Man simply CANNOT function off of mutually exclusive presumptions.  Leading your cart with a philosophy that has no reconcilable definitions/assumptions/and by extension conclusions–and thus no meaning, and thus no relevance TO life because its ideas contradiction themselves–WILL never bring peace because peace preserves life.  And life, of course, without a rational standard by which to know it objectively so that it can be pursued efficaciously is impossible to affirm.  A philosophy, a “world view”, a “faith”, a revelation which can by no means be rationally married to the individual life’s inexorable and singular frame of reference/context (that is, the context of his SELF, NOW) MUST be antithetical to life, because life is only efficaciously and objectively pursued when it is understood to be a direct relationship between a standard of all TRUTH–which must and can only be man’s SELF, NOW, in this material context– and concepts and actions which move in DIRECT service to that standard.  Without an objective standard of TRUTH, which is LIFE of SELF, NOW, concepts and actions are ships with no rudder, and no anchor by which to stop and contemplate where they are going.  They float around aimlessly until they inevitably crash and burn and sink, without purpose and without meaning.  There is no reaching the shore, or anywhere else, because the shore does not exist.  The ships have literally no where to go, because there is no definable objective.  The ships have no where to go because they have no idea why in the fuck they are there in the first place.  So they go nowhere except, eventually, straight to the bottom.

This denial of the standard of TRUTH being man’s individual SELF, NOW, in this material context is a problem because human beings are wholly conceptual agents.  It is our ability to conceptualize the SELF of our individual person as opposed to the OTHER of our environment and other people which allows us to define not only what LIFE is objectively (as the SELF) but to then conceptualize what we observe in order to organize it in service to our LIFE.  It is this ability to “see” beyond ourselves via abstract concepts (up, down, left, right, hard, soft, fast, slow, here, there, cold, hot, direct, circular, black, blue, time, space, distance, stick, ball, chair, house, fort, wall, stab, slash, weak, soft, etc., etc) which puts man at the top of the food chain.  By giving man choice…thus man possesses the unique ability to act in the the most efficacious way possibly in service to his life.  When confronting the angry lion he can make the distinction between “fight” and “flee”, and then CHOOSE which of those concepts to follow at the moment…which offers him the best way to preserve his life.  An animal cannot make this distinction.  An animal cannot organize its environment by separating “SELF” from “OTHER”.  An animal may instinctively pursue its own life, but it cannot conceptualize it or the environment in order to volitionally  pursue the best option for living at any given moment.  If the environment does not happen to possess readily a means for the instinctive animal to live, it will die.  It will not cross its mind to consider altering the environment in service to its life.  Either the environment is conducive to life or it is not.  Now, certainly a bird can fly south for the winter, but its ability to fly is its tool for living, not its ability to conceptualize.  It will move to warmer weather, but it cannot build a fire so that it does not have to move.  It cannot build a shelter by which to keep the cold air out.  For the animal, the environment controls behavior categorically.  It will never alter its behavior to serve a SELF in the conceptual sense.  Meaning, it cannot fundamentally change its “nature” to pursue its own life.  A beaver will build its dam so long as their is material to do so, but it will never decide to NOT build a dam when there is no material and seek to make use of some other means of shelter.  A squirrel will climb things as long as there are things to climb.  But it will never decide not to climb things because there is a better, more efficient way to pursue its life.  Again, the environment ALWAYS is the direct dictator of how an animal acts.  Animals always act linearly.  There is never any distinction made between the SELF and anything else, so that the SELF can be pursued in a myriad of ways, even if it means altering the fundamental “nature’ of who the animal is.  Birds don’t all of a sudden start to walk around on the ground because it is more conducive to their SELF.   If a bird cannot fly, a bird will eventually, sooner rather than later, die.  The bird will not think to make a fortress, and live in that fortress, and organize its life in a new way using the fortress as the new primary means of survival, against its natural tendency, in order to live.  (Yes, I understand that birds do not have opposable thumbs, but this is not strictly a matter of physical ability.  On the contrary, the primary limitation of animals, and why man rules over them categorically, is cognitive.  A bird would not need opposable thumbs to say, build a nest which was surround by sides and a roof, and to stuff the holes with mud, and to pluck its own feathers to make a downy interior.  Or to pick up a sharp stick in its beak and stab the cat with it.  It doesn’t do this because it doesn’t think to do this, because it does not conceptualize.)

A little side note:  Now, when I say man can “change his nature” I do not mean that man’s SELF changes.  What I  mean is that man’s ability to conceptualize SELF means that man can be a tree dweller, or a desert dweller, or a tundra dweller…he can change his actions in service to life, even if it means not playing to his inherent physical attributes.

But man does not in any way think like an animal, I submit.  Man acts in service to SELF, not to the environment.  The environment may dictate what choices man makes, but it will not alter the standard of the conceptualized SELF as the motive for what man does and why he does it.

The power of choice is a direct function of the power to conceptually abstract.  But all choice must be in service to something–for no choice is an end to itself–and the only logical something is mans’ LIFE.  And further, there is no such thing as any rational nor efficacious pursuit of choice in service to death.  That is called insanity.

And it is also called “Christian Orthodoxy” and “sound doctrine”.

When the conceptual abstractions man devises in order to pursue his life are contradictorily divorced from the singularity of man’s material SELF, then they must demand man’s death.  If they are divorced from man’s brain, they become absolute and infinite.  Instead of promoting man, they demand his death in service to their infinity.  Instead of serving man, they seek to destroy him, seeing him as nothing more than an imperfect limitation on the perfect infinity of the abstract concept which, in a vacuum of itself, cannot co-exist with man or God or anything else.  This is axiomatic.  The abstract concept of “blue”, divorced from a material (physical) and finite object by which to give it a value by which it can be observed, known, and integrated into man’s LIFE, and pressed into man’s service, must be infinite.  Meaning, the concept is the end and beginning of itself.  It has no definition and no relevancy beyond itself.  “Blue IS” is the only definition of the concept of “blue” absent a material THING.  

You see, if our life, our SELF, no longer is the standard, because we have decided that the standard of TRUTH, which should be the SELF, is now utterly outside ourselves, then all the concepts we create which are suppose to affirm and propagate the SELF go to serve whatever we decide is the standard of TRUTH outside of us.  The problem with that is that any standard outside of the SELF is by definition not only infinite, but by logical extension, categorically unknowable.  What is infinite cannot be observed, axiomatically. And if it cannot be observed it cannot be defined, known, or limited

Now, for those of you who are raising your hands in protest, remember, that which you concede you don’t know is a direct function of your ability to observe what you observe and thus DO know.  In other words, there is no such thing as what we don’t know…for what we don’t know is a conceptual abstraction; it does not actually exist.  We make conjectures about what we don’t know, again, by directly observing what we do.

At any rate, when our concepts are not conceded to be direct extensions of our physical SELVES, NOW, then they are divorced from  man entirely.  Thus, our concepts go to serve some phantom in the sky (because if we cannot set the standard of TRUTH as SELF, then we have no rational frame of reference to actually define anything, much less God) or some other concept/abstraction, neither of which has anything relevant to do with us (because, again, it is wholly outside our existential frame of reference:  the human SELF).  The logical conclusion then of this kind of thinking is that our concepts are not supposed to serve our SELF, but they go to serve something NOT us.  Which means that our concepts go to serve our death, no longer our life.  We exist to DIE, is the point.  And notice that in Calvinism, just like every other bastard son of Plato, man’s DEATH is the greatest moral good he can do.  Deny yourself, sacrifice your life, your money, your property…reject reason, reject emotions and your own understanding of right and wrong.  All your ideas are steeped in depravity, making it impossible for you to make any kind of right judgement; reject your own conscience in service to that which you are utterly incapable of grasping because it is wholly outside of you.  Look at the cross, cross, cross…and never move beyond it because the death of man, the destruction of life, is the panacea for all of life’s ills and sins.

And that is what Calvinism is.  A cult of death, as John Immel rightly and poignantly concludes. We never move beyond the cross and neither does God. Jesus is nailed there as a constant reminder of what is demanded of you:  your very existence.  It is gone, from the womb to eternity.  Whether you think so or not, YOU were dead (i.e. not YOU) when you got here and you will be dead when you leave.  There is no overcoming death in Calvinism, there is only its wholesale worship.  Even after you are saved, notice your free will is still utterly null and void.  You are still a product of evil; all your good deeds as a Christian are not really of you, they are of God.  Whatever you earned, no matter how hard you worked or how many hours you put it, you don’t deserve.  It doesn’t belong to you; it’s all God’s (how many times have you heard that tidbit of rational rape).  You can work until your back hurts and still  you don’t deserve what you earned.

How is this possible?

Because there is no you.  You ARE evil…you don’t just CHOOSE evil.  And as such, there is no YOU at all.  Thus anything “good” you receive, insofar as you are able to define a “good thing” (you aren’t), must by logical extension be purely God’s grace. You can’t deserve anything or earn anything no matter how hard you work because you are not really the human you, the SELF, you are the conceptual abstraction of EVIL. 

And you are right.  When you think about it, none of this makes any fucking sense at all.

You obey, but it doesn’t matter.  Why?  Because your life doesn’t matter.  In Christ you are dead, just as you were before, except that now the contradiction becomes “divinely ordained”; a product of your “election”.  Unsaved your death is punished.  Saved your death is rewarded.  The same depraved self, the same definition of moral perfection:  death.  The only thing that changes is now hell is redefined as heaven; it is purely a matter of word swapping. What each one actually IS, doesn’t change, because the meanings of “heaven” and “hell” are irrelevant to a SELF which does not actually exist to know them.  You cannot ever rationally make a distinction between heave and hell because you do not exist as a free agent who can actively observe his/her life and universe, make moral and epistemological judgments and pursue them.  And as such, you have no ability to really know anything because you cannot define SELF.  You are first depravity incarnate, and now in Christ you are morality incarnate.  Both are forces which possess your body, but exclude your mind…somehow (again, its all bullshit).  For this type of person, any distinction between heaven and hell is immaterial because there is no YOU to understand the difference anyway.

I want to hammer, hammer, hammer down this point.  In Calvinism/Reformation theology (and collectivism/communism, scientific determinism, socialism, fascism, Platonism, gnosticism, Kantianism, etc., etc.), there is no way to define YOU.  You are utterly removed from any metaphysical and epistemological equation.

And that is why it is all, by definition, a lie.  YOU are the only rational objective singularity in your existence.  Therefore, any idea which denies this must be a total lie.  Period.  Full stop.  There is no such thing as a philosophy which does not start with the individual existence of the human SELF.

Here is how they bullshit their way around it:

The utter contradiction in Reformed theology, which exists like a cancerous leaven in essentially every doctrine and every orthodoxy of Christianity in the world today, is that you are dualistic in your existence.  There is an infinite schism in man’s metaphysic. He both is and is not.  He knows and knows not.  He can choose and not choose.  He is evil and he is good.  He has distinct body and distinct spirit, which are each complete.  He is finite and infinite.

Man is not one; he is a a function of two essences which are mutually exclusive. This is the metaphysical assumption of Christianity in our day.  And therefore contradiction is and must always be the root of our “faith” and our theology, and thus our philosophy.  There is no such thing as a rationally founded or a rationally conclusive philosophy which can proceed from a metaphysical dualism; from a severed SELF.  Ever the two parts of man will contradict…and this is why Christianity is more a force of human destruction today; and it is a world view the likes of which are not actually philosophically discernible from communism/collectivism, fascism, Islamism, atheism, determinism, mysticism, gnosticism, Platonism, and the political theory which drives and has driven every two bit dictator in the world.  Tyranny and naked despotism is Christianity’s handmaiden, and it all goes back to the inconsistency of its Platonist ideas.

Man never gets to be what he is NOW, in this life, in this body, observing what he sees NOW and judging it and organizing it with respect to how it affirms his moral goodness and right to live and be NOW.  And this is why Christianity in general will continue to be a destructive force in the world, loving death and power more than it loves God or His children, or Christ and His salvation.  It will continue to worship man’s death and pursue it as the means to spiritual perfection.

And even worse is the marriage between a philosophy of death and the love of money.  They go hand in hand.  The death-is-life business is very profitable.  If you convince people that they don’t matter, then you can easily convince them that what they have and what they do doesn’t matter.

Now…are you connecting the dots?  Are you seeing why the ecclesiastical “authority” is so invested in Calvinism? Convince people to fear and hate themSELVES and they will fear and hate WHAT THEY OWN…and give it to you.  And that is the big motherfucking point of it all. They don’t give a shit about people, but they sure as hell want to get their paws on the cheddar people own.

It is a long and very old story, going back to the beginning of time…to the seeds of evil.  If you can successfully separate people from who they are, then you can very easily separate them from the property they possess.

Works every time, too.  Church is a gooooooooood fucking business.  And from the looks of things, it will continue to be.

“The more you bend your will to me, the more you function as a constant source of my own affirmation, and perpetually concede my right to claim you for myself and mine own ends, so that I may demand your ongoing succor, worship, adulation, and capitulation to my vacillating and fickle needs and whims; and thus, the more I can love myself.  Which is, of course, the point of it all.  Mine own adulation is the single greatest and most prestigious moral action in the entire universe.  The purpose of all that exists is to facilitate my adoration of myself.  In this sense, you are at the same time needed and wholly unnecessary to the purpose and material reality of the universe.  I am eternal, you are non-existent.  You, insofar as we choose to label you “you”, are merely an extension of me, so that I can feel through you, and claim your life-force for myself.  And yet, the contradiction which is so obvious to everyone except me is this:  without you and the succor and affirmation you are obliged and commanded by me to grant, I am faced with the crushing guilt of what I know is my infinite inadequacy.  And worse, I am made aware of the actual truth, which is not that I am spectacularly inadequate, but that I am merely an average man.  I am not particularly brilliant nor successful nor smart nor special, and even my failures are unimpressive.  And this is something that I,the narcissist, cannot endure.  Because I cannot accept average because there is no, and never has been any middle ground with me.  I am either the paragon of life gone utterly wrong, which I lived with for a time as a child, or I am God incarnate to the universe, which I became in order to kill that useless child.  And so now I am not average, you see…for this I cannot accept lest I die. I am Him and He is me when He affirms me.  And you are me when you affirm me.  And when you and He does not, then you both are void.”

This is the lie in the mind of the narcissist; it is his creed, if you will.  It is perpetually before him as the singular philosophy which defines his every living moment.  The inherent contradictions are brushed off as either irrelevant or the narcissist considers it his divine right to define and/or re-define reality in service to his “perfection”.  The never-ending violations of logic are like the climaxes of a serial rapist, feeding his false sense of intellectual and even physical superiority.  For he truly believes that he is able to see things others cannot see, to know things others cannot know, to do things others cannot do.  His presumed ability to redefine reality at will so that it bends to his emotional and psychological needs does not tell him that he should seek professional help, or that his understanding is skewed, for it is impossible for him to concede that he could ever make an irrelevant or irrational statement, or believe a contradictory belief.  So, rather than prove his need for psychiatric treatment and remediation from his destructive lifestyle, the narcissist’s irreconcilable “logic”, on the contrary, is abject evidence that no mere mortal understands the depths and complexity of his psyche (when the reality is that the narcissist is about as uncomplicated a personality as exists…all narcissists, though they think they are so unique, think the same, and their thinking is not particularly deep).  The narcissist is the lone genius in a sea of imbeciles who pretend to understand him, to counsel him, and yet he knows that they cannot possibly apprehend his mind and emotions.  When he is happy, you cannot fathom the degree of happiness, for it so transcends your pitiful emotions.  And when he is in despair, his suffering has no equal in the world, and the circumstances surrounding his anguish are of course positively epic in scope…you could never understand the weight of the responsibility he shoulders; the burdens his poor soul must endure.  You simply don’t understand, and never will, so don’t try.

