Apr 25, 2020, 8:59 PM
Religion combines wisdom literature, rituals, and social assembly to create personal, interpersonal, social, and political mindfulness with of a system of intuitive, coherent measurement, that relieves the pre-consious brain of stress about status, conflict, and uncertainty. We gain the elation of the primitive animal running with, hunting, feasting, resting, and safety within the pack (herd). Narratives (stories) using archetypes (expressions of instincts) are the most imprecise but universal and easily understood system of measurement.
Christianity works. Religion works. Institutions, traditions, laws, and norms work. For the same reason: error elimination on one hand, and norm creation on the other, together which reduce cognitive load, which reduce stress, which maintains self image, which maintains status in interacting with others.
Of the christian sects it appears that we find the best of something in each group. In evangelical protestantism we find the closest to Jesus’ teachings. In orthodoxy we find the preservation of tradition, and nationalism. In Catholicism we find an attempt at an intellectual and philosophical expansion of the underlying theology. In secular christianity we find the completion of the christian evolution into the via negativa natural law AND via positiva christian love.
I can quite easily explain what we find as failing in each of those traditions – most of which result in (a) universalism (b) failure to accommodate the fundamental, ritualistic-traditional, phiosophical-moral, and scientific spectrum – and worse, a failure to integrate and retain our martial gods and their teachings – that saved us in the real world when christianity failed.
I admit when I’m wrong all the time. I make many mistakes (irrelevant) but I err (relevant) very infrequently. Not because I am special but because the P-method makes it very, very, difficult to err.