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Nov 30, 2018 16 tweets 3 min read Read on X
When a theist asks "where do you get your morality from?" to a liberal, they generally never concede that whatever ethic they subscribe to is cladistically derived from Western Christianity. They believe they derived it themselves, uninfluenced, except by "pure logic."
I point this out to Liberals all the time, at which point they generally admit that this is necessarily the case, but that they have "evolved" past Christianity (or, are "more Christian" than Christianity). This is when customized meme-Jesuses appear in discourse.
When they're upset by ppo calling America / The West a "Christian nation/civilization" they are upset because they don't say "MORE than a Christian nation." Christianity has been surpassed they say, God is dead, God is but the dream of good governance which we can now fulfill etc
The Enlightenment is merely a renegade form of Christian thinking- in which the Logos becomes, not a revelatory miracle, but a routine faculty of the mind. It corresponds to the era of Western Literary "realism" - in which "real life" ostensibly unmediated by the divine, is art.
This is of course nonsense, as every work of literary "realism" is shaped by the imagination (not by "pure reason") & is structured mythologically. Anna Karenina is a "realist" novel, but it is molded by Christian symbolism.
Reporting "just the facts" is never a complete possibility, as it assumes that we can enter a discourse immune from the "superstitious logic" of the human imagination- that this faculty can be silenced, letting "pure reason" sing in its absence. Nonsense.
Christians "sound dumb" to liberals, as they "talk like children" by deploying a symbolic discourse as opposed to one based on abstract "realist" philisophotheologies in which cosmogonies of "reason," "utility," "the public," etc- are deployed in a "realist" narrative/mythology.
Whenever they are caught in the web of their enlightenment kabbalah, they gesture toward the supremacy of the "complexity" of their rhetoric, as if their admission of being lost is synonymous with being found.
I remember what it was like to be on the opposite side, as an edgelord teenage atheist. I considered the realms of "mythology" & the realms of "real thinking" to be separate. When I no longer believed that to be the case, I began to realize how wrong I had been.
It actually genuinely amazes me how profound some of the "dumbest sounding" Christian points are in this light- their simplicity seems "too simple" until one recognizes how much there is to unpack hermenuticallly before the point can be properly understood.
William Blake went after the Deists as hard as he did (as Hamann & Jacobi did Spinozists, who are proto-deists really)- because they were encroaching on more fundamental grounds, on Imagination itself, by denying the conditions of metaphorical discourse in favor of "pure reason."
To say "Jesus is Man & God" is to speak in poetic, metaphorical/analogical terms- just as the "3=1" of the Trinity is beyond rational accounting (shoo thomists). Deism & Unitarian "rational monotheism" are the real roots of liberal theology.
Their short sightedness is based on the very grounds of their discussion- language, which is nothing BUT layers of analogy. This is why Wittgenstein & the linguistic turn marks the exhaustion of enlightenment thinking (he read his hamann...)
Even the psychological turn of Western thinking is a return to mythology & symbolism, informed by studies like Frazer's Golden Bough. Freudianism, Jungianism, Lacannianism et al- are based upon intepretations of mythology, not from "pure reason."
I think we are actually in a potentially good position looking forward when it comes to this issue. The problem is the lack of education in these fields (though people hunger for it! So many pop-culture mythological hermeneutical essays are youtube hits).
The Human Imagination is not an endlessly complex unknowable phenomenon which must be considered always as "subconscious" or "hiding." There is such a thing as Revelation. We knew this once & we'll know it again.

