There is Nothing Noble About Sacrifice

With the conjunction of Easter and ANZAC in the same week, the word "sacrifice" is being sickeningly over-used.

"Sickeningly" because so few users of the work are fully aware of just how barbaric the ethic of sacrifice is. As I say in this repost of a blog from 2019:

There is Nothing Noble About Sacrifice.

Since so many have used the word so often, let's define it:

"Slaughter." "Surrendering..." "Immolation." Nothing noble about any of that. 

Let's examine it further:

“Sacrifice” is the surrender of a greater value for the sake of a lesser one or of a nonvalue. Thus, [the ethic of] altruism gauges a man’s virtue by the degree to which he surrenders, renounces or betrays his values (since help to a stranger or an enemy is regarded as more virtuous, less 'selfish,' than help to those one loves). The rational principle of conduct is the exact opposite: always act in accordance with the hierarchy of your values, and never sacrifice a greater value to a lesser one. [Emphasis added.]

And further:

“Sacrifice” does not mean the rejection of the worthless, but of the precious.
“Sacrifice” does not mean the rejection of the evil for the sake of the good, but of the good for the sake of the evil. “Sacrifice” is the surrender of that which you value in favor of that which you don’t.
    If you exchange a penny for a dollar, it is not a sacrifice; if you exchange a dollar for a penny, it is. If you achieve the career you wanted, after years of struggle, it is not a sacrifice; if you then renounce it for the sake of a rival, it is. If you own a bottle of milk and give it to your starving child, it is not a sacrifice; if you give it to your neighbour’s child and let your own die, it is.
    If you give money to help a friend, it is not a sacrifice; if you give it to a worthless stranger, it is. If you give your friend a sum you can afford, it is not a sacrifice; if you give him money at the cost of your own discomfort, it is only a partial virtue, according to this sort of moral standard; if you give him money at the cost of disaster to yourself—that is the virtue of sacrifice in full.
    If you renounce all personal desires and dedicate your life to those you love, you do not achieve full virtue [by this moral standard]: you still retain a value of your own, which is your love. If you devote your life to random strangers, it is an act of greater virtue. If you devote your life to serving men you hate—[by this depraved moral standard] that is the greatest of the virtues you can practice.
    A sacrifice is the surrender of a value. Full sacrifice is full surrender of all values.

"The surrender of all values." There is nothing, nothing at all, that is noble about that.

'Sacrifice,' by sculptor Rayner Hoff, inside the Australian War Memorial in Sydney's Hyde Park

Does that mean you should never fight at all? Never fight for those you love? No:

Concern for the welfare of those one loves is a rational part of one’s selfish interests. If a man who is passionately in love with his wife spends a fortune to cure her of a dangerous illness, it would be absurd to claim that he does it as a “sacrifice” for her sake, not his own, and that it makes no difference to him, personally and selfishly, whether she lives or dies.
    Any action that a man undertakes for the benefit of those he loves is not a sacrifice if, in the hierarchy of his values, in the total context of the choices open to him, it achieves that which is of greatest personal (and rational) importance to him. In the above example, his wife’s survival is of greater value to the husband than anything else that his money could buy, it is of greatest importance to his own happiness and, therefore, his action is not a sacrifice.
    But suppose he let her die in order to spend his money on saving the lives of ten other women, none of whom meant anything to him—as the ethics of altruism would require. That would be a sacrifice. Here the difference between Objectivism and altruism can be seen most clearly: if sacrifice is the moral principle of action, then that husband shouldsacrifice his wife for the sake of ten other women. What distinguishes the wife from the ten others? Nothing but her value to the husband who has to make the choice—nothing but the fact that his happiness requires her survival.
    The Objectivist ethics would tell him: your highest moral purpose is the achievement of your own happiness, your money is yours, use it to save your wife, that is your moral right and your rational, moral choice.

Fighting for your values, fighting for those you love, these are acts of integrity. Not of sacrifice.

We may honour a man acting in support of his values, even at the risk of his life. We should neither honour, nor call it, a sacrifice.

Why?

First, because honouring their memory demands it. That's a question of our integrity.

Second, there is a very practical reason; one of self-defence:

It stands to reason that where there’s sacrifice, there’s someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there’s service, there’s someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master.

Such people exist in every age. 

They called men to war in 1914 in the name of, says one historian, "an altruistic willingness to sacrifice oneself for the cause of righteousness." They call people now, Great Leaders of every description seeking sacrifice to a "higher cause" -- to the State, to the Climate, to any Great Cause selected by the Great Leaders, expunging the sin of selfishness in their answer to the call of "Duty."

But as a great writer once observed: "Under a morality of sacrifice, the first value you sacrifice is morality itself."

There is nothing noble about sacrifice. 

Hey, hey, it’s Easter!

Christus Hypercubus, Salvador Dali.

IT'S GOOD FRIDAY. AND YOU know what that means here at NOT PC: time to call out (again) the 2000-year ethic of sacrifice as nothing but inhuman. In a more rational place, we'd view the worship of human sacrifice not with celebration, but with horror. ("If you knew a father who gave up his only son to be killed in expiation for the crimes and misdemeanours of other people, would you call that chap a loving father? Or would you call him a psychopath?") 

"What's the theme of Easter, and of Easter art? In a word, it's sacrifice: specifically human sacrifice. And more specifically, the sacrifice of the good to the appalling.
    "That's the Easter theme we're asked to respond to every year."
    Easter through art 

"Let’s summarise. In Pagan times, Easter was the time in the Northern calendar when the coming of spring was celebrated -- the celebration of new life, of coming fecundity. Hence the eggs and rabbits and celebrations of fertility. Indeed, the very word  'Easter' comes from Eos, the Greek goddess of the dawn, and means, symbolically, the festival celebrating the rebirth of light after the darkness of winter. 
    "But with the coming of Christianity, the celebration was hijacked to become a veneration of torture and sacrifice ..."
    Easter Week, Part 4: Surely There Are Better Stories to Tell? 

"AND MAN MADE GODS in his own image, and that of the animals he saw around him, and he saw these stories were sometimes helpful psychologically in a a pre-philosophical age. But one of these gods was a jealous god. For this god was so angry at the world he sent one-third of himself to die to expiate the sins of those with whom he was angry, for sins that (in his omniscience) he would have always known they would commit.
    "It’s not just history the christian story challenges, is it. It’s logic."
    Easter Week, Part 3: The Holy Art of Sacrifice 

"Christianity didn’t start with Jesus, any more than the Easter story did. Paul, who never even met Jesus but who played the largest part in explaining his life, and his death, had a big hand in both.
    "Jesus’s death was a secular event his followers struggled to explain."
    Easter Week, Part 2: Enter Hercules…

"IT’S EASTER WEEK – a time, since human cultural life began up in the northern hemisphere, when men and women and their families came together to celebrate.
    "To celebrate what?
    "Why, to celebrate spring, of course. ..."
    Hey, hey, it’s Easter Week! 

Oh, and a gentle reminder that the state still owns your shop at Easter. And it still owns you all year. That's the secular sacrifice demanded by the Season.

Cartoon by Nick Kim

And a note that the greatest artists can nonetheless find the sublime within the story. Here's Wagner's 'Good Friday Spell,' aka Karfreitagszauber.  Turn it up!

It's Easter, so ...

Cartoon by Nick Kim

 

... so to save you searching for them, here are links to a few of my favourite Easter posts over the years here at NOT PC:

"What's the theme of Easter, and of Easter art? In a word, it's sacrifice: specifically human sacrifice. And more specifically, the sacrifice of the good to the appalling.
    "That's the Easter theme we're asked to respond to every year."
    Easter through art 

"Let’s summarise. In Pagan times, Easter was the time in the Northern calendar when the coming of spring was celebrated -- the celebration of new life, of coming fecundity. Hence the eggs and rabbits and celebrations of fertility. Indeed, the very word  'Easter' comes from Eos, the Greek goddess of the dawn, and means, symbolically, the festival celebrating the rebirth of light after the darkness of winter.
    "But with the coming of Christianity, the celebration was hijacked to become a veneration of torture and sacrifice ..."
    Easter Week, Part 4: Surely There Are Better Stories to Tell? 

"AND MAN MADE GODS in his own image, and that of the animals he saw around him, and he saw these stories were sometimes helpful psychologically in a a pre-philosophical age. But one of these gods was a jealous god. For this god was so angry at the world he sent one-third of himself to die to expiate the sins of those with whom he was angry, for sins that (in his omniscience) he would have always known they would commit.
    "It’s not just history the christian story challenges, is it. It’s logic."
    Easter Week, Part 3: The Holy Art of Sacrifice 

"Christianity didn’t start with Jesus, any more than the Easter story did. Paul, who never even met Jesus but who played the largest part in explaining his life, and his death, had a big hand in both.
    "Jesus’s death was a secular event his followers struggled to explain."
    Easter Week, Part 2: Enter Hercules…

"IT’S EASTER WEEK – a time, since human cultural life began up in the northern hemisphere, when men and women and their families came together to celebrate.
    "To celebrate what?
    "Why, to celebrate spring, of course. ..."
    Hey, hey, it’s Easter Week! 

"The bamboozle has captured us..."

"One of the saddest lessons of history is this; if we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken."

~ Carl Sagan, from his book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark [hat tip 'Laughing in Disbelief']

"Yippee! It's the Easter Bunny!!"

It never gets old...

[Cartoon by Nick Kim]

I went down to buy a beer today ...

... and of course I was stopped by a group of religious trolls who'd caught the ear of a bully with a clipboard, working when no-one else is allowed to.

Fortunately, you can still get a cold one down at the Pop Up Globe.

Despite the best efforts of the grey ones.

[Cartoon by Nick Kim, courtesy of The Free Radical]

.

"I understand the importance the resurrection story holds in your particular religion."

From a reply to a School Chaplain Christian Volunteer:

I understand the importance the resurrection story holds in your particular religion. If I too knew some guy that had been killed and placed inside a cave with a rock in front of it and I visited the cave to find the rock moved and his body gone, the only logical assumption would be that he had risen from the dead and is the son of God. Once, my friend Simon was rushed to hospital to have his appendix removed and I visited him the next day to find his bed empty. I immediately sacrificed a goat and burnt a witch in his name but it turned out that he had not had appendicitis, just needed a good poo, and was at home playing Playstation.

Read the whole exchange here. Hilarious.

[Hat tip Suzuki Samurai]

.

Easter through art

What's the theme of Easter, and of Easter art? In a word, it's sacrifice: specifically human sacrifice. And more specifically, the sacrifice of the good to the appalling.

That's the Easter theme we're asked to respond to every year.

The theme starts early in religion with the bloke at the heart of three of the world's large religions, whose voices in his head (we're told) told him to cut his young son's throat and "offer him for a burnt offering." The son was saved only by some other voices in his head telling him to stop. 

Caravaggio makes the crime real:

Family values, huh.

Keep reminding yourself: this would-be child-killer is revered by Islam, Christianity and Judaism. You wonder why (Greater evil hath no man than this, that he is willing to kill his own son for God.) The only other notable thing he is ever said to have done to be revered is to marry his own sister, and to offer up his foreskin to his god. Yes, really.) But the other two religions only revered him; Christianity then upped the ante by founding a whole new religion on the thing he was discouraged to do!

Think about that: to the extent you believe the story, the greatest being in the universe is sacrificing his most beloved son to a world (in their description) filled with sin and deformity (all His own work, ironically) and to a species one Christian saint described as a mass of ordure, filth and corruption. (A working definition of Sacrifice being: the surrender of a higher value for a lower one. Or even to nothing at all; sacrifice just because.)

This perversion is brilliantly captured in Dali's Christus Hypercubus, below, in which the figure at left -- infinitely smaller than the Ideal Man pinned up on the stylised crucifix -- looks up at the blindingly bright Christ figure with a look not simply of curiosity or sadness, but of literal man-worship. If we have questions here, when looking at a man – not just any man, but our ideal man – nailed up to a piece of wood like this, they might be along these lines:

"How can you worship the destruction of your ideal man?” 

“Why would you celebrate his torture?” 

“Why is suffering so damned central to your mythology?”

Fair questions, especially when confronted with priests quietly sacrificing young children to their own misbegotten lusts, and splatter-fests like Mel Gibson’s Passion that so lovingly depict every act of torture and every drop of blood in high-definition Technicolor as their Ideal Man is delivered up to the mob. (They mightn’t watch the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but how many good and gentle Christians will be searching on Netflix this Easter for the chance to see their hero graphically beaten and slayed?)

Christus Hypercubus, Salvador Dali.

You have to believe a lot of (literally) fantastic nonsense to explain this stuff away, let alone worship it. Han's Holbein's painting Christ After Crucixion helps makes plain both the reality of the sacrifice, and the precise amount of fantasy you would have to believe to swallow this stuff. Holbein's interrogation brings you up short. It tells you: This is reality. This is a dead body. It It is never going to walk again. 

A Christian Confronts Reality, Hans Holbein

Holbein's is no ideal man. It is a painting from the morgue. It is a man as he would be several days after a brutal death; decaying, rigid, gone, departed. Its features drawn, its muscles limp, its skin already decomposing. I've labelled it as Dostoyevesky did when confronted with this battered Christian corpse: when he was first brought face to decaying jowl with the gruesome reality of death and sacrifice crucifixion and its results. Dostoyevsky was immediately struck when first seeing the piece by the importance of this confrontation for his faith, and inspired to dramatise in his next novel the full importance what that confrontation meant. As described by his wife,

The figure of Christ taken from the cross, whose body already showed signs of decomposition, haunted him like a horrible nightmare. In his notes to [his novel] 'The Idiot' and in the novel itself he returns again and again to his theme.

Dostoyevsky describes in The Idiot one character's questioning:

His body on the cross was therefore fully and entirely subject to the laws of nature. In the picture the face is terribly smashed with blows, swollen, covered with terrible, swollen, and bloodstained bruises, the eyes open and squinting; the large, open whites of the eyes have a sort of dead and glassy glint. . . .
    Looking at that picture, you get the impression of nature as some enormous, implacable, and dumb beast, or, to put it more correctly, much more correctly, though it may seem strange, as some huge engine of the latest design, which has senselessly seized, cut to pieces, and swallowed up–impassively and unfeelingly–a great and priceless Being, a Being worth the whole of nature and all its laws, worth the entire earth, which was perhaps created solely for the coming of that Being!

Holbein confronts the Christian viewer with the starkest of choices: One must either believe the fantasy that God somehow repaired and raised this ravaged body from the dead, and that the Christian myth, therefore, “offers hope for humanity beyond this life”; or else you must accept that the dead stay dead, that such an event did not and could not occur, that reality is what it is – not fodder for this nastiness -- and begin making a life and an ethics from there. Dostoyevsky's Idiot crystallises the challenge. Holbein's art makes it possible.

A Christian Confronts Reality (detail), Hans Holbein

Remember here that good art need not be a thing of beauty, but it must have something to say. This -- both Holbein’s painting and Dostoyevsky’s novel -- certainly do that.

But why celebrate sacrifice anyway? Why wait, as the fantasy demands, for happiness in some supernatural realm? Why accept the nonsense that the whole of nature and all its laws were created for the sake of a fantastic and gruesome story?

Maybe, instead, we could reject the absurd, and with that embrace instead this earth and our life upon it. This is what artist Michael Newberry asks of us in his powerful reclamation of two mythological traditions.

Icarus Landing, acrylic on linen, 55x36 inches.

This is man reclaiming mythology, and embracing this earth. 

In the artist's words, 

Happy Easter!
Wouldn't it be great if we could be transformed while alive?
And evolve with plenty of time to share the wonder?
And to look towards Earth for our paradise?

Wouldn’t it just. And wouldn’t that transform lives.

Happy Easter everyone!

Have some chocolate, have some fun, and if you have to watch a movie, then make it Life of Brian.

.

Trading on E. Sunday, not for me or thee to decide

 

After years of shops being shut on Easter Sunday because religionists and unionists say so, I guess it should be good news that New Zealand’s archaic Easter trading laws have finally had an overhaul.

But like a presidential candidate unwilling to directly address an issue by punting it down “for the states to make that decision,” the Key Government has amended this one by punting it down to councils to make the call.

To councillors. Whose biggest decision every year is whether to put rates up by a lot or by an awful lot.

So expect an annual three-ring circus to erect its tent at every town hall about six weeks or so before Easter as every whacko with an agenda heads in to lobby his local loony about what he thinks other people should do.

The “argument” for punting th decision to council goes, I guess, that decentralised decisions are best. But only, I suppose, when the decision is a politically sensitive one.

But if decentralising decision making were truly valued, then what would be wrong with decentralising the decision to open or shut shops to the owners of the shops themselves. To individual shop owners.

I mean, they do own the shops, don’t they?

So who else’s bloody business is it anyway?

Yours?

.

‘Icarus Landing, by Michael Newberry

 

Icarus Landing, acrylic on linen, 55x36 inches.

It’s a bit late for Easter, but there you go: the artist just reposted it, so I can, saying:

Happy Easter!
Wouldn't it be great if we could be transformed while alive?
And evolve with plenty of time to share the wonder?
And to look towards Earth for our paradise?

Wouldn’t it just. And wouldn’t that transform lives.

.

Easter Uplift: It’s Your Revised Sermon on the Mount

Put down your symbols of torture for a moment, grab a couple of cold beers and some good old pagan Easter Eggs, and consider something more uplifting than the bloodstained Easter story.

Here, courtesy of Lindsay Perigo, is his wholly revised, updated and uplifted Sermon on the Mount.

A Revised Sermon on the Mount

Blessed are the poor in spirit—when they become rich in spirit and matter, for theirs will be the kingdom of earth.

Blessed are they who mourn—when they get over it.

Blessed are the meek—when they acquire pride, for then they shall inherit the earth.

Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after individual rights—when they rise up for their cause, for then they shall become free.

Blessed are the merciful—when they learn to discriminate, for then they shall obtain justice.

Blessed are the pure in heart, since to be pure in heart they must be using their brains.

Blessed are the peacemakers—when they learn that peace doesn't come at any price, and wipe tyrants off the map.

Blessed are ye when men shall revile you and persecute you and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely—when those men be the High Priests of Islam, Christianity, Socialism, Postmodernism, and all other manner of unreason.

Blessed are the rational, the independent, the honest, the sincere, the productive, the just, the justly proud; the scientists and capitalists; the poets, singers and symphonists of love and thought—for theirs is the glory of man.

Rejoice, and be exceeding glad, for great is your reward on earth—when you have earned it, and it is not the fruit of a bailout.

Ye are the salt of the earth—but if the salt has lost its savour, wherewith shall it be salted? If ye become tame as sheeple, ye shall be trodden under the feet of politicians and bureaucrats and postmodern philosophers. Be ye instead the light of the world. Do not hide that light under a bushel, but let it so shine before men that they may see your vision of reason and freedom, and glorify it, and bring it to pass on earth.

Amen.  Hope you’re all having a good one yourself.

Easter Week, Part 4: Surely There Are Better Stories to Tell?

Today’s final reflection on the celebrations of Easter Week, and their source…

Let’s summarise. In Pagan times, Easter was the time in the Northern calendar when the coming of spring was celebrated -- the celebration of new life, of coming fecundity.  Hence the eggs and rabbits and celebrations of fertility. Indeed, the very word "Easter" comes from Eos, the Greek goddess of the dawn, and means, symbolically, the festival celebrating the rebirth of light after the darkness of winter.

But with the coming of Christianity, the celebration was hijacked to become this veneration of torture and sacrifice I talked about yesterday.  Remember here the true nature of sacrifice:

    “ ‘Sacrifice’ [says Rand] does not mean the rejection of the worthless, but of the precious. ‘Sacrifice’ does not mean the rejection of the evil for the sake of the good, but of the good for the sake of the evil. ‘Sacrifice’ is the surrender of that which you value in favor of that which you don’t.

That’s why of itself it’s barbaric. It is, to quote Nietzsche, a revolt of everything that crawls against everything that’s high.  That’s why the barbarity of the Christian sacrifice is so stark.

If it were true.  Because unfortunately, as PZ Myers points out, Jesus isn't even saving us from anything real, and even in the made-up story he makes no change in the world with his death.

And the story itself was not even original.  In the Norse myths (to quote just one of many similar myths) the head god Odin hung himself on the World Tree Yggdrasil—although not simply to sacrifice himself to himself, but to achieve greater understanding thereby. As the Icelandic Edda tells the story,

I ween that I hung of the windy tree,
Hung there for nights full nine;
With the spear I was wounded, and offered I was,
To Othin, myself to myself,
On the tree that none may ever know
what root beneath it runs.
None made me happy with loaf or horn,
And there below I looked;
I took up the runes, shrieking I took them,
And forthwith back I fell.
Then began I to thrive, and wisdom to get,
I grew and well I was;
Each word led me to another word,
Each deed to another deed.

As Joseph Campbell observes,

No one can miss the parallels here to the Gospel themes of Jesus’ three hours on the Cross (3 x 3 = 9), the spear in his side, his death and resurrection, and the boon of redemption thereby obtained. The phrase “and offered I was/To Othin, myself to myself” is interesting in the light of the Christian dogma of Christ and the Father as One.

These are the sort of stories the Christian myth supplanted, as I mentioned in Part 1.  And in hijacking the pagan celebrations of spring,  they overtook a mostly joyful celebration of growth and fertility, of peace and new understanding, and added to it a new ingredient: the ethic of sacrifice -- the murder and torture of tall poppies -- the sacrifice of the Christian's highest possible for the sake of the meanest most rotten 'sinner,' whose redemption Christ's murder was supposed to buy.

For Christians, then, Easter is a time to revere that sacrifice and to remind themselves (and us) of the centrality of sacrifice to their fantasy. Oh yes, there's a 'rebirth' of sorts in their fantasy, but not one on this earth realm, and not before a celebration of intense pain and suffering that supposedly bought redemption and virtue for those who possessed neither. 

As Robert Tracinski says so bluntly, "Easter's Mixture of the Benevolent and the Horrific Reveals Religion's Antagonism to Human Life." And so it does.

BUT MYTHOLOGY IS A strange beast. It was, in ancient times, a form of pre-philosophical, metaphorical knowledge and inquiry. Joseph Campbell argues that “in thinking of the Crucifixion only in historical terms [Christians] lose the reference of the symbol immediately to [themselves].”

The metaphor obscured by the torture and bloodshed is still the one celebrated by all the myths of springtime, “"matching the bursting forth of flowers and the return of the sun … the plangent longing we experience at this season … very much the longing to be born anew the way nature is.”

The calculation of Easter’s date by reference to both lunar and solar calendars, to both sun and moon – the two largest beings of ancient life around which all of life was organised-- is a clue we’re talking about more than just a dead carpenter.

All these elements fit together … What we have to recognise is that these celestial bodies represented to the ancients two different modes of eternal life, one engaged in the field of time, like throwing off death, as the moon it’s shadow, to be born again; the other, disengaged and eternal…
    [Other folk symbols have similar lunar and solar resonations]. There is, to begin with, the rabbit, the Easter bunny… The rabbit is associated with the dying and resurrection of the moon.  The egg is shelled off by the chicks as the shadow of the moon is the moon reborn …

In short, the overarching pagan metaphor is a call to change, or at least renewal. ‘Cos as Bob Dylan liked to say, “He not being busy being born is busy dying.”

It’s this spirit that the composer Richard Wagner tried to capture in his beautiful Good Friday Spell music, part of the culminating wonder of his final opera Parsifal:

THE PAGAN METAPHOR undergirds the Christian, giving it whatever real life it has.

I can’t help pointing out here there is another story standing in complete contrast to the Christian story of torture and sacrifice, that is in all senses its polar opposite. A much, much better story to tell and retell.

