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nerdygaymormon · 3 years ago

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Im not LDS but Im fascinated by the idea of God the Father being born as mortal in another realm or galaxy & possibly being a redeemer like his Son is. In also fascinated by the idea of infinite regression of gods. I find Joseph Smith teachings in the King Follett discourse & the sermon on the grove interesting. My questions are Ive also read in LDS only teachings in his teachings that are in the standard works OT, NT, BOM, D&C, POGP are binding doctrines in the church to be Mormon. So does this mean only teachings related to being intelligence eternally existing with God, preexistence as spirits before birth are doctrine but God once being mortal & the other Divine beings is Joseph speculations & optional teachings & not binding to be in LDS church? These are ideas that make LDS fascinating to me. I probably will never convert because I am openly gay & a same sex married but I am Wiccan/Pagan. Im thinking of practicing Mormon spirituality but as a loner. Thank you of you answer my questions. I love yr blog

Thanks for the compliment! 😊

Most of the more unique and interesting aspects of Mormonism are not found in the scriptures, or if they are referenced it's not clear and has to be inferred.

The standard works (OT, NT, BOM, D&C, POGP) are canon, meaning they're accepted as authoritative. The D&C is open to new sections being added, but this rarely happens. There are many other documents which are not canon but carry a lot of weight, such as the Proclamation on the Family and the King Follet discourse.

King Follett discourse is one of the classics of Church literature and teaches the doctrine that humans can progress to exaltation and godliness. This used to be a much more prevalent teaching, but it seems that ever since Gordon B. Hinckley minimized this in Time magazine the LDS Church has shied away from teaching it.

Here's the quote: In an interview with TIME, President Hinckley seemed intent on downplaying his faith's distinctiveness. The church's message, he explained, "is a message of Christ. Our church is Christ-centered. He's our leader. He's our head. His name is the name of our church." At first, Hinckley seemed to qualify the idea that men could become gods, suggesting that "it's of course an ideal. It's a hope for a wishful thing," but later affirmed that "yes, of course they can." (He added that women could too, "as companions to their husbands. They can't conceive a king without a queen.") On whether his church still holds that God the Father was once a man, he sounded uncertain, "I don't know that we teach it. I don't know that we emphasize it... I understand the philosophical background behind it, but I don't know a lot about it, and I don't think others know a lot about it."

One thing President Hinckley did was downplay many of the unique aspects of LDS doctrine in order to make the church seem more palatable to other Americans and Christians. This has also meant we rarely talk about the King Follett discourse or if God the Father also was a Savior as Jesus was, and if God the Father has a Father, a regression of Gods as you put it. We want to be seen as monotheists even though we clearly have more than one godly being. Where I live, the leadership doesn't want us singing hymns that mentions Kolob or Heavenly Mother because that would be strange to any visitors in attendance.

While we don't talk about these things in Sunday School anymore, those ideas still are present in Mormonism, particularly in temple worship and in the motivation the church has against queer people.

In the temple becoming like God is the focal point of the ceremonies, that a man & woman can progress together to godhood.

Because queer people can't progress to godhead, that is a large motivator against queer rights, gay marriage, teachings about gender roles and how queer couples don't fit them.

All that being said, there's a growing number of church membership who are asking questions, such as where does it say gay couples can't marry? Why would God create queer people and then forbid them from these basic parts of life that bring happiness or ban queer people from progression to being like God? The Church leaders are having a hard time, they don't have answers how queer people fit into God's Plan or what their purpose is in life. Their response has been to erase queer people from pre-existence and from life after death. That still doesn't address what queer people are to do during this life, what our purpose is.

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republicstandard · 7 years ago

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Progressivism, Inc.

One more the more ingenious accomplishments by the globalist hegemony is convincing a huge swathe of the population that by aligning themselves with these ruthlessly exploitative corporations that one is “#Resisting” the Establishment. Amazon, for example, has a larger net worth than all but sixteen countries on earth. We are fast approaching a time—if we are not already there—where the corporatocracy is more powerful than the nation-state.

Certainly, global finance is already there (what, you thought the Federal Reserve was actually controlled by the federal government?), with the IMF strong-arming countries like Greece and Ukraine into adopting its policy “recommendations.” Liberals used to be vehemently opposed to globalism (remember “Buy Local”?) and would bemoan the fact that the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, and the IMF have basically ravaged the entire Third World. No longer. It is now far more vital to drink Pepsi to “own the Nazis” than to realize that independently-minded leaders who reject the machinations of global finance must be removed and replaced with ones much more amenable to the IMF, WTO, and World Bank dictating policy in order to effectively control their nation’s economy.

It is simply impossible to separate modern geopolitics from global finance. Take a wild guess who the Balfour Declaration of 1917 promising Palestine to the Jews was addressed to? That would be Edmond de Rothschild, financier of the first Russian-Jewish colonists of the region! All roads lead not to Rome, but Jerusalem. The forever wars in the Middle East can be easily explained first by considering the efficacy of the Yinon Plan and advancing Israeli national interests in the region through its Balkanization, and secondly by understanding that the multi-nationals are profiting immensely. “Iraqi freedom” was a financial windfall for the war profiteers of Halliburton. Afghanistan supplies the raw materials for the opiates pacifying Western populations’ resistance to their displacement and ultimately their replacement. The Israeli-occupied Golan Heights in Syria has proven to have plenty of Black gold for Genie Energy to extract. Where is the supposedly bleeding-heart Left in all of this? The lobotomized wasteland of the terminally contradictory Manichean-yet-relativistic Left of today stands not on principle, or ideals, or really anything for that matter other than consumption. To quote Mike Enoch:

All the Left talks about is Harry Potter, White Privilege, and pan-sexuality. There’s no more talk about anti-war. There’s no more talk about the economic draft. There’s no more talking about working-class issues, no more talk about wage suppression. They are completely degenerate. They are lacking in any intellectual foundation or principled politics. They’re lacking in any positions of any worth…It’s really pathetic.

Even worse, find a “progressive” cause, and there is a mega-corporation behind it. These corporations are so progressive, in fact, that billions of dollars are spent on their employees—from the public trough. That’s right, companies like Wal-Mart and Amazon pay their employees so little that a large percentage have to turn to public assistance to survive. In states like Arizona, one-third of Amazon employees rely on food stamps. Walmart’s abysmally low wages force workers to turn to public assistance to the tune of an estimated $6.2 billion in public assistance including food stamps, Medicaid, and subsidized housing. The American fast food industry represented a $7 billion drain in costs to taxpayers. And these rainbow-colored virtue-signalers are of course unanimous in their support for “progressive” policies—all while leaving the average American and the fast-shrinking middle class holding the bag.

The global “free market” subsists on child labor and wage slavery, another state of affairs liberals of yore were once committed to combating. Now Nike with its sweatshop-made products has made Colin Kaepernick the face of its new advertising campaign. “Standing for something,” even if it means kneeling, might cost you everything—or it might just cost you next to nothing in labor expenses if you’re Nike. A more perfect match of vapidity and unprincipled charlatanry you may not find—unless it is those social media “YASSSS QUEEN BEY” feminists who find multi-millionaire and cuckoldress Beyonce to be the epitome of female empowerment. Beyonce, it should be mentioned, pays 64 cents an hour to the female sweatshop workers in Sri Lanka who make her Ivy Park clothing line.

When the Women’s March claims to be pro-mass immigration and pro-labor, this gross contradiction, once again, is never “called out.” As Jim Goad put it in The Redneck Manifesto;

“In the…case of the sniffles that afflicts American society, anyone who questions our spread-eagle immigration policy is automatically tagged as a racist.”

Even though mass unskilled and low-skill immigration depresses wages and leaves the bottom 50% of the economy—American-born Blacks and Hispanics and working-class Whites alike—vulnerable to competition and especially under-the-table, tax-free payments to illegal aliens who under-cut legal wage-earners. Besides, with increasing automation, we need more people why exactly? As the third-most populous nation on earth, if the United States can’t fill its labor needs domestically, what are the odds importing Senegal, Somalia, and Honduras is going to fix that? As more workers are displaced, as those who are employed are not even paid a living wage, as an increasingly cognitively-intensive economy renders a growing portion of the population unemployable, what kind of future are we creating for ourselves? Do we even have one at this rate? And what of a morbidly obese population straining the resources of our beleaguered healthcare system past the breaking point? Does Adult Onset Diabetes Woke Pepsi-Cola have anything to say on the matter?

