Bruce Charlton's Notions

*

I was thinking about the 2008 economic crisis, which I now regard as less of a profound international crisis and more of a warning.

It was a warning that we in the West were spending more than we were producing, that apparent 'economic growth' was an illusory mixture of borrowing and inflation, and we were living off capital not income.  

*

What should have happened was a recognition and repentance, followed by reform - first to cut consumption, then to decide whether or how much to increase production.

But 2008 was a warning which has not been heeded.

*

There was no recognition, and no repentance - but instead there has been denial, lying and wishful thinking.

Consequently there has been more of the same: corrupt spending; frivolous and harmful consumption, reckless squandering of resources; raids on property and the productive population; mass immigration of economic dependents and continued channelling of resources to economic dependents: in sum, a continued destruction of productivity and all that sustains it.

There has been not just zero but negative significant remedial change since 2008 - whatever were the mechanisms that led to the 2008 crisis are in place and in operation, taking us towards another and inevitably far more severe crisis.

*

We were warned, and did nothing. 

But how could it be otherwise?

As a society we utterly lack motivational resources - and lacking these, there is no incentive to recognize reality and take personal responsibility.

(If you already know there is not going to be any effective action - you might as well blind yourself to dangers and live by soothing lies - for as long as possible.)

*

We are morally bankrupt, and the 2008 crisis has revealed this bankruptcy.

Instead of recognizing the problem, we lied; instead of doing something helpful, we prevent any helpful responses and amplify the destruction on all fronts.

*

The non-response, the anti-response to 2008 reveals that knowledge is irrelevant in a world without motivation.

In a world without motivation, nothing else matters - because motivation is an aspect of courage, without motivation there can be no courage because there is no reason for it; and without courage there can be no virtue.

Nothing motivates but religion, and for us - who lack  it - nothing matters but getting religion; yet nothing seem less likely in the West than repentance of secular Leftism and a Christian revival.

But that is our choice. The consequences will follow.

*

*

The patrons of the pressure group Dignity in Dying include some people I know (or have known) personally, plus many others I have considerable respect for, in some way; plus some others who are famous and/or influential.

http://www.dignityindying.org.uk/about-us/patrons.html

*

It is interesting, therefore to reflect on how it is they find themselves supporting such a wicked policy, and one which is absolutely certain to be widely and savagely abused even beyond its intrinsic wickedness.

The reason seems clear from the justifications or rationalizations given for the patrons support of this cause.

They perceive that at the end of life there is for many - and increasing numbers of - people a stark choice between prolonged torture and swift murder.

*

The assumption which is accepted as inevitable, is that modern medicine, health and social service institutions now control death - and that their intractable default is to perpetuate life at any cost until finally defeated by death.

Therefore, these patrons reason, since prolonged torture is the worst imaginable thing; the only solution is for this same set of medical, health and social services that currently maintain people alive as a torture, should instead murder them before they have to suffer prolonged torture.

Anyone who works for such organizations as the National Health Service will therefore have to commit murder when required by their bosses, as part of their job; or to collude in murder.

*

(This outcome is what is termed Death or Dying with Dignity - although I can't see what dignity has to do with it - surely it is about pain and suffering?)

*

My (inevitably incomplete) solution to this impossible dilemma is quite simple: to distinguish between life-extending treatments and palliative or suffering-reducing treatments - and as a default, unless requested otherwise, as the norm, to refrain from life-extending treatments in the elderly and terminally ill.

Everybody must die of something, and towards the end of life people need to be aware that someone saved from dying from X now, will inevitably die from X, Y or Z later - and the dying later may be much, much worse than the dying now.

In particular, we each need to be aware of this in ourselves. If we insist in being dragged back from death's doors (or refuse to step through them when called) - than that is not the end of the matter.

Those who refuse to consent willingly to death will have death nonetheless forced upon them - willing or not.

