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Today is a FREE taste of an Insight Politics article by writer Nathan Smith.
How to Win a Holy War
When people say “The Science,” they are aligning themselves with the new church.
David Foster Wallace once said there is no such thing as atheism. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.
The older I get, the more I understand Wallace. Atheism is a noble ideal, like world peace. But the animals expounding those ideals are just apes, not angels. Humans can only ever swap religions, they cannot become atheists. Religion is as much a part of the human condition as the ATP process that powers our cells. Everyone who has ever wanted power knows this to be true.
So, starting from first principles, what are the implications of religion as a permanent feature of every society, including ours?
The most obvious implication is that all the euphemisms used to describe what’s going on around the Western world – political conflict, culture war, deconstruction, progressivism, etc – are all myopic at best and distractions at worst. In a theocracy, every conflict is a holy war. That is the key point and the only workable frame if you decide to fight back against the current insanity.
That’s a big word, “theocracy,” and it deserves some unpacking. A theocracy is a government that is subordinate to the church, synagogue or mosque (or whatever). Since God cannot be proven by the scientific method, the Almighty only speaks through human intermediaries. So, a theocracy is really a description of a government run by a priesthood.
A church, in the functional sense, is any organisation or group which tells people how to think. Since there isn’t much difference between pseudoscience and religion (both avoid the scientific method to prove the validity of their claims), the marker of a church is the presence of unprovable assumptions that result in 1) an increase in the “faith” of believers and 2) the increase of influence over those believers held by the priesthood.
Since religion never disappears, it only evolves, by defining what “church” truly means, we can see that New Zealand does indeed have a ruling religion, priesthood and church.
For example, while the Registered Master Builders Association of NZ is an organisation that binds people together, it does not tell people how to think. However, Auckland University and Destiny Church are both organisations which do tell people how to think.
The distinction between Auckland University and Destiny Church is that Bishop Brian Tamaki has not created a system to influence how the government thinks. He only focuses on influencing his parishioners who turn up every Sunday. But Auckland University not only explicitly teaches a good chunk of civil servants and politicians using a formal system of education, but also the academic community often helps write government policy both directly and indirectly.
Do academics use plenty of reasonable data and sound scientific processes? Of course, they do. Many excellent government policies found their genesis in university labs. Yet it is also true that academics believe in unprovable nonsense. And unfortunately, this nonsense often ends up in government policy too.
When thinking about religion in a practical way, one thing to remember is that power is very shy. It prefers the shadows because the grey parts of this world always have the least friction. Power also loves magic tricks. And all great magic tricks begin by warping the language.
For example, academics will say with a straight face that, since they hold the keys to truth, the university cannot be a church because they don’t describe it as a church. If that sounds tautological, good news! You haven’t lost your mind. The university is not a church because the professors say it is “secular.” Now the separation of church and state doesn’t apply. Abracadabra!
But again, the hallmark of a church is the presence of unfalsifiable assertions that require faith to believe. It turns out, the “science-based” university is full of these things.
The biggest lie believed by the greatest number of people today is, of course, human biological uniformity, or the idea that all humans are the same. This obviously false idea is so critical to the current university/church that people get into trouble just for questioning it. Some people get in terrible trouble for studying it or just speaking about their findings to media.
Yet, despite the censorship, human biological differences (especially neurological differences) are by far the most studied issue in social science. Your mileage may vary on whether you think social science is a real science (I don’t think it is), but the fact remains that human differences are extremely well understood, at least in comparison to other social dynamics.
But you wouldn’t know that by listening to the academic priesthood. These same academics will proudly implement radical economic theories into government policy, theories that lack even a fraction of the evidence that has been accrued about human group differences. And by refusing to factor in these well-known human differences to their economic calculations, they inevitably scratch their heads wondering why their radical theories never work out.
I could mention many more nonsense ideas held by the modern university/church, but this single example is enough to demonstrate that we do, indeed, live inside a thinly veiled atheocracy. It’s not simply that the idea of human biological uniformity is wrong. The university became a church the moment this idea was elevated into an unquestionable, doctrinal belief. All sorts of religious fluff began to grow on this cancerous core idea, including the creation of a dedicated priesthood.
The magic spell of “secular” is a wonderful tactic, but don’t let it fool you. There is no such thing as “secular” education. Every school teaches religion, it just depends on whose religion will be taught. And every government is controlled by holy men, it just depends on whose holy men.
Now that I have shown we are in the middle of a holy war, how might one fight against this?
Well, the first step is to recognise that you are in a holy war. But all the subsequent steps will blur into each other because they are essentially the same: to win a holy war you must destroy the rival religion’s idols. No matter where an idol is located, no matter how sacred it may be, all enemy idols should be smashed in public at any opportunity.
The reason is simple. Smashing an idol in public forces the rival religion’s God – whatever that God is – to reveal itself and strike you down. The priests and holy warriors cannot harm you on behalf of their God. The retribution must come from the Omnipotent Other directly. Without immediate divine consequences for smashing an idol, their God is proven to be impotent.
If you smash enough idols the believers will not only stop believing, they will naturally flow to join your religion since it clearly boasts the more powerful God. That’s how humans are. Very few in any religion are die-hard zealots. Almost everyone is simply trying to align themselves with the most powerful force because they want security. Belief is proportional to confidence.
As Wallace said, the only choice we get is what to worship. When people walk into a supermarket wearing a mask, they are performing the same functional ritual as when Catholics wear a crucifix or Muslims say “inshallah”. The mask-wearer is worshipping an Omnipotent Other. Similarly, by allowing themselves to be injected with a vaccine, these same people are ingesting a religious sacrament, not unlike a communion wafer. God is protecting them.
So, when people say “The Science,” they are also aligning themselves with the new church. This phrase is invoked not to rationally prove a point, but as a magic spell of heresy to compel actions from others. The hatred of those who refused to take the Covid-19 vaccine was a result of the anti-vaxxers mocking “The Science” and defiling the religious purity of New Zealand.
When the anti-vaccine protestors camped out in front of Parliament, the faithful saw those actions as defacing the Temple of Democracy. The sacred ritual of Voting and the holy clergy of our Elected Representatives were desecrated by unclean heathens. A church can justify any nasty treatment of heretics. After all, error has no rights – the catchphrase of every religion.
And judging by the insane reaction (even in this country) to this week’s US Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe vs Wade (the federal legalisation of abortion), clearly this was a highly sacred idol of the ruling religion that was smashed in public. Does anyone want to guess what sort of idol this was?
The current ruling “secular” religion came to power precisely because its adherents understood that tearing down the statues, defiling the temples and mocking the rituals of the previous religion was the only way to win a holy war. Once they came to power, the new clergy entrenched their success by introducing their own doctrines of marriage, martyrdom and even of man and woman.
Smashing the idol of abortion is a great example of how to fight a holy war. The reality is that women who want to kill their children will always find ways to get safe abortions. Laws have never stopped people from committing murder. But by publicly defying a God without consequence, the ruling religion suffered a major blow. Take note, anti-vaxxers.
Political victories do not matter if you are losing the holy war. Many other idols of the ruling religion should be located, described and smashed – in that order. You cannot describe what you cannot find. And you cannot destroy what lacks a description. So, what is the precise location of the Covid-19 idol? Where is the idol of climate change? What is a rainbow flag? Smash, smash, smash.
But remember: the target is always Moloch, the system. Never the people. Humans will reject anything that makes them feel unsafe. Moloch is the target. Smash, smash, smash.
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