Monday, January 16, 2017

Lord Save Us From the Bullshit

Over the last several days a thought has repeatedly popped into my melon, usually in the wake of some random idiocy. It is what it is, so you'll just have to pardon the French: Wasn't Jesus supposed to save us from this bullshit?

I claim no responsibility for the thought. Rather, it is just the spontaneous fruit of forgotten meditations, as the Aphorist might put it. But since the thought kept recurring, I decided to look at it, and lo and behold, it meant something.

We are all familiar with the idea that "Jesus saves." But from what, exactly? Most people would say "from sin," but that was not my point of entry into the whole mystery. Then again, I suppose it was, since lying is a sin, and inhabiting a Lie (such as secular leftism) must be even worse.

What I want to say is that Jesus (by which I mean the whole tradition that flows from him) saved my mind. From what? Well, for starters, from mountains of bullshit. Before the transition, my mind was a vast and fertile field for the cultivation of bullshit.

Matters were only made worse by an extensive education, for The learned fool has a wider field to practice his folly, and He who understands the least is he who insists on understanding more than what can be understood (NGD).

"Christ," writes Bailie, "went to the Cross to ram a stick in the spokes of the ritual for transforming sin into the delusion of righteousness."

But you could also say he does the same to the ritual of transforming utter bullshit into the delusion of righteous truth. We see this ad nauseam in the left's ritual of transforming self-styled victims into paragons of virtue, most recently, John Lewis.

Fifty years ago Lewis was knocked upside the head by some Democrat racist (but I repeat myself), which transformed him into a Civil Rights Icon. Ever since then he has been able to conceal his grotesque political hackery behind the meretricious penumbra of civil righteousness.

Oh please. Didn't Jesus save us from this bullshit?

What is the Ultimate Bullshit? It would have to consist of the Devil appropriating the Cross for his own purposes. Is this even possible? Stupid question. Rather, is there anything we can do to prevent it?

Yesterday Instapundit linked to an editorial by a leftist minister. Here's his take on American history:

I’ll let Ta-Nehisi Coates boil it down for you. White society was not achieved through “wine tastings and ice cream socials, but rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor and land.” In short, through three centuries of kidnapping, torture, murder and rape. Broken teeth, broken bones and broken spirits. Families ripped apart. Children taken from their parents. Men humiliated in front of their wives. Women brutalized within earshot of their husbands. Lash after bloody lash on bare backs. Then, sleep on a bare wooden floor. No doctor, no dentist, no nothing. Just non-stop misery with a few hymns on Sunday.

Okay then. The diffusion of a few drops of Christianity into a leftist mind transforms the idiot into a perfect idiot (NGD).

If we begin with the principle that man is fallen, then nothing he does should surprise us. We certainly would not attribute to "whiteness" what is universal in all men at all times. But once blacks are elevated to righteous victims, it is (apparently) easy for the leftist to forget that they too are subject to the law of ontological gravity, AKA the fall. If they weren't, then Africa would be a paradise instead of a place no black American would choose to live.

Roger Kimball writes of a campus group called Teach! Organize! Resist!, which "intends to stage a number of on-campus protests and consciousness-raising events between Martin Luther King Jr. Day tomorrow and Mr. Trump’s inauguration Friday":

“We intend to organize,” their web site informs the world, “against the proposed expansion of state violence targeting people of color, undocumented people, queer communities, women, Muslims, and many others.” What “state violence” would that be? While you wonder about that, note too that the organizers “intend to resist the institutionalization of ideologies of separation and subordination, including white supremacy, misogyny, homophobia, Islamophobia, and virulent nationalism.” Oh, I see.

I don't. Didn't Jesus save us from this bullshit?

Technically, yes. "[W]e live downstream from the atoning Event and in cultures profoundly shaped by it," and "live buoyed by consolations that first washed over the world at the Resurrection, consolations that were the first fruit of unconsoled suffering."

A touching story of Suffering, Death, and Resurrection:

In the spring of 2013, my worst nightmare came true. Everything that I and my closest friends had spent the previous three decades building came crashing down around us. The entire international body of students and centers, 27 years of tireless work and commitment, disappeared almost overnight.

Sounds bad! What happened?

The truth is, as crazy as it sounds, I believed I was infallible. And for a very long time, the majority of my students believed it too. In the end, I lost everything and caused untold suffering to many people only because of an irrational refusal to admit the simple truth: like most human beings I am deeply flawed.

Oh please. Didn't Jesus save us from this bullshit?

Maybe, but for only 404 Euros you can join this deeply flawed man as he "continues his ongoing exploration of the role of both student and guru in a post-mythic context."

Did he say post mythic?

Lord save us from the bullshit.

10 comments:

julie said...

Amen.

It wouldn't be so bad if the bullshit from the left ever slowed down. I'm looking forward to Friday, but not because I believe there will be anything like a cessation of the bullshit after the inauguration; rather, I expect it to ramp up in the coming years, as the derangement syndrome reaches new heights of madness.

ted said...

Maybe, but for only 404 Euros you can join this deeply flawed man as he "continues his ongoing exploration of the role of both student and guru in a post-mythic context."

For an additional 104 Euros, you get to deepak the chopra all night long with DJ Da Free John, and for 54 more Euros, A CGI hologram of Kenneth Wilber will be projected on to your dining table. BS is not free.

debass said...

All the left has is bullshit. Since they can't perceive reality, they need to make it up. That's why you can't argue with them. There is no common accepted reality for argument. They refuse to accept the truth. Believe me, I have tried. It's not just the big lie of liberalism, it's that they lie to themselves about it. The Joseph Goebbels style of politics. They are so invested in their own bs that when you try to tell them the truth, they accuse you of lying.

Anonymous said...

Slavery, of course, is a mortal sin. Americans who practiced it were doing evil. I take it you have no rebuttal. If you did, you would be a heaping pile of manure.

I hope you are not some apologist for the federal cannabis penal gulag of forced labor currently in effect in our nation.

The cannabis prohibitionist criminals (those still alive) will eventually have their equivalent of the Nuremburg trial.

Clean up your act, unless you are in fact a dirty dog. Then just keep being yourself.

Unknown said...

It is really sad this exchange of bullshits. It is sad that the finite plays the game of the infinite on his own perverted staddle. Nobody saves nobody but each body saves himself, Floating ideas are responsible free,they become a place of responsibility when they are embodied. We are all embodied thoughts and we we are accountable to our embodied thoughts. We are not responsible for the bullshits of others or correcting it but we have to protect ourselves from our self-bullshits or indulging in bullshits. It seems we have reached a stage where humanity is no longer in the driving seat to guide the earth car, which indicates the arrival of the operation of the divine law of truth and justice to put everything in its proper place and stop all this lies and poisoning falsification by all labels. In the quran which have a copy of, there is a verse which states that all words send to humanity by God, are summarized by only two words truth and justice. That are exactly what we miss in this confused world of ours who is busy with hate mongering and false claims of superiority, every body is wrong,I am only the right gent,forgetting that the only superiority is that of truth and justice.

Gagdad Bob said...

More bullshit.

ted said...

Film recommendation: Hell or High Water. Came out this past year, and found it beautifully done!

Gagdad Bob said...

Anyone seen Scorsese's Silence?

ted said...

Not yet, but looking forward to it!

Van Harvey said...

Geezzz... bullshit and trollshit... please lord, save us from all this shit.

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