We had a post a while back on the issue of Christianity, next to the obscure Judaism, and their slow but steady passing away, and seeming downfall into ‘evil’, speaking of American Protestantism. As a secular humanist, I don’t believe in the ‘devil’, but I can take up a bit of Tillich: The concept of the demonic in the thought of Paul Tillich and its root in J. Boehme, F.W. Schelling and the Lutheran mysticism, or better yet students of ceremonial magic and other demonic subjects, e.g. Aleister Crowley, the magickal psychopath (with a k)…Monotheism was always a cryptic form of ceremonial magic, in some obscure sense, and what happens as you break the rules is a nasty surprise. This is surely a generalizable observation applicable to all, no? perhaps not. Take another example: Buddhist meditators or others who meditate with the aim of enlightenment find themselves beset with the ‘demon Mara’, an illusion of metaphysics, but a strange sense of being behind that metaphysical wall sensing an ominous other.
I can’t close the case except to note that these religions don’t belong to humanity, as such: they have been declared the property of the unseen and the unknown. The collapse of Christianity, and no doubt Judaism, (Islam?) is part of an ‘eonic shift’ (read below) and its fate halfway through the process is a complex mess of pottage/evil…Who knows? But the endgame of evangelical Protestantism and zionist crime shows the whole game entering a ‘dark side’ (as if it wasn’t always that way in some sense) of political blackholehood. Instead of being half in/half out, best to simply walk away. Secular humanists have their problems, and limits, and an often sterile atheism, but they have an element of healthy psyches able to heal.
It is sometimes said that the worst thing about the ‘devil’ is that he makes you believe he doesn’t exist. That’s rubbish, a muddle of the above. There is no ‘devil, but the demonic can be a tricky metaphysical paradox in action. The tide of secularism as to monotheism is inexorable, or so it seems. The question of Judaism is still more obscure: membership in a religion is a question of birth in a social grouping. That’s a blessing until it becomes a curse. There is no secure way to get ‘outside’. Except that there is, a figure such as Einstein found the way.
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The ‘virtual church of the holy brick’ is a somewhat (deliberately) outlandish concept useful for considering the place of religion in a future socialism, complete with its foundation stone, that holy brick. Continue reading “Beat the devil? hey it’s a Bogart movie…//Virtual church of the holy brick? religion, socialism, secularism”