Progressivism: The One True Faith

Today's random selection is a book called The Religion of the Day, but I wonder: is it just the same old Gnostic counter-religion in a new guise? For it is written:

For man to fall repeatedly into the same trap, just paint it a different color.

And what colors has Marxism, each a garish one not found in nature: "though it is flying under new colors, the spiritual roots and the deep structure of the Gnostic religious attitude remain." And 

Whoever does not believe in myths believes in fables.

Yes, the mythology is settled, but

The modern aberration consists in believing that the only thing that is real is what the vulgar soul can perceive.

The awokened? Like Sleepy Joe?

Not even the kicks of history wake wake up the liberal.

Nor even after the amphetamines kick in. In reality, 

The waters of the West are stagnant, but the spring is unpolluted. 

Only here at the fountainhead

Thirst runs out before the water does.

True, we are living in a post-Christian age but hardly a post-religious one, for ours is

a highly religious age. Secular gospels and dogmatic faiths promising salvation are all around us. So what is the belief system, the religious vision, that is displacing Christianity as the assumed narrative by which our post-Christian, modern societies live? And what is the religion that we ourselves need to be converted out of, if we are to be fully converted to the Christian faith?

A reviewer says the book

concerns the Gnostic religion of our time -- a progressivism that seeks perfection via politics or environmental or social reform. The question is how to live as a Christian in a post-Christian world that mirrors the pagan world in which Christianity was born.

 Another writes of 

the subtle principles and promises of the secular culture which make their way into our own minds without our recognizing it. 

So, right up our alley, so much so that I don't know that it says anything we haven't been saying for the last 18 years: that the post-Christian world is always and everywhere a crude anti-Christian caricature of the world from which it was hatched. The Religion of the Day is a reactionary anti-religion against the deity. It features

a new set of first principles, a new constellation of dogmas, and a new story. We call this process the developing of a new "imaginative vision."

Although we prefer to distinguish imagination from fantasy, for 

The imagination is not the place where reality is falsified, but where it is fulfilled.

Fantasy actually closes off the avenues opened by imagination -- like a delusion or hallucination, it escapes reality only to be confined to unreality. The deluded are not free, much less from their delusions.

It comes down to a matter of truth and its numberless alternatives:

by approaching the many ideologies of the day from the perspective of first principles and fundamental convictions, we can identify consistent underlying threads -- dogmas -- that unite them.

Conversely,

To be a Christian in any age is to believe the Gospel instead of some alternative.

In addition to the advantage of being true, this truth should help prevent us from catching the diseases of the day -- diseases that have leaked from the dark laboratories of academia and entered the collective bloodstream. The Church 

has always had to fight the battle against the intellectual diseases of the day... in order to develop the cure and make it available to the wider culture. 

Certainly I have had to unknowculate myself against the progressivism I caught back in the 1980s. I began redpilliing in the '90s, and only began breadpilling two years ago.

This book doesn't mention Voegelin, but he would agree that "Gnostic religion is the classic case of Christianity gone awry." It is

"the primal heresy within the Christian worldview to which all subsequent heresies return." The arrival of some form of Gnostic religion seems to be the inevitable accompaniment to Christianity wherever it succeeds in gaining significant cultural influence..

Ineveateapple?

Correct, my discarnate friend: call it the realmyth of Genesis and the falsefact of scientism:

There are two kinds of men: those who believe in original sin and idiots.

 Our idiotic friends pride themselves on being

rational, scientific, and non-religious, even while expressing evident religious behavior, such as their commitment to doctrines and dogmas that are hardly self-evident, their holding to those dogmas with a tenacity incommensurate with their provability, their propensity to seek out fellow-believers who can cooperate in their sacred project and with whom they can share communion, and their quick vilification of heretics to the faith.

Sounds like blue pill-popping wokester cancel culture to me, symptoms of which include the eradication of irony and elimination of self-awareness: as there are antibiotics, so too are there are soul-killing anti-pneumatics, rendering their consumers

unable to exercise the kind of thoughtful investigation of dogma necessary for any intelligently held religious faith, and... unable to distinguish the kind of knowledge gained by religious assumptions from other kinds of knowledge. 

This religious self-reflection is impossible for the very reason that they 

demand that "religious" considerations be left out of all the questions of the day, not realizing that they are promoting and often coercing the practice of their own religion under the false guise of being religiously neutral.

And here we are: there is no such thing as religion, and progressives have the One True Faith.