Bas Ruten, The Exorcist, and the Holy Rollers
From: Samuel Finlay
James,
Thanks for the feedback. I've been chewing on this some more while reading and going through apologetics videos and came across
this one by a Dr. Taylor Marshall who is a convert. In it, him and a buddy who are into BJJ challenge the "Is UFC/MMA Immoral" thing which apparently got kicked off a while back by a guy named Fr. Mike: on
Why MMA Strips Human Dignity.
In a later episode, Dr. Marshall and his friend focus a lot on the fact that BJJ is "regulated," which I get, but I think side-steps the issue. After all, I've been in whorehouses that were regulated. Likewise, in the comments (which are noteworthy as to the nature of this debate), he makes the point that while Boxing can cause neurological damage due to trauma to the head, BJJ is based on submissions. However, I think that misses the point also: (There's another video where they get into it also, but I'm not finished with it. So far,
I think they get warmer here.)
Frankly, I think the ultimate legitimizing factor in all this is honor. Combatants are engaging in violence. Let's not mince words. They are seeking to inflict and endure pain. However, what I think the detractors fail to understand is that there is a meaning to it. Those guys are trying to get to a place - that place where the words don't go - and they can't get there by Frisbee Golf, and they can't get there alone. They need the threat of death, even if it's the merest unspoken shadow of it, and the indisputable, brute fact of pain (whether physical or physiological) that comes from violence. In risking themselves against that, they strive to use the experience to transcend their flesh, rather than be its slave. Their fear is transformed into courage, their exhaustion becomes endurance, their pain becomes glory. Even failure can become a victory (whether as a moral one or in imparting an important lesson), and even bloodlust can find its redemption in temperance and mercy for a fallen foe.
In scanning the comments I saw a lady who rolls in BJJ and sees the merit in it. She mentions Bas Ruten is Catholic and that he wrote an article about it. I can't find it so far, but I did see
this one of a guy interviewing him. Like the one by Podles in my last, I think it's worth a read.
Bas comes across as a guy who's genuinely devout and humble, and there's a lot that's encouraging there. Seems like a neat guy to know. One of the things that jumped out at me was he mentions how Fr. Chad Ripperger made an impression on him (which is a conversation I'd have paid money to hear). I came across his stuff while down with a stomach bug about a year ago and was binge-watching YouTube videos to pass the time. Fr. Ripperger is an exorcist, and though his conference on spiritual warfare set the hook, his stuff on
Negativity and the
Effects of Sin are things I revisit. He's also the first Thomist I could sit through, and seems a bit like a First Sergeant. (That might be why.)
This sort of brings me back around where we started. Jay Dyer, if I recall correctly, posits that the presuppositions of the Scholastics led to Nominalism, then eventually Naturalism, Materialsm, and at last Nihilism. I reckon the Thomists might disagree.
Point being, this seems to follow that trend where the intellectual and spiritual classes get so cloistered that they lose touch with the nature of realm in which they are called to serve and there's a degeneration in their vitality. ("Paging Dr. Howard...Dr. Robert E. Howard...") The Buddhists, I'm told have a concept called "Idiot Compassion," which apparently refers to somebody seeking to do something about the suffering in the world but goes about it in an unskillful way that only results in more suffering. It could be something as simple as that. I don't know. I'm gonna have to think about this some more.
I do know they were wrong on the dueling thing though.
-Sam
James 6 Pence
Sam, I am not qualified to discuss the philosophical issues here.
I don’t know what Nominalism is, for instance. I avoided philosophy except for Aristotle, Plato, and Sokrates for most of my life, not wanting to take part in the limp-wristed waters of modern philosophy which has always seemed to punt to the sedentary side and away from the athletic side. Keep in mind that Aristotle kept his classes walking around the gym while goons beat each other, trained and competed to take the Olympic crown. The people who invented philosophy could not separate the agony of the contestant from higher thought. The human mind works best within a moving, striving body. It is simply hard to qualify in a laboratory.
That is why military history is so important, while Alexander, Hannibal, Tamerlane, and Bobby Lee are so important to knowing what we are. It is why the most learned men in the ancient world went to sit ringside in their little folding stools to watch the very best athletes in the world match brawn and wits.
Nothing, no sin, no mistake, no doctrine of annihilation can be as damaging to the human spirit as materialism, the dump, the trash heap, the sewer grate were life ends and process takes over.
Back to the top, to the UFC or any prizefight.
These things are good in that they present an arena for human suffering and striving. In what nation was professional boxing outlawed up until the 1980s? Sweden. Where is Sweden? Aren’t there more Muslims than practicing Christians there?
I hate the spectacle of prizefighting which can only get so rancid with boxing, since boxing is so deadly on the face of it, and intolerable to the normal human, and because it has decorum that MMA lacks. In boxing, you may be men from different nations but the rules do not permit you to treat a downed man like he is an enemy, but a brother, and you must let him get up and signal that he wishes to continue, where MMA permits you to stand over him and rain blows.
This is physically healthier for the MMA fighter, who will be stopped outright where the boxer goes on. It is, however, spiritually rancid to the audience and the spirit of the fighter who has been trained like a dog to mindlessly attack until pulled away.
I train men for boxing and assist in MMA camps. I know what I’m talking about. These are almost all exceptionally good men and to see one down while the rancid crowd is screaming obscenities hurts me, but not them. My best moment was hearing 500 people scream for my defeat in Norfolk for I had earned their hatred by fighting the crowd favorite to a draw and they went nuts when he beat me in the tie-breaker round. Those people in the crowd gave War Energy, formed a psychic dome of hostility and urgency around us that you can only get in spectacle and war, that is why spectacles are important to the warrior class.
These folks you cited claim to be spiritualists but they focus on the brain and bodily injuries, worshiping the body as true materialists. The worship of IQ is the truest tell of materialism, because Modernity tells us that humanity must be civilized to deserve life and civilization requires a three-digit IQ to work. This is all ass backwards when we consider that the real purpose of modern civilization is to extinguish our souls.
Of these prizefighting forms, boxing, with Death hanging over its head, with the next Doo Ku Kim waiting in the wings to die as the result of his courage and ambition and never-say-die attitude can never become an activity for the masses. Most men will never participate in boxing, because it endangers our real and actual god, the deity between our self-absorbed ears. The boxer is the closest thing to a duelist we have, a holdover from another age when men had to suffer to get things done, before remote controlled model planes packed with explosives killed children for us a world away so that we could feel like conquerors.
MMA, ironically, comes out of the disintegration of urban society in the modern world and materialism. MMA, in the form of the UFC, unlike their weird types of MMA I used to do, boxing football players and karate guys and such, is nothing more than a showcase to sell BJJ instruction. Trace the lineages, follow the money, track the promoters, and you will see that MMA was the Gracie clan’s bid to fill the vast need for effective self-defense in savage environments where there was no such thing as a stand-up fight, where people would tackle you from behind, bite, gouge, etc. The UFC is the largest driver of BJJ instruction dues worldwide, because it is one of the key arts, the others being Boxing, kickboxing and wrestling, the four pillars of MMA, all of which have been served a boon from this revenue. If it wasn’t for BJJ guys wanting to learn how to box you wouldn’t be able to keep a gym open in most of the municipalities in this sissy nation.
And ultimately, things come full circle, as MMA turns into pro wrestling-hip hop-clown world and honor goes away, boxing comes back, because boxing preserves aspects of the duel, though it is a poor imitation.
Boxers do not lack control to the point where they must fight in a cage.
Also, MMA and BJJ have proven to be poor forms of self-defense, for the reason that the social decay has accelerated, and where once you had to deal with one dirty fighter trying to tackle you, now you go to the guard and either get your head stomped in by the other three dudes or get stabbed. Boxing maintains the lethality of the duel.
