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…
Category: culture
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…
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.
The Matrix and the Simulation of Reality
This essay begins a series on dystopian films, a series which will explore the way our present circumstances are related to and portrayed in such films, as well as the ways in which such media actually disguise and reinforce those circumstances rather than waking us up to them or inspiring us to work against them and change things for the better.
Mass Shootings and the Dialectic of Patriarchy
Mass shootings are the latent and intrinsic violence of the patriarchy spilling over the boundaries in which the patriarchs work to contain it.
Amnesia
The situation is this: our lifespans create a partial social amnesia, in that, while we have other documentation of the past, living memories of events are limited to the generation of humans presently alive on this planet. This prevents us from getting a clear picture of how the human condition has changed over the course of our history and in particular in the very recent past (i.e. the modern era and beyond).