Unlike the anti-heroes of Bach's Passion--who murder their hero in a vain attempt to save their desiccated souls—or Dostoyevsky’s—who torture themselves with thoughts of a “malevolent universe” in which they are “trapped”--the heroes of Ayn Rand's novel The Fountainhead shun sacrifice and venerate their own human powers on this earth.

The hero of that novel, Howard Roark, appears in court in a similar position dramatically in which Bach places his own hero. Thrown to the mob and fighting for his life in court, rather than acquiesce as Bach’s hero does, Roark states instead—as clearly and categorically as he knows how—his own terms.

    “I came here to say that I do not recognize anyone's right to one minute of my life. Nor to any part of my energy. Nor to any achievement of mine. No matter who makes the claim, how large their number or how great their need.
    "I wished to come here and say that I am a man who does not exist for others.
    "It had to be said. The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing.
    "I wished to come here and say that the integrity of a man's creative work is of greater importance than any charitable endeavor. Those of you who do not understand this are the men who're destroying the world.
    "I wished to come here and state my terms. I do not care to exist on any others.
    "I recognize no obligations toward men except one: to respect their freedom and to take no part in a slave society.”

Instead of embracing the sacrifice demanded by the mob, as Paul and the Christian writers who followed him had their hero do, this hero rejects it. Rejects it emphatically.

The contrast to the other story is stark,wouldn’t you say?

The ethic of The Fountainhead, one for which each of the leading characters fights in their own way, is one in which genius has the right to live for its own sake.  The contrast with the demand of Christianity that The Good inheres in the act of suffering and dying for the expiation of others could not be stronger, or the question more important!  Rather than demanding and worshipping the sacrifice of the highest to the lowest -- or as Nietzsche did, retaining the ethic but reversing the beneficiary of the sacrifice by demanding the sacrifice of the lowest to the highest -- the ethic of The Fountainhead insists that The Good is not to suffer and to die, but to enjoy yourself and live -- without any sacrifice at all of anyone to anyone else.

In my book, that really is an ethic worthy of reverence.

NOW, I'M ALL TOO aware that if you believe the Christian's Easter Myth, then anything I say here is going to pass right by you.  So if you do insist on venerating sacrifice this weekend, and especially if you're intending a bit of crucifixion yourself, or even just a bit of mildly flogging or self-torture, then here are a few simple Easter Safety Tips for you from the Church, which are not unfortunately intended as satire.

And now, for all the bureaucrats who will be working tomorrow while insisting that others don’t, here's that Nick Kim cartoon again ...

Have a happy holiday!

Easter Week, Part 3: The Holy Art of Sacrifice

“My favourite definition of mythology: other people’s religion. My favourite definition of
religion: misunderstanding of mythology. The misunderstanding consist in the reading of
the mythological symbols as though they were primarily references to historical events…”
- Joseph Campbell

AND MAN MADE GODS in his own image, and that of the animals he saw around him, and he saw these stories were sometimes helpful psychologically in a a pre-philosophical age. But one of these gods was a jealous god. For this god was so angry at the world he sent one-third of himself to die to expiate the sins of those with whom he was angry, for sins that (in his omniscience) he would have always known they would commit.

It’s not just history the christian story challenges, is it. It’s logic.

Their god, both all-knowing and all-powerful (the two key features that make him a god) not only knows all that has happened and all that will happen, is also supposedly responsible for all that has happened and all that does happen - that's what being both all-knowing and all-powerful really means.

And to expiate the sins of those he knew would blunder he sacrifices himself to himself.

Which means that he is not just at one with our sin and suffering: he caused it all, and he knew it would all happen.

Human suffering, according to this view, is not an accident, it is god-given.

And so is God’s.

Got that?

On this view, in this story, this god is not just in favour of pain and suffering, he not just actively wills it,  in “saving” the world from himself by having his own son tortured and killed he is an example to parents everywhere. (Just like, you know, Abraham.)

EVERY RELIGION HAS ITS own core myths portraying the very heart of their beliefs. The pagan Greeks told stories of their gods, those Attic super-men, consuming Ambrosia and gambolling on Olympus.  The Norse heroes told stories of their gods lustily wenching and feasting in Valhalla while waiting for Ragnarok.  And the Christians? They tell about the time when their god sent his son down to be nailed up to a piece of wood.

As a myth, you’d think it’s hardly something to celebrate.

Yet the Easter Myth is central to Christianity, and all too revealing of the ethic at Christianity's heart that has poisoned the West ever since.

Art reveals that core. Look at that fantastic painting below, by Salvador Dali. A great, powerful, awe-inspiring, revealing piece of art.  What does it represent? It represents man-worship -- the presentation of an ideal – one of the greatest presentations of the theme in the twentieth century. (Thank you, Salvador Dali.) Note how the main figure is larger than life and seemingly immune to pain or destruction; a figure, incongruously in this context, portrayed without pain or fear or guilt.

Christus Hypercubus, Salvador Dali

The figure at left, much smaller, looks up at the blindingly bright Christ figure with a look not simply of curiosity or sadness, but of literal man-worship. If we have questions here, when looking at a man – not just a man, our ideal man – nailed up to a piece of wood, they might be along these lines:

"How can you worship the destruction of your ideal man?”

“Why would you celebrate his torture?”

“Why is suffering so damned central to your mythology?”

Fair questions, especially when confronted with splatter-fests like Mel Gibson’s Passion that lovingly depict every act of torture and every drop of blood in high-definition Technicolor. (They wouldn’t watch the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but how many good and gentle Christians will be searching on Netflix this Easter for the chance to see their hero graphically beaten and slayed?)

So that’s what painting and film can do with the theme. How about music? 

Bach’s St Matthew Passion musically and beautifully dramatises this Myth while revealing its true nature. The Passion’s thematic centre occurs when Jesus appears before Pilate and the mob.

