← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Javelin
Thread ID: 6742 | Posts: 1 | Started: 2003-05-17
2003-05-17 19:16 | User Profile
On Victor Craig's "A Defense of the Faith"
by Edwin Clark
Christianity Pro and Con I thought this was a good piece, as good as an article arguing this position can be, but still not quite good enough to be persuasive. Most of my problems with it come from its first page or so.
(1) Mr. Craig writes that Christianity "created the very culture that men of the West claim to defend." To racialists, this is just not so. The race--the white gene pool--created the culture. The genes of white people predispose their carriers to behave in certain ways, and eventually those ways of behavior are shaped into institutions and those institutions constitute the culture, which then reinforces and selects for the genetically based behavioral patterns. Moreover, white culture existed long, long before Christianity appeared--among the ancient Indo-Europeans, the "barbarians" known to the Greeks and Romans, and most obviously the Greeks and Romans themselves. What is interesting is that white men took the rather measly contributions of the early Christians (the Gospels, the letters of Paul, and various apologetic and polemical writings) and invested them with classical philosophy, Greek and Roman legal and political institutional structures, Western art forms, and even pagan religious usages (saints in place of gods, Christian festivals in place of pagan ones, the portrayal of Christ as a European, etc.)
In other words, whites re-invented Christianity to reflect their innate preferences, and it is in that form that Christianity shaped, "created," and pushed white European civilization. Revilo Oliver in his Christianity and the Survival of the West makes the interesting point that Christianity survived only among whites, that it died out in the Near East with the appearance of Islam and never took much root in Asia or Africa. That is because by the time Islam appeared, Christianity had already been re-invented as a European religion that exerted little appeal to non-Europeans. Subsequently it flourished among non-Europeans only at the point of the sword. So I think Mr. Craig is wrong in his basic premise that Christianity created the West; on the contrary, the West and its underlying genetic substratum created Christianity. (Even ignoring the genetic factor, it is still clear that whites had civilizations long before Christianity and that a very large part of post-Christian civilization derives from it).
(2) Mr. Craig writes that "Christianity must therefore be rescued and revived." Two points here: (a) why the "therefore"? Even if we concede that Christianity "created" the West, it doesn't necessarily follow that the continuing survival of the West depends on the continuation or revival of Christianity. By analogy, art may have first appeared as a means of propitiating the gods or the forces of nature, but that doesn't mean we have to continue to believe that art can really do that in order to keep producing art.
(B) How is it possible for traditional Christianity as Mr. Craig depicts it to be revived? I really don't grasp this. Christianity has died or declined to its present state because of the effects of modern science and historical scholarship; it's all very well for Christian intellectuals to concoct fancy apologetics for Christianity, but the fact is that it is simply impossible for modern educated men to believe in the Bible or the claims of the church to the degree necessary for the revival of traditional Christianity.
At the time Christianity first appeared and for many centuries afterward, it was a plausible set of beliefs because it shared with paganism a supernaturalist world view. Even highly educated men, Christian or not and usually even non-religious people, readily believed in supernatural phenomena and explanations--miracles, magical cures, curses, witchcraft, demonic possession, ghosts, omens, various kinds of fortune telling, etc. They were as ready to invoke supernatural explanations of natural phenomena they didn't understand as to invoke or look for naturalistic ones, and they really did not have very convincing explanations of phenomena they knew were natural (magnetism, thunder and lightning, earthquakes, etc.). Hence, it was not implausible to minds steeped in supernaturalism to believe that a man could rise from the dead, that loaves and fishes could be created from nothing, that a man could walk on water, that virgins could give birth, and that some beings (gods, demigods, magicians) could work miracles.
Today, virtually no educated person and few uneducated ones believe in this kind of supernaturalism. Some may suspend their normal naturalistic habits of mind to acknowledge belief in biblical miracles, but almost no one believes that supernatural explanations are as plausible as naturalistic ones. Since the 18th century, modern science has offered naturalistic explanations and denied the existence of the supernatural so effectively that the modern mind has simply retreated from and abandoned a supernaturalistic world view. Yet the restoration of just such a supernaturalistc world view is what would be required for traditional Christianity to be revived as the dominant creed of Western man. I do not say that it is not possible to be some kind of a Christian, but it is not possible to be a traditional Christian if you are intellectually serious in the light of modern science.
The only people in the last century who have been serious Christians have been either ignoramuses (i.e., people who because of stupidity and ignorance or because of willful blindness have closed their minds to the implications of science) or intellectuals (Kierkegaard, Dostoevski, T.S. Eliot, C.S. Lewis, etc.), who are able to come up with extremely sophisticated defenses of it that most people can't understand and which are usually intensely personal. That may be fine for intellectuals, but a religion confined to them and the ignorati will not be traditional Christianity and cannot be a culturally dominant force or an effective guide for most people. Given the blows suffered by Christianity in the last 200 years or so, I see no alternative to the conclusion that the Christian cat is out of the bag and can't be put back in as long as the forces that let him out are still in existence, and personally I would take those forces (science and scholarship) over Christianity.
(3) I also don't see why "no student of history can argue that Christianity is somehow `inherently' defective in ways that weaken the race." Liberal Christianity is by no means a product of the post-1945 era; it goes back at least to the Renaissance and maybe to the origins of Christianity. There are certainly passages in the New Testament that instruct us to practice an unmitigated universalism, altruism, subordination of self-interest, and rejection of this world (power, wealth, family, class, nation, race, self, etc.) I am the first to admit that these passages can be interpreted in various ways, but repeatedly throughout Christian history they have been interpreted in "liberal" ways. There is no way to settle what they "really" mean except through imposing your own meaning, which is what the traditional church tried to do, ultimately unsuccessfully.
When racialists say that Christianity is "inherently" egalitarian, universalist, etc., they usually mean that these passages are part of the Christian baggage train and can't be removed and sooner or later will pop up. They are right; these passages and heresies based on them popped up throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages. Ah, yes, but, says Mr. Craig, they were heresies, condemned by the church, and can't fairly be ascribed to real or true Christianity. Yes, and the church did suppress them, but they kept coming back and eventually triumphed.
I might also point out, especially with reference to Mr. Craig's statement that "what we now think of as `liberalism' rose up as a force independent from and hostile to the Church," that "liberalism" didn't just pop up out of nowhere. Liberalism is essentially a secularized version of Christianity that takes its "liberal" branches and exaggerates them into the whole tree. I can grant that this was done erroneously and fallaciously, but it still happened and was bound to happen once people started mouthing off about "the meek shall inherit the Earth" and that sort of stuff. It is very clear that only Christian civilization has ever spawned anything like liberalism. The Greeks and Romans knew nothing of it, and their class struggles were simply that--conflicts between rich and poor for class power--without any jabber about "rights," "equality," "peace," and "universal brotherhood." All these latter blessings derive ultimately from Christianity.
(4) The fact that it took a long time for the "inherent" tendencies of Christianity to triumph is not a persuasive argument that these tendencies aren't really there. It takes a long time for smoking to cause cancer, but just because you smoke one cigarette and don't get cancer doesn't mean smoking doesn't cause cancer. Most traditional Christians would argue that tendencies planted in the Renaissance or Enlightenment blossomed into modern secularism and communism, but the fact that it took a long time for them to so blossom isn't a problem. Moreover, as I mentioned above, it didn't take so long after all, because the inherent tendencies of Christianity began to sprout even in antiquity in various heresies; they were denounced and suppressed by other tendencies but survived underground and resurfaced later.
(5) I also disagree with the idea that "our culture is so saturated with Christianity that the two simply cannot be separated." The example given is that of Bach's B Minor Mass. Why not the Parthenon or the Iliad? How can we truly appreciate classical architecture and literature unless we restore the classical paganism that inspired them? The truth is that white men can appreciate white culture regardless of the religion or philosophy behind it; that's why we as whites do appreciate the art of the pagans or even that of non-whites, whom we persist in imagining as white people. Sharing a religious or philosophical point of view might help us appreciate it, but I can't see that it is necessary, and not sharing it might even help explain or illuminate the art and literature of pagan or Christian cultures. Certainly the Christian artists of the Renaissance appreciated classical pagan art and literature, despite their disagreements with pagan religious beliefs.
Finally, I think Mr. Craig and I could find common ground by agreeing that human beings, including and perhaps especially whites, need some kind of myth of transcendence as a motivating and justifying framework of action. Paganism provided that once, just as traditional Christianity did also once, but today neither one can be revived or restored. What whites need now is a new myth of transcendence that can offer transcendent, absolute validation for what they need to do to survive and continue their civilization. Where they can get such a new myth I don't know.