Spite is all around us; invisible, dominant: the fruit of resentment, fuelled by despair

Spite, spitefulness is a strong candidate for The Worst Sin (I've blogged on this often). 

Another word for (aspects of) spite is Schadenfreude - but this is more often treated as an amusing foible, trivialized; than recognized as among the worst of evils. 

Surely we can all, if honest, recognize in ourselves (and infer in others) this most evil of evils: a desire to harm others, to make others suffer: a motivation that will, at extremes, risk or sacrifice even oneself? 

Surely we have all felt an arising impulse that responds to awareness of happiness, beauty, moral decency, honesty in other people or the world around us... with an impulse of hatred, the urge to destroy it, to smash it. 

We observe perfection; and then a stab of desire to mar that perfection. The urge may even be yielded to, when "harmless" - as when we see a perfect reflection cast by a still pool of water... And then respond by smashing it to smithereens by hurling a rock into it! 

"Harmless" fun, maybe - a tiny lapse, in the scheme of things; no lasting harm done... Yet if we examine the motivations for such everyday (trivial) destructions, we may (if honest) find spite at the root of it.

Likewise for our actions against others. These may be rationalized as necessary, or because "he deserves it"; but at root, the motivation may be spiteful: "I want to see him suffer".  

Most people, most of the time, squash such vile feelings in themselves (and certainly try to forget them) - but surely we have all experienced them? 

And - if we have any insight or capacity to reflect - seen this in other people (including the best people, at times; including those we love the most), and perhaps been at the receiving end of it? 

People who cause trouble among groups of friends - break-up friendships, relationships, even marriages; who spread malicious rumours, mislead, misreport, life; who engage in "he said, she said" betrayals. 

And surely we have at least thought about doing such things ourselves?  

Spite is ignoble, it is despicable - but it is real.

It is found to some degree in almost everybody, and it is the master sin ruling some people (and many demons). It is seen all through human history, and all around us - yet, spite is hardly acknowledged. 

(Except, maybe, in stories about youngish children! Enid Blyton often included spiteful characters, named as such, in her stories - which is how I first put a name to it.)

It is regarded as more sophisticated and pseudo-intelligent to analyse spite in terms of other motivations - especially disguised forms of self-interest. So, the harming of B by A is likely to be described in terms of how harming B benefits A (perhaps indirectly, or over the long-term). 

But the point is not whether spite can be explained-away - Of Course it can! 

The point is to to Ask The Question. Is this spite?

We absolutely need to know whether whether spite is the real motivator behind behaviour; because if it is, then such behaviour cannot be appeased by fulfilling self-interest. 

And, like most sins, spite feeds on its own gratification. When infliction of harm brings gratification, then the infliction of more harm to more targets will probably follow.    

Spite cannot be bought-off. Spite will not be satisfied by less than suffering and destruction. 

Thus when spite is explained-away - this merely allows for the undetected and more effective deployment of more spite. 

And spite is a natural product of the besetting modern sin of resentment - with the dominant ideology of The West being the creation, encouragement, subsidy and protection of ever-more "resentment groups" defined in terms of class, sex, race, sexuality or... whatever*. 

And (in the West, the developed world) this is a world of despair (whether actual or incipient). Because nearly everybody lives-by the assumptions that reality has no purpose or meaning, and that human life is followed by annihilation. 

With such assumptions; existential despair is normal and rational; such that self-distraction from this (supposed-) reality has become perhaps the primary life goal.    

When we have so many people who fundamentally assume themselves to be victims, and who despair; the ground is prepared for the operations of spite - first directed against those who are most resented (i.e. the supposed "oppressors"); but soon (as the sin takes grip) directed against pretty much anyone who in any way irritates us. 

When the most spite-dominated people are also among the most powerful, wealthy, high status, and influential in the world - then we have.... Well, we have exactly what we see around us in the world of geopolitics, global strategy, and the international and national leadership class. 

This world of "Sorathic evil".  

A world in which anything that is (or seems to be) of-God, or Good; anything apparently manifesting the transcendental values of Truth, Beauty or Virtue. Anything wholesome, innocent, natural, spontaneous, care-free... Any such becomes a prime target for spitefully-motivated attack. 

Yet, up to now, spite is invisible. Trivialized. Explained-away. 

By refusing to recognize the operations of spite in ourselves - failing thereby to acknowledge and to repent its sinful nature; we thereby fail to recognize spite in others. 

So spite can be everywhere, dominant, and increasing - yet we choose to be self-blinkered against perceiving it. 

And until we are aware of spite; the operations of spite cannot be resisted - either in ourselves, or others. 

* Leftism now rules the West and much of the world; and Leftism is a negative, oppositional ideology built upon resentment, and depending upon continuing expansion of resentment. The so-called political "Right" (of all types) is merely a variant of Leftism**. This can be seen in its domination by resentments, but of a different inflexion; typically inversions of mainstream Leftism: e.g. resenting women instead of the Leftist resentment of men, resenting the Left-approved races etc. Of course, such motivating resentment is rationalized and explained-away on quasi-objective grounds - yet the actuality of resentment as prime motivator is sometimes revealed when spite-driven desires or fantasies are expressed; as well as by the relentlessly negative and oppositional focus of Rightist discourse (against, against, AGAINST!). 

**The only alternative to the Left is religion. All secularism, all atheism, all materialism is ultimately Leftist. 

H/T - This was stimulated by a comment from Avro G. 

Spite - in some ways, the worst sin

Spite is the desire to harm, hurt, upset, annoy or offend someone else - and it is a terrible sin because it is both insatiable and self-righteous.

A spiteful person sees happiness and wants to destroy it, on the grounds that it is smug, and it will be good-for those concerned to experience a bit of 'real life' - he observes with satisfaction the misery of others because they 'deserve it'.

Spite is worse than Schadenfreude because spite is active - spite is actually going to the trouble of causing trouble - expending effort, time and resources to create suffering in others.

Spite is ignoble, petty, babyish - whereas some people embrace the sin of pride and try to defend it as a good thing; nobody does this with spite, nobody makes a big thing about their own spitefulness - not least because it reveals their dependence on others.

That many of the highest status people in the world are primarily motivated by spite is extremely obvious; although - perhaps because of horror at the reality of this fact - people talk as if this was an extreme and outrageous suggestion. Yet surely our insight and personal experience tells us that spite is nearly universal to some degree; and the dominant passion, the prime motivator, the principal drive and source of energy for a significant number of people - including some of the richest and most famous, the most intelligent and educated, the most charming and beautiful.

Indeed, in my personal encounters with the elite, the mass media stars and celebrities; petty spitefulness is probably the major and most striking feature they seem to share in common.  

In sum; it is the spitefulness of an evil person that causes so much trouble for others. A proud spirit damns himself; but it is spite that motivates him to drag others down; it is spite that makes him a nuisance, a wrecker, a ruiner, a destroyer; it is perhaps spite that most distinguishes a demon from the general run of lost souls.


Note: I remember how, as a kid, we especially used to dislike and fear spiteful children. Perhaps especially those pretty, 'perfect' ballet-dancing type girls, the ones whom the adults thought of as especially 'good', and always believed - but whose greatest pleasure seemed to be asserting their superiority with barbed comments and insightful criticisms that you couldn't stop thinking about; and who quietly delighted in getting other children into as much trouble as possible, whenever a safe opportunity arose. And of course there were plenty of boy tormentors too - including the most dominant and 'popular' kid; who would terrorize, or make gangs in order to enjoy the misery of their victims. But, in general, spitefulness caused more childhood misery than almost any other cause - and it was a special bliss, a kind of paradise, to be among any group of kids that was free of such characters. 

Conceptualising Sin - and The Fall

Sin could usefully be defined as 'the condition of mortal life' - since that encompasses its two main aspects of wrong behaviour and death.

The Fall was therefore, primarily, moving into the condition of incarnated mortality - with its consequent inevitability of both death, and those behaviours that are a consequence of being imperfectly aligned with the divine will.

Reading the Fourth Gospel, we can see that the term 'sin' refers to a wider range of phenomena that more recent usage - in particular it is used sometimes to mean death; and by death is meant the ghostly, half-existence of demented souls that have been severed from their bodies, and wander 'witless' in the underworld that the ancients termed Sheol or Hades (later translated and reconceptualised as Hell).


The Fall refers to the choice and decision made by all of us mortal Men to leave the child-like, unfree, un-conscious Eden-paradise of our immortal pre-mortal spiritual life; where we were immersed-in God's will and lacking in personal agency - hence unable to act otherwise than in harmonious accordance with divine motivations.

When we became incarnated, we increased our free agency; but at the cost of becoming separated from God's will. Mortality (as a state) is characterised by change, corruption, disease and decay - as well as inevitable death.

Thus, no mortal Man (except for Jesus) has been fully aligned-with God's creation. We are all, therefore, 'sinners' in the dual sense of being not-fully-aligned with the divine will, and also destined to die.


However, The Fall is sometimes rightly described as a Felix Culpa - a blessed transgression; because it enables us to attain a higher level of divine nature.  

Only after being separated from our previous state of unconscious immersion God's will; are we are (potentially) able to make the free choice of aligning ourselves eternally with God's will; and after mortal death, as resurrected eternal children of God, then actively-participating in God's work of ongoing creation - as ourselves gods.

 (i.e. Small 'g' gods, working within God the creator's reality.),

(All this is made possible by our mortal incarnation, but we are free agents, so it is not guaranteed. Indeed, in the modern West, it looks like only a small minority are choosing to choose salvation and resurrection.)


At the same time, because we are not-fully-aligned with God's will in this mortal life, we will inevitably think, say and do many things that are opposed to God's will: that is, we will inevitably commit 'sins' in the more common usage of the word.

Those familiar lists of behavioural sins (e.g. the behaviours proscribed by the Ten Commandments, or the Seven Deadlys - or mortal and venial sins; or the Scriptural prohibitions from Paul's letters) can be understood as broad categories of behaviour that tend to be characteristic of those who are not-fully-aligned with God's will.

Behavioural sins (such as these lists) are therefore Not to be taken as 'sin-itself' - which is subjective; but observable 'signs' that are typically 'correlated-with' actual sin - sin itself being the mortal state of being unaligned with God's will.


The specific focus of these familiar 'behavioural correlates of sin' tends to be on those behaviours that are either especially tempting, or especially destructive of society in general or church order in particular. That is the reason why sexual correlates of sin are so prominent.

And this focus certainly seems to be necessary - in the sense that we can now observe the subversive effects of removing such restraints. The outcome has been moral inversion: i.e. the worst of all possible outcomes: the one most likely to lead to self-damnation.

However, on the flip side, there is a relative neglect and softness of attitudes to other types of more 'private' sin; such as envy, spite, cowardice, dishonesty and bearing false witness - which are in themselves probably more dangerous to the soul.


In sum; we are all Fallen in the sense that we will all die; and because our mortal lives are never fully-aligned-with God's creative motivations. And the inevitable difference between God's will and our own will leads to many thoughts, words and deeds ('sins') that are a consequence of this disharmony.

And the cure for sin - both mortality and behavioural disharmony - is on the other side of 'biological death'; when we may choose to be resurrected to Life Eternal in a condition of everlasting harmony with the divine work of loving-creation.

"The exclusion of love" - the worst possible sin

"I know it's off the point", Havard interjects, "but I'd like to ask Williams what he would regard as the worst possible sin?"

Williams answers without a moment's hesitation: "The exclusion of love."

Havard nods. 

From "Thursday evenings" (an imaginative recreation of a meeting, closely based on documentary sources) in The Inklings, by Humphrey Carpenter, 1979. 

For many years found Charles Williams's idea of the worst possible sin to be impressive - and yet also puzzling.

 (I later came-across the place where Williams gave this judgment, and from-which Carpenter derived the quotation; but unfortunately I have now forgotten where this was published.) 

Although for somewhat different reasons than Williams - I also regard "the exclusion of love" as a deep insight into sin, rooted in the ultimate nature of reality. 

For Christians; Love is - metaphysically speaking - the ultimate cause and reason for creation. 

Therefore, the exclusion of Love is the primary sin; because it rejects and opposes divine creation itself. 

This is important, because Men are easily distracted by more 'spectacular' and positive sins; but it is worth remembering that these are (in a sense) just a means to the end of the exclusion of Love. 

And also that the exclusion of Love may be at work - as a motivation, in the nature of Men or other Beings - even when spectacular sins are entirely absent. 

Many large and powerful aspects of modern life are a material embodiment of the exclusion of Love: such as bureaucracy in general, and social systems such as law, the economy, and mass media... 

The modern institution is a domain where procedures dominate. Love is excluded from operations ever-more-completely; and consequently an environment where (Love-less and Love-hating) cold, soulless, psychopathic, manipulative careerists thrive.  

And the worst of positive sins is probably spite; and that too can be seen as a consequence of the exclusion of Love. 

Where Love is present, spite can never work unopposed; but without Love, spite can become master. 

Spiteful fantasies of the suffering of enemies, are usually projections

Something that is very evident in the mainstream-leftist mass media, the alternative-"right" blogosphere, and among traditional Christians - is a tendency publicly to engage in (and advocate) fantasies of the suffering and destruction of their enemies.  

I don't expect better from leftists and the secular "right" - but I do expect better from Christians; in the sense that this kind of stuff is revealing of the individual embracing a fearful, resentful and spite-driven nature .

Fear, resentment and spite are all sins; and all besetting (characteristic) sins of our time and place - which is why this "revenge fantasy" stuff is so common, and so generally tolerated. 

Tolerated and indeed excused; on the basis that (from whatever point of view) the subjects of spiteful fantasies of suffering "deserve it". 

Which may or may not be correct, but is irrelevant; because the sin lies in the (apparently) un-repented (because publicly celebrated) indulgence of one's own fear/ resentment/ spitefulness. 

Of course, many of us (me included, for sure) are prone to this kind of sin; we are variously assailed by gnawing fear, brooding resentment, and fantasies of what horrible things we would enjoy happening to our enemies. 

And if we don't suffer from these sins, then there will be others - just as much sins, and just as prevalent and tolerated-approved! Such as dishonesty, and despair. 

After all, we are all sinners, as Jesus told us; and that's an intractable fact of this mortal life.

What matters is whether we acknowledge and repent the sins, when we begin to become aware of them...

And public propaganda and celebration of our own sins is the opposite - it is doubling-down on sin. 

NOTE: Doubling-down on sin in public usually makes that sin even more difficult to repent. It seems to be a common psychological trait that when we have made public commitments to sin, then (the sin of) pride deters us from publicly acknowledging (or even in private acknowledging, to ourselves and God) that we have made a mistake. This is why the demonic overlords have arranged society such that we are bribed and coerced into multiple public celebrations of value-inversion. But; no power on earth can prevent the repentance of a man who wants to repent and instead choose affiliation to God and divine creation.

NOTE ADDED: The problem of spiteful revenge fantasies is particularly acute and increasing, because the top-down-engineered descent of the world into destructive chaos provides almost daily temptations. Christians need to remind ourselves that "my enemies enemy" is not, thereby, my friend; and that overall spiritual good comes only from good motivations - and not as a by-product of evil intent. 

Sins are Not finite and discrete - therefore they are un-countably numerous

It is probably a consequence of the legalistic notion of religion (e.g. The Ten Commandments specifically and the Hebrew Law generally) that there are specific categories of sins, and that Men in their lives will commit a certain finite and (in principle) countable number of these sins. 

This then suggests that there must (sooner or later) be some kind of reckoning of sin; whereby each Man must be evaluated and compensate for the specific sins which he has committed. For instance; I have heard it said that after death a Christian must (in some way or another) be confronted by, and account for, each and all of the sins he committed during mortal life.

But this is wrong; because sins are in truth a consequence of our nature and that of this world. They are the degree by which we diverge from a complete harmony with God's creative purpose. 

This divergence, this failure to live-by-love, is not a matter of X number of specific acts; but instead a matter of every Man having (to lesser or greater degree) a wrong orientation, wrong motivations, wrong gratifications etc. 

Sin is the consequential totality of being-wrong and going-wrong, of divergence from the divine.  

Some Christians talk as if they themselves, or most other people, are Basically Good; and commit just a few sins per day/ month/ year. And they are able to think like this because they only count Big Sins (e.g. breaches of the Ten Commandments, or Canon Law), and completely ignore (or accept as inevitable hence 'natural' - hence they 'don't count') the innumerable instances of (for example) spite, fear, dishonesty, resentment, lust, despair etc; which everyone experiences every day - indeed every waking (or dreaming) hour. 

But that is a wrong description of the human condition. Each of us comes into the world as an unique Being and into an unique family and social environment; and we make an unique set of choices. 

And all of us are, to a significant degree, un-aligned with the 'perfect' life which would be lived entirely by love...

Sometimes we do come into harmony, and therefore we experience to some degree what a Good life is like; but inevitably we will soon steer or drift "off course" again. All who are capable will experience the Good in order that every such person can know it, and then potentially choose Good; after death when given the opportunity to follow Jesus Christ. 

Eternal resurrected life in Heaven is the perfection which we mortal beings on earth cannot attain: indeed, the fact that it is unattainable is exactly why Heaven is necessary; and why Jesus Christ was mortally born and did his work of salvation: so that we - like Him - could attain to Heaven via death.    

After death we are not - therefore - confronted with, and called to account for, our sins understood as a sequence of discrete phenomena that must individually repented. The situation is Not a double-negative of cancelling sin. I see things the other way around, almost. 

What we are confronted-with is the positive and unitary choice of whether to follow Jesus, and be admitted to Heaven - this, on condition of leaving-behind anything about us that is inconsistent with that wholly-loving reality. 

One who loves Jesus, and loves God enough (a Saint, perhaps), or even one who desires to be in Heaven unconditionally because of those deceased that he loved and who love him who are already there (and, aside, I think that contact with the beloved resurrected dead will be apparent at that point) - such people will make that decision for Heaven quite easily. 

But others may find that there is some particular "thing" about himself that he is reluctant to "give up", some "blockage" that stops him from making the choice of Heaven. 

This is known as his besetting sin. 

Then a particular and discrete choice may arise that corresponds to a particular and specific "sin" in the more traditional sense. Then we will be confronted with the need to repent that besetting sin which blocks our access to Heaven* - and it will be made clear that we must give-up that part of our mortal selves if we are to live eternally "in Love". 

In sum: the choice of Heaven is not understandable in terms of repenting every one of a large number of particular sins; because that is a wrong way to understand sin. In reality, our sins are uncountable, because they are not categorical and because they are so integral to our being and this world. 

However; many people apparently have a broadly-categorical besetting sin (or more than one) that, unless repented, will block the decision to choose salvation. And such specific sins may indeed need specifically to be confronted and repented.  

*Note: This was, for me, helpfully depicted in CS Lewis's The Great Divorce. h/t - A recent comment by Mia triggered the above reflections. 

Groups of people (e.g. a particular sex, religion, empire, nation, ethnicity, or social class) are never the root of The Problem

A good deal of human discourse is - and maybe always has been - ranged around arguments over which group of people are most at fault for the state of things? 

That group-at-fault may be very large - one of the sexes, for instance; or may be variously small - a particular religion, empire, nation, ethnicity, or social class. 

The thing is, there are so many candidate groups; and loads of evidence for all of them as being a problem, or even a Big problem - so there is constant and unresolvable dispute about which particular group is the worst.

What this amounts to is a search for the source of the major problems of the world; that special group which is the origin of the problems caused by most or all the other groups across the spread of history.

The point of this search for the origin, is the hope that when the source is known, then a solution will become possible... If the Big Problem can be located, then maybe it can be isolated, and its threat eliminated? 

So alluring is this prospect, that the project to discover the root-evil group continues; despite many generations of futility and failure - and no solid example of successful positive transformation consequent upon elimination of a particular group. 

Some of these problem groups are nonsensical projections, others are identifying a real and serious problem - by which I mean a real spiritual problem. It is a major aspect of the extremity of spiritual evil in these times that large groups have been (and are being) made evil by the sin of resentment. 

Many groups have been corrupted by resentment, to the point that resentment becomes the primary (or even sole) cause of their group-cohesion and motivation. 

Indeed, there may be nothing in common between the group members, except for the shared focus of their resentment. That is indeed the nature of The Left as of 2025: leftism has become nothing-but a collection of shared resentments. 

And, once a resentment-based group has been created, then there is the further spiritual problem that it leads not just to counter-measures, but to counter-resentment; such that a resentment-fuelled groups leads to the development of another group who "resent the resenters"*. 

And thus the problem compounds, and the search for an original group source of The Problem, and a remedy; instead spirals into a maelstrom of increasing mutual resentment.  

Why does this happen, and why does it happen so much here-and-now? 

It happens because ultimately humans are being manipulated by demons - because a world of humans that cohere by resentment is one that spiritually benefits only the Satanic strategy of human damnation - no matter what the (temporary) material outcome of inter-group conflict might be. 

And humans are more easily manipulated by demons here-and-now because we have (as a civilization) excluded the spiritual perspective from public discourse; including having denied the reality of the demonic - so that only human causes are regarded as permissible explanations for human problems.

(Spiritual explanations are regarded as necessarily false, because impossible.) 

The situation is strongly encouraged by the dominant Western ideology that regards "correctly-directed" resentment (e.g. anti-nationalist-globalism, socialism, feminism, antiracism, anti-antisemitism) as a virtue, not a sin; and which encourages resentment as a core human motivation by all means possible (state propaganda, media propaganda, laws and regulations etc).

Resentment is therefore a besetting sin of this era and place - because it is a sin that has been culturally-inverted into a virtue. 

Christians absolutely need to break out of this demonic cycle of group-resentment, on the basis that it is spiritual poison. 

As I've often said before: the reasons Christians are commanded to forgive in all situation is a spiritual (not practical) imperative; rooted in the fact that the opposite of forgiveness is the sin of resentment. 

Forgiveness is not about the evils of other person, or the other group, no matter how very evil these may be; it is instead about an evil in ourselves: We forgive sins in order that we ourselves do not fall into resentment. 

+++

* Examples of this abound on the "Secular Right" i.e. the group of anti-mainstream-Left political activists and commenters; which group includes plenty of self-identified Christians whose deepest and most compulsive interest is this-worldly, hedonic, and material. So we get those whose obsessive focus of discussion and argument is ("manosphere") anti-feminism, anti-antiracism, anti-(anti-antisemitism), and so forth. As with the mainstream Left, this broad grouping of "Alt-right"/ "Neoractionaries" etc has no net-positive spiritual motivation, and is united only by their resentments**.

**Further note: If you shake free of the past few weeks of gleeful euphoria of the Secular Right at the stated-intentions/?actions of the new US President's administration - you will observe a great surge of increased resentment (gleeful spite, Schadenfreude...), and nothing at all in the way of a positive spiritual programme. This may be "natural" for people to behave like this, but it sure ain't Christian thus gratuitously and publicly to celebrate one's own sin! 

The sin is the 'motivation' not the 'consequences'

The sin is the lie, or intent to mislead - unaffected by the justification that it was just about a small matter...

The sin is the spite: the wanting to harm another for one's own gratification - not in the magnitude of that which is wished upon them.

The sin is in the resentment - it does not matter whether criticism is 'deserved'.

Evil is in the believed and argued inversion of virtue - not in whatever harmful consequences of this inversion.

Fear, Resentment and Despair - the triad of Ahrimanic sins... Leading towards purely-negative Sorathic evil - as seen in 2020 with social destruction

(Note: Here I am using a typology of evil: Luciferic, Ahrimanic, and Sorathic - which I have adapted and transformed from their origin in the works of Rudolf Steiner.) 

*

In the past, the dominant sins were probably the triad of Anger, Lust and Pride. These, at any rate, seem to be the dominant characteristics of great sinners of history - right up into the middle twentieth century. 

But as Western society became more industrialised, specialised, coordinated and impersonally-systemic; the dominant nature of evil became Ahrimanic. 

The most prominent triad of sins became Fear, Resentment and Despair. 

 

Fear, Resentment* and Despair is the dominant mood of the world in 2020 - these are the modern, 'bureaucratic sins'. 

The self-seeking, self-aggrandising evil of the mid-twentieth century (as exemplified by the atheist-socialist dictators such as Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot etc.) is not much in evidence in the West. Of course, Luciferic evil is still present; but these sins require greater courage and motivation than are possessed by the masses - or indeed the rulers - in 2020. 

Luciferic sin is weaker and less common than in the past; because it requires high motivation which is fuelled by the virtue of courage. 

Great Luciferic sin entails a positive, active, for-the-self mind-set. However; courage, hence motivation, has been incrementally eroded by the passage of several generations of de facto atheism. Hence the rise in Ahrimanic sin; which is much more passive, negating, and directed against-others. 

Beyond the Ahrimanic lies the Sorathic, which is even more fully negative in its motivations. I think this happens, because the Ahrimanic sins erode their own basis. 

A bureaucratic world tends towards a state of passive, unconscious, materialism. The Ahrimanic impulse begins with a denial of the aliveness of the mineral world, extends through denial of consciousness to plants, then animals, and eventually - as for the past decades, creates a world where aliveness, and consciousness is denied even to Men. 

This materialism (positivism, scientism) is the basis of modern bureaucracy; which terms Men 'human resources', and generates policy on the basis of numbers and statistics. The individual Man counts only as an integer. 

 

When this world view of negation of the Self, penetrates the soul and has been internalised; we get the Sorathic form of evil. 

...Evil as the negation of The Good - any good. 

So, evil loses any positive goal and becomes directed-against Truth, Beauty and Virtue; against life and consciousness, against the natural and spontaneous, against Beings and their relationships. 

Sorathic evil's only 'satisfaction' (because it has become incapable of 'pleasure') is in this destruction of anything that is of-God; anything created, anything capable of creation.

 

An example? Well, a very obvious instance of Sorathic evil in 2020 is the imposition of that demonic-triad of lockdown, social-distancing, and masking. Leading, as they must do, to the permanent annihilation of human society - and the construction of a world of universal solitary-confinement.

Obviously the mainstream, birdemic-related, excuses for annihilating human society and culture are lies. But - much more significantly - even the architects of the Great Reset cannot make a coherent argument why societal destruction is necessary!

They do it, but They can't explain it.

 

Their attempted justification of universal isolation relates to the need (and benefits) of automation, robots and artificial intelligence systems; but this is a non sequitur. The 'need' for one, does Not imply the destruction of the other.

What we are therefore seeing here is a very pure form of Sorathic negation. Even the Global Establishment themselves, the people who are imposing societal destruction on the world, do not understand why they are doing this work of societal destruction. 

They insist upon its necessity; but they cannot coherently explain it!

 

The reason is that the 'need' for societal destruction cannot be explained in materialistic terms - which are the only terms possible in public discourse; and among those who deny the reality of God and creation. 

The true reason for societal destruction is that human society is Good and therefore needs to be destroyed. Society between Men is indeed one of the great and essential Goods of this mortal world; as Men at all times, everywhere, have acknowledged and acted-upon - quite naturally and spontaneously. 

The idea that this can and should be dispensed with is monstrous, outrageous and ridiculous... for anyone who is Not deep into the servitude of Satan. But then, that is precisely what we are dealing-with. 

 

Therefore human society is an obvious, and essential, target for Sorathic evil; not because it is 'useful' to destroy human community, not because its destruction will enhance the lives of the Global Establishment - but exactly because human society is Good, and a Great Good; and because destroying it will induce suffering and (in this atheistic world) despair on a scale unprecedented. 

 

(And despair is a sin, because it is a rejection of God: a failure to trust in God, and a refusal of Jesus's gift of eternal life in Heaven. Despair - that is, as an existential decision, not a mere emotion - is therefore the choice of damnation.) 

 

In this burgeoning world of Sorathic evil, we need to stop looking for the 'advantage' in evil. Need to stop trying to 'explain evil' in terms of it (for example) making more money for Them, or giving Them more power...

From now, evil needs gain no advantage by its action: evil thrives purely on the destruction of whatever is Good. 

Evil has therefore ceased to be a triad, and has become a unity - the unity of negation; the unity of simple destruction of Good.

This is Sorathic evil. 

* Resentment can be understood as primarily directed against others. Spitefulness is another term for this. A person motivated by spite will put his greatest efforts into causing harm to others, rather than promoting himself. He will even harm himself in his zeal to harm others. The 'positive' face of resentment is the burgeoning phenomenon of 'entitlement'; which, again, has a strong flavour that 'my' privilege is best expressed in terms of the intrusive inconvenience, anger and misery it causes to others.

 

Note added: 

There are implications in the above understanding for Christians; because Luciferic evil was usually opposed by trying to build church-administered systems to 'tame' Anger, Lust and Pride - by encouraging/ insisting-upon obedience to church rules. 

However, this strategy of taming by obedience (as we have seen) played-into the reinforcement of the Ahrimanic sins. And church-Christianity has dis-couraged, and de-motivated itself. Thus all the churches have (more, or less) become part of the global, atheistic bureaucratic System of Ahrimanic evil. In 2020, the mainstream churches have actively embraced their all-but annihilation by birdemic rules.

Ahrimanic evil was opposed by 'counter-cultural', anti-System, individualistic ideas - which, when not 'Romantic' Christian - often fell back into Luciferic evils (especially lust). And it is tempting, nowadays, to suppose that evil can be attacked by resisting and destroying the Global Bureaucratic System ('The Matrix'). But, if I am correct that this Ahrimanic System is already being superseded and consumed by negative, Sorathic evil; then the current, world dominating evil cannot be resisted by any form of destruction. 

In sum; if we aimed primarily to destroy The System, we would only reinforce the emerging Sorathic spirit of destruction. 

What then? Resistance to Sorathic evil is as simple as the evil it opposes; in that it is to pursue the positive virtues most characteristic of God - which are love and creation (which are one: creation being a superabundance of love); that is, to pursue loving and creating.

('Loving' in the sense of love in the best marriages and families; 'creating' in the broadest sense of thinking and acting from our real, divine self - we are children of God; which is always original and generative.)

And, resistance to Sorathic evil must be individual, or based upon personal, loving 'familial' relationships; because of the danger of Ahrimanic ('Systemic') evil, standing behind the Sorathic.  

So, our course seems clear and simple, as well as difficult and hazardous; which is for each individual to resist Sorathic destruction by creation; to resist Sorathic negation by love. And to ensure that these values and behaviours of creation and love come from within-us: that is, come from God-within-us. 

And not to wait for a lead from any church, institution or other-person - nor to look behind to see if anyone is following us. We must do what needs to be done our-selves, starting now.

 

Gossip: perhaps at present the most neglected and most popular of sins?

*
Throughout the Bible there are multiple references to the sinfulness of gossip, the passing on of malicious details, speculations, and falsehoods. The problem of gossip is taken very seriously in the Bible, and there are sanctions against those who gossip.

Yet gossip is the bread-and-butter of interpersonal discourse for many people, most of the time - including Christians. And it is the very basis and substance of much mass media communication, which has expanded so much in recent decades.

And the synergistic combination of interpersonal discourse with internet mass media has made the phenomenon of social networking into by far the largest and most powerful international malicious gossip fest that there has ever been in the history of the world.

So, there is a serious, damaging sin - which is rampantly growing, combined with little awareness of the gross wickedness involved.

*

An example from a while ago was the Christian-driven gossip, ignorance and lying directed against the Harry Potter books and JK Rowling. This matter is thoroughly dealt with by Jerram Barrs in the following lecture.

http://www.bethinking.org/culture/jk-rowling-and-harry-potter

As so often, people are most in danger of unrestrained sin when they feel they are being self-righteous.

Obviously malicious gossip is - sooner or later - sickening for decent people, they feel disgust for themselves and others. Moralistic gossip is the worst kind of gossip, people hatred, spite and malice are disguised.

*

The matter of gossip is not to be confused with 'judgement' - and especially not with the confused and mistaken idea among Christians that humans are (supposedly) not allowed to judge the sinfulness of others.

This is nonsense - the judgement from which Christians are supposed to refrain is that concerned with their ultimate salvation. But it would be insane and indeed wicked for humans to refrain from judging one another about their activities and motivations - of course we must judge!

So, as always, extremes are both wrong. Gossip is certainly a sin; but we must judge, and may have a duty to warn others in light of our judgements.

Part of doing right is a matter of motivation (real inner motivation, not what you might say to others to justify yourself); and part of it is a matter of knowledge based on trusted sources and persona experience; versus passing-on hearsay from sources known to be dishonest, spiteful, destructive and themselves wicked.

*

What is forgiveness and should all Christians always strive to do it?

I have often written about forgiveness on this blog, because I think the Christian injunction to forgive is widely and profoundly misunderstood - and not only by non-Christians.  

