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There is good Christianity and bad. There are good christians and bad. This [set of statements] is very good christianity, and I’m not going to criticize good Christians – at least unless good Christians (a) violate natural law (unlikely), or (b) seek to use faith in argument rather than faith in self confirmation (too commonly). Faith is for the faithful, literature for those without faith. Aristotle for those who have no need for, and science and law for those of us who rule and cannot afford it. Render under each, that which is needed by each, and natural law of men, and physical law of science to decide the conflicts between them.
My objective is to institutionalize the insights (habits) of christianity in scientific prose, and provide means of ritual mindfulness for those that cannot or will not tolerate ‘magic’. And a set of festivals that all of us chan participate in.
Those insights are (a) the daily discipline of personal humility, (b) the elimination of hatred from the human heart, (c) the extension of kinship love to non kin, (d) the exhaustion of personal forgiveness as a means of training the most misguided, and (e) the empiricism of direct, personal charity as a means of achieving, and testing both, and (f) the political intolerance of those who do otherwise, (g) the limiting of government to the natural law of reciprocity leaving only market harmony and charity for the achievement of goods, and (h) surrender of defense and rule to the aristocracy who master in violence what we master in love and charity.
And I know that this is the ultimate strategy for optimum human cooperation because science and logic tell me so.
There is an ever declining percentage of educated people that find value in the parables of underclass semitic pastoralists, depending on magic and an after life to escape lack of agency in this one, and an ever increasing percentage of people that find value in scientific exposition of the same virtues, and historical and mythical ideas of OUR PEOPLE, for whom their ‘book’ was that of homer (the trials of achilles), the great greek and roman heroes, the carolingian, germanic, arthurian, scandinavian pagan myths, and the REAL accomplishments of OUR people, which begins with the cult of non-submission of those with agency. Just as the cult of submission is the retreat of those lacking it in islam and christianity.
There is nothing in the world of faith that is not available to those who practice natural science, natural law, the histories, rituals of self authoring, and the festivals of the heroes and seasons – except a greater need to negotiate between different wants, and greater demand for mindfulness against the saddening, and a greater demand for agency and reason in taking actions in the world.
Among the poor, feeble, and lacking agency in the world, christianity is the compromise position between barbarism and science that Augustine intended to make it. And among those who are increasingly joining the prosperous, the able, and those with agency, it is increasingly unnecessary. Among the prosperous, the able, and those with agency, that compromise is harmful. And this is what we have seen.
Morality is fully contained in individual sovereignty, physical and law natural law and the markets for cooperation, and exhaustive forgiveness in bringing the immoral into both.
The only people that need comforting lies are those that cannot look the only ultimate truth in the face without fear: the universe is a hostile place, we are an nothing but a deterministic accident, and it is we who shall be the gods who transform it into the edent we desire.
We must only choose godhood as our own.