They do say that we should be “proud” of non-heteronormative sexualities/proclivities but not of our ancestors’ accomplishments. Smash the White male patriarchy but uncritically support an infinitely more repressive and regressive Islamic one. Be pro-globalist kleptocracy and function as the shock troops for the Establishment. Hasten your own civilization’s demise. Fetishize brown folks. On and on and circle the drain ever-downward.

The thing is, it is not just the relentless virtue-signaling of basically every major corporation that is at issue here; if homosexuality sells more Pepsi, then such a marketing tactic is obviously smart and profitable. The issue is the collusion both between the multinationals and the various tentacles of governmental bureaucracy and between the multi-nationals themselves in order to obliterate the age-old homelands of the Saxon and the Anglo-Saxon and the Egyptian Coptic Christian and the Syriac Christian. For those keeping score at home, despite the fact that Israel is almost entirely a “nation of immigrants,” and was illegitimately established in 1948, the Jews “have a right to a homeland,” but Britain, home to an uninterrupted genealogical line stretching back 12,000 years (and of which modern Britons owe approximately 80% of their genetic inheritance) and with a population still largely distributed along the same Anglo-Saxon kingdoms’ lines has always been multicultural. Egyptian and Syrian Muslims have carte blanche to rape and massacre the Christians in their own countries—and in ours. It is literal Nazism to support ICE, despite the fact that they work diligently to combat the now-$32 billion annual human trafficking business. Human trafficking in California is up 842% in the last decade. The cynic in me notes acidly the slave auctions in Libya, the slaughter of Christians in Syria, Egypt, and Nigeria, the White genocide in Rhodesia and South Africa, and eyes Progressivism, Inc. for its profit-margin-above-all ethos. To quote Peter Hitchens:

Globalization is all about wealth. It knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Without borders the world will become—is visibly becoming—a howling desert of traffic fumes, plastic, and concrete, where nowhere is home and the only language is money.

I would gladly forgo being able to purchase strawberries in December or pay an extra dollar for produce due to higher domestic wages than sign my country away, but the incessant propaganda of the foreskin-less globalists over at Rothschild rag The Economist and elsewhere would beg to differ—unless it pertains to a little New Jersey-sized apartheid state in the Middle East. Israel is so not racist that, as Steve Sailer informs:

Between 1984 and 1991, Israel achieved a public-relations coup by importing tens of thousands of Ethiopians who claimed to be Jews. Over the last decade, however, Israel has been taking direct action to limit its Black citizens’ fertility…Also unsurprisingly, the Ethiopians have proved increasingly less popular with their Israeli neighbors, who have come to view them and their children as backward and crime-prone. Whether that is due to White Israelis’ racism or to the Blacks’ shortcomings is a matter of dispute…Most interestingly, since 2008 there has been evidence of a widespread resolve within Israeli society to drive down the fertility of its Ethiopian minority through forcefully persuading poorly educated Black women into accepting injections of the Depo-Provera contraceptive…In Israel, Ethiopian women have said on camera that Israeli immigration officials told them that they wouldn’t be allowed into the country without taking Depo-Provera shots. They claim to have been subsequently browbeaten into staying on the contraceptive. One study found that Ethiopian women account for 57 percent of all Israel’s Depo-Provera prescriptions…In contrast to Israelis, who obsess over demographics, Americans are never allowed to think about how proposed policies such as amnesty and guest workers will impact fertility, even though the current interpretation of the 14th Amendment grants instant citizenship to any child born in the US.

We are all sharecroppers now; how many of us actually own homes and property outright, and how many are trapped in thirty-five-year mortgages or simply pay rent every month? How many commute an hour-plus to escape the blast radius of all of that diverse cultural enrichment? Do you know why the levees in New Orleans broke during Hurricane Katrina? Not because of some nefarious White plot, but because New Orleans became a chocolate city and the Blacks simply stopped maintaining them. It is as simple as that. En masse they simply cannot be trusted to be stewards of our—or any—civilization. Left to their own devices, they do not create Wakanda, they create Haiti. Nevertheless, the toxic combination of excess self-esteem and constant anti-White provocations convinces Blacks and Browns they should be afforded privileges well beyond what they deserve, and Social Justice eagerly provides the Kool-Aid. Surely global disparities are the product of some nefarious collusion by Whites to clandestinely oppress the global coloreds they’re presently concerned with giving their country away to, right?

