Anarcho-Gnosticism

So I suppose people who choose to study Jesus for a living are a likely to have an inherent bias, are they? roll eyes

If you want to concentrate solely on the weakest points and not look at the stronger ones, that's up to you.

Being based on fear, Empire seeks to nurture our fear of freedom, our fear of developing self-awareness and individual autonomy and our inability to think and act for ourselves, by playing on the worst aspects of our nature, encouraging our irresponsibility and unwillingness to learn from our mistakes by engaging in introspection. Held captive to the paranoid streak in the world soul by virtue of our inability to overcome our fear of "the other", we remain psychologically infantile, dependent on Empire to do our thinking for us while we slumber under its paternalistic gaze, and being led to believe we're free, we can't be healed because we're unaware that we're sick - or rather, the knowledge that we are sick remains hidden from us, suppressed in the depths of the collective unconscious. The paranoid schism in the world soul and fear of "the other" continues, because as PKD points out, the empire never ended.

revol68 wrote:

what utter ludricous shite.

Why is it utter ludicrous shite?

some random thoughts:

"THE EMPIRE NEVER ENDED" - The roman empire never ended, but was perpetuated through what Plato refers to as the paranoid streak in the world soul; we're trapped within what Philip K. Dick called a "black iron prison" ruled over "archons" who blind us to the true nature of the world by imposing on us a black and white, "with us or against us" dualism through which they demonise their enemies in order to maintain their control, and the privileges that attend it.

Utilising the politics of guilt by association, then, Empire perpetuates its rule in the superstitious belief in the "evil other," be that satan, or witches, or communism, or terrorism, through which it constructs its polemics in defense of power and neutralises the influence of all heresy; anyone who positions themselves in opposition to any centre of imperial power is in league with the devil, be that devil, again, satan, or witches, or World Jewry, or communism (or, for that matter, petit-bourgeois reformist capitalism), or terrorism, or what have you. I'm sure everyone here could think of other examples. Empire rules through perpetuation of the paranoid streak in the world soul, preventing us from attaining a balance between the ego and the superego which is the basis of our individual self-awareness by preaching hatred and fear of the evil, unknown other in the name of love of humanity.

Thus Empire assumes the form of the paradox whereby we adopt the behaviours, practises and attitudes of that we claim to oppose in the name of love of humanity (eg. opposing terrorism by whittling away at individual rights, supporting murderous dictators opposed to 'bloodthirsty' communism, eg. Pinochet in Chile, etc.) and otherwise generally destroy freedom and love of humanity in the name of defending it. In employing the politics of fear but calling it love, Empire seeks to prevent us from recognising in Good and Evil two halves of a greater whole, to free ourselves from hatred and fear of "the other', and in so doing transcend its dualistic Black Iron Prison.

Being based on fear, Empire seeks to nurture our fear of freedom, our fear of developing self-awareness and individual autonomy and our inability to think and act for ourselves, by playing on the worst aspects of our nature, encouraging our irresponsibility and unwillingness to learn from our mistakes by engaging in introspection. Held captive to the paranoid streak in the world soul by virtue of our inability to overcome our fear of "the other", we remain psychologically infantile, dependent on Empire to do our thinking for us while we slumber under its paternalistic gaze, and being led to believe we're free, we can't be healed because we're unaware that we're sick - or rather, the knowledge that we are sick remains hidden from us, suppressed in the depths of the collective unconscious. The paranoid schism in the world soul and fear of "the other" continues, because as PKD points out, the empire never ended.

http://deoxy.org/pkd_tcs.htm

Yeah they kinda cover that theme on the split 7" with Nuclear Holocaust on Holocaust Records. I mean, the one with the cover of Holocaust - Nuclear that has a mushroom cloud on the cover.

revol68 wrote:

Caiman del Barrio wrote:

Yeah they kinda cover that theme on the split 7" with Nuclear Holocaust on Holocaust Records. I mean, the one with the cover of Holocaust - Nuclear that has a mushroom cloud on the cover.

ah i think i've only heard one song off that on a War is Bad benefit compilation for War against War.

Is this a joke we can all join in on or one for the in-crowd?

revol68 wrote:

lol you don't claim to have all the answers but just chuck out a mental hypothesis that 2000 years fo human history can be explained with some cod psychology. Do I laugh or cry?

