When your in-group is an ideology, not a folk.

Teleology is not something that folkish pagans really think about one way or another, but there are good reasons to reject it.

Folkishness is an immanentist worldview. It sees the specific, the embodied, and the historical as the final source of good and truth. Folkishness is a this-worldly outlook. Teleology doesn't seem to be opposed to any of this at first glance.

Teleology is the idea that morality is about ends, and ends are inherent in nature. It's just baked into the idea of a watch (it's the end or telos of a watch) that it be portable, tell the time, etc. and you can measure a thing's goodness by whether it furthers its end, or telos. Teleology says that everything in reality has a telos. Again, nothing anti-folkish on the surface.

The problem is that an end implies a goal, a goal implies an intention, and intention implies a mind. If everything in reality has an end, this means that it embodies an intention, and thus a mind. So as soon as we admit that everything in reality has a telos, we admit that there exists a transcendent mind that imparts its telos. The burden of teleology is that to believe in teleology is to be an idealist. Idealism implies a transcendent mind—all reality is basically a simulation, thought within the mind of a transcendent creator god.

This is all anti-folkish through and through. So if you're a folkish pagan, think twice about teleology. You don't need it to account for any feature of the world, and to believe it is to open the door for some very bad things.

@folkishworldview

We critique Christianity pretty hard around here but this is different than critiquing Christians. Despite their views, many Christians were admirable, especially our ancestors who simply had no idea what paganism is. Today anti-paganism is much harder to justify, at least if you're identitarian.

Conversion is much more recent than people think, considering that most of your ancestors were not elites who converted first and for political purposes, but rather ordinary people who maintained pagan practices for a long time. It's significant that for half the time Europeans were Christianized they could not actually read what was in the Bible.

The process of digesting Christianity took a long time after nominal "conversion". Even today we still have not completely digested it. When you do digest it though, it looks like anti-tradition, individualism, anti-authoritarianism, contrarianism, and atheism. Most of the things that right wingers tend to appreciate about Christendom are either unrelated to Christian doctrine or are actively opposed to it. This is why many Christians were admirable: they believed as folkish pagans did, and simply slapped a Jesus sticker over it.

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Christianity has outgrown Europe.

Most based Christians aren't Christian because they love Jesus, but because they love Europe. For them Christianity is the cathedrals, the Crusades, feudalism, all the things that are just Europe. Based Christians don't worship Jesus, they worship white people. This is why they say "Europe was always synonymous with Christendom". But that was a long time ago.

In the days of Aquinas it was possible for Christianity to be essentially synonymous with whiteness. The religion was a kind of ethnic strategy. This is what the Crusades, the Reconquista, repelling the Mongol hordes was all about.

But Christianity has long ago outgrown Europe. It had to. It's universalist. It's for everyone.

Now Christianity is mainly the religion of brown people. The only way it could have become anything else was to fail in its mission. Christianity has its own interests separate from Europeans. We were only a stepping stone for Jesus.

Folkish pagan religions are different. They're by definition only for us. Paganism and Europeans stand and fall together. And the fact that folkish paganism is roaring back to life after thousands of years, is the best sign that Europeans are again favoured by the divine. Folkishness is the future.

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Platonism is the idea that the invisible is more real than the visible. This seems to agree superficially with science, although ultimately science is an inferential and empirical practice, the opposite of Platonism. But the attempt at scientism is significant.

Platonism is atheism in a toga. Platonists don't believe that the gods exist, so they retrofit the intuitive idea of existence (something very much here and now) to conform to abstraction. "Well ACKSHUALLY the MOST real things are ABSTRACT OBJECTS."

It's an attempt to rescue theism while denying that the gods could inhabit, impinge on, or even have any relationship to, everyday reality. Platonists pound the divinity peg into the atheism hole, then wonder why their "theology" got repurposed by their enemies, who have now surrendered to exactly the same problem as they did: their theology being a thinly veiled atheism.

It's really encouraging that bad ideas are slowly starting to be pushed out of paganism. This is what Christians fear the most: sincere belief in the old gods.

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Christians lean on the idea of the "common good" quite a lot. The common good is of course a good thing.

But the Christians have an odd view of it which tends toward natural law, and natural law was used to break down traditional ideas of kingship and hierarchy. As early as Aquinas, Christian theologians spoke of the "communis utilitas" as prevailing over the traditional and ancient. Far from being based and trad, you can see in Christian theology of the middle ages a strain of progressivism and utilitarianism. Over time this would develop into liberalism.

Natural law is not based. It is not trad. And it is certainly not folkish. Natural law is the thin end of a wedge that destroys tradition and turns it into the worst kind of modernity.

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It stands as a confirmation of folkishness that even its enemies have to appeal to it in order to refute it.

It's basic to folkishness that the original tradition is right, simply by dint of it being the original. Any scholar will tell you that the oldest form of pagan religion is tribal, orthopraxic, unsystematic, and pre-metaphysical. Platonists, Christians, perennialists, and others will tell you that no, the earliest religions looked like themselves. They'll say that really it's Platonism, Christianity etc. that's original, basing this on a schizoid history that no serious student of anthropology or theology would admit for a moment.

The enemies of folkishness might say that the High One can be questioned, but even unconsciously, they understand that aboriginality has power and that to claim it means to be beyond question.

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Why did Christians historically favor Neoplatonism?

What place does Neoplatonism have in Germanic Paganism?

Paganism is growing faster than any other religion globally, it's great to see our native religions coming back.

Some parts of paganism are growing faster than others. Some are even shrinking like Platonism and the "Traditionalist" school of Guenon and others. Folkish paganism is growing the fastest by far.

One other non-Abrahamic religion that's growing quickly in the West is Buddhism. Buddhists frame it as an Aryan religion of the warrior spirit turned inward, but it's not at all like that. Aryan religion prays to the gods for wealth and many sons. Buddhism wants to extinguish desire and stop being reborn. Aryan religion aims to crush its enemies by the might of the gods. Buddhism is sick to death about suffering. Aryan religion is mostly about cult and ritual. Buddhism is about learning truths. Buddhism could not be more un-Aryan in spirit.

Eventually folkish paganism and Buddhism will come into conflict because they're totally incompatible. But folkishness is the future for our people, not a foreign religion.

@folkishworldview

Thou, Nature, art my goddess. To thy law
My services are bound. Wherefore should I
Stand in the plague of custom, and permit
The curiosity of nations to deprive me
For that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines
Lag of a brother? why “bastard”? Wherefore “base,”
When my dimensions are as well compact,
My mind as generous and my shape as true
As honest madam’s issue?

In Shakespeare's King Lear, Edmund (the illegitimate son of Gloucester) praises nature as "his goddess". He places her above "the plague of custom", that is, tradition. He does this because he is a bastard, because he hates all that has lineage and right and legitimacy.

Natural law is though of as really based by pagans. But when you look at natural law and how it has been used historically, you see that it has almost always been used against tradition, against custom, against paganism.

We pagans of course venerate nature. But beware of anyone who tells you that your oldest and deepest traditions must answer to natural law. What they mean by natural law is almost always something sui generis, sprung from nothing. It has no lineage, no history, no authority. Not unlike Edmund.

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