Protestants

Protestantism leads to atheism. The first English proto-Protestants, the Lollards, advocated that even churches should be dismantled because the church is shaped like a cross and that makes it a magic spell in stone—hence the Lollards would be reasonably satisfied with a contemporary church that is shaped like a multi-functional recreational space; and, indeed, that is what it is—it’s a place to do kick-boxing and learn the recorder. Actually, the Lollards would object even to the cross on the building’s exterior—even the building was too much, for the lol-lards (as one Englishwoman said in the 1500s “her piss was as good as holy water”—another brilliant contribution by the English to theology).

Protestants deny that rites and rituals have any efficacy—if you parade round the village fields with the cross every year that is just superstition; it doesn’t do anything. God has recused himself from the world—and there are no more miracles. All we have are the laws of nature and we can use these to understand our condition and improve it. Holy water, blessings, incantatory prayers, and so on do nothing—these are superstitions, connected to idolatry (statues of saints and the like).

The final outcome from this worldview is atheism, the preparatory stop is Deism—the view that there was a God who started everything but he has now become totally obscure from the world. Nietzsche was the most consistent and total Protestant: he was born to a long line of Protestant clergymen and he took it all seriously. When he said “God is dead” what he meant was that the Protestant recession of God had carried on to such an extent that the “final superstition”, God Himself, had been abandoned.

Sure, people carry on cultural Christianity and even today pretend to be “shocked” by Nietzsche, but they do not take it all as seriously as Nietzsche did—he was a real German autist. Nietzsche’s point was that to all practical purposes God had been killed—nobody in the 19th century acted as if He was real, they acted in accord with the natural laws discovered by science. Nietzsche just wanted them to end the considerable—and it was considerable—Victorian hypocrisy and let people speak in accordance with their actions.

Hence, though I went to a very Catholic school, when we were taught about human reproduction and the teachers came to the bit on contraception they skipped it and said, “But if you have sex, be sensible, use a condom, guys.” They were modern—they fulfilled the formal requirement but nobody thought you would go to Hell for using contraception (the school is now co-ed—the final catastrophe). This is what almost all “religious” people are like today; and especially those who have sudden “conversions” to trad Christianity—and yet echo every talking point of their atheistic state. For them, religion is another lifestyle choice; they could be into cycling like everyone else right now but stained glass looks cooler—and moralism is heady medicine.

When people say they’re “rational” they mean they’re Protestants—they take superstition out of everything. Today we’re dominated by the Protestantism found with Margaret Atwood—it’s the idea that you’ve shed all superstitions, even God, and understand that true Christian humility is even to deny that you are a Christian—and that Jesus was just a wise man who said we should love the marginal; and the most marginal people, those excluded by “false Christianity”, are the Jews, women, homosexuals, and sexual minorities—they will be saved by technology, raised up so that the last are first. You get a flavour as regards this attitude with the Quakers—except it’s infinitely more smug and hypocritical (the only member of the Young Communist League USA I ever met was also a Quaker—case closed).

We’re dominated by this worldview; it’s pernicious because the people who hold it—synonymous with progressive liberals—are remarkably smug and conceited about everything and yet think they are the most brilliant and moral people ever. Ironically, they are systematically taken for a ride by Jews, homosexuals, women, and other racial groups—yet they are the “most perfect” Christians (they weep inside at how perfect they are as they marry their daughter to a black African—the superstition of blood has been overcome).

The tendency is inherent to primitive Christianity—the pagans were right to say that the first Christians were “atheists”; they deny the gods—they have a binary approach to idolatry, the idol must be destroyed (the church must be destroyed, in the end). I think there is idolatry, but it’s as with Aristotle—it’s not binary, it’s a matter of degree (it can be taken too far—as can iconoclasm).

Christianity had been stabilised during the Roman Empire, it was infused with Roman imperial authority and Greek philosophy; the saints were the gods venerated in another form. Protestantism stripped all that away and re-started the democratic tendency in Christianity; it simultaneously reduced the world to matter—it was only papists, in hock to their primitive priests, who thought God would actually “intercede” if you prayed to him in the right way (really, you were on your own—utterly; and that leads to Protestant antinomianism as well—if there’s just a cause-and-effect world it doesn’t matter what you do; you do what you do—it’s fixed; you do you, to make a judgement about it is pointless. That is both the scientific and the Protestant worldview).

Well, it’s all bullshit. Blood has sacred magical properties, the saints are real, the gods are real, God is real—they participate in human affairs if invoked (and, indeed, if not). Indeed, they appear all the time—as UFOs—but people are so indoctrinated into post-Protestantism they refuse to see it. Anyway, that’s why I’ve just done a magic ceremony sealed with my own blood to help the Russians win Vuhledar—so that the post-Protestants, the Satanists, will lose (by the pricking of my thumbs).