Are you an especially righteous Christian? 

Try this thought experiment: Read your own scripture and ask yourself “What if I’m on the wrong side of these stories…?” 

Have you ever done this?

Some wooly minds instantly seize and balk at making this move. They cannot even ask the question hypothetically. They are flooded with dread, and dread is proof that some serpent is whispering in their ear. No, God fills them with certainty that they know good from evil. 

*

Here is the problem with unprincipled people: Inevitably, they muster principles to justify whatever they want to do as Righteous Acts, but these principles shift incessantly to support the impulse of the moment.

So, when unprincipled folk need to be a flock, they bleat meekness, decency, forgiveness and love. But when the weather changes their wooly coats fall away, and now they’re howling the opposite values — greatness, lustiness, vengeance, rage — and they’re far too blood-drunk to worry about hypocrisy.

Then the hangover comes. They crawl back under their sheep’s clothing, pull the wool back over their own eyes, and spend the rest of their lives spinning lies about who they were in history. 

But the disguise is only for themselves. Sheep don’t growl. 

The justice of guilt and innocence was put on trial and was found irresponsible. 

The justice of fairness and unfairness was put on trial and found loveless. 

We need to stop indulging the Fundamentalist Christianist conceit that their “religion” is a branch of Christianity. They are a denomination of Fundamentalism, which is not even a religion but a philosophical autoimmune disease.

As a religious person, I am very tired of seeing Fundamentalism mistaken for a religion. Religion is about transcendence. Fundamentalism is about preventing transcendence at all costs, including murder if necessary. As long as we cooperate with the confusion that Fundamentalism is religion “gone too far” rather than religion aborted, we will help spread the infection.

It is pure geographical accident that American Fundamentalists use symbols stolen from Christianity. If their mothers had extruded them onto a different patch of dirt they’d have seized different symbols but they would have handed those symbols over to that same master all Fundamentalists of all denominations* worship.

–

• Yes. Islamists, Christianists, Bolsheviks and Nazis all belong to the same worldwide anti-religion, Fundamentalism. They are denominations of one and the same spasmodically violent worship of graven mental images. For these ideo-idolators, religion is belief, faith is beliefs, and killing and dying for opinions makes blessed.

The gathered sheep fall into formation, and behold: the flock is now a pack. And the pack snarls “Let us prey!” Whoever keeps their wool is devoured with the others.  

There is no shock of Revelation, no disturbance of conscience, no lost sleep. 

Today is today. Yesterday is a wooly memory. 

Tomorrow will be tomorrow. If forgiveness is needed it will be taken. 

All will be forgotten in the retellings of the tale.

We were the good guys.

The left-liberal soul is torn between left and liberal. To the left stands sensitivity to every power imbalance, from the grossest violence to the gentlest manipulation — all inequalities threaten the freedom of the individual to be who she or he is meant to be. All inequality must be eliminated before individuals are truly free. Comprehensive freedom-from is the feeling of freedom for the left gone illiberal!

The right-liberal soul is torn between right and liberal. To the right stands the longing for human accomplishment, from success in business to building great empires — all limits to what we can accomplish together threaten the freedom of the individual to participate in something greater than the self. Limits to accomplishment must be removed before a people is truly free. Unlimited freedom-to is the feeling of freedom for the right gone illiberal!

In the painful tension between individual freedom-from (which requires collective effort to protect all) and collective freedom-to (which requires individual sacrifice and participation) writhes liberalism, essentially middle, essential tense, essentially compromised. 

You may have seen this well-known quote attributed to William James:

When a thing is new, people say: “It is not true.”

Later, when its truth becomes obvious, they say: “It’s not important.”

Finally, when its importance cannot be denied, they say “Anyway, it’s not new.”

This quote is probably a distillation from a passage in James’s classic lecture “Pragmatism”:

 I fully expect to see the pragmatist view of truth run through the classic stages of a theory’s career. First, you know, a new theory is attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it.

There is no pursuit more subject to retroactive obviousness than philosophy.

Philosophy is the design of the very conceptual apparatus used to understand all experience, and this includes the experience of our own memories. Once we start thinking with a new philosophy our old thoughts are subsumed by the new philosophy and re-understood in its terms. We unconsciously dissociate from our old self, treating that old self like someone else.

It is extremely difficult even to return to old philosophies we once used but abandoned, and it is even harder yet to return to older and more primitive philosophies that were blind to experiences which, to us, are impossible to miss.

We tend to either find these older philosophies obsolete, and fail to appreciate the role they played — and continue to play! — in our present philosophies. Or we thoughtlessly do our best to believe what the older philosophies say in the terms of our new philosophies and do severe violence to both the old and the new.

Here is how I understand it: We develop philosophies we need but do not yet have with the philosophies we do have but need to leave, which in turn were developed with philosophies we used to have but left.

It is like making new tools with worn-out tools which were made from old, now broken tools. No — actually, it is not like this. It literally is this.

The big difference is that when we think of tools, we tend to view them as objects we use. Philosophies are subjects we use, and in an unnerving sense those subjects are our subjectivity.

By many, possibly most, popular philosophies, there no distinction is made between one’s own soul and our deepest subjective tools, which are not only the contents of our beliefs, but our very believing of those beliefs: our faith.

When our subjective tools begin to malfunction, we feel that we ourselves — our very souls — are breaking down. We lose our faith, and we want it back.

To be continued.

If there is one arrogance in this world worse than the “foolishness of the wise” it is the foolishness of average-at-best minds who have been seduced to the notion that they are “wise fools”. This creates an exponential foolishness lacking even the intelligence required for humbled intelligence.

Most of the world sees things in terms of us-here and them-there. We who live here are good, and they who live there are wicked. We are blessed to have been born here among the good and to have been taught the absolute truth.

The other part of the world — much smaller — sees things in terms of us-cosmopolitan and them-insular. We who are cosmopolitan understand that where someone was born and what they were taught is the absolute truth does not matter. What matters is whether a person has understood that the unexamined, uncritical belief that one is good and knows the truth is not a sign of knowing but of ignorance and will lead not to good, but to evil. We must stay alert to the fact that we ourselves are vulnerable to playing the evil role unless we stay aware of how evil actually works, and that evil works precisely through our own certainty that we are right.

This certainty — this moralistic pridefulness — will lead the wives and children and grandchildren of American soldiers who bravely fought and defeated totalitarian movements in Europe and in the Pacific to enthusiastically support totalitarians in their own land — totalitarians who promise the same returns to national greatness, the same disgust toward liberals and intellectuals, the same rise of the common folk to take back their government, the same mass conspiracy thinking. Because their families believe with all their hearts that it was Japanese or Germans or Italians that their husbands, fathers or grandfathers fought — missing entirely the fact that it was an eternal evil they fought — an eternal evil ready to seduce any person in any land professing any faith — just as long as they are prideful enough to believe they possess the knowledge of good and therefore impossible to seduce. They give themselves to the strong man who says the words they love to hear and never allow themselves to suspect who has entered their bed. They betray the principles they claim as the basis of their virtue — but it feels so right, it can’t be wrong.