in the Christian west came increasingly to be equated, particularly as our political structures became identified with the will-to-economies, with the act of physical love; hence the contemporary inability to distinguish between rationalist theism and dogmatic atheism having subsumed the full force of guiding both ideology and conduct—free from all philosophical handwringing and ethical “speculation” (‘what’s done is done; just stop killing muslims after we get the ones you want and the Global War of Terrorisms will cease to make you threat‘)—without recourse to mediation through the mutual re-interpretation of disputed concepts as termed.

9. I could tell you what this says; but you’ve got the link below. So: Real, the problem at heart here is a mutual discrimination to the exclusion of denying the place of Islam in the history of ideas developing as West. See, the muslims don’t want a damn thing to do with R-rated sexy and gut flicks, chicks in little shirts flipping their hair on stage and Lots of Feel-good Nonsense on Christian precepts; they’d prefer to be left alone to pray, argue about whose Koran looks righter, prepare elaborate meals and stories, conduct business in face to face exchange with people they can verify aren’t slippin’ hushushit to strangers marked [ S E C R E T ]…etc. Granted, they really do like Western gadgets and gizmos (would not mention `Gitmo’), when something’s screwed up internally they get our professors to perform surgery and generally just let us kill each other by taking our own drugs; but more to the point, since the post-Renaissance, the Christian idea of The West has been marked by a definitive, insular ideology which over-interprets its own development relationally as (if rational) an unavoidable historical necessity. Just because it went some way before doesn’t follow you ought to keep letting it do that. Even by silence. Since Islam previously functioned either in opposition to this rationale, or indirectly through contact mediated by various ethnic or religious minorities (including Judaism), you’re dealing with an entire swathe of globe—centered on Mecca—which doesn’t really want anything to do with our MTViewing, religious preacher-watching, visually fetishizing, ‘objective’ democraticapitalist ass because the entire “history” (i.e. what the historians have written) of our ‘civilisation’ is based around eliding certain periods in which their culture, its religion, were formative in the influence and development of our own—in particular, the middle ages. So theism, atheism, simply a theism—all that crap aside—there are historical realities to be dealt with, particularly in light of religious doctrines and the diachronic analysis of their application, but, as these do include a theological component to them, it’s a particularly good idea to recall that “history” is absolutely nothing but dead books and their Jeopardy! answer-as-question if one bothers not to re-assess the basic interpretation of facts based on their relational context of relevance.
 

www.marxists.org/reference/archive/horkheimer/1963/theism-atheism.htm

www.whitehouse.gov/government/fbci/