Marler Youth of the Apocalypse

And the Last True Rebellion
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 979-8-3509-8829-1
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 188 Seiten

Reihe: Youth of the Apocalypse

This manifesto for the despairing children of the eleventh hour deals with the issues that are tearing apart the fabric of innocence: depression, anxiety, suicide, addiction, violence, and the broken home. The author takes the reader through a tour of the wasteland of modern life, offering a painfully honest appraisal of modern society, and ends with a path to healing and purpose. Released in 2024 on the 30th anniversary of the first edition, this new, updated second edition includes commentary on modern cyber, tech and media issues facing the youth of today.

Justin Marler is an American author and musician. He is known for leaving a burgeoning career as a musician to become a monk in an Eastern Orthodox monastery. During his seven-year stint as a monk, he founded the widely distributed zine titled Death to the World. The zine had a considerable impact on youth counterculture during the 1990s, which caught the attention of the mainstream press and quickly led to the release of Marler's first book, Youth of the Apoca-lypse. Marler currently lives in Texas with his family.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Marler, Justin

Leseproben

CHAPTER FOUR: APOSTASY GOD IS DEAD.... God has been dying in the hearts of men since the world began. As time moves on, the state of mankind gets worse. A history course is actually a course in the slow death of God. In the school of nihilism, it is a course in the destruction of the world. This is our inheritance as children of war. We were born under the waters of apostasy and were raised to drown, and our many tears are mixed with this ocean. When Cain murdered his brother Abel, this rain of apostasy began to fall. When the Egyptian Pharaoh enslaved a chosen people, their cry was heard at the bottom of the Red Sea. When the Greek philosopher Socrates voluntarily drank of the cup of death for the sake of truth, his words drowned in this poisonous sea. When Christ was crucified, His tears and blood outweighed this ocean. The emperor of what was known in the first century as the “whole of civilization” went mad and began to rage against those who sought and loved the truth. Emperor Nero played his harp as he watched his own people burn his capital of Rome at his secret command. Out on his balcony, watching the flames and listening to his people cry, he continued to play. At this moment even the waters of apostasy dried up and were changed into the flames of nihilism. The frightening part about this history lesson is that this song of insanity has been playing until now, but it has gone from the beauty of a harp to total discord and distortion. Nero’s song was the beginning of the decline of Western Civilization. Since then, the distortion was amplified by the division of East and West, when western civilization broke off from the East. Because of this discord, the western part of the world summoned the “dark ages,” followed by the Renaissance and its glorification of secularism. Man’s imperfect mind began to replace the dying God. Science replaced metaphysics; this world overshadowed heaven, and the war grew colder. Christ being taken down from the Cross before His burial. We have survived centuries of violence and are barely alive. We have lived through the philosophies of Voltaire and Rousseau, and witnessed the bloodshed of their philosophy in revolution. We have seen the old order of morality and tradition slain by their “new order.” We have experienced the ideas of Darwin and embraced this faith accepted by the masses; we have seen a glimpse of these ideas through the eyes of Karl Marx when, inspired by Darwin, he said, “The idea of God must be destroyed.” And Karl Marx’s son-in-law summed up the philosophy of the times when he said, “Darwin’s On the Origin of Species took away from God His role as creator in the organic world.” Lenin and Stalin were then given the keys to the “kingdom” of this world. Stalin was a student of theology when he heard of Darwin’s popular writings. He then came to the logical conclusion that people are the result of an evolutionary process in which ruthless competition reigns. This is the modern reality of “survival of the fittest.” With this philosophy Stalin slaughtered over 40 million of his own people with some of the most cruel forms of torture ever known. Just less than two thousand years after Nero played his song of destruction, twentieth century’s mad prophet and philosopher of nihilism, Friedrich Nietzsche, struck up the same song, stoking the same flame to burn even hotter. It was he who pronounced God “DOA” by his contempt of religion in general, and Christianity in particular. He’s the one who delivered the devastating blow to those who had a remaining shred of belief in God by proclaiming with utmost certainty, “God is Dead.” Nietzsche wanted to look life square in the eye, with no God to obstruct his vision, and what he saw was agonizing. Nietzsche’s writings and philosophy opened the gates of hell not only to the belief in the non-existence of truth, but with his ideas of nihilism he gave the long-awaited justification of unbridled violence and murder. At the beginning of the twentieth century, a certain man drew inspiration from what he read in Nietzsche and acted on it. This was Adolf Hitler. After reading Nietzsche’s philosophy that the inferior and the weak should be destroyed, Hitler personified the “superman” in his will for power and brought humanity to its knees. Like Nero he burned his own people in his “Holocaust,” introduced a second World War and fought mercilessly to be ruler of the world. When looking at the progress of the modern machine towards its end, one can see the writing on the walls in music. Being a popular expression of the people, music is like a litmus test for the state of a culture. Nietzsche’s message of nihilism and the death of truth had a curious impact on the famed modern German composer, Richard Wagner, who also was admired by Hitler. In these three pillars of modern destruction we see the philosopher, the ruler and the musician collaborate to de-inspire, to dismantle and to destroy. Even after the conclusion of World War II, Wagner’s Valkyries greet each other, ride, and sing their battle-cry. Once the atomic bomb was dropped the American dream exploded, and the military industrial complex got “more complex.” It was war that gave birth to the first “counter-cultures,” the first acceptable rebellions on a popular scale. This so-called new dream opened the moral floodgates for the Beat Generation, and Wagner’s raw rhythms gave birth to new styles of music that loosed the chains of self-restraint. But the cry in the progression of music got louder with the birth of rock ‘n’ roll, which gave us songs that searched for love and answers amidst an increasingly meaningless world. The message of the Beat Generation was taken to its conclusion in the 60s and 70s. It was at this time that the most popular band in the world, The Beatles, made the statement that summed up the spirit of the times: “We’re more popular than Jesus Christ.” Youth cried out for peace and freedom but, at this point, fragmented philosophy without self-restraint led to a culture of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. The sexual revolution gave birth to the untraceable array of fashions and movements that comprised popular culture from the 20th century up to today. This generation of youth, which includes all social groups, from the popular kids to the outcasts, are in search of identity but are stifled by apathy and the pursuit of pleasure. There are different styles and fashions, but all are wired together by two things: technology and nihilism. Addiction to, and reliance on, technology, combined with the philosophical underpinning of a nihilistic worldview has numbed and emptied our souls. It is killing us slowly and invisibly. It’s the MT generation (modern technology), which ironically sounds like “empty generation.” The unified philosophy of nihilism, that believes there is no truth and no purpose, runs deep in our veins. We are hardwired with this from our youth. Through technology, information overload, imagery desensitization, lack of philosophical inquiry, and the desire to do whatever “feels good,” nihilism is only natural. It is easy to adopt, as it requires no further inquiry about life and purpose. Once this became our philosophy we were free to be enslaved by pleasure, seduction, self-indulgence, and total narcissism. In a sense, we were subtly tricked into making ourselves into gods. Now, as time moves on, the confusion increases and the machine of nihilism gains speed, working harder and faster. The youth of today can’t help but be burned and scarred for life by this machine. There is no one to tell us that the fire burns; thus, we must learn the hard way and hope that we don’t die in the process. It’s too easy to say that we, the children of the modern age, are not affected by the history of nihilism, yet we sit in ashes: abandoned children in a wasteland of apostasy, lonely survivors of centuries of violence with no one to point in the direction of home, for all has been destroyed. Nietzsche, in a frightening way portrayed these godless times and defined the experience of the youth of today in his parable, “The Madman.” Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the marketplace and cried incessantly, “I’m looking for God, I’m looking for God!” As many of those who did not believe in God were standing together there, he excited considerable laughter. “Why, did he get lost?” said one. “Did he lose his way like a child?” said another. “Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? Or emigrated?” Thus, they yelled and laughed. The madman sprang into their midst and pierced them with his glances. “Whither is God?” he cried. “I shall tell you. We have killed him‚ you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun?...