Classic EssaysRevilo P. Oliver

Theological Thinking

by Brian Boru

THE HUMAN MIND is a wondrous thing. Some weeks ago I had the experience of lending to a friend of mine, for his perusal, a recent issue of Liberty Bell magazine. Two days ago (I am writing this on the evening of 29 December 1986) he returned the extra copy to me, and we had a little time to discuss over lunch the portions of the magazine that he had read.

My friend is not an ignorant rustic who came to town by falling off a turnip truck. He does not believe that he will get warts from handling toads, and no one has ever sold him a sky-hook or a left-handed monkey wrench. As a matter of fact, he was graduated with honors from the University of California at Irvine, holds a master’s degree in economics, and after a five-year hiatus that allowed him extensive travel in South America, is now within a year of completing a doctorate in political science at a major university in the Midwest. My friend, in other words, has at least moderately impressive credentials as an “intellectual.” That is what makes the little incident that I am going to relate all the more remarkable.

My friend (let’s call him “Fred”) began reading near the middle of the August, 1986 issue. He found himself in general agreement with Jim Taylor’s assessment of Ferdinand Marcos (“Another Victim,”) and having always detested the disgusting Thaddeus Stevens (the archetypal race-mixer and race-traitor who with Charles Sumner, another of his kind, did so much to promote the rape of the defeated and prostrate South during the era that is mendaciously called the “Reconstruction”) was obviously pleased with Allan Callahan’s concise sketch of “Thaddeus and Lydia.”1 He did not know, until I told him afterward, that the offices of the Institute for Historical Review had been fire-bombed in July of 1984 by the Jews or their employees, but had been interested in historical revisionism at least since a decade ago, when he acquired Tansill’s Back Door To War, Barnes’ Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, Grenfell’s Unconditional Hatred, and a number of other essential titles that have now become classics in the literature. Fred is not unaware that the standard and generally accepted version of recent history is an edifice of lies, ruthlessly shoved down the throats of gullible Aryans by the Jews, to serve their interests.

Fred did question at first my insistence that it was the Jews who were responsible (with or without personal involvement) for the destruction of the Institute, but finally acknowledged, “Yes, they had to be the ones. Who else would have benefited from it?” Nor was he astonished when I pointed out that forensic evidence found at the wreckage of the building strongly suggested the use of a pyrotechnic compound which had produced temperatures far higher than would have occurred following a casual torch-job with gasoline. He was therefore receptive to Dr. Charles Weber’s summary of the present state of revisionist research, and quite convinced that honest historical investigation and writing, at least for the immediate future, is likely to be an increasingly hazardous occupation.

Fred’s familiarity with Madison’s indictment of “the mischiefs of faction” in the celebrated Federalist Paper No. 10 (i.e.,the irreversible corruption of institutions in a “democracy” by the stupidity and greed of a swinish electorate) made Colin Jordan’s piece (“Party Time Has Ended”) merely a confirmation of what he had himself observed of the present direction of politics, both here and in Britain. And with what could he quarrel in George Pittam’s “America’s Decline”? Even Fred had to admit that there was nothing in that article that was not factually accurate, nothing that did not confirm the thesis that the White race is in the process of committing suicide, of which indisputable evidence meets every day the eyes of any man who will open them.

So what was Fred’s problem? Why, after expressing agreement and even enthusiasm for most of the articles in this issue of Liberty Bell, did he have on his face such an expression of distaste and even revulsion as he handed the magazine back to me, grasping one corner of it in thumb and forefinger as though it were radioactive – as though the cover were the lid on a chest brawling with scorpions?

The pons asinorum, of course, was Dr. Oliver’s Postscripts, particularly the first, (“Geological Disinformation.”) Fred, you see, while being an intelligent and generally well-read man, is also a Christian.

This man, despite being familiar with the canons of historical evidence, despite having an intellectual conscience that can be offended by crude fables such as that of the Jews’ unintentionally comic “Holocaust,” still cannot control the reflex implanted in his childhood, when he was trained to believe in “the truth of the Scriptures.” This usually sensible man, who knows perfectly well the significance of the Forged Decretals and the Donation of Constantine, not to mention the countless phials of Virgin’s milk and fragments of the “True Cross” that once filled reliquaries all over Europe, still insists on regarding as sober history the collection of tall tales and tribal anecdotes collected in his Bible. It is therefore only too understandable that he should balk at any discourse that might challenge the credibility of his favorite story-book.

The first Postscript in the August issue, if you remember, concerned an article in Retirement Life according to which a volcanic eruption in the Mediterranean caused the famous “parting of the waters” in the Arabian Gulf which, it is claimed in the familiar tale, enabled Moses and his fellow pickpockets and shoplifters to scuttle away to safety after relieving the Egyptians of everything they had that was of value. Fred found particularly to his dislike Dr. Oliver’s objection to the preposterous thesis of the article, as well as to the silly fable that it was concocted to support:

A tsunami in the comparatively shallow waters of a narrow gulf is extremely unlikely and I cannot recall having ever heard of one, but assuming that one did occur and that it exposed the floor of the sea, that would not have helped the Sheenies in the story, who were trying to escape from Egypt with their loot. In the first place, their feet and the feet of their pack animals would have been bogged down in the mire of the freshly exposed sea bottom. And in the second place, if the waters did recede and exposed the sea bottom, a tidal wave of equal force would have returned long before the marauders could have traveled the distance from one side of the gulf to the other, even on dry land. The returning wave would have overwhelmed the fleeing Yids and would have delivered the world from a terrible affliction. (p. 3.)

Well, Fred’s faith was not to be perturbed by such considerations, and as he delivered his respondeo (in the manner of Aquinas), the scowl on his face turned to a smile of beatific benevolence, as though what he said was a mighty salvo to counfound a whole roomful of nasty Professor Olivers, and perhaps the thousands of even nastier fossils, in museums all over the world, that blasphemously insist on being much more than six thousand years old.

“Men,” he began, quietly and patiently, as though explaining a problem in tensor calculus to a low-grade moron, “have laid transoceanic telephone cables and built things like the Lincoln Tunnel in New York, and men will soon build a tunnel under the English Channel big enough to carry both automobile and railroad traffic. Do you imagine that a God Who fashioned the seas in the first place; a God Who had the power to create the whole, vast planetary system and hurl it into space with a flip of His wrist – that such a mighty God could not hold back the waters for as long as it might be necessary for His chosen people to cross the ocean bed and so fulfill the destiny that He ordained for them? Of course He could dry the floor of the sea for the Hebrews – and pave it with concrete too, if He wanted – if that was what was necessary for His will to be done.”

He paused, and shook his head slightly, as though in sorrow at the narrowness of my small mind. “God, remember, is by definition a being – the only being – Whose power is equal to His will. You skeptics constantly amaze me. You fret and quibble over minutiae when the evidence of God’s power is all around you, staring you in the face. Is it logical? Is it reasonable? You argue, in effect, that a man who can raise a five-hundred-pound weight could not lift an ounce. For someone who claims to be rational, that surely makes no sense at all.”

Having said that, my friend gives a little nod of the head, as though to say, “The Defense Rests.” The phrase would have been appropriate, theologians – whether professionals like Paul Tillich and Hans Küng, or enthusiastic amateurs like Fred – being merely God’s lawyers, forever pleading to get their Client off on a charge of non-existence.

Let us pass over, for the present, the question of whether a God who does things by a flip of the wrist might be “gay.” After all, he never took a wife, and the sneaking and underhanded Mary-business will not reassure anyone who has doubts about his “orientation.”2 On the other hand, it may be that he’s just such an ill-mannered and disagreeable old fart that no self-respecting goddess would have Him – not even if He made her to order. Certainly, none of the fair and gracious goddesses of the Homeric pantheon would willingly associate with the cosmic schmuck. Aphrodite would have spurned Him in contempt, Hera would have made short work of Him, and Artemis would have directed one of her unerring shafts in such a way as to insure either that He would molest no more young virgins, or else that He would spend several centuries eating His supper off a high shelf. That question, too, like the question (as Clarence Darrow put it in the famous Scopes “Monkey” Trial) of “where the Hell did Cain’s wife come from?”, does not admit of a certain or even probable answer, and so is sure to be the meat and drink of disputative theologians for as long as Christianity lasts, especially now that we have been blessed with a “gay theology” to join ranks with the already accepted and legitimized feminist and “liberation” theologies.

But let us stick to the issue at hand: the alleged legerdemain in the Arabian Gulf. If you give the matter some thought, I suppose, you can form in your mind an image of old Yahweh hunkering down, on arthritic joints, his butt hanging a few hundred feet above the shores of the “Red Sea,” and going WHOOOOOSH! so as to blow-dry the sea bed for his chosen rabble as they made off with their booty. (A strict anthropomorphism does present some conceptual difficulties, doesn’t it?) Or, a trifle more reasonably, you might conclude that God, being God, can do any God-damned thing he pleases: alter the laws of chemistry and physics at whim, render natural processes anentropic, and even – who knows? – make clergymen honest.

If God had any doubts as to how to proceed, he had merely to jump ahead 27 or 33 centuries (depending on how you date the “Exodus”) and take a peek at Cecil B. DeMille and his special-effects technicians on the Paramount studio’s back lot.3 If Yahweh had taken the trouble to learn His craft from the pious and successful master illusionist (who was once honored by having his portrait on the cover of the Birch-racket’s monthly magazine for having made some “anti-Communist” statements about which he may have been sincere), He might even have gotten together an act good enough to get Himself into the Stupid God Tricks competition on the David Letterman Show. So if ever you may be in wonder as to the might of the Almighty, just remember the little piety you were taught in childhood, suitably emended: With God [and Hollywood] all things are possible [especially with Hollywood]. I have not seen the article in Retirement Life to which Dr. Oliver refers in the August issue, so I cannot say much about it other than the obvious consideration that it is not the first effort by holy men, or by others practicing the arts of what Thomas Paine aptly called “priestcraft,” to fudge geological data for the purpose of giving a patina of scientific objectivity and credibility to the myths and fables of the Old Testament. For a really masterful exercise in that manner, one can see The Flood in the Light of the Bible, Geology, and Archaeology by Alfred M. Rehwinkel (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1951). The author is (or was) Professor of Theology at Concordia Seminary, and his work may be taken as representative of the growing literature of prostituted science – “science” brought to harness in furtherance of a predetermined conclusion or belief.

Rehwinkel’s rant – which you really should read for yourself, lest you think anything I might say about it an exaggeration – like that of contemporary “creation scientists,” will be repellent to any man with even a modicum of intellectual honesty, and we need not digress to review it in detail here. The point that matters is that the writer, having determined – or more precisely, having been emotionally conditioned to believe – that the Biblical account of the Flood must be true because it is God’s word, goes merrily about his business, assembling his data, and constructing his arguments, selectively, not to establish what he already “knows,” but to make plausible to the young audience he is addressing in emotional rhetoric the body of doctrine of which he is a paid representative.4 It is simply a fact of life in the real world that seminary professors arguing the historical and scientific truth of Genesis are as much to be believed as spokesmen for the Tobacco Institute extolling the benefits of cigarettes. It is merely typical of theologians and theological texts. Augustine, for example, specifically and candidly sanctioned the practice of drawing upon facts which support the claims of faith, and of ignoring or suppressing those which do not. If faith is what matters most (and no theologian or apologist could deny that without putting himself out of business), then truth must be subordinated to it, for truth and faith cannot both be accommodated – at least not at the same time in the same mind. Sanctified lying becomes the order of the day.

If we take the position that the Bible must be upheld as true at whatever affront to intellectual integrity and conscience we can do that, but we are obliged to recognize that the Bible is not the only book that can be so regarded. We can likewise, if we lie with equal skill, maintain, for example, the gospel of Marx – and in fact, that is just what theorists of Marxism in practice do when they try to claim that Marxism is both internally consistent and harmonious and a truthful and accurate representation of the real world, or some aspect of it. Sane and honest men, on the other hand, learn very quickly that Marxist “theory” is merely the obscene ravings of diseased minds, that its contradictions and inconsistencies cannot be resolved and were never intended to be resolved, and consign the whole mess to the realm of lunatics’ babble, which has nothing to do with reality. We must beware of theological thinking if for no other reason than because the same kind of “reasoning” which establishes the Trinity can with equal plausibility prove the existence of mermaids and fire-breathing dragons.

But what about the Bible?

Before opening that book, one has to decide what it is that one wants out of it. If it is comfort and serenity that is sought, then one can accept the preacher’s exhortation: just give your heart, your soul, your mind, and above all your money to Sweet Jesus and let the round-collars do the rest. If it is factual information one wants – if truth is the objective – then caution and sobriety are required.

Let’s put it another way. If we read a work of imaginative literature – Hamlet, let’s say – then we accept the premises of the story and take the narrative as truthful. And we are not really concerned with the historical question of whether there was even a real Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, or whether his uncle murdered his father and the rest of it. Our purpose is to participate in the drama and share its author’s poetic vision, and if we would understand why the plot “works,” we need only to see whether, if there were a Hamlet in the given circumstances, he would, or might, behave in the manner of Shakespeare’s protagonist. That is what is generally meant by the phrase, “the poetic suspension of disbelief,” and that is why it would be obtuse and almost an impertinence to cavil at the ghost in Hamlet, or the witches in Macbeth, or the pathetic fallacy whereby the sky clouds up and a horse weeps at the death of the young hero in Matthew Arnold’s “Sohrab and Rustum.” These are literary conventions with a long and venerable lineage.

We can likewise read the Bible as poetry, if we wish – although we soon find that, compared with Homer and Shakespeare, it’s pretty lousy poetry. What we can not do is uphold the poetry as sober history. We can perform the poetic suspension of disbelief if we read the Christian scriptures as imaginative literature, but not if we read them as historical documents. The point is that the Christians cannot have it both ways. They must choose one horn of the dilemma or the other. If the Bible is true – objectively and historically true – then it is true by virtue of being consonant with the rules of historical and scientific evidence, not because of “faith.” Faith is not needed if the Bible is objectively true, and cannot make it true if it is objectively false. Faith is not a means of cognition. Neither can faith transform or transvalue reality, except in the imaginations of men who are certifiably insane.

That is the criterion we must keep in mind when we ask ourselves whether Moses, if indeed he existed, parted the waters of the “Red Sea,” or whether a Nazarene bastard with uppity notions rose from the dead. And common sense, and a reasonable acquaintance with the real world, soon give us the answer.

We need not make light, or think unkindly, of persons like my friend Fred, who, after all, lost his father when a young boy, and was raised by a devoted and devout mother who honestly feared that her only son might burn forever if he displeased a God by having incorrect opinions about Him.

Suffice it to say that religions, like women’s faces, are seen to best advantage under subdued light. The spirit of generosity and compassion that pervades the characters of the best and wisest men of our race disdains tactlessness and insensitivity, and would not wish to deprive the anguished of their spiritual comfort, even if they know it to be an illusion. Men need not feel their honesty compromised if they do not barge into hospitals and proclaim to the dying that there is no God.

Nevertheless, ours is a time in which “our” religion, which is to say, the prevailing, accepted, and officially sanctioned religion, has become a deadly weapon in the hands of our racial enemies. All attempts – even Hitler’s – to Aryanize Christianity and somehow make it harmonious with, or at least, not destructive of, our racial aspirations and ethos have failed utterly. The Jewish Export Religion and its derivative superstitions have now become a deadly poison that, as William Simpson says somewhere in his great book, Which Way, Western Man?, we shall have to vomit up or die. Recognizing that, we must reluctantly set courtesy and politesse aside. Anything that enables us to understand the mechanisms of the alien deception is advantageous and indeed vital. We are obliged to say, as did the late Robert Ardrey in the first volume of his indispensable tetralogy on human origins, “We [have] tried everything else, so perhaps we should at last try the truth.”5 These fallacies are often found in combination, reënforcing each other, and they do not exhaust the theologians’ bag of tricks. But I think it would be safe to say that if you were to eliminate them, where they are found, you would wipe out nine-tenths of all the theological writing there is.

If you will look at any significant specimen of theological writing, as I have been somewhat loosely employing the term,6 you will find that the edifice consists of a superstructure which rests on four pillars. All of these were identified as flaws in reasoning by the logicians of antiquity, but at no time has that in the least impaired their operation. They are as indispensable to Hans Küng and Billy Graham as to Augustine and Luther. Christians in general, unless exceptionally well educated, would not recognize them if they were pointed out, and even many of these would not have the conscience to care if they did.

First there is the petitio principii – begging the question; assuming as already proved what is yet to be proved, which is the burden of your argument. This is what generates circular reasoning, without which the Bible would stand naked as the tawdry bag of lies and delusions that it is. It can be as ingenious and subtle as Anselm’s Ontological Argumentfor the existence of God,7 as overflowing with sancta simplicitas as the declamation of my Christian friend, who held that because men can dig under-water tunnels, the Jews’ tribal deity actually parted the waters of the Arabian Gulf. In that example, of course, the issue is not whether an all-Powerful God, if there were one, could have done what is claimed for Him, but whether the event described actually happened. Christianity is based on assertions of fact; it does not rest its case on things that could have happened. Circularity is what occurs when the first and last links in the chain of reasoning are conjoined. “Jesus Christ is the Son of God and rose from the dead!” exclaims the preacher. “Why?,” you ask. “Because the Bible says so.” “Who says the Bible is worth a damn?”’ you ask. “Jesus Himself said so, and so did Paul: ‘Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me;’ and ‘All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: That the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works.’” (John 5:39 and II Timothy 3:16-17, AV, respectively.) Round and round and round you go, and if you think you can keep your balance on that carousel, good luck. Establish either proposition independently of the other, and reasonable men would concede that you might have a point.

The second pillar of theological thinking is the non sequitur, the flawed deduction, the glittering irrelevancy. A perfect example is furnished by the very article in Retirement Life with which we began. If the parting of the waters for Moses & Co. was a miraculous act, caused by the direct intervention of God, then why go groping about for natural explanations? Why talk about tidal waves and tsunamis and the rest of it if you stand on the authority of Exodus 14, which says quite unambiguously that there was “a strong east wind,” which held back the walls of Water and dried the sea-bed at the same time? (And would it be improper to ask how a wind strong enough to hold back the sea – a wind that would have to be of tornadic intensity – didn’t blow the Jews and their possessions about like goose-down?) Similarly, from Joseph’s dream of an angel telling him how Mary came to have a bun in the oven, nothing follows, for no dream ever was or ever could be evidence of anything, except, perhaps, overdoing it at the dinner table the evening before.

But the best example of all of the non sequitur in religious thinking is the familiar “pragmatic” argument, which holds that Christianity is true because it is the foundation of morality, implying that a general decline in Christian belief must bring with it a deterioration of moral conduct. That proposition seems dubious at best, for what really precedes the decay of public morality, in any case we may wish to examine, is a deterioration in the biological quality of the population, whether from a fatuous and sentimental solicitude for the lower races and a suicidal determination to accelerate their breeding, or the moral cowardice which cannot bear the thought of ruthlessly eliminating from our own race its criminals and defectives. But the evidence would be largely circumstantial and perhaps inconclusive, and would not, in any case, be convincing to Christians. The really telling objection to their claim is the fact that it is simply irrelevant. Assume that Christian belief is the indispensable basis of moral conduct: that still does not make the belief true. Truth is not a consequence of social utility.

