The end nears

Crucifixion, by Matthias Grünewald

There's a Texas businessman who sells what he calls “doomsday shelters” to wealthy people around the world who are anticipating a nuclear war. His name is Ron Hubbard (and no, he's not related to the founder of Scientology, the late L. Ron Hubbard). The shelters are fortifications equipped with air filters. The cheapest ones are around $20,000. The most expensive cost around $5 million and come equipped with luxurious amenities and an indoor shooting range. Hubbard recently stated that two members of the Trump administration are his clients and have purchased shelters for themselves and their families to survive a potential atomic apocalypse. Hubbard is an evangelical Christian, frequently appears wearing a MAGA hat, and says he believes Jesus will soon return to rescue Anglo-Saxon evangelicals like himself after the start of total war.

Both he and most of his wealthy clients are people with large families. They follow the “be fruitful and multiply” from the Old Testament, which is the focus of those Christians who consider Jesus a “woke soyboy devoid of testosterone” or any other term aimed at labeling others as weak, inferior, and effeminate. Just imagine how shitty it must be for them — who like to say they have a warrior mentality and are fans of the Vikings — to have as their messiah an ascetic Galilean born 2,000 years ago who fed and healed people for free, preached that God favored the poor and that the rich should abandon their material possessions to follow him, a man who never had children and said that the best way to reach the Kingdom of Heaven is to be like eunuchs. In Matthew 19,11-12, Christ says the following:

Not everyone can accept this teaching, but only those to whom it has been given. For there are eunuchs who have been made so from birth and eunuchs who were made so by others, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let those accept this who can do so.

Jesus said this in response to a question from the apostles about whether or not a man should marry, and the meaning he uses is intimately linked to reproduction and not merely to sex, as these pathetic, warrior-like Christians hypocritically defend while cheating on their wives whenever they can, often in relationships that aren't even heterosexual. These warrior-like Christians, indeed, any self-proclaimed warrior of any religion, are mere slaves to the blind will to live that animates them. Nothing more. They are crude puppets justifying their natural programming. Add to that the shameless neo-Calvinist idea that God favors the rich, and you have the perfect idiot. Every now and then I see multimillionaire pastors from this or that trendy church buying luxury goods, and I wonder what Saint Onuphrius and Saint Syncletica of Alexandria, two Christian ascetics of the desert who lived in 4th-century Egypt, would have to say about these luxurious, materialistic, and pseudo-warrior Christians of the 21st century. It's pathetic. It's comical, even.

This is one of the reasons why Schopenhauer is brilliant. His analysis of religions, which divides them into optimistic and pessimistic, is spot on. Optimistic religions are those that affirm the will, while pessimistic religions deny the will. This basically means affirming or denying existence itself, the world of becoming, etc. Within the same religious tradition, even within the same denomination, you can have groups and individuals who interpret and practice in an optimistic or pessimistic way, but the foundation of the religions themselves already indicates whether they are optimistic or pessimistic in general. And it's not difficult to know who is who. It's important to emphasize that, for Schopenhauer, these philosophical interpretations are what remain after we strip religion of its literalness and dogmas. The rest is pure mythology surrounding this philosophical core. It doesn't even matter if the religion is polytheistic, monotheistic, or atheistic, as in the case of Buddhism. He, like me, doesn't believe in anything supernatural or spiritual about religions. For him, all those supernatural stories only cover the philosophical core of religions.

They are popular metaphysics. They are stories invented to appease the real metaphysical need of the Homo sapiens, the only being born of nature who felt displaced from it, displaced from everything, and wondered what in the hell he and all other beings are doing here. Religion is the doctrine of faith, while philosophy is the doctrine of persuasion, in the words of Schopenhauer himself, and the final message of each religion invariably ends up being the affirmation or negation of the will that animates everything in existence. Look: religions are not elaborate conspiracies created so that people swallow the affirmation or negation of the will more easily, that's not it. That they contain teachings that end up being analogous to those of various philosophies, especially with regard to ethics, may be accidental. It is very likely the case in all instances. But in the end it comes down to the same thing: some popular metaphysics, that is, some religions, affirm the will, say that the world of becoming is wonderful, while others deny the will and reject becoming.

That is why, for Schopenhauer, although the Reformation arose from a righteous indignation at the countless abuses of the Catholic Church, it denied the main vestige of what was truly Christian within the Church: the ascetic principle, which is nothing more than the ultimate expression of the negation of the will, and which exists in other religious traditions around the world, such as Brahmanism, Jainism, and Buddhism. It is no coincidence that all these religions have ascetics or monks. What this means, in simple terms, is this: by opposing monasticism as a rule, the Protestant Reformation definitively abandoned Christianity, which is pessimistic and rightly rejects the world as the highest teaching, and embraced optimism. This is why, over the decades and centuries, a significant portion of Protestants worldwide have come to focus on the Old Testament, which is the foundation of an optimistic and will-affirming religion, Judaism — except for some passages that are important to both Schopenhauer and myself, of course, such as the myth of man's expulsion from the Garden of Eden and half of the book of Ecclesiastes.

This doesn't mean that everything in the Reformation was wrong according to him. The great success of the Reformation in philosophical terms, for him, was something else entirely: the emphasis on depravity and salvation by grace, which is nothing more than the idea that, in the end, not everyone will be able to awaken to the truth. And even within Protestantism, Schopenhauer acknowledges that groups emerged here and there that were right even on the issue of asceticism, as he exemplifies well in the case of the Shakers in the United States.

I, an atheist, am more Christian than those fools who write “Christ is King” and “Deus Vult” on their social media profiles while spreading dominion theology, a bag of shit pulled from the rectum of North American Protestants between the 19th and 20th centuries, which unfortunately produced a strong tree that is currently bearing terrible fecal fruits, threatening to destroy one of the best things that Western civilization once sought to defend, at least in appearances: that is, the freedom of conscience and the secularization of institutions and society. Imagine living in a country where blasphemy or apostasy are crimes, sometimes punished even with death? We had gotten rid of that before I was born, although religion still guided some norms of conduct and laws, as has always been clear in the issue of abortion and euthanasia in Brazil and several other Westernized countries.

But the truth is this: I am more Christian simply by recognizing and agreeing with the denial of free will in Christ's message, even as an atheist, than multimillionaire pastors who spend their lives talking about Jesus while considering him a mere addendum to the Old Testament, to the point that many of them dress up as Jews in their temples that look more like warehouses and shopping malls. I repeat: it's pathetic, it's comical, even. If you look, you'll find many Christian apologists who say I'm interpreting it wrong, that this talk of denying the will by not having children, expressed more explicitly in the New Testament by Saint Paul, is something particular to his time, since many thought that Jesus would be returning soon and it was unnecessary to create new consciences to go through the tribulations of the end times. They ignore that Jesus himself also denied the will and reproduction, as in the passage about the eunuch I cited, and worse, that Jesus always equated the material world with evil.

Furthermore, these apologists fail to realize that, by using the argument that Saint Paul and other first-century Christians preached asceticism because they believed Jesus was returning soon, they are shooting themselves in the foot. They themselves constantly proclaim that Jesus is returning and fuel all sorts of apocalyptic nonsense, even attempting to influence politics in predominantly Christian countries, as in the case of those ignoble individuals surrounding the current American president, who believe that the war they are waging in Iran is the beginning of the tribulations described in the Book of Revelation. Now, if these apologists were consistent, they wouldn't have children, nor would they calmly tolerate their Christian brothers and sisters multiplying as if there were no tomorrow. But they don't do that; on the contrary. In The Trouble with Being Born, Cioran recounts that a friend of his believed the end of the world was near, but at the same time, was the father of a large family. Cioran points out his inconsistency and writes that procreation does not occur on Patmos. Patmos, for those who don't know, is the Greek island in the Aegean Sea where Saint John wrote the Book of Revelation.

Greece, incidentally, is the most important center of Byzantine Orthodox Christianity, which until 1054 lived in communion with Roman Catholic Christianity. It is full of ancient monasteries. My paternal grandmother was Greek, having arrived in Brazil in 1954, at the age of 20. In my childhood, she still received visits from the Orthodox priest while she lived in Brasília. But I know that she also practiced Catholicism, being devoted to Our Lady of Aparecida. Although she never learned anything about the denial or affirmation of the will, and although she, like a good Greek, affirmed her will, I know very well what she thought of money-grubbing Christianity. Despite all the flaws my grandmother might have had, and like any human being she had some, she didn't have this one. She never yielded to the appeals coming from younger friends and relatives of her who embraced this affirmative Christianity, a Christianity that unconditionally loves the Old Testament and is ashamed of the New, a religion that is the ultimate expression of current commercial nihilism.

There's some sort of nihilism and perversion when someone believes we're in the end times, whether religiously or, worse still, based on historical and scientific evidence, and yet chooses to generate new consciousness. In the case of Christians, even if the end of the world weren't a factor, the perversion would still exist, since they all tend to believe that God punishes unrepentant sinners eternally in hell. This means they're gambling with the souls of their own children, because they don't know if their children will be unrepentant sinners and go to hell after they die. Imagine sleeping peacefully knowing that you generated a consciousness, a soul, that risks burning eternally if it simply stops believing in or following your God? It's a kind of monstrosity that only faith can give us. Now, imagine if this God really existed and sent souls to hell while simultaneously commanding us to multiply: he would be ordering procreation while condemning many of those born to hell after they die. It would be disgusting.

by Fernando Olszewski