Once more, after another long windy dissertation, the religious brainwashing brigadier, John Milbank, ends up with a distorted political and religious vision of humanity. In reality, humanity is only six times removed from worms and barely once removed from monkeys. God knows He does not exist. God is a bizarre figment of our imagination which is confused by our pain while our brain becomes like mashed spuds with the observation and comprehension power of zits. 

Here is a taste:

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The churches, and perhaps especially the Church of England, need to ask themselves just why they have become so often alienated from the populace at large, so little like folk religions? For now, if we are honest, we would have to say that the vox populi has to a degree, however distorted, spoken as the vox Dei, where the churches have failed to do so. It has named and politically shamed the double-headed liberalism that is through and through secular and quite clearly a rejection of our inherited Western Christian values which reach back past the enlightenment to Israel, Greece and Rome.

What we have to ask ourselves here is whether the excessively middle-class character of the Church sometimes conceals a compromise with the world that less fortunate people instinctively distrust and secretly despise. Too often the churches speak in the voice of pseudo-expertise and the idiom of the passing hour. But it is far more likely that if they cleaved more to mystery, to theological learning and authentic mystical piety rather than to bland, abstract nostrums, they would be able to translate this into liturgical, symbolic, festive terms to which people would respond emotionally and instinctively, and which could then re-infuse our entire culture from the local to the global level.

Equally, the churches need to be more directly involved in education, medicine, charitable work and locally just economic practices, if they are directly to demonstrate to people how the gospel transforms their lives in practice. Above all, the churches need to promote a mode of education at every level which re-links knowledge to the spiritual formation of character.

So in the end, populism is not just something for Christians to ponder. Rather we may have to see that a crude populism is an inevitably ugly or distorted religious reaction to a secularism that can never deliver the shared culture, the looking to heaven and aspiring to transcendence and salvation that all human beings, just as human beings, according to our theology, really desire at depth. Populism may be our problem, the consequence of our long-term failure, and something to which only the Church can truly offer a noble alternative.

John Milbank is Research Professor of Politics, Religion and Ethics at the University of Nottingham. His most recent book, written with Adrian Pabst, is The Politics of Virtue: Post-Liberalism and the Human Future.

 

read more: http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2017/02/16/4621192.htm


