I was reading Henry Chadwick's essay on the distinctiveness of Christain Ethics this weekend past. It is important not to mis-state what it was that the Gospel brought to the philosophy and ethics of the ancient world.
The distinctiveness of Christian ethics lay not in a great Mosaic reordering of society, a new set of Laws to a people that walked in darkness. But rather “in the conception of divine grace. The characteristic stress on humility is the correlative of that” (p.271). It is naïve to think that the first preachers of the gospel “brought a brilliant light and radiant purity into the Stygian darkness of a polytheistic society, the supreme values of which were nothing but power, honour, wealth, and sex” (p.267) Personally having been gladly persuaded by the writings of Perry and Holland I feel I must defer to Prof Chadwick's superior understanding on this.
What Chirstianity brought was not a new form of 'kindness' either, as it is presented in the meliorist therapeutic churches of today but something stranger and more unnerving.
Nicolas Gomez Davila (I recommend reading his aphorisms) describes it interestingly thus :"Christianity is an impudence which we must not disguise as kindness."
He was also the thinker who first pointed out that modern, progressive Christianity has collapsed the Great Commandment into a subtle heresy - "You shall love your neighbour with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. On this commandment hangs all the law and the prophets"
Progressivism and 'Wokery' are as much a Christian heresy as Islam is. We are forever trying to conform the Gospel to the World by trimming it's difficult and awkward aspects.
We love our neighbour for God's sake. Not for his own.
William, I'm with you on this. In Christian terms the new religion is close to the anti christ i.e. that which purports to be Christ - as progressiveness does by superficially trading on Christian values.
I also think the battle against the new religion can only be won by reasserting the far stronger moral order at the core of Christianity - and all major religions really. To take an example, to argue about "women's rights" in relation to "trans rights" is to agree on the ultimate importance of liberation and expression, whereas as ultimate values these are both misconceived as they centre the self.
I can agree with much of that although from a Christian perspective I would argue there can be no 'winning' of 'wars', even wars of ideas. The arms of a Christian are truth, righteousness, peace and faith. Beyond that we are in the hands of the Potter. Who cares not a jot for one nation or civilisation over another but looks at the heart of the believer.
You are dead right about the delusive self-centred values of liberation, expression and all the other cords of vanity used to draw iniquity. These are, strange to say, the Laws of Aleister Crowley's Thelema, not Christs Gospel.
Or to look through the other end of the telescope, Dr Johnson once said "the first Whig was the Devil"!
"Social justice politics is about who gets to be on the Cross"
Progressiveness is not an extension of Christianity at all but its complete subversion where the thing above all else (the BAE if you like) is not something beyond the ego but the ego itself, right down to the egoic desire to replace Christ on the cross. This is a critical point in my view if one wants to argue against it. And the new religion is also worse (less useful) than the paganism of the Romans or Greeks because those belief systems still regarded the wantings of the ego as a path to unfulfillment or outright tragedy e.g Narcissus, Icarus and Oedipus
And the deification of identity such as "trans identity" is the fullest expression of this, the obscenity that one's particularised wishes take precedence over even the given reality of a living body (as if the body is mere property of the ego) is only matched by the futility of the hope that pursuing, say surgery, has any possibility, at all, of making one happy.
I find it hard to take Boris as a Catholic; this is surely in name only, and so he could have a church wedding to Carrie. When did he last attend mass? Blair was obviously a Catholic, but waited until he left office before officially converting.
Had entirely forgotten Boris's "conversion". As per Brexit, no doubt he has a drawer full of drafts justifying his conversion to Eastern Orthodox, Judaism, Hinduism, Satanism, etc to be brandished at the next expedient moment.
This was a ripping read. There seems to be something exhausting around all this. As if it sucks air and energy from ordinary life (civic, work, friends, family). Let's also not overlook the much observed role of women in driving it.
Speaking of which, did anyone else notice that the pictures and video clips of the most militant and objectionable pro-Hamas/Palestinian demonstrations suggested a preponderance of women involved? Or am I imagining this, based on a sampling error.
Yes, it mainly seems to be women, and there are so many of those videos now. Something quite chilling about the whole thing, although the man telling one woman 'I supported BLM' didn't feel me with huge sympathy.
Ed, theme for next post. Progressive ideals reflect a feminine perspective, showing compassion for the underdog and avoiding conflict. Our humanities departments, schools and HR departments are matriarchal institutions. Is this due to feminism, the defeat of patriarchy, or just technology and decadence? And what is the direction of travel of this trend?
Why would young women be drawn to strident - assertive young men. This is always been the case- Women and Gays are drawn to extremes to meet men. Also women shame me into joining extremist groups.
I rate Joel Kotkin's recent analysis of the features of coming neo-fuedalism, but I think in this article you are onto the ideology which is cementing it, neo-paganism.
"Social justice politics is about who gets to be on the Cross"
Recently the claimant appears to have been Chris Packham, the 'environmentalist', who told his BBC TV audience that "I carry the guilt of previous generations.", that is, all those generations who have failed to become manic environmentalists and political activists, with the associated, new, creedal requirements. The 'saviour' complex is in full swing, and raving. The accompanying preview video showed Packham running his hands through his hair in despair and anguish at our recalcitrance etc. (the words 'Father, forgive them because they know not what they do." sprang to my mind).
I pointed out to Owen Jones a few years back in a comment to a Guardian piece of his that the requirement that 'we' ('Man') should be responsible for the state of the 'natural' world, which he was stating as a 'socialist' ideal, was first stated at the beginning of Genesis, by God.
Quite how this disguised 'Christianity' merges with the quite obviously pagan elements in our modern world is unclear. Environmentalism in the UK was always a *right-wing* philosophy when I was young. It was promulgated first of all by the upper classes from especially the 1930s onward, following earlier moves by the hunting lobby in the US. The first major legislation of any note, 'The Protection of Birds Act' of 1954, was sponsored by people like Prince Philip and a collection of upper-class figures whose accents would now provoke amusement on TV shows. Yet it has now become, seemingly, part of the left-wing world view.
My one (probably unoriginal) insight is that ideologies that ignore human nature are doomed to fail. It never occurred to me until I read this article, that Christianity fell into this category, too.
'Actually I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect 'history' to be anything but a 'long defeat' - though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory. '
I'm confused. Christianity (or, at least the Bible does in case we need to be more specific) makes several very clear statements about human nature. Are you referring to the institution of religion? i.e. the Catholic church, mainline Protestant denominations etc.
When I say human nature, perhaps I'm not using the exact, correct term. Please excuse me, I am a programmer and don't know much about philosophy or the humanities. I'm a Catholic, so my views on Christianity are shaped by that.
People want to be free to do what they want to do (individualism) and no longer be told by doctrines or dogmas. "I want to have sex/kill babies/lie about being a woman/get rich and enter the kingdom of heaven/covet thy neighbour's car/etc."
Look at sexuality, for example. By my estimate there are over 200 million homosexuals in the world (with quite a wide error bar on that estimate). Christianity, according to many denominations, does not allow the act of physical love (eros) between such persons. That's a large number of people being denied their true nature.
Men aren't born to be monogamous, but Christianity demands this of us (Ed has written some good points on this before). Sleazy dudes use this to say they want an open relationship or promote polyamory.
Divorce. We should do all we can to stay together as a couple, and while making divorce easier has increased the divorce rate (bad), there are occasions where marriages completely break down.
Abortion. Tracey from accounts just wanting not to be passed over for a promotion at work (possibly the sins of pride and greed?) murders her unborn child.
If we re-paganising then that's rather regressive and bad news for the weak - women, children and the old. Exposing children - Romulus and Remus and Paris were survivors - was routine, we have abortion instead. In Inventing the Individual by Larry Siedentop, pagan Greco-Roman culture was very religious and hierarchical around the family and the state and today's reversion to paganism centres more around the unencumbered self and its realisation. So there may be a difference between now and then, unless individual selves need something to hold them all together and we find that we all have to worship the same gods, or else.
John Gray calls current progressivism hyper-liberal/Christian, and says it lacks the modesty of paganism. But a paradoxical syncresis is probably a better framing, as you say.
I think I mentioned it on twitter - My mother in law - was born sometime in the 1950s in the Peruvian jungle. Her father was a Spaniard. Or at least European. She spent her first few years in a hotel.
