Category: Religion, Myth, and Theology

Gods exist like numbers, counts, weights, and volumes exist: their objective function is to provide a standard of weight and measure, and to do so for those human values that assist us in cooperating on some given group evolutionary strategy. Such an anthropomorphized standard of weight and measure told in narrative form is both intuitive independent of one’s knowledge and ability, and insulated from rational argument and therefore contrived mismeasure. Whereas, buddhist rituals, the stoic virtues, deliberate choice of rational philosophy, or purely scientific knowledge each increase the demands upon the person, and increase his choice. The beauty of tort law, pagan gods, and western hierarchical disciplines all of which provide a means of mindfulness is that they adapt to the individual and provide a market for individual needs. The beauty of monopoly gods is that they are very inexpensive, require little or no comprehension, and create a monopoly and relative equality of understanding the world. The fact that monotheism brought about a more than one thousand year dark age via monopoly should not be lost on us. Whereas but a few centuries in the ancient and modern worlds using the market for mindfulness by a hierarchy of increasingly complex technologies that like virtue, rule, and outcome ethics, or myth, wisdom literature, reason, and science, can mature with each of us. It is a fallacy to ask whether or not gods exist. Standards of measure exist. Gods are a standard of measure. A rich standard, like numbers are a rich standard – with many applications. So gods exist as standards of measure. Do they exist as in ‘persist’? Then no. But neither do numbers. Nor do positions. The universe cannot remember so it cannot use positions, only states and forces in time. So gods to not exist in any other form than as a various set of weights and measures by which we are provided mindfulness and decidability in personal, interpersonal, and community strategies of cooperation, satisfaction, fulfillment, conflict and war. Now, we humans can speak of constant relations in many different grammars: from logic to math, to algorithms, to processes and procedures, to models and simulations, to markets and reality’s high causal density, to descriptions, to ideal fictions lacking understanding of causality other than internal correspondence, to fictions that inform by analogy or inference, to the conflationary fictionalisms that combine magic(technology): pseudoscience, myth(history): Pseudo-history, wisdom literature(law): pseudo-rationalism. And those grammars either provide continuous relations between the physical universe and speech describing our imaginings, or they do not. Some of our grammars produce ‘stories’ that correspond to reality and some that don’t, some to a possible reality and some that don’t, and some to parable that corresponds somewhat or not, and each of these correspondences provides us with mindfulness or not, and agency in reality or not. Thankfully we can measure both mindfulness and agency, and their consequences. And in general, like anything else, there exists an optimum medium between the twin axes of (a)mindfulness and worry, and (b) correspondence and fiction. And it’s fairly obvious (empirically) that it’s cheaper to teach mindfulness and allegory by fiction(acceptance), and more expensive to teach worry and truth (ambition). And that higher intelligence discounts the cost of teaching truth and lower intelligence limits us to fictions. Intuition (analogy) is always cheaper than reason(measurement).

Gods exist like numbers, counts, weights, and volumes exist: their objective function is to provide a standard of weight and measure, and to do so for those human values that assist us in cooperating on some given group evolutionary strategy. Such an anthropomorphized standard of weight and measure told in narrative form is both intuitive independent of one’s knowledge and ability, and insulated from rational argument and therefore contrived mismeasure. Whereas, buddhist rituals, the stoic virtues, deliberate choice of rational philosophy, or purely scientific knowledge each increase the demands upon the person, and increase his choice. The beauty of tort law, pagan gods, and western hierarchical disciplines all of which provide a means of mindfulness is that they adapt to the individual and provide a market for individual needs. The beauty of monopoly gods is that they are very inexpensive, require little or no comprehension, and create a monopoly and relative equality of understanding the world. The fact that monotheism brought about a more than one thousand year dark age via monopoly should not be lost on us. Whereas but a few centuries in the ancient and modern worlds using the market for mindfulness by a hierarchy of increasingly complex technologies that like virtue, rule, and outcome ethics, or myth, wisdom literature, reason, and science, can mature with each of us. It is a fallacy to ask whether or not gods exist. Standards of measure exist. Gods are a standard of measure. A rich standard, like numbers are a rich standard – with many applications. So gods exist as standards of measure. Do they exist as in ‘persist’? Then no. But neither do numbers. Nor do positions. The universe cannot remember so it cannot use positions, only states and forces in time. So gods to not exist in any other form than as a various set of weights and measures by which we are provided mindfulness and decidability in personal, interpersonal, and community strategies of cooperation, satisfaction, fulfillment, conflict and war. Now, we humans can speak of constant relations in many different grammars: from logic to math, to algorithms, to processes and procedures, to models and simulations, to markets and reality’s high causal density, to descriptions, to ideal fictions lacking understanding of causality other than internal correspondence, to fictions that inform by analogy or inference, to the conflationary fictionalisms that combine magic(technology): pseudoscience, myth(history): Pseudo-history, wisdom literature(law): pseudo-rationalism. And those grammars either provide continuous relations between the physical universe and speech describing our imaginings, or they do not. Some of our grammars produce ‘stories’ that correspond to reality and some that don’t, some to a possible reality and some that don’t, and some to parable that corresponds somewhat or not, and each of these correspondences provides us with mindfulness or not, and agency in reality or not. Thankfully we can measure both mindfulness and agency, and their consequences. And in general, like anything else, there exists an optimum medium between the twin axes of (a)mindfulness and worry, and (b) correspondence and fiction. And it’s fairly obvious (empirically) that it’s cheaper to teach mindfulness and allegory by fiction(acceptance), and more expensive to teach worry and truth (ambition). And that higher intelligence discounts the cost of teaching truth and lower intelligence limits us to fictions. Intuition (analogy) is always cheaper than reason(measurement).