Your purpose is never to criticize or offer counsel, suggestion, or advice…for this is a rank insult to his superior status.  And never, ever hint at his own culpability in the matter, for to do so will invite an onslaught vitriol and invective.  The only thing you can possibly offer him is a shoulder to cry on; to be the one who affirms his greatness and tells him that all men of infinite moral worth and intellectual perfection must frequently endure the torches of the commoners –those empty-headed automatons who run in pointless circles, only shells of life.   You must reassure him that his plight is merely proof that he is far above the rest; that his Tower of Babel he has been successfully built, and its greatness is such that not even God can  bring it down.  Reassure him that his victory in the face of such Herculean odds is inevitable; that he has proven time and time again the superiority of his intellectual and psychological fortitude and his physical stamina, of which no mortal words can adequately describe.  Tell him without reservation that he is the personification of stalwart resilience.  He is invincible, everyone else temporal, expendable, and doomed to eternal failure and to the curse of the fires of hell.  After a while he will come out of his funk, brimming with narcissistic supply, and able to see once again that all the universe rises and falls by his will and purpose.

Well…he will come out of his funk for a time, anyway, until his narcissistic supply runs shallow, which it always inevitably does, as reality has a cruel way of inexorably intruding upon the narcissistic fantasy…and then the cycle will begin again.

*

You think I am exaggerating?  Really? Then I submit you have never met a true narcissist.  Your incredulity is irrelevant…and I mean that not as an insult, but only as a matter of fact.  Not only is this not an exaggeration, I have likely not done justice to his perceptions of himself.  The level of self-deception and false hubris is likely beyond what one who is not a narcissist can adequately explain.  Truly, these are sick people, and that is the primary thing you need to know.

And they have their own theology, in the form of neo-Calvinism and the resurgence of Reformation ideals.

And they are quite probably right now running your church.

Are you afraid?

You should be.

*

The narcissist will regale you with long and ostentatious tales of his unconditional love; of the free gift of his grace and doting heart; of his immaculate and infinitely sacrificial charity…

…and then he will proceed to innumerate, without skipping a beat, your countless moral deficiencies which constantly foil and restrain his “free” grace and his “unconditional” love.  In short, you soon find out that with the narcissist, every day is opposite day.  “Unconditional” means absolutely conditional in every way imaginable.  “Free” means absolutely at severe cost to you.  If you want to partake of his divine and corpulent dispensations, you must pony up the narcissistic supply.  Your claim to your self-ownership is the single greatest condition which prevents the narcissist from bestowing upon you anything at all, even the mere recognition of your existence.  You are either a source or potential source of narcissistic supply, or you are void.  Irrelevant. Non-existent.  Disregarded.  Out of sight and out of mind.

The narcissist will never hesitate to contradict himself to your face in service to his full-on farce of existential superiority…for what does he have to fear?  Again, need I remind you that your existence is so immaterial that it isn’t even truly recognized.  Whatever contradictions you may point out to him are dismissed or savaged as yet another condition of yours which presents a stumbling block to his “unconditional” love.  His “free” and “unfetter” desire to show you his perfect grace is fettered by your faults, of which he is, of course, categorically allowed (hypocritically) to point out.  And your stubborn insistence on your existence is the biggest motherfucker of all your “conditions”.

Let do that again.

Your existence is the insufferable condition which will automatically exclude you from the grace and love of the narcissist.  The narcissist, in so many words, will explain that it is, at the root, your very being which is the primary problem…why you can’t understand him, why you can’t possibly commune with him, why you must be punished.  For your own good, he will hypocritically and contradictorily explain.  He will deflect the accusations (either from you or from the small, thin voice of his “true self” which is little more than a dried up husk of the actual human being he used to be) of his own hypocrisy by arguing that the reason his unconditional love may appear hypocritical is because you persist in the lie that you are actually YOU…that you even exist to have an opinion concerning him or anything else at all.  You, not him, are the hypocrite who makes your own existence the condition which then must preclude an unconditional love.  Your refusal to renounce your individual, autonomous SELF is why instead of unconditional love he is forced to heap upon you hate and violence and endless criticism. The sin of your existence has created a condition in you which is the root of all your pain (of which you are of course wholly culpable for, somehow).  And the condition is defined thus:  that you insist (rightly) that you must be YOU in order to receive love, grace, adoration, revelation, and reconciliation, which, of course, renders the unconditional love a categorical contradiction in you.  Your very existence is the condition which precludes the unconditional love.  This is otherwise known, in certain peculiar theologies, as “total depravity”.

For you neo-Calvinist survivors…is any of this sounding more and more familiar?  Of course it is.  Narcissism is narcissism is narcissism.  Wherever it is found, in whatever form, the template is always the same.  You exist to serve someone else, or you do not exist.  In other words, you don’t exist…you are merely an extension of those who claim to rule over you by divine mandate.

By demanding that “unconditional” love require an object in YOU that it may be defined and known as love, you have contradicted the narcissist’s root assumption:  that he alone is actually aware of SELF.  By insisting that YOU are a prerequisite to any relationship involving something specifically directed at YOU–that YOU must come first in any equation involving the transference of value between YOU and someone/something else–automatically proves that you cannot possibly be elect.  As in Calvinism, the entire problem narcissists have with people is that they always want to BE people, individually, and self aware.  That is the sin of them totally defined.  And that is what the narcissist despises, because it demands that the entire philosophy is one of relationship, not of rule.  And the narcissist, like the Calvinist, insists that the only real existence is one in which you have no actual volition of your own.

You see, in a relationship, moral worth is equal.  In rule, right is claimed by special, unknowable, divine mandate, which always ends up “verified” to the masses through their wholesale slaughter and oppression.  And human value is replaced by divine right to either own or destroy the opposition.  For indeed, the right to destroy the premise of humanity’s own existence is the narcissist’s idea of a perfect world.  He rules you, period.  Full stop.

It is this claim–that of your autonomous self–which enrages the narcissist like nothing else can.  He does not tolerate the presence of any other volitional agent, not even God.  Your claim to self-being and self-ownership invites his wrath like a line of cocaine invites a drug addict to snort.  Because what it says to the narcissist is that he is obligated to consider you in the relationship, and thus may not then reserve all his unconditional love for himself.  By claiming your own SELF–and even worse, the moral and existential equality of your own SELF–you deny him his “rightful” place at the center of the universe.  Interaction cannot be wholly self-serving.  He must share his charity and affection with you…and this notion utterly contradicts and distorts the narcissist’s twisted definition of love.  You see, to the narcissist, unconditional love means love which is completely self-directed.  Since your existence presents a condition which denies his definition of “unconditional”, he rejects your claim to SELF entirely.  He will see you dead or destroyed…or, more likely, will abandon you, before he cedes one inch of love to you.  The only love is the love reserved for him.  If it is not directed solely inward, it is not love, by definition.  It is a lie, a farce, and a sin.  He is the only one who does not present a condition which precludes unconditional love.  Because he is the source of all love (and everything else), due to the fact that he alone is morally perfect, he alone gets to say what is done with it.  And since no one else can receive it because no one else exists–and those who “do” deny the unconditional love by the condition of their existence–all the love must go to him.  

(As an aside, those of you with narcissistic parents might have noticed how they abandoned you emotionally and psychologically as soon as you attained a modicum of self-sufficiency and self-acknowledgement.  Oftentimes, narcissistic parents are less likely to be violent with their children (though they certainly can be) and will instead resort to savage emotional abuse and the “silent treatment” as punishment for perceived slights to their perfection.  The most egregious slight being, again, any claim to your self-ownership/existence.)

