Resolved: The Left is Satanic

As mentioned in a comment yesterday, this, from the Washington Post, is beautiful in its upside-downedness: "The Satan of Modern Satanism is a metaphorical icon for Enlightenment values."

In other words, what we call satanic is what they call enlightened. "We" -- not you, Jethro, the enlightened -- "embrace a large diversity of individuals from a wide spectrum of political and cultural backgrounds --"

Okay, stop right there. I think I'm gonna hurl. Do you really believe this? Or does what you call satanism have the effect of completely foreclosing self-awareness? You just said that people with whom you disagree are crass and superstitious tribal theocrats. I don't feel very embraced.

"... but we’re all unified by our respect for individual rights and pluralism. It is axiomatic within [progressive] Satanism that individuals must be judged for their own actions and for their own merits."

If that's the case, then ur doin it rong.

This reminds me of how modern tyrannies always describe themselves as "democratic" or as "republics": during the Cold War there was the (East) German Democratic Republic and the Democratic Republic of (North) Vietnam. Now there is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. The Islamic Republic of Iran. The People's Republic of China. Each as frighteningly diverse as our contemporary left.

It is axiomatic "that individuals must be judged for their own actions and for their own merits." That's a coincidence. That's axiomatic for us too. Someone must be interfering with the implementation of this broadminded and magnanimous principle. I wonder who it could be?

"Slavery in the United States was traditionally -- and rather credibly, from a theological perspective -- justified on scriptural grounds."

Er, no. It was never credibly justified on scriptural grounds, but rather, rationalized on that basis in order to attempt an end run around a Declaration of Independence animated by the Christian principle that all men are created equal.

Prior to this, no one had to justify slavery on any basis. Rather, it was self-evident that the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. In a word, a world ruled by power (or the metacosmic left, if you prefer). But once God incarnates as man, man is seen in a new light, even if it takes centuries to be seen by people living in Rio Linda.

Note also that southern slavery was not a creature of theology, but of the state. Democrats were and always have been statists. Jim Crow was enforced by law. But in the US, the purpose of positive law is to protect natural rights. We have a natural right to be free. Therefore, Democrats were lawless then, just as they are lawless today. Have you ever heard of a Republican riot? Of course not. That's what Democrats do.

The above might sound irrelevant to our discussion of the cosmic axioms of Thomas, but the opposite is true. As mentioned a few posts back, truth is truth. Thus you have three options: conform yourself to it; rebel against it; or invert it.

The left chooses option three, as per the editorial above. This is why they "ironically" accept the mantle of satanism, as Satan was not only the first rebel against a "tyrannical" God, but he attempts to build a "counter-kingdom," so to speak, based upon an inversion of truth.

For example, in reality, the left utterly rejects the principle of merit. But like a North Korea that pretends to be democratic, the left pretends to want universal standards for all.

If that were the case, then Elizabeth Warren wouldn't pretend to be an Indian and Hillary Clinton wouldn't pretend to be a woman. We wouldn't have to suffer with "wise Latinas" on the Supreme Court, or punish Asian guys named Robert Lee. Certainly we wouldn't frame a cartoonish indictment against an entire race by branding it "privileged." The Obama White House would honor the bust of Winston Churchill instead of dishonoring itself with pestilent creatures such as Al Sharpton.

The key point to remember is that satanism -- the real kind -- always involves inversion: of truth, of virtue, of beauty. It is why ESPN can honor the "courage" of Bruce Jenner for taking his sexual identity confusion to the extreme, or why NFL players can denigrate the only country in the world where they would be so richly rewarded, and which has the most affluent black population of any nation. Inversion.

I wonder if Thomas says anything directly about it? Let's see here...

Nah, let's just continue page by page. In so doing, a deeper truth will emerge; or better, a vision of a properly ordered and bright-side up cosmos.

Now, at the top of this cosmos is God; or rather, God is the name we give for this top. This top is necessary and therefore eternal. It not only Is, but cannot not be. Conversely, We Are (thanks to I AM), but might not have been. Therefore, we are dependent (at least vertically) upon necessary being.

