REpiphany: Christianity’s perpetual self-pity

General Discussion
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Years ago, the anti-Israel faction found Jesus— and He was a Palestinian! He woulda been waiting in the mud at the checkpoints to get into Israel to make some money (cuz conditions under the PLO didnt exactly create jobs….never mind the inconvenient fact of his Jewishness. )
At the height of the George Floyd unrest, Jesus was Black. Stained glass windows were being smashed because they didn’t so depict Him. If He were here, it woulda been His neck under Chauvin’s knee!
And now: He’s trans! An androgyne. That wound in His side? Obvs a proto-surgical symbol for creation of a vagina.
IMHO, Christianity brought this on itself, by dwelling interminably on Jesus’ victimhood, His awful suffering.

As a child I dreaded Easter. The congregation has to parrot the “Give us Barbbas!” line. Gentle Jesus had been hurt emotionally and physically in horrible ways—by ME! It was MY sin that wielded the scourge, drove in the nails. Oh, I was sorry, wretchedly sorry, I didn’t mean to do it! Didn’t even know I WAS doing it, honest! Li’l 7 year old me was reduced to a quivering pool of tears of pity and self hatred. Guilt, an overbearing burden of consciousness that never left me.

That’s what makes it easy, and so successful, for any minority that wants to jerk the rest of us around to co-opt Jesus into their ranks. They, “the least of these” ( both in terms of numbers and in their self-assumed lowly victimhood) assume the bloody mantle of those for whom we should care most, TO whom we had better show kindness and tolerance—or find ourselves on His left hand . (At least, after the seating arrangements are finalized at the Last Judgment, there won’t be any suspense…)
We, “the West” live in a Christian world, we swim in that body of mythology and ideology whether we profess the faith or not. We don’t have to be religious to accept the awful idea that pain and self-sacrifice, mortification of the flesh, are good, they must be, either in emulation of Jesus or as penance for Not emulating Him. (Which of course, we cannot do: He was GOD, we aren’t.)
“You will own nothing, and you will be happy”.
“…like Jesus” is the substrate there., it’s the reason the Davoiserie, the climatistas, have been so successful, it’s the reason nobody DARES, or only rarely, to point out the the solution to all of human misery is: (wait for it)

WEALTH.
Individual and national.

Selah.

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That is an interesting point. However, it raises the issue of what is wealth?

From one perspective, wealth is the outcome of consuming less than one produces, and then investing that deferred consumption into some venture which will produce enough to repay the investment. (Let’s leave aside for the moment how one would measure production & consumption. Every bureaucrat believes that she is productive).

So Bill Gates uses his deferred consumption to buy farmland. But that farmland is productive only if someone works it – and the person wading through mud is not going to be Bill. Thus one man’s investment requires other people to labor. Could we draw from this the perspective that “Wealth” is fundamentally a call upon the hard work of other people? But by that definition, the senior citizen on Social Security and the unmarried mother on Welfare are wealthy.

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I’m not sure what national wealth means. The goal should be to enable individuals and families to meet their needs and beyond, to be able to invest in the future, keep as much as possible of the proceeds of their work and investments, and provide the funds needed to build that future. Measures of “national wealth” such as GDP per capita don’t mean much unless you look at how that GDP is distributed. If you have a society, as exists in many countries, where the vast majority of the wealth flows to a tiny percentage of the population due to historical and structural reasons and the majority are close to living from paycheck to paycheck with no independent wealth, the nation is not wealthy—only a few people skimming off the top are, and they often aren’t loyal to the “nation” but to the institutions that allow them to do that. If, on the other hand, you have an opportunity society where families can provide for themselves and save for the benefit of their children, you have a stable society that is funding its own development in the future.

I see no conflict between the Christian concern for the plight of the poor and the free market goal and its demonstrated performance in lifting the poor out of poverty into a productive, self-sustaining lifestyle. The Davosie, by contrast, seems bent on reducing everybody but themselves to a global proletariat who they can control via social credit, programmable money, and replacement of private property with everything as a service paid for by their funny money.

Here is a chart of the percentage of the world population living in extreme poverty from 1820 through 2015.

poverty_2023-01-08

So far, so good.

