ON CONVERSION TO PAGANISM AND ON RELIGION IN GENERAL (important) (prepare for so

ON CONVERSION TO PAGANISM AND ON RELIGION IN GENERAL

(important) (prepare for some ‘ouch’ moments) (answer three for dagon)

First, my view of ‘paganism’ would be this: that it is quite possible to study the history (or legend) of our existing heroes (Alexander, Aristotle, Caesar, Newton, Shakespeare, Washington, Jesus ) and then to build statues and temples to visit, and subconsciously converse with our mental images of them. And by doing so create investments and therefore value, in the values, virtues, and behaviors we associate with them. And that this is a purely scientific process that in fact functions as we desire it to for the same reason imagining conversations with other people you know very well do. And we get a psychic reward for having done such things. This does in fact train us to behave as we desire to. And through synchronicity of many people doing the same, bring about the influence on ourselves, families and society by our numbers, that we wish we could bring about if we had the power and influence of our heroes. So this is my view of paganism. It is a purely scientific ‘spiritual’ (psychological) method of self training and personal and social transformation. Metaphysically, we do, by such practices, and such synchronicity, produce social consequences the same way that markets indirectly produce social consequences. We do not agree or conspire directly but indirectly. That we think this is or requires some sort of magic is nonsense. It merely requires practice like any other discipline. (I can imagine myself talking to any number of historical figures. it’s not difficult. We all do it.)

And, furthermore, I can understand prohibiting such temples, statues, symbols that were antagonistic to the polity. After all, churches, temples, statues, and symbols are method of claiming territory on behalf of a group’s evolutionary strategy. So preventing such claims is necessary, not only desirable.

Second, as far as I know, “Religion” and “Education” constitute a false dichotomy. There is no difference between them. These are the properties of Religion(normative and personal skills) and Education (Commercial Skills). In other words, Religion for peoples who have not yet entered the market because they are subsistence farmers, and Education for people who have entered the market because they are no longer subsistence farmers.

We need these forms of eduction:

– Festival(feast) – Trust through celebration

– Sport (competition) – Trust through teamwork

– Ritual(sacredness) – Trust through self constraint

– Virtues(ethics) – Universal and Normative Success

– Mindfulness(self) – Psychological insulation from consequences of informational scarcity in a market/society)

– Crafts(trade) – method of providing reciprocal value to the tribe so it is possible to survive in it.

All of these rituals deprive us of selfishness and make it possible to succeed in all aspects of society.

So in my perspective Religion is an anti market education system and taught cheaply to people who do not have market influences to shape their ethics, and Education as we understand it evolved to Transition people into market ethics so that they would succeed and understand market ethics (meritocracy), and how they differ from subsistence ethics (equality). And that this separation was rational given that it is very cheap to teach people by lying and allegory and equality, and it is more expensive to teach people by history and calculation, and meritocracy.

The problem being that none of us are subsistence farmers, and all of us live in the market and have no other choice any longer to return to the fields. The territorial value of the individually farmable earth was maximized long ago.

So as far as I understand it religion is just a cheap way to enslave people by teaching them sufficient information to survive as agrarians and pastoralists but not enough information, nor the right information, to survive in a market society where we cannot judge our actions by whether they are equal to that of others, but by whether they facilitate exchange with others to whom we are increasingly and eternally unequal.

If you can understand this, and are intellectually honest, you will likely – with some great discomfort – come to accept that all attempts to preserve ‘religion’ in the sense of the mythical and supernatural is actually extremely destructive to mankind. And the reason the door is still open for the Abrahamic deceptions via abrahamic religions, Abrahamic pesudo-rationalisms (continental philosophy), and Abrahamic pseudosciences (Boazian Anthropology, Freudian psychology, Darwinian Denial, IQ Denial, Class Denial, Gender Denial, Race Denial, Merit Denial, Marxist Socialist economic denial, postmodern truth denial) is that we have failed to close the door on our tolerance for lying.

My very simple reasoning:

*I place a higher value on truth, reason, and the elimination of error, despite the higher cost, than I place on meaningfulness, intuition, and the identification of opportunities despite the lower cost.*

In other words, I see cheap intuitionism as an immoral discount on expensive reason, and a means of justifying suggestion and indoctrination rather than rational choice and learning. So I see abrahamism as one of the worst and most immoral inventions in all of human history. And the cause of the dark age, and the cause of the islamic cancer that spread during it – including the loss of the great civilizations of the ancient world forever. And the Abrahamic-marxist-postmodernist cancer that still spreads today.

And so I don’t accept the *fallacy of special pleading* that ‘meaningfulness’ or ‘accessibility’ are any more important than the hard work of truth. I mean, we teach expensive literacy, mathematics, sciences, economics, and history. And we in the past taught expensive vocabulary, grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Why is it that we cannot also teach expensive testimonialism: natural law and the logic of cooperation? Why can’t we teach history as a series of biographical narratives of the people who made the great insights and transformations in each of those fields? Even if you want to preserve the Buddha and Jesus why cannot they be stated in historical terms and studied for their innovations, rather than continuing their justification by abrahamic deception?

You know, there isn’t any reason. Because any other reason requires lying and teaching lying.

Now, it is true that Aesop’s fables, and fairy tales, and legends that have been with us for hundreds if not thousands of years are valuable to children. It is true that heroes of the greek myths are merely superheroes. This is a simple mythos of the hearth and home – not a mythos of the polity.

And yes it uses anthropomorphism to simplify the communication to children the same way cartoons simplify the richness of human subtle expression so that children can grasp the more obvious communication. But why can we not directly transition into the teaching of virtues for children(grammar age). The transition into comparisons (logic age), and transition into self authoring ( rhetoric age )?

You know, there isn’t any reason. Because any other reason requires lying and thereby teaching lying.

The greek dark age after the bronze age collapse (1177bc), included the loss of writing and of memories of history. So the greeks had to invent via homer, a new history and a new group evolutionary strategy: resistance of the tyranny of the east. And they had to invent their gods.

We are not in that position. by all evidence in all of history, western man has defeated his own limitations, taken a seat among his ancient gods, and there is more to learn from the memories of real men and real achievements than there is from characters we would have to invent in order to equal them. There is greater glory in the study of our ancestors than in the study of any of the gods – all of whom are far worse than any man every thought to be.

In fact let me say this: the reason to invent gods is because your family, your clan, your people are shit failures in history. And any attempt to create such gods is merely to try to avoid the truth that your people are shit failures in history. It’s nothing but inventing a heritage you do not have. So it is better to find a realistic hero to learn from or a portfolio of real heroes and seek to change that history than remain the consequence of it.

So I am anti-falsehood. And I am pro education. And I do not mean the current education system that is abrahamic in teaching deceit. But the time of ‘religion’ in the old sense is gone. The time of ‘Moral’ education is present. And there is no special pleading for the means of teaching morality. because the lightest test of morality is truth, the next fraud, the next theft, and the next harm, and the next murder, and the next evil: intention of harm for no purpose other than harm.

I think almost all intellectuals – at least at the very top of the intellectual pyramid – go through a fairly similar evolutionary process of finding something that they feel is not right, falsifying everything they can in order to find a solution to what they feel is not right, then applying that solution to the intellectual frameworks we live by, then accumulating enough experience that our ‘mythologies’ *can* contain general rules that have survived the tests of the markets for such rules over long periods of history. And that by using this network of myth, we can ‘calculate’ understanding that we cannot calculate by any other means. For the simple reason that the informational density of the temporal narrative, when made mythical (not supernatural) and therefore intertemporal(immortal), allows us to calculate a broader set of very imprecise problems in the very high information density that we call ‘reality’. And that through many of us using these same rules, we function more as a ‘hive mind’ that is unconscious but still ‘calculating’ our success, one human decision serving as a sort of ‘neuron’ in the network of that brain we call ‘society’.

But while I understand that the purpose and value of enduring myths, and the superhuman ability of the gods, demigods, heroes and saints of those myths, is necessary for the purpose of illustration, and that the immortality of those gods and demigods is necessary for the intergenerational transfer and persistence of those myths, the relationship with those gods and demigods can mirror our civilization’s strategy or undermine it.

In the case of western civilization the fact that the gods merely represent a parental extended family with as many different talents as our own; that for every possible person on this earth there is some god that he can appeal to; that our relationship is contractual; that we can outwit or out compete them if we try; that we can earn our places among them by heroism, and that our purpose on this earth is to leave it changed for the better for having lived it, and to be remembered for it. And that we should strive to discipline and deed to develop the virtues that allow us to transcend the animal impulses. Well, that is about as close to a scientific religion as possible.

And as far as I know, the purpose of science is to understand the laws of the universe – and among them men. And that having done so, we then understand the language of the gods. For it is their language that the universe is written in.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine