Christianity teaches that you cannot do it on your own. Only with God can you be right. The believer does not belong to himself. He is a means to an ends. This is the degeneration of the self, and of personal strength. It is the lie that you cannot achieve without the presence of an almighty being, that you cannot escape addiction without a surrogate addiction to a higher power, that a human is not valuable purely of themselves.
"Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own."
1 Corinthians 6:19
"This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him."
1 John 4:9
The Christian is urged to not be a supple and living vital body, but to treat the body as nothing but a house for a religious idea. Degeneration of the self easily turns to degeneration of the body:
"Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires."
Galatians 5:24
Many religions denigrate the body, in preference for an idea called "spirit." This is in fact the worst excess of the brain, thinking that it can escape the body, but a human is an embodied organism; we cannot escape the body, and the sensation of having a body. The body dictates our sense of space and pervades our metaphors. To deny it is to deny ourselves.
What does Jesus say about this spirit? Blessed are those who are poor in it! (Matthew 5:3)
Those in a state of spiritual poverty, the empty, those without hope... shall inherit the kingdom of heaven.
Even this spirit is degenerate! Those who are spiritually healthy are not blessed, but those who are suffering in spirit.
Jesus also teaches that the meek are blessed. The bold and the uninhibited will not inherit the Earth. Not those who can speak their minds. Only the enfeebled.
Jesus has more to say on inhibition. Woe to anyone who is not inhibited enough!
"But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell."
Matthew 5:28
The Christ teaches a degeneration of the natural sexual impulse. The vitality of sex is negated. And it is better that your physical powers be degraded, to the extent that your body be mutilated, than for you to feel this natural impulse!
This idea that finds it first expression in the fable of conception without sex is fully realised in horrible life-hating goriness in Matthew 5:28.
If you have any vitality left, you are not to utilize it:
"But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles.
Matthew 5:39
You should act as if you are powerless. A virtue that we admire greatly, that finds expression in nearly every film we watch or book we read, resistance against evil, which we call heroism, is according to the Christ a vice. Jesus would have us put out bunting for the Nazis and welcome them in to the Whitehouse.
This passivity, this assumed powerlessness, is not enough. A believer must regress to childhood. A degeneration of all adult vitality, to the enfeebled state.
"And he said: "Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me."
Matthew 18:3
The faithful should,
"Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation, now that you have tasted that the Lord is good"
1 Peter 2:2-3
Even more so than babies, there is no real milk but the idea of milk!
Christianity wants nothing less than the negation of wisdom and learning:
"I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children."
Matthew 11:25
Only a degenerate philosophy could offer its truth only to children and deny it to the educated.
Simply subscription to this philosophy guarantees knowledge of truth and falsehood! No need for reason:
"We are from God, and whoever knows God listens to us; but whoever is not from God does not listen to us. This is how we recognize the Spirit of truth and the spirit of falsehood."
1 John 4:6
Thus Christianity promotes the degeneration of our reasoning powers. This leads in turn to degeneration of the will, the acceptance of slavery. Romans 6:15-22 espouses that all is slavery, and the only hope is slavery to God. See also 1 Peter 2:16.
As childlike slaves, we can never be fully responsible for our actions.
"As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do?this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it"
Romans 7:17-20
Rather than to the strength to own his own actions, the believer is directed to his own weakness. He is told, sin can be taken from you: the consequences of your actions can be escaped from. In reality your actions are set in history and reverberate inexorably through the present towards the future. But the believer is divorced from his actions. Sin made him do it. He is told he has hope of being washed clean of his own actions. This is the degeneration of responsibility.
In fact the believer is encouraged not just to disown his own actions, but to disown everything. Family, possessions, the world itself are to be given up. Jesus is the ultimate embodiment of divorce from the world. To the perceptive Nietzsche,
"in [Jesus'] sight everything else, the whole of reality, all nature, even language, has significance only as sign, as allegory."[1]
This is the degeneration of our vital relationship with the world.
"Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them. 16 For everything in the world?the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life?comes not from the Father but from the world."
1 John 2:15-16
For Paul, the ultimate degeneration, the negation of everything:
"But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things?and the things that are not?to nullify the things that are.?
1 Corinthians 1:27-28
The Christianity of the NT is a philosophy that turns everything on its head, so that the weak and the foolish and the despised are the things of virtue, and ultimately everything is nullified.
[1] FW Nietzsche, The Antichrist, Trans HL Mencken, New York, Alfred Knopf.
http://www.gutenberg.org...
Source: http://www.debate.org/debates/At-its-core-Christianity-is-a-philosophy-of-degeneration/1/
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