–“Faith is not a business transaction. Or at least it shouldn’t be. When it becomes a transaction, it’s worthless.”– Craig Gipson
I would need this statement explained to me, because I’m not quite sure which argument you’re making. But I think I might be able to science it if I was sure – and then explain that as you mean it, I assume you are correct – despite stating “worthless at all” instead of worthless to whom.
It was far easier to solve (science) every other problem I worked on than religion. Religion was the hardest problem in social science. It took me years. No other problem took more than a year or two.
Because we are unequal in sex bias (empathizing systematizing), unequal in traits (personality and intelligence) and unequal in experience(upbringing and education) … and despite this inequality, chrstianity claims to be a universal religion despite that it’s a personal religion where it’s meaning is whatever an individual can justify it means within the very broad boundaries it establishes.
Both islam and rabbinical judaism are far more rigorious innovations on top of christianity, just as christianity is an innovation on semitic cults to make them survivable against greco roman reason – which – unfortunately was a much higher burden on the mind and intuition than the semitic superstitions and mythicisms.
But the flexibility of christian religion, because it is so ‘unspecific’ and so ‘personal’, and more of a collection of parables and subequent concepts (trinity etc), it was more able to adapt to more advanced european civilization that was aristocratic military realism (top down) rather than underclass peasant mysticism (bottom up).
So given that in all aspects of life, we are free of previous survival, economic, social, and political constraints, with a vast scope of opportunities in each, we are diverging from one another more according to our sex biases, traits, class, experience, and ethnicity, than converging.
This has put extraordinary pressure on our depenence on a common set of weights and measures, of both cognitive frame, values, expectations, and behavior.
We have seen our people diverge into preference for a grammar (logic, narrative) that is within their cognitive ability and suits their traits and temperaments, reflecting our individual preference that grammar (logic) in the the spectrum of grammars available to man: myths, theology, ideology, philosophy, empiricism, science, and now operationalism made possible by our breadth of knowledge of the laws of the universe at all scales.
Under agrarianism, all but a tiny fraction of us were largely indifferent. And just as in early urban areas, it was possible for people to diverge into a division of labor and separate classes of influence and responsibility given our abilities, we are seeing people cognitively diverge into a division of cognitive labor using whatever system of understanding (measurement) they can possibly manage given the equilibriuim or disequilibrium between the feminine empathizing to masculine systematizing, the combination of feminine empathizing with feminine neuroticism and the intellectual capacity of the individual to access (use and understand) a grammar that services any point on that spectrum. We are, we have, diverged. So faith is only accessible to a certain coincidence of genetic, personality, and intelligence traits. For the rest they need increasing self confidence in the precision of, unambiguity of, consistency, and correspondence with actionable reality of, whatevrer set of principles they use to guide themselves through the kaleidic experience of life.
Spirit is intuition. It is fast. It is cheap. And we trust it more than our reason. Moreover, the more empathic, conforming, neurotic, and reactive vs systemic, disconforming, stable, and active one is, the more one requires dependence upon intuition, and the more one depends on a trained intuition to maintain self regulation.
So what are we going to do given the divergence between our people? We must accomodate them all.
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