Islamophilia: Voltaire’s “Fanaticism Or Mahomet” Can’t Be Played Anymore

The extremely wealthy and intrigue-prone Voltaire, friend and adviser to King Louis XV of France, was radical only in the minds of the most obdurate regressives and the Inquisition… In particular, Voltaire advised Louis to not defend the French settlements in America…. with the consequence that the genocidal, enslaving colonization of the enemy won. Yet Voltaire’s play on Muhammad and Intolerance is now banned…

Or, more exactly, to give it its exact title, “Fanaticism Or Muhammad the Prophet” cannot be played, lest the people crazed with god and tribal identifications go nuts once again! Islamophilia is a grave disease which, should it be not checked, would transmogrify into Catholicophilia, in other words, the Inquisition, when those who have power find pretexts in your minds to destroy your life for reasons you have.

Thus “god” fanaticism replaces all spiritual striving with blind obedience to whoever has the biggest sword. It is most convenient to tyrants who can then terrorize in the name of “God”. This is what went wrong with Oriental Rome, and its spiritual spawn, Islam. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahomet_(play)

There is nothing unfair or inflammatory to calling those who go to churches, mosques or temples, fanatics: this is actually what “fanum”, temple, means… Fanaticism or Muhammad was first played in Lille, in… 1741.

“Where would Virgil and Homer be if people had bothered them about the details?” Voltaire asks. Voltaire’s Mahomet was presented to annoy the religious fanatics.

In a private letter to Frederick of Prussia, Voltaire acknowledged that he had made Muhammad worse than he was: “Mahomet did not exactly weave the type of treason that forms the subject of this tragedy.” Instead Muhammad was himself the object of one determined attempt on his life (on a trail, involving a rock avalanche, among other things; the ambush was not prosecuted because it involved individuals too close to Muhammad…)

Voltaire blackened Muhammad a bit, so he would get Papal approval to show the play which was actually anti-Christian even more fundamentally than anti-Muslim, as the root of Islam is Judeo-Christianism.

The great philosophe was clearly familiar with the more positive details of the Prophet’s life. Translations of the Qur’an and Hadiths were ancient in France, by Voltaire’s time. Two French biographies of Muhammad, Henri de Boulainvillier’s Vie de Mahomed (1730), and Jean Gagnier’s La Vie de Mahomet traduite et compilée de l’Alcoran (1732). As a passionate anti-cleric, Voltaire used Islam to attack the hypocritical religiosity and predation which underpinned France’s Ancien Régime. Voltaire was against against priests of every denomination who “rise from an incestuous bed, manufacture a hundred versions of God, then eat and drink God, then piss and shit God.” Voltaire weaponized Muhammad against Christianism.

In Zaire, an earlier play Voltaire has the Sultan observe:
My heart doesn’t know itself …Custom and law moulded my earliest years to the happy Muslim religion. I see only too clearly: the training that we are given as children shapes our feelings, our mores, our belief. On the banks of the Ganges, I would have been a slave to false gods; in Paris, a Christian; in this place, a Muslim.

Voltaire’s subsequent essay, De l’Alcoran et de Mahomet (1748), maintains his view that Muhammad exploited beliefs in the supernatural while having no such supernatural obsession himself. Naively, Voltaire regarded Islam as inferior to the Chinese religion because—unlike Muhammad— Confucius depended neither on revelation, nor on lies, nor on the sword for his teachings, but only on reason. Disputing the claim that Muhammad was illiterate—a theme he took up in Chapter VI of the Essai sur les moeurs—Voltaire makes some positive comments about the founder of Islam:

“How can one imagine that a man who had been a merchant, poet, legislator and sovereign was unable to write his name? If his book is unsuitable for our times and for ourselves, it was truly good for his contemporaries. His religion was even better. We should recognise that he virtually rescued the whole of Asia from idolatry. He taught the unity of God and forcefully denounced anyone claiming that God has partners. He banned the usurious exploitation of strangers, and enjoined the giving of alms. Prayer is an absolute requirement; acceptance of eternal decrees animates all. It is hardly surprising that a religion so simple and wise, taught by a man who was always victorious in the field took power in much of the world. In actuality the Muslims made as many converts by the word as by the sword, including Indians and many Negroes. Even the Turkish conquerors submitted themselves to Islam.”

Subtle was Voltaire.

Not so with our times.

Patrice Ayme

Islamism, same as Christianism, is all about fanaticism. No ifs and buts…

Rousseau’s Infamy

Jean-Jacques Rousseau famously started his treatise “The Social Contract” with: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. One man thinks himself the master of others, but remains more of a slave than they are.”

Rousseau claimed that man was naturally good but became corrupted by the pernicious influence of human society and institutions. French sailors implemented Rousseau philosophy in Tasmania: they went swimming in the nude, to show the natives they had nothing to fear. Hundreds of Natives attacked the French, who gathered a vivid impression of Rousseau’s wickedness.

Rousseau’s beautiful tweet is only true as a poetic metaphor, a helpful bleating to a despondent sky. Otherwise, it is erroneous in roughly all ways. Man is not born free, but fatally dependent upon others, and especially lactating human female(s). (Until very recent technological developments.) The one who thought of himself as the master often was, or is, really the master, whose very mind had been made by an ideology of mastery. And thus, cannot be otherwise. Even more surely than Rousseau advanced by seducing judiciously chosen wealthy women. (Say Jean-Jacques: “To write a good love letter, you ought to begin without knowing what you mean to say, and to finish without knowing what you have written.”)

I Strike, Therefore You Die. Nature Is Not About Goodness, Just Balance

[Natural Quantum Supercomputer At Work. The latest on rattlesnakes show them capable of foresight and engineering, in preparation for a strike… a few hours later.]

As New Scientist puts it, April 13, 2016: “It’s a premeditated attack. A deadly rattlesnake seems to be planning attacks by clearing a path for its strike in advance.

Northern Pacific rattlesnakes (Crotalus oreganus) have been filmed manipulating vegetation near the burrows of ground squirrels. It’s the first time they have been captured on video moving grass in such a way, says Breanna Putman at San Diego State University in California.

Putman and her colleague Rulon Clark recorded two instances of hunting rattlesnakes pushing away grass around them at the Blue Oak Ranch Reserve in California’s Santa Clara County.”

If rattlesnakes can premeditate and prepare their deadly attacks, so can humans. (In particular, plutocrats.)

Chains, around ankles, are a rare sight. Yet ideologies, stunting minds, are common. Actually, the word “ideology” comes short: minds go deeper than ideas. Ideas are anchored in moods. Mentalities are ecosystems for ideas. Rousseau’s basic axiomatic mood, anchoring his entire critique, was anti-civilizational. (He got carried away from the Ancient Regime, not understanding that was not civilization, but plutocracy run amok.)

Rousseau preached returning to nature to live a natural life at peace with neighbors and self. He heaped scorn on civilization: “Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces…Trust your heart rather than your head… What wisdom can you find greater than kindness… The truth brings no man a fortune… Everything is good as it comes from the hands of the Maker of the world, but degenerates once it gets into the hands of man“.

Returning to nature is fundamental, agreed, because that is where the deepest structures of our minds come from. Yet lives in the wild were short, brutish, and cruel. Civilization is a remedy for nature.

We are made, evolutionarily speaking to handle the short, brutish and cruel. Paradoxically this may be what is missing now. Instead, we are slowly been overheated like the proverbial frog in an increasingly torrid bath.

Similarly, too much politeness can kill a proper debate. Calling fools and their stupid ideologies for what they are is a preliminary requirement to think correctly.

Even more paradoxically, politeness can be a diabolical weapon against those who do not expect it, especially our greatest enemies. Had I met Bin Laden, I would have been polite. I would have asked what exactly happened. Bin Laden was initially recruited by the CIA and SIA, to lead an Arab mercenary army against the Afghan Republic. The latter initially had a defense accord with the USSR, but also intended to develop Afghan geology with French expertise. All this became impossible as the White House conducted a secret war, using Pakistan. As that was not enough democratic president Carter gave a secret order of attack, July 3, 1979.

So politeness can be appropriate, or not. In the case of Rousseau, the answer was clear. Rousseau sent Voltaire a copy of his “The Social Contract” and Voltaire wrote him the following:

“I have received your new book against the human race, and thank you for it. Never was such a cleverness used in the design of making us all stupid. One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours. But as I have lost that habit for more than sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it. Nor can I embark in search of the savages of Canada, because the maladies to which I am condemned render a European surgeon necessary to me; because war is going on in those regions; and because the example of our actions has made the savages nearly as bad as ourselves.”

De Sade coldly observed that Rousseau had no idea of the nature of nature (paraphrasing). The argument can be made, and has been made, that there is a direct filiation between the philosophers Rousseau and (the quite similar) Herder, and the Prussianized Nazism which disfigured Europe, after Metternich and Bismarck launched their conquering ways.

Voltaire said that “one must crush infamy!”. But infamy is clever. Even rattlesnakes are clever. Just as it was recently documented that a rattlesnake, preparing for an ambush, will clear its strike trajectory, so it is with most thinking beings, and not just predators. Elephants and rhinoceroses have been observed attacking with enormous fury and persistence even innocent calves. Surely, indeed, the nature of nature is not to be strictly cuddly.

In the end, Jean-Jacques himself had to admit the truth: “All my misfortunes come of having thought too well of my fellows“. Well, after behaving all too long like a rattlesnake of love, striking here, and there, lying in ambush… no wonder.

Patrice Ayme’

Was Jesus Christ Immoral?

‘TURNING THE OTHER CHEEK’ MEANS COLLABORATING WITH EVIL.

Instead, Forget Abraham, Resist, Crush Infamy, and Save the Little Children.

Jesus is an imperial Roman fabrication. Not only his mythology was cut and pasted from pre-existing religions, but even His birthday was displaced from one side of the Sun to the other. This 6 months translation made it coincide with the Winter Solstice and the Saturnials, the feast and celebration of the Greco-Roman empire which lasted weeks.

No philosopher of note has considered Jesus since Nietzsche noticed that the crucifix was a sex symbol for frustrated Christians. So why do I bother? Well, the USA is pervaded by God, and Jesus is his son. That would be OK, except that the GDP of the USA is growing at an annual rate of 5%, whereas Europe, and even Germany, has been stagnating with zero percent growth since 2008.

Both facts are related, but I will not get into that for this essay. Another point is that a version of the remarks on Jesus’ morality was censored on a philosophy website, because the moderator, a professional philosopher, and self-declared atheist, viewed it as “unduly offensive”.

Real philosophers offend the baffled and uncomprehending masses with true ideas they cannot swallow yet.

In the West, for more than a millennium, “Jesus” was viewed as the paragon of morality. Instead I will propose the exact opposite, by analyzing carefully what may be Jesus’ most famous saying. It made “Jesus” into the whetstone on which Nazism, among other evils, was sharpened.

I already pointed out that Jesus had homicidal tendencies: not only did this rabbi make explicit threats, but he said he came to impose the “Law” the Old Testament.

Said Old Testament depicts a God drunk on power, mass homicides, and a passion for torturing to death little children, so as to humiliate or punish their parents. It is hard to find a more despicable character in the history of ideas. The Biblical god can do whatever He pleases and call that divine.

The local plutocrat, our local lord, made in God’s image, was then morally justified to behave just as he wished all along. Hence the dealing and pushing of Christianism onto the mystified masses by plutocrats, from Constantine to Putin.

Jesus said: [those who] serve other gods … thou shalt surely kill him; thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people. And thou shalt stone him with stones, that he die.” [Bible New Testament; Dt.13:6-10]

A Christian, Elizabeth Carter, was not thrilled with the unconventional picture of Jesus I gave. She commented (Dec 5, 2014):

“Christ taught us not to resist evil but to turn the other cheek.

He said that if you choose to live by the law of Moses you will be judged by the law of Moses…

Jesus was crucified and did not resist the evil that was being done to him at all. Christians were told to follow Him.”

The statement “Christ taught us not to resist evil but to turn the other cheek,” is the epitome of immorality.

Jesus, even if he existed, was a savage of 2,000 years ago who repeated like a parrot what rabbi Hillel The Elder said a century before. Even the conservative Edmund Burke, 250 years ago, came to realize that Jesus was morally evil. Said Burke: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

Ironically this idea is central to the French Revolution, which Burke hated. In the French revolution, good men decided to do something about plutocracy… And the struggle is not over. Voltaire’s “IL FAUT ECRASER L’INFAME” got it right, and got the whole world rolling in the correct direction.

What did Chris thought he was achieving with turning the other cheek? Looking somewhere else? Indicating that punishment, cheek slapping, should be pursued, until morale improve, or one passes out?

Or was Christ, by turning the other cheek to evil, teaching us to collaborate with evil? Or, to put it more crudely, and to the point, to collaborate with Auschwitz? Let Him get to the oven first. With my most sincere contempt.

The hundreds of extermination camps the Nazis set-up all over Germany could function only because, like Jesus, the average Christian German decided to turn the other cheek and look somewhere else. Some extermination hells, such as Dachau, were in full view, a few kilometers from Munich. An outraged American general forced the whole local population of good Christian Germans to visit this place of extermination. The honorable German citizens put their finest clothes, and grimly contemplated what their hellish culture of cheek turning allowed to happen.

Jesus is distinctly less popular in Germany now. He had told the Germans to avert their eyes, and not fight evil. Jesus was wrong as wrong could be. All over Europe, he does not cut the saintly figure he used to.

Christians were told to follow their love boy, Jesus, and his dad. Germans were told to follow their “Guide” (Fuhrer).

Evil’s face could be that of a hungry lion, or that of a thug, or a rampaging dictator. Turning the other cheek only encourages it. The mythical Jesus Himself, when confronted with a few merchants in the Temple, not really an outrage in my opinion, got very angry, and physically violent, as he threw them out.

Thus the alleged acts of the mythical Jesus make no emotional sense: if some fast buck artists soil the Temple with their wares, He attacks them, but if some dictator puts a child in the oven, He turns the other cheek? Insignificant is outrageous, and outrageous, is insignificant?

Is it this perverse logic which allowed hungry Crusaders to roast and eat little Muslim Children?

