three arguments for religion

I have a somewhat ambivalent view towards religion. In general I approve of it but modern Christianity fills me with dismay. 

As to whether I’m actually a believer, I have to be honest and say I tend towards agnosticism. However I do feel that no society can survive without religion. Religion is simply something that is hard-wired into us. If we stop believing in mainstream religion we almost invariably end up turning towards fringe cults, or new age silliness, or pseudo-religions like environmentalism, Social Justice or even liberal democracy. It always ends badly.

There is however another very important argument in favour of religion. Without the moral framework of religion we end up judging everything on the basis of emotions. We don’t know what is right or wrong so we go for whatever gives us the most satisfying warm inner glow of emotion. And we end up on an emotional roller-coaster as we desperately try to find the certainty that we never can find.

The third argument in favour of religion has to do with social conformity. Human beings have a very strong, and sometimes very dangerous, instinct to conform. It takes great inner strength to stand against this temptation, and religious faith is one of the few things that can offer us that inner strength.

But that brings us back to the problem of modern Christianity. Christianity, a practised by a majority of Christians today (and as promoted by the vast majority of church leaders) is not a religion at all. It is a pseudo-religion and it has all the disadvantages outlined above. It is based on emotion and social conformity. On the whole it is doing us more harm than good.

If the West is to survive we need to find real religion again. 

the legal immigration con

While it’s pleasing that immigration is finally on the political agenda there is a worrying aspect to this - people have become so focused on illegal immigration that they’ve convinced themselves that legal immigration is no problem at all. Nothing could be further from the truth. Legal immigration is a much greater threat to western civilisation.

Will illegals there’s always the option (assuming the political will exists) for deportation. It is possible (again if the political will exists) to prevent illegals from bleeding the country dry with welfare payments. It is even possible to prevent illegals from voting, on the perfectly sound grounds that they have absolutely no right to vote in someone else’s country. With legal immigrants none of these options exist. Legal immigrants can steal all the best jobs. They can help themselves to welfare. They can commit crimes and it’s extremely difficult to then deport them (if they have citizenship it’s just about impossible ever to get rid of them no matter how criminally inclined they are).

Once again we’re being conned by the elites and by our politicians. They want us to focus on illegal immigration because they don’t want us to notice that we’re being invaded by legal immigrants. We’re being conned and, sadly, most of us are falling for it.

All immigration, legal or illegal, is a problem. This is why you have to be very cautious about trusting someone like Donald Trump. He's essentially pro-immigration. Very pro-immigration. He just wants to give it the fig-leaf of legality. His much-vaunted wall will be useless if it includes a door which is going to be left permanently open for legal immigration. And that's exactly Trump's intention. Be careful of that "big beautiful door" he's promising. It's a door that will allow population replacement to proceed as planned. 

how to win and how to lose

Why is it that the globalists and SJWs always seem to win while those who oppose them almost invariably lose? It seems like a mystery since we know from the Brexit vote and the Trump election win that the opponents of globalism are by no means insignificant in numbers.

The answer is extremely simple. The Left has always been well organised, and they have always been passionate and committed. Conservatives have been hopelessly disorganised and they have just not had the same level of commitment. And commitment is what it’s all about. Fanatics make formidable foes. Well-organised fanatics are just about unbeatable. Numbers don’t really matter. A hundred organised political zealots are worth ten thousand lukewarm supporters.

The Left as such has now effectively ceased to exist but the globalist/SJWs who have taken over the movement have retained the old Left’s faith in organisation, passion and commitment. 

They also do not know the meaning of defeat. Take the Brexit vote - the Remain supporters never had the slightest intention of accepting the vote if it went against them. Or take the US election - it never even crossed the minds of Clinton supporters to accept the result if it didn’t go their way.

For conservatives losing has always been an opportunity to display their ability to be gracious in defeat. For the Left losing was always regarded as merely a temporary setback  - a defeat was not the end of the struggle but only the beginning. It is the same with the globalist/SJWs of today.

It may be partly a matter of psychology. Those who wish to preserve traditional ways are characterised more by common sense and good judgment than by zealotry. Those who wish to destroy the traditional order are those who are driven by enthusiasm, hatred, obsessiveness and hysteria - all of which contribute to making them effective political foot soldiers.

There are few examples of traditionalists who have shown the level of commitment and organisation that their enemies take for granted. The few who have demonstrated those qualities have mostly been motivated by religion. In the post-Christian West there seems little chance of religion becoming once again the necessary motivating force.

So what can be done? I don’t claim to have the answers but at the very least, as a first step, we have to understand why we have usually lost. 

nationalism - blood and soil

The most effective form of nationalism is that based on ethnicity and attachment to the land - blood and soil. That raises a difficult problem for countries such as Australia, the United States and Canada. For the US the difficulties are insuperable - there never was much chance of blood and soil nationalism there.

For Australia though there was a real chance of such a thing. Up until the 1940s Australia was remarkably homogeneous both ethnically and culturally. We were genuinely an outpost of British civilisation. Culturally we were British, but with a few variations as a result of our geography and our history. We were, slowly, developing a sense of ourselves as a people. We were proud of being British, but also proud of being Australian. We had a real chance of forging a coherent national identity. The blood part of the equation could not be expected to be as strong as you’d find among people who had lived on the same land for centuries but it was still there.

The soil part of the equation was a possibility as well. Compared to Britain Australia was a harsh unfriendly and even ugly landscape. Even the well-watered coastal fringes lack the charm and the prettiness of the English countryside. Despite this Australians had created a perverse fondness for the Australian landscape. In fact we possibly loved the land even more because it was superficially ugly and uninviting - it was a land you could only love if you got to know it. If outsiders couldn’t appreciate it that was their problem.

We developed a mythology based on the landscape. From an early stage Australia was highly urbanised but even Australians who lived their whole lives in cities were familiar with the mythology of the Bush, of cattle stations and drovers and bushrangers.

Australia in the late 1940s should have been well placed to develop, eventually, a strong sense of Australian-ness based on ethnic unity and a strong attachment to the land. Then our government, in its infinite wisdom, decided we needed mass migration. As so often it was a policy imposed upon the people. Since both major parties enthusiastically supported  mass migration there was no need to ask the Australian people how they felt about the matter. There was certainly no need to hold a referendum even though this was a policy that would radically change our society.

Up until the 1970s it was not a fatal problem. Most non-British immigrants were from Italy or Greece, with smaller numbers from eastern Europe and various Balkan nations. They assimilated fairly well. Our national identity was weakened but not quite destroyed. Then began the influx of Third World immigrants. 

It’s perhaps not quite too late for Australia now but time is definitely running out. The only hope is that people realise that the mainstream political parties - all of them - have betrayed them and intend to go on betraying them. Socially conservative and traditionalist Australians who imagine they are doing the right thing by voting for the LNP coalition are deluding themselves. They are voting for the destruction of Australia.

Nothing can be achieved until voters are prepared to reject both the mainstream parties.

what if the elites don’t actually have a plan?

What a really smart super-villain looks like

A horrible thought occurred to me today. What if the elites don’t actually have a plan? What if they’re not evil geniuses after all?

When I say they don’t have a plan I mean a coherent long-term plan. They certainly have short-term plans - dismantle nation states, create a single global market, keep the population divided by means of identity politics, keep the population docile with sex, drugs and mindless entertainment. 

But what is the ultimate purpose? Is there a long-term vision of the future behind all this? Obviously the elites are motivated by the desire for money and power (especially power) but do they have a reason for seeking so much power, is there something they wish to achieve? Are they aiming for the same goal the Old Left was aiming for, the creation of Utopia? Or is just power for its own sake? 

Of course this is not a new idea. In Orwell’s 1984 the Inner Party had no plans other than to maintain itself in power. Orwell understood the concept of an elite focused purely on power, but most of us find that difficult to cope with. We assume there must be a master plan, even if it’s an evil master plan. The diabolical criminals of fiction like Dr Fu Manchu or Bond villains like Ernst Stavro Blofeld usually had some reason for desiring absolute power and those of us who oppose the globalist project tend to assume (even if we do so unconsciously) that we’re dealing with evil geniuses who have everything all worked out. It’s a disturbing thought that the globalist elites may not be evil geniuses - they may be simply evil. Even worse, they may be evil buffoons. 

I started thinking long these lines during a discussion at Oz Conservative on the Islamification of the West. One commenter argued that the elites actually desire to create a global Islamic society, that their ultimate aim is the triumph of Islam. I have never believed this. My view is that the elites aim for a global atheist society on the grounds that such a society would be the easiest to control. Any religion is a threat to the globalists - it offers an alternative view of society and the religious hierarchy offers an alternative source of authority. These are things the globalist elites will never tolerate. My theory is that the elites see Islam as a very potent short-term weapon but that they believe that within a couple of generations the Islamic immigrants will be just as secularised as the host nations. In the long term the elites believe that Muslim immigrants will become good atheists. Destroying Christianity turned out to so easy that they naturally assume that they can destroy Islam when it is no longer useful to them. This may be a deluded belief on their part but I am unable to see any other explanation that fits the known facts.

A diabolical criminal mastermind who did think things through

So it’s possible that the Islamification of the West is an idea that hasn’t been thought through at all. It’s a short-term strategy and the long-term consequences have simply been ignored. 

It’s also possible that all of the elite strategy is defined by short-term thinking. Identity politics, feminism, LGBT extremism, the destruction of the family, the stoking of facial hatreds - perhaps all these things are also ideas that seemed useful as short-term expedients but again the long-term consequences were never considered.

Even the core objectives of globalism - the single global market and open borders - may fall into the same category. They may not be such wonderful ideas, even for the elites. If the elites lose control of one nation state they can always find others to loot. If they lose control of a global super-state they lose everything.

The elites have so far succeeded spectacularly in all their endeavours so it’s not surprising that they should become wildly over-confident. The ancients called it hubris. They also believed that hubris always leads to nemesis. If the elites really are stupid rather than evil geniuses then nemesis may indeed be a real possibility.

the real traditional family

A commenter at Oz Conservative makes some important points about marriage. What we think of as the traditional family, a husband and a wife and a couple of kids, was essentially a postwar invention. As this commenter points out 

“the definition of marriage changed in the Anglosaxon world under the influence of atheisim and liberalism from one of an intergenerational social institution to a personal relationship. It is this transformation and reduction of the primary social institution of society to a mere personal relationship which is the greatest causative factor in the collapse of Western civilisation.”

He goes on to add

“The former institutional framework was devoted to the preservation of culture, values, tradition, religion and wealth and the transmission of these to the next generation.”

I think this is quite important. The nuclear family is an aberration, and a dangerous one. The nuclear family of the 1950s was certainly better than the morass of immorality, lust and selfishness into which we have now sunk but it was fundamentally flawed. It was a device for enhancing consumption. It created more household units, and each of these household units required a house, a car, a refrigerator, a dishwasher and a host of other consumer goods. 

It was good for the economy and bad for civilisation. It reduced marriage to a formalised version of shacking up together. Marriage was no longer about duty, or responsibility, or maintaining tradition, or ensuring the future. Marriage was now a vehicle for sexual gratification and romantic Hollywood-fueled fantasies. When combined with increasingly easy access to divorce the results were catastrophic. Now you could not only have sexual gratification and romantic fantasies, you could have an endless cycle of instant sexual gratification and starry-eyed but doomed fantasies.

The reality is that neither sex nor romance can form a firm foundation on which to construct an actual family. And a family is not a transient arrangement between two autonomous individuals. It is an ongoing institution. Your family existed before you were married and it will continue to exist after you are dead. Marriage is not a pairing of two atomised individuals pursuing short-term pleasure. Happiness is, or should be, something much deeper - the sense of a life well-lived, of contributing towards something that will live on after one’s death.

And (as this commenter points out) once you accept marriage as a mere sexual arrangement then you have no basis on which to oppose homosexual marriage, polygamy, or any depraved arrangement that the mind can conjure up. On the other hand if you adhere to the idea of marriage as being part of a larger institution of family life then it immediately becomes obvious that two homosexuals living together do not in any way, shape or form constitute a family.

Easy no-fault divorce, the contraceptive pill and the misguided decision to remove the social stigma and legal disadvantages of de facto relationships combined to sound the death knell for the family but the nuclear family had already fatally undermined the actual traditional family.

the end of retail employment

There is an issue that no-one today seems to want to deal with, or even to acknowledge, but it’s an issue that is going to cause profound trauma to what’s left of our society. That issue is the imminent disappearance of retail employment.

It’s already happening but we’re still pretending there’s no problem. Bookstores have largely disappeared. Video stores have pretty much gone completely. Music stores are now rare. This is nothing compared to the tsunami that is approaching. It seems highly likely that supermarkets will disappear within the next ten years. Most of the specialty stores in your local mall will close. Online shopping will no longer be an option - it will be the only option. Very very few retail businesses are going to survive.

And once the malls are deserted because most of the shops have closed what happens to the businesses that depend on the passing trade in shopping malls? What happens to the coffee shops? They will close too.

This will be a wonderful world for certain big corporations. With wage bills largely eliminated profits will skyrocket. It won’t be such a swell world for ordinary people. Manufacturing jobs have already been eliminated or outsourced to the Third World. What happens when retail jobs are gone as well?

We already have a problem with a large underclass that survives generation after generation on welfare. What will society be like when that underclass becomes 40% of the population?

We are facing a change as dramatic as the Industrial Revolution. Of course we will be told that fantastic new opportunities will open up. There’ll be lots of service jobs! Now let’s be honest - most service jobs are crap. The work is often ghastly, the pay is atrocious and worst of all much of the work is casual. Most service jobs are about as attractive as being in domestic service in Victorian England. And it would take a lot of service jobs to compensate for the loss of retail jobs. An even bigger problem is that a large proportion of service jobs are subsidised by the government, or in other words paid for by the taxpayer. They are not productive jobs. They do not actually add to the wealth of the country. They’re a cost, not a benefit, to the economy.

So far feminists have ignored this issue, even though a majority of the people who are going to lose their jobs are women. Feminists don’t care since it won’t impact their careers in academia, the bureaucracy and the media.

Middle-class people in general are not worried by this looming disaster. They assume that it will only affect working-class people like those horrid little shop assistants. Middle-class people however should not be too confident that their jobs are secure. More and more IT jobs are going to be outsourced. Whole industries that provide the sort of employment that middle-class people like will disappear. Does anybody believe radio has a future? Or newspapers? Even television will feel the crunch and many jobs will go.

I suppose the globalists and the SJWs will have their answer ready - they will tell us that what we need is more immigration!

The future will be interesting, but I suspect it won’t be very pleasant.