Humanity

HEGE Series

Rabbit-Hole 01

• Humanity

  • Culture

    • Games
    • Food
    • Art
    • Music
    • Hollywood
    • Adam Curtis
    • American Adam
    • Modernism
    • Materialism

      • Christmas
  • Ethnicity

    • African
    • Asian
    • Celtic-British
    • First Peoples
    • Franco-Roman
    • Grecian-Balkan
    • Semitic
    • Slavic
    • Spanish-Latino
    • Teutonic

      • Exulanten (Exiles)
  • Racism
  • Human Body

    • Pinocchio
    • Addiction
    • Desire
    • Identity
  • Language

    • Reason
  • Personality
  • Relationship

    • Divinity
    • Creation
    • Sexuality
    • Marriage
    • Family
    • Community

      • Intentional Community
      • The Bruderhof
  • Spirituality

    • Oral Tradition
    • Philosophy
    • Psychology
    • Heterodoxy

      • Catholicism

        • Secularism
      • Protestantism
    • Orthodoxy

      • Christian Apologetics

        • Gnosticism
        • Western Esotericism
      • Iconography
      • Monasticism
      • Truth
      • Love
      • Beauty
      • Challenges
      • Lazar Puhalo

It‘s Time to Defend the History of All Texans The way we learn about our collective past is under attack.

I am... making clear what Man’s conquest of Nature really means and especially that final stage in the conquest, which, perhaps, is not far off. The final stage is come when Man by eugenics, by pre-natal conditioning, and by an education and propaganda based on a perfect applied psychology, has obtained full control over himself. Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man. The battle will then be won. We shall have ‘taken the thread of life out of the hand of Clotho’ and be henceforth free to make our species whatever we wish it to be. The battle will indeed be won. But who, precisely, will have won it? ...
— C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man 1943

The Abolition of Man — Fr. Thomas Hopko | Ancient Faith Ministries
Abolition of Man Lecture - Fr. Thomas Hopko | Youtube

The Mystery of Being Human in a Dehumanizing World
The conservative preference for an informal but strong network of local support from churches, family members, and friends is theoretically desirable. But in our increasingly fragmented and isolated modern world, where bonds that traditionally wove communities together are increasingly frayed, these networks are harder to form and maintain, such that policies of economic austerity can foster child poverty.

The Elephant in the Courtroom
— A curious legal crusade to redefine personhood is raising profound questions about the interdependence of the animal and human kingdoms.

Human Race

[T]here are two races of men in this world, but only these two — the "race" of the decent man and the "race" of the indecent man. Both are found everywhere; they penetrate into all groups of society. No group consists entirely of decent or indecent people.
— Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning | Wikipedia

For self-control is common to all human beings who have made choice of it. And we admit that the same nature exists in every race, and the same virtue.
— Clement of Alexandria, Volume 12. The Writings of Clement of Alexandria

Family of Man

See — Cosmology

The Church As Family
A New Parish Model 
"Neither Jew nor Greek, Male nor Female"
"On Earth, As It Is In Heaven"
Theotokos — Ark of the New Covenant — The Church — The Body of Christ
The head of the Body is Christ, Christians are His members
All One Body — One Family 

The Family of Man | Wikipedia
The Family of Man | MOMA
The Family of Man: The Photography Exhibition that Everybody Loves to Hate
The Family of Man...was never an avant-garde or even particularly innovative exhibition. Its general message – that all people are similar in their joys, pain, and work – was not especially thought-provoking, unexpected, or radical. Its design was attractive, but by no means ground-breaking. Scholars constantly look back at it, but they are on a mission to find new faults and shortcomings. And it seems that The Family of Man keeps providing endless reasons to hate it, despite those few historians who have attempted to analyze the show in a more benevolent light.

Delivery Man (film) | Wikipedia — Trailer

The Early Modern Family | Johann Sommerville

Anthropology

Anthropology | Wikipedia
See — Maximus the Confessor

Contort Yourself James Chance & The Contortions
It's better than pleasure, it hurts more than pain...
Now is the time to lose all control
Distort your body, twist your soul
Contort yourself, contort yourself

Anthropology of Antichristianity Parts 1-8 | Remembering Sion
See — Government, Totalitarianism, The Beast

Prophets, Priests, and Kings (Part 1)

The Age of Loneliness (Part 2)
 
The Crucible of History (Part 3)
 
The Rights of Man (Part 4)
In modern anthropology, man is a fortress, buttressed and hedged about on all sides by the rights he has built up to protect himself from an oppressive society and an unjust universe.
But what lives inside that fortress? What remains within, when nothing in all the wide world is allowed inside unless we freely choose to permit it? What remains to define who we are, when even the ties of kith and kinship are subject to the whims and preferences of each passing moment?
There can be only one answer: we are our desires.
This is the fundamental anthropological principle of Antichristianity: we are our desires, and we have the inalienable right to pursue their fulfillment.
 
The Freedom of the Cross (Part 5)
[The "Rights of Man"] have promised justice, but brought us only oppression. They have promised independence, but brought us into a subjection far worse than has ever existed under any tyrant in all the annals of history.
They have enslaved us to ourselves.
St. Justin the Philospher once said: “To yield and give way to our passions is the lowest slavery, even as to rule over them is the only liberty.”
The only liberty.
The modern world has achieved great success in its fight against external oppression and outward subjugation. But as Archimandrite Vasileios of Iveron once asked, “What am I supposed to do with a success that does not conquer death?”
And therein lies the fundamental difference between Christianity and Antichristianity. As Fr. Seraphim Rose once wrote, “The Antichrist is the fake Christ who promises to give outwardly and obviously what Christ brought inwardly and hidden.”
The world given birth to by the Enlightenment (that forerunner of the Antichrist, which sought to build the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, to build the Tower of Babel anew) has brought with it outward freedom, outward riches, and outward justice… but has left the inward man to starve like the prodigal son, surrounded by the riches of the far country, but himself perishing with hunger.
Because as paradoxical as it might be, here is the truth: in this life there is no freedom without obedience, there is no joy without suffering, and there is no life without death.
There is no freedom except the freedom of the Cross.

The Age of Desire (Part 6)
When the Lord was taken down from the Cross, the Cross remained on Golgotha, and then it was thrown into the pit that was in that place, where this instrument of execution was usually thrown, together with other refuse. Soon Jerusalem was razed and all of its edifices were leveled to the ground. The pit containing the Cross of Christ was also filled over. When the pagans rebuilt the city (the Jews were forbidden to come near the place where it was), it happened that on the place where the Cross of Christ was hidden, they placed an idol of Venus, the pagan Goddess of fornication and all manner of lusts. This is what the enemy [of humanity, the Father of Lies - Ha Satan, the Devil] suggested to them. This is how it is with our inner cross. When the enemy destroys the spiritual order in the soul, this is our mental Jerusalem, and then the spiritual cross is thrown down from the Golgotha of the heart and is covered over with the garbage of the affections and lusts. Lustful self-pleasure then rises like a tower over all our inner peace, and everything in us bows down to it and fulfills its commands until grace shines upon us, inspiring us to cast down the idol and lift up the cross of self-crucifixion.
— St. Theophan the Recluse | Wikipedia
And just as it was no accident that the Romans built a temple to Venus on top of Golgotha, so also it is no accident that nearly every attack on Christianity in today’s culture has something to do with sex. There is no more powerful goddess than Venus; she brought down Troy, and she brought down Christendom. That, at least, is the conclusion some scholars have begun to reach: after examining the data, sociology professor Mark Regnerus put it quite simply: “It’s not science that’s secularizing Americans — it’s sex.” Mary Eberstadt has argued convincingly for the same conclusion.

