October 12th, 2018 3:43 PM
THE CONSTITUTION OF RELIGION – “THOSE WHO COME UPON US IN OUR WILDER DAYS NOT KNOWING WHAT USE WE MADE OF THEM. 😉 “
—“Curt Doolittle, you confessed to some aspergerism. Asperger people tend to be general intelligences, and fail to see archetypes, swiss-knife like cognitive schemata, and therefore, the value of religion. Can you explain where I’m wrong?”—- Giego Caleiro
[W]ell, instead, I would say that those of us at the edge of the spectrum are more fully human (dependent upon reason), and those of you who are not, are less fully human (still dependent on animal impulse and intuition). I am not the first person to say that aspie-ness is the next step in evolution since it simply means there is more introspective capacity than neuro-commoners possess, and greater ability to process volumes of information, and that we are perfectly happy with one another, and that it’s neuro-commoners that are no longer ‘fit’ for socialization.
That said, to address your question about associative (pre-cognitive) rather than rational or calculative (cognitive) relations: you know, you can find VALUE in archetypes and I’ve argued about reforming stoicism to make use of archetypes and thereby limit ‘religious’ literature to heroic rather than submissive and supernatural content. This is the future of ‘Religion’ as I undrestand it since it is not dependent on professed belief in and dedication to ritualization of falsehoods.
But when we talk about SOCIAL and POLITICAL and ECONOMIC orders, which is my job, “Meaning” is how you coerce people to agree with your FRAME while TRUTH is how you render disputes and limit people to that which is not parasitic and predatory and deceitful with the UNIVERSAL FRAME (what we call scientific frame).
So what you call religion and are indoctrinated to think of religion as monotheism, I (correctly) understand that it is just a method of training the intuition (emotions) such that they conform to the group’s evolutionary strategy. And this same process can be achieved through many ways – some of which are nearly perfect (stoicism), some a be less so (greco-roman polytheism, shintoism, ritual, ancestor worship), some quite a bit less so (buddhism), some outright bad (christianity), some outright catastrophic (islam) and some outright evil (judaism).
So while my ‘gift’ allows me to see subtle patterns independent of emotional and cognitive bias better than the vast majority of people, it doesn’t mean I don’t understand (or practice) some version of religion. It means, that like Nietzsche, I undrestand the depth of the evil of abrahamic religions and that we are still struggling to release ourselves from the dark ages that they imposed upon this world, through the use of a particular frailty of the human mind when open to suggestion.
So I specialize in VIA NEGATIVA (law, decidability) which says only what you must not do, not what you must do. Whatever you do that doesn’t violate that law is either amoral (irrelevant) or moral (not bad), or good (additive to the commons). One can, VIA POSITIVA (meaning, education) train the body, intuition(emotions), and mind (calculation) and memory (general knowledge) by various means. And I judge those means and the law judges those means not by how easy it is or familiar it is to transfer meaning – but, via-negativa, by the damage caused by any falsehood, parasitism, predation therein.
Ergo, abrahamic religions are all evil – the greatest evil man has faced other than the great plagues. The question is how can we produce a literature (“Wisdom Literature” is the name for this category of education) that is absent those ‘bads and falsehoods’.
Stoicism was eventually invented by the late greeks and romans and it was the combination of stoicism and mithraism that should have resulted in the ideal man, and the ideal virtues – for the simple reason that Homer provided a hero of the aristocracy, zeno a hero of the new middle class, and the jews a hero for the slaves women and underclass. The problem is, that the underclass hero was authoritarian slave owner and judaism a rebellion, christianity an undermining, and islam a conquest of the great civilizations – destroying aristocracy wherever it went, and knowledge and learning with it.
We have ancestors worthy of worship – hundreds if not a thousand. Those who have shit ancestors make up gods. Those of us with ancestors (Odin) or archetypes (greco-roman-egyptian) need not fabricate false heroes from the leftover scraps of their betters.
If you are not capable of having this discussion I will understand. Few are. Which is why these religions are evil. There is no difference between cigarette addiction, alcohol addiction, drug addiction, and monotheistic abrahamic addiction, other than the means by which the opiates are released into the system. That is why religious people demonstrate addiction responses and withdrawal symptoms when they are confronted with the fact that their mindfulness (training of their emotions) can be performed by many means, but they lack the will courage and honor to leave superstition behind.
Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine