More Freakin’ Fascinating Reading from Eric S. Raymond

Eric put up a new essay yesterday, Islamofascism and the Rage of Augustine, inspired by a comment at the Belmont Club. I don’t have sufficient historical or religious study to judge the overall accuracy of Eric’s premise, but it rings true to me from the knowledge I do have. Interesting excerpts:

It was Augustine’s theology of sin and grace that sharpened that tool into a blade. In a nutshell, it reduces to this: (1) We are all sinners, broken and wrong. (2) To escape this condition, we must not only obey authority but internalize it. (3) Even if we succeed at (2), only the whim of divine authority can save us, and that whim is beyond human ken. The tyrant can never be called to account, and to act against him is to be damned.

Worse: in Augustinean theology, the intention to sin is as bad as the act. It is not sufficient to behave as though we believe when we really don’t. It is not even sufficient that we allow authorities to coerce us into believing absurd things or performing atrocities in God’s name. We must conform not only outwardly but inwardly, become our own oppressors, believing because it is absurd. The God-tyrant can never be rejected even in our own minds, or we are damned.



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The alliance now forming between the Islamo-fascists and the hard left should surprise nobody who understands the deep structure of either belief system. Both are, fundamentally, designed as legitimizing agents for tyranny — memetic machines designed to program you into licking the boot of the commissar or caliph that stomps you. But outside of a tiny minority of the brave (Robert Ingersoll) or the crazy (Nietzsche) Western intellectuals have averted their eyes from this truth, because to recognize it would almost require them to notice that the very same deep structure is wired into the Gnosticized Christianity of “Saint” Augustine — and, in fact, historically derived from it.

Hence the shared Christian/Islamic propensity for putting unbelievers to the sword for merely unbelieving. You will search in vain for such behavior among post-Exilic Jews, or Taoists, or animists, or any other world religion. Only a religion which is totalitarian at its core, fundamentally about thoughtcrime and sin and submission, can even conceive of a need to murder people wholesale for the state of their unbelief. The massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Eve and Stalin’s liquidation of the kulaks were of a piece, both jihads against thoughtcrime.

RTWT. Discussion would be appreciated. I do wonder where Protestantism comes into play here, because with the rise of Luther, as one of Eric’s commenters said,

(T)he Roman Catholic church was basically an institution that had been developed to enforce European feudalism. After Martin Luther it tried for a century to exterminate Protestantism with military force, but failed. Since the mid 17th Century it has not known what to do with its self.(sic)

Protestantism, in my mind, is a much more “live-and-let-live” form of Christianity, though it does have a tendency to fall back on fire-and-brimstone-burn-in-hell-heathens! mode from time to time. Reader Sarah has commented here several times on the cultural benefits of Protestant Christianity in the move towards individual rights and freedom, and I am, in general, in agreement with her.

I wonder, do any of the Islamic sects represent a “protestant” form?