I Reject, I Affirm. ''Raising the Black Flag'' in an Age of Devilry. - Page 65 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#15242463
But well before the final, the End of History, there is much that will happen to be sure.

The West, being perhaps the final iteration of the Greco Roman Ecumene, will follow the same Imperial path.

American Presidents, no matter how offensive their predecessors in office, basically grant immunity to them so that the same courtesies are given to them. No one will hold elected office now without the surety that no opponent will imprison them or even see them dead or in exile.

Now, those with the force will make sure they have the supreme power and can never be ousted, for their own survival.

Stupid rotten degenerate bastards. I do not know that they even understand what they have unleashed. Of course they haven't, they fell right into his trap even after being warned for years that the man is not one to be easily trifled with or underestimated.

They don't understand him or China or Islam or the world outside the West, or people in general even. They don't understand anything at all.

Not that the man's followers are much better.

God help me, I'm going to almost enjoy what's coming. Almost, since I will likely almost weep tears of blood instead.
#15242600
annatar1914 wrote:But well before the final, the End of History, there is much that will happen to be sure.

The West, being perhaps the final iteration of the Greco Roman Ecumene, will follow the same Imperial path.

American Presidents, no matter how offensive their predecessors in office, basically grant immunity to them so that the same courtesies are given to them. No one will hold elected office now without the surety that no opponent will imprison them or even see them dead or in exile.

Now, those with the force will make sure they have the supreme power and can never be ousted, for their own survival.

Stupid rotten degenerate bastards. I do not know that they even understand what they have unleashed. Of course they haven't, they fell right into his trap even after being warned for years that the man is not one to be easily trifled with or underestimated.

They don't understand him or China or Islam or the world outside the West, or people in general even. They don't understand anything at all.

Not that the man's followers are much better.

God help me, I'm going to almost enjoy what's coming. Almost, since I will likely almost weep tears of blood instead.


@Potemkin , @Tainari88 , @Political Interest , and our friend @Verv , all:

This chaos on the political plane in the West is caused by philosophy, which in the Christian West congealed into the semi Arian heresy of " Filioque Procedit " against the Trinity, and the semi Pelagian heresy of an effective denial of Ancestral/Original Sin.

Semi Arian, because it tries to introduce inequality and confusion of roles in the Godhead. Semi Pelagian, because of the triumph of the Jesuit theology of Molinism and of Arminianism in the Protestant world in the 1700s. And as Lezek Kolokowski noted in " God owes us nothing ", the Modern Age would have been impossible to sustain without the latter.

And so too in Government. Is not the American and European parliamentary system but a reflection of the confused image of the Christian Trinity in the West? Is not the assumption of inner innocence as per Pelagius the root of the assumptions and assertions of Liberal Democracy concerning the Body Politic, that it is not a " Massa Damnata"?

" As above, so below "

And furthermore, is not the Salvation Theology of Anselm of Canterbury the root of the problematic Western jurisprudence, a conception of life that is legalistic and views the world through the lens of material transactions, of courtrooms and prisons?

I might also note that with the Papacy crowning it and giving it a " Christian " aspect, all this is essentially a rebirth and continuation of the Western Roman Empire, from the Donation of Pepin in the 700s to it's near culmination today. The Empire, such as it is in its temporary Synarchic form, has even expanded from its previous iteration as even China and Japan can attest to even within living memory...
#15242667
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The Solemn League and Covenant was an agreement between the Scottish Covenanters and the leaders of the English Parliamentarians in 1643 during the First English Civil War, a theatre of conflict in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. On 17 August 1643, the Church of Scotland (the Kirk) accepted it and on 25 September 1643 so did the English Parliament and the Westminster Assembly.[1]

At the time, the Protestant leaders of the English Parliament were in conflict with King Charles I. Fearing Irish Catholic troops could join the Royalist army, Parliament requested the aid of the Scots. The Presbyterian Covenanters promised their aid, on condition that the Scottish system of church government was adopted in England. This was acceptable to the majority of the English Long Parliament, as many MPs were Presbyterians

