THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

Almost a decade ago, when I first mentioned Zoroastrianism on Whitaker Online, there was a chorus of cat calls. It still seems strange, even to regular BUGS readers that I talk so much about the history of religion.

Once again, people will agree that Political Correctness is our established RELIGION, but they don't THINK about it.

Realizing this is a RELIGION makes it an entirely different thing from the Conspiracy of Geniuses or the Force of History that so many of us, tragically, think it is.

You see, every historical religion went under because it sought food for its priests and power in THIS world. Every religion becomes an industry, and like any other industry. Then another one comes and out competes it. That is what has happened to millions of religions.

In my lifetime, the Main Line Protestant religions were visibly disappearing. The Methodist Church membership consisted heavily of living people who had been raised in that church and never bothered to change it to "agnostic."

I remember when the one thing that distinguished evangelical Christianity from the industrial version was GROWTH. A major portion of the American population shifted into Born Again religion. Totally unnoticed by our media, South America had new millions of Born Again Christians every year.

Until they went political, Born Again Christians were on their way to conquering both Americas.

In discussing economics, I made the point that things don't collapse visibly. It is simple arithmetic: things stagnate, THEN they decline. Born Agains have stagnated. Economies have stagnated.

Historically this stagnation phase goes unnoticed.

Those who notice it are later called Prophets.

In fact the stagnation phase is the absolute peak level of the idea that this industry or this society will go on forever.

When Hadrian built his Wall, it announced two things:

1) the Roman Empire had reached the limits of its expansion, and 2) those limits were set in stone because they were meant to last forever. And in Hadrian's time it was assumed that the Roman Empire would last forever and the Eternal City of Rome would be mega just as it had been its alpha.

When Constantine moved his capitol to Byzantium, it was not a declaration that his Roman Empire had ended, and he did not resign his job.

In fact, the Holy Roman Empire was finally ended by Napoleon seventeen centuries after Hadrian. The actual direct line of Caesars only ended in 1453, when Constantinople fell to Islam.

Even after Napoleon, Russia called itself The Third Rome and Tsar, Kaiser, and Kaiser meant emperor in the Roman sense. The Pope is Pontifus Maximus, a Caesarian title.

The point is that if people can't even agree on when the Roman Empire fell, how can they possibly recognize the stagnation point?

But to us this is all a quibble. History tells us that the Roman Empire fell sometime in the first part of the first millennium, but you will play hell finding an agreed-one date.

The fact is that the collapse that everybody seems so obsessed with IS a quibble. It is the point of stagnation that really matters.

Our Established Religion 2

Born Again Christianity has reached its stagnation phase. In my youth it was growing wildly, and now it has stopped or the curve is reaching the asymptotic stage.

There are a couple of clear reasons for this. First of all, Born Again Christianity has become an industry. Those who control it now depend upon it for their livelihoods.

Secondly the same thing has happened to evangelicalism that brought down the Mainline Protestant churches in North America and the Catholic Church in South America: it put its cards in THIS world, and it LOST.

I asked before, what part of "My Kingdom is not of this world" do Bible-thumpers have trouble understanding? When the main Catholic Church threw itself into being a tool of big landowners in South America and a major part of the priesthood sided with the Communists in the name of Liberation Theology, everybody had assumed it had Both Sides covered.

But both Communism and the big landowners have been discredited.

While the Catholic Church was seeking power on both sides in South American politics the evangelicals were out there conquering the next world. I saw a documentary on a back area of Bolivia or Peru, the announcer said "We are the first Westerners here," and at that moment they came on a lake some Born Again missionaries were doing baptisms.

I used to get my ammunition reloaded in the dormitories of our local Born Again theology school. Out in the African bush you would often find that the only people were mercenaries and missionaries.

Christianity on Europe has simply collapsed. Someone will write in the "they have proven" this is no longer true, but it is routine for a giant church to have a tiny group of people sitting in the front.

What called Nietzsche to say "God is dead" was that the churches had taken on Galileo and lost, and then they had taken on every new theory in the eighteenth century and lost.

There were still lots and lots of healthy churches in America, but at the top of the intellectual ladder, from which ideas filtered down, it seems to Nietzsche that it had doomed itself.

This is of interest to us because this whole section if moving toward how or PRESENT established religion is dooming itself.

