Apr 10, 2020, 12:09 PM
—“Curt Doolittle: in comparison between Orthodoxy and evangelical Christianity in making states more or less better or first world or third world?”—Ibrahim Abd El Shihead
Narrow Point:
The fact that the orthodox church didn’t or couldn’t compete with the state on one hand, and didn’t try, as catholicism, to compete with science, reason, commerce, and law, (competition) and remained a specialist in family affairs (unity, community, love) is why it is still regarded as sacred to the people. This is why I don’t ever seem to have a problem with the orthodox community “church is for church, law is for disputes to be avoided at all costs, state is for state to protect us, and we all get along fine if we do our f-king jobs”.
The problem i have with xianity is that western christians haven’t given up on fantasy of monopoly – theocratic rule, and can’t seem (like russians and traditional americans) to practice the natural trichotomy of state, law, and faith., Under the rather (insane) presumption that the church, having failed so drastically wouldn’t do so again.
So to in this sense while evangelical christianity is closest to jesus’ teaching, the orthodox church is closest to the institutional church we need, and the catholic church and the protestant churches to that sought to limit the parasitism of the church, were failures. In other words, orthodoxy seems to have avoided both the catholic attempt to rule, the protestant attempt to undermine the church’s corruption, the necessity of catholic and protestant churches to attract members of the aristocracy as local administrators, and best preserved the role of the church in society. Another example of the value of intolerant monarchies.
Broader Point:
Aristotelianism seems to produce scientific and technical potential.
Christianity seems to produce political and commercial potential but it wasn’t enough in russia probably because they missed the renaissance, reformation, and enlightenment.
Islam seems to resist political, commercial and scientific potential, but produces underclass harmony.
Judaism produces organized crime families that prey on the commons, which is extremely profitable for them at the cost of the host people. Judaism hasn’t been nearly as destructive as islam – but it’s certainly been bad for germany, russia, america, and now all of western europe.
Hinduism is some kind of absolutely beautiful madness that I still struggle to get my arms around, but their problem seems to be demographic and without division into sub-states politically impossible to overcome.
buddhism produces an equally kind harmony at the cost of stagnation. china is trivially easy to understand because they escaped religion. japan and korea easiest to understand.
Without christianity (enforced) scandinavia, and without buddhism (enforced) japan/korea, would have come provided a pattern we needed. the optimum ‘religion’ was rule of law, militia, monarchy (imperialism), paganism (aristocracy), stoicism(middle) epicureanism (lower middle) heathenism (family), and a priesthood of any kind to take responsibility for the peasantry.
This competition serves better than monopoly but it needs strong rule of law to prevent any usurping the rest. The problem is, markets are susceptible to intolerant monopolies and monotheism is intolerant and intolerance wins, so the only ‘total intolerance’ we need is defense of those markets.