Let's start from Christian assumptions, that sports and competition are part of the fullness of life, it completes the physical form and forms a united life that unites a team, linking the physical and emotional and the spiritual in a bond of love and pleasure. The rest of this essay is going to be devoted to deconstructing these assumptions
1. There is no equality in Football- Football is inherently about domination and submission, about assertion of the will to power over other bodies and mimetically over other social rivals. This can be demonstrated by listening to the language of sports, which often reveals more than people would spell out in an ethical context. “destroyed,” “cracked,” “smashed”- the common denominator is symbolic violence.
2. Football is a cover for lack. Football is merely a Band-Aid that covers over and reifies the tragic separation between opposing social groups that has cursed our world since it occurred. Far from team unifying, it’s rather transmuting each other while remaining separate and producing additional separate things, like a chemical reaction that produces new compounds while disappearing the ingredients that went into it. And worst of all, the hormones released during Football compels the participants to believe that they have established a genuine connection, like an opium addict forgetting their disgusting surroundings in a drug-induced haze.
3. All forms of love are opposed to each other: don’t fool yourself into thinking that the love of Football is somehow compatible with love of God, for this defies everything we know about love. Love is absolute loyalty to one thing, and thus completely contradicts and opposes love for anything else. Love for nation, love for Football and love for God are in absolute contradiction with each other. This is because love is truly a form of worship, and love of football is worship of certain ancient deities, some of whom are known as Hermes. This worship is absolutely incompatible with worship of the Platonic or Abrahamic One God. You have to choose!'
4. You’re feeding the archons- closely related to the last argument, but on a more occult level, is the realization that love of Football feeds the archons, powerful cosmic forces or persons which control Earth on the material level. As portrayed in Tracy Twyman’s Genuflect, these activities are a form of sacrifice that ends up feeding the forces that live off the energy of earth, and ultimately help them maintain the forms of control that work through facets of earthly life, which ensures that all humans are kept in a state of tragic subservience and isolation.
5. The myth of positive, healthy, or moral physical competition relies on a division between “degenerate” and normative sporting practices, but arguably this was blown apart by the revelations of Freudian psychoanalysis, in which it’s revealed that in sporting competition lies the foundation of sex. There is no non-sexual sport, and the division between moral and immoral forms of it is a false one.
6. Commercialization of Football proves that Football is evil- A lot of people have the intuition that the commercialization of Football has had negative, damaging effects, but commercial Football is merely filmed Football. Why does something become evil when it gets on camera, like some sort of moral version of the double slit experiment’s observer effect? Occam’s Razor suggests the property is inherent to the thing in itself.
7. Football teams aren't real- just to really hammer home the point that we can’t draw a distinction between degenerate and moral physical competition, I want you to consider the unstated assumption of the claim that “team” competition is different from other kinds. Why does a particular ritual cause an act to have a different inner essence than it had before? Why is it that the same act sometimes has a super secret evil inner essence and sometimes a super secret good inner essence? Does any of this make sense?
8. The Kingdom of God will be ushered in with the abolition of Football The unification of all things, the healing of the male-female divide, the end of gender. The cybernetic age is arguably the tunnel through which we will be pulled kicking and screaming into the new Aeon. Almost nothing will make it out the other side. Nothing attached that is. After Freud and Sade and Nietzsche, this entire system of bodily control turns towards finding immortality in the machines. St Paul, the first accelerationist, anticipated this when he said that the flesh is corrupt and that we must find something better.
Points 1 and 2 are observing real things, but it’s not the inherent nature of sexuality, but its *falleness.* Alas, everything else is fallen too. Misdirected human desire and the tendency to treat others as merely means rather than ends are evident everywhere we look, though it’s especially evident in places where our animal impulses run strongest. Still, “a cold, self-righteous prig may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute.”
Point 3 doesn’t really hold up when you extend the analogy. If having sex is worshipping Venus and going to war is worshipping Mars, we have hardly exhausted the pagan archetypes. You will have to concede that engaging in commerce is worshipping Mercury, sailing the ocean is worshipping Neptune, industry is worshipping Vulcan, and so forth. Pretty soon we will run out of human activities that don’t preclude worship of the one God.
From a Christian perspective, there’s a sense in which this is getting at something real: we do in fact engage in idolatry constantly and in many arenas. This is why God ultimately has to give God what God is due, which man cannot do unassisted.