If we become willing to die, and let die, when the time comes - then this will mostly eliminate the pressure for people to be 'humanely murdered' in order to avoid the terrifying and horrifying consequences of what passes for modern 'health care'.

* 

*

It is interesting to notice how pervasive is the Leftist anti-family social conditioning which trains children that they should not be grateful to their parents: that they 'didn't ask to be born', that it is therefore their parents duty to provide, and that gratitude is not just needless but inappropriate (when things are thus properly considered...).

On the other side, parents are told that they have chosen to have a child like a fashion accessory - for their own pleasure, and must therefore serve that child's needs with no expectation of gratitude, nor of a personal and loving relationship.

*

In sum, the parent is supposed, as an ideal, to be a dutiful official who impartially distributes and administers the necessary goods and services to their clients (children) whose 'right' it is to receive them.

Parents are conceptualized as if perfect, detached, ideal-bureaucrats; diligently serving a deserving minority. Children are simply receiving what is their due.

Any emotions that might accompany this neutral transaction would be... inappropriate.

*

One particularly appealing antidote to this nightmare scenario of modernity (and one which sustains the family) comes from that aspect of  Mormon theology which sees each of us as precisely having asked to be born; and being born into a situation in which mortal and immortal powers are personal, and necessarily - and properly - have passions such as love, sorrow, compassion.

In such a world view, the natural propensity for personalizing human relationships does not need to be suppressed - and certainly suppression of the personal is not regarded as a virtue.

Rather, from God and Christ and the Holy Ghost on downwards through angels and men, the most important reality is of personal relationships - in which gratitude for help is both natural and desirable; and the lack of gratitude is correctly seen as a moral failure rather than a consequence of superior insight.

*

*

As a good kid (or, at least, one who tried to be good ) I thoroughly disliked the way some authors would portray bad kids in an approving fashion.

By bad kids, I mean nasty, mean, selfish, sadistic kids; the kind who would deliberately smash your toys for a laugh, chuck your hat into a tree where it was lost, or burst the football so nobody could play.

(You can tell a bad kid by the look on his face - this will be a sneer, of one or another type.) 

I now look back and perceive such fictional characters as early weapons in the anti-Good culture wars - part of a concerted, and almost-wholly-successful, attempt to subvert, ridicule and actively-attack those kids - or adults - who sincerely try to be helpful, honest, smart and truthful.

*

*

When someone asks the purpose of life, the answer can become a bit convoluted - but the simple and universal answer is to be happy.

On this, I think, everyone agrees - everyone seeks a happy life.

The differences come when considering the scope of 'life'.

*

The three main variables are:

1. Time-scale - short-term versus long-term

There are trade-offs between being happy immediately and being as happy as possible overall, across life; between the immediate certainty of here-and-now happiness by doing exactly what you want, and deferring happiness now - or accepting suffering - as an investment in building less-certain but potentially greater happiness later.


2. Mortal life versus post-mortal life

The modern secular person is concerned only by happiness during mortal life, but most religious people are concerned with happiness across a life which extends beyond mortality. Therefore the scope of a happy life varies in duration between a finite (but uncertain) number of hours, days or decades; up to some greater unit than mortality, which varies between religions and extends up to infinity.


3. Personal happiness versus the happiness of a larger unit

There is a wide variation in the understanding of that unit whose happiness is to be pursued and maximized. At one extreme it is just me - the individual; but beyond that there are many increasingly larger units of all believers; the family, tribe, nation; all humans, the living world - potentially up to the whole existing universe.

*

If it is assumed that the desire for a happiness is intrinsic and universal, this scheme can be used to classify all religions (whether private or public) in terms of whether the aimed-at happiness is now or later, for mortal life or beyond, and just for me or some larger group.

Both the modern secular hedonist and the devout Christian seek a happy, but the differences in attitudes and behaviour may be vast - not because they conceptualize happiness differently, but because they perceive reality differently; and therefore conceptualize the scope of happiness and the scope of life differently.

If you see 'life' as ending in death, and only concerning your-self, then a strategy of maximizing happiness leads to quite different results from a person who sees 'life' as extending beyond death and encompassing others people - past, present and/or future.

*

All people are the same insofar as they all want to be happy, their aim is to have a happy life; and differences between people can be reduced to differences in the perceived nature of reality. 

*


[Note: Differences between people 'can be' reduced to differences in perceived nature of reality - and this is enlightening in some ways; but this analysis (this kind of analysis) is necessarily a reduction. Meaning that much is left-out by it. To put it mildly.]

*

From the middle 1990s for a decade, I was reading and re-reading Emerson with tremendous avidity - not only in a literary way, but as a guide for life.

Having not looked at him for several years, and not since I became a Christian, I have returned to re-read some favorite bits and pieces in the past couple of weeks - and was struck by two things.

*

1. Emerson is a really good writer; I mean really good. The quality of his prose is unique and unsurpassed (that is, other writers are equally good, but in different ways) - I find it elating, intoxicating, almost too powerful to bear for any length of time.

2. Emerson's anti-Christian agenda is now blazingly clear and obvious to me, from almost everything he ever wrote and said; as is his staggering egotism/ pride, and these are linked. Emerson's work is a vast and unbounded, extended assertion of himself, his potential and his adequacy against anyone or any thing (including God) that tries to constrain or direct it.

*

(Emerson was raised as a Unitarian and became a prominent Unitarian minister - and Unitarianism is already anti-Christian in its profoundest implications - although the first generation of Unitarians refused to acknowledge this, and generational inertia meant that the fundamental anti-Christanity of Unitarianism took a while to emerge. So, Emerson was never a Christian, although perhaps he supposed he was - but nonetheless he found the rebel sect of Unitarianism to be already stultifying, empty and spiritually dead: which was a just criticism since it amounted to merely a system of secular ethics and an ungrounded and unjustifiably exclusive usage of Christian scriptures and form loosely associated with an impersonal theistic God. Naturally this rapidly slid into exactly the kind of eclectic 'spirituality' - that we now term New Age - which Emerson pioneered with such glorious eloquence.) 

*

I conclude that Emerson is, exactly has his contemporaries saw him, a terribly perilous writer! - precisely because he is such a great writer, and has so many stunning insights - yet ultimately these are put to the service of a doctrine of such extreme, such total self-centredness that I struggle to comprehend it.

*

Perhaps Emerson's greatest and most valuable (and most often repeated) insight is that each person must appropriate the world for himself and in his own terms; a living religion (that is to say any true religion) simply cannot be just a following of rules and rituals.

To put it as Emerson did in an early work, to be properly alive, each individual must experience (again and again, day by day, indeed hour by hour) their own personal revelation - they must experience direct and divine communications of reality.

For Emerson this imperative was pretty-much the entire aim of life - so that the ideal life became in one sense that moment of revelation timelessly filling all; in another sense (because, experience seemed to show that these moments did come to an end) an incessant search for the next moment of revelation - life as a sequence of such moments.

*

But Emerson's error, which led him into paradox and the evil advocacy - if not practice - of Pride as a principle of life - as indeed the only principle of life; was to reject the past, to reject the unity of humanity, to perceive himself (his soul) as the only thing that was really real - to argue for a subjectivism so extreme as to amount almost to solipsism. 

In his burning desire to shed the constraints of history and society, which seemed to be shackling his imagination, and focus all meaning on his own individual moments of revelation (the total affirmation of Me! Here! Now!); Emerson destroyed the basis of humanity, of sharing, shape and purpose - and consequently his influence (among those who actually read what he wrote and try to live by it) has been substantially pernicious.

*

What was needed and what was necessary was to accept Emerson's assertion of the absolute necessity of personal revelation, albeit perilous, as an addition (or restoration) to Christianity.

