The Pnictogen Wing

By the way, I am dead certain that Orwell had Christianity in mind when he was writing "1984". It's not exactly an anti-Christian screed but he peppers the story with Christian iconography, and has O'Brien cite the Inquisition as an early approximation of what the Ministry of Love is trying to do. O'Brien's a deliberately priestly figure. He sermonizes, he summons up eternal power, he promises salvation. He's allowed to be poetical and even ecstatic in a culture that otherwise forbids both poetry and ecstasy. He commands Time itself.

Don't worry, Winston; you are in my keeping. For seven years I have watched over you. Now the turning-point has come. I shall save you, I shall make you perfect.

How many evangelical preachers and missionaries made similar promises to their victims?

~Chara of Pnictogen

Last few days we've run smack into the "Marxism is really gnosticism" and holy fuck is this a big thing with the Christian right—but more importantly, it's a big thing with right-wing figures who are clearly Christian in sympathy, who drop little hints and signals about their Christianity, but who for political reasons refuse to admit that they're Christian.

I feel like there's a lot going on here. First, there's the general reactionary-Christian tendency, which has been going on for many decades, of trying to secularize their own ideology, stripping it of overt religious content so that they can claim to be legitimate scientists and scholars who just happen to believe in creationism and policing pregnancies and other such things. In concert, they've been working overtime to propagandize secular theories, both scientific and academic, as secret religions. If you're old enough (like me) you may remember the attempt to pretend, some decades ago, that "Secular Humanism" was a religious belief that was the secret true reason for evolutionary biology and other things—well that's gotten far more elaborate over the years and it seems like they've decided that gnosticism is a handy one-size-fits-all method for pretending that secular ideologies are secretly religious.

~Chara

Even though my RL childhood was technically irreligious—my sibling and I were brought up by an excommunicated ex-Catholic Chilean mother and an atheistic American biologist father—I was surrounded by a whıte American culture pervaded with the social defaults of Christianity. Some of them came from my mother, who despite her fierce hatred of the Catholic Church which had betrayed her, and her leftist conviction that religion was an opiate for the masses, still clung to some vestige of Christian belief. She had my sibling baptised Lutheran, she used Catholic references in conversation (joking about lighting novenas, say) and she was definitely afflicted with Catholic guilt, which she passed along to me. It was perhaps inevitable that once I was jolted out of my adolescent science-nerd atheism, I gravitated towards Christianity and the simplifying belief in a single all-encompassing God. I rebelled against my mother by darting towards the religion she rejected (I didn't know she'd been excommunicated until much later in life) partly due to G. K. Chesterton, who made a whole reactionary career out of pretending that Catholic orthodoxy was the true rebellion.

But I'd gotten introduced to polytheism during my college education—all those semesters of Latin and Greek "classics"—and eventually that won out. Christianity's allure faded quickly upon contact with it. It was one thing to read Chesterton (or Lewis or Sayers or Charles Williams) and think, "Yes, these people clearly have hold of something worth pursuing." It was quite another to run up against obnoxious authoritarian Bible-bashers and find that there was no way to talk to them, even as an ostensible co-religionist. I could infallibly be accused of faithlessness, because I didn't have much faith. It was a sense of duty that chiefly bound me to Christianity, not faith. And when, tears later, we stumbled back towards polytheism, again we felt that duty was far more important than belief. The gods were treading us underfoot, and it was fitting and proper to acknowledge them and try to propitiate them.

But I haven't been able to discard monotheism, for multiple reasons. One is that our headspace has a number of monotheists, in varying stages of evolving attitudes towards their respective creeds. Among the most forcible and influential of our fictive introjects is a Muslim woman (a former assassin from the Nizari Isma'ili state commonly referred to as the Order of Assassins) who has been gently urging us towards studying Islam. We have at least two Jewish headmates, and a few Christians. As for myself...I have long felt that it makes sense at least to conceive of a kind of superset of deity, a comprehensive godhood—I daresay that I'm wandering in the vicinity of some Gnostic or Neoplatonist notion of Pleroma, there—and thus I haven't abandoned monotheism, even if I prefer to work with multiple gods.

What about Kris, our host? I presume to speak for them, but Kris has fundamental difficulties with words, especially about abstract topics like this, and they have admitted to me that their own feelings about religious belief and worshipping gods (or One God) are vague and doubtful. In their childhood in Hometown they were made to worship an Angel, but they got little from it, and developed an interest in fringe beliefs and the occult chiefly because they felt like "The Church of the Angel" was not satisfying them. I daresay that running up against a bunch of religious weirdos like myself and many of my fictive friends has left Kris still a bit flummoxed.

~Chara of Pnictogen