This was in effect a treaty between the English Parliament and its Scottish counterpart for the preservation of the reformed religion in Scotland, the reformation of religion in England and Ireland "according to the word of God and the example of the best reformed churches", and the "extirpation of popery [and] prelacy".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Civil_War

#15243174
So anyway (I'll establish the connection to what I wrote earlier, following up), I got to thinking about a couple of things:

One is Gog and Magog, the Alexander Romance, and the Barrier which the ancients believed held back the apocalyptic hordes of Magog.

The other was the phrase " Non Plus Ultra" carved on the " Pillars of Hercules ", the Straights of Gibraltar. It means " thus no further ", a Barrier prohibiting sailing and settling what might lay beyond.

The stories of the Barrier Alexander made to confine Magog say it is of some impenetrable mystical material between two mountains ( recalling the Pillars of Hercules!), except in the East somewhere not the West.

Of that, later. But my hypothesis is that the " Barrier " was real, and so too the prohibition of sailing to the ultimate West. But that the direction in which the hordes of Magog will come from is wrong.

Eventually, the Barrier of the Pillars of Hercules was breached and the prohibition against restoring or finding Atlantis, so to speak, set aside. If there was ever a limit to the Greco Roman world anywhere, the Pillars were it.
#15243911
annatar1914 wrote:So anyway (I'll establish the connection to what I wrote earlier, following up), I got to thinking about a couple of things:

One is Gog and Magog, the Alexander Romance, and the Barrier which the ancients believed held back the apocalyptic hordes of Magog.

The other was the phrase " Non Plus Ultra" carved on the " Pillars of Hercules ", the Straights of Gibraltar. It means " thus no further ", a Barrier prohibiting sailing and settling what might lay beyond.

The stories of the Barrier Alexander made to confine Magog say it is of some impenetrable mystical material between two mountains ( recalling the Pillars of Hercules!), except in the East somewhere not the West.

Of that, later. But my hypothesis is that the " Barrier " was real, and so too the prohibition of sailing to the ultimate West. But that the direction in which the hordes of Magog will come from is wrong.

Eventually, the Barrier of the Pillars of Hercules was breached and the prohibition against restoring or finding Atlantis, so to speak, set aside. If there was ever a limit to the Greco Roman world anywhere, the Pillars were it.


But nothing says that if there is a Barrier, to dig deeper into these symbols and metaphors, that it exists above or even near the people it holds back. That is, for every action there is a reaction, like Ying and Yang. So the finding of the New World In 1492, Bacon's " New Atlantis ", had immeasurable consequences for the Old World and the Cosmos in general.

But what was the Reaction? And what precisely was the Revolution exactly in human history? There's only one Revolution, and America embodies it and the Modern Age which came into being all at the same time: the Copernican Revolution, the Protestant Revolution, the Industrial/Capitalism Revolution, the American Revolution. This is the source code for Western/Faustian Civilization which influences everything right down to the methodology of warfare and the tiniest of architectural details, everything universally.

So in a eschatological and meta historical sense, it arose to break apart the previous age, the pre modern, and turn it into fuel for the modern. How successful is the American Revolution today? Look around you.

Next post I will discuss the resistance, the reaction.
#15244283
annatar1914 wrote:But nothing says that if there is a Barrier, to dig deeper into these symbols and metaphors, that it exists above or even near the people it holds back. That is, for every action there is a reaction, like Ying and Yang. So the finding of the New World In 1492, Bacon's " New Atlantis ", had immeasurable consequences for the Old World and the Cosmos in general.

But what was the Reaction? And what precisely was the Revolution exactly in human history? There's only one Revolution, and America embodies it and the Modern Age which came into being all at the same time: the Copernican Revolution, the Protestant Revolution, the Industrial/Capitalism Revolution, the American Revolution. This is the source code for Western/Faustian Civilization which influences everything right down to the methodology of warfare and the tiniest of architectural details, everything universally.