The reason that Christians are called upon to forgive everybody and every-thing is that the alternative is to nurse resentment, which is bad for us - is indeed a sin, and one of the commonest (because officially encouraged) in this time-and-place. 

There is no place for resentment in Heaven; so to enter Heaven we must be prepared to give-up all our resentments; and insofar as we harbour resentments during our mortal lives, then so much the worse for us. 

Almost always, resentment harms ourselves, and does nothing whatsoever to whoever is resented. 

For example, it is common to continue resenting people long after they have died - sometimes for many generations or centuries.

Resentment is therefore on the spectrum of that worst of sins: spite - whereby the desire to harm others is more powerful than even the desire to benefit oneself. Resentment is like that. It is a willingness to orientate one's life around negative desires for another person or people. 

So, forgiveness is simply a recognition that resentment is a sin and does us harm; and repenting any resentments we feel. 

This means that forgiveness has nothing to do with remitting just punishments, nor has it anything to do with forgetting - and failing to learn from - the harms that others have done to us. 

Obviously, Christians need to learn from our experiences in life; and when other people have lied to us, stolen from us, assaulted us, tried to make us miserable or to destroy that which we most value - it would be idiotic to pretend this never happened! 

As for other people asking us for forgiveness... well they shouldn't do it; and they would not do it unless they were deceitfully trying to manipulate others for their own benefit. 

Anyone asking another human being for forgiveness is on the wrong side in the spiritual war. They should be asking God for forgiveness.

But even then, God Just Is merciful; so that forgiveness by God is a non-problem for anyone who has recognized their own sin and repented it. 

Repeatedly begging God for the forgiveness promised by Jesus Christ to all who repent, seems likely to be a problem of not-really-repenting - and then asking to have the fact ignored. 

If someone wants to repent, but somehow can't - then they should be repenting their failure to repent - and not psychologically-groveling to be forgiven despite not repenting!

The evil of the Mass Media - the greatest evil of which I know

*
I am now sufficiently detached from mass media outputs that I am continually struck by the alien-ness of the whole business. I particular, I am repeatedly struck by the fact that no matter what evils are being reported or discussed in the mainstream mass media: the mass media makes them worse.

*

No matter how utterly horrific something may be in and of itself - once the mass media gets hold of it, it becomes worse.

In 1001 ways, the mass media makes things worse - mis-attributing blame, blaming the innocent, hiding and excusing the guilty, dwelling sadistically on suffering, causing suffering, hounding victims, advocating violence on the wrong side and prohibiting violence on the right side, creating wicked taboos and breaking sacred taboos... in general propagating lust, spite, envy, hatred, confusion and inversion of values, despair and all manner of evils.

*

No situation is so bad that the mass media cannot and does - day by day, hour by hour, as a matter of routine - make it much, much worse.

And no situation is so bad, that the mass media does not encourage more of the same.

*

As an 'entity' the mainstream mass media is by far the most wicked THING that has even been in existence - because (not being a human personage and therefore not limited by the minimal intrinsic coherence of a human; but a spirit of evil using human personages - who consent to being used) the mass media can and does operate to destroy all Goods of all types in all directions - not simultaneously but sequentially.

This is (must be) the work of the greatest evil of which I know - of more than human evil - of the greatest evil in existence. 

*
Note added: I am assuming the truth of the standard Christian belief that advocating sin is far worse than actually sinning; because sinning is (to a significant extent) unavoidable while advocating sin is deliberate. 
REF: http://addictedtodistraction.blogspot.co.uk/
*

Sorath is ascendant... But is Sorath a specific being?

I have recently blogged about the theme of Sorathic evil; which I adapted from some remarks of Rudolf Steiner - and which I first came across, summarized, in the work of Terry Boardman. 

Sorathic evil is here defined as a purely negative, short-termist and destructive kind of evil; ultimately motivated by resentment and hatred of God and all that is God's creation. 

I envisage Sorathic evil as a kind of end-stage (end-times) phenomenon; and one we may observe following-on from the recent and current Ahrimanic evil that denies the reality of God, creation and the spiritual realm altogether; and attempts to impose a wholly materialistic and scientistic, Global Total System of surveillance and control. 

This Ahrimanic evil takes a long-term perspective, aiming to maximize quantitative human damnation - and in pursuit of this goal includes necessarily various elements that are good; such as the bureaucratic virtues of obedience, thoroughness and hard-work. 

Ahrimanic evil aims to create a system of value-inversions (virtue becomes vice, while sin is encouraged and rewarded; truth becomes hate-facts and fake-news, while lies are science... etc.). This System will (by such means as law, media propaganda and corporate regulations) subversively 'process' people into a social structure that is anti-God, anti-Christian, anti-Good.  

But as Ahrimanic evil has become dominant and pervasive, and gets closer to completion (as is happening rapidly at present) so the stage is set for Sorathic evil. 

It will begin to be 'noticed' that The System still relies upon good-motivations (e.g. residual habits of thinking and behaving inherited from tradition and Christianity; or innate common sense evaluations and survival instincts as a consequence of human biology). 

When these tacit and implicit Christian (or Pagan) virtues are pointed-out;  and the Ahrimanic will begin to lose faith in their compromises. 

As The System becomes more 'total', and as Good agents are disempowered and suppressed) inevitably Sorathic zeal begins to focus on those aspects of the The System itself, that conflict with the aims of evil. 

Extremist and impatient Sorathic agents will turn-upon the plodding 'moderates' of evil; aiming to purge them. Indeed, by this point the sincere Ahrimanic agents will be among the least-evil of those who wield power and influence.    

Until that point, short-termist immediate evil cannot prevail; because it cannot self-organize. After all, Sorathic agents will fight each other whenever immediate advantage is to be gained from it.

However, when Good has been substantially destroyed and replaced with an evil-orientated and evil-permeated System; then there will commence a kind of natural selection among agents of evil. 

Sorathic agents that are more short-termist (hence destructive) will begin to prevail over Ahrimanic agents who are trying to be long-termist by clinging-onto virtues like obedience and pragmatic long-termism.  

And Sorathic 'gratification' is, at this extreme, sheerly spiteful destructiveness. A Sorathically-motivated being will destroy even when this takes hard work, and even when it harms the Sorathic being. 

(For a Sorathic being; cutting off your nose to spite your face is normal operational procedure.) 

Against such reckless, frenzied, destructive hate; the sensible, practical, self-seeking Ahrimanic 'moderates' will be helpless. 

For this reason I do not think that there can be a specific being of Sorath. 

Instead Sorathic evil is a kind of mass effect, the product of many spiteful individuals operating in a situation of advanced-evil where good agents have been dispersed and stripped of power. Individualistic spite will prevail. 

There cannot be a Sorathic 'leader'. Any attempt to plan and lead Sorathic activity, would be self-contradictory! After all; planning and strategizing of evil is Ahrimanic rather than Sorathic! 

Maximizing immediate short-term destruction is intrinsically opposed to optimizing long-term Systemic evil They are goals that cannot simultaneously be pursued - one or the other must prevail. 

In conclusion, I do not think that Sorath is a specific being, but a type of evil: the most advanced and extreme type of evil - therefore, one that cannot thrive until the ground has been prepared for it, by the success of Ahrimanic evil and its expulsion of Good agents from public discourse and practice. 

And the ground has, very nearly, been exactly thus prepared; and the ascendency of the Sorathic has already begun. 

War and the devil

*

Last Sunday was the English Remembrance Day, dating from the 1914-18 Great War.

As we reached the end of a sermon on war, and the fact that God was present always despite the horror of war, I was aware that while everything which had been said was true, it felt incomplete.

What was missing was the devil.

*

I don't really see how a Christian can properly address the topic of war without reference to Satan.

Without that reference we have - on the one hand, the sinfulness of men and on the other the Goodness of God - but what when the sinfulness of men becomes organized, purposive, when torments are not 'merely' a by product of military necessity but are planned and delighted in, relished?

A particular horror of war is the excuse and opportunity it gives for this kind of strategic sin that delights in inflicting atrocity.

This is, of course, the hallmark of the demonic in its extreme form - and ought to be labelled as such.

*

One reason why Christians should strive not to be worldly, is that in this world Satan is greatly powerful. The same delight in torture, the delight in the act of torture, is evident in at an everyday level in malicious gossip (i.e. 99 percent of discourse in the public arena), and in Schadenfreude - pleasure in the misfortune of others: a species of that most odious vice envy; and an almost ubiquitous and indeed socially-sanctioned sin from which few are immune and of which many openly boast.

*

Not the least evil of Leftism is that it puts envy at the core of politics; celebrates and institutionalizes envy, spite, delight in the misfortune of enemies; builds a vast edifice of policy and sanctions on envy.

The Left just is a coalition of envy.

*

When when it comes to war, Christians need to be aware that leaving-out the devil makes them sound unreal.

Ultimate eternal victory of God is assured; but meanwhile we are here on earth under the dominion of darkness; and we would not be thinking about war if that fact did not affect us.

The world, the flesh and the devil.

*

The superficiality, triviality and short-term expediency of Western Elites

Yesterday I listened to a video in which political commenters Gonzalo Lira and Alexander Mercouris were discussing the Western Elites - i.e. the leadership class: and how they had declined, across about half a century, to the current very low level of superficiality and short-termism. 

GL and AM were not able to link this symptom to its spiritual roots - although they did sense that the phenomenon was due to the Western leaders (especially) actually being not true leaders but puppets of globalists, whose loyalty was to these globalists rather than to their nations. 

(i.e. Western 'leaders' are in truth merely middle managers; in a world-wide bureaucracy of which the masses are ignorant of the identities of the genuine leaders. Their middle manegrial role is, indeed, evident in the personalities and (ahem...) capabilities of Western national leaders.)

But GL and AM did a good job of describing those symptoms; and others, such a total incapacity even to understand other world views (instead projecting their own extremely cynical selfishness onto everyone else - such that genuine patriotism, religiousness, and long-termism are utterly invisible), their dishonesty, and their complete absence of any vision or purpose for their societies. 

The division of the world nations that has been triggered by the Fire Nation war has revealed that this collapse of leadership is a mostly Western phenomenon. 

AM described the stark difference in attitudes and priorities between the two sides of the recent international divide that is evident nowadays, whenever world leaders gather to meet and plan. 

He says that the disgust and disdain of the non-Western leaders for the trivial 'showbiz' antics of their Western equivalents is plain, and increasing. 

What GL and AM both miss, as I said, is that the problem goes much deeper than incompetence, lack of empathy and covertly misplaced loyalties; and deeper also than the corruption of the Western mass populations. 

The problem is that the Western elites serve powers that are, or are themselves, actively evil. 

They are not merely misguided, insensible and self-deceiving; leading unintentionally to bad outcomes -- instead the Western elites actually desire and seek bad outcomes. 

Many among the elite desire to make the whole world a totalitarian uni-state of omni-surveillance and micro-controlled behaviour and thinking. 

And increasing numbers of them are personally-motivated by sheerly destructive spite directed against their (ever expanding list of) enemies.  

Indeed, the elite 'morality' (such as it is) is an inversion of reality and truth - they want a world of lies, ugliness and sin; of mass suffering, fear, resentment and despair (i.e. they want this for others). 

Thus even astute and critical secular analysts such as GL and (especially) AM; are actually blind to the most important things in the world; in the sense that they sense the surface ripples, but are unable to identify the deep currents that cause them...

Because the currents that drive material change in the world - globally, nationally, locally, personally - are themselves spiritual in their origins and purposes.

Note added: I should make clear that, so far as I can tell, all of the nations of the world are on the same downward path towards the agenda of evil; but at different rates, and some nations are much further along that path than others. 

During this past calendar year, there has apparently been a small but significant and hopeful reversal of down-sliding in the Fire Nation. This is due to three decades, and continuing, of Orthodox Christian revival; bringing movement towards the earlier Byzantine polity of (aimed-at) harmony and integration between State and Church. 

If so; this process has a long way to go before a stable, top-down, Christianly-led social structure is achieved... If indeed such an atavistic restoration is possible - given the evolutionary development of Man's consciousness towards individuality of agency and personal responsibility for salvation and theosis. 

Such a reversal toward 'medieval' structures is not possible in The West, I am sure. We surely need to embrace Romantic Christianity and aim at Final Participation; if we are to avoid mass spiritual damnation. However, it may be that other peoples have a different destiny.  

Old books about Mormons - more anti-Mormon than I could possibly have imagined...

*

I spent an interesting few hours looking through some old books about Mormons which were in the collection at The Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle upon Tyne - a prestigious provincial club and library dating founded in 1793.

What I found surprised me in several ways. There were plenty of books on "The Mormons" dating from about 100 years ago - which was the first surprise; the second surprise was how very, very strongly anti-Mormon they were; the third surprise was the utterly outrageous things they said.

The oldest account was of Lord Redesdale's visit of 1873 (published in his Memoirs of 1915):

Brigham Young was all-powerful, bearing a more undisputed mastery than king or tsar or kaiser. He was a law unto himself, and had his Vehmgericht, or rather was also a secret court unto himself. True, there was no Folterkammer, no eiserne Jungfrau, but those old methods were out of date ; the revolver and the bowie-knife were swifter and as sure ; Jordan was the oubliette. There has been some attempt to deny the existence of the Danites or Destroying Angels who were Brigham Young's executioners. That is futile, for the men, as I can testify, were as well known in Salt Lake City as the Prophet, and the Old Man of the Mountain himself was not more faithfully or more bloodily served by his hashishin than was the Lion of the Lord by his band of bravos. There were whole-sale murders like the Mountain Meadow Massacre, but there were also other crimes, secret murders actuated by private spite, jealousy or lust, the stories of which are well known to those behind the scenes in Zion. It was not healthy for a man to incur the wrath of the Prophet or of the leading Saints. It was not conducive to long life to love a maid or wed a wife upon whom the eyes of one of the holy ones might have fallen.

*

The Mystery of Mormonism by Stuart Martin (1920) presents itself as a balanced view - in between the official church history and the more sensational anti-Mormon books.

Its introduction ends like this:

Since Mormonism was born in that small wood its story has been mostly tragic, with here and there a gleam of heroism lighting up the dull, terrible sadness of pitiful, wasted effort and misguided action. The scars of its sufferings are plainly marked upon Mormonism ; and, if the creed is to live, its final adjustment to the demands of the civilisation of the twentieth century has yet to be made. The author has tried to indicate what that adjustment demands of Mormonism, and how the finer men and women of the Church shrink from the coming crisis. When the adjustment takes place — as it inevitably will, though most likely by slow degrees — the Mormonism of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young will be strangled in Utah, and the last vestige of its abominations will disappear.

The final word is as follows:

As for the religious part of Mormonism, its doom is clear. It is the author's belief that before long it will be attacked, and it will crumble before the attack. Its wave of fervour is nearly spent, and in the day when it is finally attacked by its opponents this organisation, which has been a thorn in the flesh of the great American Republic since it was founded in 1830, will vanish as a creed. In that day Mormonism — the Mormonism which has quarrelled with every neighbour it has had, the Mormonism the history of which is one black page in the story of the United States — will cease to exist. Rent by internal schisms, attacked by forces as relentless as Knowledge and as powerful as Time, it will ultimately totter to a gaping grave ; to a tomb dug by itself. When that day comes, the last vestige of the abominations of Mormonism, as its founders intended it to be, will disappear from the earth, and the name of Joseph Smith will be but the memory of a man who, in his delusion, founded a gigantic fraud.

*

That may sound pretty extreme - however Brigham Young and the Mormon Empire by Frank J Cannon and George L Knapp (1913) goes even further. This has Brigham Young engaged in wholesale castration and assassination related to his "modern gospel of human sacrifice".

That's correct: human sacrifice.

After that there isn't really any further to go.

*

Still, the other books had their moments.

I Woodbridge Riley's The founder of Mormonism: a psychological study of Joseph Smith Jr (1902) has the following heading for its final section: "Was He Demented or Merely Degenerate" (he seems to suggest both at once).

R Kauffman and RW Kauffman take a different angle in The Latter Day Saints: a study of the Mormons in the light of economic conditions (1912) - they see the Mormon phenomena from a socialistic perspective in terms of just another instance of capitalistic exploitation, on a gigantic scale. But for the Kauffman's that is all any religion ever is.

*

If the books written about the Mormons were indescribably hostile and foolish - books written by visitors to Salt Lake City tended to be very positive.

