Apr 5, 2020, 10:10 AM
(from elsewhere) (pls move to christian propertarians group)
(no anti-christian signaling pls)
Great Questions. Thank you.
It is difficult to transition between Theological, Philosophical, and Legal-Scientific thought. This is because the ‘tests’ (theological obedience, philosophical choice, and legal-scientific decidability in matters of conflict) in each system of thought vary from wisdom to choice to necessity. To think in terms of law and science means eliminating what is false and irreciprocal so only the true and reciprocal (good) remain. So while the theological attempts to sculpt with clay, the legal-scientific attempts to carve away stone. This difference between the positive and negative is a difficult transition for the faithful, just as the reverse is a difficult transition for the legal-scientific.
The difference between spiritual (emotional, imaginary, and intuited) and material (intellectual, actionable, and observable) is well understood in the philosophical literature as the difference between experience and action. experience and observation overlap but the Positive information from Experience, and the Negative information from Action are not the same. There is more ‘felt’ with experience than is observed. Both Faith and Science depend upon this difference. Faith to say ‘there is more to life than the material”, and law-Science ‘there is means of settling conflict by the observable and material’.
Lastly, there is a difference between P-law (the natural law of sovereignty and reciprocity within the limits of proportionality) and my opinion. I have opinion. The law consists of what amount to ‘proofs’ of decidability under tests of sovereignty reciprocity and proportionality. So don’t confuse the law with my opinion.
—“Why doesn’t Propertarianism promote Christianity?”–
That’s not true. Law doesn’t promote it prohibits. Science doesn’t promote it explains. We explain why jesus’ teachings were true and an innovation. We state it in scientific terms. Christianity is compatible with natural law, extends natural law, and contributes to high trust commercial society with middle class majority ethics. As such Propertarianism makes other religions illegal because they are not compatible with natural law and jesus’ extension of natural law. So we don’t necessarily promote christianity we prohibit competitors. We do not consider practicing heathen (love of nature and ancestors), pagan (love of heroes and archetypes), and christian (love of god) together as incompatible. We understand this as the evolution of religion from familial, to tribal to cultural to political – which is the evidence of the evolution of religion.
There are three sets of laws that God has shown us with evidence of his hand. The laws of nature, the natural law of reciprocity, and the evolutionary law of transcendence. Fundamentalist (literalist) Christianity is not compatible with Laws of Nature (science), and because of this, incompatible with the evolutionary law of Transcendence. The laws of nature are evidence of god’s hand. So wherever religion is incompatible with God’s hand then the men who wrote that religion erred. I seek to solve the problem of the incompatibility of religion with the evidence of God’s hand. This leads one to the conclusion that the deists are right and jesus was right and the jews and muslims and church doctrinists were wrong – but wrong only because they were doing the best they could with the primitive knowledge of god’s hand they had at the time.
The basics underlying christian faith (god, soul, jesus teachings, ten commandments as property rights, and devotion) are all compatible with the evidence of god’s hand, in one way or another. And that the doctrine does succeed in causing the faithful to behave in accordance with god’s hand.
–“How does Propertarianism account for the dignity of the human person by virtue of their potential for relationship with God versus their potential for advancing civilization?”—
We say it in scientific terms: if you demonstrate by your actions that you follow the evidence of god’s hand, and do not act counter to the evidence of gods hand then you are due dignity and respect – just as those who do not, do no deserve dignity and respect. However, your experience is not observable, only your actions. How you believe and feel is not observable and decidable by other than your actions. If you do not treat others as jesus would demand, then you are not christian regardless of what you feel and believe. There are many christians who use christianity as a means of doing nothing at all because others are not conforming to their demands. This is the ultimate selfishness, ultimate deceit, ultimately unchristian denial of jesus’s teaching, and ultimate heresy. These people are not christian. They are evil in christian garb.