Passing over the vintage Gnostic claims of point 4 for a moment, let’s consider what we can take from Freud: it’s not a literal empirical account of how humans universally develop. Psychology rejected that a long time ago. Instead it’s a modern myth that expresses something quite similar to the Biblical Fall in a secularized register: it shows us that as we come to social and moral awareness, we become aware of intractable conflicts between our deepest appetitive drives (which go far beyond sex, although sex is an expression of them; the “erotic” is not the “genital” in Freud) and our need to reconcile ourselves to the imposed limits of the world around us, and this causes a kind of crisis and psychic wound whose fallout we continue to deal with throughout life, even if we can more-or-less successfully transition to a mature and integrated relationship to our desires and other people. Repression takes the place of original sin in the psychoanalytic framework. The family serves as the ordinary site of the original psychic conflict, but this does not mean all sexual desire proceeds from a literal desire for incest. Again, this works best as a mythos, not a scientific hypothesis, but nothing about it implies that all sex is equally to be regarded as either meaningless or evil; indeed, Freud in his own atheistic way, shows us the profound and inescapable weight that our relationship to our bodies and to other people carries. Sex is not the only form of eroticism, but it is the most intense and most fraught because it combines our higher and lower natures: we encounter other people both as intensely desired objects and as other thinking and feeling subjects like ourselves.
Reconciling those two things is the tricky part, and Gnostics have always rejected it because they believe the material world of objects is to be despised as something that taints our real spiritual selves. There is a long tradition in the West that feeds that intuition, going back to Plato’s notion of rational souls “falling into bodies,” and even deeper to primal intuitions about bodily functions impairing contact with higher powers (this is one reason religions around the world have ritual cleansing practices, promote celibacy in certain contexts, and so on). But when this tendency is absolutized, it mistakes what human beings are. We are body-soul unities who are meant to live in a world of matter (the ultimate Christian eschatological hope is the *union* of heaven and earth in resurrected bodies, not simply escaping one world for another, and its ultimate image is of a marriage). The tension between the subject and the object in sex is not something we are meant to flee from in horror, but to wrestle with and master—or alternatively, sublimate into higher forms of desire of which sexual love at its best is the pale shadow.
Points 6 and 7 are more or less arguments from incredulity, and the incredulity comes from failing to appreciate the way this constitutive tension of sex works in a fallen world. Why is watching a film of sex worse than sex? Because it is a kind of sexual act on the part of the viewer that effaces the mutuality of the sexual encounter and the subjectivity of the other; even more completely than a selfish lay, it makes the other an object of consumption for the benefit of my physical sensation. It is a visual and physiological mockery of a real encounter with not simply another body but another consciousness, without any of the friction and difficulty and beauty of dealing with a real person. This is why even people who have no moral objection to porn per se recognize it as kind of pathetic. We know sex can be more than this, and it should be.
Marital love at its best (to move to your 7th point) recognizes that truth. Sex is not just about sex, both because it brings new persons into existence and because it engages the whole person. In practice, of course, marriage has a complicated relationship to cultural constructs like inheritance, property, demarcating family units, and so on, but those are downstream of the tremendous power and danger of sex that leads us to want to channel it in pro-social directions (though we have often done so in more-or-less unjust ways). Fundamentally, though, the moral question is whether the ways that we engage in sex are worthy of ourselves and of the other person as human beings. The context and intentionality around the physical act itself matters in that sense, and we can in fact do it in better or worse ways, even if never perfect.
We will never quite get rid of that “lack” this side of the Escathon. That is the human condition. But we are not ghosts in a piece of contemptible meat-clay. Our bodies are part of what make us, us. The Kingdom of God (or even, in a smaller way, happiness in this life) is not the pure rejection of flesh but its redemption. And anybody who has had a lover knows there are redeeming joys to be had in this broken world we inhabit.
"If an activity falls under a pagan god, then participating in that activity is worship of the pagan god, and is thus incompatible with worship of the true God"
You realize that there is a pagan god for absolutely everything? The Romans had a god of door hinges. Is it idolatrous to use doors?
It's pretty good. I think many of us have this intuition that the way we were meant to be was disembodied, pseudo-omniscient, immortal, discoverers of the secrets of reality. One wonders what we're meant to get up to in Heaven. I guess it could be pure bliss of a sensual, sexual, emotional variety... but another intuition that we have is that the happiness of discovering or relating true things to ourselves and others is a step higher on the step ladder.
The only part I don't get is the Archons part. I guess this is just a supercool branded term that makes someone's philosophy sound LARPier? I don't hasten to include such vague objects in my ontology because, if we're admitting "Archons" then why can't we admit The New Flesh that is created when I'm joined with my wife in marriage?
"Archon" just means ruler in greek. In gnostic systems it refers to demonic beings/gods who rule the material cosmos. They generally aim at keeping humanity ignorant of divine matters for the purposes of making themselves feel superior as well as keeping the cosmic order which benefits them running.
It sounds weird but it's important to keep in mind the original context where they would've been identified with traditional pagan gods.
If sex was evil then adam and eve wouldn't be able to have it in front of god in the garden of eden, though I like the contrarian nature of this article
Fine, let’s say you’re right that sexuality is evil in the Christian sense. So? What’s wrong with evil?
You’ve made no argument for why we should accept the traditional Christian conception of evil as a framework for living our lives. It’s funny that you mention Nietzsche because he would’ve had a field day with this post.
Strongly disagree. Using your pornographic argument, I agree that people have a gut reaction that porn is evil, and I agree that that indicates that porn is indeed evil.
People also have a gut reaction that sex is good. Particularily monogamous, loving sex. That indicates that sex is good.
Porn is evil because it is corrupted sex, quite similar to prostitution, porneia, sexual immorality.
If all sex was evil, why would our saviour even need two words to distinguish it? The existance of sexual sins implies that sex is inherently sinless.
One problem with the machine transhumanism at the end: angels are supposed to be made of fire, and burn and shine. Silicon (at least not the way we use it to make computers isn't compatible with that.
Why stop at sex? Love or "compulsory sociality" is evil because love is simply a way of subsidizing the capitalists. When you give money to a beggar on the street, you are simply covering for the capitalists who use unemployment as a tool of control. It is often the case that wealthy capitalists will donate to religion and the community. Perhaps religion and community are bad in the first place if the capitalists like them. In addition, parasocial relationships are no less evil than social relationships. Both friendship and a parasocial relationship to a streamer rely on an imagined connection to an unknown. In addition, many social norms of the community are backwards and harmful. In general, the community is no different than the state: it is a tool of the powerful to repress the less powerful. The problem with sex is not sex, the problem with sex is love.
Why Football is Evil:
Let's start from Christian assumptions, that sports and competition are part of the fullness of life, it completes the physical form and forms a united life that unites a team, linking the physical and emotional and the spiritual in a bond of love and pleasure. The rest of this essay is going to be devoted to deconstructing these assumptions
1. There is no equality in Football- Football is inherently about domination and submission, about assertion of the will to power over other bodies and mimetically over other social rivals. This can be demonstrated by listening to the language of sports, which often reveals more than people would spell out in an ethical context. “destroyed,” “cracked,” “smashed”- the common denominator is symbolic violence.
2. Football is a cover for lack. Football is merely a Band-Aid that covers over and reifies the tragic separation between opposing social groups that has cursed our world since it occurred. Far from team unifying, it’s rather transmuting each other while remaining separate and producing additional separate things, like a chemical reaction that produces new compounds while disappearing the ingredients that went into it. And worst of all, the hormones released during Football compels the participants to believe that they have established a genuine connection, like an opium addict forgetting their disgusting surroundings in a drug-induced haze.
3. All forms of love are opposed to each other: don’t fool yourself into thinking that the love of Football is somehow compatible with love of God, for this defies everything we know about love. Love is absolute loyalty to one thing, and thus completely contradicts and opposes love for anything else. Love for nation, love for Football and love for God are in absolute contradiction with each other. This is because love is truly a form of worship, and love of football is worship of certain ancient deities, some of whom are known as Hermes. This worship is absolutely incompatible with worship of the Platonic or Abrahamic One God. You have to choose!'
4. You’re feeding the archons- closely related to the last argument, but on a more occult level, is the realization that love of Football feeds the archons, powerful cosmic forces or persons which control Earth on the material level. As portrayed in Tracy Twyman’s Genuflect, these activities are a form of sacrifice that ends up feeding the forces that live off the energy of earth, and ultimately help them maintain the forms of control that work through facets of earthly life, which ensures that all humans are kept in a state of tragic subservience and isolation.
5. The myth of positive, healthy, or moral physical competition relies on a division between “degenerate” and normative sporting practices, but arguably this was blown apart by the revelations of Freudian psychoanalysis, in which it’s revealed that in sporting competition lies the foundation of sex. There is no non-sexual sport, and the division between moral and immoral forms of it is a false one.
