Tuesday, August 15, 2006

The Ten Commandments of... Satan!

One thing that has really surprised me about the spiritual path is that no matter how deeply you get into it, you keep discovering others from the past who have visited the same place, as well as contemporaries who know exactly what you’re talking about when you discuss it--just as if you were both viewing the same garden or landescape. And I’m talking about very minute, subtle things that one can only discover for oneself, not objective or “exterior” dogmas that can be disclosed to anyone. This leads me to conclude that the world of Spirit--which can only be revealed to subjects--is actually a thoroughly objective world.

Take, for example, yesterday’s post on The System of the Antichrist. It’s fair to say that for most people--certainly the secular left--such a topic would generate nothing but howls of derision. As a matter of fact, one of the reasons I write the way I do is to undercut the cynical and ironized left by anticipating their every move and going them one further. It helps that I used to be one of them, so I am wearily familiar with the grooves in which their little minds run. At One Cosmos, we are always laughing at our ideological opponents, but never in the angry and destructive ways of the left. For their part, they either do not get the humor or they take it personally.

Reader Jacob C. made exactly this point yesterday, quoting Lewis’ Screwtape Letters: "Only a clever human can make a real Joke about virtue, or indeed about anything else; any of them can be trained to talk as if virtue were funny. Among flippant people the Joke is always assumed to have been made. No one actually makes it; but every serious subject is discussed in a manner which implies that they have already found a ridiculous side to it. If prolonged, the habit of Flippancy builds up around a man the finest armour plating against the Enemy that I know, and it is quite free from the dangers inherent in the other sources of laughter. It is a thousand miles away from joy; it deadens, instead of sharpening, the intellect; and it excites no affection between those who practise it."

Exactly. I believe it was Jonah Goldberg who pointed out that the left has been been brought so low intellectually that its greatest thinkers are comedians: Bill Mahar, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Al Franken, Janine Garofolo, Larry David, Margaret Cho, Garrison Keillor, and on down. Their biggest website--huffingandpissed--is mostly comprised of vacuous celebrities who are just like the comedians, only funnier (albeit unintentionally so). You could never win a debate with such an individual, because their primary weapon is a sort of mocking tone that undercuts any serious discussion. A mere raised eyebrow or roll of the eyes incites the “woo woos” from the knowing audience, who are trained to know exactly what they are supposed to gleefully mock.

As Hoarhey put it yesterday, “It seems to me that the left tends to enviously block access to those higher planes for anyone trying consciously or unconsciously to reach them. Then once the higher planes are touched upon and the process of assimilation begun, the mocking and ridicule begin.” Yes. Exactly. You might say that this kind of derision is one of the “satanic defense mechanisms,” as it serves to repress and deny the higher vertical, as opposed to the lower vertical, as does a conventional defense mechanism.

And this is the real reason liberals detest a Rush Limbaugh--not just because he runs circles around them, but because he does so with humor and derision. He mocks their sacred cows, which is when you realize that the secular left is every bit as devout as you are, except that they have transferred their allegiance from the things above to the things below. Piss Christ? That’s just free speech. But don’t ever refer to a bitter, man-hating moonbat activist as a feminazi! Don’t ever mention that a “home” is at the end of a long list of virtues and attributes that are generally missing in the person without one! Never make fun of the sacred Person Without Health Insurance, even if he is an addle-brained 21 year-old who chooses to spend his money on other things. And never, ever make fun of that Pied Piper in Diaper, Mahatma Gandhi, as I did the other day, because he was for peace!

The list of liberal icons and sacred cows is endless, for the very reason that it partakes of time and not eternity--of the many and not the One. I don’t know if anyone has really noticed, but the reason I entitled my book One Cosmos Under God is to emphasize the hierarchical nature of the cosmos, and the fact that the cosmos only makes sense because it is conditioned from the top down. Although it is a banality to point out that we live in the relative, there is no such thing as the “absolutely relative” for the very reason that the relative partakes of the Absolute. The Absolute is anterior to the relative, whether conceived of as ground (at the base) or source (at the apex) of creation; it is actually both, resulting from the fact that the Absolute is necessarily both immanent and transcendent. For the same reason, the relative necessarily and inevitably contains degrees of being, with the last degree known as “God.”

