If you have arrived here it is likely because you are already somebody who is conscious, afraid, and internally quite shattered. It is a common condition in these times; there is hardly a rock in the developed world which cannot be turned to find angst. The source of it can never be agreed upon, however, and in this uncertainty all the world has come to its knees in a fit of empty and hollow madness: screaming into the void your oh-so-nuanced solution as if somebody were ever going to hear it.
Many of us believe that, in fact, there is somebody hearing our every anguished groan. I will not remain mysterious in this light; I am among these people. I do ask, however: is the answer really sitting right behind us? Is our short history of spiritual fulfilment the simple answer: a return to tradition? Without the usual monotony of questioning “how far back?” and “rose-tinted glasses!”, I would like to make a quite pragmatic rebuttal to this belief – if I may.
“You learn from your mistakes”, wise men have said. I think we can all agree upon this platitude. A child clearly learns from their mistakes, or else any punishment at all for bad behavior would simply be useless cruelty. Elsewise, we’d still be defecating in chamber pots and tossing our waste onto the streets below. That is not to say that the wisdom of the past is somehow comparable to the technology and intelligence of the past. However, I would posit that we should consider ourselves lucky to live in Modernity. It is a time where one can truly observe a change unlike any other in history, perhaps in over one thousand years. In any case, one item we can agree upon is that the past three or so decades have been increasingly dreadful. People are simply not happy anymore; no amount of boomer “wisdom” can wake the doomer from his misery, and we are fighting in the streets for political control simply to try and feel effectual.
Where did we go wrong? What was the mistake of Modernity, exactly? The industrialization and then rapid deindustrialization of Labor? The Internet? Pornography? The sexually perverse? Social Justice Warriors? The institutionalization of Corporatism? End-stage Consumerism? Peace in Europe? Global American Hegemony? Zionism? The CIA? The Zionist CIA Deep-State? Capitalism as a whole? White nationalists? White replacement? Any technology invented later than the Bronze Age as a whole? Ignorance of the “Lindy Effect”? Demons? Satan himself??? GOD Himself?????
I think my point here is more than made, and while I won’t address whether any of those items are legitimate problems or not, it is because such a discussion is utterly immaterial to the real solution.
What is the largest emotional and intellectual institution that the developed world, and the West in particular, has shockingly lost within the last century? It should be quite simple. For the last eleven millenia of our human existence, humans have been decidedly religious creatures (see: Göbekli Tepe). From the point of view of scientism, at the very least Mankind must be evolved to some degree to deal with religion. Even with our long lifespans and meek footprint on the Earth’s history, eleven millenia is enough to affect such change.
We are religious creatures. We have an innate propensity to understand the divine. God is not a simple concept in rational terms, and you would think that surely if we were rational creatures, God would be terribly difficult to understand as children. Verily, this is not the case. God seemingly requires very little explanation to a young child in fact, and it is a concept that they will come to understand very early in their development.
I should make it clear: just because some religious concept is difficult to grasp as a child, it does not mean that this concept is unnatural or unreal. It is quite the opposite in fact, and in general, those religious or theological concepts that are most abstract and esoteric are the ones which hold the most truth. But, “we hold these truths to be self-evident” is always a true statement when it comes to those truths that come to children naturally. Let it be known that children are not the arbiters of truth but nevertheless an important test of it. They cannot tell us if something is necessarily true or false, but they can sometimes tell when something is true, and will never generate false positives.
Where am I going with all of this? Yes, clearly we are religious creatures. Yes, it is surely interesting that children can be such excellent learners of simple yet esoteric truths, like the existence of the divine. But to what end?
The end is this: within the last century, religion has categorically collapsed in the West and elsewhere. We are at a particularly low point now, and there is no doubt that it is one of the greatest contributors to the widespread social unrest and angst felt by us commoners. You are not meant to be, nor are you factually right to be, so apathetic towards the Divine.
So what then? Off to the cathedral (or Cathedral) we go? No.
We can no longer trust the old religious order to safeguard our societal and individual wellbeing. Firstly, in a society in which communities are so large and diverse-of-experience, you will never find a priestly figure who can accurately guide your personal relationship with a higher power. The beliefs and narratives constructed in such a relationship are heartening and often warm, but in fact do not last very long, and do not transcend your own personal experience in the slightest. I have found that in this modern age of widespread doubt and insincerity, there is truly only one path to true belief in God. It is, sadly, in the extremities of human experience: suffering, yes, but love, angst, joy and all they bring with them too. Every religious text practically ever written has told us this, but we are sadly too ignorant and too beholden to institutions to remember it (at least, most of us are this ignorant – I have been long among this group). I will discuss this further in a later article, but those who know it, know.
Furthermore, dogmas have categorically failed religion. It is ironic that this seemingly necessary evil, utilized to protect the church, would become the downfall of religion as a whole. But I am not exaggerating. For centuries, even millenia, the unthinking man was vaguely religious enough that he had faith and fulfillment in his life and soul. Now, these unthinking men are able to see the contradictions between the Church’s doctrine and what is plainly available scientific fact or metaphysical truth. This simple observation will instantly break any real and genuine faith that this man once had in a higher power. He does not know it, but he is now confined to a life of nothing but misery emanating from his internals. Indeed, he will likely find some comfort in the consumerist motivation to simply earn money and the human motivation to simply raise a family, but his soul will be dampened and weak.
Some churches have made considerable steps to try and mitigate this, and I will proudly wear it as a badge of proof that my analysis is correct here. These institutions have become masterful at the art of self-preservation for these millenia, and have billions more dollars and thousands more men to come to the exact same conclusion I came to recently, long ago. The Catholic Church is the most obvious example of this: rapidly shifting their dogmas on the literal meaning of Revelation and Genesis, and even homosexuality. Traditionalists will surely become ill being reminded of these things, but you must understand: now that gay people are able to come out of the closet, many people are meeting others who they know to be gay for the first time. What is the significance of this? Very few who meet any reasonable or personable gay person will then accept the violent, coercive actions that the Church once demanded be taken against such people en masse.
The narrative of these dogmas has collapsed because in the age of mass communication; everybody encounters a number of new experiences several orders of magnitude greater than they did even 30 years ago. Some of my readers will surely then suggest that the problem is in widely dispersed information; I would not disagree that this has caused many problems, but unfortunately restricting that will not solve this particular issue. We simply cannot predict the future. The hundreds of popes who are now long dead certainly didn’t. This extends to all religious dogmas or even texts; they act brazenly in their claims, and then pay the price when their claims become so weak that they are in essence anti-strong: they drive away people from their own religion.
Don’t we, as people who are deeply concerned for the wellbeing of humanity and its relationship with god, want a religious order which is immune to the future? I certainly do. I want people to have something to believe in that will not collapse – not now or ever. I want a unifying institution that is literally impervious to shooting itself in the foot – or better yet avoids the shooting in the first place.
How? Do you actually want to create a new religion? Do you realize how absurd that is, to start fresh when we have alive albeit sick religions that are millenia old? No, not really. I’m not sure I’d even call what I’m trying to accomplish a religion as such, though I think that is the most efficient and effective name. So also in a sense, yes. This is where we are nearing the end of the scope of this particular writing.
If you follow along, you will find God to be very clearly true. When you know God, the doctrine is hardly an issue. You can indeed read every book on Earth and not know him, but in nature, in your pain, in pleasure, in art, indeed, in the extremities of the human condition, the shadow of God is seen. This is the Sod’s way, whereby doctrine is a means to an end, whereby we accept our shallow, broken, human state, whereby all that the institution says is said to bring you to a very simple, natural state: to know God.
With love,
ARK