Third, if we can’t answer a man’s argument, we can always asperse his person. This is the argumentum ad hominem. For example, I (an evangelist) don’t have to listen to what you (a nasty atheist) have to say, because you are going to Hell! “Be ye not unequally yoked with unbelievers,” Paul says in II Corinthians 6:14, “for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness?” Find a Christian who can, without raising his spleen, read Paine and Ingersoll and Bertrand Russell,8 and you have found a rare being, one who is probably on his way out of the mire of faith and moving toward the dry ground of common sense. It would never occur to Paul, nor to the millions whose thinking he has influenced, that while Christian and atheist cannot share a fellowship of faith, they can participate in the fellowship and communion of men who seek the truth – and that, I would think, is an enterprise worthy of all men of good will. But, as I have already indicated above, between faith and truth there is an unbridgeable chasm, and the Christian has already made his choice.

Sometimes the argumentum ad hominem is couched in such extreme condescension as to reach the level of downright incivility. Of that the most repulsive example is the nauseatingly smug rejoinder, “I shall pray for you.” My Christian friend Fred, after returning the offending magazine to my hand, affirmed that he would pray for my soul and for the souls of “those who have led you astray,” evidently fearful that even now old Yahweh must be gathering charcoal and lighter-fluid for the great post-Apocalyptic soul-fry.

I would not be candid if I did not admit feeling a measure of disappointment in my friend, but I did not feel like dignifying such a thoughtless and patronizing remark by answering it. The fact is that nobody has “led me astray.” My present conclusions are the result of some twenty-five years of careful and I hope dispassionate study and reflection on these issues, beginning with my reading of Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason when I was a freshman in college, and continuing to the present time. I stand by them unequivocally and without apology. And I will continue to search for truth, as best I can, until I either die, or become too senile to open a book.

I am certainly not infallible, and I do not claim to have achieved finality. I happily leave that species of intellectual hubris to those most comfortable with it: holy men. I, you see, can afford the luxury of acknowledging the possibility that I could be wrong. My Christian friends can’t. That is what makes them and their religion so vulnerable.

As a matter of fact, I should be honored to be roasted on the same spit with William Gayley Simpson and Revilo Oliver, and I look forward to not having to knock about for the next few billion years with a gaggle of saints. Pray for me? – nay! Hearken if you must to the echoes of your own voice that you have the impudence to call God’s, but spare me, O vain and foolish man, your feckless agitations of the empty air. Come to think of it, if Dante was right, there will be a lot of Christians taking passage below-decks, having fallen from the sin of spiritual pride, and that would be enough to make Hell distinctly unpleasant!

Finally, we have as the fourth pillar of theological thinking the argumentum ad ignorantiam, the appeal to ignorance, which would shift the burden of proof to the skeptic. It claims, in essence, that we should accept Christianity because we cannot prove that it is not true. At the very least, it is said, we should give it the benefit of the doubt because it might be true, and that usually buttressed with an appeal to its supposed social utility as a means of enforcing morality.

All of the objections discussed above apply equally well here. Christianity rests on claims of fact, so what might be the truth is irrelevant, and cannot be used to support the believer’s case. The value of religions in general, and of the Christian religion in contemporary Western society in particular, with respect to the maintenance of ordinary morality is at best problematical, and in any case a belief cannot be held true merely because it is useful. And finally, reasonable men do not feel bound to believe everything they cannot disprove, for if they did, we should have to populate the universe with every impossible animal and mythical monster conceived in the folklore of a thousand nations and tribes; we should not be able to take a step without bumping into a cerberus or a polyphemos or a Loch Ness Monster. We should have to believe in phlogiston and alchemy, in spontaneous generation and Ptolemaic epicyles, and in all the rest of the intellectual débris that litters the course of our race’s history.

These four devices, as I have said, do not exhaust the ingenuity of theologians in devising bad reasons for embracing the absurd. We have not even mentioned Paul’s famous oxymoron in Hebrews 11:1, or Pascal’s Wager, which have prevailed upon intelligences that should have known better than to take them seriously. We have not discussed the sentimental appeal, on the part of conservative and religiously motivated writers like Russell Kirk and Richard Weaver, to the high Middle Ages as some sort of golden era from which we, poor wretches, have ignobly fallen – strangely silent, of course, on the question of why mediaeval man, for all his evident piety, needed no more encouragement to drink and fight, to blaspheme and fornicate, than his Twentieth-Century counterpart. An adequate treatment of all these topics would fill a rather large book. Still, from even a small sample one gets a fairly accurate idea of the whole.

A good-natured Jesuit once explained to me the difference between a philosopher and a theologian. A philosopher, he said, is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn’t there; a theologian is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn’t there and finds it.

Theological thinking is something that the rational mind cannot embrace without disowning itself. The rational mind of Aryan man cannot hold, at the same time, two contradictory and antithetical propositions or concepts. Men of other races, whose minds may be fully as keen and subtle as the best of our own, can, but we can’t. It is an inescapable limitation imposed by the structure of our intelligences and the way we look at the world – the only way we can look at the world. We have, as a race, tried since the age of the Schoolmen to make sense out of nonsense, and we ought, I think, to have at last the simple honesty to recognize that it can’t be done – and move on.

Theology is a bag of intellectual goods that honest men cannot buy. It may be palatable and even appealing to other races, but it is alien to us. If we look to its antecedents, we can soon form a simple and easily demonstrated historical judgment: Theology is Jewish.

