The word “sin” drips with centuries of religious baggage, conjuring images of fire and brimstone preachers and penitent souls begging for redemption. But what lies beneath the surface of this concept? In this episode, we’ll embark on a journey through the history and philosophy of sin, tracing its etymological origins, its central role in Christian…
Category: philosophy
Why I Am Still a Satanist
On November 11th of last year, the pundit Ayaan Hirsi Ali released an essay on the media platform UnHerd titled “Why I am now a Christian.” In the essay, Hirsi Ali—formerly a prominent ex-Muslim atheist—announces her conversion to Christianity and explicates the reasons for her change of faith. I don’t find her reasons to be…
Reflections on the Eve of Insanity
On October 7th of this year, Hamas militants, in coordination with other Palestinian militias, launched a surprise attack on Israel from Gaza, planned in part by Iran (Said, Faucon, & Kalin, 8 Oct 2023), resulting in at least 800 civilian deaths and many hundreds of additional military deaths, though the exact numbers are heavily disputed….
Morality and Narrative in Scorsese’s Bringing Out the Dead
Hail, back today with another film criticism episode, this time looking at the 1999 film Bringing Out the Dead by Martin Scorsese as part of my series of episodes looking at the religious themes from Scorsese’s films. Now, when it comes to Scorsese and religion, The Last Temptation of Christ, the subject of my last…
German Parallels to American Fascism
In this essay, we’ll see some striking and deeply troubling parallels to Germany in the 1920s, parallels which should be of grave concern to anyone who doesn’t want to see genocidal fascists take control of the most powerful economy and military in the history of the world.
The Dialectic of Christian Fascism
Today I’ll be arguing that this progression is amplified by a dialectic within certain threads of modern Christianity, an internal contradiction that pushes those threads further and further in a fascist direction.
Kurt Gödel and the Search for a Platonic Ontology
As I’ve mentioned before, ecumenical phenomenology has an enormous capacity to answer a wide range of difficult philosophical questions. This episode will be exploring some of those questions and the answers that ecumenical phenomenology provides.
What Is a Cartel?
Human activity involves the redistribution of resources, including informational resources, to meet individual and collective needs. This process occurs through various systems, including biological, technological, and social systems, and is driven by the laws of thermodynamics and the increase of entropy over time. A distribution system is defined by its primary distributionary resource, which is the resource it is primarily responsible for distributing, and includes feed resources, which fuel the system, infrastructure, which facilitates the distribution of the primary distributionary resource, and the territory in which the system operates. Distribution systems may be analyzed at different levels of scope depending on the primary distributionary resource being studied and the purpose of the analysis. Normal order refers to the norms and expectations that govern distribution within a distribution system and is established through normative ordering cartels, which have normal order as their primary distributionary resource. Normative ordering occurs through ordering communication and results in the acceptance of a new normal order. Collaborative competition is the context in which many social systems operate, characterized by a combination of cooperation and competition within a shared normal order. The state of war is the exception to collaborative competition, involving a disagreement about the normal order and a struggle for control of ordering communication. Normal order is established through either the threat of violence or rational agreement on a non-violent alternative.
A User’s Guide to the Ecumenicon
Many of my recent episodes have been focused on explicating my central philosophical doctrine, ecumenical phenomenology, a transcendental and phenomenological idealist ontology of abstract reality. This episode continues that series, but I have at this point a complex net of ideas spread over several episodes and so I think it would be worth, as my patrons have suggested, laying it all out in one place as simply and briefly as I can.
Individuation and Societies of Control
People in modern societies and especially in modern Western societies tend to value individualism over conformity. This is certainly a paramount value for we Satanists, Satan being effectively the first individualist. But if we draw a simple equation between individualism on the one hand and freedom and good on the other, I think we’re being catastrophically naive and blind to the ways in which our individuality is both produced and manipulated within societies of control.