Why was it a hotel. Because it was full of people coming and going... There were other children there. The children would play outside and hear babies crying. They would try to get the adults to investigate - The children would be whipped and told they were imagining things
American religion constantly swings back and forth between institutional and intuitional forms. What you are calling paganization Tara Isabel Burton calls "the Remix." For example, one percent of Americans say they are Buddhists, but eight percent say their "spiritual life" has been influenced by Buddhism. That's not surprising: "mindfullness" is secularized Zen, and it is ubiquitous in American corporate cultures. "Woke social justice" is very much a religion of the internet, worshipping the gods Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Decolonization, and of course, Safety. But it is hardly the first example of secular ersatz religion taking on millenarian themes. Yevgeny Zemyatin opened his novel "We" with a narrative acknowledgement of this transference. It got the book banned. We simply always create new religions out of old materials lying around, except that this time, everyone is their own priest and souls have genders.
It may interest you to know, for example, that despite the clear purpose of the Seven Sleepers being imperial propaganda for a beleaguered Eastern Rome, Muhammad refers to it in the Qur'an.
Religion seeks to answer the question what do we do with desire. Its answer is just stop desiring because you are complete already. Consumerism and the modern religions of identity and expression also seek to addresses this question but do so by saying you will be complete (with no sense of lack) but ONLY if you get this one person or thing or experience over there.
"everyone is their own priest and souls have genders."
I think you're on to something there. While rational people have suggested that woke progressivism(?) is turning into a religion, it's always seemed to me that what they ultimately worship isn't "Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Decolonization, and of course, Safety", but their own egos. Embracing those tenets seems to be the path to power for people lacking in many other ways.
Cluster B narcissism? Gnostic splitting as psychological splitting? Surely there is no relationship whatsoever between the craving for "authenticity" and personal ego. Surely Hermeticist alchemical constructions ("nonbinary") are not just luxury beliefs, emphasis beliefs, in the infinite tradition of wealthy societies wasting themselves on woo. Surely!
Genderism is unique in being poly-monotheistic. Every gendersoul is self-created, and also sinless. That is heretical to almost every religion, but the fun fact about gnostic ideas is that they are parasitic, attaching themselves to existing beliefs and reproducing themselves anew.
"At the start of the Ukrainian war some prominent American witches even put a hex on President Putin, although it doesn’t seem to have done much good."
It’s ironic since the Russian elite, including the president, is probably one of the most occult-obsessed on the planet. Those witches didn’t know who they were dealing with.
wow, I didn't know that about Putin. has that been written about? I know he spent a lot of lockdown reading about history (despite my love of the subject, not often a good idea)
Well, it's not wildly publicized. I heard about it from a personal acquaintance who is well-informed about what is going on in the Kremlin behind closed door. From what they told me, it's quite bizarre indeed. If you are interested, I can try connecting you with them, and you can make your own mind. You can contact me through our friend, the Great Khan of Austin, TX (hope you know who I mean).
Well, Gabyshev wasn’t really a shaman, I mean shamans usually do not venture outside of their “territory,” but Putin and his pals were convinced that he had some mystical power.
Let's not forget our brave Wiccan practitioners in WWII who hexed Hitler in "Operation Cone of Power" as per Gerald Gardner's 1954 book Witchcraft Today.
At least 'sacrificing goats or dressing up as druids at Stonehenge' would be entertaining (if, that is, the latter were to actually follow the ancient customs). What strikes me about the practices of our modern theology is its mind-numbing dullness: all the enchantment of a puritan committee meeting.
This is one of the best pieces on our present social and cultural morass that I've read in a long time. Thanks, Ed.
Here in Australia, those declaring themselves Christian also dropped below 50 percent of the population at the 2021 Census. But the repaganisation trends have been evident for many decades. There has been a rapid acceleration of these trends in recent years combined with a rise in anti-Christian sentiment. Christians now find themselves facing a future in which they are a beleaguered minority.
I was reading Henry Chadwick's essay on the distinctiveness of Christain Ethics this weekend past. It is important not to mis-state what it was that the Gospel brought to the philosophy and ethics of the ancient world.
The distinctiveness of Christian ethics lay not in a great Mosaic reordering of society, a new set of Laws to a people that walked in darkness. But rather “in the conception of divine grace. The characteristic stress on humility is the correlative of that” (p.271). It is naïve to think that the first preachers of the gospel “brought a brilliant light and radiant purity into the Stygian darkness of a polytheistic society, the supreme values of which were nothing but power, honour, wealth, and sex” (p.267) Personally having been gladly persuaded by the writings of Perry and Holland I feel I must defer to Prof Chadwick's superior understanding on this.
What Chirstianity brought was not a new form of 'kindness' either, as it is presented in the meliorist therapeutic churches of today but something stranger and more unnerving.
