Telegram Web Link
I very much appreciate the reply in the conversation on paganism. My one concern is that the article contains a lot of claims that I think the vast majority of other pagans would deny. Starting with "Ancestor Worship" and going on to attitudes towards "truth" and child-sacrifice. It's hard to talk generally if I think the majority of the co-religionist would just disown the perspective.
https://ragingmandrill.substack.com/p/a-reply-to-dave-the-distributist
Forwarded from Hector R.
Hey Dave, post on your telegram maybe? It'll be in your discord.
Forwarded from The Prudentialist
Thank The Distributist for talking about them and keeping tabs on them so we don't have to.
Ok so following AA and Charlie’s thread, it looks like the Pagan v Christian food fight is starting up again. Good grief I want this to end. Maybe the long awaited livestream convo? Some issues.

1. Maybe I followed the wrong threads but last time I asked for participants I got a list of names that turned out to have no body of work (YT channel, Substack, conference talks). I highly suspect that if I engage with these people in convo the higher order pagan content creators with just dismiss their answers as “crazy” and not representing what “real” pagans believe.

2. Raging Mandrill did write a good Substack response to me which offered a conversation. I want to take him up on this. However a fair few of the points in that essay felt “soft”, e.g I doubt they were ever exposed to adversarial scrutiny and would dissolve the second I pushed on them in a livestream. Part of me wants to send him a private message with responses so he can write a “version 2” of the essay to represent some stronger arguments. I don’t want to “destroy” individual pagans in a debate, I want to resolve this issue which means I needs steelman arguments.

3. Even without a livestream, This idiotic endless conflict between religions can end if we agree to ground rules. Keep the conflict centered on theology, belief, and ACTUAL real life religious practice / profession. But I am sorry to say, the pagans aren’t observing this obvious boundary. Their attacks aren’t CS Lewis style apologetics for why Odin exists and should be worshiped, they are the rhetorical low-blows calling Christians “cucks” and repeating leftist / atheist historical inaccuracies. I am sorry but you use fighting words I will assume you want to fight. But somehow the people who love casting shade never show up for the rumble.

Anyway this is tiresome. How can we resolve this so I don’t have to hear about it constantly?
Ok probably an apology is in order. For the last two months I think I have been totally trolled by this entirely non existent “pagan-community”. Post today, I am entirely convinced that this community does not actually exist and is instead just a collective of people trying to troll Christianity from the rights. I still think there is a productive conversation to be had with individual right wing anti-Christians but really no conversation with “paganism” because it doesn’t exist. https://twitter.com/ogrolandrat/status/1570478510753599488?s=46&t=ki8PG8ebeDiWIsg2bwlQYQ
Forwarded from Laura Towler
Watching the Queen's funeral and I have to say, I haven't seen those in charge speak so unashamedly positively about Christianity and "our nation" in as long as I can remember. Of course when they say "our nation", they don't actually mean "our people". They mean anybody living here (and the Commonwealth). But it's still a nice little taster of what could be if we had leaders who were actually on our side.
How do we deal with aggressive anti-Christian jabs (complaints) coming from other right-wingers which don’t represent serious critiques?
Anonymous Poll
18%
Aggressive pushback (can’t look weak!)
25%
Steelman and engage (reply to the argument they SHOULD have made)
49%
Ignore (don’t waste time OR create division!)
9%
Some other option (please reply)
Last beach day of 2022?
I regret not mentioning the “Gordian knot” in the context of Peterson’s manifesto.
At the request of some followers, I am cranking out a VERY quick response (kind of) to Academic Agent’s Substack on Christianity/religion NOT being a driving force for civilizational health.

https://forbiddentexts.substack.com/p/religion-as-a-non-factor-in-the-fate

I say "kinda" because I am actually not answering AA’s analysis directly because I don't intend to use his methods, e.g. appealing to esoteric readings of history via Evola and Spengler. I don't have the space to contest his analysis of these authors directly. For all I know AA is right about the correct "Spenglarian perspective", but nevertheless I want to show how the proposition "Religion does not have a large impact on civilization-health" seems, to me, frankly ridiculous. I’ll walk through the way I approach this problem, based on the way I usually tackle complex issues.

The first problem with in our analysis is the issue of establishing "CAUSE" in a vague historical question. This can be dicey since the all events in history, when broken down sufficiently, come back to "human choice". But simply saying "it's all just humans making choices" is completely useless. Similarly, going in the opposite direction, all human actions are caused by external factors, so we could just as easily say that all historical events are caused by physics and the boundary conditions of the universe. Equally useless.

In order to be a proper "cause" of certain historical events, said cause would have to be 1. observable, 2. something actual decision makers could "have" or "not have", and 3. Be something that might influence actual political decisions (e.g. we could observe a historical decision maker with and without a certain input (cause) and see that his decisions differ based on having/not having that input). Also, one additional issue at play is that, all other things being equal, we would prefer our discovered “cause” to be “actionable” (e.g. we can actually take actions based on these observations to improve things).

Another difficulty comes in measuring the "decline" of a civilization. Not a well-defined term. My two favorite proxy numbers (well one number with a side note) is the core society’s birth rate that can be maintained alongside its cultural and technological competence (which me might measure in IQ). There are a thousand measures for health but I am picking these because they are easy to observe, and therefore easy to use for cursory analysis.

So how does the cursory analysis turn out? Say for instance if we look at broad correlations? Pretty good for Christianity at least. Here, we first must focus on RELIGIOUS PRACTICE and not RELIGIOUS AFFILIATION (a small mistake AA makes in his essay). However with this correction in play the correlation becomes obvious. The PRACTICE of Christianity correlates highly with family formation inside groups both inside and outisde of the West. Furthermore, historically speaking, the West / Europe achieved their height (demographically and culturally) as their peak of religious devotion, with the declines setting in as religious practice faded away in the early 20th century. Broader analysis shows the same effect. Christianity comes to Europe in a demographic and cultural slump, and this slump resumes shortly after religious practice breaks down. Correlation can be established.

But Distributist! Correlation does not equal causation. Indeed, but the question of the "causation" is incredibly dicely and correlation gives us a base-line for what our Bayesian priors should be. We know religious practice occurs with civilization health. But is it a cause of strong civilizations or simply caused BY strong civilizations? Tough question. Let's tackle this issue by comparing religion as a cause to other leading candidates (leaving out things like "physics" and "human choice" which are degenerate answers as discussed above). Our best candidates for driving civilization health (other than faith) are:

1. Genetics / Race
2. Hard Privation (war, plague, famine)
3.
2025/10/22 10:07:28
Back to Top
HTML Embed Code: