There is No God, and He is Obama

First, we bring your attention to a nice rant by Ace of Spades, which relates to all the Voegeling we've been doing around here lately:

"I have long contended that man is a fundamentally religious animal -- and I don't necessarily mean that in a good way -- and that many people who consider themselves above religion are actually quite beneath it...."

"[A]nd, rather than subscribe to a conventional religion in which their desire for transcendence can be more conventionally satisfied, instead channel their religious impulses into areas which are not by nature religious and which by nature must not be religious" (emphases mine, for these passages go to the left's ubiquitous violation of the second commandment, demonstrating that behind ideology is idolatry).

"Our politics now is simply about a god, and I mean the god Obama," AKA "the Unaccomplished One." (To which I might add that he must remain unaccomplished, on pain of becoming particularized in time and stripped of his godhead. You might say that he is our first apophatic president, in that any statement about him cannot possibly reach his transcendence, so we can only say what Obama is not -- and for many on the left, it is sufficient to say that he is not George Bush.)

"Religious hysteria does not require a god. Religious hysteria only requires Dogma & a Devil."

Quite true, and conservatives are in a position to clearly see this, since we are the Devil of the left.

In another sense, you could say that the left has no gods, only demons. The left is not even reactionary, since it never reacts to our actual beliefs, only our suspected -- actually, projected -- motives. And "Reducing another’s thought to its supposed motives prevents us from understanding it" (Don Colacho), thus sealing the left's ignorance. Project and attack, project and attack, in a closed circle. Conservatives simply serve as placemarkers in this absurcular psychodrama.

In another post, Ace says that "Conspiracy theories are the religion of the bitter. It's fundamentally a religious response to confusion, disorder, and disappointment." And since politics is about order, intrapsychic disorder engenders deformed and aberrant politics. (And then the external disorder engenders more psychic disorder, which is how the left keeps its base -- in both senses of the word -- growing.)

About the project-and-attack cycle of the left, PowerLine has a revealing piece called The Dems Rally their Legions of Haters for 2014. I know the credulous LoFos believe this stuff, but is it possible that liberal elites really believe it? I'd like to at least give them credit for being sociopathic manipulators of the LoFos, but who knows? I think Obama might be dumb enough to swallow most of it, but I find it doubtful that Bill Clinton believed his own BS.

In any event, the email demonstrates how our honest wish for clean elections is turned on its head. And no mention at all of the state's real world harassment and suppression of dissent and loyal opposition through the IRS, and the tainted electoral victory the latter helped give to President Asterisk.

Which, by the way, doesn't matter. It's like they say in the Muslim world: if it's true, it's already in the Koran, so why bother with science? Likewise, since god is already in the White House, why bother with honest elections? Either you ratify the divinity, or you're a demon whose vote shouldn't count anyway. Simple as.

Note in the example from PowerLine how the grotesque abuse of language results in the deformation of reality. It's not that words escape them. Rather, words are tortured and summarily executed.

Here is a subtle point by Voegelin, an irony worthy of Eckhart. I don't want to say it's an infallible dogma handed down from the Chair of Petey, but I think most Raccoons will relate.

That is to say, just as leftists are fundamentally religious -- or at least idolatrous -- "Every mystic is in a way 'atheist,' inasmuch as he knows there is a time when symbols" reach a kind of breaking point. For clearly, no container is remotely adequate to contain God, who is by definition uncontainable. The finite cannot circumscribe the infinite, so God is just a name for the nameless, religion a (providential) form for the formless.

I mean, right? This is why, both individually and collectively (i.e., in history), the symbols must be periodically "renewed and recast through recourse to the experiences from which they emerge." To put it in meta-symbolic terms, (n) eventually hardens into (k), at which point one must undergo -- or sopher -- new O --> (n) experiences in order to renew and refresh the exhausted or saturated religious symbology.

As it so happens, I was thinking about this on the way to work yesterday. Clearly there was a time in history when Christian symbolism wasn't remotely problematic for even -- or especially, rather -- the greatest intellects. But one has to be honest, and acknowledge that it clearly doesn't speak in the same direct way to many in the modern world.

Lileks mentioned a typical case the other day, a cranky guy who runs a tech blog but who is a wannabe metaphysician. He inflicted his Deep Thoughts about people who speak in tongues upon his unsuspecting audience of nerds, dweebs, geeks, and schmendricks:

"'We' don’t speak in tongues; religious nutjobs do, and they do it because they believe in superstitious nonsense. I’ll bet my bottom dollar that there is a high correlation between tongue-speakers and climate change deniers and creationist 'science' school curriculum pushers -- people who are doing real and genuine harm to our society and the planet."

Another fine example of the project-and-attack cycle.

I don't think I would be committing the inverse error if I attributed to this genius a radically naive and narrow understanding of science, as it necessarily parallels his n. & n. understanding of religion. As Voegelin writes, "there is nothing wrong with calling physics science, as long as one does not pretend that nothing else is science." The moment one does this, "an ideology has arisen which is called 'scientism.'" And this ideological faux religion requires demons.

Furthermore, the very symbolism of this always-intuited but never empirically provable construct called "universe" is "no more than a demythologized version of the myth of the cosmos." The experience of a cosmos is always something we subjectively participate in, and the experience is not actually containable by any symbol. In other words, you might say that the soul contain the cosmos, not vice versa.