Separation of church and state is not possible. It just creates a selection pressure for religions to shed the spandrels named "church" and "god." And this is precisely what we see today -- a state religion with no church and no god
We cannot escape religion and myth. All states are always theocracies, the only question is: whose gods? whose myths?
In America we tried to create an explicitly agnostic state, but our founding fathers did not understand that religion is a living organism, and that all living things, like liquids, eventually taker the shape of their container
There is not one religious tradition in USA, but two: the exoteric tradition is protestantism, and the esoteric one is humanism, the latter of which is the provenance of "freedom", "rights", "equality", etc.
The humanist state was supposed to be a platform for diverse Christianities, a trick it pulls off by rooting the tenets of the faith and inserting some enlightenment values into the kernel
It’s possible to run Christianity on an enlightenment stack, but it wasn't designed for it. Christianity was built to run on monarchy, because the relationship of a king to his subjects reflects the relationship of God to man
The USA civics patch allows multiple Christianities to run in one polity, but it introduces some critical security vulnerabilities and ultimately denatures that which it was meant to preserve
It was only a matter of time before a someone developed a fork of protestant Christianity that could cross the church-state barrier. We call that fork “progress,” and with a few tweaks to the phenotype it was able to capture the entire state
Progress is built on the protocols of USA civics. It can’t pay homage to God, because God is explicitly excluded from the political formula. Instead it deifies abstract concepts, venerating liberty, equality, and “rights”.
Progress replaces the church service with the protest rally, the return of Christ with the moral arc of history, total depravity with implicit bias, and the crucifixion with the Holocaust (six million times more powerful than the original!)
One way we can tell progressive politics is essentially religious is to note this curious formula: the personal is political. Progress is not content with the non-overlapping magisteria of church and state. It demands that all facets of life be subjected to its moral calculus
In 1964, the civil rights act marked the total victory of the new progressive church over the government of the USA, ending the separation of church and state.
Civil rights became a new foundational mythology, propagating through the base layer of US ideology, insinuating itself beneath all other beliefs. We now teach children the hagiography of the civil rights era in social studies classes and in the moral thrusts of their cartoons
Civil rights was zero-to-one, everything since that has been one-to-many; consolidation, refinement, iteration. But in the early 2010s, a virulent emancipatory discourse centered on homosexuality was deployed into mainstream conversation
It's absolutely the case that phones make you more civically and socially engaged, not less, which is why everyone is so stupidly credulous in social media, because when you feel like sauron is watching, the safest thing to do is hail mordor.
In Chinese POW camps, they converted prisoners into agents for the CCP by enticing them to make public speeches praising the party, not with sticks but with carrots, and what you say publicly "of your own volition" becomes your own conviction.
Going on social media and posting about inequality or refugees etc. causes you to invest in those causes, it's an autocatalytic loop where a seemingly innocuous action conditions you to perform it again.
Smartphones catalyzed the great awokening because in the seething vortex of social media, people want to say things that make them feel important, and nothing makes them feel more important than regurgitating anthems about lifting up the oppressed
If you can manufacture an oppressed denomination of people, then a majority of other people will make public noises about helping them, because doing so makes them feel large and powerful and gregarious.
The Great Awokening is a play on "The Great Awakening", the name that we give to a series of Christian revivals across the last few centuries. And just as we see in The Current Year, revival has alway been a disease that primarily afflicts women
Charles Grandison Finney in the Second Great Awakening: “Women composed the great majority of members in all churches. They dominated revivals and praying circles, pressing husbands, fathers, and sons towards conversion and facilitating every move of the evangelist.”
Family men, fathers and husbands, wanted to have nothing to do with these revivals, and though they “tried to prevent their wives or daughters from attending church,” they “were eventually brought into the church themselves by these women.”
Christian men could not formulate any principled objections to the revivals of the great awakenings and no one running the American civics stack can formulate a principled or compelling argument against the great awokening
We live in a world where both the right and the left are significantly to the left of the civil rights act, and that means they are both very far to the left. Your republican leaders have never rolled back one jot or title of the accursed machinations of progress
As long as you believe in the moral validity of “human rights”, as long as you think individual liberty is an end in itself, the most you can do is plead “too fast, too fast”
Of course, sodomites will never be free as long as we are allowed the freedom to criticize or exclude them, but freedom of speech is for losers, literally; powerful people already have it, only weaklings ever ask for it
There’s nothing women like more than correcting the speech of petulant children. If “what about the freedom to say mean things?” is your principled argument, you’re a twat. Not even God believes in freedom of speech
In Stalinist Russia, there was only one way to criticize the state that didn’t get you gulagged: the 50 Stalins criticism: “yes, Stalin is good, but he doesn’t go far enough! If only we had 50 Stalins!”
Arguments from leftist overreach are just haggling over the # of Stalins
Arguments from leftist overreach are just haggling over the # of Stalins
Theocracies do not tolerate heretics. With the merging of church and state, freedom of religion is a shambling corpse, and Christianity has the option of abandoning patriarchy and heteronormativity or being destroyed
But if you’re running the American civics stack, you don’t get to say, at last, THIS is one progression too far, THIS emancipation is too much, because as we are realizing, giving puberty blockers to toddlers is in the constitution, only the hermeneutics took a while to work out