When Pilate asks the crowd who should be freed, Barabbas or Jesus. The crowd replies, "Barabbas!" and Pilate asks, "When what should I do with Jesus, who is called the Christ?" The crowd shouts, "Let him be Crucified!"
    This final shout is musically rendered in such an awful way that the hearer is almost struck dumb. One can feel the terrible doom being called down.
    Pilate then asks (in Part 56), "Why, what has this man done?" His question is answered by what is probably the loneliest Soprano ever, who says, "He has done good to us all, He gave sight to the blind, The lame he made to walk; He told us his father's word, He drove the devils forth; The wretched he has raised up; He received and sheltered sinners, Nothing else has my Jesus done."
    Following this is an even more poignant aria that begins, "Out of love my Saviour is willing to die." After that the chorus repeats the sentence, which is made worse by what we have just heard.
"Let him be Crucified!"

Made worse, much worse, because of the good he has apparently done.

Just think, Christians revere Christ as their ideal, and in some of the most plangent music ever Bach has his chorus and soloists praise him, worship him, eulogise Him – this, above all, was their hero (Bach tells us); a man known only for good deeds; who spread the good word; the man they believe their god sent to earth as an example of the highest possible on this earth -- and then they and that god went and had him killed.

Tortured.

Crucified.

That's the story. This, says Bach in the true honesty that great art reveals, is what Christians revere: The murder of their ideal man.  The sacrifice of himself to himself.  To appease what? Why, to appease his own blodlust.

It’s an astonishing ethic to celebrate, isn’t it: the sacrifice of the ideal man just to appease and placate the mob.

THE SACRIFICE, YOU SEE, is the thing. Sacrifice is the central ethical thesis of Christianity—so important that an all-powerful god was supposed to sacrifice his own son (who is also himself) to himself just to make the important point: that sacrifice of a higher value—of the very highest—to everything that crawls on earth is central to the Christian ethics.

Central? As the apostle Paul set it up, it is his religion’s very core.

In the Easter Myth giving voice to this ethic of sacrifice, we are invited to praise the willing sacrifice of the man they hold up as their ideal to a mob of the vilest  sinners--sacrificed as a point of ethical and religious necessity in the most vile and bloodthirsty way imaginable.

It's of no avail whether in the Christ myth we hear that he was arrested for blasphemy, or for disrupting temple rituals, or for preaching without a police permit, or that he came to replace one stone-age form of witch-doctory for another. It's of no avail because none of those points are central to the Easter Myth, or of the central Christian ethic portrayed therein: they’re all just plot devices to get the story to Golgotha, and the god-son nailed up.

That is the vile story we are invited to admire and the ethic we are enjoined to emulate – the ethic that has infested the world ever since.

“What would Jesus do (WWJD)?” is the question religionists encourage. And the ultimate answer: Why, he would give up his very life up to the mob, and his very body to be tortured by it. Why? To save (somehow) all you miserable sinners.

The sacrifice, you see, is the thing. And just to be clear what we mean by sacrifice:

“Sacrifice” is the surrender of a greater value for the sake of a lesser one or of a non-value. Thus, altruism gauges a man’s virtue by the degree to which he surrenders, renounces or betrays his values…

That a story is celebrated in which a divine sacrifice, a human being, a son of the “all-powerful” is offered up in the most vile, most bloodthirsty way possible--to "save" a mob who, according to those same Christians, are created as vile sinners--and to "appease" a bloodthirsty and omnipotent God who intended all this to happen, and (according to the story) sent this ideal man down to earth to make sure that it did …. now if that's not a vile story, even if t'were true, then my name is Odin.

And there's certainly nothing enlightening there on which to base an ethics. And base an ethics on it the religionists certainly do. One they insist is “sublime.”

No wonder the religionists see nothing to apologise for today when priests quietly sacrifice young children to their own misbegotten lusts.

HANS HOLBEIN’S PAINTING ‘CHRIST AFTER CRUCIFIXION’ lays bare the reality of the sacrifice even in some ways even more starkly than Mel Gibson’s splatter movie.

Hans Holbein, 1521, ‘A Christian Confronts Reality’ (after Dostoyevsky)

It’s not a pretty painting, as this detail makes plain:

Hans Holbein, 1521, ‘A Christian Confronts Reality’ (after Dostoyevsky), detail

A good subtitle for this 1521 painting might be ‘A Christian Confronts Reality.’  That, at least, was how the Russian novelist Dostoyevsky felt when confronted with this naturalistic depiction of the battered Christian corpse in 1867: confronted with the horrific reality of crucifixion and its results, Dostoyevsky was struck by the importance of this confrontation for his faith, and inspired to dramatise in his next novel what that confrontation meant. Said his wife,

The figure of Christ taken from the cross, whose body already showed signs of decomposition, haunted him like a horrible nightmare.  In his notes to [his novel] The Idiot and in the novel itself he returns again and again to his theme.

Holbein confronts the Christian viewer with a powerful choice: One must either believe that God raised this ravaged body from the dead, and that the Christian myth, therefore, “offers hope for humanity beyond this life”; or else accept that the dead stay dead, that such an event did not and could not occur, that reality is what it is – with all that follows therefrom. As Dostoyevsky has a character explain it in his novel The Idiot,

His body on the cross was therefore fully and entirely subject to the laws of nature. In the picture the face is terribly smashed with blows, swollen, covered with terrible, swollen, and bloodstained bruises, the eyes open and squinting; the large, open whites of the eyes have a sort of dead and glassy glint. . . .
   Looking at that picture, you get the impression of nature as some enormous, implacable, and dumb beast, or, to put it more correctly, much more correctly, though it may seem strange, as some huge engine of the latest design, which has senselessly seized, cut to pieces, and swallowed up–impassively and unfeelingly–a great and priceless Being, a Being worth the whole of nature and all its laws, worth the entire earth, which was perhaps created solely for the coming of that Being!

Remember, good art need not be a thing of beauty, but it must have something to say. This, both Holbein’s painting and Dostoyevsky’s novel, certainly do that.

If you believe the Creation myth and all that goes with it, the idea that all this was designed by something supernatural and omnipotent, then you must believe this torture too was designed. That it was intended.  That the god that once insisted Abraham sacrifice his own son now makes the mob insist on the sacrifice of their ideal.

Let me ask you again, Don’t you think it astonishing to celebrate this barbarity?

IT WOULD BE EVEN MORE astonishing if that were what Easter really meant.  Thankfully, it’s not.