The Age of Morality (Part 7)
And this is truly the most tragic thing of all: that even our love, our mercy, and our compassion — the highest and most God-like qualities which a human being can possibly possess — have been so subtly and insidiously twisted as to become the very instruments of our destruction. Because the fact is that once we have accepted a new anthropology — the anthropology of Antichristianity — we have also thereby accepted a new definition of what it means to love, of what it means to have mercy and compassion on another human being.
We have chosen the “love” of the Devil over the love of God. For the Devil, too, spoke of freedom. The Devil, too, made God out to be a petty tyrant, trying to keep His children down. The Devil, too, promised us that we would be as gods, and that the path to godhood lies precisely in rejecting the law, in seizing for ourselves anything and everything which we desire.
And we have believed the devil’s lie so thoroughly that we think his promise has come true. We really believe that we have become as gods, that we are the makers of our own destiny, that this earth of thorns and thistles is (or shall shortly become) Paradise, and that slavery to our own fallen flesh is the heavenly inheritance and birthright which God for so long had wickedly and unjustly withheld.
And in our madness and our delusion, we really believe that to be left in such a condition is the very essence both of freedom and of love. We really believe that every human being has an inalienable right to build their own personal Babel. And more than this, we really believe that if we love someone, then we will never ever suggest that what they have created for themselves is only a hollow imitation of Heaven. We believe that if we really love someone, then we must bless their own personal Babel, and we must do everything in our power to make them feel that it truly is their home.
But true Christian love for others does not require us to build or bless Babel on their behalf. Quite the contrary: it requires us to point them away from this perishing world, toward the Paradise which we all truly seek.
So often we interpret the Golden Rule handed down to us by Christ in a shallow, superficial, and worldly way. We don’t like to feel bad about ourselves, and so we don’t want to say or do anything that could possibly make others feel bad about themselves. We even allow ourselves to believe that this is the essence of true Christian love and mercy.
But the love and mercy of Christ is not given in order to make us feel good about ourselves. It is given in order to bring us to saving repentance and humility, and thus to true spiritual health, peace, freedom, and joy. The love and mercy of Christ does not wish us to perish in bondage to our passions, but rather to free us from delusion and bring us into the light of the knowledge of God. “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

Demonic Autonomy and Divine Obedience (Part 8)
Let us examine more closely the words of the Devil in Genesis 3 (and truly, the fullness of mankind’s existential dilemma can only be comprehended through a profound understanding of Genesis 3):
And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.
As the Scriptures say, the serpent was indeed exceedingly cunning. In this one short reply, he managed to implant within our hearts three lies which would subsequently bring about all the long centuries of death, destruction, suffering, and misery which have since befallen the human race:
  1. Disobedience to the commandments of God brings not death, but deification.
  2. Deification consists in “knowing good and evil,” which is to say (at least in one sense) that deification consists in deciding for ourselves what is good and what is evil.
  3. The commandments were given by God not out of love, but rather out of petty tyranny.
And in merely enumerating these three lies, it is all but impossible to avoid seeing that modernity has enshrined all three among its most basic articles of faith. And note well that the essence of all three lies is the same, namely this: to be a god means to be autonomous. To be free means to be autonomous. To be a real human being means to be autonomous.
And in this fatal principle of autonomy, we see why the Devil is named in Greek diabolos: the divider, the slanderer, the one who brings confusion. He slanders God and makes Him out to be a liar, and through his own lies the Devil brings about confusion as to the true meaning of deification, and the freedom which makes it possible: we no longer believe that they consist in our unification with God, but rather precisely in our division from Him.
The lie of autonomy brought Lucifer down from Heaven, and it brought our First-Created Parents Adam and Eve out of Paradise and into this broken and fallen world. In fact, it can be said without any exaggeration that this lie created Hell itself. ...
It might be said that to love is to wish the best for the beloved, and to give unstintingly of oneself in order to give the best to the beloved, even to the point of one’s own death. And insofar as this, there is actually not much difference between Christianity and Antichristianity, because (notwithstanding the malice of the devil) both seek to fulfill the deepest desire of the human heart for love. Both seek to bestow freedom, paradise, and divine life upon the human race.
The difference, however, is precisely this: what is truly best for the beloved? How can we be free? Where can paradise be found? What does it mean to be divine? Absolutely everything hinges upon the answer to these questions, which is why theology and anthropology are both so crucially important for all of us in our daily lives.
Antichristianity — and the Devil who founded it — proclaims that freedom means autonomy, that paradise can be created in this world, and that to be a god is all about power. And therefore, it proclaims that to love one another means to bring autonomy to others, to struggle to turn this world into paradise, and — most of all — to bless the lives that others choose to live, no matter what that happens to look like.
Christianity, however, proclaims that freedom can only be found in obedience, that paradise can only be found with God, and that to be a god means to take up the Cross and to follow Him Who first carried it for our sakes. And therefore, it proclaims that to love one another means to do absolutely everything in our power to bring them to Christ, Who alone — through our obedience to Him — can grant us true freedom, can bring us to the true Paradise, and can make us truly divine.
We all want to be gods. We all desire paradise. We all yearn for love. But whose path will we follow, and who will we trust: God, or the Devil? This is the only choice before us, the same choice which the human race has been struggling to make ever since that fateful day in the Garden at the beginning of the world, and the same choice with which we will struggle until the end of time.