Christian Software Patch: Uninstall
August 6, 2023
By NZB3
The Roman era is different to the Christian because of the object of sacrifice.
Like primitives, the Romans held that gods both large and small determined forces of nature and that they were personal and could be appealed to. Food or drink, the lives of animals or children or slaves were taken in the name of appeasing these forces or of soliciting favours. A bit of dead baby in the foundations helps make a spiritually sound house. Kill a bull to ensure a good harvest. There’s even some ratio about how many people’s blood needs to be spilt to make sure the sun comes up today; But that’s Aztec. In a Roman household items of food were left out regularly or as burnt offerings in the fire. It’s the same thing we do today for Santa on Christmas Eve. Or, what we do for our dead when they have passed over to the supernatural world.
As Christian metaphysics wans I see more and more grave sites with trinkets and beer bottles accumulating in cemetaries as surrendered offerings from this world that are supposed to have influence in the next. Up to a generation ago Christian metaphysics was too dominent for anything other than clean, uniform lines of tombs and their simple headstones. Especially the military ones standing in ranks in death as soldiers did in life. Laying some flowers were the only concession to a pre-Christian way of thinking of the dead. Anything else would be akin to blasphemy since Jesus had your loved ones in heaven now and they didn’t need you to drop off their favorite chewing gum or a toy to play with.
Our new decorated cemetaries are an outward sign that we are returning to the primitive. The new culture creeps over the old, colonising the cemetaries. Pacific Islanders immigrate to New Zealand, die here, and deposit their cemetary culture over the top of the old. Plain Christian graves of the Settlers lay alongside gaudy plastic orniments from the $2 shop coating their new neighbours like thick icing on a virtue-signalling bithday cake. Petrol-heads who died in drunken car crashes have graves decked out in beer bottles and paraphanalia from their bedroom walls. Gang plots resemble Viking runed headstones as if the tribal affiliation, too, continues into the afterlife. It makes sense that the transitionary doorway of Viking graves from Pagan to Christian would look a lot like the doorway used as we exit Christian format for a Neopaganism.
Humans never stopped believing in this form of canabalism. For tens of thousands of years we were sure we could influence the supernatural by sacrifice of people and things from the land of the living. Christianity assented to this and merely re-directed it on one perfect man rather than a plethora of animals, food, artifacts, babies, and people. This was as fraudulent as the former premise yet a great step forward for civilisation. It allowed us to have the effects of a secular society, a non-canabalistic society, without having to address the bug in the machine. Without having to change. The Jesus software patch was good for that but it was bad because it left a problem unsolved for 2000 years that could come back to bite us again.
The-non fraudulent step would not be to mitigate the canabalistic sacrifice but to reject it. Christianity was deferred maintenence. However, it was the sort of buying-time that might allow us to prosper so well that we might have the wealth and power to self-examine and fix that flaw. If so, it was a step toward the right direction. On the other hand maybe nobody or no culture ever does this? Maybe once you take a philogenetic fork you don’t get to go back, ever, even if your fork provides the requisites of introspection?
To be post-Christian tends to involve returning to the primitive. We have uninstalled a software patch and gone back to directing the sacrifice onto people and things. You might have some ideas about what those things are. I’m thinking plastic, coal, petrol, liberty, meat, national defense, families, masculinity, femininity, identiy, and many more.
We think we can stop climate change as if it were an angry god that wants us to pay more for fuel and not use plastic. We thought that a pandemic could be stopped the same way. Not by scientific means but by mask rituals and other quasi-religious sacrifices such as of jobs and our economy as a whole. Freedom was burned on the pyre. Events killed off on the alter. Billions of dollars of our bloodstream was diluted down in inflationary monetary policy to the benefit of the string-pullers because they said it was to stop COVID-19.
So it’s fairly same-as-it-ever-was in that case. Roman, Christian, whatever. Humans continue to be a sacrificial species. The signs are everywhere. Unless we give that up we must regress back to what we were before and reboot. That’s going to hurt a lot of people who rely on a functioning social and economic system but it will be of their own making. We choose this culture, we choose to sacrifice or not to sacrifice. We choose to make warnings like this one mainstream or to ignore them.
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