6. Commercialization of Football proves that Football is evil- A lot of people have the intuition that the commercialization of Football has had negative, damaging effects, but commercial Football is merely filmed Football. Why does something become evil when it gets on camera, like some sort of moral version of the double slit experiment’s observer effect? Occam’s Razor suggests the property is inherent to the thing in itself.
7. Football teams aren't real- just to really hammer home the point that we can’t draw a distinction between degenerate and moral physical competition, I want you to consider the unstated assumption of the claim that “team” competition is different from other kinds. Why does a particular ritual cause an act to have a different inner essence than it had before? Why is it that the same act sometimes has a super secret evil inner essence and sometimes a super secret good inner essence? Does any of this make sense?
8. The Kingdom of God will be ushered in with the abolition of Football The unification of all things, the healing of the male-female divide, the end of gender. The cybernetic age is arguably the tunnel through which we will be pulled kicking and screaming into the new Aeon. Almost nothing will make it out the other side. Nothing attached that is. After Freud and Sade and Nietzsche, this entire system of bodily control turns towards finding immortality in the machines. St Paul, the first accelerationist, anticipated this when he said that the flesh is corrupt and that we must find something better.
I think this says way more about what you think Christianity is than about the ethics of football.
this is the most schizophrenic thing i’ve ever read
This is hilarious.
Points 1 and 2 are observing real things, but it’s not the inherent nature of sexuality, but its *falleness.* Alas, everything else is fallen too. Misdirected human desire and the tendency to treat others as merely means rather than ends are evident everywhere we look, though it’s especially evident in places where our animal impulses run strongest. Still, “a cold, self-righteous prig may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute.”
Point 3 doesn’t really hold up when you extend the analogy. If having sex is worshipping Venus and going to war is worshipping Mars, we have hardly exhausted the pagan archetypes. You will have to concede that engaging in commerce is worshipping Mercury, sailing the ocean is worshipping Neptune, industry is worshipping Vulcan, and so forth. Pretty soon we will run out of human activities that don’t preclude worship of the one God.
From a Christian perspective, there’s a sense in which this is getting at something real: we do in fact engage in idolatry constantly and in many arenas. This is why God ultimately has to give God what God is due, which man cannot do unassisted.
Passing over the vintage Gnostic claims of point 4 for a moment, let’s consider what we can take from Freud: it’s not a literal empirical account of how humans universally develop. Psychology rejected that a long time ago. Instead it’s a modern myth that expresses something quite similar to the Biblical Fall in a secularized register: it shows us that as we come to social and moral awareness, we become aware of intractable conflicts between our deepest appetitive drives (which go far beyond sex, although sex is an expression of them; the “erotic” is not the “genital” in Freud) and our need to reconcile ourselves to the imposed limits of the world around us, and this causes a kind of crisis and psychic wound whose fallout we continue to deal with throughout life, even if we can more-or-less successfully transition to a mature and integrated relationship to our desires and other people. Repression takes the place of original sin in the psychoanalytic framework. The family serves as the ordinary site of the original psychic conflict, but this does not mean all sexual desire proceeds from a literal desire for incest. Again, this works best as a mythos, not a scientific hypothesis, but nothing about it implies that all sex is equally to be regarded as either meaningless or evil; indeed, Freud in his own atheistic way, shows us the profound and inescapable weight that our relationship to our bodies and to other people carries. Sex is not the only form of eroticism, but it is the most intense and most fraught because it combines our higher and lower natures: we encounter other people both as intensely desired objects and as other thinking and feeling subjects like ourselves.
Reconciling those two things is the tricky part, and Gnostics have always rejected it because they believe the material world of objects is to be despised as something that taints our real spiritual selves. There is a long tradition in the West that feeds that intuition, going back to Plato’s notion of rational souls “falling into bodies,” and even deeper to primal intuitions about bodily functions impairing contact with higher powers (this is one reason religions around the world have ritual cleansing practices, promote celibacy in certain contexts, and so on). But when this tendency is absolutized, it mistakes what human beings are. We are body-soul unities who are meant to live in a world of matter (the ultimate Christian eschatological hope is the *union* of heaven and earth in resurrected bodies, not simply escaping one world for another, and its ultimate image is of a marriage). The tension between the subject and the object in sex is not something we are meant to flee from in horror, but to wrestle with and master—or alternatively, sublimate into higher forms of desire of which sexual love at its best is the pale shadow.
