I am still struggling with my health, and can barely walk. NEVERTHELESS…
Here are a few new pages from the second edition: a reasonably profound critique of Christianity, en passant.
I would remind you: this is what à-bas-le-ciel (as a creative project) was originally devised for, but I never had a single colleague or contemporary from the atheist movement to work with (nor to work against, I might add).
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"If you've accepted the authority of a pagan witch-doctor, learning to believe that certain gestures of his hands and certain words chanted in an incomprehensible language will have a magical effect, you can easily transfer this reverence to a Christian priest: he simply uses different words and gestures, appealing to the same basic superstition. Transference of faith is far more simple than the transference of skepticism, as the transference of desire is easier than the transference of detachment."
"In the last few centuries, Christians of every sect wanted to imagine that their followers could instead arrive at this point of submission to the power of their rituals through reason alone, refusing to see that this use of reason undermined the faith it was meant to serve. People who are not afraid of ten thousand tiny demons are not afraid of one god, either, because they do not need His protection against Them: the church without ghosts soon enough becomes a church without believers, as one kind of haunting relies upon the other, reciprocally. Over a period of 500 years, the modernization of Christianity eradicated the belief in 'rival' (smaller, lower) superstitions, inadvertently destroying the basis for belief in any superstition whatsoever."
"Christianity made itself half-rational and entirely lost its magic as a result. In training children to believe in the supposedly-rational world of Pascal and Descartes, with the monotheistic god and the Christian church as its logically-deduced leader, the modernizers of theology destroyed the basis for the whole structure of personal subjugation (to the greater whole) that they were trying to defend."
"The exceptions prove the rule: the Quakers embraced the total insanity of the crassest superstition (with every man being 'seized' by the holy spirit and becoming a prophet by virtue of having 'a seizure', speaking in tongues, etc.) and led a sincere revival that lasted a hundred years, while the rest of the Christian faith withered away. As soon as the Quakers felt embarrassment and tried to rationalize their religion, they caught up with the decline that every other form of the half-rational religion had experienced in the same millennium."
"To be rational and reasonable seemed at first to be an ornament to the faith, but, after a few generations, the faith itself had become nothing more than an ornament of only so many sequins, worn by rational and reasonable people on only so many special occasions. And it would be delightful to imagine that this is what destroyed the civilization of Easter Island or laid waste to the work of a dozen dynasties in Egypt, but there has never been any example of a civilization destroyed by its self-awareness other than our own. It is a holotype: neither the decline of Confucianism nor the fall of Communism followed the same pattern. Never once in the history of India or Arabia will you find such irony."
"It was in Europe, uniquely, for a transitional period of a few centuries, that we saw aristocrats accepting god's existence only as a theorem, 'proven' like Pascal's pontifications, explained in axioms like the philosophy of Descartes, and so on. Whereas in Ancient Rome we could all accept the divinity of Julius Caesar after his death, and his religious status as pontifex maximus had been the least controversial thing about him while he was still alive, crucially, in our 'early modernity', our ostentatiously rational ruling class could never accept that the political power of particular human beings was 'proven' by words and gestures performed like a magician's trick on a stage. The god of their abstract reasoning seemed to discredit his own worldly authority: their faith, arrived at rationally, discredited blind obedience to mere rituals. The real threat to the church was not atheism but deism."
"With or without irony, aristocrats of this kind often said (or wrote) that they envied 'the pure faith' of the peasants, but even if they secretly despised it, they were alienated from it just the same. They could speak for hours about the abstract relationship between divine creation and worldly hierarchy, but they could not sincerely say they accepted that one man would rule (rather than another) because he was rubbed with a magic ointment in a public ceremony presided over by the Pope --a ritual that continued down to the coronation of Napoleon, even though the 'Sacred Ampoule' containing the magic oil for this ceremony had been (quite intentionally) destroyed by revolutionaries just a few years before. Both in France and England, the peasants, in their purity, believed that a king could magically cure scrofula (an infection that horribly distorts the shape of the neck, most often caused by tuberculosis) with a mere touch, even after civil wars (or, more rarely, the outright abolition and restoration of the monarchy) had demonstrated to them how new kings could be contrived --sometimes repeatedly, within living memory. What exactly was there to be envied, for the Aristocrats who had been corrupted by a passing acquaintance with Greco-Latin literature? If the right to rule had been revealed to be a mere ritual, the only question that remained was whether this ritual, like the king's cure for scrofula, should be regarded as real or unreal."
"If a man is genuinely terrified to eat without first getting some blessing put upon his food (warding off demons, etc.) there can be no question of axioms and proofs to substantiate the authority of the person providing the ritual; but the Christian who has accepted the supremacy of god only through Neoplatonic reasoning cannot be convinced that it would be dangerous for him to eat without getting the magic sacrament first, and in the absence of this fear (this reliance, this dependency) he will regard the authority of the ritualist as something no different from (and no more difficult to question than) the qualifications needed by an actor to perform a particular part in the theater. Believing in reasoning leads to believing in nothing, even if the people who preach Reason themselves are the most pious victims of blind faith, like Descartes (d. 1650) and Hobbes (d. 1679) and Newton (d. 1727) and Kant (d. 1804). All of these men believed in the same god as the Neoplatonists, but they were as modern as Machiavelli (d. 1527) in this one respect: they could not believe in the magical difference between a crown and a peasant's cap."
"If you obey only those rules you can understand, you'll be in a constant state of rebellion: every society relies upon obedience to an incomprehensible and mysterious set of rules as fragile as the Sacred Ampoules. Rational defiance of them would be anarchy. The ostentatiously rational aristocrats of the last few centuries were anarchists in constant rebellion against the mystique of the dark ages, although they considered themselves to be the most devout conformists within the same system of church and monarchy that they would destroy."