Author Archives: danijel

Religion for children

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I don’t believe that one should not explain religion to children and instead wait for them to grow up and “make up their own mind”. It’s as stupid as saying one should not teach them maths or science and should instead let them grow up ignorant and uneducated and then, when they’re 18, they can make up their own mind about how much 2+2 is. However, I don’t believe in filling their heads with dogma, either. What I do is wait until they are old enough to understand the real explanations, the real theology, and then teach them as I would adults. The thing is, religion is demanding, much more so than science. I could explain forces and vectors to my kids at a very early age; I could teach them how to code in Logo almost as soon as they could read and write. But religion requires a much more advanced and mature ability for abstract thinking, and although you can fill children’s heads with formulaic explanations, in my opinion that would be worse than useless. As a result, I had to start by giving them a very good foundation of rational thinking, problem solving and, essentially, breaking down complexity into solvable parts. At the age of 13, with my older kid, I’m still not sure whether he quite gets is, but I did explain quite a lot about Christianity, Buddhism and Hinduism, in the sense that I explained how they approach similar issues from different standpoints and provide valid answers, and how different theologies can produce essentially identical ethics. Also, I try to strip down the superficial and get to the core issues; for instance, I explained Christianity as a top-down approach, of a revelation of deep truths from God’s perspective, that’s essentially identical to what was later revealed in the near-death testimonies. Buddhism, on the other hand, is the bottom-up approach by a man who figured out the fundamental problems and worked out ways of solving them, figuring out some of the most sophisticated spiritual truths in the process. Hinduism, however, is a mixture of both top-down revelations through scriptures and bottom-up processes of Yoga, and isn’t as much a religion as a set of religious paths wrapped together by common culture and civilization. Judaism is a history of one tribe’s process of figuring out transcendence, with varying degrees of success; if not for the magnificent phenomenon of Jesus, which required knowledge of the backstory and context of his teachings, it would be historically irrelevant and nobody would care about it; transformed and reshaped by Christianity, it reaches great sophistication and value, although most parts of the traditional Judaism are useful primarily as examples of the things people tried, before Jesus, and failed. But not all religions are good. Islam, for instance, is a product of a deranged mind of a madman, who heard a few things here and there about Christianity, Judaism and Zoroastrianism, it all got mixed up in his head and spewed forth in form of psychotic hallucinations. Unlike good religions, Islam is spiritually worthless and exists only for ill. If Satan ever created his own ideal religion, it’s Islam. It makes people dumb, unquestioning, deluded and violent. Essentially, it’s a false religion, trash that needs to disappear. It’s a spiritual virus that reduces everything it touches to shit.

At one point, I tried to explain the concept of prayer, and you might find my explanation interesting, so I’ll repeat it here.

Prayer is often misunderstood, by stupid people who aren’t trained in abstract thought, as a wish-list one recites in the direction of God, expecting him to deliver. However, that’s not how intelligent people understand it. To them, prayer is not about asking God to produce material benefits to the believer, it’s not even about talking. In fact, it’s the process of focused and directed listening. In the process of prayer, you attempt to focus your mind on the best available approximation of God you can reach towards, with the highest, most sophisticated parts of your spirit, and trying to sense what it’s telling you. It’s like sensing a magnetic field with a compass; you watch the needle move and it helps you sense the lines of magnetic force, and thus you scan the topology of the magnetic field. In the process of prayer, you learn about God; where He is, where He is not, what do you need to be in order to feel harmony with That which is Out There. You learn how to feel alignment, and you learn how to feel discrepancy. You learn to live in such a way that you feel approval from that direction, you feel you’re doing the right thing. You do talk, but you talk in order to feel out the direction, you feel which words align with it the best, which thoughts align with it the best, and later, which actions align with it the best. Even learning science and maths, or poetry and literature, can be a form of prayer, if it helps you extend your mind’s reach, make it more flexible and powerful, allow you to think clearly, to feel clearly and remove confusion. Prayer can be a sophisticated and subtle thing. Of course, it can be an act of brainwashing yourself by mindlessly repeating phrases which you don’t even understand. Different people, according to their level of comprehension, understand prayer differently, but that is so with everything; people also understand gravity differently, according to their intellectual prowess.

So yeah, that’s how I teach children about religion. 🙂

About sin

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People have strange ideas about sin, and usually the accompanying imagery is sexual. I assure you, the concept has nothing to do with sex, and it is far from being trivial or arbitrary. But let me explain.

When you don’t know what is right, and you stumble around trying to figure it out, it’s a process of learning. You always make mistakes. It’s the normal process of figuring things out, of breaking through the wall of your limitations.

When you know what is right, you decide to do it, but you occasionally fail, it’s called a lapse. It’s not hypocrisy to know what is right and still occasionally fail to do it. It’s called imperfection. Only God is free of those. The rest of us fuck up, fix the mess, pick ourselves up and try to do better next time.

When you know what is right, and you decide tu bury this feeling, change it and change your concept of right and wrong in order to justify a different course, it’s called sin.

As you can see, sin has nothing to do with mistakes, errors or lapses. It’s a completely different phenomenon. Mortal sin is the kind you refuse to let go until you are destroyed; the kind that makes you stubbornly go the wrong way, defend the wrong choices, until there’s nothing left of your soul to redeem.

You can make mistakes and be free of sin. You can make occasional lapses and be free of sin. You can be deceived or deluded and still be free of sin. It’s not difficult to be free of sin, it’s not something only Jesus could do. It’s as easy as recognizing God, choosing the direction that leads to Him, and be forever loyal, choosing repeatedly, over and over again, the path of renunciation of all that is worldly, illusory and binding, the path of choosing truth over lies, of having your mind’s eye unclouded by desires and deceptions, of being always ready to let go of your life in order to follow God wherever He leads you. And it’s not even difficult, because God is such a great and wonderful prize, that casting everything else aside is no sacrifice. The only sacrifice is enduring this life, being delayed in joining God.

Who’s the enemy, and how to win?

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Watching Alex Jones on his YouTube channel, one would get the impression that “the globalists” are the enemy.

Or is it the leftist liberals, the neo-Marxists, feminists?

Or is it the neo-cons?

Or is it the Muslims and their fifth column in the West, which tries to weaken our resistance to shitty civilization-forming ideologies and the shitty cultures that they form?

If you ask the liberals, it’s “bigotry” and various “oppressions” that are the problem.

So let me tell you what I think.

I think the problem is several levels removed from the place where humans usually look for it. As St. Paul said, it’s not the flesh that’s the enemy, it’s the evil spiritual structure that dominates over it. The war is not against human bodies of this or that group, it’s not against hardware. It’s against software, against the spiritual power, against ideologies and belief systems that contaminate the minds and cause evil and suffering.

Buddha would say that the problem is suffering. The cause of suffering is projection of spiritual power into illusory and ephemeral things. The solution is to detach and withdraw. When the inertia of the flywheel is spent, the result is nirvana.

Jesus had a different take on it. He said that the problem is that Satan basically has power over the world, and is an active force that lies, binds and destroys souls. The solution was to redeem the world from his power by offering sacrifice of sufficient value, and simultaneously forcing Satan to administer the deathblow. It’s a complex equation, but it’s elegant and it had a good chance of actually working.

Because, you see, I think Buddha got one thing wrong, the one Jesus got right. The world is not a passive place where you just happen to invest your energy in form of projections and desires. The world is intentionally designed in such a way as to delude you regarding your true nature and the nature of reality, and to continually sing the sirens’ song of attraction, that provokes attachment and binds your fate to its own. The world is not a passive factor in our situation. It’s in fact the determining factor, exuding influence of such magnitude, that almost any degree of individual choice is outweighed and overshadowed. To say that the world is merely a given and that our attachment to it is our own problem to solve is like stating that gravity has nothing to do with the fact that we don’t happen to just spontaneously fly into space, and that we are holding on to the surface of the Earth by some act of our own volition. In a word, it’s false.

