Humanity, the genus Homo, did well for 5 million years without God. Finding food, water, and surviving were good enough deities to get the genus Homo’s psychology by.
But now we have individuals going around, proclaiming the absurdity of life (Camus and his ilk)… To find meaning, they need lions to show up, so they can think upright, and they don’t know it. They have become like sheep, as Christian propaganda insisted their were… whereas lions ran away from their distant ancestors. Running after lions was all the religion our ancestors needed, when they showed up.
If humanity is so ferocious, and self reliant, why would humanity have ever needed gods? Men were the gods.
Who needs gods? The difference is civilization, and, more precisely, its military aspect and the cancerous growth known as plutocracy.
When one is a tyrant, the last thing one needs is to have as subjects, men who believe they are gods… And this is true for bankers, today’s real gods, and they hide their malevolence behind their arrogant deluded little boys: Clinton, Major, Bliar Blair, Bush, Obama, Trump, Macron… And they half demented girls: Thatcher, Merkel, May…
Catholicism was invented and imposed by emperor (“Saint”) Constantine, and his tyrannical successors (in Arabic: caliphs). In turn, Catholicism was the proximal cause of the military collapse of the Roman state, without any question. Islam was a bellicose ideology of Muhammad which enabled him to seize Arabia. Muhammad’s two immediate successors, companions and accomplices, Abu Bakr and Umar were immediately capable of building a gigantic empire, thanks to that immensely ferocious religion. They crushed the Persian and Roman empires, in a few years. Believers in Islam believe they sit with god after death, if they fight for Islam, or Muhammad.
Don’t think it’s over: watch Indonesia, where Islam is creeping back everyday some more (the president there suggested recently to release the mastermind of Islamist terror there…)
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Our ancestors at work: no need for Gods to chase cats. The story there is that the cheetahs were hunting impalas next to a dam. Jackals gave the alert, and baboons decided to encircle and then suddenly charge the cheetahs, to remove them from the premises…Baboons will act that way, even against lions. Our ancestors were expert at that, even 20 million years ago. I have met chimpanzees in lion territory with very few very small trees around, and they tried to frighten me (differently from the lions, who just went away).
Catholicism profited Roman Catholic plutocracy:
Those who think Catholicism didn’t bring the collapse of the Roman state should know the major facts (they don’t). It did, 100% (although the cause of Roman Catholicism itself was Roman military fascism, itself a consequence of plain old Roman financial fascism… for contemporary banks, see below).
In particular Roman Catholicism was proximally causal in the fall of the empire, when the Occidental part of the empire was led by Frankish generalissimo Arbogast. Arbogast had long been emperor in all but name. His Frankish nature prevented him (at the time) to be elected to the Purple. The emperor Theodosius had established terror decrees against “heretics” since 380 CE. Those led to the devastation of the empire’s intelligence, culture, libraries, books, spirits, and intellectuals… Let alone the Jews and whoever Theodosius wanted killed.
Arbogast tried to reestablish religious plurality, and civilizational sanity. So the Catholic fanatic, emperor Theodosius of the Oriental part, went to war. The mostly Frankish Roman army of the West got, barely, killed by Theodosius, thanks to a hurricane and the Goths, at the battle of the Frigidus river, September 5-6, 394 CE.
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No More Western Roman Army… So Back to More Savage Franks:
Result? After Arbogast’s soldiers got killed at Frigidus, so was the Roman army in the West (although Germans were constantly attacking the Roman Germanias). Theodosius, sole emperor, died in 395 CE. Within six years, the government of bishops which by then led Rome, called onto (much less Romanized) Franks to protect the provinces of Gallia and the two Germanias; but in 406 CE, 12 years after the disaster at the Frigidus, Germanic nations broke through the Frankish curtain, and invaded the Western empire. In particular, the Vandals invaded all the way to Africa, et present day Tunisia. There they established a maritime empire, and blocked grain supplies to the gigantic city of Rome, and most of Italy. Rome fell to the Goths in 410 CE. Actually the king of the Goths, Aleric, had commanded the Gothic forces fighting the Romanized Franks at Frigidus. Small world: the eternal return of the same, just as bankers nowadays.