This absolute and inflexible demand for modern, personal revelation, I perceive as the point of unity between Emerson and the other great long-term spiritual influence born in the United States at almost exactly the same time: Joseph Smith, the Mormon 'living prophet' of modern, latter day revelation.

Joseph Smith could have endorsed Emerson's cry by which he opened his first great published work Nature -


*

The religious difference between Emerson and Smith is essentially that Emerson took this demand to behold God face to face, and enjoy an original relation to the universe as his sole aim and principle, while Smith added it (and its products, such as the Book of Mormon and his other collected revelations) to existing Christianity.

Smith thus achieved what Emerson, in his scandalous 1838 address to Harvard Divinity School, had declared was impossible:

I confess, all attempts to project and establish a Cultus with new rites and forms, seem to me vain. Faith makes us, and not we it, and faith makes its own forms. All attempts to contrive a system are as cold as the new worship introduced by the French to the goddess of Reason, — to-day, pasteboard and fillagree, and ending to-morrow in madness and murder.  

*

Even as Emerson wrote his speech, Joseph Smith had already built a new city (the first of three) as headquarters for the saints in Kirtland, Ohio; and the years since the above words were spoken, Smith's 'Cultus' - with its 'new rites and forms' added-to, modifying, re-interpreting existing modes of Christianity - was (contrary to Emerson's characterization of it as 'vain') indeed 'established'; and has continued to grow into a major world religion - and has been neither a dead religion of pasteboard and fillagree (rather, a tremendously motivating religion which sustains great devoutness and other-worldliness), nor has it ended in madness and murder.

But, on the other hand, a stripped-down New Age version of Emerson's spirituality of individualism and subjectivism has merged with mainstream secular Leftism, and grown and grown to become the dominant mode of thought in the West almost entirely discarding Emerson in the process.

(And quite naturally so, since Emerson was not necessary to the development of New Age spirituality - rather he was a prophet, herald or advance guard of it.).

But what a fascinating divergence from such close roots and similar demands are Ralph Waldo Emerson and Joseph Smith - both emerging in the North Eastern corner of the USA in the 1830s!

*

*

Or rather, to be for- or against-"war" is senseless - it all depends on what type of war.

*

War includes several objectives - for example plunder, defense against plunder; empire building or defense against empire building; religious conquest or resistance to such - and war can be proactive (e.g. exterminating pirates nests) or reactive (arming against raids from pirate ships).

Each of these is a different scenario - some of them are very different from each other (e.g. a treasure-seeking war for the expansion of an Empire versus a village fighting a band of robbers who have come to burn, steal, slaughter and enslave).

*

My point here is that it turns-out that 'war' is one of those fake Leftist concepts (such as 'immigration' or 'education') which bundle together opposing entities and thereby sow confusion, create chaos and prevent resolution.

The concept of 'war', in its modern sense, is a product of pacifism (or 'anti-war') which arose in the late 1700s as an early sign of the conquest of the Left, and spread among the intellectual elites.

Pacifism - by being anti-the-thing-it-called-war thus led to the phony problem of 'war', which is that it divided the world into themselves (the pacifists) and their opponents were labeled as pro-war, warmongers.

*

(We see analogous phenomenon with Left-defined pro- and anti- positions in relation to open-borders-mass-immigration, education, diversity, human rights and so on. The 'pro concepts are nonsensical, undefined, incapable of definition, obviously wrong, intrinsically destructive etc - but the Left promotes them as nice/kind things, things which we need more-of, and more, and yet more; such that any dissent from the destroying nonsense is vilified as evidence of the opponent being a nasty/torturing kind of individual.)

