oldborn said:
...
As for comrade rhubroma, he has Inner Battle issue to not belive and finding all sort of arguments to keep himself out of trouble
That's because I was never an
affection seeker, unlike my bother, who always sought the love and approval of my parents. I hope I won't have to explain what I mean by the term. At mealtimes my brother was always silent and never dared to ask a question; I constantly asked questions and was repremanded by my parents for asking the most
impossible questions. My mother would beat me with a raw hide which she always kept in readiness, and my father would box my ears, especially when he was on a drinking binge. I had many whippings, but I cannot remember my brother being whipped or having his ears boxed. I was interested in anything that was different, but my bother was not. I wanted to know
everything - no question must remain unanswered.
It was at this time that I developed my distaste for ignorance and intolerance and set upon the pursuit of consciousness through a careful study and examination of the written sources and travel. We have to get out of our native environment, I thought, if we are to make ourselves useful in this brief life. My parents thus didn't
bring me up, they
dragged me up, until the age of eight or nine and Uncle Michael, who had moved to the south of France to, in his own words,
leave the barbarians behind, had to step in and gradually undo the almost total havoc they had wrought. He went to immense pains to turn my totally chaotic mind into one that was acceptable and receptive. My parents believed that they were bringing me up, but they actually destroyed me, just as they destroyed my brother, who became just like them. Instead of talking about bringing me up, they should have talked about bringing me down with their Catholic and republican methods. Thanks to their upbringing, which was purely and simply a process of destruction, as I have said, everything in my mind was mutilated beyond recognition, to borrow a phrase that is usually used in a different context. In their brutal conservative Catholic and republican way they had stirred things around in my young mind and created total confusion, so that it took Uncle Michael just as long to raise order out of my mental chaos. Instead of educating us, our parents actually mutilated our minds. Being Catholics of Irish and Italian descent first and foremost and then secondly conservative republicans, they ruined our minds with their appalling Catholic and republican methods. Until Uncle Michael came in to rescue me.
But since this is a thread about religion, not politics, I will only relate what Uncle Michael said about how the Catholic Church can do unimaginable harm to a child's mind if the parents are Catholic and adhere more or less automatically to the Catholic religion, but I have found this to be the case with religion in general. To say that we had a Catholic upbringing, so spoke Uncle Michael, amounts to saying that we were utterly destroyed. Catholicism is the supreme annihilator of the child's soul, he said, the supreme inspirer of terror, the supreme destroyer of character. That's the truth, he said. Untold millions owe it to the Catholic Church that they have been destroyed, that their lives have been ruined, their nature denaturized, he said. The Catholic Church has the destruction of the human personality on its conscience - that's the truth, he said. For the Catholic Church won't tolerate any human being other than the Catholic human being. As children we always delighted in Catholic ritual, which at first seemed like a fairy tale, undoubtedly the most beautiful one we knew. And for the grown-ups it was a life-long spectacle, the only one they knew. But the fairy tail and the spectacle have between them perverted and destroyed all that's natural in human beings, so said Uncle Michael. Using the fairy tale for children and the spectacle for adults, the Catholic Church pursues a single aim, the total seduction of all who fall into its clutches. It uses the fairy tale and the spectacle, which is what we call its
culture, to bend them to its will, to extinguish them as human beings, to turn them into unthinking Catholics who have no will of their own and whom insolently call themselves
the faithful.
Naturally Uncle Michael was exaggerating, but it was just his manner of going to extremes in ways that vivify our sense of human possibilities, however destructive, that began to liberate me from the chaos and foolery. Finally, and this was his most bald way of explaining things, Uncle Michael thought that the Catholic faith, like all faiths, was a perversion of nature, a sickness to which millions succumb quite deliberately because it's their only salvation, the salvation of the weak, who are quite incapable of independent thought and, having no minds of their own, need a higher mind to do their thinking for them. And the Catholic mind, he thought, like all religious mindsets, has a terrible way of thinking, wholely self-serving and inimical to human nature, conducive to its own ends and its own glory.
