Spiritual Warfare and the Left's Abuse of Language

In the last sector of the penultimate circle of Hell are more counterfeiters: of coins, of words, and of persons. These are related to the three planes of human existence, the physical, the psychic/emotional, and the spiritual.

According to Upton -- and let's give her a big hand, because I'm not sure I'll be able to make it through purgatory without her steady virgilance -- "the impersonators, those who falsify the body, are related to the physical plane." She regards the monetary counterfeiters more symbolically, as relating to the falsification of values and desires, i.e., the psychic plane.

But the worst offenders -- and this has been a theme of ours since the earliest days of the blog -- are "the falsifiers of language, those who pervert meaning itself," and who, as a result, hijack and even blow up the spiritual plane, with all occupants on board.

Such offenses must come -- man being who he is and all -- but woe to the man who commits them in the name of tenure!

In that prehysteric post linked to above is a fine quote by Father Seraphim Rose:

It is corrupting to hear or read the words of men who do not believe in truth. It is yet more corrupting to receive, in place of truth, mere learning and scholarship which, if they are presented as ends in themselves, are no more than parodies of the truth they were meant to serve, no more than a facade behind which there is no substance.

They put a warning on the side of cigarette packages. How about a warning at the entrance to our liberal universities? They force us to watch those ghoulish TV commercials, like the one with the cancer victim breathing through the hole in her neck. Why not scary programs featuring demented, end-stage liberals with grotesque holes in their souls?

Oh, right. MSNBC.

The secular west, because it has lost all contact with the spiritual, is obsessed with the physical -- for example, the First Lady's preoccupation with fat people. It's not complicated. Just put down the fork and get your ass out of the sofa. Oh, and maybe get a life that has some genuine spiritual meaning and joy instead of mere fleeting animal pleasures.

Oh, right. Can't talk about that. Separation of church and plate.

But the Obamas are Christians!

Yeah, right. To plagiaphrase Don Colacho, dialogue between leftists and Christians has become possible ever since the left started to falsify Marx and Christians Christ.

Upton makes the critical point that each level of counterfeiting is successively more "collective," which makes perfect sense. Here again, falsification of language itself would be the most serious offense, because it affects everyone; it distorts "the world-view of an entire culture" (Upton).

Political correctness is just such a falsification, not because it consists of "lies" -- which would be easy enough to correct -- but because it is a much wider assault upon what is even thinkable. To combat this or that individual lie of the left is essentially to hand them a victory, because one is playing on their field of dreams and using their terms of abuse.

It is the work of an instant for the left to magically transform Tea Partiers into racists, or religious people into theocratic fascists, or citizens opposed to Public Suckler Unions into "enemies of the middle class." To even respond is to dignify the argument, for Defeating a fool humiliates us (Don Colacho's Aphorisms).

Either one understands the following, or one does not (from the precogitated bloggerel linked to above):

"The moral and intellectual pathology of the left revolves around its misuse of language. It is not so much that leftist thought consists of lies, as that it is based on a primordial Lie that causes it to enter a parallel looniverse where, even if they say something that is technically true, they do not say it because it is true, which makes all the difference. [Don Colacho: There is no worse foolishness than the truth in the mouth of a fool.]

"The primordial lie is the nullification of the covenant between language and reality, so that language is used for its effect rather than as a tool to convey truth. For the left, good language is effective language, whether it means ridiculously exaggerating the danger of heterosexual AIDS in order to increase funding, brazenly lying about George Bush supposedly lying about WMD, or blaming hurricane Katrina on Bush's environmental policies."

The point is that our present civil war between American classical liberals and the left is spiritual warfare. And the central front of this war is on the field of language. This is a war that the left cannot win, because if they win, they lose, for a human being cannot undermine language -- the Word -- without ceasing to be human. Logocide is suicide. And deicide, of course.

Because of his fidelity to truth and reality, the conservative (not Republican!) is able to clearly enunciate what he believes, without evasions, qualifications, distortions, or name changes: Limited government. Adherence to the Constitution. Rule of law. A strong defense. Traditional morality. Low taxes. Liberty. Individualism. Freedom of choice. Slack.

Conversely, the liberal is only able to discuss what he believes while in the presence of other liberals. Truth only escapes accidentally, such as in the recent NPR flap, or Obama's characterization of American citizens as bitter clingers. They cannot tell us that public sector unions are a scam to force citizens to funnel money to Democrat candidates, or that Obamacare is a trojan hearse for socialized medicine (even though many prominent liberals are on record as saying so).

While looking for something else, I stumbled upon this little gem I'd been saving from Flopping Aces, Liberal To English Translation. Sums things up nicely.

Tenured hellion shoving another human truth down the memory hole.

Counterfeit Theophany and Genuine Theophunny

Enough with the sowers of scandalous schism in the valley of violent vendetta. On to the counterfeiters.

Why counterfeiters? According to Upton, "implicit in this sin is the degradation of knowledge from the sacred to the profane."

And now that I think about it, this sin ought to be a biggie, because of the essential sanctity of Truth from which all truth is derived. In reality, there can be no "profane truth," unless one has a priori profaned oneself and the world with it.

We interrupt this broadbrush for an armor-piercing bullet in from Don Colacho: If one does not believe in God, the only honest alternative is vulgar utilitarianism. The rest is rhetoric.

The word counterfeit has some interesting etymological implications. The Oxford dictionary says that it is derived from the Latin in opposition to + to make.

Thus, we are once again dealing with a kind of perversion of man's deiform creativity. When God creates, It. Is. Good. But when the counterfeiter creates, it is not just worthless, but generates a kind of negative value -- for example, inflation in the case of counterfeit money.

But counterfeiting in every domain creates inflation and negative value. For example, there is both knowledge (k) and its opposite (-k).

Importantly, (-k) isn't just the absence of knowledge, but the active presence of "false knowledge," most notoriously, leftism in all its mixed up guises and dollsies. There is also love (L) and (-L), gnosis (n) and (-n), reality (O) and (Ø), divine energies (↓) and (-↓), etc.

And while I don't have a handy pneumaticon for it, there is also "false" or "minus beauty," which is not mere ugliness, but a terrestrial beauty devoid of goodness, of transcendence, of the noetic Light that shines through true beauty.

Female beauty is one of the most metaphysically transparent phenomena in all of creation, but think of the countless ways it can be perverted by both men and women for purposes of manipulation or domination or titillation or whatever.

Yes, The sensual is the presence of a value in the sensible (Don Colacho).

On the one hand, The unforeseeable grace of an intelligent smile is enough to blast away the layers of tedium which the days deposit. On the other, there is The destructive capacity of the imbecile’s smile (DC).

Either way, The quality of an intelligence depends less on what it understands than on what makes it smile (DC).

Guffah-HA! For verily, the Raccoon's laughty revelations are mighty, they are wise, they are silly!

In Genesis, the Jehovial One provides big LAUGHS to old Abraha-ha-ham. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Jest!

Do you want to know what goes on in the core of the Trinity? I will tell you. In the core of the Trinity, the Father laughs and gives birth to the Son. The Son laughs back at the Father and gives birth to the Spirit. The whole Trinity laughs and gives birth to us (Eckhart).

And When the inferior scholar is told of Tao / He laughs aloud at it. / If it were not laughed at, it would not be sufficient to be Tao (Tao Te Ching).

So anyway, Dante makes reference to a spiritual huckster who claimed to be able to teach people to fly. Not only was he a prototypical Deepak, but a footnote on p. 157 mentions that Deepak's own guru, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, "made the same claim... to teach students how to levitate."

But you will have gnosissed that there is no genuine levity in the new age in general or Deepak in particular. Both are as pre-ironic and un-funny as the most unfunfundamentalist. The only humor in Deepak is strictly unintentional. No wonder he is featured in the deeply unfunny (-F) Love Guru!