The government of bishops viewed those who were not fanatically Catholic, and obedient as heretics to be destroyed. They didn’t just destroy independent individuals, but the entire Republican organization, by destroying culture, libraries, books full of (non-Catholic) wisdom. The destruction, by torture, of individuals such as Hypatia and major libraries, such as the one in Alexandria are examples of this situation.
Less well known, is that the bishops forbade the death penalty. Thus highways were thereafter paralyzed by bandits: incarceration, besides slavery, was not possible in antiquity. Also plutocratic families (which often had a bishop) couldn’t be forced to pay taxes.
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Catholicism and Islam were most profitable to the leaders claiming to “believe” in them during the Middle Ages:
Catholicism brought the collapse of the Roman empire in the West. The Franks, in the late Fifth Century, took over completely, and reestablished the situation by reimposing a modicum of tolerance, and then a lot of innovations. And, first of all, mandatory secular education between the Sixth and Eighth centuries (generally uniquely attributed to Charlemagne, erroneously, as the fighting against the Papacy was during the Sixth Century). This Frankish spirit of overture and advancing civilization was weaponized to conquer Europe. Main events: elimination of the Goths, 507 CE, final colonization and domestication of the Saxons by Charlemagne in a 30 year war, 800 CE; reconquest of Britain and Southern Italy, Sicily, late Eleventh Century.
However, the conjugation of grievous Frankish civil war (Battle/massacre of Fontenoy) contemporaneous with multiple simultaneous deep invasions by Viking, Avars and Muslims, brought a disintegration of the empire. It’s not that the empire collapsed like the Assyrians in 614 BCE, or Nazi Germany in 1945. Instead, West Francia, exasperated by the military inefficiency of the empire, broke away from the rest, and then exploded in turn into around 60 states of diverse natures, through militaristic localization, also known as the Feudal Order.
Great lords of the Eleventh Century were plutocrats who would have been without justification for except the violence of their military feats… if not for the heavenly justification of violence by the Bible. Hence Bible god came back: a resurgence of terroristic, mysogynistic and pedophiliac Catholicism, starting around 1026 CE (when an entire religious establishment of a French city was burned alive by the Papacy… Crusades followed, two generations later…).
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So “god” provided the metaphysical backup for degenerating Roman plutocracy and the Feudal Order. What about more modern times? Why were Americans so Christian “god” obsessed?
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God provided solace after giving reasons to eliminate the Natives:
The Bible is full of holocausts ordered by god, and king David is punished most horribly for refusing to destroy a nation: his son is tortured to death by god, over a week.
Hence, when the “Pilgrims” got to the New World, they extolled the riches of America (relative to Europe) to their kind left in Europe, urging them to come… And space the Pilgrims made by killing, enslaving and scalping the Natives: it was the Bible all over again: grabbing the “Promised Land”, by extermination of the preceding inhabitants…
God enabled to do what Constantine or Muhammad, and their successors did with it; kill one’s opponents, because god ordered it. Falling asleep while the bankers make deals with Hitler, Franco, and their ilk? Indeed! Once one has eliminated the Natives (as was done in the Americas and Australia), what is left of the need for god? Acquiring the mentalities of lambs!
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God as Daddy or Mummy for baby lambs:
For modern Americans God became just a guarantee of perpetual infancy. The god-thing obsession? If we please a superior being, we will do better, s/he will take care of us. In other words, babyhood, all over again.
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Attali to the Rescue:
Before the US Revolution, many Americans believed in a much more natural form of divinity. It turns out that, when a deity dictate what is right and wrong, it’s actually “The Man” who decides what is right or wrong.
Now we have a more serious situation than pleasing The Man.
In particular, bankers are in command of the planet: Clinton, and then Obama made sure of it. Their rewards were colossal, and much appreciated by their tiny mind.
However, the times for gravitas has come. Jacques Attali, who is in very good position to know about bankers (he headed a totally major European bank, among many high level positions he had), warns us that a financial calamity, just like the preceding one, is around the corner.
See:
Democratic Illusion and Capitalist Cynicism
(I will write an essay on it, if I find the time…)
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Attali says the bankers are back to industrial sized evil, worse than 2008. Why are the bankers back to their nefarious ways?
In part because Obama would finish all his discourses, certifying, like G. W. Bush, or Clinton, that “God bless America”. So the US lambs were satisfied, and have been bleating contently ever since. Their bankers’ boy, Obama, was excellent, as the color of his skin testified, they said, with characteristic, we-believe-in-bible-god psychology.
