It Is On: Moses vs. Queeg

Slept too late to write a new post. I decided to repost one on Israel, and this is the first one I pulled out. It has been edited, revised, and fortified with new insultainment. Bear in mind that Queeg is just a convenient prop for a more general class of philosophical knucklehead.

As we know, many on the left love Jews. It's Israel they hate. Which, as Dennis Prager points out, is about as logical as saying that you love Italians, but that Italy has no right to exist. However, in the case of Charles the Queeg, there's a slight variation (unless he's done a 180 on this issue as well). That is, he loves Israel. It's Judaism he hates. Is hate too strong a word? I don't think so, not if he's remotely intellectually consistent.

Now, I don't think too many people will accuse Queeg of intellectual consistency, so I guess we'll have to draw out the implications of his stated beliefs for him.

First, it is strictly impossible for one to simultaneously be a reductionistic Darwinist and a religious believer. Please bear in mind that, as always, when I use the word "Darwinist" or "Darwinism," I am referring to natural selection in the scientistic sense, as a broad philosophy with materialist metaphysical assumptions. In this sense, to say that one is a Darwinian is to say that one believes that natural selection alone is man's sufficient reason.

As I have explained many times, belief in evolution is not problematic for the religious believer. In fact, a moment's thought informs you that evolution is a necessary consequence of God's existence, being that the Creator is outside time, whereas creatures are within it. Therefore, anything within time can develop or decay, but can never be unchanging or "eternal." To the extent that things evolve toward their nonlocal archetype -- and human beings are quintessential in this regard -- then that is only because God exists. It cannot be explained on any Darwinist basis. (And it is indeed interesting that the recent discovery of a more ancient human furbear suggests that some present day primates may have devolved from man, so to speak.)

All we ask is that the metaphysical Darwinist draw out the moral and epistemological consequences of his materialist assumptions. Thus, to the extent that everything may be reduced to natural selection, then there is no "point" to human life -- there can be no "true self," let alone a "higher self" and a "lower self" (or inner and outer self), a conception which which is at the basis of all orthodox traditions. Obviously, in the Darwinist paradigm there can be no teleology, no transcendent normality, no culminating point of development, no essence, and no perfection. I would think this would be an uncontroversial statement, something with which we can all agree, even a shrill and spiritually purblind Lizard living in his reinforced bunker beneath the Reino del Ciego errport.

Queeg fails to see that a nation of Darwinist flat-earthlings will not defend itself from the Islamists he once warned us about. Rather, with no transcendent principles animating us, we will eventually go the way of old Europe. For a Darwinist Lizard, anyone who puts his genes on the line to defend a transcendent principle would have to be an idiot. (This argument is forcefully made in Natan Sharansky's new book, Defending Identity; he says that liberty without a transcendent identity will not defend itself, while spiritual identity without liberty is fascism.)

My guess is that the vast majority of our men and women in uniform are animated by Judeo-Christian, not Darwinist, principles. This would be equally true of those who fought for our freedom in the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and World War II. To be intellectually consistent, Queeg would have to say that these people were shills, phonies and frauds. They need to be as courageous as Queeg, and fight for the right to have no transcendent principles to fight for. Admit it: to fight for a God that cannot exist is just plain stupid. And if Darwinism is correct, then God either cannot exist or has nothing to do with our essential being. Indeed, a term like "essential being" is completely meaningless. We truly are just replicating machines, just as Richard Dawkins insists.

In order to be intellectually consistent, Queeg must express as much contempt for Judaism as he does for the Discovery institute, unless he is just ignorant of Jewish metaphysics, which seems likely. It's almost embarrassing to have to remind him of something so elementary, but Judaism teaches that human beings are in the image of the Creator. For the Darwinist, this is pernicious nonsense. Not only is it wrong , it's not even wrong. To the extent that people believe such nonsense, it's only because we have some sort of "religious" gene that makes us believe in sacred cow manure.

Judaism maintains that existence is holy -- or that it is our earthly task to make it so. For a Darwinist, there can be no real qualiity of "holiness" or "the sacred." Again, these are just illusions, tricks of the genes. They can have no basis in reality. In truth, nothing is sacred. Period.

Now, all awakened souls know that awareness of the sacred is one of the keys to comprehending God, as it is one of the "divine modalities" that shines through matter and lends it its metaphysical transparency. I remember when I was younger, camping in Yosemite and being overwhelmed by its majestic beauty. But for a Darwinist, there can be no such thing as transcendent beauty. Indeed, to waste one's time nurturing such illusions probably just compromises one's chances of survival, as a hungry bear might be just behind that tree.

For the Darwinist, thought is merely the meaningless byproduct of the physical brain. In can have no metaphysical certitude and no ultimate significance. But for the Jew, it is a link between man and Spirit, as is Man as such. For the Jew, human thought mirrors the creator's "metacosmic wisdom," on the one hand, and his "intracosmic intelligence" on the other. In other words, there is the "uncreated wisdom" of Torah, and the "word" as embodied in the book of creation itself. For the Lizard who crawls in his intellectual belly, the Torah is just a manmade book of fantasy, while the cosmos is just a random accident with no intrinsic meaning.

For Judaism, existence is a revelation; to a certain extent, it is an externalization of God's interior, which is why we find traces of divine beauty everywhere, and why we have access to Truth and to Virtue, the latter of which is "beauty of soul" and "truth of conduct," so to speak. For the Darwinist Lizard, truth can only be convention, while virtue can only be a social agreement.

Or, if Queeg does believe in absolute truth and morality, I invite him explain how. But you will have no doubt noticed that Queeg only trucks in sneering contempt, ad hominem, and argument from authority. He never fleshes out and explains the basis for his philosophical views. Which doesn't matter, for if he were to attempt to do so in any consistent manner, he would soon discover that he cannot, because it is impossible. He would just look silly trying. You can't just omnipotently delete those aspects of reality that do not fit your paradigm, and then call it "consistency." Well, I suppose you can, but as Gödel taught us, such consistency can only be purchased at the price of completeness.

Here is another example of a nonsense statement to the vertically challenged Lizard encased in matter: "All the light God has given to Israel is hidden in the Torah; the Torah is the crystallization and mysterious permanence of the Sinaitic revelation. On Sinai, the real presence of hokhmah, divine 'wisdom,' appeared before the 'Chosen People': 'Israel penetrated the mystery of hokhmah,' says the Zohar..." So if Queeg wishes to be intellectually consistent, he would again express just as much contempt for Israel as he does for the Discovery Institute, because this is a lie and a fraud perpetrated on generation after generation by rabbinical shills on gullible Jews -- who were indeed "chosen," but by natural selection, just like the rest of us.

For a Darwinist, the Torah cannot be what Judaism says it is, the "static letter" which "serves as the unchanging point of departure for spiritual contemplation of revealed truth." The traditional interpretation, or oral dictrine, "is like a hammer which shatters the stone, thus freeing from it spiritual 'sparks' of hokhmah which dwells within it."

Now, I'm not even Jewish, but I have enough experience of Torah study to know the above statement to be 100% true. But if it is true, then Darwinism can't be. I mean, really. "Sparks of holiness" hidden in a book? Striking a book with a hammer of esoteric doctrine to make the spiritual sparks fly? What utter nonsense. There is no "light" in any book, much less a collection of pre-scientific fairy tales.

What is Man? For the Darwinist, nothing special, just an accident of the genes. This view is obviously 100% at odds with Judaism, for which the mystery of man is central to the Divine-Cosmic drama. In Judaism, Man is both revelation and symbol, which "links the lowest world with the supreme 'self' of all things." Within us, we contain the "superintelligble principle," which breaks out into "ontological wisdom" on the one hand (hokhmah), and "onto-cosmological intelligence" (binah) on the other. This is why we may know the truth of God on the spiritual plane, the truth of man on the psychic plane, and the truth of the cosmos on the material plane. But ultimately it is all One integral -- and simple -- Truth; for it is all a reflection of the Absolute One.

For the Darwinist, there can be no "One," only the many. As such, there can only be a chaotic babel of opinions and tastes, a path from nowhere leading to nothing. While existence is a mystery, it is an "empty mystery," unlike the "full and divinely overflowing" mystery it is for the observant Jew.

Our primary home is the vertical world, and it is strictly impossible to derive it from any purely horizontal world without doing great violence to man -- in fact, annihilating Man as such. It is quite literally a kind of genocide, which is again what is so disturbing about the darkness of LGF. For the first principle of conservatism is that there is a real transcendent order to which man owes his primary allegiance. This is another way of saying that man lives in a vertical world which is the real and enduring world, in contrast to the horizontal world of ceaseless change and mutation. No enduring principles can be derived from that world, at least none that apply to the human station per se.

This downward spiral into scientistic anti-humanism cannot continue indefinitely without eventually hitting bottom and then crashing through to the other side (recall my graph of spiritual space from a few weeks back), thus completing the cosmic inversion, i.e., the Fall. But the very essence of Jewish spiritual practice is the "inversion of the cosmic inversion," so it is again 100% at odds with the foolish beliefs of Liztards.

Inquiring minds want to know: from whence comes the reptilian certainty of the Liztard on matters that far transcend his cramped and earthbound intellect? It comes from the transcendent absolute, only dissipated and "frozen" within the confines of a quasi-animal ego, the latter of which is only the exterior internalized.

For when someone asks if you "believe in Darwinism," let's be honest. They aren't asking if you believe in whatever the theory has been demonstrated to prove -- like a bacterium that learns a new trick. Rather, they are asking if you believe that it provides an all-encompassing explanation for human existence, and ultimately whether or not you are a theist. And to the extent that God exists, then Darwinism quite obviously cannot embody any kind of "total explanation." Not even close. Indeed, it can only be a kind of elaborate lie when it exceeds its rightful bounds, for it becomes a Tree of Death -- death to the intellect, death to objective morality, and death to the very environment in which man's soul flourishes.

When the Darwinist protests that "you don't have to be religious to be moral," know that he is mouthing a pure absurdity, for he is presupposing eternal principles that cannot be explained on any Darwinian basis -- again, because Darwinism only accounts for change of outward form, not the permanence of what not only transcends form but in-forms it to begin with, i.e., transcendent interiority.

Reductionistic Lizards would have us believe that merely "having morals" is somehow synonymous with knowing the Good and acting in conformity with it. All people have morals. The question is, are they Good? And for the last time, it is a strict impossibility that one could ever arrive at the Good through natural selection alone. Frankly, it is an absurd argument that no remotely sophisticated person could take seriously. Again, in this struggle for survival between rabbi and reptile, we only ask that the latter be intellectually consistent in following their first principles to their meshuginna consequences.

(Quoted material taken from The Universal Meaning of the Kabbalah by Leo Schaya.)