That fellow who pretended to teach people to fly, according to Upton, "manifests the sort of spiritual inflation [there's that word again] or hubris that is visible to all, while hidden in his soul was a much more serious transgression, the sin of pseudo-alchemy [-A?], a counterfeit of inner spiritual transformation." Such spiritual con artists generally have a kind of meretricious charisma that draws others into their web of deiceit.

I remember being impressed a number of years ago by something Joseph Chilton Pearce mentioned in one of his books, that culture often provides a "counterfeit model of development" that prevents the real thing. Every counterfeit cultural object or activity is a kind of parasite on something real, so we have counterfeit love, counterfeit sensuality, counterfeit literature, counterfeit art, etc.

And as Deepak and other (-L)ove Gurus farcibly demonstrate, the hardest to attain is the easiest to counterfeit.

What's next, a counterfeit President?

Comedy? Comedy how? What's comedic about it?

Contemporary Liberalism and the Resurrection of the Blood Feud

Eight circles down, one to go. To review, the eighth circle has ten departments that cater to different sins, but one of the sins discussed in Canto XXIX strikes me as a little idiosyncratic to warrant such a heavy punishment: "counterfeiters posing as alchemists."

We'll deal with them in tomorrow's post. But first we need to move past the "sowers of schism," one of whom is a relative of Dante. In life, this fellow was a participant in, and ultimately victim of, a mindless blood feud. Virgil councils Dante to move along and not waste time indulging in pity for this paisano.

If only we could follow Virgil's advice and offer no slack to the worshipers of blood! In the margin I have a little note to myself: Japan-Germany-Islam, but those are only recent maninfestations of a soul-pathology that is planted deep into the heart of man.

This is something Dennis Prager often discusses, i.e., the distinction between those whose values are based upon truth and goodness, vs. those whose values are rooted in blood.

In this regard, we cannot actually consider, say, Nazi Germany, to be an aberration, because it was animated by the ancient mind parasites of blood and soil, which seem to co-arise with man's self-consciousness -- indeed, they seem to be the poisonous fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, upon which the blood-worshipers cannot stop gorging themselves. Truly, it is the satanic eucharist.

We have by no means conquered these mind parasites. The attempt to do so begins with the ancient Israelights, moves on through Christianity, and then has its fullest political expression in the United States, which was explicitly founded upon ideas and values, not blood or soil. Anyone can be an American, so long as they adopt certain values.

At least this used to be the case. For the past century, the atavistic left has been engaging in a rear-guard action designed to drag America back down into the violence, bigotry, and parochialism of blood and kin.

Today they call this diabolical doctrine "multiculturalism," and we are now suffering the consequences of having a president -- provincial and incurious fellow that he is -- whose "post"-modern education succeeded in making him believe that his primitive prejudices are not only normative, but superior to what comes developmentally later.

The proglodyte left was able to accomplish this assault on America by hijacking the civil rights movement and using it as a vehicle not to transcend blood, but to bathe in it. Which is why the left is so obsessed with race.

But it's actually the other way around: those who value blood over ideas have no other respectable vehicle of expression than the modern left. Their values dominate academia (e.g., "black studies," "critical race theory," "Chicano studies," "queer theory" [since they believe homosexuality is in the blood, i.e., genetic]), the MSM, and politics (recall that Clinton wanted a cabinet that "looks like America," not one that thinks like America).

The more Americans are compelled by the state to think in terms of racial categories, the less we are able to think in abstract categories of truth, decency, justice -- or, as Dennis Prager says, the American triumvirate of liberty / e pluribus unum / in God we trust.

And not just any God, of course, but the universal God of Judeo-Christendom. It completely defeats the purpose of America to give one's primary allegiance to some tribal moon god, or to a manmade religion masquerading as science.

In fact, each leg of the American trinity is implicitly related to the others. For example, the Judeo-Christian God is the God of liberty. Other so-called gods are not, most notably, the god of Islam, who is a god of surrender and obedience.

And the doctrine of e pluribus unum -- from many, one -- directly contradicts the doctrine of multiculturalism, which teaches: from one, many. In such an upside-down world, truth must be a secondary concern, which makes it no concern at all. It is much more important for the left to have a "Latina" or female on the Supreme Court than a gifted and impartial jurist who will preserve and protect the political Truth embedded in the Constitution.

But this is a shrill smokescream anyway, because we all understand that the left's hysteria about race and gender is just the rationale for a raw power play. Their "racial pride" does not extend to Thomas Sowell or Clarence Thomas or Walter Williams or Shelby Steele.

This also explains the implicit alliance between Islamists and the international left, because they share the common value of blood. They love the Palestinians, because they are engaged in an endless blood feud against the very people most responsible for delegitimizing blood feuds. No wonder Jews are the most picked on people in history!

Don Colacho: Unless circumstances constrain him, there is no radically leftist Jew. The people that discovered divine absolutism does not make deals with the absolutism of man.

Americans value liberty. The left values equality. What's the difference? "Liberty is the right to be different; equality is a ban on being different" (Don Colacho). The left says: If you're black, then start thinking like one, n#@%*r! Why more blacks aren't offended by the contempt with which they are treated by white liberal elites is a bit puzzling. Identification with the aggressor?

According to Upton, "The principle of the blood feud divides the love of Justice... from its impersonal roots in the metaphysical order. It renders the virtue of Justice interested and personalistic, and thereby perverts it for evil ends" (emphasis mine).

Oh my yes. One way the left does this is by replacing Justice with "social justice," which, because it means nothing, means everything, and vice versa. The left can justify any power grab based upon the pseudo-ideal of "social justice."

Upton makes a more subtle point, that the person who descends into the swamp of blood and race cannot help dividing his own mind against itself, which requires psychological projection in order to maintain a fraudulent sense of psychic wholeness.

Thus, for the left, every "good negro" such as Al Sharpton, must evoke projections into a "bad negro" such as Clarence Thomas. Likewise, the Palestinians cannot love their own children without hating Jewish children. It is a total degradation of the human condition. Me, I couldn't care less if Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson are "black." Much more importantly, they are sinister idiots.

No, knucklehead, it's the opposite of the Berlin Wall. It's not designed to keep good people in, but bad people out.

It Is On: Christ vs. Mohammed

Just kidding. I don't want to be a sower of discord.

But must we be so religiously correct? Mohammed certainly wasn't. Nor was Dante. So let's clear the air between them. No holding back. It's healthy!

For Mohammed, Christians -- the "worshipers of three gods" -- are idolaters: God forbid that He should beget a son!... Those who say: 'The Lord of Mercy has begotten a son,' preach a monstrous falsehood...

And what happens to idolaters? Slay them wherever you find them... Fight against them until idolatry is no more and God's religion reigns supreme.

What, you think he was just kidding around? You know, referring to the "greater jihad," i.e., the struggle against internal demons? Yes, don't murder real Jews. Just kill the ones crawling around inside your head! If only. God's lips to your ear!

So the poet has good news and bad news for Mohammed. The bad news? No virgins for you! The good news? This is not the ninth circle of Hell. Only the eighth.

Let's go to our reporter on the scene. Dante, what do you have for us?

"Thanks, Gagdad. We're here in the eighth circle of Hell, among the sowers of schism and scandal. You'll be surprised to find out who we ran into here, coming up after the break!"

I beheld, / Cloven from chin to where the wind is voided. / Between his legs his entrails hung in coils; / The vitals were exposed to view, and too / That sorry paunch which changes food to filth. / While I stood all absorbed in watching him / He looked at me and stretched his breast apart, / Saying: "Behold how I now split myself! / Behold, how mutilated is Mohammed!"

Gosh. In real life, the Christian author of the book we've been discussing is married to a Sufi. Well, if Carville and Matalin can make it work....

But as you know, some of our best unknown friends are Sufis, so this obviously doesn't apply to them.

According to Upton, the souls here "tried to gain by creating conflicts that other people would have to live with; they believed that peace can be established by exporting war."

The mutilated bodies move in endless circles, which Upton likens to "an addiction to conflict, a failure to reach integration of the soul." "The split torso of Mohammed" suggests "the attempt to make one's way through life by creating and benefitting from conflicts that reach beyond oneself to others, though their original cause lies within one's soul."