More on that this afternoon…

Easter Week, Part 2: Enter Hercules…

Apotheosis of Hercules c. 1539. Oil on canvas. Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna

Christianity didn’t start with Jesus, any more than the Easter story did. Paul, who never even met Jesus but who played the largest part in explaining his life, and his death, had a big hand in both.

Jesus’s death was a secular event his followers struggled to explain. He had arrived from nowhere, talking mysteriously about bringing the kingdom of god on earth – interpreted hopefully by many as the coming of a “Messiah”¹ to liberate the Hebrews from Roman rule – before arriving in Jerusalem  and almost immediately being put to death.

Any followers who believed Jesus was the Messiah may well have dreamed of some form of political or military triumph in which the priestly authorities would be overthrown and Israel liberated. Instead, Jesus had been arrested, subjected to a rudimentary trial and executed as a common criminal by the most humiliating punishment of all, crucifixion.¹

His brutal death ended their hopes and plans, and put their leader in whom they’d placed all their hope in the pathetic and very public position of being an “unprophetic prophet.” What to do?

In short, the crucifixion may have been the result of a serious miscalculation. If so, that most haunting of cries, recorded in Matthew and Mark and in the original Aramaic, `My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me', rings out with particular resonance. It was only later, especially through the theology of Paul, that the emphasis shifted towards the crucifixion as the defining moment of Jesus' life.²

The gospels supposedly describing Jesus’s life by his followers were written decades later, “by educated Greeks, themselves outsiders to Judaea, but not to Judaism, between AD 70 and AD 100. The gospels illustrate how four Christian writers envisaged Jesus and his message in the period forty to seventy years after his death.”³  Even so, we see how reluctant these writers were to include what becomes the Easter story in the fact that the earliest versions of the first “canonical” gospel, Mark, for instance, do not even have  a resurrection. The story is grafted on later.

Hey, hey, it’s Easter Week!

IT’S EASTER WEEK – a time, since human cultural life began up in the northern hemisphere, when men and women and their families came together to celebrate.

To celebrate what?

Why, to celebrate spring, of course. The end of winter; the onset of new life; of fertility and rebirth; the end of winter’s cold and darkness and the start of longer days, more sun, summer harvests and a time when living is easy. Or, at least (when most of life in those early days was nasty, brutish and short) easier.

Imagine this week thousands of years ago, long before lighting and heating and modern refrigeration and all the first-world delights and problems of today; back when it was a valuable thing to own one candle; when literal life and death was a matter of the success of the next harvest.

No wonder then that this celebration, of this time, was so important to the agricultural societies we came out of that it still lingers today in a different form. As Easter.

IN THOSE EARLY DAYS, the spring celebration was everywhere—and in forms that still sound familiar today.

It was observed in China, where it was called a “Festival of Gratitude to Tien.” Tien, of course, being “the Holy One,” always spoken of as one with God, existing with him from all eternity, "before anything was made."  The story might sound familiar:

"The common people sacrifice their lives to gain bread; the philosophers to gain reputation; the nobility to perpetuate their families. The Holy One (Tien) does not seek himself, but the good of others. He dies to save the world."¹

The celebration was observed in early non-Roman Europe, Saxon pagans celebrating annually in honour of the goddess Ostri, or Eostre with a week’s indulgence in all kinds of sports, called carne-e-vale, followed by a fast of forty days.

Persians and Egyptians celebrated this time as the start of the Solar New Year with the giving of eggs as a fertility symbols, usually stained with colours from dye-woods or herbs.

The Babylonian goddess of fertility, war, love, and sex was Ishtar (pronounced “Easter”). Ishtar’s Sunday commemorated the resurrection of her consort, a god called "Tammuz," believed to be the only begotten son of the moon-goddess and the sun-god. It was celebrated with rabbits and eggs, and sacred cakes with the marking of a "T" or cross on the top.

Stop me if any of this is sounding at all familiar. 

Hebrews too used eggs as part of their feast of the Passover, and the custom prevailed as the celebrations changed. The manner of their changing says much about the manner in which the new religion, Christianity, usurped one of its forebears:

In the earliest times, the Christians did not celebrate the resurrection of their Lord from the grave. They made the Jewish Passover their chief festival, celebrating it on the same day as the Jews, the 14th of Nisan, no matter in what part of the week that day might fall. Believing, according to the tradition, that Jesus on the eve of his death had eaten the Passover with his disciples, they regarded such a solemnity as a commemoration of the Supper and not as a memorial of the Resurrection. But in proportion as Christianity more and more separated itself from Judaism and imbibed paganism, this way of looking at the matter became less easy. A new tradition gained currency among the Roman Christians to the effect that Jesus before his death had not eaten the Passover, but had died on the very day of the Passover, thus substituting himself for the Paschal Lamb. The great Christian festival was then made the Resurrection of Jesus, and was celebrated on the first pagan holiday—Sun-day—after the Passover.²

This usurpation of earlier celebrations caused great problems in early Christian communities. One simple problem was the date, one reason the current Easter festivities make no sense in terms of correlating Easter with the Passover that Jesus was, according to gospel writers, in Jerusalem to celebrate.

Although the matter is only recorded in a letter of Constantine, there was also agreement that the date of Easter would be fixed according to the custom of Rome (where the date was decided with reference to the lunar calendar) rather than [in Constantinople and beyond]. The [Christians of Roman] Asia still tied the feast to the Jewish Passover, an interesting example of the continuing Christian links with Jewish tradition, with the result that Easter usually failed to fall on a Sunday. Constantine, in contrast, rejected a feast which was celebrated `in accordance with the practice of the Jews ... Having sullied their own hands with a heinous crime [the death of Jesus] , such men are, as one would expect, mentally blind.'³

Christianity having become a state-enforced religion, the usurpation was violent.

The Jews were particularly hard hit. Many Christians still attended the synagogues or, in defiance of Nicaea, celebrated Easter on the same day as the Passover. John Chrysostom was furious. A series of sermons that he preached in 386 in Antioch is shocking in its tasteless denunciations of the synagogues as equivalent to brothels or dens of thieves. Accusing the Jews of every kind of perversity (including, of course, the murder of Christ) John dredged his way through the Old Testament in search of any displeasure shown by God to Israel, often taking texts out of context to do so. These oratorical campaigns became part of the new Christian ideology. In 415, Severus, the bishop of Mahon in Minorca, set on fire a synagogue filled with its congregation after they had refused to debate with him.