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Putting the 2 above comments together, I’d say that when you have a country which enables people as individuals to obtain financial security, then you have a wealthy nation. And that means there is likely to be. Safety net .

In the Old Testament, wealth is not a bad or dangerous thing. Wealth and many descendants and a long earthly life are the rewards God bestows on the righteous.

Thanks to what is loosely called “Western civilization” (or imperialism) as your chart illustrates, everybody in the world is richer. Obesity is now a bigger problem than hunger. Women re no longer chattels and race and caste discrimination are out of fashion. We’ve accomplished ll this— but we’re poised to turn it all around again now, And maybe we’re primed to accept that . Lay not up for yourself treasures on Earth…

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So back in the 1850s when human beings depended on sunlight & windpower & falling water & horses, most of us lived in extreme poverty. It would be interesting to compare the chart of declining extreme poverty with a chart showing the rise in per-capita use of fossil fuels – but I guess we all know what that would show. We should thank coal, oil, and gas for the fact that we live so much better than our ancestors.

But – there is always a but – extracting and using fossil fuels productively calls for a massive amount of co-operative effort by huge numbers of human beings. A man alone, or a family alone, does not stand a chance. And the politicians & lawyers necessary for that co-operative effort leave us wide open to the kinds of ruling class abuses we see today. The politicians, bureaucrats, financiers, & lawyers are throttling the goose that has laid the golden eggs. Then this civilization, like every one that preceded it during the millennia of human existence, will collapse. And the cycle will begin again.

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What you say, Gavin, in your last para is the subject of a book I read years ago, not Hobbes but it had “Leviathan” in the title, I’m pretty sure, which argues as you do that only “big government” can provide resources en masse, and guarantee tranquility.

Okay, but that’s ALL it should be doing!

Our fed govt is only s’posed to be in charge of two things: interstate relations friendly or unfriendly, and, national defense. It is waaaaay beyond its mandate and has been for years.

The best, most felicitous, and unique aspect which America DID have, by repute and in reality, was stability. That attracted wealth from all over the world, it gave citizens the confidence to generate more and more of it—because wealth is something which is created, not something which is consumed. The kazillions that Bill Gates made: did he TAKE it from anybody else? Does anybody have less because he has more? ? No. It wasn’t there before! It’s not a zero-sum game.

I always think of Spain, which came to the new world for 2 reasons: gold and the Church. They sent all the gold back to the monarch, but it didn’t enrich the nation, only the Court (and the Church). So yuh. A wealthy nation can only be so if it facilitates enrichment of its cotizens.

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And, as that gold and silver made its way into circulation, it set off the great inflation known as the “Spanish Price Revolution” which saw prices across western Europe rise by a factor six over the 150 years starting in the second half of the 15th century. This led to the typical disruption of the economy and social unrest that inflation always causes, and affected other countries as much as Spain as the money flowed across borders. Wages lagged behind prices, and contributed to impoverishment of the general population.

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Interestingly, much of the silver extracted by the Spanish from South America was then shipped on to China where it was traded for tea, silks, porcelain, and other fine goods. When the supply of silver started to run low, the resulting trade imbalance led to the English exports of opium to China, and then to their Opium Wars to prevent China from blocking that trade. That was the start of the “Century of Humiliation” which figures so highly in today’s official Chinese consciousness, for which we & our descendants will be paying.

All of this because Ferdinand & Isabella decided to take a flutter on sponsoring an Italian sea captain’s wild idea half a millennium ago!

It is difficult for us to recognize just how long the consequences of actions can keep rumbling through history.

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That is fascinating; I didn’t know that.

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In his essential book, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, Alex Epstein provides compelling figures illustrating the relationship between fossil fuel consumption and improved human welfare.

Figure 1.2: Fossil Fuel Use and Life Expectancy in China and India

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Figure 1.3: Fossil Fuel Use and Income in China and India

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Figure 3.1: Fossil Fuel Use and Human Progress-the Big Picture

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Love this! “the Moral Case for fossil Fuels” …in a nutshell: DO YOU WANT MILLIONS OF PEOPLE TO DIE OF STARVATION AND/OR COLD?!?!? No? Case closed.

