Is Christianity the Psycho-Spiritual Immune System of the West?
Is Christianity the Psycho-Spiritual Immune System of the West?
pascal's new wager / spiritual psychotechnologies / intelligence challenges
📖 Reading Time: ~13 minutes.
🏴 Vibecheck: I’ve been on a roll recently—great routine, optimistic momentum, health, and a new creative fountain I haven’t tapped into in a while. I’ve got a video experiment below I’d love your feedback on. Blood & Ink is on fire right now. I would love to hear from you, whether it’s “this sucks” or a simple “👍”. I’ll be in the comments, let’s open up the dialogue for these. Sending love to you, see you next week. 🔥 EB.
📻 Experimental Session: EB Radio
I miss old-school radio shows. DJ’s riffing, curating a track list of bangers in between conversations. So I sat down one day last week and did one.
I’d love your feedback. Is this a direction worth pursuing? I’ll have another take next week.
Hopefully this works for you. Because of YouTube copyright, it may be blocked in some countries, let me know).
🩸 Blood & Ink
If you want to receive more from me throughout the week, here’s what I dropped over at Blood & Ink last week. I'm enjoying the daily ritual, and we’re just getting started.
Friday: The Secret of Bodhidharma’s Eyes
Saturday: Psychological Strength
Sunday: The Path is the Practice
Monday: Does God Love OnlyFans?
Tuesday: Preparation for Sudden Violence
Wednesday: Tradition is Not the Worship of Ashes
Thursday: On Ethical Disobedience
🚨 TRIGGER WARNING: I imagine this will be a sensitive topic. This is a working thesis. I do not claim it as the truth, though I feel something important here.
📜 NECESSARY CONTEXT: I am not Christian, nor was I raised Christian. My parents were (and remain) scientific materialist atheists. At the time of this writing—32 years old—I have never attended an official Church service. Writing this is as strange for me as reading it may be for you, but I hope you’ll open your mind for a moment to join me on this adventure.
⚖️ Pascal’s Wager in the 21st Century
You might be familiar with Pascal’s Wager….
Blaise Pascal was a seventeenth-century French mathematician, philosopher, physicist, and theologian. His Wager is simple (intensely paraphrased from the original):
“If the choice is between believing in God, gaining eternal joy while continuing to live life as normal — or eternal hellfire, one should choose belief in God.”
A few weeks ago I came across a ‘modern re-interpretation’ of Pascal’s infamous Wager:
“God may or may not be real, but the other side is so passionate, so committed to worshipping Satan, evil, and corrupting children that even if God wasn’t real, believing in Him to fend these demons off is preferable.”
This frame is how I approach this essay because that argument is becoming impossible for me to ignore.
👀 Call It Like You See It
I spent too much of my life bending the knee to people-pleasing and martyrdom, becoming world-class at biting my tongue…
Through an arduous inner journey, I’ve been fortunate enough to get mostly over that hurdle.
On the one hand, you can always retreat to the safe, partial bypass frame that “everything is perfect, this is all the Divine Play, God is in all things, and everything is an illusion generated by your karma,” Set that aside for a moment.
On the other hand, if I were to call it as I see it, our present situation is something like this:
Modern culture has been on a slippery slope for centuries, steamrolling itself into depths of depravity, narcissism, moral bankruptcy, weakness of character, and downright evil that would make the great villains of our past weep with joy.
…excuse me, but what the actual fuck is this?
I can pull hundreds of examples like this in 5 minutes flat.
Is this the best humanity has to offer? Hyper-sexualization of children, obvious blaspheming against world religions (try doing this against Islam!), and straight-up demonic worship.
And these are just the subtle examples! They leave room for ‘artistic interpretation’.
We haven’t even cracked into the obvious and proven pedophilic degeneracy of P Diddy or Epstein—whose client list we may never see as it would crumble the aristocratic elite—let alone admissions from the likes of Megan Fox that she drinks blood in ritual ceremonies.
Nietzsche—prophetic as always—called this several hundred years ago:
“God is dead.”
While many have heard that before and proudly trumpet it to gain the cultural clout associated with weaving quotations of ancient philosophers into everyday conversation, that was not the entire statement:
“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves?”
The void of moral righteousness and ethical boundaries left by the cultural movement away from religion is so big that it may not be possible to counteract it.
🧬 The War Inside of You
When I say that Christianity is a psycho-spiritual immune system for the West, I mean it literally…
Most people say that they want peace in the world. But if you—yourself—had ‘total peace’ inside of you, you’d be dead!
At every single moment, there is a war being waged inside of you. Your immune system is constantly attacking and neutralizing foreign invaders, bad actors, and corrupted cancerous cells.
If your immune system was completely at peace, you’d be dead in a matter of days.
Easy enough to understand at the individual level. Which leads us to an obvious question: how do you create an immune system for a culture?
To address the obvious pushback right from the outset: yes, a culture needs an immune system to survive.
A culture is a specific thing. There is a set of ideas, beliefs, customs, and practices associated with the ‘us’ that is part of the culture, contrasted against the ‘them’, those who are not part of the culture. If you allow every terrible idea, and every person into a culture, the inevitable end game is the erosion and elimination of that culture.
Without an efficient and effective immune response, you die.
The thesis I am advancing here is that Christianity is (or has been) the immune system of Western Culture.
🛡️ Protection Against What, Exactly?
Let’s take a look at the few examples I have been able to come up with as this idea has been percolating.
Nihilism & the Meaning Crisis
Of course, while religion is not fundamentally necessary to provide a sense of transcendent meaning and purpose in one’s life, it certainly did a good job of it.
While simultaneously, modern empirical culture is struggling to come up with an existential orientation beyond ‘be a good consumer’.
‘Deaths of despair’ like suicide and overdose are killing more men aged 25-50 than anything else. And that’s just the extreme end of things, to say nothing of the countless number of aimless, driftless, depressed, disempowered people walking around.
Degeneracy & Moral Bankruptcy
We are being slowly but effectively corrupted by a tsunami of degenerate behaviour and moral bankruptcy.
Scams, manipulating people, pornography, addiction, corrupt leaders, fertility and reproductive crises. The list reaches longer.
This is the most acute and obvious example of a lack of immune response: toxic components are given free rein and are multiplying, inundating and crippling the host body.
Christianity in more ways than one, directly addresses issues of morality, ethical behaviour, becoming an upstanding person, and how one ought to act in the world.
Strong Boundaries & Cultural Protection
A favourite line of the spiritual community—particularly when debating religious folk—is to pull a quote from the Bible itself, “Love thy neighbour as yourself.”
To them, this is carte blanche access to let any one and everyone into their borders and treat them the same, if not better, than their population.
They forget (or more commonly ignorant, like I was) that the Bible also says that mass invasions of foreign people into your culture are a punishment for Sin:
Deuteronomy 28:43-53
Foreigners who live in your land will gain more and more power, while you gradually lose yours.
They will have money to lend you, but you will have none to lend them. In the end they will be your rulers.
All these disasters will come on you, and they will be with you until you are destroyed, because you did not obey the Lord your God and keep all the laws that he gave you.
They will be the evidence of God's judgment on you and your descendants forever.
The Lord blessed you in every way, but you would not serve him with glad and joyful hearts.
So then, you will serve the enemies that the Lord is going to send against you. You will be hungry, thirsty, and naked - in need of everything. The Lord will oppress you harshly until you are destroyed.
The Lord will bring against you a nation from the ends of the earth, a nation whose language you do not know. They will swoop down on you like an eagle.
They will be ruthless and show no mercy to anyone, young or old.
They will eat your livestock and your crops, and you will starve to death. They will not leave you any grain, wine, olive oil, cattle, or sheep; and you will die.
They will attack every town in the land that the Lord your God is giving you, and the high, fortified walls in which you trust will fall.”
NOTE: In fairness, there are many, many passages in the Bible that refer to loving your neighbour, being supportive of those in need, etc.
North America—and most of greater Europe—welcome an astronomical number of legal and illegal immigrants into the country.
Two things happen here:
The government cannot handle the influx and prioritizes new immigrants over its population.
The existing culture is diluted until there is no remaining original culture, just one nameless, faceless, national consumer base.
Here’s a simple way to put this: someone from a different country, with a culture you don’t understand and a language you cannot speak, from halfway across the planet, who brings their culture to you, instead of fully assimilating into the hosts’ culture, is not your neighbour.
Have you forgotten what the ‘neighbour’ means?
Is there a place for legal immigration and providing the opportunity for a better life? Absolutely without question. But the sanctity of the host culture and the lives of the people come first. There is more tension in that discussion than you imagine.
🎯 A Very Challenging Recognition
Buckle up, this is going to be challenging for most of us. I’m wrestling with it deeply right now. It will activate a handful of pre-programmed defensive techniques. This is okay. Take a deep breath.
I do not intend to convey any judgment or prejudice, my goal is precisely the opposite — to take an extremely sobering look at reality and be considerate of all people.
If you are (1) able, and (2) interested, in following the writings that I’ve put out here for the past few years, you’re likely sitting somewhere at 110+ IQ.
For better, and sometimes for worse, my writing is not the easiest to digest.
The trap for you is that you imagine that the way you view reality, and how you process information and orient yourself in the world is the way everyone else does, just to a varying degree based on personal preferences and childhood experiences.
This is incorrect.
The average experience between you, and someone who is 80-100 IQ is vastly different. Let me give you two examples. Take this question:
“If you didn’t eat breakfast yesterday morning, how would you have felt?”
You may answer: “After a few hours I’d probably be hungry, maybe a little tired, grumpy.”
For others, their answer is: “But I did eat breakfast yesterday morning.” “Yes, but how would you have felt if you hadn’t?” “I don’t know, I ate yesterday, and this morning. I feel good.”
An inability to get into the past hypothetical. Let’s take it up a notch. Next question:
Write a story with two named participants having a conversation. One participant is telling a story that discusses two other named participants.
Even for you, this might be challenging at first pass. But sitting down for a few minutes, you could do it. Juggling who’s talking and keeping the storyline straight takes a bit of effort, but not outside the realm of possibility. A story about a conversation about a conversation. This is recursion.
This is a near-impossible task for someone lower on the IQ spectrum.
You might be tempted to think that sure, for someone with learning disorders or dyslexia this would be tough. But remember when I say this applies to ~100 IQ and lower, I am speaking about HALF of any given population.
Why bring this up? How does this connect to Christianity and the West?
Be honest with yourself, if you are living with someone who cannot reasonably consider how they might have felt if they didn’t have breakfast yesterday, how do you possibly plan to coordinate with them and reason into complex dynamics of law, morality, ethics, future preparation, the emergence of complex systems, whatever it is.
It’s easy for you to sit down and say “Here’s my grand synthesis of the moral implications of the world religions, paired with the best emerging psychological techniques, packaged into a secular framework that if we all just got on board, humanity would jump up the scale of consciousness like 300 points.”
That will NEVER happen.
Not because people don’t want it. But because most simply can’t. No judgement. No problem. Just reality.
How then do you create any kind of civilized society?
You need to create a moral and ethical framework for a collective that everyone can get on board with.
And while some of your desired nuance might be lost, I believe you vastly overlook the utility of saying “This Good, This Bad. Don’t do bad, go to Hell.” Everyone needs to be on the same page for this vehicle of society to operate effectively.
Am I arguing that religion/Christianity is just a salve for idiots? Or as Karl Marx said that religion is simply ‘the opiate of the masses’? NO.
But overlooking the coordination problem is idiotic. If you’ve ever tried to lead a team, you know how hard it is to coordinate even 5 people. Imagine coordinating millions of people, reasonably successfully, for centuries?
What’s your plan, Stan?
I berated religion for years, I still have deep apprehensions about it. But at the same time, I’ve lived the midwit meme of “here’s my 20-page whitepaper combining the best of ancient wisdom with modern technology to create an emergent culture to facilitate the ongoing evolution of humanity.”
It needs to be digestible.
When you desire to live in reality and seek solutions that have real chances of success, you must contend with this.
The Christian religion is a psycho-spiritual technology that has been refined by our Western ancestors over millennia with the express purpose of protecting its host culture like an immune response against all kinds of foreign invasions, be they physical or ideological.
Today, we are living through the example of what happens when this immune system is taken offline, or overrun completely.
The host body is dying, infections of mind viruses and physical degeneracy are taking over, and we lack the ‘noble warrior’ white blood cells to activate an equal an opposing force and keep the body politic alive.
Is this all religion is? No. Just recently I discussed the positive framing of how it helped orient people toward truth, goodness, beauty, mastery, and divine expressions through cathedral consciousness. Of course there is also the institution of marriage, ethical conduct, community building, and more. But this aspect of religion is also important.
It is not all doom and gloom. That is also not my intent. There is beauty, possibility, and hope. There is always hope.
Just something to consider,
Eric Brown.
Lot of Christians would probably consider that ‘germ Jesus’ image satanic 🤣
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Fascinating post though -- good food for thought, thanks for writing 🙏🏼💙