*

Consequently, there are volumes of inconsequential nonsense spouted on the general theme of 'war', and how terrible it is, thus whether 'war' may be morally justified or otherwise...

trying (and, obviously, failing) to use this incoherent and undefined notion of 'war' as the basis for short universally-intended and context-free formalizations and rules concerning how 'war' should be conducted and what is necessary and forbidden in that conduct...

and then enforcing these nonsensical bureaucratic formalizations (only) onto those who are stupid or weak or confused enough to allow them to be enforced upon themselves...

and them congratulating themselves on this as evidence of the moral progress of humanity - in the face of those Right-wing remnants of societal evil who actually want 'war'...

*

But because there is no such thing as war: we must un-ask all questions concerning its nature and desirability and conduct.

*

*
http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/review-of-fall-of-arthur-by-jrr-tolkien.html
*

*

I feel that what is coming is a Great Simplification in which all sub-issues that concern us (economics, populations-ethnicities-personalities-intelligences, law and order, science, the mass media, military matters, education, health services...) will fall-away; to leave just that one great organizing principle: religion.

The simplification will be into those (few) who have a religion and who live-by that religion, and those who have an anti-religion and live by that.

*

Only those who have a religion have the basis for cohesion, for doing anything.

*

The mass majority who live by anti-religion; that currently dominant secular multitude who adhere to a fluid collection of incoherent, and un-cohere-able micro-principles, simply have no possibility of responding to the vast intricacy life and its problems.

Lacking which their numbers, wealth, power etc. mean absolutely nothing.

*

It is not just that the anti-religious majority lack the basis for cohesion - it is much worse than that. It is that their strongest-held and most zealously-enforced ideas work against cohesion - actively seeking-out, subverting and destroying every glimmer of possible hope; all chance or plans for any effective response, or organizing goal.  

*

It really is terribly simple (and simply terrible, in all likelihood).

*

*

It is interesting to compare this blog with my other main one

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.co.uk/

This one takes much more time and effort, and gets more comment, but only about 80 readers per post on the day it is posted - while the NCP blog gets about three times as many readers per day's entry but seldom attracts comments.

This blog gets more than 1000 readers per day - but spread thinly across loads of past entries.

I get the feeling that this blog is dying...

*

*

As yet another of my friends and colleagues (this is now happening annually, or more often, in my circle) gets into a vicious media firestorm over an utterly trivial remark, I reflect on the horrific combination of causal non-offense with consequential unrestrained condemnation and vengefulness that is characteristic of modern 'morality'.

*

This stuff is not going away, on the contrary it is getting worse - with the advent of blogs, Facebook, Twitter and the like such narratives have, indeed, become a mass media daily staple.

It is impossible to exaggerate the mismatch between the alleged (non-) offence and the scale and fervour of condemnation - which can lead, nowadays (at least in the UK) to sanctions up to and including prison - since (in a bizarre variant of the butterfly-causing-a-hurricane story) it is argued that any remark on any topic which 'offends' anybody can be extrapolated to some possible catastrophic conclusion.

*

So, on the one hand, nothing is too trivial to dominate world media discussion; yet on the other hand no truly abhorrent moral offense is so serious that it cannot be ignored, hidden or re-framed into either victimhood or even a virtue.

*

It is a despicable, shameful state of affairs.

It reveals the utter evil of modern morality as initiated and sustained by the mass media and those who consume it and allow it to dictate their world view (which is, in practice, almost everyone).

And that's about all I can say on the topic.

*

*

Sexy/Hot means that a person is deliberately and by contrivance (it cannot occur by accident) projecting or radiating a sexual signal - a signal implicitly of availability and desire; which is why it is so difficult to ignore this signal, and why it is so powerful a means of getting attention and manipulating others.

But why is being Sexy/Hot regarded - as it all-but-universally is in mainstream modern culture - as a Good Thing?

*

In all traditional societies, probably all societies until about 60 years ago, Sexy/Hot was recognized for what it is - extremely dangerous and invariably disruptive and potentially absolutely destructive: in short, something to be squashed ruthlessly.

I date the change to the 1950s and the key figures of Marylin Monroe and Elvis Presley - probably the first major mass media stars celebrated for being Sexy/Hot.

