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Tag: spirituality

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    Hypocrisy Over Power

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    1–2 minutes

    Reading Foucault and Nietzsche convinces us that power relations and the “will to power” underlie all dynamics and institutions.

    However, this revelation reduces everything to a single drive of importance, ignoring the traditional binary of secular/profane versus holy/sacred.

    The acceptance of “power” instead of “sacred/profane” collapses the binary; it flattens humans back into utilitarian monsters, entirely secular.

    More interestingly, to accept that there is an unattainable realm of ideals and hold them sacred creates a universal hypocrisy: we cannot achieve perfection and must remain humble and merciful given our failure to achieve the unattainable perfection. Yet, acceptance is not condoning.

    Instead of limiting hypocrisy through attempting sacred alignment “power” sees hypocritical behavior as necessary and useful, valid as a stratagem. This denies justice and civility to reinstate “might is right.”

    In this sense, power as priit macy only reverts humanity back to animality.

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    God is dead is not far enough

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    1–2 minutes

    Slavoj Zizek says that declaring “God is dead” leaves standing the edifice of religion, our ideological faith in divinity itself. Because even with God dead, the Christian God can be revived. (If we only kill the idea, we know that the concept survives to be resurrected. How do you kill the concept?)

    Much more damming is to consider God is either evil or stupid. This means the route of destruction lies inside divinity, so the enactment of evil stupidity is immanent to the faith, bringing about its own corrosive implosion.

    The way to undermine faith is not to kill it (drown, outlaw, or silence it) but to point out its fundamental contradictions that align with our cultural bias: We hate nothing more than stupidity and will even claim that the root of evil is idiocy.

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    Mindful to Mindless

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    1–2 minutes

    Being mindful means not being distracted by your mind, emotions, fears, or concerns but being in the present, undistracted.

    The conundrum is to consider the undistracted state, mindful, as "mindless" since we are not actively engaged in thinking or doing. However, to give yourself over to a torrent of emotions and frivolous thoughts is an animalistic state, mindless and without control, completely captured by impulse and reaction.

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    Transcending Material Goals for Sublime, Unattainable Fulfillment

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    1–2 minutes

    When pursuing a goal, motivation falters as you’re haunted by dark fantasies of failure. These fears obscure the path, and success becomes elusive: you are nearly there, but cannot see it. You need a guiding light beyond your objective.

    To overcome your doubt and dissuaded fixation, shift focus from tangible objectives to abstract, immaterial goals—commodities that transcend physical limits.

    Unlike material achievable goals, which deteriorate and shift due to their finite nature, the commodity can never be fully attained. It is eternal and avoids capture. This echoes the logic of capitalism, where commodities are fetishized into the sublime, approximate to God, and the pursuit itself becomes divine.

    This animating motivation stems from a base, subjective desire, which can now be elevated to transcend the original, objective need. In so doing it offers a long-term stable, albeit unattainable, path toward self-fulfillment.

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    To be free: pause remembering and cease imagining

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    1–2 minutes

    The past is mostly artificial, so when we continuously construct our “self” it is based on transfigured delusional remembrance.

    We then encounter each moment not as it is but from a “deluded self” reacting to a subjective narrativization, a private myth only tenuously touching on reality. This “self/ego” approaches interactions –either wounded or emboldened– attempting to correct our myth, to make the imagined real.

    Thus, we seldom pay attention to the present but busily imagine an improbable future from a distorted past, which traps us in quirks of our own making.

    If we can pause remembering and cease imagining, we could be free to see the present moment.

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    impossibility of stopping

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    1–2 minutes

    We are the most potent, rapacious animal: we cannot be stopped, even by ourselves.

    Disciplined behavior will not suffice, so we are left with two solutions: 1) creating a parent for ourselves, such as God or AI, or 2) creating a new territory into which our drives can expand, such as space or virtual worlds.

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    Mystical reversal: empirical empowerment

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    1–2 minutes

    A supernatural realm persists, enacting odd changes while remaining veiled from comprehension. This mysterious realm seems to serve as the underlying foundation of the palpable, natural world we inhabit. With careful attunement and rituals, we can align with the mystery, predicting and anticipating its caprice.

    While embracing empiricism or materialism might seem to disregard this mystical dimension it is not at odds with it, rather it reverses our relationship: by empowering the physical we induce change on our terms for tangible profit or benefit attempting to reduce dependence on "magical" influence.

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    Church’s Role in Sustaining Democracy

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    1–2 minutes

    In America, around half of all volunteer-based groups have a religious affiliation. Additionally, between 35 to 40 percent of the population goes to church regularly. However, over the past 50 years, the percentage of people who vote and volunteer has declined by 10 to 20 percent. This decline has also been observed in the "third places" that were once known for community support and socialization.

    In his book "Bowling Alone," Robert Putnam highlights how dwindling participation in community organizations has eroded our ability to run meetings, manage disagreements, bear responsibility, entertain strangers at home, or participate in sports and games.

    As a result of maintaining organized groups, the church has become a primary training ground for civic engagement and leadership, as well as diplomacy. These are fundamental hallmarks that are required for a successful democracy. Religion plays a crucial role in preventing isolationism and atomized individualism, thus retaining social fabric and support.

    In a fraying democracy, the rise of unified voices, and therefore democratic majority, is likely to arise from religions that maintain, train, and unify.

    [tags  democarcy, religion, voting, third place, socialization, politics,]

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    Progress versus progressivism

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    1–2 minutes

    Who can be against progress? Don’t you want "change" so that everyone is treated well and fairly? Yes, of course.

    However, progress is merely the process of moving towards a goal, not the goal itself.

    The confusion is that progressivism co-opts the term "progress" to mean a singular vision: a neo-liberal techno-rationalist future of egalitarian leveling that will be beneficial for human enlightenment, comfort, and peace.
    Yet, to many citizens palatable progress is a retroactive return to traditional micro-social communities, which carry the negative connotations of religious fundamentalism and Luddites.

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    shapeshifting beliefs (religion and conspiracy)

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    1–2 minutes

    The early Christians were experts at playing into other groups’ oral traditions and prophecies. They recruited by shapeshifting, assimilating, and aggregating. It’s like grafting new branches onto your tree. The issue is that they had to write in code because the Romans did not want the church to grow too powerful.
    Compared to today, this long conspiracy and aggregation of alternate cur conspiracies, while at the same time hiding from and despising the power of the state, has interesting effects.
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    Early Christians adeptly merged their beliefs with existing oral traditions, recruiting followers through a shapeshifting assimilation. This approach resembled grafting new branches onto an established tree.

    Writing in coded language was crucial as they grew, as overt expansion threatened Roman authority. This blend of espionage, aggregation, and subterfuge under state scrutiny parallels the modern interactions between populist beliefs and established powers.

    From this point of view, it is understandable that a religion distrustful of state authority is primed for conspiracy theories and will morph to adopt survival tactics, even if they are counter to their core tenants.