It is a supreme stroke of iony, then, that these days I'm presently engaged in doing a massive research project at, above all places, the
Biblioteca Vaticana, to attempt to explain how the visual imagery changed between XIV and XVI century Rome to build a new identity and ideology of the papal aristocracy and the consequences that this had for transforming Rome and Europe at the time, when one thinks of the protestant reform.
In Italy there is a very real problem of how the Catholic Church has entered in to the Italian political scene. Nothing has been changed by the various political turnarounds since the Lateran Pact of 1929, and of recent years: in Italy the Catholic mind does all the thinking and, because it can harness a significant voter support, even the socialists allow the Catholic mind to do their thinking for them, as they haven't developed a socialist mind. Basically the Catholic Church in this country can do whatever it wants and isn't even taxed by the state for the billions and billions it earns, just in Italy alone, anually. Everywhere we're confronted by the Catholic spirit, which admittedly has given us hundreds of thousands of Catholic works of art but destroyed the spirit of freedom and independence, the only natural spirit. What use are all these works of art, these Catholic churches and palaces, when for centuries we've had no minds of our own? Once my Italian friend Marco, who has a most distincitive intellect, and for whom I have thus always harbored the highest regard and admiration, patently stated that our nation suffers from chronic mental debility, he told me, which the Church has exploited more than any other European country, even more than in Ireland, where a degree of intellectual freedom and self-sufficiency still survives. In our country, Marco said, the Catholic Church has never had any difficulty in bringing the necessary pressure to bear and forcing the Italian people, and hence the Italian state, into total submission. Only in recent decades, with things like the divorce and abortion referendums, have there been hints of emancipation from Catholic dominion, from the monstrous pressure of the Church, from the age-old stranglehold of Catholicism, Marco told me. Only recently, he said, has it become possible to discern, here and there, the tentative emergence of a kind of thinking and philosopizing that owes nothing to Catholicism. Only in recent decades have a few Italian minds begun to think independently, to use their Italian heads, not just their Catholic heads. Catholicism is to blame that for so many centuries Italy had no philosophers, no philosophical thought, no philosophy, Marco told me. It's fair to say, he said, that since the Ancient Roman Empire for the last thousand years and five hundred more all thought has been ruthlessly suppressed by the Catholic Church. And the nation has made life easy for itself under the aegis of the Catholic mind, said Marco, which has always done its thinking for it, on a proxy basis and in
its own way. In the last thousand years Catholicism, the
signorie and, lastly, the fascists, have had a devestating effect, a lethal effect, on the nation's spirit, as all the evidence shows, he said. In the last thousand years, on can say, Catholicism extirpated thought and ushered in an efflorescence of art. The mind having been suppressed for centuries, Italy became a land of art. Having become a thoroughly mindless people during the centuries of Catholicism, Marco told me, we have allowed art to flourish. True, this has given us Masaccio, Donatello, Brunelleschi, Piero della Francesca, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Bramante, Parmigianino, Giorgione, Titian, Caravaggio and Bernini, yet Marco could not applaud the fact that we have, he said, a Leonardo but have lost our minds, that we have Michelangelo but have forgotten how to think and given up trying, that we have Bernini but have become more or less brainless. No other country, Marco told me, has allowed the Catholic Church to rob it so unscrupulously of the faculty of thought, no other country allowed itself to be decapitated, as it were, by Catholicism. We have no Montaigne, no Descartes, no Voltaire, he said, only monkish and aristocatic poetasters like Aquinas and Petrarch with their Catholic inanites. In recent years, Marco told me, we've seen the beginnings of change, but it will take centuries, not just decades, to repair the intellectual depredations of Catholicism. If they
can be repaired, he said. Our nation has allowed itself to be exploited, Marco said, more than any other by the Catholic Church. For over a thousand years!
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