Nicolas Gomez Davila (I recommend reading his aphorisms) describes it interestingly thus :"Christianity is an impudence which we must not disguise as kindness."
He was also the thinker who first pointed out that modern, progressive Christianity has collapsed the Great Commandment into a subtle heresy - "You shall love your neighbour with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. On this commandment hangs all the law and the prophets"
Progressivism and 'Wokery' are as much a Christian heresy as Islam is. We are forever trying to conform the Gospel to the World by trimming it's difficult and awkward aspects.
We love our neighbour for God's sake. Not for his own.
William, I'm with you on this. In Christian terms the new religion is close to the anti christ i.e. that which purports to be Christ - as progressiveness does by superficially trading on Christian values.
I also think the battle against the new religion can only be won by reasserting the far stronger moral order at the core of Christianity - and all major religions really. To take an example, to argue about "women's rights" in relation to "trans rights" is to agree on the ultimate importance of liberation and expression, whereas as ultimate values these are both misconceived as they centre the self.
I can agree with much of that although from a Christian perspective I would argue there can be no 'winning' of 'wars', even wars of ideas. The arms of a Christian are truth, righteousness, peace and faith. Beyond that we are in the hands of the Potter. Who cares not a jot for one nation or civilisation over another but looks at the heart of the believer.
You are dead right about the delusive self-centred values of liberation, expression and all the other cords of vanity used to draw iniquity. These are, strange to say, the Laws of Aleister Crowley's Thelema, not Christs Gospel.
Or to look through the other end of the telescope, Dr Johnson once said "the first Whig was the Devil"!
Fair point.
A really interesting piece Ed, offering a thought provoking analysis. It really highlights what we have lost. Thank you.
thank you
"Social justice politics is about who gets to be on the Cross"
Progressiveness is not an extension of Christianity at all but its complete subversion where the thing above all else (the BAE if you like) is not something beyond the ego but the ego itself, right down to the egoic desire to replace Christ on the cross. This is a critical point in my view if one wants to argue against it. And the new religion is also worse (less useful) than the paganism of the Romans or Greeks because those belief systems still regarded the wantings of the ego as a path to unfulfillment or outright tragedy e.g Narcissus, Icarus and Oedipus
And the deification of identity such as "trans identity" is the fullest expression of this, the obscenity that one's particularised wishes take precedence over even the given reality of a living body (as if the body is mere property of the ego) is only matched by the futility of the hope that pursuing, say surgery, has any possibility, at all, of making one happy.
I find it hard to take Boris as a Catholic; this is surely in name only, and so he could have a church wedding to Carrie. When did he last attend mass? Blair was obviously a Catholic, but waited until he left office before officially converting.
he famously said his faith was like Magic FM in the Cotswolds. Sometimes he can pick it up but sometimes it's just fuzzy.
Or was that Cameron? would need to check.
That was Cameron; "like Magic FM in the Chilterns." Which tells you everything you need to know about David Cameron.
One of Boris Johnson children is a Vaughanian.Carrie is a St Charles alumni - Christianity still matters between 5-16 it seems
Had entirely forgotten Boris's "conversion". As per Brexit, no doubt he has a drawer full of drafts justifying his conversion to Eastern Orthodox, Judaism, Hinduism, Satanism, etc to be brandished at the next expedient moment.
haha
'The case for Satanism by Boris Johnson', one of the great unpublished Daily Telegraph comment pieces.
This was a ripping read. There seems to be something exhausting around all this. As if it sucks air and energy from ordinary life (civic, work, friends, family). Let's also not overlook the much observed role of women in driving it.
Speaking of which, did anyone else notice that the pictures and video clips of the most militant and objectionable pro-Hamas/Palestinian demonstrations suggested a preponderance of women involved? Or am I imagining this, based on a sampling error.
thank you Mike.
Yes, it mainly seems to be women, and there are so many of those videos now. Something quite chilling about the whole thing, although the man telling one woman 'I supported BLM' didn't feel me with huge sympathy.
Ed, theme for next post. Progressive ideals reflect a feminine perspective, showing compassion for the underdog and avoiding conflict. Our humanities departments, schools and HR departments are matriarchal institutions. Is this due to feminism, the defeat of patriarchy, or just technology and decadence? And what is the direction of travel of this trend?
thanks Martin. I am working on a post on such a theme!
Why would young women be drawn to strident - assertive young men. This is always been the case- Women and Gays are drawn to extremes to meet men. Also women shame me into joining extremist groups.