A person with clinical Narcissistic Personality Disorder is, unfortunately, beyond hope and beyond help.  The human being who once embodied the vacuous shell which is now seen has been emaciated and destroyed by a long, tortured death inside the narcissist’s psychological iron maiden.  The vacuous shell is merely a semblance of a human being; a robot, charged and rebooted by the souls of others which program love into him so that he can “feel”.  Nothing is real to the narcissist.  Everything is a contradiction, a lie, a masquerade.  The love he feels for himself isn’t love at all.  It is hate.  The love he feels for others isn’t love at all.  It is rage.  The things he concedes about himself are the stuff fantasy movies are made of.  Reality brings the realization of his average status, and his wholly inadequate ability to live up to the illusion he has created.  Thus, reality is death, and he avoids it like the plague.

If this series on narcissism reads like a Calvinist theological catechism, do not be surprised.  You have judged correctly.  For Calvinism, like narcissism is merely another bastard son of Plato.  The Primary consciousness is the narcissist’s shell, rather than the Pastor/Priest-in-the-stead, but the functional assumptions are precisely the same, as are the outcomes.  Nothing beyond the cult of personality is real.  All either sacrifices itself to the “authority” of the vessels of the “revelation”, or it is sacrificed to the vessels by divine mandate.

Existence is sin.  SELF precludes love.  You do not get to be you.

Proceeding from where we left off in the last post, let us examine rule number two with respect to the assumptions and consequential behavior of the narcissist, as I have come to see it:

The second rule of narcissism is that it is perhaps philosophically (that is, clinically described as) a form of masochism, but the practical application of it to others resembles more of sadism; though, again, there is not the abject hatred of humanity and the requisite pleasure derived from their suffering.  Nevertheless, it must be conceded that the behavior of the narcissist towards his fellow man is catastrophically destructive, ruining the lives of his fellow human beings with a remorseless violence–be it emotional or physical or both–and there is an almost vampire-like lust for their routine sacrifice to his appetites. Children of narcissists may (and often do, I believe) become victims of severe psychological disorders, such as panic/anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, narcissism dependency, or even become narcissists themselves.

Narcissists have capricious temperaments, and can react differently to the same situation or words/behavior of his fellow man, without reason.  One never knows how a narcissist will react in any given situation.  This uncertainly renders his victims skittish to the point of dysfunction if exposed for too long; and his vicious temper when confronted with what he perceives as an insult or a denial of his omnipotent perfection can render his victims emotionally broken for years to come, and maybe for the rest of their lives.

He may be labeled as a masochist, but I submit that if he is no friend to himself, the narcissist is even less of a friend to his fellow man.  And for that reason, I do not concede he is purely a masochist.  He may not take direct pleasure in the pain of others, but the fact that their exploitation results in his pleasure (and exploitation is indeed what it is, whether he understands this or not) in the form of narcissistic supply means that there is a dark streak of sadism running through his personality.  Indeed, it is this tendency to annihilate his victims with a stoic, emotionless savaging of their autonomous selves which thus groups the narcissist in with other severe psychological pathologies such as psychopathy/sociopathy and Borderline Personality Disorder.  Narcissism is self-hatred which translates into a blanket punishing of humanity by routinely engaging in behavior which denies and destroys it.

What this means is that engaging the narcissist is extremely hazardous to your health.  His inability to see other human beings as actually human leads to all manner of human destruction.  He has no compunction about damaging or destroying anyone whom he deems “broken” or unable to perform their “jobs” for the narcissist.  And your job is, of course, solely defined by the narcissist.  You obviously have no say.  He possesses no capacity for apprehending individual human contexts, personality nuances, or belief systems of other people; and as such these aspects of people’s humanity are entirely ignored by the narcissist.  He has no objective beyond self-preservation through the slaking of his insatiable appetite for narcissistic supply…a full slaking of course ever eluding him.  Indeed, it is my opinion based on my reading that his need for narcissistic supply is the only real barrier between narcissism and full-on psychopathy.

But again, it isn’t that the narcissist hates people.  His hatred is reserved purely for himself…which is why they are I think considered more masochistic than sadistic.  No, the narcissist cannot hate people or take direct pleasure in their pain precisely because, as I have explained, they do not acknowledge the existence of other people.  And though we may be tempted to consider the narcissist more…hmm, “desirable” than the psychopath; less dangerous perhaps (which he is to society at large in a sense, which he disregards as non-existent and irrelevant unless he is actively engaged with it) or more “stable”, we must remember that to deny another person their humanity–and by extension, their natural human rights (life, liberty, autonomy, property)–represents the zenith of human destruction.  It targets man at the place sure to do the most damage:  his very SELF.  To deny a person the right to claim his or her very material existence–their very essence and being–as actual and as their own is the single greatest act of immorality which can be perpetrated upon man, I submit.  It completely eradicates man at his source, the SELF, and everything that follows which is a product of their lives.  Further, when human beings are deemed non-existent then not only are they denied the knowledge of themselves, who are TRUTH in the only way rationally definable, they are denied knowledge of and access to God, Himself, by definition, who is man’s Creator, and as such is the single greatest affirm-er of individual human life in the entire universe.  But the narcissist says no.  The narcissist declares God the Creator of nothing.

If one were to ask me if I thought the devil himself were a psychopath or narcissist, I would deem him a narcissist.  The psychopath takes pleasure in hurting humans, and will taunt them by saying that not even God can help them once they become his target.  The narcissist will say that there are no other humans to hurt, and that there is NO God to help them, regardless of whether they are his “target” or not.  And no matter how many times they may say God and you exist, your narcissist does not actually believe it.  Not in the sense that he concedes they are autonomous entities in their own right.  They are forms of narcissistic supply, existing to satisfy his craving, nothing more.  God is treated with no greater deference than you are.

This sounds more like the devil to me than a psychopath.

If I am making narcissism out to be more appalling than you ever thought, good.  Narcissism is the scythe put to humanity.  And once you have come face to face with a real, actual, clinically defined Narcissistic Personality Disorder…well, trust me, the horror of that experience is not easily shaken, if it ever is.  To be stripped of your humanity in either a violent or a coldly indifferent instant, and thought of and looked at as literally nothing more than a jockstrap to hold someone’s sad little balls up…well, it’s frankly disturbing.

I submit that Calvinism is little more than narcissism in mystic guise, which is why when you hear of abuse in the neo-Calvinist church, it is so fucking horrific, and yet simultaneously played down or denied as not really such a big deal after all.  “God” is always bigger than the circumstance, of course (they won’t even deign to call it abuse most of the time) and has great plans which will come of it…but never for the victim you will notice.  No, the victims are merely the “vessels of wrath”; cosmic bed pans for the divinely called priests/pastors-in-the-stead to defecate in as an expression of God’s divine determinism.  God’s all-determining will, which is the vehicle for the abuse of course, renders the narcissistic church not only perfectly morally innocent of any consequences of the abuse, but the recipient of what will surely come to a blessing for the church because of it.  Because the church, in lock-step keeping with the assumptions of the narcissistic personality, can only ever do “God’s will”.  Which is to say, they can never do wrong, no matter how wrong it might look to you or I.

In Calvinism, just as is the clinical description of the narcissist, there is no YOU.  Only they exist.  Even God is merely an illusion.  The real deity is the pastor/priest…for their theology can make absolutely no metaphysical distinction.  There is no difference between God and His men “called”, somehow, to enlighten the masses to His absolute “truth”.

Stay tuned for part four.

