THE SCIENTIFIC CASE FOR CHRISTIANITY
There is a case for what we call religion (institutions of the production of mindfulness by training moral intuition). There is a better case for a ‘post-supernatural’ religion closer to stoicism, which does achieve mindfulness but without the drawbacks of superstition and supernaturalism.
So historically, christianity has been optimum. Christianity is optimum only because it has been Germanized over the centuries, and instead of a semitic religious monopoly, christianity serves one point of the triangle of European trifunctionalism – meaning competition between elites and institutions of the military-state, cooperation-trade, and social-faith.
So the good in christianity is the odd combination of primitive semitic underclass myths, the long history of European philosophy, and the longer history of European traditional law of individual sovereignty. Europeans made Christianity compatible with aristocratic civilization despite it’s origin as a priestly slave religion in the middle east. And moreover, judaism, christianity, and then islam were revolts against indo European (European and Persian) military, political, economic, and cultural superiority.
In this sense, Christianity (was) the optimum existing religious system (set of moral intuitions) for the same reason European civilization out-innovated, out-governed, out-produced, and out-evolved all other civilizations in such a very short historical time frame, despite being a small population on the edge of the bronze age.
Why? Christianity made it possible for women, the underclass, and slaves to integrate into aristocratic European civilization’s demand for individual heroism as a responsibility by simply doing no wrong, and if possible doing some goods, despite not having strength, skill, education, family and clan productive assets, wealth, or political or military achievements.
Christianity has a very simple rule embodied in the character of Jesus: the elimination of hatred from the human heart, the extension of kinship love to all, forgiveness of petty human frailties until impossibly unrepentant, and a demand for personal acts of charity at personal cost – in exchange for the mindfulness of knowing you’re doing the right thing at all times; that negativity from others is to be forgiven, and that hardship is the cost of this mindfulness, and that ‘offering up’ those costs, and having confidence that ‘god’ loves you, does in fact produce a society in which produces the optimum human behavior whether nor not god exists.
Cheers
CD
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