Our old friend fiend Roosh V — the erstwhile PUA who has renounced his old life and converted to Christianity — recently read a book. It’s called “Orthodoxy And The Religion Of The Future,” and it’s by some dude called Father Seraphim Rose.
The book — apparently really big in Russia, according to Roosh — is basically a warning against “New Age” and other allegedly demonic forms of spirituality and/or beliefs.
As Roosh puts it in his extended review,
The book offers a summary of all false religious phenomena that are helping to condemn souls in our modern times, such as New Age beliefs, mediumistic practices, “alien” sightings, and pseudo-demonic forms of church worship.
Wait, what’s that about aliens?
According to the good Father, whom Roosh quotes at great length,
UFO encounters are but a contemporary form of an occult phenomenon which has existed throughout the centuries. Men have abandoned Christianity and look for “saviours” from outer space, and therefore the phenomenon supplies images of spacecraft and space beings. …
It is clear that the manifestations of today’s flying saucers are quite within the “technology” of demons; indeed, nothing else can explain them as well. …
A couple of paper plates coated in silver paint and hanging off a string can explain them, too. Plus Photoshop.
UFOs are but the newest of the mediumistic techniques by which the devil gains initiates into his occult realm. They are a terrible sign that man has become susceptible to demonic influence as never before in the Christian era. In the 19th century it was usually necessary to seek out dark séance rooms in order to enter into contact with demons, but now one need only look into the sky …
We live near the end of this fearful age of demonic triumph and rejoicing, when the eerie “humanoids” (another of the masks of the demons) have become visible to thousands of people and by their absurd encounters take possession of the souls of those men from whom God’s grace has departed.
Dang, these demons aren’t messing around, huh?
Roosh again:
Orthodoxy has a credible and rational explanation for paranormal activity, and the definitive sign to me that alien sightings come from a place of evil is that the United States government is using them to distract the population from its horrible crimes through a drip-drop method of propaganda release that is keeping apostate Christians in heightened anticipation for some type of major alien encounter they think will be beneficial to mankind but which will really be used to control them just like all other Satanic schemes.
With that in mind, here’s a video that might cause Roosh’s head to explode. (You can skip the first minute or so if you’re in a hurry.)
Evidently there’s a lot of other demonic shit going around, according to Father S — watch out for Yoga and speaking in tongues! Roosh sums it all up with an appropriately apocalyptic conclusion:
This book is an excellent wake-up call for lapsed Christians, whether Orthodox or not. There are a lot of demonic traps out there and the sad reality is that most Christians are so oblivious to them that they open demonic doors thinking that it will bring them closer to the god of easy Christianity, who gives spiritual experiences from paltry spiritual labor.
Apparently Roosh wants to lower the minimum wage for “spiritual labor.”
And now we are arriving at the end of human history where a system of globalization is ready to welcome Antichrist, even if the human managers of this system don’t know exactly how they’re bringing it about. Whether consciously or not, world leaders will accelerate a mass persecution of Christians who would not accept Antichrist, and this persecution has already begun in germ stage.
I look forward to Roosh’s impending post on vaccines as the Mark of the Beast.
Who knows, maybe some of us will be alive when the Antichrist comes, but until then, I highly advise you to read Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future so you have a fighting chance to say no to the innumerable benefits that Satan will offer you to snatch away your salvation before the final moment.
Well, ok then. You want to set a date for that “final moment?” It would really help with planning.
Yeah, I didn’t think so.
By the way, here’s what the animated version of the graphic above looks like. Blingee is down and I’m still trying to figure out how to properly work the new site I’m using.
Follow me on Mastodon.
Send tips to dfutrelle at gmail dot com.
We Hunted the Mammoth relies on support from you, its readers, to survive. So please donate here if you can, or at David-Futrelle-1 on Venmo.
@Karalora,
My understanding from reading the History for Atheists blog on that subject is that the consensus from historians studying that timeframe is that Jesus very likely existed, as near as anyone can tell from this distance in time. Of course, telling the difference between what he really did vs. what the legends around him said he did is the fun part.
Which I suspect would be a major stumbling block for some of the more strident Biblical literalists, pro and con, of whether He existed. The gospels were never intended to be biographies as we understand the concept today, thus things in real life might not have gone down the way the Bible says they did. And that knowledge would cause the ‘pro’ side to enter Blue Screen of Death mode. (The ‘con’ version of that would be the knowledge that many of the things the Bible said Jesus did did happen and wasn’t a 100% work of fiction.)
@ karalora & redsilkphoenix
I find the Josephus extract quite plausible. Certainly in terms of how near contemporary historians viewed the issue. I think there’s definitely some later Christian interpolation; but applying all the usual literary and history analytical tools; especially the ‘criterion of embarrassment’ I suspect this is approximately the authentic kernal; and probably reflects all we can know about the historical Jesus.
[* Some people argue this is a Christian addition; but I think it’s probably original. A Christian would have said ‘was the Christ’ rather than just reporting what his followers claimed.]
I know there probably was a historical Jesus and I didn’t mean to give the impression that I thought otherwise. I also know that the historicity of Jesus means bupkis regarding the capital-T Truth of Christianity in general or any one sect of Christianity in particular (any more than the archaeological discovery of ancient Troy proves the existence of the Hellenic pantheon)…and I was referring to that subset of Christians who firmly believe otherwise and will therefore seize upon anything that they think “proves” it once and for all.
@ karalora
Oh yeah, I totally got where you were coming from. And like you say, both ‘the bible is literal’ and ‘there’s nowt true in the bible’ are wrong.
