Hail and welcome. I’m back again today revisiting the content of my earliest essays, and for this one we’ll be focusing on the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden as it appears in the second and third chapters of the Book of Genesis. The first things we want to ask when…
The First Day of Creation
I thought it might be fun to revisit the topics and themes of my earliest episodes, starting with my first essay, “Six Days of Creation and the Sabbath.” It’s been almost five years now and both my knowledge and my writing skills have improved immensely, and my perspective and positions have shifted as well. The circumstances certainly warrant a second look at things.
A Tale of Two Christians
A Satanist Reads the Bible continues today with our series on the rising threat of Christian fascism in America. Today we’ll be looking at the thought of two Christians, one early 20th century German and one from our own day, respectively, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Eric Metaxas.
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.
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.