In my experience, there are two essential rules which seem to undergird and describe Narcissistic Personality Disorder.  I do not mean symptoms, of which I believe there are nine mentioned in the psychiatric diagnostic and statistical manual.  I mean that these are assumptions you can make about how the narcissist views you and others; and what the practical effects are upon human beings who engaged them, when the narcissist acts in service to his assumptions.  These two rules are:

1.  You do not exist as you.  You are a machine, or an appliance, of which they presume to be the sole operator/proprietor.  Their wants, needs, and desires, no matter how insane, contradictory or capricious, you are to categorically reflect.  You are a program or a switch..and this is exactly how they see you.  They react in anger when you make even the slightest pretense of autonomous existence; when you do not respond according to the preconceived notion of their sole ownership of all the appliances (people) they “purchase” with their “affection” and their “attention”.  A person the narcissist has deemed as belonging to himself but does not acknowledge his slightest whim is treated as, again, a broken machine/appliance in need of “fixing”, which comes in the form of verbal/psychological/emotional abuse, physical violence, or a simple tossing aside like so much useless trash (ignoring or the “silent treatment”).  You see, your job is to serve as a vehicle for his convenience, and thus your role is to serve as nothing more nor less than the perpetual affirmer of his omnipotence and moral perfection; their supreme ontological importance.  In short, his infinitely superior agency makes him essentially God to you.  He does not understand the nuances of humanity, the many layers of thought, feeling, and motivation which drive a human being along the pathway of his or her life.  And I mean literally.  As in he literally does not understand humanity outside of the machine/appliance model.

It isn’t that the narcissist, like a psychopath, hates people as such.  It is that he is, again, literally unable to understand the nature of other human beings as equally self-aware, equally feeling entities.  He simply does not and cannot see you as a full-on personality of your own.  You are a machine, a robot, a computer, an appliance, a thing which is merely a human doppelganger, wearing merely a thin and unconvincing exoskeleton of human form.  Underneath you are wires and microchips and transistors, brackets and harnesses, nuts and bolts.  He assumes ownership of you like he would own a television, or a cell phone.  Your life is literally not your own.  It does not matter that you may live in a different neighborhood, or county, or state, and have your own house and car and job and family.  All of that is utterly irrelevant, and makes about as rational an impact in his thinking than if you were a washing machine claiming to have a social circle of its own.   All of your life is utterly ignored…and when you are out of sight. like an appliance, you are essentially out of mind.  He may call you, or have you over for a visit, or take you out on a date, but understand that this is not in service to, nor proof of, your own separate existence as a rational being.  No, this is merely how he accesses you.  Turning on the television requires him to pick up a remote and press a button.  Starting the stove involves walking to the kitchen and twisting a knob.  Starting you involves calling a number on his cell phone and a well-imitated pretense of interpersonal interaction.  That is it.  Any gift given to you on your birthday, Christmas, or “just because” is in service to him.  Filling up the car with gas gets him around town.  Showering you with compliments and gifts and false empathy or love fills you up so that you will continue to run in service to himself…dispensing your narcissistic supply like the television dispenses his favorite shows, or the stove dispenses his favorite brownies.

You must accept this.  You are not a person to him.  Ever.  No matter how much he may make you feel like one.  For the narcissist, it is an impossible realization and connection.  As incredulous as this might be, trust me…if you know a narcissist, evaluate your relationship with him in light of what you have just read.  You will be shocked, I submit, at the eerie and seemingly uncanny ability I possess to describe this person, whom I have never met, so perfectly.  But it isn’t that I have some kind of special revelation or extra sensory perception.  This is the face of narcissism, and it is consistent amongst people, collectively and individually. Truly, when you have seen one you have seen them all. The narcissist, I submit, is the closest a human being can come to being deprived of a soul.  To being merely a plastic person.  The irony here, of course, is that he is the machine, not you.  He is the appliance, and you exist to keep him running.  And deep down, somewhere within the corpse-like husk of his “true self” which he killed years and years ago, he knows this.  But he cannot acknowledge it, lest he die.  The fear of this truth being brought to bear on his consciousnesses is what keeps him going so inexorably, relentlessly, in pursuit of his coveted narcissistic supply.

So as I was saying…you are an element of, or an extension of himself, like any other piece of his property.  You exist only to do a job that he alone gets to define.  You are nothing more, and never will be.  Full stop. If you are friends with or otherwise involved with a narcissist this is the first thing you must come to terms with should you decided to remain in the relationship.  To attempt to advocate for your own autonomous SELF will only confuse and enrage the narcissist.  Do not bother.  It is a complete waste of time.  He possess no psychological or emotional capacity to understand nor concede.  Even if he swears he does, he does not.  Being in a relationship with a narcissist thus involves surrendering yourself to one of only two options:  Leave and do not look back, or stay and accept your place as a walking canvass for his whims and desires; an ever-present source and reflection of his own self-adulation.  Accept that you may never speak of yourself as an autonomous human being without inviting the abject wrath of the narcissist.  And always remember that the narcissist does not change.

Now, over time, faced with a weakening body and mind, which are unavoidable reminders of his own fallibility and temporal existence (which he generally does NOT ever think about, let alone concede), the narcissist may grow more tolerable, knowing that he no longer possesses the strength nor alluring presence and disposition with which to restrain you and your own self expression.  He may slowly slink back and accept at least practically what he never could intellectually.  But this will come only after years and years of abuse, torment, and psychological/emotional savaging at the hands of the narcissist.  And by that point, your capacity for self-expression and acknowledgement will likely be almost as blackened and corroded as the narcissists “true self”, which only briefly existed in childhood until the false self, the monster which has been the face of the narcissist ever since and the only “self” of his you have ever known, murdered it in service to his own perceived survival.  And should you choose to remain, long term, with your narcissist, you likely won’t know what to do with your autonomous SELF any more than that he ever did.

(Please stay tuned for part three)

Narcissism, clinically speaking (not colloquially speaking), has fascinated me for a long time, probably because I have known at least two full-blown narcissists–again, I submit, clinically speaking–in my life.  And these people were, unfortunately, no mere acquaintances.  Furthermore, I was, as many of you already know, a loud and proud member of neo-Calvinism poster tyrant, Sovereign Grace Ministries for fifteen years.  And as one who unreservedly believes that Calvinism, among many other vile ideas, is little more than a seething pit of narcissistic manifestos masquerading as “sound doctrine”, I consider my time there at the very least the equivalent to a grad school residency specializing in that particular personality disorder.  Of course I do not profess to be a professional psychiatrist, but the point is that I have done enough research and been around the disorder long enough to feel comfortable calling something or someone “narcissism” when I see it/them.

A recent conversation with someone I consider to be an abject jewel of narcissistic personality disorder enlightened me to yet a further realization of just how deep the canyons of self-delusion and rational desertion run in these people.  I do not mean this post as a personal assault upon this person; truly I do not begrudge (much) my time with this specimen.  It has been a wonderful learning experience…and I mean that sincerely.  No sarcasm intended.  I intend this post to be a criticism of the narcissistic personality in general and not, again, as a personal invective against this person.  I hold against him no ill will.   But be that as it may, his disorder must be discussed in the public square.  For indeed narcissism is nothing if not a rank public menace, and the more we know the more our rational revulsion and pity is increased to our benefit.  Which is to say that most importantly, we can protect ourselves against being dragged down into the pit of their man-eating Platonism.  And when we can know the enemies of the SELF for what they truly are, we can promote the SELF, and in doing so the love and awareness of God and others.  And we can rightly file narcissism within our life experiences under “What not to do”.

In short, I mean this post as something which will help us look beyond the ostensible demeanor of society’s parasitic types so that we can better deal with them, and avoid the mistake of surrendering our bodies and minds to their despotic ideas.