How do finite beings orient themselves to a necessary being that is infinite and eternal? Long story short, via the mode of faith. Faith is what makes the leap from finitude to infinitude. Furthermore -- and this is important -- faith is already a tacit foreknowledge of its object. Faith not only exists because its object does, but is a kind of prolongation of the object -- or of its energies (i.e., grace).

So, as Thomas says, the "ordering of the intellect to infinity would be vain and senseless if there were no infinite object of knowledge." But the infinite is the necessary ground of the finite, just as eternity is the ground of time.

Thus, "although the human reason is unable perfectly to comprehend what lies beyond its limits, nevertheless it acquires much perfection for itself if it, at least in some way, perceives by faith."

Put conversely, if you are devoid of faith, then you will be vulnerable to a kind of systematic stupidity, because you will fill this space with your own finite knowledge and mistake it for (or elevate it to) God. From a purely metaphysical standpoint, God is no-thing. Jumping ahead a bit, Thomas says that "This is the final human knowledge of God: to know that we do not know God."

But there is intermediate (cataphatic) knowledge short of the final (apophatic) un-knowing, for "God is one in reality but multiple according to our minds; we know him in as many ways as created things represent him." And God is represented quintessentially in the human person -- which explains the enigma of how each human being can be unique.

In other words -- and this is a self-evident truth -- man is one because God is. This is not in reference to the oneness of human nature, but rather, the opposite: the unrepeatable oneness of each individual. We are not ants, despite the left's project to deny our uniqueness and lump us into categories such as race, gender, class, etc. To the extent that you force the latter upon individuals, then you are indeed doing Satan's heavy lifting.

So we rate the Washington Post's editorial Meta-Ironically True.

The Final Happiness of Man and the Ultimate Stupidity of the Left

Time only for a rapid-fire speedpost:

Bottom line for today -- and for all time: the final happiness of man consists in this -- that in his soul is reflected the order of the whole universe.

Sounds nice. But is this even possible?

Yes. We're talking about the order or structure, not necessarily the content. For It is said that the soul is in a certain sense all things, because it is created to know all things.

Again, there is nothing in the world that is proportionate to the soul and its potential to know; if it exists, then we can damn well know it (because existence and intelligibility are synonymous terms, like being and truth). Nothing in the world can explain that which understands and thereby transcends the world.

Atheists like to accuse believers of anti-intellectualism, but the reality is precisely the opposite. Well, not exactly; for we are opposed to mere intellectualism, which is to the intellect what rationalism is to reason, or pørn to eros. And it is no doubt the case that most people do not approach religion primarily via the intellect.

Nevertheless, we are the ones who push the intellect to the farthest reaches, whereas the atheist -- if he takes a moment to think about it -- will notice that he has no grounding whatsoever for the intellect, and therefore no basis to even trust it. Certainly he will not accede to the gnotion that the soul is all things, even though there is no principle in his philosophy that permits him to make such a sweeping assertion -- about all things, no less!

To "understand" something means to know its causes. God, of course is the first (vertical) cause of the universe -- or, prior to that, of existence itself. What does the atheist imagine is the cause of existence? Whatever it is, it represents the wrong answer and therefor a primordial failure to launch. This is a multiple choice test with only two possible answers.

Recall that man is always necessarily situated between O and Ø. This is because intellectual natures have a greater affinity to the whole than other beings. Here Thomas is not referring to special eggheads but to man as such, who is characterized by Reason. It is because of Reason that we can move closer to or more distant from Ø.

Thus, it is critical to bear in mind that the intellect cuts both ways. There are numberless counterfeit forms of intellection, which may be lumped under the rubric ideology. Ideology is the religion of the tenured, for it pretends to comprehend the totality -- the whole -- while undermining any possible basis for comprehension at all. Ideology is a kind of total stupidity that seals itself in a systematic and applied ignorance.

This is because, as Thomas says, A devil knows the nature of human thought better than man does, so it is quite easy for him to hijack the machinery of the mind and soul. Or maybe you've never been to college. Or read the NY Times.

