Slack Liberation Theology and the Reign of the Anti-Bob

How time flies! It's already Antichrist Saturday. However, I think I'll change the name, since that one is too loaded, and bound to be misunderstood by all but our most fanatical readers. Therefore, we'll use the term anti-Bob to designate the Odious one who wishes to misappropriate our slack and reduce us to serfs of his levy-athon state. Instead of a nation of resourceful and individualistic rascals in charge of our own slack, the anti-Bob would turn us into a grey nation of pathetic sponge Bobs and splenetic bland beasts. Obama is the quintessential Slack Liberation Theologist, as he is all about liberating us from our precious, God-given slack.

But when the slackless have enviously confiscated all of the slack from the productive members of society, there is no slack left for anyone but the super-wealthy. Look at the present situation, in which the anti-Bob is even plundering the slack of future generations (at least the ones who will not be aborted, abortion being the ultimate in slack theft) in order to give a kind of "false slack" to his slack-jawed and open-handed mytho-flockers.

But any serious slackonomist knows that this will fail, as true slack can never be created or conferred in this manner. Our founding subgenii knew that our slack was a divine birthright, and that the state could not grant it, only protect it. The problem inevitably faced by the left is that eventually there is no more slack left to steal. Then, instead of being the beacon of slack for the world, we will be just like any other slackless hive of leftist rabble, climbing over each other like animals to fight over the few crumbs of slack granted by the state.

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It was like watching people letting themselves be hypnotized for the greater glory not of Christ but of men. It was like watching a generation willing to continue their enslavement to a self-imposed definition of inferiority rather than rise up in the liberation of truth faith and equality. I saw not a hunger for the glory of God, but a thirsting after the glory of a race to the detriment of all others. How weak, I thought, and how shameful. A Christ triumphant would drive these race hustlers from His temple. --Vanderleun @ American Digest

Yesterday I mentioned that one of the reasons the left gives Obama a pass on his membership in a religious hate cult is the soft bigotry of low or no expectations for blacks. Of course they hate us. Of course they believe crazy things. Of course they seek solace in bizarre conspiracy theories.

However, another big reason is that the left doesn't take religion seriously except for any version of "conservative" Christianity, which it takes as a serious evil. All other religions are simply harmless or neutral, no matter how harmful, Obama's Trinity Church being a quintessential example. Spengler quotes James Cone, one of its most prominent "theologians":

"Black theology refuses to accept a God who is not identified totally with the goals of the black community. If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him. The task of black theology is to kill Gods who do not belong to the black community.... Black theology will accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy. What we need is the divine love as expressed in Black Power, which is the power of black people to destroy their oppressors here and now by any means at their disposal. Unless God is participating in this holy activity, we must reject his love."

Spengler notes that in his recent defense of Rev. Wright, Obama made reference to the "academic prominence" of Black Liberation Theology -- which, translated, means the indulgence by white leftist intellectuals of this kind of abject kookery. Ironically, Obama's "faith in the white establishment is touching; [Wright] honestly cannot understand why the white reporters at Fox News are bothering him when the University of Chicago and the Union Theological Seminary have put their stamp of approval on black liberation theology."

Of course, white leftists do not put their stamp of approval on Black Liberation Theology because it is theology, but because it is Black, but more to the point, Marxist.

[Brief update: just yesterday I read a passage by Balthasar, who raised a point that I have discussed in the past, that Marxism represents a kind of radically upside-down and debased version of Judaism -- which would explain why, in the history of leftism, disaffected and sometimes frankly anti-semitic Jews have always played such a prominent role (think of Noam Chomsky, George Soros, Howard Zinn, Michael Lerner, etc.). It's just a brief footnote, but he reminds us of how any "liberation theology" is rooted in a utopian messianism, in which the object of hope is fully immamentized. In true theology, the messiah is outside space and time, even while drawing us toward him.

But the false messianism of the left takes the Jewish idea of the messiah, and politicizes it. This creates a "radical eschatology," in which it is believed that our existential alienation can be remedied by overturning the present order. This is why the left is always so reactionary, since they inevitably convert perennial existential / ontological / spiritual problems into political ones. In turn, they will always be attracted to false messiahs and anti-Bobs, whereas the spiritually normal person will be immune to the attraction. There are no political solutions to spiritual problems, whereas there is usually a spiritual solution to most politicized problems.]

All valid theology has to do with systematic distinctions between ego and Self on the one hand, and reality and illusion on the other. Ego is to illusion as Self is to reality. Human beings are uniquely and providentially situated in the cosmos so as to be naturally (horizontally) idolatrous but supernaturally (vertically) -- or "transnaturally" -- oriented to the Absolute. This is just another way of saying that human beings are mirrors of the Absolute, and potentially contain within themselves the entire scale of being, the whole existentialada.

For example, Schuon notes that the great Christian virtues, e.g., charity, humility, poverty, and childlikeness, have their final end in the transcendent Self, or in Christian terms, the nous. Each of these virtues represents a negation "of that ontological inflation which is the ego." Practice of them helps soften and dissolve this existential infarct that clogs up the arteries of being. Likewise, Christ represents "the Self holding out a hand to 'me'; man must lose his life, the life of the ego, in order to keep it, the life of the Self."

Black Liberation Theology precisely turns the cosmos upside down in the manner of all materialists -- which is another reason why it is embraced by left wing materialists. For it promises not any kind of universal transcendence of the ego, but a particular fulfillment of its demands for a "chosen" (in the pernicious, non-Judaic sense) people: "Black theology refuses to accept a God who is not identified totally with the goals of the black community." Here the "black community" is analogous to the rebellious ego, which makes its own intrinsically heretical demands upon God: "If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him."

Shelby Steele writes of Obama that "a little race hatred seemed a small price to pay for a more secure racial identity," and that his tacit endorsement of "a mindless indulgence in a rhetorical anti-Americanism" represents "a way of bonding and of asserting one's blackness." Again, the source and outcome of this need are ego insecurity and "hardening," not spiritual aspiration and transcendence.

In genuine theology it is understood that "the world" -- and by extension, your very life -- are "on fire," so to speak. This is how many of Jesus' most extreme statements are to be taken -- as urgent calls to get a clue about the eternal order of existence, and to do something about it before it is too late. I would say "obviously," but I guess it's not, that Jesus was not referring to the political order of the world. Rather, he was speaking to Man as such about Existence as such -- not to this or that man in this or that situation, but about the way things always are for man as he always is.

But as Vanderleun notes in his essay, it's easy to confuse the manacles we forge for ourselves with the ones we imagine are placed upon us by others, and then rail against the others as a substitute for the universal call to self-betterment and transcendence. For as Schuon writes, "the man who does not know that existence is an immense brazier has no imperative reason for wanting to get out of it" -- which is why the beginning of wisdom is the awe of God, not the hatred of white people, or Rush Limbaugh, or "neo-cons," the latter attitude only plunging those who embrace it deeper into the flames.

I thought, watching these sermons, these crazed rants spouted in the name of God, "Don't they know.... Can't they see... They're not worshipping God or Christ, they are worshipping men.... racist men.... the very thing their forefathers suffered under and fought to get free of... and now they're back in the same place. --American Digest

Don't fwy off with my swack, Mr. Pwesident! It's not yours.