The circular movement in Hell is simply a parody of integration, which, oddly enough, reminds me of Gödel. For Gödel proved that any formal system that is consistent will be incomplete, and vice versa. Thus, ironyclad logic proves the insufficiency of any scientistic doctrine, which can only move in an artificial, manmade circle that excludes the greater reality.

Science -- and atheism more generally -- is surely consistent, but at the price of completeness. And the price of incompleteness is Hell, as it were, for what is repressed and denied doesn't simply "disappear." In other words, spiritual defense mechanisms -- i.e., psychic defenses against Spirit -- don't actually eliminate God!

One such defense mechanism is a kind of "drawing back" that stops the materialist from reaching the inevitable conclusions implicit in his first principles. Thus, in the words of Don Colacho, What still protects man in our time is his natural incoherence. That is to say: his spontaneous horror before consequences implicit in principles he admires.

Again, incoherence, dis-integration, incompleteness, hell, Ø.

Don Colacho has many other aphorisms that apply:

--Intelligence should battle without respite against the sclerosis of its findings.

--Everything that can be reduced to a system ends up in the hands of fools.

--Man calls “absurd” what escapes his secret pretensions to omnipotence.

--For the last two centuries ago they have called a “free thinker” the man who believes his prejudices are conclusions.

And here is one Gödel would love: Only he who suggests more than what he expresses can be reread.

This was indeed Gödel's deeper point -- not that we cannot know truth, but that human beings have access to deeper or higher truths that cannot be proved with logic, which is a closed system. Therefore, anything that is true in a self-sufficient way is ipso facto false, again, because it will be incomplete. What is not deiform is deformed.

Atheistic imbeciles often point to the "inconsistency" of the Bible. Well, duh! What they call inconsistency, we call "bubbling over with infinite implications and higher syntheses."

Back to the sowers of schism. Say what you will about the Muslim world, but I detect a decided absence of integration, whether we are talking about lust, or violence, or envy, or hatred. Why?

In the book, I discuss my own theory of how one may assess cultural maturity (pp. 177-180). Short story even shorter, the key variables are integration of the psyche and actualization of one's potential.

To take an obvious example, how possible is it for a Palestinian to understand and integrate his primal hatred, instead of taking it out on Jews? Not very. This is a culture that celebrates and distributes candy upon learning that a Jewish baby just had her throat cut by one of their heroes.

Upton points out that the sinners in this circle of Hell literally have tongues "slit asunder," for "to speak with a forked tongue" results in a "kind of speech" which "is the exact opposite of the effect of a spiritual fable which integrates the scattered psyche by drawing many meanings from one -- as did the preaching of the Apostles on Pentecost."

In Islam, there is the well-known doctrine of taqiyya, which permits them to taqyyoutta both sides of their mouths.

PowerLine cites a recent example. To western dupes, Hamas announces that the are "not responsible for the murder of the five family members from the Itamar settlement.... harming children is not part of Hamas' policy, nor is it the policy of the resistance factions."

But for the Arab Muslim world, the message is rather different: "Five Zionist usurpers were killed the morning of Saturday, 12 March 2011, in a knife-stabbing carried out by a Palestinian in the usurper (settlement) of Itamar east of the city of Nablus."

Why not just announce what you believe, as conservatives do? You will have noticed that we don't have to keep changing our name as soon as the reality of what we stand for taints it. In contrast, lying is and must be intrinsic to the left -- which is why, for example, NPR is in trouble for accidentally speaking the truth to a wider audience outside their little closed circle of affluent white liberals.

The godless are always disintegrated and closed to reality -- as are the godful who fail to integrate is and ought, horizontal and vertical, heaven and earth. Now, if they could just keep it to themselves instead of inducting us into their pneumadrama...

It's just a flesh wound!

Incarnating the AntiWord

Is it getting hot in here, or are we getting close to the center of Hell? We haven't yet bumped into any religious founders -- that will have to wait until the next canto -- but I do see a Pope up ahead, in the rear-view mirror.

