Why the West is NGMI [Part 1]: The death of religious identity
Rejecting your religious identity without first proposing an alternative is like a serpent shedding its skin before having already developed new skin underneath. Without an alternative frame to protect itself, it is now vulnerable and exposed to threats, and it will die quickly. This is what the West has done in its self-righteous suicide; it rejected Christianity before first outgrowing it.
Three core Western values are critical thinking, freedom, and commitment to logic over emotion. It was only natural that, by 2024 AD, en-masse skepticism would erode the foundations of the Christian faith: a religion based on Eastern mythology… a Son of Man (not of God) who defied that same mythology… and a demagogue Roman emperor who made a mess out of fusing the two into an incoherent dogma enforced upon millions for political currency. Expelling Eastern mythology was logical, but it came at a cost, because Western ideals were attached to Christianity.
The West has thrown the baby out with the bathwater: It has rejected its religion, and with it, the values and identity that were fused into it. We were under the assumption that these values came from Christianity, when it was the opposite: Christianity came from Western values - Christianity was Judaism adapted to Western standards.
Without a steadfast identity, individuals and communities are doomed to devolve into an unmotivated, self-hating, and undignified state, especially when faced with out-group aggression. They have no motivation to stand for what they can’t define. Without defining values, principles, ideas and ideals, people cannot know who they are, and why they should bother living. With an identity gap plaguing the West, is it any wonder that gender dysphoria, drug addiction, suicide, and susceptibility to fanatic ideologies are on the rise?
Yes, the West rejected its religion, without first detaching those defining Western values from the religion. Westerners were under the false presumption that their values came from their religion, but it’s the other way around. In fact, Christianity was Judaism adapted to the values of the West of early antiquity. Western values are older and bigger than Christianity; Christianity just appropriated them.
And now, desperate for new values - any values - the West has plunged itself into the self-destructive cults of feminism, socialism, wokeness, LGBT supremacy, pathological guilt, and the adoption of predatory expansionist Islam (the second most subversive religion after statism).
The fall of Christianity
Other than old people “discovering God” a few years before they die (convenient), very few people go to church anymore. This applies to Eastern Orthodox churches too (supposedly a bit more reluctant to let go than their Catholic/Protestant/Anglican counterparts. Christianity has been reduced to cheap shamanism and tax-exemptions schemes - which is why you see denomination after denomination spring into existence in every corner, with no actual followers.
Self-anointed “Christians” claim they “love Jesus,” and they celebrate Christmas, but other than that, they do nothing of what their own religion demands: women covering their hair (yes, like Islam), staying chaste until marriage, not fornicating, not lying, not killing (or supporting big oil wars), and not stealing - receiving welfare is the most devious underhanded type of theft. Theirs is a religion of humility, yet they whore themselves for fame, status, and carnal projections on Instagram. They seek wealth, yet Jesus could not have been clearer when he asserted that those with earthly riches would never enter heaven. Christianity is not dying - it has died long ago.
However, at least the cultural manifestation of Christianity was still there. Many weren’t practicing Christians, but they valued its culture, history, principles, stories. Many Westerners did not believe that wine was actually the “blood” of Christ (a pagan practice), but at least they selectively valued the ideals and moral principles of Christ. But today, we went from denying the divinity of Christianity to rejecting the defining moral principles and values associated with it.
The fall of Christianity was a bad thing - and this coming from me, an areligious.
It is not the religion itself that matters (anyone interprets his religion the way it suits him). What matters is the identity, meaning, and purpose that come with religion. Without a religion to act as people’s anchor in this crude reality, there emerges an identity gap. Militant atheists do a disservice to their cause when they promote the destruction of Christianity, without first suggesting anything else to replace it. They just open the gates to more aggressive religions like Islam. Atheists bent on destroying Christianity fail to recognize the meaning of religion, and the importance of individual and cultural identity derived from religion. I know - I was one of them, regrettably.