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LIMIT WEALTH ABSOLUTELY: Elizabeth WARREN To The rescue:
(Ex-Harvard law professor) Senator Elizabeth Warren is running for president. To my surprised amazement, she rolled out her financial program last week: she proposes enormous taxes on the super wealthy. 2% of wealth above 50 millions, and even more, higher up.
Senator Warren’s wealth tax would be the way I would implement limiting wealth absolutely.
https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2014/05/31/limit-wealth-absolutely/
Let’s keep our cynical fingers crossed that Warren’s wealth tax is not just a trick to keep Sanders from running again… (She used to be way milder, nearly timid…)
In France, Rothschild merger and acquisition banker Macron, another boy president, ignorant of all, but for manipulating the lambs, removed the wealth tax (the yellow jackets want it reinstated). That particular wealth tax was too restrictive, I say. But Macron said the wealthy French would then flee to other countries… like the USA. Well, with Warren as president that would be easily fixed…
The USA taxes worldwide already: so wealthy US citizens won’t be able to escape (all the more as the French Republic is also learning from US ways and means…)
And for that change of taxation, what do we need? We need for US citizens to realize they have been kept in infancy by their increasing plutocracy (“In God We Trust”, borrowed from the Nazi army, was installed in US minds by the US Congress only in 1954…)
For Americans to graduate from infancy, they need to reject “god” and go back to their revolutionary roots… which were decidedly secular, we have that secularism in writing, from the most official documents by the US Founding Fathers… Philosophical infancy was nice, but it’s all over, the lions of fate are onto us now.
Amen.
Patrice Ayme
Tags: Attali, Bankers, Catholicism, Elizabeth Warren, Fall of Rome, Gods, Homo, Limit Wealth Absolutely
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 
January 29, 2019 at 1:44 am |
“Why would humanity have ever needed gods? Men were the gods.
Who needs gods? The difference is civilization, and, more precisely, its military aspect and the cancerous growth known as plutocracy.”
Human aspiration subtends our notions of the supernatural.
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January 29, 2019 at 1:54 am |
Patrice,
I happened upon this paragraph in Gilbert Murray’s; Euripides and his Age: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/35472/35472-h/35472-h.htm
“But this great result was not merely the triumph of a particular city; it was the triumph of an ideal and a way of life. Freedom had defeated despotism, democracy had defeated kings, hardy poverty had defeated all the gold of the East. The men who fought of their free will for home and country had proved more lasting fighters than the conscripts who were kept in the lines by fear of tortures and beheadings and impalements. Above all “virtue,” as the Greeks called it, or “virtue” and “wisdom” together, had shown their power. The words raise a smile in us; indeed, our words do not properly correspond with the Greek, because we can not get our ideas simple enough. “Virtue”[Pg 39] is what makes a man, or anything else, good; it is the quality of a good soldier, a good general, a good citizen, a good bootmaker, a good horse or almost a good sword. And “wisdom” is that by which a man knows how to do things—to use a spear, or a tool, to think and speak and write, to do figures and history and geometry, to advise and convince his fellow-citizens. All these great forces moved, or so it seemed at the time, in the same direction; and probably it was hardly felt as a dangerous difference when many people preferred to say that it was “piety” that had won in the war against “impiety,” and that the Persians had been destroyed because, being monotheists, they had denied the Gods. No doubt “piety,” properly understood, was a kind of “wisdom.””
Thought you might like it.
I think the argument that needs to be made is about the nature of money, as I’ve argued previously. That it is the social contract holding mass societies together, not a commodity to mine and store. As this medium of exchange, it destroys the system to build up huge reservoirs of it. As blood is a medium and fat is a store, or roads are a medium and parking lots are a store, they can’t be mixed up.
As it is now, much of this notation value is “stored” by the government borrowing up trillions and spending in ways that support the private sector, but don’t compete with it for profits. When that system fails, the next step is disaster capitalism/predatory lending, as the old treasuries get traded for the remaining public assets, parks, mineral and water rights, highways, etc. Then we have to pay to use them.
Much as government is the central nervous system, banking is the circulation system of society. Head and heart.