Why, it's Pope Boniface, who does indeed have the insolent mouth of a maliface criminal. What did he do to get here?

Probably not much. If you're Pope, the standards should be higher, should they not? I don't want to go to a doctor who knows no more about medicine than I do.

The same goes for a doctor of the soul. But it's very tricky when you institutionalize these things. There are inevitably a few rotten apostles in the barrel. And it's no less tricky if you don't institutionalize the ordainment of hOly men, because then you end in a cult o' vultures or deepack o' jackals.

Come to think of it, it really reminds me of psychology. I am a "licensed clinical psychologist." As such, I can assure you that the title is absolutely meaningless. It means precisely nothing. It implies no skill, no talent, no gift, no special knowledge, no intellect, no expertise, no wisdom. The difference between a good and bad psychologist is more or less infinite, even though they have the same coarse crudential.

Indeed, quite often it implies just the opposite of wisdom and good sense, for there is no indoctrination like the indoctrination of the educated. Since they move in herds, it's easy to corral them.

It's not just psychology, but the social sciences in general. Again, there is more wisdom in one of Don Colacho's aphorisms than in whole university departments, which is not surprising, since these subversive little depth charges generally teach the opposite of what is taught in a typical graduate school.

Example?

Okay. The psychologist dwells in the slums of the soul, just as the sociologist dwells on the outskirts of society. (1)

The idea of “the free development of personality” seems admirable as long as one does not meet an individual whose personality has developed freely. (2)

Poverty is the only barrier to the throng of vulgarities that whinny inside souls. (3)

He who understands least is he who he stubbornly insists on understanding more than can be understood. (4)

Our maturity must re-conquer its lucidity daily. (5)

How can one claim to be a psychologist and not understand the distinction between soul and psyche (1), or the proper uses of freedom (2), or the nature of sin (3), or the limits of human knowledge (4), or the proper goal of the human maturational process (5)?

Forget any one of these, and you have fallen into a parallel looniverse of tenured nonsense. You are so far from being a nuisance Coonical Pslackologist that I can't even smell you from here.

Back to Boniface. How did he get here? I'm not sure if we can trust Dante, since he clearly has a vendetta against the man, and I certainly know nothing about him.

Says here that "Boniface, for Dante, is personal and public enemy number one.... Dante now settles his score with Boniface in the Divine Comedy by damning the pope even before his death in 1303 (the journey takes place in 1300)."

Let's let wikipedia sort it out.

This doesn't look good. There were rumors that he pressured the previous Pope -- a saintly man -- to resign, and "One of his first acts as pontiff was to imprison his predecessor in the Castle of Fumone." He "put forward some of the strongest claims to temporal, as well as spiritual, power of any Pope, and constantly involved himself with foreign affairs."

Uh oh. His chief minister denounced him as "a heretical criminal (and practitioner of sodomy)," and "There were rumors he had died of suicide from 'gnawing through his own arm' and bashing his skull into a wall."

Well, who knows? The point is that if he were guilty of such acts, Dante is showing us the appropriate punishment.

For Dante, one of the worst sins allegedly committed by Boniface was to preemptively absolve a man of sin -- in other words, to forgive him of a sin he was about to commit for his own benefit.

Today we refer to it as "teaching children self esteem" for doing both nothing and anything. No one has more self-esteem than the criminal or the leftist who boldly believes he is entitled to your stuff.

Boniface's "evil counselor," Guido da Montefeltro, is in Canto XXVII, while Boniface himself is first referred to back in Canto XIX, where we are told that he will reside in another precinct of the eighth circle for "taking by guile" and violating the "Lovely Lady," i.e., the Church.

Can't get much worse than that. If the Church is the temporal prolongation of Mary, where the eternal Word is ceaselessly conceived and given birth in the ground of the soul, then to violate Her is to poison the pneumacosmic economy at the very root. It is rape, it is incest, it is murder, and it is suicide, all rolled into one.

Which reminds us of another aphorism: What is thought against the Church, unless it is thought from within the Church, lacks interest.