Convinced to abandon the religion of their forefathers, and with it, their ethnic, cultural and moral identity, people of the West now desperately try to replace Christianity with other religions even more aggressive and irrational; such as Islam or government/state worship. When your community identifies with its religion - regardless of how misguided the religion was - and when it’s been addicted to religion for centuries, you don’t just abruptly take its opium away (to quote the evil embarrassment Karl Marx).
Granted, there appears to have been a systemic inorganic effort to erode Christianity from the beginning of the 20th century at least, and even earlier perhaps. The libertine movements of 19th-century Western Europe, the 20th-century homosexual movements on central Europe, the hippy love free-for-all of the 1960s-1970s, the blatantly satanic rock music of the 1980s-1990s, and gay-gangsta-demonic rap music of today. These don’t feel like grassroots movements, but rather, shoved-down-our-throats social engineering by groups with the resources to do it. Almost nobody asked for those movements, yet they were still promoted anyway by special interests with institutional power.
There are rumors in the music industry asserting that music labels in the 1980s and 1990s were granting incentives to rock bands to express satanic themes. This explains the sudden emergence of satanic heavy metal, which has now transferred to hip-hop and pop. Almost nobody makes it in the music industry unless they agree to promote any narrative they are given. P. Diddy anyone?
Yes, the West threw out the baby (values, principles, ideas, ideals, virtues, identity) with the bathwater (religion). Perhaps it needed Christianity for a while to consolidate its identity and defend itself - Europe has always been under relentless constant attack from Eastern expansionists: the Persian wars, centuries of brutal Arab raids, invasions and child-grabbing from Mongols and Ottoman Turks - who are still pushing Westward (even today’s Turkey maintains territory disputes with all of its neighboring countries, and projects aggressive claims in the Mediterranean through its vassal government in Libya.
And perhaps this sense of threat is why so many young insecure Westerners of today display a misguided affiliation with their perverse version of Christianity on Twitter and Substack - yet in real life, they do nothing that is Christ-like. In their weak minds, the Roman Empire is a supposedly masculine ideal, and militant Christianity (an oxymoron) is somehow the answer.
Atheist remorse
Western atheists now painfully realize that their cause of getting rid of religion has empowered and emboldened one religion (Islam) over another (Christianity).
Even Richard Dawkins, the celebrity-prophet of modern atheists, commented on the benefits of cultural Christianity, after witnessing Britain displacing Christianity with Islam. In his own words:
“I do think that we are culturally a Christian country. I call myself a cultural Christian. I’m not a believer. … And so you know, I love hymns and Christmas carols, and I sort of feel at home in the Christian ethos. … If we substituted [Christianity] with any alternative religion, that would be truly dreadful.” - Richard Dawkins
Source: Washington Examiner - Richard Dawkins has some regrets
Yet militant atheists don’t seem to hold themselves accountable for the damage they did to their communities, and the service they did to expansionist Islam and other political cults (yes, Islam is first a political ideology, and second a religion - that’s how you get Islamists rejecting religion but adhering to political Islam). The likes of Hawkins worked hard to help kill Christianity only to make way for Islam - good job, geniuses!
The problem with Christianity
Christianity was useful to the West, yet Jesus’s teachings are far from ideal. Yes, he preached defiance, forgiveness, compassion, humility, and tolerance, but these values, when applied indiscriminately, are self-destructive. This is another reason why the West is dying.
The West has largely rejected Christianity, but has kept certain debilitating remnants of Christianity: the pathological guilt of original sin, giving everything to the self-anointed “poor,” loving those who hate you, turning the other cheek; this is exactly what Western leftists are doing. The pathological altruism of woke socialism seems to come from Christian influence.
So, the West is damned if it keeps Christianity, and damned if it discards it. If it keeps the self-debilitating Christian values of subservience and pathological tolerance, it cannot survive when faced with aggressive expansionist cultures like Islam. If it rejects Christianity, it loses its Western values that have been associated and attached to Christianity. So, without a solid identity derived from those values, the West again becomes vulnerable and ripe for destructive conquest.
When Western communities become civilized, they solve most of their social and geopolitical issues. When they no longer have unsolvable problems or existential threats, they begin inventing them. For example, the pretentious wincing of feminism is the privilege of women who have it all. You don’t get feminist movements in societies with actual problems - food shortages, unending war, disease, poverty.
Without challenges, people lose purpose, and therefore lose direction, focus, and meaning. Westerners need to have problems to have a purpose - so they import their problems. This is expressed in the pathological hospitality of literally paying welfare abusers from all over the world to come parasitize your communities with their entitled aggression, their insecurity complex, and their hatred for your for condescending them with your charity; charity which they take regardless. Don’t blame the welfare abusers: blame your pathological self-righteous pretentious altruism.
A life without challenge creates challenge; but the West had no plan to address the challenges it had created for itself. It just instinctively put itself in trouble, assuming that things would turn out well.
The West needs to be subservient and self-punishing because it carries the subversive teachings of Jesus in its collective subconscious: original sin, turning the other cheek, loving those who hate you, giving everything to the self-proclaimed “poor.” But these instincts of Christ-like submissiveness are triggered only when Christian societies solve all the real problems of their communities; when they achieve peace and prosperity. Then, they feel guilty and undeserving of peace and prosperity, and so their self-punishing Christian guilt sets in. With an impostor syndrome overwhelming them, they seek to destroy themselves: hence the collapse of the West we are witnessing today in 2024 AD.
Yes, it was logical and ethical to get over the shackles of Christianity - yet another religion enforced by a madman (Constantine “the great”) for political reasons. But, we should have never promoted the end of Christianity without offering a strong identity in return. This is because we have trouble separating our values and ethnic identity from religion.
Western values preceded Christianity, and can exist without it; we just forgot how.
The free pass of Islam
We cannot abandon religion, something so fundamental and so fused into Western culture, without first surgically removing and safeguarding the values associated with is. We cannot get rid of something as powerful as religion - which gives meaning and purpose - without first figuring out something else to take its place. If we don’t, then other, more aggressive religions (Islam or Marxism - same thing) will take advantage of the resulting faith gap, and take over. We see it blatantly clear today.
Congrats on destroying Christianity. Say ‘welcome’ to Islam. Progress!
You weren’t as hard on Islam as you were on your own religion. You were too cowardly and scared to be called ‘racist.’ Now you shall pay your Jizya in sweat and blood.
When you take away people’s religion, you rob them of the values that they associate with that religion. You strip them of their identity, their meaning and their hope - their existential reason for being. It is no wonder that this identity gap is now being filled by the two most fanatic and subversive religions of them all: Islam and statism (the worship of the state). And these two religions seem to have formed an unholy alliance.
The alliance of Islam and statism is understandable, because Islam is first a political ideology, and second a religion. Islam is concerned more with how to micromanage the physical world when it’s not promising its deprived followers 72 sex slaves, and servant boys, in a meaningless afterlife of loathsome debauchery and degeneracy. Islam is political because it comes with its own in-depth legislation (Sharia law), and intricate structures for an authoritarian regime (caliphate), detailing everything from family law and vice to banking and expansionist warfare. Islam is Marxist totalitarian statism before Marx was even born. Islam promises a centrally planned totalitarian society (socialism), with the added bonus of an unverifiable promise of a sex-obsessed degenerate afterlife.
Westerners turn to Islam because they have comfort of their own to turn to. Their own “champions” are too scared to be labeled “racist” for standing up for their identity, when they’re not busy worshipping sellout politicians. The desperately confused Westerners have no choice but to look to morally bankrupt grifters like Andrew Tate (a Muslim). Not only does this show that the West has already died, but it suggests it’s now in zombie mode, refusing to go down with the dignity and integrity of its forefathers. The lost offspring of the old Westerners are now turning to Islam: the antithesis of the West. They turn to Islam no less, an appalling political totalitarian ideology masquerading as a religion of sex slaves and afterlife orgies only for males (Muslim women know their religion is bullshit - they just play along with it because Islam mitigates their female envy).