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Being less scholarly than ya’ll, I keep thinking on a book I read called Why Civilizations Die - And Why This One Will Too. Several proposals are put forth there that seem to have some merit.

World overpopulation is a myth. MOSTLY we see a continuum of increased governmental ”subsidy”, leading many to wonder why they should spend such money for the raising of children when they know their old age is “covered” - by government. So the need for children to care for the old is no longer viable.

The number of children in a given society is a measure of how hopeful those IN that society are about the future. America has managed to keep up with at least replacement birth rates because the Christian households have hope for the future. Such is not the case with many other societies.

So if we take these two ideas together, then we can see why Bill & Melinda Gates would NOT have any children because they can spend their wealth on things THEY think are ‘good’, and educated women tend to have far fewer babies because they have other interests than family to occupy their time. This seems true not just of Christian families but families in general.

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Actually, Bill and Melinda Gates have three children: Jennifer (born 1995), Rory (1999), and Phoebe (2002). When Jennifer was born, the joke was that her real name was “Microsoft Child for Windows”.

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Yuh that’s ANOTHER thing about Christianity. While in the OT humans are perpetually and at every opportunity commanded to procreate, reproduce, multiply—in the NT Jesus says nothing about that (although He has a lot to say about marriage, which makes the dearth of any remarks about parenthood kinda…odd.) He is not advocating procreation. I think cuz He and His disciples believed they were living in the last days, the Great Tribulation was imminent, nobody wants to bring children into a disintegrating world (sound familiar?)

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The man behind the World Bank’s “dollar-a-day” poverty line:

I have always thought poverty is not just about low consumption or income, but also involves things that are missing in standard (even comprehensive) measures, notably access to non-market goods, as is often reflected in attainments in basic health and education.

our standard poverty measures tell us nothing about our progress in lifting the floor … There are fewer poor people in the developing world, but the poorest are not much better off."

“it is important to make sure that our measures are socially relevant … [we now appreciate more] the importance of relative deprivation and social inclusion to personal well-being”

“After a long period of neglect, we … [economists] are learning a lot about the limitations of our standard household-level measures of welfare in properly reflecting the circumstances of women and children.”

What about home-grown food, home-made items, community entertainment, village barter, most religious activities? What a moron.

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…in fact, it is explicit: “The days are coming when ye shall say, blessed are the wombs that are barren, the teats that never gave suck.” Ei yii yii……really that coulda been said by any modern climatista…

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Good point. We have to note that societies are not uniform. Religious groups within societies like Mormons, Amish, Muslims tend to have above-replacement-sized families, while welfare single mothers also tend to have multiple children. It is the upper middle class bureaucrat & lawyer white collar women who are under-reproducing.

Where will this lead? Clearly to a less stable future world in which the multiracial children of religious families face the multiracial desperate under-educated children of welfare. My money is on the children of the religious surviving – but the process of surviving may undermine their religious beliefs. And of course we should not ignore the probability of mass movements from over-populated African & Asian areas to weakened Western areas. History will continue!

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When people lose faith nd hope in their culture they stop breeding. It happened to lotsa tribes in Melanesia when the then-modern world fell on ‘em like a ton of bricks because of the strategic importance of their geographic location in WW II. How can you wanna go on with the slow arduous labor of hollowing dugout canoes, or making rope from plant fibers, when you see a plethora of ready-made, and even better, such items being disgorged out of the bellies of planes nd ships?
The clash also spawned a new religion, the Cargo Cult.
Natives built runways in the jungles or on their tiny islands, like we put up birdhouses, to attract the big silver birds. And mimicked what they assumed were the religious rituals of the superior civilization, erecting flagpoles and saluting the banners. Too fascinating! I think it still exists, or did until the last few decades, the faithful awaiting the return of “John Frum”. (Even though now, of course they do have access to the once miraculous-seeming “cargo”.). Funny Ol’world. (No not really.)

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That was a specific part of a specific prophecy about a war in the near future that would destroy Jerusalem. It took place less than 40 years later. Josephus wrote the book.

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So? The warmists are prophets too.

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