INNOCENCE OF THE CRETINS WHEN THEY PRAY AS A HERD?
The really optimistic bask in bad news, the erroneously pessimistic cling to daddy, that is Father Christmas, Christ, God, Muhammad, Huitzilopochtli. Is daddy all what the superstitious cling to? Or is the clinging to infantile superstition part of the vertiginous intoxication of the herd with erroneous mental strategies, most favorable to those inclined to rule, and the cruel brutes in their service? Yes to all! Even bacteria have found those tricks.
Many are the reasons to be opposed to superstitious religions. Today I will focus on just one.
The respect, love, and tolerance of ignorance, excuses all, even the greatest crimes. It’s intrinsic to superstition. And enough to nail the Christian moral system:
“Forgive Them, Because They Know Not What They Do. Most Convenient Excuse Ever.”
Aztec philosophers told the Conquistadores that brandishing torture to death as the symbol of their religion of proclaimed love was outrageous. The conquistadores agreed. They removed the squirming Christ from the crosses of Mexico.
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Ignorance is the perfect justification for murder. If a brute wants to commit a great crime, an unjust war, he can be a Christian, hide in the Bush, and join the Legate of the Pope proclaiming:“Tuez-les tous, Dieu reconnaitra les siens.” “Kill them all, God will recognize his own.”
The occasion for this all encompassing, fundamentally Christian declaration was the crusade against the mighty County of Toulouse (1209-1255 CE). Toulouse was a Roman Republic in all but name. The Pope could only hate a secular Republic that admitted one could NOT tell on which side of the devil the Catholic church was.
That particular crusade against the original Protestants killed one million innocent French victims. Crusades were not just something to kill Jews and Orientals with, and steal their riches. Crusades was something plutocrats did to whoever they could do it to. (In the end the Crusades backfired: the church came out of them fighting with itself, and so many nobles died, they were washed out by history next.)
On the internet nowadays the feeble minded herd is in full evidence, warts and all. Its ugly stampeding nature resonates all over. Anonimity allows the greatest cheating. There are actually companies making false reviews (they typically dispatch their employees to make false comments from cyber cafes, so that’s untraceable). That is punished by law in some countries (Suisse).
A strident woman claimed that Obama’s ambassador in Libya was killed because he, Obama, was in the process of invading this peaceful land.
I pointed out that the truth was dramatically the other way around. She then hurled at me in public the intriguing theory that I was, obviously, a woman who had suffered abuse in my childhood. Living in denial of Obama’s ongoing invasion of Africa had led her to discover who I was. On the way, she boasted that she had been herself abused, it took one to know one. Narcissism and exhibitionism are strong Internet medecines.
Here is another example of Internet infantilism. Someone insinuated that World War One happened because: …”The government faced two choices: ban the use of coal or impose further restrictions. And then, by a curious set of circumstances, World War I happened, and people had something more urgent to think about. After the dust had settled, the pollution question seemed to have been forgotten… Again: coincidence?”
The real truth is more sobering. There was a true conspiracy, but not about coal pollution. That was fully documented in several ways. I commented about what really happened:
“War was decided, in December 1912, by four Prussian Staff generals, the top guys, and very reluctantly agreed by the two top admirals. Then the American presidency pushed, very secretly, the Kaiser to war in May 1914. France and Britain did not see the war coming.”[Note 1]
An anonymous Don Quixote named “Lionel” snapped: @ Patrice Ayme: “France and Britain did not see it coming etc!
And your sources to back up that astonishing bit of information are….? Suddenly a flat earth seems more probable.”
The Internet is all about quoting “sources“. Bacteria, individually are weak, and stupid, but they form bacterial mats or film, full of channels, and then they are hard to destroy, even with antibiotics. They are still stupid, but very strong as a mass.
Much of the Internet consists into morons linked to each other like bacterial films. Not only do Islamists networks and American neocretins organize themselves that way. In 2012 Wikipedia told Philip Roth that he was no authority on… Philip Roth; if he wanted to be taken seriously, about Philip Roth, he, Roth Philip, would have to quote sources on Philip Roth. It’s all about sources, not basic facts and elementary logic. It’s all about quoting those who, most often, have a perverse interest to spread disinformation.
The madness of the crowds is well known. The nastiness of crowds, even more striking, is a close relative. “Lionel” apparently subscribes to the well known disinformation that war was intrinsic to imperialism in general, and also to France, Britain, Germany. In other words World War One was not about a fascist Prussian plutocracy attacking democracy, it was about something else, whatever it is, denied by morons like me. Anything but the truth.
Indeed it’s rather inconvenient to observe that, in the most literate country, a fascist plutocracy could be so much in command of men’s hearts, that it could launch a world war as if it were a weekend excursion. And an entire nation would goose step behind. I replied this to his brutishness:
@ Lionel: Why do you need to insult me? I am a physicist, not a flat earth person.
That France and Britain did not see the attack of August 1914 coming is a historical fact. If they had seen it coming, they would have been more ready. That you do not know that they did not expect war does not make it less so, and does not give you a right to assault those who know, when you do not, by calling them morons.
Verily, the French Republic and Great Britain did not see the First World War coming. To wit:
Britain had “no army”. Lord Kitchener, recalled precipitously from Egypt, confirmed this in a famous joke, after being named Secretary for War. As he contemplated the seven British divisions. [Note 2.]
Great Britain was all into Irish problems, up to the end of July. Reading the British press of the times shows this. The entire British army in Europe, or in the world, consisted of the equivalent of just one French army corps.
France was expecting a war so little in the summer of 1914, that the entire French government was out on vacation. When it was clear the Prussians had ordered a full mobilization, and were going to attack, the under-secretary of agriculture in Paris had to decide, on his own, to order General Mobilization. Most of the French government was on a boat, incommunicado.
