Let me help you. Religions provide wisdom, and governments provide laws. If your religion conflates wisdom with law it is not a religion but a form of government masquerading as a cult. Ergo, if your religion contains laws it is a competitor to, not a compliment to, a government. As such it can be regulated, prohibited, and warred against if necessary.
I am trying to find a way to talk about the fact that we have never had a conflationary system of thought (monotheism) in the west, and have always had separation of church (peasantry) and state (nobility) and burgher/freeman (commerce). And that the church (religion), the burgher (philosophy), and the state (law) all competed with their own narratives.
The problem is the BINDING narrative. If christianity fails as teh binding narrative, how do we replace that binding narrative, yet preserve christianity for the underclasses (the weak) who need it?
Germanicized christianity, even latinized christianity, differs from byzantine christianity, differs from judaism, differs from islamism, differs from egyptian and prior eras’ shamanism.
Germanized christianity always possessed ALL models of thought, from the aristocratic and martial law, to the philosophy, to the religion of the poor. But we used each in its place. And christianity did serve as the majority doctrine since the vast majority of people were poor and ignorant. When that is true, it’s easy for the martial/legal, and the philosophhical/commercial to ‘go along’ with the civic binding narrative and rituals.
The question is, now that the majority are not poor and ignorant, what is the binding narrative under which we can still make use of science, law, philosophy and christianity?
I mean. christianity is fucking ridiculous. Church isn’t. Myth, Festival, Ritual, Discipline aren’t. They’re necessary. The content of jesus’ philosophy is trivial. The magical shit is nonsense. nothing but jewish and syrian and byzantine lies. the natural law that the church inherited from the romans and the stoics, and the science that the modern era inherited from the greeks and the engineering from romans is all there for us to use. History is there for us to use.
By any measure we have ‘discovered’ that we, and less so the chinese, are ‘right’ and that everyone else is not only wrong but catastrophically and degeneratively wrong.
So, how do we modernize the church, retain jesus’s (valuable teaching) but achieve in the modern world what Aquinas achieved in the ancient? how do we modernize the teachings of jesus, and the ancient lessons of babylonians so that they are compatible with the ancient lessons of the european peoples in greek, roman, germanic form?