The Nature of Our Reality

I read an article (or comment to an article) today (I forget where) that mentioned someone’s trip to Germany. He said that in all the thrift shops and flee markets you could find religious trinkets. It appeared that religion had been thrown on the trash heap.



I see nothing wrong with that. Christian cathedrals and churches have always been a central repository for the best of art. But the putt-putt course inside a church is obviously crossing a line.

But remember which line we’re crossing (whether considering putt-putt courses or universal salvation): It is Christianity which must give way to the rest of the culture, not the other way around. Try putting a putt-putt course in and around Martin Luther King’s grave as a way to “bring people to the civil rights cause in roundabout means”.

Always giving, never demanding. Today’s Christianity. And the reality is, the churches in Europe, from what I understand, have little function left other than as tourist attractions and art repositories. At least be glad they’re not open homosexual and pedophilia recruitment centers.

I thought the perfect reflection of the times was an article I read recently (linked from Drudge, I believe….perhaps this article or one like it).

It talked about this new band of people who are going all “natural” — that is, they are forgoing bathing as a means for skin health. Their claim is that all that bathing and showering is harmful to the skin and that one is much better to let the “good” bacteria take up residence. This supposedly induces a condition in which one doesn’t stink.

I’ll believe that when I smell it. But religion has been the traditional way of morally bathing. Now we’re a society of kooks who take up foolish-faddish notions. And the only thing that can make such notions true is a bunch of idiots believing the same thing (and covering their noses).

Granted, bathing with mild soap and not scrubbing hard is a must. But the greatest benefit to health wasn’t penicillin. It was cleanliness. Bar none. No other cause did as much for people’s health and well being.

Without a doubt, there are “good” bacteria that live in our gut. That is not the contention. The contention is whether being filthy and never taking a bath is not only good for you (it isn’t) but produces no smell (this would be impossible). And that’s not to contest that there might be good skin bacteria. But I know kooks when I read them. If you’ve spent any time on any particularly day at even mildly physical activity, you’re going to get dirty and smelly.

Take a shower. Use mild soap. Don’t scrub hard. Rinse thoroughly. And the #1 skin care protection that makes all this “good” bacteria nonsense pale in comparison is stay out of the sun (or use a good screen blocker).

That’s not to say that religion isn’t full of foolish-faddish people. The hard sell for religion in this current age are all the kool-aid drinkers and wafer-thin people who make an idol out of the bath water without actually dipping their toes into it.

This piece should give us a good idea of just how vapid much of "science" truly is.

Aliens are just waiting

How anyone could call such a thing a "study" is beyond me. Speculation, day-dreaming, shooting the bull, I could accept, but "study", no way.

I just read an article by Roger Kimball in The New Criterion titled, "What's Left of Descartes?" In short, the article goes over how influential Descartes was on modern thought through his "formulation of the so-called "New Science" that was destined to replace the contemplative model of science inherited from Greeks."

Kimball states,

To an unprecedented degree, Descartes understood that the citadel of nature could be successfully stormed only by redescribing reality in the language of mathematics-thus purging the visual world of all that was merely visual-and then by testing those descriptions in experiment.

...underlying Descartes' "method" was a fateful new attitude toward both the self and the world. As the image of rendering man the master and possessor of nature suggests, physical reality was henceforth to be seen as a homogenous field for human experimentation, manipulation, and reconstruction. "

Thus it was that Descartes' efforts to achieve certainty by withholding assent from everything susceptible to doubt instigated a revolution not just in philosophy but in the whole tenor of intellectual life.

Kimball questions if Descartes would have welcomed Marx's, Nietzsche's or Freud's "determination to subject every accepted opinion to the corrosive scrutiny of doubt."

And here is Kimball's reply to that thought, which is why I am writing this post.

In the Discourse on Method, Descartes warns that the "resolution to get rid of all opinions one has so far admitted to belief is in itself not an example for everybody to follow." For one thing, he explains, it is just the sort of thing to tempt those many people "who think they are more clever than the are, and cannot help forming precipitate judgements."
Jacques Derrida, where are you?
What is today's insanity if not a case of "those many people who think they are more clever than they are forming precipitate judgements?"

Much of today's world view has been formed by educated simpletons who have been allowed to pontificate on things above their intellectual capabilities, and thus lead illiterate simpletons down destructive paths. The unfortunate results are beginning to unfold before us.

The article goes into much more detail than I covered, so the question of skepticism is more fully addressed. By chance, or not, I am reading Will Durant's "The Age of Louis XIV" and it is in this or Durant's "The Age of Reason Begins" that there was a pretty good short bio on Descartes. He was certainly a strange man. He constantly moved to avoid being disturbed by family, friends and admirers. I can understand that from the point of view that really deep thought requires long and quiet reflection, which cannot generally be maintained in the normal hustle and bustle of life.

The poet Henie commented that where they first burn books they will burn people. The history of the 20th century confirms his comment. What we are witnessing in the cities on fire is a pagan ritual and it is only a small step until the fires are for people. Their concept of "science" is only science if it agrees with their assumptions of political correctness. 

A large part of our culture has become pagan. The tribalism is the most apparent symbol of the Neo-paganism but the focus on only science that fits the PC norm is another, comparable to astrology and tea leaf reading. There is no possible scenario that has this ending well. There will be increasing violence and bloodshed. It is only a question of how many will die to put the pagan in his place. 

There have been at least a few incidents of the Insurrection burning buildings with people (not always cops) inside.  So we're already at the burning people stage, or at the least it's incipient.

Happy Halloween!

What do you call a chicken that haunts your house?

"They attribute the existence of everything to themselves . . . that's why Buddhism is very fashionable [among the liberal types]."