The Nation of Islam (another political organization) admits that Islam is a more aggressive religion, and that Christianity is a religion for slaves. Both these points are true. The West was held down by Christianity. Christianity brought us the dark ages due to its Easter influences, even though Christianity was Judaism adapted to Western higher standards.
Regardless, the subservience of Christianity cannot be the answer to Islamic aggressive expansionism - a fundamental defining trait of Islam. And Islam cannot be the answer to the identity gap of today’s Westerners - we cannot trade good values for despicable ones.
Outgrowing Christianity
We cannot reject Christianity - we must outgrow it. The West rejected its religion while it was still reliant on it; while it still needed it to amalgamate its values, to give it an identity, to give it purpose, focus, and meaning. Westerners jumped off the sinking boat of Christianity, and into the water… they failed to recognize the rescue boat waiting right there for them…
Religion is like a tumor in your brain that you can’t simply cut out. If you do, you kill your brain too in the process. We cannot throw away Christianity, because we discard our values along with it. This is because these values, in the collective Western conscious, have been appropriated by Christianity. In fact, they precede Christianity, and can exist without it.
Instead of rejecting Christianity, we should have outgrown religion. This means to recognize it as a dark page in history, accept its evolution from religious dogma to cultural identity, and move on with dignity, without punishing ourselves for outgrowing religion. Most importantly, it means identify the Western values of Christianity (tolerance, humility, forgiveness, acceptance, defiance of dogma, individualism, nobility, kindness), while rejecting its counterproductive and antithetical values (obedience, dogmatism, tribalism, submission, humiliation). Then, we must understand that we can voluntarily choose to hold good values without requiring the threatening mandates of a sadistically cruel deity. There can be no compulsion in holding values, otherwise values cease to have meaning.
Understand that, at least the Abrahamic “values” of Christianity, are counterproductive values. You shouldn’t need a better argument other than the fact that the founder of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam was a schizophrenic hearing voices in his head telling him to slaughter his son in a game of proving obedience to a cruel sadistic deity. And even if those voices were real, no such deity is moral or deserving of worship. At best, such a deity is deserving of terror.
We don’t need religion to push virtue, morality, and principle by force. If it’s by force it is meaningless, hypocritical, and it fosters resentment against those values. Any adherence to those values is reluctant, forced, and pretentious. Instead of threat, these values must come from a place of incentive, otherwise they are unsustainable. When values, moral principles, and ideal are not enforced through fear, then they have meaning. Only when taken up voluntarily are virtues meaningful. And besides all that, there is the added bonus of moral principles also having social and personal utility.
Understand that the values we have instilled in religion are higher and more moral than the religion itself. Keep the values, but let aside the religion as the mythology it is.
For the right reasons
Another reason why the West is falling is because it has abandoned its religion for the wrong reasons. The reasons it chose to abandon its religion are a teenage-angst type of rebellion against a daddy-figure. It isn’t logic. Look at most militant atheists out there - blue-haired and socialist - claiming to be more educated and reasonable than their counterparts. This is not the case. They reject Christianity, yet fail to see the insane irrationality of the religion of socialism and state-worship. At least I cannot disprove the Christian faith - but I can disprove the existence of “the state” as implied to be an all-powerful all-knowing benevolent entity separate from its corrupt priestly class (politicians and bureaucrats). To claim that “the state” exists because government officials exist is to claim that a god exists because the church and clergy exist.
If we are to reject Christianity, let us to it out of consistently logical critical thinking, not political agendas or unresolved daddy issues.
We don’t need an empty promise of a vague afterlife to have meaning. Holding moral principles, and adhering to higher values (higher than any religion could preach) gives more meaning than collecting points for a meaningless afterlife of eternal boredom. Being a person of ethos and virtue, of values and higher ideas - especially when no tyrannical god demands it of you - gives more meaning and purpose to your life than any obsessively vain expectation to “live forever.”