Nice people, these early Christians.

As Voltaire would say about now,

Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.

More to come tomorrow …

NOTES:
1. L. Maria Child recounts the litany in The Progress of Religious Ideas through Successive Ages.
2. Thomas Doane tells the story in his Bible Myths and their Parallels in other Religions.
3. This and the next quote come from Charles Freeman’s excellent New History of Early Christianity.

Easter Uplift: It’s Your Revised Sermon on the Mount

Put down your symbols of torture for a moment, grab a couple of good old pagan Easter Eggs, and consider something more uplifting than the Easter story Here, courtesy of Lindsay Perigo, is his wholly revised, updated and uplifted Sermon on the Mount.

A Revised Sermon on the Mount

Blessed are the poor in spirit—when they become rich in spirit and matter, for theirs will be the kingdom of earth.

Blessed are they who mourn—when they get over it.

Blessed are the meek—when they acquire pride, for then they shall inherit the earth.

Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after individual rights—when they rise up for their cause, for then they shall become free.

Blessed are the merciful—when they learn to discriminate, for then they shall obtain justice.

Blessed are the pure in heart, since to be pure in heart they must be using their brains.

Blessed are the peacemakers—when they learn that peace doesn't come at any price, and wipe tyrants off the map.

Blessed are ye when men shall revile you and persecute you and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely—when those men be the High Priests of Islam, Christianity, Socialism, Postmodernism, and all other manner of unreason.

Blessed are the rational, the independent, the honest, the sincere, the productive, the just, the justly proud; the scientists and capitalists; the poets, singers and symphonists of love and thought—for theirs is the glory of man.

Rejoice, and be exceeding glad, for great is your reward on earth—when you have earned it, and it is not the fruit of a bailout.

Ye are the salt of the earth—but if the salt has lost its savour, wherewith shall it be salted? If ye become tame as sheeple, ye shall be trodden under the feet of politicians and bureaucrats and postmodern philosophers. Be ye instead the light of the world. Do not hide that light under a bushel, but let it so shine before men that they may see your vision of reason and freedom, and glorify it, and bring it to pass on earth.

Amen.  Hope you’re all having a good one yourself.

Easter Week, 4: Surely There Are Better Stories to Tell?

Today’s reflection on the celebrations of Easter Week, and their source…

In Pagan times you see, Easter was the time in the Northern calendar when the coming of spring was celebrated -- the celebration of new life, of coming fecundity.  Hence the eggs and rabbits and celebrations of fertility. Indeed, the very word "Easter" comes from Eos, the Greek goddess of the dawn, and means, symbolically, the festival celebrating the rebirth of light after the darkness of winter. 

But with the coming of Christianity, the celebration was hijacked to become this veneration of torture and sacrifice I talked about yesterday.  Remember here the true nature of sacrifice:

    “ ‘Sacrifice’ [says Rand] does not mean the rejection of the worthless, but of the precious. ‘Sacrifice’ does not mean the rejection of the evil for the sake of the good, but of the good for the sake of the evil. ‘Sacrifice’ is the surrender of that which you value in favor of that which you don’t.

That’s why of itself it’s barbaric. It is, to quote Nietzsche, a revolt of everything that crawls against everything that’s high.  That’s why the barbarity of the Christian sacrifice is so stark.

If it were true.  Because unfortunately, as PZ Myers points out, Jesus isn't even saving us from anything real, and even in the made-up story he makes no change in the world with his death.

And the story itself was not even original.  In the Norse myths (to quote just one of many similar myths) the head god Odin hung himself on the World Tree Yggdrasil—not to sacrifice himself to himself, but to achieve greater understanding. As the Icelandic Edda tells the story,

Easter Week, 3: Mythologising Sacrifice

“My favourite definition of mythology: other people’s religion. My favourite definition of
religion: misunderstanding of mythology. The misunderstanding consist in the reading of
the mythological symbols as though they were primarily references to historical events…”
- Joseph Campbell

AND MAN MADE GODS in his own image, and that of the animals he saw around him, and he saw these stories were sometimes helpful psychologically in a a pre-philosophical age. But one of these gods was a jealous god. For this god was so angry at the world he sent one-third of himself to die to expiate the sins of those with whom he was angry, for sins that (in his omniscience) he would have always known they would commit.

It’s not just history the christian story challenges, is it. It’s logic. Their god, both all-knowing and all-powerful (the two key features that make him a god) not only knows all that has happened ad will happen, he is also responsible for all that has happened and does happen - that's what being both all-knowing and all-powerful really means.

Which means that he is not just at one with our sin and suffering: he caused it all, and he knew it would all happen.

Human suffering, according to this view, is not an accident, it is god-given.

On this view, in this story, this god is not just in favour of pain and suffering, he not just actively wills it,  in “saving” the world from himself by having his own son tortured and killed he is an example to parents everywhere. (Just like, you know, Abraham.)

Easter Week, 2: Enter Hercules…

Apotheosis of Hercules c. 1539. Oil on canvas. Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna

Christianity didn’t start with Jesus, any more than the Easter story did. Paul, who never met Jesus, had a big hand in both.

Jesus’s death was a secular event his followers struggled to explain. He had arrived from nowhere, talking mysteriously about bringing the kingdom of god on earth – interpreted hopefully by many as the coming of a “Messiah”¹ to liberate the Hebrews from Roman rule – before arriving in Jerusalem  and almost immediately being put to death.

Any followers who believed Jesus was the Messiah may well have dreamed of some form of political or military triumph in which the priestly authorities would be overthrown and Israel liberated. Instead, Jesus had been arrested, subjected to a rudimentary trial and executed as a common criminal by the most humiliating punishment of all, crucifixion.

His brutal death ended their hopes and plans, and put their leader in whom they’d placed all their hope in the pathetic and very public position of being an “unprophetic prophet.” What to do?