The Post-Christian Christian

If you do just one thing today, make it "renounce Satan and all his works"

I read this term a couple of days ago, of the “post Christian gentile”, referring to modern (western), industrial man. Someone was expressing the idea that cultural integration of Middle Eastern and African people into “post Christian gentile civility/submission” was the blind spot of the powers that be today, sort of like the Soviet Union trying to jump from a feudal economy into an industrial economy without the intermittent steps.

The idea of the humanist human of our day as “post Christian”, I think is interesting.

It almost feels impolite to state it so directly: by the tenants of such a man, from his perspective looking out, the “Christian” part is an embarrassing open secret. A modern man is embarrassed by historical Christianity, and considers it an arbitrary thing, it is “a” religion - one of many, interchangeable, and arbitrary.

The language around it is itself a kind of trap. We say Christianity is “a” religion, when the concept of “a religion” is itself the conceptual, philosophical, linguistic product of so-called Post-Christian thought. In Christian thought, there is only *one* religion - and heresies, and paganism, which are not “the same thing”, but categorically different. There is no plural version of the word religion. It is a synonym for “Christendom”. Linguistically, what we are saying when we say “Christianity is a religion”, is, “Christianity is a [something that is like Christianity]”.

What the post-Christian project is, is an attempt to pick and choose all the “good” parts of your heritage, and discard all the “bad”. Judging which is which is left up to Reason and Analysis, and Tempered-disinterested-scientific-mindset. To analyse it “objectively” and “rationally” and improve it by cutting away the fat.

As a recent example, the phenomenon of the 00's Internet atheists, what we now call fedora atheism, was always philosophically and attempt to rationalise “Christian” (Western civ, call it what you want) social ethics, but without the embarrassing hocus pocus. They all coincidentally happened to discover by pure reason and logic, most of the social and moral ethics of the society they grew up in.

To have all the boons of Christian civilisation without any of the burdens of, for example, sexual ethics. Having a high trust society, but without having to do any of the hard stuff that makes such a society, like not fucking other people’s wives, or being involved in people around you’s lives, and working on projects together that you share a mutual interest in, such as building infrastructure or helping your neighbour fix his roof.

The idea that you can pick up all the "good" parts of historical Christianity. Without all the embarrassing baggage, is wrong. It’s an Either/or, all or nothing. You can't pick and choose the parts you like, you can only take the whole thing and build on top of it. Trying otherwise is the idea behind all morality and psychology for 200 years, and it has lead to the worst tragedies in recorded human history. The natural political or organisational state of mankind - what in Christian thought you would call pagan, heathen, or perhaps even gentile - is a brutal, unaccountable mafia oligarchy. Christendom is the only historical anomality, where we have been anywhere close to any alternative to this. Everything “good and noble” about our enlightenment humanitarian values were grown in the laboratory conditions of historical Christianity. And as we can see, they don’t fare so well outside of those laboratory conditions.

The essential mistake in a nutshell is most people have confused the “good” parts with the “easy” parts. Because more than anything, they are lazy. Sloth is the sin of our era, not pride or lust or greed. Anything that is difficult about it is thrown out.

It is difficult to deal with Christ. It is extremely difficult to integrate with modern dasein.

It would be nice and easy if we could just have all the supposed fruits of Christianity, all of civilisation, all the gains and success and wealth, without all the difficult, weird, heavy stuff. All the light and easy, without all the heavy and difficult. Putting that another way is saying, Christianity without Christ.

It would be 'nice' to have a firm ontology and a morality that did not make demands of you. It would be nice to have existential certainty, and not live in fear of death, and not live in anxiety and neuroticism, and having a full frame for existence, the world, and your place in it, without it having any implicit demands in regards to your behaviour. It would be nice to have all the cake in the world, and never get fat.

It would be nice if you could have a morality, that worked itself on you, where you didn’t have to lift a finger. An active morality, that acted on you as a passive recipient.

This is part of why I call God the generative principle.

The sin of the digital era is not pride or wrath of lust, but sloth.

"Consumer" society is antithetical to Christian Life. Consuming is by definition passive, willingly letting yourself be acted upon, willingly engaging in a subject-object relationship as the "lesser" partner. And Christ is the generative principle.

A world without Christ is dead, and the modern attempt has been trying to turn Christian ethics into a benevolent lie, a Zizekian horse-shoe, and this is impossible. Christ is a dichotomy. Either or. To hybridize it is incompatible with human psychology. It's a yes/no.

Western world wanted to harvest the fruits of Christianity without sowing, and now we are in a spiritual famine. The so called culture war is no war at all but a revolution, and it’s trying to turn pre-Christians into post-Christians, like soviet economy skipping a step, and it is causing cultural mass famines and starvation.

The idea of the modern cosmopolitan post Christian "well behaved, nice" citizen is an insane, contradictory, delusion. They are not well behaved, they are not behaving at all - they are passive. They don’t do anything. They are exactly not behaving, but the opposite.

You can't "educate" non Christians into post Christian "just be nice" bug people, and in a generation you won't be able to do it to the western world either, because there will be nothing left of their Christian heritage. Then, all hell breaks loose.

The Christian improves himself, he seeks to become a better Christian. The post-Christian seeks to improve "Christianity", without his own person involvement or stake. Without getting his hands dirty. Without action - without the generative principle.

The mistake is of the type so prominent today, of calling all weakness a strength. I’m a handicapable neurodivergent rape survivor living an alternative lifestyle, not an antisocial brain-damaged violent drunk.

We have misidentified as “progress” and “growth”, a tumor of sloth. The post-Christian man is not a being that has moved past Christ, but one that has forgotten him.

Drinking to forget works, but it doesn’t make you happy, it just make you unable to remember why you are miserable. All your physiological responses are the same, whatever happened to you still resonates physically in your body. You just lose the sentient overview of knowing what caused it. So instead of being miserable and guilty, you feel miserable and helpless, because you don’t know what to do about it.

I'm civilizational terms:

Now the party’s over, and you don't remember why you’re miserable.