As for the humans, I would divide them into several groups. There are the ones who are aware of the situation and are actively working to counter it. There was about a handful of those throughout history. Then there are those who are aware that there’s some serious problem here, but are unaware of its exact nature, and are doing things that are sometimes useful, sometimes harmful, and sometimes useless.

There are those who don’t see it as a problem, but a great thing, who completely align their spiritual vector with that of the world, and who see attachment of spirit to matter as a great thing, and not a problem. And in the end, there are those who are unaware of anything, and just stumble around life like idiots.

The biggest problem is that the last group forms the vast majority of mankind throughout history. The vast majority of humans are as stupid as rocks. They merely want to preserve their existence as they see it, they want there to be more of things similar to them and less things that are dissimilar or threatening in other ways, they want to reproduce and they want to gain more influence. Tantric yoga would call them “the pashavi”, from pashu, which means “animal”, so it’s roughly translated as animalistic ones, the ones who are stupid animals who fight, feed and make little pashavi. In tantric yoga, the opposite of a pashavi is a yogi. A yogi understands that there’s a problem, he understands that he has to do something to get out of the problem, and he takes active measures, such as gaining knowledge, finding a guru who can teach him, and practising yoga with the goal of attaining liberation from the world.

So, essentially, the humans are divided into staunchly different groups according to the software that runs in their brains. They can be stupid cattle, they can be Satan’s henchmen, and they can be beings who strive for spiritual perfection and freedom, with varying degrees of success. In rare cases, they can be the agents of God, who possess true knowledge and power and are actually able to do something about it all.

As you are probably able to tell, my perspective differs significantly from anything that is widely believed.

My perception of the current state of worldly affairs is that the evil humans are running around like chickens with their heads cut off, wishing to do some evil, but without a supreme guiding evil force to direct them, and so they often contradict each others’ efforts, while increasing chaos, suffering and the overall amount of evil. The stupid ones are as stupid as they always were, only in greater numbers due to the exponential population growth, and the good ones are so outnumbered and they feel so dispersed and powerless, they are on the verge of getting completely confused and going crazy in this mess.

The thing is, the evil ones are not clearly divided according to ideology. You can’t just say “separate a certain ethnicity or religion or a political group, kill it off and thus solve the problem of evil”. You have evil globalists, but you also have evil nationalists, and evil Christians, and evil atheists. The evil ones are not all Muslims. Basically, there are different intellectual and emotional contents that exist on different spiritual vectors, and it’s the actual vectors that I find interesting, not the labels people put on them. I care whether someone has a spiritual connection to the transcendental or not, whether he understands the nature of the transcendental and the nature of the world, and whether he understands what spiritual choices and actions create what kind of a destiny for himself and others. Heinlein wisely stated that goodness combined with ignorance invariably results in evil, and I would express that as a mathematical formula, where intent multiplied with understanding determines the result. Good intent multiplied with shitty understanding equals evil. Shitty intent multiplied with good understanding equals evil. Only good understanding multiplied with good intent produces good results. Having in mind that people’s understanding of reality is shit, for the absolutely vast majority, you tell me if their intent matters. They are as likely to do evil deeds if they have the best motives, as they are if they have the worst ones. Having that in mind, I’m rather cynical about those who think they have a recipe for fixing things. The communists had it, the Nazis had it, everybody had it. Every damn fool thinks he can make the world a better place, and Buddha would rightly say that the only result of that is being attached to the world, and I would add that the additional result is usually adding your energy to the exact force that makes this world such a terrible place to begin with, because multiplying ignorance with zeal increases the overall “heat” of the chaotic pot in which we are all being cooked.

It is my opinion that the solution is not in introducing more energy into the system, in form of various efforts within the world. It’s not in the attempts of self-control, as if we are the ones to blame for falling, and not gravity. It’s not in trying to magically extract and transform evil that is contained in the world, in hope of making it good. The solution is to break the pot in which we are being cooked, even if we are to fall into the fire at first. This world needs to die.