*

So why the change?

Godlessness, obviously.

Without God there is only this world, and in this world only pleasurable distraction, and among pleasures (short term, selfish pleasures - which are obviously the easiest pleasures to sell) sex is about the most powerful (at least, in a world where people have enough to drink and eat, and are warm and dry).

*

So this is what we find; and people have ceased to notice that in celebrating and promoting and adopting as a universal lifestyle the ideal of being Sexy/Hot, we are purposefully and with zeal contriving to destroy... well... everything, pretty much.

*

*

This was put forward with great clarity (and beauty) by Ralph Waldo Emerson: that the highest soul is one who does not discriminate between good and evil but sees both as necessary complements of the whole.

Or rather, that the only ultimate evil is to sever the true unity of reality by forcibly introducing an artificial schism between good and evil - such that the wholeness of life and of each human life is destroyed.

From the monist perspective which sees unity as the ultimate truth, this must be correct; thus all Christians are revealed as (qualified) pluralists (as are most other religions).

And since unconstrained pluralism collapses into monism (think about it); the truth of Christianity (and most other religions which have a limited-pluralism) is thus put wholly upon revelation - it is revelation (and that only) which tells us the extent of pluralism.

But it is this deistic spirituality of non-discrimination - with roots in the Romantic movement including the New England Transcendentalists -  that underlies the incoherent concretization and perversion of modern politically-correct 'non-discrimination', and the ethic that the only true evil is to 'discriminate'.

*

*

Harvard maybe, or the New York Times, or NGOs or what?

No, No, No - None of the above. 

Un-ask the question - it is badly formed.

*

There are no Leftist 'ideas' - there are only oppositional slogans - slogans in opposition to Christianity, tradition, decency, patriotism, natives, men... stuff like that.

They are not ideas, because there is no requirement for cohesion or internal consistency or consistency between the ideas or anything of that sort.

*

Leftist 'ideas' are not ideas: they are just slogans, sound-bites, notions, propaganda images - that's all they are.

These are so easy and obvious to manufacture (anyone can do it by simply asking Why? over-and-over again, or playing-the-opposites-game of negating every statement - for goodness sake four year olds do this all the time!) that it is deeply misleading to try and locate their origin.

*

*
*

*

Like all that comes from God, this doctrine is pure, it is clear, it is easy to understand—even for a child.

D Todd Christofferson

https://www.lds.org/general-conference/2012/04/the-doctrine-of-christ?lang=eng#watch=video

*

I accept, and indeed embrace this as an axiom - because I believe it is the pervasive implicit message of the whole Bible, but especially the New Testament.

What comes from God is easy to understand.

It can become as complex as the human mind can attain to - and this may be enjoyable, challenging, motivating for some individuals (and I am one of them), and it may be a means to the end of appropriating doctrine into the heart - but ultimately all this is difficulty is unnecessary.

Underneath the abstractions of theology, metaphysics, philosophy, history, analysis and investigation lies crystalline transparency of doctrine, through which the truth is easily perceived.

That a child must be able to understand, is therefore a test of doctrine.

*

*

The secular Right's location of Leftism in 'The Cathedral' (the term from blogger Mencius Moldbug) - emphasizing the Professoriate of elite universities such as Harvard - is mistaken and over-complex; in reality things are much worse that that!

The source of Leftism is the mass media.

The Educational institutions such as Universities, civil administration, the legal system etc.... these are merely conduits through which the Leftist message flows from its media source.

*

But the mass media is something im-personal, without head; specifically, it is a demonic force impersonating a human voice (just perceive the tone of voice by which we are addressed - as if emanating from a person, yet there is no identifiable or locatable person behind it).

This makes it so difficult to focus upon the media - indeed it is essentially impossible to do so, which is the secret of the media success. The editors and journalists and anchors and illustrators and the rest are all disposable units - the media is an organized colony with no visible controller - but there is a controller (not wholly in charge, but sufficiently so).