You could start by coming up with a response that actually demonstrates a basic understanding of my hypothesis. If you bothered to take the time to actually try to understand what I'm saying it would be pretty clear that I'm not trying to explain 2000 years of history, but rather a pattern that extends back over 2000 years (and probably a lot longer). There's actually a difference.

I didn't say that claiming the existence of Jesus shouldn't depend on evidence, I was rejecting your insinuation that he didn't exist because we don't have written evidence from when he was alive...there are very few people in that period who's existence could be verified that way. You are asserting that his existence is dubious just because of the oral transmission of knowledge about him for the first several decades after his death.

Some Jesus scholars are Christians...many are secular with Christian upbringing, some are from different religions and others are straight-up atheists...yet across the board it is asserted that not only can we be sure of the existence of Jesus, there are certain things we can be reasonably sure about his life.

I can try. Coercive authority seeks to compel the respect it can't command because it's illegitimate, and it's illegitimate because it's based on the maintenance of class privilege and has no ethical justification. Throughout human history it has manifested as Empires—centres of power that seek to extend their control to every corner of the physical world and into every corner of the human mind, the thrust for total domination being the primary characteristic of coercive authoritarianism. In order to maintain that control and thereby class privilege, Empire, though its outward form has changed (sometimes it's called christianity, sometimes it's called democracy, sometimes it's called communism), has always prevailed, and thus the human race has always been enslaved to coercive authority. The mechanism I'm arguing that it has used to disguise itself has been guilt by association, which has in turn been based on dualism, or the tendency to think in black and white, eg. Good vs. Evil, God vs. Satan, Heaven vs. Hell, East vs. West, etc. etc. The trick is simple: anything at odds with established power is tainted by associating it with "the other," so for example critics of the Catholic Church were in league with Satan, anarchists are all bomb-throwing terrorists, and Salvador Allende who was overthrown in a U.S.-backed coup on September 11, 1973 was a godless communist infadel and not a moderate social democrat elected through the regular channels of representative democracy. Whether Empire claims to act in the name of God, or the free market, or democracy, or the dictatorship of the proletariat, or whatever, the result is still the same: the paradoxical tendency to destroy freedom in the name of its defence and the perpetuation of the master/slave relationship upon which class privilege and class oppression is built. That's roughly it.

revol68 wrote:

woah some deep shit there. oh wait it's ahistorical shite that gives up any concrete engagement with complex history for silly metanarratives. Real concrete forms become little more than the manifestation of some primordial pychosis, you replace contingent socio political analysis with a pathetic quasi transcendental founding principle, like Hegel's world spirit in a therapy session.

How so?

In order to maintain that control and thereby class privilege, Empire, though its outward form has changed (sometimes it's called christianity, sometimes it's called democracy, sometimes it's called communism), has always prevailed, and thus the human race has always been enslaved to coercive authority.

thugarchist wrote:

OK. I wasn't wrong then. You're mental.

Takes one to know one. Why am I mental?

...today, the only class which, in its 'subjective' self perception, explicitly conceives of an presents itself as a class is the notorious 'middle class' which is precisely the 'non-class': the allegedly hard-working middle strata of society which define themselves not only by their allegiance to firm moral and religious standards, but by a double opposition to both 'extremes' of the social space - non-patriotic 'deracinated' rich corporations on the one side; poor excluded immigrants and ghetto-members on the other. The 'middle class' grounds its identity in the exclusion of both extremes which, when they are directly counterpoised, give us 'class antagonism' at its purest. The constitutive lie of the very notion of the 'middle class' is thus the same as that of the true Party line between the two extremes of 'right-wing deviation' and left-wing deviation' in Stalinism: the 'middle class' is, in its very 'real' existence, the embodied lie, the denial of antagonism - in psychoanalytic terms, the 'middle class' is a fetish, the impossible intersection of left and right which, by expelling both poles of the antagonism into the position of antisocial 'extremes' which corrode the healthy social body (multinational corporations and intruding immigrants), presents itself as the neutral common ground of Society. In other words, the 'middle class' is the very form of the disavowal of the fact that 'Society doesn't exist' (Laclau) - in it, Society does exist.