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CAN WE ELIMINATE RELIGION? NOT REALLY, BUT THAT REQUIRES WE DEFINE RELIGION AS MARKET DEMANDS RATHER THAN THE CURRENT MEANS OF PRODUCTION.

—“However unrealistic of a goal it might be, wouldn’t the ideal situation be a world without organised religion? Or is there some benefit to religion that I’m not seeing?”—Dann Hopkins

Religion is just education. that’s all. Period. The ‘trick’ of both church and state is to claim church does no education, or that state education is sufficient.

We need training in physical fitness, mindfulness, manners-ethics-morals-rituals (payments to the commons), the laws, the means of calculating that we think of as the 3R’s, the skills to run a household, and the skills for employment.

It does not, as it once did, provide for physical fitness.

It provides mindfulness in the personal, interpersonal, and public spheres of life.

It provides the some of the manners, ethics, morals rituals that are the positive laws of the social order (not negative laws as is law proper).

It provides a venue for public contract making (this is my child, this is my promise to the community, this is my mate, this is our property, this person has died and his or her property may be distributed).

It is, to some degree, a computational necessity – meaning that it is very bad not to have that mindfulness.

It provides child-level parables and myths which are no less a form of calculation about action in the world than are laws, logic, and mathematics.

But there is no reason we cannot have lessons, parables and mythos and histories for each class of people at each stage of their lives, all of which contain the same messages.

There is no reason the church rather than the school, post office, or library is not still the center of civic life, and that government is not relegated to the production and maintenance of material commons, just as we keep commerce out of religion.

So I think I have most of this figured out – not that I am interested in the content in and of itself, but that I understand how to frame the problem, and restore the incentives, such that the second abrahamic dark age does not capture our people.