“You do well, my son, to cry like a woman for what you couldn’t defend like a man.”
Apposite quote sir - you are a joy to read!
I may have seen this, but with sound off. Thank goodness
There was a preponderance of another demographic segment involved but we are Not Allowed to Notice That.
Indeed. But I'd expect that, so it didn't particularly catch my attention.
I rate Joel Kotkin's recent analysis of the features of coming neo-fuedalism, but I think in this article you are onto the ideology which is cementing it, neo-paganism.
"Social justice politics is about who gets to be on the Cross"
Recently the claimant appears to have been Chris Packham, the 'environmentalist', who told his BBC TV audience that "I carry the guilt of previous generations.", that is, all those generations who have failed to become manic environmentalists and political activists, with the associated, new, creedal requirements. The 'saviour' complex is in full swing, and raving. The accompanying preview video showed Packham running his hands through his hair in despair and anguish at our recalcitrance etc. (the words 'Father, forgive them because they know not what they do." sprang to my mind).
I pointed out to Owen Jones a few years back in a comment to a Guardian piece of his that the requirement that 'we' ('Man') should be responsible for the state of the 'natural' world, which he was stating as a 'socialist' ideal, was first stated at the beginning of Genesis, by God.
Quite how this disguised 'Christianity' merges with the quite obviously pagan elements in our modern world is unclear. Environmentalism in the UK was always a *right-wing* philosophy when I was young. It was promulgated first of all by the upper classes from especially the 1930s onward, following earlier moves by the hunting lobby in the US. The first major legislation of any note, 'The Protection of Birds Act' of 1954, was sponsored by people like Prince Philip and a collection of upper-class figures whose accents would now provoke amusement on TV shows. Yet it has now become, seemingly, part of the left-wing world view.
My one (probably unoriginal) insight is that ideologies that ignore human nature are doomed to fail. It never occurred to me until I read this article, that Christianity fell into this category, too.
'Actually I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect 'history' to be anything but a 'long defeat' - though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory. '
I'm confused. Christianity (or, at least the Bible does in case we need to be more specific) makes several very clear statements about human nature. Are you referring to the institution of religion? i.e. the Catholic church, mainline Protestant denominations etc.
When I say human nature, perhaps I'm not using the exact, correct term. Please excuse me, I am a programmer and don't know much about philosophy or the humanities. I'm a Catholic, so my views on Christianity are shaped by that.
People want to be free to do what they want to do (individualism) and no longer be told by doctrines or dogmas. "I want to have sex/kill babies/lie about being a woman/get rich and enter the kingdom of heaven/covet thy neighbour's car/etc."
Look at sexuality, for example. By my estimate there are over 200 million homosexuals in the world (with quite a wide error bar on that estimate). Christianity, according to many denominations, does not allow the act of physical love (eros) between such persons. That's a large number of people being denied their true nature.
Men aren't born to be monogamous, but Christianity demands this of us (Ed has written some good points on this before). Sleazy dudes use this to say they want an open relationship or promote polyamory.
Divorce. We should do all we can to stay together as a couple, and while making divorce easier has increased the divorce rate (bad), there are occasions where marriages completely break down.
Abortion. Tracey from accounts just wanting not to be passed over for a promotion at work (possibly the sins of pride and greed?) murders her unborn child.
Hope that ramble explains where I'm coming from.
If we re-paganising then that's rather regressive and bad news for the weak - women, children and the old. Exposing children - Romulus and Remus and Paris were survivors - was routine, we have abortion instead. In Inventing the Individual by Larry Siedentop, pagan Greco-Roman culture was very religious and hierarchical around the family and the state and today's reversion to paganism centres more around the unencumbered self and its realisation. So there may be a difference between now and then, unless individual selves need something to hold them all together and we find that we all have to worship the same gods, or else.
John Gray calls current progressivism hyper-liberal/Christian, and says it lacks the modesty of paganism. But a paradoxical syncresis is probably a better framing, as you say.
I think I mentioned it on twitter - My mother in law - was born sometime in the 1950s in the Peruvian jungle. Her father was a Spaniard. Or at least European. She spent her first few years in a hotel.
Why was it a hotel. Because it was full of people coming and going... There were other children there. The children would play outside and hear babies crying. They would try to get the adults to investigate - The children would be whipped and told they were imagining things
It probably wasn't a hotel...