Thus, Satan’s first commandment is really just a reversal of the actual first commandment. Instead of “I am your God and you shall have no other gods before me,” the parallel looniverse of the secular left begins with “there is no Absolute and you shall bow down before all of the sacred relativities we have inserted in His place.”

From this commandment follow many implications. In fact, reader Gumshoe touched on a number of them yesterday, quoting the author Eric Raymond. For example, “There is no truth, only competing agendas,” “All Western claims to moral superiority are vitiated by the West’s history of racism and colonialism,” and “There are no objective standards by which we may judge one culture to be better than another. Anyone who claims that there are such standards is an evil oppressor.” All are repressive absolutes disguised as relatives, and in fact, designed to undermine and subvert the Absolute.

Reader Will also touched on this first commandment, noting that an intrinsic part of the secular left's agenda is to reduce Intellect (which is the means by which human beings may know Truth) to mind and mind to brain, making it a wholly material epiphenomenon. However, “Like any physical attribute, if the human intellect is not yoked to and governed by the Higher Intelligence, it runs amok and eventually goes crazy. It's taken some time to get there, but currently, the spiritually bereft intellect is basically in charge of most of the world's influential institutions, which of course means the world is in deep stew. As far as definitions of the Antichrist go, I think this would do OK.”

Precisely. Again, the secular left turns the cosmos upside down and inside out. As a result, instead of being conditioned in a hierarchical manner from the top down, it is conditioned from the bottom up. This results not in true liberation, only in rebellion and pseudo-liberation, for there can be no meaningful freedom outside objective Truth. The left rejects top-town hierarchies as intrinsically repressive, but the opposite is true--only in being conditioned by the higher can we actually elevate and liberate ourselves from contingency and relativity. Are there repressive hierarchies? Of course. But almost all of them come from the left, in the form of various socialist schemes, or from Muslim fanatics, in the form of totalitarian Sharia law. America is an experiment in ordered liberty oriented toward an explicitly spiritual telos, not a satanic workshop to explore and celebrate the numberless dead ends of mere horizontal freedom.

Well, that covers just Satan’s First Commandment. As I will attempt to demonstrate in subsequent posts, each of the commandments of the secular left represents an inversion of the actual commandment, the world turned upside-down and/or inside-out.

28 comments:

Anonymous said...

Can't help but feel I wrote this somewhere else, but - I can't help but feel that envy has to be a major component of the Left's determined secularism. "How dare they (pretend to) be more enlightened than me! I'll teach them!"

Anonymous said...

brilliant!
you're absolutely correct about the total inversion of the commandments by the left.
these days, the secular left look more like rebels without a cause than the freedom fighters they claim to be.
their clowns, john stewart, larry david, etc. are doing our right-wing agenda a huge favor by numbing the rebellious teens, steering them away from any relevant discussion. stewart and his posse are the exact opposition we need, securing our thousand year reich with their spiritual ineptitude.
sure, maybe rush limbaugh has some problems with his drug addictions and whatever else the left tries to smear him with, but at least he's not afriad to say what he thinks, even when its downright bullshit and everyone knows it is. i love it, it just makes the left more angry and fowl mouthed.
even limbaughs bullshit is more truthful than any skit by john stewart. and why? because he truly believes it, instead of just repeating the mantra.

god gave us a gift on 9/11, now we're finally in the position to destroy the last remnants of any left-wing, socialist, pinko commie crap still stinking up this country. hail gagdad bob!
lets call up GLADIO and get this show on the road...before the left wakes from its slumber and realizes our coup is already in progress.

Anonymous said...

For me, at least, today's most obvious satanic inversion of truth is the "peace" imposed by the Mideast cease-fire. This "peace", for anybody with the eyes to see, provides Israel's enemies - and not just Hizbollah - the opportunity to entrench near Israel's borders.

Interesting, if disheartening, to see how Rudolf Steiner's Luciferic/Ahrimanic equation plays out here. Though in seeming opposition to each other, the Luciferic (death-worshipping Islamofascism) is actually abetted by the Ahrimanic (the completely horizontal-oriented, "just the facts, ma'am"" perspective of the U.N. and European Union types.