Oftentimes, these people are not rank idiots who stumble around in their folly like drunk sailors, so obviously troubled that anyone with eyeballs and a half of sense can see it.  No, these are seasoned sadists (more on that distinction later), with enough wit and guile to masquerade–initially anyway–as even the most compassionate souls.  Often intellectual, they have a way of qualifying every vile thought, every self-serving whim, every hiss of their utter disdain for you and all things “other” in a way that makes them sound like Mother Theresa’s protege.  A wolf masquerading as a sheep; a devil as an angel of light…it is an art form which they have perfected, having lived almost their entire lives in relentless pursuit of the only manna which satisfies their lie and prevents the truth of their own catastrophic existential failure from sending them into a personal hell of naked, pointless oblivion…this manna being what is known as “narcissistic supply.  They blend in perfectly.  Well, what I mean to say is that they blend in perfectly…until they don’t.  Tuning your mind to a point where you are hyper-alert to logical contradiction removes the false narcissistic front of intellectualism and rationalism like a good pair of night vision goggles.  Once you learn to spot the rape of reason a mile away, the narcissist will no longer have the upper hand on you and your life.  But beware, and do not underestimate their acumen.  Like I said, they have perfected the pursuit of narcissistic supply.  And no matter how vigilant you are, occasionally they’ll get an idea past you, and even to those of us who spend our free time counting the ways of evil philosophy so that we may never be blind to its madness will be tripped up for a time by the artful narcissist.  Guard against this by bearing in mind that all ideas must be vetted for the consistency of their premises, as measured against individual human life–yours included and particularly–as the standard of all TRUTH, before being accepted and you’ll likely be okay.

Be ever alert for the narcissist.  And understand that, like the Siren’s of Homer’s Odyssey, even when you are fully aware that the person with whom you are engaging is a narcissist, you may find yourself nevertheless attracted to his rocky shores.  And there you will surely and inexorably be shipwrecked.  Do not be fooled by his charisma, his charm, or the excitement you sometimes feel when you are around him.  Never underestimate his uncanny ability to make a life which is solely about himself seem like it is all about you.

More coming later today…stay tuned !!

I submit that interpretation is antithetical to the idea of a “plain meaning” of Scripture.  “Words mean things” as a truism ultimately is incomplete.  The logical assumption of such a statement is that words can somehow exist in a vacuum of meaning outside of the context of the human agent and his/her environment.  Since this is not rationally possible, “words mean things” MUST be qualified.  And, of course, the obvious problem is that once this statement is qualified the question which must be begged is, “WHO gets to decide what the words mean, exactly?”.  And the question which is begged by the begged question is, “Why do THEY get to decide what the words mean?”

Why does Paul Dohse get to decide what the words mean instead of the Calvinists he and I oppose?  Nothing against Paul, but the question is a legitimate one.  Why should I trust his definitions over the definitions of the Reformed crowd?  What makes his interpretation more noble and righteous than theirs?  Simply swapping external standards of TRUTH will not solve anything.  And I asked Paul several times in a debate with him “What is the standard of TRUTH”, and got no answer.  That was concerning.  Either the standard of TRUTH is man and his life, or it is something else.  If it is something else, then ultimately man must die in service to it…his life and existence itself is meaningless, and an affront to truth.  So it is quite irrelevant what the standard is if it is not man’s life.  Whether it is the Bible or whether it is God or whether it is Calvinism is quite immaterial at the end of the day.

Anyway…I’ve gotten ahead of myself.

It isn’t enough to say “words mean things”.  Thus you cannot approach the Bible with the interpretive premise of the “plain meaning of the text”.  There is, again, no plain meaning of any text.  The things the words mean are never simply “what they are”.  Outside of a human agent interpreting the words, they cannot possibly mean anything at all.  Each an every person is the absolute context for every item in the lexicons of every language in the world.  Therefore what the words mean will always and only ever be a direct function of the individual human being considering them.  It can be no other way.

Thus, as we have shown that words need a context by which their meaning can be discerned (interpreted), we are left with only two choices which have to do with deciding that the meanings of words are actually “legitimate” or not.  Words and their meanings are only legitimate in how they serve a context…except, what is “context” exactly?  For there is no such thing as a context in a context…meaning, context is not a thing itself.  The context is then of a standard of absolute TRUTH…and this is constant, perpetual, never-changing, and infinite, and it is the thing which all concepts, words, meanings, interpretations and contexts perpetually revolve around.  The context then is the standard of TRUTH wherever it happens to be at any given moment with respect to its environment (place and time).  And therefore words must always serve the standard–its perpetuation, health, and affirmation–before they can be given any meaning or value.

So, yes…as I was saying, when considering “context”, which is the standard of TRUTH as it relates to its environment at any given moment, we have two choices we can make.  The standard of TRUTH is either ourSELVES, meaning, our existence and life; or the standard of TRUTH is well…something else, something outside of your existence.  And this is the root difference between the Primacy of Consciousness approach to existence, and the Primacy of Existence.  The Primacy of Consciousness approach puts the standard of TRUTH outside of man’s life.  Meaning, man himself doesn’t really exist except as he sacrifices himself for this “law” of existence outside of his own.  Put simply, man’s only moral obligation–indeed, his only moral act–is to die for the “cause”, so to speak…either literally, or practically, via surrendering his person and property and mind to the “priests” of the Primary Consciousness, or, as is sometimes the case within certain schools of Biblidolatry, to figure out for himself, in the absence of a mystic overlord in the flesh, just how he is supposed to remove his self from the existential equation by figuring out just what the “plain meaning’ of the text is and then dying to that.

Thus, we see, in the Primacy of Consciousness model, man only really “lives” when he denies that he has any ownership of himself because he must, being utterly outside of TRUTH, lack any epistemological competence, and therefore cannot really claim to know anything at all, especially himself if he is outside the Primary Consciousness.  For without the outside standard, he has no hope of even claiming he exists at all…his life is merely an illusion, and thus, has no real bearing on TRUTH.  Death is his moral obligation thus again…and he can’t really even know this without the knowledge of the Primary Consciousness, which he cannot get, by definition, from the Primary Consciousness on his own which is why the proponents of this philosophy are so big into “election”.  The way you know you are “elected” to “salvation” (the categorical death of you which is supposed to, contradictorily, bring life) is if you concede the truth of the Primary Consciousness without considering your life as a context by which to vet its “truth”.  And the rest of us unfortunate slobs are rightful heirs of judgement and wrath…somehow culpable for our “evil” even though, according to the philosophy, we had no choice but to be “evil” because we weren’t divinely (and arbitrarily) chosen by the Primary Consciousness.  A choice which, incidentally, can have nothing to do with us…and so how we are still culpable for our judgement and hell is well, as John Immel would say, punted into the great cosmic abyss of God’s (Primary Consciousness) mystery.

So, man’s only real “knowledge” is then, the Gnosis, or divine revelation given to him by an intermediary of the Primary Consciousness.  In the case of Calvinism, the mystic impostors for God (Pastors) are the intermediate between man and God; and in the case of the Biblicists, they would say that the Bible is the intermediate between man and God.  And what I mean by “intermediate’ is, of course, the divinely chosen keeper of the Gnosis.

If you have already seen that there is and can be no real distinction between the keeper of the Gnosis and the Primary Consciousness itself (or himself or herself, depending) then hats off to you, because you are absolutely right.  Why?  Because you, in your infinite depravity and the tragically embarrassing moral failure that was your birth, can by no means have anything to do in any way with the Primary Consciousness because he, she, or it is completely mutually exclusive to your life; and as such, you need to have something or someone around who or which can connect the Primary Consciousness to your existence.   And that someone or something is the compelling force which has the “keys” by which to either “save” you or “damn” you according to their impossible-to-dispute claim to hold mandate from the Primary Consciousness to serve as his/her/its absolute power to enforce its absolute will upon humanity with the singular purpose of destroying all of it, either by integrating it (again, somehow…and trust me the logic is impossible to reconcile) into itself or by killing off the detractors.  In other words, the purpose of the Priests is to decide which of the existentially-challenged savages is sacrificing themselves and which, in their stubbornness, need to be sacrificed on the PC’s behalf.

*

The Primacy of Existence approach is the better one, and the one which we all must insist upon as the approach for our lives because it is the only rational one.  It is the only one that doesn’t trade man’s life for his death.

The PE approach basically says that man’s life is the plumb line for all TRUTH because, quite obviously, nothing can be said to exist at all without a human agent existing FIRST.  The reason being that for you to know anything as TRUE and for TRUTH to have any relevancy to you, you must actually exist first.  You can neither know TRUTH, nor can truth be revealed to you without your life being there to serve as the source…the reference, not the vessel, of that truth.  This of course leads one to the only logical conclusion:  all truth is an extension of individual human life.  There is nothing that can be said to be true that denies the prerequisite of life before it can be seen to be true.  In order for the revelation of God to be known as TRUE, man’s life is required to serve as the revelation’s reference.  This means that all truth must affirm man’s life as the absolute, infinite reference.  Anything that says that man’s life is outside of truth…or that man’s life proceeds from a construct, a Primary Consciousness, that is outside of his existence, cannot possibly be true.  For there is no way that man can be birthed by something or into something which is wholly exclusive to him.  In other words, man is the source of HIMSELF.  You are the constant in everything…and without you, nothing can be qualified as even existing let alone as TRUTH.

Of course, the emotional knee-jerk reaction to this is that I am nothing more than a man-worshiping apostate…my claims, heretical and criminal, denying God, denying Christ, and blah, blah, blah.  Well…if anyone can explain to me how they can know any TRUTH at all outside of the frame of reference of their own SELF, then I’m all ears.  Believe me, it is quite an impossible argument to make.

Don’t you think its ironic that the only way you can claim a TRUTH which exists whether you are around or not is because you are around?   That the only way you can declare a truth outside yourself is from within yourself?  That the only way you can know God is because you were born  first?  Or do we pretend that what we know precedes ourselves?  That you know what you know because you weren’t around to know it?  That its true to you, even without you?

There is absolutely no logic to that.  Think about it, and thinks some more.  Without YOU, you cannot claim that ANYTHING exists…by definition.  Don’t we think it is ironic and contradictory for someone to say “truth doesn’t need me to be true” when the only way they can possibly concede that is because they exist?!  Who makes the statement “truth doesn’t need me”?  ME is making that statement.  ME, the person, has to exist first before they can know the truth which somehow doesn’t need them to be true.  Without them, there is no frame of reference for truth…no frame of reference for the existence of anything.  The backwards logic is mindblowing.

No, you give birth to what you know.  What you know did not give birth to you.  You say, “Argo, but I didn’t need to exist for Abe Lincoln to be President, or for Jesus to walk on water.  Those events were true even though I wasn’t yet born.”  And I say, how can you know that except by your existence?  The answer is:  you cannot.  And so which comes first in the “chain of truth”?  Your existence, or the fact that Abe Lincoln was President.  The answer is:  your existence must come first.  Before you can know that Jesus walked on water before you were born, you had to be born.

This is fun, huh?  Isn’t it great turning traditional logic on its head?  I love it.

And so the PE approach rightly claims man’s life as the standard of TRUTH, and thus gauges truth, value, meaning, morality, etc. in how it affirms man’s life.  Those things which affirm him are truth, those which deny him are false.  Those things which seek to perpetuate his life according to his own tastes and pleasures and health and contentment and satisfaction as an end are “good”;  those which demand from him pain and suffering and death as an end are “evil”. Does this mean that pain is always evil and pleasure is always good?  No…that is the argument of the “words mean things” crowd.  Remember, the context is always human life.  Pain and suffering can be good if the end is individual life..such as giving your savings away to help provide for your sick mother a place to live.  Pleasure and comfort can be evil, such as when you enslave other men for your “pleasure”.  The context is what is “good” for LIFE.  And so what I mean by “pleasure” and “pain” go beyond whatever “plain meaning” we might have.  No, they must be defined according to the context of the individual in how they pursue their own life, as is their right, while obviously affirming the rights of others with whom they relate to do the same.  Jesus dies on the cross to affirm man’s life and God’s goodness.  It was suffering, but the end was life.  It was ultimately his choice to pursue life, and this WILL bring pleasure in the end because life is GOOD, and good is rationally defined by what is MOST pleasing…and what is most pleasing will always be SELF-affirming, not what is painful and life-despising.  So am I saying that Jesus dying on the cross had value not only for man but for Him?  Yes I am.  Our relationship with God is an exchange of value, just like it is with any relationship.  As God turns man to Himself by his mercy, God reaps the benefits of man’s adoration…this adoration and worship is pleasing to him.  A sweet aroma, as the Bible says.  To say that God finds no value in man that He would sacrifice for him in such an epic way is to not only underestimate man’s innate worth because he is able to rightly observe God as God, which God likes, but also underestimates the goodness of God and the power of God as the Creator of man in the first place.  God will by no means create that which can observe God as God without that creation being something God will unreservedly adore.  What is the next best thing to being God?  To be recognized and worshiped as such, I submit.  And further gratifying is knowing that you gain this adoration by providing something of equal value and esteem:  man’s LIFE; knowing that you gain this adoration and praise and worship in the most moral way possible:  by giving man his SELF, his LIFE.  And this life is GOOD, and being good will then feel good.

To hate one’s life, I submit, is to hate God.  And no, this does not contradict Luke 14:26.  For what is “hating one’s mother, father, sister and life” mean in the context of following the Christ?  Jesus is making the argument that no one else can BE you for you.  That YOU are your life, and it is not found in anyone else.  Hating your life in that context, I submit, is hating the world’s definition of what is YOU.  Because that is a standard of life outside of the infinite and absolute YOU, which is the root of your moral goodness before God.  To pretend that anyone else has a right to define who you are for you…that you belong to some notion or idea is NOT Christ’s message.  Christ’s message is to be “born again”, from this life into His.  Born again means throwing off the definitions of this world for who you are and returning once again to the perfect moral innocence you had as a child.  Where on the day of your reason you looked around and knew that you were YOU, alone, and nothing and no one else was you and that you were GOOD.  And that it was RIGHT and TRUE and GOOD to be you and to live.  And that this–being you–is the end of your existence; its absolute purpose.  To be you.  And to affirm that same level of moral innocence in others by loving them for THEIR existence as human beings having innate worth before God.  And by this, we affirm that we can know God as the Creator of this good life, and thank Him, not despise Him for birthing us into a hell on earth which demands that each and every one of us sacrifice ourselves to some idea, some standard which someone ELSE has decided for us that we must conform to in order to truly live.

And that…that life of you and you alone, by no standard except the innate goodness of your very material being as a creation of God is the life we love, and that is the life we do not dare despise.

In the next post on this subject, we will look at the particular Primary Consciousness of “Bible”, as is espoused by Christians who would call themselves Biblicists.  We will look at why this approach shares the same destructive outcomes as Calvinism/Reformation theology, and why replacing allegorical hermeneutics with “literal” hermeneutics is basically the same thing:  saying the Bible is the standard of TRUTH is no different and has no better moral outcome than saying Reformed interpretive premises are the standard of TRUTH.

“Please understand that I have no beef with any church and their selection of primary and secondary doctrine. I may disagree with the doctrinal emphasis or even the core theology of a particular church but I would vociferously defend their right to express and celebrate their beliefs. I would also “elect” not to attend a church that subscribed to the set of beliefs that are described in TULIP, etc. I would be unhappy. Also, given my propensity to verbally emote, in excruciating detail, my disagreements and affirmations, it would stand to reason that the church leaders would be dispirited by my presence as well.”

This is a quote of Dee’s.  She is the moderator and one of the proprietors of www.wartburgwatch.com.  Go ahead and read it…take a moment to think about it.  Try to decide if you can figure out just what point Dee is trying to make here, because I must admit that I am struggling.  Maybe we can think this through together and come up with something coherent.