I would have to waste another three minutes demolishing Milbank's tortuously fiddled arguments one point at a time. Instead I will state that populism is not what he thinks it is — and that everyone, including me, is brainwashing (or trying to) other human creatures for either making a quick buck, for getting a cheap seat in a fictitious heaven or for increasing the natural understanding of whom we are — intelligent animals in a genuine humanitarian sputtering deficient democracy in need of improvements. I bat for the latter. All religions, wherever they’re coming from, have been the bane of humanity despite the charity and the self-floggings. Religions are not coming from Vox Dei nor from Vox Populi. They are coming from the cunning bastards (mostly men) who want to control the mind of people while collecting cash and women, while waging wars and dishing out punishment. Religions are coming from "Vox Reges", the voice of kings (queens included) and their popes. Here we have to refer to King Solomon, King David and other false prophets as well. All prophets are false by definition.
Religion is a neat way to place yourself at the top of the pile and claim “sovereignty” over the flock of sheep which you educate to stay at the bottom. This has been the trick from the beginning and the bible is full of this long-winded shit. As Lenin said way before Goebbels, “if you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth." 
So what is vox populi in politics?
Populism is a political doctrine that proposes that the common people are exploited by a privileged elite, and populism seeks to resolve this. Ah! The underlying ideology of populism can be any political colour, left, right, or centre  Populism is like a religion. Presently, populism appeals to the pain, the frustrations and the fear of ordinary folks who think that “democracy” is failing them and are promised “better" from con artists. Unfortunately, due to the law of widearse averages and lowest common denominators, there are more idiots on the planet of humanoid. Populism taps into this bountiful source of democratic grief. Without realising it, most of the idiots like me out-there don’t want to understand anything that could rock the boat beyond a few comforts and a bit cash under the pillow, that is not credit. Populism is the snake-oil used by the elites of whatever colour to change the decor of the room, while leaving the people roaming in philosophy-absent shitholes. Watch the TV. Stay armed with emotions like gogglebox idiots on a couch. Have a good cry and we will switch the channels for you so you don’t have to think.
The first easy tricks of populism are to manipulate all the aspects of human uncertainty, using traditions and religions that cultivate ignorance of the present, promote hatred of nature and the right to shoot anything that moves, with promises of a better future — tomorrow. I know it’s tautology but considering that “tomorrow never comes” you know what I mean. 
Religion has been “populism” by excellence. It was the main toilet-brush for our cavernous dunny we use for thinking. Since the advent of “secularism” in most western countries, secularism has been a fierce competitor to the religious voices. Religions hate this “godless” competition. Such competition is the devil’s work. 
Nonetheless our political systems should be secular, but then, the morons like Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have shuffled the cards as to attract the most loony of voters, including calling on the bigots, the gun-slingers, the dumbwits, the racists, the anti-racists, the fascists, the sexists, the pseudo-feminists, the latte chardonnay set, the completely nutsos and the bleeding hearts with no heads. Most people slurp a noodle soup of ignorance, served through fear and pain, while being promised the best of ever best to become much better.
You’re welcome, Voltaire.
Blaming others often becomes the centrepiece for the deceitful morons to maintaining power. We see it every day with Turnbull and Morisson still complaining that Joe Hockey left them with a black hole in the economy. Er, no… They really complain about the people before Joe but it’s basically the same lie and Joe was the pits of a treasurer under instruction from Abbott. In this environment, Vox Populi is like putty with no other reason to be used than as a justification for breaking windows to replace the windows. It keeps us busy. And the media is in on the loop. News of broken windows to be fixed become our daily fare of information. Our mind goes blank: we are saved by the putty.
This isn’t new. Even the Greeks and the Romans were aware of this vox populi capers back in antiquity. And things of course should change, but the strongest argument against change is that we, even we, fear to loose what we’ve got by sharing it better — all that loot that we have acquired by the deceit of "hard work”, for which we are lured through various means into prostitution, including religious prostitution. We only survive because we exchange carrots for potatoes in a capitalistic system that takes its slices and that really does not care whether we fail or not, as long as we pay the system as we go. We also “give" tax deductible religious indoctrination in this wonky cogworks. Unenlightement and mediocrity rule. Happy clappy rules. Mediocrity is happy. Mediocrity is easy street. Average Moronia is our suburb.
We can do better but the idiots are multiplying faster than we can “educate” them to the finery of altruism, understanding of humanism in order for them to develop freedom from dictums. But we have a problem: they love dictums. Dictums minimise the need for thinking. Dictums are godly.
So what should do? Create yet again a new “political” party?
The Humanist Party? A Social Democratic Party? The Democratic Party? The Wisdom Party? A Science and Arts Party? The Intelligent Party? The Acutus Party? The Populariat Party? The Courage Party? The No-Bullshit Party? The Party-Party? The Fools-on-the-Hill Party? The Progressive Party? The No-Greed Party? The New Party? The Nationalist Party? The Chi Party?...
All the good names have been taken, all polluted and corrupted. Look at One-Nation a term that has been bastardised with rubbish simpletonian ideas and selected ignorance. 
The "Liberal Party" is the same boat. In Australia, they are not liberal but full-blown CONservatives with not an ounce of progressive concepts that could help all people. These CONseratives cultivate the walled-in elitist garden plots while ALWAYS blaming the poor for the weeds. 
It’s possible that we may not need "another political party”. We could have an honest wolf in sheep's clothing to infiltrate the existing parties that are led by rabid dogs. We may need to replace our entire system of government with something that is really responsible to our place in this environment — a novel enlightened method of managing our societies while being responsible to nature and protective of our own fabricated cocoons with new improvements that don’t cost the earth. Easy?
We need expert guidance from scientists and engineers, philosophers and artists… with no bullshit, nor warmongering, no thieving, nor ego. May be we should call this new party: The Dream Party. Or the Dreamers Party. 
In the past, the king and his minions told us what we were: vermin and cannon fodder. They used the clergy to transmit this simple message in hellfire tones with promises of improvement in the thereafter. Die with a smile on your face, trooper or terrorist...
Following some social improvements due to the dissemination of information with the invention of the movable type in printing, the nobility, the clergy and the third estate (the people —we, the scums) "shared power” like one shares — hum — duties on a pyramid construction site. The pharaoh is still the chief. The king had the final say until his head got chopped off. This sad state of affairs has been replaced in various ways by more democratic systems.  For example, in England the power is decided by the nobility and the people, while the kingdom has diminished influences but still represents the clergy and the moral duty. In the US, the nobility has been replaced by aggressive enterprising rich men, the people have been replaced by fat crash-test dummies and the clergy allied with some media baron has a secret hold on who gets to govern amongst the loony rich. Him or Her?...
In Australia, it’s about the same as the US, except the unelected Queen is the President of the Republic of Australia, but with as much power as a push-on lawn-mower. 
Amongst all this, in order to maintain the flock of sheep deep in the bilges of the ship, the media, now using various amusing transmission means, promotes the idea that the people have a choice. This is the lie as promoted by the journos themselves who tell you in private that they don’t have an influence on whom we vote for. I would say to them that if this were the case, they should not bother being a journalist. Just show us pictures of scantily clad women and cats videos instead of this incessant political commentariat that bore us to tears and self-inflate journalists like ego-balloons. So in the end, we’re an educated bunch of wet shawn sheep with the power to fart sideways, left or right, when we’re asked to. 
The press on the left is non existent except in unseen little pockets of insignificant resistance while the “independent-always” media leans to the right-always and the right-wing media is the spiritual guide to Ghengis Khan. Hail Hitler. 
In the settled modern world of well-defined countries under the United Nation conventions, there is a two speed level of rape and pillage. 
First, this translates as hammer the local poor in their last bastion of negative comfort, Centrelink, while the rich get more concession of a very generous tax scale in which negative gearing is a given for them to accumulate more loot while the poor struggle to buy two oranges. 
Second, destroy countries that are doing well in the Middle East, except the Saudis. Here this rape and pillage is designed to make sure oil is traded in dollars, not troubled roubles. Under the umbrella of righteousness, the deeds of destruction are performed like gang rape by NATO led by Zandar disguised as G. I. Joe, the populist hero...
And the media think that either the poor are bludgers who don’t want to work so we had to replace them with robots in China, or that it is an outrage that a robot is so faulty as to only penalise some poor people, not all the poor sods who deserve a public flogging for being poor and draining this glorious nation of valuable cash, while the rich politicians who devised the machine deserve choppers and first class with the benefit of the doubt as travel companion.
So populism is what it’s cracked up to be. A way to sell second-hand faulty goods to the gullible public. Nothing new. No need to harp on the religious values being debased by populism. Religious dictums have been the ultimate format of populism. It’s even in the title of the leader, the pope. It’s the same with the Islam extremists who rely on sadist sharia to commit the vilest of atrocities in their new populist push.

Gus Leonisky
Your local populism expert...