Linux on a Macbook Air

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What do you do with an old late-2010 Core2Duo 1.8GHz Macbook with 2GB RAM, that is no longer able to run the current Mac OS quickly enough? Apple’s recommendation would be to throw it away and buy a new one because it’s about time after 6 years and the hardware probably wore out significantly by now. The second part of the recommendation I have no problem with – since the machine is indeed too slow for running a modern OS with all the applications that I need, I bought a 15” retinabook as a replacement. However, the part where I just throw the old machine away, although all the hardware still functions, it has a very good keyboard, monitor and a touchpad, the battery is above 80% – I don’t think so. So, I tried several things, just to see what can be done.

The first thing I did was boot it from a USB drive containing Ubuntu Trusty Mate LTS 64-bit, to see if it’s actually possible and if all the hardware is correctly recognized. To my surprise, it all worked, completely out-of-the-box and without any sort of additional tweaking, except for one very specific thing, which is the Croatian keyboard layout on a Mac, which is different from the standard Croatian Latin II layout used by Windows and Linux. I tried selecting a combination of a Mac keyboard and Croatian layout in the OS, but it didn’t work. I ended up editing the /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/hr file to modify the basic layout:

xkb_symbols "basic" {

    name[Group1]="Croatian";

    include "rs(latin)"

    // Redefine these keys to match XFree86 Croatian layout
    key <AE01> { [         1,     exclam,   asciitilde,   dead_tilde ] };
    key <AE02> { [         2,   quotedbl,           at] };
    key <AE03> { [         3, numbersign,  asciicircum, dead_circumflex ] };
    key <AE05> { [         5,    percent,       degree, dead_abovering ] };
    key <AE07> { [         7,      apostrophe,        grave,   dead_grave ] };
    key <AE11> { [         slash,    question       ]       };
    key <AB10> { [     minus, underscore, dead_belowdot, dead_abovedot ] };
    key <AD06>  { [         y,          Y,    leftarrow,          yen ] };
    key <AB01>  { [         z,          Z, guillemotleft,        less ] };
    key <AD01>  { [         q,          Q,    backslash,  Greek_OMEGA ] };
    key <AD02>  { [         w,          W,          bar,      Lstroke ] };

};

Essentially, what I did was reposition z and y, put apostrophe above 7, and question mark/slash to the right of 0. However, the extended right-alt functionality now works as if on a Windows keyboard, so it’s slightly confusing to have the layouts mixed. (ps.: I had to repost the code because WordPress was acting smart and modified the “tags” so I converted it into html entities).

Other than having to tweak the keyboard layout, I had to use the Nouveau driver for the Nvidia GPU, because any kind of proprietary Nvidia driver, either new or legacy, freezes the screen during boot, when xorg initializes. That’s a bummer because the proprietary driver is much faster, but since the only thing I’m about to use the GPU for is playing YouTube videos on full screen, and that works fine, I’m not worried much. Everything else seems to work fine – the wireless network, the touchpad, the sound, regulating screen brightness and sound volume with the standard Mac keys, everything.

Having ascertained that Linux works, I formatted the SSD from gparted, installed Linux, tested if everything boots properly, and copied my edit of the keyboard layout to the cloud for further use. Then, I decided to test other things, wiped the SSD again, and tried to run the Apple online recovery, which supposedly installs OS X Lion over the Internet. Now that was a disaster – the service appears to work, but after you really start doing it, the Apple server reports that the service isn’t “currently” available. After checking online for other users’ experiences, it turned out that it’s “currently” unavailable since early 2015 if not longer, so basically their service is fubared due to zero fucks given to maintenance of older systems.

OK, I found the USB drive containing the OS X Snow Leopard that I got with the laptop, and, surprisingly, it worked great – I installed the Snow Leopard on the laptop but I couldn’t do anything with it because most modern software refuses to install on a version that old, Apple’s own services such as the iCloud and the Apple Store don’t support it, so I just used it to test a few things and I found out that it’s as fast as I remember it when I just bought the laptop – there’s no lag or delays introduced by the newer versions, everything works great, except that the current Linux is a much more secure and up-to-date system than Snow Leopard, so I did the next experiment; I took the Time Machine drive with the current backup of the 15” retinabook running Sierra, and booted from that. It gave me two options – install clean Sierra, or do a full system recovery from the backup. I did the clean install first, and it surprised me how fast the machine was, much faster than my slow El Capitan installation that I was running before finally giving up on the machine, because I had no time for this shit. Then I decided to take a look at what the full recovery would look like. It worked, but it was as slow or slower than the full installation on El Capitan. I tried playing with it but gave up quickly – after getting used to my new machines, it’s like watching paint dry.

I decided to try Linux again, but with a slight modification – instead of running the perfectly reliable and capable, but visually slightly older-looking Mate (which is basically a green-themed fork of Gnome 2), I decided to try the Ubuntu Trusty Gnome LTS 64-bit version, which runs the more modern and sleek-looking, but potentially more buggy and sometimes less functional Gnome 3. Why did I do that, well, because the search function in Gnome 3 is great, and resembles both Spotlight and Windows 10 search function that I got used to in the modern systems, and visually the Adwaita theme looks very sleek and modern on a Macbook, very much in tune with its minimalist design. So, I loaded it up, copied back my modifications of the keyboard layout (which are actually more difficult to activate here than in Gnome 2, requiring some dpkg-reconfiguring from shell). I made a mistake trying to test if the Nvidia drivers work here – they don’t, and I had to fix things the hard way, by booting into root shell with networking (not so much for the networking, but because in the normal root shell mode the drive is mounted in the read-only mode), did apt-get remove nvidia*, rebooted and it worked. Then I installed the most recent kernel version, just to test that, and yes, the 4.2.0-42-generic kernel works just fine. The rest of the installation was just standard stuff, loading up my standard tools, PGP key and the RSA certificates, chat clients and Dropbox, so that I can sync my keepass2 database containing all my account passwords in encrypted form, as well as the articles for the blog.

So, what did I gain, and what did I lose? I lost the ability to run Lightroom, but this machine is too weak for that, and I removed it from the position of a photo editing laptop in any case. The second thing that doesn’t work is msecure, where I have all my current passwords stored in the original form; the keepass file is a secondary copy, so that’s not great. However, Thunderbird mail works, Skype works, Rocketchat works, Web works and LibreOffice works. The ssh/rsync connection to my servers works, all the secure stuff works, UNIX shell functionality works. Essentially, I can use it for writing, for answering mail, for chat, web and doing stuff on my server via ssh. The battery life seems to be diminished from what I would expect, but it’s actually better than it was on El Capitan and Sierra, which seemed to constantly run some CPU-demanding processes in the background, such as RAM compression, which of course drained the battery very quickly and made the machine emulate a female porn star, being very hot and making loud noises. 🙂

I gained speed. It’s as fast as it was running Snow Leopard when I initially bought it, which is great. Also, I have the ability to run all the current Linux software, and I don’t have to maintain the slow macports source-compiling layer in order to have all the Linux tools available on a Mac. I do realize, however, that I’m approaching this from a somewhat uncommon perspective of someone who uses a Mac as a Linux machine that just happens to run Adobe Lightroom and other commercial software; I never did get a Mac to get the “simple” experience that most users crave. To me, if a machine can’t rsync backups from my server, and if I can’t go into shell and write a 10-line script that will chew out some data, it’s not fit for serious use. I run a Linux virtual machine on my Windows desktop where I actually do all the programming and server maintenance, so having Linux on a laptop that’s supposed to be all about “simplicity of use” is not contradictory in any way – to me, simplicity of use is the ability to mount my server’s directories from Nautilus via ssh, and do a simple copy and paste of files. This works better on Linux than anywhere else. Also, the Geeqie image viewer on Linux is so much better than anything on a Mac, it’s not even funny. These tools can actually make you very productive, if you know how to use them, so for some things I do, Linux is actually an upgrade. However, I can’t run some very important commercial software that I use, so I can’t use Linux on my primary setup. That’s just unfortunate, but it is what it is. Linux is primarily used by people who want free stuff, and are unwilling to pay for software, so nobody serious bothers to write commercial software for it. Yeah, theoretically it’s supposed to be free as freedom, not free as free beer, but in reality, Linux is designed by communists who have serious problems with the concept of money, either because they don’t understand it, because they reject it for ideological reasons, or both. In some cases, however, Linux is an excellent way to save still functional machines from the planned obsolescence death they were sentenced to by the manufacturers. Also, it’s an excellent way of being sure that you don’t have all kinds of nefarious spyware installed by the OS manufacturer, if that’s what you care about; however, since I guess that most of the worst kinds of government spying is done by exploits in the basic SSL routines and certificate authorities, that might not help much.

Also, the thing about Linux is that it tries to write drivers for the generic components used in the hardware, instead for the actual hardware implementation. This means you get a driver for the Broadcom network chip, instead for the, I don’t know, D-Link network card. The great aspect of this is that it cuts through lots of bullshit and gets straight to the point, reducing the number of hardware drivers significantly, and increasing the probability that what you have will just work. The problem is, there isn’t much done to assure that every single implementation of the generic components will actually work, and work optimally. In reality, what this means is that if your hardware happens to be close to the generic implementation, it will just work, as it happened to just work on my late-2010 Macbook Air, for the most part. However, if something isn’t really made to generic spec, as it happens to be the case with my discrete graphics, trying to use the generic drivers will plunge you headfirst from the tall cliff of optimism into the cold sea of fail.

So, do I recommend this? Well, if you’re a hacker and you know what you’re getting yourself into, hell yeah. I did it for shits and giggles, just to see if it can be done. Would I do it on a “productivity” machine, basically my main laptop/desktop that I have to depend on to do real work reliably and produce instant results when I need something? That’s more tricky, and it depends on what you do. I used to have Linux on both my desktop and laptop for about 5 years, from Ubuntu Gutsy to Ubuntu Lucid. Obviously, I managed to get things done, and sometimes I was more productive than on anything else. At other times, I did nothing but fix shit that broke when I updated something. If anything, Linux forces you to keep your skills sharp, by occasionally waking you from sleep with surprise butt sex. On other occasions, you get to laugh watching Windows and Mac users struggle with something that you do with trivial ease. At one point I got tired of the constant whiplash experience from alternating between Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and quarantined Linux into its safe virtualized sandbox where it does what it’s good at, without trying to run my hardware with generic open source drivers, or forcing me to find free shitty substitutes for paying $200 for some professionally made piece of software that I need. Essentially, running Linux is like owning a BMW or an Alpha Romeo – it runs great when it runs, but for the most part it’s not great as a daily driver, and it’s fun if you’re a mechanic who enjoys fixing shit on your car to keep your skills sharp. I actually find it quite useful, since I maintain my Linux servers myself and this forces me to stay in touch with the Linux skill-set. It’s not just an exercise in pointless masochism. 🙂

About Western supremacism and hate speech

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How do you deal with existential threats without hate speech?

Let’s think about this a bit, OK? Hate speech is supposed to be a bad thing, inciting hatred and violence against some group of people. But what if you have a group of people that poses a serious threat to your civilization and threatens to either alter it beyond recognition in a negative way, or outright destroy it? It is politically correct to mention Nazis as one such group – they are commonly accepted as a group that needs to be suppressed in every possible way, and probably the only group against whom hate speech is commonly acceptable. There’s nothing better for virtue-signalling than hate speech against Hitler and the Nazis, right?

However, what about communists? They actually killed more people than the Nazis; the commonly cited numbers are 100 million people killed by the communists, vs. 25 million people killed by the Nazis. Yet, it seems to be popular to declare yourself a “socialist”, speak about social revolution and wear a Che Guevara t-shirt, despite it being a commonly known fact that Che was Fidel Castro’s executioner who personally killed hundreds of people, and wrote about enjoying the feeling immensely. However, I have a feeling that condemning any kind of socialism and putting it on the same level as Nazism would be recognized as some form of hate speech.

If so, I’m all for hate speech. Hate speech is great, I love it. It’s an intellectual immune response against abject evil. Everybody should practice it, in moderation of course, and it should be seen as the most normal response when faced with villainy and evil. You see it, you feel revulsion and hatred for evil, you speak out against it in clear terms. Evil political ideologies, that intend to transform civilization into Gulag archipelago and killing fields and concentration camps need to be hated and condemned.

However, how far is it permissible to go with this? Hate speech, yes, definitely. However, I am rather uncertain about active measures, such as the use of violence against proponents of evil ideologies. It looks like a slippery slope where you’re so effective at fighting monsters that you become one yourself, as Nietzsche would say. Fighting for peace or killing for non-violence sounds very much like fucking for virginity. You can’t use the means that are inherently opposite to your goals. Or can you?

Can you imprison Nazis for denying Holocaust and praising Hitler? Or does it oppose the very tissue of tolerance that is supposed to make up our civilization? Can you imprison people for tolerance, or is it akin to fucking for virginity?

However, let’s explore another possibility – it’s not about tolerance at all. What if “tolerance” is just a bullshit word that was simply pulled out of someone’s arse, just like the concept of human rights, in order to obscure a deeper, yet inconvenient truth: that our society was built on the basis of a Graeco-Roman philosophy and law, Christian ethics, and scientific approach to the physical universe? What if tolerance and human rights had nothing whatsoever to do with it, and were invented by someone who didn’t like Christianity and wanted to do away with it, similar to AD (Anno Domini, year of the Lord) designations being replaced by the CE (Current Era)? What made our civilization great is neither tolerance, nor adherence to the concept of human rights. Our civilization, in fact, put a man on the Moon before those concepts were even accepted in the common discourse. I would actually go so far as to state that the acceptance of tolerance as a virtue, and acceptance of the concept of human rights as a basis of law, is the point where our civilization started collapsing and decaying to the point where it isn’t worth fighting for unless we abandon those two parasitic concepts and go back to the roots, to the real reasons why our civilization is great.

The Nazis were not defeated because we were tolerant. They were defeated because we had more guns and soldiers than they did. That’s all there is to it – the Nazis were defeated not because they were necessarily a philosophical evil, but because we killed more of them than they killed us. The victors in this bloody war then invented all sorts of rationalizations about why this was some cosmic fight of good against evil, to make it seem it was all worth it, but the fact is, we don’t even know if the Nazis would have killed the Jews in the concentration camps and resorted to various evils had they not been violently opposed by other countries. They did attempt to deport the Jews into Israel, for instance, and had they not been opposed in that, and had that succeeded, they would have simply get rid of all their “undesirables” that way, and we would have the state of Israel that we have today, and Hitler would get on with his megalomaniacal architectural projects in the capital of Germania. I am certain that, had there not been a war, the Germans would eventually get rid of the Nazis, just like the Russians got rid of the communists. The best way of keeping arseholes in power is to oppose them by a foreign threat. Without a credible foreign threat that would marshal the population into submission, the dictatorial regimes have to accept blame for their own failures. So, if the Nazis proved to be incompetent rulers, I seriously doubt they would manage to stay in power “for a thousand years”.

The reason why Nazism and Communism were perceived as aberrations is that they abandoned the common core of our civilization, which is Christianity. They are both Modernist ideologies that wanted to get rid of the Christian heritage and replace it with something new and “better”. They killed so many people because they had no compunctions about destroying the “ancien regime” they hated, in a way very similar to the bloodbath that was the French revolution. In a very real way, all those revolutionary regimes show what people are capable of when they don’t expect to be judged for their actions by God. If there is no judgement other than by “history” or “mankind”, if there is no good greater than the good of your political class, race or nation, what is there to stop you from just wiping out everything you don’t like? It’s not tolerance that stops the Christians from killing people. It’s the faith in resurrection, the faith in the afterlife, the faith that this world isn’t all there is, the faith that you cannot solve problems by outright slaughter, because your war isn’t against the flesh, but against the evil spirit of Satan (Ephesians 6:12). A Christian doesn’t attempt to solve problems by killing his religious and philosophical opposition, but by defeating it in both debate and in the criterion of fruits – a Christian desires to be the tree that bears the best of fruits, and here we come to the true reason why our civilization out-competed every other in good results. Science itself was invented by Christians who wanted to mine the physical world for truths and goodness infused into it by its Creator. That’s all there is to it. Science isn’t some eternal opposition to Christianity, as atheists would want to convince you. Science is a tool invented by the Christians in order to explore God’s creation and to praise Him by bearing the abundant fruits of knowledge. Only later was it hijacked by the modernists, by those who wanted to get rid of God and Christianity and create their own kind of order, watering the earth with human blood in the process. They, the murderers, the evil ones, are the originators of the concepts of tolerance and human rights, because they needed those empty and meaningless words as something to put in place of God’s law and God’s judgement as the reasons to be and do good.

What made our civilization great is the Augustinian interpretation of Christianity, the concept of Creation as the process of progressive revelation of God through greater knowledge of both the spiritual truths and the physical world. This understanding is what gave birth to science and technology, and it was later hijacked by the Nazis and the Communists and other Modernist ideologues who tried to uproot science from its Christian origins and use it as a weapon in the hands of the atheists that can be used to violently hammer God out of the minds of people.

This Augustinian understanding of the Catholic Church is in complete opposition to the “sola scriptura” principle of the Bible-fanatics, who don’t understand that the Bible itself doesn’t exist as they understand it, as a singular document of revelation, but as a progressive emergence of religious concepts in the minds of people. As the Catholics understand it, this process of revelation didn’t end with the formulation of the final canon of the Bible. No, it just took other forms – of revelations by saints, of saintly and good deeds of people, of science and technology. The fact that the Bible stops telling the story at a certain point in time doesn’t mean that God stopped talking. Some of the things He had to say took form of this computer I’m using now in order to write this. That’s what I mean when I say that the core of our civilization, what makes it great, is the Augustinian interpretation of Christianity.

It is not great because it is inherently tolerant. In fact, I would argue that it is inherently intolerant, and that it needs to be. It needs to testify its own truth, by living its own ideals and heritage, and producing great things as a testament of living according to God’s plans, because all those great fruits of science are the results of figuring out how the world really works.

And when we figure out what our roots are, when we figure out what made our civilization great, how it became so much superior to everything produced in China or Africa or all those tribes everywhere, we will reclaim our rightful place in the world: of teachers and masters, rather than the guilt-ridden people who need to watch every word in order not to offend some tribe of fucking idiots who understand both God and the world wrong, which is why their civilizations are worthless and they all come to the Christian-made paradises of the West to get some of that. And the irony is, instead of changing in order to be more like us, and therefore better, they try to change us in order to be more like them, not understanding that being like them is the very reason why their own countries are hellholes from which they are now escaping. Their countries are hellholes because they lived there. When they migrate over here, without changing their evil ways, they will turn this place into a hellhole, too. What we need to do is make them either change, to make them reject whatever stupid bullshit they used to believe and practice in their own shitty countries, and to accept our superior ways and beliefs, or get the fuck out to wherever they came from, and now. That’s all there is to it. We need to stop apologizing for being better than everybody else. We need to embrace our right to rule the world, given to us by the very simple virtue of being the ones who figured it out.