Charles B Spahr wrote an interesting account of America's Working People (1899,1900) in which he visited New England, Chicago, The South and various other places to report on conditions. He was very impressed, on the whole, by what he saw in Salt Lake City:

The general level of morality is unquestionably high. Inquiry at police headquarters confirmed the Mormon claim that the Mormon population hardly figured at all among those arrested for crime or disorder, or among those who ministered for gain to criminal and vicious tastes.

But the statistics were the least trustworthy signs of the high morality. The real evidence of it was in the care for the poor, the temperance, the thrift, and the public spirit, that were apparent.

There was, however, one point upon which the impression revived was distinctly unfavourable, and this was the supremely important matter of sexual morality. (...) But what I heard from frank and conscientious Mormons in deprecation of these charges, even more than what I heard from Gentiles in their support, convinced me that the sin of polygamy in the fathers was bearing its fitting fruit in an epidemic of sexual immorality among the children. (...)

Nevertheless the impressions I received in the streets and from the testimony of scandal-hating people, without regard to creed, convinced me that sexual morality in Utah was much lower than in any other American community I had visited, and but little higher than in Continental Europe.

*

That point point about sexual morality being a weak point (the one-and-only weak point) of Mormons a century ago, makes for an interesting contrast with modern times. And it is perhaps an encouragement to modern Mormons.

*

A Church of England Priest the Rev. HW Haweis published Travel Talk in 1896 in which he reported on a vist to Salt Lake City of 1893:

...what I saw and what everyone may see spoke for itself. I saw a happy and contented people, a clean and sanitary city (...) neat houses and prosperous farms, well-behaved children, venerable elders, agreeable and cultivated ladies... 

*

The fascinating thing is that we now know that the travellers' eye witness accounts were correct, and the surprising numbers of people who wrote specialist (referenced, supposedly scholarly) books about 'The Mormons' - several of which were distributed some 5000 miles way to Newcastle upon Tyne England - were wrong; very wrong, absurdly and wickedly wrong.

This strikes me as an early example of political correctness based on and in the mass media. 

*

One more matter. When I became interested in Mormonism a few years ago I got the impression that the Mountain Meadows Massacre was something which had been hidden and suppressed until recently; and it was an atrocity that modern Mormons were supposedly having to come to terms with.

Not so. It features in all these early anti-Mormon books and the Rev Haweis goes so far as to remark on the "everlastingly quoted Mountain Massacre".

So, not such new news, after all...

*

All in all - my morning in the library confirms CS Lewis's advice on the value of Reading Old Books.

*

The implicit modern religion of Transhumanism

Transhumanism is not ridiculous - not something to be disposed of with a sneer - rather, Transhumanism is the implicit religion of modern, secular Leftism - it is mainstream and near-universal in the West - it has great power and reach - it underpins the main assumptions of public discourse and policy.

In sum, most modern Western people's actual lives and opinions are based on the Transhumanist belief that Man can, will and should transcend his humanity -- and that the nature of humanity, as it has existed so far, should be considered as a set of defects and limitations that need to be transcended.

Transhumanism is an incremental outgrowth of the secular religion of progress - it sees itself as the optimistic alternative among modern secular Leftist ideologies.

What is Transhumanism? -- well, it is a network of beliefs that people can/ will - sooner-or-later/ and should:

1. Always be happy - never suffer (except insofar as they wish to)

2. Never be ill, never age

3. Never die - there will be no ageing (see above) and death will be infinitely postpone-able - the person will be open-endedly repairable or restoreable - death will be reversible

4. Be able to improve intelligence, personality, strength, capacity for pleasure etc - beyond anything yet attained by any human

5. Be able to change sex, make new sexes, abolish sexual identity and the need for sex itself - or redefine and modify them endlessly

6. Wholly detach reproduction from sex - be able to make babies, perfect babies, without intervention of parents - to bring them up perfectly without 'need' for families

7. Go beyond historical levels of human wisdom, goodness - achieve a higher morality (which will be effortless and universal)

and so on...


None of these things have actually been achieved, indeed in many ways we are further from achieving them than we were a few decades ago - as human capability dwindles and hype increases...

But the core idea is to live-by the belief that such things could-happen - and therefore we should behave asif they have-happened.


Capability dissolves good and evil - because good and evil are subsumed within pleasure/ pain - and when good is pleasure, and pleasure is psychological - then goodness become the technical problem of ensuring pleasure (and abolishing pain) and removing any obstacles to this - and any 'moral' factors which interfere with this can and should be engineered-away.

Human nature is something to created and recreated - the purpose of Transhumanism is, after all to transcend the human; so the core project is not to make humans happier but to go beyond humans - the idea is that humans should build something better than humans - where better is seen in terms of the hedonic axis of pleasure/ fulfillment versus suffering/ misery, such that any human, biological, historical limitation on positive emotional states can and should be removed.

Because, from the Transhumanist perspective, to think otherwise is to want, and to enforce, pain, suffering and misery on oneself and others. And that is evil.


The basis of Transhumanism is that human limitation is the primary problem in life, and human capability is therefore the primary good for humanity; and more capability is better - because (and this is key) any problems that may arise from capability should/can/will be solved by more capability.


Name your problem, and Transhumanism has a solution: Loneliness? Solved by manipulating emotions, perhaps pharmacologically but ultimately genetically - so you cannot feel lonely anymore (i.e. human nature will be re-engineered to become immune to the problem).

Or technology will provide everyone with a perfect virtual social world - psychologically-indistinguishable from the real social world, and completely satisfying and available without limitation. (Meanwhile, the necessary work and reproduction will be done by other means.)

And people will never get fed-up of these solutions, because that fed-up-ness too will itself be engineered-away.


If you happen to believe or feel that the above approach is wrong or wicked or pathetic - then that too is something which can - and probably should - be edited-out -- because it is obstructive at best, evil at worst.

In the end, all reasons for misery and conflict will either be solved in reality, or else we will be re-engineered so as to case caring about them - so 'problems' will cease to be perceived as problems, 'limitations' will cease to be felt as limiations.

And this will not be boring, because boredom will become a thing of the past -- we will be satisfied with what we have, and the possibilities of novelty are open-ended - everything can be change; life will be an endless play and adventure - with all the thrills but none of the risk -- That is the Transhumanist hope, or promise.


The thing to recognize about Transhumanism is that it does not have any respect for human nature as it is - it sees nothing 'sacred' in humans as they are; indeed humans as they are are seen as on the one hand arbitrary, contingent products of natural selection - which could easily have been otherwise, and which are - anyway - simply optimized for average reproductive success under average ancestral conditions...

Why on earth should such a bundle of historical chances be preserved?

And further than this, human nature as it is is seen as a major problem - if not the major problem - because on the one hand we are full of aggression, hatred, sadism, spite etc - while on the other hand we are vulnerable to pain, misery, despair, terror and all manner of sufferings. Both sins and the vulnerability to sin can and should be deleted.


To understand Transhumanism, and understand its visceral appeal and its almost universal influence on modern values - one needs to appreciate, to experience for oneself, this intoxicating sense of liberation that comes from regarding Man as nothing but the contingent product of natural selection... 

One needs to feel the sense that every problem by progress can be solved by more progress - including that any insoluble problems can cease to be regarded as problems

- so that subjectively (so far as he knows) Man attains through progress nothing less than absolute freedom, and complete happiness - forever.

Now, the fact that this is not actually happening is irrelevant so long as the people who have implicitly bought-into Transhumanism, and made it their core belief and hope (typically without knowing the word Transhumanism, nor even thinking-about the subject)... none of this matters so long as the adherents believe that it is going-to happen. 

My feeling is that Transhumanism is immune to argument - it is a circular system (as are all viable metaphysical systems) but it is dependent on optimism - it feeds upon itself, but that self is fueled by the hyper-reality of the mass media.

So, at present Transhumanism is sustained by the fact that people live mostly in the virtual world of the mass media, where mass media reality feels realer than real reality. 

When the mass media crumbles and collapses, when the major social systems such as the economy, law, science, medicine, police, military collapse (as they will, because we, as a culture, are 'not even trying' to maintain and sustain them - we are trying to do various other things but are not trying to maintain functionality - indeed, we have long since ceased to regard reality as real)... when these collapse, so will the psychological basis for Transhumanism collapse.

Transhumanism is the objectification of subjectivity - it is the belief that subjectivity can be engineered at will and without limit to become absolutely gratifying - it is the belief that subjectivity is everything. 

If and when objectivity re-asserts itself, when objectivity become impossible to ignore - Transhumanism will evaporate with no trace left behind - it will seem no more than a group-insanity, no realer than the other mass delusions which beset our civilization in relation to sex and sexuality, economics and law, education and medicine - none of which are amenable to discussion or refutation - all of which are themselves versions of the triumph of subjectivism.

Of course, people can retain their subjectivism in the face of anything and everything. The ultimate subjectivism is indeed that of Satan - who pits the subjective self against the whole of reality, and chooses to prefer the self. And Satan cannot be persuaded. 

But the pervasive mainstream Transhumanism of modernity is a much shallower thing - dependent on  an 'optimism' that is itself dependent upon very specific and unsustainable levels of escalating engagement with the mass media; and a consequent mind-set which takes for granted fundamental technological progress in capability and efficiency without troubling itself about the sources. A mind-set consumed by virtuality, subjectivity, hype and spin. 

However, the real, underpinning sources of actual objective techno-progress are all going-going-gone -- all of them.

The foundations are gone from under the post-industrial revolution system of capability. The edifice of modernity is become a house of cards balanced on sand - the whole being sustained by self-delusions. 

And the surface hope of Transhumanism is continually being undercut and undercut, by the deep daily reality of Godless cumulative nihilism and despair. 

Techno-optimism and the capability of attaining it as a reality is continually being eroded by endemic Western self-hatred; and by the mostly-covert but increasingly obvious, cultural wish for escape from the modern situation by some kind of painless suicide into a suffering-free, blissed-out, eternal nothingness... 

(But the possibility of that, is itself is not solidly believed.)

In sum, Transhumanism is much more powerful and pervasive than generally realized - it is a real factor in the behaviour of modern Man. It facilitates many of the most deeply damaging trends of our culture -  but Transhumanism itself prevents the possibility of its own attainment; for which thanks be to God!

(Note - for a deeper understanding of Transhumanism, its causes and its consequences, read That Hideous Strength and/ or The Abolition of Man by CS Lewis.)   

*

Something snapped. The world turns on its dark side - It is winter.

The poignant chorus that opens Michael Tippet's A Child of our Time came to mind this morning, as I contemplated my sense of a turn towards darkness, a line being crossed, apparent extinction of the possibility of this-worldly hope. 

This is, of course, not prove-able by any material/ objective/ public "evidence" or logic; but I feel that something which was holding-back some significant number of Men to be motivated by God and Good, seems to me to have snapped. Snapped in response to the unremitting destructiveness and aggressive untruthfulness of the Western leadership class. 

Some slender yet lingering optimism has blinked out; a belief concerning the possibility that National and Globalist rulers ("Them") could - sometime soon - perhaps learn from experience, might awaken to spiritual reality, and potentially step backwards from teetering on the knife-edge that they have constructed for Mankind. 

Some aspiration that others, elsewhere in the world, would (overall, in principle) cleave to God's agenda - in face of the general trend. 

I sense that the camel's back has broken under the final straw. Inner intimations of Good groupings somewhere, somehow! - feelings that I hardly knew I previously held - have been snuffed-out like a guttering candle. 

"They" have (it seems) pushed, and pushed, with their reckless escalating of threats to Mankind being used to blackmail compliance; until just-now the constraints on fallible mortal Men have snapped; and suddenly many have switched from Good motivations to evil motivations. 

The tragedy of sustained war (of any kind, but especially a spiritual war) is that while explicit material aims may remain the same; and the sides in dispute may be much as before in their membership; the spiritual situation has been transformed - because suddenly "good aims" are poisoned by evil underlying spiritual motivations. 

Then, a side that was Good, is now motivated by evil.

Those demon-servants who asserted the evil of their enemies from the beginning, see themselves vindicated. "See!" they say, "I always told you they are wicked!" ; whereas it was actually the effect of their own unremitting spite against their enemies that sapped the will-to-Good - brutalized, and finally broke the minds of the once-Good. 

Once someone is committed to evil, they can always find plenty of evidence of evil in others - because evil always is present in others. 

This world and its Beings is mixed between God and Satan. It is not our-selves, but only our spiritual affiliations, that can be for-good. 

Yet, in the spiritual war, because a commitment to God, Good, divine creation - is an inner thing that cannot be proved or refuted in any objective fashion, it can be claimed by anyone. 

Claimed especially by those who serve the agenda of evil, and who live by lies and are driven by a positive belief in sin. 

In such matters we must - because there is no alternative, as well as because it is what God desires of us  - use personal discernment. And take personal responsibility for this usage - not sheltering behind some external "authority" whose inner true-motivations we almost-never can know. 

(In this modern era, appeals to authority are merely rhetorical, not real; mere "public discourse" and not a valid basis for determining our eternal destiny.) 

Our basic spiritual task in a world that has indeed "turned to the dark side" is not qualitatively different from that which has confronted earlier generations; and we in the West have already been living in such a world of spiritual "winter" for some decades.  

There are no "good sides" anymore, not anywhere in the material world, but only in the spiritual world. And this is a lesson well worth learning, essential indeed; so that we are not led astray by loyalty to nations, institutions, corporations, churches who in their hearts have embraced sinful motives!  

A genuine (small, but infinitely significant) Spiritual Awakening really is happening

In these End Times it is necessary to acknowledge that evil lying corruption is the New Normal. For maybe the first time in the history of the world, a large majority of the people (and certainly Far more numerically than ever before) have actively taken the side of Satan in the spiritual war.

Yet, at the same time I am absolutely Sure that there really is an awakening of a small minority of people - meaning that they have recently become aware of the triumph of evil, and that the rulers and majority of ruled are indeed insane. And without the current frenzy of gloves-off demonism, it would not have happened.

This awakening is largely a private and personal thing - it does not register statistically being swamped by the tsunami of cynical vileness; yet the sheer rapidity and size of this rising-tidal wave has been such as to shake some people into a recognition of what has been here for a long time, but previously almost undetected.

In other words, souls have been saved, more souls are being saved; and we need to remember that every single saved soul is of infinite importance - because Heavenly life is eternal.

This will not affect the accelerating progress of evil towards ever more chaos, collapse, fear, resentment, spite, and despair - the material world is lost; our culture and civilization is doomed (including the economy, science-technology, health care, education and the rest of it). All of these are on the way out at a rate that is increasing by the day.

But these are secondary. One vital side-effect of the 2020 coup that we should not fail to notice, is therefore that it has never been easier to attain salvation and eternal life.

The contrast between the gift of Jesus which we shall all be able to choose after biological death, and the nihilistic hell which is all that this world has to offer, has never been more stark -- there has never been so little ambiguity All is being made black and white with no grey areas in between to confuse the issue. There have always been two sides in the spiritual war; but now that the side of darkness is so vast and so pervasive, even the tiniest gleam of light becomes blinding and visible from far-off.

That great weapon of blurring, confusion and misdirection that has seduced so many souls into unrepentant sin over the most recent generations has all-but disappeared.

It has never been easier to be good in our hearts; even as it has become all-but impossible to be good in our public actions.

Worry is anti-Christian

Worry is fear-spread-thin; and fear is the opposite of Love.

(Fear is, indeed, cast-out by Love - and the injunction Not to fear is almost a refrain in the New Testament.)

Yet we can, and many do, spend their entire conscious lives worrying; and if they accidentally stop worrying for a few moments, then they feel guilty - they apparently suppose that the world is being held-up by their worrying.


But this is evil - by which I mean to worry is to Be evil: to spend life worrying is evil, it is a state of sin.

Worry is (therefore) anti-Christian.


But what if I can't Help It! - what when can't help worrying?

Of course you can't help it, neither can I - but that doesn't stop worry being evil - it means we must repent the fact that we worry, instead of feeling guilty if we don't worry.


Worrying about stuff, being worried about 'other people'/ the environment/ poverty/ freedom/ global warming/ disease/ death... this doesn't make you a good person - but the opposite.

Because Fear is A Bad Thing, then it doesn't matter what you fear - choosing a worthy subject for your fears does not change fear into a virtue; any more than it would make resentment or spite into a virtue.
 
Re-naming fear as 'concern' does not make it good!


The false rationalisation is that Not to worry is to be Uncaring... You've heard this...

Hah! So, if somebody, somewhere, has had or might-have something bad happen to them - then we ought to worry about it! Yeah, right...

It is time for you to stop thinking you have a duty to worry; and instead think about your duty to Be Not Afraid.