Against Judaism and Christianity

 

The Old Testament was written and edited by Jews mostly during the magnificent Greek Era, and thus contains many elements of sound, excellent, Greek philosophy. The New Testament was written during the magnificent Roman Era, and thus contains many elements of sound, excellent, Roman philosophy.

But the Bible is also suffused with irrationality and supernaturalism. It mostly stands in opposition to reality, this world, Mother Nature, and Natural Law. It rejects individual happiness and human greatness in this world. Jewish and Christian philosophy opposes reason, science, materialism, and “worldliness”. They oppose what Augustine called “The City of Man” in favor of “The City of God”. Ancient monotheists said it was the sacred duty of man not to achieve or be heroic, but rather to be humble, submissive, obedient, and a “slave” to this new “god” thing. These monstrous goals and ideals are why the best and brightest of the Greeks and Romans were so passionate in their desire to defeat the foolish and depraved Jews and Christians.

Greek historian Apion (~20 BC to ~45 AD) noted: “The Jews have chosen a way of life contrary to all humanity.” Roman historian Tacitus (56 to 120 AD) observed: “The practices of the Jews are base and abominable, and owe their persistence to their depravity.”

As for the Jewish offshoots, Tacitus states: “The Christians were convicted [after a terrible fire], not so much for the crime of arson, but of hatred against mankind.” Roman intellectual Celsus [~140 to ~220 AD] criticized the leading thinkers of both Judaism and Christianity saying: “They invite [to their religions] the foolish, the dishonorable, and the stupid.” Moreover: “Their injunctions are like this: ‘Let no-one educated, no-one wise, no-one sensible draw near. For these abilities are thought by us to be evils.’”

It’s very suppressed today, but the fact is the finest intellectuals and philosophers of classical Greece and Rome hated and feared Judaism and Christianity. They saw these bizarre and loathsome belief-systems as alien and inimical to virtue, happiness, and their respective ways of life. What a horror that to this day Western culture still hasn’t decently rejected the disastrous and depraved philosophies of Judaism and Christianity.

New Day Dawning

 

Hopefully, Donald Trump will partially govern like a liberal hero: pro-freedom, pro-capitalism, pro-Enlightenment values, pro-Western Civilization, and hugely pro-American. Hopefully, Trump will emerge as a semi-libertarian. As such...

Job One is cut spending and shrink the government. State power and authority should decline while Individual liberty and responsibility should rise. The five main costs of the federal government are: $1.5 trillion for Social Security, $1.1 trillion for servicing the debt, $1.0 trillion for Medicare, $0.9 trillion for funding the military, and $0.6 trillion for Medicaid. If interest rates are cut from Biden’s 7% in late 2024, to Trump’s 3.5% in late 2019, this should save about $550 billion per year. By getting better deals, lessening waste and fraud, and buying more effective weapons, the military can maybe be cut by about $150 billion. Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid should be reduced by one-third at a minimum, as Americans turn to private charity, and away from today’s communist charity. That almost saves Elon Musk’s two trillion dollars right there!

Job Two is flatten taxes. Everyone should pay 20% of income or 1% of net worth, whichever is greater. There needs to be no exceptions whatsoever. There needs to be zero tax deductions, exemptions, write-offs, shelters, loopholes, and subsidies for both rich and poor.

Job Three is deregulate all business. Production and trade should feature far fewer labor laws, business permits, and professional licenses. Let everybody become a doctor, lawyer, and stock-broker instantly. Without waiting or needing Big Brother’s approval, let everyone open up a business in their house or shop, such as a hotel, restaurant, bar, movie theater, dance hall, hair salon, gym, mechanic, repair shop, clothing store, grocery, pharmacy, casino, sex club, and the like. Private evaluation and accreditation services like Angie’s List and Yelp will replace the current communist ones. Let people work and get rich!

Job Four is deregulate all personal and social behavior. As much as possible, free up drugs, prostitution, and gambling. Let people have fun and be happy!

Job Five is break all diplomatic, cultural, social, and economic relations with slave states. Especially China, Russia, Pakistan, North Korea, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. It's a crime to interact with such savages and monsters. Why morally sanction, financially enrich, and militarily empower our enemies and destroyers?