(This evil culinary fact is well documented through direct eyewitnesses and participants; one would assume that, as good Christians, the Crusaders just turned the other cheek, so they could munch better…)

Essential to Jesus’ “teaching” is that one should not resist infamy. The very fact lover boy Jesus did not resist his own crucifixion, as Christians say, is the very proof that, either he deserved it, or he was of the lowest moral sort.

Or maybe he was a masochist who wanted to be crucified, because that gave him a sexual kick, to rub his buns on rough wood.

And his followers are even worse. I mean what are these creeps going to do when some monsters come to torture a child? Turn the other cheek? Not resist? Celebrate Abraham, who bound his own son, to slit his throat, because he was in love with his boss? That’s clearly worse than gay marriage, it’s gay murder.

How much more despicable can one be?

Those “Christian” ideas ought to be buried in the mental rot to which they belong. They are precious only in the sense that they laud the exact sort of systems of thought and moods we should avoid like the mental plague they are: lethal and contagious.

To have made a religion out of collaboration with infamy, is not just inhuman, absurd, demented, and an insult to our true creator, biological evolution. It should outright be made unlawful to teach it as non-fiction. And frowned upon, submitted to the severe punishment, as non-assistance to children in danger. Some demons will laugh: ‘No wonder Christians love the cross so much: deep down inside they know they all deserve it, being the lowest of the low’.

Amen.

Happy Birthday, Christ. Should you have truly existed, as the Good Lord, no doubt you taught the exact opposite of many of the words plutocrats such as emperor Constantine put in your mouth.

Patrice Ayme’

Baboon Philosophy Needed

Many people hold a cynical attitude about Cynicism. They hold that it’s nothing other than an unwarranted, exaggerated, mostly negative attitude, non-constructive way to live, feel and think.

And, as Scientia Salon puts it “if they think they’re talking about Cynicism the philosophy, with a capital C, they’re dead wrong“.

I propose to go much further than simply rehashing cynicism.

Baboons Are A better Model Than Dogs To Understand Humans

Cynics, kynikos, means “dog-like”. The main idea was for humans to live according to nature… And thus reject the “nomos” (the way things are managed), when it does not fit nature. In extreme form, it meant living like dogs (that Diogenes embraced, and so did the enemies of cynicism).

The question arises: what is it, to live according to nature? Rousseau thought it was to live like angels. Sade replied that Rousseau had no idea what he was talking about. Voltaire (a friend of Sade) told Rousseau that “jamais autant d’intelligence” had been deployed to make us all stupid, and he felt like “marcher a quatre pattes” after reading his book.

French sailors, fresh from believing Rousseau, discovered Tasmania. The French has dressed au naturel, as they expected that the Natives, being the most primitives on Earth, would be happy and welcoming. Instead, the Tasmanian tried to kill the French in a massive premeditated ambush, and the sailors came back to France, announcing Rousseau had been found incorrect.

TASMANIAN EFFECT.

So is the nature of man that of a dog, or wolf? Is the famous Roman “Homo Homini Lupus”, true?

Well Ancient Greeks knew dogs, but not baboons. Baboons technical name is “cynocephali” (dog-heads). In more ways than simple appearances, they are half-way between dog and men. As I grew up in Africa, I observed baboons in the wild, or captivity. I was struck by their humaneness.

Recently the great apes were re-labelled as “Hominidae”, to remind us of their humaneness. However, in one important way, baboons are closer to man than to any other species. Both man and baboons have evolved to make a living in the savannah, instead of among the trees. This brought to bear on the species the same evolutionary pressures, hence the same solutions. Particularly in the realms of defense, attack, group-think (and specifically what I call intellectual fascism).

To do so, to live in the savannah, where they go drink everyday, in a killing gallery, baboons had to evolve not just an omnivorous way of life, but super-predatory ways, all the way to the fascist, military instinct some insist could NOT possibly be human. As they move about, baboons form well organized armies, and the fierce military spirit to go with them. The larger, the noisier, the more horrific the army, led by seemingly crazed leaders, mad with uncontrollable hatred and rage, the better, to put all predators to flight.

Back in Africa, it seemed to me that no philosophy that did not understand baboons could pretend to understand man. Thus a philosophy of origins had to encompass baboons. Conversely, baboons are easier to understand than people: people hide behind complicated cultures and their various make-belief “creators”, whereas baboons do not have this sort of arrogance.

The zoologist Buffon pontificated that baboons were “too obscene to describe”. Baboons were an experimental model contradicting Rousseau. A progress from the Greeks, I would respectfully suggest, would be to graduate from dog to baboon, as a philosophical paradigm, a simpler model of Homo Sapiens.

Once one has understood that people are super-baboons, one has made a gigantic step forward in the true nature of humanity, and its “nomos”. As we bring the greatest crisis in 65 million years, it’s high time.

Patrice Ayme’