Points 6 and 7 are more or less arguments from incredulity, and the incredulity comes from failing to appreciate the way this constitutive tension of sex works in a fallen world. Why is watching a film of sex worse than sex? Because it is a kind of sexual act on the part of the viewer that effaces the mutuality of the sexual encounter and the subjectivity of the other; even more completely than a selfish lay, it makes the other an object of consumption for the benefit of my physical sensation. It is a visual and physiological mockery of a real encounter with not simply another body but another consciousness, without any of the friction and difficulty and beauty of dealing with a real person. This is why even people who have no moral objection to porn per se recognize it as kind of pathetic. We know sex can be more than this, and it should be.
Marital love at its best (to move to your 7th point) recognizes that truth. Sex is not just about sex, both because it brings new persons into existence and because it engages the whole person. In practice, of course, marriage has a complicated relationship to cultural constructs like inheritance, property, demarcating family units, and so on, but those are downstream of the tremendous power and danger of sex that leads us to want to channel it in pro-social directions (though we have often done so in more-or-less unjust ways). Fundamentally, though, the moral question is whether the ways that we engage in sex are worthy of ourselves and of the other person as human beings. The context and intentionality around the physical act itself matters in that sense, and we can in fact do it in better or worse ways, even if never perfect.
We will never quite get rid of that “lack” this side of the Escathon. That is the human condition. But we are not ghosts in a piece of contemptible meat-clay. Our bodies are part of what make us, us. The Kingdom of God (or even, in a smaller way, happiness in this life) is not the pure rejection of flesh but its redemption. And anybody who has had a lover knows there are redeeming joys to be had in this broken world we inhabit.
Some of these arguments could be polished to make something more convincing but in this state I can't say that about them.
to put it kindly, i think you would do well to spend more time with Lacan
"If an activity falls under a pagan god, then participating in that activity is worship of the pagan god, and is thus incompatible with worship of the true God"
You realize that there is a pagan god for absolutely everything? The Romans had a god of door hinges. Is it idolatrous to use doors?
Bring back the monasteries.
It's pretty good. I think many of us have this intuition that the way we were meant to be was disembodied, pseudo-omniscient, immortal, discoverers of the secrets of reality. One wonders what we're meant to get up to in Heaven. I guess it could be pure bliss of a sensual, sexual, emotional variety... but another intuition that we have is that the happiness of discovering or relating true things to ourselves and others is a step higher on the step ladder.
The only part I don't get is the Archons part. I guess this is just a supercool branded term that makes someone's philosophy sound LARPier? I don't hasten to include such vague objects in my ontology because, if we're admitting "Archons" then why can't we admit The New Flesh that is created when I'm joined with my wife in marriage?
"Archon" just means ruler in greek. In gnostic systems it refers to demonic beings/gods who rule the material cosmos. They generally aim at keeping humanity ignorant of divine matters for the purposes of making themselves feel superior as well as keeping the cosmic order which benefits them running.
It sounds weird but it's important to keep in mind the original context where they would've been identified with traditional pagan gods.
Going to ban you from my timeline as clickbait. Absolute trash
If sex was evil then adam and eve wouldn't be able to have it in front of god in the garden of eden, though I like the contrarian nature of this article
Fine, let’s say you’re right that sexuality is evil in the Christian sense. So? What’s wrong with evil?
You’ve made no argument for why we should accept the traditional Christian conception of evil as a framework for living our lives. It’s funny that you mention Nietzsche because he would’ve had a field day with this post.
Strongly disagree. Using your pornographic argument, I agree that people have a gut reaction that porn is evil, and I agree that that indicates that porn is indeed evil.
People also have a gut reaction that sex is good. Particularily monogamous, loving sex. That indicates that sex is good.
Porn is evil because it is corrupted sex, quite similar to prostitution, porneia, sexual immorality.
If all sex was evil, why would our saviour even need two words to distinguish it? The existance of sexual sins implies that sex is inherently sinless.
I assume this is rage bait?
One problem with the machine transhumanism at the end: angels are supposed to be made of fire, and burn and shine. Silicon (at least not the way we use it to make computers isn't compatible with that.
Why stop at sex? Love or "compulsory sociality" is evil because love is simply a way of subsidizing the capitalists. When you give money to a beggar on the street, you are simply covering for the capitalists who use unemployment as a tool of control. It is often the case that wealthy capitalists will donate to religion and the community. Perhaps religion and community are bad in the first place if the capitalists like them. In addition, parasocial relationships are no less evil than social relationships. Both friendship and a parasocial relationship to a streamer rely on an imagined connection to an unknown. In addition, many social norms of the community are backwards and harmful. In general, the community is no different than the state: it is a tool of the powerful to repress the less powerful. The problem with sex is not sex, the problem with sex is love.