Augustine on the Trinity, or Luther on justification by faith alone, or even Hal Lindsay telling us (from his privileged information) all about the Battle of Armageddon and the End of the World, all differ in style and emphasis from Hillel’s learned commentaries on the Law, but not really in kind. Jesuitical quibbles and subtleties are, at base, rabbinical quibbles and subtleties, directed toward different ends. The lineage is as unmistakable as that of the plain chant that grew from the liturgical chants of the post-Exilic temple. Exercises in theology do not in any degree resemble historical or scientific or philosophical inquiries. Both in objectives and in means they are totally irreconcilable with the kind of thought that produces things like Darwin’s Origin of Species or Geoffrey Bibby’s Looking for Dilmun or John von Neumann’s Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Theory. These are the memorials of men who have looked out upon the world to the end of explaining some aspect of external reality. Scholars and scientists direct their intelligences outward; their labors inform and fecundate the human mind. Theologians, who may have very keen minds indeed, direct their intelligences inward; they, in effect, hide in a closet and masturbate.

Over the years, Dr. Oliver has reminded us, at various points in his writings, of Professor R.G. Collingwood’s observation that one cannot fully understand a statement unless one knows the question that it was formulated to answer. Every device of theologians, of which we have considered only a few of the principal ones, was a response to an objection on the part of some interlocutor, perhaps centuries ago, who challenged some point of doctrine. It is a large part of what seminarians learn about in their apologetics courses. The very fact that apologetics is a distinct discipline attests to the necessity, felt by each branch or denomination of the Christian religion, to meet reasoned objection, since no church has any longer the power to barbecue annoying skeptics. It gives some credence to the complaint of a lady I once knew, a Catholic “traditionalist,” who lamented that the one place where a young Catholic was most certain to lose his faith was a Roman Catholic seminary. It will not do to suggest the analogy between seminarians studying heresy and medical students studying disease, for medical students do not ordinarily contract the illnesses they are learning about. Seminary students studying apologetics, on the other hand, are at grave risk of being fatally stricken with common sense. And if that happens, what becomes of their “vocation?”

The fact is that one can never know with certainty what another man believes, or how he feels about something. All we can know is what he is willing to profess, with the understanding that from observing his actions we may draw such conclusions as seem warranted, and with the dolorous knowledge that nearly all men will lie, if they perceive an advantage to be gained thereby, and if they think they can get away with it. That raises the discomforting possibility that many professional clergymen, perhaps even a majority, do not really believe in the doctrines that they profess. We may think them liars, unconscionable frauds who are not merely uttering, but living a lie, but they, consoling widows with the hope that they will some day meet their spouses in the great Bye-and-bye, may think of themselves as physicians administering placebos, to relieve the symptoms of psychosomatic illness. It’s not really honest, they may tell themselves, but then it doesn’t really hurt anybody either. Does it?

I am inclined to have a greater regard for the intelligence of holy men than for their protestations. In ages past, when men were rarely favored with literacy, the simple parish priest of courtly romance may actually have existed from time to time and place to place, but that figure in no way resembles the supple young men of today, who know very well what they are about, and who are highly skilled in the arts (which Jesus is said to have condemned) of making nays that sound like yeas and of pouring new wine into old bottles.

The theological thinking promoted by the Jewish Export Religion has poisoned the soul and paralyzed the conscience of Aryan man. It has made him sentimental, credulous, and foolish. It has so alienated him from his racial roots that he can, in a fit of religious dementia, claim to be “a true Israelite,” and so estranged him from ordinary human decency that he can long for Armageddon and a tableau of universal slaughter, to be watched from the clouds, to which, he fancies, he will be “raptured.” It has contemned his time-honored virtues of honesty, honor, courage (especially intellectual courage), loyalty to race and nation, the innate longing to explore and seek new worlds, and the will to master, to conquer or die. It has scorned life in the world that is, to peddle lying promises of things that can never be. It frankly declares that men must come to its imaginary god as if little children, precisely because little children have not the capacity to distinguish reality from fantasy, and truth from lies. Its practitioners would, if they had their way, reduce every grown man to a puling sucktit.

But a child cannot help being raised as it is, for it is under the control of those who are older, bigger, stronger, and by nature and law, in positions of authority over it. A grown, mature man with even a moderately active intelligence has no such excuse. The plea that “I was raised a Catholic (Methodist, Lutheran, etc.), so I guess I’ll always be one,” is the despicable refuge of weak and cowardly minds. Let no misguided attachment to parents or childhood memories absolve from the duties of conscience: a man is as responsible for what he believes and its consequences as for his conduct.

To Christians of good will I would address but one question, and I would request that they think carefully before answering. I ask you in conscience: If Christianity were false, would you want to know it?

And to all of our race I would say: let us at last put aside vain illusions and idle fancies. Let us face the fact that we are alone in a universe that cares not of our plight, and live in it as best we can. Let us take leave of the childish folly that insists that “we must have a faith” – any faith, true or not. Better would we make our home under the open sky, naked to the elements, than in a rotting shack, reeking of filth and crawling with vermin; if it is the lot of the Faustian seeker of knowledge and power to live as a nomad, so be it. Let us close the door on imaginary terrors; there are real ones enough. Let us cease to look for strength to meek and humble saviors, and search instead within ourselves; we will find it nowhere else. Let us turn away from cringing before contemptible enemies and stand up to our adversaries, that those who come after will not justly despise our memories. Let us live and strive and die, when it is time, like men.


NOTES

1 The example of Thaddeus Stevens reminds us how frequently, as Lothrop Stoddard pointed out in The Revolt Against Civilization, the really remarkable degenerates of history exhibit a physical deformity that proclaims, like a badge, their mental and moral deformity. Their ravings and their murderous hatreds are likewise the products of diseased brains, which explains why they cannot be prevailed upon by earnest argument, missionary zeal, and “love.” One Thaddeus Stevens is enough to blow to smithereens all the sanctified lies and hypocrisies of our age which somehow depend on the assumption that nurture and not Nature makes the man. It also demonstrates quite convincingly that the proper instrument for dealing with what Stoddard called “the revolt of the under-man” is not the “marketplace of ideas,” but the firing-squad. Kierkegaard is not a writer whom I particularly admire, but there is an aphorism of his (admittedly taken out of context) that could be well applied here: “In vain would they fight intellectually against error,” he wrote, “when they should be fighting ethically against rebellion.”

2 Consider the repulsive vulgarity of the whole tale of the “Incarnation”: a supposedly all-powerful God decides to send his son into the world. Instead of simply bringing him forth ex nihilo, or even fashioning him from the dust, as he is said to have done with Adam, the old demiurge instead implants him on the person of a betrothed virgin. He slyly slips in ahead of poor Joseph, who, being a pious Jew, evidently doesn’t mind being cuckolded by a will-o’-the-wisp. (At first Joseph, it is suggested in Matt. 1:19, seems to have formed the reasonable conclusion that Mary’s condition was the result of contact with a passing stranger – a Roman soldier or official, perhaps, who happened to see her and who wanted to taste a kosher virgin; at any rate, he knew that her state was not his own doing.) In any case, Mary is, in the colloquial phrase, “knocked up,” and God initiates his wonderful new religion with a debauched marriage. What a rotten thing to do! What a characteristically Jewish thing to do! Do you mean to tell me that God could not have located, in all of Palestine, an unattached virgin to be the vessel of David’s seed? Was there not a young virgin to be found anywhere in Palestine? (We are discussing Jews, remember, so the question is not rhetorical. It reminds one of the Professor of Philosophy who once took a survey of the thirty undergraduates in his Existentialism course by requesting of the co-eds, “All of you who are still virgins, please float to the ceiling.”) Better yet, why could not God have foisted Jesus on the body of a cow or a she-ass? That would have been better show-biz to wow the rabble, and no vile unbelievers could have denied the miraculous nature of the event. Perhaps that trick wasn’t in his repertoire; or perhaps God was just having a bad day, as we all do now and again, and couldn’t do any better than compromising his Mother by impregnating her with her Grandson. That is a question I leave for soteriologists to toil over.

3 3. This interminable screen-epic – it runs nearly four hours, even with a twenty-minute intermission – is, unintentionally, one of the funniest films ever made. The preposterous events, narrated with a solemn unction by DeMille himself, are made to seem yet more grotesque against the ludicrously sententious and stilted dialogue. Every time Moses or Pharaoh expresses a wish, a sombre voice off-stage – a rabbinical voice, as if intoning the Kol Nidre – says, “So let it be written; so let it be done.” From the technical standpoint, the special effects are highly proficient, given the more primitive technology available to the industry in 1956, so it is a (barely) passable kid-movie, if you have to park your youngster in the neighborhood theatre on a Saturday afternoon so you can have some peace and quiet at home – provided, of course, that you have explained to your child that The Ten Commandments is just a story, and that just because the Bible is the Holy, Infallible, and Inerrant Word of God, that doesn’t mean that any of it is true. My own taste in films with antiquarian-mythological settings leans more toward Ulysses (1955), Helen of Troy (1957), and Jason and the Argonauts (1962), in the last-named of which the scenes of Jason prying open Talos’s heel, and of his battle with the monsters resurrected from the Dragon’s teeth, equal or excel the best of DeMille’s cinematic tricks. (I know that Kirk Douglas had the title rôle in Hollywood’s beau geste to Homer’s immortal wanderer, but try to overlook the incongruity of a Jewish Odysseus and enjoy a what is otherwise a rather good film; the Rosanna Podesta who played Helen may not have been a great actress, but she was an astonishingly beautiful woman thirty years ago, and Greek as well, if that was her right name, worthy of the character she portrayed.) Of course, you may want to see The Ten Commandments yourself, sans kids, for reasons of your own. You may want to scrutinize the mechanisms of an effective propaganda-piece, which for thirty years, in theatres and on the idiot-box, has been promoting the idea of Jewish sanctity, and the notion that any people who try to defend themselves against Jewish predators must be “Nazis.” You get the idea very early on that Pharaoh Ramses (Yul Brynner) is really a Hollywood Führer, and his master-builder Beket (Vincent Price) an SS interrogator. You may wonder why Bithia (Moses’s adoptive mother, played by Nina Foch) got so worked up that she had to overturn her chair in the scene in which she orders a chariot to take her to Goshen, to find her wayward son. (Moses has at this point abandoned the responsibilities of Pharaoh’s successor-designate to wallow in the mud with his fellow Jews.) And you really should enjoy again that gem of characterization, one which amazingly escaped censure as a “racial stereotype” – the late Edward G. “Robinson,” in the rôle he was born to play, as Dathan, the Hebrew overseer, a slimy, conniving, repulsive little kike who has the hots for Joshua’s girl-friend (Lilia, as portrayed by Debra Paget) and who is Moses’s principal rival for leadership of the kosher rabble. The only thing the film lacked was a producer with the imagination to make it into a musical comedy, with a chorus of tap-dancing locusts to chastise the Egyptians for not handing everything over to the sheenies in the first place.

