SelfAdoration.com

Why an #atheist #church? Because regardless of what you believe, you need to be reminded regularly of the need for and the benefit of moral #philosophy. This is the value every church offers, I just serve it up without the smoke and mirrors.

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This week’s service: The Power of Poetry.

It makes girls swoon and boys fight, and it drives every quest for the next frontier: poetry. And yet it is mocked everywhere, most especially in academic mock-poetry, and it is ridiculed and shunned by the people who need it most: Men.

When men surrendered poetry, they surrendered everything that has ever mattered in Western civilization: Love, family, art, civility and ultimately civil order itself. The people who are not poets are brutes. And it shows.

No doubt you have other things to do with your time, but I challenge you to find anyone who will challenge you quite as thoroughly as I will. I most certainly have not surrendered my poetry, and I aim to show you what I can do with it.

This is the homily from my first service for The Church of Splendor with all the church business cut out. This is a philosophically ambitious argument about moral ambition, an equally-opportunisitical offender, a thoroughgoing take-down – and rebuilding – of everything.

If you value rethinking everything from the ground up, you should give me half-an-hour of your life. I promise to repay it a thousand fold.

To see the whole service, go here.

You give me 99 seconds, I’ll give you a brand new world…

This is from my first service for The Church of Splendor. If you want to see the whole argument, go here.

This is the opening sequence from my first service for The Church of Splendor:

If you want to see the whole argument, go here.

I keep talking about starting an atheist church. Here I am, starting one. My goal is to do this live on Saturday afternoons from a congenial bar, but Sunday mornings are a churchy enough time of day to start with.

We’ll start with something simple: What should a morally-ambitious person do?

Here it is on Spreecast.

I’ve got the Phoenix by the wings and we can fly where we want to go.Tambako the Jaguar / Foter / CC BY-ND

If you have to tell a man what he’s seeing, it’s not there, not for him.

In the long run, what will matter about my work is that I invented egoism. By showing how the self comes to exist and by demonstrating its paramount importance to the uniquely-human life, the idea of self-adoration is mine forever.

In the short run, what matters about the things I say is everything else. Whoever you claim to listen to – Tony Robbins, Zig Ziglar, The Secret – I’ve got the real goods, and I can show you how to get the actual results you’re looking for – not just wealth but a wealth of spirit, an abundant joy. Whatever you say you want from the world – political liberty, stronger families, a better deal for men, simple human flourishing – every bit of it comes from egoism.

To change the world in the way you want it changed, you must increase the number of egoists.

I know how.

I’m doing it. Slowly. I could do it faster – we could do it faster – if you would pitch in and help.

Anything you can do is great, but here’s something immediate and specific: Put this video:

in front of the right pair of eyes. I don’t know that this appeal will actually appeal to anyone, but it’s the one I can stand to make.

Social media is fine, but it’s unlikely to do the job, at least not by itself. Email promises to be a better bet, something like, “Who ELSE should be seeing this?” Or just email the link to this post.

I hate begging. I’m not interested in money, and the glare of public attention is repellent to me. But I’ve got the Phoenix by the wings and we can fly where we want to go.

Do your self a great big favor and follow through.

Secrecy and a lazy, self-willed ignorance are their weapons. Transparency and blinding illumination are ours.

graftedno1 / Foter / CC BY-ND

There are three types of Marxists in the world:

1. People who don’t know they’re regurgitating Marxist dogma, as with the “fat is beautiful” saddgirlz or the Hollywood ‘intellectuals’.

2. People who are actively, consistently and knowingly promulgating Marxist dogma, as with Pete Seeger.

3. The fully-aware knowing Marxist chess-masters, like Bill Ayers, who are minding, managing and manipulating the other two groups.

Is American public (and private) dyseducation a Marxist conspiracy? Groups 1 and 2 don’t know what group 3 does: That’s all it is. Because group 3 is so good at disguising Marxist doctrine as anything else, groups 1 and 2 will easily and usually unwittingly adopt the Marxist line on any topic without having to be specifically instructed. Birds of a feather.

This same phenomenon is all the explanation that is needed for the IRS persecution of Tea Party groups. When the ‘conspiracy’ is a noxious intellectual gas that pervades everything, direct command and control is normally unnecessary. A hint or two, here and there, at most.

One of the ways Marxism has perfected its camouflage is by mocking anyone who comes to be aware of this pandemic, subterranean agenda. Derision in response to the identification of Marxist propaganda, overtly or just by eye-rolling ridicule, is the Fallacy Ad Hominem in quest of the Fallacy of Well Poisoning. People resort to logical fallacies when they know their arguments cannot bear up to rigorous scrutiny. In other words, they issue their big fake Hillary-like guffaws because they know they can’t best you honestly.

But this is why all of us must be aware of Marxist orthodoxy all the time, and why we must expose it as such wherever we discover it, especially when it is cloaked in sheep’s clothing. Secrecy and a lazy, self-willed ignorance are tyranny’s weapons. Transparency and blinding illumination are ours.

Don’t let up. You’re winning.

If you want Terri Schiavo – or your ailing Grandma – dead, then kill her yourself. But call things by their right names. The act is murder. The actor is a murderer. And the victim is not ever a volunteer.h.koppdelaney / Foter.com / CC BY-ND

At FreeTheAnimal.com, Richard Nikoley riffs on an idea that has bounced around between us for close to a decade: If you want someone dead, kill him yourself:

I have a modest proposal and it’s already in the title: if you want someone dead, then just kill them yourself.

You see, it’s very difficult for me to assume that many people don’t want one whole fuck of a lot of people dead. Isn’t that part of the reason why so many agitate, then stand in line at a voting booth, to vote death by proxy, “support the troops,” and all thayt? Do they go home and wash their hands?

If you want someone dead — and I’m certainly not saying there’s not valid reasons for that — then kill them yourself.

Just kill them yourself.

Imagine a world where that was the creed, and you had to live with, or got to enjoy, the real consequences of your deed. Might you be a little careful?

My piece of this turns on the state-sanctioned murder of Terri Schiavo in 2005. I wrote this about it at the time:

Schiavo

I have very little time right now, but I’ve been following this case for years, and I don’t want to have misrepresented my views by my silence.

I am stoutly opposed to “sanctioned” violence in any form, with the only exception being where to fail to act with immediate force will result in even greater injury. I think Ayn Rand and much of the (broadly-drawn) libertarian movement has made a huge mistake in their endorsement of abortion. Abortion is the wedge issue by which Communism seeks to introduce the idea of a “sanctioned” murder into the minds of otherwise decent people. Geriatricide and “merciful” infanticide are other emotion-laden tines in the same rhetorical fork. If we ever come to the day when we as a culture proceed to killing (more…)