Ideology confuses theory with perception, such that the mind perverted by it can perceive only what the ideology permits him to see. Taken to its logical endpoint, the ideology results in seeing, say, an Asian sportscaster named Robert Lee and thinking at once of a Confederate general. In other words, a normal person just sees Robert Lee the Asian sportscaster. In fact, not even Asian. Just a sportscaster.

But that's naive. The ideology permits one to see far beneath the surface, to the very essence of reality. And that essence always involves victims and oppressors.

So, ideology is omniscience. Only in reverse. And upside-down. It is knowing nothing. Forever. AKA hell.

White Privilege and Free Will

I never watch CNN -- I prefer MSNBC for high-spirited liberal lunacy -- but I happened to have CNN on when Trump finished his speech last night in Arizona. On comes the bewildered face of CNN anchor Don Lemon, who at first seemed a little hesitant from all the triggering. Then he says of the president:

"He’s unhinged. It’s embarrassing." The speech was "without thought," "without reason," "devoid of fact," and "devoid of wisdom." "There was no gravitas. There was no sanity there. He was like a child blaming a sibling on something else" (sic).

Let's see: unhinged, embarrassing, without thought, reason, fact, or wisdom, lacking in gravitas, and prone to externalizing blame. CNN! Which is just a metonym for the left.

Isn't projection interesting? It's phenomena like this that first got me interested in psychology. My favorite subject was always psychopathology: there are so many interesting ways for the mind to go off the rails.

In fact, one reason why psychology has become so shallow and boring is that so much fascinating deviance and pathology has been normalized. Indeed, it is celebrated.

We'll get back to Thomas in a couple of days. I only have a little time this morning, but I'm reading an excellent book on the pathologies of the left, a collection of essays by Kenneth Minogue called Liberty and its Enemies.

Some of the essays were published as long ago as 1961, but Minogue clearly saw what was coming. He accurately prognosticated the death spiral of liberalism due to its being hijacked by the left -- that "the era of classic liberalism was an interim between the old monarchical orders and the emergence of a new, threatening age of minute bureaucratic regulation" (from the introduction).

It's sobering to realize that liberalism is over, but I don't see it coming back. Yes, we can preserve little islands and outposts of resistance, but it seems to me that the culture at large is lost. European culture certainly is, but they're just the leading edge of the disease process.

Nevertheless, to paraphrase the poet, "we fight to keep something alive because it is worth keeping alive, not because we expect a final victory." So be a happy warrior and just keep ridiculing these assouls until ridicule is finally outlawed.

The death of liberalism only shows that you can drive human nature out with a pitchfork, but it always comes roaring back. And human nature is, unfortunately, drawn more to security then freedom. Given a choice, the inferior man -- and certainly the horde -- will always choose the latter. It is the main reason why the left wants open borders: in order to import hordes of inferior men who don't want freedom, but rather, freedom from freedom. Or, they want to feel "free" while being dependent. That's the best. I remember it well. I think being 17 years old was the Best Year Ever.

(BTW, the reference to inferior men has nothing to do with race or ethnicity, but is just a fact -- as the president rightly says, "they're not sending they're best." Furthermore, his suggestion that immigration policy should revolve around our needs was met with the usual howls from the usual suspects. Rather, immigration policy should be driven by the left's need for fresh victims.)

Classical Marxism divided the world into economic classes. As such, the individual not only disappears, but his being is determined by economic factors. Yesterday we spoke of the distinction between rebellion and inversion. Marxism is a cosmic inversion, because it places existence (economic class) above essence (the unique individual).

Contemporary leftism is just an iteration of this perversion; instead of being solely determined by economic class, people are determined by their race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. If you are white, you have White Privilege. If you are black, you are an oppressed victim. Again, you are determined by the group to which you belong. Not only is freedom eliminated, but free will.

But not so fast! Notice the sleight of hand: authorized victims of the left do not have free will. Rather, they are wholly conditioned by circumstances and "root causes," so It's Not Their Fault. Not so for beneficiaries of White Privilege: they not only have free will, but a malevolent free will that creates and oppresses victims.

