—“Mr. Doolittle, I have a question for you. What are the non-parasitic parts of Christianity that we can push forward, and how do we solve the problem of leftist progressive subversion in the Church? I’m a Christian so as you can imagine, this issue is close to me.”— A Friend
This is a deep discussion and please realize that it’s people like you I most definitely want to make happy if at all possible.
Some people are church-ists ( authority, institutions, social mindfulness), some people are bible-ists (words, meaning, mental mindfulness), and some people are jesus-ists (Person, Role model, emotional mindfulness ).
Jesus solved the problem of the prisoner’s dilemma – the ultimate problem of human cooperation. Jesus stands as one of the great thinkers in history, and a role model for all of us regardless of what reasons we have for justifying his teachings. There are three ways of interpreting Jesus. As the evidence of divine intent, as emergently divine, or as a philosopher. But we all vary a bit in our psychology. And we all have different psychological needs. So whether choose to see him as the hand of God, as a prophet, or as a philosopher, is a psychological choice. And that choice is a personal one. The science says he was right regardless of our psychological needs. As long as we behave as he instructs then the reason we choose to do so is not material except to our own psychology.
The net result is that what he says to do, regardless of how he says it, is the scientifically optimum means of human existence. Period. And in simple terms: If Jesus said it, then it’s Christian. If anyone else did, it isn’t. It’s an opinion, storytelling, mythology, or worse. And the only part of Christianity that’s certainly, scientifically, true is the role model he gives us. There is a reason the catholic church stopped using the bible and incrementally evolved dogma as a merger of philosophy and theology.As I’ve said before we have seen the collapse of the traditional churches. We have seen a 50/50 split between people abandoning religion and joining fundamentalist groups. We have a good idea of why that is – but it doesn’t matter. What we have not done is modernize the people and the dogma, and the functions of the church to fill the needs of modernity, and to provide the three different interpretations of Jesus to three different audiences, whether fundamentalist, traditionalist ritualists or secular philosophicals. I am fairly sure I know how to do that but to test that theory would take a great deal of time and effort and political will. It may however be necessary to defend our civilization against the evils that seek to convert us to worse ideologies.
I do science. I’m not critical of Jesus at all just the opposite. However, I have to separate Jesus from the fictional literature of the bible, from the corruption of the church in claiming that the bible’s wisdom literature is history, and from the dark ages of ignorance the church and her corruption subject our people to.