Category: Religion, Myth, and Theology

MY VERY SIMPLE SCIENTIFIC TECHNIQUE AND WHAT I HAVE LEARNED FROM RELIGION

Religion is, surprisingly, the ‘hard problem’ of social science. Every other problem I have set out to solve (understand) has been trivial by comparison. Truth took me a year. The grammars took me less than six months. And those are very hard problems. Religion was much harder.

I use a very simple (scientific) technique, that long-term followers know well, which is to attack a problem, causing other people to defend it, until I understand their incentives. This is a better method of research than reading what other authors opine (make excuses for or against.)

I am trying to understand (better than I do now) why the the demand for the God (bad) and Jesus (good) mythos’ (they are different) persists among some people and groups and not others. I have begun to understand it better than I did. I understand (easily) why certain classes demand it. I have begun to understand the different weights different cultures attach to it.

And I am ‘testing’ whether (I think correctly) it is simply a failure to provide mindfulness by non-nonsense means (and why governments would resist teaching a non-nonsense method of mindfulness).

Mostly what I have come to understand, is that people are ignorant of the available options and their intuitions have been so successfully trained by the one they already hold, that they cannot imagine training their intuitions by any other means.

So (a) man needs mindfulness, and (b) and man needs mindfulness to different degrees, and (c) the mindfulness is dependent a bit on genetics of mindfulness (males less than females in general, and females more in general), (d) personality needs, (e) class circumstances, (f) cultural-political circumstances – all of which generate (or do not generate) demand for mindfulness.

Now, that mindfulness can be provided by the Hindu Means (literary immersion), the three abrahamic monotheistic means (organized indoctrination) of low(islam), working(christian), and middle (jewish) religion; the buddhist means (training); the rather ‘new age/european’ (philosophy-as-religion-substitute) means; the shinto and ritual means (ritual); or by cognitive-behavioral education that we call ‘Stoicism’ for context.

And there is a great deal to lean just from the ORDER of those methods of training: how much infrastructure is needed to preserve the ‘illusion’ of the mythos vs argument vs ritual vs education. And how much ‘ability’ given the means of training (immersion in hinduism through individual education in stoicism). But this is just a matter of WEALTH sufficient to pay for the means of TRAINING vs a given period of time: ie: producing the mass illusions of the ancient religions required an informational vulnerability (absence of knowledge and alternatives) that existed only in the past – and no longer does.

So if one wants to produce a religion that is not made of lies, it is entirely possible to do so – with a total absence of religious parables. And instead, a reliance on parables of history, and training in the virtues.

Christianity has a very simple set of underlying principles that are constituted in only four statements. Islam and judaism can also be, but to do so is horrifying. Christianity’s four statements are quite simple and will in general produce consequent goods.

There is just no need to lie to people and train them to be vulnerable to lies, and train priests to lie, and politicians to lie by the same means in order to teach those four rules.

No more lies by judaism, devolves into christianity, devolves into islam, evolves into marxism, postmodernism, feminism.

No more lies. People need “imaginary friends, parents, leaders” for very well underst reasons: they have been failed by those around them, to provide positive socialization and training by existential means.

We are able to teach truthful speech (science) and there is no reason we cannot provide positive socialization and training (mindfulness) by equally truthful means.

Convergence on the Truth: continuous correspondence between reality perception cognition recollection description negotiation, and advocacy.

Affections.

-Curt