The Hollow Gods of Wires and Sand
Designer religion and its discontents
Recently
reached out to me with an essay criticizing Malcom Collins’ Building an Abrahamic Faith Optimized for Interstellar Empires from a perennialist perspective, following up on ’s piercing critique of Collins’ concept of religion in Faith With Both Eyes Open. As its name implies, Lindsey’s Against Designer Religion makes the point that you cannot simply cobble together a faith in order to min/max your socioeconomic modifiers, and that the very idea that you can do this is a doomed outgrowth of the same disenchantment that killed God in the first place.
Yesterday I sat down with Lindsey to discuss this question, and it was an absolutely fascinating conversation, starting with the Space Abrahamism essay and Lindsey’s response to it, and moving on to examine the Apollonian and Dionysian tendencies in civilization, cosmogonic chaos and eschatological order, McGilchrist’s hemisphere hypothesis, the schizo-autistic worldview, Spengler’s second religiosity, and the unfolding jihad between the regime’s own designer religion of Universal Catholic Wokeism vs. the underground gnostic resistance of organic right-wing mytho-memeticism.
As it happens, I’ve been writing up my own thoughts on religious re-enchantment, so this conversation with Lindsey came at a great time as it helped to clarify various ideas I’ve been playing with. I hope to get that essay out soon. In the meantime, the podcast on Thoughtfox will provide something of a preview.
Lindsey’s a new voice on the scene, but one to watch. Reading him I’d thought he was substantially older than he is, given both his practiced style and his erudition. Head over to Thoughtfox and subscribe.
I had the pleasure of meeting Michael Collins at Liberty Forum here in New Hampshire.
I hope to get a chance to talk to him again, as while all the criticisms I've been hearing have merit (some more than others), I do think he and Simone's hearts are in the right place and they're actually trying to do something about it.
The nature of religion makes it impossible to engineer, and it's not going to come from someone who's a staunch atheist, because they will tend to automatically dismiss the entirety as irrational.
If I were to attempt to engineer a religion, I would look at first for the evidence of what is likely to exist outside of this infinitesimal slice of material reality and see what makes the most sense.
After you determine that, then the methodical and scientific exploration of that evidence could point the way towards what that larger reality contains, and might allow a better understanding of what we actually are, and what our purpose is.
I have my own ideas on this naturally, and at some point might put them down so others might consider if they are useful to them, but given the infinite and expanding nature of consciousness and reality it's a certainty all individual consciousness will, in time, find out for themselves - and the joy is truly in the journey.
Religion, for those in the trenches, is synonymous with authority.
The small people don't have the tools to defy religion. When it no longer addresses their lives, they simply abandon it.
If you talk to them, they don't deny the authority, they just don't participate, which puts everyone in a really weird place. If anyone cares, this is part of the why behind rock music, because it is real, it is transcendent, and it lives in the hearts of the small people.
Honestly, everyone can put their gifted precise grey matter arguments together, but it won't matter, because the small people won't grasp the language.
Why the Gnostic?
Because the power of Gnosis lies in its direct, sweaty, agonizing appeal.
I do realize that the wild, transcendent, uncouth waves of people tranced out scares the fucking shit out of those in polite society. I do realize that talking about hanging with dead people is just too much for an intellectual approach to existence.
Okay.
I'm not asking anyone for anything here. I'm just going to point out to anyone willing to listen that true spirituality is a lovers embrace of transcendence, and that transcendence never occurs in well behaved rooms of politely seated people reciting by rote to some dude in a suit or a funny hat.