Thus, only white people have free will. Hey, don't blame me. I'm not the racist. The left is.

As Minogue says -- in 1961 -- "The delinquency of victims is an index of the extent of their suffering." Notice how the president got in trouble over just this question: Antifa and BLM are violent thugs, but their thuggery is only a measure of their suffering and victimhood. Not so white supremacists: they freely choose their evil.

Well, which is it? "a logically consistent environmentalism" effaces the distinction: "either we are all the products of our environment, or we are not. Similarly, the rich are free to mend their ways," while the poor aren't. Never mind that the majority do. They're just the millions of exceptions that prove the rule.

So, like the president, I condemn both sides for choosing evil.

But as Obama's spiritual mentor once said, the white man's greed rules a world in need. This is another way of saying that people without free will are oppressed by people with it.

The Vector of Reality and the Church of Non-Being

This book of Thomas's conclusions dressed as axioms consists almost entirely of things humans are entitled to know, by virtue of being human (and in order to become fully human!).

And yet, if I'm not mistaken, most human beings don't want to know them, or at least don't care. Many humans, upon hearing them, would reject them outright. That's just G3AOA (Genesis 3 All Over Again).

Therefore, curiously, it is as if an entitlement -- a gift -- is treated as a burden or nuisance. Then it's as if you have to compel people to believe what people most want to know -- analogous, say, to forcing sailors to consume citrus in order to avoid scurvy. But I don't want to eat an orange! Fine. Die then. But I don't want to know about the First Cause! Fine. Be an idiot then. Go to hell in a handbasket of mind parasites and tenured willfulness.

Not only do human beings want to know these things deep down -- it's how we're built -- but this is the very purpose of having an intellect. Why do people think they have an intelligence that is so disproportionate to anything in the world? For no reason at all? Ultimately, the only "object" proportionate to the human subject is God.

I'm not complaining, mind you. Just warming up.

Let's lift off where we packed up yesterday. This one is worth repeating, because it's so fundamental:

The further a being is distant from that which is Being of itself, namely God, the nearer it is to nothingness.

Again: man is always situated between O and Ø. However, he is -- obviously -- the only thing in all of creation capable of movement within that space. Everything else -- from angels to amoebas -- occupies a single plane. But man -- miraculously -- has freedom of movement in this space, which is none other than free will.

(Yesterday I read that every year the earth falls about 15 centimeters further away from the sun. A sin against Apollo! But that's involuntary, so Not Guilty.)

However, orthoparadoxically, man is only really free when he is moving toward truth, light, virtue, beauty, etc.: in the orbit of O.

To the extent that he seeks and moves toward Ø, then he is not only unfree, but a "slave of sin," so to speak. We will no doubt have more to say about this as we proceed. For now, I'm just going to move along page by page, and blog whatever pops into my noggin.

By the way, many moderns object to the word "sin," and I don't entirely blame them. Sometimes idiots saturate a perfectly fine word, as in how the left has ruined the beautiful word "liberal." For me, sin isn't an underlying reality -- in fact, it has no reality at all -- but rather, the effect of movement toward Ø. Call it what you want, but the more passionate and determined the movement, the more lost the sinner.

Next: Good and true and being are one and the same thing in reality, but in the mind they are distinguished from each other.

Precisely. This goes to exactly what I just said a few paragraphs above about movement toward truth, light, virtue, and beauty. We have different names for these, but they all emanate from the same source, and the closer one moves toward the source, the more they converge.

Recall what I just said about sin having no reality. Well, Evil consists in not-being, so there you are. But sin-ing (the verb) consists in movement, again, movement toward the nothingness of Ø. God is Being, and all that is implied in this. Evil is measured in distance from Being, or non-Being.

Thus, Evil arises through some particular thing lacking, but good arises only from a whole and integral cause. Which is why evil is at once impermissible and inevitable (or ineveateapple, as Petey says).

Looked at this way, the creation as such is Good, just as God says it is in Genesis. Nevertheless, it is not God, so draw your own conclusions. As the Man himself says, "Why do you call me good? No one is good -- except God alone."

Thus, could it be that creation has a kind of crisscross pattern of Being and Not-Being? I don't know. We'll come back to that one.

Here is a nonlocal point where Christianity and eastern religions converge: Sin does not occur in the will without some ignorance in the intellect. Christians tend to focus on the act, whereas eastern approaches focus on the Bad Idea -- the cosmic ignorance -- behind all the sophering.

For example, the aim of yoga is to "become united with the Godhead, the Reality which underlies this apparent, ephemeral universe." Yoga is simply movement toward O by any means necessary, e.g., jnana, raja, bhakti, hatha, etc. Different yokes for different folks -- although Jesus's is easier than trying to do it oneself.

Here again, this one reflects what was said above about freedom and O: To will evil is neither freedom nor a part of freedom. Or course it "feels" free, but it is really a kind of reactionary rebellion; at the extreme -- as with the contemporary left -- if becomes outright inversion.

I'm sure we'll have more to say about this as we go along, but the left worships at the altar of Ø, which is where mere error transitions to outright satanism.

You will have noticed that such persons are no longer susceptible to correction. They have given themselves over to Ø with all their hearts, minds, and strength. This is the world of Fake News, Fake Degrees, and Fake Culture, all mutually supporting one another. It is Darkness Visible -- more visible every day.

We do not strive toward evil by tending towards anything but by turning away from something. From what, for example, is the New York Times fleeing?

That was rhetorical.

Just know that Judgment must not be passed on things according to the opinion of the wicked, but according to that of the good, just as in matters of taste, judgment must not be according to the opinion of the sick, but according to that of the healthy.

But who is wicked, and who is sick? Asked Pilate. Asked the Times.

Now, believe it or not, Everything evil is rooted in some good, and everything false in some truth. It's how and why seduction works. Look at Antifa: it is good to be against fascism, right? Nevertheless, Antifa is evil. Likewise, Stalin fought Hitler, but that hardly made him good. Rather, the good he did served as a shield from the great Evil he Was.

And for nearly a third of WWII, there was an alliance between these supposedly "opposite, though similar, barbarisms of Nazidom and Bolshevism" (Churchill).

We can say the same of the twin barbarisms of white supremacism and Antifa. Even after Germany invaded the USSR, Churchill pulled no punches: "The Nazi regime is indistinguishable from the worst features of Communism." The latter "excels all forms of human wickedness in the efficiency of its cruelty and ferocious aggression." Nevertheless, Churchill was spiritually mature enough to know that it sometimes takes a demon to defeat a demon.

Unfortunately, one of the demons ended up seducing Roosevelt, but that's a story for a different post. Suffice to to say that any idiot can commit evil. But in the words of the Aphorist, The Devil can achieve nothing great without the careless collaboration of the virtues.

Staring at the Nonlocal Sun is Bad for the Health of Your Ego

Are you bored of the eclipse yet? Even my son asked, "What's the big deal? There's a sunset every evening." And he's no cynic. Just group-trance resistant.

Well, at least the media are momentarily hysterical about something other than Trump.

The sun is such a primordial symbol of divinity, it must resonate in a particularly intense way among the spiritually obtuse and/or untutored. I'm sure you've read stories of how eclipses affected premodern people. I just looked it up, and we don't actually have to go back in time. For example, here's a laughty sage who explains why eating food during a lunar eclipse is harmful.

But solar eclipses are that much more dangerous. For example, 4,000 years ago a couple of proto-pundits were beheaded for failing to notify the king of a forthcoming eclipse. If only we could do the same to pundits who failed to predict the cosmic catastrophe of Trump.

The general consensus seems to have been that a demon or monster was attacking and robbing the trembling horde of the central principle that orders and illuminates their primitive cosmos. In other words, Trump Derangement by another name.

Schuon has some pertinent things to say about the symbolism of the sun:

To say that the sun is God is false to the extent it implies that "God is the sun"; but it is equally false to pretend that the sun is only an incandescent mass and absolutely nothing else, for this would be to cut it off from its divine Cause; it would be to deny that that the effect is always something of the Cause.

The point is that for the great majority of human history, the sun was regarded as a god. But before you dismiss this as kooky talk, consider the adequacy of the symbol for a preliterate people. It is as if the sun wordlessly conveys a number of perennial metaphysical principles, for example, "luminosity, heat, central position, and immutability in relation to the planets" -- or the light of intelligence, the warmth of emotion, the centrality of the Absolute, and the infinitude of its benevolent grace. We might say that helio-centrism is theo-centrism v.1.

Let's return briefly to the subject of language abuse. It cannot be sufficiently belabored that this is what the left does. Remember Jesus' crack about how Satan is a liar from the beginning, and that "whenever he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies?" That's the left; or rather, the left is that.

Please note that I do not say this polemically or bobnoxiously. Rather, I say it literally. Later in the post -- or maybe tomorrow -- I will explain why this must be the case, for God gives us the choice between God or nothing, O or Ø, and on that choice rests everything else. Choose the latter and you have chosen to live in a permanent solar eclipse. You are officially a lunatic, someone who reflects light but imagines it comes from within.

"Man's chief nourishment," writes Pieper, "is truth.... Anyone who wishes to live a truly human life must feed on truth." Which is theophagia, or eating God.

Just this weekend I was feeding on a particularly rich source of truth, in the form of some bon bons from the pen of St. Thomas. Actually, I read it through twice, but even then, it's not "digestible" in the usual way, for this is not "information" per se, but more like spiritual pneutriants -- or better, enzymes -- that catalyze vertical recollection. As Pieper says in the preface, they "should be absorbed thoughtfully again and again; in this way the reader will kindle his own thinking."

I was going to present some of these pregnant thoughtlets "without comment," but they inevitably kindle my own thinking. They are naturally -- or supernaturally -- fertile.

Pieper mentions that Thomas combines order and mystery: there is "the clear and intelligible building up of reality, as well as the doctrine which reflects that reality." But this order is everywhere "interwoven and crossed by mystery." Therefore, in a note to myself, I added that the cosmic area rug is a tapestry of mystery and intelligibility, each necessarily flowing from the fact of Creation.

In other words, if the world were not created, it would be unintelligible and not even mysterious. As we've mentioned before, the world is only intelligible to us because of God, but it as also never completely intelligible for the same reason. Simple as. What we know is always surrounded by and even steeped in Mystery. You might say Left Brain Right Brain. No matter what the former knows, the latter imbues it with a Mystery that cannot be eliminated short of a devastating stroke or soul-deadening tenure.

"Everything eternal is necessary."

Right. Therefore, everything necessary is eternal. Man can never contain the eternal, but he can certainly know the necessary, and thereby touch the eternal, no? For example, God is necessary being. Put conversely, he cannot not be. Boom! Eternity while you wait.

Extending that one a bit, "Everything changeable is reduced to a first unmoved being," another Necessary Truth. As such, "each particular knowledge is also derived from some completely certain knowledge, which is not subject to error." Knowing truth -- any truth -- is sufficient to prove God.

Recall that Pieper is providing these nuggets shorn of their explanatory apparatus. But none of that is necessary -- nor sufficient -- if you just see their Truth directly. The bottom line is that God Is. If he isn't, then neither are we. Literally.

Why? Because "The further a being is distant from that which is Being of itself, namely God, the nearer it is to nothingness."

Recall what was said above about man being situated between O and Ø. It doesn't get simpler -- or more complicated -- than that. But the complication results from falling out of the orbit of O, for Ø is not actually a "direction"; unlike O, it is not an attractor, rather, a tendency in man -- a tendency to go nowhere by any number of paths.

Christians reject evolution! Hardly. St. Thomas out-Darwins Darwin, not only permitting evolution, but mandating it; he provides a ground for evolution that Darwinism itself cannot furnish: "The Divine Wisdom joins the last of the higher kind with the first of the lower kind." Man and ape. But also man and angel (or archetype), for there are always two sides, vertically speaking.

Well, I think I'll go outside and check out the eclipse. That's enough gazing at the nonlocal sun for today.