Is There Intelligent Life on Earth? (part 12)

by Revilo P. Oliver

The Gospel

FASHIONS constantly change, of course, and con men are always coming up with new words, but if you look to the essentials, you will see that with Jack Catran we have gone back to Edward Bellamy, and that means, the revelations of Messiah Marx, whence a clear spoor leads back to primitive Christianity. And with Marx, we have left even “science fiction” behind and entered the magical world of religion.

As everyone who has read the Marxists critically has not failed to see, and as Mr. Bannerman most recently reminded us in the July issue of The Liberty Bell, the gospel of St. Marx is just the old Judaeo-Christian mythology with the supernatural sanctions left out, thus making the cult the most implausible and unreasonable of all the Christian heresies. It is true that there is reciprocal hostility between Marxists and the other Christian cults, but that is merely normal. Christian sects began persecuting each other even before one of them attained political power in the decaying Roman Empire, and everyone remembers the fearful Wars of Religion that convulsed and almost ruined Europe. The Gospel of Love invariably incites the most savage and blood-thirsty hatreds.

Marxist cults are both a culmination of the evolution of Christianity and a most impressive instance of the historical and social phenomenon that is best called the cultural residue.⁵⁴ Throughout all history, customs survive the conditions that occasioned them, and all religions inculcate beliefs that come to be taken for granted and so survive the doctrines from which they were originally derived.

We cannot here discuss the long and ironical evolution of Christianity after the Jews inflicted it on the already mongrelized Roman Empire.⁵⁵ As everyone knows, out of the welter of competing sects and the various adaptations of their propaganda to make it less offensive to the Aryan mind, there emerged a generally accepted dogma that Jesus, who was supposedly a third of his father and had more or less taken over from the old man, had ordained such things as “brotherhood” and “equality” and “human rights.” Now so long as one believed in the existence and super-natural power of Jesus and in the veracity of the theologians who claimed to know what he had commanded, one had to accept those strange and unnatural notions as divinely sanctioned and therefore to be enforced, even in open violation of the facts of human nature.

In the Eighteenth Century, men who found the wild tales in the Bible simply unbelievable had to reject the childish myths, but they turned back to the purer source from which the Christians had taken the odd notion of “all mankind,” the Stoicism of the Graeco-Roman world, and became deists, believing in Nature’s God, who was so often mentioned at the time of the American Revolution. This god, whose existence and wishes his votaries deduced from what they knew of the physical world and of the beliefs that the Christians had taken from the Stoics, was believed to have ordained the social dogmas that Christianity had already imposed on Europe, “human rights,” “brotherhood,” etc.

Marx concocted his heresy in a time in which greatly increased knowledge of nature had, as we remarked earlier, sent Nature’s God into the limbo of dead gods. He therefore dispensed with supernatural sanctions altogether, but retained the old dogmas about “human rights” and “equality” and the rest of the social doctrine that Jesus had supposedly commanded men to follow.

Marx was driven, of course, by the lust for destruction that his race has shown throughout its history, but he could count on the law of the cultural residue to prevent most of his contemporaries from seeing that the doctrine that was generally accepted as desirable and right became absurd as soon as one dispensed with a divinity who commanded what was contrary to nature. Without a god to enforce them, “human rights” are merely meaningless noises produced by vocal cords. There are no “rights” in nature, where the only law is the survival of the fittest, i.e., force, the power of muscle or mind. An unarmed man alone in a jungle has no “right” not to be eaten by lions. An American colonist had no “right” not to be tortured to death for the amusement of the Indians who had captured him. There can be no “rights” without the power to enforce them. Only an organized society can create rights, which it bestows by general consensus on its members to regulate their conduct and prevent an anarchical dissolution of the society. A society can bestow rights only on its citizens, to the exclusion of aliens and of other mammals, although it may wish to treat them kindly.

Organized societies may, of course, think it expedient to adopt norms of conduct between themselves, and where the nations are of the same race and have the same instinctive standards, such agreements may bestow rights that can be enforced so long as the concord is maintained. Thus, for example, a German in France may have rights, so long as the two nations are not at war. And among Aryans before their civilization was rotted by alien races (who were naturally intent on their own advantage), there was even a consensus that was supposed to bestow certain shadowy rights in wars between Aryan nations, since the racial instinct forbade certain atrocities. For example, many German soldiers who surrendered to American, Canadian, or British forces during the Jewish War Against the West thought they had a right not to be tortured and murdered; they were mistaken, for the Jews’ stooges had repudiated the standards that had been accepted by civilized nations, and so the Germans, as they soon discovered, had no rights.

The set of illusions, of which “human rights” is a key example, are the real essence of the religion, and it is not at all remarkable that, as we have so often seen in our contemporaries, individuals flop back and forth between the more orthodox Christian sects and Marxism, often executing several such floppings in the course of their lives. Basically, they remain Christians, as did the Lutherans, who repudiated the Papacy, and the Calvinists, who repudiated Luther, too, and all the many other warring sects. The important difference is that so many “Liberals” and the like do not see that the Marxists, having eliminated their god, also eliminated all basis for the social superstitions he supposedly ordained, so that their talk about “all humanity” and “equality” has become mere childish drivel about Santa Claus, his reindeer, and the toys he will bestow when he arrives.

Mr. Catran is just an up-to-date version of Swedenborg, another engineer who thought he had revelations. All that he has really done is put Science in place of Jesus as a miracle-worker, with a great loss in credibility. He will probably have a fit when he discovers that he has really remained a Christian in his heart and his fantasies.

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Source: Liberty Bell publications; transcribed by Racial Idealism