And like the head and heart, they are separate, because they serve different functions. Politicians can’t be left in control of the money, as they live and die on the hope they provide, so printing money is a cheap high. Evidence of this is that since the rich are the only ones that count, the Fed has been showering them with cheap money for the last 31 years and then the Treasury soaks up the surplus, to minimize the inflation. Threaten to tax what they currently borrow and you will really see the long knives come out, but that’s the only way to make the system healthy. Like blood, it has to keep cycling.
We are staring into the abyss.
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January 30, 2019 at 12:33 am |
Hi Brodix!
Yes I like the passage you quoted.
Except I don’t believe the soldiers of the Achaemenids were afraid of impalement. I think they were less well trained, equipped and motivated than the Greeks. When Persia controlled the Ionian and Phoenician fleets, yes, there was coercion, but there was also greed among some of the captains of said fleets… And they were less motivated than the Athenian, for sure…
Banks, private banks create most of the money, and they lend to the wealthiest, thus making the wealthiest ever wealthier, as observed.
To counterbalance this, at the minimum:
This is de facto what Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s proposed tax on wealth would do, limit wealth absolutely! An excellent development.
Lack of democracy is the abyss; extreme wealth brings it automatically. This was the problem with Persia, which was a dictatorial union of plutocrats. Ultimately Persia defeated the Athenian democracy by using the Spartan plutocracy, which it handsomely financed…
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January 30, 2019 at 11:34 am |
Patrice,
I tend more toward skimming the surface, due to time and that’s how most people are, so that’s why I see the conceptual paradigm shift as essential, with policy following up. That money is a quantification of the social contract and we only possess it like we possess the section of road we are using.
What I see as the elephant in the room is the extent to which government borrowing is foundational to the functioning of capitalism. Whereas it is promoted as free enterprise and free markets, these huge pools of surplus wealth would not be sustainable, without the public being responsible for borrowing it up and paying interest. It has to be kept in circulation, so it gets used to fund wars against the rest of the world.
That’s the public conversation that has to happen, before the public understands why and gets behind taxing this surplus, not just borrowing it. It’s not an argument against wealth, per se, but the responsibility for sustaining excess abstract wealth, along with it being used to both leverage more and drain actual value out of the larger community and the environment.
This issue goes much deeper into the current tendency of theoretical science to see their abstractions as fundamental to reality, than the other way around. Map versus territory issues.
On the quote, it hints at what you seem to be getting at; That for the Ancients, there wasn’t a distinction between religion and politics, so despotism was synonymous with the top down, father figure lawgiver of monotheism, while all the gods arguing and fighting was synonymous with the tumult of democracy.
As I’ve pointed out before, the logical fallacy of monotheism is a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgment, from which we fell. More the new born, than the wise old man. Monotheism just gives us the divine right f kings.
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January 29, 2019 at 2:37 am |
Great essay! Yeap, the greater the creeps the greater their gods. Can’t stand US commanders in chief evoking god all day long. Does Trump do that?
I never listen to him.
BTW, you have a typo: Rome FELL to the Goths,
NOT feel as you or your spellchecker wrote
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January 31, 2019 at 2:10 am |
Corrected, thanks! Spellchecker I am afraid…
I never listen to Trump either. I nearly listen more to the insipid Theresa May, and the Kamala Harris singing the praises of Islam…
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January 30, 2019 at 3:24 am |
Warren has a good idea with a wealth tax (a la Piketty?) but it remains to be seen how well she will be able to sell it. At least it has been “run up the flag pole” and into the mix with a call by Ocasio-Cortez for return to progressive taxation of 70% after $10 million. Plutocrats will be in all out war against this in the media so we shall see.
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January 30, 2019 at 5:51 pm |
There is this Starbucks billionaire running 4 presidency he was on 60 minutes. He runs as independent, and he is wort more than Trump. Made all his money from banks, expanding worldwide, after banks bought Starbucks for him.He is an establishment plant, a CIA operative, they do this to cover their operations, that ‘s why they pay no taxes
He went ALL OUT AGAINST WARREN WEALTH TAX. So elite is already on the attack against Warren
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January 31, 2019 at 2:08 am |
A wealth tax existed in France when Piketty was still in diapers… It was removed by banker Macron instantaneously.
My point is that the Roman Republic had an ABSOLUTE wealth tax for centuries…
Like GMax said, Plutos are in all-out war already… But it pales relative to the circus in UK.
Anyway good to see at last democrats re-appearing in the Demoncratic Party, who are nearly as much left as Ike in the 1950s (barely joking…)
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January 30, 2019 at 9:26 pm |
It is certainly a little early to see how things pan out, but at least Warren looks like she is actually running to do something, as opposed to be something, which seems to be the usual political ambition.
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January 31, 2019 at 1:49 am |
Yes indeed, Ian. But she scores half of what sexy Kamala Harris, who is Indian, Black, white, young and inexperienced. a new Obama, and a Muslim propagandist presently scores…
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January 31, 2019 at 11:54 am |
According to a new report from Politico, there are only two prospective candidates that the nation’s bankers genuinely fear. “It can’t be Warren, and it can’t be Sanders,” claims one anonymous CEO of a major bank. “It has to be someone centrist and someone who can win.”
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/there-are-only-two-democratic-hopefuls-wall-street-fears/
Banksters won’t allow anti-bankster politicians to have power in the system they own.
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February 2, 2019 at 1:22 am |
Funny these, Warren and Sanders are the two I approve of. Harris is a fake, and the Starbucks plant, despicable, directly an outright bank agent (banks is how he bought Starbucks, CIA how he got it in 77 countries…)
At this point I am more for Pocahontas… I have forgiven her her 5% Native American thing… because, after all, it is true…
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February 3, 2019 at 9:12 pm |
A god is just an authority figure. Has been since the dawn of time. Same goes for what rules in your head.
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February 3, 2019 at 9:14 pm |
There is a science of gods, a science of authorities, a generalized theology. Polytheistic religions are different from monotheistic ones: overall, less fascist in the will to be led (led by many instead of just one). Emperor Constantine made god in HIS imperial image, by inventing the appropriate Catholicism, enforced by the military-like Catholic church.
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February 3, 2019 at 9:20 pm |
I know of no other god than that which is within – the authority we give anything and everything. What is outside is merely a mirror to that within.
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February 3, 2019 at 9:24 pm |
A “god” is just one way, and a name, to speak about superior principles, basic axioms… The inner machinery of mind has them, from basic programmation in embryology, infancy, childhood, and they can be changed in adulthood… with great effort. But what’s sure is that we shouldn’t just “divinize” what’s inside… After all, shit is part of it… And, as there is bacterial shit, and we better expel it, there is spiritual shit. I try to excrete mine… For that I engage in a healthy, wholesome diet of raw and fibrous, not overly processed data… It allows me to identify what is no good, and it’s not wrong logic, wrong data, but also wrong feelings, wrong emotions, wrong moods…
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February 11, 2019 at 5:21 pm |
Except in India. Most are female and benign and represent ideas and natural forces, a division of labor of sorts. The great Earth mother, an Indian creation!
Partha
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February 11, 2019 at 9:58 pm |
Thanks Partha… As I always say, we need more of the Indian perspective here…
Now turns out Indian civilization is supposed to have originated in the Western Middle East, according to some recent archeology…. Yeah, !!!!!!!!!!!!!
What is sure is the the Great Mother cult is immensely old in the Middle East… She came with various names, including Cybelle, with dangerous cats at her feet…
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February 4, 2019 at 4:48 am |
Warren and Sanders are being vilified in the media, as is AOC- media attack dogs somehow cannot understand marginal tax rated. Their anti-pluto tax policies and push for Medicare for all will meet media roadblocks. The Starbucks candidate is pure plutocrat and Harris is just another donor class darling. Yet Tulsi Gabbard cannot even get mentioned in the corporate media. Corporate media propaganda is the big hurdle.
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February 4, 2019 at 11:11 pm |
Agreed. The word “corporate” (what belongs to a corpus, a body) omits the satanic, diabolical, nature of it all. Pluto corporations is more like it. Reading the British “popular” (meaning plutocratic) press about Brexit is enlightening. The steering of public opinion there has reached Nazi levels of propaganda (huge lies all over). I don’t understand why Warren scores so low and Harris so high… except the former is for serious change, and the later the new Obama… Much pleasing all Plutos the world ever saw. However, she should be better than Clinton or Obama. After all she is a Berkeley native… 😉
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