Talk to God, He talks back
These are our Christians? Dawg, we're never establishing Zion.
It’s become hard to defend Christianity when our Christians are online defending the demise of civilization and their own replacement by citing some perverted apathetic Christianity. There’s a long genealogy to this gynocratic Christianity which started developing as soon as the apostles died. If you find that your Christianity has a 2000 year conflict between the Aristotelians and the Platonists, you left Christianity 2000 years ago. You’re now trying to approach God through rationality and you’re going to get lost on that path because your rationality will eventually fail you.
To try to approach God on the road of sober rationality is an admission of the superiority of the Reddit worldview and opens up the Gospel to abuse and personal faith crises. When Facts and Logic become the foundation of your faith, the inevitable absence of Facts and Logic destroys the foundation of your Faith. You’ve undoubtedly seen this in real time. People try to understand God through their faculties, asking questions like “Why did God do this when he also did this?” or “why is God making me do this? It doesn’t make sense.” Some reply by telling them that it akshually does make sense. But more often it really doesn’t make sense, in fact it contradicts sense. At that point you can either come up with a contrived theology which you don’t really believe, or you can be honest and admit that your rational epistemology is unable to support faith, and at that point you can hold on to your epistemology and walk away from God or admit that faith lies beyond what your fallen mind can comprehend and take your questions directly to God. Oddly enough, even most self-proclaimed Christians don’t have enough faith to believe God would ever talk to them.
Facts and Logic theology changed the meaning of Christianity and the telos of the Christian. It’s this which is the source of the failures of Christianity identified by Nietzsche, which he was exactly right about.
To view the world through sober rationality is to embrace the morality of ethics. But the ethical will inevitably always fail you. Kierkegaard identified this well; when God asked Abraham to sacrifice his son, this obviously contradicted all ethical judgments. How could God expect him to offer a child sacrifice, the child through which his covenant with God to spread his seed like the stars was to be fulfilled? But Abraham had the faith to ignore ethical reservations and talk to God directly, and God told him to carry on as commanded. This action of faith is what Kierkegaard called the Teleological Suspension of the Ethical. For Abraham to achieve his promised Telos it required suspending the ethical. The same thing happened when God commands Nephi to kill Laban.
The telos of the Christian isn’t to merely live in wait for the next life. You cannot believe this if you believe God selected us in the pre-existence for this dispensation and that we can be foreordained; this implies that there are purposes which we serve during mortal existences. We live just as much for this life as the next.
The human telos has gone unappreciated by most Christians because they 1) misunderstood our relationship with God and 2) treated being a good Christian ontologically the same as being a good woman. Nietzsche is correct in his observation that Christians adapt a sklavenmoral in their relationship to God. The idea of God as our Father is just an analogy to most Christians, and thus you are unable to talk to him like you would to a literal father. So you transform yourself into a slave when you believe you are unable to talk to your master. This isn’t an issue when you know that God is literally your father and you are able to speak to him, and he will talk back.
The second mistake is one that I witness every week in Sunday school. The way which most of us go about studying the gospel naturally lends itself to feminization. Most people have been taught to study the scriptures for what Nietzsche called antiquarian reasons, which is remembering factoids that they then use to comfort themselves. Ask a congregation why they study scriptures, you get different variations of “to feel comforted” or “to know He’s there for me” and so on. This is the feminine understanding of the Gospel, and a misunderstanding of the eternal-feminine. In Goethe’s Faust, the eternal-feminine was enough to save Gretchen in that it made her a good Christian, but the inverse isn’t true. The eternal-feminine may make a good Christian, but a good Christian is not someone who embodies the eternal-feminine. It’s understandable why women read scripture like this; it’s very maternal. Perhaps this interpretation has a place, but when men are browbeat into this understanding, it becomes a vacuum which sucks the life out of them and turns them into trad effeminate dorks afraid of their own penises.
For men, we need a better understanding of God, guided by the study of the scriptures for what Nietzsche called the monumental reason. This means we read the scriptures to study its great men and learn from their actions and apply them to our own lives. Most importantly, we must learn from the actions of Christ. I suppose we can say this means to be Christ-like, but we run into a definitional problem here. Being Christ-like doesn’t mean being a wholesome chungus. This is the means by which Christ’s message is most abused, “Christ said love your neighbor, and yet you won’t bake a cake celebrating a transition surgery.” And some so-called conservative Christians fall for this. “Christ said we are all the same, so we should let in 130 million BASED CATHOLIC immigrants to own the libtards.” Once again, this is the feminine understanding driven by the desire to be a mother to all. You see, the epistemology of the trad is most often ontologically the same as the LGBT Lutherans.
Being like Christ means to do the will of the Father. We don’t wear sandals because He did, or eat fish for breakfast. We find the greatness of all prophets within the deed of doing the will of God, which is necessarily the teleological suspension of the ethical. Their telos was to be great, which is manifested in our remembrance of them. To do something great requires you to suspend the ethical. In the pursuit of the will of the Father, Christ overcame death. And as Gilgamesh discovered, we too can overcome death by being remembered through the ages. It isn’t pious to think you are too good to desire eternal life in mortality. Being remembered is the only way which you will ever come to exist. Remember, Achilles was real, you aren’t. The only way you’ll be remembered is by being great, which means suspending the ethical, which means talking to God. God will call you to action, not inaction as prescribed by those who read “love thy neighbor” and closed the book. This is the telos of the Christian.
My proposition to you, like all things, can be abused. When some people learn that God can reveal to them, they use it as an excuse for their debauchery, “I asked God, and he said I should get a tattoo”. That’s fine, they won’t be remembered. I suspect the height of Christianity wasn’t meant for the masses. Many are called, but few are chosen, so to say.
This is not an endorsement of Gnosticism. This is an endorsement of the restoration of the gospel through the prophet Joseph Smith (PBUH) who dared to talk to God.
Check out this substack for more about the subversion of Christianity.