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More from @Logo_Daedalus

Sep 9
Very strange experience today, woke up from a dream, the dream in which I woke up from was me waking up from what I assume was a blackout, I woke up in the dream with writing on my hand that had some cryptic apology written by "the staff" who had, I put together somehow, thrown me into this janitorial locker space when I was, I assume, blacked out. I left the space & found that it was a strange abandoned strip mall / luxury hotel combination in the middle of an infinite plain of autonomous farms, massive threshers & combines, gargantuan machines with nobody in them-- nobody anywhere-- I walked in circles around this estate confused-- & then I actually woke up for real.
I only remember a few dreams a year vividly-- this is one of the strangest ones that I can remember in recent times-- it was vivid at the level of the vivid dreams/nightmares I had as a kid. I've been sort of beside myself all day with the imagery in my head of it all. It was a profoundly beautiful but terrifying scenery. It felt like some one-off concept episode in Black Mirror where the only way it could resolve is "none of it was real"-- which is how it resolved in reality, I just woke up & was like "oh that was a fucking dream"
It felt, in the dream, that the reality of the situation was that I'd been placed by some force "the staff" in some ersatz human zoo containment space-- as if this was some warped conception of Elysium-- a Chat GPT / Grok generated concept of paradise-- it is hard to explain
Read 10 tweets
Sep 6
Yes, it does. When you have literally millions of workers doing corvee labor, because the Inca had higher population density than medieval europe, & myriad generations operating in a tradition of stoneworking & the production of immense public works projects— they get good at it!
If you’re looking for “evidence” in the form of some hypothetical Incan codex manuscript instructing stone workers how to do their jobs— you won’t find it!
Really the failure of imagination here is due to the western bias to “individual genius”— the notion that one guy had to be “the guy who has the intellectual property claims to that technique.”
Read 8 tweets
Sep 2
All the "IQ Discourse" doesn't take into account that above the median, IQ is diminishing returns-- elite midwits are the only people interested in just accumulating money & status for its own sake-- the highest IQ person I ever met was a "mentally ill" homeless person.
IQ is also correlated with executive function-- if you have really high executive function your basic principle is "leave me alone" & not wanting to have to follow orders. Lao Tzu was more high IQ than Confucius, & Confucius essentially admits this when he refuses the call to be emperor-- being emperor sucks, any extremely intelligent person would do everything to avoid that imposition on life. The highest IQ person in the world probably plays video games all day & schemes the disability system. The only people interested in public acclaim in the form of status & money are midwits.
This "mentally ill" homeless person got free money from the government to spend all day doing whatever he wanted to do, which was mostly reading & playing RTS games on his laptop. This was in a homeless shelter in Cambridge MA.
Read 11 tweets
Sep 2
The funny thing about America is that the most honest people are the hedge fund managers. They don't bullshit you-- they say "the defense of my class interest is paramount." They tell you what they actually believe.
Now, a Politician who is backed by hedge fund managers (etc)-- they have to be very careful with their lies, they can't tell you their job is to serve the hedge fund managers (etc)-- they tell you something else, which is a lie.
What does Trump think? It doesn't really matter because if he runs afoul of the hedge fund managers he'll say the opposite next week. The hedge fund managers don't change their tune though. They will say "Trump is a retard" & then donate to him & when he's dead they'll piss on his grave.
Read 7 tweets
Sep 1
“Fascist” becoming a meaningless term people call anyone who disagrees with them has been a disaster for any popular understanding of Fascism as a political economic order— conveniently, this happened at the same time that America became more fascist than any fascist state prior.
“The specter of fascism” is useful in that it allows people to believe fascism isn’t the order of the day already. “We might be becoming fascist” is a way of avoiding the recognition that we’ve had fascism for a hundred years. FDR was just the most competent fascist.
Image
Read 7 tweets
Aug 30
Aliens: Earth is funny because all its engagement with 70s/80s scifi film canon is done rather tastefully & with subtlety— when it wants to make a literary reference, it has to hammer you over the head constantly to make it stick. You could have just named her “Wendy” & called them “The Lost Boys”— that was enough.
Look it’s a Peter Pan reference— you know because they hold the book in front of your face & read it & before that they show you the Disney animation— so it’s like a reveal that the book exists. I guess this is what it takes with modern audiences.
Meanwhile Timothy Oliphant is clearly meant to be Roy Batty & there’s a metatextual debate here about the metaphysical stakes of what makes a human a human & Hawley is trying to tastefully sublate Ridley Scott in a similar way as Blade Runner 2049– & that’s just communicated by wardrobe etc
Read 4 tweets

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