I am fairly sure at this point that my concept of christianity differs little from say Jefferson’s except in the current scientific language I would use to express it.
I practice an intellectual form of what we call christianity. It is demonstrably more pagan (the adoration of beauty, life, nature, the universe) in sentiment. It is not submissive but heroic. It is not the demand of a god, but an exchange with one. It is not mystical, but psychological and ethical, social and moral, political and economic. But it remains spiritual: a means of serving the pack by submission to, investment in, and sacrifice for, the pack (the tribe).
I pray to and take advice from my god daily. Yet I see this god as a construction of man’s collective intuition, belief, and action, and the magic of religion a product of complex consilience.
When I talk to my god he is not the semitic, Egyptian or babylonian terrorist, nor the fearsome Odin, nor the importune Zeus. He is the “all-father” for certain, but he is a distinctly christian father. A wise monarch, not a pious priest or selfish demon.
Or better yet, he is the god I need him to be in order to do the work of my people – to raise my people from beast, to man, to gods all. To transform the entire universe to eden. Not to be cast out of paradise, but to construct it.
So in this sense I see Polytheism as superior for an advanced civilization: to lionize our generals and saints, artists and poets, scientists and philosophers, manufacturers, merchants, and craftsmen. Because all of us require that our gods speak to us in our our language.
But what are gods? Gods are the product of the human mind, just as are numbers and formulae, and they exist just as do numbers and formulae. They are what we wish to be if we were able, not what exists prior to us.
Is it better to practice ancestor worship, disciplined ritual, as the Japanese and the stoics? It certainly appears so. Is it problematic to practice nature worship, seek advice of the gods? I do not see reason to. I can pray to the soul of Aristotle and if I understand him well enough hear his advice. Prayer is a means of circumventing your cognitive biases by a ritual act of submission to the pack. We hear the truth in prayer because we cannot lie to ourselves before an the knowing gods.
If Christianity can find room for Intellectual Christians then why must it remain ‘truth’ rather than ‘myth and allegory’? Surely a tea ceremony, or the daily ritual of diary planning and writing are personal rituals rather than political. While prayer remains a mixture of personal and political. But all three quiet the mind so that we can listen to intuition gained from the study or experience of the ideas of great minds free of the multitude of biases that cloud our minds.
Christianity can be expressed as an entirely rational system of thought. The premise is very simple: extend love of kin to non kin, and in doing so construct trust, and trust will produce prosperity. When paired with aristocracy and chivalry, this comprises the western character: heroism: the construction of personal excellence for the purpose of service to and advancement of the tribe.
That we create god within us is more important for us than to explain the vicissitudes of nature – the universe is definitely hostile to human life.
If I agree with the Catholic philosophers and Mormon practice, why is there no room for those men of science (truth) who need even FEWER biases and comforts in order to gain access to our intuitions? We need fewer excuses and incentives to think and act in Christian fashion, other than because of our station or disposition we understand that limiting consumption and contributing to the commons with our thoughts, feelings, and efforts is
you see, I understand the cancer that is monopoly in any form, and the genius that is what we call balance of powers, but is better considered a division of labor. For in that division we produce multiple excellences, and through voluntary exchange we find the golden mean: the optimum path for many specialists rather than the only possible path for monopolists.
The church is meaningless and rudderless without aristocracy. Aristocracy is meaningless without the church. Without the competition between Nobility, Priesthood and Burgher (bourgeoisie), two must be subject to the whim of one rather than each in constant excellence each conducting exchanges, and where those exchanges form an information system by which we investigate all three possible dimensions of social order as specialists, use each that we find advantageous, and continue to evolve. Meanwhile each keeps the other from abuses by a competition for power.
This was our western secret and we have abandoned it for the folly of monopoly government by the lower classes in which we simply lie and cheat and manipulate outside of government and using government rather than between the great houses of state, church and industry.
A man must be educated by the church and the aristocracy and industry. He can then specialize to suit his abilities: education and care-taking, invention and production, law and order.
I do not see the value in the bible that I see in our great literature. I see value in a church, in a priesthood, in a mythos, and in rituals. I do not see the value in heaven that I see in the natural world. I do not see the value in false gods that I see in past saints and heroes. I do see a true god, and a truthful god, that seeks to parent us through our evolution such that we may transform the universe into the garden of eden. And that god has many faces.
It has taken me a long time to understand that across all of mankind the words spoken in ritual whether field, temple or church, are meaningless. It is the safety we feel in ritual that matters – our feeling of membership in the pack and the great comfort that it brings to us no matter what the forum (including TED talks for the new hippie era).
We need a christian reformation as well as a restitution. And we need to kill forever the monopoly of the heresy that is state-run-secular-humanism as one of the great failed experiments – another great lie – in human history. A heresy that is a monopoly, and as a monopoly NOT CHRISTIAN OR WESTERN but middle eastern.
It is not only islam we must purge from the west, but democratic secular humanism: the worship of the state: the worst false god man has invented in two thousand years.
Curt Doolittle
The Philosophy of Aristocracy
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine