I throw my hat in with Mark Yuray (and M. Moldbug) in the argument about whether to restore the Great Tradition or to synthesize a religion based on reason.
Go ahead and read Yuray’s essay and the previous one that he references to get caught up.
I don’t really want to get into the details (in part because I go into some of the reasoning in more detail in my forthcoming e-pamphlet), but at least some of the personal influence for me is that I have been a part of various rationalist religion-replacement efforts not related to any Yudkowsky cult earlier in my life.
That experience also lead me to lend some more credence to the history of such rationalist cults going back to the Reformation, but also the various Marxist manifestations of such cults.
I’m just incredibly skeptical of any such efforts for similar reasons as to why I don’t believe in central planning in economics. There is too much hidden knowledge contained within a traditional religion. The trees of an engineered effort are liable to bear mutant fruits.
Because I have been part of such a failed effort up-close, and because it really had destructive consequences for most of the people involved, and because other similar efforts have often had monstrous consequences, I’ve cast my lot with the nostalgic Christians.
I am also contemporary Silicon Valley-ish in that I believe that execution is more important than ideation. The guys spending a lot of time coming up with new ideas will be outperformed by the people who take the field and jerry-rig solutions to problems as they present themselves. Also, building trust tends to be more important than most people operating on their own tend to figure out.
Ensuring that the guy next to you does not stab you in the ass is a hard problem that most people in most places fail to solve. It’s a particular problem for secularists, but less of an issue for more orthodox religions, because of the presence of (wait for it…) hierarchy and structure that limits schismatic behavior.
Distributed knowledge is more important in economy than centralized knowledge. A system that prioritizes centralized knowledge is comparatively inferior.
Christianity once reached a certain point because it worshiped perfection. Once, no one would draw pictures of the Father, because He was beyond our understanding. The Trinity, with the confusion of having persons in one being, begins to make sense once you realize the nature of the being surpasses personhood, and that the being wants men to become perfect.
The pagans wanted to become perfect too, but all previous religions would simply fight the fight from superstition and multiple gods, to the one god (perfection), and then have to content themselves with being a servant, since men cannot become perfect. But in Christianity we have the promise of the perfect becoming man, to provide us a way to become perfect.
Hopefully, even an atheist can see the point of this- motivation for people to keep trying to improve themselves, a promise that despite our failures God will perfect us.
Unfortunately, modern Christians have lost the plot and one mostly encounters feel good narratives and progressive egalitarianism everywhere. The loss of the nobility and the dysgenic trends since the 1800s have damaged it severely. Rather than trying to improve oneself, the general tendency is to slide.
I look with horror on the discussions about engineering / inventing / synthesizing a religion. As a Christian True Believer it’s something monstrous from Hell, a pure Enlightenment kind of project.
Or something from Dostoyevsky’s “Demons”.
Could you please write a post explaining why Biblical numerology is stupid? Thank you.
What would I know about Biblical numerology?
Well, you say that “I’ve cast my lot with the nostalgic Christians”, so I’d like to hear the language you use to separate the wheat from the chaff.
The anti-modernists, the ones who aren’t self-destructing. I’m not the best spokesperson for this.
I have been thinking about this, and I wonder if something modeled on the Free Masons would be worth looking into. Outwardly it would be a civic organization and do charitable stuff in the community, maybe once a month have an event with some speakers, a feast and then a dance.
It would not be explicitly religious; there could be separate chapters for protestants, catholics, pagans or whatever. The idea would to have something that would allow for traditionally minded people to work together on long term projects. Building a network of charter schools might be an example. It can also provide an expanded business network for members. I think that getting organized in the physical world should be a priority, and filling in the philosophical or theological parts can be done later.
A long initiation process with many different levels will help filter out entryists and people who are not fully on board with the mission. Maybe it could work like the mystery cults in the classic world, but it seems that we could take most of our reactionary thought and turn it into ancient knowledge. It would also emphasize the distinction between the in and out groups, and individuals responsibility to the in group (I am not sure that I fully buy the notion that western europeans are innately pathological altruists, they can be made ethnocentric enough with the correct guidance)
I have some idea of this institution that has been bouncing around my head for a while but right now it is a pile of notes that need more structure :/ regardless I would like to hear your thoughts on this idea.
Sterling