Born Agains are now more interested in Pro-Life than they are in the next world, where Jesus said HIS Kingdom is. If they had had their way, the tens of thousands of babies born from in vitro fertilization, babies who were wanted, would never have been born.

For the moment, Pro-Life is a boon to Born Again Industry. You keep your congregation contributing and you don't go where you learn to reload ammunition as a survival skill.

Christianity survived because it backed down from crap like this.

Every church in London denounced Jenner's satanic practice of putting germs from cows into human beings. But as their congregations began to die or came into church disfigured for life, they somehow totally forgot their theological objections.

Those objections are as valid today as they were then. But an industry drops any product that becomes enormously destructive to its very existence.

Prohibiting abortion is no longer on the Born Again list of possibilities, so they have branched out into crippling any research that they decide involved embryos. Eventually, as in the case of vaccinations, they will get in the way of people in wheelchairs walking and replacing diseased or aging body parts.

Then this silly crap will be seen as silly crap.

You see, the nice thing about these social issues is that they make the preacher or priest feel he is being realistic and practical. It gets him off the simple fact that either Heaven or Hell is real or he is a guy who lives on nonsense or even is a guy wearing a dress for no reason.

When the church sticks to all or nothing, Heaven or Hell, not of this world, it can grow. But if the fight is over THIS world, and it goes beyond doing to others what they do to you, it goes to stagnation, and then on down.

If I were a doomed embryo I would be happy if I could be used to get somebody out of a wheel chair. But any discussion of the Golden Rule in human affairs is denounced today as Humanism.

So Born Again has stagnated.

Next I will explain my ideas as to how this is what is happening to the Established Religion we are under right now.

Our Established Religion 3: None Dare Call It Silly

What destroys an established religion in our latter days is not being wrong, it is being SILLY. In Nietzsche's day, the various churches had fought vaccination, the idea that earth was over 4500 years old, the idea that the earth was not the center of the universe, and in fact worn a dunce had over and over and over again for all to see.

When Nietzsche said God is Dead, he meant for intellectuals, real ones, not Mommy Professors. He meant that at the top of the idea chain, the God Industry had made a laughing stock of faith.

The Religious Industry lives entirely in THIS world. For a millennium and a half it had dictated all reality. The idea that His Kingdom is not of this world was absolute heresy.

I did a review of a Galbraith book many years ago for National Review. Posing as an intellectual biography, it was the same crap he had put in the hundred books before it. It had the usual supply and demand doesn't work in it.

My statement was, "Galbraith is still talking about leftism in theory. Leftism is collapsing because it has been put into practice."

Faith in the next world cannot be proven by discrediting evolution here.

This is a routine lesson no one has learned: You win power on theory, but once the theory is tried out, you are in deep trouble.

That's what happened to the religion decided on at Trent and that's what happened to the main line Protestant faiths invented by Luther and Calvin. Until competition from the Pentecostals made them toe the line more, they were actually on their way to the complete collapse European Protestantism has accomplished.

Exactly the same thing happened to the left with the trying out of Communism in the real world. You won't see much real difference between how a Marxist today argues and how anti-evolutionists argue.

When the Soviet Empire collapsed FROM PURE SILLINESS, the whole leftist charade was exposed. No Christian wants to talk about the Christianity Industry's battle against smallpox vaccines, and no leftist wants to talk about the fall of Communism.

Why not? Because any discussion of these things shows how SILLY they were. Not how their theories had imperfections, but just plain dribble-mouth silliness. I remember right after the USSR fell, one after another leftist commentator congratulated a respectable conservative on his understanding that liberalism is NOT Communism.

Actually Kennedy had been working with the Communists to undermine Reagan. The KGB files are filled with the people McCarthy called Communists. The last desperate bid to save the Soviet Empire by defeating the Strategic Defense Initiative they called Star Wars took out all the stops, all the pretense that the entire left was on the same side.

Joe Sobran noticed that, and wrote an article for National Review called "Congress's Red Army."

With new advances in knowledge about real animal behavior, the whole BASIS of leftist theory has been swept away. As it is tried out in practice it really shows its nonsense.

The Obama election has been a shouting example of this reality.

None Dare Call it Silly. That is, none who want to make a living in the kept opposition.