Bruce Charlton's Notions

I've been brooding on a few paragraphs Rudolf Steiner wrote - not for the first time; but they came to mind - seem relevant.

(See excerpt below.)

A large proportion of people nowadays, far more than in Steiner's time; are de facto atheist - either explicitly or implicitly. And this means they are ill - mentally ill, superficially, but with a subtle physical-biological cause.

Even in a strictly biological evolutionary context; humans are made to believe in deities. And when they don't, when they deny the gods; they cannot function - become incoherent (lacking any centre and focus for their instincts and learning) and all-but cease to reproduce.

Atheist Man also ceases to be able to learn from experience - because his experience breaks down into disconnected, arbitrary, incomprehensible pieces.


Living in an arbitrary world; the God-denier lacks even the basic instincts for survival - he feels no reason why he, people like himself, his family, his groups - why any of this has any reason to continue; he indeed typically harbours hatred and resentment against whatever is like himself - a desire of suicide, extinction, to be replaced; he regards death as annihilation, and hope that it will put an end to all consciousness.

Yes - this is already a world of sickness and death.


Edited from How do I find the Christ? A lecture by Rudolf Steiner (1918)

In the first place there is in man an inclination, a proclivity, to know what may be called in a general sense, the Divine.

The second inclination in him — that is, in the man of today — is to know the Christ.

The third inclination in man is to know what is usually called the Spirit or also the Holy Spirit.

There are men who deny all these inclinations. In the course of the nineteenth century, in European culture at any rate, men have denied the existence of anything Divine in the world.

What is it that makes a man deny the existence of the Divine — the Father God in the Trinity? In every such case there is an actual physical defect, a physical sickness, a physical flaw in the body. To be an atheist means to the spiritual scientist to be sick in some respect. 

It is not, of course, a sickness which doctors cure — indeed they themselves very often suffer from it — neither is it recognised by modern medicine. There is an actual sickness in a man who denies what he should be able to feel, in this case, not through his soul-nature but through his actual bodily constitution. If he denies that which gives him a healthy bodily feeling, namely that the world is pervaded by Divinity, then, according to Spiritual Science, he is a sick man, sick in body.

There are also many who deny the Christ. The denial of the Christ as something that is essentially a matter of destiny and concerns man's soul-life. To deny God is a sickness; to deny the Christ is a calamity. To have no relationship with Christ is a calamity.

To deny the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, signifies dullness, obtuseness, of a man's own spirit.

Atheism — denial of the Divine — denotes an actual pathological defect. Failure to find in life that link with the world which enables us to recognise the Christ, is a calamity for the soul. To be unable to find the Spirit in one's own inmost being denotes obtuseness, a kind of spiritual mental deficiency, though in a subtle and unacknowledged form.

There is in Man an inclination to know the Divine.

The second inclination in him - that is, in the Man of this era - is to know the Christ.

The third inclination in Man is to know what is usually called the Spirit, or also the Holy Ghost.

*

1. Where a Man denies the Father God - denies a Divine Principle in the world as such - there is an actual physical defect, a physical sickness, a physical flaw in the body.

To be an atheist means to the spiritual scientist to be sick in some respect... an actual sickness in a man who denies what he should be able to feel, through his actual bodily constitution. If he denies that which gives him a healthy bodily feeling, namely that the world is pervaded by Divinity, then he is a sick man, sick in body.

2. There are also many who deny the Christ. The denial of the Christ as is denial of something that is essentially a matter of destiny and concerns man's soul-life.

To deny God is a sickness; to deny the Christ is a calamity.

3. To deny the Spirit, the Holy Ghost, signifies dullness, obtuseness, of a man's own spirit.

*

So - atheism denotes an actual pathological defect. Failure to find in life that link with the world which enables us to recognise the Christ, is a calamity for the soul. To be unable to find the Spirit in one's own inmost being denotes obtuseness, a kind of spiritual mental deficiency, though in a subtle and unacknowledged form.

Edited from: https://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/atheism-is-actual-physical-defect.html 
Entire text at: http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/FndChr_index.html#sthash.ddQ5kd7d.dpuf

Are They insane - or are They evil?...

Readers of this blog must have asked themselves this question with increasing frequency throughout 2020; but it has been looming ever larger over the past half-century. 

 

For instance; the trans-agenda activists are certainly insane; but in psychologically abusing, poisoning and mutilating children by official diktat, they have also attained a world-historical level of evil. 

And much the same applies to the other litmus test issues - bizarre insanity and purposive evil are at the same time extreme and interwoven. 

Why? What is the causality here? 

 

The root is atheism*.

Rudolf Steiner made some wise and deep comments to the effect that atheism (not to believe in a god) was in fact an actual sickness, which takes the form of insanity. 

In the past, all through human prehistory and history up until the past few generations in TheWest; society was structurally religious, and everyone (including atheists) was brought-up in a religion.

In the past, atheists were individuals, living in a religious society - so although they were insane, they could nonetheless be good. 

But now we live a world where insane atheists are ubiquitous, and insane atheist values are everywhere. For the first time ever we have atheists who were raised by atheists (who were raised by atheists) and living in a public discourse that assumes the validity of atheism. 

In these current conditions, atheists are not only insane, but also evil - because... why not? 

Atheism is rootless relativism; which reduces to a 'morality' of expediency; dictated by an un-moored society that is ripe for demonic manipulation, and helpless against demonic inversion of values.  Hence the trans-agenda etc.

The atheists do not originate societal evil - that comes from the powers of purposive evil working upon sinful Men. But atheists have no reason Not to go along with the strategies of Satan (who is not real to them). 

In an evil world, atheists will be evil. 

 

So, generalised atheism is the reason for co-occurrence of insanity with evil in modern societies. 

 

*It is my assumption is that a large majority of self-identified Christians, and Christian churches, are in truth atheist - since they accept in practice all the core atheist assumptions, and follow all the mainstream atheist ideologies. 

There is in man an inclination, a proclivity, to know what may be called in a general sense, the Divine. The second inclination in him — that is, in the man of today — is to know the Christ. The third inclination in man is to know what is usually called the Spirit or also the Holy Spirit.

As we have said, there are men who deny all these inclinations. There has been abundant evidence of this, particularly in the course of the nineteenth century, when in European culture at any rate, things reached such a climax that men have denied the existence of anything Divine in the world. In Spiritual Science — where the existence of the Divine in the realm of the super-sensible cannot be a matter of doubt — the question may be asked : What is it that makes a man deny the existence of the Divine — the Father God in the Trinity?

Spiritual Science shows us that in every case where a man denies the Father God — that is to say, a Divine Principle in the world such as is acknowledged, for example, in the Hebrew religion — in every such case there is an actual physical defect, a physical sickness, a physical flaw in the body.

To be an atheist means to the spiritual scientist to be sick in some respect. It is not, of course, a sickness which doctors cure — indeed they themselves very often suffer from it — neither is it recognised by modern medicine ... but Spiritual Science finds that there is an actual sickness in a man who denies what he should be able to feel, in this case, not through his soul-nature but through his actual bodily constitution. If he denies that which gives him a healthy bodily feeling, namely that the world is pervaded by Divinity, then, according to Spiritual Science, he is a sick man, sick in body.

There are also many who deny the Christ. Spiritual Science regards the denial of the Christ as something that is essentially a matter of destiny and concerns man's soul-life. To deny God is a sickness; to deny the Christ is a calamity.

This must inevitably be the view of Spiritual Science. To be able to find Christ is a matter of destiny, a factor that must inevitably play into the karma of a man. To have no relationship with Christ is a calamity.

To deny the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, signifies dullness, obtuseness, of a man's own spirit.

The human being consists of body, soul and spirit; in all three there may be a defect. Atheism — denial of the Divine — denotes an actual pathological defect. Failure to find in life that link with the world which enables us to recognise the Christ, is a calamity for the soul. To be unable to find the Spirit in one's own inmost being denotes obtuseness, a kind of spiritual mental deficiency, though in a subtle and unacknowledged form.

http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/FndChr_index.html#sthash.ddQ5kd7d.dpuf

There are no plans to remove the regulations on 'social-distancing' - the laws by which every person must (with a handful of exemptions) treat every other person as if ritually unclean.

And there is little apparent desire from people that this should change. People are self-policing at all times, including in private and outdoors.

I went on a walk in Northumberland during which I saw just six people in two hours - two of them were coming along the path towards us; and they laboriously stopped and stepped-back a couple of yards to let us pass without breaching regulations.

This was in the middle of a forest, in the middle of nowhere, with nobody else around; and the attitude of the interaction was clearly one of being polite and considerate - as if this was the proper way for human beings to interact, and as if anything else would be rude, aggressive and reckless.

You see how a Godless people are helpless putty in the claws of evil? They have (we British have) long-since embraced evil in our hearts; by our solid belief in the meaninglessness and purposelessness of life - and consequently the mass of people experience very little friction when asked to treat themselves and each other as plague rats.

As Steiner correctly said a century ago; atheism is a disease, a sickness, a disability (albeit chosen, self-inflicted) - and it is no stretch at all for a society of atheists to live by their belief that sickness is primary and disease is universal.

