Thoughts While Listening to The Collins Brothers



I was led to a radio interview with the Collins Brothers, Gnostic Luciferianism - What is it ? "Religion of Apotheosis" Paul and Phillip Collins via a Youtube link on Facebook today.

As I listened I made the following notes.

The Catholic sesquipedalian Collins Brothers, authors of  The Ascendancy of the Scientific Dictatorship: An Examination of Epistemic Autocracy, From the 19th to the 21st Century,
seem not to notice the Luciferianism in the Vatican.

At 21 minutes in we get the inevitable phrase "immanentizing the eschaton." This is the Collins' Catholic (via Voegelin and  American conservatism) putdown of any who presumes to try to make this world a Heaven (merely trying to improve one's self through gnosis or to ameliorate man's lot on this world is enough to qualify) rather than accepting one's place and suffering in Faith until one dies and is judged by God. I do not believe the Collins Brothers can get through an interview without using this term. 

Of course, Gnosticism was a prime heresy suppressed by the early Church for "Immanentizing The Eschaton," which, to the Church, is a form of the Sin of Pride. Salvation can only come through Faith and the Church. Good things come from God but without the intercession of Jesus Christ via the Holy Roman Catholic Church, Man is Lost. 

Self-knowledge and knowledge of the world are anathema to the Church since both lead man and society away from the bindings of the true Faith.

The Collins Brothers present many good insights, however, the blinders they wear courtesy of the Catholic Church, force them to scrupulously examine Trees and to ignore the Warden of the Forest.  

Some Collins Brothers Links:

http://www.thebyteshow.com/CollinsBrothers.html
http://www.conspiracyarchive.com/Articles/Egypt_and_Beyond.htm

Eric Voegelin, Nazi refugee. Is it any wonder he despaired that government could do good?

"Don’t let them immanentize the eschaton," Eric Voegelin wrote in the National Review back in the fifties. "Them" referred to anyone (liberals) who believed government could be used as a tool to improve the lot of the people.  At the same time National Review conservatives were embracing big government as long as it was big in ways they wanted: Promoting big military, big intelligence (especially big intelligence since the Buckley Brothers were heavily involved in this avocation), big corporations, suppression of people's movements around the world, and obedience through faith and dogma. Conservatives who thought otherwise were ostracized. 
This pattern was copied, consciously or unconsciously, from the Catholic Church. In fact, many of the neo-cons are Catholic. Take a look at the current roster of the Supreme Court. There are six Catholics (four of whom are ultra conservative, one not quite so ultra and another a purported liberal). 
If government cannot be used to improve man's existence (a marker of their Faith), the only other things it can do is to protect a wicked establishment and oppose change. The United States government and the Catholic Church have lurched (in the case of the Church one might say it re-lurched) over to this kind of faux conservatism since Voegelin wrote these words. Voegelin would be appalled.



Eric Voegelin Quotes and Notes:

Let us peruse a few words of Eric Voegelin and discover what flavor conservative he is. 

 “A further reason for my hatred of . . . ideologies is quite a primitive one. I have an aversion to killing people for the fun of it. What the fun is, I did not quite understand at the time, but in the intervening years the ample exploration of revolutionary consciousness has cast some light on this matter. The fun consists in gaining a pseudo-identity through asserting one's power, optimally by killing somebody—a pseudo-identity that serves as a substitute for the human self that has been lost. . . . A good example of the type of self that has to kill other people in order to regain in an Ersatzform what it has lost is the famous Saint-Juste, who says that Brutus either has to kill other people or kill himself.
. . . . I have no sympathy whatsoever with such characters and have never hesitated to characterize them as "murderous swine."


[I wonder if the conservatives who consider him a hero understand that their own belief set might be counted among the "ideologies" hated by Voegelin, especially after their conservatism morphed into a murderous and intolerant neo-conservatism.-JB]


"In order to degrade the politics of Plato, Aristotle, or Saint Thomas to the rank of "values" among others, a conscientious scholar would first have to show that their claim to be science was unfounded. And that attempt is self-defeating. By the time the would-be critic has penetrated the meaning of metaphysics with sufficient thoroughness to make his criticism weighty, he will have become a metaphysician himself. The attack on metaphysics can be undertaken with a good conscience only from the safe distance of imperfect knowledge." 

"Excuse my rough words—I don't mean to be disrespectful to the psychological analyses of Sartre (late in L' Être et le Néant, for example)—but he is a vulgarian and an epigone. He's not interesting.  He's not to be compared with Camus;   he was a thinker!  Sartre is not on that level."

[Sartre was a comedian.-JB]

"[Milton writes in Of True Religion , 1673:]  Catholic worship cannot be tolerated  "without grievous and unsufferable scandal giv'n to all consciencious Beholders."   And he leaves it to the civil magistrate to consider whether Catholics in England can be tolerated at all, even without public worship.   If Catholics should complain that their conscience is violated if the celebration of the mass is not permitted to them, he replies that  "we have not warrant to regard Conscience which is not founded on Scripture." . . . . Radical scripturalism has become, in the field of social technique, the instrument through which the conscience of man can be kept within the limits of national jurisdiction.
Milton goes even further in his scripturalism:  he expects everybody to do his duty and to use the opportunity offered by the English Bible translation for becoming thoroughly acquainted with Scripture.  "Neither let the Countryman, the Tradesman, the Lawyer, the Physician, the Statesman, excuse himself by his much business from the studious reading thereof. . . ."
Using a modern category, we might say that Milton was a totalitarian National Scripturalist. . . ." 

[I wonder what my Christian conservative friends think of that.-JB]
 

Voegelin Link:

http://www.voegelinview.com/

Many more quotes here:

http://www.voegelinview.com/ev/voegelin_pungent_observations.html