Christian Mysticism and Church

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anyone else in here into Christian Mysticism? Tonight I am listening to the Tao of Christ.

Also, has anyone else thought of founding a church for official protections?

also, did yall see the EO trump signed today on Iboga and other psychedelics? I cried.

Santo Daime is a christian denomination that treats DMT as the sacrament. They're legally protected to use it in ceremony in USA since 2009.

 

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The great educational value of the war against Christendom lies in the absolute truthlessness of the priest. Such purity is rare enough. The 'man of God' is entirely incapable of honesty, and only arises at the point where truth is defaced beyond all legibility. Lies are his entire metabolism, the air he breathes, his bread and his wine. He cannot comment upon the weather without a secret agenda of deceit. No word, gesture, or perception is slight enough to escape his extravagant reflex of falsification, and of the lies in circulation he will instinctively seize on the grossest, the most obscene and oppressive travesty. Any proposition passing the lips of a priest is necessarily totally false, excepting only insidiouses whose message is momentarily misunderstood. It is impossible to deny him without discovering some buried fragment or reality

Big words, but it rings to me quite empty and shallow. If it had been written in the 18th century at least one could still appreciate the bravery, but not today. And I believe it's playing a trick:

We can take it at its word, and interpret this as the claim that everything ever stated by any priest has been a falsehood. This is a remarkable claim that's very easy to disprove by providing any of the myriad cases of priests making true claims.

So it can't mean that. What does it mean, then? That a priest never said a truth "as a priest", where "as a priest" is conveniently defined to make the statement true? Some other convenient interpretation? In any case, those would make the whole claim a tautology, while being very dishonest.

I can only conclude the text is an expression of emotion. All we can be sure this text shows is that the author dislikes priests. Which is fine, but hardly interesting or ground-breaking material. I don't see a mere expression of dislike as being too convincing to anyone religious, either.

Here's something that shows the emptiness of the quote while being amusing (to me, at least):

The great educational value of the war against Accelerationism lies in the absolute truthlessness of Nick Land. Such purity is rare enough. The 'man of reaction' is entirely incapable of honesty, and only arises at the point where truth is defaced beyond all legibility. Lies are his entire metabolism, the air he breathes, his bread and his wine. He cannot comment upon the weather without a secret agenda of deceit. No word, gesture, or perception is slight enough to escape his extravagant reflex of falsification, and of the lies in circulation he will instinctively seize on the grossest, the most obscene and oppressive travesty. Any proposition passing the lips of Nick Land is necessarily totally false, excepting only insidiouses whose message is momentarily misunderstood. It is impossible to deny him without discovering some buried fragment or reality

 

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Thinking further about it, something else amusing about that quote is that Nick Land himself wouldn't be allowed to post it here:

If you state something as your opinion then please support that opinion with good reasoning. If you cannot do that then don't state your opinion at all since it's useless for others.

 

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Have any of y'all checked out the work of Marshall Davis, author of the Tao of Christ, or Richard Rohr? Both modern Christian Mystics.....Marshall Davis

 

[alpharex]

What happens now post EO? I have GWOT vet friends that need ibogaine treatment

 

[Transform]

And yeah, really if we go far enough back in almost any culture, it'll start getting weird, even in indigenous European cultures.

"Weird" itself refers to the pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon nature religion known as Wyrd, so I don't know if you hit that particular nail on the head intentionally…

 

[Varallo]

Big words, but it rings to me quite empty and shallow. If it had been written in the 18th century at least one could still appreciate the bravery, but not today. And I believe it's playing a trick:

We can take it at its word, and interpret this as the claim that everything ever stated by any priest has been a falsehood. This is a remarkable claim that's very easy to disprove by providing any of the myriad cases of priests making true claims.

So it can't mean that. What does it mean, then? That a priest never said a truth "as a priest", where "as a priest" is conveniently defined to make the statement true? Some other convenient interpretation? In any case, those would make the whole claim a tautology, while being very dishonest.

I can only conclude the text is an expression of emotion. All we can be sure this text shows is that the author dislikes priests. Which is fine, but hardly interesting or ground-breaking material. I don't see a mere expression of dislike as being too convincing to anyone religious, either.

Here's something that shows the emptiness of the quote while being amusing (to me, at least):

Thinking further about it, something else amusing about that quote is that Nick Land himself wouldn't be allowed to post it here:

Of course it is his opinion; he wrote it, so that is obvious. In many cases, it is immediately clear that something is merely personal opinion from the way it is framed. Here, in his philosophy, it’s per definition you could argue, the rule is not made for this I would say.

I don’t think the issue is really whether Land is simply “right” or “wrong,” nor whether the passage presents itself as absolute. You can disagree with the passage, of course, but I think one thing Nick Land does well, especially in the context of the wider piece, is force questions, assumptions, into the open. He pushes on them aggressively, and in doing so also destabilizes them. It is also obvious that he has little sympathy for Christianity, so the hostility is not hidden.

What makes the passage effective, to me, is not that it should be read as a literal claim about every priest. If you read it only as a literal claim, you are almost guaranteed to miss what the passage is doing. Rather, it works as an exaggerated and provocative compression of the gap between Christian moral language, institutional religion, and God.

I think it is also important to realize that this comes out of Shamanic Nietzsche, where Land is not doing a traditional reading but dissecting Nietzsche’s thinking in a very different way. In that sense, I think he is actually doing a good job, even if he does it in his own style. It is radical, and precisely through that radicalization he forces a different mode of thinking. What Nietzsche would call ressentiment is here turned back into a direct attack on priestly morality.

The reason I chose that quote is also tied to how Christianity is currently being used, and the tensions and conflicts around it that are becoming increasingly visible. Even this week, in the friction between some world leaders and the Pope, or in wars framed in Christian terms by figures who themselves carry the symbols of crusades on their skin, you see how charged this terrain still is. That is why Land, for me, feels relevant it’s not just abstract radical philosophy, it is still actively unfolding, as is the obscenity of Christianity.

That is mainly how I read Land, not as a balanced philosophical theory, but as exaggerations that provoke thought.

Disclaimer: this is my opinion