The Pnictogen Wing

Kotomine Kirei.

For a long time I was terrified this guy was in our system somewhere. It seemed to make too much sense, because of our Catholicism, but as it turns out we never had THAT sort of Catholic experience (you know the one I mean) so we think we're safe, though I admit that I'm still a little afraid he'll pop through a doorway unexpectedly. In earlier days Sir Mordred or someone else would probably have just spitted him immediately but we don't want to do things that way, especially because I feel like I do kinda understand parts of this guy. We do have some things in common, enough to worry me.

Nasu Kinoko might have some Problematical™ issues but I've got to say, he's spot on with his insight into the Catholic mindset (and a lot of other things). He's got this guy clocked, and is superb at depicting that kinda...awful, self-absorbed, navel-gazing thing that corrupted Christians are really good at, like the most important thing in the world was that he Fell. Kirei's hypocrisy is on point: he can put so much energy into Christian invocations (used as magic spells) that gosh darn it it almost sounds like he MEANS it! When he fries old man Matou in the third Heaven's Feel movie it's almost epic—but it's still fucking Kotomine Kirei. I've never seen a better depiction of such a hollow person, hollow but still self-aware enough to know that something is dreadfully wrong with him and he needs answers.

He actually envies Emiya Kiritsugu. Just...yeah. You know what, though? I kinda do too.

In Fate/Zero there's a kind of labored but still interesting scene that cross-cuts between briefings: Kirei's learning about Kiritsugu and coming to some rather doofy conclusions about the guy but ones that are very consistent for a fallen Christian. It's how they all talk, like they can see into the sicknesses of everyone's soul with their laser vision. (The last Heaven's Feel movie supplies the counterpoint: Kirei admitting in retrospect that he'd been totally wrong about Kiritsugu but that, much like neutral Flowey, he still just doesn't get him.) Meanwhile Kiritsugu is learning about how Kirei started out as a promising candidate for priesthood but ended up bouncing around whatever shit jobs the Church gave him—sounds a bit familiar eh?—and then he kinda bounced through magical study as well, not responding to ANY particular discipline. It horrifies Kiritsugu, which is a bit funny considering what he himself thinks of being a mage.

But I was like that too, for so long. I think of all the different subjects I tried, always with genuine interest, but then some trauma would fling me out of them. The one lucky break I got, Classics, hasn't been practically useful yet although I've always valued the sense of academic grounding it's given me. It actually meant a LOT to see a humanities professor touch (however briefly) upon mathematical or scientific concepts that I knew from a different angle; I could see instantly that the two perspectives squared with each other. Hence I can actually say that I have an alma mater and...you know, that's pretty cool. I don't think a lot of people get that from college these days.

And it was never enough either. I'm not sorry I didn't take up the subject academically, in grad school, which would have been a terrifying dead end, especially now that it seems like celebrity-minded Classics professors are all moonlighting as fascist propagandists. But what else was I supposed to be doing if not that? It's a bit strange to think that we finally, FINALLY, could come to the conclusion that it always had to be "generalist", because that's the only way to study magic. It really was true; we had to learn it the hard way. Magic really is the Art of Arts, which touches in some way upon every other human subject including the ones that haven't been invented yet. But we've had a devil of a time chasing after its study, for reasons that are only slowly coming into sharp focus.

Studying magic requires total humility and self-knowledge, and that's why Kotomine Kirei always crapped out at a certain point—he hit some wall within himself that he refused to tackle. He's plainly got that neurosis you see in failed Christians so often, that endless preoccupation with the question: "well if it was WRONG then why didn't GOD stop me?" So Kirei remains "a dog of the church" as Matou Zouken gleefully points out, still doing their offices, still skulking at a churchhouse that never seems to have anyone in it except himself, almost like he needs the sanctuary still to feel safe. I'm glad at least I didn't make THAT mistake. When I burned out on Catholicism I just left.

I really like mapo tofu now, though.

~Chara of Pnictogen

Christianity, as I've said before, is both a wild and playful thing, turning up in folk beliefs and syncretic religions and who knows how many lively and tremendous works of fiction, and it's also a dying authoritarian juggernaut. This die was cast a long time ago, unfortunately. Christianity began questionably, with St. Paul's dubious interpretation of the Incarnation (which I am assuming, for the sake of argument, actually happened—I'm Catholic you know! kinda) and his determination to make the new cult both radically distinct from Judaism and more palatable to professionals like himself. From the start, Christianity was cursed with the disease that's presently almost about to kill the patient: Christianity wanted desperately to be NORMAL. The lurch to embrace Roman tyranny a few centuries later sealed the deal. You can't get much more failed, as a transformative moral and social force, than merging with the Roman Empire.

Now look at Christianity, especially in the United States, which has been preening itself as the New Jerusalem for a while, while hypocritically claiming to honor the old. This terrifying trope of "Western civilization" lives on, like an even more poisonous and maddening version of the older-fashioned myth of descent from ancient Troy. The Romans most famously tried that one out but Great Britain did as well and I'm pretty sure there's other instances of European national founding myths which somehow go back to Troy or at least to Æneas. "The West" is still hagridden by ancient Greece, as hagridden as Rome was. "We conquered you, and yet you are better than us, whyyy" seems like an eternal mystery for many Europeans and persons of European descent.

Hence there's no shortage of prideful Americans claiming to be the prophets and priests of a deathless Christian faith, and at the same time they don't seem to know what they believe any more. They shout about Jesus and the Lord in one sentence, accuse trans people of killing God in the next sentence. How did this happen? It's pretty simple: NORMAL smothered Christianity. St. Paul's objections to adhering to Jewish practices seems almost like laziness. It was an impediment to facile conversion. "You mean I have to worry about what I eat now?" and so forth. St. Paul, like any cynical salesperson, was selling canned Jesus, simplified salvation, a simple formula for businesspersons to adopt into their lives while going on doing what they're doing, just as St. Paul himself did.