The unthinking mob, which flits from Two Minute Hate to Two Minute Hate, is forever at the mercy of mass media and the state-controlled carrot-and-stick. It is almost in foment and is incapable of forming a frame of reference outside the Idiot Box, and the message is relentlessly anti-White and anti-Western. Demographic warfare is just one tool of the globalist social revolutionists. As Lothrop Stoddard wrote in The Revolt Against Civilization:

A fundamental quality of destructive criticism is its glorification of the primitive. Long before it elaborates specific revolutionary doctrines and methods, it blends with its condemnation of the present an idealization of what it conceives to have been the past.

Rousseau was especially guilty of this in his idealization of the Noble Savage. We can see in this glorification of the primitive the Luddite impulse animating the cult of “climate change,” though only for the West as rapid industrialization and environmental degradation in China and India passes without comment. China is busy colonizing the entire planet and we are hung up on kneecapping our economies for the sake of one-tenth of a degree Centigrade. Trust me, given China’s record on not just the environment but human rights as well, this is not a positive development. But sure, let’s keep focusing on the Russian red herring.

I love the way Mark Steyn excoriates the bizarre and megalomaniacal delusions of the Left—“We can’t enforce the border, but we can turn down the global thermostat!” Blissfully unaware that glacier growth and snowfall are rising in Antarctica, that the Mini Ice Age from 1350-1850 resulted in the high point of glaciation, roughly coinciding with the advent of photography, and that climate change has defined Planet Earth for the entirety of its existence. Glaciers in the Northern Hemisphere are in fact receding, but it is a natural process that is unclear how much of which is caused by increased carbon emissions. My guess is not much, but this is of course speculative. What is not is that Barack Obama’s misguided attempts to curtail carbon emissions cost this country 125,000 jobs and $1.5 trillion dollars; Justin Trudeau’s pursuit of similar policies and suffocating regulation is crippling the Canadian economy. Conservation is very clearly a Eurowestern value. A quick glance at the rest of the globe confirms this, but modern liberals go ballistic over carbon footprints and get wet for cost-ineffective “green energies” while simultaneously ignoring the sheer volume of pollution and the abominable damage done to the environment courtesy of non-Western countries. For example:

The twenty worst cities globally for air pollution are: Onitsha (Nigeria), Peshawar (Pakistan), Zabol (Iran), Rawalpindi (Pakistan), Kaduna (Nigeria), Aba (Nigeria), Riyadh (Saudi Arabia), Al Jubail (Saudi Arabia), Mazar-e Sharif (Afghanistan), Gwalior (India), Hamad Town (Bahrain), Allahabad (India), Shijiazhuang (China), Karachi (Pakistan), Dammam (Saudi Arabia), Umuahia (Nigeria), Raipur (India), Kabul (Afghanistan), Ma’ameer (Bahrain), and Bushehr (Iran).

The nations with the highest levels of air pollution are: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt, Bangladesh, Kuwait, Cameroon, United Arab Emirates, Nepal, India, and Libya.

The nations with the lowest levels of air pollution are: New Zealand, Brunei, Sweden, Australia, Canada, Finland, the United States, Iceland, Estonia, and Spain.

The top five nations with the highest carbon dioxide emissions per capita are: Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, and Trinidad and Tobago.

The nations with the most deaths from air pollution are: Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Egypt, China, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, India, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia.

The nations with the fewest deaths from air pollution are: Sweden, Australia, Brunei, New Zealand, Finland, Cameroon, Iceland, Norway, the United States, and Spain.

The twenty countries with the most polluted urban areas are: Pakistan, Qatar, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, United Arab Emirates, Mongolia, India, Bahrain, Nepal, Ghana, Jordan, China, Senegal, Turkey, Bulgaria, Mauritius, Peru, Serbia, and Iran.

The twenty countries with the least polluted urban areas are: Australia, Brunei, New Zealand, Estonia, Finland, Canada, Iceland, Sweden, Ireland, Liberia, Japan, Bhutan, Norway, Malta, Portugal, Spain, the United States, Monaco, Malaysia, and Luxembourg.

According to the World Health Organization data spanning from 2008-2016, eleven of the twelve worst cities in the world for mean concentration of particulate matter in the air were in India, with the other in Cameroon. The majority of the top three hundred cities were found in China alone.

95% of the plastic waste that is choking our oceans comes from just ten rivers, eight of which are in Asia, while the other two are in Africa; among the primary offenders are the Yangtze River (727 million pounds of plastic waste per year), the Xi, Dong, and Zhujiang Rivers (233 million pounds), and the Ganges River, (1.2 billion pounds). China produces by far the most plastic waste that winds up in the world’s oceans—a whopping thirty times more than the United States!

Lithuania, Latvia, Russia, and the United States have the strongest environmental democracy laws, whereas Belize, Cambodia, and Jordan have the worst.

Countries such as Laos, Vietnam, Burma, Mozambique, Zambia, Indonesia, Tanzania, and Thailand are doing very poorly in their efforts to protect endangered species, as evidenced on the World Wildlife Fund’s scorecard. The demand for exotic animal parts, such as rhinoceros horn, is primarily driven by the Asian market, especially in China.

According to Yale’s Environmental Performance Index, the top ten nations in the world for environmental stewardship and conservation are, in order: Finland, Iceland, Sweden, Denmark, Slovenia, Spain, Portugal, Estonia, Malta, and France. The bottom ten are: the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mozambique, Bangladesh, Mali, Chad, Afghanistan, Niger, Madagascar, Eritrea, and Somalia as the worst.

That whole global utopia without Whites? Try Ethiopia in 1984.

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republicstandard · 7 years ago

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Cleanliness Is Next to Godliness

The wisdom of the Ayatollah Khomeini:

“If they have intercourse with a cow and sheep and camel [the animals’] urine and dung becomes unclean and drinking their milk will also be unlawful and [the animals] must be killed and burned without delay, and the person who had intercourse with them must pay money to the owner. Further, if he had intercourse with any beast its milk becomes unlawful.”- Resaleh Towzih al-Masa’el, #2412

“A man can have sex with animals such as sheep, cows, camels and so on. However he should kill the animal after he has his orgasm. He should not sell the meat to the people in his own village, however selling the meat to the next door village should be fine.”-Tahrirolvasyleh, fourth volume, Darol Elm, Gom, Iran, 1990

“After urination, one must first wash the anus if it has been soiled by urine; then one must press three times with the middle finger at the base of the penis; then one must put his thumb on top of the penis and his index finger on the bottom and pull the skin forward three times as far as the circumcision ring; and after that three times squeeze the tip of the penis.”- Resaleh, #72

“There are eleven things which are impure: urine, excrement, sperm, bones, blood, dogs, pigs, non-Muslim men and women, wine, beer, and the sweat of the excrement-eating camel.”- Resaleh, #83

“Every part of the body of a non-Moslem individual is impure, even the hair on his hand and his body hair, his nails, and all the secretions of his body.”- Resaleh, #107

“Female prisoners who are virgins must be raped before execution to prevent them from entering heaven.”

This ain’t your daddy’s Europe. Trash-strewn streets in the City of Light, acid attacks on the Thames, cannibalism on the Tanaro—this is life in Europe now, nothing more than a re-creation of from whence the migrants came. Every single aspect of this civilization-deteriorating experiment has been some combination of ignorance, gross miscalculation, paralysis from apathy or fear, and something infinitely more sinister, the entire enterprise fraught with the most profound arrogance, illogic, greed, and often willful denial. As Douglas Murray puts it, human being are not figures in a math equation, and the notion that if you can somehow generate just the right proportions, you can create a post-racial, harmonious, globalist utopia is a heinous grotesquery that makes a mockery of existence itself. That Europe and the Western world more broadly should begin to regress to their changing mean is utterly unsurprising; that a Netherlands comprised of Turks and Moroccans or a UK comprised of Pakistanis and Nigerians should have a decidedly different “flavor” a tragic, transformative inevitability of what was first coined by Renaud Camus as “The Great Replacement.”

The West has proven willing to sacrifice even its most sacred cows in the interests of furthering “diversity”; when taboos against cannibalism are broken twice in Europe less than two weeks apart, when animals are raped in front of children at petting zoos, when pedophilia becomes normalized, and when our natural reaction of shock and disgust to all of this is condemned as “bigotry,” there can be no other conclusion than that the very fabric of our societies is disintegrating. By essentially recriminating our hard-wired response to these gross bodily violations and societal taboos, we are being asked to partake in an inversion of not just our culture and moral code in favor of the alien Other, but to deny our basic human instincts that this is wrong. Roger Giner-Sorolla and Pascale S. Russell make the useful distinction that:

With the recent upswing in research interest on the moral implications of disgust, there has been uncertainty about what kind of situations elicit moral disgust and whether disgust is a rational or irrational player in moral decision making. We first outline the benefits of distinguishing between bodily violations (e.g., sexual taboos, such as pedophilia and incest) and no-bodily violations (e.g., deception or betrayal) when examining moral disgust. We review findings from our lab and others’ showing that, although many existing studies do not control for anger when studying disgust, disgust at non-bodily violations is often associated with anger and hard to separate from it, while bodily violations more consistently predict disgust independently of anger. Building on this distinction, we present further empirical evidence that moral disgust, in the context of bodily violations, is a relatively primitively appraised moral emotion compared to others such as anger, and also that it is less flexible and less prone to external justifications.

The infantile notions of “hate” and xenophobia predicated on the idea that those opposed to wholesale demographic change are somehow small-minded and ignorant, and are irrationally raging against “progress,” is itself a simple-minded and ignorant reduction of something much more complex into a playground sense of morality. Art Markman states:

Studies suggest that there is a tight relationship between our sense of moral purity and the emotion of disgust. Violations of our sense of moral purity lead us to feel the emotion of disgust. When we experience the emotion of disgust, we also change our judgments of the moral purity of others… This view of disgust suggests that the emotion of disgust is strongly connected to our sense of morality. That is, when we feel disgust, we should also express feelings of moral outrage. And to counteract those emotions, we should increase our concern with purity.

If we perceive ourselves to have been wronged, or worse, violated, and our desire for redress is ignored if not outright condemned, the mechanisms of disgust and outrage—real outrage—will rightly find themselves in the embrace of righteous anger. If left unchecked, this increase in concern for purity can have momentous consequences. What starts as a very legitimate desire to maintain both purity and sanctity, if not properly channeled, can lead to the most extreme cases of violence and even genocide. I’ve no doubt many people on the Left are simply viewing both historical and contemporary events through an opposite prism, that is, essentially, “they know not what they do” (though clearly many of the so-called “elites” have a particular agenda), but the accelerating polarization between Left and Right, and the Left’s unwillingness to engage in dialogue, is producing rhetoric that is, and I mean this literally, genocidal. This is not emanating from the Right, the supposed home of the “Nazis,” but on the Left, where the global extermination of whites is viewed as the highest moral calling.

Of course I believe that the Right is in the right to want to not only preserve that which we hold dear and most sacred—family, nation, tradition, religion for some—but that we are morally justified in fighting back to reverse these trends of dissolution and dispossession. The collision course is set because I truly believe that the radical Left has passed the point where they no longer view us as equals but as both corrupted and de-humanized obstacles to attaining utopia. Our extermination, as buck-toothed, inbred hillbillies or backwards fossils of another era is morally justified in their view. Purity on the Right involves far “cleaner” distinctions such as male-female, right-wrong as opposed to relativism, or ethno-cultural-derived demarcations between nations; for the Left, it is moral purity that is of the utmost concern, and for us, their morality is alien and ugly. It luxuriates in its impurity, and that disgusts us.

People have always been divided, both in real, fundamental terms like race and sex, and in more socially-constructed terms such as taboos, dietary restrictions, and cultural customs. Tribalism is ingrained in our very nature, and we are being compelled to deny our nature by the Cult-Marx globalist utopians. Even that which is a product of culture is informed by biology, though there is in this current age the inclination to dismiss tradition as somehow antiquated, and thus of no use to us in the present day. As Jonathan Haidt writes:

If morality is about how we treat each other, then why did so many ancient texts devote so much space to rules about menstruation, who can eat what, and who can have sex with whom? There is no rational or health-related way to explain these laws. (Why are grasshoppers kosher but most locusts are not?) The emotion of disgust seemed to me like a more promising explanatory principle. The book of Leviticus makes a lot more sense when you think of ancient lawgivers first sorting everything into two categories: “disgusts me” (gay male sex, menstruation, pigs, swarming insects) and “disgusts me less” (gay female sex, urination, cows, grasshoppers).

Many of these religious prohibitions look absurd to us today, especially through the prisms of modern scientific knowledge and atheism, but Haidt is wrong—there were perfectly legitimate reasons for these decrees, even if they seem a bit obscure or strange. First, they helped define who the in-group was versus the out-group through specific practices that could be held in relief against surrounding tribes or societies; second, with an incomplete understanding of viruses, germs, and pathogens, ancient peoples could still make observations and practice deductive reasoning, and might rightly conclude certain foods and/or activities had a propensity to produce illness; and third, outsiders may well bring foreign pathogens with them that could decimate the tribal unit or local settlement that didn’t have a specific immunity.

We know, for example, that sodomy does carry an increased risk of certain STDs as opposed to vaginal intercourse, particularly due to both the exposure to fecal matter and the sensitivity of the anus to micro-tears, and given that most STDs are contracted from bodily fluid transmission, especially as it pertains to blood and semen, this makes a lot of sense; menstruation, though obviously not an illness, is often accompanied by mood changes, nausea, cramps, and dizziness, and so, coupled with the discharge of blood, might give ancient peoples the impression that there was something to this monthly occurrence that was either harmful or at least significant in ways they may not fully have understood.

Returning to Haidt’s list, there are many bacterial infections people may contract from swine, especially with limited knowledge of hygiene and none of bacteria. Per the South African Pork Producers’ Organisation:

If all the causes of foodborne disease are analysed, pigs and pork could theoretically be implicated in over 40% of cases. The CDC (Center for Disease Control) in 2003, found that in America, Salmonella caused 26% of all food poisoning cases. Salmonella is commonly found in the intestine of pigs. The other causes of foodborne disease that pigs might carry…are Clostridium perfringens (4%), E. coli (6%) and Campylobacter (4%). These last three are also common in the intestine of pigs.

Finally, pertaining to swarming insects, locusts (technically a kind of grasshopper) are notorious for wiping out crops and thus, in a far less technologically-advanced age and with no bug-resistant pesticides and GMOs, the ancients would be right to regard swarming insects with apprehension as locusts often were harbingers of famine. As noted by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO):

A swarm the size of Niarmay (Niger) or Bamako (Mali) eats the same amount of food in one day as half the respective country. A swarm the size of Paris eats the same amount of food in one day as the half population of France; the size of New York City eats in one day the same as everyone in New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey; the same size of San Francisco eats the same has half of California, the size of Sydney (Australia) eats the same amount of food in one day as Australia eats in 1.5 hours…There are 10 species of locusts but the Desert Locust is the most notorious (destructive). Found in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, they inhabit some 60 countries and can cover one-fifth of Earth’s land surface. Desert locust plagues may threaten the economic livelihood of one-tenth of the world’s humans.

Conversely, other grasshoppers can make for a decent snack, and though I know they are not the same thing, their crepuscular cricket cousins can be ground into a type of flour for baking. We need to be very careful of trying to impress our modern understanding and morality on to the past. That said, there are certain dangers in clinging too tightly to tradition, ranging from cultural ossification and the inability to adapt, evolve, or innovate, to lashing out in the most extraordinary violence at a world changing too quickly to be understood. Incidentally Islam checks all of these boxes, yet we foolishly compound the error of importing fundamentalist Muslims in the first place by further increasing their numbers via immigration, and they’re all too happy to reproduce well above replacement level while we fail to do the same.

Returning to the argument that biology is the primary driver of culture and thus civilization, I offer here an ancient example contrasted with a trio of modern ones. The first sewers were laid in Rome well over 2,000 years ago; Strabo, writing around the time of Christ stated:

The sewers, covered with a vault of tightly fitted stones, have room in some places for hay wagons to drive through them. And the quantity of water brought into the city by aqueducts is so great that rivers, as it were, flow through the city and the sewers; almost every house has water tanks, and service pipes, and plentiful streams of water.

In the year 100 AD, an early form of indoor plumbing was implemented by the Romans, and their waste and their potable drinking water from the aqueducts, several of which are still presently in operation over two thousand years later, never came into contact. Contrast this with modern-day Mozambique, where people are literally crushed to death by mountains of garbage; or Ghana, which loses almost $300 million a year due to the costs associated with poor sanitation and where 90% of human excreta ends up in the same rivers and lakes the country gets its drinking water from; or Port-au-Prince, Haiti, which has no sewer system at all to service its three million people. Still think all civilizations are created equal? And once again, who creates these civilizations? Is the “magic dirt” about which Steve Sailer joked responsible?

According to the World Bank, around one-seventh of the world’s population still defecates out in the open where the human waste often finds its way back into the water supply and the fecal bacteria spread disease. Listed here by percentage of the population still practicing “open defecation,” see if you notice a pattern:

Eritrea: 76%

Niger: 71%

Chad: 68%

South Sudan: 61%

Benin: 55%

Togo: 51%

Namibia: 50%

Burkina Faso: 48%

Madagascar: 44%

Liberia: 42%

According to the World Health Organization, 56% of deaths in sub-Saharan Africa are attributable to communicable diseases, many of which would be preventable with proper sanitation.

In 2010, Haiti suffered a severe cholera outbreak that killed around 10,000 people and sickened close to a million more; although according to the CDC the last cholera outbreak in the U.S. was over a century ago, countries like Malawi, Burundi, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zimbabwe, Sudan, Niger, Nigeria, Angola, Ethiopia, and Uganda have all wrestled with cholera outbreaks this decade. In 1994, over 12,000 people in what was then Zaire died from a cholera epidemic. Approximately half-a-million people have been afflicted with cholera in Yemen since 2016. Other countries that have had issues with cholera in the last few years include India, Pakistan, Cuba, Mexico, Malaysia, Iraq, Bangladesh, Namibia, Kenya, Liberia, Burkina Faso, and Cameroon. Britannica defines cholera as, “an intestinal disease that is the archetype of waterborne illnesses. It spreads by the fecal-oral route: infection spreads through a population when feces containing the bacterium contaminate water that is then ingested by individuals.” From NPR’s All Things Considered:

Public health authorities say cholera will stay in the environment for a long time, because Haiti has the worst sanitation in this hemisphere. It’s hard for Americans to imagine what this means. The cumulative sewage of 3 million people flows through open ditches. It mixes with ubiquitous piles of garbage…Follow pediatrician Vanessa Rouzier on a tour of a Port-au-Prince slum called Cite de Dieu—City of God—to get an idea of what it means to live in a city sans sanitation…We cross over a wide canal that cuts through the slum. The garbage-clogged channel brings sewage down from the hillside precincts of the capital. “So you can imagine that if human waste goes through there, and if it rains, [it] just really spills into the environment and ends up in the sea,” Rouzier says. She takes us down to a small, garbage-cluttered beach on the edge of the slum and points to a ramshackle structure perched on stilts over the water. Those who have seen the movie Slumdog Millionaire will know what it is — an outhouse. “If you live close by the water, you may use these over-the-sea hanging toilets during the daytime,” Rouzier says. “But at night you wouldn’t come out in the dark to use that. You would have a bowel movement in some sort of plastic bag and...throw it out during the day out here.”

As a woman, the primary reason you would not use the outhouse at night is that many women in the Third World, especially Africa, have expressed fears that using a public toilet alone, or even going to the bathroom in the bush privately, will result in their sexual assault, and the data support this fear. Numbers ranging from 20-50% of African women report having been sexually assaulted in the last year, with 40-70% reporting sexual abuse at some time in their lives. Ethiopia—never colonized by the West save a brief five-year Italian occupation—is particularly bad. Per Ejaz Khan:

Ethiopia is estimated to have one of the highest rates of violence against women in the world. A report by the UN found that nearly 60% of Ethiopian women were subjected to sexual violence. Rape is a very serious problem in Ethiopia. The country is infamous for the practice of marriage by abduction, with the prevalence of this practice in Ethiopia being one of the highest in the world. In many parts of Ethiopia, it is common for a man, working in coordination with his friends, to kidnap a girl or woman, sometimes using a horse to ease the escape. The abductor will then hide his intended bride and rape her until she becomes pregnant. Girls as young as eleven years old are reported to have been kidnapped for the purpose of marriage. Also the Ethiopian military has been accused of committing systematic rapes against civilians.

But it’s the West that suffers under the oppressive thumb of the Patriarchy, right? Ethiopia, by the way, is a perennial “leader” in the number of Diversity Lottery recipients the United States imports. Good stuff.

Now there’s something very crucial in all of this that people seem either unwilling or unable to deduce—these conditions don’t just happen. It isn’t by chance or some kind of miracle that certain societies produce landscapes that would more accurately be described as hellscapes, whereas others look clean and orderly, and where those societies produce spectacular architecture and lasting infrastructure. Each outcome is a by-product of its unique civilization, and civilizations are only as good as their people. You didn’t perchance see Japan or Iceland or New Zealand among the countries listed, did you? The troublesome intractability of biology is a thorn in every Leftist’s side, but they’re working to remove these thorns and fashion them into a crown before crucifying us for the otherwise unanswerable sins of inequality.

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