In truth, the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic are two sides of the same devil. I think it's the Ahrimanic element that's most dangerous, ultimately - it's more the seductive "ape of God".

Gagdad Bob said...

Folks, that post by anonymous was a fine example of sorrychasm--the sorry chasm between the Left and Reality.

Anonymous said...

Yeah, anonymous - "fowl-mouthed" because bird-brained, no doubt.

Way to prove the point about air-headed mocking there, anony.

Anonymous said...

i just strip your essays of all the words you use the thesaurus for..
simplifying your message for you so you don't fall off topic again

Anonymous said...

A couple of the main differences between a secular "progressive" (in actuality a regressive) and a religious conservative it seems to me is that the latter will possess patience and the ability to forgive.
Take the following quote for example.
“All Western claims to moral superiority are vitiated by the West’s history of racism and colonialism,”
This is one of the more important planks in the democrat as well as the communist partys propoganda platform.
On the surface, this thought could be seen as true and evoke a measure of guilt in people who are inclined to taking on shame from the actions of others with whom they feel they are connected. A thinking AND forgiving realist will take a step back and see that in an imperfect world, western influence has been a force for good in general and that it's founding principles are self correcting and point in an ever evolving direction towards the good. Rather than throwing everything out the window and starting over from scratch, the forgiving realist will work with what actually does work and has been proven to work.
As an unforgiving, shallow thinking, absolutist youth, I can see myself taking on the shame of the above statement and blaming myself for what went before. Any action on my part or others to relieve said guilt would have been acceptable to me. As a deeper thinking FORGIVING adult, I am no longer attached to the unconscious, guilty patterns of dealing with my emotional discomfort. Because of forgiveness, I no longer accept the guilt projected on me from the left. I see that guilt driven parenting as well as guilt driven government is manipulative, does not work and will eventually lead to calamity. The gift of forgiveness has relieved my false guilt and has turned my world and thus my worldview 180 degrees. It has also done wonders for my complexion and guards against undue influence from emtional zealots like algore. :)

Anonymous said...

I have the feeling that the lazy and moronic countermag has shown up in the form of
anon. by the tell tale clue of his inability to reach the shift key.

SC&A said...

Failure and suffering are a ncessary ingredient of leftist thinking.

Not of course, ACTUAL or REAL failure, (as in, going to Africa or South America, and helping people, but unable to change the world) but the kind of failure that can be perceived as such- and crafted into a noble expression, easily manipulated.

In fact, where liberals were once at the fore of helping others worldwide, that has now become the purview of the religious right. The left has deliberately abandoned outright help for others in favor of political activism only.

Be sure to note how that activism ignored Darfur, for example. No upside there for a BusHitler agenda.

Lisa said...

Yeah, what Alan said, and who's Stan?

Anonymous said...

Great post, Bob! I greatly enjoyed this, and your your previous entry, wherein you quote C.S. Lewis. Yes, flippancy, and a generally snarky manner of addressing things has been a weapon of the Left ever since the 60's.

Anonymous said...

Will's comment at 10:24 reminded me of an old theory I had when in school, that mediocre teachers were actually worse in some ways than truly bad teachers. Everyone recognized the bad teachers. Thanks to tenure and teachers' unions they were rarely punished for being awful, but we all knew, and responded accordingly.

Mediocre teachers usually seemed good - friendly, affable, you learned a little from them - nothing to sett off the alarm bells. But there was a laziness there. The result was usually boredom, but depending on the teacher it could also be the teaching of outright lies. (Of course for that, all a teacher needs to do is follow the textbooks to the letter - they are notoriously full of erroneous information, which many teachers never bother to fact-check).

nuke gingrich said...

Nice piece, Bob. I wanted to comment on this quote from Hoarhey:
As Hoarhey put it yesterday, “It seems to me that the left tends to enviously block access to those higher planes for anyone trying consciously or unconsciously to reach them.