Areligion
I stopped calling myself ‘atheist’ when I realized that almost all atheists were fanatic socialists. Atheism has become synonymous with state-worship, the dumbest and easiest-to-debunk religion of all. Atheists swapped one god for another - an even more deluded one. So, instead, I say that I am areligious, because I have the humility to admit that I don’t know whether a god exists. Instead, my position is that of remaining unconvinced by religions. I am open to be convinced, but I require logical arguments. So far, no religion has offered any, other than good arguments for the simulation theory.
All religions are inaccurate, false and manmade. Why? Because no one making religious claims about the nature of reality has any possible way of knowing those claims are true. It’s hearsay, willful thinking, delusion, and deception. It’s believing in things you cannot personally verify, and no one can. All religions are false because they are unsubstantiated claims. And so, they can be rejected without having any burden of disproving them (Hitchens’s burden-of-proof epistemological razor).
Of course, a ‘burden of proof’ fallacy cannot become an ‘absence of evidence’ fallacy. This is why I reject only the claims of people who have no possible way of knowing those claims - I don’t reject the theoretical assertion of divinity.
The YouTuber Armoured Skeptic does a great job showing how Jesus’s values contradict the savagery of the original Judaic dogma, which worships a god of envy, vengeance, genocide, and sadism.
Let’s just say that all three Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) are based on illogical, immoral, and horrendous hearsay. If these faiths were not imposed on populations by political interests, they would have long seized to exist, because they are illogical, immoral, and unconvincing to the critical mind.
Despite what the truth may be, we know that religions aren’t it. Why? Because they have historically been unproven assertions by people claiming ownership of their exclusive interpretation of “the word of god,” which they used to their advantage. Anyone who’d manage to convince a bunch of gullible idiots that he was (conveniently enough) the sole messenger of god, would enjoy privileged treatment, leadership, and positions of social status. From the ghastly pedophile warlord Mohamed to the schizophrenic voices-in-my-head Abraham, these self-announced “messengers of god” were “surprisingly” - and conveniently enough - treated with favoritism in their societies. Moses was just a demagogue claiming to be the only one who could see god up in a mountain somewhere alone, and that - conveniently enough - he was the sole receiver of God’s Commandments. He then felt threatened and surprised when some of his people lost faith in his wild claims, and decided to worship a magical ram instead. The ram was still more believable than the ridiculous burning bush of Moses. This religious deception also includes pagans of antiquity (see the soothsayers and shamans), and modern cults like Mormonism, statism, and modern academia. Cults are profitable - we now call them grifts.
Behind each religion there is a soothsayer, a shaman, a deceiving grifter.
Western values are greater than the religion that appropriated them
Western civilization has been held down by Christianity for a long time. Christianity has appropriated those values that traditionally define the West from antiquity - values such as critical thinking, individualism, freedom, work ethic, etc. Christianity has corrupted them. Even when these values are expressed, Christianity takes the credit, because it has integrated those values into it.
Yet, each time the West achieved something significant, it was when the West was distant from Abrahamic religions: Ancient Greco-Roman modernity (not to be confused with the corrupt hellhole that was the Roman state), the Renaissance, the abolition of slavery, the era of piracy and revolutionism, the industrial revolution, the era of leaping scientific breakthrough (19th-20th century).
In eras when the West was possessed by religion, however, we got the dark ages and the misguided Crusades. Even though the Crusades were a half-assed response to centuries of Islamic aggression, they were corrupt, and carried out very poorly, butchering themselves through Europe for pillage and plunder. When the West was religion-obsessed, we got witch burning, slave owning, and the despicable world wars (statism is the most fanatic religion of them all).
And here we are, today, with the cult of statism (government worship) merged with the fanatic ideology of “progressivism,” which means “deconstructionism” or, more accurately, destructionism. Religious statism is a death cult, a religion of death and destruction, of breaking things apart rather than of building them up.
This is the problem: The West broke its identity along with its religion. It “deconstructed” them both, along with the values that were erroneously associated with and credited to Christianity. Progressivism is about destroying, and not building anything else in its place. It’s about demolishing something because it’s imperfect, and not having anything better to replace it with.
This is why, instead of Christianity, we now get socialism and Islam - far worse alternatives.
Granted, the Western values of critical thinking, freedom, and logic were what led us to the movements of skepticism and atheism. Good luck getting that kind of critical thinking from Eastern cultures… shame-bound and tribalistic, obsessed with dogma over reason. There will never be a strong and accepted movement of criticizing religion in Eastern cultures - not as long as Islamic despotism reigns. Even the Kurdish people, who have rejected Islam in their struggle for independence, have replaced Islam with Marxism - the distant cousin of Islam, the same fanatic intolerant totalitarian religiosity.
What can we do?
I am guilty of militant atheism too - I went through an angry atheist phase when I blamed religion for some of my problems. I preached the total dismissal of religion, but I didn’t have anything better to recommend, nothing to replace religion with, as a framework of ethos, culture, and identity.
I had no idea how to fill the gap of existential identity that a dead religion creates.
But would could possibly replace Christian culture, identity, and all the values that go with it, without falling into yet another dogmatic orthodoxy that renders us manipulable and obedient to despots and demagogues?
Here’s an idea…
We must first understand that certain Christian values are counterproductive. Self-righteous guilt is one Christian value that has eroded the Western value of being noble, and turned it into pretentiously pious self-punishment. Christian guilt turned the virtue of internally sourced motivation for good into virtue-signaling through self-crucifixion. The Westerner is typically guilt-based (noble), which means he is concerned with what his conscience thinks of him. Instead, Christianity preaches to the shame-based who are only concerned with what others think of them, without their conscience having a voice. (See shame-culture and guilt-culture). This is why now fallen Westerners don’t actually feel guilty; they only need to pretend to be guilty, to appear noble in pretentious self-loathing. This comes from Christianity.
Second, we must accept that there is little meaning in a meaningless afterlife of vague god-praising, a hellish boredom without end. Most people can’t stand an hour in church - imagine that boredom for eternity. There is even less meaning in the eternal orgy of a degenerate Islamic afterlife - a ridiculous thing to believe in with a straight face.
Then, we can acknowledge that there is utility in upholding principles, values, and ideals - things that give us identity, purpose, and direction. There is meaning in holding these principles, values, and ideals, only when there is no compulsion - only when there is no divine punishment or reward associated with them. The reward is already plentiful: identity, purpose, focus, direction, utility, and meaning; in this life, the only life we know. Hoping for an afterlife you were told about by people who have absolutely no possible way of knowing it exists is folly to say the least.
The answer to the Western identity gap is a realization: that freely choosing to uphold your ethos, your pathos, your thymos, will give you more meaning than any false prophet’s empty promises.
We can separate the appreciation of culture, values, and even expressions of spirituality from monolithic religion. As a civilized society, we can learn to accept that there is no further need for centralized religions. Rather, may choose to want a decentralized, organic, and spontaneous culture based primarily on freedom to choose what we individually value. The only meaningful ideas, ideals, virtues, and principles are those that don’t have to answer to some priestly inquisition, or state technocrat.
We can understand that Christianity did not form the West, but rather, the West formed Christianity; Christianity is Judaism adapted to Western values of antiquity. The mythology of the stories of saints, the values and philosophy that Jesus Christ promoted, the customs, even Christmas; they all have their roots to Ancient Rome, Greece, Germania. The pagan religions were appropriated to make the Christian religion more palatable to Europeans, something used politically by Constantine “the Great” and others like him. Religious demagogues fused religion and state to brainwash and manipulate people into obedience, oppression and war. This is evident by the fact that only the Abrahamic faiths have used religion as a sole cause for politics and warfare.
