I have been reading this series during working hours at my fake and gay email job and I started crying during the part about every man authoring his secret gospel. A female co-worker asked me what was wrong and I told her I was crying about blacks, she seemed satisfied
Hi Zero, you spent a lot of time on this very important topic, so thank you for that. I covered the interplay between Christianity and Nietzsche from a somewhat different angle yesterday, focusing heavily on the theory that Christianity was concocted by Saul of Tarsus as a revenge strategy against Rome, if you would like to check it out.
Apr 27, 2023·edited Apr 27, 2023Liked by Zero HP Lovecraft
Basically don't allow your compassion to be the only driving force, there needs to be space for aggression, glory, beauty and excellence. All this can be done without Christ. As much as people poopoo on Varg Vikernes he does promote this kind of morality and he has a cool metaphysic for flavour!
May 10, 2023·edited May 12, 2023Liked by Zero HP Lovecraft
Random unorganized thought of disparate origins and something incidental out of "The Grand Miracle":
Aescetic: Negates the world because its supposedly ugly.
Nature worshipper: Affirms the world because he feels beautiful.
Jew: The world is in need of repair, and we are consecrated for that. The agents of that rejuvination through our obedience to the laws of God, which require our separation from the others in the world.
Christian: the world is in need of repair... and we were sent out because of God's love, with commandments to be different in order to engulf it.
Apr 29, 2023·edited Apr 29, 2023Liked by Zero HP Lovecraft
"more civilization-destroying in the entire world than the sex drive of a horny jewess,"
Meanwhile, at a Synagogue:
A Rabbi, bearded, bespectacled, and respected as you know, is teaching the chosen under his charge the fine details of their way of life. Study of the torah, the need to remember their role in repairing the world, community, and wariness of gentile distractions.
A voice, interrupting the flow of old-time religion, suddenly speaks up, "I think we must start by not having the men and women be separated. Isn't this one of the symptoms of a disjointed world? Wasn't this separation a curse? How can we claim to be a community, when we are symbolically and purposefully kept apart from each other as fellow Jews?" Of course this was uttered by a young woman within their temple. Obviously and visibly squeezing and shifting her thighs together, even as she crafted her argument.
The Rabbi, right after hearing this, gives a heavy sigh, taps a button under the pulpit table on the Bimah, and then makes as if he didn't notice her by continuing on his teaching and recitations.
Swiftly, a small group of The Horny Police enter the temple and drag out the girl. The Rabbi tries to keep ceremony over her kicking and screaming. Telling the people, "I advise that you all ignore that. Do not worry or become distracted--"
She was able to get out some of her venom into the heads of vulnerable members of the tribe, before her removal by yelling, "Its not a curse to be a woman!"
The Horny Police's grand mistake here was forgetting protocol, and not putting a bag over the girls head first.
Being witnesses to this incident, A brief and awkward silence had stood over the congregation, before being banished by the old Rabbi saying, "Now, where were we?"
But just as he was resuming his lecture, a young man stood and exclaimed, "She's right! How can we call *this*-" he gestured at the door way, "- A community."
The Rabbi shook his bowed head. "Oy vey," he said to himself, "this will be a long century."
on your point about christianity being feminised, i believe it is a result of an over-emphasis on seeker-friendly churches, and a failure to expound on the harsh and difficult words of Jesus. i.e. the lack of remorse telling the young rich ruler that it is difficult for the rich to enter the kingdom or the wrath of God in the OT being still relevant.
Obviously an excellent analysis. I’m going to be the occultist commenter. I wanted to ask if you were aware or have a that this Christo-Nietzschean synthesis is at the core of the magic of some modern occultists such as myself? The instrumentalization of the irrational in order to establish and develop “superhuman” efficacy/pagan virtue was arguably the essential goal of Crowley’s “Magick”, which is where the importance of mystical experiences you are critical of come into play. They’re tools for shaking loose rational constraints (which yes, also functions as crowd control). But you’ve discovered basically what he did, except sans Crowleys obsession with being the antichrist for probably reasons to do with his time. (I think in a modern day he would have embraced and openly loved Christ.) This is, in my view, why those who are into magic will say things like “magic is the essence of all religion”, because it is precisely that instrumentalization of faith in which they all participate. Religions are for that reason the greatest arts of mankind, in my view. What you’ve done here is see behind the curtain. This is the spoken of door which can never be closed. Despite never being able to unsee, my life is filled with more magic and beauty than would have ever been possible otherwise and I am more fulfilled than ever.
