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Don't they?

Aside from that, I don't have enough conviction on the rest to disagree with you. Yet I remain unconvinced that something valuable isn't lost when we abandon religion.

Overall, I don’t think so although things have been worse since COVID. Wars are always devastating, too. I don’t believe progress is linear. IMO, education and philosophy have led to people being less brutal overall, not that many aren’t still brutal and have more powerful weapons with which to express their brutality. Most societies don’t think stoning people to death, burning people alive, or torture are valid punishments although they still happen sometimes. Depending on one’s locale, those things were pretty common in the past for even relatively minor transgressions. The Old Testament says that we should stone to death disobedient children and burn sex workers alive if their father is a religious leader.

I think religion has contributed positive things to the world, especially as far as art, music, literature, and philosophical thought are concerned. I just believe that we’re progressing beyond it. Something like Universalist Unitarian churches could be useful because the emphasis is more on ethics than beliefs. Conversations about morality and ethics are valuable IMO, but it’s really hard to have them when people cite scripture and aren’t willing to think or engage beyond that. I’m not saying it’s always that way, but it’s often the case in more conservative areas.

I very much hope you are right about that.

I remain fearful.

some of my stupidass coworkers act more like wild animals than humans.

sometimes i imagine idiots i hate, such as some of my coworkers, with their heads on the body of a dog.

some idiots do *not* deserve to be human.

Smart people are prone to much dumber and more destructive ideas than the modestly intelligent. A genuinely dumb guy would never fall for something as idiotic as Marxism (100 million deaths in the 20th century) or any of its critical theory offspring, it takes a somewhat smart person to talk themself into it because they want to believe it and are good at self rationalization. This is a big part of the reasons that I hate smart liberals with dumb ideas more than dumb conservatives with dumb ideas, the dumb guy at least has an excuse. Post modernism is the other poster child for this, it's like the perfect trap for midwits.

In August, 1897, Herzl convened the first Zionist Congress in Basel. In the entry for September 3, 1897 of his diary, Herzl sums up what he considers to be the defining moment of the Congress:

“If I were to sum up the Basel Congress in one word–which I shall guard against pronouncing publicly–it would be this: at Basel I have founded the Jewish state. If I said this out loud today, I would be answered by universal laughter. Perhaps in five years and certainly in fifty, everyone would recognize this.”

If the slogan “Herzl founder of the Jewish State” appeared laughable on September 3, 1897 (Herzl’s “today” in his diary entry above), what of Theodor fitting out Hans, his lowly tormented son, in the grubby regalia of a medieval ghetto Jew and crowning him, Duke, Doge, Doxe, Prince – King(?) of the Most Serene Jewish Republic

And the religion of the Jewish State? The religion of “our fathers”? Yes, “we are bound together only by the faith of our fathers”, said Herzl? That is the “only” thing that binds us. Which faith is this? Not the faith in ADONAI[2] of the Torah:

“I believe, says Herzl, in the ascent of man to higher and yet higher grades of civilization; but I consider this ascent to be desperately slow. Were we to wait till average humanity had become as charitably inclined as was Lessing when he wrote “Nathan the Wise,” we should wait beyond our day, beyond the days of our children, of our grandchildren, and of our great-grandchildren. But the world’s spirit comes to our aid in another way…This century has given the world a wonderful renaissance by means of its technical achievements; but at the same time its miraculous improvements have not been employed in the service of humanity” (pp. 53-54).

Herzl’s “faith of our fathers” is faith in man, faith in the gentle gentile “world’s spirit”. The religion of the future Jewish State will bear the marks of a true religion: rebirth (“renaissance”) and miracles (machines). Machines will be the new servants of Humanity. Darwin (1809 – 1882), Hegel (1770 – 1831) and Marx (1818 – 1883), the three feet of the prophetic tripod (dreifus) will hold up an edifice that not even Samson – and his God – has the power to topple.

Of the three feet of the tripod – Darwin, Hegel and Marx, Hegel was the one with the golden fus (foot) . (Marx, himself, was a devotee of Hegel). Herzl, like so many Jews of the Enlightenment, was a convert to Hegel. It was Hegel’s “World Spirit”, Herzl believed, that infused purpose and meaning into history, animating the human spirit, planting in the human heart the awareness of his right to freedom, peace and joy – and of inevitable – if very slow – progress. For Hegel, religion is consciousness revealing itself to itself as spirit. What is enlightened religion? It is a consciousness of the unity of Being and Thought, of Spirit and Mind. Where’s the sin in having such a religion? The sin lies in the absence sin, in the absence of the consciousness of sin – an aberration of the true “faith of our fathers” where sin against a Holy God is written large on every page of the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible). Flinging”sin” in the bin cannot expunge the abcess in the soul. Of all peoples, Jews are the most mental and sentimental; the most rational and the most schmaltzy. The issue of the Jew is that truth can only be grounded on a holy, pure God. Pure reason won’t cut it, nor will sentimental puree. God chose the Jews for something better.

“[Herzl] had once understood Jewish identity and Judaism as part of a past, an anachronism that had brought only misery, oppression and illusionary hope to the chosen people. Being chosen had not brought anything better to the Jews. Their refusal to accept the dominant culture in which they lived, adopt their values, worship their Gods, had only brought millennia of repeated misery and oppression.”
What was Hans, Herzl’s son, the homeless Prince, thinking when he wrote the following lines? Was he thinking that the “Jewish State” was no more than an edifice, a front? Was he thinking how absurd it would be to imprison the universal world spirit in another Ghetto – but on a grander scale: the Jewish State?

This is what Hans wrote:

“My father was a great man, whom I loved… But I’ve come to see that he made a great historical error in his attempt to rebuild the Jewish State…. My father did not realize the true mission of the Jewish people, which has proven that the living and fertilizing spirit does not need territorial boundaries, and that a people can live and exist even when fortifications and borders have disappeared. I would ask them not to attempt to add to the decadent civilizations but to remember their true identity and work for the cultural reconstruction of their homeland – and this homeland is the entire world.” (Hans Herzl to Marcel Steinberger in Princes Without A Home (1929). (from; onedaringjew-wordpress)


the "working" on the world-spirit
by any means necessary

Last edited by traven on 04 Dec 2024, 2:57 am, edited 1 time in total.

Orange man "joked" about making Canada the 51st US state. Will someone kindly stop the world so I can get off?

It's satisfying when sh***y people get their just desserts, even if it's unlikely to result in long-term change.

Hoovernomics is making a comeback. If it fails like last time, we won't be seeing the Republican party again for another twenty years.