One big problem with using books like the bible as historical sources is that the distinction between fact and fiction wasn’t necessarily as clear cut back then. Heck, Livy and Pollio were well know for debating whether ‘history’ books should be merely factual or also inspirational. But contemporary readers of course knew that, and filtered their reading experience accordingly.
I do love all this though, and someone made a great analogy recently about Old Testament books. It was about how people would tell stories about the past but they were actually making a point about the current times.
He just said “M*A*S*H is set in the Korean War but it’s about the Vietnam War.”
Then all those OT books suddenly made sense.
Everyone knows that the last scion of Jesus is Linda Fiorentino.
@Buttercup: Correct, but IFO wouldn’t fit for the joke I wanted to make.
@hammerofglass: Good catch. That explains a lot. Guess Roosh is 50 years behind on his reading (among other things).
@Alan: Just like so many stories set in the future are about the present. The original Star Trek is set in the 2060s, but it’s about the 1960s.
The 2260s, actually.
@ Karalora, @Alan,
I’ve mentioned this blog recently a time or two (including in this thread), but if you haven’t already, you should check out the History for Atheists blog. The guy who runs It is an atheist who got sick and tired of all the bad history a lot of anti-theists kept throwing around to discredit Christianity and religion in general without using their vaunted rationally to see if it was really true. So he created the blog to counter that.
His series of posts on Jesus Mythicism (aka anti-theists who are dedicated to proving He was never anything but a third-century forgery for grifters to gain political power in the ancient world) blends pretty well into this discussion on the reality of Jesus.
https://historyforatheists.com/jesus-mythicism/
Also O’Neil’s Great Myths series and his examinations of the true origins of Christmas, Easter, and Halloween are worth reading too.
@ redsilkphoenix
Hey; thanks for that! Although that is just turning into another time-sink; and I have work to do! 😀
But I really love all this. It started back in school. We did RE ‘A’ Level (I passed, so I think I can genuinely refer to myself as a Biblical scholar). But one of the modules was about the synoptic gospels. It was the first time I’d encountered the idea of exploring the actual history of Christianity, and how the Bible came to be written. I got fascinated and read loads and loads on it all; and I’m still really into it today. Although now I can just watch the rather excellent videos from Useful Charts and Religion for Breakfast. Eh, kids today, don’t know they’ve been born.
Although I find the discussions about Jesus Christ’s historicity to be fascinating, and am not denying that Jesus Christ existed, I must caution readers that Tim O’Neill’s blog “History for Atheists” has attracted considerable criticism from another atheist amateur biblical scholar, Neil Godfrey, as you may read here: https://vridar.org/?s=%22history+for+atheists%22
Among several flaws in O’Neill’s claims, the following are noteworthy:
Fun fact:
This sort of not even compostable idea—which is nothing more than (what the Roman Church call) sola ecclesia writ large—is helping to drive a low level of Russian vaccine acceptance that is pissing-off Putin, normally a backer of any Traditionalist Orthodox nonsense that can boost his ratings.
Note that Robert Anton Wilson’s argument of the 1970s is similar, but does not require the belief that Ultimate Evil were responsible for the sorts of experiences that in another age would be accounted demonic or angelic but are now credited to aliens. He at least claimed to be agnostic as to whether there were definite object correlates to them, e.g. people really encountering real things or else these were just human perceptual glitches, but on the other hand he seemed to have a lot of trouble with usual restrictions on the meaning of the word ‘real’. (He was very keen on ‘reality tunnels’, but never used the term to refer to sceptics who provided alternate explanations to the ones proffered by [i.m.a.o.] obvious scam artists.)
That “caution” depends heavily on the credibility of that other “atheist amateur biblical scholar, Neil Godfrey”. Which is, unfortunately, minimal. Godfrey is a proponent of fringe ideas who makes a strange virtue out of rejecting consensus in favour of the obscure, the outdated and the marginal. He is also a master of nitpicking and pettifogging over minor points, usually based on studied misreadings of whoever he has decided to target.
Take this claim that I’m guilty of “ignoring the fact that multiple mainstream biblical scholars have said that there are strong parallels between the Gospels’ accounts of Jesus Christ and Josephus’s account of Jesus ben Ananias in favour of claiming incorrectly that such parallels are not significant”. Most of Godfrey’s readers wouldn’t bother actually reading what I said in the article Godfrey niggles over here. In it I quote the fringe Mythicist theorist Richard Carrier and am careful to specifically cite his book On the Historicity of Jesus, pp. 429-430. Given that Carrier has a footnote (p. 429, n. 85) noting the two scholars who have made similar points, Godfrey’s claim that I “[appear] not to be aware that Carrier was presenting a well-known observation among professional scholars” is clearly nonsense. Nowhere do I say that Carrier is the only person to have made something like this argument, I simply note his version of it because he is a Mythicist and Weeden and Evans aren’t. So Carrier’s version is the most relevant to the argument I’m critiquing.
Of course a couple of others have made the same point. Very few of Carrier’s arguments are original or new and the field of NT Studies is so old and so well ploughed that pretty much any possible line of argument has always been made by someone at some time. If I’d said this argument was unique to Carrier, Godfrey’s niggling over this tiny point would have some minor impact. But I don’t. So his nitpicking is just typical weak pettiness from Godfrey.
The other supposed examples in your “caution” are similar exercises in careful misreading of what I say, padded out with passive aggressive sneering. Godfrey takes himself immensely seriously and has a number of churning resentments against people who don’t. I’m just one of his regular targets. So perhaps you should be a bit more careful when citing people who are renowned for their nasty little vendettas against their critics and handle their rather weak criticisms with much more care.