It's always been a MASSIVE issue with St. Paul. If he really believed in Jesus then where was his humility? He had none. He wasn't repentant and reflective and thoughtful about his previous mistakes, the things he supposedly repented of. Instead he did what every toxic Christian today still does, in mimicry of St. Paul: they say, "Whoops, my bad, I won't sin again I promise!" and then get straight to pretending that their conversion now entitles them to special social status. St. Paul was the first obvious Christian hypocrite, a fake Apostle, and now Paul's shittiness is baked into Christianity.

Everything since then feels like a creeping paralysis or wasting disease slowly spreading through Christianity, killing belief, killing the mystery that Christianity was supposed to embody, reducing it to a dead litany that corporate executives intone from time to time while they're scamming money. Christianity may still be a religion (though I'm not sure how I'd even define it, because so much of Christianity now exists as independent offshoots and syncretisms) but public Christianity surely isn't. It's a political label, a badge of membership in an evil society. Any politician or boss who conspicuously wears a cross or makes a point of saying "I have Christian values" might as well be saying they're in S.P.E.C.T.R.E. or something.

Well, now what

~Chara of Pnictogen

Silly question, right? U.S. Atheists might scoff and say God (meaning the Christian God in this context, for American atheists generally don't think further than that) never existed in the first place so the question is moot—and yet I daresay it's atheists who tend not to think about the logical implications of their own statements. If God never existed then why do so many human beings feel as if God exists? Atheists tend not to understand that Christian faith isn't merely an outrageous assertion shouted out in defiance of the void. Christians (some of them anyway) believe that they have empirical evidence of their faith: they think they've seen faith rewarded, and therefore have more reason to believe. There may be irreligious reasons for this but no atheist I've run into seems very interested in them, not in any serious or analytical way. Rationalbro discourse on religious belief is mired in pseudoscientific chatter about evopsych and "memetics"; the attitude prevails that because religion isn't "real" (even though plainly it is, even if gods aren't) there's no point in talking accurately about it.

There must exist some physical entity that is equivalent to "God", not as an omniscient and omnipotent creator of everything, but as a thing that motivates belief. Even if God is merely a thought, thoughts ought to be explainable in material and physical terms, for thoughts are hosted on physical beings. If God is a "meme" then what is a meme, exactly? Every scrap of writing I've ever seen on memetics takes zero interest in the underlying mechanics of memetic existence. They take "meme" on Dawkins's authority, I would guess, and therefore feel safe in speculative blithering about psychological and social implications (in spite of their profound ignorance of both psychology and sociology.) What is it, exactly, that compels the human phenomenon known as belief on faith—belief without visible reason?

"It's irrational, it's not important," seems to be the general answer offered by U.S. intellectuals. American (and "Western") authorities have plunged down a deep rabbit hole—one that, ironically, C. S. Lewis predicted would happen in his monograph The Abolition of Man, and wrote into a fictional novel called That Hideous Strength. Science and academia, Lewis feared, in search of perfect "objectivity", would discard the idea that human emotions were meaningful, and thus discard morality and ethics as well. If pain itself is meaningless then there's no objection to hurting people as long as inflicting pain can be construed as "rational" and "objective". And this is indeed what has happened. Jack Lewis, on this point anyway, was entirely correct.

Long story short, there's been—at least in those levels of U.S. academia which gain access to the popular press and prestige—no serious inquiry into what "God" is, not as a spiritual or metaphysical entity but as a human phenomenon. Needless to say, the fanatical and hypocritical Christians scattered throughout American professional life have probably been knocking everyone away from studying this, for their own safety: their "faith" is not one that withstands scrutiny of any sort, much less intellectual analysis, so they've been methodically spoiling and spreading chaos through intellectual disciplines that they wish to regard as theirs for protective reasons: psychology and psychiatry especially, but also philosophy, evolutionary biology, history, and many others.

Obviously belief in the Christian God is not wholly dead but I sense that there's a massive collapse in general Christian faith incoming. Christianity in general, as a source of public influence and political pressure at least, has been shrivelling up for the last several decades, if not the last few centuries, though lately the process seems to be considerably accelerated. (Acceleration is intrinsically good, as we know. /s) The 1960s and 1970s led to a definite recrystallization of U.S. Christianity around purely secular values, especially anti-Black bigotry and other such collective hatreds. The U.S. media, conditioned into reflexive deference to Christians, have refused to put two and two together when it comes to the obviously political and secular nature of the Christians who dominate Republican politics, maybe because deep down the U.S. media doesn't want to accept the profound implication, i.e. that a huge mass of purported Christians, people with an extraordinary amount of power in the United States, has in fact lost their faith and won't publicly admit it. To them, I suspect, God is dead, though they're in denial about it.

~Chara of Pnictogen

So...is it possible to get from Loki in Pompeii in C.E. 79, just a few more years backward to get them to Damascus in circa C.E. 35, where they could...I dunno, slit Saul of Tarsus's throat? I think every Assassin in the Pnictogen Wing would love to do it but—look, I'm a pacifist okay so I'm gonna resist that undertow.

Maybe Saul could see something else! Surely that's the Occam's Razor solution, a much less damaging sort of knife. Saul of Tarsus saw something that turned him into the world's most destructive jerkass and we're all paying the price, so if we could only figure out how to make him see something else and nip the problem in the bud. Who knows, maybe the Roman Empire would even be less shit as a result, through some ripple effect. Maybe with Christianity as an irritant they were even worse.

~Chara of Pnictogen