Politics Part III: Theology

Ok. I will try to write about the intersection between politics and theology. Good luck. First of all I don’t expect too many to understand the angle I wish to highlight in some sense in this post, and second of all, this subject is so explosive that whatever a reader takes from this it might be highly offensive to them, I don’t know. Politics sucks, in so many ways, but the way it undeniably creates division and hatred is god damn depressing.

Anyway, the starting point I would like to begin with is the sober realization that people in the general west have lost their theological language and therefore the ability to understand issues of a higher nature than the relatively mundane reality we can explore with secular language tools. I don’t want to blame anyone but the religious crowd for this loss, we among the religious have through centuries weaponised all kinds of theological language in order to topple each other down for the goal of being correct. The consequence of this behavior has been that all talk about God and the spiritual realms has been a challenge of truth in the most crude sense of the word. And then, when we entered the scientific era we found ourselves with a standard of truth - understood in this sense - which any statement in theology can’t live up to. It’s not meant to and that in turn left most everyone with a scientific mind set to abandon theology as a whole. To speak with the rationalist of the 20th century: no talk of theology could ever be seen as meaningful in any real sense of the word.

The problem is though, that outside of religious dogma, theology is regarding everything that is unknown or mystical to us. Theology consists of various tools to talk about the things we cannot know, the potential realms of reality that can’t be seen during the day and only vaguely suspected during our nights. This is the reason why theological truths can’t be held to the scientific standard of the term, because by its very definition it is untestable and frankly unprovable in any other sense as well by our analytical minds. But this doesn’t mean the content of theology lacks relevance or that it doesn’t “exist”, no when we use theological language it is an implicit recognition by us that we realize we must trust our faith when assessing the truths of theological statements. For westerners this is tricky to the degree that it is largely undoable to us, we can only trust what is proven by the scientific counsel of brahmins, the rest has to be considered phony if not outright dangerously idiotic.

In this context the atheist decree seems rather strange to me. In my ears it has become a declaration that there are no unknowns. We can assess that God, no gods whatever the definition, doesn’t exist because we have found that there is no place where they can possibly live! We know it all about existence, not exactly perhaps, but good enough to make this claim and the more we can progress the more this claim will be supported. Not only God is dead, but mystery as well. You’ll see.

Hopefully you can see how ridiculous this is, but regardless this is an underlying attitude that is almost everywhere in the west.No one of us really believes in God, because no one relates to the mysterious in any meaningful way. The spots where the mysterious can live are strongly guarded and everyone that dares to venture to the borders of the mysterious is seen with deep suspicion. I would say this is one of the core reasons why the western mind is so easily duped by authority. We have no reason to mistrust someone speaking from authority, since there essentially aren’t any unknowns the authority figures must know what they speak about and barring human errors they must be essentially correct. Why would you suspect foul play, ever, really? Let us all do what the dear leaders are telling us, from their position they must know where we are heading. Right?

So here we are, in the west. We have no gods, meaning, we have nothing of value outside of the day world of status, resources and pleasurable experiences. No one has any resistance when the invitation comes to play a level higher up in the social game and everyone pays the demanded price for being able to do so. Say the right things, avoid the wrong-people, buy the proper brands in the advised manner. There is a strong focus on the ideal of diversity among us, but really, there isn’t any diversity to be seen. No one cares about anything other than winning in our social game, no other values have any chance of survival in the society we built for ourselves in the west.

And the damning part is that we have no real way of talking about this, since this is truly a topic for theological discourse. If you try with the means of politics you will only create enemies for yourself and your cause - surely you press these issues only to advantage your group at the cost of ours, don’t you? The fact that this isn’t a discussion about the social game as such, but rather why we are playing in the first place doesn’t really matter. The political language isn’t built for that point to come across.

To this picture the West now has a clear opponent. A system of thought that hasn’t gone through our own semantic dialect and therefore has access to realms of reality we simply don’t. Islam is inside the West, finally, and this time the West can’t beat them at the battlefields of Wien, Tours or Malta, they are here to stay and thereby Islam is a threat on an existential level to the culture of the West.

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Listen. Now we truly have ventured into the explosive parts of this text and I will fully admit that I in essence don’t know what I talk about when it comes to Islam, like I may be doing when it comes to Christianity. I have no inside view of the culture and the religion and everything I know from the outside is filtered by the bias I have as a Christian, right-leaning youngish male. Still, what I consider as fact is that Islam is theologically fundamentally different from anything we have seen and dealt with in the West. Where Christianity is a set of metaphysical ideas, meant to alter the ways of how to live as a subject of the Empire, Islam is a project that takes theological ideas as tools in order to build a nation that can overtake and be the empire. Islam is, in contrast to Christianity, not translatable. Islam only works in a pre-modern, arabic context and when operating in a conquest mode the goal is undeniably to make everyone and everything pre-modernly arabic. The theological ideas of Islam aren’t too weird for a Christian, it’s a variant of Judaism that switches some things around, sometimes in a worse direction but perhaps also to the better other times, I wouldn’t really know. The odd thing to the westerner is how the system pushes subjugation not to ideas alone but to a cultural nation, very strictly defined. The Christian West believes in universalism, that national or cultural identity is irrelevant in the perspective of the theological ideas that is the core point of the system it inhabits. This is adopted also by the Secular west, the scientific or democratic ideals are what is actually valuable - how you lead your life in other aspects isn’t really relevant if you accept the reigning ideals as presented. 

The God of Islam is therefore not dead at all, regardless what the atheists may scream about, the God of Islam lives in every heart of muslims who believe and strive for the nation of Islam. This is in essence not a political rant so I’m not thinking of Jihad or islamists as such, but wish to point out that it is a theological staple in the islamic system to build this defined nation. Ever since The Prophet this has been the reason why Islam exists and the only really detestable aspect of this aim, neutrally speaking, is that Islam doesn’t dismiss violence, war and context by the sword when pursuing it. It’s not always the point, to be religious warlords as the Prophet himself, but it’s always permissible if the context is proper for it.

Politically speaking, I’m writing this text to declare that I personally don’t care about the immigration issue all that much. Spiritually I like to train myself into seeing humanity as one cohesive group and from that point of view it doesn’t matter if there are living brown people in Sweden or black humans in the Americas or whatever conflict humanity has in terms of races and ethnicities. However, I care about the ideas and values we share in the collective mind and those of Islam scares me. Not because I have any opinions on the Arabic nation as such or because I see Mohamed as a bad theologian necessarily - I’m too ignorant to really have an opinion - but because the spirit of Islam is at war with universalism as an ideal. Islam fits the void the western empire has created because our confusion in terms of being without gods can be filled with One God, One world view, One permissible nation so very easily. Islam and Christianity have been at war since the inception of the former and it’s sad to see that the culture of Christianity finally seem to have lost the long battle, essentially on walk over in the end. We gave up our ways because we stopped being able to talk about how we find the faith - and with that the strength - to live as we do.

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Is it over because of all this? It’s easy to adopt a black-piiled doomer mentality over the evolution that has passed the last few decades but even if our institutions, our countries, our churches may be doomed, every breathing individual can still do what is necessary to become resistant to the spirit of Islam. Find your way to your own theological, spiritual language and with its aid go forth and explore the realms of reality that can’t be discussed or explored during the western day. They are out there and within them I’m sure there is an answer of how to conduct a life even within an islamic empire, if that will see its day.

Regardless who is Cesar, give to him what is his, but give everything else to God and there will be a way also to the day after tomorrow.