Sunday, April 29, 2007

On Bigness

Imperialism, Big Business Globalism, and Big Government, break down into smaller nations, states and localities, as Bigness has always done throughout history. Localism, variety and divergence are natural and harmonious with human nature. The question is what will be the extent of the damage done by the latest attempts at Bigness?

When Bigness fails, force is often used, yet even force can’t stop the devolution into smaller units. Big Business tactics of offering money, pleasure, power, the good consumer life are more manipulative. China is now trying these things with its population. Will Western Civilization be mortally wounded? Will the globe be polluted beyond repair? Will Western people survive, since we are not replacing ourselves?

Religion has always been the foundation of Civilization. The Theoevolutionary Church will support the redeeming of life, the renewal of localism, bonded by the Church. Without religion pernicious Bigness will rise again.

Sunday, April 22, 2007

Selling The Collective Unconscious

The liberal wing of Jungian spiritualists tend to want to use the Collective Unconscious–which all people share–as a basis for understanding peace and equality between all races and cultures. This is naive, and perhaps manipulative.

Archetypes in the Collective Unconscious, such as the Royal, Warrior, Magician and Lover, (as defined by Neo-Jungian Robert Moore) were obviously useful in human survival and reproduction, which is why they have been inherited. We should not overlook this inherited purpose. These Archetypes came by way of natural selection and competition in evolution and to define them as promoting peace between all people is deceiving.

When Evolution is seen as the deepest activating force in the cosmos, and in ourselves–which is the position of the Theoevolutionary Church–then competition and natural selection look healthier. Jungians tend to neglect, or de-emphasize, the very creator of the Collective Unconscious, which is evolution. Perhaps evolution should be given its own central Archetype?

Competition, Variety, Diversity, and Localism harmonize with our evolutionary nature, and these are reflected in the Conservative doctrines of the Theoevolutionary Church. As we have said elsewhere, to love ones neighbor is not literally to love the whole world, which would be contrary to human nature, it is to love one's kin, one's group. This definition harmonizes with the definition of love of God: evolution takes place best in diverse, separate groups, thus in loving one's group and loving ones neighbor we love God, and we love God by evolving to God. We love the world in the sense that we affirm the right of every group to love its own neighbor, its own group, then all groups may love God by evolving to God.

Sunday, April 15, 2007

Objection To Anarchism And Revolution

R. H. Tawney said the remedy for bad laws is good law, not lawlessness. Like the revolutionary, the anarchist hungers for a society in which order and fraternity reign without the “tedious, stale, forbidding ways of custom, law and statute.” (Luther) The revolutionary thinks order and fraternity naturally well up in their native purity from the heart.

“The task is not to destroy but to revitalize the existing social order, which though vitiated, still has valuable resources which would be criminal to destroy or neglect.” (Jean Ousett)

Counter-revolution does the opposite of revolution. It renews social bonds instead of breaking them, it co-ordinates the classes rather than to disorganize or antagonize them.

Human institutions are often a tragic parody of our hopes and ideals; some men hate men for this weakness, and cry revolution, others know that man will never be perfect and work with the imperfect social institutions built by man.

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Objection To Dualism

Traditional Christians can rightly object to the dualism between the spiritual and material that Luther inadvertently introduced, thereby causing the divorce of spiritual restraint from secular activities, which helped transfer the maintenance of Christian morality to the state. This made men unable to climb upward plane by plane, men had to choose between the spiritual and the material. As R. H. Tawney put it, monasticism was secularized.

In the same way, in separating evolution from the Church and the spiritual, the Church must not make the mistake Luther made in the Reformation, this puts evolution in the hands of secularists and science alone and removes it from Christian morality.

The Theoevolutionary Church places evolution in the hierarchy of planes that reach to Godhood. Higher consciousness and higher intelligence are religious goals, they reflect the nature of Godhood and they are evolved from the simple to the complex in an ascending plane.

Wednesday, April 04, 2007

Economics Influenced by Religion

In an imperfect world with imperfect people, who do you want to attempt to control your inevitable, economic activity, secular lawyers, or religion? The Church made this noble attempt in the Middle-Ages, without perfect success, of course, but they at least didn’t give up and redefine greed as “free enterprise,” and avarice as “economics,” to use the terms R. H. Tawney used. The Church insisted that economics was the servant not the master of civilization, which it eventually became.

Economics should once again be influenced by religion, in a system strong enough to stand against criminal unscrupulousness but elastic enough to admit legitimate transactions, admitting the imperfection of man, unlike communists and capitalists who believe that perfection is possible.

Should usury once again be prohibited? It should be policed at least by a religious ethos.

Monday, April 02, 2007

The Philosophical Base

We apply the deeper understanding of human nature coming in from the fields of sociobiology to the philosophical basis of the natural law, as defined by Aquinas in the "Summa Theol.." That is, “every law framed by man bears the character of law exactly to that extent to which it is derived from the law of nature. But if on any point it is in conflict with the law of nature, it at once ceases to be a law; it is a mere perversion of law.”

The Evolutionary Christian Church affirms natural law, which for us includes material, biological, evolution advancing all the way to supermaterial Godhood. Evolution is derived from nature, and we believe our religious laws should not be in conflict with the laws of nature. Perversions of religion and natural law should be adjusted, and we have adjusted them.