Sam, if you and I and every dude reading this stood in front of Mike Tyson and threw hands with him, he would kill half of us. Our necks would break, dude. It’s like getting hit by a car when you get to that level.
It is good for the man to fight before a crowd so that he can test himself at actual insanity level. However, it is also necessary for the man, the real modern warrior, the duelist, to fight alone, with just him and his antagonist. This takes us into deep waters of another kind. Some fighters are invincible in these private matches and some of these choke on stage, and the opposite also happens. Jack Johnson once said to James J. Jeffries when Jeffries offered to fight him for free in the cellar of a bar, that “I ain’t no cellar fighter.” Johnson was playing for the biggest stakes in a deadly closed game and he made his play.
But for the well-rounded man he needs to know what it is to fight alone in a close space, or at least on a narrow strip before seconds, in order to find himself. Then he needs to be able to fight before a crowd who hates him or loves him mindlessly and not lose what he found in the lonely solitude of that match fight.
In an ideal world, in a warrior society, when men fought for something other than money, fights only took place before fighters or former fighters or seconds. Every man in the room or on the green was a fighting man come to see a test of two of their kind before a gathering of their peers. Prize-fighting eventually transcends and corrupts this, bringing money into the mix, but the fighter can still stay pure, so long as he is not handled by the reptilian management that runs cage fighting, which is what MMA is. The cage is what I have a problem with.
In ancient pankration any man who stepped back out of the open, unroped, unfenced, unwalled skamma [dugup] lost. You could lose ancient MMA like a sumo match, just getting pushed out.
Pankration was about will and honor.
Boxing, with no rounds, was about will and honor, the honor of your city, your father and the holy day on which the fight was conducted as a sacred rite.
The ancient MMA fighter was actually judged by the priests of the God whose altar he fought before, not judged a winner. His opponent let everybody know who won. He was judged as to the honorable of dishonorable nature of is conduct.
Compare this pagan rite to our modern atheistic version, where men are locked in a cage like beasts with a third one there to drag off the one who gets the final upper hand.
Of course, this is to demean the fighters, to control them, to make of them entertainers to titillate the crowd. This teaches its own lesson for those that go into the cage, reminding them of the invisible cage he walks in every day, as he negotiates a world where it is a crime to use his skills to defend himself, his loved ones and his property.
A fighter cannot attain the decency of combat today, in our evil world that he could once attain in the past world of honor and virtue. But he can still fight and, like many fighters I have known, he cannot forget that the real enemy is not the man he is testing himself against, but the men who arranged the contest who are always and without exception, trying to screw both of them. More life lessons learned in the ages old art of one-to-one combat.
I say to the born again Catholics who decry such combat, that they should watch a private fight, between two professionals, an affair of honor, and then see what they think, once the filth that clings to prizefighting and which Tertullian and other Church fathers warned about has been taken away and all that remains is the act.
Mind you, these men are my enemies, the enemies of my kind.
Just after A.D. 510, a generation after the last emperor of the Western Roman Empire had been taken from his throne at Ravenna by a barbarian chieftain, a full century after Rome itself fell, 14 athletes signed a plaque, that they had secretly contested with each other before the sacred precinct of the altis at Olympia, a crime for which the Universal [Catholic] Church would have them executed if caught. These men fought in secret for the lost honor stripped from their ancestors by Catholicism, under sentence of death if they were discovered conducting the ancient masculine rites of their forbearers.
It is only through some unique aspect of the American conscience, perhaps from hundreds of years sharing the frontier with warrior enemies and warrior allies, that the American Warrior can conceive of being a Christian and a warrior, for in previous ages these were mutually exclusive conditions. To fight for honor is to fight for something pre-Christian. It was not against God to kill for Him, His Church, His King, His Pope or to slay heretics and unbelievers, but it was always and will always be against Christianity to fight for your honor. As God and His Church was supplanted by the state, you will see in military codes of justice a transfer of Christian prohibitions against dueling to military prohibitions against dueling.
Honor, in its pure warrior sense is strictly Heathen.
(c) 2019 James LaFond