There are hundreds of christian sects and all that they share is some point on the spectrum between priority for the tyrannical god of the old testament semites that jesus tried to reform, and the loving god evident in jesus’ behavior and teaching. Your faith is in your mind. Your behavior exists and is observable. So in this sense, Propertarianism (God’s natural law of sovereignty and reciprocity within the limits of proportionality) judges your actions because no law can judge your mind.
—“1. I don’t think Christianity is argued in the same way as any other faiths (moral baiting), like I tried to say, it is the unique and unrepeatable Christian response to suffering and relationship that really converts and ‘saves souls’.”—
As an example, the presumption that man’s soul needs saving is the creation of a false debt. You will live a better life, cause those around you to live a better life, by following the teachings of jesus, and thereby insulating yourself and others from the animal impulses within us all. If you do so you will save your soul from emotional suffering in this world and the next. To save yourself from physical suffering requires more than saving yourself from emotional suffering. That is where science, technology, and medicine provide what faith does not.
—“2. Christianity civilized the West and not the other way around. I don’t understand the idea that early Christianity was another religion of warfare from within. Christianity was spread by its own blood, not the blood of others.”—
Why did christianity(a jewish heresy) spread among europeans, rabbinical judaism among jews, and islam (a christian heresy) among arabs and non-europeans? Because of what these people were beforehand. It is simply not true that other than a tiny minority accepted christianity willingly. This is church mythos. In all cases it was imposed upon them by leaders who found political value in it, a useful tool for political control of people, and a literate administrative class in the priesthood to do so. even during the high middle ages the documentary record looks a lot like “political correctness” is practiced today: the common people gave lip service, the urban people went along, and the upper classes virtue signaled, with a minority of purists truly devoted to the faith just like today. Those who write write history. Fortunately we have a lot of documentation from outside of the church and the writings of these people are decidedly ‘medieval’, right up until the enlightenment.
—“3. The Church was always meant to lead the state, not compete with it. Like I said, the latter was embedded in the former (even when it deviated from its philosophy in practice).”—
The church was forcibly imposed on europe by the greeks after they defeated rome and reconquered it, closed the schools, killed or outcast the philosophers, and destroyed the arts, temples, literature, and knowledge of the greco-roman civilization. The purpose of the church was to prevent the restoration of roman (european) aristocracy. Some monks in the north, particularly ireland, worked to save what little knowledge remained in europe. Some middle easterners saved the work of some of the greeks and romans. Then destroyed the rest with the muslim conquest.
The problem was that the church was far more corrupt than the state it sought to replace. So after the institution of the church we had the monastic movement to defend the people from the church, then the protestant reformation to defend people from the church. The renaissance reformation and scientific revolution to escape the corruption of the church.
Jesus was a gift from god. He was the only christian. American Evangelical Protestantism the closest religion to the one Jesus imagined, and the church as a political institution the farthest thing from the one he would have imagined. So the church failed in the early medieval period. It failed in the igh medieval period. It was punished in the restoration of european civilzation. And in the 19th Century it failed again in response to discoveries of science. And it has been destroyed by the marxist-postmodernist-feminist revolution against both christianity and aristocracy. And it wasn’t until the middle of the 20th that protestant evangelicals finally cast off the corruption of the church, and returned christianity to a religion of the people, by the people, in imitation of jesus christ. I have seen evangelical preachers take christianity even closer to its roots by teaching christianity as an intuitive more emotional close relation to our ancient religion of stoicism, and our scientific understanding of cognitive behavioral therapy.
My view of christianity is an attempt to use jesus teachings to create an institution of governance and oppression, where jesus was trying to lift poor ignorant people out of tribalism, so that they were not a permanent underclass taken advantage of by usurers and tyrants, by loving each other as the greatest resistance movement against tyranny whether familial, tribal, national, or imperial in human history.
So I am personally hostile to ‘Church-ianity” but I consider myself a christian who seeks to follow the teachings of jesus christ: “Love thy neighbor”.
I am not sure anything else is required. There are five principles buried in christian teaching. Every one of them is reducible to “love thy neighbor and thy conscience shall be free.” That’s it.