One of the weirder ultra-right-wing "dark intellectuals" is James Lindsay, "Conceptual James" (another person with the strangely glassy vibe) who occupies a strange place in U.S. #politics, one that's attracted quite a few of the dark-Enlightenment types: nominally James is a godless academic, a Ph.D. mathematician (devoid of achievement beyond a repulsive publication prank he once pulled) but his audience is largely right-wing Christian. He refuses to comment on the matter and surely there's a purely mercenary aspect to this: right-wing Christian business-men are big sponsors of pseudo-science and eugenicist cranks and other such persons who dangle the promise of scientific proof of their fondest hatreds.

Lindsay came up with an especially cute pitch that's like honey to Christian flies: he claims to have discovered that Marxism is really Gnosticism at bottom.

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That may seem like pure nonsense but it's bridging a gap between the godless technofascist hatred of leftism and the apocalyptical devilry which the right-wing Christians see from leftists and especially their twin favorite idols of hatred, socialism and communism. I don't actually know if these words are distinct for them, mind you, but making "socialism" into devilry allows them to pretend that Nazism is really leftist. (Because there's "Socialism" in the name, you see. That proves they're really leftist. /s)

One of the usual extremist Christian methods is to accuse leftism (and everything else they despise) of really being a secret religion.

(etc.)

That may seem weird coming from extremist Christians, but these are Christians who don't want to be thought of as "religious" so that leaves them free to use the word "religion" practically as a slur, the way that "cult" is pejorative.

The reactionary Christian pose is that #GlobalWarming and the #trans community and all things they deem to be "culturally Marxist" are just irrational cults, "ideological" (i.e. evil, which the #Democrats also believe). So James Lindsay supplies a need: he's a putatively irreligious scholar claiming to have proved that Marxism is merely a cult, a Gnostic one.

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Gnosticism is a mystical form of Christianity but that doesn't matter to this crowd, because they've totally internalized the ancient Roman-era condemnation and persecution of Gnostic Christians. Gnosticism melted away into the #occult affairs of Europe and the Mediterranean and that's all the devil's business, of course, if you're a patriotic American anyway or if you're #CSLewis. (Who, ironically, may accidentally have achieved one of the most extraordinary necromantic workkings I can think of...but more later.)

It's all just heresy to them in the end, forbidden wicked stuff which the faithful are encouraged from knowing nothing about.

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But therein lies a trap. You see...the really powerful folks in this whole crowd, especially those who are loudest about their godliness and their God-ordained hatred of witchcraft and Satanism, privately feel that they have a licence to dabble in these things themselves. They are tempted by the power (and yes there is real power there, at least for the time being) and they convince themselves that God would approve of exploiting the villains' own methods against them. They tell themselves they're like undercover agents forced to resort to any sneaky treacherous means in order to achieve their mission.

And after all, they're only tricking and deceiving evil people, damned people whose fates are sealed and therefore whose lives no longer matter.

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So who might really be interested in Gnosticism? I mean, in a practical spirit, hoping to draw upon ancient lore and secret knowledge in order to achieve magical transformation?

There's honest students of all this stuff, mind you. I feel that #occult study can be respectable enough; in an earlier age it was more acceptable for both Christian and Muslim polymaths to flirt with occult matters. But there's surely any number of exceedingly toxic and power-hungry Christians, people who would fly into a rage if you openly accused them of being anything other than "Biblical" in their ways, who have been mucking about with the dark arts.

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@mxchara I believe spiritual warfare manuals are actually modern Christian grimoires

Reactionary Christianity has gotten more openly magical in its concept of Christian lifestyle and practice. There's a striking scene in the old documentary film Jesus Camp about a scary Charismatic Christian youth pastor, "Charismatic" meaning that she uses a stunt of lapsing into babble during her endless droning exhortations and teaching her flock that this is "speaking in tongues" and directly communicating with the Holy Spirit. You find out in the documentary that the children learn to regard non-babbling churches as being spiritually dead or wrong.

Anyway in this particular scene, Becky Fischer...baptizes her latest venue in the Blood of the Lamb, basically.

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She doesn't literally splash blood around, mind you, but she's effusive and free in her blood imagery, speaking of Jesus's blood gushing everywhere (cf. Julius Caesar's nightmare which so terrifies his wife Calphurnia in Shakespeare's play) and pouring all over the pews and the sound system and everything else, purifying them, driving out the bad mojo and insuring the success of the coming performance.

This is a magical act. It's doing a spell: invoking a powerful force in words with the intention of bringing about a desired change in as quick and direct manner as possible.

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They've absorbed so much superhero fiction and other fantastical and magical entertainments that they now conceive of God and Jesus as if they were the Green Lantern Corps, a posse of Good Guys with miraculous powers on tap but who must remain secret, unseen, existing only in the high-flown words of a million Christian celebrities and authorities.

It was foolish. They really were not supposed to be meddling with this stuff at all but their concept of Christianity has become so flimsy, so hopelessly mired in the temporal world and reliant upon concrete things construed as evidence of God's reality, the right-wing Christians saw no problem whatever in diving headfirst into the forbidden.

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They can't any longer imagine freedom as anything other than pure undiluted freedom of action. To be free is to be totally beyond restraint...

...ask yourself. Who broke the World?

You know the answer. It's always been so goddamned obvious.

~Chara of Pnictogen

@nautilus oh excellent point. I admit I've yet to have the nerve to look at one of those