In a brilliant post that starts with Carl Jung on what used to be call "Primitive Man" (in a less enlightened age), Ace hits center mass on
one of the biggest blind spots of the secular left:
Magical thinking reasons not just from cause to effect (my fetish
doll will give me control over the target), but from effect back to
cause: if an extraordinary event occurred, such as a crocodile eating a
woman, it must be due to an extraordinary cause, such as conclave of
sorcerers using their Words of Power to manipulate the crocodile into
its lethal bite.
Modern Man and Primitive Man are hardly any different at all. Modern
Man likes to think he's given up on magical thinking, of hokum and
superstition and dream-logic somewhere between "mythology" and
"sustaining lie," but in fact they think precisely the same way. They
just call things by different terms.
It is too hard to accept that the Great Progressive Hope could have
been killed down by such a pissant little loser of a malcontent
crocodile, I mean communist; therefore, he wasn't.
No, no piddly little crocodile, I mean communist, decided to kill
Kennedy on its own; rather, it was bidden to do so by a conclave of
Rightwing Sorcerers, sorcerers who poisoned the very air with Magic
Words, Magic Words of great power, like "socialist" and "Anyone But
JFK."
These Magic Words commanded the crocodile, I mean communist, to kill the King.
And thence to Global Warming, Sarah Palin, and the Tea Party. The hysteria is a religious hysteria, from people who pat themselves on the back about how they have left all that idiotic superstition behind, not realizing that they have simply given it free rein. As he sums up:
You don't need God to be religious hysteric.
All you need is a Dogma and a Devil.
This is absolutely brilliant.
9 comments:
BP,
You're running a pretty great win streak in outstanding posts here in the last month or two. This is another winner! Keep up the good work.
well stated my friend. good post!
I posted at length about this recently. It really is a psychological thing people just can't accept the most powerful man on earth was killed by this total loser.
But pretty much everything on the conspiracy side it's been pretty thoroughly debunked. An 88 yard quartering shot on a target moving 11 miles an hour is not even that hard. It is certainly not superhuman.
And the magic bullet just wasn't magic. It did what bullets do.
*has. Not it's. Posting on my phone. It apparently wanted my grammar to be horrible today.
On the flip side I can say I have met very few true Christians in my sojourn in the USA. Many hypocrites but few true believers.
Before you grumble I'm a hypocrite too, but at least I'm aware I am.
Juvat, thanks.
Knottedprop, the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.
Knottedprop;
I've always been taught that there was only ever one perfect Christian.
The example set is a good one to strive towards, but so far, but for one, appears to be impossible to actually obtain.
I don't call it hypocrisy. I call it "being human".
For a second (and arguably even more ruinous) example, I give you Gavrilo Princip.
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