Category: Religion, Myth, and Theology

RELIGION AND MEASUREMENTS

(important)

( William Butchman writes an OP reconciling supernatural fictionalism, with propertarianism via decidability. It inspired me to write this piece extending one of his paragraphs to explain that religion provided a means of measurement and decidability. )

When we moved from religion (the immeasurable world – but a world whose ‘measurements’ if we may call ‘wisdom’ that, consisted of the results of trial, error, and observation – a simple science, but a science none the less) to quantitative science: the measurable world, we rightly increased the precision of the measurable world and evicted religion from our discipline of measurement. Unfortunately we evicted religion from the unmeasurable world (cooperation at scale), and replaced it with pseudosciences (aggregates). So instead of instructing men to act morally based upon experience, such that each action would cumulatively produce a measurable good, we measured goods and told me they need not act morally if we produced this abstract measurement of good. It never seems to have occurred to anyone that all this did was increase the number of not-good actions by people. And falsely attribute to the new measurements what was nothing but the product of fiat money (removing the shortage of hard currency) and fossil fuels (removing the cost of physical labor).

Religion provides decidability in that which can only be measured by individual moral action that results in cumulative goods. Religions, like the common law, evolved incrementally in response to what we had learned. So each religion contains some error as well as some truth. What we call the physical sciences, provide decidability by aggregate changes in sttate even though we do not KNOW the equivalent of moral action in the universe – the first principles of the transformation of energy at small and large scales.)

The Natural Law (as I understand it) merely states the measurement of individual ‘good’ action, the way mathematic states the measurement of addition and subtraction of the natural numbers. It is very simple. Addition: do undo others only that which you would have done unto you. Subtraction: do nothing unto others that you would not have done unto you. Through simple addition and subtraction all of the descriptions of the physical world can be written in an increasingly complex set of combinations. And likewise, through simple positive moral actions, and negative moral constraints, we can build all of natural law. And then we can use natural law to examine all religions, and to determine if they are, like the physical universe, written in gods laws, of the physical world(Existence), the world of Action(Property), and the world of Speech(Testimony).

However, the golden and silver rule are reductio in meaning. They assume the christian or aryan edifice provides context. And while Christianity was always balanced by Martial Aryianism in a competition, The Hindu lost that competition, and the Sinic (Chinese), Semitic (Jewish/Muslim), never possessed it. So what one assumes is good good for himself and others by his actions, may answer the question of what is good for himself and others at city-state scale, but fails at national, empire, and global scales.

For the simple reason that each civilization, and each group within it, uses a slight variation on those rules in order to perpetuate the group’s strategies in the realities in which it exists.