Thread by @TAJackson20

It turns out that walking for like 4 hours when it's below -30 Celsius cures chronic migraines or something. 🤷‍♂️
But anyway, it's been way too long so let's finally get around to do this.

Joseph de Maisre's "Examination of the Philosophy of Bacon"
Chapter Seven
"The Union of Religion and Science"

Last time, we discovered that Baconian naturalism is crypto-pantheism and therefore any any honest materialist should've admitted defeat once the Big Bang was proved real. (Fred Hoyle knew this)

Now, I've gained a lot of folowers since that was posted in October, so some of you might not know exactly how evil Francis Bacon was.

Good thing the chapter starts with this.

Maistre points out the disastrous effects that his scientism has had, including... whatever the 19th century equivalent of soyface is.

And speaking of soybois who fucking love science, Maistre gives us a solution that is both poetically appropriate and also #Lindy.

From here we see Maistre extol something uncommon in our day, yet entirely obvious: virtue epistemology. Maistre proved quite prescient in this, anticipating Mendel and others.

Why the Enlightenment sucked: A very long paragraph.
(most of you have probably only heard of Locke and maybe Pascal. That's part of the problem)

What he's getting at here is the difference between positive and negative liberties and the final collapse of teleology in the so-called Age of Enlightenment. It says "you are free to do anything you want!" but cannot answer the question "What should I want to do?"

Maistre is still, nonetheless, a model of Christian charity. His ultimate lament regarding these degenerates is how they wasted their talents that they could've used properly.

Bonus Sufi brofist.

My personal opinion is that things were fucked well beyond reformability by the Reformation, ironically enough, which puts me in a weird place Catholics post-Revolution and realizing they're more optimistic than I am.

Like here, for instance, where Maistre laments the expulsion of the Jesuits from France and I just want to scream "No, you fool! They were ALWAYS bad! If anything, all of them in the WORLD should've been expelled from this mortal coil!"

(It'd be a diverion to explain why in this thread, just read the late ZippyCatholic's history of Jesuit perfidy here)
zippycatholic.wordpress.com/2017/10/09/we-…

Anyway, MAistre isn't digressing like I am, his complaints about the 18th century have a point: that Anglos, and Bacon specifically were responsible for all this 🏳️‍🌈 shit.

You might have heard of Maistre's adage "Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists." Well, as you can see, Maistre means this in the sense that civilization is founded by priests. (nb: the temple Göbekli Tepe is the oldest known building & predates FARMING, somehow)

Also...
"This is why Christian nations have surpassed all the others in the sciences, and why the Indians and the Chinese, with their so much and too vaunted science, will never catch up to us while we remain respectively what we are."

>TFW ur so 🏳️‍🌈 u get eclipsed by China

We're hitting levels of pride that shouldn't even be possible.

An interesting change of events: normally the translators are calling out or making apologies for Bacon's ignorance, which just goes to show how deeply the conflict thesis meme goes. (Thanks, Martin "Reason is the devil's whore" Luther)

Maistre goes mythbusting on this, noting that two of the most well know stories of scientific repression in his day were a) of a guy who made up crazy nonsense and still wasn't even given more than a scolding and b) outright false

"inconceivable that they can still dare to speak of it after all the explanations that have been given on this subject."
If only he knew.
Anyway, the reason Galileo got bitchslapped unlike the rest was bc he was wrong, they were better, & he was an unrepentant asshole about it.

In short, Galileo got bitchslapped because he was being a bitch.

Maistre makes a point here: the Galileo Affair happened in the Papal States, so the Pope, as sovereign, was well within his rights to punish him. If one condemns Catholics for this, every nation with false convictions stands likewise accused. (not that Galileo's was really false)

🤔

The point here is that most scientists in this age were also occultists and you should try to make sure an idea is true/good before you support it. (note: Kepler was the one who had actually fixed the problems with Copernicus' cosmology and the church rewarded him for it)

...Which is all a long way of saying that science without faith inevitably becomes fake and 🏳️‍🌈.

And also that "religion repressed astronomy" is the exact and precise opposite of the historical record.

Oh, and please forget how the assorted faiths and cults have invented, inspired, or financed the creation of most art in history. We wouldn't want to get in the way of that whole "persecuted artists" meme.

Of course, the anti-Catholic could accuse e.g. the renaissance popes of crowding out other potential subjects of art but this would miss the fact that those other subjects were worse and if you think otherwise you're a brainlet with shit taste.

This is actually a fairly long section about the importance of faith to aesthetics, but since I have literally no knowledge of aesthetics, I'm afraid I'll be skipping most of it as I'm unable to comment on it.

Here's a good bit though, on the neoclassical LARPers.

He ends on it, too. Neopagans can never recover from this.

Next time: After demonstrating how stupid anything is when severed from from faith, Maistre examines what becomes of faith in this severance.

A hint: Remember how Bacon called the study of morality a waste of time? He had a vested interest in doing that.