When the Prussians attacked, the surprise was so great that the Grande Duchesse du Luxembourg, not too clear about what was going on, put her large limousine across a bridge in a determined attempt to stop the Teutonic horde.
Even the Austrians were surprised when Berlin ordered them to declare war to the democracies. Vienna, horrified, resisted for several days the pressure from the Prussian General Staff (so much for the Sarajevo assassination being the direct cause of WWI; its role was mostly indirect, as the Austro-Hungarian heir was the closest friend to the Kaiser, and determined to keep the peace no matter what; once he was dead the greatest obstacle to Prussian militarism was gone).
It is not a strange thing when people who are completely ignorant hide their ignorance below insult and offense. Ignorance is one of the sins the Bible does not recognize. An unrecognized sin is a healthy sin, it can keep on devouring the spirit.
The failure to recognize ignorance for the sin it is makes the Christian moral system quaint, obsolete. Christianity makes ignorance into an innocence. It should not be, as Christ famously said while rubbing his behind: “Forgive them father, because they know not what they do!”
But it should be, now and thereafter: “Forgive them NOT, for protecting their crass ignorance below furious aggressivity, and leveraging their lack of knowledge into personal abuse.”
I am used to critters insulting me because their (lack of) knowledge, a precious flower they are cultivating, and that rose can only be defended by equating facticity to flat earth.
One should stop just searching for authority, and a hyperlink to it, instead of thinking by oneself. What’s my source for 1 +1 =2? I am sure some will ask malignantly. They got me there, I must confess my ignorance. I cannot provide with the “sources”. Sorry, it’s just something I know.
Anybody can access the British press archives of July 1914. Look at the front page of the Times of London, seven days before Earl Grey went to the House of Commons to request a war declaration against the fascist Reich.
A week earlier, the front page of the Times of London was all about Ireland (by then the fascist generals in Berlin had closed their trap, their plans were unfolding like clockwork. They had even sent the Kaiser away in vacation incommunicado, under false pretense, because they were afraid that His Majesty would stop them, after He realized the enormity of what was going to happen, namely a deliberate world war, and against the empire His own grandmother he admired so much, Queen Victoria, reigned over so long).
Yes, France and Britain did not see World War One coming, and it was a sneak deliberate attack. [Note 3 on Asia.]
Malevolent ignorant brutes are worse than malevolent knowledgeable brutes. Why? Because the ignorant ones think they are righteous, whereas the knowledgeable ones at least know that they are in the wrong. I also know that there are two types of ignorance: the one from happenstance, and the one from a willful cover-up, when ignorance itself is viewed as power, something to be desired that is deliberately cultivated, as the Little Prince does with his rose.
Why is ignorance so desired? Because the herd is ignorant, and welcomes only those so endowed. low mental power is cheap and comfortable. It just does not tolerate interruptions. A bonus is that those who stampede with the herd are mighty.
So far, though, real history, made of real facts, always won, in the end. All what’s left of the efforts of morons is that their little cover-ups and non sequiturs become themselves part of history.
So who invented the myth that the two democracies, France and Britain caused World War One, just as much the fascist Reich? Well, the same malevolent ones who created the myth that the Versailles Treaty caused Nazism… The same ones who are finding fascism superior to democracy, the same ones who much prefer plutocracy to our better angels. The same ones who feel that cruelty is how to get even, or even how to get ahead. The spiritual equivalent of bacterial film: strong, stupid, and nothing human about it.
Saint Paul and company were careful to incorporate the “Logos” within the core of Christianism. It’s also known as the “Verb” and “Holy Spirit”. They had too, lest the resistance of the Neo-Platonists to their fascist friendly superstition would be too great. But speech without knowledge is pure intellectual fascism. (And the fascist side is what seduced the Roman emperors in the version of Christianism they imposed.)
Verily, the essence of humanity is the generous striving for the truth. The Will to Truth is the core of the evolutionary morality hard wired into us, and no superstition can claim to be fully moral without it. [Note 4.]
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Patrice Ayme
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Note 1: Why was the Prussian General staff and German plutocracy so desirous of war? Their explicit reasoning was that time was working against Prussian fascism, when the ever more powerful French Republic was helping the quick democratization and industrialization of Russia. The admirals were against the war, because they knew the Royal Navy, especially with the French “Royale”, could not be defeated.
Note 2: Lord Kitchener, upon being named Secretary of War, August 1914: “No one can say my colleagues in the Cabinet are not courageous. They have no Army and they declared war against the mightiest military nation in the world.” Kitchener told a startled cabinet that the war would last at least three years, and that Britain needed to rise immediately a million man army. Kitchener died in combat, 22 months later, when his ship sank off Orkney after hitting a German mine.
Note 3: In the same vein, if some incident occurs in Asia, and a war starts, it will be because of the deliberate policy of China in search of a Lebensraum at sea. It will not be a bout whatever tiny incident will be construed as of great significance. And that, the Lebensraum, aggressivity-towards-others in turn will a repetition of the fascist plutocratic mental syndrome, in the German Second Reich style. I have long held to that theory, and I was pleased to see The Economist rolling it out on its front cover in September 2012. Complete with how little Chinese minds are molded into hatred. Same as little German minds, a century ago.
Note 4: Do I know what morality means? Yes. The word was coined by the (lawyer-Consul) courageous philosopher Cicero (later assassinated by one of Cleopatra’s boyfriends), from the Latin mos (gen. moris) “one’s disposition”. Certainly hundreds of millions of years of evolution have engraved our disposition.
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 