These five jobs are more than enough for Donald Trump to get started on. In today's hideous welfare state world, even a liberal hero will find them rather challenging.

But hopefully a new day of liberty is dawning! There should be more possibilities for human greatness and happiness coming up! Perhaps soon there will be more Individual pleasure and satisfaction, mixed with social cooperation and harmony, based upon significantly expanded liberalism and political freedom!

The Coming of Trump

 

In many or most respects, the pre-inaugural Donald Trump is acting like a liberal hero. And America and the world are treating him as such. But Trump knows little of true liberalism; and he believes in and advocates it still less.

For 2600 years now life has been a battle between the liberals and the illiberals. The philosophy and culture of liberalism rose under Greece and Rome, but it declined under the Christian Dark Age. Liberalism rose again during the Renaissance and Enlightenment, but retreated during the current welfare statist Dark Age. The world seemingly hit its liberal and civilizational nadir in the 1980s.

Then came the liberal champions Deng Shiao-Ping of China, Mikhail Gorbachev of Russia, Margaret Thatcher of Britain, and Ronald Reagan of America. These four remarkable individuals were both products of the partial return of liberal philosophy and society, and drivers of them. Underlying this minor ascent of man were such liberal intellectuals as Frederich Bastiat, John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spenser, Ludwig von Mises, Frederich Hayek, and, especially, Ayn Rand.

Now comes Donald Trump. Evidently he’s read a small amount of Rand, and he even likes and agrees with her somewhat. But Trump is very shallow and weak intellectually. His rather primitive, petty, and vulgar lifestyle reveals and reflects this. Strategically and psychologically, Trump may be “playing chess, while everyone else is playing checkers” but on the deep and important issues, Trump is mostly playing tic-tac-toe.

Yes, Donald Trump has a rather dynamic and heroic persona and character. He’s something of an alpha male leader. And it even seems like he might emerge as something of an iconic, historic, and transformational figure. Let's hope!

But Trump is also a considerable liar and lowlife. And his main philosophy – to the extent that he has one – is immensely amoral and unprincipled. Trump is fundamentally a pragmatist and utilitarian.

Donald Trump largely rejects right-wing religious conservatism and left-wing collectivist progressivism. But that doesn’t make him a straight-wing individualist liberal. He doesn’t even know what that is! Generally, Trump leans to the contrarian, subversive right as he keeps his distance from RINO, establishment, country-club, and swamp Republicans. He's generally somewhat virtuous overall, and has good instincts, and is a political natural. He’s also a nationalist, populist, and patriot. Trump also favors and practices non-ideological deal-making, doing what works, and common sense.

When it comes to issues of philosophy and profound intellectualism, Donald Trump rarely or never stands on principle. This is because he doesn’t know many good principles and isn’t much aware of what’s right. But Trump realizes this about himself -- which is a kind of strength. He stands somewhat above Right and Left, and thus he has the ability to pick out what's best from both and to somewhat transcend them. This allows him to sometimes go moderately go in the pro-realism, pro-reason, pro-individualism, pro-liberty, liberal direction.

Ultimately, Donald Trump from January 2025 to January 2029 -- assuming he actually lives that long – isn’t likely to advance liberal philosophy and civilization in America and the West that far. Not even liberal politics. Under him, freedom will seemingly only rise slightly -- if that.

This is because Trump simply doesn’t believe in getting rid of fascist drug, prostitution, gambling, and early-abortion prohibitions. He doesn’t believe in eliminating fascist labor laws, business permits, and professional licenses. He doesn’t believe in terminating socialist Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Welfare, Food Stamps, and housing subsidies. He doesn’t believe in privatizing socialist roads, parks, schools, mail, and money. All of this Donald Trump sees as a species of madness. Political liberalism and libertarianism are ideals he fundamentally opposes.

At best, Trump might cut crime a bit, somewhat deregulate the economy, partially free up the energy industries, deport a moderate amount of illegal aliens, and occasionally stand up for America against enemies like China, Russia, Pakistan, North Korea, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. But Trump is a total welfare statist. His foreign policy is one of engaging with and appeasing evil; he doesn’t believe in victory. His domestic policy is one of coercion and regulation; rhetoric aside, he doesn’t believe in freedom. Trump strongly rejects free statism, economic laissez-faire capitalism, social libertarianism, personal liberty, and political liberalism. And he may well spend like a drunken sailor and get us into some pointless wars.

If someone were to walk up to Donald Trump and quietly point out that the purpose of gov’t is to uphold individual rights, establish liberty and justice for all, protect people and property, prevent the initiation of force, and create a socio-economic system of pure freedom...he wouldn’t know what the hell you were talking about. All of this is alien to his notions of gov't.

Still, political leaders adapt. They improvise and adjust themselves to the times, social situations, cultural trends, and changing intellectual beliefs. They tend to comply with what the masses and elites demand of them. Maybe the leading thinkers of America and the West can somewhat force Trump away from Big Brother and in the direction of freedom. By far the best hope for political liberalization on the planet today is Argentina’s Javier Milei. Maybe from afar Trump can observe and learn from him. Or maybe Milei can personally talk to Trump and influence him directly.

Ultimately, it’s up to the intellectual leaders of the Atlas Society, Objective Standards Institute, Ayn Rand Institute, Cato Institute, Reason magazine, and others to get to work and try to intellectually persuade and personally push Donald Trump in the liberal philosophical and political direction. More important than this, liberal thinkers need to continue to try to win the philosophical battles in the intellectual journals, think-tanks, and elite universities. This will eventually touch Trump, and all the political leaders of the world which follow.

Immortality

 

In order to live forever, humans should probably try to learn from at least three relatively well-documented species which show negligible senescence, i.e. little or no biological deterioration with age. These are:

* Hydra (Hydra vulgaris): tiny freshwater animals which show no signs of aging when protected from predators and disease. They maintain their ability to regenerate cells and avoid cellular deterioration through continuous renewal of their stem cells.

* Immortal Jellyfish (Turritopsis dohrnii): saltwater animals which can revert to an earlier life stage when stressed, avoiding death from aging indefinitely via cycling between adult and polyp stages.

* Planarian Flatworms (Planaria tricladida): small underground animals which can regenerate their entire bodies from small pieces and show no signs of aging due to a large population of stem cells called neoblasts.

People should also probably learn why certain closely-related species have such different lifespans. Here are some:

* Calico rockfish (S. dallii) and Halfbanded rockfish (S. semicinctus) appear to only live 15-20 years while Rougheye rockfish (Sebastes aleutianus) live 200 years or more.

* among bivalve ocean creatures, Eastern oysters (Crassostrea virginica) live about 5-10 years and Common mussels (Mytilus edulis) about 20-25, while Hard-shell clams (Arctica islandica) live over 500 years.

Humans probably need to learn the biological secrets of these creatures, such as by studying their genomes, as well as their mechanisms of negligible and reverse senescence. Then we need to apply such knowledge to ourselves.

Two obvious techniques for this are: (1) using the new CRISPR Cas9 technology to rewrite the human genetic code; and (2) using the old method of gene therapy thru viral vectors to do the same. Both techniques can potentially enhance the longevity of individuals via direct genetic manipulation.

The world needs scientific, medical, and healthcare geniuses to work on all this. The word needs new iterations of Leonardo Da Vinci and Albert Einstein to work on the theoretical and intellectual side of this issue; and new iterations of Thomas Edison and Steve Jobs to work on the practical and effective side.

People profoundly need to shun government funding or communist research and development on this subject. People need to strictly avoid having the state "throw money at the problem" and utilizing versions of the Post Office and DMV to try to enhance human longevity. This won’t just be ineffective and useless; it will slow down, stop, or reverse progress by diverting scarce money, knowledge, energy, enthusiasm, and publicity from competent researchers and developers.

To defeat mankind’s worst enemy, the Grim Reaper, there is a desperate need to work on this problem immediately. Many billions of dollars and thousands of scientists and doctors are currently working on this issue, but there needs to be far more.