Tag Archives: paganism

Response to ‘Penny Dreadful’ Finale

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A Response to the Response…

Ok, didn’t even touch on the supposed return to God through a murder and all but technical suicide! This story’s end exemplifies just the sort of spineless capitulation to “evil” that embodies paganism, not Christianity. Christianity may have it’s share of martyrs, but these were not vainful or cowardly deaths… they weren’t fleeing from the fight through suicide!

Look at the Rus under the [Yellow] Horde… for two hundred years the king of Moscow owed his crown to the sanction of the Khan. When the Khan beckoned, the King of the Rus rode hundreds even thousands of miles to wait around amidst his warriors and tents for the Khan to deign to see him. And at the merest sign of slight, the Khan might ride with his horde of warriors hundreds, even thousands of miles to raze the kings keep and every settlement along his route. But the Rus King humbled himself to save his people and the Rus held to their church and culture. Evicted from their homes into the winter’s cold they would cut bricks of peat as they dug holes within which to shelter themselves, warming themselves with those smoldering bricks until the Horde finished their murderous sport and returned home. The Christian Rus stood their ground against impossible odds until the short equation of the Mongol life reached its logical and self-destructive end. When such Rus, as there must have been, gave into hopelessness and killed their loved ones and themselves–we do not lionize them for these acts!

This story line was a Pagan’s shallow interpretation of sacrifice plastered over the supposed adoration of the Christian Lord. It is a disgusting slur upon the true values professed through the Christian faith. Meanwhile, shows like Futurama get cancelled as weak-willed executives bend to the shallow impulses of Christ waving camera muggers when reference is made to a “Zombie Jesus.” These are slights of deliberate misinterpretation by granting gravity to the flotsam and jetsam of charlatans rather than honoring what is true and central to Christianity.

-CFJurgus

Forbidden Planet

Forbidden Planet (inspired by the movie) completed 2009

In, The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes elaborates a theory on the nature of pre-modern consciousness, the bicameral mind. At this point in human consciousness there was language, but people didn’t have the power of self narration… they couldn’t say, yesterday I did this, tomorrow I will do this, I am doing this. The skills necessary for survival had been accumulated slowly and passed on thru mimicry. The chief or king would impart commands for the activities necessary for the maintenance of the community attending to crisis in the manner passed down from the previous generation. The theory suggests that totems were used to aid the king in attaining a meditative trance to experience an auditory hallucination of the advice imparted by the previous king for this maintenance and meeting crisis… that as populations grew, communities began to bump into each other, resulting in conflict and war, something new in the experience of these bicameral kingdoms. Previous to this, carved reliefs would show the king beseeching a deity seated in a throne; at a certain point these carvings show the king before an empty thrown. With the new crisis no amount of meditation would produce a solution… god had abandoned them. In such breakdowns like that experienced by the Assyrians… these societies became paranoid and desperate with fear. Carvings show the king holding lions suspended by the tail as trophies. No doubt having experienced atrocity they learned to wield that fear and capacity for atrocity to meet these new challenges.

Living in Englewood I saw the same pattern starkly, and gained the sight to see its more subtle manifestations elsewhere. The fruits of our society are paraded before all, but on the street in Englewood, the gods have gone. There is no answer to the question, ‘how do I get there from here.’ Instead, there is gratuitous violence, intimidation and humiliation. Fear rules, intimidation becomes the primary tool to meet challenges until it falls short of the purpose and violence becomes necessary. Life becomes a reaction to that fear and threat, but these survival strategies don’t unlock the promise of the greater society they only trap their adherents in smaller and smaller backwaters. The only ones benefiting being our living steles, celebrities–and the industries which produce them–pushing these dead-end survival strategies.