notes towards "social creationism"

Social Creationism 
 
Social Creationism “It is remarkable how Darwin recognizes among beasts and plants his English society with its division of labor, competition, opening up of new markets, ‘invention,’ and the Malthusian ‘struggle for existence.’ It is Hobbes’s bellum omnium contra omnes.” [fn]

Jesus was tried and convicted, tormented and executed by Roman colonialist oppressors: Jesus threatened the imperial status quo. Can this be said of the founder of any other major religion? Jesus was a radical.
Reject God and another myth, Nature, fills the abhorrent void.(nature so abhors a vacuum that she’ll fill it herself; nature fills a God-sized vacuum.) Exchange the paternal God to maternal Nature. Exorcize capitalistic conditioning and classless society dialectically materializes.
But nature is an amoral process. The blind grind of selective forces. Eating and being eaten. Fucking and being fucked. And fucked over.
…antagonism between humans is natural, as in the vast majority, if not totality, of species. genetic conflict of interests…examples of sexual pathos from nature…Nature’s mechanism for speciation --for bio-diversification--is natural selection, this is hardly the right tone--we’re talking sexual selection here.Socialism is better supported by the Eden & Heaven of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
(1) Eden = the state of nature/noble savage
(2) The Fall = capitalism, patriarchy, agriculture, western civilization, white people, etc. (the Satan surrogate varies depending on the denomination: romantic anarchism, militant feminism, socialism, Afro-Centrism, etc.)
(3) Heaven = the world after the Revolution/Revelation
Eden--a world before evil
The Fall--the problem of evil [the problem of evil introduced]
History--the consequence of evil
Revelation--the showdown between good & evil
Heaven--the abolition of evil [the problem of evil solved] contrast with the Buddhist doctrine of Samsara: “evil” --suffering--is an intrinsic component of existence. History, where we live, is the period between the introduction & expulsion
of evil.
Evil is born, lives & dies: good is eternal.
“A moral drama…”
There are varying versions of these myths, of course, some less bathetic than others.
Our current state: Godless socialist & Christian capitalists. The triumph of Calvinism. vast oversimplifications, too easy associations
Socialism (all forms of secular progressivism) has appropriated, without attribution, cardinal Christian ideas. At the same time, it offers itself as a repudiation of Christianity! It isn’t a repudiation, it’s the fulfillment of Christianity. The Christian ethic secularized. Marx killed Christ on the road.
Christ did not preach socialism so much as live it.
Socialism requires a supernatural foundation. What could be more
appropriate than their (re)union? this is of course, highly debatable. Will Durant characteristically gives both sides brilliantly, but seems to believe the conservatives have the upper hand in this debate. The Devil confuses the world by disassociating the name from the ethic of Christ.
Socialists are social Christians, social Creationists.
Christ nominally the faith of those who reject Christ: the capitalists. The socialists meanwhile deride Christianity as upper class opium…(which it is; but it didn’t start that way: some radicals do, at least, play lip service, at least, to “radical Jesus,” others, a sure minority, such as the formidable Jaques Ellul, place their dissatisfaction with the status quo firmly in the life and teachings of Jesus, and against “Christendom”) …
The ethic of capitalism, if it can be so called, meanwhile is best supported by the Darwinian hypothesis. (hence “social Darwinism”) (Darwinism itself is a theory of “invisible hands”)
Darwin descends from Malthus, Marx from Jesus Christ.
Socialism found Darwin in the end to be non-adaptive. Darwin was a temporary expedient.
Again, Jesus socialist is debatable, to say the least. But surely more defensible than laizze-faire Jesus?
Engles on early Christianity:

"The history of early Christianity has notable points of resemblance with the modern working class movement. Like the latter, Christianity was originally a movement of oppressed people: it first appeared as the religion of slaves and emancipated slaves" of poor & subjugated peoples. (?!) "Christianity and the worker's socialism preached forthcoming salvation from bondage and misery..." etc. pg. 168
Engles implies German peasant war the last of a series of socialistic uprisings until that of "the workingmen communists after 1830."
second Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians CH8--esp. Lucian of Samosata describes Christians (uncomplimentary) as communistic.
Now lets look at Pelagius….
Now lets see the Taborites…

Cohn, Pursuit of the Millennium
“held that real Christianity required a communist organization of life… they proposed to restore the simple ritual of the apostolic Church, and repudiated all ecclesiastical rites and robes that they could not find in early Christianity… Most Taborites deduced communism from millenarianism: Christ would soon come to establish His Kingdom on earth: in that Kingdom there would be no property, no Church or state, no class distinctions, no human laws, no taxes, no marriage; surely it would please Christ, when he came, to find such a heavenly utopia already established by his worshippers.” At Tabor “‘all is held in common, no one owns anything for himself alone; so to own is considered a deadly sin. They hold that all should be equal brothers and sisters.’” Will Durant