Maybe it is envy. At that point in my life, I thought you could reach that higher plane through just the right combination of pills, drink, and women. It was deceptively enjoyable, and ultimately self-destructive.

And this: no matter how deeply you get into it, you keep discovering others from the past who have visited the same place, as well as contemporaries who know exactly what you’re talking about when you discuss it-
The Spirit bears witness.
Thanks again, Bob for a nice read.

Anonymous said...

Bob:

For obvious reasons, I liked what you said about the Left's greatest heroes being comedians. But there seems to be a difference, one that I can't quantify, between Lenny Bruce telling us not to be afraid of words and Gagdad Bob telling us not to be afraid of the Word.

And besides, any list of subversive comedians is incomplete without the patron saint of subversion. I don't know HOW you left him out.

Sal said...

"Failure and suffering are a ncessary ingredient of leftist thinking.

Not of course, ACTUAL or REAL failure, (as in, going to Africa or South America, and helping people, but unable to change the world) but the kind of failure that can be perceived as such- and crafted into a noble expression, easily manipulated."

Siggy -
I'm sorry, but I'm not quite sure what that means. An example, please?

Perhaps I'm looking at it from an "it mattered to that one" perspective? Could this be an aspect of the "if it's not perfect, it's a failure" leftist utopia-think?

Anonymous said...

The Ten Satanic Commandments

1. There is no Lord thy God, and thou shalt place "him" on the bottom of your list of priorities. Feel free to worship graven images, be they carven, printed, or broadcast on TV.

2. Go ahead and take the name of God in vain - there is no such thing as a holy word, nor a binding oath.

3. Keep no day holy - either keep working or keep slacking. It's not as if God cares.

4. To hell with your father and mother. They're the ones responsible for screwing you up, and their generation is the one that screwed the whole Goddamn planet up.

5. You shall condone murder, but only when it suits your purposes.

6. You shall give in to all sexual desires, for they are natural and healthy products of an untainted mind.

7. You shall take whatever you feel you've got coming.

8. You shall lie and misrepresent the truth when it serves your purposes.

9. You shall envy your neighbor for having a more attractive S.O. than you.

10. You shall envy your neighbor for being richer than you and having all the things you don't.

...Maybe Bob and Petey can rework these.

Gagdad Bob said...

Plus, instead of being engraved in granite, they're chiselled in jello. More flexibility that way.

Anonymous said...

re the comic spokesmen of the left and their mocking brand of "humor":

In the 60's and 70's, there was Abbie Hoffman and now Michael Moore. Both of them had (have) characteristics of the clown. Many people have a fear of clowns, which I think is an intuitive perception of something archetypal - the clown is the archetypal Trickster, which has its place in an ordered cosmos. But in a godless vacuum, the Trickster becomes the evil clown, the ur- rebel without a cause, the destroyer of order.

John Wayne Gacy was often professionally employed as a clown. Charles Manson's schtick for the cameras is to act clown-ish - seeing him at it is pretty chilling. As Lon Chaney once said, "There's nothing funny about a clown in the moonlight."

No matter how much it may try to camouflage itself, evil always manages to revert to its real form, at least to a degree. Of course, I can't say that all comics of the left are evil clowns, but it is interesting that the major spokesmen for the left are indeed comics who mock.

Counter Mag said...

So what I would like to know is this:
People who mock and lash out at others are obviously hurting inside. Bob, from a psychological point of view, name-calling is just externalization of the hurt inside, as one tries to rid themselves of their own pain by downloading it onto others. Is it not? Aside from the endless debate over truth, good and evil, it is our insecurities that often drive us to act out in 'evil' ways.
So, if you are all as close to God as you say you are, then why are you rejecting these people as evil?
Why don't embrace the political left with understanding and compassion? Don't you think that your message might penetrate deeper if it includes all of humanity instead of just those who share your political philosophies? I don't want you to reject this question as some lefty moonbat trying to start an argument. I'm fully serious. At times you all seem to separate the spirtual guidelines from the political, yet every essay I read seems to meld the two into one, with politics far outweighing the spiritual content of your writings.

Anonymous said...

I'll handle this, Bob.

