Category: Religion, Myth, and Theology

Christianity is reducible to the extension of kinship trust to non kin. What we call ‘Christian Love’ means treating others as kin. Now, Natural Law is reducible to reciprocity. But it turns out that being very forgiving, over time, is the best possible cooperative strategy. While we evolved altruistic punishment for the untrustworthy (violators of reciprocity), meaning that we retaliate at high cost against ‘cheaters’ (untrustworthy), it turns out that exhausting forgiveness produces the highest trust polity, and by consequence the most prosperous. Unfortunately, the limit of such tolerance is in interpersonal relationships and does not scale AT ALL. And so christian tolerance in politics and group evolutionary strategy is suicidal, even if christian tolerance in interpersonal relations is extremely beneficial. The reason being is that an individual can eventually know the limit of tolerance for another, while none of us can know the exhaustion of tolerance for those we do not personally know. As such all christian tolerance and charity is limited to the interpersonal, and all political tolerance is limited to reciprocity. Because the moment we engage in political charity or unlimited charity we create the very evil that we seek to eliminate through our tolerance. Or in economic terms: if you subsidize any behavior you will always get more of it. This is not true on an interpersonal scale, but it is always true beyond the interpersonal scale. Worse, there are many people who seek virtue signals (status) by giving away that which others produced. They steal status from others by this means. So tolerance, especially christian tolerance, beyond the personal scale, where you pay the costs of your charity yourself, merely creates more evil in the world. For this reason most christians are anything but. They are just seeking self congratulatory virtues without actually earning them – but instead, they become bad people in and of themselves, and subsidize bad people in politics, and subsidize bad people in the community. As such christianity is a defect if practiced on other than the interpersonal scale. So the optimum strategy is “A Prosecutor in Politics, and a Saint in Person.” Christianity became suicidal when it became political rather than merely personal. So so natural law then provides us with an equilibrium of the via-negativa and the-via positiva: the via-negativa (law) being reciprocity, while the via positive (wisdom) being interpersonal exhaustion of opportunity for cooperation. You see, this is why science and scientific law are so important: so that those who pretend they are good are not able to create evil on vast scales under cloak of moral intentions. If you bear no sacrifice, you can earn no virtue. Period. And that is a necessary consequence of the natural law of reciprocity.