Christianity has added zero value in my life since my birth and I wanted to abandon it but realized that Atheism is a dead end. I studied Judaism for 15 years and even thought of converting until I stumbled upon Gnosticism about 10 years ago. Gnosticism appealed to me, and I studied it whereupon I realized that Kabbalah (which I was then studying) was nothing but Jewish Gnosticism – or a Gnostic commentary on the Torah – laid upon a substratum of Neoplatonism and non-Platonic Greek-inspired mysticism such as isopsephy. This realization compelled me to find out which of these two emerged first, Gnosticism or Judaism. As it turned out, study uncovers uncomfortable facts.
Before mentioning these uncomfortable facts, it is best to find out why Christianity is losing its appeal today.
Christianity is Losing its Appeal in the West
“As you may know, many young conservatives have left Christianity. Although I was raised Catholic, I too am leaving Catholicism, as I believe it is no longer a healthy religion…The Church has become the number one enemy of Western Civilization. Soon the only people left in Christianity will be third-world immigrants and a handful of self-hating whites” quotes Matthew Rose in his introduction to the article The Anti-Christian Alt-Right: The Perverse Thought of Right-Wing Identity Politics. Rose associated this phenomenon of ideologically-motivated apostasy from Christianity with the new political ideology that has been christened the alt-right.
As Rose concedes, this is a grassroots movement of the people silenced by a left-wing establishment. The internet provided these silenced people with a platform to meet anonymously and network, which explains why this leaderless decentralized movement was able to gain over 10 million adherents and a modicum of political power without any political representation, financial backing, real life institution, or official media representation. When this movement moved out of the cybersphere into the real-life political space in America, it was Hillary Clinton who attempted to discredit it in August 2016 when she described it as a movement based on “race-baiting ideas. Anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant ideas, anti-woman (ideas)”. Still, the movement survived and even played a part in helping Donald Trump win the 2016 elections.
To matters of religion, is this movement really opposed to Christianity?
The alt-right movement was not created principally to oppose Christianity. In fact, the author of the quote above states that he is disillusioned with Christianity because Christianity “is no longer a healthy religion”. This is a debatable opinion. What I categorically disagree with is the opinion that Christianity or the Church is “the number one enemy of Western Civilization”. This idea that Christianity is bad for Western Civilization, which for the alt-right means Western European people and their descendants can be traced to the cynical German Atheism movement whose vocal advocate was the philosopher of pessimism and lover of Upanishads, Arthur Schopenhauer.
Schopenhauer deeply distrusted people and felt that he was overlooked by his peers, and this led him to resent popular philosophers of his time, especially Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel whom Schopenhauer resentfully described as a “charlatan”. When his lecture at the University of Berlin resulted in a very low student turnout, Schopenhauer’s distrust of academia grew and he came to distrust academicians, though he still revered Immanuel Kant. Nonetheless, this did not stop him from using the academic method to investigate reality and then publish his thoughts in a near-academic tone in The World as Will and Representation (1818). Ironically, this work went on to deeply inspire Alphonse Louis Constant whose thoughts led to the French Occult Revival. Constant was a French occultist who adopted the name Eliphas Levi Zahed, and published his greatest book – Dogma and Ritual of High Magic (1856) – under this assumed name.