The lesson? There is no resistance to evil when evil is regarded as good.

If we are (personally, socially) to escape the universal self-damnation of actively preferring this demon-administered totalitarian world; awakening must come first. There can be no positive change without motivation and courage for the Good.

As I have been saying for a decade - atheism is not viable, atheism is despair and death; religion is essential, non-optional.

The primary task for everyone who has not already done it, is to

Choose Your Religion.

Note - I would add that CYR is only a beginning; and having chosen, one must strive (daily, hourly) to put it first. The birdemic crisis has revealed that merely-self-identified religion (such as that of Bishops) is merely-atheism - indistinguishable in practice and under stress. 

Nowadays, most people are nowhere near being a Christian - because they do not even believe in 'deity', let alone a personal creator God, let alone Jesus Christ... 

So for people such as myself, becoming a Christian is part of a very big 'package' of beliefs; which amounts to such a profound reorientation that it took years to 'work through' my life, even to a moderate degree. 

Rudolf Steiner insightfully distinguished between dis-belief in God, Jesus and the Holy Ghost - emphasizing that atheism is a literal pathology - a profound spiritual sickness. Steiner is, I am sure, absolutely correct - and this is the primary explanation for the insane and unrepentant species of inverted-evil that plagues our world now. 

Just as one example: if we do not recognize that we dwell in A Creation - therefore a universe with purpose, meaning, and personal relevance; then we will be have no core or coherence to our belief and life. We shall be adrift, and probably oscillate between hedonism-to-forget, and despair-when-we-remember. 

Steiner said that to believe in God but not Christ, was a calamity. To believe in God and Christ but not the Holy Ghost was to live disorientated and dulled in a fog of incomprehension. 

But since the time of Steiner - at least in The West, but I suspect everywhere - to believe in God, one must be a Christian; and to be a Christian one must believe in the Holy Ghost - i.e. (by my understanding) must have a lively, active, interactive, direct personal relationship with Jesus via The Holy Ghost. 

(In other words, we must now actively believe in all three of God/ Christ/ Holy Ghost - and the partial forms of the past have become impossible. This includes that Christianity is the only Possible religion for now, in The West.)

And I believe that the nature of genuinely-Christian changes to the life of a Christian convert need to begin with this kind of deeply-rooted reorientation, and well-up into the specifics of what we do. 

Arising bottom-up and from inside-out - not vice versa.  

In other words; as of 2022 - we don't become a Christian by following a rulebook or recipe, or changing our lives. 

We might - like a devout monk - spend every hour, 24/7, following a strict Rule, engaged in prayer, meditation, worship, study, confession, fasting etc. - and (as of 2022) not progress a single micrometer towards being a real Christian. 

What once was effectual, is effective no longer. 

(As is, or should be, evident from the way such persons have actively allied themselves with work on the side of Satan - the totalitarian evil rulers of This World.) 

These things may be good from some people to do from grounds of expediency, and 'psychologically' to break free from evil influences and habits...

But the Real Thing (at the level of the soul) needs to come from some combination of solid and confident faith in the hope of resurrected life eternal (i.e. the decision to follow Jesus to Heaven after mortal death)...

And the guidance of knowledge of 'what to do' which can be conceptualized as a consequence of our direct and personal relationship with the Holy Ghost. 

The Christian life has become very simple, but that simplicity constitutes its great difficulty. And the simple make take a long time to work-through the confusion, complexity, and burgeoning chaos of Life Now. 

I continue to be amazed that so many people get drawn into trap-debates in which somebody pretends not to understand the obvious or to believe the absurd. 

These things cannot be debated, because when an antagonist has adopted this level of dishonesty; then evidence and logic will be ineffectual.

Meanwhile, the real debate ought to be conducted at a higher level- the metaphysical level of assumptions; where it might be understood how it is that the obvious is being-denied, or the absurd is being-asserted.   

I first saw and recognized this tactic when Bertrand Russell debated F.C Copleston concerning the existence of God. Russell's main tactic was repeatedly to claim that he did not understand what Copleston meant by his questions and concepts relating to God; despite that these issues had been mainstream human discourse for millennia. 

Russell was - dishonestly - debating from assumptions that ruled-out any possibility of coherent argument at the level of generality capable of addressing the question. He was forcing discussion down to a level of technical micro-specialization that - however resolved - left the main question untouched. 

We can see exactly the same tactic used every day in the mainstream Big Lie, globalist policies relating to the birdemic and its peck, climate, mass immigration and all the rest. 

Because the obvious is being denied, and the absurd is being propagated - debate is forced down to the level of technical-micro-issues; where only specialists can operate - and where the conclusions are too small scale to affect the broad policies - and where the debate can be moved back and back interminably.

