Killing God And Elevating Greed

Christ driving the moneylenders from the temple, by Rembrant. They came back

The separation of church and state is a deep western value. Secularism is the liberal value par excellence, you can have faith, but keep it to yourself, and certainly out of governing. But given that western values also include killing children, we have to question such things.

Long ago—in the 'Enlightenment' they stole from the Lord Buddha—Europeans killed their Lord and called it a brave new day. They've been proselytizing this path ever since, calling it secularism. Instead of an invisible man they now believe in an invisible hand, with economists as its priests and scientists as its miracle workers. And this great golden god called 'the economy' really did work miracles. People got used to growth every year, something which used to be an anomaly. The first shall be first and the last shall be last, but don't worry, it'll trickle down eventually. When things got bad, as they do cyclically, the economists just sacrificed some children and poor people and it all got growing again.

In truth, all they really value is money. Principal is the only principle, profit is the only prophet, usury is the only use. The astonishing belief that there was a man in the sky was replaced with ‘the [even more] astonishing belief that the nastiest motives of the nastiest men somehow or other work for the best results in the best of all possible worlds,’ as John Maynard Keynes said. A fairly full description of capitalism from one its architects. The 'invisible hand' was a throwaway metaphor from Adam Smith that somehow became a state religion, like basing your civilization on a random joke you heard at a party. This obviously hasn't worked out in the end (awfully hot, isn't it?). Westerners thought they were following science but, more accurately, they were following Satan.

The love of money is the root of all evil, as the full saying goes. What is capitalism but the love of money? When race, religion, and ritual are all considered backwards, what else is there? Which way are we going? If you believe in progress, where does that lead, exactly? When nobody thinks about the end times, you can have good times now. You are what you measure, and if you stop counting sins and start counting wins, you end up with a different world entirely. And what do we measure every quarter, every year, every day? We do not measure, as the original (and not awful) RFK said, “the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play.”

Western society traded the immaterial for the material and—like all deals with the Devil—it was a good deal. It was the second-greatest trick Satan ever pulled. The first was convincing the world he didn't exist. The second was making the world believe in compound interest. So people that built cathedrals built up capital instead. I have physically experienced this shift. In Montreal, I used to enter the underground by taking an escalator under a church, in between skyscrapers of bank buildings, descending into a shopping mall. Can it get more symbolic than this? Satan is real, and he's what westerners really worship. Just watch any ad on TV. They're all about temptation. Adam ate just one apple from the tree of knowledge, but the children of Adam Smith said ‘fuck it, eat all of it’.

Am I calling for a caliphate, or the return of God kings? I'm not against it. I am open to different concepts besides the ones conquered into me. As the serial-killer philosopher Anton Chigurh said, “If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?” If the rule of secularism led to us slaughtering babies on satellite TV while extincting 99% of creation, of what use was the rule? You have to question this system at the simplest level, because that's where it's gone wrong. And you have to question the idea that one system must be applied to every place on earth, with ungodly violence.

The European Enlightenment was fake, God is real, and these are certainly the end days for life as we know it. There are other ways to govern ourselves (not all of ourselves, that's itself a colonial idea) but for different communities there are different ways. Precisely what Aristotle said when he said, “some persons think that there is only one species both of democracy and oligarchy; but this is not true… All laws are, and ought to be, framed agreeable to the state that is to be governed by them, and not the state to the laws.”

Aristotle, Keynes, the Kennedys, if you read them, all of the philosophical founders of modernity deny the bastard they helped create. The belief in a Holy Father at least centered something holy, whereas today we center ourselves and wonder why everything around us is on fire or going away. Even if you consider the Devil to be just a story, wouldn't believing in that have helped us survive? What is belief anyways, except perception at a higher dimension? Our regular perception (what we call reality) is literally a simulation, we encode a tiny sliver of light in dots on our retina and process it with literally the same hardware that we render dreams. It's all made up. Religion is just a way of perceiving higher things. Why shouldn't it have a place in governing?

Our perception of things in front of us helps us avoid running into them and our perception of something above us keeps us from ruining them. But we lost this fear of what's above in our hubris, and now the sky really is falling. Whether Satan is real or not, what difference does it make? He wins. Look around, it's fucking hot. Asking a human if they believe in God and the Devil is like asking whether the chicken believes in the ax. Who gives a cluck? We're completely plucked.

It all started when western philosophy severed the religious part of their brain (the practicing, not the preaching) and ran headlong across the continents, killing, colonizing, and enslaving and calling it ‘enlightenment’. This was supposed to be replaced with a secular, scientific morality, but we the colonized have never seen any evidence of this. It's entirely made up, just another belief system, and capitalism is literally a belief in greed. In evil. They killed their God and elevated the worst of their men and we end up where gods and better men all predicted. With the gates of hell opening upon Gaza, cold cruelty in our rulers' hearts, and all of God's creation going to ruin. We didn't appreciate what we had, we didn't listen when we were told, and and now all our delusions are rapidly depreciating in front of us. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.