This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit radixjournal.substack.comThe Hellenist joins Richard and the gang for a wide-ranging discussion. Summary generated by an evil AI robot.The conversation delves into The Hellenist’s journey from a Christian upbringing to embracing Hellenism, criticizing Christianity for its "slave morality" and radical teachings. He argues that Hellenism, with i…
They invented all this stuff because they were thinking men.
And Christianity, in my view, it's the opposite of that.
Actual biblical Christianity is telling you to turn off, and Judaism as well, and Islam, it's telling you to just turn off your mind and just do what this book tells you.
And this is the word of God, and if you do it, you're going to get to go to heaven.
And that just...
To me, even if they were to say that, and actually what was in the book was good stuff.
I mean, maybe they taught you, okay, you have to do Aristotelian ethics.
And, you know, okay, sure, that's fine.
But they're not telling you to do that.
They're telling you to be weak.
They're telling you to be submissive.
They're telling you to basically just take it.
Just anybody comes around, slaps you, just take it.
Let them slap you again.
Give them your shirt, you know, do whatever.
You're just waiting on Jesus to come back.
To me, that cannot have a place in our society whatsoever, because it's intemperate, it's radical, as you said.
What do you make of the fact that so many Christians weren't weak, though?
Because there's a flip side to Christianity that it can obviously, evidently inspire fanaticism.
It can play into or buttress or be around at the very least
colonial,
I mean, Constantine became a Christian, you know, as the story goes, before winning a battle.
So what do you make of that irony?
And I don't really have an answer to it myself.
I mean, outside of saying, you know, some...
Did they do this because of Christianity or in spite of it?
I think that's fair enough, but I don't know.
Maybe a kind of Dionysian religion like Christianity is, it actually in some ways can fuel these things.
It can fuel conquest.
It can fuel domination.
I mean, we had a religious war between Catholics and Protestants.
And I love to mention the wars of religion whenever Christians will be like, we were once all united.
We have to all be Christians in order so we're not fighting each other.
And it's like, guys, we did in a way commit genocide against one another.
And there were lots of other geopolitical considerations at play.
I get it.
But it was fanatical.
The wars of religion.
And it was about extermination at some point.
I mean, as I was saying, you could argue that Bohemia was genocided, basically, during this period.
So this idea that Christianity just makes you meek and mild, it's not, evidently, it's not true.
It can inspire vicious hatred and so on.
Yeah, it is.
Between ourselves, among white people.
Anyway, I'm not sure I even have a definitive answer to this.
It's something worth contemplating, but what do you make of that?
I just think they have to ignore the Bible.
There has to be a number of verses that they just don't believe.
I don't know whether it's because they're ignorant of the verses.
I think it's a little bit more of confirmation bias.
I tell them all these verses all the time online, you know, when I get into it, Christians, I'm like, do you even know what your book says?
And they either know or they don't know or they dismiss it.
It's like, well, you didn't really mean that or, you know, or anything.
And so they get into this mindset of warriors for Christ.
And I think if you can be a warrior for Christ, then it's like, it's okay to kill people.
If you're doing it in the name of God or in the name of Christ.
So they go out there to the battlefield with the big crosses and everything.
It's like, well, this is why we're doing it.
It's for Jesus.
We're going to kill everybody that doesn't believe Jesus, and then everything's going to be great.
But maybe that's sort of brilliant in a way.
You'll sometimes...
For instance, this is kind of...
It's morbid on my part, but I'll sometimes get into these true crime interviews with people, the killers, and I have a bit of a morbid fixation.
It's not healthy, but I'm admitting it.
But very rarely do you see someone, you will occasionally see someone who's either dumb.
And a psychopath.
And they will just say, like, yeah, like, you know, like, he snitched, so I killed the motherfucker.
If you see interviews with a lot of these people who clearly are criminal, antisocial personality disorder, to say the least, they should be locked away.
There's no doubt about it.
Jeffrey Dahmer apologized before the court, and I don't know if you've seen that.
Other famous people will sort of justify it.
You know, I watched pornography as a child, so you should feel sorry for me.
Or, you know, I was taken over, I was sort of possessed, and I did this, and I don't know why.
You'll sometimes get that, even though I think they actually did it for very specific reasons.
And so I guess what I'm saying is, maybe this isn't the best.
Kind of metaphor or something.
What I'm saying is that in this weird way, like the guy from the Whatever podcast, who I like personally, and what is his name again?
I'm forgetting at the moment.
I don't know.
Sovereign Bra?
Yeah, Sovereign Bra.
Is he on that show?
I thought he was just a guest host or something.
I think he's the lead host, isn't he?
Maybe I'm wrong.
It doesn't matter.
What I'm saying is that type of guy who posts Crusader memes.
Maybe there's something about the human psyche or the Western psyche that you need to have a valence over the real.
The real is our own Will to power and even bloodlust or resentment and revenge and things like that.
That's in all of us.
I sound like a Christian tonight.
Within every human heart is evil.
It's right.
It's true.
But you sometimes need this veil of justification.
There's almost something brilliant about...
The Crusader meme in the sense that it allows you to engage in these subhuman barbaric acts under the guise of a sort of superhuman morality.
There's this quote that atheists love, and Peter Hitchens quoted it at every debate and speech, which is that Christians talk about bad people being turned good through the gospel or through the Bible.
There's a guy in prison, and you preach to him, and he gets out, and then he's safe.
He found Jesus, he contributes to community, he's pacified.
And you can find examples of that, no question.
But what he said is that the question is really, can you make a good person do evil?
Like can, like that you need
Because it's morally justified.
Yeah, or economically justified.
Yeah, exactly.
But you need that end in order to justify it.
And I guess my response to that is, first off, there are no good people.
But like...
I guess I'm sort of a Protestant here.
We're inherently depraved.
But my other response to that is that, and this is going to maybe sound quite brutal or even evil, but the winners of history, the people who ultimately are selected, the people whose ancestors survive and have Or,
excuse me, whose progeny survives and the progeny become ancestors of other progeny.
Those are the people who were able to marshal that religion in order to destroy other people who could have survived.
So, in some ways, the great challenge of history is to make good, good people do evil things.
There are many people who are passive, inert plants who don't want to commit evil.
And in some ways, you need to give them a religion as a way of inspiring
Right. Right.
Right. When they say good,
they mean that in some bourgeois sense of like NAP or not harming, just inert, basically.
And so religion needs to be able to inspire violence and evil in order for that people to predominate.
And so maybe there's something about Christianity that's quite brilliant in the sense of like, A knight for Christ.
You know, you're killing someone on behalf of this Jewish hippie.
You're murdering thousands on behalf of Bob Dylan.
Right, right.
Isn't Jesus kind of Bob Dylan-based, like literally?
Yeah. You're like, in the name of Bob Dylan!
That's in a way the brilliance of Christianity.
Yeah, I think I get it.
And I was just reading Napoleon's letters to St. Helena, you know, and he talked a lot about Christianity in that.
I was reading some other letters, too.
And he keeps making, he's very pro-Christianity in these letters, but not because he believes in any of this stuff, or at least that's not the impression I got.
It was that...
It's a tool for social order.
And what he was pointing at was that it's this idea of equality that he says is so powerful because he's basically attributing all of his success.
To Christianity.
He's saying that all these people that I needed to get out there and go be evil and kill a bunch of people in order to win is I did it through Christianity.
Is that all these people, there's a drive in most people because most people are not aristocrats.
You know, they're not wise.
They're just average.
And you take the average and the below average and they make a majority.
So they can push the aristocrats around as long as they buy this idea of equality.
So if you are downtrodden, then equality sounds great.
And this is basically what Nietzsche was saying with slave morality is that it's their way to get power is equality.
It's their only way to get power because they're subordinate.
They can't win any other way.
So they gravitate towards this equality idea because it's...
Promising to give them power.
If they're a slave, you live in a democracy, they're going to get emancipated.
So it's this desire for power that they use equality.
But what Napoleon seemed to be saying is that if you are a wise general, you're going to use this to your benefit.
You may not believe all this stuff.
It doesn't matter because as long as you can get them to go out there and kill for you, then...
Then you can win.
Then you can survive.
Then you can do all the stuff that's necessary to maintain a country.
It's like you're either conquering or you're getting conquered.