Q: "Bob, from a psychological point of view, name-calling is just externalization of the hurt inside, as one tries to rid themselves of their own pain by downloading it onto others. Is it not?"

A: It could be many things. It depends.

Q: Aside from the endless debate over truth, good and evil, is it our insecurities that often drive us to act out in 'evil' ways?

A: No. There are numberless insecure people who are good and decent.

Q: So, if you are all as close to God as you say you are, then why are you rejecting these people as evil?

A: You're putting words in my mouth. I reject evil because it is evil, just as I embrace good because it is good. If you don't hate evil, you're as lost as someone who doesn't love what is good--or who loves evil. Love is hardly a good if one loves the wrong thing. In fact, it isn't love at all, any more than a lie is knowledge.

Q: Why don't embrace the political left with understanding and compassion?

A: Understanding is compassion. Truth is the most important virtue.

Q: Don't you think that your message might penetrate deeper if it includes all of humanity instead of just those who share your political philosophies?

A: No. I have no such messianic goal in mind to alter humanity. I am simply recasting old Truths that have always been known because human beings were made to know them. But for a variety of reasons, many humans lose their ability to know truth. They can't be helped until they decide to stop lying to themselves.

Q: At times you all seem to separate the spirtual guidelines from the political, yet every essay I read seems to meld the two into one, with politics far outweighing the spiritual content of your writings.

A: It is a false teaching to separate the spiritual into its own little ghetto. We are in the world, not of the world. But we are in the world, and, like our founders, we will always fight for the political conditions that are favorable to spiritual evolution. There is no more worthy endeavor.

Anonymous said...

Wasn't it Chesterton who said (to the effect) If a man no longer believes in God, he is willing to believe in anything ?

Gagdad Bob said...

Yes--he said that such a man doesn't believe in nothing, he believes in anything.

Anonymous said...

I believe that there is some truth to the first commandment of satan: that it is just the exact opposite of the first commandment.By simply contradicting the original commandment it shows true opposition.You mock your enemy by completely doing the things he or she detest most.

Anonymous said...

Outstanding post, Bob!
What the left regards as humor, in their idols such as Margaret Cho, Bill Mahar, Colbert, etc., I see as bitterness, rage and envy.
The "humor" these clowns use, is (thinly disguised sometimes) insults, and designed to hurt.
Instead of mature humor, which is among the best defense mechanisms,
it is a weapon, meant to do as much damage as possible.
Leftist "humor" is projected pride, and rebellion, devoid of wisdom and truth, and a means of spreading chaos and evil.
Pride was the first sin, committed by lucifer/satan, who was the chief musician.
It is no wonder that so much music is steeped in evil, full of malice, lust, envy, rage, and all the sins that pride gives birth to.
Comedy (rants), music (subversive emotions), art (crap...literally), theatre/acting (empathy for evil), education (indoctrination, programming), pseudo-science (subjective "truth") and politics (feel good lies designed to enslave "victims") are among a few of the ways the left puts forth it's agenda's.
The lefties in power want to be saviors, but they become dictators, even gods.

Anonymous said...

Will and Ben, good posts.

You certainly pinpointed the reasons I feel alienated from so much of modern culture these days: angry, unfunny "comedians", books, plays and movies identifying with evil and trying to make us sympathize with it, music that exalts base emotions and art that is----um, ahem! You get the picture. . .

Many thanks!

Anonymous said...

Yeah, me too!
What's going on?

Anonymous said...

Maybe we're all the same person...
Wouldn't that be a kicker,
A psychologist with split personalities...

Anonymous said...

Ben USN:

As I said before: Blame Bill Hicks. He's the one who started it.

There's an anecdote about Hicks that for some reason I am compelled to relate: His last performance on "Late Night with David Letterman" was actually censored, because NBC was afraid of the consequences of broadcasting a routine that contained jokes at the expense of the pro-life movement ("If they're so pro-life, why don't they lock arms and block cemeteries?"). Bill, of course, was righteously angry about it, but also genuinely hurt: "They're just JOKES! I don't know why they're all so afraid of jokes!" He didn't talk about it as though it were a wound to his pride or an insult to Free Speech - he was simply sad about the whole thing.

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