4 That phrase, “the Biblical account of the Flood,” is a kind of euphemism the purpose of which is to conceal the fact that the Jews, with their inborn latronic talents as cultural parasites, took that story, as well as their cosmogony, from the Sumerians. The correspondence between the two accounts is so close that, as Professor J.W. Swain remarks in the first volume of The Ancient World (New York: Harper, 1950, p. 223), “The [Biblical] stories of creation, the patriarchs, and the flood are so similar to Sumerian accounts of the same things that no one can doubt the ultimate Sumerian origin of the Hebrew version.” It may not be out of place to remember that the first reference to “Hebrews” is the Akkadian word in the Amarna tablets transliterated as Habiru, meaning “invaders,” “thieves,” or “robbers.” The parasites’ racial mentality has not changed in three thousand years.

5 African Genesis (New York: Atheneum, 1961, p. 205.)

6 The term “theology” is one of which it is notoriously difficult to formulate a satisfactory definition, for reasons which you will find explained in the perceptive essay “Against Theology,” in Walter Kaufmann’s The Faith of a Heretic (New York: Doubleday, 1961.) Kaufmann, a Jew or half-Jew (mother née Seligssohn) teaches (or taught) in the Philosophy Department at Princeton, and is also the author of the earlier Critique of Religion and Philosophy and a number of other works. Kaufmann’s is a keen and penetrating mind and he has, moreover, a fine prose style, which, unfortunately, is more than can be said of most who write on religious subjects. Despite the immeasurable value to the Jews of their Export Religion – where would they be without it? – it is, nevertheless, a curious fact that often the most acute and telling criticisms of Christianity come from Jews (e.g., Hugh J. Schonfield, author of The Passover Plot and Those Incredible Christians) who write from a range of motives that may include simple honesty. I mean merely to indicate that the considerations under discussion here apply not only to works like Augustine’s City of God and Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, but equally to contemporary popular apologetics and evangelism. By theological thinking I mean not only that which argues or assumes the existence of a god or gods, but any which attempts to rationalize a belief that is unreasonably, obstinately, and irresponsibly held, usually with an intense emotional attachment, against the relevant evidence. By that definition the insistence that Negroids do poorly on test-scores in school merely because they are “disadvantaged” would be a timely example of theological thinking.

7 Anselm argued that God, defined as an Absolutely Perfect Being, must necessarily exist, for such a being, lacking existence, would be less than perfect, and therefore a contradiction in terms. The argument, on inspection, collapses into a tautology: an Absolutely Perfect Being, if there were one, would be absolutely perfect. Because we can conceive of, and define, an “absolutely perfect being,” that does not mean that there is one. We do not attribute existence to everything we can define, for if we did, we would have to believe that griffins, centaurs, and leprechauns exist. Kant made the point, in his famous remark in The Critique of Pure Reason, that “existence is not a predicate.” It would not be patronizing to note that Anselm had probably the greatest mind in all of the Middle Ages, and to wonder what he might have been able to accomplish had he been born, say, in the Nineteenth Century and received a decent university education.

8 Let me suggest that you not be so quick to dismiss Russell as a mere “pacifist” and “commie bastard,” as did the Right-wing publicists of the Fifties. Genius usually earns its eccentricities, and Russell had his share and then some. But if you peruse the Philosophy of Logical Atomism and the Principia Mathematica (co-authored with Alfred North Whitehead), you will meet a mind of the very first rank, and one which discerned quite early in life that Christianity is not only foolish, but pernicious. Like many learned men who reject religion in their youth, Russell retained many of its derivative social superstitions, including undifferentiated pacifism. With the British journalist James Cameron, he founded one of the first of the many groups that agitated for nuclear disarmament, but that was probably because he remained throughout his long life more Christian in his thinking than he ever suspected. Of relevance here is the collection called Sceptical Essays, and in particular the piece entitled “Why I Am Not a Christian,” which, inter alia, pokes a little good-natured fun at the staid and teddibly respectable Church of England.

* * *

Source: Liberty Bell magazine, April 1987; transcribed by Racial Idealism

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