I read this entire transcript. Yes, I read it. If I learned anything, it's that you are well-read. I'm impressed with your understanding of Christianity and its nuances. To have a solid understanding of the Christian faith, popular culture and not shy away from offending....everyone, takes balls. The conclusion, or the entire purpose of the work is lost on me. I can't affirm that a man who denies objective truth (Fred) can be granted the affirmation of a position of value. It might sound good, but it can't be true, by his own epistemology. So, it's nice. It's all very nice.
Thank you for this, it was in many ways one long synchronicity for me. Isn't it very much the American Civic religion's spirit, this idea of of fully decentralized religion? Spirituality is all about hierarchy and authority, the burning word that obliterates everything like the Chicxulub meteor. Your take is for us to become pratyekabuddhas, private Buddhas, which seems, I don't know, weak, which is ironic given all that was said here.
In mass recently I felt this sudden urge to start screaming at the priest right in the middle of it, and it made me think an entire spirituality can be built around that. The next time I went, I did so after drinking an entire bottle of wine first, which I saw as a tantric practice, to experience the collision between sacred and profane. I was very focused throughout, which I usually am not, and when the Gospel was read, I felt a profound rage I cannot explain, so the practice was a success, though not one to do habitually.
I want to develop Christian tantra, which would be built around experiencing the tension of opposites, such as rebellion and submission, and reason and faith. You did that here to some extent. Nietzsche could be a part of that, though I don't think his work has the clarity and intensity to be elevated to the status of scripture, being philosophy in the end, though very spicy philosophy.
This has been a fascinating read. I am going to read up on Apostle Fred, and then reread the whole thing. I do not see how Christo-Fredism solves tbe sexual Christianity shredder. I suppose a Fredist young man would feel no guilt about sexual conquest. This would help the top tier young men (in terms of SMV) but still leaves a lot of incels. The wimpy side of Christianity has always annoyed me. Jesus was intense and purpose driven. He and Fred get along.
Ive been thinking about this almost nonstop for the past few days. It’s a lot to digest. Almost all of the diagnosis is spot on. Hopefully the Christianity Shredder analysis (an absolute gem) and its component honesty about the spiritual doldrums of contemporary Christianity will influence the dissident right for the foreseeable future.
But I wonder if—and I sincerely mean no offense—you aren’t the wrong person to lead this revival seeing as you aren’t religious yourself and maintaining the appearance of Christian protestant orthodoxy (to say nothing of orthodoxy itself) seems to be of marginal concern to you. High openness, low agreeable people are generally the worst kind of people to create an orthodoxy since their tastes often alienate the lay people who form the backbone of any successful religion.
Putting aside my religious distaste for declaring Nietzsche a New Gospel, I still don’t think this new religious positivism would work for a few reasons:
1. First, not all “holy contradictions” are equal. “Holy contradictions” as you call them are only useful insofar as they are spiritually compelling. I don’t believe blatant falsehoods are spiritually compelling. You call the Trinity and the Incarnation “absurd falsehoods,” but if they are false at all they are not *blatantly* false. People can believe *obviously* false things with enough sophistry (“A man can be a woman, if we redefine ‘man’ and ‘woman’ to refer to meaningless consumerist labels,”) but people cannot believe blatantly false things—by which I mean, false propositions which they cannot contemplate without simultaneously contemplating the proposition’s falsity. Try as I might, I cannot believe 1 apple = 2 apples. This is why Nietzsche sees the will to power as being based on the will to *ignorance,* not the will to falsehood. We can make ourselves willfully ignorant of some things or choose not to direct our attention to two opposing concepts at the same time. (This is what I imagine you think happens when Christians discuss the Trinity.) But what we cannot do is meaningfully affirm both contradictory elements— “this statement is false.” I believe the contradictions that arise from beatifying St. Freddy are too blatant. This is pretty serious because the reason blatant falsehoods fail is because nobody is willing to risk anything for something they automatically know is wrong. To put it bluntly, do you believe ChristoNietzscheans would be willing to kill someone for blaspheming Nietzsche? I don’t. For the same reason I know most neopagans aren’t willing to kill for Odin: everyone knows it’s a LARP and Odin isn’t real. This will be particularly true for first gen CNs who know that this is just a noble lie we invented so we can declare a holy war and seize political power from the left. But the reason most religions work as well as they do is because they are good at seizing power while *also* drawing their hosts attention away from the fact that their actions are predatory. To paraphrase moldbug, religions are about letting the chimp bloodlust run wild while providing a cover story that makes the ego feel warm and fuzzy. C/N does not make the ego feel warm and fuzzy because it’s too honest about its own predatoriness.
2. This leads to my second point: if you want to synthesize Nietzsche and Christianity, I think you’d be better off arguing that the Nietzschean elements you want to include *already are* authentic Christianity, then finding evidence of Nietzscheanism in the Bible. That way, you’re reinterpreting an old religion rather than creating a new syncretic faith. IIRC this is how you argued the US gov originally worked. It declared mere Protestantism the state religion and then discreetly interpreted enlightenment values into the official state formulation of Protestantism.
I find Kierkegaard is superior to Nietzsche as a model for the “synthesis” you want because this is exactly what he does: finds the Christian übermensch in the Old Testament in the form of Abraham (and also David, Solomon, etc) which he calls the Knight of Faith. The knight of faith is distinct from the Nietzschean übermensch in that the KoF genuinely believes in God, salvation and transcendent meaning (whereas Nietzsche sees these things as basically spooks); however, the KoF isnt fueled by resentment and doesn’t despise the body. In Kierkegaard’s words, the KoF differs from ascetic souls (“knights of infinite resignation”) because the KoF believes through virtue of the absurd that he can achieve the eternal in the temporal. Translation: ascetics resign the world now so they can spiritually conquer the world in the afterlife when they die; when KoFs resign the world, they do it so they can spiritually conquer the world *in this life.* eg. Abraham, who had faith that the covenant with Isaac could still be upheld even if Isaac was killed.
But the key difference between Kierkegaard and the enlightenment or C/N syncretism is that Kierkegaard actually is an orthodox Protestant Christian and he isn’t trying to graft a foreign ideology into Christianity for self interested reasons. His interpretation of scripture was honest and spiritually, rather than politically, motivated, even if you happen to disagree with it. Reading Nietzsche (or the enlightenment) into scripture is dishonest and comes across like the psychoanalytic reading of Georgia Buddha you critiqued in Ep.1.
I think the inorganic and ad hoc nature of C/N as you have formulated it is a potential long term weakness: if the Gospel is malleable enough that we can arbitrarily declare someone a saint to suit our political needs without so much as a pretense that this person really was an orthodox Christian, what will prevent further revision in the future? Moreover, admitting that Nietzsche is a foreign body encourages people to see his thought as a virus trying to subvert their genome and reject it. Keep in mind that the New Testament relied very heavily on the Old for legitimacy, constantly making references to OT prophecy. Eg. Matthew and Luke contain genealogies of Christ because they are actively trying to show their writing fulfills the Old Testament and therefore derives its legitimacy from the Old Testament and the Old Testament’s God. Nietzsche does nothing like this.
"Attributing Godhood to kings is something common;"
Its rather important to remember that the Jews or Hebrews, Israel, had refused to do this. Instead, their kings and rulers had to come to terms with God, a seperate personality, so that he may have access to the world. The implications of this that was seeded in Israel, who struggles with God, had grown into the Western world, and were carried down into Western religion and philosophy ever since.
This essay is dynamite. I come from a background studying Philosophy of Religion, and your characterization of this practice as elevating logic to the status of a god was exactly what happened with me. This has inspired me to write an essay on the Decline of Christianity with my intended audience being the Analytic Christian types. I will be quoting this essay.
I'm wondering if another way to approach a synthesis with Nietzsche would be to interpret Nietzsche's cannon as a sort of 'old testament' which Christ ultimately fulfills. The Church Fathers wrote about how the writings in Plato and Socrates were preludes to the wisdom which Christ ultimately fulfills. Contemporarily, Hieromonk Damascene makes a case for Christ being the ultimate fulfillment of the teachings of Taoism, in much the same way Christ fulfills the law of the Old Testament. I wonder if Nietzsche's work can be given similar treatment, and if engaging and popularizing such a practice could lead to the proliferation of this synthesis.
I have been reading this series during working hours at my fake and gay email job and I started crying during the part about every man authoring his secret gospel. A female co-worker asked me what was wrong and I told her I was crying about blacks, she seemed satisfied
Hi Zero, you spent a lot of time on this very important topic, so thank you for that. I covered the interplay between Christianity and Nietzsche from a somewhat different angle yesterday, focusing heavily on the theory that Christianity was concocted by Saul of Tarsus as a revenge strategy against Rome, if you would like to check it out.
Very important topic, glad you've taken the time to really hash it out. Think I will be relistening to these several times.
Basically don't allow your compassion to be the only driving force, there needs to be space for aggression, glory, beauty and excellence. All this can be done without Christ. As much as people poopoo on Varg Vikernes he does promote this kind of morality and he has a cool metaphysic for flavour!
Random unorganized thought of disparate origins and something incidental out of "The Grand Miracle":
Aescetic: Negates the world because its supposedly ugly.
Nature worshipper: Affirms the world because he feels beautiful.
Jew: The world is in need of repair, and we are consecrated for that. The agents of that rejuvination through our obedience to the laws of God, which require our separation from the others in the world.
Christian: the world is in need of repair... and we were sent out because of God's love, with commandments to be different in order to engulf it.
"In the end, what could be more perfectly Girardian than an articulation of Christianity which requires no sacrifice?"
This is a beautiful line, it's extremely illuminating, and I'm glad you kept it.
"more civilization-destroying in the entire world than the sex drive of a horny jewess,"
Meanwhile, at a Synagogue:
A Rabbi, bearded, bespectacled, and respected as you know, is teaching the chosen under his charge the fine details of their way of life. Study of the torah, the need to remember their role in repairing the world, community, and wariness of gentile distractions.
A voice, interrupting the flow of old-time religion, suddenly speaks up, "I think we must start by not having the men and women be separated. Isn't this one of the symptoms of a disjointed world? Wasn't this separation a curse? How can we claim to be a community, when we are symbolically and purposefully kept apart from each other as fellow Jews?" Of course this was uttered by a young woman within their temple. Obviously and visibly squeezing and shifting her thighs together, even as she crafted her argument.
The Rabbi, right after hearing this, gives a heavy sigh, taps a button under the pulpit table on the Bimah, and then makes as if he didn't notice her by continuing on his teaching and recitations.
Swiftly, a small group of The Horny Police enter the temple and drag out the girl. The Rabbi tries to keep ceremony over her kicking and screaming. Telling the people, "I advise that you all ignore that. Do not worry or become distracted--"
She was able to get out some of her venom into the heads of vulnerable members of the tribe, before her removal by yelling, "Its not a curse to be a woman!"
The Horny Police's grand mistake here was forgetting protocol, and not putting a bag over the girls head first.
Being witnesses to this incident, A brief and awkward silence had stood over the congregation, before being banished by the old Rabbi saying, "Now, where were we?"
But just as he was resuming his lecture, a young man stood and exclaimed, "She's right! How can we call *this*-" he gestured at the door way, "- A community."
The Rabbi shook his bowed head. "Oy vey," he said to himself, "this will be a long century."
on your point about christianity being feminised, i believe it is a result of an over-emphasis on seeker-friendly churches, and a failure to expound on the harsh and difficult words of Jesus. i.e. the lack of remorse telling the young rich ruler that it is difficult for the rich to enter the kingdom or the wrath of God in the OT being still relevant.
Obviously an excellent analysis. I’m going to be the occultist commenter. I wanted to ask if you were aware or have a that this Christo-Nietzschean synthesis is at the core of the magic of some modern occultists such as myself? The instrumentalization of the irrational in order to establish and develop “superhuman” efficacy/pagan virtue was arguably the essential goal of Crowley’s “Magick”, which is where the importance of mystical experiences you are critical of come into play. They’re tools for shaking loose rational constraints (which yes, also functions as crowd control). But you’ve discovered basically what he did, except sans Crowleys obsession with being the antichrist for probably reasons to do with his time. (I think in a modern day he would have embraced and openly loved Christ.) This is, in my view, why those who are into magic will say things like “magic is the essence of all religion”, because it is precisely that instrumentalization of faith in which they all participate. Religions are for that reason the greatest arts of mankind, in my view. What you’ve done here is see behind the curtain. This is the spoken of door which can never be closed. Despite never being able to unsee, my life is filled with more magic and beauty than would have ever been possible otherwise and I am more fulfilled than ever.
Anyway thanks for the essay. Love your work.
I read this entire transcript. Yes, I read it. If I learned anything, it's that you are well-read. I'm impressed with your understanding of Christianity and its nuances. To have a solid understanding of the Christian faith, popular culture and not shy away from offending....everyone, takes balls. The conclusion, or the entire purpose of the work is lost on me. I can't affirm that a man who denies objective truth (Fred) can be granted the affirmation of a position of value. It might sound good, but it can't be true, by his own epistemology. So, it's nice. It's all very nice.
Thank you for this, it was in many ways one long synchronicity for me. Isn't it very much the American Civic religion's spirit, this idea of of fully decentralized religion? Spirituality is all about hierarchy and authority, the burning word that obliterates everything like the Chicxulub meteor. Your take is for us to become pratyekabuddhas, private Buddhas, which seems, I don't know, weak, which is ironic given all that was said here.
In mass recently I felt this sudden urge to start screaming at the priest right in the middle of it, and it made me think an entire spirituality can be built around that. The next time I went, I did so after drinking an entire bottle of wine first, which I saw as a tantric practice, to experience the collision between sacred and profane. I was very focused throughout, which I usually am not, and when the Gospel was read, I felt a profound rage I cannot explain, so the practice was a success, though not one to do habitually.
I want to develop Christian tantra, which would be built around experiencing the tension of opposites, such as rebellion and submission, and reason and faith. You did that here to some extent. Nietzsche could be a part of that, though I don't think his work has the clarity and intensity to be elevated to the status of scripture, being philosophy in the end, though very spicy philosophy.
This has been a fascinating read. I am going to read up on Apostle Fred, and then reread the whole thing. I do not see how Christo-Fredism solves tbe sexual Christianity shredder. I suppose a Fredist young man would feel no guilt about sexual conquest. This would help the top tier young men (in terms of SMV) but still leaves a lot of incels. The wimpy side of Christianity has always annoyed me. Jesus was intense and purpose driven. He and Fred get along.
Ive been thinking about this almost nonstop for the past few days. It’s a lot to digest. Almost all of the diagnosis is spot on. Hopefully the Christianity Shredder analysis (an absolute gem) and its component honesty about the spiritual doldrums of contemporary Christianity will influence the dissident right for the foreseeable future.
But I wonder if—and I sincerely mean no offense—you aren’t the wrong person to lead this revival seeing as you aren’t religious yourself and maintaining the appearance of Christian protestant orthodoxy (to say nothing of orthodoxy itself) seems to be of marginal concern to you. High openness, low agreeable people are generally the worst kind of people to create an orthodoxy since their tastes often alienate the lay people who form the backbone of any successful religion.
Putting aside my religious distaste for declaring Nietzsche a New Gospel, I still don’t think this new religious positivism would work for a few reasons:
1. First, not all “holy contradictions” are equal. “Holy contradictions” as you call them are only useful insofar as they are spiritually compelling. I don’t believe blatant falsehoods are spiritually compelling. You call the Trinity and the Incarnation “absurd falsehoods,” but if they are false at all they are not *blatantly* false. People can believe *obviously* false things with enough sophistry (“A man can be a woman, if we redefine ‘man’ and ‘woman’ to refer to meaningless consumerist labels,”) but people cannot believe blatantly false things—by which I mean, false propositions which they cannot contemplate without simultaneously contemplating the proposition’s falsity. Try as I might, I cannot believe 1 apple = 2 apples. This is why Nietzsche sees the will to power as being based on the will to *ignorance,* not the will to falsehood. We can make ourselves willfully ignorant of some things or choose not to direct our attention to two opposing concepts at the same time. (This is what I imagine you think happens when Christians discuss the Trinity.) But what we cannot do is meaningfully affirm both contradictory elements— “this statement is false.” I believe the contradictions that arise from beatifying St. Freddy are too blatant. This is pretty serious because the reason blatant falsehoods fail is because nobody is willing to risk anything for something they automatically know is wrong. To put it bluntly, do you believe ChristoNietzscheans would be willing to kill someone for blaspheming Nietzsche? I don’t. For the same reason I know most neopagans aren’t willing to kill for Odin: everyone knows it’s a LARP and Odin isn’t real. This will be particularly true for first gen CNs who know that this is just a noble lie we invented so we can declare a holy war and seize political power from the left. But the reason most religions work as well as they do is because they are good at seizing power while *also* drawing their hosts attention away from the fact that their actions are predatory. To paraphrase moldbug, religions are about letting the chimp bloodlust run wild while providing a cover story that makes the ego feel warm and fuzzy. C/N does not make the ego feel warm and fuzzy because it’s too honest about its own predatoriness.
2. This leads to my second point: if you want to synthesize Nietzsche and Christianity, I think you’d be better off arguing that the Nietzschean elements you want to include *already are* authentic Christianity, then finding evidence of Nietzscheanism in the Bible. That way, you’re reinterpreting an old religion rather than creating a new syncretic faith. IIRC this is how you argued the US gov originally worked. It declared mere Protestantism the state religion and then discreetly interpreted enlightenment values into the official state formulation of Protestantism.
I find Kierkegaard is superior to Nietzsche as a model for the “synthesis” you want because this is exactly what he does: finds the Christian übermensch in the Old Testament in the form of Abraham (and also David, Solomon, etc) which he calls the Knight of Faith. The knight of faith is distinct from the Nietzschean übermensch in that the KoF genuinely believes in God, salvation and transcendent meaning (whereas Nietzsche sees these things as basically spooks); however, the KoF isnt fueled by resentment and doesn’t despise the body. In Kierkegaard’s words, the KoF differs from ascetic souls (“knights of infinite resignation”) because the KoF believes through virtue of the absurd that he can achieve the eternal in the temporal. Translation: ascetics resign the world now so they can spiritually conquer the world in the afterlife when they die; when KoFs resign the world, they do it so they can spiritually conquer the world *in this life.* eg. Abraham, who had faith that the covenant with Isaac could still be upheld even if Isaac was killed.
But the key difference between Kierkegaard and the enlightenment or C/N syncretism is that Kierkegaard actually is an orthodox Protestant Christian and he isn’t trying to graft a foreign ideology into Christianity for self interested reasons. His interpretation of scripture was honest and spiritually, rather than politically, motivated, even if you happen to disagree with it. Reading Nietzsche (or the enlightenment) into scripture is dishonest and comes across like the psychoanalytic reading of Georgia Buddha you critiqued in Ep.1.
I think the inorganic and ad hoc nature of C/N as you have formulated it is a potential long term weakness: if the Gospel is malleable enough that we can arbitrarily declare someone a saint to suit our political needs without so much as a pretense that this person really was an orthodox Christian, what will prevent further revision in the future? Moreover, admitting that Nietzsche is a foreign body encourages people to see his thought as a virus trying to subvert their genome and reject it. Keep in mind that the New Testament relied very heavily on the Old for legitimacy, constantly making references to OT prophecy. Eg. Matthew and Luke contain genealogies of Christ because they are actively trying to show their writing fulfills the Old Testament and therefore derives its legitimacy from the Old Testament and the Old Testament’s God. Nietzsche does nothing like this.
for me this is a trumpet, a sign to leave the wilderness
"Attributing Godhood to kings is something common;"
Its rather important to remember that the Jews or Hebrews, Israel, had refused to do this. Instead, their kings and rulers had to come to terms with God, a seperate personality, so that he may have access to the world. The implications of this that was seeded in Israel, who struggles with God, had grown into the Western world, and were carried down into Western religion and philosophy ever since.
This essay is dynamite. I come from a background studying Philosophy of Religion, and your characterization of this practice as elevating logic to the status of a god was exactly what happened with me. This has inspired me to write an essay on the Decline of Christianity with my intended audience being the Analytic Christian types. I will be quoting this essay.
I'm wondering if another way to approach a synthesis with Nietzsche would be to interpret Nietzsche's cannon as a sort of 'old testament' which Christ ultimately fulfills. The Church Fathers wrote about how the writings in Plato and Socrates were preludes to the wisdom which Christ ultimately fulfills. Contemporarily, Hieromonk Damascene makes a case for Christ being the ultimate fulfillment of the teachings of Taoism, in much the same way Christ fulfills the law of the Old Testament. I wonder if Nietzsche's work can be given similar treatment, and if engaging and popularizing such a practice could lead to the proliferation of this synthesis.