Sunday, July 03, 2022

Theological materialism can re-enchant and repair the world

Conservative Christians see materialism bringing only narcissism and nihilism into the world, and they look forward to the religious “re-enchantment” of the world. They believe only traditional religion can restore a politics and a culture oriented toward the highest Good.

But conservative Christians are mistaken about materialism. Materialism can give us a Godhood that includes both religion and science.

Conservative Christians think that our disenchantment with the religious world coincided with scientific advances but scientific advances have given us the best way to repair and re-enchant the world. Meaning can once again pervade the world, producing men and women capable of restoring a politics and a culture based in the evolution of the material world.

There is a way to reconcile and synthesize these things: Godhood is evolved to in the material world. It is the material will to Godhood that replaces the will to power and the spiritual drive. The “first cause” is the material activation within life, Tirips, or the will-to-Godhood activating material life, and then life is shaped by the vagaries of natural selection and evolution. There is endless evolution toward higher and higher truth, intelligence, beauty, and goodness, that is, continually evolving ascending Godhoods are reached. But life can also fall back in devolution, new cosmos are formed again, but always giving life another chance to evolve to Godhood. 

We can repair the world not tear it down. We can conservatively keep the old ascetic inward path to the "god" within in the Twofold Path, but only as a symbolic glimpse of the real Godhood reached in the outward path of material evolution to real Godhood. The Twofold Path can make room for the traditional, non-object-idea-only definitions of the God-Within, or even the bliss feelings of Father-Within of the Inward Path of the great religions---this is included but transformed in the Outward Path of the evolution to Godhood in theological materialism.

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