For instance, the birdemic phenomenon has almost nothing to do with whether the germ (if indeed it is A Specific germ, rather than a fluid and broad class diagnosis of many germs) was lab-created. That the inferred viral structure must have been lab generated has been known since very early 2020. 

But, after a period of denial and shut-down; the debate moves on to where it was done, who did it, why they did it - and then, the structure was itself not discovered from isolates; but merely inferred on the basis of computerized predictive modelling and from non-rigorous methods of clinical sampling...

My point is that this debate can run forever - and in the end we are no closer to acknowledging the obvious fact that the birdemic was obviously (obviously from Day One) a deliberate sham, and the actions 'against' it were political not medical, and did vastly more harm than even the imputed good; and that the peck was unnecessary, ineffective and harmful. 

The simple obvious question is why certainly-harmful measures were coercively applied worldwide; without any coherent evidence of need in the first place; and absent evidence that they would, even theoretically, have any significant compensatory benefit. 

 

We now get the same crude tactic applied on a global scale when people claim not to understand what is 'a woman', or understand why real marriage is between a man and a woman. Or they simulate the conviction that Of Course men can change into women, and vice versa; and can reverse the process... at will. 

And therefore, people have a fundamental human right at any time, and fluidly, to assert any sexual identity and have it universally recognized with sanctions against those who disagree or err. 

Or when people demand 'evidence' that open-ended mass immigration from alien and hostile cultures will be lethal for the host nation. Evidence!

Or affect not to comprehend why it is A Bad Thing that the most intelligent, wealthy and healthy women choose to reproduce at about a quarter of the minimum replacement level. This fact tells us some horrific home-truths about our civilization; but only if we can recognize mass reproductive sterility and extinction as A Bad Thing. 

This simulated dumbness is therefore a powerful tactic when used by those with power. 

It also blends and synergizes with psychological sickness; because there are those who really do not comprehend what it means to ask "Does God exist", and who really do not understand the difference between men and women... and so forth.

As Rudolf Steiner tellingly remarked; atheism is an actual sickness. It is a profound denial of purpose, meaning and genuine relatedness in our-selves and the world; that cannot but do actual harm to thinking, discerning, understanding, basic social functioning - and indeed to merely biological surviving and reproducing. 

Thus; in a world where atheist assumptions are built-into all public discourse; we have an actually sick world. 

In sum we have, on the one hand, a sick mass world in which thinking, discernment, understanding - the ability to learn from experience - are all self-crippled; and on the other, top-down - active and dominant demonic powers who are expanding and increasing the damage by deliberately dishonest denials of the obvious that demand proof, and assertions of the absurd demanding disproof...

And where proof and disproof are placed in a context where the most important issues are relativized and subdivided out of existence; and where proof and disproof have zero acknowledged meaning and no necessary implications... 

A lot.

Christians have often claimed that many atheists are actually (deep down...) believers in God; but I suggest the opposite: that here-and-now the problem is that most self-described Christians are really atheists.

How do I know? By application of an insight from Rudolf Steiner, which is that when someone denies the God - that is, denies a Divine Principle in the world - then there is an actual physical defect, sickness, and flaw in that person.

The atheist denies something that he should be able to feel, and feel naturally, simply by means of his actual bodily constitution.

And when someone denies that which gives him a healthy bodily feeling, namely that the world is pervaded by Divinity, then he is a sick man, sick in body.

By this test, as well as the large proportion of explicit atheists, many or most professed Christians are also atheists - and this is an objective, observable fact which is seen in their behaviour: that is, they behave as sufferers from the same physical illness which can be seen in atheists.

The effect of this illness is profound - indeed it accounts for the dominant and striking distinctive features of modernity... that blank, defocused, ungrounded, alienated affect which almost everybody displays (whether covered by a superficial striving, or not).

...This is the behaviour of someone who believes that reality has no meaning, but is merely a combination of change and rigid determinism; and therefore the behaviour of someone who inhabits a world in which only business of an individual is to maintain some kind of emotional adjustment to a senseless situation over the short-term.

This behaviour, characteristic of deep atheism, is the norm; so much the norm, indeed, that little else can be found anywhere - whatever convictions, or lack of conviction, an individual may profess. Just look-around, just speak to people with this in-mind...

By this test I discern that we inhabit a world of atheists, almost entirely.

Our problems go much deeper than we commonly recognise; and 'conversion' to normal Christianity believed in the normal way is grossly inadequate. To profess a belief in God is ineffectual when what is necessary is a new world-view, rebuilt from the ground of fundamental convictions and attitudes, upwards.