American religion constantly swings back and forth between institutional and intuitional forms. What you are calling paganization Tara Isabel Burton calls "the Remix." For example, one percent of Americans say they are Buddhists, but eight percent say their "spiritual life" has been influenced by Buddhism. That's not surprising: "mindfullness" is secularized Zen, and it is ubiquitous in American corporate cultures. "Woke social justice" is very much a religion of the internet, worshipping the gods Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Decolonization, and of course, Safety. But it is hardly the first example of secular ersatz religion taking on millenarian themes. Yevgeny Zemyatin opened his novel "We" with a narrative acknowledgement of this transference. It got the book banned. We simply always create new religions out of old materials lying around, except that this time, everyone is their own priest and souls have genders.
It may interest you to know, for example, that despite the clear purpose of the Seven Sleepers being imperial propaganda for a beleaguered Eastern Rome, Muhammad refers to it in the Qur'an.
The Californian Ideology, as it's been called.
Burton writes that we are all on a pilgrimage none of us can get out of. Remove the religion from people and something else fills the gap.
Religion seeks to answer the question what do we do with desire. Its answer is just stop desiring because you are complete already. Consumerism and the modern religions of identity and expression also seek to addresses this question but do so by saying you will be complete (with no sense of lack) but ONLY if you get this one person or thing or experience over there.
"everyone is their own priest and souls have genders."
I think you're on to something there. While rational people have suggested that woke progressivism(?) is turning into a religion, it's always seemed to me that what they ultimately worship isn't "Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Decolonization, and of course, Safety", but their own egos. Embracing those tenets seems to be the path to power for people lacking in many other ways.
Cluster B narcissism? Gnostic splitting as psychological splitting? Surely there is no relationship whatsoever between the craving for "authenticity" and personal ego. Surely Hermeticist alchemical constructions ("nonbinary") are not just luxury beliefs, emphasis beliefs, in the infinite tradition of wealthy societies wasting themselves on woo. Surely!
Genderism is unique in being poly-monotheistic. Every gendersoul is self-created, and also sinless. That is heretical to almost every religion, but the fun fact about gnostic ideas is that they are parasitic, attaching themselves to existing beliefs and reproducing themselves anew.
Ed, you have a great knack for pointing out disconnects in beliefs. A good read that.
thank you!
"At the start of the Ukrainian war some prominent American witches even put a hex on President Putin, although it doesn’t seem to have done much good."
It’s ironic since the Russian elite, including the president, is probably one of the most occult-obsessed on the planet. Those witches didn’t know who they were dealing with.
wow, I didn't know that about Putin. has that been written about? I know he spent a lot of lockdown reading about history (despite my love of the subject, not often a good idea)
Well, it's not wildly publicized. I heard about it from a personal acquaintance who is well-informed about what is going on in the Kremlin behind closed door. From what they told me, it's quite bizarre indeed. If you are interested, I can try connecting you with them, and you can make your own mind. You can contact me through our friend, the Great Khan of Austin, TX (hope you know who I mean).
There was an interesting case a few years back where a Yakutian shaman went against the grain of the Kremlin. This was taken as a threat.
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/09/27/superstitious-minds-why-the-russian-elite-fears-a-rebellious-shaman-a67460
https://www.hoover.org/research/why-putin-fears-shamans-exorcism
has he since had food poisoning/fallen out of a window/died using the safest form of transport?
Last I can see, indefinite confinement in a psychiatric institute.
Well, Gabyshev wasn’t really a shaman, I mean shamans usually do not venture outside of their “territory,” but Putin and his pals were convinced that he had some mystical power.
Let's not forget our brave Wiccan practitioners in WWII who hexed Hitler in "Operation Cone of Power" as per Gerald Gardner's 1954 book Witchcraft Today.
At least 'sacrificing goats or dressing up as druids at Stonehenge' would be entertaining (if, that is, the latter were to actually follow the ancient customs). What strikes me about the practices of our modern theology is its mind-numbing dullness: all the enchantment of a puritan committee meeting.
This is one of the best pieces on our present social and cultural morass that I've read in a long time. Thanks, Ed.
Here in Australia, those declaring themselves Christian also dropped below 50 percent of the population at the 2021 Census. But the repaganisation trends have been evident for many decades. There has been a rapid acceleration of these trends in recent years combined with a rise in anti-Christian sentiment. Christians now find themselves facing a future in which they are a beleaguered minority.
thank you!