Comments on: God, Carts, and Horses

By: Free Northerner

Free Northerner — Wed, 09 Jul 2014 05:02:29 +0000

[…] can’t get the cultural aspects of religion without the religious belief. Related: On religious […]

By: zhai2nan2

zhai2nan2 — Thu, 03 Jul 2014 09:27:49 +0000

They want the courage back, the martial prowess , the willingness to defend one’s kith and kin. And so they go about crafting ash spears and drinking mead and invoking the dread name of Odin at midnight of the winter solstice. But my guess is that they will be frustrated in these efforts and, the old Viking bloodlust won’t materialize. Not because a belief in Odin never inspired Norsemen to go forth and die gloriously in battle. But because they don’t believe in Odin. So no matter how assiduous they are in their rituals, what they are ultimately doing is playacting – See more at: http://www.socialmatter.net/2014/07/02/god-carts-horses/#sthash.uWa3K7Lo.dpuf

There are some people who try to be neopagan and fail. They can do the rituals, but they can’t quite feel the spirit.

There are other people who don’t try to be neopagan and who nonetheless succeed. They feel the spirit so strongly that it doesn’t matter that they don’t do rituals.

If spirits are real and can interact with us, our interactions with spirits are more important than any other part of religion.

If spirits cannot interact with us, religion might as well be replaced by any kind of other empty ruleset – the rules to Scrabble, for example.

If you follow the spirits that you can intuit, wherever they lead you, you will end up knowing who you really are. The answer is not guaranteed to satisfy your preconceptions.

There are quite a few fine fellows wandering the earth right now who will fail to be neopagans, but who will succeed at being heroes somewhat like Chesterton’s Napoleon of Notting Hill. There are also some not-so-fine fellows who think they are Sam Gamgee, but who are really Smeagol.

By: Sam

Sam — Thu, 03 Jul 2014 04:10:03 +0000

“And he that sat upon the throne said, “Behold, I make all things new.”

By: Desdichado

Desdichado — Thu, 03 Jul 2014 01:52:28 +0000

You’ve pretty much nailed the motivation of a lot of new young neoreactionaries/reactionary sympathizers on the head there, Mr. Glanton. I am close to being among those “overnight converts” to Catholicism. It’s not so much an intellectual thing as it is a metaphysical longing that neoreaction just so happens to give an approving intellectual schema for. It’s as if we moral nihilists, children of a progressive upbringing that is, as Zippy might say, “positivist”, can’t take the final step and embrace an aesthetic until there is at least some empirical justification for. Before we can say that prayer to the God of our fathers, we must make an farewell obeisance to the god of our terrible Lovecraftian Mother, the Enlightenment.

Even if you have an air-tight philosophy, you’ll be tempted to exchange it for a new one if everything it explains comes out to “everything you do is pointless and worms will eat you when you die.”

By: nyan sandwich

nyan sandwich — Wed, 02 Jul 2014 18:28:14 +0000

This hits close to home for those of us metaphysical nihilists who believe the that contents of the universe are basically lovecraftian, but also have that desire to serve a higher power and honor the glorious and muscular religion of our ancestors. That conflict weighs heavily on my soul, and I’ve been searching for a resolution with few results. Perhaps the joke is on us, and the universe contains no beauty and thus all perception of meaning and beauty must be born of delusion. Still I have hope for a post-nihilist religion that is able to reconcile harsh reality with a glorious spiritual and cultural context. As you say, wanting the culture and beauty won’t make it so, but neither will wanting it create faith that the harsh meaningless reality I see just isn’t so.

By: God, Carts, and Horses | Reaction Times

God, Carts, and Horses | Reaction Times — Wed, 02 Jul 2014 17:01:43 +0000

[…] Source: Social Matter […]