We must understand that Western values defined Christianity, and not the other way around. Yes, Western values have been fused with Christianity, after so many generations of associating one with the other. But that doesn’t mean that rejecting Christianity should reject those values too.
If a defining Western value is critical thought, then yes, we can’t have Christianity hold back the West anymore, as it has for centuries.
I assert that the dark ages were the result of adopting the newly formed Christian religion, and its obsession with building a vague alleged afterlife rather than focusing on caring for the one life we have now. The Renaissance was the result of the re-emergence of critical thinking in Western Europe, and a sentiment of free trade combined with a defiance of the busybody Church. Even Michelangelo was bold enough to sneakily imply - in “The Creation of Adam on the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling - that God was a creation of the human mind (according to some interpretations). Following the Renaissance, there was a freedom-oriented appetite for exploration and discovery away from religious dogmatism and monarchic despotism: hence the era of exploration and colonization - not by armies first, but by people who just wanted to be free from it all. The state’s armies that brutalized indigenous populations? Those came later.
Freedom, critical thinking, and a sense of nobility are at the core of Western idealism. We do not need an Eastern religion to keep those values. Those values are far bigger and higher than any manmade dogma.
On a darker note…
I think the West, or Western civilization, or Western values - whatever you want to call this concept - is, unfortunately, past the point of no return. Whatever we do now is too little too late. Is this doomer mentality? Perhaps. Perhaps it’s also the dignity of accepting reality; the refusal to delude oneself with childish, cowardly, wishful thinking. I can’t think of anything we can do to save the West now other than letting it go with dignity, without desperately trying to keep a corpse alive, Weekend-at-Bernie’s style. Everything ends. Let it end gracefully.
On a brighter note…
There is optimism in burying a dead horse, instead of hopelessly beating it, hopelessly hoping it’ll rise again. Who knows - when you give up on dead horses, perhaps only then will you finally realize what you’ve lost. It is more dignified to give up on foolish hope that drains you of your self-respect. Deluded hope is simply pathetic, undignified. And who knows - with self-respect may come empowerment. With the dignified acceptance of your doom may come self-accountability in seeing where we were responsible - and thus in control - of our fate; and therefore, where you have the power to change it. Only then can you seek to resurrect your culture, or out of its ashes, make another one, a better one.
We must give up false hope…
Maybe you need to first give up completely if you can ever hope to recoup, put your pieces together, and begin anew with fresh motivation, a rekindled spirit - and perhaps new strategies. Because, if you cling on to false hope that the dead horse will somehow resurrect, you’ll never figure out how to make a tractor instead. Maybe we need to reach the bottom before we can kick back up. Floating in mid-water gets you nowhere.
Thank you for reading.
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Very good, long and detailed article. Almost like a book.
One thing i would like to point out, people usually don't know anything about christianity. Not just those who refers to christianity and poses as a christian - even those who reject christianity (for example, the regular internet atheist in your example),
-They haven't read the bible. They have some imagination and opinion about what the bible says, but they don't actually know about it.
-They have some theories about what the so called christian morals are. In reality, the morals are quite different than what they think.
-They don't understand, what the bible is. Instead of viewing the bible as a collection of stories of the interaction of god and the people, they are randomly taking out of context quotes to prove their points without even understanding the context around a given story or quote.
-The bible is full of mistranslations (especially the english version) so its advised to try to understand what the writers wanted to say with the given words instead of taking it word by word.
-Imagining things into the bible which is simply not there - or the opposite. Sometimes fueled by these mistranslations, sometimes, by the imagination of the debater.
-Trying to fast-read it like reading some sort of operation manual of a chinese dvd player. Its impossible to fast-read the bible, its an extremely heavy text where reading every page is a fight.
BY THE WAY before i forget it.
"Devil was god" In Hungarian language, God is called Isten. Isten and Satan words, both are built around the same letters (STN - iSTeN - SaTaN), where one form suggest positivity and the another suggests negativity, of the same thing.