So in a eschatological and meta historical sense, it arose to break apart the previous age, the pre modern, and turn it into fuel for the modern. How successful is the American Revolution today? Look around you.

Next post I will discuss the resistance, the reaction.


At least, that was the intent, to speak about the reaction to the New World and Americanism/Americanization/the American Revolution, but the forces of Reaction (not Tradition, an important distinction!) can be safely said to have become " American " to a significant degree: Hitler and his love of American movies and automobiles, and admiration for Henry Ford, for example.

Reaction then is not directly opposite Modernity, nor is Tradition directly opposite Progress. You won't see anyone from a traditional society turn down toothbrushes on principles, quite the contrary. So then, either new categories need be discovered, or old ones brought back, to delineate the outlines of the world we face now.

I propose then the basic broad equivalence between " Americanism " and " Modernism" (and probably " Hellenism " of the Greco Roman society as its predecessor) contra " Traditional " . Modernism can be said to have begun as a Pagan worlds reaction to Christianity, via mainly the heresies which exist to this day, but really both have existed from the beginning of the world in embryonic form at least.
#15245312
@Potemkin , @Verv , @Political Interest , and others:

Few days ago I had an personal experience that made me reflect on time travel of all things, and Magian notions about the sovereignty of God, chains of cause and effect, what is considered possible and what is thought impossible. Spengler with his ruminations hinted at this with what he called the " inner structure of the Arabian Nights tales", that is, incidents in the tales where effects resulted in their causation, and so forth.

The Greeks did not believe in Chaos in the sense that it means today, being the absence of Order, but rather a Chaos that is the Other, unbounded, incommesurable, infinite with an infinite complexity beyond human understanding. Is not the God of Magian Monotheism the " Chaos" of the Greco Roman world? Recalls the antithetical worldview of H.P. Lovecraft, does it not? Symbolic ravings and lampooning of the God and peoples he despised, but important still.

I recall too what Blessed Augustine said about Time, about how he knew what was until he started thinking more about it. We have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Or we imagine wheels and cycles. But from eternity all of this finite incomprehension is just vain grasping. I think that the timelines are constantly being shifted and turning back and forth into itself, like a kind of living breathing organism, just another provisional and contingent creature of God.

In the Book of Daniel, at one point St. Daniel is in the Lion's den in Babylon and so God sends His Angel to Judea over a century earlier, to the prophet st. Habbukuk who has a meal ready for some farm laborers. The Angel appears and tells him where He's taking him, sends Habbukuk forward through time and space where he brings Daniel a meal, whereupon he is returned back to his own time and place.

Anything is possible, with God. The West says some things are not possible, especially One Sovereign God Who can do anything. The reality of living within a work of art, being a work of art

Where would our liberty be, what would it rest instead upon a infinite yet antitheistic and uncreated cosmos? This is the Faustian civilization. Being creators and gods ourselves.

This is what Syria is about, what the Ukraine is about. What ISIS and the 1979 Iranian Revolution are about. And before that, the October 1917 Revolution. One can only see all this from another temporal vantage point.

Revolution is the eschatological breakthrough of Temporal Eternity, of the infinite Divine "Chaos" , into the finite space and time we can apprehend in the formal linear sense....
#15245557
Revolution is the eschatological breakthrough of Temporal Eternity, of the infinite Divine "Chaos" , into the finite space and time we can apprehend in the formal linear sense....


Revolution happens when a group of desperate people, lead by a group of opportunistic people (even if well meaning) get pissed off enough to act.
#15245681
Drlee wrote:Revolution happens when a group of desperate people, lead by a group of opportunistic people (even if well meaning) get pissed off enough to act.


@Drlee :

Are you a Deist, Drlee? Or do you see God's will in the ebb and flow of history, culminating in its end with the physical return in glory of His Son Jesus Christ?

Do you see meaning in human events? Or is it just one thing after another:

" a tale told by an idiot, sound and fury, signifying nothing"?

I'm not trying to be belligerent, but I am curious if I am to reply to your comment intelligently. As it is, I believe in purpose to human events, and in the sovereignty of God, that what happens happens by His will and for His reasons.
#15245888
annatar1914 wrote:@Potemkin , @Verv , @Political Interest , and others:

Few days ago I had an personal experience that made me reflect on time travel of all things, and Magian notions about the sovereignty of God, chains of cause and effect, what is considered possible and what is thought impossible. Spengler with his ruminations hinted at this with what he called the " inner structure of the Arabian Nights tales", that is, incidents in the tales where effects resulted in their causation, and so forth.

The Greeks did not believe in Chaos in the sense that it means today, being the absence of Order, but rather a Chaos that is the Other, unbounded, incommesurable, infinite with an infinite complexity beyond human understanding. Is not the God of Magian Monotheism the " Chaos" of the Greco Roman world? Recalls the antithetical worldview of H.P. Lovecraft, does it not? Symbolic ravings and lampooning of the God and peoples he despised, but important still.

I recall too what Blessed Augustine said about Time, about how he knew what was until he started thinking more about it. We have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Or we imagine wheels and cycles. But from eternity all of this finite incomprehension is just vain grasping. I think that the timelines are constantly being shifted and turning back and forth into itself, like a kind of living breathing organism, just another provisional and contingent creature of God.

In the Book of Daniel, at one point St. Daniel is in the Lion's den in Babylon and so God sends His Angel to Judea over a century earlier, to the prophet st. Habbukuk who has a meal ready for some farm laborers. The Angel appears and tells him where He's taking him, sends Habbukuk forward through time and space where he brings Daniel a meal, whereupon he is returned back to his own time and place.

Anything is possible, with God. The West says some things are not possible, especially One Sovereign God Who can do anything. The reality of living within a work of art, being a work of art

Where would our liberty be, what would it rest instead upon a infinite yet antitheistic and uncreated cosmos? This is the Faustian civilization. Being creators and gods ourselves.

This is what Syria is about, what the Ukraine is about. What ISIS and the 1979 Iranian Revolution are about. And before that, the October 1917 Revolution. One can only see all this from another temporal vantage point.

Revolution is the eschatological breakthrough of Temporal Eternity, of the infinite Divine "Chaos" , into the finite space and time we can apprehend in the formal linear sense....


@Potemkin , @Verv , and @Political Interest , other friends:

What does all this have to do with what I wrote earlier, about Modernism ultimately being about the reaction of the Pagan Greco Roman world to Christianity?

Cycles of Time, and bounded Space, the inner meaning of what they represent as external symbols.

Blaise Pascal pondered the nature of the " problem " when he wrote:

" the eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with terror ". Terror as in it's old meaning of overwhelming awe.

The Pagan Cosmos was finite and geocentric, and concentric " spheres" sang in an unearthly Pythagorean harmony as they moved the planets and stars in their courses. This Cosmos moved in regular cycles , and so too in Time, an eternal return.

Pascal in the 1600s knew from Science and from his Christianity that this Pagan Cosmos did not exist, but he was an absolute outlier among even thinking mankind, who had not absorbed the Copernican Revolution in their mental cosmological topography. Already a seeming heretic to the Papal Church for his " Jansenism", Pascal could only hint at what he was saying in anti Aristotlean works like the " Treatise on the Void".

Modernism and this modern era are two very different things, that the former is very much a reaction to the latter. Nowhere is this best exemplified by Cartesianism. It is as Alexis de Toqueville said of Americans, that nowhere is Cartesianism most followed than in America, but where Rene Decartes is the least read. This is unsurprising as America is the very model of Modernist reaction, this religious belief in one's reason and reasoning skills, the false division between mind and body, and much more.
#15246120
@Potemkin , @Verv , and @Political Interest :

I was once a quite reactionary monarchist. But it's actually antithetical to the core of my long held beliefs. Read Ludovici, its clear that Aristocracy is contrary to Christianity, an essentially racist and tyrannical system of governance.