I’ll wait.

[tick tock]

Finished?

Good.  Now, let’s examine this intellectual puzzle, because Dee, if nothing else, is very prolific, almost prodigious, when it comes to pithy remarks that contradict multiple points in a single breath.  Let’s look at this doozy.  What did you come up with?

Here is what I got:

Dee somehow has managed in her mind to make a complete and practical distinction between  a church “selecting their primary and secondary doctrine” and that same church actually practicing those doctrines.  Meaning, if you read her quote, she is utterly in favor of, and would support any given church selecting whatever doctrine they want to teach and be taught, regardless of how oppressive and destructive to humanity it might be I presume; and yet at the same time she reserves the right to disagree with—which means oppose—the actual implementation (teaching) of that doctrine that she is so happy they selected.

Hmm…wait.  No.  That’s not it.  Or is it?  I’m so confused.  She’s okay with them choosing what they believe, and yet she disagrees with what they believe.  And that can only mean that she does have a problem with them believing what they believe.  No…wait.  She has doesn’t have a problem with their right to believe what they believe, but she has a problem with what they believe. But if they don’t actually choose it, then how can she know that any right has been exercised so that she can affirm the right?  No…okay, let’s see.

Okay, here it is: Believing the doctrine is their right, it’s just that she doesn’t like the doctrine.  She just likes that they believe it.  Why?  I guess because they have a right to believe it.

So…er.  What in the hell does that have to do with anything?  I mean, as far as I can tell, no one is threatening to impose martial law on the neo-Calvinist churches.  In fact, the only ones interested in martial law are the Calvinists, I submit.  If there is anyone who should be reassuring the opposition that they have no interest in denying anyone’s right to believe what they believe, it should be the fucking Reformed crowd.

Still, I’ve gotta work through this.  Bear with me.

Hmm…you like the right but hate the belief; and yet there is no right without the belief, because rights are irrelevant and don’t functionally exist unless they are being exercised, and often times exercised in service to beliefs you hate.  But there is no distinct dichotomy between rights and actions, so the real debate isn’t “right”.  Rights are merely a vehicle for ideas.  The ideas still need to be destroyed even if they are exercised as a “right”.

Yep…yeah.  I think I’ve got it.  The right to believe what you believe is totally irrelevant.  Ideas are the issue. Not politics.

Of course, such pointless diversions aren’t, unfortunately, a joke.  We aren’t discussing rights, we are discussing evil ideas which destroy humanity.  It is this kind of thinking which kneecaps Dee, and many other discernment bloggers’ argument against abuse in the church.  Talking out of both sides of one’s mouth makes for no effective rebuttal of a Reformed Orthodoxy that has been codified, systematized, synthesized, and fully integrated into Western thinking for going on 600 years.  And this is why today Christianity has become little more than a collection of mutually exclusive ideas meant to convey a cohesive belief system which is good for nothing except propagandizing the masses in service to a theocratic Marxist “state”.  Be it a full fledged theocracy collective like Calvin’s Geneva, or the tyrannical mystic  Marxism of today’s Reformed “local” church.

Now, now…I know what you are thinking.  All Dee is doing is proclaiming the right of people in this country to believe what they want, and the commensurate right of people to believe differently.  Yeah, yeah…I get that.  I am an Enlightenment-American (my new hyphenated label…you like it?), and utterly deny the right of government to enforce morality except in the cases of direct violations against person and property.  That being said, I too, have no problem with people believing what they want; nor do I have any problem with standing up and expressing my opinion that what they believe is stark naked bullshit.

But here is the difference.  First, I submit, after spending much time on a her blog, that Dee does not make a connection between what people choose to believe-their assumptions–and how what they believe drives abuse in the church.  She doesn’t think that “celebrating” an evil, destructive doctrine will lead to human sacrifice in the form of all manner of horror.  I think to her, “celebrate” means happy and nice and loving.  And thus, “celebrations” of ideas always will lead to life, regardless of what those ideas are.  So, the tyranny is only caused, not by celebrating or choosing ideas, but by meanies whose mommies just never taught them any manners.  Could I be misreading Dee?  I suppose, but I have not seen it myself.  I still have not yet seen Dee make a connection between ideas and abuse.  Just “bad people” and abuse.  Or, people who are not “doing” the ideas “right”. Like, it can’t be the ideas’ fault, but if there is abuse, it must be in spite of the doctrinal assumptions, not because of them.  If I am mistaken about this, please send me a link.

Second, and to emphasize my first point, by being completely comfortable with people selecting whatever doctrine they want, Dee, I submit, is again not seeing anything particularly wrong with IDEAS.  The point is not whether people have a right to believe what they want…the inherent right of free thinking and free speech is irrelevant in this fight against the Reformed, neo-Calvinist juggernaut which is slowly coagulating Christianity into a violent, theo-Marxist altruistic hoard.  The point is that ideas matter…more than anything.  You can’t on the one hand be completely complacent about the fact that there is a growing denomination of Christian influence which is substituting life for death as the yard stick of man’s moral GOOD, and then turn around and condemn them on your popular blog for “celebrating” the very ideas you just said they have every right to implement…to foist at the point of oppressive “church discipline” upon the masses.  You can’t condemn doctrine and laud it too, is my point, and this is exactly what I believe Dee does in her statement.

The fact is one cannot ever celebrate any group of people choosing to accept and teach a belief system which categorically concedes the singular premise that DEATH is GOOD.  I don’t really give a shit if Dee thinks they have a right to believe what they want.  Again, what does that have to do with anything?!  You can believe that a friggin monkey built Disneyland…that isn’t the point of a “discernment blog”.  The point is to confront abuse…the rape of children, the fleecing of innocent parishioners in service to a money-lusting Pastor, the installation of idiot twenty-somethings in positions of “authority” (force) over mature and seasoned men and women, the relegation of women away from their own self-perpetuation and self-fulfillment in a free society to a “biblical role” which denies them any natural right to pursue their own interests and talents as categorical human equals.

And you will never confront abuse by “celebrating” the fact that everyday another church falls prey to the mystic despotism which is sweeping through our great faith like the Orc hoards of Isengard.

So, sure…they have a right to choose their beliefs.  They have a right to practice their beliefs.  But the don’t have the right to tell me that it isn’t stark, raving rational larceny.  And they don’t have the right to say it isn’t abusive.  And they don’t have the right to deceive the communities of our great nation in service to their own will to power.

You know…hmm.  I hate all this talk of “rights”.  It’s just…well, it’s just fucking irrelevant, like I said.  So, scratch that last paragraph as just ranting.  Rather…again, their “right” is immaterial.  Getting into this “rights” business is a red herring.  Better said, they have an evil doctrine, and it should not be tolerated by anyone who concedes that morality is summarized best by doctrines which confess that God actually loves and inherently values his children for who and what they are.  And the whole idea of they have a “right” to it is just pointless, immaterial blabbering. It is only useful for false humility.

Yes…that’s exactly what bothers me about Dee’s “you have a right” business and blah, blah, blah.  It has the appearance of something disingenuous about it.  Like…don’t be scared, I’m really a nice person.  Of course you have a right to your beliefs, we can all get along.  We just need to be nicer, okay? If you guys would just do it like Wade does, we could all go back to baking Christmas cookies, and my commenters could spend more time discussing their love of chocolate and sharing lasagna recipes.

It’s just…trying to assuage the very people who are exercising their rights in about the worst way possible.  It’s totally besides the point.  Your right to believe what you want.  Here’s a newsflash for Wartburg Watch. THAT?  Has never been the issue.  And the fact that you are making it an issue tells me that you still don’t get it.

Abuse is ideas, not politics and not personalities.  Abuse is doctrine.  Period.  Full stop.

And further: The Constitution allows us to have these debates.  It is sad that it seems it has become yet another Wartburg Watch excuse for intellectual laziness.