Originally a Twitter thread made in response to the latest round of Christians gloating over their saint Boniface:
Regardless of how much we’re told that ‘technically speaking’ Christian theology imbibes the world with the image of God, the attitudes Christianity gestates in its followers have always been against the world. It’s evidence the spirit of the religion contradicts its theory.
Of course, the response is to quote this saint, to refer to that theologian. The issue is that religion is much more than just the authorised view, it gestates in the soul a “feeling” derived from the religion’s spiritual zeitgeist which transcends theology and doctrine.
Repeatedly in Christianity’s history we see the zeitgeist’s draw of its followers towards a despondency against the world. In spite of the Church affirming the world’s goodness, the soul resents the world as an ungodly materiality that has been doomed by its corruption in sin.
Regularly Boniface is brought up as a stab at pagans, celebrating the saint’s cutting of a sacred tree. But the act itself and its celebration betrays Christianity’s world-hating and dualistic zeitgeist. It is an act of iconoclasm against the very world itself.
Ancient Europeans held certain natural places to be sacred because, in proper accord with their religious zeitgeist, the natural world itself was brimming with the goodness of divinity. It was anathematic to despoil these sacred places, to do so being symbolic of hating the gods.
This wasn’t because they believed the physical place itself to be a god or gods, but because they recognised such places closely adhered with the gods, a place of exceptional resonation with divinity within nature.
It is only in the severity of their love for the deities who pour forth their beauty and their goodness into the world that they sought to revere as sacred nature’s most ancient things and its most beautiful locales. Not a deluded idolatry, but a veritable love for the highest.
European religions lacked the pervasive doctrinal structures of the Christian church, and so reverence for the world as a goodness imaged from higher divinity did not come from saints or theologians, but from the spiritual zeitgeist of European religions.
It was in the proper European religious spirit that they were driven to the love of divine goodness, to the worship of the gods and the highest divinity, and to hold sacred all the natural beauty that emanates from the heavens.
Any iconoclasm against the world is necessarily to hate an image of divinity, and by hating the image, you hate the imaged. The Christian zeitgeist drives them against all the images of divinity, which truthfully is itself part of a broader Abrahamic zeitgeist.
The residual love for the natural world that remained trace in European Christianity can only be attributed to the trace of the European soul which is always drawn throughout the centuries back to the true gods Europe had abandoned.
But always, in spite of every doctrine and creed and word said to the otherwise, the Christian zeitgeist has only ever drawn souls toward dualistic contempt for our world and everything within it. Its ultimate end is the world’s total dissolution, which they even admit be true.
Apotheism 