But here I go back to my metaphor of " the Giants ".

But not believing that progress necessarily is inevitable in this fallen world, Monarchy and Aristocracy can easily return to the leading form of societal control, in our lifetimes
#15246591
September 11th, the feast of the beheading of the prophet, Forerunner and Baptist of Our Lord, St. John.

And appropriately, the day that commemorates the Orthodox Christian warriors fallen in battle.

Also, the Ur-event of the modern era " 9-11".

Related, the date of the lifting of the siege of Vienna by the Poles, fighting the Ottoman Turks.
#15246860
annatar1914 wrote:@Potemkin , @Verv , and @Political Interest :

I was once a quite reactionary monarchist. But it's actually antithetical to the core of my long held beliefs. Read Ludovici, its clear that Aristocracy is contrary to Christianity, an essentially racist and tyrannical system of governance.

But here I go back to my metaphor of " the Giants ".

But not believing that progress necessarily is inevitable in this fallen world, Monarchy and Aristocracy can easily return to the leading form of societal control, in our lifetimes


It may be the case that these more archaic forms of government could be relevant again in terms of offsetting the excesses of capitalism and liberal democracy which even cease to resemble the goals that they originally had for themselves.

I think that Christianity is perhaps not even meant to be translated into temporal power. It is something that can guide principled behavior across various systems. But, knowing man, whatever system we create is designed to become hypocritical and be dragged downwards.
#15246864
Verv wrote:It may be the case that these more archaic forms of government could be relevant again in terms of offsetting the excesses of capitalism and liberal democracy which even cease to resemble the goals that they originally had for themselves.

I think that Christianity is perhaps not even meant to be translated into temporal power. It is something that can guide principled behavior across various systems. But, knowing man, whatever system we create is designed to become hypocritical and be dragged downwards.

“And again he said, ‘To what shall I compare the kingdom of God? It is like leaven that a woman took and hid in three measures of flour, until it was all leavened.’” - Luke 13:20-21

Notice Jesus’ use of the word “hid”.
#15246909
@Potemkin and @Verv , gentlemen, my friends:

Very good, and well said. That is to say that on a personal and individual level, the Christian can live anywhere under any political and social economic system in almost any mode of existence. As long as society is possible at all, even an evil government under evil rulers is acceptable as long as the wicked restrain the wicked, at least.

But on a more universal level, it appears too that errors can have no rights and Christians have an obligation to themselves and to others to find more just political and social economic arrangements if possible, for the good of all. If possible.

Obviously too, this would not be a individual undertaking. Left to themselves, people tend towards naturally developing democratic institutions, like the Soviets . Autonomous, anarchic, and collective, surviving and thriving best under cooperation not competition.
#15246959
Potemkin wrote:“And again he said, ‘To what shall I compare the kingdom of God? It is like leaven that a woman took and hid in three measures of flour, until it was all leavened.’” - Luke 13:20-21

Notice Jesus’ use of the word “hid”.


@Potemkin :

I wanted to make more specifically individual responses, so here mine goes.

As societies are penetrated by the leaven of true Christianity, even unbelievers are moved to improve society and ameliorate the human condition. This particularly can happen when the Church as an institution is beset by heresy and schism itself.

Such was the collapse of Slavery as a human institution, and so to the collapse of the present social economic and political system.

But, not being a Marxist as such, until direct Divine intervention at the End of History as we know it, I find it possible and even probable that evils can return to beset and threaten any true human progress. Hence my concerns about Fascism and a kind of return to a new Dark Ages.

On the positive end of affirmation, this means that I continue as a Socialist, seeing this as an expression of the aforementioned "leaven" in socio economic terms. I need only to look at my brethren in the last century enrolled in the Russian Labor Brotherhood of the Holy Cross for an example.
#15247380
@Potemkin , you might appreciate this moment in time:

Feast day of the Prophet St. Moses.

