SelfAdoration.com

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…)

I can think of almost nothing in the lives of ordinary Americans, nothing that is ‘organized’ or ‘official’, that is not thoroughly steeped in Marxism.˙Cаvin 〄 / Foter.com / CC BY

[I wrote this essay in 2002, and, of course, by now everything it addresses is just that much worse. Tyranny is an avoidable fate – but not if you don’t know how to recognize it. —GSS]

 
My son is a Cub Scout. A few weekends ago he had his yearly ScoutORama, a sort of Scout convention and trade fair. The theme of this year’s event was ‘American Heroes,’ and it turns out that American Heroes, for the most part, build small catapults and cook in Dutch ovens. One Cub pack took the theme rather more to heart, with a huge display called ‘Freedom In Unity’.

To an attending Cub Scout I said, “Is it conceivable to you that unity and freedom might conflict?”

After a moment’s thought, he said: “Huh?”

As a father of an eleven-year-old, I fully expected this retort. Undismayed, I pressed on: “Isn’t it reasonable to suppose that the quality best represented by the word ‘freedom’ is freedom from other people?”

“HUH?!”

And my wife pulled me away, arguing, quite correctly, that it is unfair to expect children to regurgitate, much less competently defend, the horseshit they are force-fed by adults.

They do so eventually, of course, and thus become the adults who do the force-feeding of the next generation of helpless victims – unminded before they can be fully mindful, starved and stuffed at the same time, gorged forevermore on horseshit.

But: It’s not the what, it’s the where, the who, the how. And most especially: The why.

When the French, to pick an odorous example, rail against Individualism, we know what we’re hearing. When radical feminists – or radical environmentalists, or radical vegans – heap scorn upon Liberty, it doesn’t take much acuity to see right through them.

But to listen carefully – and I am cursed with the skill of listening carefully – to a Scout leader or a PTA president or a youth minister is to listen no less to the preachments of Herr (more…)

Me and my girl Cherry Bomb making our first movie of the New Year:

In the video, I am reflecting on my end-of-year essay on mastering something difficult this year: If you apply yourself to doing what you have always wanted to do, you will make an enduring improvement to your way of being.

Near the end, I mention my “High-D” diet and a video I made for the 21 Convention’s YouTube page.

If you would like to help build The Church of Splendor, I’m eager to hear from you.

Anti-humanism as the ruling paradigm of science:

Subjectivity is your private experience of the world: your sensations; your mental life and inner landscape; your experiences of sweet and bitter, blue and gold, soft and hard; your beliefs, plans, pains, hopes, fears, theories, imagined vacation trips and gardens and girlfriends and Ferraris, your sense of right and wrong, good and evil. This is your subjective world. It is just as real as the objective physical world.

This is why the idea of objective reality is a masterpiece of Western thought—an idea we associate with Galileo and Descartes and other scientific revolutionaries of the 17th century. The only view of the world we can ever have is subjective, from inside our own heads. That we can agree nonetheless on the observable, exactly measurable, and predictable characteristics of objective reality is a remarkable fact. I can’t know that the color I call blue looks to me the same way it looks to you. And yet we both use the word blue to describe this color, and common sense suggests that your experience of blue is probably a lot like mine. Our ability to transcend the subjective and accept the existence of objective reality is the cornerstone of everything modern science has accomplished.

But that is not enough for the philosophers of mind. Many wish to banish subjectivity altogether. “The history of philosophy of mind over the past one hundred years,” the eminent philosopher John Searle has written, “has been in large part an attempt to get rid of the mental”—i.e., the subjective—“by showing that no mental phenomena exist over and above physical phenomena.”

Why bother? Because to present-day philosophers, Searle writes, “the subjectivist ontology of the mental seems intolerable.” That is, your states of mind (your desire for adventure, your fear of icebergs, the ship you imagine, the girl you recall) exist only subjectively, within your mind, and they can be examined and evaluated by you alone. They do not exist objectively. They are strictly internal to your own mind. And yet they do exist. This is intolerable! How in this modern, scientific world can we be forced (more…)