*

Whose voice is it, then, which emanates from the mass media, who grabs our attention, who engages us, diverts or terrorizes us, pre-organizes our categories of thought?

What is the personality behind the mass media, the purpose that drives it, the motivation which makes the mass media cohere sufficiently such as to become an unprecedented evil extending its micro-tentacles into every corner of life, into every recess of the mind?

Hmm, let's think... who could that possibly be?

*

*

Reflecting on my previous post...

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/christianity-as-mystery-religion.html

and arguing from a background that patriarchy (male leadership) is necessary to long term stable or thriving institutions (patriarchy as the rule, but not ruling-out specific exceptions)...

it suddenly struck me that there is a problem mostly for Protestants and women - because when the inner ring is a leadership circle, and therefore all-male, then devout women have no special role or place.

So, the problem for Christians is to combine 1. patriarchy with 2. a 'mystery religion' - to enable distinct and a higher life of faith for both sexes, within a patriarchal context.

*

When monasticism is the ideal in the Catholic denominations (Eastern Orthodox, and as a sub-dominant but significant strand in Western Roman- and Anglo-Catholicism), then there is a place for especially devout women as nuns - indeed there have usually been more women in 'religious' orders and monasteries than men.

And Mormonism is a Temple religion, with the same access and status for devout women and men (via marriage and the family).

But in rejecting monasticism, Protestants removed a higher path open to women.

In theory, that is to say in Protestant theology, this does not matter to salvation and degree of sanctification - in practice, it probably does matter a lot to that minority of devout women who might in other denominations become nuns.

*

The answer would, I suppose, be Protestant nuns (and monks)

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/protestant-monks-christian-communal.html

although that might prove difficult/ impossible to square with the foundational anti-clericalism of the Reformation as it survives in some of the Protestant denominations.

* 

*

In practice, although seldom in theory, most Christian denominations are 'mystery religions' with a two-level structure: an outer part for semi-adherents, and an inner part for a higher-level elite.

*

In Eastern Orthodoxy, the monastic life is highest (and monks are not usually priests); in Roman Catholicism priests are an inner circle, higher than laity. This is obvious.

But even among Protestants, the church organization is often - in practice - two layer. In evangelical churches it seems there is usually a wide outer circle which engages with the unconverted, and contains the recent converts and semi-attached.

This layer is all that outsiders and those who attend only public services perceive; but there is an inner circle of those who have leadership positions, with preaching privileges including leading home groups.  (The mystery element in this is prayer, of a qualitatively higher intensity and duration. )

Mormonism makes the distinction explicit - with a wide circle of Ward 'church'-attending Mormons, and an elite of Temple Mormons selected from among those active and obedient, and for whom the potential level of theosis (accesed via Temple 'ordinances') is higher.

(Much as in Eastern Orthodoxy the potential level of theosis is higher - i.e. Sainthood - for those monastics who engage in ascetic disciplines.)

*

I suspect that all long-term successful religions require this basic structure of an outer and public aspect; and an inner, secret mystery life for the elite.

Christian churches often emphasize the opposite, the absolute 'equality' of all believers, but ultimate spiritual unity is compatible with many forms of proximate hierarchy and specialization in organization.

Sometimes the distinction is explicit and celebrated, sometimes it is implicit and denied - but I think it is always there. 

*

*


*

*

A lot of reactionary blogging resembles a grasping at straws supposed to indicate that the wind has just changed, and that the secular Left is not longer triumphant and that things are now moving in a different direction.

I don't believe it; not for a moment.

What these folk are doing is combing the vastness of the mass media for microscopic counter-currents which are found even in the most strongly unidirectional river.

We will know the wind has changed, or the tide has turned, first by explicit repentance for what has been happening, then explicit resolution that the direction must be reversed.

This, when it happens, is not something that will require close attention public affairs - it will hit our society with the force of a cataclysm. 

*