So claims an article in the National Interest. Claiming the Left has no authority, it the then praises the "authoritative" Books of monotheist religious traditions as somehow grounding Conservatism. To which I had this reply:
Thunberg I have mixed feelings about. A respectable commentarian, Off-Guardian (notably critical of The Guardian's anti-Corbyn and anti-Palestinian biases) says Thunberg is being used for greenwashing by the corporatocracy, whatever her personal merits, her "thing" has become fake. I'd dismiss that except that Grunberg's appearances in Israel and Hong Kong (and notably praising the Hong Kong protestors) shows that, in my view, she's not entirely up to speed on everything left, and can't be understood as the always-correct child's voice like she plays in major liberal and left media. She pretty well understands the global warming thing...any 5 year old could do that...but the vaster realms of social organization and misinformation she might not fully understand--as most of my friends don't either. So, I have the highest respect her activism and drawing attention to the urgency of global warming, which is real and she's doing far more than me, but I don't grant her thinking presumed authoritativeness on all matters.
No religions have singular "books," they have historic and ongoing practices which may to some degree fetish certain relics. And the Books that Christians, Jews, Muslims and Mormons fetish are especially cranky, far beyond insane if you were to take them literally. Ancient relics, around which vast volumes of mind bending philosophies have developed, some better than others, but there would be no benefit and much deadweight in starting from restricted and fake "divine" words no matter how reasonably they were to start off. Better to weight ideas against the mind and senses of the present, informed by the past of all human thinking and experience, and likely future. The problem is still, in whose interpretation, but that problem isn't solved by having a few insane fetish books, legends, and mantras to which everything must refer, it's only compounded by them, and increases the audience of modern cranks and charlatans who may appear parroting ancient tautologies to rhetorically grant themselves greater authority, while drowning out the true thinkers and feelers of the present who actually do connect past and present thinking and feeling which can be verified with universally critical rather than tribalist thinking.
Capital may have some errors, but is an uncompleted masterpiece nevertheless of some kind of material philosophy, not a compilation of cranky folklore. That same philosophy is boiled down much more completely and succinctly in the Communist Manifesto. There you have your short and coherent work, which might as well service as the "creed" or fetish book of the left, and around which there is a universe of successive left books, some of the highest quality which do represent the best mind and senses of the informed present, for example, the history books of marxist Eric Hobsbawm.
Workers of the World, Unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!
But it should always be understood that wholeness is a critical aspect of the truth, and that wholeness is never found in any one book, nor in every book written, nor even in every book that could be written. Therefore, it's best not to fetish only one book, but instead learn by critically comparing all books and the immediate present, and imagine even better books.
With regards to the exclusive books of Christianity, I am taking great pleasure reading Christ's Ventriloquists by Eric Zuesse, which reveals the fraudulence of the New Testament books, all actually written by Paul and his followers, rather than the Jewish Christians such as James, the full brother of Jesus, who continued Jesus' actual teachings, and Jesus' actual followers. Paul's Savior Worship version of Christianity is distinctly incompatible with actual Judaism, but is far more useful to imperial enterprises than the anti-imperial proletariat uprising of the original Jewish rabbi Jesus, who was crucified for sedition against the Roman Empire and it's local Jewish client government (corrupt oligarch Herod's "Israel" of the day). Modern Christianity is virtually Jesus's religion turned upside down, the religion of imperial western warriors since Constantine, because Paul had given it the necessary forms to ultimately assume the role of empiral service, and Paul's Christianity was an immediate success in the Roman world leading to Constantine's ultimate conversion. Jesus' actual thinking is actually more represented in the original rabinnic Judaism, which is very much inspired by the ethical communism he (and many other rabbis like him) actually preached, as best represented by the Sermon on the Mount and the denunciation of money changers. Sadly, the rise of Zionist Judaism after the Holocaust has crowded out the more ethical communist voices and replaced them with malignant propertarian Herodian tribalism, but the ethical voice (having the sound of Jesus' prototypical ethical communist voice) is still found among anti-Zionist and communist jews.
But it should always be understood that wholeness is a critical aspect of the truth, and that wholeness is never found in any one book, nor in every book written, nor even in every book that could be written. Therefore, it's best not to fetish only one book, but instead learn by critically comparing all books and the immediate present, and imagine even better books.
With regards to the exclusive books of Christianity, I am taking great pleasure reading Christ's Ventriloquists by Eric Zuesse, which reveals the fraudulence of the New Testament books, all actually written by Paul and his followers, rather than the Jewish Christians such as James, the full brother of Jesus, who continued Jesus' actual teachings, and Jesus' actual followers. Paul's Savior Worship version of Christianity is distinctly incompatible with actual Judaism, but is far more useful to imperial enterprises than the anti-imperial proletariat uprising of the original Jewish rabbi Jesus, who was crucified for sedition against the Roman Empire and it's local Jewish client government (corrupt oligarch Herod's "Israel" of the day). Modern Christianity is virtually Jesus's religion turned upside down, the religion of imperial western warriors since Constantine, because Paul had given it the necessary forms to ultimately assume the role of empiral service, and Paul's Christianity was an immediate success in the Roman world leading to Constantine's ultimate conversion. Jesus' actual thinking is actually more represented in the original rabinnic Judaism, which is very much inspired by the ethical communism he (and many other rabbis like him) actually preached, as best represented by the Sermon on the Mount and the denunciation of money changers. Sadly, the rise of Zionist Judaism after the Holocaust has crowded out the more ethical communist voices and replaced them with malignant propertarian Herodian tribalism, but the ethical voice (having the sound of Jesus' prototypical ethical communist voice) is still found among anti-Zionist and communist jews.
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