Category: Religion, Myth, and Theology

THE MEANING OF “SACRED” Recent political events have brought to the fore, discourse on the sacred. But what does the word ‘sacred’ mean? It means a total prohibition on privatization of the commons, or socialization of losses into the commons, in display, word, and deed. In other words, you have zero rights to those commons, zero rights in those commons, and you benefit from those commons precisely because you have no rights to them or in them – as does no one else. THE CHURCH Christianity teaches us one unique thing and teaches us one general thing. For christianity, it saturates us in narratives and rituals that ask us to extend kinship love to non kin – on an individual basis (not a political or military). It asks us to eliminate hatred from the human heart. This just happens to be the optimum cooperative strategy: exhausting investment in cooperation before engaging in retaliation, and when engaging in retaliation doing so out of necessity, and without emotion. The church, temple, or ritual experience teaches us sacredness: that there are conditions under which we have no rights of expression: in display, word, or deed. It teaches us Agency over ourselves. Those capable of agency can be taught. Those who lack agency over themselves demonstrate that they are a danger to the rest. And as most of us recall, as children, adhering to ritual in church for a single hour once a week is an exercise in self discipline that even the most well intentioned may struggle with. THE POLITY We have seen the total destruction of the sacred in pursuit avoiding the effort of developing agency over the self – such that we learn to fast, learn to constrain our actions, our minds, our words, and our displays. And this is because like the parable of the boiling frog, we cannot sense the intertemporal in the moment or even in our lives. Even if we can sense the consequences of our failure to pay the high cost (tax) of developing agency, and the sacred as one more kind of fitness. Physical Fitness (the body) Mental Fitness (mindfulness) Emotional Fitness (Sacredness) Social Fitness (Manners, ethics, morals, traditions, Rituals) Economic Fitness (the skills of measurement) Political Fitness (the natural law)