In This House We Believe Mind Parasites are Real

This is interesting: progressive religion isn't just a personal mind virus but a collective one that can only burrow into an existing culture that it could never have produced: it

is inherently parasitic like a virus, or to put it more neutrally, it is derivative rather than original. The Gnostic turn of mind will inhabit an already existing religious faith or philosophical system and re-order the structure of its host body even while assuming the host's mythic power (The Religion of the Day). 

And here we are? 

You are correct, sir. But we could also say that Christianity is "viral," for example, in the way it wormed its way into the existing Roman Empire and spread throughout its body. And indeed, Richard Dawkins has called religion as such -- AKA the "God delusion" -- a virus of the mind, so what's the difference?  

Dawkins analyzes the propagation of religious ideas and behaviors as a memetic virus, analogous to how biological and computer viruses spread.

Dawkins also describes religious beliefs as "mind-parasites," and as "gangs [that] will come to constitute a package, which may be sufficiently stable to deserve a collective name such as Roman Catholicism..."

How to tell when one is infected? Well, the "faith sufferer" will, for example, hold convictions

that something is true, or right, or virtuous: a conviction that doesn't seem to owe anything to evidence, but which, nevertheless, the believer feels as totally compelling and convincing.

This is not my experience, rather, the opposite, for all the evidence -- evidence for truth as such -- points to a nonlocal source of Truth. Science, of course, assumes the intelligibility of the world to intelligence, without being able to account for what is otherwise a great mystery with no principle to account for it.

Mystery?

There is a conviction that "mystery" per se is a good thing; the belief that it is not a virtue to solve mysteries but to enjoy them and revel in their insolubility.

Again, not in my experience, for we do not equate mystery with the unknown, rather, with the infinitely knowable. Mystery is an easily verifiable existential and ontological fact. Unless, of course, you are omniscient, like Dawkins.

If the believer is one of the rare exceptions who follows a different religion from his parents [like Bob], the explanation may be cultural transmission from a charismatic individual.

Is that what it is? Granted, I have been influenced by certain individuals, but I would not say it is because of their charisma. Rather, because their explanations seem truer (i.e., conformed to reality) and account for more data than the alternatives. 

A while back we began a series of posts on "philosophical nonstarters," of which atheism must be chief. I reject atheism on purely intellectual, logical, philosophical, metaphysical, experiential, and even scientific grounds.

What if we flip the script and say that atheism is a dangerous mind parasite? 

Historically, practical atheism has been the shrouded beginning and final result toward which all Progressive religious schemes tend.

As such, it is both the first principle and last end -- the alpha and omega -- of the left. It is one of the primary divisions between conservative liberals and illiberal leftists. 

Dawkins and I agree on the existence of mind parasites, since these are the stock in trade of the coonical pslackologist. I am intimately familiar with their destructive influence, but how does one distinguish these from live-enhancing memes that lead to human flourishing? 

For example, the wiki article cited above references a meta-review of 100 studies showing that religion has "a positive effect on human well-being by 79%."

Which for our purposes is neither here nor there, because a person living in untruth is setting himself up for unpleasant feelings down the line. 

We certainly agree with Dawkins that there is such a thing as bad religion, since that is precisely the subject under discussion, i.e., progressive religion. However, unlike Dawkins, we maintain that man cannot not be religious, even -- indeed, especially -- if that man is a progressive atheist. 

If your neighborhood is like mine, you've seen the signs of the times:

 In my house it's more like this:

We also agree that science is real, but if only science is real, how to account for rights of any kind? 

Being a Christian Nationalist, I believe they are anchored in the plain meaning of the Declaration of Independence -- that they are endowed to us by the Creator. It is the leftist who believes in them "without evidence," principle, or ground. For example, if "black lives matter," it can only be because all lives do, but why? Where did they get that crazy notion?

Obviously they got it from Christianity, but it is like a cut flower that can only wilt when detached from its roots. In this regard it is a bit like a virus, which is a fragment of genetic information looking for a host. The real host is the body from which it has been excised. Call it the Body of Christ, but that is getting ahead of the post.

Back to our book. It echoes what we just said, in that progressive religion "arises out of the soil of Christian belief." For who but a confused and poorly catechized Christian would say "kindness is everything"? Christianity has never been a suicide pact. Pacifism is just one of the shadows or viruses of Christianity. 

In this context, atheism is just one more Christian heresy. It assumes a strictly rational universe that can be understood by the human mind, except they get off the truth train at a provincial bus stop instead of taking it all the way to the top. 

Gödel?

You guessed it, Petey. Nothing could be more illogical than pretending to enclose being in one of the mind's rationalistic models. To the atheist we say: be reasonable! A little perspective, please. But of course, it is "a futile task to look for logical consistency in a Gnostic worldview."

In such an unstable alloy, there will be remaining bits from the host vision that do not square well with new Gnostic ideas.

As to the parasitic nature of progressive religion,

Much of the potency of a given Gnostic belief system comes from what it has borrowed from an existing and internally more coherent way of seeing things. It is doubtful that something called a "pure Gnosticism" could exist for very long on its own.

This being for the same reason that a virus cannot live long without finding a host. Technically a virus isn't even "alive" per se. Which is perhaps why, when I look at the left, I see dead people.

There has never been a successful civilization founded on a Gnostic form of religion, and it is unlikely that there could be, given that many elements of Gnostic belief militate against any stable civilizational development. 

Again, the virus of progressivism can only hijack a living system. I well remember my own infection, which leads to questions of "treatment," "cure," and "inoculation," which I suppose we'll consider in the next post. Bottom line for today: even Marxism was and is

dependent for much of its attractive power on the Judeo-Christian faith that preceded it, and has proved a destructive and incoherent failure wherever it has been put into practice.

It evolved -- or devolved, rather --

in the context of Christianity, and current Gnostic movements are dependent to a great degree on the Christian vision of reality.... [their] existence is unthinkable without the Jewish and Christian religion that preceded it.

In this house we believe in parasitology and epidemiology.