Christianity is Jewish. And indeed the Church sees itself as the authentic Jewish religion and Israel of God, and that eventually the Jews will come to realize this. And almost with the suggestion then that the Time of the Gentiles period, of the collective
Gentile gathering into the Church, will come to an end at some point.

So it's this Jewishness that sets off so many out there, and this antipathy has preternatural roots.
#15247518
There is a political aspect to what St. Paul called " the Mystery of Iniquity ".

Since Satan's kingdom on Earth is not in fact divided, all evil, all sin an all death, all ignorance and errors, tend to the building up of that infernal kingdom, the sinful structures of " spiritual wickedness in high places " .

So in short the political aspect of the building up of evil involves the mechanisms by which say, moral rot from certain people in country "A" can effect the strength of a popular false religion in country " B" perhaps. Or similar connections.

And yet since only a few perceptive persons can even see even a limited amount of such connections, the best policy from a concerned Orthodox Christian faced with the inevitable ineptitude and clumsy flailing about of confronting collective evil, is the striving for personal holiness. And collectively, an awareness of exactly what organized evil must be fought, when and how.

The important thing to remember in that latter societal conflict is that the organized evil will likely be presented as something good, because (given the nature of evil as a privation or distortion of something good) it will be for the most part exactly that. It will resemble the Truth in clever ways, but contain absurdities and facile lies. As an Orthodox Christian, I see this Organized Evil as a false religion apeing the true one, an entire way of life resembling almost as insult the true way of life, integral and complete.
#15247762
annatar1914 wrote:@Potemkin and @Verv , gentlemen, my friends:

Very good, and well said. That is to say that on a personal and individual level, the Christian can live anywhere under any political and social economic system in almost any mode of existence. As long as society is possible at all, even an evil government under evil rulers is acceptable as long as the wicked restrain the wicked, at least.

But on a more universal level, it appears too that errors can have no rights and Christians have an obligation to themselves and to others to find more just political and social economic arrangements if possible, for the good of all. If possible.

Obviously too, this would not be a individual undertaking. Left to themselves, people tend towards naturally developing democratic institutions, like the Soviets . Autonomous, anarchic, and collective, surviving and thriving best under cooperation not competition.


These two distinctions you have just made may be the most important observations that we can make as Christians...

(1) We can abide in any system - including evil ones. We are not 100% responsible for what the government does. It might actually sometimes be preferable for us to live in an evil system where the wicked is kept in check by the wicked, than in a system that is good on paper and where the government itself commits no evil, but the government cannot keep evil in check...

(2) Errors have no rights.

(3) Christians are obligated to seek justice when possible - not in some super ambitious way that means heading some movement and taking control (and thus imposing) some view, but in the sense of feeding the widow, clothing the naked, etc., and just trying to improve what is around you in a humble way...

Politics can then be something of a playground for Christians to try to use to illustrate points, I guess.

Perhaps it is also the case that Christians should then be willing to be relativists to some degree: to believe that the right path for the American is perhaps a Libertarian, while the best route for an Iraqi would be Ba'athist, and the best way for an Indian to think could be some Indian liberal party that is not nationalist and very socialistic...

This would be because the different situations and setups require different language and work, and there are even different strengths and truths for different peoples to draw upon... Truths that may only be relevant to themselves and their culture.

After all, in Orthodoxy we do pray for this city and this country. Of course, we pray for the world, but it makes sense that there are divisions... Not because the act of having people divided as in people should not feel united, but because the division of people itself can be beneficial since different cultures & peoples have different needs based off of their circumstances, and different systems and infrastructure that they use...

This is why it is refreshing to meet Christian Socialists... and Christian Anarchists... in addition to the monarchist cosplayers and dangerously far right fellahs playing a bit too much with fire.
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