Peter Chelcicky, “peasant turned philosopher” advocated pacifistic anarchism. “He attacked the powerful and the rich, denounced war and capital punishment as murder, and demanded a society without lords or serfs, or laws of any king. He bade his followers take Christianity literally as they found it in the New Testament: to baptize only adults, to turn their backs upon the world and its ways, upon oaths and learning and class distinctions, upon commerce and city life; and to live in voluntary poverty, preferably tilling the land, and completely ignoring ‘civilization’ and the state….” (Durant 71)

The drummer of Nikleshausen….?

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Apostles 2:42, 44-5,
4:32-7
Christian communism. Liberation theology.

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“Only in the teachings of (Thomas) Munzer did these communist notions express the aspirations of a real section of society. He was the first to formulate them with a certain definiteness, and only after him do we find them in every great popular upheaval, until they gradually merge with the modern proletarian movement, just as the struggles of free peasants in the Middle Ages against increasingly feudal domination merged with the struggles of the serfs and bondsmen for the complete abolition of the feudal system.”
3 political camps: the conservative Catholic, the Reformist Lutherans and the Revolutionary
party of Munzer.
“When in 1517 Luther first opposed the dogmas and statues of the Catholic Church his opposition was by no means of a definite character…. At that early stage it was necessary that all the opposition elements should be united, the most resolute revolutionary energy should be displayed, and the sum of the existing heresies against the Catholic orthodoxy should be represented. In exactly the same way out liberal bourgeoisie of 1847 was still revolutionary, called itself socialist and communist, and clamored for the emancipation of the working class. Luther’s sturdy peasant nature asserted itself in the stormiest fashion in that first period of his activity.

“But this initial revolutionary zeal was short-lived. Luther’s lightning struck home. The entire German people was set in motion. On the one hand, peasants and plebeians saw the signal to revolt in his appeals against the clergy, and in his sermon of Christian freedom; on the other, he was joined by the moderate burghers and a large section of the lesser nobility. Even the princes were drawn into the maelstrom. The former believed the day had come to settle scores with all their oppressors, the later only wished to break the power of the clergy, the dependence on Rome, to abolish the Catholic hierarchy and to enrich themselves on the confiscation of church property. The parties stood aloof from each other, and each had its spokesmen. Luther had to choose between them. He, the protégé of the Elector of Saxony, the revered professor of Wittenberg who had become powerful and famous overnight, the great man with his coterie of servile creatures and flatterers, did not hesitate for a moment…. Luther now preached peaceful progress and passive resistance….”Luther becomes a vassal of the Reformist party. The people accuse him of “having become just another flunkey of the princes” and stone him in Orlamunde.
When the peasant revolt breaks out, Luther is initially conciliatory, urging both parties to lay down their arms & negotiate. When this fails, and as the revolt begins to threaten more newly-Protestant princes and nobles “all the old animosities were forgotten… Compared to the hordes of the peasants, the servants of the Roman Sodom were innocent lambs, sweet-tempered children of God. Burgher and prince, noble and clergyman, Luther and the Pope, all joined hands “against the murderous and plundering peasant hordes.
“They must be knocked to pieces, strangled and stabbed, covertly and overtly, by everyone who can, just as one must kill a mad dog!…Whoever hath pity on those whom God pities not, whom He wishes punished and destroyed, belongs among the rebels himself. They do not hearken to the Word, and are foolish, so they must hearken to the rod and the gun, and that serves them right.”[Engles, throughout]

Munzer: 1488-1524
At 15 he “organized a secret union at the Halle school against the archbishop of Magdeburg.”
An early doctorate in theology (only kind?)
“the chiliastic works of Joachim of Calabrese were the main subject of his studies”
confrontation with Luther shortly after 1517 over Muenzer’s “politicization” of the reformation.
Muehlhausen, Thuringia, formation of “eternal council” based on word of God. Sermon to the Princes. Draws from Daniel 2:44: “the kingdom of God will consume all earthly kingdoms”
Omnia sunt communiaCaptured after battle of Frankenhausen May, recants under torture, beheaded.

Comte…the religion of man…Enlightenment…

Zinn: “Look at it this way. It is the second coming. Christ couldn’t make it, so Marx came…”“…Since we punish thieves with the sword, murderers with the halter, and heretics with fire, why do we not turn on all those evil teachers or perdition, those popes, cardinals and bishops, and the entire swarm of Roman Sodom with arms in hand, and wash our hands in their blood?